Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (5 page)

“There were people in the crowd,” Fredo continued, “who refused to move or attempted to push their way past the skirmish line. They exhibited unlawful, hostile behavior and did not respond to verbal directions to disperse. It was impossible to arrest these individuals at the time, due to the officers being outnumbered. After approximately forty minutes, and with the use of approximately sixty uniformed police officers, we were finally able to gain control of the situation.”

It was only then that the authorities began trying to sort out what exactly had happened. Were the two reports of gunfire related? Were they even separate incidents? Was the black Bronco on Orange Grove Avenue and the white SUV that made a sudden 360 somehow part of a coordinated attack? And, more to the point, who, if anyone, had actually been shot?

The answer to that last question was, at that moment, lying on an operating table at Cedars Sinai Hospital, gasping for air as his chest cavity filled with blood. With all the conflicting information, rumor, and speculation surrounding that night, there would remain one piece of irrefutable evidence: the six-foot-three, 360-pound corpse of Biggie Smalls.

CHAPTER
3

Mad Dogging

B
IGGIE HAD DIED AS HE LIVED:
surrounded by an entourage, even if, this time, it had been randomly gathered from the war zone around the Petersen. Puffy Combs, who in the moments immediately following the shooting was the first at Biggie’s side, would lead the deathwatch.

It was Combs who had shouted at the driver, Ken Story, to slow down, halfway across Wilshire Boulevard, as the shots rang out behind them and everyone in the vehicle reflexively ducked. Story glanced up into the rearview mirror and saw Biggie’s Suburban stopped at the light across the intersection.

He immediately made a U-turn and pulled up directly in front of the idling SUV. Combs jumped out, ran to the vehicle, and opened the passenger door. There was a look of surprise on the victim’s face, as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. “I was trying to talk to him,” Combs would later recount. “But he wasn’t saying anything or hearing anything.” Distraught, Puffy had tried to pull the dying man from the car, aided by a few bystanders. But it was futile: Biggie’s massive frame was, literally and figuratively, dead weight. Instead, Puffy got back into the Suburban, peremptorily ordering Eugene Deal, who had replaced Ken Story behind the wheel, to drive to the nearest hospital, without waiting for an ambulance to be summoned or the police to arrive. Story, meanwhile, had taken over driving from G-Money in the death car and followed Deal up Wilshire Boulevard with the mortally wounded Biggie beside him. He had still not uttered a word.

Meanwhile, from the front seat of the black Blazer, the last car in the convoy, Paul Offord and Reggie Blaylock had gotten the best view of what had happened. Just prior to the shooting, moving up to take their place as the follow-up vehicle, they were momentarily distracted by the white SUV trying to squeeze in front of them. As Blaylock hurried to close the gap and cut off the interloper, the six shots rang out. Acting on long experience as a police officer in gang-infested Inglewood, Blaylock ducked beneath the dash, then quickly looked up again to mark where the gunfire was coming from.

As he would later recall, with a cop’s eye for detail “I saw a 1994 or ’95 Chevrolet Impala, SS, black, with large wide tires, possibly eighteen inches, stopped in the northbound number two lane next to Biggie’s car. It was about twenty-five feet in front of me. I saw the driver holding a gun with his right hand extended out the open window. I never saw the driver’s face, only his hand. I can say only the color of the hand was lighter than mine. I heard Paul Offord saying from the passenger seat beside me, “Right there! Right there! Someone is shooting!”

The Impala peeled off onto Wilshire Boulevard, accelerating east. Blaylock gave chase. The pursuit was cut short, however, due to a built-in gasoline governor in the rented Blazer, which decreased the fuel supply if the car exceeded ninety miles an hour. Blaylock soon lost sight of the fleeing vehicle, which had turned down one of the dimly lit side streets off Wilshire, and he returned to the crime scene.

For his part, Offord had been distracted by the sudden appearance of the white SUV in the last moments before the shooting. “I think it might have been involved,” he later told police, recalling how, as the shots rang out, the mysterious car had vanished south on Fairfax.

Minutes later, as he floored the Suburban up Wilshire Boulevard on his way to the hospital, Ken Story would have had time to consider how it had all gone so wrong. As owner and operator of T.N.T. Protection Services, he had utterly failed to carry out his primary responsibility, to keep his client alive. There were going to be fingers pointed, that much was for sure, and he was equally sure they would be pointed in his direction.

In retrospect, the entire night at the Petersen had seemed to Story full of ominous portents. “After the party,” he would later tell police, “while standing in the parking structure, I noticed a lone male several feet away, staring at us. I signaled to Damien Butler that we should keep an eye on him. He appeared to be a gang member, dark complexion, wearing blue jeans and a white striped shirt. I think he could have been involved in Biggie’s death because of the way he was mad dogging us.”

But Story’s recollections and recriminations were cut short as he made the desperate dash, up Wilshire to San Vicente Boulevard, then north a short distance to the emergency room entrance of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. A hysterical woman, perched in the backseat next to Biggie, was alternately screaming directions to the medical center and a stream of profanities directed at everyone on the guard detail, particularly Bad Boy’s security chief, Paul Offord.

It was Aysha Foster, one of the four women who had been in close proximity to the shooting as they walked down Wilshire Boulevard. Foster, whose only connection to Biggie was her impending marriage to his friend D-Roc, crouched behind Foxy Brown’s Lexus with her friends as the bullets flew. A short distance from where the women were hiding, the Impala sped off just as Foster raised her head to see Puffy standing at the bullet-punctured door of Biggie’s car. She hurried across the street, dodging the black Blazer as it gave chase, and jumped into the Suburban just as Ken Story was pulling away behind the SUV carrying Combs. There she gave full-throated expression to the anger, fear, and outrage felt by everyone. “I remember thinking to myself that she was someone close to Biggie,” Story would recall; “a sister, a relative, or a close friend.”

Ken Story wouldn’t be the only one replaying the evening’s events. For James “Lil’ Caesar” Lloyd, there was more than enough second-guessing to occupy him all the way to the hospital. In retrospect, the threat to his cousin and musical mentor had been clear enough during the Vibe party. First and foremost, there was the presence of Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the Crip kingpin Puffy had previously turned to for West Coast security. Keffe D had buttonholed Combs for a whispered exchange at Biggie’s ringside table, but at the time Lil’ Caesar had no idea what the conversation was about. It was only after the fire marshal had announced that the party was over and the entourage was on its way out that he heard firsthand what was on Keffe D’s mind.

“Hey, man,” Lil’ Caesar recalled Davis saying to him, some twenty minutes before the shooting. “You need some security, someone on your side …” Lloyd, who had met the Crip a year earlier backstage at a Combs Summer Jam concert in Anaheim, assured him that everything was under control. He gave little thought to Keffe-D’s offer of additional muscle. It had seemed, at the time, like just another hustle.

It must not have seemed that way in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Perhaps Davis had been trying to tell him something. Perhaps he could have warned him of the light-complexioned black man with the receding hairline, wearing an incongruous bow tie, that Lil Caesar had glimpsed in the driver’s seat of the Impala, firing away at the helpless bulk of his cousin?

Eugene Deal, part of the Bad Boy security detail, might well have been rehearsing his own misgivings as he drove Puff to the hospital, flat out down the six-lane boulevard. Deal had accompanied Biggie and Combs to the Soul Train awards the night before and stayed behind with Puffy after the rapper, rattled by the hostile reception, had left immediately after the presentation. It was backstage at the Shrine that Deal overheard a brief encounter between Combs and Mustapha Farrakhan, the son of the Nation of Islam’s controversial leader, Louis Farrakhan, and a close acquaintance of the star.

The tense exchange began when an unknown member of the organization had stepped in front of Combs as he was leaving by the stage door. “I want to talk to you,” he said, in a characteristically clipped Black Muslim manner. “You are disrespecting our brothers in the east.”

Deal had no idea what the issue might be, but remembered Combs turning to Farrakhan, standing nearby. “Yo, Mustapha,” he entreated. “Tell him you and I are cool.” Farrakhan nodded to his lieutenant, who stepped back and let Combs pass. The standoff had ended as quickly as it began.

Or had it? After the party at the Petersen, as Deal waited for Puffy and Biggie to say their goodbyes, he noticed an individual walking quickly up Fairfax. Light-skinned, with a sparse mustache and a receding hairline, he was wearing a blue suit and a bow tie, the trademark attire of the Nation of Islam.

It was only later that Deal would discover that his description, at least in part, matched those of others who had caught a glimpse of the shooter behind the wheel of the Impala. Foremost among them: Gregory “G-Money” Young.

Driving the second Suburban, G-Money had turned in time to see a black man in a bow tie, left hand on the steering wheel, and the glint of a gun in his right. Lil’ Caesar would subsequently report much the same thing to police when describing the glimpse he had gotten of the killer through the open window of the Impala. He had a fade haircut, Lil’ Caesar would recall, and was wearing a light-colored suit and a bow tie, although it was hard to tell in the glare of the streetlights in the intersection.

Was Biggie’s death in retaliation by the Black Muslims for some slight, real or imagined, that Combs had committed against the “brothers in the east?” To Eugene Deal, it seemed a distinct possibility. He wouldn’t be the only one to eventually connect those circumstantial dots.

It took a little more than five minutes for the two vehicles to reach the hospital. They screeched to a stop at the emergency room entrance, halfway down a short street bisecting the sprawling medical facility. It was shortly before 1:00 a.m. D-Roc was the first out, jumping from the still-rolling SUV and running headlong into the lobby, shouting for assistance. He led a pair of paramedics back to the car, opening the door on Biggie’s inert body. After a look at the size of the victim, one of the emergency room staff hurried back in to get more help. It eventually took six men to hoist Biggie out of the seat and onto a waiting gurney.

Conspicuous in its absence was the blood that should have been gushing from the massive wounds the rapper had sustained. In fact, Biggie was so padded with fat that the paths of the bullets simply closed up, blocking off the blood flow. All the hemorrhaging was occurring internally.

Biggie showed no signs of life, and it was later determined that he probably expired at the scene of the shooting. Yet the emergency staff still undertook a heroic effort to resuscitate him. For twenty minutes, doctors in the trauma center performed an emergency thoracotomy, internal defibrillations, and eventually a last-ditch intracardiac massage.

Meanwhile, in the ER lobby, Combs was on his knees, praying for the life of his friend. Lil’ Caesar lay beside him on the linoleum floor, sobbing uncontrollably. The harshly lit room was slowly filling up with others who had rushed over from the Petersen, including Biggie’s estranged wife, Faith Evans. Some gathered in small clusters, hands joined in prayer, wiping away inconsolable tears. Others simply sat staring at the waiting room artwork that hung on the cream-colored walls.

After what some would remember as an eternity and others recall as the blink of an eye, a doctor approached Combs and Evans. Christopher Wallace, he told them, was gone. He had been pronounced dead at 1:15 a.m.

A stunned silence followed, punctuated by the sobs of Evans and Foster. A tentative discussion began among Biggie’s closest confidants as to who would inform his mother. It was D-Roc who finally made the call, reaching Voletta Wallace in her Brooklyn home at 5:21 EST. He could hardly speak through choking sobs and Voletta, immediately fearing the worst, let out a piercing scream. Her sister-in-law, who was staying with her at the time, took the phone and eventually coaxed the grim news from D-Roc, informing the prostrate mother of what she already knew.