Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (6 page)

As dawn broke that morning, Voletta Wallace was already on her way to the airport for the flight to Los Angeles to indentify her son and make preparations to bring his body home. By that time, news of the rapper’s death had already been flashed across the country and around the world. Radio stations began a nonstop rotation of his music and record outlets put in urgent calls to distributors, upping their orders for
Life After Death
.

By dying in a spectacular burst of violence, Wallace had, in fact, become even larger than he had been in life. And almost as quickly a flood of speculations, rumors and conspiracy theories began circulating, gaining credence with each retelling.

While the motive for the murder was anyone’s — and everyone’s — guess, the cold facts of the homicide were left for the deputy medical examiner, Dr. Lisa Scheinin, to detail during the autopsy performed that morning at 10:30. She determined “multiple gunshot wounds to the abdomen and chest” as the official cause of death. Four of the six bullets fired from the Impala had found their mark, one each in the left forearm, the soft tissue of the back, and the muscle of the left thigh, all non-fatal. The fourth was a different matter. Its trajectory had successively penetrated the ascending colon, the liver, the pericardium, the heart, and the upper lobe of the left lung. This fatal, final bullet finally came to rest in the victim’s anterior left shoulder, where it was recovered by the coroner. In the course of her detailed examination, Scheinin would also note that the victim was morbidly obese and had a long biblical inscription tattooed on his right forearm. For the purpose of the procedure, a toe tag confirmed his identity.

Eight days later, Biggie’s body lay in state at the viewing parlor of the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on Madison Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His remains filled a large mahogany coffin lined in white velvet, open to reveal his head and upper torso. He had been dressed in a cream-colored double-breasted suit and matching shirt, a teal blue tie, and a white derby hat.

Outside, along Madison Avenue, thousands of fans had gathered, holding up posters of the slain rapper and playing his music on boom boxes at full volume. Inside, 350 invited guests sat through a ceremony dubbed the
“Final Tour
.” Puffy Combs delivered the eulogy and Faith Evans performed the gospel classic “Walk with Me, Lord.” The recessional was an instrumental version of “Miss U,” a song Biggie had written after the death of Tupac Shakur. “
The motherfuckin’ shit just get me so motherfuckin’ mad,
” read the unsung lyrics,
“’cause you know that was my nigger.”

The guest list for the service was, in its own way, even more impressive than the all-star roster at the disastrous Vibe party. Aside from Puffy, his substantial Bad Boy posse, all the members of Junior M.A.F.I.A., and a sizeable contingent of Wallace’s extended family, the mourners included Mary J. Blige, Queen Latifah, Dr. Dre, Sister Souljah, Mustapha Farrakhan, Tommy Hilfiger, Flavor Flav, Lauren Hill, Wyclef Jean, Naomi Campbell, Kweisi Mfume of the NAACP head, the former New York City mayor David Dinkins, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and rappers including Q-Tip and DJ Clark Kent. Also on the invited list, buried among the celebrity well wishers, was the name Robert Ross, known on the streets of South Central LA as “Stutterbox.”

As the funeral motorcade moved down FDR Drive, over the Brooklyn Bridge and into the heart of Biggie’s old stomping grounds, crowds lined the streets of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Along the route, impromptu shrines of flowers, candles, and malt liquor bottles had been laid out, as well as street vendors peddling assorted Notorious B.I.G. memorabilia. The distinctive sound of Biggie’s raps echoed from windows as the hearse proceeded at a stately pace to the Fresh Ponds Crematory in Middle Village, Queens.

But what should have been a solemn farewell quickly turned violent as spectators clashed with a heavy police presence. Riot-equipped SWAT teams, who had taken up position at various key points along the route, used nightsticks and pepper spray to disperse the increasingly unruly onlookers. By the time the motorcade finally rolled through the wide gate of the crematorium, ten people had been arrested, with several more suffering minor injuries.

In the memorial service program, Voletta Wallace had expressed her gratitude to “the people she hasn’t met yet who’ve lent their support, given their positive feedback and helped her remain strong through this difficult time.” But as she took the ashes of her son home that afternoon, there was another group already beginning to come together, a loosely linked network of police investigators, gang associates, and amateur sleuths of every description, determined to find out who had killed Christopher Wallace, and why.

PART

TWO

CHAPTER
4

The Call

O
N MAY 1, 2006,
a little more than nine years after the events at the Petersen Automotive Museum, I received a call from Detective Brian Tyndall of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Robbery-Homicide Division. He asked if I would be interested in becoming part of a task force charged with reopening the Biggie Smalls murder investigation. I remember the date: the department was on maximum deployment in anticipation of May Day demonstrations. It was also my birthday.

My name is Greg Kading. At the time I took the call, I was a detective supervisor assigned to the LAPD’s Major Narcotics Unit. I understood immediately why I was being asked to work on a case that, while it had long since gone cold, was still one of the most famous unsolved murders in the annals of American criminal justice. I was, to put it as modestly as possible, well qualified for the job. It was almost as if everything I’d accomplished in law enforcement up until then had been in preparation for this single assignment.

On the other hand, my whole career could also be considered an unlikely choice for someone of my background. I was born in Reno, Nevada, where my parents worked in the casinos and divorced when I was two years old. It was the sixties and my mother, who was very much a child of those times, hit the road with my two older sisters and me in tow. Over the next decade we lived like gypsies, moving from house to house, sometimes campground to campground, never staying in one place for long. I attended school only sporadically and was slipped my first dose of LSD at age ten, courtesy of one of my mom’s hippie friends. A year later we headed south to Mexico, where my mother’s boyfriend had scored a few kilos of cocaine. The plan was to meet up with him and head back to the States in the guise of an innocent family of tourists. We got as far as Orange County, California, before word came that the federales had nabbed the would-be dope runner. With no place left to go, we just stayed where we were.

It was in the town of San Juan Capistrano that we settled into what passed for a normal life. I joined a Pop Warner football team, whose coach, Wyatt Hart, a lieutenant in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, became in many important ways the father I never had. I was sixteen when my mother once again decided to move on. I refused to go and the coach offered to take me in. Realizing she couldn’t provide the stability I craved, my mom agreed. Over the next few years I became for all intents and purposes a member of the coach’s family. He was the one who guided me, gently but persuasively, toward a career in law enforcement, using his influence to help me land a job with the Sheriff’s Department in 1986.

As a sheriff’s deputy, I was assigned various tasks within the county’s jail system and, while it hardly suited my image of actual police work, it was there that I first gained a working knowledge of criminals and criminal mentality. Nevertheless, I had no intention of spending my days shuttling inmates to court dates or conducting cell searches. Instead, I applied to the LAPD and was accepted, graduating from the academy in March 1989.

My first assignment was as a patrol officer in the Newton Division in South Los Angeles. Covering a large swath of downtown LA, Newton was in the hotly contested heart of the city’s raging gang war zone. As a beat cop on those tense and dangerous streets, I gained firsthand familiarity with the infrastructure of more than thirty active gangs, constructing elaborate flow charts detailing the hierarchy of the Four-Trey Crips and the Five-Deuce Gangster Crips, the Blood Stone Villains and the Hang Out Boys. The list went on and I made it my business to familiarize myself with each faction, their turf boundaries and the specifics of the specialized criminal enterprises that kept them in business.

There was an intense sense of camaraderie among the officers at Newton. It’s that feeling of loyalty, to your partners, your division and to the department as a whole, that I believe is essential to an effective police force. We shared a common sense of purpose and, more important, had one another’s backs. The men and women I worked with were more than colleagues, even more than friends. They were individuals who one day might be called upon to save my life and vice versa. That’s a powerful bond. In the rising tide of gang activity that, by the early nineties, would all but overwhelm the city, we saw ourselves as society’s last stand against total anarchy. But it was more than just the performance of our sworn duties. There was an undeniably daring aspect to chasing bad guys, putting your life on the line, and swapping stories with your buddies over a beer at the end of a long day. I loved being a cop. I loved being a good guy. And I loved it when the good guys won.

I didn’t share that sense of solidarity nearly as much when, in early 1990, I was transferred to the Wilshire Division in the LAPD’s West Bureau. At that time Wilshire was simmering with racial tensions among black, white, and Hispanic officers. It wouldn’t have been noticeable to a casual observer, but in the locker rooms or after-hour hangouts, a clear division was discernible among the ranks. It made me uncomfortable, but I kept my head down and my nose clean, and after a few months I was recruited back to Newton to become part of a unit called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums: CRASH, for short.

Formed in the early seventies by the legendary and controversial police chief Daryl Gates, CRASH was charged with stemming the tide of gang violence fueled primarily by the drug trade. Given unprecedented freedom of action, CRASH showed results, especially during 1987’s Operation Hammer, a citywide sweep of gang hideouts that accounted for nearly fifteen hundred arrests on a single weekend in April of that year. Given the crisis atmosphere of the time, with drive-by shootings causing tragic collateral damage on an almost daily basis, it was easy to justify the free hand that CRASH had been afforded. But with it, inevitably, came accusations of abuse and overreaching.