Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (9 page)

At the same time, it was revealed that Anderson had been in continuing conversation with another Wayside inmate named Michael Robinson. As if on cue, Robinson notified jailers that he, too, had information bearing directly on the Biggie case. In the pecking order of informants, Robinson, behind bars for robbery, was several credible cuts above Anderson. He had in the past provided highly reliable information and was so well thought of by law enforcement officials that, after his death years later, the FBI would step forward to pay his funeral expenses.

Robinson’s story likewise eclipsed that of his fellow inmate in the sheer breadth and detail of the story he told. The Wallace murder, he related to investigators, had been the result of a contract put out by Suge Knight in retaliation for Tupac Shakur’s death six months earlier. The shooter was a killer-for-hire, a member of the Fruit of Islam, the paramilitary branch of the Black Muslims, an associate of the Crips, and a close friend of a local gangster known as “Stutterbox.” While the killer’s true name was either “Kenny” or “Keeky,” he was more commonly known as “Amir,” “Ashmir,” “Abraham,” or something similarly Middle Eastern.

It was at that point that Poole had what he thought was the decisive piece of evidence to make his conspiracy case. The detective had paid a visit to the Montebello City Jail, where David Mack was being held for bank robbery. While there, Poole examined the visitors’ log kept by the facility. Among the first names listed after Mack’s arrest was Amir Muhammad.

“Amir.” “Ashmir.” “Abraham.” Poole was convinced he had at last found a clue that linked David Mack directly to the killer of Biggie Smalls, as identified, however vaguely, by a jailhouse informant.

CHAPTER
6

Wrongful Death

R
USSELL POOLE’S CONSPIRACY THEORY
would go on to become a potent element in the perfect storm of police corruption, gang warfare, and public cynicism that descended over Los Angeles in the summer in 1998.

David Mack and his partner Rafael Perez would, of course, go on to become poster boys for the so-called Rampart Scandal, eventually involving more than seventy officers from the division, many of whom would end up being accused of everything from unprovoked shootings to planting evidence and framing suspects. Drug dealing, bank robbery, perjury, and a massive cover-up would all become part of Rampart’s continuous headlines during that troubled period.

By a wide measure the most extensive case of alleged police malfeasance in U.S. history, Rampart cracked wide open in August of that year after Perez was arrested for stealing six pounds of cocaine, worth over $80,000, from an LAPD evidence room. A further inventory of the drug locker turned up another missing pound along with the bags of Bisquick that Perez had used to replace the purloined coke.

“Is this about the bank robbery?” he allegedly asked when arrested. It wasn’t, nor has it ever been determined whether Perez helped Mack pull off the heist. But the inadvertent remark helped investigators tie the pair together along with several other Rampart officers. Perez would later cut a deal with prosecutors, producing four thousand pages of testimony describing a ruthless criminal subculture that had taken root at the division. Much of the account provided by Perez eventually proved to be little more than an attempt to deflect attention from his own criminal behavior onto the entire division. Of the seventy-plus officers who were implicated by Perez, fifty-eight were brought before internal administrative boards, twelve were given suspensions, seven resigned, and five were terminated. Before it was all over, the five fired officers were reinstated with full back pay.

Nevertheless, Rampart spawned nearly 150 civil lawsuits, costing the city close to $125 million in settlements. It’s been suggested that Chief Bernard Parks lost his job in 2001 as a direct result of the scandal and, further, that it contributed to the defeat of Mayor James Hahn by Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005.

It was in that poisoned atmosphere that Russell Poole’s assertion of cops and gangsters working the same side of the street found fertile ground. The fact that he had, at least to his own satisfaction, linked LAPD officers to Suge Knight, a high-profile gangbanger, only added fuel to the flame.

In June 1998, thanks largely to his escalating war with the LAPD, Poole was taken off the Wallace murder investigation and was eventually relieved of his duties at the Robbery-Homicide Division altogether. After being shuttled from one assignment to another over the next eighteen months, Poole resigned, devoting himself to promoting his theory, including extensive interviews for the book
LAbyrinth
and appearing in the documentary
Biggie and Tupac
, an account of his role in “breaking” the case.

In September 2000, almost a year after he had left the force, Poole filed a civil suit in federal court naming Chief Bernard Parks and the City of Los Angeles as co-defendants and alleging that the chief had violated Poole’s First Amendment rights to go public with his findings. He went on to accuse the LAPD of deliberately closing off his efforts to thoroughly investigate corruption within its ranks. It was a questionable claim on the face of it, primarily because Poole had no right to “go public” with any aspect of the investigation while still a police officer. But in Poole’s mind, as revealed to
LAbyrinth
author Randall Sullivan, the lawsuit was his attempt to “get the truth out the one way that was left to me.”

In any event, Poole’s legal maneuverings accomplished exactly the opposite. The civil suit opened the gates to a flood of legal actions and counteractions that would keep the courts busy for years, even as they further obscured whatever truth about Christopher Wallace’s death might have yet been revealed.

In 2002 Biggie’s mother, Voletta, his estranged wife, Faith Evans, and various members of the Wallace family filed a federal wrongful-death lawsuit, using Poole’s playbook to claim an LAPD cover-up in the killing. “I’m sick to my stomach over the way this case has been handled,” the aggrieved mother would later tell the
Los Angeles Times
. “There is a murderer out there laughing at my family and laughing at the cops. And it makes me furious. I’ve held my tongue for months now, but I’m fed up with the police just pussyfooting around.”

The LAPD was quick to respond. Shortly after the family’s wrongful-death suit was filed, the department launched Operation Transparency, an attempt to get out in front of whatever might be revealed in the civil case by gathering up every scrap of information existing on the Biggie Smalls investigation. Internal Affairs swept into the Robbery-Homicide headquarters and hoovered up virtually everything in sight that might conceivably have a connection to the case: police reports, detective field notes, witness interviews, forensic findings: the data filled a whopping ninety-two-volume “murder book” of four-inch thick three-ring binders. It was all hauled away and promptly sequestered, which brought the murder investigation itself to a screeching halt.

But nothing could slow down the courtroom circus into which the civil case would, over the next three years, devolve. For example, it was during the discovery process that the family’s defense team became aware of a cassette recovered from the desk drawer of Detective Steven Katz, confiscated during Operation Transparency. On it, Katz was heard interviewing a jailhouse informant who confirmed that Rafael Perez had worked for Death Row Records and that, further, on the night of the murder he had placed a call to David Mack. The revelation caused an uproar, especially after Katz testified that he had simply “forgotten” about the tape’s existence. “The day before this trial began,” read a statement by the Wallace family in 2005, “we held a press conference and made clear that this trial was intended to hold the LAPD accountable… little did we know at the time what dark secrets lurked in the desk drawers of homicide detectives and little did we suspect that so many lies would be told under penalty of perjury.”

Presiding over the trial was U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, who seemed to agree that dark secrets were indeed lurking. She called Katz’s claim of forgetfulness “utterly unbelievable” and “very disturbing.” The beleaguered detective was promptly removed from the case, but the judge was far from placated. In a scathing statement just before declaring a mistrial, Cooper went on to assert, “The detective, acting alone or in concert with others, made a decision to conceal from the plaintiffs in this case information that could have supported their contention that David Mack was responsible for the Wallace murder.” To underscore her displeasure, she ordered the LAPD to pay all legal fees associated with the case, as well as imposing a stiff penalty on the department. The total damages came to more than a million dollars.

But that was hardly the worst news that the city and its increasingly discredited police department would be handed in the 2002 civil judgment. In additional remarks relating to her findings, Judge Cooper let it be known that, if she were to make a ruling then and there, it would be for the plaintiffs to the tune of $500 million. The figure represented the earnings the estate claimed had been lost by Biggie’s death, based on an estimate provided by the Recording Industry Association of America.

The legal maneuverings would drag on and on. Poole’s First Amendment case continued to wind its labyrinthine way through the courts to no conclusive end. The Wallace family would go on to file an amended suit against the city, once again alleging a police conspiracy in the shooting and this time asserting that the LAPD had “consciously concealed Rafael Perez’s involvement in the murder.” In the estimation of one legal analyst hired by the city, the claims being made by the family, and the evidence being offered to support them, were not particularly compelling. The danger for the LAPD, however, was that together they would amount to “death by a thousand cuts” in the minds of the jury.

The essential weakness of the Wallace civil suit was underscored when another U.S. district judge summarily dismissed it. But five months later Judge Cooper was back with a reinstatement. What would be called by the
Los Angeles Times
“one of the longest running and most contentious cases of celebrity justice” on record had taken on a life of it’s own, feeding rampant and increasingly bizarre speculation and unfounded conspiracy theories that further obscured, if that were possible, the tragedy at the heart of the case.

All those zeros in 500,000,000 had, of course, gotten the LAPD’s undivided attention. There was a very real possibility that the suit would end up being among the most expensive the department had ever had to pay out. So it came as no surprise that the brass wasted no time in putting together a task force to finally solve the nine-year-old case, find the killer, and hopefully exonerate the police in the process.

I was more than ready to take on the job. The three-year-long George Torres investigation had pretty much wrapped up by then and I had gotten a taste for complex, multifaceted, and high-profile detective work. The specter of a potentially immense judgment made the resurrected investigation that much more of a priority for the department, which meant substantially more manpower and resources would be made available to the task force. I also knew that if we succeeded where others had gone off the rails, it would be a career milestone.

I would be bringing the sum of my experience and expertise as an investigating officer to the case, particularly as it applied to the intelligence I had been gathering on Los Angeles gangs for going on twenty years. I knew the turf, the players, and the feuds igniting the bloody street wars that had terrorized the city for so long. But it didn’t take an expert to realize that the Biggie murder was, one way or another, gang-related.

At the same time I was only too aware that the investigation was considered by many to be cursed. There was, first and foremost, Russell Poole’s ruined law enforcement career to consider. But it was the entire Robbery-Homicide Division that had taken the biggest hit to its reputation and prestige. The detectives who worked there had long considered themselves an elite unit, and it was hard to swallow the embarrassment of allowing such a significant investigation to go completely cold. The simple truth was that there were no volunteers stepping forward from RHD to join the fledgling task force. It was more than a little unusual to put together an investigative team on a major murder case
not
made up of the Robbery-Homicide detectives, but it also worked to our advantage. A central pivot of the investigation was, after all, the possibility of police involvement. RHD had conspicuously failed to find the killer. Was that a result of plain bad luck, uncharacteristic incompetence, or a department-wide cover-up? To find the answer to that question, it made better sense to draw in recruits from across the board and allow them to follow leads that could possibly take them to Robbery-Homicide’s downtown headquarters.