Dead Wrong Read online

  Also by Randall Sullivan

  The Curse of Oak Island

  Untouchable

  The Miracle Detective

  LAbyrinth

  The Price of Experience

  DEAD WRONG

  The Continuing Story of

  City of Lies,

  Corruption and Cover-Up in the Notorious B.I.G. Murder Investigation

  RANDALL SULLIVAN

  Copyright © 2019 by Randall Sullivan

  Cover design by Cindy Hernandez

  Cover photograph © Christopher Wallace © Clarence Davis/NY Daily

  News Archive/Getty; city skyline and police shield © Getty

  Page 1: All images public domain; page 2: Perry Sanders and Rob Frank, Courtesy of Sanders Law Firm. Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, Courtesy of the Los Angeles Daily Journal; page 3: Voletta Wallace (top), Courtesy of Getty Images. Voletta Wallace (middle), Courtesy of AP Images. Voletta Wallace (right), courtesy of Voletta Wallace; page 4: All images public domain. Page 5: Michael Berkow and Sergio Robleto, public domain. Voletta Wallace and Faith Evans, Courtesy of AP Images; page 6: Kevin Hackie, Courtesy of AP Images. Marion “Suge” Knight, Courtesy of Getty Images; page 7: Christopher Wallace and Sean “Puffy” Combs, Bernard Parks, Courtesy of Getty Images. Rafael Perez, Courtesy of AP Images; page 8: Gerald Chaleff, Courtesy of Getty Images. Chuck Philips, Courtesy of Dennis Romero.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011, or [email protected].

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: July 2019

  This book was set in 12 pt. Janson by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021- 2932-1

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4700-4

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated to the memory of Sergio Robleto and Russell Poole

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Randall Sullivan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Dead Wrong Roster

  Documents

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Insert

  Back Cover

  PREFACE

  I wrote the book LAbyrinth: A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., the Implication of Death Row Records’ Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal more than fifteen years ago. At that time, like the investigator who was the book’s protagonist, I believed the truth would come out and those murders would be solved long before now.

  I was wrong.

  Even in 2002, I was incredulous that arrests hadn’t been made. I was asking people, “Do you believe that if Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin had been whacked by the Mafia in the 1950s, there’s even the slightest chance the killers would have gotten away with it?” In those days, comparing Tupac and Biggie to Sinatra and Martin made sense to only a sliver of the American populace. Today, a far larger segment of our society gets it. But that hasn’t made the slightest impact on the investigation of either murder. The only explanations I can conceive of for this are that people don’t care enough and that those in positions of power have a vested interest in making sure the facts remain obscured.

  In LAbyrinth, I followed Detective Russell Poole of the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division into the maze of lies and corruption that surrounded the Biggie and Tupac killings. As Poole followed the evidence that implicated LAPD officers working for Suge Knight and Death Row Records in the Notorious B.I.G. slaying, he came up against an institutional stone wall so thick and encompassing that it not only choked off his investigation, but suffocated the man’s faith in the organizations and the traditions to which he had dedicated his life. In the Los Angeles of the late twentieth century, the vectors of racial politics and institutional entrenchment had been woven into a thicket so dense that it smothered Poole’s probe of the Biggie murder, and of the assassination that he believed was connected to it.

  Poole never claimed to be certain beyond all doubt that LAPD officer David Mack had helped arrange the Notorious B.I.G. homicide or that Mack’s friend Amir Muhammad had been the shooter. Poole’s position was that this theory of the case was the one best supported by the evidence and therefore the one to which he should dedicate his efforts. He was prevented from this at every turn. When Mack was arrested in December 1998 for the robbery of a Bank of America branch near the University of Southern California campus, Poole was denied permission to run forensic tests on Mack’s vehicle, to obtain subpoenas for Mack’s financial records, or to obtain the ballistic evidence that might have connected Mack to the Biggie murder. He was not even allowed to speak to Amir Muhammad. The best explanation he ever got for that was, “We’re not going in that direction.”

  Gradually, Poole came to believe that Mack’s former partner Rafael Perez had been his accomplice in the bank robbery and that Perez might have been part of the Biggie murder conspiracy. Poole became convinced that Mack and Perez were part of a cadre of LAPD officers—“gangsta cops”—who were working for Death Row Records and aiding the record label’s CEO, Suge Knight, in commission of crimes that ranged from drug dealing to homicide. Poole was not allowed to investigate the evidence that supported this theory, either. Eventually he found his way to Kendrick Knox, an LAPD officer who had investigated the links between the LAPD and Death Row, until his probe was shut down by orders from on high. Like Knox, Poole became convinced that the orders blocking their investigations had come from the very top—from LAPD Chief Bernard Parks.

  By then, though, the Biggie investigation had been subsumed by what became known as the Rampart Scandal, in which the central figure was none other than David Mack’s friend and former partner Rafael Perez. The Rampart Scandal had been invented by Perez after his arrest on charges that he had been stealing large quantities of cocaine being held as evidence in the LAPD’s Property Division and selling it on the street. The Rampart Scandal narrative, largely concocted by Perez—im
plicating dozens of mostly innocent officers in an epidemic of corruption and brutality—had been swallowed whole by the media in Los Angeles, particularly by the Los Angeles Times. In part this was because that narrative was publicly endorsed by the Times’ main source, Bernard Parks, whose motives were both personal and political. Poole and his investigation were first absorbed and then stifled by the Rampart Scandal.

  Because of his insistence on the possible guilt of fellow officers in Biggie Smalls’s murder, Poole became a pariah within the LAPD, administratively harassed and personally insulted. Other detectives increasingly avoided any association with him. Nearly broken, he took a leave of absence to consider his options, then returned to the LAPD after being transferred out of the Robbery-Homicide Division. Watching what was happening as Rafael Perez played puppet master to the entire city and the Biggie murder investigation was buried in the process proved to be too much for Poole, however. In 1999, he resigned from the LAPD after nearly nineteen years on the job, walking away not only from the career that had been the core of his identity, but also from the pension he might have attained by remaining with the department for another fourteen months. He filed a lawsuit against the LAPD and Chief Parks that was dismissed on a statute of limitations claim by the City of Los Angeles. At that point, Poole had been marginalized to the point of nonexistence.

  There’s some irony, I think, in the fact that I found my way to him by a process that was almost a reverse engineering of the one that had at first diverted Poole’s investigation of the Biggie murder, then terminated it. In 2000, I was asked by Rolling Stone magazine, where I’d been a contributing editor for many years, to consider writing an article on the Rampart Scandal. I gave a tentative answer of yes, then asked that every article ever published on the scandal be delivered to my hotel room in Los Angeles. I spent several days reading, and what most astonished me was how little there was there. Not only was the fabric of the Rampart Scandal shockingly flimsy, but it was obvious that the entire thing rested on the claims of a single individual, Rafael Perez, who was a far-from-credible character.

  I made an appointment to meet with Richard Rosenthal, the deputy district attorney who had both prosecuted Perez on the drug theft charges and brokered the deal that resulted in the Rampart Scandal. During our conversation, Rosenthal shared two pieces of information that stunned me. The first was that Rafael Perez had failed not one, not two, not three, not four, but all five of the polygraph examinations to which he had submitted. The second remarkable fact Rosenthal revealed was that what became the Rampart Task Force had originated from the connections that had been made by a former LAPD detective named Russell Poole “between the David Mack bank robbery and the Biggie Smalls murder.”

  For a Rolling Stone reporter that last was, obviously, compelling news. I knew I had to meet this Russell Poole and made arrangements to do so through Poole’s attorney, who insisted that we meet at his office in Beverly Hills. I found the lawyer to be unhelpful—his main concern seemed to be maintaining control of both Poole and our conversation. Fortunately, he was called out of the room by his assistant at one point, leaving me alone with Poole. “I need to talk to you without this guy around,” I told Poole, and handed him a business card with my cell phone number written on it.

  He called me the next day and agreed to meet me for lunch near his home in Orange County. Over sandwiches and beer, Poole told me that he had been the one who arrested Rafael Perez on the original drug charges. He was in a position to make that arrest, Poole said, only because he had been removed from the Biggie case by means that were particularly devious. At first, Poole explained, he was told by his superiors in the LAPD that he was being reassigned from Robbery-Homicide to a special task force that would be dedicated to investigating his theory of the Notorious B.I.G. murder, just as Rosenthal had said. In a matter of days, however, that unit became the “Rampart Task Force,” Poole recalled. The Biggie case was unceremoniously abandoned, and “the entire focus of the task force became Perez.” That had marked the beginning of his departure from the LAPD.

  By the time we had finished lunch, Poole and I were getting on well enough that he told me, “I have something to show you.” I followed his pickup truck to a storage facility that was a short distance away. When Poole opened his unit, he gestured toward a wall lined with boxes of documents. That was everything connected to the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur murders that he’d been able to copy and carry out of the Robbery-Homicide Division before he was transferred to the task force and taken off the Biggie case, Poole said. I convinced him to let me make my own copies. When I read them, I was astonished and elated. These LAPD files, including the department’s main investigative file—its “Murder Book”—of the Biggie case, not only validated what Poole had told me, but, when pieced together, formed a narrative far clearer and more convincing than he’d been capable of describing. They formed the spine of, first, my Rolling Stone article “The Murder of Notorious B.I.G.” and then my book LAbyrinth.

  The article and the book each created some sensation. It was the article, though, that convinced Voletta Wallace, Biggie’s mom, as well as her attorneys and her representatives, that the estate of Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G., should file a wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. LAbyrinth ended there, in early 2002. This new book, its sequel, tells the story of what’s happened since. Which is a lot. But not enough. There are people who need to be held to account.

  PROLOGUE

  In the nineteen years after Russell Poole’s 1999 resignation from the Los Angeles Police Department, the nearest approach the investigation of the murder of Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G., would make to justice was during the last week of June and the first week of July in 2005. The events of those fourteen days had unfolded with a suddenness and force that made a major breakthrough feel imminent.

  It began on the evening after the third day of testimony in the civil trial that pitted the Wallace Estate against the City of Los Angeles. The trial had lurched forward fitfully after the opening statements on June 21. The combination of a skeptical media and witnesses who were beginning to either duck and cover or simply disappear had compelled the attorneys for the Wallace family, Perry Sanders and Rob Frank, to combat an impression that their case was falling apart almost from the moment the court proceedings began. The jurors should be advised that there would be inconsistencies in the testimony of “reluctant” witnesses who were terrified because those implicated in this case “are incredibly violent people,” the attorneys had told the panel in their opening statement. This was driven home when the first important witness for the plaintiffs, Kevin Hackie, took the stand and produced an hour of what the Los Angeles Times would describe as “erratic” testimony. The newspaper’s coverage of Hackie’s appearance in court emphasized the bodyguard’s repudiation of his previous sworn testimony that LAPD officer David Mack had worked in a “covert capacity” for Death Row Records. The Times made absolutely no mention, though, of how Hackie’s testimony began, with the following series of questions and answers:

  Q: Do you want to testify in this case?

  A: No, sir.

  Q: Why not?

  A: I’m in fear for my life, sir.

  Q: What are you afraid of?

  A: Retribution by the Bloods, the Los Angeles Police Department, and associates of Death Row Records.

  Things improved from the plaintiffs’ point of view on the following day, when retired LAPD detective Fred Miller took the stand and surprised everyone in court, first by praising his former partner Russell Poole’s work on the case, then by revealing that, after Poole left the LAPD, he himself had taken the case to the district attorney’s office, seeking to have Suge Knight charged with B.I.G.’s murder. Prosecutors had told him that the case was “not quite there,” said Miller, who could offer no explanation for the LAPD’s subsequent failure to investigate further, replying instead with a blank expression and a shrug of his shoulders. The most
startling revelation of the trial’s second day, though, came during the testimony of another LAPD detective, Wayne Caffey, who told of having been shown a photograph of a woman posing with David Mack and Mack’s former partner Rafael Perez that he understood had been seized from the home of a South-Central L.A. gang member. The woman in the photograph, Caffey said on the stand, was apparently Chief Bernard Parks’s daughter Michelle. “That had the jurors on the edges of their seats,” recalled the lead attorney for the Wallace family, Perry Sanders. “They had to wonder what the daughter of the chief of police was doing posing with a couple of gangster cops for a photograph found in a gang member’s house.”

  The atmosphere in court became even more fraught the next day, when a Hollywood screenwriter who had been researching the police scandal for a proposed HBO movie testified under oath that during a private meeting, Detective Caffey had told him that the LAPD was in possession of a secretly recorded videotape. It purportedly showed Mack and Perez present at a meeting in the offices of Death Row Records in which Suge Knight had ordered B.I.G.’s murder.

  All that, though, would be utterly eclipsed by what happened that evening.

  At dusk on June 23, 2005, Perry Sanders was riding to dinner in an SUV with blacked-out windows, accompanied by two three-hundred-plus-pound bodyguards hired by the Wallace family to protect him during the trial. En route, Sanders took time to listen to his voice mails. One was from the secretary at his office in Louisiana, informing him that three people with tips on the B.I.G. case had phoned that day. Only one caller was anonymous, Sanders remembered, but for some reason it was this person he phoned back first. He almost hung up, Sanders admitted, when the man on the other end of the line began the conversation with the words, “In another life …” He had already dealt with too many “ ‘Tupac’s been reincarnated’ type of callers” in the four years since he had taken this case, Sanders explained, “but then this guy goes on, ‘… I was at a Board of Rights hearing in the basement of L.A. County’s Men’s Central Jail.’ ” The LAPD’s disciplinary proceedings, Sanders knew, were not ordinarily—not ever, in fact—held in the basement of the jail. Before he said anything further, the man on the other end of the line told the attorney he would require an absolute promise that his identity, should Sanders discover it, be protected. When Sanders agreed to this, the man said he held a position of considerable influence within the LAPD and had a lot to lose, but “felt he just couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t share what he knew,” Sanders remembered. “The guy sounded very credible. He gave me lots of names and dates and other specific details, so I knew that if he was not telling the truth, it would be easy to determine.”