LAbyrinth Read online

  Praise for LAbyrinth:

  “With LAbyrinth, Randall Sullivan offers a heretical view of Rampart and much more. … LAbyrinth is a jeremiad, leveling everything in its path. … LAbyrinth gleefully wants to provoke a discussion. Well, a knockdown brawl, but still.”

  —R. J. Smith, Los Angeles Magazine

  “A fascinating read.”

  —Mark Brown, The Rocky Mountain News

  “One of the most exhaustive, compelling studies of hip-hop culture ever published.”

  —Meghan Sutherland, Paper

  “Sullivan makes a strong case for thinking that the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls are connected, and the LAPD Ramparts Division scandal is connected to them. … You haven’t got the goods on any of these notorious cases until you read this intricate showbiz true-crime thriller.”

  —Booklist

  “Sullivan strikes again. … Sullivan’s reportorial writing style accurately reflects the investigative work of homicide gumshoe Russell Poole while building the drama within the truly labyrinthine political cover-ups, cop-to-criminal crossovers and the breaks in the LAPD’s code of silence.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Compelling … Augmented by a roster of more than 130 key players, a detailed timeline of events, and reference to 224 supporting documents, the book offers a blueprint for federal authorities to investigate the grave injustices it alleges. … No single source presents so complete or damning a record as LAbyrinth.”

  —Evan Serpick, CNN.com

  “Knowing a scandal when he sees one, Sullivan names names and sets scenes piled high with drugs, guns, cash, fab cars, and corpses.”

  —Anneli Rufus, Eastbayexpress.com

  Also by Randall Sullivan

  The Price of Experience

  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

  * * *

  RANDALL SULLIVAN

  Copyright © 2002 by Randall Sullivan

  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. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Permission to quote from Notorious B.I.G.’s “Somebody’s Gotta Die” by Hal Leonard Corporation. Words and music by Sean Combs, Christopher Wallace, Nashiem Myrick, Carlos Broady, and Tony Hester. Copyright © 1997 EMI April Music, Justin Combs Publishing Company, Inc., Big Poppa Music, EMI Longitude Music, Nash Mack Publishing, and July Six Publishing. All rights for Justin Combs Publishing Company, Inc. and Big Poppa Music controlled and administered by EMI April Music, Inc. Contains elements of “In the Rain.” All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

  PHOTO CREDITS: page 1, bottom right, Robert Yager; page 3, top, Ted Soqui/CORBIS Sygma; page 4, bottom left, CORBIS; page 4, bottom right, Simone Green-English, page 5, top left, AP/World Wide Photos; page 5, top right, Bill Jones; page 5, lower left, AP/World Wide Photos; page 5, lower right, George De Sota/Newsmakers; page 7, top right, Robert Yager; page 8, top, Robert Yager.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sullivan, Randall.

  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 / Randall Sullivan.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4743-2

  1. Murder—California—Los Angeles—Case studies. 2. Police misconduct—California—Los Angeles—Case studies. 3. Police corruption—California—Los Angeles—Case studies. 4. Shakur, Tupac, 1971–5. Notorious B.I.G. (Musician) 6. Knight, Suge. I. Title.

  HV6534.L7 S848 2002

  364.15’23’0979494—dc21

  2001053709

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  To M.D., who talked me into this.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I THE RACE CARD

  PART II DEATH ROW INMATES

  PART III NATURAL LEADS

  PART IV INVENTING THE SCANDAL

  PART V HEAT FROM A COLD CASE

  EPILOGUE

  LABYRINTH ROSTER

  TIME LINE

  DOCUMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY/RECOMMENDED READING

  “Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.”

  —Robert F. Kennedy

  Retaliation for this one won’t be minimal

  Cuz I’m a criminal

  Way before the rap shit

  Bust the gat shit

  Puff won’t even know what happened,

  If it’s done smoothly

  —from “Somebody’s Gotta Die,” Notorious B.I.G.

  PROLOGUE

  March 18, 1997, North Hollywood, California

  Even people in passing cars could see that this was an occasion for steering clear. It was just past four in the afternoon, the beginning of rush hour in Los Angeles, when two men, one white, the other black, became embroiled in what appeared to be an overheated traffic dispute. Both combatants were dressed to display their muscular builds, although in styles at considerable variance. The white man, who drove a battered Buick Regal, wore a pale gray tank top that showed off his bulging biceps and with it a baseball cap bearing the insignia of a marijuana leaf. He sported a bushy Fu Manchu mustache and his long, silver-streaked hair was tied back in a ponytail. The black man, who drove a shiny green Mitsubishi Montero, had a shaved head and a goatee, while the breadth of his bare chest showed beneath a green Nike jacket worn open nearly to the navel.

  The Buick had just stopped in heavy traffic at the intersection of Ventura and Lankershim Boulevards when the Montero pulled up on the left, rap music thumping through its open windows. The black man began staring in the direction of the Buick and shaking his head. The white man thought he must be looking at someone on the sidewalk and turned to check, but the sidewalk was empty. The white man rolled down his window and asked, “Can I help you?”

  “Roll that window up, you punk motherfucker!” the black man shouted back. “Get out of my face or I’ll put a cap up your ass!”

  “What’s your problem?” the white man asked.

  “I’m your problem, motherfucker!” the black man shouted. “Pull over right now and I’ll kick your motherfucking ass!”

  “Yeah, sure,” the white man replied.

  The black man became so enraged that his eyeballs bulged. “I’ll cap your ass, motherfucker!” he screamed. “Pull over right now!” The man in the Montero punctuated his threat with a series of curious hand gestures, then pointed to the side of the road.

  The white man nodded and said, “All right, let’s go. Pull over.”

  It looked as if the two were going to climb out of their cars and go at it right there, but as soon as the Montero parked in a red zone on the other side of the intersection, the Buick sped away, veering south on Cahuenga Boulevard. Screaming curses out his window and pounding on his steering wheel, the enraged black man forced h
is way back into traffic and took off after the Buick, slaloming between cars, even veering into an oncoming lane at one point.

  The Montero finally caught up when the Buick was stopped by a red light at Regal Place, four car lengths from an on-ramp to the Hollywood Freeway. As the SUV pulled up next to the sedan, other motorists heard the black man screaming through his passenger-side window, then saw him lean toward the Buick and extend his right arm. The white man, who had been shouting back, suddenly ducked his head, banged his chest against the Buick’s steering column, and let his foot slip off the brake as the car lurched slightly forward. The Montero’s windows were tinted almost to opacity, and witnesses weren’t sure whether the black man had a gun, but the hand that came out of the Buick’s open window a moment later, as the white man sat up straight again, definitely was filled with an automatic pistol. A woman in a Mercedes sedan who was a long way from her home in Pacific Palisades remembered that the white man wore “this very determined, focused expression” as he fired off one shot, then a second.

  The first bullet passed through the passenger-side door of the Montero and lodged in a gym bag. The second shot struck the black man on the right side just below his armpit, punctured his heart, and stopped in his left lung.

  Though only seconds from death, the black man managed to swing his Montero into the left lane and make a U-turn. A woman working in an office across the street looked up when she heard the gunshots and saw, through the SUV’s open window, “the full face of this black man smiling and grinning, a sarcastic laugh-grin … holding the steering wheel with his left hand and pumping his right hand.” The black man disappeared from the woman’s sight as his Montero coasted into the parking lot of an am-pm mini-mart and came to rest against the store’s front wall. The Buick, now following the Montero, pulled into the same parking lot moments later.

  Behind the store were two California Highway Patrol officers who had just finished a coffee break when they heard gunshots. The CHP officers swung their separate patrol cars around the west side of the building just in time to see a white male wearing a cap with a marijuana leaf on it pointing a handgun at a black male who was slumped forward in the seat of a green SUV. The CHP officer in the lead braked to an abrupt stop, swung open his car door, and crouched behind the vehicle as he drew his sidearm and ordered the white male to drop his weapon. “I’m a police officer,” the marijuana guy shouted back, and pulled on a chain around his neck to lift the gold shield of a Los Angeles Police Department detective above his tank top.

  He was Frank Lyga, an undercover narcotics cop assigned to the Hollywood Area Field Enforcement Section. He had never seen the dead man before, Lyga said.

  By the time detectives from the LAPD’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division arrived on the scene, however, they knew not only the dead man’s identity but also what it meant. The deceased was Kevin Gaines, an LAPD officer for the past seven years. Currently assigned to the department’s Pacific Division, Gaines was off duty at the time of his death.

  “As soon as we found out that the dead guy was a black police officer, we knew we were stepping into a political minefield,” recalled Russell Poole, who would become lead detective in the LAPD’s criminal investigation of the shooting. What Poole couldn’t begin to imagine was how widespread and well concealed those mines were laid. The detective began to experience a distinct sense of foreboding, however, when a computer check revealed that the Montero was registered to the address of a production company owned by Death Row Records. Knightlife, it was called.

  PART ONE

  THE RACE CARD

  Detective Poole is an absolutely outstanding detective. He now has 9½ years of homicide experience and has handled every possible situation. He is hard-working, loyal, productive, thorough and reliable. His contact with the public is always courteous and professional. He is a definite asset to the Los Angeles Police Department.

  —From the final “Performance Evaluation Report” filed on Detective Russell Poole before his transfer to the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division in late 1996

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was after dark by the time Russell Poole arrived at the shooting scene. Cahuenga Boulevard, the main thoroughfare linking downtown Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley, was closed off in both directions by yellow police tape and patrol cars with flashing lights. The enclosed area was crawling with brass, captains as well as lieutenants. Poole’s squad leader, Lt. Pat Conmay, his partner, Detective Supervisor Fred Miller, and the members of the LAPD’s Officer Involved Shooting team were all standing in a group. The Internal Affairs investigators, as always, kept to themselves.

  Frank Lyga was still at the scene and had been informed that the dead man was a police officer. “Lyga was very confident at that time,” Poole recalled. “He felt certain he had done nothing wrong. I don’t think he realized that the fact Gaines was black was going to be as much of a problem for him as it was.”

  The OIS team drove Lyga back to the North Hollywood station to take his statement. Poole was informed that his assignment would be to investigate a possible charge of assault with a deadly weapon against the undercover detective. Poole was collecting spent cartridges and making measurements of the shooting scene when he and Miller received a tip that Gaines, although married, had been living with a girlfriend at an address in the Hollywood Hills. The two detectives drove to the Multiview Avenue address and found themselves at the gated driveway of a mansion belonging to the notorious gangsta rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight, CEO of Death Row Records. Gaines’s girlfriend was Knight’s estranged wife, Sharitha.

  Sharitha Knight already had been informed of Gaines’s death, and was cried out by the time Poole and Miller interviewed her. Sharitha’s mother, who introduced herself as Mrs. Golden, did most of the talking at first, explaining that her daughter was married to but separated from Suge Knight, and that Kevin was her boyfriend. They had seen Kevin only a few hours earlier, Mrs. Golden told the detectives. He said he was going to the gym and intended to pick up new tires for the Montero on his way home. “Sharitha did say that Kevin had done some ‘security work’ for Death Row, but she gave no details,” Poole recalled.

  Sharitha Knight had met Gaines in 1993 at a gas station on La Brea Avenue just south of the Santa Monica Freeway. Gaines (who had been reprimanded repeatedly for attempting to pick up women while on duty) pulled up in his patrol car next to her Mercedes, Sharitha said, and began a casual conversation that grew more animated when she told the officer who she was and described her mansion in the hills above Cahuenga Pass. Gaines bet the woman dinner that she was exaggerating, and the two began dating exclusively after he paid off. Gaines soon took up residence in the mansion, separated by twenty-five miles and two million dollars from the house in Gardena where his wife, Georgia, and their two children lived. Sharitha was working at the time as Snoop Dogg’s manager, and obtained work for Gaines as the rapper’s bodyguard.

  Poole and his partner made no protest when Sharitha Knight cut the interview short after less than half an hour. “This was her boyfriend and she was distraught,” Poole explained. “It was a delicate situation.”

  As he drove back down Cahuenga Pass toward the LAPD’s North Hollywood station to interview Frank Lyga, Poole recalled, “I thought to myself, ‘This case is going to take me to places I’ve never been.’”

  * * *

  Poole already had been to places that few people raised in the suburbs ever see. Now a burly forty-year-old with a sunburnt squint and glints of silver in his reddish-blond hair, Poole had been a slim twenty-two-year-old with freckled cheeks and bright green eyes when he accepted his first assignment with the LAPD, as a patrol officer in Southwest Division, working out of a station near The Coliseum. “The department didn’t try to prepare me for what it was to be a white officer in a black neighborhood, because there’s no way to do that,” he recalled. “But you learn real quick. All of a sudden this shy kid from La Mirada is working ten hours a day in South Central Los Angeles.
It’s like you’ve been given a front-row seat on life in the inner city.”

  At La Mirada High School, situated on the border between Orange and Los Angeles Counties, Poole had been voted most valuable player on a baseball team that won the Suburban League Championship. Pete Rose was his childhood idol, and Poole’s teammates tagged him with Rose’s nickname, “Charlie Hustle.” “I ran everywhere I went, full blast,” he explained. “It was the way I was brought up, to give all you had all the time.”

  His father was a twenty-seven-year veteran of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department who had spent much of his career as a supervising sergeant of the detective bureau at Norwalk Station. “I looked up to my dad,” Poole recalled. “He had been in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, and I used to love to look at his medals. We were a very traditional family. My father was the breadwinner, my mom stayed home and took care of us kids. My two sisters shared one bedroom, while my brother, Gary, and I shared another. I thought that was pretty much how everybody lived.” His father never encouraged him to become a cop, and Poole kept his dream of playing baseball in the major leagues alive until a torn rotator cuff during his second season at Cerritos College ended his athletic career. Although he graduated with a degree in criminal justice, the young man went to work in a supermarket and was night manager at an Alpha-Beta store when he married his wife, Megan, in 1979. The two had known each other since they were children, and the bride wondered out loud whether her young husband would be satisfied with a comfortable life in La Mirada. Her question was answered less than a year later, in the autumn of 1980, when Russell Poole entered the Los Angeles Police Academy. “I decided that I needed something more stimulating than the grocery business,” he explained. Fewer than half of those who entered Poole’s Police Academy class would finish with him.