The Unsolved Mystery of the Notorious B.I.G.

David Corio/Redferns/Getty

Those who arrived as spectators at the Federal

courthouse in downtown Los Angeles on July 6th
expecting to observe the fourth day of testimony in
the Notorious B.I.G. wrongful-death suit swiftly
discovered that they were on hand to bear witness to
something else: history. In an announcement that
stunned everyone who had been following the case in
the media, presiding judge Florence-Marie Cooper
abruptly suspended the proceedings and called a
mistrial. Only a handful in the courtroom knew of the
remarkable events of the previous days: an
anonymous late-night phone tip; the extraordinary
lockdown of a Los Angeles Police Department
division; a stash of secret, incriminating documents. But the following day, Judge Cooper issued a
written ruling stating that she had come to believe the LAPD had deliberately concealed a
massive amount of evidence that attested to the involvement of rogue officers in the rapper's
slaying.

L.A. Times Responds to Biggie Story

The implications of the judge's decision extended far beyond the mystery of B.I.G.'s unsolved
murder. For months, Los Angeles' most prominent political figures and police officials, along with
the city's most influential media, had been insisting that this legal claim by B.I.G.'s family was
nothing more than a nuisance suit, based on an outlandish conspiracy theory that attempted to tie
a group of LAPD officers —affiliated with Suge Knight's Death Row Records and the Bloods gang
— to not only the murders of B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, but also to the origins of the biggest
police-corruption case in Los Angeles history, the so-called Rampart scandal. Yet here was one of
the most respected district court judges in Southern California declaring in open court that the
LAPD's lead investigator on the B.I.G. murder case for the past six years had deliberately
concealed hundreds of pages of documents. The contents of these pages not only supported the
conspiracy theory, but also implicated the central figure in the Rampart scandal —the disgraced
detective who was the source of the whole sorry, sordid affair — as one of those involved in the
rapper's death.

This article appeared in the December 15, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online
archive.

The judge's declaration of a mistrial provided one of those breathtaking moments when the facade
of a Big Lie is peeled back to reveal the men behind the curtain. Suddenly, the central figures in
this scandal were not the collection of corrupt police officers whose double-faced criminality has
been the focus of both public and private investigations, but rather the people who hold the levers
of control at the city's most powerful institutions.

Rolling Stone's #133 Greatest Album of All Time: Ready to Die by The Notorious B.I.G.

Back in 2000, it looked as if all the skeletons rattling around the scandal had been locked away in
deep closets. But in the spring of 2001, theories that had been discarded by both the police and the
L.A. media were explored by articles in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Perry Sanders, the
iconoclastic lawyer who would spearhead the wrongful-death lawsuit, first became involved in
the case in June of that year. An attorney for murdered rap star Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a.
Christopher Wallace, asked Sanders to read the Rolling Stone article. "I thought there were
grounds for filing a lawsuit just based on reading the story," says Sanders. Because he takes cases
only on contingency, however, the attorney had to decide whether he could justify spending
hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years of his life to sustain a federal court claim
against the city of Los Angeles.

Notorious B.I.G. Killed in Los Angeles

Angular and fit, the fifty-one-year old Sanders is a mercurial Louisianan whose shaved head and
pale eyes give him the look of a more intelligent Bruce Willis. The son of Perry R. Sanders Sr., one
of the South's best-known Baptist ministers, the attorney had devoted much of his young
adulthood to the music business; he performed as a guitarist and vocalist all across the Southern
club circuit during his years in college and law school. By the time he passed the bar in 1982,
Sanders co-owned the Baton Rouge recording studio Disk Productions, where he and two
partners composed and recorded jingles for companies including Hilton and Honda. Within a few
years, Sanders moved on to Nashville, working in entertainment law by day and as a writer and
producer at night, then to L.A., where he was a partner in the studio West Side Sound. Eventually,
he returned to Louisiana and the practice of law, specializing in environmental and civil-rights
cases. He made enough money by his mid-forties that he could devote his considerable energies to
whatever interested him.

"The B.I.G. case interested me plenty," Sanders says, but he and his sometime associate, Colorado
attorney Rob Frank, were at that moment embroiled in a massive environmental suit against the
Schlage Lock Company. Not sure if he could afford what the B.I.G. lawsuit would demand,
Sanders dispatched Frank to meet with the murdered rapper's mother, Voletta Wallace, in New
York. "After meeting with Voletta," Frank recalls, "I reported back to Perry that we may or may
not have a great case, but we certainly had a great client."

Tall and bespectacled, Wallace still speaks in the lilting accent she brought with her when she
moved to New York from Trelawny, Jamaica, as a young girl in 1959. She remembers Christopher
not just as a world-famous rap star but also as the largest five-year-old in their Brooklyn
neighborhood — a boy who was already living with the nickname "Big" by the time he turned ten.
She worked two jobs to raise him alone from the age of two, when B.I.G.'s father, a small-time
Jamaican politician named George Latore, abandoned the family. To this day, she seems to be as
proud of the prizes her son won as an English student at Queen of All Saints Middle School as she
is of the awards he received for his rap albums.

Before her son's murder, she says, "I trusted everyone. I trusted the Los Angeles Police Department.
I had to believe that they wanted to find out who the murderer of my son was. I had no idea
there were such powerful forces involved in all of this." After reading about LAPD officer David
Mack's alleged involvement in her son's murder, Wallace decided to pursue a civil action. "I
wasn't thinking about the world that I was taking on, only that something was not right and I
have to make it right. If I have to sue them for that, I was gonna do it."

By early 2002, Sanders had weighed what he learned from Wallace and arrived at a decision, filing
a civil-rights claim in the federal district court of central California. "We knew it was a long shot,"
he admits. The lawsuit accused the LAPD of "policies and practices" that permitted officers to
obtain employment with Death Row Records and enabled at least one of them, David Mack, to
conspire with his friend Amir Muhammad in the murder of Notorious B.I.G. "Even then we didn't
appreciate the magnitude of what we were getting ourselves into," says Frank. As it dawned on
them, each attorney drew upon the other's strengths. The forty-year-old Frank, with his blond
beard, slumped shoulders and self-deprecating attitude, was a skilled legal technician who
handled most of the briefs and motions, but deferred to Sanders in matters of strategy and
presentation. Despite his reputation as a brilliant attorney, Sanders' Southern accent and good-
time grin initially made it difficult for a lot of people in L.A. to take him seriously. "Being
underestimated," he admits with a sly smile, "was our biggest advantage at the beginning of the
case."

"This wasn't a gang shooting," says Detective Poole. "Biggie's murder was much more sophisticated
than anything any gangbanger pulls off."

He and Frank would soon recognize, however, that the strange facts of Biggie's murder and the
convoluted web of events and people surrounding it would become their greatest assets.

When LAPD officials tried to explain how the murder of Notorious B.I.G. had gone unsolved for
eight years, one excuse they could not offer was a lack of witnesses. Dozens of people had been
on the street at forty-five minutes past midnight on March 9th, 1997, when B.I.G. was shot to
death. At least seven people, including two of those who had been in the car with B.I.G., had
gotten a good enough look at the killer to help the police create a composite drawing of the man.
As many as a hundred others witnessed the thing go down.

The killer, it seemed, had exploited a recent complacency among those in B.I.G.'s entourage. Death
Row Records' infamous CEO, Marion "Suge" Knight, had been sent to prison a month earlier;
there was a general feeling that hostilities between the major East Coast and West Coast rap labels
were cooling and that the gun violence, which had climaxed with Tupac Shakur's murder in Las
Vegas six months earlier, might be at an end. Perhaps even the blue-jacketed Crips who had
backed Puffy Combs and B.I.G. could make peace with the red-coated Bloods behind Suge and
Tupac, some people hoped.

B.I.G.'s murder took place on the last day that he and Combs were to spend in Los Angeles. B.I.G.
and Combs did not decide until that afternoon to attend the evening's Vibe magazine party at the
Petersen Automotive Museum in L.A.'s Miracle Mile District. The party would be a closed event
for music-industry executives, Combs had been told; security would not be a problem. The scene
at the Petersen Museum apparently had been quite mellow, especially given the complications
suggested by the guest list. Among the women in attendance, for example, was B.I.G.'s estranged
wife, Faith Evans, whom Shakur, on his last record, had famously claimed to have "fucked" as a
way of settling scores with her husband. Death Row rapper DJ Quik had shown up with ten
fearsome-looking Treetop Piru Bloods in tow, while the dozen or so Crips who wangled
invitations included Orlando Anderson, widely believed to have pulled the trigger on Shakur. By
midnight, the museum was crammed with many more people than it was permitted to contain,
and a majority were smoking marijuana. At 12:30 A.M., the air was so thick with smoke that an
announcer warned the crowd, "The fire marshal's gonna turn the party out!"

B.I.G., Combs and the rest of the Bad Boy contingent headed for the nearest exit. In the cool, fresh
air outside, B.I.G. and Combs waited for valets to deliver their vehicles and debated whether to hit
another party or head back to the Westwood Marquis. Combs decided they should just return to
their hotel and climbed into a white Chevy Suburban next to his driver, Kenneth Story, with his
three bodyguards in the back seat. B.I.G. lifted himself into the passenger seat of a green
Suburban, next to his driver, Gregory "G-Money" Young, while Junior M.A.F.I.A. rapper James
"Lil' Caesar" Lloyd, who had grown up with B.I.G. in Brooklyn, and B.I.G.'s best friend, Damien
"D-Rock" Butler, rode in the back seat.

Combs, in the lead, blew through the amber light at Wilshire as the signal turned red and Biggie's
vehicle stopped on the south side of the intersection. A white Toyota Land Cruiser promptly
made a U-turn and tried to cut between Biggie and a trailing Chevy Blazer driven by Bad Boy's
director of security. At that moment, a black Impala SS pulled up on the Suburban's right side.
The driver, alone in the sedan, was a black male whose blue suit, bow tie and fade haircut
suggested Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam sect. He looked B.I.G. in the eye for a moment, then
reached across his body with a blue-steel automatic pistol held in his right hand, braced it against
his left forearm and emptied the gun into the front passenger seat of the Sub-urban. B.I.G. was the
only passenger in the vehicle hit by the bullets. As the Impala sped away, heading east on
Wilshire, the Land Cruiser made another U-turn and drove off. The Suburban in which Combs
rode slowed nearly to a stop when Story heard the gunshots. Everyone inside ducked, then
someone shouted that B.I.G. was under attack. Combs jumped out of the vehicle and ran across
Wilshire to the green Suburban. When he opened the passenger-side door, Combs saw B.I.G.
hunched over the dashboard with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, bleeding through his
jacket. He spoke to B.I.G., Combs told police, but his friend just stared back, eyes open and blank.
The terrified Combs jumped into the Suburban behind B.I.G., while Story pushed G-Money aside
and drove the vehicle to the emergency dock of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, less than five
minutes away. At the hospital, it took six people to lift B.I.G. onto a gurney. Doctors rushed him
into surgery as Combs and the others dropped to their knees and prayed, but B.I.G. was
pronounced dead at 1:15 A.M.

The most striking thing about the immediate investigation of the murder was the absence of
detectives from the LAPD's elite Robbery-Homicide Division. "They were there that first night,"
notes Sergio Robleto, a former LAPD lieutenant who would eventually join Sanders on the case as
a private investigator. "But they were gone by the next morning and didn't come back to the case
until an entire month had passed. In thirty years, I had never seen that: a murder case involving a
major celebrity that wasn't taken over by Robbery-Homicide right out of the gate."

The Wilshire detectives who handled the investigation that first month accomplished almost
nothing, notwithstanding a number of promising leads. The LAPD had solid descriptions of both
the killer and his vehicle, plus four spent shell casings from the gun that had fired the fatal shots.
Despite multiple descriptions of the killer as "a Muslim," however, the people downtown wanted
to focus attention on rumors that B.I.G. had been murdered by Crips gang members angry that
they hadn't been paid for security work. "To me it was obvious this wasn't a gang shooting," says
Detective Russell Poole, who, with partner Fred Miller, would become a lead investigator on the
case when it was finally assigned to Robbery-Homicide in April 1997. "Biggie's murder was much
more sophisticated than anything I've ever seen any gangbanger pull off. This was professionally
executed."

The clues collected by investigators assigned to B.I.G.'s murder pointed in the same direction as
the word on the street did — directly at Suge Knight.

The detective had come to the Smalls case directly from a shooting investigation that was no less
controversial. It had taken place nine days after B.I.G.'s killing, on the other side of the hills, in
North Hollywood. Two men — one white, the other black — had become embroiled in what
appeared to be an out-of-control traffic dispute. Only after the black man was dead did the
California Highway Patrol officers who were first to arrive on the scene discover that the shooter
was undercover LAPD detective Frank Lyga, and that the dead man was off-duty LAPD officer
Kevin Gaines. What was immediately a politically explosive case took the first of several strange
turns when detectives ran a computer check on the customized Mitsubishi Montero that Gaines
had been driving and learned it was registered to Suge Knight's estranged wife, Sharitha.

Poole and Miller soon received a tip that Gaines, although married, had been living with a girl-
friend in the Hollywood Hills — in a gated mansion owned by Suge Knight. Gaines' girlfriend, it
turned out, was Sharitha, who, among other things, had served as Snoop Dogg's manager.

Rumors had been circulating for months that there was a cadre of black LAPD officers employed
as "security" by Death Row, despite the department's having explicitly forbidden any involvement
with the gangsta rap label. But from the start, Poole's superiors discouraged him from pursuing
"the Death Row aspect of the case." The LAPD brass also seemed in no hurry to vindicate Lyga,
even though every bit of available evidence supported the detective's self-defense story. Poole
was stymied in his efforts to move aggressively on the investigation when it was transferred to
the LAPD's Internal Affairs Division, under the supervision of then-deputy chief Bernard Parks.
Poole knew that under the auspices of Internal Affairs, the details of the case would be shielded
from the public and the investigation would likely be more controlled by the department's top
officials.

Poole's orders to steer clear of anything having to do with Death Row Records, however, were
becoming difficult to obey. Officers from the LAPD's Pacific Division told Poole that Gaines
regularly showed up for work wearing thousand-dollar Versace shirts and that he owned a fleet
of cars, including a BMW and a Mercedes. "All this on a salary of $56,000 a year," Poole observes.
Then Poole received information from a reliable prison informant that "Officer Gaines and other
LAPD officers provided security for members of Death Row Records during various criminal
activities … [They] accompanied the members during drug deals and acted as lookouts and
advisers."

The day after reading the informant's statement, Poole received a phone call from a detective in
the Wilshire Division. The caller advised him that homicide investigators there had information
that Gaines might be involved in the recent assassination of Notorious B.I.G.

The majority of clues collected by investigators assigned to B.I.G.'s murder pointed in the same
direction as the word on the street did — directly at Suge Knight. An inmate at California's
Corcoran State Prison said that his cellmate, Marcus Nunn — a Mob Piru Blood from Knight's
home turf in Compton — had confided that Knight, from behind bars, had hired another Mob
Piru to take Biggie out. Nunn also said he knew the name of the person who had killed Shakur —
also on Knight's orders. A former Death Row employee claimed he could provide police with
evidence that B.I.G. had been murdered by members of Knight's "goon squad."

Detectives were amazed that witnesses came forward, given the level of fear Knight inspired in
virtually everyone who dealt with him. For the first time in a long while, people seemed to view
Knight as vulnerable. Watching him get locked up seemed to turn the tide. Yet until the month
before B.I.G.'s murder, Knight had been getting away with outrageously violent behavior for
years. At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Knight had combined his status as an all-
conference defensive end for the football team with a reputation as the biggest drug dealer on
campus, while repeatedly using his athletic connections to avoid prison time. On Halloween night
1987, Knight was arrested after shooting a man twice and stealing his Nissan Maxima, yet
managed to have the felony charges against him reduced to misdemeanors.

Moving home to Southern California in 1990, Knight used the constant threat and regular exercise
of violence to transform himself from bodyguard to talent agent to record producer. In 1991,
Knight showed up for a meeting with Ruthless Records owner Eazy-E accompanied by two of his
thugs from the Bloods gang. During the next hour he "persuaded" Eazy to sign over three of his
top acts — including the leading talent in rap, Dr. Dre — for no compensation. After launching
Death Row Records with an investment by the legendary drug lord Michael "Harry-O" Harris,
Knight secured $10 million from Jimmy Iovine and Ted Field of Interscope and promptly released
Dr. Dre's The Chronic, which by the end of the year had become the biggest-selling rap album ever.

Detectives investigating the murder learned that "LAPD officers provided security for members of
Death Row during criminal activities … and drug deals."

Despite his wealth, Knight maintained his reputation as a dangerous man. The most serious
charges against him stemmed from a 1992 incident at Hollywood's Solar Records. There,
surrounded by an audience of his homeboys, Knight dealt with an impudent rapper named
Lynwood Stanley by pistol-whipping him and his brother George, then forcing the two to take off
their pants and lie naked in front of him while he removed IDs from their wallets. He promised to
have them killed if they went to the police. The brothers called the cops anyway, but Knight, with
the aid of his megalomaniacal attorney David Kenner, was able to delay his trial for three years,
and then persuaded both the victims and the prosecutor, Larry Longo, to back his appeal for a
suspended sentence. Judge Stephen Czuleger, who did not know at the time that the Stanleys had
recently signed a $1 million contract with Death Row Records — or that a few months later,
prosecutor Longo's eighteen-year-old daughter would become the first white singer signed to a
Death Row contract — recommended a nine-year suspended sentence but agreed to let Knight
spend a month in a halfway house, then walk away from the whole mess with five year's
probation. Knight's involvement in the melee that preceded Shakur's murder in Las Vegas in
September 1996, however, would end his freedom.

As was his standard practice in securing new talent, Knight had honed in on Tupac Shakur at the
lowest ebb of the rapper's life. Shakur was in the New York state prison at Dannemora, serving
up to a four-and-a-half-year sentence for sexual assault and recovering from the five bullet
wounds he had suffered in the lobby of the Quad Recording Studios off Times Square. Knight
promised not only to solve Shakur's money problems, but to secure his release from prison as
well. In October 1995, Shakur signed a three-page handwritten agreement drafted by Kenner, and
within a week he walked out of prison to the white stretch limousine where Kenner and Knight
waited for him.

But within a year, Shakur would try to break away from Knight. First he formed his own
production company, Euphanasia, to develop movie projects. And later that summer, the rapper
fired Kenner as his attorney — effectively signalling his independence. It was a move that a lot of
people predicted would get him killed. At the MTV Video Music Awards held in New York a
week later, Knight approached Shakur to insist he had no hard feelings; as a gesture of friendship,
he invited Shakur to join him in Las Vegas for the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon heavy-weight title
fight the following weekend. When Shakur confided to his fiancée, Kidada Jones, that he felt
uneasy about the trip, she advised him to wear his bulletproof vest. But Shakur said Vegas was
too hot for that.

As the Death Row contingent stepped out of the MGM Grand Hotel's auditorium following the
bout, one of Knight's homeboys approached Shakur to whisper in his ear. Shakur's bodyguard,
Frank Alexander, saw him turn to stare at a young black man who stood on the other side of the
hallway. The man was Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, a member of the Southside Crips. Anxious
to impress Knight and the other Bloods with his continuing loyalty, Shakur charged across the
hallway and threw a punch at Anderson. The Crip went to the ground immediately, said
Alexander, who found it difficult to believe the skinny rapper could hit that hard. Knight and the
Bloods surrounded Anderson, punching, kicking and stomping. They all fled before the police
arrived, but Knight, strangely, stopped very near the scene of the crime to make a phone call.

About an hour after the fight, the Death Row crew traveled in a caravan of luxury vehicles to
Knight's 662 club. At Knight's insistence, he and Shakur rode alone in Knight's BMW, listening to
Shakur's newest album, Makaveli, at an obliterating volume. When the BMW stopped at a red light
just off the Strip, a white Cadillac with four young black men inside pulled up on the right. The
passenger in the left rear seat rolled down his window, extended the barrel of a semiautomatic
pistol and sprayed the side of the BMW with thirteen bullets, mortally wounding Shakur, before
the Cadillac sped away.

"When you saw it laid out, the whole thing looked pretty well planned," Poole says. "But how did
the killers know Tupac would be in that car at that place at that time?" Poole's suspicions would
harden into a working theory after he learned that Snoop Dogg had told the L.A. County Sheriff's
office that Knight was behind Shakur's murder. Poole was further convinced after he was advised
by several people who knew Knight well that he was perfectly capable of taking the risks
involved in sitting so close to the target of a contract killing.

Bad news for Knight followed shortly, when the D.A.'s office in Los Angeles obtained a security
camera videotape of the attack on Anderson at the MGM Grand and decided Knight's
participation was a violation of his probation. When Knight showed up for his court hearing in
February 1997, he was wearing not one of his famous red suits, but rather the blue coveralls of an
L.A. County jail inmate. But nothing about the hearing was more remarkable than this: South-side
Crip Orlando Anderson, whom virtually everyone believed to be Tupac Shakur's killer, had come
to court to testify on behalf of his sworn enemy, Bloods gang member Suge Knight. "I seen him
pulling people off of me," Anderson swore on the witness stand. Judge Czuleger, like virtually
everyone else present, concluded that Knight was paying Anderson for this performance.
Czuleger ordered Knight to begin serving the nine-year prison sentence that had been suspended
two years earlier. Two weeks later, Notorious B.I.G. was shot dead in Los Angeles.

The most startling discovery he had made about the circumstances surrounding Shakur's murder,
Poole told Sanders, was that among the security staff working for Death Row in Las Vegas that
evening was an LAPD officer. Richard McCauley, it turned out, was the only LAPD officer who
had ever officially applied for a permit to work for Death Row Records. That permit was revoked
in early 1996, however, and McCauley had been ordered to avoid any association with Death
Row. Information that he had violated that order, and was in Las Vegas on Death Row's payroll at
the time of Shakur's killing, would produce the only investigation the LAPD has ever made of its
officers' involvement with the record label.

It seemed as if one of the dirtiest cops in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department was
playing puppet master to the whole city.

Poole had learned about McCauley's involvement with Death Row from the senior lead officer in
the LAPD's West Valley Division, Kenneth Knox. Knox had first visited Knight's CAN-AM
Recording Studios on June 23rd, 1996, because of complaints from neighbors about seeing "armed
gang members" coming and going from the Death Row studio; studio manager Kevin Lewis
explained that the people carrying guns were not gang members but off-duty police officers.
"Some are your guys," Lewis told Knox.

"As soon as it was suggested that there were at least several, and probably a lot more, LAPD
officers working for this gangster organization, the brass told Knox to back off and not to get
involved anymore," Poole explains. "He had become convinced that this was a huge scandal in the
making." What Poole knew that Knox did not was that three other LAPD officers had been
identified by informants as "associates or employees" of Death Row Records. The names of these
officers are now familiar to almost everyone in Los Angeles: Kevin Gaines, David Mack and
Rafael Perez.

Officer David Mack first came to the attention of detectives investigating B.I.G.'s murder in mid-
November 1997, when he was arrested for one of the biggest bank robberies in L.A. history. With
the assistance of a girlfriend who worked at a Bank of America branch near the USC campus,
Mack and two accomplices had stolen $722,000 in shrink-wrapped bundles. He had pulled a Tec-9
semiautomatic pistol from a shoulder holster under his suit jacket, pointed it at the two women
who were counting the cash and told them, "Don't touch those fucking pagers or I'll blow your
heads off!"

The girlfriend rolled over on him only a month later, though, and Mack was arrested on
December 16th. Mack encased himself in a hard shell from the moment detectives from the
LAPD's bank-robbery squad began reading him his rights. "Take your best shot," he told them. At
the Montebello City Jail, where he was locked up after his arrest, Mack informed the other
inmates that they had better not fuck with him because he was a member of the Mob Piru Bloods,
then boasted that the nearly $700,000 remaining from the bank robbery was "invested" in a way
that would double his money by the time he was released from prison.

What most interested Poole about the arrest report on Mack was the black Impala SS parked in
the garage of his house next to a wall decorated with Shakur memorabilia; detectives described it
as a "shrine" to the slain rapper. When Poole asked to have Mack's Impala tested by the LAPD's
Scientific Investigations Division, however, "the brass said no," he recalls. "They didn't want to
'step on the FBI's toes.' What bullshit! The LAPD has never cared about stepping on the FBI's
toes."

But Mack would not become the focus of Poole's investigation until January 1998, when Poole
learned that the first person to visit the arrested officer in jail was a man who went by the name
Amir Muhammad. An inmate described by the L.A. County Sheriff's Department as an "ultra-
reliable informant" (having already solved two homicide cases for them, deputies said) had
reported that the shooter in the Biggie Smalls case was a contract killer who belonged to Louis
Farrakhan's elite security squad, the Fruits of Islam, and went by the name Amir or Ashmir. The
inmate had been told the killing was ordered by Knight and had something to do with the death
of Tupac Shakur.

Muhammad and Mack met as scholarship athletes — Muhammad was a running back on the
football team, and Mack was an All-American middle-distance runner — at the University of
Oregon in the late 1970s. Poole took a deep breath when he first saw the driver's license photo
Muhammad had presented at the Montebello City Jail: While Mack looked nothing like the
composite drawing of the shooter in the Smalls case, Muhammad bore a distinct resemblance to
the suspect. And Muhammad (whose legal name is Harry Billups) had used a false address and a
false Social Security number when he signed in as a visitor at the jail, Poole learned.

When Poole re-interviewed B.I.G.'s best friend, Damien Butler, the detective showed Butler a
photo lineup. "I'm sure this guy was standing just outside the door to the museum as we were
entering the party," Butler said, as he pointed to a photograph in the upper-right-hand corner. It
was Mack's mug shot.

From Poole's point of view, this evidence all but nailed Mack for involvement in B.I.G.'s murder.
The detective's superiors told him they did not see it that way. "I was told, 'We're not going that
way,'" Poole says. "'Just keep your mouth shut and do your job.'"

Yet Poole's follow-up interviews with Shakur's former bodyguards, Frank Alexander and Kevin
Hackie, added to his mounting conviction that the primary link between the murders of B.I.G. and
Shakur was Knight. Alexander told Poole he believed the assault on Orlando Anderson had been
staged. Convinced by Alexander that he needed to interview Anderson, Poole found the Crip
difficult to locate. He finally turned up on May 29th, 1998 — shot to death at a car wash in
Compton. Yafu Fula, a childhood friend of Shakur's who was riding in the same car with
Alexander at the time of the murder, and who had told Las Vegas police he could identify the
killer, was himself shot to death in November 1998 in the hallway of a New Jersey housing project.

"It just seemed incredibly convenient," Poole observes. "The best witness and main suspect in the
murder of Tupac, both shot dead, while the case remained unsolved."

Poole first heard the name Rafael Perez in February 1998; still overseeing the Biggie murder
investigation, he was given a list of LAPD officers who were closest to Mack. The most significant
incident connecting the two went back to their days as an undercover narcotics team, when they
had been involved in the shooting death of a drug dealer named Jesse Vincencio; Mack had been
awarded the Police Medal, the LAPD's second-highest honor, for the shooting. Poole was struck
by a statement from Perez that he owed his life to Mack and would do anything for the man.
Poole learned that Perez and another black detective, Sammy Martin, had left with Mack for
Vegas two days after the bank robbery, staying in a $1,500-a-night suite at Caesar's Palace and
blowing through $21,000 in a weekend.

It was becoming clear that Perez was no ordinary corrupt cop. The LAPD amassed considerable
evidence that Perez and his partner Nino Durden, possibly aided by other officers, were selling
cocaine — three kilos of it, stolen directly from the LAPD Property Division — on the street. But
at Perez's trial in the summer of 1998, the jury deadlocked. "That hung jury changed the whole
outlook of the investigation," Poole recalls. "Parks wanted this thing over by the end of the year,
but when they lost that first trial, the chief panicked, thinking, 'We gotta do something fast.' So
they started pushing to make a deal with Perez."

An informer claims Knight told him, "My people handled the business … and because the LAPD
was involved, this murder would never be solved."

That deal would have a bigger impact on Los Angeles than any ever negotiated by the city with a
criminal defendant. Perez was recast as a whistle-blower, a flawed but ultimately heroic man
exposing the corruption around him. Over a period of weeks, and then months, Perez went on to
implicate more than seventy officers with whom he had worked at the LAPD's —Division in
assorted crimes and abuses against the community's largely Hispanic population. The story Perez
told became increasingly byzantine, with descriptions of a "crash pad" where a "secret society" of
—officers debauched themselves with stolen drugs and coerced prostitutes; of prizes given for
shooting gang members; and of cover-ups by assorted supervisors. All along, Perez insisted he
knew of no criminal activity by either Mack or Martin.

In September 1999, Bernard Parks, now the chief of police, held a news conference to announce
that a total of twelve LAPD officers had already been relieved of duty on the basis of what Perez
said. From the start, The Los Angeles Times framed the story in the context of the Rodney King
beating — the brutalization of minority victims by blue-suited brutes. Parks addressed the Los
Angeles City Council the next day and made the remarkable statement, "We take Rafael Perez at
his word." On and on it went: lawsuits, indignant editorials, a cottage industry for the political left
in L.A. Despite failing five city-administered polygraph tests, Perez would be sentenced to just
five years, less time served, for the cocaine thefts, and receive immunity for all other crimes to
which he had confessed. To some, it seemed as if one of the dirtiest cops in the history of the
LAPD was playing puppet master to the whole city.

The inconsistencies in Perez's story emerged slowly. First, the LAPD was never able to find the
crash pad Perez had described. When Perez appeared at an LAPD trial board to testify against
former colleague Lawrence Martinez, whom he had accused of helping to frame two gang
members on gun charges, Martinez's attorney pinned him down on the date, got Perez to name
the informant he met with shortly before the arrest, then promptly demonstrated that the man
had been in prison on that date. "The problem with Perez," the attorney said, "is that he's told so
many lies that he's confused. He doesn't know what the truth is anymore."

Chief Parks continued to back Perez, telling reporters "seventy to eighty percent" of what Perez
claimed in his "confessions" had been verified by LAPD investigators. Yet by early 2001, all eleven
of the —officers subjected to Board of Rights disciplinary hearings, in which the main witness
against them was Perez, had been exonerated — because, as the LAPD captain who presided over
one of those hearings put it: "Perez has shown himself not to be a credible witness."

By this point, though, the official story line of the scandal had achieved the sort of critical mass
that made those who questioned it irrelevant. In May 2000, the L.A. Times ran an article under the
headline "Man No Longer Under Scrutiny In Rapper's Death." It was written by Chuck Philips, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning music-industry reporter. An LAPD detective had told Philips that the
department was no longer investigating the theory that Mack and Muhammad had been involved
in B.I.G.'s murder. The article, however, raised many more questions than it answered. The
detective quoted in the piece gave no explanation for why the LAPD had abandoned this "theory."
LAPD detectives told Philips they still wanted to interview Muhammad — but didn't explain why
(if he was no longer a suspect), or why they had neglected to contact him. And while Philips did
speak to Muhammad, he failed to report any answer to the most obvious question: If
Muhammad's visit to Mack in jail when he was arrested in December 1997 was an innocent
contact between two old friends, why had the man used a false address, false Social Security
number and an out-of-service phone number to arrange it?

But the Times had overlooked many details about Muhammad. The newspaper had not reported
that on October 21st, 1998, Muhammad had been arrested in the city of Chino for "firearm
brandishing," in an incident where he was reported to have pulled his black BMW sedan up
alongside the white Blazer in which his ex-girlfriend, Angelique Mitchell, and her new boyfriend
rode and pointed a pistol at the couple. Police found a semiautomatic Beretta with an eight-round
clip in Muhammad's car when they pulled him over. Muhammad (who was now shaving his
head, rather than wearing the fade haircut he had sported at the time of B.I.G.'s murder) denied
pointing the pistol at the couple, then explained that he was in the process of moving and had
forgotten the gun was in his car. After providing police with a fake driver's license (in the name of
"Harry Muhammad"), he was eventually cited for carrying a concealed weapon and released. Six
days later, Mitchell and her boyfriend were dead from gunshot wounds to the head, in what
police would rule a murder-suicide. "Harry Muhammad" waited two years, then had his weapons
conviction expunged.

Still, the damage from the L.A. Times was done: In one fell stroke, the only viable theory of the
Biggie Smalls murder had been discarded. Russell Poole, after quitting the force in 1999,
attempted to resurrect the story by filing a federal lawsuit against the LAPD in 2000, but his case
was dismissed on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. It looked like the subject
might be buried forever, until Perry Sanders and Voletta Wallace stepped forward in early 2002
and filed a federal lawsuit that threatened not only the LAPD but everyone involved in promoting
and profiting from the scandal.

During her first meeting with Rob Frank, Wallace advised the attorney that a confidential source
had told her that a man named "D-Mack" was the key to solving this murder and that she had
passed this information along to the police in Los Angeles. While Sanders and Frank found no
mention of this tip from the victim's mother in the first batch of documents they received from the
LAPD, they did discover that another informant had apparently given detectives the same tip.
The attorneys later found a piece of jailhouse correspondence that Mack had signed with his street
name — D-Mack — and the initials "MOB," for "Member of Bloods." "As soon as we saw that,"
Sanders says, "we knew this case wasn't as long a shot as we had feared."

The attorneys were further encouraged when they learned that the FBI was looking into B.I.G.'s
murder. A young agent in the FBI's Los Angeles office, Phil Carson, had become convinced that
an independent federal investigation was warranted. By late 2003, Carson was working with a
pair of detectives from the LAPD's Internal Affairs Division, who apparently felt the same way.
Carson and the Internal Affairs investigators phoned Sanders to ask for a meeting. He and Frank
were staggered when the three investigators began the meeting by stating, "We believe you have
sued the right people, and we believe other police officers were involved."

On the other hand, their depositions of Steve Katz — the lead detective on the Biggie investigation
since 1999 — left the attorneys with the impression that the LAPD still believed it could bluff its
way through this mess and, in fact, intended to make sure the Biggie murder was never solved.

The attorneys were startled by Katz's admission that during the past few months, he had made
three trips to Houston in connection with two primary suspects named Richard Daniels and Tony
Draper — men never implicated by a shred of evidence — who had been seen in a Bentley coupe
the night of the shooting. Sanders and Frank could barely conceal their astonishment: The LAPD
had identified the vehicle driven by the killer as a black Impala in dozens of documents, including
search warrants. The attorneys asked why no forensic tests had been run on Mack's black Impala.
Katz had no explanation.

The detective seemed to become confused, though, after Sanders and Frank got him to
acknowledge that the FBI was focusing its investigation on the "Mack-Muhammad theory" of the
case. Katz insisted that he had recently made a "plan" to interview Muhammad but was asked by
the captain of the Robbery-Homicide Division to "hold off," because the FBI was still
investigating. He had been considering placing a wiretap on Muhammad, Katz admitted. Why,
the attorneys asked, would he do that? Because Muhammad was still a suspect in the murder,
answered Katz, apparently forgetting that he had earlier stated that Muhammad was not a prime
suspect. Katz acknowledged that there was one piece of evidence that implicated Muhammad in
this crime: a witness who had placed him at the scene on the night of the murder.
Sanders and Frank both knew that Katz was referring to the man they believed would be their
best witness at trial, Puffy Combs' former bodyguard Eugene Deal.

Deal had impressed lapd DEtectives as the most credible witness among those in the caravan of
cars that had carried Combs and B.I.G. to the Petersen Museum party on the night of the murder.
In his interviews with the police, Deal, a New York State parole officer, had strongly denounced
the LAPD's pet theory that Crips had committed the crime, mainly because the members of the
gang he met at the Petersen party that night had shown him "nothing but love." And Deal's
description of the "Nation of Islam guy" who seemed to be stalking Combs as they waited for
their rides after the party had always been the most intriguing statement provided by any
witnesses. As the Muslim approached from the sidewalk that evening, Deal said, he "seemed to be
checking them out" — Combs in particular — before turning to walk north in the direction from
which the black Impala would come less than ten minutes later. Deal said that police never
showed him a photo of Amir Muhammad, but documentary filmmaker Nick Broom-field did;
with camera rolling, Deal was shown pictures of a half-dozen people who had been linked to the
murder in one way or another. Deal immediately picked out one photo and said, "That's him right
there."

The man in the photograph was Harry Billups, a.k.a. Amir Muhammad.

Deal was remarkably consistent in the deposition conducted this past Valentine's Day by Frank,
Sanders and a lawyer from the Los Angeles city attorney's office. He was on edge from the
moment he saw that "serious-looking" man in the blue suit and bow tie outside the Petersen
Museum, Deal said in his deposition. "We had had a confrontation [the night before] at the Soul
Train Awards with some people that were from the Nation of Islam, and I was a little worried
about that," he said. As the Muslim "came close," the bodyguard recalled, "I looked him in his eye,
and I showed him my weapon." Only then did the man turn and disappear among the cars that
lined the street. As the Bad Boy caravan left the museum's parking structure a few minutes later,
Deal rode in the lead vehicle with Combs. They had just driven past Wilshire when "I hear Tone
[a member of B.I.G.'s entourage] say, 'Yo, somebody is pulling a gun at B.I.G.,'" Deal recalled, "and
then I heard something go bap-bap-bap-bap-bap."

Sanders and Frank were convinced the bodyguard was a solid-gold witness. A giant of a man
(six-feet-seven and 309 pounds) who carried himself with quiet confidence, Deal spoke well and
without hesitation. Better yet, he had nothing to gain from his testimony in the case; in fact, he
was paying a considerable price for his cooperation. After interviewing him, Deal said, the
LAPD's Katz told him that "they'd be getting back in touch with me… . But I never heard from
them after that day." But Deal believed the LAPD did speak to his employer. He was put on
unpaid leave for exceeding the allowable number of hours devoted to outside employment during
the time he was working for Combs. To make matters worse, Combs, a friend of Deal's since 1989,
has not hired him again since learning that Deal was talking to the police.

The man who would be Diddy had failed to fully cooperate with the investigation of B.I.G.'s
death ever since it had begun back in 1997. Notorious B.I.G. was not only the Bad Boy label's
biggest earner, but also, supposedly, one of Combs' closest friends. Yet Puffy had made it clear
from the start that he would be doing nothing to help police solve the murder. Gregory Young,
who had been sitting next to B.I.G. when he was shot to death, told Poole that Combs went so far
as to tell the other members of the Bad Boy entourage that "if our names even appear on a witness
list, we're out of a job." And now, suddenly, the other witnesses who were in the vehicle with
B.I.G. on the night of his death also seemed to be losing their memories.

Wallace has been reluctant to speak about Combs in connection to this case, but she now says, "If
Puffy has been threatening people with the loss of their jobs for cooperating with the police, I
want that made public … If — and I'm gonna spell that capital I, capital F — IF he did that, then I
think he is lower than low."

One lawyer says, "Somebody at the Times has an agenda that involves discrediting our case and
protecting the city from a suit."

Even with Deal on their witness list, Sanders and Frank were feeling out-gunned. They added
firepower in the person of Sergio Robleto, who had spent twenty-six years with the LAPD,
retiring in 1995 to enter high-end private security work. His last position with the department had
been commander of South Bureau Homicide, where he supervised Poole. Before agreeing to
become involved in the case, Robleto asked if he could take a look at the evidence the attorneys
had received from the LAPD. "It was forty-four boxes of stuff," Robleto recalls. "When I read
through it, I was shocked by what I found. Percipient witnesses who were present on the street
when this shooting took place haven't been interviewed by the LAPD. That just doesn't happen."
Robleto was especially scandalized, he says, by the degree to which "political considerations" had
compromised the B.I.G. murder investigation. "Internal Affairs made sure that anybody who said
anything bad about Rafael Perez was neutralized. This case was corrupted from the start, and it
only got worse as it went along."

After reading through the evidence, Robleto agreed not only to work for the plaintiffs as an
investigator but also to testify in court as an expert witness. He helped develop several witnesses
for the plaintiffs, including a man whom they believed could break the case wide open — an
intimidating convicted felon named Mario Ha'mmonds.

Ha'mmonds, a former partner in a small rap label called Lock Records, had a long and
complicated history of both criminal conduct and cooperation with the authorities. He had been
working with the FBI since the early Nineties and was passed on to the LAPD as a "confidential
and reliable" informant in 1999, after the B.I.G. murder. From 1997 to 1999, he was part of Knight's
protective circle at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo.

A hulking figure who wore graying dreadlocks and black horn-rim glasses with his prison blues,
Ha'mmonds sat in a wheelchair fingering prayer beads during his deposition in May. He was
being treated for a broken neck and liver cancer, among other ailments, Ha'mmonds said, and he
understood that he was not long for this world. He remained a man who could take care of
himself, however; Sanders and Frank questioned him at San Quentin, where he had been
transferred from the Marin County Jail (serving a sentence for identity theft and forgery),
following a bloody battle with another inmate. This man had attacked him with a pen,
Ha'mmonds said, after overhearing a phone conversation involving the Smalls case. Although in
his wheelchair at the time, Ha'mmonds had managed to inflict what the authorities characterized
as "great bodily injury" on his armed assailant. "Music, records, film — crime," he said, in answer
to a question about what kinds of businesses he had been involved in. He freely admitted that he
had spent twenty-six of his forty-nine years in jails or prisons.

An Oakland native, Ha'mmonds was OG (original gangster) in the most fundamental sense of the
term, having joined the much-feared Black Guerrilla Family prison gang while incarcerated as a
young man. What really gave Ha'mmonds stature in the gangsta-rap world, though, was the time
he had spent as an enforcer for the most powerful drug lord in Northern California, Felix
Mitchell. Ha'mmonds had dropped out of the BGF in 1987, when he joined a Nation of Islam
splinter group known as Five Percenters, which anointed him "a Muslim who will commit crimes
in the name of Allah," as Ha'mmonds explained it. He abandoned the Five Percenters to become
an orthodox Sunni Muslim in 1990, around the same time he decided to "debrief" (inform on his
former fellow gang members) in order to escape the suffocating confines of the super-maximum-
security prison at Pelican Bay and return to a mainline institution. Most of what he told the
government involved "when we had dudes killed or we killed ourselves," Ha'mmonds said in his
deposition.

Ha'mmonds had worked ever since as what he liked to call an "agent provocateur" and had been
well paid for assisting the government in various investigations, in particular those involving
Death Row Records and Suge Knight. His introduction to Knight was provided by Shakur: He
and Pac had known each other since the late 1980s, when the future rap legend was a skinny,
scared teenager living in Marin City and working as a dancer with the Digital Underground. The
two of them had met up in Las Vegas for the Holyfield-Bowe heavy-weight title fight in
November 1995, Ha'mmonds said, and were gambling with a group that had included Knight,
Snoop Dogg and several members of the Dogg Pound, at Caesar's Palace, before adjourning to the
VIP room at Knight's 662 club. One night when Knight had arranged for them to be alone,
Ha'mmonds recalled, Knight said, "'You're from up north, right, man? You fuck with Felix and
them, right?' I said, 'Yeah.' And he mentioned Christopher Wallace — Biggie Smalls — and he
say, 'You know, that fat punk is giving me a lot of lip and a lot of shit on the East Coast. You
think you can handle it?' By 'handle it,' meaning, can you arrange or do — assassinate —
Christopher Wallace, Biggie Smalls? I told him no." Knight seemed very disappointed: "He say,
'Aww, I thought you was hard, man.'"

But Ha'mmonds was still welcome to hang with Knight and his crew. During a video shoot in
L.A., Knight had told him that there was no need to worry about drug busts and such while on
location, "'cause we got LAPD.'" It was in this period that he met David Mack, whom he
understood to be part of Knight's security team. "I don't trust cops," Ha'mmonds said, "regardless
of how cool they is." But he felt an immediate rapport with another man he met at one of Knight's
parties in Las Vegas; Amir Muhammad. He was impressed that Muhammad had greeted him in
fluent Arabic.

Knight and Ha'mmonds had shared the same cellblock at San Luis Obispo Men's Colony in the
late Nineties, living just ten feet from each other. Both the LAPD and the FBI communicated with
him in that regard. During their first few days on the block, Ha'mmonds said, "Me and Suge
Knight reacquainted ourselves from our little escapades in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and we
reminisced and laughed and jived and bull-shitted about it." Their relationship became more
serious when Knight began to rely upon Ha'mmonds for physical protection. Knight apparently
understood that the Rolling Sixties Crips had wanted him dead. On top of that, Knight "wouldn't
even trust his own Bloods associates," Ha'mmonds said, "because a lot of them wanted to do
something to him there as well." Knight turned to the Muslims and brothers who either were, or
had been, members of the BGF, explained Ha'mmonds: "He made sure we had money on our
books, made sure that our families was taken care of." Over time, Knight began to rely on
Ha'mmonds in almost every detail of daily life: "I would get people to run his errands for him …
to run his weed over to different quads, make sure the officer was bringing us what we needed."
Since Knight could barely read or write, Ha'mmonds said, "I used to sign for his packages" and
spent evenings reading aloud to him in the prison yard's bleachers.

The murder of Notorious B.I.G. had taken place not long before Knight was moved to the Men's
Colony, and Ha'mmonds recalled that Knight hadn't needed much time after his arrival to take
credit for the killing. "He said, 'My people handled the business. They took care of him … and he
took it like a fat bitch.' He started laughing, and he said, 'We just missed Puffy.'" At first, Knight
maintained that B.I.G.'s murder was retaliation for Shakur's slaying, according to Ha'mmonds. He
began to doubt this story, though, when people associated with the Bay Area rappers Too Short
and E-40 offered him money to assassinate Knight, insisting it was Knight who had had Shakur
killed. "They asked me, Why am I hanging out with this dude," Ha'mmonds recalled, "when you
know he killed homeboy?"

Two of the names Knight had mentioned in connection to the murder were "Reg" — believed to be
Death Row's then-director of security, Reggie Wright Jr. — and an individual he referred to as Big
Sykes. Knight went on to name two other members of the "team" that had taken B.I.G. out,
according to Ha'mmonds: David Mack and Amir Muhammad. Knight told Ha'mmonds that all
four had helped him arrange the murder by phone while he was incarcerated at the county jail in
Los Angeles, and he gradually offered details about how the killing had been accomplished: Two
women who had infiltrated the Bad Boy camp provided the information about when and where
B.I.G. would be exposed, and his team had coordinated events on the night of the murder using
cell phones. Knight never did tell him who exactly pulled the trigger, Ha'mmonds said. He did,
however, ultimately reveal that his story about B.I.G.'s killing being payback for Tupac's murder
was "a smokescreen," Ha'mmonds said, adding that shortly before Knight's transfer to Mule Creek
State Prison, "He say, 'Later on, down the line, you'll see the big picture. It's about money.'"
Knight also told Ha'mmonds he had no concern about being charged with B.I.G.'s death. "He told
me this out of his own mouth, that because LAPD was involved, that this murder would never be
solved, and that 'If anybody says anything against me, I can find out.'"

For Sanders and Frank, Ha'mmonds' pretrial testimony was about as good as it could get. Still,
they knew he'd pose problems as a witness — after all, he was a snitch, a career criminal who had
been involved in murders. Of greater concern: While LAPD records indicated Ha'mmonds had
passed on the information about Big Sykes and Reg being involved in the Notorious B.I.G.
murder, there was no mention of Mack or Muhammad in those documents. The moment he had
brought up Mack and Muhammad to the LAPD, Ha'mmonds says, he was told, "We don't need to
talk about that." Ha'mmonds came to believe that whatever he told the LAPD was somehow being
passed on to Knight. At his last two court appearances, Ha'mmonds said, "people from Knight's
camp" had taken seats in the gallery and that both had made slashing motions across their throats
when he looked at them.

LAPD representatives clearly recognized how damaging Ha'mmonds' testimony could be to them:
They had not only withheld tapes and materials generated by his interviews with the police
during their initial surrender of evidence in the case but had blacked out his name in documents
as well. Police officials relented only after Sanders and Frank discovered an obscure reference to
the man and threatened a court order, persuading the LAPD to turn over everything in its
possession that mentioned Ha'mmonds. This resulted in the production of documents that
revealed the biggest problem for the LAPD: The department itself had vouched for Ha'mmonds'
integrity when it used his statements to obtain search warrants in its investigations of Knight.
During his interrogation by the city's attorneys, Ha'mmonds put it this way: "I am an honest
individual. Even though I'm a criminal, I do not lie. My credibility … must be good, because I've
made a livelihood out of this. People are in prison … locked up from some of the information that
I have contributed to government agencies."

"The LAPD has to be asking themselves how they're going to call him a liar now," Sanders says,
"when they've already called him a credible witness. I can't wait to see how the L.A. Times tries to
spin this one for them."

When looking back on this nine-year-long saga of deceit and corruption, nothing is more
troubling — or more incomprehensible — than the role played by The Los Angeles Times.Sanders
bluntly describes the Times as "a co-conspirator in the cover-up."

Up until September 2002, the Times could have settled its debt to the reading public with a
moderately embarrassing mea culpa-an acknowledgment that all was not as it had seemed in the
story of whistle-blower Rafael Perez and the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.
Instead, the newspaper chose to go over the top with a huge two-part frontpage article (written
by Chuck Philips) published on the six-year anniversary of Shakur's slaying. The gist was that
Shakur' had been murdered by Crips gang members at the behest of Notorious B.I.G., who had
offered them $1 million to do it. The Times reported that on the night of Shakur's killing, a Crips
"emissary" had visited B.I.G. in the penthouse suite at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, where
the enormous rapper promised $1 million on the condition that Shakur was killed with his gun —
then placed a loaded 40-caliber Glock on the table in front of him. The only two named sources in
the article about B.I.G.'s involvement were Knight and Atlanta rapper E.D.I. Mean, both of whom
offered descriptions of the shootings that had already appeared in print many times. There was
no documentations offered of B.I.G.'s stay at the MGM Grand or even of his presence in Las
Vegas. The paper couldn't name one person who had seen one of the most famous young black
men in the country a flamboyant rapper who weighted almost 400 pounds and traveled with an
entourage — in Las Vegas that weekend.

Within five days, the Times was forced to publish a new, shorter article — also authored by Philips
— reporting that lawyers for the Wallace estate had produced invoices that placed B.I.G. in a New
York recording studio-Combs'"Daddy's House"-on the evening he was supposed to have been
meeting with those Crips in Las Vegas. B.I.G.'s family was even able to provide MTV with a
digital tape of the song "Nasty Girls" that the rapper had recorded during that session.

After the "B.I.G. killed Tupac" article appeared, Voletta Wallace, who describes herself as
"flabbergasted" by the Times' attack on her son's reputation, was immediately contacted by friends
of her son who said they had been with B.I.G. in New Jersey, watching the Tyson-Seldon fight on
pay-per-view, roughly an hour before the Times claimed he had been meeting Crips in Vegas. "It
was so ridiculous," she says. "My son is Notorious B.I.G. If my son is gonna go to Las Vegas, don't
tell me nobody didn't see him."

The deluge of biased reporting about the case had begun to wear on Sanders, he admits: "It's been
a big enough drag to have a whole bunch of very good lawyers against us in this case, but to have
the biggest newspaper in the state doing triple back flips to try to influence the jury against us has
made it much more difficult." Still, no one on the plaintiffs' side was prepared for the front-page
article by Philips that the Times ran in June, eleven days before the civil trial was scheduled to
begin, under the headline "Informant in Rap Star's Slaying Admits Hearsay."

The essence of the story was the headline: The secret informant who first told police that B.I.G.'s
killer was a Nation of Islam member named "Amir" or "Ashmir" had "admitted" that his
information wasn't firsthand. Philips did his best to use the man's own background — which he
had described in a sealed deposition — against him: The informant, known as "Psycho Mike," had
grown up in Compton and had shot a man to death to avenge the murder of his brother; he had
joined the Black Guerrilla Family while behind bars, stabbing another inmate fourteen times as his
"blood in" initiation rite. He had later experienced a religious conversion that resulted in, among
other things, his becoming an informant for agencies that included the L.A. Sheriff's Department,
the FBI and the DEA, He was also a diagnosed schizophrenic who had been on medication for
most of his adult life and a man who had instilled fear in his enemies by cultivating a reputation
for unpredictable eruptions of violence.
The judge ruled, "The detective… made a decision to conceal evidence… that supported the contention
that David Mack was responsible for the murder."

What the Times did not report was Psycho Mike's consistency and lucidity during his deposition.
He had not been caught in a single contradiction by the city attorneys who tried to trip him up.
"Ten minutes into that deposition, I knew this guy was going to be an absolutely great witness for
us in court," Sanders says.

"He came across as someone who was just going to tell it like it was, and to hell with you if you
didn't like it."

The section of the article that embittered Sanders and Frank, though, was where Philips used
Psycho Mike's February 3rd, 2005, deposition to suggest he was confessing that his information
Muhammad in the murder had come to him secondhand. In fact, he had never said it was
anything else: Most of what he knew about this case, Mike explained, had resulted from trusted
friends and family connections. One of Mike's own brothers had been a professional killer (until
he himself was murdered in his bed) and, in that capacity, was familiar with Muhammad, whom
he also had understood to be a contract assassin. "He wasn't a stranger to my brother," the
informant observed. "Two killers was in the same group."

When Psycho Mike finally met Muhammad at the house in Compton where a Death Row Records
employee named Rick James lived, he said he brought up the Smalls case. Muhammad
immediately dropped his voice to a "killer's whisper" and "said that if my brother was alive, I'd be
dead," apparently meaning that his own brother would have killed him for his insolence. "[He
said] 'I would not be here talking about it.'"

Despite what Psycho Mike claimed to know about how dangerous Muhammad was, he went
along with an FBI plan to get incriminating statements from him on tape in December 2003,
driving south to San Diego and knocking on the door of the house where Muhammad was then
living. But Muhammad "got spooked when he seen me," Mike recalled. "Thought I was coming
there to kill him" and refused to let him inside.

Almost immediately after this encounter, Psycho Mike said, someone had leaked word of the FBI
investigation to Chuck Philips, who promptly produced a story for the Times that "penned me out
as the source of going down to San Diego with a wire." He was furious: "I confronted [FBI agent]
Phil Carson, and I wanted to jump on him. I wanted to hurt him." Carson, though, insisted he
wasn't Philips' source, and even signed an affidavit stating so.

Sergio Robleto described the release of the sealed deposition transcript of the "Informant Admits
Hearsay" article as "tantamount to jury tampering." And the Times' decision to reveal the
informant's street name was, he believes, like "signing his death warrant." Within days of the
article's publication, Robleto says, Bloods gang members found Psycho Mike's secret location,
roughed him up on the street and promised to come back later and "take care of [him] for good."
He disappeared immediately after this incident, and neither Robleto nor the attorneys he is
working for have been able to contact him since. Sanders and Frank had expected the man to be
one of their strongest witnesses but now would have to make do with a DVD of his deposition.

As the days and hours ticked down toward the start of the trial, the two attorneys realized that
Mike was not the only important witness they would have to do without. Kenneth Knox, the one
officer other than Poole who had attempted a substantive investigation into the relationship
between Death Row Records and the LAPD, had disappeared. Robleto had last spoken to Knox in
late 2004. By then retired from the police department, Knox was "extremely reluctant" to discuss
Death Row Records, Robleto says: "He explained that his wife was terrified of Suge Knight." At
the same time, however, Knox said he felt compelled to address the troubling manner in which his
investigation had been abruptly shut down by the LAPD, which, among other things, had wiped
clean his computer hard drive.

In the weeks before the law-suit's trial date, Robleto and his associates devoted many hours to
surveillance of Knox's home and saw no sign of him. "We heard he had gone to Mexico to avoid
our subpoena," Robleto says, "but we wondered how he knew exactly when he needed to
disappear." This raised questions about the involvement of Assistant City Attorney Don Vincent,
the former police captain who was now the city's lead lawyer on the case. He has known Knox
since he was seventeen — in fact, he recruited his old friend onto the force. But in an interview
with Rolling Stone, Vincent denied telling Knox to make himself scarce. Says Frank, "However it
happened, his disappearance has hurt our case and helped theirs."

The attorneys were especially concerned about losing another important witness after Judge
Cooper decided against them in a dispute about how the trial should be structured, ruling with
the city that the case should be broken into three parts — and that the first hurdle the plaintiffs
had to get over would be the highest. Sanders and Frank knew they possessed overwhelming
evidence that the LAPD had alternately neglected and obstructed an investigation into the
possible involvement of LAPD officers associated with Death Row Records in the murder of
Notorious B.I.G., but "you can't sue someone for the failure to fully investigate a crime," Frank
explains.

To win their civil-rights law-suit, the attorneys would have to prove that the LAPD was guilty of
a "pattern and practice" that had resulted in the rapper's death. And Cooper had ruled that they
would first have to convince the jury that Mack had been involved in B.I.G.'s slaying before they
could make the case that the LAPD had covered it up. On the other hand, they weren't held to the
"proof beyond reasonable doubt" standard of a criminal trial, the attorneys note, and would only
have to convince a jury that it was more likely than not that Mack and his friend Muhammad
were involved in the murder. Mario Ha'mmonds and Eugene Deal, whom they intended to
present as their final two witnesses, would provide plenty evidence to persuade a jury that it
needed to hear the rest of their case, the attorneys believed.
By June 21st, when a jury had been selected to hear opening statements, Sanders and Frank
realized that combating the impression that their case was falling apart would be even tougher
than they had imagined. One witness after another had begun to duck and cover, convinced their
lives were at risk if they testified in open court. Frank urged the jury to prepare for inconsistencies
in the testimony of "reluctant" witnesses frightened because those implicated in this case "are
incredibly violent people."

After the mistrial, Wallace's lawyers were contacted by a number of political figures in Los
Angeles — worried that this lawsuit might bankrupt the city.

The first important witness called by the plaintiffs, former Shakur bodyguard Kevin Hackie,
promptly confirmed the two attorneys' fears with what the Times described as "erratic" testimony.
The newspaper's coverage of Hackie's appearance in court emphasized the body-guard's
repudiation of his previous sworn testimony that Mack had worked in a "covert capacity" for
Death Row Records. The Times made no mention 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.

The following day, though, things began to improve dramatically from the plaintiffs' point of
view. Retired LAPD detective Fred Miller, who had been both Poole's partner and his supervisor,
not only praised his former partner's detective work but testified that after Poole left the LAPD,
Miller had taken the case to the district attorney's office, seeking to have Knight charged with
B.I.G.'s murder. Prosecutors had told him the case was "not quite there," said Miller, who could
offer no explanation for the LAPD's subsequent failure to investigate further.

The most startling revelation of the day, however, was the testimony of LAPD detective Wayne
Caffey, who told of having been shown a photograph of a woman posing with Mack and Perez
that he had understood was seized from the home of a South Central L.A. gang member. The
woman in the photograph, he said on the stand, was apparently Bernard Parks' daughter
Michelle. "That had the jurors on the edges of their seats," Sanders says. "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."

Things got even stranger the next day, when Hollywood screenwriter Mikko Alanne, who had
been researching the police scandal for a TV movie, testified under oath that during a private
meeting, Caffey had told him 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 Knight had ordered B.I.G.'s murder. Caffey denied this story.

But the drama of the trial's first four days would pale in comparison to what happened the
evening of June 23rd and during the days that followed.

Perry Sanders was riding to dinner in an SUV with blacked-out windows, accompanied by two
bodyguards hired to protect him during the trial, when he took some 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 remembers,
but for some reason it was this person he phoned back first. Sanders almost hung up, he admits,
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 years
since he had taken this case, but then, Sanders says, "This guy goes on: 'I was at a Board of Rights
hearing in the basement of Parker Center.'" Board of Rights hearings were the LAPD's disciplinary
proceedings, Sanders knew, and ordinarily were not held in the basement of police headquarters.
But before he went further, the man said he required an absolute promise that his identity would
be protected. When Sanders agreed to this, the man said that he was a member of the LAPD's
command staff and had a lot to lose but "felt he just couldn't live with himself if he didn't share
what he knew," the attorney recalls. "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." Sanders immediately phoned Robleto and asked him to verify that a proceeding
like the one described had taken place. Robleto phoned back in the middle of the night to say he
was convinced that what the attorney had been told was accurate.

"I showed up for court on Friday morning at 7:30," Sanders recalls, "and by noon had a
handwritten presentation to make before the judge." Judge Cooper, flummoxed, asked for
suggestions about what to do. Sanders proposed adjourning until Monday morning while both
sides investigated what he had been told.

"And by Monday we all knew it was all true."

That weekend, for the first time in memory, the LAPD had locked down an entire division — and
not just any division, but the department's most prestigious, Robbery-Homicide — to search it
from top to bottom. Robleto and Poole say they believe the lock-down was essentially theatrical,
because the Internal Affairs investigators who performed the search already knew what they were
going to find: more than 200 pages of documents hidden in two drawers belonging to Detective
Steve Katz. Most of those pages related to assorted hearings and investigations that involved the
sworn testimony of a prison inmate named Kenneth Boagni, regarding the confessions of Rafael
Perez to his involvement in crimes that included the murder of Notorious B.I.G. "Talk about shit
hitting the fan," Sanders says. "You should have seen the faces of the city's attorneys when we got
to court on Monday morning."

Most of the Boagni materials have been placed under seal by Cooper and are therefore impossible
to detail. A general description, however, has been offered in court documents. What they reveal
is this: Sometime in 1999, Boagni was a cell-mate and friend of Perez's at a California penal
institution. During that time, according to Boagni, Perez took pleasure in describing his work for
Death Row Records and his participation in various crimes, including the murder of Notorious
B.I.G., and he detailed his activities, and Mack's, at the Petersen Museum on the night of the
killing. This information had come to light as the result of a Board of Rights hearing involving
charges against a Sgt. Paul Byrnes, who had been implicated by Perez in the —scandal.

One of the three panel members at the proceeding involving Byrnes — and the only civilian
among them — was Xavier Hermosillo, a former public-relations executive best known in
Southern California as a radio talk-show host and community activist. Hermosillo says he found
Boagni to be a "totally credible" witness. Right up front, Boagni told the panel he was the black
sheep of a good family and that his main motivation was redemption. He'd been blessed with
athletic ability and been drafted by the Houston Astros, Boagni said, but he continued to get into
trouble with the law. He still considered "P-Dawg" a friend, Boagni said, and felt bad about
"stabbing him in the back" but knew for a fact that Perez had falsely accused any number of
fellow officers, including Byrnes, of crimes they had not committed.

At the Byrnes hearing, Boagni had tried to tell the panel what Perez had told him about his own
involvement in B.I.G.'s murder. "But as soon as he started talking about that," Hermosillo says,
"the LAPD's representative jumped to his feet and cut it off, saying it was "under investigation.'"

What the scant available record reveals about this "investigation" is that Cliff Armas, from the
LAPD's Officer Representation Section, visited Boagni on a number of occasions at Calipatria State
Prison in 2000; Boagni told the officer about the involvement of Perez and Mack in B.I.G.'s
shooting. Armas told Boagni he would pass along the information to another investigator. When a
pair of LAPD detectives showed up at the prison where Boagni was housed, the inmate assumed
they were the investigators Armas had spoken of. The two detectives, though, were members of
the Task Force, a group that was committed to the validation of Perez's story. Boagni began to
suspect that the two detectives had a hidden agenda; they seemed bent on trying to trip him up
and persuaded him not to testify. Boagni filed a complaint that led eventually to an Internal
Affairs Division investigation in which he was interviewed many times. The details of that
investigation are also under seal.

The single most remarkable fact the judge and attorneys released to the public was this: Boagni
offered to wear a wire on Perez to see if he could get him to admit he was lying about the
accusations he had made against his fellow officers and to implicate himself in the Biggie murder,
and the LAPD turned him down. As Sanders and Frank would note in the Motion for Sanctions
they filed with Cooper, "There would appear to be no possible legitimate LAPD motivation for
such rejection of help."

The LAPD's wild-eyed attempt to defend itself against these charges left Judge Cooper shaking
her head. In a deposition of Katz that she ordered, the detective said he'd been sitting in court
"reviewing his chronological record" when he saw Boagni's name and realized he "forgot" to
inform the attorneys on the case about the tapes and documents in his possession. Early that
evening, he returned to his office and was told by his commanding officer that Internal Affairs
was about to lock down the entire division to search for the Boagni materials. Katz handed them
over-not to his supervisor, but to a private investigator working for the city on the B.I.G. lawsuit.

City Attorney Don Vincent attempted to mitigate the damage to his side by arguing that Boagni
was an insignificant witness who might easily have been over looked. The judge was having none
of it. Katz's claim that he forgot about the Boagni material in his desk was "utterly unbelievable,"
she ruled: "The detective, acting alone or in concert with others, made a decision to conceal from
the plaintiffs in this case information which could have supported their contention that David
Mack was responsible for the Wallace murder." The judge listed eighteen of the documents that
Katz had hidden from the other side in this case, before addressing Vincent's arguments. "The
sheer volume of information attests to the seriousness with which [the LAPD] treated this
informant's statements and belies [the city's] current position that he is just another jailhouse
informant seeking favors."

While the judge could not bring herself to award the plaintiffs a default judgment (which would
end the trial in favor of the plaintiffs), she felt she had no choice but to declare a mistrial. The
judge awarded the plaintiffs "fees and costs" as a sanction for the city's misconduct.

Sanders and frank were at once exultant and overwhelmed. They knew that in the next trial likely
to occur next summer — the city would have to defend itself against a vastly expanded lawsuit
before a judge who quite clearly had become convinced that their claim had merit. "The law of the
case is that the LAPD potentially withheld information," Frank explains. "And now there's been a
judicial finding of that fact. So we have won the most significant point before we even go to trial.
Their lead investigator has been found to be a liar and a cheat."

The inclusion of Perez as one of the officers implicated in B.I.G.'s murder changed everything,
Sanders and Frank knew. The scandal and the lengths to which police and city officials had gone
to protect Perez from those who knew him as a fabricator were now an essential aspect of the
case. This allowed the attorneys to demand a vast trove of documents that related to Perez's plea
deal, his secret testimony and the investigations that resulted. Sanders and Frank believe there are
still grounds for default judgment. Notations on the Boagni evidence demonstrated that at least
nine of Katz's superiors going up to the rank of assistant chief-were aware of its existence and
relevance. "Katz wasn't alone in this," Frank says. Sanders adds, "If we can catch them
withholding other documents, I believe the judge will have to declare a default verdict in our
favor."

How much could the city of L.A. stand to lose? In the court report by economist Peter Formuzis
on B.I.G.'s future earnings potential, Keith Clinkscales, former president of the company that
founded Vibe magazine, had described B.I.G. as "the world's most popular hip-hop artist at the
time of his murder"; the report estimated that he would have earned at least $362 million during
the remainder of his life. The estate's lawyers could claim every penny of that, and perhaps a good
deal more. After the mistrial, Sanders says, he was contacted by a number of "concerned parties"
— including political figures in Los Angeles — worried that this lawsuit might bankrupt the city.

Along with Frank, Sanders has taken particular pleasure in watching how the L.A. Times has
absorbed the new reality of the case. The newspaper's story reporting the discovery of the Boagni
materials changed dramatically from one edition to the next. The first version ran under a
subhead reading, "Three weeks into their civil case, lawyers for Notorious B.I.G.'s family have
failed to prove an LAPD link to the star's 1997 slaying." That version did not even mention the
lockdown of the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division and the discovery of the hidden tapes and
documents until the fifth paragraph. By the third version of the story, however, the lead sentence
reflected what was already appearing in East Coast newspapers: "The LAPD deliberately hid
witness statements tying corrupt police to the slaying of Notorious B.I.G., a federal judge said
Thursday in granting a mistrial and potentially lucrative attorney fees to the rapper's family."

Still, the newspaper didn't seem to want to go down without a fight. In the first article reporting
the discovery of the hidden Boagni materials, Andrew Blankstein, the reporter who had covered
the trial for the Times, threw in a line from Mack, interviewed in prison, claiming that Sanders and
Frank "offered him inducements to change his testimony." Sanders, who had already called the
allegations a lie, confronted Blankstein. According to Sanders, "He said to me, 'I've got editors. I
was instructed to put that in there.' So I know that somebody in a position of power at that
newspaper has an agenda. I don't know what it is, but I know that it involves discrediting our
case and protecting the city from this lawsuit." (Blankstein didn't return calls asking for comment.)

Los Angeles Times assistant managing editor Marc Duvoisin told Rolling Stone, "We stand behind
our coverage of the killings of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace. Chuck Philips and The Los
Angeles Times have no agenda regarding these stories. We have not tried to favor or disfavor any
of the parties to the Wallace lawsuit. We have tried to learn about and publish important and
interesting information to the best of our ability, and we will continue to do so. For reasons that
should be obvious, we will not reveal the identities of confidential sources."

Sanders visited Boagni in prison in early October. Composed and articulate, he "might now be the
best witness we have," the attorney says. Alerted soon after this visit that LAPD officials were
spreading the story that Boagni had recanted, Sanders asked if it was true, and in reply, received a
letter in which Boagni wrote that he stood by his earlier testimony "100,000 percent." The letter
also made it clear, however, that Boagni was beginning to recognize the powerful position in
which recent events had placed him. He had just been visited in prison by an LAPD
representative, who "made it perfectly clear that if I was to testify, I would bury the city and the
LAPD," wrote Boagni, adding that the police representative "also made it clear he hoped I
wouldn't depose or testify."

Sanders' concerns about how the city and the LAPD might try to manipulate Boagni are likely to
be overwhelmed by the eighty-one CDs of evidence related to Perez that the LAPD is supposed to
send in response to the plaintiffs' most recent discovery demand. The CDs are expected to contain
tens of thousands of pages of documents, and he and Frank will have no choice but to search
through every one of them, Sanders knows, as they prepare for the next trial.

Meanwhile, eight years after the death of the Notorious B.I.G., he remains a major star. Later this
month, Bad Boy Records will release Duets: The Final Chapter, in which contemporary stars such as
Snoop Dogg, Eminem and Jay-Z rap to existing Biggie tracks.

Voletta Wallace continues to insist that she doesn't care how large her victory is in this civil case.
The L.A. Times has reported that the Wallace estate has tried to settle for as little as $18 million.
Sanders won't comment on that, but he notes that the Times articles have omitted one crucial
detail of every settlement discussion he has had with the city: his client's demand that the LAPD
devote its resources to solving her son's murder. "What I need from this lawsuit is that the person
or persons who murdered my son are brought to justice," Wallace says. "What I need from this
lawsuit is honesty. What I need from this lawsuit is to show that humans have integrity, show
that they're not cowards, show that they're not liars, show that they care about the truth."

Wallace seems to have achieved a remarkable calm amid the storm of secrets and lies her court
claim has unleashed. "Let it all come out," she says. "There's nothing they can surprise me with
anymore." When asked what she imagines her dead son would say about her claim that his
murder was the nexus of a vast and complex conspiracy, she pauses for a few moments, then
answers, "I think he would say, "Well, if you didn't know before, now you do.'"