DJ Quik almost immediately initiated a second attack, this one on Kelly Jamerson, witnesses said. Jamerson, also a member of the Rolling 60s Crips, was chased into the El Rey’s lobby, where a crowd of twelve to fifteen Bloods surrounded him. One of them knocked him to the ground by hitting him in the head with a beer bottle, and the rest of the group closed in. “We’re going to kill this motherfucker,” the El Rey’s security guard heard one of the men say, as he joined the others in kicking and stomping Jamerson for at least ten minutes, by which time the man on the ground was covered with blood and clearly unconscious.
The El Rey’s ticket taker told police that, immediately after the fight, he was approached by a man who handed over three claim tickets and said, “We need these cars brought up right away. We’re with DJ Quik and he’s the reason this fight started. We need the cars brought around back.”
At least five witnesses, including three who were willing to give their names, said they had seen DJ Quik kicking Jamerson while he lay on the ground. Nearly all of the others who were identified in the attack on Jamerson, however, were not DJ Quik’s bodyguards, but members of Suge Knight’s personal security detail. These included Alton (“Buntry”) McDonald, Crawford (“Hi-C”) Wilkerson, Jai Hassan Jamaal (“Jake the Violator”) Robles, and Ronald (“Ram”) Lamb.
Easily the most knowledgeable and compelling of the witnesses police interviewed was a young man who spoke to them several times by telephone but refused to give his name. The Crips had believed it was safe to attend a Death Row party, this witness said, because Snoop Dogg was one of their own. DJ Quik was the first to physically attack Kelly Jamerson, according to the witness, and struck him with both a chair and a champagne bottle before joining the others in stomping Jamerson after he fell to the ground. The witness confirmed the participation of Jake, Buntry, and Hi-C in the attack, then added two other names, Bernard “Zeek” Thomas and Donell Antwayne “Donzel” Smith, both associates of DJ Quik. He himself was a close friend of DJ Quik’s, this witness said, and actually grabbed the rapper by one shoulder during the attack on Jamerson to try to pull him away, but “DJ kept on like he didn’t hear a word I said.” When police tried to convince the witness to give his name, the man refused, explaining that it wasn’t just his own life he was concerned about. “If they knew I was talking to you, they might kill my whole family,” he explained, then added this observation: “You police do not realize how powerful Suge Knight is. Going up against Suge or any of his people is like going up against the Mafia. It’s a death sentence.”
Despite what looked like an overwhelming case against DJ Quik, and strong cases against Jake (who had been seen leaving the El Rey missing one shoe), Buntry, and Hi-C, no criminal charges were ever filed in the murder of Kelly Jamerson. “The most amazing thing was that there was almost no official explanation of why they weren’t arresting anybody,” recalled Russell Poole, who had been on temporary assignment to Wilshire Detectives at the time, but was not directly involved in the investigation of the El Rey incident. “The D.A.’s office said it was a case of ‘insufficient evidence,’ but didn’t elaborate, and the media barely noticed. It was like the whole thing got swept under the carpet.”
Detectives at Wilshire Division whispered among themselves that this was a “political decision.” The Rodney King riots and the O.J. Simpson trial had left Los Angeles so traumatized that the threat of racial conflict in any form sent shudders of dread through L.A.’s civic leadership. “At that time Suge Knight was being portrayed as one of the most important black entrepreneurs in the country, and anyone who criticized him could expect to be called a racist,” Poole remembered. Knight also had powerful political allies, including the most influential black office holder in Southern California, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who earlier that year had responded to questions about the Death Row Records CEO’s alleged criminal activities by telling reporters, “The only thing Suge is threatening is the status quo.”
The most troubling report made by a witness who had been present at the El Rey Theater during the killing of Kelly Jamerson, Russell Poole would learn, never became part of the official case file. The witness in this instance was a Long Beach Police Department officer who had infiltrated Death Row Records as the agent of a federal task force probing allegations that Suge Knight and his record label were heavily involved in drug dealing and illegal gun sales. According to the task force agent, a number of off-duty police officers, including members of the Los Angeles Police Department, had been working without permits as bodyguards at the El Rey Party. These officers not only failed to rescue Kelly Jamerson, the task force agent said, but all left the theater without identifying themselves to uniformed cops on the scene, and never reported later that they had been present when Jamerson was killed.
Poole would not see the task force agent’s report until he was nearly finished with his investigation of the Gaines-Lyga shooting, and even then the report was not provided to him by either his supervisors or any other member of the department’s brass. “What it told me, when I read it, was that the LAPD had known for at least two years that some of our officers were working for Death Row Records,” Poole recalled. “With all the stuff that had come out about Kevin Gaines’s connection to Death Row, you’d think the brass would have wanted the detectives investigating Gaines to know about this, but in fact the opposite was true. They wanted to keep it hidden from us. That really started me wondering what the hell was going on.”
The task force agent’s report related at length the stories he had been told by other Death Row employees about the company’s involvement in drug trafficking. Before starting Death Row, Suge Knight had made most of his money by dealing drugs he stole from Hispanic suppliers, according to the task force agent’s sources. Suge’s record company had been started with drug money, other Death Row employees said, and since its inception it had served as a kind of clearinghouse for the transport of cocaine from the West Coast to the East Coast by members of the Bloods gang. The agent’s report went on to state that the gangbangers paid $18,500 for a kilo of coke in L.A. and sold it to rappers in New York for $26,000. “I already had heard from a number of sources that Suge Knight regularly paid some of his performers with drugs that they could deal, instead of checks,” Poole said. “So I found the information in [the task force agent]’s report pretty plausible.”
On the basis of such stories, Poole and Miller had arranged within forty-eight hours of Kevin Gaines’s death for a drug-sniffing dog from the LAPD’s narcotics group to check the green Montero. According to official police reports, the dog “showed strong interest for the odor of narcotics” in the rear passenger area of the Montero. “The narco guys told us they were sure that cocaine had been transported in this vehicle,” Poole recalled, “but all they could find was dust.”
On March 31, Poole received a memo from a black LAPD officer named Stuart Guidry. According to Guidry, an informant who was an inmate at Lancaster State Prison and insisted that he had “loaned Suge Knight the money to start Death Row Records” claimed to know a good deal about Kevin Gaines’s involvement with the record company. “The inmate stated Officer Gaines and other LAPD officers provided security for members of Death Row Records during various criminal activities,” Guidry’s report read. “The officers accompanied the members during drug deals and acted as lookouts and advisors. The officers monitored police frequencies, assisted in choosing locations for drug transactions and gave information on police tactics. The inmate stated he was not surprised at Officer Gaines’ death, but he believed it would be from someone else as opposed to a fellow officer. The inmate also stated, ‘Just wait until they search his house and see all the expensive things he got from working for Death Row.’”
Poole immediately renewed his request for an expanded investigation of Kevin Gaines’s background and activities. “My superiors, though, said there was not enough probable cause for a search warrant,” Poole recalled. “It was total bullshit. We got Gaines transporting dr
ugs, we got him stiffing in a 911 call and assaulting cops at the scene, we have four other roadway incidents, we have him linked directly to Death Row Records and Suge Knight. I wrote a twenty-page report detailing all this stuff, but still couldn’t get a warrant to search either Gaines’s home or his financial records. The average citizen’s home would have been raided by a whole squad of cops on the basis of what we had. I knew the decision was coming straight down from Chief Parks. My superiors, though, just kept telling me, ‘Gaines is dead. Let’s forget about it.’”
Kevin Gaines’s name kept popping up, however. One day after reading Officer Guidry’s memo, Poole received a phone call from a detective in Wilshire Division advising him that homicide investigators there had information suggesting that Gaines might be involved in the recent assassination of rapper Biggie Smalls. They needed a recent picture of Gaines, the Wilshire detective said, to use in a six-pack photo lineup.
This phone call was one of the main reasons that Poole readily agreed, on the morning of April 9, 1997, to take over as lead investigator in the Biggie Smalls murder investigation.
PART TWO
DEATH ROW INMATES
Poole is the type of employee who every supervisor wishes he had more of. He is thorough—NOTHING gets past him! He constantly reviews his and his partner’s work product for anything that may have been missed.
—From the “Performance Evaluation Report” filed on Detective Trainee Russell Poole for period 3/1/89 to 9/30/89
CHAPTER THREE
Biggie Smalls aka Notorious B.I.G. aka Christopher Wallace had been shot to death fifteen minutes after midnight on March 9, 1997, one month to the day before Poole was assigned to investigate the rapper’s murder. The Smalls murder was an eerie replication of Tupac Shakur’s killing six months earlier. Shakur had been riding in a BMW on the Las Vegas Strip when a white Cadillac pulled up alongside and a black male with a Glock pistol fired thirteen shots into the BMW’s passenger side. Four of those bullets hit Shakur, who lingered for several days after doctors removed a shattered lung, then died on the afternoon of September 13, 1996. Biggie Smalls was riding in a GMC Suburban when the black driver of a dark-colored Chevrolet Impala SS pulled up on the Suburban’s passenger side and sprayed the SUV with shots from a 9mm pistol. Smalls was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center forty-five minutes later.
The Suburban in which Smalls was riding had been the second vehicle in a caravan of three SUVs that had just pulled out of a parking structure at the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile. The occasion was the same one that had resulted in Kelly Jamerson’s death two years earlier, a Soul Train Record Awards “after party,” only this event was sponsored not by Death Row Records but by Quincy Jones’s VIBE magazine. Riding in the front passenger seat of the lead Suburban was Bad Boy Entertainment CEO Sean “Puffy” Combs, whose vehicle had not been fired upon. None of the four other passengers in Biggie Smalls’s Suburban had been hit by any of the bullets fired from the Impala. “I was right behind [Biggie] in the backseat, but not one bullet hit my door,” rapper James “Lil’ Caesar” Lloyd told the Los Angeles Times. “Not one bullet hit any other window. Every single shot fired hit Big’s door. They was after him for some reason.”
At least seven witnesses had seen the shooter, whom they described as a clean-shaven black male with a medium complexion and a fade haircut, wearing either a gray or light-blue suit with a bow tie. In wardrobe and grooming, the killer had looked a lot more like a member of Louis Farrakhan’s security group, the Fruit of Islam, witnesses agreed, than any kind of gangbanger. He had been alone in the Impala, firing across his body through the car’s open window with a blue steel pistol held in his right hand.
From the outset, a lot of people let it be known that they suspected the deaths of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur were connected by more than just the violent milieu of gangsta rap. Within a few hours of Smalls’s murder, LAPD detectives told reporters that they believed the rapper’s killing might be linked to “bicoastal tensions in the rap world,” as a Los Angeles Times article put it. “Everyone knew that was just another way of saying that the primary suspect was Suge Knight,” explained Russell Poole, who would come to believe that Knight not only was responsible for Biggie Smalls’s death, but Tupac Shakur’s as well.
Like a lot of the rappers who worked for him, Marion Hugh Knight Jr. had grown up in Compton, a city of 110,000 surrounded by the black and brown neighborhoods of southern Los Angeles County. Compton was still racially mixed and working class when Maxine and Marion Knight Sr. bought their house in the city. That was in 1969, five years after the birth of their only son, a boy they called “Sugar Bear,” the parents said, because he had such a sweet disposition. By the time “Suge,” as he became known, reached his tenth birthday, however, Compton was ravaged by two concurrent developments: first, the loss of its manufacturing base, and second, domination by the two most murderous gangs in U.S. history, the Bloods and the Crips.
The Crips had come first. The gang was started a year before the Knights settled in Compton by a group of Fremont High School students who at that time called themselves the Baby Avenues. The name was a way of honoring their older friends and relatives who belonged to the Avenue Boys gang. Black gangs had existed in Los Angeles since the 1920s, when groups like the Goodlows and the Boozies controlled prostitution and gambling in the Central Avenue section of town. During the 1950s, civic leaders in Los Angeles persuaded many gang members to join car clubs, but these soon became little more than headquarters for groups like the Businessmen and the Gladiators, whose members fought with knives, chains, or baseball bats and soon were held responsible for dozens of robberies and assaults. Car clubs vanished quickly after the Watts riots in 1965, and in the increasingly militant atmosphere of the late ‘60s many of L.A.’s gangs claimed at least some measure of association with the Black Panther Party.
Right around this time, the Baby Avenues committed a robbery that would profoundly shape the future of L.A.’s inner-city neighborhoods. The victims were a group of Asian merchants who had been confronted as they left a meeting on store security measures by Baby Avenues members who brandished sticks and demanded their money. One of the merchants, who spoke very little English, tried to explain to police that the robbers, like cripples, had carried walking sticks. A reporter was standing nearby when the frustrated victim shouted at the police officer who was questioning him, “Crip! Crip!” When an article about the “Crips” gang appeared in the newspaper the next day, the Baby Avenues were so flattered by the publicity that they adopted the name and began committing even bolder robberies. Soon the gang spread into divisions—Eastside Crips, Westside Crips, Compton Crips.
By the early seventies, when the Crips adopted the color blue as their badge of honor, they were by far the most feared black gang in California and had spread across much of southern Los Angeles County. In the summer of 1972, however, the Compton Crips became involved in conflict with another Compton gang called the Original Pirus. The Pirus had been a Crips gang, but they broke away after a much larger Compton Crips set beat them bloody in a brawl along Alondra Boulevard. Embittered but determined, the losers called a meeting on Piru Street in Compton, where they were joined by the Lueders Park Hustlers and several other independent gangs that were tired of the Crips’ domination: the Bishops, the Athens Parks Boys, and the Denver Lanes, as well as the L.A. Brims, who had lost one of their leaders earlier that year when he was murdered by the Crips. The new alliance agreed to answer the blue railroad handkerchiefs the Crips wore (initially to conceal their identities during robberies) by adopting the color red, and to call themselves the Bloods.
The lengths the two gangs went to separate themselves from each other were almost comically elaborate. The Crips began using the letter “C” to replace the letter “B” in nearly everything they said or wrote: Instead of, “I rode the two-oh-three bus to the beach,” it was, “I took the two-oh-three cuss to the ceach.” The Blo
ods answered in kind, then began signing their graffiti “CK,” for Crips Killer.
Within a few years the Bloods had become L.A.’s second-largest gang, but still they were outnumbered by Crips three to one. “The only reason the Bloods could hold their own was that they could mobilize members from all over South Central,” explained Russell Poole, who had worked as a gang intelligence officer in South Central L.A. for four years during the mid-1980s. “Cliques like the Hoover Crips and the Rolling 60s figured they had enough people to take care of their own business and very rarely turned to one another for assistance. If the Bloods wanted payback, though, they’d have a big conclave of groups like the Van Ness Gangsters, who were the biggest Bloods gang in South Central, and the Black Pee-Stones, who controlled the Jungle. They could bring in Bloods from Compton and Inglewood, and they’d all decide together how to deal with the Crips. That’s what made them so dangerous. They were equally if not more vicious than the Crips.”
As a young police officer in South Central L.A., what most astounded and appalled him, Poole said, were “the number of shootings, nearly all of them gang-related, that would occur in a single eight-hour shift. I’d never seen even a single gunshot victim before I encountered them in the field, and let me tell you, there is nothing that can prepare you for the real blood and guts of gun violence. Seeing people die in front of you, and the agony of friends and loved ones who are present, the screaming and wailing and incredible chaos of a shooting scene in South Central.”
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