A pair of Compton police officers, however, told the court that Anderson’s story had been quite different when they interviewed him in October of 1996. “He basically said he had been jumped by some Bloods. Also Suge and Tupac,” one of them explained. A Las Vegas police detective said Anderson had told him that “Tupac and Suge beat him up pretty good.” And the MGM Grand’s security manager told Judge Czuleger that she had seen Suge kick Anderson three times.
Kenner’s answer was a man who said he choreographed fight scenes for action movies and was good friends with Steven Seagal. He had watched the videotape a hundred times, said the man, who testified that a frame-by-frame breakdown had convinced him Suge’s hands were in a defensive posture: “He’s trying to stop the activity from [going] any further.”
Judge Czuleger clearly wasn’t buying it, and ruled that Suge was an “active participant” in the attack on Orlando Anderson. Before the judge could issue a final ruling, however, David Kenner produced a psychiatrist who was being paid $250 an hour to tell the court that he strongly disagreed with a probation report that claimed Mr. Knight was “criminally oriented.” Mr. Knight was a socially active and concerned citizen of the black community who displayed neither a propensity for violence nor what he would describe as antisocial behavior, the doctor said: “He’s not a dangerous person.”
Kenner also called witnesses who testified that Suge was an advocate of black citizens who had distributed Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas toys to the poor people of Compton while an inmate at County Jail. Suge was “a compassionate man,” declared Danny J. Blakewell of the Brotherhood Crusade. Another witness noted the presence in court of C. DeLores Tucker, who believed that Suge could use his prominence to steer young black men away from gangs. This was a distinctly ironic moment, given that Suge had almost single-handedly destroyed Tucker’s reputation, calling her, among other things, “a hoax” who claimed the title “Doctor” on the basis of honorary degrees from obscure colleges. Tucker was presently the target of a Death Row lawsuit that accused her of having an economic motive for her public criticism of gangsta rap. Still, the woman sat nodding in court as one Rahiem Jenkins told the court that if Dr. Tucker could forgive Suge Knight, then the judge too should “embrace him.”
Suge himself took the stand to tell Judge Czuleger, “I definitely don’t want to do my life behind bars, but if it’s more positive for the community by me being incarcerated, I’m willing to sacrifice myself.” He thanked C. DeLores Tucker, and said she had helped him come to a decision that he would never allow the word “nigger” to be used on another Death Row Records release.
Bill Hodgeman replied with a recitation of highlights from Suge’s criminal history: A plea of guilty to battery with a deadly weapon in Las Vegas during 1987; pleas of guilty to separate charges of battery in Beverly Hills and Hollywood in 1990, and a plea of guilty to disturbing the peace in Van Nuys that same year; a conviction in 1991 when he gave a false name after being arrested in possession of a concealed weapon; another conviction, this one for assault with a deadly weapon, in Las Vegas in 1992; plus 1995 convictions for conspiracy to illegally possess a firearm and for assault with a firearm.
Judge Czuleger ordered that Suge should be detained by the California Department of Corrections for a ninety-day “diagnostic examination,” then return to his courtroom in May to be sentenced to state prison.
Two weeks later, Biggie Smalls was shot dead in Los Angeles, and from the first day investigators let it be known that they considered Suge Knight the prime suspect.
PART THREE
NATURAL LEADS
Detective Poole is a self-motivator who is enthusiastic and consistently gets the job done. He has the quality of knowing what has to be done and does the job without being told. Detective Poole plans and organizes his caseload in a most efficient manner.
—From the “Performance Evalulation Report” filed on Detective Russell Poole for the period 10/1/94 to 3/18/95
CHAPTER SIX
For Russell Poole, his assignment to find the shooter in the Biggie Smalls slaying was an opportunity to escape the stricture of the Gaines-Lyga case. A murder investigation, Poole believed, would not be subject to the sort of bureaucratic intrigue that had frustrated his attempt to probe the links between the LAPD and Death Row Records. “I guess you could say ignorance was bliss,” Poole recalled, “at least at the beginning.”
By the time Poole joined them, homicide detectives from the LAPD’s Wilshire Division had spent nearly one month building a case that appeared to be headed nowhere in particular. Not that the Wilshire detectives hadn’t kept busy. The murder book on the Smalls investigation already was thick with witness interviews, clue notes and evidence analysis. The curious quality of it all, though, was that the picture that emerged could be at once so detailed and so sketchy.
Most of what the LAPD knew about Biggie’s murder came from the ten young men who had been riding with him in the caravan of three vehicles that had just left the VIBE magazine party at the Petersen Automotive Museum. Puffy Combs, who had been sitting in the passenger seat of the Suburban just ahead of Biggie’s, understood that coming to Los Angeles for that year’s Soul Train Awards entailed a certain amount of risk. But Paul Offord, Bad Boy Entertainment’s director of security (who had been riding in the “trail car” right behind Biggie’s Suburban), explained to detectives that, with Suge Knight in jail, there was a general feeling that the East vs. West feud was cooling off.
Prior to the shooting, Biggie and Puffy had spent almost a month in Los Angeles without incident. They were in town to promote Biggie’s upcoming album, Puffy had explained to the Wilshire detectives, and to take advantage of L.A.’s superior production facilities to shoot and edit several videos that would be released with the album. Also, Biggie saw the trip as a chance to tell California radio listeners that he loved their state and wanted no trouble with anyone out here.
At the Soul Trains Awards on the evening of Friday, March 7, 1997, Biggie, who had been injured in an auto accident a month earlier, walked onstage to present an award with the aid of the cane he needed to help support his 6′3″, 390-pound body. Before he could announce that the winner was R&B singer Toni Braxton, however, Biggie’s voice was drowned out by boos from a contingent of Bloods who sat in the balcony throwing West Coast signs at him. “What’s up Cali?” Biggie yelled back, his tone light yet defiant. The big rapper left the event almost immediately, however, and watched the rest of it on the television set in his suite in the Westwood Marquis. Puffy remained in his seat until the end of the awards ceremony, and afterward was able to depart without the sort of ugly confrontation that had spoiled the previous year’s Soul Train Awards show.
Biggie and Puffy did not decide until the next afternoon that they would attend the VIBE after party on Saturday evening. The party was to be a closed event for music industry executives only, Puffy had been told, so security would not be a problem. The Bad Boy group assembled at the Hollywood Hills home of Andre Harrell, who now was CEO of Motown Records. Puffy had been staying with his former boss for the past week. He and Biggie and their entourage traveled to the Petersen Museum in three separate vehicles. In front was the white Suburban in which Combs rode with his man Kenneth Story at the wheel and three bodyguards in the backseat. Next came the gangbanger-green Suburban in which Biggie sat up front with his driver Gregory “G-Money” Young, while Junior Mafia rapper James Lloyd (“Li’l Caesar”), who had grown up with Biggie in Brooklyn, and Biggie’s best friend, Damien (“D-Rock”) Butler, sat in the backseat. The “trail car” was a black Chevy Blazer in which Bad Boy handyman Lewis (“Groovy Luv”) Jones rode with Offord and an off-duty police officer who was working security for Biggie that night.
The scene at the Petersen Museum had been surpisingly mellow, everyone agreed, especially given the complications suggested by the guest list. Among the women in attendance, for example, were Biggie’s estranged wife Faith Evans, Tupac Shakur’s former fiancée Kidada
Jones, and Suge Knight’s estranged wife Sharitha. DJ Quik had shown up with ten Tree Top Pirus in tow, while the dozen or so Crips who wangled invitations included Orlando Anderson. Upon arrival, Biggie headed straight for a table in a dark corner, where he remained seated for the entire evening. When the deejay played Biggie’s new rap homage to the West Coast, “Going Back to Cali,” the crowd erupted in cheers, and there was a general feeling that, with Suge Knight removed from the scene, peace might be at hand.
By midnight, however, the museum was crammed with many more people than it was permitted to contain, and an overwhelming majority were smoking marijuana. At 12:30 A.M. the air was so thick with smoke that an announcer was sent to the microphone to tell the crowd, “Please stop smoking blunts. The fire marshal’s gonna turn the party out!”
Biggie, Puffy, and the rest of the Bad Boy contingent headed immediately for the nearest exit, as did many other partygoers who believed they had heard the announcer say the fire department was shutting the party down. Gulping at the cool, fresh air ouside, Biggie and Puffy waited for valets to deliver their vehicles to the curb of the museum’s parking structure, debating whether to hit another party or head back to the Westwood Marquis. Puffy decided they should just go back to the hotel, then climbed into the white Suburban next to Kenneth Story, with his three bodyguards in the back of the vehicle. Biggie lifted himself into the passenger seat of the green Suburban next to G-Money, with Li’l Caesar and D-Rock in the next row of seats. Just as the vehicle pulled away from the curb, Groovy Luv slid into the third row of seats. Paul Offord again rode with the off-duty police officer in the black Chevy Blazer.
Biggie’s Suburban bore a sticker on one wheel that read “Think B.I.G.” It was a promotion for his new double album, Life After Death, which was playing at deafening volume on the green Suburban’s sound system as the vehicle turned left out of the parking structure and headed north on Fairfax Avenue. Puffy’s Suburban, still in the lead, blew through the amber light at Wilshire Boulevard and was preparing to make a left turn as the light turned red and stopped Biggie’s vehicle on the south side of the intersection. A white Toyota Landcruiser promptly made a U-turn on Fairfax and tried to cut between the green Suburban and the black Blazer that was approaching from the rear. At that moment, a dark-colored sedan pulled up on the green Suburban’s right side. The driver, a black male with with a fade haircut who wore either a light gray or pale blue suit and a bow tie, looked Biggie in the eye for a moment, then reached across his body with a chrome-plated automatic pistol held in his right hand, braced it against his left forearm, and emptied the gun into the front passenger seat of the Sububan.
Clearly the target of the attack, Biggie Smalls had been the only passenger in the green Suburban who was hit by the bullets, which riddled his immense torso.
The dark sedan then sped away eastbound on Wilshire, made a left turn on Ogden Drive, and disappeared into the night. The white Landcruiser made another U-turn and sped away also.
The Suburban in which Puffy Combs rode slowed nearly to a stop when the driver heard gunshots. Everyone inside ducked their heads, then someone shouted that Biggie was under attack. Combs jumped out of the vehicle a few moments later and ran across Wilshire to the green Suburban. When he opened the passenger-side door, Puffy saw Biggie hunched over the dashboard with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, bleeding through his jacket. When he spoke to Biggie, Puffy told police, his friend just stared back, eyes wide open and scarily blank. The terrified Combs jumped into the Suburban behind Biggie as Kenneth Story pushed G-Money aside and drove the vehicle to the emergancy dock of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, less than five minutes away.
At the hospital, it took six people to lift Biggie onto a gurney. Doctors rushed him into surgery as Combs, Lloyd, Butler, and the others dropped to their knees and prayed, but Biggie was pronounced dead at 1:15 A.M.
Gregory Young and James Lloyd were the only two passengers in the green Suburban who said they had gotten a good look at the killer’s face, and at the hospital that night they assisted police in making a composite drawing of the suspect. Both Young and Lloyd had described the assassin’s vehicle as a dark green sedan, but police realized that the four vapor lights that illuminated the shooting scene could have given a greenish cast to a black car if it was clean and shiny. Kenneth Story told police that three separate witnesses had approached him at the hospital to say that the killer had been driving “a clean, black Chevrolet Impala Super Sport.” He had seen exactly such a vehicle parked on Fairfax Avenue as he and the rest of the Bad Boy group waited for their vehicles in the Petersen Museum’s parking structure, Story said.
A Metropolitan Transit Authority driver whose bus had been westbound on Wilshire when the shooting occurred confirmed to police that the shooter’s sedan was black, and said he had watched a white SUV speed from the scene after the sedan and make the same left turn on Ogden Drive that it did.
Kenneth Story also gave police four shell casings that had been given to him by two separate witnesses who said they were collected from the shooting scene. LAPD officers already had collected three other matching shell casings, all of them from German-made “Gecko” brand bullets that were rarely seen on the West Coast.
The biggest obstacle the police faced in investigating the murder of Biggie Smalls was that almost no one who had been present at the scene wanted to talk to the cops. As the first LAPD “Progress Report” filed on the case would note, “Despite the hundreds of people who attended the party, detectives have located few admitted witnesses to the shooting.”
Part of the problem was that Suge Knight had been identified as a suspect in the first story that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on the morning of March 9. Knight’s brother-in-law, Norris Anderson, who had taken over as general manager of Death Row while Suge was “away,” told the Times, “It’s ludicrous for anyone out there to blame Death Row. We do not condone this type of activity, and Death Row certainly had nothing to do with it … Death Row knows how bad something like this can feel. It happened in our backyard with Tupac just a few months ago.”
Most observers felt that Anderson’s last point was the important one: Revenge for Tupac’s killing would be the main motive offered by both police and media to explain Biggie’s assassination during the next few days. The rumor that Suge Knight was responsible for Biggie’s death spread through the worlds of both hip-hop musicians and black gangbangers all during that day, followed soon by a story that Suge had been attacked in prison by an inmate who stabbed him eleven times with a chicken bone. Death Row replied the next afternoon with a prepared statement: “Death Row Records would like to dispel all rumors and speculations of a prison stabbing incident involving Marion Knight, CEO, Death Row Records. Mr. Knight has not been part of any type of attack and is doing fine.”
That same day, however, an LAPD lieutenant was quoted in the Times as saying that police believed Biggie Smalls’s death had been “a hit, a directed target coming out of New York, Los Angeles, or Atlanta.” The head of the New York Police Department’s Anti-gang Enforcement Section was even more explicit: “All indications are that Biggie Smalls’ murder was retaliation for Tupac Shakur’s murder.”
The first question Russell Poole asked was why the LAPD’s Major Crimes unit hadn’t taken over the Smalls murder investigation until four weeks after Biggie’s death. “I couldn’t recall a single other murder case with that kind of high profile where Major Crimes wasn’t called in right from the start,” Poole explained. “The brass gave an explanation that they needed the resources for the Ennis Cosby case, but that was bullshit. We had another fifteen or sixteen detectives available. Somebody high up in the Department didn’t want Major Crimes involved. They only asked us to take over when Wilshire Homicide said they couldn’t handle such a complicated investigation. This was a month after the murder, and I think by that time they had realized they better move control of the investigation downtown.” Poole was even more troubled when he looked at the logs
of the first twenty-four hours after Biggie’s murder and discovered that four Robbery-Homicide detectives and an RHD lieutenant had been at the hospital and the murder scene during the early morning hours of March 9. “I never could get an explanation of why they didn’t take the case right then,” Poole recalled. “It was perplexing, to say the least.”
The case clearly had overwhelmed the Wilshire detectives. “During my investigation of Kevin Gaines, I was constantly over there trying to probe around,” Poole recalled. “But they were going in circles. They’d start on one thing, go with it for a while, then jump on another clue that came along and drop the first thing. That’s how confused they were. These were good detectives, but they didn’t have experience in handling a high-profile case, and they still had to handle their normal workload of murders in Wilshire.”
Poole believed the phone call that Wilshire Detective Paul Inabu had made to him on April 1, asking for a photograph of Kevin Gaines, was what caused the transfer of the case to Robbery-Homicide. “Word got around quickly,” he recalled. “The lieutenant went to the captain, the captain went to the commander, and the commander went to Deputy Chief Parks. Immediately, Fred Miller was called to a meeting with the lieutenant, but no one spoke to me. Your partner is supposed to keep you informed, but all Fred would tell me was that we had been offered the case and he was in charge.” When Poole asked if detectives had followed up on the report that Kevin Gaines had been involved in drug deals and gun sales involving Suge Knight and Death Row Records, he was told to “leave it alone.”
“My superiors made it clear they didn’t want to probe that clue,” Poole recalled. “They didn’t want cops going around with that photograph showing it to people.” Poole decided not to make waves. “I understood that the brass had political considerations. My approach was to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open, to be the same detective I’d always been, but keep quiet about it.” What most rankled Poole was his exclusion from Miller’s meetings with their lieutentant and captain. “They already understood that I was an aggressive investigator, and they were concerned about keeping me contained,” Poole said. “The best way to do that was to withhold information. But in my entire career I’d never been part of any investigation where I was expected to work in the dark.”
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