At least he and Miller agreed on one point, Poole recalled: The Wilshire detectives had wasted a lot of time and energy chasing the theory that the Crips killed Biggie Smalls. The story had been started by a pair of anonymous tipsters who phoned Wilshire Division and told detectives there that Biggie had been killed because he owed the South Side Compton Crips money for security work, and that Keffy-D was the shooter. Keffy-D’s real name was Duane Keith Davis, and he was the uncle of Orlando Anderson.
When this story leaked out, Puffy Combs denied ever employing gangbangers at Bad Boy Entertainment. “We’ve never hired Crips or any other gang members to do security for us,” he told MTV’s Kurt Loder. “But the misconception is that because we’re young and black, we’re not handling business like anybody else.” Dozens of witnesses recalled that Puffy and Biggie had been accompanied by Crips at the 1996 Soul Train Award show, however, and a number of intriguing clues linking the Crips to Biggie Smalls surfaced almost immediately. Compton Police Department Detective Tim Brennan told the LAPD that the South Side Crips had definitely provided security for Biggie Smalls in the past, and that Biggie had attended a celebrity basketball game at Cal State Dominguez Hills, right next to Compton, the day before the murder. An anonymous informant added that Biggie was at the Crips main hangout in Compton, South Side Park, that same day with members of his entourage.
Yet another anonymous informant, this one offering a more detailed story than any of the others, said the East vs.West feud had turned deadly during the summer of 1996, when Puffy Combs placed a contract on Suge Knight, and offered a reward to anyone who could bring him a Death Row medallion. This was why Tupac Shakur got shot, the caller said. This informant also said the killer of Biggie Smalls was not Keffy-D but one Ozine Bridgeford. What made this interesting was that, according to the Compton cops, Bridgeford was a former Mob Piru Blood who had left the gang when he had a falling out with Suge Knight’s scariest thug, Alton (“Buntry”) McDonald. Bridgeford had become so convinced Buntry was going to kill him that he went over to the Crips. It was soon after this, according to the informant, that he accepted the contract on Biggie.
The story made no sense to anyone who understood the way Compton’s gangs operated. The Bloods were the ones who wanted Tupac Shakur’s murder avenged, and who had been threatening Biggie Smalls for the past three years. Why would someone who had abandoned that gang to join the Crips take a contract on Biggie? The Los Angeles Times jumped aboard the Crips theory, however, and was riding it into the ground. The Times also was reporting that the killer hadn’t fired from inside that dark sedan, either, but rather walked up to Biggie’s Suburban and struck up a friendly conversation. Biggie was rolling down his window “to give him five,” according to the Times report, when the man pulled a gun and opened fire. The LAPD could have blown this nonsense out of the water quite easily, but all the department’s spokesman, Lt. Ross Moen, would offer in response was, “There are a lot of people saying different things.”
The theory that the Crips were behind Biggie’s death was given a further infusion of life when LAPD detectives learned that Keffy-D had been issued two traffic citations in 1996 while driving a new, black Impala Super Sport. The LAPD Air Support Division did a flyover of Keffy-D’s home on California Avenue in Compton, and spotted a partially covered black vehicle behind the residence. When the police seized Keffy-D’s Super Sport, the Crip hired attorney Edi M.O. Faal (who earlier had represented Orlando Anderson) to tell reporters, “Mr. Davis intends to make it absolutely clear that he had nothing to do with the death of Notorious B.I.G.” But by then the news had leaked out that Keffy-D was at the Petersen Museum party on the night Biggie Smalls had been killed. On March 20, in an interview at One Police Plaza in New York, James Lloyd told the police that Keffy-D approached him at the party with ten other Crips and said, “Whassup? You need some security, someone by your side?” When Lloyd told him, “We’re all right,” Keffy-D walked over to Biggie and spoke briefly to him, Lloyd said. There was no hostility, though, Li’l Caesar added; when security hurried over to head off trouble, Biggie waved them off, saying, “He’s cool, I know him.” And both Lloyd and Greg Young agreed that the shooter had not been Keffy-D or any of the other Crips whose photographs they were asked to view.
Finally, after Keffy-D proved he had an iron-clad alibi, Fred Miller told the Times, “We haven’t named him as a suspect. We don’t think he had anything to do with it.”
Russell Poole had considered the Crips theory dubious from the outset. “To me it was obvious this wasn’t a gang shooting. Biggie’s murder was much more sophisticated than anything I’ve ever seen any gangbanger pull off. This was professionally executed. We all knew that—it was obvious.” Also, the fact that a reward of $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Biggie’s killer had been offered by the City of Los Angeles mitigated overwhelmingly against the theory that the Crips had been behind the murder. “In my experience, a reward offer of twenty-five-hundred dollars would have solved any crime that was committed by a Crip,” Poole said. “Somebody would have snitched, I can guarantee you. And for twenty-five thousand, you would have had people lining up to collect the money. There was a big announcement in the media and posters were distributed all over Compton and South Central. Yet no one came forward, not even when Biggie’s mother doubled the reward to fifty thousand three weeks later.
“I was convinced pretty quickly that the implication of the Crips was a smoke screen. The only question was who had been blowing the smoke.”
On April 14, Poole became the first LAPD officer to speak at length with Biggie Smalls’s mother, Voletta Wallace. The woman was blunt in stating her belief that, as she put it to the Los Angeles Times, “the police don’t care about solving the murders of young black men.” She was especially skeptical about a white detective who sounded to her like a character out of a cowboy movie, Wallace admitted. Russell Poole, however, was a police officer who had been praised again and again for an unusual ability to win the confidence of people who had lost loved ones to gang violence. “Empathetic” was an adjective that appeared repeatedly in his personnel package. “In dealing with the friends and family members of homicide victims, Detective Poole is compassionate, sympathetic and, most of all, never too busy to make himself available to discuss the status of the case,” his supervisor at South Bureau Homicide had written in 1995. “He consistently leaves them with the confidence that he ‘sincerely cares.’” That was true, agreed Voletta Wallace, who eventually would describe Poole as the single officer of the Los Angeles Police Department whom she felt could be trusted. For her, the reason was quite simple: “Detective Poole wanted to know who my son was. None of the others ever asked.”
For most of her adult life, Voletta Wallace had worked two jobs to raise her only child in the third-floor walk-up apartment of a row-house tenement on St. James Street in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood. Though a young girl when she moved to New York City from Trelawny, Jamaica, in 1959, Voletta still spoke in the lilting accent of her native island. Biggie’s father was Jamaican also, a small-time politician and businessman named George Latore who abandoned the family before his son was two years old. Biggie saw Latore once more at the age of six but grew up without any memory of the man.
Christopher Wallace was the largest five-year-old in his neighborhood and at the age of ten already was known by the other children as “Big.” Voletta, who worked days as a preschool teacher, enrolled her son at St. Peter’s Claver Elementary and Queen of All Saints Middle School, where he was on the honor roll and won awards as the best English and math student in his class. Biggie also began well at Brooklyn’s best public high school, Westinghouse, but rapidly lost interest in all his classes except art and, to his mother’s immense displeasure, dropped out during his junior year, at age seventeen. He could make money on the streets, Biggie knew, as a dope peddler. Soon he was venturing north up Fulton Street into Bedford-Stuyvesant, selling weed and nickel bags of cr
ack cocaine on street corners.
He talked a lot tougher than he was, according to the officers of the 88th Precinct, who remembered Wallace as a soft, scared kid who would cry whenever they brought him in for questioning. When Biggie was busted for selling crack during a visit to North Carolina in 1991, he phoned his mother in tears, pleading with her to send the $25,000 he needed to make bail.
Soon after his return to Brooklyn, Biggie went back to selling $3 vials of crack in front of a Chinese restaurant on Flatbush Avenue, but he also began spending a lot more time at the home of a childhood friend named Chico Delvico. In a small back room, the two used a pair of Technics turntables to begin mixing the sounds that Biggie gradually flavored with lyrics about life on the street in Clinton Hill. Almost everyone who heard the pair remarked that Biggie seemed to have a natural gift. His mother believed it was hereditary.
Rap has roots in what Jamaicans called “toasting,” a musical form that originated with island disc jockeys like Duke Reid and Prince Buster who spoke aloud over the American R&B records they played at “blues dances” in Kingston’s ghettos. Early on, the deejays shouted simple phrases like “Work it” and “Move it up” that evolved into longer and longer “toasts.” Eventually toasting stars like U Roy began to create lengthy singsong rhymes backed by steel drums and a heavy bass line. Bronx deejay Kool Herc, who had been born in Kingston under the name Clive Campbell, was heavily influenced by Jamaica’s toasting tradition when he began to pioneer the music form that became known in America as rap during the early 1970s.
Almost twenty years later Christopher Wallace and Chico Delvico formed a deejay group they called 50 Grand, and began working street corners and small clubs with a crew from Bedford Avenue that called itself the Old Gold Brothers. Eventually Biggie began to perform solo as Quest, and produced a crude set of homemade demo tapes. Eventually one of those tapes made it into the hands of the Brooklyn rapper Mister Cee, who passed it along to the new national director of A&R at Uptown Records, Puffy Combs.
Puffy was transfixed. “As soon as I put it on, it just bugged me out,” he later told MTV. “I listened for days and days, hours and hours. And his voice just hypnotized me.” Biggie’s voice was unique in rap, husky and harsh, yet melodic and musical in a way that made speech sound almost like singing. And Puffy, like a lot of people who heard those early tapes, loved Biggie’s lyrics. (His mother thought Christopher had developed his ear by listening to the nursery rhymes she read to him every night as a preschooler.) His tales of small-time gangsters, street scuffles, sexual intrigues, and bloody climaxes were, to Combs’s ear, the first really authentic gangsta rap produced on the East Coast.
The success in the late ‘80s of N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton and the rapid rise of Death Row Records had transformed rap almost overnight. East Coast groups like Def Jam’s LL Cool J and Public Enemy were eclipsed by what Dr. Dre, Ice-T, and Snoop Dogg were doing on the West Coast, but Biggie played bad better than anybody who had come before him. He would never have Tupac Shakur’s sex appeal, but Biggie’s look was unlike anyone else’s. A hulking fat boy whose favorite meal was waffles with ice cream and bacon, Biggie’s wide, round, pouchy eyes and pudgy, hairless face gave him the look of an immense child, while his deadpan scowl and wandering left eye suggested just enough menace to make him interesting. Even as a drug dealer he’d paid attention to his wardrobe, working the streets in a fashionable ensemble of Timberland boots, Karl Kani jeans, and hockey jerseys, topped by a terry-cloth headband. When he became “Biggie Smalls” (a name borrowed from a character in the Sidney Poitier–Bill Cosby film Uptown Saturday Night), the combination of his dark skin and pale pink lips with the pinstriped suits and derby hats he wore suggested a fellow who’d been recruited out of a minstrel show into Al Capone’s mob. “I may be a big, black, ugly dude,” he once told an interviewer, “but I got style.”
Style for gangsta rappers was the product of an outlandish cross-cultural fertilization that combined ghetto gangbanger attitudes and Rastaman spirituality with the patois of Hollywood mafiosi, and Biggie had a natural affinity for all the form’s origins. Puffy Combs told the nineteen-year-old he was poised to become a major star, but then one night in 1993 Biggie learned that his mentor was out of a job. Puffy immediately began organizing a plan to launch his own record label, one that would be built around Biggie Smalls. Puffy’s greatest challenge was making Biggie believe it could still happen. Despondent over Puffy’s ouster from Uptown Records, Biggie had a pregnant girlfriend, a best friend (Damien Butler) who was behind bars, and a mother who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Drunk most of every day on the Hennessy cognac he imbibed, Biggie was tempted to return to the streets with his vials of crack, but Puffy hustled to distract him with small jobs performing on remixes with other rappers. Finally, after working on it in the studio for months, Puffy was ready to release Biggie’s first solo album under a title that was even more sadly ironic than his posthumous Life After Death.
Ready to Die, Biggie’s debut on the Bad Boy label, produced two singles that hit No. 1 on Billboard’s chart, “Big Poppa” and “One More Chance.” Both went double platinum, and “One More Chance” was named Billboard’s Rap Single of the Year. Biggie, who was not quite twenty-one, had become rich and famous overnight. Performing now as Notorious B.I.G. (because another rapper out in California had called himself Biggie Smalls first), he was voted Billboard’s Best Rap Artist in 1995. By then, though, the lethal idiocies of life as a gangsta rapper already were beginning to threaten not only his success but his very existence. For a lot of it, Biggie had only himself to blame.
Biggie and his entourage were arrested for the 1994 beating of a music promoter named Nathaniel Banks in Camden, New Jersey, a charge that put the rapper in jail for four days. Then in March of 1995, Biggie and a friend became annoyed by autograph seekers as they were leaving the Palladium near Manhattan’s Union Square, and exchanged shouted threats with several men in the crowd. When the fans jumped into a taxi to get away, Biggie and his companion gave chase, caught the cab a block away, then proceeded to smash the vehicle’s windows with baseball bats. After his arrest, Biggie was forced to plead guilty to criminal mischief and harrassment. Three months later, he was arrested in New Jersey for robbery and aggravated assault. Though the robbery count was dismissed, the charge of assault still hung over Biggie at the time of his death. In July of 1996, police in Teaneck, New Jersey, raided the Courts of Glenpointe town house that Biggie had purchased for $310,000 eight months earlier, and confiscated an infrared rifle, a submachine gun, several automatic handguns, a revolver, a huge cache of hollow-point bullets, and the rapper’s marijuana stash. Assorted weapons and narcotics charges that resulted from the raid were pending at the time of his death. Biggie was arrested again in September of 1996, two days after Tupac Shakur’s death, when he and several other rappers were caught smoking pot in Biggie’s limousine while it was parked in Brooklyn. That same month, Biggie’s left leg was fractured in three places when Li’l Caesar lost control of Biggie’s SUV on the New Jersey Turnpike; he spent two months at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation and was still in a wheelchair when the clinic released him just before Thanksgiving.
Biggie’s deepest fears, however, arose out of the hatred Tupac Shakur had harbored against him ever since the shooting at Quad Studios. Biggie insisted he had nothing to do with that attempt on Tupac’s life, but the release of his record “Who Shot Ya?” while Shakur was in prison at Dannemora was widely perceived as a taunt. Biggie at first seemed to view the “East vs. West” feud as grand theater, a terrific publicity stunt that would help both sides sell records. When Snoop Dogg and Tha Dogg Pound began shooting their mocking “New York, New York” video in Times Square, Biggie went on local radio to tell one station’s listeners, “This is our city, and you know the beef we have with these muthafuckas.” Biggie laughed off the fool from his neighborhood who emptied a pistol into one of the Death Row crew’s trailers, but began to realize
how serious the war between Bad Boy and the Los Angeles label had become in July of 1996 when he went to Atlanta on behalf of Puffy Combs to perform at a huge outdoor concert where Suge Knight was represented by Tupac Shakur. During Biggie’s set, Shakur’s crew began to chant, “Tupac! Tupac! Tupac!” Then on the way to their hotel after the concert, Biggie and his bodyguards became convinced that they were being followed by a van filled with paid killers. Biggie’s bodyguards had their Glocks locked and loaded as the vehicle they rode in made a series of reckless lane changes before speeding onto an interstate highway. The van stayed with them, though, and soon was joined by a pickup. The three vehicles shadowed one another for nearly an hour before Biggie ordered his driver to stop and his bodyguards prepared for a shoot-out. Only then did the van and truck speed away.
After Tupac released his “I fucked your bitch” record, Biggie shot back with “Dumb rappers need teachin’/Lesson A, don’t fuck with B.I.G./That’s that.” And he seemed almost to be boasting when he spoke about the feud with Tupac for the documentary Rhyme or Reason: “One man against one man made a whole West Coast hate a whole East Coast, and vice versa.”
Biggie’s attitude became much more sober after Tupac’s death, however. “I had nothin’ to do with any of that Tupac shit,” he told Spin magazine. “That’s a complete and a total misconception. I definitely don’t wish death on anyone. I’m sorry he’s gone—that dude was nice on the mike.” Biggie even admitted how afraid for his life he had become. “I think about it every day,” he told MTV. “Every day it’s real, that’s how real it is. I think somebody’s tryin’ to kill me. I be wakin’ up paranoid. I be really scared.”
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