Biggie wrestled publicly with his fear on Life After Death. The album opened with the thump of a beating heart; over that, Biggie began talking on the phone to Puffy Combs, telling his producer that he had been thinking about suicide. Gunshots cut the conversation short and Biggie fell to the floor. Then Puffy was at Biggie’s bedside in the hospital, telling him they were an “unstoppable” pair, destined to rule the world, and that they had a lot of living left to do. His voice was gradually drowned out by the flat-line tone of Biggie’s heart monitor. On “Miss U,” a rap dedicated to a friend who had been shot dead on the street in Brooklyn, Biggie admitted that he cried for three days afterward, even though the deceased was a “thug.” Life After Death ended with a song that featured Faith Evans. “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)” was his favorite cut on the album, Biggie told Billboard, because it “brings to mind the expression, ‘You’ll miss me when I’m gone.’”
When Biggie arrived in Los Angeles during early February of 1997, though, he tried once again to sound unflinching. If he had to pick, his choice for a home would be the East Coast, because that was where he grew up, Biggie rapped in a song for his new album called “Going back to Cali.” But that didn’t mean a “nigga” couldn’t “rest in the West.” California had “the weed, the women and the weather,” Biggie told the Source. He confided to an interviewer from VIBE that he was going to buy a house in L.A., and insisted, “I get love out here. And if they don’t love me, they are going to learn to love me. If I’m scared, I’ll get a dog.”
Biggie sounded more worried about flying to London than about whatever risks he faced in L.A. when he phoned his mother from his suite at the Westwood Marquis on the afternoon of March 8. Biggie had been scheduled to leave that morning for a promotional tour in Europe, but Puffy canceled the trip. Just as well, Biggie said, since he didn’t feel that enough bodyguards had been hired for the week he was to spend in London. He had off-duty cops guarding him in L.A., Biggie told his mother, and felt safe with them around. Her son told her he was going to a party that night, Voletta Wallace recalled, but only because Puffy wanted him there.
The night before, Biggie had told a VIBE reporter that he was no longer ready to die: “I think there are a lot more lessons that I need to learn. There are a lot more things I need to experience, a lot more places I need to go before I can finally say, ‘Okay, I had my days.’”
When he lumbered out of his hotel suite that night, though, Biggie wasn’t wearing the Bad Boy medallion Combs had given him, that diapered baby wearing work boots and a baseball cap. Instead, the rapper wore a golden Jesus hanging on His cross.
CHAPTER SEVEN
On April 16, Russell Poole learned that he would not be one of the four RHD detectives sent to New York to interview Puffy Combs and the others who had been part of the Bad Boy entourage on the night of Biggie Smalls’s murder. Fred Miller had made the decision that Poole was to prepare witness interview “packages” for the other four detectives, but stay behind to sort through the detritus of the Wilshire Division’s investigation. “Follow up,” it was called. Poole was not happy. “I was used to watching Fred divvy out most of the hard work to other detectives,” he explained, “but when you’re a lead investigator on a case, you don’t want other detectives doing the witness interviews.”
Poole already felt apprehensive about how the “murder book” on the Smalls case was being assembled. “These reports are not just the official record of a case, they’re also where any new detective who joins an investigation is supposed to begin. But they also eventually become public record, and it was made clear to me that this was a very important consideration in Robbery-Homicide. I’d already seen how careful they were downtown about what went into the record on the Gaines-Lyga investigation, and they were being even more selective about what they put into the Biggie Smalls murder book. So much was purged or added to change the appearance of the book on the Smalls case that to me it bordered on fraud. And in both investigations, nearly everything that was changed involved clues that linked the LAPD to Death Row Records.”
The first political hot potato to land in the lap of the investigators assigned to the Smalls case was the news media’s discovery that at least six off-duty police officers had been working for Puffy Combs and Biggie Smalls on the night of the murder, and that the only one of them who witnessed the shooting had left the scene without making a statement to the LAPD’s detectives. Inglewood police officer Reggie Blaylock had been the driver of the black Blazer that served as the “trail car” in the Bad Boy entourage as it left the Petersen Museum. Blaylock eventually would provide a detailed account of his observations, but that was more than a month after the murder and by then the media was having a field day with the story. OFFFICERS MAY HAVE SEEN RAP KILLING; OFF-DUTY OFFICER WAS BEHIND VEHICLE WHEN RAP STAR NOTORIOUS B.I.G. WAS SLAIN, AND UNDERCOVER NEW YORK AGENTS WERE TRAILING THE SINGER THAT NIGHT, SOURCES SAY, read the headline on the Los Angeles Times story.
Damien Butler, James Lloyd, and Greg Young all told the Times that LAPD investigators had shown them surveillance photos of Biggie and Puffy that were taken in Los Angeles around the time of the Soul Train Awards. One picture had been snapped “as late as ten minutes before the killing,” according to the Times story. “If they were there all that time before, it just seems impossible to me that they didn’t see the incident,” D-Rock told the Times. “Where did they go? They had to see it.” In fact, the two “undercover New York agents” were a detective from the NYPD’s Major Crimes Squad and an officer from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The NYPD detective was looking for a man who had shot an undercover cop in New York and was believed to be employed by Puffy Combs. The ATF agent was investigating reports that Bad Boy Entertainment was involved in illegal gun sales. The two had abandoned their surveillance on the evening of March 7 immediately after the Soul Train Awards. It was the NYPD detective who had told the LAPD that they needed to find and interview Officer Reggie Blaylock.
Blaylock, who said he had been recruited to work for Puffy Combs by Kenneth Story at a gym where they worked out together, gave investigators an account of the evening that ran to six pages, single-spaced, yet added little to what police already knew. The only real revelation was that Puffy Combs had loaded two young women into his Suburban before leaving the Petersen Museum’s parking structure. Of all those who made up the Bad Boy security detail, Blaylock seemed most impressed by Eugene Deal, whom he described as “Biggie’s personal bodyguard.” Neither he nor Deal had observed any tension between Biggie and the Crips who approached the rapper briefly during the Petersen party, Blaylock said. The Inglewood officer agreed with Paul Offord that a white SUV had tried to pull between their black Blazer and the green Suburban Biggie rode in, and provided a definitive description of the vehicle driven by the shooter: “A late model Chevrolet Impala SS, black, with large wide tires” that was “very clean.” He never saw the shooter’s face, Blaylock said, only his hand as he stuck a semiautomatic pistol through the open window and fired off four quick shots, followed by another burst of three shots.
For the LAPD detectives, the part of Blaylock’s story most difficult to swallow was that he tried to pursue the Impala, but the car had vanished by the time he turned right on Wilshire Boulevard. “There’s no way Blaylock ‘lost’ the Impala,” Poole said. “No experienced police officer could have lost that car that fast under those circumstances. I think he backed off because he knew it was going to be bigger than anything he had imagined. That’s why he left that night without giving a statement. He knew he was in deep shit for working without a permit and didn’t want to answer questions if he didn’t have to.”
Blaylock eventually would receive a twenty-four-day suspension for accepting private security work “without proper authorization,” but Poole was far less interested in what happened to the Inglewood policeman than in persistent rumors that LAPD officers in the employ of Death Row Records had been at the Petersen Museum part
y, and might have been involved in the murder. “Normally, I would have just shrugged that stuff off,” Poole said, “except for the reports I’d heard about Kevin Gaines’s involvement in criminal activities connected to Death Row, and what I read in the report by the Long Beach detective who was working for the federal task force. Also, the interview with Reggie Blaylock made me realize that all of the cops who were working security for these rappers must have had the same thought at some point, ‘If shit goes down, what am I going to do?’ And when you look back at the El Rey Theater incident, what did they do? They ran like scared rabbits, instead of being witnesses. Because they needed permits to work for these rap labels and they didn’t have them. Suge Knight had to have known all this. He’s very shrewd and he knew police departments wouldn’t let their officers work for him or his organization. So the ones who crossed the line and worked for them anyway—he had them by the balls. And when you have policemen in your pocket, you are one powerful gangster.”
He wanted to follow up on the rumors of an LAPD–Death Row connection, Poole said, but Fred Miller dismissed them as “crap,” and insisted that they concentrate for now on Biggie’s associates and whatever evidence already had been assembled. Poole and other detectives assisting the investigation wasted dozens of hours reviewing more than thirty videotapes that had been seized from surveillance cameras at the Petersen Museum, from a nearby am pm mini mart, and from the City National Bank branch that was directly across from the shooting scene. The LAPD brass became very excited when they learned that a woman from Houston had called the television program America’s Most Wanted to claim a friend of her daughter had videotaped the Biggie Smalls shooting. The tape in Texas would be “instrumental in solving the case,” LAPD spokesman Ross Moen told reporters. When detectives flew to Houston to take a look, however, they discovered that all the videotape showed was Puffy Combs’s Suburban leaving the museum’s parking structure and heading north on Fairfax to the intersection with Wilshire. Gunshots could be heard in the background, but by the time the camera panned back to the green Suburban the black Impala was gone.
LAPD Crime Scene Logs for the early morning of March 9 did reveal that someone driving a black Ford Bronco had fired a single gunshot in the vicinity of the west side of the Petersen Museum about ten minutes before Biggie Smalls was murdered, and that LAPD officers were en route to the location when that black Impala pulled up next to Biggie’s Suburban on the east side of the building. It looked at first like a planned diversion, but detectives who interrogated the young man they arrested for negligent discharge of a firearm decided he was simply a fool who had been showing off.
When the team of four detectives Miller had dispatched to New York City returned to Los Angeles during the last week of April, they had little to show for their trip. Gregory Young, who had been sitting right next to Biggie when he was shot, would provide the LAPD with no new information. “Young said, ‘Puffy has told us that if our names even appear on a witness list, we’re out of a job,’” Poole recalled. What made this threat amusing was that the very first name on the LAPD’s list of witnesses in the Biggie Smalls case was “Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs.” Puffy was no help to the LAPD detectives either, however. Interviewed at his attorney’s Park Avenue office, Combs not only said he knew nothing about Biggie’s murder, but denied even that there had ever been any “rivalry” between Bad Boy Entertainment and Death Row Records.
Damien Butler also offered little, although he did confirm that Biggie had attended a celebrity basketball game at Cal State Dominguez the day before his murder. D-Rock told detectives as well that Biggie had not moved out of the Four Seasons Hotel in L.A. because of security concerns, but because the management asked them to leave after a “loud altercation” between Biggie and his Philadelphia girlfriend, Tiffany Lane.
The L.A. investigators suspected that the women who were traveling with the Bad Boy contingent at the time of the shooting had included D-Rock’s girlfriend Aysha Foster and three companions from Brooklyn, who had flown west to party with Biggie and his crew. Foster, though, insisted that she and the other three women were on the sidewalk outside the Petersen Museum when Biggie was killed, and heard the gunshots but never saw the shooter.
Paul Offord was the most forthcoming of the Bad Boy group, and the first to tell the LAPD that when Biggie came out of the Petersen Museum that night several young black men in the crowd began shouting and throwing West Coast signs. He was “uncomfortable and concerned,” Offord said, which was why he focused so intently on the white SUV that tried to cut between his black Blazer and the green Suburban carrying Biggie. He did not even see the black Impala on the other side of the Suburban, Offord said, until he heard shots and turned to see the gun in the hand that was extended through the Chevrolet’s open window.
All the LAPD detectives agreed that the most impressive of the New York witnesses was Eugene Deal, and that Deal had provided the only really compelling information. This involved Deal’s observation of a black male wearing a bluish-gray suit with a bow tie whom he had seen standing on the east sidewalk of Fairfax Avenue as Biggie and Puffy were preparing to leave the Petersen Museum. The man, who appeared to be a Black Muslim, “seemed to be checking them out,” Deal said, then walked north on the sidewalk in the direction from which the black Impala would come less than ten minutes later.
James Lloyd provided no more information about Biggie’s death than did Puffy Combs, but L’il Caesar did give his most detailed description to date of Tupac Shakur’s shooting at Quad Studios three years earlier. He and Biggie and Puffy were up on the eighth floor, waiting for Tupac, but not certain he would show up, said Lloyd, who stuck his head out a window and spotted Shakur approaching the building on the sidewalk. At Biggie’s request, he went down to tell Tupac what floor they were on, Lloyd said, but by the time his elevator reached the ground floor, Shakur had been shot. He immediately pushed the CLOSE DOOR button and rode the elevator back up to the eighth floor to tell Biggie and Puffy. He knew Tupac believed that Biggie and Puffy were responsible, said Lloyd, who denied any knowledge of this. Unlike Puffy, though, L’il Caesar admitted that there was hostility between Bad Boy and Death Row, and that it had “caused us all trouble” in any number of cities where Puffy Combs’s performers appeared.
* * *
On May 7, Poole and Miller flew to Las Vegas to consult with the detectives there who were investigating the murder of Tupac Shakur. The LAPD detectives had little doubt that Shakur’s death was connected to the shooting of Biggie Smalls. “Suge Knight hated Puffy Combs, and anonymous sources had told us that Puffy was responsible for Tupac’s death,” Poole explained. “Knight had told people that Combs had Jake Robles killed, and even though Robles was a total thug, he and Suge were close. Biggie was close to the Crips, and the Crips were who had been implicated in Tupac’s murder. No matter how many times Puffy denied it, we knew that Crips had worked as bodyguards for Biggie when he came to L.A.”
The theory that the Crips were responsible for Tupac’s murder was most strongly backed by the bloody gang war that broke out in Compton in the immediate aftermath of Shakur’s shooting in Las Vegas. Everyone who lived in Crips territory understood “that since people thought Southside had killed Tupac, his people, the Mob Piru, would be riding in our neighborhood,” a young man named Corey Edwards had explained to the LAPD in a sworn affidavit. “Tupac wasn’t really from Mob Piru, but that’s where Suge Knight grew up and Tupac was now part of Suge’s group. We just warned everyone to be careful.”
Not everyone was, however. On September 9, 1996, two days after Tupac was shot, a young member of the Southside Crips named Darnell Brims—“rumored” to have been in the white Cadillac with Shakur’s killer two days earlier—walked into a liquor store near the intersection of Alondra Boulevard and Atlantic Avenue, right on the borderline between Crips and Bloods territory. Brims had just stepped inside when a Blood with a gun in his hand rushed through the door behind him and opened fire. Hit three times in
the back and buttocks, Brim plunged to the floor. The Blood stepped forward to finish him off but hesitated when he saw that Brims had used his body to cover the critically wounded ten-year-old girl who lay under him. Whatever measure of humanity remained in the Blood prevented him from firing another shot, and both Brims and the girl, Lakezia McNeese, survived. So did a pair of Piru Bloods shot in a drive-by shooting on North Bradenfield Street the next day. A Blood, whose brother worked for Wrightway Protective Services, was shot several times at the corner of Bradenfield and Pino by Crips who rode in a blue Blazer; he also survived.
Thirty-year-old Bobby Finch was not so lucky. Corey Edwards had warned Bobby the day before that the Mob Piru would be riding through the neighborhood. But Finch, who worked private security with his brother, a Compton school police officer, knew that gang shootings almost never happened before two or three in the afternoon, and figured it was safe to drop off his ten-year-old daughter at his mother’s home on Compton’s Southside early on the morning of September 11. The girl had just gone inside when Bloods opened fire from a passing car and mortally wounded him.
Compton P.D. gang officers had raided a Southside Crip “safe house” on East Glencoe Street the day before, when they were tipped off that a weapons dealer had just delivered a duffel bag filled with guns to the location. Although some of the young men inside escaped, and one, Jerry “Monk” Bonds, was seen running from the house with a gun stuffed into the waistband of his pants, the Compton cops did seize an assault rifle, two handguns, a huge cache of ammunition, and “seven full-face black ski masks.” On the evening of Bobby Finch’s murder, Compton detectives were contacted by a citizen who said she had just seen several Southside Crips, including Keffy-D and Baby Lane Anderson, carrying weapons into a house on South Burris Street. When police responded to the location, they did not see Keffy-D, but Anderson was in the front yard. When Anderson ran inside, the police followed him through the door, where they discovered an AK-47 assault rifle, two shotguns, an M-11 assault pistol, and a .38 revolver, along with a good deal of ammunition.
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