Neighbors advised them that the Crips were warning people to stay off the street because “it’s on,” police said. The next day, Compton gang officers reported that their informants said the Neighborhood Crips, the Kelly Park Crips, and the Atlantic Drive Crips had joined Southside’s army, while Mob Pirus had recruited the Leuders Park Pirus and Elm Lane Pirus to their side. “All Piru groups are aligned with Death Row Records,” observed the Compton P.D.’s affidavit, which also reported that the members of Suge Knight’s goon squad had been telling the other Bloods that Tupac Shakur’s killer was “Keffy-D’s nephew.”
The next shooting in the gang war took place on September 13, the day Tupac Shakur died, when a pair of Piru Bloods were murdered by a Crip who approached them on foot. Shortly after the news that Tupac was dead reached Compton, two more Crips were shot on South Ward Street. Three other Crips were shot the next day on Chester Street, and then, suddenly, the shooting stopped and the war was over. Word spread on the street that maybe it wasn’t the Crips who had killed Tupac after all.
The Las Vegas police certainly had their doubts, and just about all the detectives in Vegas seemed to be sure of was that they weren’t likely to arrest Shakur’s killer. “The Las Vegas homicide guys showed us this whole cabinet of clues that they had just sort of filed away, and weren’t really following up on,” Poole recalled. “We all talked about what a defense lawyer could do with all the contradictory evidence that had come in. But then the Vegas guys told us that the main reason they would never solve this case was that the politicians didn’t want them to. They said the powers that be had let them know the city didn’t need an O.J.-style circus. I was shocked, but my partner was yucking it up with them, and saying he feels the same way about the Smalls case. Fred said, ‘These are just gangbangers with money.’”
The investigation of Tupac Shakur’s murder by the police in Las Vegas already had been criticized by an assortment of observers as astoundingly sloppy. Many key witnesses were never interrogated, and those who were said the cops seemed a lot more interested in threatening them than in getting answers to their questions. The more Poole read about the case, the more convinced he became that the Las Vegas police had “messed up” from the very beginning, starting with the failure of the two bicycle officers, who were at the rear of the Death Row caravan when the shooting started, to secure the scene and detain witnesses. Instead, the bike cops had gone after Suge Knight’s BMW, while cars continued to drive through the crime scene for at least twenty minutes and dozens of pedestrians trampled over evidence. In a large part this was because the first wave of detectives and canine units were dispatched to the wrong location. Then no aerial photos were taken, and the Metro police who were the first to arrive at the shooting scene alienated all but one of the eyewitnesses to Tupac’s murder. That lone cooperating witness was Shakur’s backup singer Yafu Fula, who assured police he could identify the killer if shown a photograph. Instead of detaining Fula, however, the Las Vegas police let David Kenner persuade them to release the rapper by promising to set up an interview that never happened. Two months later the nineteen-year-old Fula, his torso protected by a bullet-proof vest, was shot in the face in the hallway of a New Jersey housing project. He died nine hours later at Newark’s University Hospital.
The Las Vegas police had also let Suge Knight skip town without talking to them, although Suge did return four days later for the brief interview that the Vegas homicide investigators described to the media as “not helpful.” Russell Poole, however, was intrigued by what the Vegas police told him about their conversation with Knight. “They said the interview was very strange,” Poole recalled. “Suge Knight had been cut on the side of the head by a piece of glass, but he kept pointing to it and telling them he was hit with a bullet. They thought it was an act, that he had cut himself. And he kept telling them it was the Crips who killed Shakur, which was weird, because these gangbangers never snitch on each other.”
It was only after his trip to Vegas that Poole began to consider another theory of Tupac Shakur’s murder that had been floating on the street and in the media: Suge Knight had arranged the hit. Knight hadn’t helped to alleviate suspicions by telling ABC’s Primetime Live the outrageous lie that a bullet fired by Tupac’s killer was still lodged in his head. Then when the network’s reporter asked if he had any idea who Shakur’s murderer was, Suge answered, “I don’t get paid to solve homicides.” The rumor that Knight had orchestrated the gang war that began immediately after Tupac’s slaying was fueled by the report of a police informant who said Suge had delivered an entire load of AK-47 assault rifles to Bloods gang members at the Nickerson Gardens housing project on the night before the shooting started.
Other than Orlando Anderson, the most interesting witness to Shakur’s murder among those still alive was Tupac’s bodyguard Frank Alexander. From the beginning Alexander had described the attack on Baby Lane Anderson at the MGM Grand as an incident that seemed staged. Anderson almost appeared to be waiting for the Death Row group when it emerged from the Tyson-Bruno fight, Alexander said, and the Crip had not tried very hard, if at all, to escape when Tupac, Suge, and their entourage of Bloods came after him in the hallway outside the hotel’s auditorium.
Alexander’s description of his dealings with Suge Knight in the aftermath of Tupac’s shooting was curious as well. Suge brought him out to the Paradise Valley mansion that night, Alexander recalled, and the two met out by the red swimming pool, where the only lights were those illuminating the Death Row emblem that seemed to float like a ghostly stain on the water. When the Las Vegas detectives interviewed Alexander, Suge said the bodyguard should tell them that Orlando Anderson had snatched a chain off Tupac, and that this was what set off the attack on him. Anxious to get out of there, he agreed to whatever Suge wanted, Alexander recalled. On the afternoon of September 13, though, Suge brought him back out to the mansion, Alexander said, and this time adopted a more threatening attitude. David Kenner was at this meeting, the bodyguard recalled, and so was Death Row’s head of security, Reggie Wright Jr. Before he realized what was happening, Alexander recalled, Suge began to blame him for Tupac’s death, insisting that the bodyguard should have had a gun on him that evening, permit or no permit. The atmosphere became so ominous that he began to believe he might not leave the house alive, but just when he began to think about making a run for it, the phone rang. When Suge received the news that Tupac was dead, he seemed to forget that Alexander was there.
He never saw Suge again after that day, the bodyguard said. After Knight was pulled back into court to face the charge that he had violated probation by participating in the attack on Orlando Anderson, though, Alexander began to receive phone calls on a regular basis from Kenner and Milton Grimes. The lawyers wanted him to testify for Suge, but he answered that he would be a better witness for the prosecution than the defense, Alexander said. Soon after he talked to the Las Vegas police, Alexander was warned by a friend of his who still worked for Wrightway Protective Services that Death Row intended to have him killed. That same day, a security guard who was close to Reggie Wright Jr. confirmed what his friend had told him, Alexander said. The bodyguard made one more call, this one to David Kenner, who began to read to him from his interview with the Las Vegas police. He told Kenner that he hadn’t said any of those things, recalled Alexander, who nevertheless admitted he was troubled by “all the shit that was off” on the day Tupac was murdered.
The police in Compton, however, continued to insist that their evidence pointed toward Orlando Anderson or one of the other Crips who was in Las Vegas as Shakur’s killer. Almost all the evidence the Compton cops had against Anderson and the Crips, however, Poole noticed, was based on anonymous informants. Baby Lane Anderson was a clear cut above the average gangbanger, Poole discovered. He graduated from high school, attended Compton College for a couple of semesters, and had a half brother who graduated from Berkeley. Word on the street was that Baby Lane—who never had been convicted of a crime as
an adult—was the only Southside Crip who didn’t drink or use drugs. The kid didn’t even have tattoos. Anderson was no choir boy, of course. He had fathered four children out of wedlock by the age of twenty-three, but never once held a job that required him to file a federal tax return. And whatever his involvement in the murder of Tupac Shakur, there was little doubt he had participated in the retaliatory attacks on Piru Bloods that resulted from the murder of Bobby Finch.
Tupac Shakur’s estate named Anderson as one of two defendants when it filed a wrongful death lawsuit in the rapper’s slaying. The other alleged killer named in the lawsuit was Jerry “Monk” Bonds, who reportedly had been spotted driving a white Cadillac into an auto body shop at White and Alondra in Compton. Corey Edwards, however, told the LAPD that if the vehicle driven by the killers of Tupac Shakur had indeed been the “late model” Cadillac he saw described in the newspaper, it couldn’t have been Bonds’s, because that battered old heap was an early ‘80s model.
Anderson, meanwhile, along with his family and friends, continued to deny that he been Tupac’s killer. “I just want to let everybody know that I didn’t do it,” Baby Lane told CNN, claiming that he was afraid to leave his house for fear that he would be killed by someone out to avenge Tupac’s death. A lot of things about the way Anderson had handled himself in Las Vegas struck not only Poole, but other detectives also, as curious. When the Vegas police tried to persuade him to fill out an incident report and file a complaint against Suge Knight, Tupac Shakur, and others who had participated in the attack against him at the MGM Grand, Anderson refused. “And the MGM security guards said that Anderson didn’t want to tell them who had beat him up,” Poole recalled. “They said his behavior seemed really odd, because he wasn’t angry at all—he just wanted out of there.” Corey Edwards told the LAPD that he saw Baby Lane in the bar at the MGM Grand right after the attack on him and that Orlando just told him “everything was cool.” Anderson “didn’t appear to be too upset about what happened,” Edwards recalled.
“There was something fishy about that whole incident at the MGM Grand,” Poole said. “I was starting to wonder if it had been staged. Suge Knight might have wanted it on videotape to set up a motive for the killing of Tupac Shakur that would point the blame at the Compton Crips.”
If that was so, Suge had an ally in Compton’s mayor, Omar Bradley, who publicly criticized the police in Las Vegas for not pressing their case against Orlando Anderson. “We arrested someone [for the murder of Tupac Shakur],” Bradley told reporters. “The Las Vegas police didn’t want him. Compton police thought he was the one.” Poole was not entirely surprised when he learned that Omar Bradley and Suge Knight enjoyed a cozy relationship. Knight had cooperated with Bradley on a number of “civic endeavors,” and even met with the mayor to discuss financing his run for the Compton district’s open congressional seat. Compton for years had been the most corrupt municipality in all of California, and Mayor Bradley’s commitment to patronage politics was notorious. Among other things, the mayor had appointed his sister to a school board whose other members included a convicted felon and the key witness in a bribery scandal. In 1993, when the state Department of Education discovered that Compton’s Unified School District was $20 million in debt, a subsequent investigation revealed a horrific level of failure throughout the small city’s academic administration. Featherbedding was so extreme that six secretaries did the work of one, and school buildings had leaky roofs, broken windows, and walls that were literally covered with graffiti. Janitors ignored bathrooms so completely that the stench made state investigators gag when they tried to use them. Despite the fact that student test scores in Compton were by far the lowest in California, Bradley leveled the predictable charge of racism when the state took over administration of the city’s schools. It was the same accusation he made against those who insisted upon “hounding” Suge Knight.
On May 27, 1997, Poole found this message on his desk in L.A.’s Parker Center: “Officer Knox of LAPD West Valley called. His informant will give you any info you need. The officer’s captain will not allow Officer Knox to get involved. Call Officer Knox on 5/28/97 at 0700 hours and he will tell you how to get in touch with his informant.” Poole had never heard of Senior Lead Officer Kenneth Knox before that day. Nor had he been told of the “civil abatement” action against Suge Knight’s recording studios in Tarzana that Knox had undertaken almost a year earlier.
Knox’s involvement began on June 21, 1996, when he was summoned to a meeting with an aide to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick and members of the Tarzana Courts Home-owner’s Association to discuss “numerous complaints about Death Row Records.” The meeting was not without a certain droll humor. The small industrial park where Death Row leased its studio space was surrounded by town houses and condominiums occupied predominantly by wealthy Jewish people. During the past year these residents had experienced an astronomical increase in the number of assaults, auto thefts, and armed robberies in the area, most of them committed by black gangbangers from Compton. There had been a number of confrontations between gang members who parked their cars in private parking spaces and refused to move when asked. Residents complained that they were afraid to go outside after dark, and that even when they stayed indoors they were tormented by noise from the studio that was both excessive and continuous.
Two days later, Knox and three other LAPD officers arrived at the CAN-AM Recording Studios in Suite 211 at Pacifica Industrial Park “to verbally admonish Death Row Records.” It did not go well. The studio manager, Kevin Lewis, son of the jazz musician Ramsey Lewis, “immediately threw up the race card,” as Knox noted in his report, and blamed the company that owned the building for any problems the neighbors were experiencing. When Knox explained that many neighbors had complained about seeing “armed gang members” coming and going from the Death Row studios, Lewis answered that the people carrying guns were not gang members, but off-duty police officers. “Some are your guys,” Lewis told him. If they were police officers, a skeptical Knox asked, why were they “dressed down” like gangbangers? Because the rappers they worked for, including Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur, preferred that look, Lewis answered.
In his report of this encounter, Knox described himself as “shocked,” but he shouldn’t have been. Five months earlier, on his very first visit to the Death Row studios, Knox had encountered in the parking lot a young black male he believed to be a gang member. The young man admitted he was armed, Knox recalled, but then claimed to be an LAPD officer who was working off duty as a security guard for the record label. Knox was unable to obtain the alleged officer’s name, but described the encounter to Captain Robert Gale when he returned to the West Valley station. Gale said it was common knowledge among the department’s brass that a number of black LAPD officers were working for Death Row.
The day after his first meeting with Kevin Lewis, Knox went back to the Death Row studios with Captain Gale and a West Valley sergeant. As the three strolled through the studios they saw Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur, and M.C. Hammer, each surrounded by known members of the Mob Piru Blood and Bounty Hunter gangs. Knox met no police officers on this visit to the Tarzana studios, however, and questioned Kevin Lewis on his claim that LAPD officers were working for Death Row. On many evenings, Lewis replied, an LAPD officer from Metro Division sat at the studios’ front desk. When Knox said he doubted any LAPD officer would be foolish enough to work for Death Row Records, Lewis just smiled.
Knox went back alone three days later to tell Death Row’s manager that the department wanted to officially register its concern that the presence of so many gang members, unlicensed “security personnel,” and, possibly, off-duty police officers increased the possibility of “armed confrontations” in the neighborhood. A number of local businessmen already had complained that gang members were brandishing weapons at them. Kevin Lewis appeared “unimpressed.”
A series of fruitless meetings ensued between representatives of the LAPD and Death Row Reco
rds. Assaults and robberies in the area continued, and on one occasion a pair of LAPD officers who were working the area’s crime suppression detail became involved in a verbal altercation with four Crips in the Death Row parking lot that nearly turned into a shoot-out. The officers backed off but then pulled the four over as they drove away because the vehicle they rode in was not registered. A computer check revealed that three of the four were on parole for armed robbery. When the car was searched, the officers found a semiautomatic handgun and two ski masks. They were friends with Tupac and Snoop Dogg, the four said, and had just stopped by for a visit.
On July 2, Knox informed Death Row Records that LAPD officers were not permitted to work for the record label. An annoyed Reggie Wright Jr. demanded either a meeting with the department brass or a formal letter outlining its policies. Two weeks later, Knox prepared a memorandum that was distributed department-wide, summarizing his investigation of Death Row Records and warning officers that a supervisor should accompany them “during all contacts” at the Tarzana studios. Knox also noted in his memo that no valid work permits had been issued for employment with Death Row Records.
Knox made no headway in his civil abatement action until the morning of July 30, 1996, when Kevin Lewis dialed 911 to report that he had been attacked by two men in Death Row’s parking lot. He had just arrived for work and was walking from his car to the studios, Lewis said, when he heard footsteps behind him and turned just in time to see the baseball bat that struck him on the top of his head. When he fell to the ground, Lewis said, the man with the bat and another hit, kicked, and stomped him until he lost consciousness. Police interviewed the Death Row manager at a nearby hospital emergency room, where he received eight stitches to close the wound on his head, four more for a wound on his neck, and treatment for “various cuts and bruises on his body.”
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