LAbyrinth

by Randall Sullivan

  Until this attack, Lewis had been particularly arrogant and obnoxious in his dealings with the LAPD. When Knox had informed him that LAPD officers were not permitted to work for Death Row, Lewis responded that “they would make millions of dollars by recording an album about LAPD officers not being allowed to protect Snoop Dogg,” as the officer’s notes of the conversation described it. In reply to a question from Knox about why Death Row hired only black officers, Lewis said that the only white employees at Death Row Records were the punk rockers he hired as his personal “slaves.” Lewis’s overconfidence, however, was shaken by his beating in the parking lot. Death Row’s manager at first told police he knew both his attackers and the person who had sent them after him. The very next day, however, Lewis said he didn’t know who had attacked him or why, then insisted that he no longer wanted to press criminal charges. A large man who had been a college athlete, Lewis made a considerable impression when he admitted he was frightened, and did not want to risk retaliation.

  Lewis became increasingly cooperative after this, however, and Kenneth Knox began to rely upon him for inside information as his civil abatement action turned into an increasingly complex investigation. Knox spent hours on the phone with detectives from the Las Vegas Police Department after Tupac Shakur’s murder. At the same time, he consulted regularly with the two federal agents heading up the task force probing Death Row Records, Dan McMullen of the FBI and John Ciccone of the ATF, who provided “intelligence information” on the alleged involvement of Suge Knight and Death Row Records in a gun-smuggling and narcotics-distribution ring that operated out of the Nickerson Gardens housing project. Compton detectives, meanwhile, helped Knox compile lists of gang members affiliated with the record label. He soon was considered to be such an expert on Suge Knight and company that Afeni Shakur’s New York attorney, Richard Fischbein, phoned Knox to ask for “the hierarchy structure of Death Row Records.” Reggie Wright Jr. became so accustomed to dealing with Knox that Death Row’s director of security freely admitted to the LAPD officer that Suge’s personal bodyguards were armed members of the Bloods gang. From the Compton police, Knox learned that there were three contracts out on Suge’s life, and that the Rolling 60s Crips and the Bounty Hunter Kill Squad both had promised that Suge would be dead before Christmas. Knox observed that Knight now came and went from Death Row’s studios in the middle of a five-vehicle caravan.

  By the beginning of October, Death Row’s Tarzana operation was finally getting the LAPD’s full attention. On the first day of that month, eight LAPD officers responded to a “major disturbance” call at the Death Row Records studios. The security guard would not let them through the door, but he did step outside to say that an “altercation” had taken place inside and that he had struggled with a gang member who was trying to use a metal chair as a weapon. The officers saw a bloody towel at the security guard’s desk, but the man was reluctant to provide any information, insisting that he did not know the names of the men involved and that they had left the location. The building’s night manager, however, told officers that most of the gang members who had started the trouble were still inside and that he was concerned about the damage they might do if the police left. The LAPD officers then “evacuated” the studios and, in the course of this action, rounded up thirteen suspects, seven of them members of the Mob Piru Bloods. One man wore a bullet-proof vest, but if the gangbangers had guns, they were stashed inside.

  On October 10, a female LAPD officer from West Valley Division informed Knox that a friend of hers had just sold Suge Knight a yacht, and that he believed Knight was using it to smuggle narcotics and firearms into the country from Mexico. That same day, Kevin Lewis, panicked by the murder of Tupac Shakur, admitted to Knox and an LAPD captain that Death Row had “an internal security problem,” but he still seemed reluctant to discuss specifics. Five days later, a man who lived near Death Row’s studios phoned the LAPD to report that he had observed prowlers outside his home who seemed to have come from the vacant house next door. When police arrived, they found the back door of the vacant house open and went inside to check, guns drawn. The prowlers had vanished, but the officers did discover bills of sales for two Glock semiautomatic pistols, a Department of Water and Power bill that had been sent to Death Row Records, and a box from a nearby dry cleaners with a receipt bearing the name “David Kenner.” The next day, three members of Tupac Shakur’s Outlaw Immortalz were arrested and charged with attempting to rob a Decatur, Georgia, liquor store with a pistol that had been stolen from a home near the Death Row studios in Tarzana. Two days after that, Knox was advised that Suge Knight, detained as a possible prowler outside a condominium in Woodland Hills, had told police officers he lived there with his girlfriend and had lost his keys. The condo had been rented to David Kenner, police learned, and was occupied by a young woman named Latricia Johnson. The Jeep Cherokee and the Mercedes parked downstairs were registered to Kenner, not Johnson.

  Knox had no clear picture of what had been taking place inside Death Row’s studios, however, until Suge Knight was jailed for violating his probation, and Kevin Lewis began preparing to leave the record label. Almost immediately after Knight was locked up in County Jail, Lewis phoned Kenneth Knox to ask for police protection, offering in exchange to tell the LAPD a good deal about what he had seen happening around him in recent months.

  He was a legitimate music producer who had been brought to Death Row in 1994 by Dr. Dre, Lewis wanted Knox to know, and only became involved with the record company because he did not realize that Suge Knight was more of a gangster than a music mogul. He had been planning to leave the rap label since early that summer, Lewis said, but made the mistake of confiding this to a couple of other employees at the record company. The attack in the parking lot took place only a short time later, Lewis said, but being beaten with a baseball bat was a lot less frightening than the mind games Suge Knight began to play with him. One of Suge’s favorite forms of torture, Lewis said, was to keep him working late at the studio, let him go home, then phone at 3 A.M. to say, “I need you over here right now.” When he complained that he had just gotten to sleep, Suge simply repeated, “I want you over here right now.” He’d take a shower, get dressed, and drive to the studios, Lewis said, but each time he arrived Suge would say, “I just wanted to see if you’d come when you were called. See you later.”

  Suge also began to send around his crew of thugs to give him the evil eye, Lewis said. “Neckbone,” “Heron,” “Chili Red,” “Rock,” “Tray,” “Hen Dog,” “Lil Wack,” and the others were all frightening characters, Lewis told Knox, but none compared to Alton McDonald—“Buntry”—who, with his brothers Tim and James, were known within Death Row as “Suge’s killers.”

  In addition, there were a lot of Black Muslims around the studios, Lewis said, and especially at Suge’s private parties. Suge himself professed to be a Muslim, said Lewis, whose relationship with Louis Farrakhan’s son Mustapha, a childhood friend, had put him in good with Knight when he first went to work for Death Row. Most of the Muslims involved with Death Row, however, had adopted the faith in prison, Lewis said, and like everyone who was part of Suge’s inner circle they considered the time they spent behind bars to be a badge of honor. For these guys, getting out of prison was like graduating from college was for most people, Lewis explained.

  The atmosphere around the studios had become increasingly scary, Lewis said, since Jake Robles’s 1995 killing in Atlanta. He’d been present at the Chateau Le Blanc during the assault on Mark Anthony Bell that December, Lewis said, and was stopped on Suge’s orders when he tried to walk upstairs to see what was happening. Particularly unsettling was the way police officers and gang members mixed within Death Row’s security detail, Lewis said. Some nights there would be as many as seventy-five Crips and Bloods in the building. Guns were everywhere, but the worst part was that you didn’t know if the guys carrying them were cops or gangsters, because some of the cops acted more like gangsters than the gangste
rs did.

  Tupac’s murder had convinced him it was time to get away, Lewis said, but by then he had discovered that you didn’t just leave Death Row. At one time he had believed his father’s famous name, and the fact that his family’s friends included Jesse Jackson (their next-door neighbor in Chicago), would protect him, Lewis said. But Suge Knight didn’t give two shits about any of that. Suge was a bad guy—no morals, no heart, no soul, Death Row’s former manager explained. Gangbangers who looked like they wouldn’t flinch if you put a gun to their heads, would leave his office bawling like babies. By the fall of 1996, the stories that circulated through the studios were the kind that you didn’t want to repeat to anybody, for fear word would get out that you liked to talk. The whole company was built around fear, and the atmosphere was “insane,” Lewis said. After Tupac’s death, all he knew was terror, the Death Row manager explained. He went days without sleeping and would lie in bed at night wondering when they were going to come for him, and whether they would just beat him up or actually kill him.

  When Knox asked about the black police officers employed by Death Row, Lewis said that Reggie Wright Jr. dealt exclusively with them, and that he knew very few of their names or what departments they worked for.

  Lewis did know the name of the LAPD officer who worked the front desk at Death Row, however. And that, Kenneth Knox told Russell Poole, was Richard McCauley.

  The connection between Officer Richard McCauley and Death Row Records had first come to the attention of the Los Angeles Police Department in October of 1995, when Lt. Anthony Alba of the LAPD’s West Valley Division received a phone call from a Compton police sergeant. His department was concerned that one of their officers was working for Suge Knight, despite being ordered not to, explained the Compton sergeant, who asked Alba to visit the Tarzana address that evening and see if this officer was seated at the front desk. When Alba arrived at the Death Row studios, he did indeed discover a police officer stationed near the metal detector at the entrance. This was not the Compton officer he had come looking for, however, but Richard McCauley, currently assigned to the LAPD’s Wilshire Division. When he advised McCauley that “it would be wise for him to terminate his employment there,” Alba recalled, the indignant officer answered that he had a valid work permit. This was true; two months earlier, the LAPD’s Human Resources Division had given McCauley permission to work off duty for Wrightway Protective Services. Wrightway had been founded with a $300,000 “investment” from Suge Knight, and provided security almost exclusively for Death Row Records, but the Human Resources Division made no real check into the company’s background or affiliations.

  Only when Lt. Alba persisted did McCauley agree to terminate his employment with Death Row Records. The officer’s two lieutenants at Wilshire Division believed McCauley “fully understood the severity of the conflict of interest his off-duty employment posed for the department,” and they recalled that the officer had made an impassioned promise to “sever all ties with Death Row Records.” The lieutenants informed their captain that “McCauley appeared to be sincere and fully regretted his involvement with Death Row.” The officer’s disavowals of Suge Knight and his record label were “so strong,” in fact, the lieutenants recalled, that they felt McCauley’s pending promotion to sergeant should not be jeopardized by this one unfortunate lapse in judgment.

  On November 1, 1995, McCauley was formally ordered not to work for Death Row or any company associated with it. His work permit was revoked by the LAPD one week later. But in September of 1996 the Las Vegas Police Department would inform Kenneth Knox that an LAPD officer named Richard McCauley had been in Las Vegas when Tupac Shakur was shot. Furthermore, the Vegas cops said, while Shakur fought for his life at the University Medical Center, McCauley was a guest in one of the rooms at the Luxor Hotel reserved by Suge Knight for Death Row Records personnel.

  This was not exactly shocking news. McCauley had been under suspicion since the previous June, when Kevin Lewis showed Knox a work form for Death Row’s security detail that included the name Richard McCauley. Knox informed his commander, Captain Valentino Paniccia, but the captain declined to contact Internal Affairs. Paniccia did say, however, that he would make a phone call to McCauley’s captain in Wilshire Division, Lyman Doster.

  Captain Doster told Paniccia that he believed McCauley had ended his employment with Death Row Records months earlier, and said the officer definitely had been ordered to do so. This was, however, a cop who had some problems, Doster added. McCauley was the object of several complaints by Community Watch block captain Tilly Jackson, the leading anticrime activist in the black community that made up the southern section of Wilshire Division. Jackson had impressed Doster by organizing a number of “anticrime marches,” and had risked her life on several occasions to mobilize black neighborhoods against gang activity. The woman was more covert, though, in her efforts to close the business she considered the locus of organized criminal activity in her neighborhood. She wanted whatever she said about the Community Liquor Store to be confidential, Jackson had advised Captain Doster, because she feared what the people associated with it might to do her. Neighbors she trusted told her they had seen “a lot of guns” in the back of the liquor store, Jackson explained, and she believed weapons were being bought and sold there. Also, she had heard many reports of narcotics sales conducted inside the liquor store, Jackson told Doster.

  One of the things that concerned her, Jackson explained, was the close relationship an LAPD officer named Richard McCauley seemed to have with employees of the Community Liquor Store. She believed McCauley was a “bad cop,” Jackson said. He regularly frequented Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles Restaurant, where he was often seen sitting with the manager, a man who had a reputation as a major drug dealer. The LAPD had for some time classifed Roscoe’s as a “problem location,” mainly because the place stayed open until 4 A.M. on weekends, attracting a large and rowdy crowd. Reports of fights, disturbances, and shots fired in and around the restaurant had become regular occurrences.

  After talking to Jackson, Captain Doster instructed McCauley’s sergeant to “monitor” his connection to both Roscoe’s and the Community Liquor Store. Perhaps this young man needed a talking to, Doster said. Only a short time later, Tilly Jackson phoned Doster to complain that the owner of the liquor store had told her he knew she was trying to get his business closed, and that he had threatened her life. The only way the man could have gotten this information, Jackson told Doster, was from a police officer.

  In February of 1996, Doster told Captain Paniccia, after several conversations with detectives from the Compton Police Department, he had asked McCauley if the officer was still working for Death Row Records. McCauley insisted he had “severed his association with the company” back in October of 1995, Doster said. But now, four months later, Paniccia was saying that he believed McCauley had continued his involvement with Death Row. Doster advised the West Valley captain that McCauley already had one sustained allegation of “lying and denying” in his personnel package, and that he felt it was possible the officer might be on the verge of “going the other way.”

  The LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division did not commence its investigation of Richard McCauley, however, until the Las Vegas police phoned Kenneth Knox three months later. To say that the department’s investigation proceeded slowly would put it kindly, Poole and Knox agreed. Not until May of 1997 did Internal Affairs investigator Sgt. John Iancin travel to Las Vegas to collect statements from nearly a dozen witnesses who said they had observed McCauley working as one of the private security guards posted outside Tupac Shakur’s room in the University Medical Center’s Trauma Unit during the days before the rapper died. Four of these witnesses were hospital security officers who said McCauley had boasted to them about being an LAPD officer. Suge Knight had kept private bodyguards in the Trauma Unit around the clock, the security officers explained, two per twelve-hour shift. McCauley’s light complexion and green eyes made him stand out, the
y said, and so did his weight lifter’s build. Also, several members of the hospital’s staff had remarked upon McCauley’s late-model Mercedes sedan, wondering how a police officer could afford it. McCauley told them he worked regularly for Tupac Shakur, the hospital employees recalled, and that Suge Knight had brought him to Las Vegas from L.A. to provide “extra security” for the rapper.

  McCauley himself was interviewed by Iancin two weeks later. By this time the LAPD had obtained work records from Death Row Records that showed McCauley had been posted at the front desk in the label’s studios on numerous occasions during the spring of 1996, not only more than six months after his work permit was revoked, but also during a period of time when he was on sick leave from the department. During his interview with Iancin and another IA investigator on May 27, 1997, however, McCauley insisted that the evening in October of 1995 when he met Kenneth Knox was the only time he had ever worked at the Death Row studios. McCauley agreed that the signature on the LAPD Employees Report form in which he had pledged to “permanently sever his ties with Wrightway Protective Services” was his, and that he had kept this promise.

  Yes, he had traveled to Nevada around the time Tupac Shakur was killed, McCauley admitted, but the purpose was to visit his grandmother in Henderson, about fifteen miles from Las Vegas. He did not attend the Tyson-Seldon fight, and was not inside the MGM Grand when Orlando Anderson was attacked, McCauley insisted, nor was he part of the Death Row caravan when Tupac was shot.