Suge’s rapper DJ Quik, whom many in the LAPD believed should have been charged with the murder of Kelly Jamerson, was briefly a suspect in the Smalls murder. Quik had shown up at the Petersen Museum party accompanied by ten Bloods, and the day after Biggie’s death several witnesses reported hearing him say, “Fat motherfucker should not have been out here in the first place.” Detectives received the tip that Quik’s most trusted bodyguard drove a black Impala SS, but when LAPD officers attempted to locate the man they learned he recently had been murdered in what appeared to be a home invasion robbery.
A series of other promising leads took detectives nowhere. During July of 1997, the house in Woodland Hills, where Suge kept his girlfriend Stormy Randham and the child he had fathered by her was burglarized. Soon after this, Kenneth Knox informed Poole that the young woman’s mother, Patricia Wright, only recently had been arrested in another home leased by Knight for the gruesome 1981 murder of her then husband, Willie Jerome Scott (whose body was found in an abandoned motor home with a large knife buried in his chest). An informant who came forward fifteen years after the fact, told police that Patricia Wright and her lover had killed the man to collect his life insurance. Detectives for a time thought they might use the pending murder charge to pressure either Wright or her daughter into cooperating with them, but in the end neither woman gave them anything they could use against Suge Knight. A call from an ATF agent in San Diego, who gave his name as John McNeil and said he had compelling evidence that M.C. Hammer had killed Biggie Smalls for Suge Knight, intrigued detectives—until they learned that the ATF had no agents named John McNeil in California. Some clues were simply puzzling; a former PR man for Death Row Records reported that his home in Louisiana had been burglarized, but that the thief took only some canisters of film he had shot while promoting the rapper Nate Dogg.
Many of the most intriguing clues connected to the murder of Biggie Smalls involved the theory that his killer had been either a Black Muslim, or someone dressed like one. A security guard who had been posted at the main entrance to the Petersen Museum on the night of the VIBE party told detectives that just before the party began he had spoken to a pair of men he believed were Muslims. Both sported short fade haircuts, the security guard said, and one wore an electric-blue suit. One of the videotapes seized from the museum’s surveillance cameras had caught the image of a Muslim in a suit and bow tie standing just outside the front entrance with two other black males. There was the odd story—attested to by several witnesses—that Puffy Combs had been accosted by a Muslim at a restaurant in Century Plaza only a couple of days before Biggie’s killing. When the man began to berate Puffy for how he had treated the Muslims in New York, witnesses said, Mustapha Farrakhan was forced to intervene. On the other hand, detectives from the LAPD, Compton P.D., and Inglewood P.D. all reported recent robberies and shootings in which the suspects had posed as Muslims in order to obtain access to private residences.
By far the most compelling claim of a Muslim connection to the murder of Biggie Smalls, however—and perhaps the best clue received by detectives involved in the Smalls murder investigation—had come from a jail inmate described by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as an “ultra-reliable informant.” This man already had solved two homicide cases for them, sheriff’s deputies explained. The shooter in the Smalls case had been a contract killer who was a member of “the Fruit of Islam,” the Sheriff’s informant told the LAPD, and went by the name “Amir” or “Ashmir.” He had been told that the killing was ordered by Suge Knight, the informant said, and that it had something to do with the death of Tupac Shakur.
Suge Knight now was among the numerous inmates at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo who professed a devotion to Islam. Practice of his religion had become rather difficult for Suge, however. Sentenced by Judge Czuleger to serve the full nine years of his sentence for the assault on the Stanley brothers at the Solar Records studios, Suge entered the Men’s Colony in June of 1997, and immediately was awarded a plum assignment to the prison’s “yard detail.” After the LAPD named him as a suspect in the murder of Biggie Smalls, though, Knight had been moved to Administrative Segregation. (The prison’s administration at the same time posted one of the LAPD’s “Wanted” posters looking for information about Biggie’s killing in the “module” where Suge was housed.) As an “ad seg” inmate, Suge received his meals in a cell he was permitted to leave only for showers, and the “non-contact” meetings where he was separated by a thick glass wall from visitors, who were shuttled daily to the prison in a blood-red limousine. Without Knight’s presence in Los Angeles, though, Death Row Records was rapidly becoming a shell of its former self. The label’s first release after his incarceration, The Lady of Rage’s Necessary Roughness, was a flop, and Snoop Dogg’s disaffection from the label was becoming increasingly obvious. Death Row insiders also suggested that Suge had fallen out with David Kenner. Those who had been named as the “temporary heads” of Death Row Records in Suge’s absence included not only Norris Anderson and Reggie Wright Jr., but also Sharitha Knight and the singer Michel’le, who, despite being the mother of one of Dr. Dre’s children, had taken to identifying herself as Suge’s wife and was ensconced in Knight’s old office at Interscope. No one doubted that Suge was still running things, of course.
Despite the mountain of bad press he had received in recent months, the media’s attack on Knight seemed to be softening. The attorney Suge hired to defend him against the government’s racketeering investigation, Milton Grimes, had struck an effective blow by asking why the IRS and FBI were focusing entirely on Mr. Knight, while his corporate masters at Interscope, Time Warner, MCA, and EMI went unquestioned. Interscope, which had settled its share of Afeni Shakur’s racketeering lawsuit with a payment of $3 million, plus the promise of royalties from posthumous albums created from Tupac’s unreleased recordings, remained in business with Death Row, while MCA and its parent company, Seagram’s, pocketed their share of the profits. Time Warner, whose CEO had announced the company’s decision to sell its share in Interscope by declaring, “If music is being distributed in our name, we must bear responsibility for that music,” quietly retained control of Death Row’s music publishing rights worldwide. EMI already had paid a reported $50 million for a half-interest in Priority Records, a company that distributed many of Death Row’s albums, and was angling to purchase the gangsta rap label outright. As such facts were contemplated in a series of newspaper articles published in Los Angeles during the second half of 1997, the revisionist history of Suge Knight advanced to the point that one article quoted an entertainment lawyer who said, “Suge was no different than any of the other head honchos in this business. There is a formula and he understood it. You step on others’ backs to get where you need to go.”
The news for Suge still was more bad than good, however. Perhaps the most alarming report he received was that Michael “Harry-O” Harris had been transferred to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, where he was said to be cooperating with federal agents investigating the claim that Death Row Records had been started with drug money. LAPD detectives could get almost no information out of the feds, however, other than that their investigation of Death Row Records was “ongoing.”
Russell Poole remained convinced that the connection between Death Row and the police officers employed by the record label was in some way relevant to the Biggie Smalls case, but he was not encouraged by his superiors to pursue this aspect of the investigation. The conflict between Poole and his partner, meanwhile, intensified week by week. “Not long after we came back to L.A. from Las Vegas, Fred told me, ‘We’re not gonna solve this case. We’ll go through the motions, but we’re never going to make an arrest,’” Poole recalled.
“I told him I was sure we could solve the case, but I have to admit that I was wondering if anybody wanted us to.”
The partners bickered over the dozens of hours Miller had invested in checking the records of cell phon
e calls that had been made in the vicinity of the Petersen Museum shortly before Biggie Smalls’s murder. “A complete waste of time,” Poole called it. There had been a flurry of such calls, Poole explained, and some of them were clearly “Death Row-related,” but most of these conversations were conducted on “clone” phones, using numbers that had been stolen. “And by the time we called the numbers we thought were connected to Death Row, they were all out of service,” Poole recalled.
When Poole asked his superiors what had happpened to the investigation of Derwin Henderson and the other black officers accused of interfering with the Gaines-Lyga investigation, his questions were met with either raised eyebrows, stony silence, or suggestions that he mind his own business. “We didn’t know if Henderson was connected to Death Row or just a friend of Sharitha Knight’s,” Poole recalled. “It was an obvious investigation that needed to be done, but it never was. I was concerned that the cops who had been involved with Death Row were going to start disappearing back into the woodwork now that Suge was in prison. Nobody would even talk about the informant who had implicated Kevin Gaines in the Smalls’s shooting, and I came to believe that this clue was simply quashed.”
Poole couldn’t be sure about that, however, because he was excluded from many meetings involving the case. “Here I am listed as one of the two lead investigators, and I can’t get anybody to tell me what’s being said behind closed doors,” he recalled. “Fred kept reminding me that I had no pull. Now, among homicide investigators rank rarely matters. The point is to solve the case, and everybody helps everybody else do it. But suddenly in this case rank is everything, and I’m constantly being reminded that I have no power and should just keep my mouth shut.”
Poole couldn’t help but see a contrast in how the LAPD had responded to Biggie Smalls’s murder and the shooting death of Ennis Cosby, since both investigations were taking place at the same time. “In the Cosby case, there were about fifteen hundred clues that came in, from all over California, and we followed up on every one,” Poole recalled. “I was sent way out into the desert to check on one of twenty-five clues in that case they gave me. Because in high-profile cases you get a lot of people calling up thinking they know who did it. From an investigator’s point of view it’s sort of like a lottery and you just hope you get the right clue. It turned out that the Cosby case was solved by a clue that came in from the National Enquirer, which was really a first. But in the Smalls case I saw lots of clues that were sort of being shunted to the side, even though I thought they were important, while a lot of time got wasted on stuff I knew wasn’t going to pan out.”
During the late summer of 1997, Poole struggled to keep his displeasure with his partner to himself. “Fred wrote the six-month progress report on the Smalls case all by himself,” Poole recalled. “It was less than two pages long and a total summary. There was absolutely nothing in it that wasn’t already public knowledge. When I let it be known that I thought a lot had been left out, the lieutenants and captains told me they knew Fred was a lazy ass who hadn’t made a major arrest in years, but that I’d just have to deal with it. He was a Detective III supervisor with twenty-seven years on the job who seemed to have a lot of clout, so I wasn’t in a hurry to challenge him, either. People don’t want to take on a guy with that kind of seniority, because they know he has nothing to lose, while you have a lot to lose.”
Poole soon would find himself engaged in an increasingly public dispute about the direction of the Biggie Smalls murder investigation. By the time it was over, Fred Miller’s insistence that police officers could not have been involved would be backed by most of the LAPD brass, including the new Chief of Police, Bernard Parks.
Poole’s theory of the case would become much more difficult to dismiss, however, after November 6, 1997, the day an LAPD officer named David Mack pulled off one of the biggest bank robberies in Los Angeles history.
* * *
Like Suge Knight, David Mack had grown up north of Alondra Boulevard in Compton, west of Wilmington Avenue and east of Leuders Park, the territory of the Piru Bloods. And like Knight, Mack had left the neighborhood on an athletic scholarship. During the early 1980s, while at the University of Oregon, he won three PAC-10 conference titles and an NCAA championship in the 800 meters. Mack was ranked number one in the world going into the 1984 Olympics, but a leg injury that wouldn’t heal ended his track career before he could compete for a gold medal, and in 1988 he joined the Los Angeles Police Department.
Mack began his police career in Southeast Division, where the combination of his athletic career and the fact that he had been personally recruited into the department by Bernard Parks gave him a good deal more status than the average rookie cop. After only two years on the job, he was turned loose on the streets as an undercover narcotics officer. In 1993, Mack was awarded the LAPD’s second-highest honor, the Police Medal, for shooting a drug dealer who allegedly had pointed a gun at the head of Mack’s partner, Rafael “Ray” Perez.
Jesse Vincencio was holding a pistol in his right hand as he approached their parked car, Mack and Perez said. The two undercover cops gave Vincencio $20 for a rock of cocaine, but the dealer threw the money back into Mack’s lap, they recalled, then asked, “Are you Crips or Bloods?” The two denied being either gang members or drug dealers, Mack and Perez said, but Vincencio (who later would test positive for PCP) became so agitated that Mack slipped his own gun out of his waistband and held it hidden under his shirt. Vincencio suddenly raised his weapon and pointed it back and forth between the two men in the car, pausing finally with the barrel of his weapon aimed at Perez’s head. Convinced he was about to be killed, Perez would testify, he pleaded with Vincencio, “Come on man, I’m just a basehead, take it easy. Don’t shoot.” At that moment, Mack pulled his own pistol from under his shirt and fired four shots. Vincencio had been hit, but was still on his feet, standing in the middle of Cambridge Street, according to Mack, when once again he raised his weapon. Mack said, he pushed his car door open and crouched behind it, firing off five more rounds. Vincencio was not yet down, however, according to Mack and Perez. The dealer turned left and began to run, reaching back to point his gun one more time at Mack, who fired off another four shots, making thirteen total. When the smoke cleared, Vincencio was dead and Mack was a police hero, credited by Perez with saving his life.
Little more than a year later, however, Mack had given up his prestigious assignment in the Narcotics Bureau to work the graveyard shift in West L.A. He needed more time with his wife, Carla, and their two children, Mack said. But the flexibility of his new schedule also allowed the officer to devote more hours to his extracurricular activities. Among these was his relationship with Errolyn Romero, who had been a nineteen-year-old ticket taker at the Baldwin Theater in 1990, when Mack first asked her out. Their subsequent affair lasted seven years. Romero’s disapproving family insisted that she break it off with Mack, and the young woman told them she had, but she continued to sleep with the married man even after she went to work for the Bank of America. In August of 1997, Romero was transferred to the big B of A branch just north of the USC campus at Jefferson and Hoover. This bank was a huge operation, with twenty teller stations and a large wall of “ballistic Plexiglas” that separated the lobby from the vault area.
Normally the bank kept about $350,000 in currency in the vault, but slightly more than twice that amount had just been delivered by armored car on the morning of November 6, 1997, when a black male wearing a three-piece gray suit with sunglasses and a tweed beret walked through the front door and headed directly for the bullet-proof door that divided tellers from customers. A security guard said he couldn’t go back there, and the man explained that he simply wanted to get into his safe deposit box. After the man in the gray suit filled out a safe deposit box entry form, Errolyn Romero buzzed him through the first gate, then left her window and unlocked a second security door that opened into the vault area. Inside, two female employees of the bank had just begun to count th
e $722,000 (all in twenties, fifties, and hundreds) that sat in three separate bundles on a steel cart, sealed in plastic shrink-wrap.
The man immediately shoved Romero to the floor, opened his suit jacket to reveal the Tec-9 semiautomatic assault pistol that hung from a shoulder strap, took the gun out, pointed it at the two women who were counting the cash, and told them, “Don’t touch those fucking pagers or I’ll blow your fucking heads off! I want all the money Brinks just brought! Don’t lose your life over money that’s not yours, and don’t give me any of that exploding bait! If it explodes on me, I’ll come back and kill you! Don’t look at me, and don’t touch those pagers!” Both the tone of the man’s voice and the expression on his face convinced them he was perfectly capable of following through on his threats, the two women explained later, and they immediately got on the floor.
The man let his weapon drop back into the strap under his jacket and scooped up the three bundles of cash. If they used their pagers to set off a silent alarm, or if a dye pack exploded on him, the man warned the three women again, he would come back and kill them.
The man in the suit appeared to be acting alone until an unarmed bank security guard saw him carrying the money as he left the vault. The guard ran to a telephone, but before he could dial he felt a gun barrel against his ribs, then heard a second man say, “Put the phone down, fool!” As it dawned on the bank’s customers that a robbery was in progress, the man in the suit began to shout at them: “Close your eyes! Don’t look at me! Get out of the way! I have a gun! I’ll blow you up!”
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