“Stay there. Don’t go anywhere,” the second robber told the security guard, as he followed the man in the suit out of the bank door to a white van where a third robber sat behind the wheel. The van drove less than half a mile to a parking lot behind an apartment building on Ellendale Street. A USC student who lived in the building turned toward his open window when the van screeched to a stop. He stuck his head out of the window when he heard what sounded like police radios, the student said, and saw two black men jump out of the van. “Let’s get out of here,” the one who carried a bag over his shoulder shouted, then both ran off on foot.
All three robbers had vanished by the time police arrived and discovered that the van was wiped clean of prints. The man in the gray suit and his accomplices had pulled off one of the biggest heists in Los Angeles history, but their execution would prove far superior to their planning. Within a week, the Bank of America’s corporate security division informed the FBI that its USC branch had far more cash on hand at the time of the robbery than was authorized, and that the money had been ordered by assistant manager Errolyn Romero. The bank sent Romero to the LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters on December 16,1997, to take a polygraph test administered by an FBI agent and two detectives from the Department’s Robbery-Homicide Division, Brian Tyndall and Gregory Grant. After telling Romero that she had failed the polygraph, the detectives showed the young woman a batch of bank security photographs of the robber who had been with her in the vault. Visibly upset, Romero did not answer yes or no when asked if she could identify the man, instead inquiring, “What if I can convince him to give the money back?” Was she afraid of this person? the detectives wondered. “Yes and no,” Romero replied. She couldn’t bring herself to say the man’s name, but finally opened her purse, took out a business card, and pushed it across the table to the detectives, who were more than a little startled to see that it was emblazoned with an LAPD badge and the name of Officer David Mack.
Mack was carrying fourteen hundred-dollar bills in his wallet when he was arrested that evening. Police found another $2,600 in fifties when they searched his house, along with receipts and invoices for $18,000 in cash purchases that had been made in the six weeks since the robbery, all hidden under the carpet in a closet. Officers also recovered the Tec-9 pistol and shoulder strap Mack had used in the robbery.
What most interested Russell Poole was the black Impala SS parked in Mack’s garage next to a wall that was decorated with Tupac Shakur posters and memorabilia; detectives described it as a sort of “shrine” to the slain rapper. “As soon as I learned that David Mack owned a vehicle that matched the one used in the Biggie Smalls killing, and that Mack had used it as the third car in the bank robbery, I asked to have it tested by our Scientific Investigations Division,” Poole recalled, “but the brass said no, that they didn’t want to ‘step on the FBI’s toes.’ What bullshit! The LAPD has never cared about stepping on the FBI’s toes. What they didn’t want was to find out that one of our officers was implicated in Biggie Smalls’s murder. Because there was no telling where that might lead.”
Poole’s interest in Mack only increased, however, with each new report he received from detectives working the bank robbery case. In Mack’s house they had discovered thousands of rounds of German-manufactured 9mm ammunition, the detectives said, exactly the kind of bullets that had killed Biggie Smalls. Mack had grown up in the same Compton neighborhood with Suge Knight, where he was a legend for his foot speed, and like Knight, proudly professed to be a Muslim. Biggie Smalls’s killer looked like a Muslim, witnesses said. Mack, it turned out, had been seen at numerous Death Row functions, and he was known for dressing in the same blood-red suits that Suge Knight and his entourage favored.
From the moment of his arrest, Mack had acted more like a gangster than a police officer, Poole was advised. Even as detectives from the Bank Robbery squad read him his rights, Mack smirked and told them, “Take your best shot.” At the Montebello City Jail, where he was locked up after his arrest, Mack immediately informed the other inmates that they better not fuck with him because he was a member of the Mob Piru Bloods. Mack also boasted while in custody that the nearly $700,000 remaining from the bank robbery was “invested” in a way that would at least double his money by the time he was released from prison. He could do eight years standing on his head, Mack said, and would be a rich man when he hit the streets again.
A lot of what the police knew about Mack’s plans they learned from the young man who had stolen the white van used in the bank robbery, Dale Williams. The FBI had interviewed Williams in January of 1998, shortly after he was arrested in Redondo Beach and told police there that he had important information about a major crime. He had known David Mack most of his life, said Williams, because his father, a former Arizona state sprint champion, had tried to convince Mack to attend USC rather than Oregon. During October of 1997, Mack had offered him ten thousand dollars to steal a van he could use in a robbery, Williams said. Mack also asked if he knew anyone who did “work” and could handle a lot of money, said Williams, who understood “work” to mean drug dealing. On November 5, 1997, he stole a white Toyota Sienna van from the Budget Rent-a-Car lot at the airport, Williams said, and delivered the vehicle to Mack that evening, along with a set of paper dealer tags from Crenshaw Motors. Mack initially said he was going to use the van to rip off a drug dealer, Williams said, but changed his story at some point and said an armored car carrying $900,000 in cash was the target. Mack slipped on the evening of November 5, though, and said something about “the bank” opening at 9 A.M. Williams knew Mack had a girlfriend who worked for a bank, because David had said several times she was going to make him rich. Mack admitted what he was up to at that point, Williams told police, and even showed him the Tec-9 he would carry into the bank on a shoulder strap, explaining that he planned to wear a suit and a wig during the robbery.
He was at his friend Darryl Dorberry’s house the next morning at 11:40, about an hour and a half after the bank robbery, Williams said, when Mack showed up, threw $10,000 in fifty-dollar bills on the floor, and said they were square. After he learned that David had been arrested and was locked up in the Montebello City Jail, however, Williams said he became concerned about his own exposure, and decided they needed to talk. His method was simple: He and a female friend went to a mall in Montebello and started shoplifting until they were caught; when the local police locked him up, he and David had lots of time to talk. What worried him, Williams explained, was an article in the newspaper that described Errolyn Romero’s part in the robbery and reported that she had identified Mack as the “mastermind.” He was surprised and disappointed to learn that his old friend would put himself in a position to be ratted out by Romero, Williams said, because David had told him many times before, “Never trust a bitch.”
Mack apparently planned to deal with Romero, Poole soon learned. While at the Montebello jail, Mack hired a Hispanic gang member to kill Romero, but the would-be hit man got scared at the last minute and went to the police. The FBI and the LAPD found his story credible enough to insist that Romero be transferred to the special housing unit at the women’s jail downtown.
Romero now intended to use a “duress” defense at trial, claiming Mack had intimidated her into cooperating in the robbery. She had seen Mack resort to violence several times in bar fights, Romero said, and believed him when he told her that if he found out she had another boyfriend he would kill her, and no one would be able to prove he did it. Still, she had never believed Mack would actually go through with the bank robbery, Romero said. Afterward, his only response to her questions was to say she had better keep her mouth shut. “The weak and those who talk too much get eliminated,” Mack told her, the young woman said. Several times during their relationship Mack had told her that he had no problem with killing someone to protect himself, and boasted that he had shot three people to death while working as an undercover cop. When Mack described the circumstances of one fatal shooting, Romero
recalled, she said he should have aimed at the man’s legs instead of his body. Mack’s reply was that he didn’t want that person to testify about the circumstances of the shooting.
On the basis of Romero’s story, LAPD detectives performed a cursory reinvestigation of the shooting in which Mack allegedly had saved his partner Perez’s life, and reported that they had found nothing improper. Poole, who noted that Mack and Perez had been involved in a total of five shootings (in a department where the majority of officers—himself included—went their entire careers without ever firing a gun while on duty), doubted that Jesse Vincencio’s death had been thoroughly examined. He would be borne out when a pair of eyewitnesses the police had failed to interview came forward to say that Vincencio never drew his gun before David Mack shot him in the street. “I was sure that shooting was dirty,” Poole recalled, “but I couldn’t get any of the brass interested in taking another look at it.”
David Mack would not become the primary focus of Poole’s own investigation until shortly after he returned from a three-week vacation in January of 1998 and learned that the first person to visit the arrested officer in jail was a man who went by the name Amir Muhammed. “‘Amir or Ashmir,’ our informant had said was the name of Biggie Smalls’s killer,” Poole recalled. Amir Muhammed had been Harry Billups when he and Mack met as students at the University of Oregon, where Billups started at both tailback and wide receiver on the football team. A high school sprinter in California and Virginia (where he had grown up), Billups worked out regularly with the university’s track team and lived with Mack in a dormitory dominated by athletes.
Poole took a deep breath when he saw the driver’s license photo Muhammed had presented at the Montebello City Jail: While David Mack looked nothing like the composite drawing of the shooter in the Biggie Smalls’s slaying, Amir Muhammed bore a distinct resemblance to the suspect. Muhammed had used a false address and social security number when he signed in as a visitor at the Montebello jail, and when Robbery-Homicide detectives did a computer search on the man, they turned up eight prior addresses, each with no forwarding.
A short time later, Poole examined David Mack’s personnel file and was stunned by the dates of Mack’s “family illness” leaves. “Most coppers very rarely take ‘FI’ days,” Poole explained. “You only get a few and most of us save them for a major emergency.” During the last eight months of David Mack’s LAPD career, however, the officer twice had taken a series of family illness leaves. As Poole suspected it might, one series of “FI” days taken by Mack coincided with the date of the bank robbery. Mack had taken an earlier series of family illness leaves, though, on March 4, 6, and 7—immediately before the weekend of Biggie Smalls’s murder.
This discovery was followed shortly by Poole’s reinterview of Damien Butler. After about ten minutes of preliminary questions, Poole showed Biggie Smalls’s best friend a “six-pack” photo lineup. “I’m sure this guy was standing just outside the door to the museum as we were entering into the party,” Butler said, as he pointed to a photograph in the upper right-hand corner. It was David Mack’s mug shot.
From Russell Poole’s point of view, the evidence already in hand not only implicated David Mack in the Smalls shooting, but very nearly nailed him for it. The detective’s superiors in the department did not see it that way, however. Not only did the LAPD fail to run forensic tests on Mack’s Impala, no search at all was made for Amir Muhammed, aside from an aborted one-day stakeout and a single run of his name through the department’s computer system. “We were kept from following these natural leads because they implicated a cop,” Poole said, “plain and simple. The brass told me, ‘We’re not going that way.’
“All along I had tried to keep an open mind about whether police officers were involved in the Biggie Smalls murder. I didn’t know. There were little clues here and there that pointed in that direction and made me wonder. I asked again what had happened to the Gaines clue. The only answer I got was that they made up a six-pack folder with Gaines in it, but I never saw or heard any evidence that they showed it to any of the witnesses. All I knew was that there was no mention of it at all in the murder book. The clue had been completely purged.
“I thought the arrest of David Mack and the evidence that implicated him in the Biggie Smalls murder was our big break in the case, but it was like everybody wanted to look the other way. And once I got Mack ID’d at the Petersen Museum party, the whole investigation ground to a halt. Suddenly Fred is meeting with the brass on an almost daily basis while I’m being cut out of the loop. I went twice to my lieutenant to complain, but he was afraid to do anything, because he really didn’t know which direction this thing was going to turn. There were captains and commanders coming in and out of his office, then reporting directly to the deputy chiefs. The brass wanted updates every day, so they could control whatever information was made public. I really couldn’t grasp what was happening, because I’d never dealt with something like this before. All my commanding officers up to that point had told me to follow the case wherever it leads, and don’t stop until you find the killer. That’s how it works. One clue leads to another clue which leads to another clue which leads to another clue and that’s how cases get solved. But that process had broken down completely during the course of the Biggie Smalls investigation.
“Whenever I pressed for an explanation of why we weren’t investigating these clues that connected Mack and possibly other LAPD officers, I couldn’t get any real answers. I was told, ‘Don’t go there. Just keep your mouth shut and do your job.’”
Poole understood that many of his colleagues in Robbery-Homicide now considered him a pain in the ass. The guy was irritatingly earnest, some felt. Among other things, Poole was the only detective in the division who kept “The Homicide Investigator’s Creed” tacked to the wall above his desk. “No greater honor will ever be bestowed on an officer or a more profound duty imposed upon him than when he is entrusted with the investigation of the death of a human being,” it read. “It is his duty to find the facts regardless of color or creed without prejudice, and to let no power on earth deter him from presenting these facts to the court without regard to personality.” Some RHD detectives began to roll their eyes whenever they looked at the thing, joking to one another that even Poole’s e-mail address was eaglescout-at-dot-something.
“The pressure was subtle,” Poole remembered. “Looks, raised eyebrows, guys murmuring, ‘Leave it alone.’ I was becoming an outcast.”
Poole received a clear signal of where he stood with his superiors on January 22, 1998, when a black detective who had played a relatively minor role in the Smalls investigation up to this point, James Harper, sent him this note: “Russ, Lt. Conmay wants myself and Haro to maintain control of the Mack clue book—Harper.”
Even if the LAPD wasn’t chasing them with much enthusiasm, clues continued to come in that linked David Mack to gangsta rap in general and to the Death Row Records label in particular. Most of the tipsters were other police officers. One was a detective who had seen Mack wearing a Nation of Islam pinkie ring. Another LAPD officer, who considered Mack a friend, said that David had offered him an off-duty job providing security for “the wife or girlfriend of an unnamed Death Row Records executive.” A sergeant with the Beverly Hills P.D. recalled that during the previous summer he had taken an off-duty job working as a security guard outside the Wilshire Theater during the recording of a Def Jam concert for HBO. Security inside the theater was provided by Muslims from the Farrakhan sect, the sergeant said, who “were very uncooperative” until an LAPD officer pulled up in a black-and-white patrol car and spoke briefly with them. He later had recognized that officer from photographs in the newspaper as David Mack, said the Beverly Hills sergeant, who recalled that the Muslims inside the theater “were much more friendly” after Mack came and went. That same sergeant said he had seen Mack on two other occasions, once at a 7-Eleven store that had just been robbed and again at the end of a car chase that had sta
rted in Beverly Hills but ended in Hollywood. On both occasions, Mack seemed to show up out of nowhere, said the sergeant, who had the feeling “something was going on with the guy,” but couldn’t put his finger on it.
To Poole, it looked like the other LAPD detectives assigned to the Smalls case were just going through the motions. “They were piling up paper, but they weren’t making connections,” Poole said. “They’d ignore what I thought were the best clues we had, then run off after something that obviously led nowhere. It was incredibly frustrating to watch. I mean, we already had ten times more than we needed to write search warrants on Mack. Hell, we almost had enough to take Mack to trial.”
But even the single supervisor in Robbery-Homicide whom Poole still trusted advised him to keep quiet. “I knew Brian Tyndall was a fine detective and an honorable man,” Poole explained, “but he was also a guy who believed in following orders and doing what he was told. He’d tell me, ‘Just relax a little, Russ. We’re gonna work things out.’” Even though Poole had been excluded from the investigation of David Mack, he still was nominally listed as the lead investigator on the Biggie Smalls case, Tyndall reminded Poole. There were other avenues he could pursue. Suge Knight still was considered the main suspect—focus on him.
Frank Alexander didn’t know much about Biggie Smalls’s murder, but the bodyguard was only too happy to implicate Suge Knight in the shooting of Tupac Shakur. His first contact with Death Row had come in September of 1995, Alexander told Poole during an interview in Laguna Niguel, the same month Tupac was released from prison in New York. Before beginning work, the bodyguard recalled, he was interviewed by Reggie Wright Jr. at the offices of Wrightway Protecive Services in the city of Paramount. At 5’7” and 260 pounds, Wright did not impress Alexander, who had taken home more than fifteen first prizes in international bodybuilding competitions. Reggie and Suge Knight were “tight as brothers,” however, Alexander said, and Suge often referred to Wright as his personal bodyguard.
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