LAbyrinth

by Randall Sullivan

  Poole transferred to Harbor Division Homicide, but one month later the deal Ray Perez had made with police and prosecutors became public. Poole was so disgusted that he felt he now had no choice but to resign from the LAPD. Before doing so, however, he took care of some unfinished business. He had been haunted, Poole said, by a story Kevin Hackie had told him about the 1993 murder of two Compton police officers. One of the slain men was Smoky Burrell, Reggie Wright Jr.’s former partner. “Hackie said that it was common knowledge that Burrell and Wright were robbing dope dealers of their money and narcotics on duty,” Poole’s notes of the interview read. “‘They were notorious for stealing money.’ Hackie says that the person who killed Burrell, Regis Thomas, may have been robbed by the two officers (Burrell/Wright) on previous occasions.” Before submitting his resignation, Poole took his notes to two LAPD lieutenants, a captain, a commander, and to the office of Chief Parks. “What worried me was that the guy who killed Burrell had gotten the death penalty,” he explained, “yet may have thought he was protecting himself from another rip-off or even defending his life. I wanted to make sure this was investigated before the guy got executed, but nothing was ever done.”

  Poole also delivered his investigative files on the Biggie Smalls murder—including the evidence that implicated Suge Knight and LAPD officers associated with Death Row Records—to William Hodgeman, the assistant district attorney who had become a public figure during the O.J. Simpson trial but was best known within the local law enforcement community as the liaison between Los Angeles County and the federal government. Hodgeman also was the prosecutor who had gotten Suge Knight sentenced to state prison. “I still hoped somebody someday would make use of this stuff,” Poole explained.

  It wouldn’t be Poole, however. On October 25, 1999, Russell Poole submitted his letter of resignation to the LAPD. It contained just enough information to let Chief Parks and the rest of the department’s brass know that he believed he had the goods on them. “The issues and circumstances [of my resignation] have to do with how some investigations I was involved in were handled,” Poole wrote. “My concerns were addressed to my superiors, but were swept under the rug.”

  PART FIVE

  HEAT FROM A COLD CASE

  Poole is a team player who makes himself available to assist others without regard to the time of day or night. Poole is a quality person who has found his calling. He has become one of the finest young detectives on the Department.

  —From the “Performance Evaluation Report” filed on Detective Trainee Russell Poole for the period from 3/1/89 to 9/30/89

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Shortly after his resignation from the LAPD, Poole agreed to cooperate with the Los Angeles Times. This would be, he eventually concluded, one of the worst mistakes he ever made. “The Times reporters, [Matt] Lait and [Scott] Glover, had been phoning me for months, trying to get me to talk,” Poole recalled. “A couple of days after I turned in my detective’s shield, I finally called them up and said, ‘Okay.’ I gave those guys everything I had, and then they came out with this story that was completely fucked-up.”

  The Times’s story seemed simply sensational when it ran on the morning of December 9, 1999. “A former Los Angeles police officer already in prison for bank robbery is among the suspects in the 1997 slaying of rap star Notorious B.I.G., according to sources and confidential LAPD documents obtained by the Times,” the article began. “Among the theories [LAPD] investigators are pursuing is that ex-Officer David A. Mack conspired with Death Row Records founder Marion ‘Suge’ Knight to arrange the contract killing of the 24-year-old rap sensation whose real name was Christopher Wallace, according to a former detective on the case.

  “Specifically, detectives are trying to determine whether Mack arranged for a longtime friend to carry out the attack outside the Petersen Automotive Museum on March 9, 1997, according to sources and Los Angeles Police Department documents. Police would not say whether they have been able to locate or question the man they suspect of being the gunman under this theory. He is Amir Muhammed, who was known as Harry Billups when he and Mack were college classmates at the University of Oregon, according to sources and documents. Muhammed apparently dropped from sight after visiting Mack in prison on December 26, 1997.”

  The Times article was vague about what police had done to “pursue” the theory that Amir Muhammed was the killer of Biggie Smalls, describing Muhammed as a shadowy figure who was impossible to locate: “Detectives searched for Muhammed, but many of the addresses that came up in a background check were either false or led to post office boxes, according to LAPD robbery-homicide documents. Police surveillance of some of those locations failed to find him. Numerous attempts by the Times to locate Muhammed through public records and a former friend were unsuccessful.”

  The “former detective on the case” who had been the Times reporters’ main source couldn’t finish the article the first few times he tried. “I was just in shock when I read it,” Poole recalled. “They made it sound like the case was about to break wide open, instead of describing how the investigation had been thwarted. It was like the LAPD was on the brink of arresting this Amir Muhammed for the murder of Biggie Smalls. What I had told them was that nobody ever really looked for Muhammed, because the brass didn’t want to conduct an investigation that might lead to LAPD officers, and that the clues that implicated David Mack were basically discarded. I tried to get those guys to do another story that got it right, but they wouldn’t.”

  The Times would “do another story” almost five months later, but this article read more like a veiled retraction than a clarification of its earlier report. The newspaper’s May 3, 2000, article was written by business reporter Chuck Philips. MAN NO LONGER UNDER SCRUTINY IN RAPPER’S DEATH, read the headline. PROBE: MORTGAGE BROKER HAD BEEN INVESTIGATED IN NOTORIOUS B.I.G.’S SLAYING, BUT POLICE SAY THEORY IS NOT BEING PURSUED.

  The main source for Philips’s claim that the LAPD had rejected the idea that Muhammed might be involved in the murder of Biggie Smalls was Dave Martin, identified in the Times article as “the lead detective in the case.” “We are not pursuing that theory and have not been for more than a year,” Philips quoted Martin as saying.

  Philips also interviewed Amir Muhammed himself, who told the reporter, “I’m not a murderer, I’m a mortgage broker.” The Times’s earlier article “made it sound like I was some mystery assassin who committed this heinous crime and then just dropped off the face of the earth—which is the furthest thing from the truth,” complained Muhammed. He had not left his house for three days after the article ran, Muhammed said, for fear that one of Biggie Smalls’s fans might be provoked into an attempt on his life.

  Philips’s article actually raised many more questions than it answered, but almost no one in the local media seemed to recognize that fact. Muhammed’s attorney told the Times’s reporter that, one week after the first article ran, LAPD detectives had assured him that his client was not a suspect. They would like to interview Muhammed, the detectives said, “but never followed through with their request,” the Times reported. Why not? was the obvious question, but if Philips had asked it, there was no evidence of this in his article. Amir Muhammed himself cited the failure of the LAPD to interview him as proof that “they obviously realized at some point it wasn’t true” that he had been involved in the murder of Biggie Smalls. All it really proved, though, was that the LAPD had abandoned a viable theory without even a perfunctory investigation.

  Philips’s article also did not offer any explanation of why the LAPD had rejected the theory that David Mack—and possibly Amir Muhammed, as well—were involved in the murder of Biggie Smalls. There were no questions or answers about how Mack and Muhammed had been eliminated as suspects, or what the scope of the LAPD investigation had been. No one was asked to explain why Russell Poole’s requests for warrants to search Mack’s home, to run forensic tests on his car, and to examine his financial records were refused, despite an enormous amount
of probable cause. Among the most obvious questions that Philips apparently hadn’t asked Amir Muhammed was this one: Why, if your visit to David Mack in jail was an innocent contact between two old friends, did you use a false address, a false social security number, and an out-of-service phone number when you signed in at the jail? And the biggest question, of course, was why—if what Amir Muhammed said was true—he hadn’t sued the Los Angeles Times for libeling him.

  In New York, these questions would have been asked the first day and every day afterward, until reporters got answers. But Los Angeles was a long way from New York. The West Coast city had only one daily newspaper, but even worse, it had an “alternative” press that was more driven by political agendas than journalistic obligations. The rest of the local media not only failed to demand answers from the Los Angeles Times and the LAPD, but instead made a mob attack on the city’s one real newspaper for running the first article that named Amir Muhammed as a suspect in Biggie Smalls’s slaying. The firestorm of criticism was ignited by an article in the online edition of Brill’s Content that accused the Times of running Philips’s article as a way of avoiding the full retraction owed to Amir Muhammed. The claim that Muhammed was a suspect in the murder of Biggie Smalls “turns out to be dead wrong,” Brill’s Content reported, and the Times’s failure to acknowledge this only compounded the newspaper’s sins.

  The LA Weekly promptly published an article (under the headline A B.I.G. MISTAKE) that chronicled the behind-the-scenes battle in the Times’s newsroom. After Philips’s story was ready for publication, the Weekly explained, the reporter and his editor in the Business section, Mark Saylor, were beset by editors from the Metro section “who reportedly wanted to play down elements of Philips’s story that raised questions about what (Matt) Lait and (Scott) Glover had reported, and were successful in watering it down.” Saylor, who had engaged in a public screaming match with the Times’s executive editor Leo Wolinsky shortly after the Brill’s Content piece was published, told the

  Weekly that the atmosphere in the newsroom was “tense and uncomfortable.” Saylor resigned from the newspaper shortly after this.

  The Weekly did at least speak to Russell Poole, reporting that the “retired detective” admitted he was the only member of the LAPD who had wanted to pursue “the theory that Mack and Knight had convinced Amir Muhammed to shoot Wallace” and that he advised Lait and Glover that “he hadn’t been able to check out the theory in any detail” because the department’s brass refused to grant permission. “In fact, Poole says, the reluctance of his partner and supervisors to take the Mack-Muhammed theory seriously was one of the reasons he quit the force in disgust,” the Weekly reported. The paper then dismissed the evidence linking Mack to the murder of Biggie Smalls as “gossamer thin,” however, and the implication of Amir Muhammed as “even more tenuous.” Since the paper had done absolutely no independent investigation of “the Mack-Muhammed theory,” though, all its editors knew was what they read in the Times.

  The Weekly’s reporting was top-notch compared to that of the New Times of Los Angeles. The city’s other “major” weekly told its readers that Amir Muhammed was “an innocent mortgage broker” who had not been a suspect in the murder of Biggie Smalls for at least seven months before the Lait-Glover article that identified him as such ran in the Los Angeles Times. The New Times quoted an unnamed police source who said the LAPD had not pursued the Mack-Muhammed theory “because top investigators felt it wouldn’t hold up,” but provided absolutely no explanation of why not. The paper then leveled the inevitable charge of racism, quoting unnamed “cynics inside the paper” who believed “the Times would never have embraced such flimsy evidence if the target had been a prominent white businessman, instead of a Nation of Islam member.” The New Times sank even lower by illustrating editor Rick Barrs’s column with a drawing of Amir Muhammed being lynched by two white male reporters.

  The most predictable and audacious comments on the Mack-Muhammed theory came from Suge Knight’s latest attorney, Robin J. Yanes. This whole idea had come and gone a year ago, Yanes said, and was being recycled by the LAPD “to cover their butts.” Yanes then said, “Suge doesn’t know” David Mack. Suge most certainly did, however, as more than one witness already had told the LAPD.

  For Russell Poole, the media fiasco that had ensued following the publication of the Chuck Philips article was perhaps even more disillusioning than what he had witnessed as a member of the LAPD. “It was like the cover-up had been covered up, this time by the media,” Poole explained. When one took a close look at what actually was said in the avalanche of articles that castigated the Los Angeles Times for its original story on the Mack-Muhammed theory, they boiled down to this: Amir Muhammed could not be a murderer because he was a mortgage broker; David Mack had been cleared as a suspect in the murder of Biggie Smalls because the LAPD said it wasn’t investigating that possibility; and the only reason these two had been singled out for mention was that they were black.

  “The Los Angeles Times’s credibility was out the window, as far as I’m concerned,” Poole said. “And this Rick Barrs guy at the New Times—what a stupid shit. None of these papers, not even the Times, did any probing whatever. They didn’t ask the right questions, so how could they get the right answers?”

  The idea that Amir Muhammed must be innocent because he was a mortgage broker especially infuriated Poole. Back in 1994, the detective had arrested a mortgage broker named Willie Darnel Hankins for shooting a man to death in an office on Wilshire Boulevard. During the course of an investigation that involved the subsequent murder of the accused man’s father, Willie Hankins (whose real estate loan business had made him one of the wealthiest men ever to emerge from the South Central Los Angeles ghetto), Poole was astounded by “how skilled these guys were at manipulating and covering up in financial deals.” Working as a mortgage broker “is a perfect way to make dirty money look clean,” he explained, “and that’s what a lot of them do.” He had heard a number of stories back then, Poole recalled, about mortgage brokers who were helping gangsta rappers and other members of the Bloods gang launder the money they made from drug and weapons transactions.

  Poole also recalled that the investigations of Kevin Gaines and Rafael Perez had shown that both men boasted about the large real estate portfolios they were able to accumulate. “I realized that there might have been a connection there to Harry Billups, or Amir Muhammed, or whatever he calls himself,” Poole said. “For me, the fact that he’s a mortgage broker only raises a lot of new questions. It was really painful to find out that not only the LAPD, but also the Los Angeles Times, doesn’t want those questions answered.”

  The Los Angeles Times had been serving for months as the principal publicist for the accusations of Rafael Perez. The story that Perez had made a deal and was talking to the cops became public on September 16, 1999, one day after Bernard Parks held a news conference to announce that a total of twelve LAPD officers already had been relieved of duty on the basis of what Perez said. Nino Durden was the only one named. “It’s not a good day,” said Parks, who only a few hours earlier had handed out eighteen Medal of Valor awards to employees of the police department.

  For the Times, the most important revelation to emerge was bannered across page one of the paper’s Metro section: EX-OFFICER SAYS HE SHOT UNARMED MAN. Prosecutors at that moment were attempting to have Javier Ovando released from state prison, the Times informed its readers. The headline on the story in the next day’s edition of the Times announced that Perez had implicated another officer in a second shooting AS CORRUPTION PROBE WIDENS. Even at this early stage, the newpaper reported, the “probe” had become “the most extensive inquiry into LAPD conduct” since the 1930s.

  LAPD, CORRUPTION PROBE MAY BE TEST FOR CITY LEADERS, read the headline on the Times’s next article. Already the paper was framing the story in the context of the Rodney King beating, the brutalization of minority victims by blue-suited brutes, and a police department that requi
red the oversight of civil rights activists to protect them. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office announced that day that it was suspending enforcement of its anti-gang injunctions against more than one hundred members of the 18th Street Gang. The day after that, the Times published a lengthy interview with Rafael Perez, under the headline, EX-OFFICERS CALLS CORRUPTION A CHRONIC “CANCER”. What he had done to Javier Ovando haunted him even in his dreams, Perez told the paper: “I go to sleep with it and wake up with it. It’s something I have been living with for almost three years, and I wanted to find some closure for me, and, in a sense, a beginning for Mr. Ovando. … This is something that I’m doing for me and for my God, and something that I need to do to make me whole.”

  Bernard Parks addressed the Los Angeles City Council the next day and told them that many more officers than the twelve already suspended would be subject to investigation. “We take Rafael Perez at his word,” said the chief, whose admission that “we may end up with a lot of information we can’t prove” seemed to slip past the ears of most listeners. “Horrifying,” the council’s most left-wing member, Jackie Goldberg, called the contents of the chief’s briefing. “We’re not going to put blinders on to these allegations,” an anonymous official of the U.S. Justice Department advised the Times, which reminded readers that federal officials “have been monitoring the LAPD for the last several years.”