LAbyrinth

by Randall Sullivan

  Almost immediately, Sonia Flores confessed that she had made up the story about the murders of Chino and his mother. She had little choice, given that the FBI had located the alleged murder victims, alive and well. She had fabricated her tale, Flores said, to punish Perez for dumping her after she became pregnant by him, and wanted him to spend the rest of his life in prison. The feds, however, were troubled by a feeling that some of what Flores had told them was true. A number of things had checked out, such as her description of the black BMW driven by Sammy Martin and her recollection of the shooting outside the McDonald’s on Union Avenue. Mack and Perez were fascinated by lap dancers, and Flores’s description of the bank robbery had been spot on. The young woman also was able to lead the FBI to a garbage-strewn ravine in Tijuana just like the one she had described, but two days of digging by the Mexican authorities turned up no human remains. What to make of Flores was a subject of some debate at the U.S. Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. One FBI agent suspected that Rafael Perez had persuaded the young woman to tell the story, then renounce it, so that he would not be forced to testify in court. When the FBI permitted Flores to plead guilty to a single count of making false statements to federal authorities, they insisted that she agree to at least two polygraph examinations intended to determine if anyone else had helped concoct her story. The results of those tests were never made public.

  By this point, the truth had become a fragile fossil immured in sediments of deceit, cynicism, and sanctimony. Those few fragments that could be pried loose were too contaminated to trust, and the cost of clarification apparently was more than anyone wanted to pay. That spring of 2001, word around the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles was that the state would not proceed with any more prosecutions related to the Rampart investigation, leaving further action to the federal government. A total of five LAPD officers had been fired by then, and another forty disciplined, but cop after cop were beating the charges against them at departmental trial boards. “The only real witness is Perez,” Russell Poole observed, “and Perez becomes less believable all the time. Yet they’re paying these gangbangers millions of dollars on the basis of what the guy says. Has anything like this ever happened before?” It had not.

  By March of 2001 the last possible opportunity to separate simple truth from the complex of lies that surrounded the Los Angeles police-corruption scandal seemed to be the trial that might result from the lawsuit filed against the LAPD by Russell Poole. The federal judge who would preside over the case was admittedly impressed by what he had seen of Poole’s documentation, while those who reviewed the entire file predicted that the case would explode on the city if it ever came to court. Poole’s attorneys won virtually every early pretrial hearing, including one that resulted in the judge’s order that Chief Parks and other senior LAPD officers submit to videotaped depositions.

  He steeled himself, Poole said, with the knowledge that he could never do more damage to the police department than had already been inflicted. The LAPD by now was an almost entirely demoralized organization. The department employed nearly a thousand fewer officers than it had when Parks took over as chief, and a recent Police Protective League poll suggested that as many as two-thirds of current officers wanted to quit their jobs. Even with the substantially reduced requirements that had been implemented in the name of diversity, the department was unable to fill its Police Academy classes. Dissension within the LAPD had advanced to the point that the vice president of the PPL stated publicly that the entire Rampart scandal was the result of Chief Parks’s determination to protect black officers, an assertion that would have been unthinkable one year earlier.

  “We’ve come to the point where there are two standards in the LAPD now,” said former Deputy Chief Steve Downing. “One for white officers and another for minorities. You can’t possibly maintain discipline under those conditions.”

  The PPL’s leadership had been warning for months that closing the LAPD’s CRASH units would leave gangbangers feeling “they’ve been given a green light to go back and terrorize people.” Such dire predictions were dismissed as police propaganda at first, but Los Angeles had seen a huge increase in violent crime during the past year, with murders up more than 25 percent, after eight years of steady decline, and gang members blamed for most of them. The key witness in one of the alleged CRASH frame-ups was arrested for rape, and in July 2000, after making a deal to collect $231,000 from the City of Los Angeles for the beating inflicted on him by Brian Hewitt, Ismael Jimanez was accused by federal prosecutors of conspiring to commit two murders during the previous year.

  The investigation that Russell Poole had begun back in March of 1997, meanwhile, the one that Rafael Perez almost single-handedly turned into the “Rampart scandal,” appeared to have subsided into terminal limbo. The murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls remained unsolved, and Chief Parks continued to insist that they had nothing to do with the crimes by cops that had ravaged his department. “The racial politics of this city have become so ridiculous that the police department and the district attorney’s office don’t want to solve the Biggie Smalls case,” asserted Downing. “They’re afraid Johnnie Cochran will defend whoever is charged, and we’ll have another O.J. situation.”

  Suge Knight, meanwhile, was about to be transferred to a federal prison in Oregon where he was scheduled for release in early August, meaning he would be back in his office at Death Row Records before the summer was over. The racketeering probe of Knight and David Kenner by the U.S. Justice Department recently had been described as “inactive” (in a story written by Chuck Philips for the Los Angeles Times), but the Biggie Smalls case refused to die.

  On June 6, 2000, LAPD detectives Greg Grant and Brian Tyndall, along with Lt. Emmanuel Hernandez, made the trip north to the Cornell Correctional Facility, where Kevin Hackie was incarcerated on a weapons charge. The three officers were most interested in Hackie’s claim that he knew what David Mack had done with the missing $700,000 from the Bank of America robbery in November of 1997. What Hackie first told the LAPD contingent, however, was that he had seen Mack and Ray Perez together at a number of Death Row Records functions “that were reserved for close friends of the owner or individuals considered to be in the owner’s inner circle,” and that Kevin Gaines had attended similar events. Hackie provided numerous places and dates where he had seen Mack and/or Perez with Suge Knight, beginning with the Black Image Awards show at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1995. He was told then that Mack and Knight had grown up together in Compton, Hackie recalled. Mack had been without Perez at that event, but the two were together with Suge and his entourage at a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas during May or June of 1996, Hackie said. He saw Mack with Suge only a short time later at the MTV-sponsored “Toss It Up” event where Tupac Shakur made a guest appearance, Hackie went on. Hackie first met Kevin Gaines at Tupac’s “California Love” video shoot, he said. The story that Suge Knight did not welcome Gaines’s presence at Death Row events was a fiction, Hackie added. Gaines was at a second Tupac video shoot only a couple of weeks later, at a mansion in either Santa Ana or Anaheim Hills, and Suge had been present as well. Gaines also was at the Death Row Christmas party in December of 1995, and only a few days later was with the Death Row contingent that distributed frozen turkeys in Compton for the Brotherhood Crusade. He saw Gaines at several other Death Row events, Hackie said, the last being an awards ceremony in April of 1996.

  Hackie also told the LAPD detectives that in February of 1999, shortly after his arrest on the weapons charges, he had been locked up at the Century Sheriff’s Station in Lynwood for seven days with Ray Perez. The two of them never discussed the bank robbery, Hackie said, but Perez did say he still employed a street dealer named “Cadillac Willie” who was selling kilos of cocaine for him.

  Hackie also told the LAPD trio that he had important information about the murder trial of Snoop Dogg. In January or February of 1996, Hackie said, Reggie Wright Jr. told him (during a conversation at the
Death Row studios in Tarzana) that the case against Snoop was destroyed when important evidence disappeared from the West Los Angeles Police Station. Wright seemed to imply that one of his friends on the LAPD had taken care of this for him, Hackie recalled.

  “I don’t know what motivated Tyndall and Grant to go interview Hackie in prison,” Poole said. “Hackie already had told us enough in our first interview with him that if we had just followed up on it all, we probably would have gotten to the bottom of all this. And if we’d had a picture of Perez at that first interview, we’d probably have ended up interviewing him, too, and who knows what that would have led to.”

  The story Hackie gave the LAPD paled in comparison, though, to the one that a Los Angeles jail inmate named Mark Hylland told to the FBI early in 2001. Hylland was a paralegal who had a history of practicing law without a license, often in the service of clients engaged in criminal enterprise. He claimed to have become involved with Ray Perez, David Mack, and two other LAPD officers back in 1992, when he met them at a strip club called Fritz’s in Bellflower. Eventually the four hired him to launder the fortune they were earning as drug dealers, Hylland claimed, by secretly investing the money in real estate. According to Hylland, the main tactic of the four was to place the property in the names of the Hispanic gang members they arrested in the Rampart Division. “They’d wait until one of these guys went to prison,” explained an investigator who had spent much of the past six months unearthing the paper trail left by these transactions, “then put the property in his name, rent it out, default on their mortgage payments, wait for the property to be repossessed, then buy it at auction for half of what it cost a year earlier.” Behind a screen of phony transactions, he had discovered dozens of real estate deals that linked Hylland to Perez, Mack, and at least two other LAPD officers, said the investigator, who had become convinced that this part of Hylland’s story could be proved.

  It would be considerably more difficult to verify what Hylland had to say about the murder of Biggie Smalls, however. According to Hylland, he met Suge Knight for the first and only time in the parking lot of a Denny’s restaurant in Bellflower where Knight was accompanied by Mack and Perez. After a brief conversation, Hylland said, Knight opened the trunk of his car, removed an envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, and handed it to Perez, who then handed it to him. His job, Hylland said, was to fly to Arizona to hand this money over to a Phoenix cop who eventually obtained the weapon used in the hit on Smalls.

  “The story sounds fantastic, I realize,” said Hylland’s Santa Monica attorney, W. Ronald Seabold, “but Mr. Hylland tells it very convincingly.” While both the LAPD and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office dismissed Hylland’s allegations, the FBI had interviewed him on four separate occasions, Seabold said. Hylland failed a FBI lie detector test in March of 2001, but a subsequent investigation turned up flight manifests and hotel records that showed the man had traveled to Phoenix on the dates he claimed. Seabold asked the U.S. Justice Department to take Hylland into federal protective custody.

  The FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office might have decided that they needed no new witnesses, however, after cutting a deal with Nino Durden. In late March, Durden agreed to a seven-year, eight-month federal prison sentence and promised to testify against Rafael Perez and “other unindicted co-conspirators” for crimes not fully specified. Durden had been arrested by the LAPD back in July of 2000 and charged with attempted murder in the shooting of Javier Ovando. It was, said then D.A. Garcetti, “the most serious crime we can prove at this time.” Shortly after Steve Cooley replaced Garcetti as district attorney, however, it was conceded that the evidence against Durden did not support an attempted murder charge. In his March 29, 2001, plea agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s office, Durden admitted he was guilty of violating Ovando’s civil rights and agreed as well to plead guilty in at least three other cases in which he and Perez framed, beat, or robbed criminal suspects.

  It seemed obvious to the Los Angeles Times that the federal government intended to use Durden in order to charge Perez with the Ovando shooting, but this was not necessarily so. The deal Perez had reached with the district attorney’s office would make it difficult to prosecute him for any crimes to which he already had confessed. Perhaps, some speculated, Durden was prepared to testify that Perez had committed crimes not mentioned in his “confessions,” including those that involved David Mack and/or other LAPD officers associated with Death Row Records. Russell Poole regarded that as a dubious theory. “Durden knows as well as anyone that if he goes up against Suge Knight he’ll have to spend the rest of his life either in protective custody or in hiding,” Poole said. “Even if he knows who killed Biggie Smalls—and I doubt he does—I don’t think he’d ever talk about it.” What the feds might be able to do with Durden, though, Poole said, was persuade Perez to talk to them about those matters he had refused to discuss earlier. “If Perez believed he was facing serious prison time because of what Durden was prepared to say about him in court, I think he’d be willing to cut a new deal, this time with the feds, and tell them what he knows about David Mack and the rest of this,” Poole said. “That’s assuming the feds want to know. Whatever they do with Durden, though, it’s going to open this all up again, and I welcome that.”

  In the meantime, the most startling revelation in the Biggie Smalls case had been produced not by the LAPD or the FBI or by the Los Angeles media, but by a documentary filmmaker based in West Sussex, England. Nick Broomfield was best known as the director of Kurt and Courtney but had become fascinated by the Biggie Smalls murder, especially after meeting with Russell Poole in Los Angeles. Early in May of 2001, Broomfield flew to New York to look for those who had been part of the Bad Boy Entertainment entourage on the night of Biggie’s killing. He was especially interested in meeting with Eugene Deal, the New York State Parole Officer who had impressed LAPD detectives as the most reliable witness among those in the caravan of cars that had carried Puffy Combs and Biggie Smalls to the Petersen Museum party in March of 1997.

  In his interviews with the police, Deal had been both first and strongest in denouncing the theory that Crips committed the crime, mainly because Keffy D and the other gang members he met at the Petersen Party had shown him “nothing but love” that night. And Deal’s description of the “Nation of Islam guy,” who seemed to be stalking Puffy Combs as they waited for their rides after the party, had always been the most intriguing statement provided by any of the witnesses to Biggie’s slaying. The Muslim-looking fellow, Deal told Broomfield, had been dressed and groomed just like James Lloyd and Gregory Young said the shooter was: “He had the blue suit and bow tie and white shirt, peanut hair, receding hair-line, brown skin.” And after looking them all over very coolly, Deal explained, the Muslim walked away in the same direction that the killer’s car came from just minutes later. Deal, by the way, believed that the assassin’s prime target had been Puffy Combs, he said; if the first Suburban, the one carrying Combs, had stopped at the red light, Puffy probably would be dead today instead of Biggie.

  When Broomfield asked him to describe the Muslim’s face, Deal answered that he had looked “almost” like the composite drawing of the killer that an LAPD artist had made with the help of Li’l Caesar and G-Money. Only “this guy had a stronger cheekbone structure, where he looked a little sterner,” Deal explained.

  Broomfield then showed Deal both composite drawings of the shooting suspect done by the LAPD and photographs of a half-dozen individuals who had been linked to the death of Biggie Smalls in one way or another. Deal immediately pointed to one photograph and said, “That’s him right there.”

  “That’s him?” a startled Broomfield asked.

  “Yeah,” Deal said. “That’s the guy who came up to me.”

  “That guy? That’s him?” Broomfield asked again.

  “Yes,” Deal answered.

  “Were you ever shown this picture before?” Broomfield asked.

  Deal shook his head. T
he LAPD had never shown him a photograph of this man, Deal would explain a few minutes later.

  “That’s definitely him, though?” Broomfield asked again.

  “Yep,” Deal said, nodding his head vigorously.

  The man in the photograph was Harry Billups aka Harry Muhammed aka Amir Muhammed.

  When Broomfield told Deal the identity of the man he had picked out, the parole officer demanded to know why the police had not shown him a picture of Muhammed earlier: “I gave them my description of the individual which was far different from [the composite] because of his cheekbone structure and everything like that. Right? Why didn’t they read my statement and look at this picture and put it to this? Knowing he had something to do with it?”

  That was the same question he wanted to ask, said Russell Poole, when Broomfield sent him a transcript of his filmed interview with Deal. “I really want to hear what Fred Miller and Chuck Philips of the Times have to say when they hear about this,” Poole said. “I wish I could see their faces when they read about it. But what I’d really, really like to see is the expression on Chief Parks’s face when this comes out. If I had a picture of that, I’d hang it on my wall.”

  Two weeks after Broomfield’s interview with Deal, the frame placed on the “Rampart scandal” by the Los Angeles media was widened considerably by a pair of articles in national magazines. Published less than a week apart in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, both articles placed the story of the Los Angeles Police scandal in the context of the Gaines-Lyga shooting, the David Mack bank robbery, and the Biggie Smalls murder investigation, something that no Los Angeles–based publication had done.

  The local press answered with attacks on the magazine writers that mainly demonstrated how ignorant they were about a story they had been covering for almost three years now. The most lengthy diatribe was written by Charles Rappleye of the LA Weekly. Rappleye debunked the Rolling Stone article * with exactly one named source, Richard McCauley, who insisted he was the only LAPD officer ever to work for Death Row Records. Rappleye, who had been writing about the Rampart scandal since 1999, apparently did not know that Sharitha Knight had told the LAPD back in March of 1997 that Kevin Gaines worked for Death Row, or that at least three LAPD officers had told investigators during early 1998 that David Mack attempted to recruit them to work for the rap label, or that Reggie Wright Jr. had named three additional LAPD officers who did “security work” for Death Row when he was interviewed by the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division in May of 1997. That made five LAPD officers other than Richard McCauley who had been identified by the department as employees of Death Row Records prior to the spring of 1998, while at least a dozen others had been named by one source or another as LAPD officers suspected of working for the rap label. When the author of the Rolling Stone article cited the Internal Affairs investigation in which Reggie Wright Jr. was interviewed, then noted that Richard McCauley had resigned from the LAPD “in lieu of dismissal” shortly before a trial board hearing where he faced six potentially criminal charges, each one related to the lies he had told about his work for Death Row, a “humbled” Rappleye retreated into silence.