The Los Angeles Times’s strategy was to ignore the magazine articles altogether. While the San Fernando Valley’s Daily News responded to the Rolling Stone and New Yorker articles with a front-page story, the Times’s only mention of the magazine pieces was a tiny item in which the newspaper reported on an absurd “racketeering” lawsuit filed by Kevin Hackie, who had accused Rolling Stone and The New Yorker of joining the LAPD in a conspiracy against him. The Times’s Chuck Philips promised to publish a story that would utterly vindicate Suge Knight in the Biggie Smalls murder, but no such article ever appeared.
Death Row Records itself did issue a “statement” that described the Rolling Stone article as “ridiculous and absurd,” warning that Suge Knight was meeting with his lawyers (among them David Mack’s former criminal attorney, Donald Re) “in order to ascertain any lawful and legal remedies that may be available to him.” And only hours after his release from federal prison in early August of 2001, Knight granted an interview to Chuck Philips, who produced an article that read more like a press release than a news report. After noting once again that Kevin Hackie had sued Rolling Stone for exposing him “to immediate and imminent bodily harm” (while failing to mention that Hackie’s attorney had agreed several weeks earlier to drop the magazine as a defendant in the lawsuit), Philips ended his article with a quote from Suge Knight: “I’m God’s child and God always reveals the truth,” Suge said. “Those stories are full of lies.”
Not everyone thought so. Just a few weeks after the Rolling Stone article appeared, Russell Poole was visited by a pair of FBI agents who told him that, on the basis of “what had come out recently in the media,” the bureau was launching its own investigation of Biggie Smalls’s murder. “Just about every question they asked me concerned the involvement of LAPD officers with Death Row Records,” Poole said. “I have to admit I was encouraged. I don’t know for sure where the FBI is headed, but neither of these two guys seemed to be playing games.”
At almost that same moment, attorneys representing a former Long Beach police officer critically wounded by a gang member armed with a gun that was officially in the possession of the Compton Police Department sat down to depose the Compton P.D.’s former deputy chief, Gary O. Anderson. His department, among several others, had been riddled with corruption, Anderson told the attorneys, much of it related to police officers who were in the employ of Death Row Records. “Read the Rolling Stone article,” Anderson told the Long Beach officer’s lawyers. “It’s right on the money.”
The loud rumble in the background, though, was the news that Voletta Wallace and the New York law firm that represented her son’s estate were seriously contemplating a wrongful death lawsuit that would accuse individuals ranging from Bernard Parks to Suge Knight of responsibility for Biggie Smalls’s murder. When Russell Poole flew back east for a meeting with Voletta Wallace in February of 2001, “I told her that I still believed the truth would come out,” the former detective said, “but only if she took the lead in demanding it.”
During the summer of 2001, a team of attorneys based in Louisiana and Colorado, each of whom had become involved after reading the Rolling Stone article, began preparing the rough draft of a legal filing that would grow to more than sixty pages by Thanksgiving. After struggling for months with the idea that all of those named as conspirators in the pending lawsuit were black, Ms. Wallace decided to proceed.
“People are afraid of all the skeletons in the closet,” she explained. “But we have to let those skeletons out. I’ve been waiting more than four years. If we keep waiting, I’m afraid there won’t be anybody left alive to talk by the time they finally open the door to that closet.”
EPILOGUE
All through the spring of 2001, Russell Poole’s lawsuit against the City of Los Angles had been delayed by a series of defense motions and requests for continuance. Then on June 6, one day after James Hahn was elected mayor of Los Angeles, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson dismissed Poole’s suit on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired by the time it was filed. This bad news was followed almost immediately by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the statute of limitations did not apply in cases where a timely complaint had been made to supervisors who failed to adequately investigate it. In such cases as those, the court ruled, the statute of limitations was effectively suspended.
Poole’s attorneys promptly filed an appeal of Judge Wilson’s dismissal of the suit with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which responded to the initial filings by urging Los Angeles city officials to sit down with Poole’s attorneys and cut a deal. The city’s attorneys, obviously shaken, replied that they would prefer to have a ruling from the court before deciding on a course of action. The Ninth Circuit is expected to rule sometime in early 2002.
No matter what the appeals court’s decision, however, it seemed unlikely that Bernard Parks would be forced to submit to a deposition by Poole’s attorneys before his term as Los Angeles Police Chief ends in August of 2002. “Parks must be one of the luckiest men alive,” Poole observed.
The chief already was caught up in another controversy, however, this one created by his refusal to permit LAPD officers to wear an American flag pin that honored the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens. The sheer folly and arrogance of the man had resulted in attacks on his character by journalists across the country. The Los Angeles Times, however, did not consider the matter worthy of even a brief article. The Times chose also to ignore the results of a survey of the LAPD’s rank-and-file officers conducted by the Police Protective League that were published in late November of 2001. Asked to “grade” their chief of police, LAPD officers gave Parks a C- for integrity, a D for trustworthiness, and Fs for innovation, communication, and collaboration. Seventy-two percent of those who responded told the PPL that they did not trust Chief Parks. “By far and away, this is the most negative report card” ever given to a Los Angeles Police Chief by those who served under him, said PPL president Mitzi Grasso. “It exemplifies [Park’s] lack of leadership qualities.” L.A.’s new mayor, James Hahn, insisted that LAPD morale was “improving.”
Racial politics continued to be the chief impediment to criminal investigations involving rap labels. In Texas, a federal drug investigation focused on the Houston label Rap-A-Lot and its owner, James Prince, was frozen after Rep. Maxine Waters sent a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno requesting that she intervene on behalf of an “African-American entrepreneur” who had been “harrassed and intimidated “by the Drug Enforcement Agency.”
Prince’s business dealings had been of interest to federal authorities since 1988, when a car bearing dealer plates from a used-car lot he owned was stopped near El Paso by police officers who found more than two hundred pounds of cocaine in a hidden compartment. Prince’s cousin, who carried a card identifying him as a salesman for the car lot, sat in the passenger seat of the vehicle when it was stopped. While the salesman was released (because of insufficient evidence that he knew about the cocaine hidden in the vehicle), the driver was convicted and sentenced to federal prison. James Prince later helped the wife of the convicted man set up a bail-bond company housed in the Rap-A-Lot building. A federal task force formed in 1998 arrested several Rap-A-Lot employees, as well as a black Houston police officer convicted of using his patrol car to help one of the rap label’s employees rob a drug dealer. The first federal trial of a Rap-A-Lot employee arrested by the task force ended with a hung jury in April of 2000 at the end of a proceding in which the star prosecution witness was threatened by a courtroom spectator while testifying and a juror complained that another spectator had attempted to write down her car’s license plate number.
A month after Waters’s letter was sent, Prince was interviewed by the DEA’s Office of Professional Responsibility in the congress-woman’s Washington office. Despite the fact that her congressional district was more than a thousand miles from Houston, Waters was present for that interview, an ev
ent DEA officials described as “unprecedented.” Almost immediately afterward, the probe of the Rap-A-Lot label was suspended, over the strenuous objections of narcotics detectives in Houston, and the DEA agent who had been in charge of the field investigation was transferred to a desk job.
One year later, Prince’s label released a CD in which rapper Brad “Scarface” Jordan boasted about the ability of the “Rap-A-Lot mafia” to stop a federal investigation, end the careers of agents involved in it, and kill those who became police informants.
“Our tax dollars at work,” observed Russell Poole, who had followed the Rap-A-Lot investigation from Los Angeles.
Puffy Combs was proving no less adroit than Suge Knight at avoiding incarceration. Combs had been skating out of trouble with the law since 1991, when nine people were killed in a stampede at a celebrity basketball game he had promoted. While Combs was assigned 50 percent culpability in a civil suit, no criminal charges were filed. In 1995 Combs was convicted of criminal mischief for threatening a photographer, but he got off with a fine. That same year, he was arrested by the FBI in Washington, D.C., for menacing a man with a gun in a parking lot near Georgetown University. Puffy was released on his promise to appear later in a D.C. courtroom, but he never did and the charges were mysteriously dropped.
In 1998 Combs was investigated for firing a gun in a Cleveland hotel room, but no charges were filed. Puffy was arrested in early 1999 for an attack on record executive Steve Stoute in which Combs and his associates reportedly beat the man with a champagne bottle, a chair, and a telephone. Before the charge against Combs was reduced from assault to harrassment, Chuck Philips weighed in with a piece that ran on the front page of the Los Angeles Times’s Business section, writing “In a business where bare-knuckle tactics are common, Combs’ alleged literal use of them on an executive at a rival corporation is an extraordinary event with no precedent.” Suge Knight’s criminal history apparently didn’t count for much in Philips’s mind.
Only a few months later, Combs, girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, and their entourage of approximately thirty people arrived for the weekly “Hot Chocolate” party at Club New York in Manhattan, where they spent most of their time in a roped-off VIP section. Puffy and his rapper Shyne at some point got into an argument with a man who allegedly tossed a wad of money at the pair. According to eyewitnesses, both Combs and his rapper pulled semiautomatic pistols. Shots were fired and three people standing outside the velvet ropes were wounded. Police later found shell casings from two separate weapons. Seventeen days later, Combs was arrested on charges that he had carried two loaded guns in his Lincoln Navigator as he fled the nightclub, one of which was thrown from the vehicle. Both pistols had been recently fired, according to police.
Despite the testimony of witnesses who said they had seen Combs fire his pistol inside Club New York, Puffy was acquitted at a trial in which his defense team included Johnnie Cochran.
In August of 2001, just as Suge Knight was preparing for his release from federal prison, Combs granted an interview to Details magazine, which was preparing a photo spread of Puffy and his new girlfriend, model Emma Heming, wearing diamond crosses, Chanel sunglasses, and nothing else. The interview ended quickly, however, when the magazine’s reporter asked if Combs was concerned that the East vs. West rap feud would flare up again when Death Row’s CEO was released from prison. “If y’all want to know bout East Coast–West Coast, why don’t you ask Suge Knight? Why don’t you interview him?” Combs demanded, then stormed out.
Suge reportedly was much amused. His vow to “restart” Death Row Records (now known simply as “Tha Row”) had been aided considerably by the success of an album the label had assembled from Tupac Shakur’s outtakes and released in March 2001. Tupac’s posthumous CD, Until the End of Time had gone triple platinum by the time Knight was released from prison. Suge struck new deals with both domestic and international distributors, and reportedly was in negotiations to sign Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes of TLC, the hip-hop bad girl best known for burning down her boyfriend’s house. According to Suge’s PR reps, Lopes would give up her “Left Eye” nickname to be marketed by Tha Row as “NINA,” an acronym that happened to be gangsta-speak for a 9mm pistol.
Neither Suge Knight nor his renamed record label was free of the past, however. In December of 2000, a jury in Los Angeles had awarded $4.34 million in compensatory damages and another $10 million in punitive damages to record execs Lamont and Ken Brumfield, who claimed that back in 1993 Knight had persuaded the rapper Kurupt (Ricardo Brown Jr.) to break his contract with them and sign a new one with Death Row Records. David Kenner, who had represented Suge and Death Row in court, promptly vowed to appeal. And only days after Chuck Philips greeted Suge’s return to L.A. with a puff piece that ran on page one of the Times’s Business section, the paper was obliged to report (in a story that ran on page six of the same section) that the rapper Daz Dillinger (Delmar Arnaud) had sued Knight and Death Row for cheating him out of more than $1 million in royalties.
Suge would profess both his religious faith and his patriotism in public statements made after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And when construction resumed on the 9,000-square-foot mansion in the hills above the San Fernando Valley that Knight had abandoned when he began his prison sentence back in 1997, Suge announced that he did not intend to live in the house, but rather would use it to create a “positive environment” for troubled youth. Only an outpouring of protests by outraged neighbors prevented the project from proceeding.
What a shame, remarked Suge, who insisted that all he ever wanted to do was serve his people.
The same month that Suge was released from prison, Afeni Shakur showed up in Georgia to attend groundbreaking ceremonies for the Tupac Amaru Center for the Arts, scheduled to open in March of 2003 with a studio space for the performing arts, and a gallery whose first showing would be of paintings and drawings sent to Afeni by fans of her son’s music. An adjacent garden was to commemorate Tupac and other victims of gun violence. The Christopher Wallace Memorial Foundation, meanwhile, already had been operating for almost four years as a distributor of scholarships and grants to deserving students from inner-city schools. Voletta Wallace said the organization’s goal was to make B.I.G. an acronym for “Books Instead of Guns.” One had to wonder if either mother had ever listened to her son’s records.
While it seemed certain that the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls would never be solved by the police in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, that did not mean the killers were in the clear. Two days before Thanksgiving 2001, a team of FBI agents arrived at the home of Russell Poole to collect copies of the investigative files he had kept in storage for more than three years now. The bureau had decided to proceed without asking for any assistance at all from the Los Angeles Police Department, the agents told Poole. “They said they didn’t want their investigation to be ‘contaminated,’” reported Poole. “I never thought I’d get satisfaction from hearing a word like that used to describe contact with the LAPD.” Nearly everyone he asked for advice, including his own attorney, had warned him not to share his documents with the feds, Poole said. “I went ahead anyway,” he explained, “because I figured, ‘Hey, it’s my government, too.’ I don’t want to end up feeling like there’s nobody I can trust.”
One week before Christmas 2001, the team of attorneys who now listed their clients as Faith Evans, Voletta Wallace, and “The Estate of Christopher Wallace” were still haggling over the language of a lawsuit they intended to file before the end of the year. The lead lawyers were Perry Sanders of Louisiana and Robert Frank of Colorado, nationally renowned litigators whose class-action lawsuits on behalf of United Airlines flight attendants and against the Schlage Corporation were already among the most closely watched in the country.
Earlier drafts of the lawsuit prepared by Sanders and Frank named not only Bernard Parks, but also David Mack and Amir Muhammed, as defendants in racketeering claims they intended to make against the City of
Los Angeles and the LAPD. These versions of the lawsuit contained the specific allegation that “Defendants Amir Muhammed and David Mack conspired to murder Christopher Wallace.”
After the New York attorneys respresenting the Wallace estate had signed off, however, the Los Angeles lawyers retained as “local counsel” persuaded Sanders and Frank to significantly reduce the scope of the suit, dropping the racketeering claims to focus on the LAPD’s “deliberate indifference.” Specifically, the suit would allege that the LAPD failed to properly supervise its officers, ignored or concealed the fact that officers were involved with Death Row Records, and deliberately chose not to investigate the probability that LAPD officers were involved in the murder of Biggie Smalls. David Mack and Amir Muhammed were still named as defendants on state civil-rights claims in the revised draft of the lawsuit, but attorneys had taken a tack that did not require them to prove that the two conspired to kill Biggie Smalls, only that there was probable cause to investigate that likelihood.
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