The man who rented the car turned out to not be involved in what happened.
***
September 21 - October 1, 1996
In the days that followed, Tim and Bob prepared what would be the biggest simultaneous warrant services the city of Compton had ever seen. It was a sweeping effort that called for hours preparing the operation plan. Several agencies assisted: Long Beach P.D., the L.A.S.D., the Los Angeles County Probation Department, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, the F.B.I., A.T.F., the D.O.J., the Division of Adult Parole Operations (D.A.P.O.), and the California Youth Authority. It was imperative there be enough personnel to hit all the locations at once that were listed in the warrant. Tim and Bob held several meetings with the heads of each agency prior to serving the warrants. Bob, with Sergeant Baker’s help, gathered the background information on each suspect and the residence, including rap sheets, warrant checks, DMV printouts, photos of each suspect, photos of each residences, and maps to each location.
Tim would write the warrant affidavit. It had to be done in chronological order and written so the judge could clearly understand and sign off on it. Tim and Bob had prepared many warrants in the past that covered anywhere from ten to twenty locations. This warrant would be double the size of any warrant they had ever done.
Tim had the knowledge and experience to handle the task.
***
WARRANT SERVICE DAY: Tuesday, October 2, 1996
A media frenzy swept through Compton that morning. The operation began at 2:00 a.m. and involved three different briefing auditoriums in three different cities, nine different local and federal agencies, and over four hundred law enforcement personnel.
Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson (left) and Terrence “T-Brown” Brown, aka “Bubble Up”
Duane Keith “Keefe D” Davis (l) and Deandre Smith (right)
The raids began at 4:00 a.m. and were conducted at over forty locations in several cities. Over forty search warrants, plus eighteen arrest warrants for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and attempted murder were served. Tim and Bob drove to several locations throughout the night to identify offenders. By 9:00 that morning, reporters, cameras, and news teams swarmed the command post in the rear parking lot of the Compton police station. News choppers circled overhead. They were about to learn about the possible killers of Tupac Shakur. The excitement was thick.
The first round of prisoners brought in were members of MOB Piru, Elm Lane Piru, and Lueders Park Piru. Several of them were employees of Death Row. The offenses they were being charged with included conspiracy to commit murder, weapons and narcotics violations, and parole violations.
The second van load of prisoners contained the one who would draw the most media interest. Inside was twenty-two-year-old South Side Crip Orlando Anderson. He’d been captured as he tried to escape from the second story window of his apartment in Lakewood. Items seized from his residence included a 9mm handgun, a blue South Side gang t-shirt, and items from Las Vegas.
By this point, several informants had identified Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson as Tupac’s shooter. Also identified as being in the white Cadillac with Anderson at the time of the shooting were other members of the Burris Street Crew of the South Side Crips: Deandre “Dre” Smith, Terrence “T-Brown” Brown (aka “Bubble Up”), and Duane Keith “Keefe D” Davis. Several other names had also surfaced during the extensive investigation.
Anderson was being brought in now for the gang-related murder of OG Palmer Blocc Crip Elbert Webb, for which he and Deandre Smith were the prime suspects, but information had already leaked to the media that he was the number one suspect in the murder of Tupac Shakur. Millions had already seen the videotape of him being beaten by Tupac, Suge, and MOB Piru gang members at the MGM Grand prior to the shooting. To anyone who understands gang mentality - disrespect one, you disrespect all - Anderson was the most logical suspect responsible for the murder of Shakur.
Vegas P.D. homicide detectives Becker and Franks had come down for the big warrant day. Everyone did their jobs scooping up the players believed to be involved in the Tupac shooting. Numerous people were arrested, including South Side Crips close to Anderson like T-Brown, Deandre Smith, Darnell Brim, and more. The goal was to bring them all in, get them all dirty. That was the only way any of them were going to roll on the others. The strategy was to go after the weakest link.
Tim and Bob were already exhausted after all the work they’d done over the prior two weeks leading up to this day of rounding up suspects. Now they had to spend hours interviewing the people they’d arrested. It wasn’t an easy task. Gang members didn’t just sit down and start singing. There was an art to getting them to open up. Sometimes it took hours to get them to tell the truth.
Tim and Bob were much too tired, definitely not in the right frame of mind to immediately jump into trying to get gang members to open up. They were being pulled in multiple directions. Tim had to give the captain information for a press conference that was about to happen. Bob was getting call after call from officers asking questions. It was sensory overload for them. Their fuses were blown, yet twenty-eight felony suspects were in custody for whom charges needed to be filed in the next two days.
Tim and Bob admittedly should have interviewed Orlando Anderson much more extensively - not just for their own investigation, but for Las Vegas as well - but they were fried. The Vegas P.D. detectives sat in on their interview, but they had very few questions. Tim and Bob realized after the fact that they should have asked questions for Becker and Franks, but it really wasn’t their place to do so. The Tupac case wasn’t their murder. It had happened in Las Vegas, so the case belonged to Becker and Franks.
Tim and Bob asked Orlando Anderson if he killed Elbert Webb. Anderson naturally denied it. He admitted to being in Las Vegas the weekend of the Tupac/Suge shooting and acknowledged that he’d been beaten up at the MGM by Tupac, Suge Knight, and others. When asked if he shot Tupac and Suge, he denied any involvement.
***
Tim and Bob offered Becker and Franks their assistance interviewing the MOB Piru and South Side Crips that had been rounded up, but Becker and Franks said they were heading back to Vegas and to keep them posted of any developments. Tim and Bob believed that if more interviews had been done, Becker and Franks would have had sufficient evidence to solve the Tupac case, but they couldn’t force the matter. They felt like they’d set everything up, with all the players involved in place, in custody. All Vegas P.D. had to do, as the saying went, was knock it down. It was a frustrating moment, but Tim and Bob had local murders to solve. Becker and Franks left and with them went, what Tim and Bob knew had been, the best chance there ever was to solve the murder of Tupac Shakur.
History would confirm that missed opportunity as, two decades later, the murder of Tupac would still be treated as unsolved, even though Tim and Bob believed - and still believe - that on the day they served the warrants, they had the killer and his accomplices in custody. This belief wasn’t based on theories that required stretching the truth, posing unprovable or murky what-ifs, or diving into rabbit holes of conspiracy that required, at the very least, a suspension of disbelief,
Police officer holding Death Row chain seized during Tupac search warrant raid.
It was straightforward, based on facts, eyewitnesses, highly-reliable informants, logical, linear motives, and physical evidence that was right in front of anyone who cared to see it. Orlando Anderson and members of his South Side Crip clique, the Burris Street Crew, had killed before. This Tupac/Suge shooting was no different, except the victims had been high-profile celebrities.
The case might have been hard to prove because the eyewitnesses and informants were from the gang world, which in itself, posed a challenge about their credibility. But it all made sense, in a connect-the-dots kind of way.
***
During their interview with Terrence Brown, aka “T-Brown” or “Bubble Up” (who Keefe D later admitted was in the car with when Anderson
shot Tupac), he made an interesting remark.
“I would like to talk about Vegas,” he said, “but it’s too deep.”
He was a felon facing time for possession of an assault weapon and cocaine to sell. This statement from him told Tim and Bob that he had been involved, but he wasn’t willing to give up further info for a possible deal.
***
Tim, Bob, and the gang unit saw the multi-location warrant sweep as a huge success. A cache of weapons, money, and narcotics had been seized, and many of the players on both sides of the recent gang war - South Side Crips and Pirus - had been arrested and put in jail. This would mean a cease-fire, at least for a time.
Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson exiting the jail van on warrants day, October 2, 1996.
The most famous photos taken on the day of the raids included one of a handcuffed Orlando Anderson exiting the jail van in the rear lot of the Compton police station.
Also included was the photo of an officer’s hand holding a gold Death Row necklace like the one that had supposedly been snatched from Trevon Lane when he was jumped at the Lakewood Mall.
***
MOB Pirus at Foot Locker throwing up gang signs.
An interesting detail about Trevon Lane’s necklace: over the years, it has consistently been a part of the Tupac murder narrative that the Death Row chain had been “snatched” from Trevon - as in, “taken from him” - during the altercation at the Lakewood Mall. However, when Tim interviewed Trevon years later, Trevon said the necklace was never taken from him. He said that it had been snatched off, but fell to the ground and was recovered. He claimed to still be in possession of the chain. That didn’t change the fact that Trevon Lane had been jumped by South Side Crips at the Lakewood Mall, and that incident, in turn, set in motion a series of events that very likely ended with the murder of Tupac Shakur.
It did, however, make the gold Death Row chain a McGuffin of sorts, a Hitchcockian device that served to help drive the legend of what really happened.
Every story needed a good plot device.
A mythical prized, stolen gold chain was just as good as any.
***
After the shooting in Las Vegas, Suge Knight was arrested for probation violation. Tim and Bob, along with their gang unit colleague Detective Ray Richardson, were subpoenaed to appear at Knight’s revocation hearing in December 1996, based on information and photos that had been recovered during the warrants and Orlando Anderson’s interview.
The F.B.I. Death Row Task Force, which had been investigating Suge for quite some time, hadn’t been able to produce anything compelling enough to be considered a violation. The Compton gang unit detectives gave the prosecutor, William Hodgman, photos of Suge, Tupac, and MOB Piru members throwing gang signs. They also gave Hodgman a statement written by Tim that contained Orlando’s interview where he admitted that Suge and Tupac had beaten and kicked him at the MGM Grand.
Hodgman and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office were still reeling from the effects of the O.J. Simpson trial, which had taken place a year earlier. Hodgman had been the lead prosecutor, but was replaced by Marcia Clark after suffering a mild heart attack in the courtroom. The verdict in the O.J. case had left the city, and the country, strongly divided along racial lines after Simpson was found not guilty of the brutal murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
The D.A.’s Office and Hodgman were in desperate need of a win in the widely-publicized case with Suge Knight, which was already falling apart due to a lack of real evidence and witnesses being paid off. The videotape of the beatdown of Orlando Anderson in Vegas and the photos of Knight and MOB Piru members throwing up gang signs had been the only damaging evidence, and even those were being challenged.
Suge Knight’s attorney, David Kenner had neutralized the first threat by producing Orlando Anderson, this time singing another tune. Anderson testified in court that Suge didn’t kick him. He took things even further and said Suge had tried to stop the beating altogether. Kenner produced a self-defense expert who testified that what appeared to be Suge kicking Anderson on the videotape were actually evasive moves made by Suge in an effort to protect Anderson and stop the fight.
For their next move, Reggie Wright, Jr. and David Kenner approached Tim, showing the photographs of Suge throwing gang signs that had been recovered during his warrant. They asked Tim to appear as a gang expert on Suge’s and the defense’s behalf saying the poses in the photos were not gang-related.
“I’ll testify that the ‘M’ hand sign in that one photo means ‘MOB’ and the ‘P’ in the other photo means ‘Piru,’” Tim said.
The defense didn’t call him to the stand to testify.
The hearing was coming to a close. Hodgman was worried that Anderson’s testimony in favor of Knight had hurt the state’s position. He wanted Tim to take the stand and rebut Anderson’s testimony, but because of what happened with Mark Fuhrman on the witness stand in the O.J. case and how it had impacted public opinion regarding the credibility of white Los Angeles area cops, Hodgman thought it might be better to have gang unit detective Ray Richardson, who was Black, testify about what Anderson had really told them about the assault in Las Vegas.
After hearing Richardson’s testimony, the judge revoked Suge Knight’s probation and sentenced him to nine years, the maximum amount of his original sentence.
Suge would end up doing five of those years.
Meanwhile, the murders continued…
16
WHAT LOOKS LIKE PAYBACK:
THE MURDER OF BIGGIE
Hip-hop superstar Christopher George Latore Wallace, who performed under the stage names “The Notorious B.I.G.” and “Biggie Smalls,” was (and is) considered one of the greatest rappers of all time, even when he was alive. His rise had seemed almost meteoric from the moment his single “Juicy” debuted in late summer 1994. The song sampled an R&B hit from 1983, “Juicy Fruit,” by the group Mtume. Produced by Bad Boy label head Sean “Puffy” Combs, along with Jean-Claude Olivier (aka “Poke,” one half of the now-legendary hit-making duo Trackmasters, aka “Poke & Tone”), hip-hop heads everywhere could be heard rapping along with “Juicy”’s opening lines that summer when it first dropped:
It was all a dream!
I used to read Word Up magazine…
The first of three singles from Ready To Die, his (eventually multi-platinum-selling) debut album on the fledgling Bad Boy label, “Juicy” catapulted Biggie to A-list rap status. Less than a year later - with the Isley-Brother’s-sampled “Big Poppa,” a noteworthy appearance on R&B group Total’s song “Can’t You See” from the New Jersey Drive soundtrack, and summer 1995’s seemingly ubiquitous “One More Chance/Stay With Me” remix, which sampled eighties R&B group DeBarge’s song “Stay With Me” and featured his wife, Faith Evans and his Bad Boy label mate Mary J. Blige - Biggie had already secured a prominent place for himself in hip-hop history as one of the best emcees in the game.
***
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York in 1972, Christopher Wallace was a smart kid who excelled in English, but dropped out of school when he was seventeen, five years after he’d begun dealing drugs. The drug game brought in much-needed cash, but it also brought run-ins with the law, including jail time and a period during which he was on probation. Biggie had been drawn to hip-hop as a teen, often showing off his skills on the block and in rap battles. Despite the money to be made in narcotics, this would be where he would establish himself and gain fame.
He chose the name Biggie Smalls from a character played by actor Calvin Lockhart in the 1975 Sidney Poitier/Bill Cosby film, Let’s Do It Again. It suited him. Lockhart’s Biggie was a slick-tongued, well-dressed, badass gangster. Wallace had a natural born ability for the smooth, deep-voiced, near-lisp-tinged wordplay he spit so effortlessly, loved Coogi sweaters, Versace, and expensive jewelry like the iced-out Jesus pieces he rocked so often, and knew the dark side of the streets from the years he’d spent selli
ng drugs.
But there was a problem. There was already another rapper named Biggy Smallz[29] - a white, possibly Latino, kid[30] who, interestingly, had a connection to Tupac - and allegedly this was the reason Biggie switched to being called The Notorious B.I.G. The original moniker stuck despite the change. He would continue to be called Biggie Smalls, and sometimes just Biggie, by the hip-hop world and others for the rest of his life and beyond, and he still referred to himself by the name, even in songs. He did it in “Juicy” (“Sold out seats to hear Biggie Smalls speak…”), “Big Poppa” (“Because one of these honeys Biggie gots to creep with…”), “Hypnotize” (“Dead right, if they head right, Biggie there every night…”), and a number of songs in between, both on his own records and guesting on tracks with others. He was large in build and height - an imposing figure who had a way with words and a way with the ladies. The name seemed a perfect fit. It was his no matter who’d called dibs first or had legal rights to it. White Biggy Smallz, in the long run, never registered enough on the hip-hop radar for there to be any confusion as to who was who. He met an untimely death in 1994.[31]
Biggie’s album Ready To Die hit the music scene hard. In the first part of the nineties, the east coast had been making its mark with stellar works from acts like Native Tongue[32] artists A Tribe Called Quest, who’d released the instantly-classic album The Low End Theory in 1991, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Wu-Tang Clan, who burst onto the scene with their landmark debut Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) in 1993, and Nas, whose 1994 introduction Illmatic came out five months before Biggie’s and remains, along with Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), among the most seminal and important works in the annals of hip-hop.
The west coast, however, had been a behemoth in the first part of the nineties, critically and commercially, with N.W.A’s final work Niggaz4Life and debuts by Cypress Hill and Yo-Yo all hitting in 1991; benchmark albums from Ice Cube; a wildly commercial (and wildly derided) release from MC Hammer; the emergence of Tupac; and Dr. Dre’s juggernaut of a solo debut The Chronic in 1992, followed by Snoop Dogg (who’d been prominently featured on Dre’s album) in 1993. Snoop’s inaugural release Doggystyle sold over eight hundred thousand units in its first week. Dr. Dre’s G-Funk (“gangsta funk”) sound was P-Funk[33] heavy, giving fans a dose of smooth, clever rhymes over familiar grooves that made bodies pack the dance floor, slip into an easy, laid-back, head-nodding chill as they cruised the boulevard, or got blunted at home on the album’s namesake herbals. For a time, it seemed to many as if the west coast had hijacked the rap game and was running it.
Once Upon A Time in Compton Page 21