Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  After hanging up, Sanders immediately phoned Sergio Robleto, the former LAPD South Bureau Homicide commander who had been hired by the plaintiffs as their lead investigator, and asked him to verify that a proceeding like the one the anonymous caller described had taken place. Robleto phoned back in the middle of the following night to say that he was convinced what Sanders had been told was accurate.

  “I showed up for court on Friday morning at seven-thirty,” Sanders recalled, “and by noon had a handwritten presentation to make before the judge.” District Court judge Florence Cooper, who was presiding over the civil trial, admitted she was flummoxed after reading Sanders’s pleading and asked for suggestions about what to do next. Sanders proposed adjourning until Monday morning while both sides investigated what he had been told.

  “And by Monday we all knew it was all true.”

  That weekend, for the first time in memory, the LAPD had locked down an entire division—and not just any division, but the department’s most prestigious, Robbery-Homicide—so that U.S. marshals could search it from one end to the other. Sergio Robleto and Sanders’s star witness, former LAPD detective Russell Poole, would say later that the lockdown was essentially theatrical, because the Internal Affairs investigators who had secured the scene already knew what was going to be found: more than two hundred pages of documents hidden in two drawers belonging to the LAPD detective who had been heading up the investigation of B.I.G.’s murder since Poole’s resignation and Fred Miller’s retirement. Most of those pages were related to assorted hearings and investigations that had resulted from the testimony of a prison inmate, named Kenneth Boagni, regarding the confessions of Rafael Perez, the central figure in the Rampart Scandal, to involvement in crimes that included the murder of Notorious B.I.G. “Talk about the shit hitting the fan,” Sanders said. “You should have seen the faces of the city’s attorneys when we got to court on Monday morning.”

  The majority of the materials seized from the drawers in the Robbery-Homicide Division would be placed under seal by Judge Cooper, making it impossible to quote from them directly. General descriptions of what Boagni himself had said, though, were offered in other court documents. What these revealed was that in 1999, Boagni had been incarcerated in a special branch of Los Angeles County’s jail system, where he was the cellmate and confidant of former detective Perez. During that time, according to Boagni, Perez took pleasure in describing his work for Death Row Records and his participation in various crimes, which included the murder of the rapper he called Biggie Smalls. Perez had detailed his activities and David Mack’s, Boagni said, at the Petersen Automotive Museum on March 9, 1997, the night of Biggie’s slaying.

  What the available record revealed was that an envoy from the LAPD’s Officer Representation Section had visited Boagni on a number of occasions at Calipatria State Prison in 2000, and that during their meetings Boagni had described the involvement of Perez and Mack in Biggie’s shooting. When a pair of LAPD detectives showed up later at the prison to meet with him, Boagni had testified, he assumed they were the investigators assigned to the Biggie murder. The two detectives, though, were members of the Rampart Task Force, a group committed to validating Perez’s claims. He began to suspect a hidden agenda, Boagni would say, because the two detectives seemed determined from the first to trip him up. Eventually, he said, the two did their best to convince him not to testify.

  The single most remarkable fact that the judge and the Wallace family’s attorneys released to the public was this: Boagni had offered to wear a wire on Perez to see if he could get him to admit he was lying about the accusations he had made against his fellow officers and to implicate himself in the Biggie murder; the LAPD had turned him down. As Sanders and Frank would note in the motion for sanctions they filed with Judge Cooper, “There would appear to be no possible legitimate LAPD motivation for such rejection of help.”

  The LAPD’s attempts to defend itself against these accusations strained credulity to a point where they left the judge shaking her head, first in bafflement and finally in disdain. The Los Angeles city attorney’s office attempted to mitigate the damage to its side by arguing that Boagni was an insignificant witness who might easily have been overlooked. The judge would have none of it. The LAPD’s claim that the detective in charge of the Biggie murder investigation simply “forgot” about the Boagni materials in his desk drawers was “utterly unbelievable,” she ruled: “The detective, acting alone or in concert with others, made a decision to conceal from the plaintiffs in this case information which could have supported their contention that David Mack was responsible for the Wallace murder.” The judge listed eighteen of the documents that the LAPD had hidden from the other side in this case, before addressing the city’s arguments: “The sheer volume of information attests to the seriousness with which [the police department] treated this informant’s statements and belies [the city’s] current position that he is just another jailhouse informant seeking favors.”

  While Judge Cooper was not able to bring herself to award the plaintiffs a default judgment, she felt she had no choice but to declare a mistrial. At the same time, she was awarding the plaintiffs “fees and costs” that would come to more than $1 million as a sanction for the city’s misconduct.

  Sanders and Frank were at once exultant and overwhelmed. They realized that in the new trial, which they hoped would be scheduled for summer 2006, the City of Los Angeles would be forced to defend itself against a vastly expanded lawsuit before a judge who quite clearly had become convinced their claim possessed merit. “The law of the case is that the LAPD potentially withheld information,” Frank would explain. “And now there’s been a judicial finding of that fact. So we have won the most significant point before we even go to trial. Their lead investigator has been found to be a liar and a cheat.”

  The addition of Perez as one of the officers implicated in B.I.G.’s murder changed everything, Sanders and Frank knew. After sorting through the Boagni testimony, along with the documents drawn from the sprawling mess that was the Rampart Scandal, the attorneys would realize the lengths to which police and city officials in Los Angeles had gone to protect Perez from those who knew him to be a fabricator. This evidence was now an essential aspect of the Notorious B.I.G. wrongful death lawsuit, Sanders said, and would allow the plaintiffs to demand a vast trove of documents related to Perez’s plea deal, his secret testimony, and the investigations that resulted.

  Much of the police department’s command staff was now likely to face difficult questions. Notations on the Boagni evidence demonstrated that at least nine of the lead detective’s superiors, going up to the rank of LAPD assistant chief, were aware of its existence and significance. “He wasn’t alone in this,” Frank said. Sanders added, “If we catch them withholding other documents, I believe the judge will have to declare a default verdict in our favor.”

  Such a verdict would be devastating to Los Angeles, as both sides knew. The report submitted to the court by forensic economist Peter Formuzis on B.I.G.’s future earnings potential included a quote from the former president of the company that founded Vibe magazine, in which Christopher Wallace was described as “the world’s most popular hip-hop artist at the time of his murder.” According to his calculations, Formuzis had written to Judge Cooper, Notorious B.I.G. would have been likely to earn at least $362 million during the remainder of his life. The estate’s lawyers were prepared not only to claim every penny of that sum, but also to demand punitive damages based on the degree of dishonesty the LAPD had demonstrated in connection with this case. Immediately after the mistrial, Sanders said, he was contacted by a number of “concerned parties”—including political figures in Los Angeles—worried that this lawsuit might bankrupt the city.

  Month after month since taking the case, he had absorbed body blows delivered by the city’s legal team and the editors and reporters at the Los Angeles Times, Sanders said, but now, finally, he could feel the balance tipping in his favor. “We’ve not
only got the case, we’ve also got the momentum.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  The process by which the Wallace family had chosen the attorney who would represent them in court had as much to do with how the music business operates as with the way the legal profession works. That was probably why Perry Sanders Jr. of Lake Charles, Louisiana, had gotten the job, Sanders perhaps being the one lawyer in America who could truthfully say he had spent many more hours singing into a microphone than he had speaking from a courtroom lectern.

  In Sanders’s mind, it had all started with Rusty Kershaw. In the mid-1990s, Sanders and Kershaw were two of Louisiana’s better-known citizens. A lot of people in the state still thought of Sanders as the musician son of Louisiana’s most famous Baptist preacher, Perry Sanders Sr. Years after he earned his law degree at Louisiana State University, the younger Sanders had seemed more committed to his career as a singer-songwriter and music producer than to establishing himself as an attorney. As a college student in the 1970s, he had performed all across the Southern club circuit, and by the time he passed the bar in 1982 was co-owner of the Baton Rouge recording studio Disk Productions, where he and his two partners supported themselves in some style by composing and recording jingles for companies that included Hilton and Honda. Within a few years he had moved on to Nashville, working in entertainment law by day and as a writer and producer at night, and then to Los Angeles, where he was a partner in the studio West Side Sound. By the end of the eighties, though, Sanders had returned to Louisiana, where he set up a law practice in his hometown, Lake Charles, and made a name for himself with a series of civil rights claims that produced local headlines and environmental lawsuits that turned him into a rich man. The police brutality cases he had won in Lake Charles and New Orleans were especially closely watched in those cities’ black communities, which had a lot to do with how Sanders had been drawn back into entertainment law. The case in which he represented the New Orleans–based rappers Beats by the Pound and won back an assortment of copyrights from Master P’s No Limit Records was especially well known in Louisiana, and only in part for the unlikely success Sanders had achieved. In that case, as in others, the attorney had driven a hard bargain with not only his opponents but also his clients. He took all his cases on contingency and generally paid the costs out of his own pocket. He got paid only if he won, Sanders would point out, but if he won he got paid big. In the lawsuit against No Limit, Sanders had taken half of the copyrights he’d won back.

  Rusty Kershaw was an even more favorite son in Lake Charles. The guitarist and his fiddler brother Doug had become regulars on the Louisiana Hayride show during the mid-1950s. By 1957, Rusty & Doug had joined the Grand Ole Opry and were recording a series of songs that made the country charts, including their top ten hit “Louisiana Man.” Outside the South, Kershaw was known for his work on Neil Young’s album On the Beach, in particular for his playing on what a lot of aficionados considered Young’s greatest song, “Ambulance Blues.” In 1992, Young had returned the favor by playing with Kershaw on Rusty’s solo album Now and Then. Though widely loved among other musicians, Now and Then was not a commercial success, and Kershaw’s discouragement had turned into bitterness about what he saw as a failure of support from the Domino Records label. By the time he got Sanders on the phone, Kershaw was complaining that “the producer had taken not only most of the money, but also most of the credit” for the album, as the attorney recalled it.

  That producer was one of the best known and most respected in the music business, Rob Fraboni, celebrated for his work with Bob Dylan, the Band, Eric Clapton, and the Rolling Stones, among others. Fraboni actually owned Domino Records, Sanders discovered, a label he had created to record some of his favorite Louisiana artists, Kershaw among them.

  Moved by Kershaw’s story and aware that the target of the musician’s ire was a man with deep pockets, Sanders was preparing to file a lawsuit against Fraboni when he made a phone call to his client Charles Vessels, a legendary record promoter who now ran an artist management company out of Beaumont, Texas, just an hour down the interstate from Lake Charles. The two of them agreed that Now and Then was a great record that for some reason had underperformed in the marketplace, Sanders recalled, but as soon as he mentioned that he had accepted Rusty Kershaw as a client and was about to sue the owner of Domino Records, who had also produced the album, Vessels became upset. “He told me, ‘Don’t do that. Rob Fraboni is a friend of mine. He’s also a great guy who would never cheat a musician,’ ” recalled Sanders. “Charles says, ‘Let me make a call.’ ” Only about an hour later, Vessels phoned back to say Fraboni would be flying to Lake Charles the next day and wanted to meet for lunch.

  Fraboni, it turned out, was every bit as cool a fellow as Charles Vessels had claimed he was. “He says, ‘Look, I want Rusty to get what he needs. This was just a misunderstanding,’ ” Sanders recalled. “Within minutes we had an agreement—probably the easiest settlement of a case I’ve ever had. I was headed up to New York on some other business, and Rob and I agreed I’d bring all the paperwork and we’d get it signed then.”

  While he was in New York, Fraboni asked Sanders if he liked Les Paul. Who doesn’t like Les Paul? asked Sanders, for whom the “father of the electric guitar” was a personal hero. His good friend, the musician and electrical-systems whiz Gregory Ercolino, was close to Les, Fraboni said, and could get Sanders a table on the floor of the tiny Iridium Club in the basement of the Empire Hotel, where Paul was performing. By the time Sanders left New York, he not only owned three Gibson guitars signed by Paul (“To Perry, Keep on Rockin’ ”), but had formed a lasting friendship with Ercolino, who would soon marry one of the other people Sanders had met that night at the Iridium. This was the eminent music attorney Terri Baker, whose long list of famous clients included Notorious B.I.G. Soon both Baker and Ercolino would become significant people in Sanders’s life. It was Baker who introduced Sanders to Dan Pritzker, the owner of the legendary Vee-Jay Records label, whose catalogs included the music of Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, and Little Richard. Vee-Jay had a copyright case that needed to be filed in New Orleans and wanted a Louisiana attorney to handle it, explained Pritzker, who became a big Sanders fan after the attorney won back all the copyrights, trademarks, and master recordings that were in dispute.

  In the months after the Vee-Jay case was settled, Sanders and Ercolino traded visits, with the attorney recording his album After Mother at Ercolino’s old farmhouse in upstate New York, “with two open mics and him playing pots and pans and me on Neil Diamond’s old guitar,” Sanders recalled. Ercolino came to Louisiana to stay for two weeks with Sanders in Lake Charles at his converted barn on English Bayou. The two of them spent a lot of those days racing Sanders’s speedboat to the Gulf of Mexico, but their vacation was interrupted by a deposition the attorney had to take in a civil rights case he was prosecuting. Just for a kick, he brought Ercolino along as his “legal assistant,” Sanders recalled, and “Greg thought it was just about the most exciting and interesting thing he’d ever been part of.”

  All those pieces were in place in June 2001, when Rolling Stone magazine published my article “The Murder of Notorious B.I.G.” Recalled Sanders: “I get a call from Terri Baker, who asks me, ‘Perry, have you heard that cops might have been involved in the murder of Notorious B.I.G.?’ She said she and Greg were just sitting there flabbergasted. She said, ‘I want you to read this and tell me what you think.’ So she faxed the article to me. I read it and thought, ‘Whoaaa.’ ” He advised Baker that “it would be a tough case to make, because you would have to get the city of Los Angeles on the hook,” Sanders recalled, but also told her that if even half of what had appeared in the Rolling Stone piece was true, there was plenty to work with and a huge upside if they won in court. She would need the family’s approval, Baker said, but she thought he might be the perfect attorney to represent the slain rapper’s estate, given his unusual background, which included handling both civil rights and copyright ca
ses, along with his experience in the music business.

  Sanders and his sometime associate, Colorado attorney Robert Frank, were at that moment embroiled in a massive environmental lawsuit against the Schlage Lock Company, however, and neither lawyer was sure he could afford the money or the time the B.I.G. lawsuit would demand. Baker pressed Sanders to meet with Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace. Sanders asked Frank, who was in Boston at the time, to drop down to New York and introduce the two of them to Mrs. Wallace.

  That would be no easy task, considering the extreme contrast the pair of attorneys presented. The ebullient Sanders was a singular character in just about every regard, including his appearance. Nearing fifty, he was still athletically built, with a shaved head and hardly any eyebrows. His chiseled features lent him the aspect of an actor who’d been hired to play Lex Luthor as a protagonist. “Perry isn’t just larger than life. He also thinks big picture better than any lawyer I’ve ever met,” Frank said. “It endlessly amazes me how often he makes a brilliant decision without needing to think about it very long, usually based more on intuition than analysis.”