Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Carson went to his FBI supervisors with Berkow’s request and was relieved when his bosses told him that there was no way they were giving the LAPD the blueprint of their investigation. Carson still hoped to get Mora and Sambar back on the case, so he suggested offering the LAPD brass an olive branch. “Through Perry Sanders, I had access to witnesses who wouldn’t talk to the LAPD, because they thought LAPD was involved in Biggie’s murder. I said we should help the LAPD find out what these people knew.” His boss, Steve Gomez, agreed. Carson placed a call to Katz, the Robbery-Homicide Division detective who had supposedly been in charge of the Biggie investigation for the past two years, and asked if they could look at the Murder Book together. Katz agreed.

  “So I go over to LAPD to sit down with Katz and go through the Murder Book,” Carson recalled. “And very quickly I’m in shock.” Numerous photographs that were part of the book when he had examined it at the FBI office were now gone, Carson realized. “These were photos of police officers who were inside the Petersen Museum on the night of the Biggie murder,” Carson recalled, “plus a photo of Big Gene Deal standing with the person he identified as Amir Muhammad outside the museum by Puffy Combs’s vehicle. All of those photos had been removed.”

  He couldn’t tell Katz that he knew the photos were missing, Carson explained, because he was not supposed to have seen the Murder Book previously. Only when he found a report in the Murder Book in which Katz had made reference to the missing photographs did Carson ask the detective where those pictures were now. “Katz told me he had no idea what I was talking about,” the FBI agent recalled.

  For a few moments, Carson sat stunned, trying to gather his thoughts. “And then I actually tried to convince Katz he should work with me. I tell him, ‘Hey, this is where I am, this is what I’ve got. If you guys want to reengage your Murder Book and work with me on this case, I’m open to it.”

  As a result, Carson was invited to what he understood would be a meeting with Katz and Robbery-Homicide’s commanding officer, Captain Al Michelena. His main purpose in going, Carson said, was his hope that he could persuade the LAPD to run a ballistics test on the GECO shell casings recovered from the scene of the Biggie murder and still in the police department’s possession.

  “I brought Steve Gomez with me, and when we get to Robbery-Homicide we’re shown into this room where ten or twelve of these old-school, crusty, keep-everything-close-to-the-vest kind of RHD [Robbery-Homicide Division] guys are sitting around the table,” Carson recalled. “And they’re looking at me like I’m the plague. I look at my boss like, ‘I didn’t expect this,’ and he looks back at me like, ‘I didn’t, either.’ The tension was insane. I mean, these guys, if eyes could kill, I’d have been a dead man.”

  He quickly realized that the men in the room understood that the FBI believed Russell Poole’s theory of the Biggie case was supported by enough evidence to warrant opening a federal investigation, and that this made him their enemy, Carson recalled: “They get that we don’t investigate homicides unless there’s a federal nexus, and the involvement of police officers is one of the things that creates that federal nexus. So they know we must have some real evidence of police involvement in the Biggie murder. They realize that the FBI has decided to pick this case up where Russell Poole left off, and they’re both terrified by and furious about that. And they let us know that they have absolutely no intention of helping us in any way, shape, or form.”

  He and Gomez were each in a daze after they walked out of that conference room, Carson said. “But Steve told me, and I agreed, that we should try to maintain an amicable relationship with the LAPD, if that was possible.”

  Shortly after that meeting, Carson was approached by the most decorated television reporter in Los Angeles, Chris Blatchford, with a request that he appear in a special that Blatchford was putting together on the Biggie murder for KTTV, the local Fox network affiliate. “My bosses and I agreed I should do it, because, the thinking was, this is local and it could generate some leads. We didn’t know how many, but at least dozens, we figured. Maybe hundreds.” As part of his ongoing effort to show the police that he wanted to work with them, not against them, Carson approached the LAPD to suggest they set up a joint hotline that would be publicized on the KTTV special.

  “So we come to an agreement that I thought even at the time was crazy,” Carson recalled. “I would do the interview, but LAPD would handle the hotline.” A few days after the special aired, Steve Katz informed Carson of the results. “Guess how many leads the LAPD said they got from that special? Zero!” Carson recalled. “Guess how many phone calls the LAPD said they got? Zero. They didn’t even try to pretend. They could have said, ‘Oh we got fifteen calls and twelve were crazies and the other three wouldn’t give their names,’ and we wouldn’t have known for sure they were lying. But they didn’t care.”

  Carson would not truly begin to realize what he was up against, though, until he tried to interview Reggie Blaylock, the Inglewood police officer who had been working as part of the Puffy Combs–Notorious B.I.G. security detail on the night of Biggie’s murder. Blaylock, who was at the wheel of the black SUV that was serving as the “trail car” in the Bad Boy Records entourage as it left the Petersen Museum that night, had disappeared from the scene by the time LAPD investigators arrived. Weeks would pass before the LAPD could compel Blaylock to provide a statement. His description of the events surrounding Biggie’s murder ran to six pages but offered almost nothing useful to the investigation. He claimed never to have seen the shooter’s face and could only describe his complexion as “lighter than mine.”

  Just as Russell Poole had been, Carson was most troubled by Blaylock’s failure to give chase after the shooting. “You’re a sworn law enforcement officer carrying a gun sitting at the wheel of a vehicle that is right behind a vehicle in which the passenger is shot to death and you don’t go after the shooter?” Carson wondered. “No way does that make sense unless there’s something else going on. So of course I want to ask Blaylock about it. But the LAPD kept him so wrapped up that I could not get to the guy. They literally shielded him from me. That was when I first began to understand that the LAPD was not simply refusing to assist me in my investigation, but was actually doing what they could to obstruct me.”

  Perry Sanders and Rob Frank received a bracing lesson in where they stood in the eyes of the Los Angeles Police Department when Judge Cooper granted their first major discovery motion and ordered the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division to share its entire case file on the Notorious B.I.G. murder investigation.

  “We arrive at Robbery-Homicide and there’s file cabinets lined up that are filled floor to ceiling,” Sanders recalled. “They put us off in an interrogation room in the corner, and all the cops are outside sneerin’ at us.”

  “They were trying to intimidate us for sure,” said Frank. “It was a completely hostile atmosphere. I was waiting for them to lock the door on us.”

  In Sanders’s recollection, “It was plenty tense and a total blast. I mean, there we are in the bowels of RHD, in the belly of the beast, and they have to deal with us. I love that stuff.”

  The fun ended when the files began to arrive in the interrogation room, one after another, “like on some crazy conveyer belt,” Sanders recalled. “It’s comin’ at us so fast we have to make quick decisions on what to have copied. We’re both speed-readin’ through this stuff that is ninety-nine percent baloney.”

  “There were so many horses all we could do was look for zebras,” Frank remembered. “Anything out of the ordinary we grabbed. We could only hope we were guessing right.”

  The day was a template for how the City of Los Angeles would answer the Notorious B.I.G. lawsuit, satisfying the letter of the law with as little actual cooperation as possible. Perhaps because he sensed it would be this way throughout, Sanders had earlier decided that a court reporter should be present at the Rule 26 conference. These conferences are face-to-face meetings between the attorneys for the pla
intiffs and the defendants in federal cases, held immediately before the discovery process begins. “Under the rules, the city had an obligation to disclose any relevant evidence,” Frank explained. “I went through it painstakingly, asking every conceivable question.” The transcript of the Rule 26 conference eventually came to be among the most significant pieces of evidence placed before the court.

  “But we had absolutely no clue it would be that way at the time,” Frank said. “Bringing the court reporter in was an absolutely brilliant decision by Perry.”

  “Just a wild-assed hunch,” Sanders said. “I figured I was probably wastin’ money, but somethin’ told me to do it.”

  Once they had the Robbery-Homicide files in hand and began to bring in more discovery, much of it based on the list of documents cited in the back of my 2002 book LAbyrinth, Sanders and Frank realized that the next big step was to hire the right private investigator. Everybody he knew in L.A. said that was Anthony Pellicano, Sanders remembered. When he spoke to Pellicano in early 2002, though, the investigator’s aggressive grasping made him uneasy, the attorney said. “Pellicano wanted a twenty-five-thousand-dollar retainer right now,” Sanders recalled. “I mean, he wanted it right now.” Something about how intensely Pellicano demanded the money gave him pause, said Sanders, who by the time he flew back to Colorado Springs a few days later had decided to tell Frank they should go in another direction. Instinctive or reasoned, the decision would prove a wise one. Within the year, Pellicano would be arrested for illegally possessing grenades and plastic explosives, and the subsequent federal investigation would spiral into wiretapping and racketeering charges that added another fifteen years to the P.I.’s prison sentence. More than a dozen of Hollywood’s best-known power players—Michael Ovitz, Brad Grey, and Ron Meyer, among them—would be drawn into the biggest scandal the entertainment industry had seen since the arrest of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. One of those put through the wringer was Bert Fields, considered by many the most powerful attorney in show business, who had used Pellicano as his investigator for years. “I can’t remember how many times Rob thanked me for not getting us into that mess,” Sanders said.

  Sanders, in the midst of relocating to Colorado from Louisiana, was house hunting in the Colorado Springs area when Russell Poole phoned to say that he was visiting a relative in Denver and offered to drive down for a meeting. “I had the same reaction that Rob did,” Sanders recalled. “There was a plain decency to Russ that made me feel real good about how he’d come across as a witness in court.” It was Poole who suggested that Sanders and Frank consider hiring Sergio Robleto as a consultant and an expert witness. His former supervising lieutenant in LAPD’s South Bureau Homicide was one of the sharpest and most dedicated cops he’d ever worked with, Poole told the attorneys, and absolutely the best he’d ever worked under.

  Seventeen hundred unsolved murders were on the books when Robleto arrived at South Bureau, a number he publicly declared to be “completely unacceptable.” That apparently hundreds of killers were escaping justice in South-Central L.A. created an impression that the LAPD didn’t care about the mostly young black men who were their victims, Robleto said, or the law-abiding people who had to live in fear of gang members with guns. He immediately established an unsolved murder unit, one that he closely supervised, often working right alongside his investigators. Within a matter of months the number of murder arrests in South Bureau skyrocketed, as did the number of unsolved cases that were closed.

  This success had made Robleto a hot commodity in the department, where many believed he was destined for an eventual appointment as the LAPD’s first Hispanic chief. Sergio had surprised and disappointed a good many people, Poole told Frank and Sanders, when he resigned in 1995 to take a position at Kroll Associates, the New York–based “risk consulting” firm that had become popularly known in the media as the “corporate CIA.” The attorneys, though, were delighted to learn that Robleto had spent four years (1998–2002) heading up Kroll’s Los Angeles office before leaving to establish his own private investigation agency. Kroll’s fingerprints were all over the LAPD, Sanders and Frank knew. Not only had the company won the contract to monitor the department’s compliance with the consent decree imposed on it by the U.S. Department of Justice in the aftermath of the Rampart Scandal (placing the LAPD under the supervision of a federal monitor), but the man chosen to succeed Bernard Parks as LAPD chief in 2002 was Kroll executive William Bratton, who had formerly served as police commissioner in both Boston and New York. Among many other things, Robleto might help them understand the politics of the LAPD, Sanders and Frank agreed. And if he was as good an investigator as Russ Poole said he was, it seemed there could be no better choice.

  The attorneys became somewhat skeptical, though, when Robleto showed up in Colorado Springs to examine the investigative files they’d received in discovery. “I’d talked to Sergio on the phone, laid out our case,” Frank remembered. “He said he’d come out and see me. I assumed he was going to set up a meeting, but he’s at my office at nine the next morning. I shake hands with this short and slightly chubby Guatemalan guy, smiling and jovial, and suddenly I’m not sure about him. I thought maybe he wasn’t serious enough. But he asked to have all the Murder Book files moved to the conference room so he could spread them out and study them, and I figured, why not? Four hours later he comes in to see me and starts asking a series of questions that I hadn’t even thought of and couldn’t answer. And he did it with a precision and clarity that absolutely astonished me.”

  That twinkle in Robleto’s eye, Frank and Sanders quickly learned, masked an ability to combine focus and ferocity that they had encountered in few other people. “On top of that, I came to know Sergio as one of the best human beings I’ve ever met,” Frank said. “People think I hate cops, because I’ve sued a lot of them, but I don’t. And I always put Russ Poole and Sergio Robleto at the very top of the list of cops I’ve met.”

  Robleto had first become familiar with the Notorious B.I.G. murder investigation and the politics surrounding it back in 2000. That was when Poole had contacted him to ask for support. “Russ said there was an article coming out in the L.A. Weekly about how the LAPD had ostracized him and refused to let him fully investigate the murder,” Robleto recalled. “He knew that making sure every major crime gets fully investigated is something near and dear to my heart. I preached tenacity, as Russ was well aware. Russ was in full battle mode at the time, and he was a pretty intense fellow anyway. He asked me to talk to the reporter writing the article and ‘tell him what you know about me.’ So I did. I told the reporter that Russ was one of the finest investigators I had in South Bureau, that there was none better. He was absolutely tenacious, absolutely honest, absolutely committed. I didn’t fully understand what was going on with Russ at the time, though, so I wasn’t willing to talk about Chief Parks, which may have disappointed Russ a little.”

  When he arrived in Colorado Springs, there were fifty-four volumes of the Biggie Smalls Murder Book, Robleto remembered, the most he’d ever seen connected to a single case: enough four-inch blue binders to fill a pair of file cabinets. It took him two solid weeks to read through those and the forty-four boxes of other materials from the LAPD stacked in a conference room. By the time he was done, Robleto was prepared to tell Frank and Sanders that this was by far the most politicized and compromised murder investigation he’d ever seen.

  “The most glaring thing, the most shocking, was the number of percipient witnesses who were never interviewed and the number of major clues that were never followed up,” Robleto recalled. “People who had been at the scene at the time of the murder were never interviewed because they were never called back, and then the LAPD lost track of them. That, to me, was unbelievable.”

  He recalled another case in South Bureau where there had been a hundred witnesses to a murder, Robleto said. His detectives had interviewed fifty of those before saying they found the killer, Robleto remembered. “I interviewed the rest an
d found he wasn’t the guy. That’s why you talk to everybody. That’s also why in this case I found myself asking, ‘How it is it possible that they didn’t even bother to call up witnesses who said they knew who committed the crime?’ That’s absolutely deficient. Reckless, almost.

  “Leads that name a suspect we call ‘category one’ leads,” Robleto explained. “Seeing how many of those the LAPD investigation just let slide gave a lot of credence in my mind to what Russ was saying about not being allowed to go and follow leads, because of the politics.”

  In his entire career, he had never seen a case where the LAPD had “chosen to obfuscate or block a murder investigation,” Robleto said. “To me, that was something to be proud of. But I couldn’t see any other reason why the department had walled off this investigation, telling a detective, basically, ‘Don’t go there.’ ”

  What excited Frank was Robleto’s determination that the Notorious B.I.G. assassination was the furthest thing from a gangbanger murder; it had been too well planned and well executed to have been the work of anyone but professionals. “The level of foreknowledge and sophistication in the Christopher Wallace murder was the most significant thing to me,” Frank explained. “Sergio was able to show that whoever committed this murder knew things about Christopher Wallace’s security and whereabouts. That was just amazing. The precision of the killing and the escape afterward suggested this was a far, far cry from some thug murder. It also suggested access to communications equipment and police frequencies. In order to pull up alongside Christopher Wallace’s vehicle when he did, number one, the driver had to have known when the Wallace vehicle was leaving the Petersen Museum. And the spot where the shooting took place had to have been staged, with the communications and the escape route all laid out in advance. There were police everywhere, on the corners and in the parking lots, and more police coming in response to shots fired. And yet no police came across the killer’s car, even made eye contact with it. The killer or killers knew where the police were. That was significant for a lot of reasons, but especially the whole color of law claim we were making. Some aspects of this murder required someone to use authority or pretense of their authority, and it would also have required police communication equipment or its equivalent. There had to be somebody who was either a cop or was helped by cops. This was all part of what we were going to need Sergio to testify about.”