Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Said Robleto, “The description of the original response in the documents I’d seen was confusing. There were fifteen hundred people packed into a room and sixty police officers on the scene. With that many policemen, how the hell did somebody not notice something was coming down?”

  A gunshot fired on Orange Grove Avenue just minutes before the murder was a partial explanation, Robleto said. Russell Poole apparently had been the only LAPD investigator who believed that the Orange Grove shot was not an unrelated event but rather a deliberately staged distraction. Robleto found himself agreeing with his former detective. Other investigators had accepted the explanation of the young man who claimed he had fired the shot after his gun had fallen out of his Ford Explorer’s map pocket to the pavement and he had discharged a round into the air to make sure his weapon was still working. To Robleto, though, this sounded like “a perfect way to stage such a distraction and get away with it.”

  What Robleto found most difficult to fathom was that the Robbery-Homicide Division hadn’t taken the case right from the start. He’d learned from the LAPD reports he’d read in Colorado that the RHD captain and one of his lieutenants “were there that first night.” But, recalled Robleto, who had worked in Robbery-Homicide in 1983–84, “they were gone by the next morning and didn’t come back to the case until an entire month had passed. In thirty years I had never seen that: a murder case involving a major celebrity that wasn’t taken over by Robbery-Homicide right out of the gate.”

  And in this case the major celebrity was the victim, which made it even harder to fathom. “There was no other possible explanation other than that this was a political decision,” Robleto said. “Clearly this case was beyond the resources of Wilshire Division.” He could see that plainly in the LAPD’s own documents, Robleto said. “You had people removing evidence and handing it over to the police later, which basically makes it useless. There were witnesses who had given a description of the shooter, but no one seemed to follow up on it. I mean, the killer had been identified as either belonging to or wanting to appear to belong to a certain group, the Nation of Islam, but no effort was made to follow up on that until Russ Poole came on the case a month later. They wasted time chasing a theory that the Crips had done it when everything pointed away from that. They had a helluva lot of good clues in Wilshire, but they weren’t able to do much with them, in part because they were overwhelmed. Then when Russ came in, he was being set up to fail almost right from the first.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  What had become clear to Sanders and Frank in the first round of discovery and witness depositions was that the Los Angeles Police Department had no real interest in solving the murder of Christopher Wallace. Nothing made this more evident to the attorneys than their questioning of the detective who had been in charge of the case since 1999, Steve Katz. Sanders and Frank were startled by Katz’s admission that he’d made three trips to Houston in connection with a pair of “primary suspects” named Richard Daniels and Tony Draper, who had been seen driving a Bentley Coupe near the Petersen Automotive Museum on the night of the shooting. What made this so astonishing was that neither Daniels nor Draper had been implicated in the crime by even the tiniest shred of evidence. In dozens of documents, including search warrants, the LAPD had identified the vehicle driven by the killer that night as a black Impala. Katz couldn’t offer an even remotely persuasive reason why the investigation should focus on Draper and Daniels. “All we could think of was that it made Katz look like he was keeping busy, and it gave him and his partner a series of paid vacations in Texas,” Frank said.

  Phil Carson put it this way: “My interest had forced the LAPD to start pretending they were investigating the case. They had to do something, even if it was nothing.”

  Robleto was even more perplexed than the attorneys by the LAPD’s focus on the two Houston men and their Bentley. “I really tried to understand and be open,” Robleto said. “I still wanted to believe in the police department I’d given most of my career to. But there was absolutely no evidence that pointed to the two Houston guys. And the difference between a Bentley and an Impala SS is huge. Nobody’s going to mistake one for the other.” He was disgusted, Robleto said, when he saw reports on how LAPD investigators had reconstructed the shooting scene in an alley to try to figure out whether the trajectory of the bullets that killed Biggie matched up with the window height of the Bentley better than the Impala’s. “If you look at the street where the murder occurred, you see that the pavement drops toward the curb, where it’s about a foot lower than in the center of the road,” Robleto said. “The vehicle Christopher Wallace was sitting in was on the high part of the road, and the shooter’s car was by the curb on the lower part of the pavement. Yet they did the reconstruction on perfectly level ground. Their approach was at best flawed and at worst stupid. It was a complete waste of time and money, but when you looked through the records of their so-called investigation, it looked like that was exactly what they wanted to do, waste time and money.”

  Katz and the LAPD certainly weren’t investing any resources in the theory of the Biggie Smalls murder that Russell Poole had put forth in his original investigation of the crime. For nearly everyone who had followed the case, Eugene Deal’s identification of Amir Muhammad as the “Muslim-looking guy” whom the massive bodyguard had encountered outside the Petersen Museum just before the shooting had been a bombshell. But neither Katz nor anyone else from the LAPD had ever contacted Nick Broomfield, the documentary film director who had shown Deal the photo lineup from which he’d identified Muhammad. According to Katz, Deal “didn’t give a real hundred percent identification, but he said he felt that it was him.” In fact, Deal was definite: “That’s the guy,” he’d told Broomfield. “That’s the guy who came up to me.” When Broomfield asked if that was “definitely him,” Deal nodded vigorously. “Yep,” he said.

  When Katz finally did interview Deal, he left the big man embittered and skittish. After they spoke, Deal said, Katz called Deal’s superiors at the New York State Parole Department to report him for working as a bodyguard to Notorious B.I.G. That wasn’t true, said Deal—he was Puffy Combs’s bodyguard on the night of the shooting—but Katz’s claim had been enough to embroil Deal in a protracted dispute with his employer, which accused him of working too many hours outside his regular job.

  To Sanders, the strangest part of the Katz depositions had been his explanation for why he had never questioned Amir Muhammad. Katz explained that since the FBI was focused on the “Mack-Muhammad theory” of the case, the LAPD had made a decision to let it handle that part of the investigation.

  “Oh, I see, they let us handle it,” Phil Carson would say when Sanders told him what Katz had said. “What about the two years Katz had the case before there even was an FBI investigation?” Wasn’t it true, Frank asked during one Katz deposition, that Phil Carson had sent him a note suggesting that Suge Knight’s attorney David Kenner may have made mortgage payments for David Mack or Amir Muhammad? It was, Katz acknowledged, but the LAPD never looked into that claim.

  The LAPD was in possession of documents in which Amir Muhammad had identified his work address as 1297 Steiner Drive in Chula Vista, wasn’t that correct? Frank asked. Had the LAPD determined whether that was correct? No, it hadn’t, Katz answered, “because that is inclusive of some of the things that the FBI is doing.” Had the LAPD made any attempt at all to contact Amir Muhammad subsequent to August 15, 2003? Frank asked. It had not, Katz answered, because the FBI was “working that angle of the investigation.” And besides, the detective added, he didn’t consider Amir Muhammad to be the “primary suspect” in the murder of Christopher Wallace. But Richard Daniels and Tony Draper were primary suspects, Frank observed. Katz’s only reply was a slight smirk.

  A moment later the detective said he had recently planned to interview Amir Muhammad, only to be asked by the new commander of the Robbery-Homicide Division, Captain Michelena, to “hold off” for sixty days to let the FBI comp
lete its investigation. But he still planned to interview Muhammad at some point in the future, Katz said. “Does that mean a month, two months, six months?” Frank asked. “I couldn’t tell you,” answered Katz, who then mentioned that he had been considering placing a wiretap on Muhammad.

  Why would you do that? Frank asked. Because Muhammad was still a suspect in the murder, answered Katz, contradicting what he had said just moments earlier.

  Frank and Sanders would depose Katz at length three times prior to trial, and yet in all those hours there was only a single revelation that either attorney found remarkable. At one point, Katz for some reason mentioned that a hidden microphone had been placed in Suge Knight’s cell while he was being held in the L.A. County Jail. Why had that been done? Frank asked. It was because the LAPD had obtained “information that indicated that he may have been involved in the murder, but not enough to sufficiently arrest him,” Katz answered.

  Suge Knight was far more isolated and vulnerable than he had been during the years Russell Poole was investigating him as the man behind the murder of Notorious B.I.G. A good deal of Suge’s new circumstances had to do with the attrition of his thugs. Aaron Palmer, better known as “Heron,” had been the first to fall, shot dead at the wheel of a Toyota 4Runner stopped for a red light at a Compton intersection at dusk on June 1, 1997, less than three months after the Notorious B.I.G. murder. Heron was heading home from a Death Row party when two men jumped out of a blue van and emptied their semiautomatic pistols into him. He was thirty years old.

  The next to go down was William “Chin” Walker, who, just after midnight on April 4, 2000, was sitting next to fellow Blood Wardell “Poochie” Fouse in a white Chevrolet van parked on a dead-end street in Compton, when two men ran up on both sides of the vehicle and emptied their pistols though the windows. Walker, in the driver’s seat, had bled out by the time he made it to the hospital. He was thirty-seven. Though gravely wounded, Fouse survived. Three weeks later, Vence “V” Buchanan had been found facedown in a Compton graveyard. Word on the streets was that Buchanan, although a Blood himself, was allied with a renegade group of Death Row bodyguards and drug dealers from the Fruit Town Piru Bloods set that had turned against Suge and the Mob Pirus. V, it was said, had helped arrange the shooting that left Chin Walker dead and Poochie Fouse in a wheelchair for three months.

  According to eyewitnesses, men wearing police uniforms had grabbed Buchanan off the street at the intersection of Central and 135th avenues, cuffed his hands behind his back, and forced him into the back of a dark-colored Cadillac. By the time his body was found in the cemetery, V had been tortured, mutilated, and finally executed with a bullet to the back of his head. Alton “Buntry” McDonald, Suge’s number one thug, and his partner David “Brim” Dudley reportedly had made a videotape of Buchanan’s torture and execution that they were playing for audiences of fellow Mob Pirus.

  Brim escaped the vengeance of the Fruit Town Pirus for nearly another year before he was shot dead on March 25, 2001, outside Buntry’s house. Just over a year after that, on April 3, 2002, Buntry was filling the tank of his black GMC Denali at the big Shell station at the corner of Rosecrans and Atlantic avenues when two men walked up with pistols and shot him four times in the chest before fleeing in a pickup truck, leaving the hulking gangster dead at thirty-seven.

  Henry “Hen Dog” Smith became Suge’s new top thug, but occupied that position for only six months. On the afternoon of October 16, 2002, Hen Dog was wearing a Death Row medallion around his neck and sitting at the wheel of a burgundy Jeep parked next to a fried-chicken stand in South-Central L.A. while his girlfriend used a nearby pay phone. The girlfriend’s infant son was lying on the backseat when a young man stepped up next to the Jeep, leaned in through an open window, fired six shots, then fled on a bicycle. Thirty-three-year-old Hen Dog was dead on the spot.

  By the summer of 2003, Poochie Fouse had largely recovered from the wounds he’d suffered in the 2000 shooting that claimed Chin Walker’s life. Early on the evening of July 24, he was riding a motorcycle on Central Avenue when a car sped up from behind him and the young man in the passenger seat began firing. Poochie, now forty-three, was hit ten times in the back and died in a puddle of blood on the pavement.

  Even those of Suge’s thugs who survived were unavailable to him because of their prison sentences. Travon “Tray” Lane and Roger “Neckbone” Williams, each of whom had participated in the stomping of Southside Crip Orlando Anderson* on the night of the Tupac Shakur murder, were behind bars after armed assault and weapons convictions.

  Knight himself had spent nearly all of the past six years behind bars. He’d done five of those years as part of his sentence for assaulting producers George and Lynwood Stanley at Solar Records in Hollywood. During that period, Suge was held in jails and prisons all over the state. His longest residence was at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, a small town in central California that in earlier incarnations was known as Bed Bug, Freeze Out, and Hardscrabble. In May 2001 Knight landed at the federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon, to be processed back into society.

  Upon his release in August of that year, Suge did his best to project an air of confidence about the revival of his renamed record company, Tha Row. “Welcome Home Suge,” read the billboard above Tha Row’s Wilshire Boulevard offices on the day of Knight’s return to Los Angeles. “Better days is coming,” Knight told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s like we’re getting ready for the Super Bowl. Preparing for the game. We’re going to win the big one. Going to sign some new young producers to come up with some tough new stuff.” The reality, though, was that with Tupac Shakur dead, and Snoop Dogg and Doctor Dre moved on to other companies, Tha Row had become a second-tier rap label where the nearest thing to a star was the modestly talented Kurupt.

  Within fourteen months of Suge’s release from prison, Buntry and Hen Dog had been shot dead by the Fruit Town Pirus, and Knight himself was a hunted man. In November 2002, fifteen months after his release, Suge was caught up in the net cast by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in the Eric “Scar” Daniel murder case. Daniel, one of the Fruit Town Pirus believed to have pulled the trigger on Buntry, had been shot dead on June 7. The Sheriff’s Department issued arrest warrants in connection with the killing for eight men, all Mob Piru Bloods and Suge Knight associates. One of them was Knight’s bodyguard Kordell Depree Knox, who had been fired from his job as a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy only a couple of weeks earlier. In the course of searching Tha Row’s offices and the nine-thousand-square-foot home in Malibu where Knight was currently living, sheriff’s investigators put together a case that Suge had violated the terms of his parole by associating with convicted felons and known gang members. He was arrested on December 2, 2002, and locked up in Los Angeles County Jail, where he would be spending Christmas.

  Suge had seemed to sense immediately that the Sheriff’s Department was overreaching. His arrest was a desperate effort to salvage the bungled investigation of the Scar Daniel murder, Suge told the Los Angeles Times in an interview the day after Christmas. When he last met with his parole officer, Suge said, a gang investigator had showed up to threaten him with a long jail sentence if he didn’t tell what he knew about the killings of Scar, Buntry, Hen Dog, and V Buchanan, among others: “I told him, ‘You better handcuff me right now. Because I don’t know a thing about it.’ ” The Sheriff’s Department admitted that Knight was not a suspect in any of the murders. The case it had made against Suge was based entirely on photographs seized from the Malibu house and Tha Row office that showed Knight posing with various Bloods, all of them making what were described as “gang signs.” The pictures were from a rehearsal for his rapper Crooked I, Suge said. The cops were so clueless that “they think anything with fingers in the air is a gang sign,” he explained. If “I have to stop dealing with people from the hood, I might as well shut down my business,” Knight added. “I can’t turn my back on the people I came up with. Rap comes from the same place that
I did—the ghetto.”

  Suge sounded more plaintive than defiant when he told the Los Angeles Times, “I ain’t no gangster. I’m too damn old. I’m a grown man trying to run a business.”

  What Suge didn’t say was how immensely galling it had to have been that, while he was struggling to sustain a floundering rap label on the West Coast, his hated East Coast rival Puffy Combs was sitting on top of an ever-expanding entertainment empire. Bad Boy Records continued to put out one hit record after another, many of them featuring the owner himself, who these days was calling himself P. Diddy, soon to be simply Diddy. Combs’s Sean John clothing line was being distributed by high-end department stores, while he himself appeared in advertisements for the company in magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair. The Sean John line’s 2001 runway show was the first to be televised nationally, and in 2002 the New York Times had a front-page story on Combs and his company. For several years in succession, Sean John had received a Designer of the Year nomination from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. And now Puffy was talking about adding a line of fragrances. He was no longer dating Jennifer Lopez but was partying regularly in the Hamptons and on the Upper East Side. They were even putting the homely little motherfucker in movies, Suge marveled.