Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  The worst thing, though, was that while Knight remained a favorite target of law enforcement in Los Angeles, Combs seemed to be getting a pass from the cops in New York. Puffy was dealing with at least one lingering headache, however, and that was his connection to the last remaining effort to bring the killers of Notorious B.I.G. to justice. Perry Sanders was determined to depose Combs in preparation for the civil trial in Los Angeles, and Combs seemed just as determined to avoid it. “What happened the night of the murder was the main thing,” Sanders said. “But I also wanted to talk to Puffy about him tellin’ other people who were there, ‘If you’re a witness, you’re fired.’ ” (When he was interviewed by the LAPD in New York, Gregory Young, who had been sitting right next to Biggie when he was shot, stated, “Puffy has told us that if our names even appear on a witness list, we’re out of a job.”)

  Sanders tried at first to set up the deposition through Biggie’s former manager Wayne Barrow, who was also close to Combs, but Puffy continued to bob and weave behind his phalanx of lawyers. “So I sent him a letter sayin’, ‘You either voluntarily show up for the deposition or I’m gonna sue you,’ ” Sanders recalled. “Somebody who knew him called me after he got the letter and said you could hear him screamin’ all over New York. This person said, ‘He is so pissed off he doesn’t know what to do.’ ”

  Combs would finally agree to sit down with Sanders on June 10, 2004, in his attorney’s offices at 99 Park Avenue in Manhattan. “With almost no advance notice, we had to fly straight out to New York,” Sanders said. Still, the deposition almost didn’t happen. “All these LAPD officers showed up,” Frank recalled, “and Puffy refused to do the depo with cops in the room.” Two of the LAPD officers were detectives assigned to the department’s Risk Management Section, which was coordinating with the city attorney’s office in opposition to the Estate of Christopher G. L. Wallace v. City of Los Angeles lawsuit. The third was Detective Steve Katz. Combs and his attorney were not happy about having Katz in the room. Only when the three detectives agreed to wait outside could the deposition proceed.

  During the next couple of hours, Combs proved to be unfailingly polite and consistently unhelpful. He added “sir” each time he answered one of Sanders’s questions, until the attorney told him it was unnecessary. But it took seventy pages of transcript just to get Puffy to identify the people who were with him in L.A. at the time of Biggie’s murder and to acknowledge their relationships to him and to his company. Even then he was vague and uncertain, adding “to the best of my recollection” to nearly every answer he gave. When Sanders asked if he remembered Biggie being booed at the Soul Train Awards ceremony on the night of the murder, something that thousands had witnessed live and millions had seen on television, Combs answered, “No.” He also denied the confrontation with Nation of Islam members that had taken place as he and his entourage were leaving the Shrine Auditorium that night, an incident already testified to by other witnesses. He maybe had seen Mustapha Farrakhan sometime that weekend, Puffy said, but couldn’t remember exactly when. What Combs seemed to most want to make clear, though, was that he was in no way responsible for Biggie’s security: “I wasn’t involved in his whereabouts. He was on my label. I wasn’t his parent or anything like that.”

  He had heard “rumors” about an East Coast–West Coast, Bad Boy–Death Row feud, Puffy allowed, but never experienced it personally. “Hype” was how he described the feud, adding, “I didn’t play any role in the hype.” He also had no knowledge of Biggie or Suge Knight or Tupac Shakur playing any role in the hype, Puffy managed to say with a straight face, the same one he wore when he told Sanders, “To be honest, I don’t really know who killed Biggie, to be perfectly honest.”

  As Frank would observe, “Generally when a person says ‘to be honest’ twice in the same sentence, they’re lying. But it was obvious pretty quick that we weren’t going to get anything of value out of Sean Combs, so Perry just turned him over to [Los Angeles assistant city attorney] Paul Paquette.”

  Paquette got even less cooperation than Sanders had from Combs, who said he couldn’t even remember how many vehicles had been in his entourage the night of Biggie’s murder or what kind they were. “All Puffy wanted was to make sure he didn’t get called as a witness at trial,” Sanders said. “And by the time we finished that deposition, everybody in the room knew he probably wouldn’t be.”

  Combs seemed to warm up when the deposition was over. “I sat around with him after and we talked a little,” Sanders recalled. As it happened, Puffy was in the best shape of his life at that moment, training to run in the New York City Marathon five months later. “So he was eatin’ real healthy and whatnot,” Sanders remembered. “That day he was eatin’ some soup. And he had an extra container of tomato soup. So he looked at me, then passed the soup over to me, and said, ‘Here. Don’t say I never did anything for you.’ ”

  Sanders’s biggest remaining concern about Sean Combs was that Puffy might have bullied Eugene Deal into silence. The big man suddenly seemed determined to disappear from public view. Efforts to arrange an interview and on-camera deposition had been fruitless. Deal was gruffly defiant on the phone and clearly felt that cooperating with the authorities had cost him far more than doing the right thing was worth. Combs, for whom Deal had worked on and off as a bodyguard nearly as long as he had been a parole officer, had fired him for talking to the cops and to Nick Broomfield. On top of this, the rumors that had been spread about him being some sort of police snitch made his life more difficult and more dangerous. “People that I meet on the street, who was fans of Biggie and Tupac, they look—they look at me in a derogatory manner,” Deal would explain. “I’ve come out and found my car, you know, on flats, windows busted.”

  It was only through the intervention of Voletta Wallace that Rob Frank had been able to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Deal in a suite at the New York Hilton. Things began to move in a potentially disastrous direction, though, the moment Sanders showed up to join them. Stepping through the hotel room’s door, Sanders took a look at the size 16 EEE basketball shoes Deal was wearing and immediately informed the big man, “I can whup your ass in one-on-one.”

  “What the fuck did that cracker just say to me?” Deal asked Frank. Deal, who stood six feet seven inches tall and weighed over three hundred pounds, had attended the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on a basketball scholarship. Even in his forties, he continued to be one of the most feared playground players in New York City.

  “I said I can whup your ass in one-on-one,” Sanders told him.

  “You crazy motherfucker,” Deal replied, but now he was smiling.

  The contest between Sanders and Deal would take place at Basketball City at the Chelsea Piers in New York. Deal won six out of eight games and broke Sanders’s nose, but loved the way the smaller man battled him. “You showed me somethin’,” Deal conceded.

  Deal’s deposition took place on Valentine’s Day 2005. To the immense relief of Sanders and Frank, Deal not only repeated his story about encountering Amir Muhammad outside the Petersen Museum on the night of Biggie’s murder, but also gave the most detailed sworn account yet of what had taken place. Right at the start, Deal debunked the recurring claim that Puffy and Bad Boy had hired Crips to provide security in Los Angeles. Never happened, Deal said. Puffy used only off-duty or retired law enforcement officers.

  Deal said he had first come out to Cali in February 1997 to provide security during the shooting of Biggie’s “Hypnotize” video. There’d been some gang members hanging around, some Crips, some Bloods, but no problems. He returned to New York after the video wrapped, but then got a call from Bad Boy’s head of security, Paul Offord, asking him to come back to L.A. and stay until Puffy and Big were ready to leave. So Deal took some vacation time and flew west again.

  He still recalled the night of the Soul Train Awards after-party at the Petersen Museum vividly, Deal said. He’d been concerned from the moment Puffy said they’d be attending the par
ty. Part of that was the size of their entourage. With the addition of “some guys from Philly” who’d worked their way into the group, “it was like twenty-three of us that went to that party,” Deal said, which made it difficult to keep track of everybody. Rob Frank steered Deal to the events that took place after the Bad Boy group quit the party and stepped outside the museum. He had made sure the drivers parked right in front of the doors, Deal said. Why? Frank asked. “Because I had a bad feeling about that night,” Deal answered. “I had a feeling that somebody from Bad Boy or one of us had to die because that was our last night in the city. I had got a couple of phone calls from friends and other people that somebody was sending somebody out there to get us.” It made him “extra cautious,” Deal said. “I was on point the whole time.”

  His concerns only increased when he saw the “Nation of Islam–looking guy” who was trying to check them out, Deal said. “While the cars was loaded up and Big and them was waiting to get in the cars … I took a walk out the parking garage,” Deal recalled. “I made a right, looked up and down the street. And this guy in blue and white was walking by hisself … and he came into the garage. And then Paul said, ‘Yo, did you see the guy in blue and white?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I got my eye on him.’ ” He recalled a light-skinned black man “dressed like he was from the Nation of Islam” who had strong cheekbones and a square face, and was “serious-looking,” Deal said.

  He stayed outside on the sidewalk until all the others were loaded into the cars, Deal said, and that was when he saw the Muslim-looking guy coming “close to Mr. Combs’s vehicle … And he looked me in my eye,” Deal remembered. “I looked him in his eye. He didn’t say anything to me. And I showed him my weapon. He looked at me again and turned around and walked down the street the other way where he came from,” in the direction of Fairfax Boulevard.

  When Deal got in the lead SUV, sitting directly behind Puffy, he told Kenny Story, who was driving, “Yo, Kenny, don’t stop at this light. Keep going. Run the next three lights.” Story was running the first of those lights, at the intersection of Fairfax and Wilshire, when he and the others in the vehicle noticed that Biggie’s car wasn’t following, Deal remembered. He looked back and saw that Biggie’s SUV was stopped along the curb on Fairfax, where three young women stood. “Next thing I know I hear Tone [Anthony Jacobs] say, ‘Yo, somebody pulling a gun on Big and them. Yo, he pointing a gun at Big and them.’ ” Story braked to a stop, Deal recalled, and then “next thing you know, I heard something go bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap. Then I’m trying to open the door, and Kenny just stepped on the gas. Me and Tone were screaming at him. Puff ducked down. Me and Tone were screaming, ‘Yo, what you doing, man? They shooting at Big and them. And he said, ‘We don’t know who they’re shooting at.’ We said, ‘Man, they’re shooting at Big. Turn this car around.’ ”

  Story did as told, Deal said. “And as he’s turning around, we see the [shooter’s] car going around the corner.” Tone said it was an Impala, Deal remembered. “We stop right in front of Big and them’s car, right. Big’s car look like an airplane now: everybody doors is open except Big’s … We get to the car, see Big right there. Big’s in the car laid back.”

  He and Jacobs jumped back into their vehicle with Tone driving now and chased the Impala, Deal recalled: “Tone seen where the car went, turned, you know. So we followed him. We see the car just flyin’ and we goin’ after the car.” But their rented SUV had a governor that prevented the vehicle from accelerating to a speed above ninety miles per hour, Deal explained, “and it’s like every time the truck would get up to a hundred, it would go back down to ninety. So now I say, ‘You know, Tone, we ain’t going to catch him, man.’ You know, the guy was out of there. So we went back.”

  When they returned to the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, they saw Puffy and all the others still standing outside the SUV where Biggie lay, eyes wide open, in the passenger seat. “Everybody was askin’, ‘Big, you all right? You all right, Big? You all right?’ I don’t see no blood, I don’t see nothin’.” (An autopsy report stated that Biggie had so much body fat the blood couldn’t seep through to the surface of his skin.) An ambulance had been called, but Story jumped into the driver’s seat of the SUV and told his wounded friend, “Big, I’m going to get you to the hospital,” Deal said. Then Biggie spoke his last words, “Just do it.” Puff sat next to Biggie all the way to the hospital, Deal remembered, telling him, “Big, keep your eyes open. Keep your eyes open.” But by the time they made it to the hospital’s emergency entrance, Biggie’s eyes were closed. They never opened again.

  He knew the man he’d encountered outside the museum as they were preparing to leave had been the killer, Deal said, as soon as he and Lil’ Cease had a chance to speak. “Lil’ Cease had said a guy from the Nation of Islam shot Big. And I said, ‘The guy with the blue suit, blue bow tie, and the white shirt with the white handkerchief? With the peanut head?’ ” Lil’ Cease asked how he knew that, Deal recalled, “and I said, ‘He’s the one walked up to Puff’s car.’ ” After he showed the Muslim his gun, Deal told the others, the guy had walked away toward “exactly where the shooting was, that same direction.”

  Deal told Sanders and Frank that he had given the LAPD statements on three separate occasions and was convinced the L.A. cops were more interested in discrediting him than in listening to what he said. The first time the LAPD officers showed him the composite drawing they’d made of the suspect, Deal said that he “told them that [it] was not a clear identity of the guy, that they had his bone structure in his face wrong, that he was a lot slimmer and stronger in the face, not fat in the face.”

  He’d never seen a photograph of Amir Muhammad, Deal said, until Nick Broomfield showed one to him as part of a six-pack photo-lineup card. Broomfield had waited until the cameras were rolling to let him see the lineup card, said Deal, who immediately recognized Amir Muhammad as the “Nation of Islam–looking guy” he had seen the night of the murder. The LAPD came to New York to interview him shortly after Broomfield’s film was released, recalled Deal, who demanded to know why the police had never showed him a photograph of Amir Muhammad. The last time Steve Katz interviewed him, the detective had told Deal that “they might need [him] to come out to do a lineup or just to come out to L.A. and do a lineup on this individual.” Deal said, “But I’ve never heard from the police after that day.”

  * Anderson, shot to death himself in 1998, has been and continues to be the primary suspect as triggerman in the Shakur murder.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The ways in which Gene Deal had been punished for standing up and speaking out infuriated them, Sanders and Frank would say. Nothing the forces of the other side did, though, would enrage the two lawyers like the coordinated effort to discredit and discourage another of their key witnesses, Mike Robinson.

  It would not have been inaccurate to say that the Wallace family’s case against the City of Los Angeles had begun with Robinson. In spring 1997, the man known to many as “Psycho Mike” was working as one of the most successful police informants in Southern California. Certainly no other informant was more beloved by his handlers. There were two of these: a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy named Richard Valdemar and a special agent from the FBI’s L.A. office named Tim Flaherty.

  Valdemar was Mike’s main point of contact with law enforcement. They had met in the early 1990s. Robinson had been brought to Los Angeles from a state prison up north because it was believed he could help solve one of the most vexing murder cases in the city’s history. This was the 1985 slaying of Sheriff’s Sergeant George Arthur, who had been assigned to the Men’s Central Jail at the time. At just around 10 p.m. on the night of June 1, Arthur was killed during the drive home after finishing his shift at the jail. An assailant hidden in the back of Arthur’s van had attacked him while he was negotiating an on-ramp to the 10 freeway. Witnesses said the van began to careen wildly before colliding at full speed with a center divider. They had seen a second man, bleeding from a
head wound, climb out of the wreckage of Arthur’s vehicle and escape. But the witnesses were unable to offer any better description, because it was dark and they were driving past at high speed. Medical examiners first believed Arthur had died from injuries suffered in the crash, until an autopsy revealed that a gunshot had killed him. Evidence of a violent struggle was recovered from the van, along with blood and other “biological evidence” that did not match Sergeant Arthur’s. Still, somehow, the murder would go unsolved for almost fifteen years.

  It was a case that Valdemar took personally, because Arthur was his former partner and a close friend. Arthur had gotten involved in a shootout with members of the Black Guerrilla Family gang and survived, but two of the men shooting at him hadn’t. “George was convinced that the gang had put out a contract on him,” Valdemar recalled. “He told me, ‘If anything happens to me, you know who to look at. It’ll be them.’ ”

  Mike Robinson, Valdemar had been told, was a former BGF member who had undergone some sort of religious transformation in prison and started warning law enforcement when he believed police officers were being targeted by the gang. Psycho Mike’s story was considerably more complicated than that, as Valdemar would learn. Mike had grown up in Compton as one of eight children, all of them criminals. He started stealing bicycles at “five or six,” Mike said, and at age eight went into the first of several California Youth Authority (CYA) institutions where he would do time. He became a professional auto thief by the time he was twelve and joined the Compton Crips in his teens. Not long after his twentieth birthday, he was convicted of murder. That crime, like everything else about Mike Robinson, contained elements that created a measure of sympathy for the perpetrator. He had been driving a stolen van on a street parallel to Artesia Boulevard when he was flagged down by two of his “aunties,” Mike would explain. They were the ones who told him his twin brother had just been shot to death on the next block by a gang member named Lorenzo. Less than a minute later, Mike had killed Lorenzo with a hail of bullets that left the woman he was with paralyzed. Robinson would spend seventeen and a half years in state prison for that crime.