Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Any doubts that remained in Carson’s mind when it came to Berkow vanished several days later, on March 20, 2004, when the Los Angeles Times published an article under the headline “FBI Probes Rap Star’s ’97 Killing.” The thrust of the story was that the feds were “pursuing a six-year-old theory” that former LAPD officer David Mack and his friend Amir Muhammad had killed Notorious B.I.G. at the bidding of Suge Knight. None of the facts that implicated Mack and Muhammad in the assassination were mentioned in the article. Muhammad and Knight, though, were given ample space to deny their involvement in the slaying. The section of the article that created consternation, however, was the part that described how the FBI had “wired an informant in an attempt to elicit incriminating statements from” Muhammad at his home near San Diego.

  “Even if Mike’s name was never mentioned, Muhammad knew he was the informant,” Valdemar said. “And as soon as Muhammad knew, so did a whole bunch of other very dangerous people.” Mike never really worked as an informant after that day, Valdemar recalled. “You have to understand, Mike never truly trusted cops. His experience in Compton was with people like Reggie Wright, dirty cops who will do anything for money. After that article, he decided all cops were pretty much the same.”

  He would remember that Saturday morning “until the day I die,” Carson said. “I’m getting ready to go to the gym and I get a call from Perry Sanders and he’s livid with me. I think Perry’s a great guy and we had gotten along fine up to that point, but he’s furious at me now. He tells me about the article and I have him read it to me.”

  The section of the article that most astonished and enraged him, Carson recalled, was a quote from Deputy Chief Berkow, who had told the Times that the informant sent to Amir Muhammad’s home had been part of “a joint FBI-LAPD investigation” and that the LAPD was “cooperating with the feds 100%.”

  “That was just a damn lie,” Carson said. “I told Perry, ‘There is no way in hell the LAPD was involved. The only person who would know what we were doing, and who must have been the Times’ source, is the same person directly quoted in the article, Berkow, because I briefed him on it.”

  Mike Robinson was even more furious at Carson than Sanders was. He first heard about the Times article, Mike said, when a deputy from the Sheriff’s Special Intelligence Task Force “came and got me early in the morning and told me that I had a contract out for my life.” Since then, “I don’t know where to go,” Mike said. “I’m running from my life. I feel like I have to carry a gun. I don’t trust LAPD. I don’t trust the newspaper.”

  He had immediately blamed the FBI agent who had sent him to Amir Muhammad’s home in Chula Vista, Mike said: “I confronted Phil Carson, and I wanted to jump on him.”

  When Mike accused him of having “penned me out,” Carson swore it wasn’t him. “I told him, ‘Mike, why would I ever give up an FBI informant?’ Tim and I got him calmed down, but he was worried about his life. And rightfully so.”

  Carson was so indignant that he did something extraordinary by FBI standards: he provided Sanders and Frank with a declaration in which he publicly accused the LAPD of having outed Mike Robinson as an informant in order to damage the Mack-Muhammad theory of the Biggie murder. “The declaration was actually written by the FBI, which provided it first to the city attorney’s office, which then passed it on to Perry Sanders,” Carson recalled.

  The Times article had contained “information and procedures” that were “singular in nature,” Carson’s declaration read, “known only to me and one person I informed at the Los Angeles Police Department. To the best of my knowledge, no other person, including my peers and supervisors at the FBI, possessed this information.”

  Much as Sanders and Frank appreciated what Carson had done, the attorneys were frustrated by the FBI’s refusal to name Berkow as the “one person” at the LAPD to whom Carson had described the San Diego operation. Still, “Phil Carson’s declaration was great to have,” Sanders said. “It would show the jury how far the LAPD was willing to go and how complicit the L.A. Times was in what had happened to Mike Robinson.”

  For Sanders, his adversarial relationship with the largest newspaper in California had become the defining struggle of the entire lawsuit. “It’s been so far beyond anything I’ve ever seen or imagined,”he said. “We knew this was going to be difficult. We knew going up against the second-biggest city in the country in court was going to be an uphill struggle. But it’s been made ten times harder by the L.A. Times doing everything it possibly could to undermine our case. And that includes giving free rein to the most corrupt journalist I’ve ever met to work hand in glove with the LAPD to accomplish that.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Chuck Philips had entered the Notorious B.I.G. story on May 3, 2000, when an article with his byline was printed on an inside page of the Los Angeles Times under the headline “Man No Longer Under Scrutiny in Rapper’s Death.” The story appeared almost five months after the Times had run its one and only story on Russell Poole’s working theory of the Biggie case. Though Poole was “in shock” at how that earlier article had distorted what he’d told the Times reporters—“They made it sound like the case was about to break wide open, instead of describing how the investigation had been thwarted”—the appearance of the story at least made public the idea that police officers working for Death Row Records might have been involved in the murder of Notorious B.I.G. Philips’s article, though, appeared to at once discredit Poole’s theory and depict Muhammad as the innocent victim of an overzealous police investigation. This was not entirely welcome among the newspaper’s staff: Chuck Philips’s editor from the Times Business section and editors from the Metro section had contested the content of Philips’s article to the point of a screaming match in the middle of the newsroom.

  The article quoted the current lead investigator on the case, Detective Dave Martin, as saying, “We are not pursuing [the Mack-Muhammad theory] and have not been for more than a year.” Muhammad was quoted as saying, “I’m not a murderer, I’m a mortgage broker,” and described his visit to Mack at the Montebello City Jail as nothing more than an expression of concern after his former college roommate was arrested on bank robbery charges. Philips either hadn’t asked or wasn’t interested in printing the answers to the two most pertinent questions his article raised. The first was why the LAPD wasn’t “pursuing” Poole’s theory. No explanation whatsoever had been offered by Martin. The second, and equally obvious, question was why, if Muhammad’s visit to Mack in jail was an innocent contact between two old friends, the man had used a false address, a false Social Security number, and an out-of-service phone number to arrange it.

  In 2005, while researching what became the Rolling Stone article “The Unsolved Murder of Notorious B.I.G.,” I asked Philips why he hadn’t reported this information. The Times reporter at first said he hadn’t been aware of it. When I pointed out that it had been included in the newspaper’s earlier article on the Poole theory, Philips said he was concerned that Muhammad might have ended the interview if he was asked questions that challenged him on those points. What most baffled me—and Russell Poole as well—was that Philips’s article had led the rest of the Los Angeles media to publicly dismiss the Mack-Muhammad theory of the Biggie murder. “It was like the cover-up had been covered up, this time by the media,” Poole said.

  Philips’s next article on the Notorious B.I.G. murder was a two-part series appearing in September 2002 on the Times’ front page under the headline “Who Killed Tupac Shakur?” The gist was that the rapper had been murdered by Crips, who had been offered $1 million to do it—by Biggie. On the night of Tupac’s slaying, Philips reported, a Crips “emissary” had visited B.I.G. in the penthouse suite at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, where the rapper promised the money on the condition that Tupac was killed with Biggie’s gun—then placed a loaded .40-caliber Glock on the table.

  No one was identified in the article as the source of the claim about the alleged meeting at the M
GM Grand. Nearly three years later, when I interviewed them for Rolling Stone, Philips and his editor Marc Duvoisin would say that their sources were two Crips whom Philips had met at a park in Compton; neither journalist would reveal the gang members’ names. I asked if Philips or anyone else at the Times had attempted to obtain some independent verification of Biggie’s presence in Las Vegas on the date of the alleged penthouse meeting and was stunned when Duvoisin said no, no one had.

  “You don’t think that if a flamboyant rapper who weighed almost four hundred pounds and traveled with an entourage had been staying at the MGM Grand that weekend, people would have noticed and remembered?” I asked. Duvoisin’s reply left me flabbergasted: the question of whether Biggie was in Las Vegas that night “wasn’t an issue until our article was published,” he said. It took me a moment to gather myself before I said, “That’s right, Marc. Your article made it an issue. And before you made it an issue, by reporting that on a certain date Biggie met with the Crips in Las Vegas and offered them a million dollars to kill Tupac, don’t you think you should have made some effort to establish that Biggie was actually in Las Vegas at that time?”

  Within a few days of the publication of the Biggie-killed-Tupac articles, at least some of Duvoisin’s colleagues at the Times were asking that same question. Immediately after Philips’s articles appeared in print, Voletta Wallace was contacted by several of her dead son’s friends, who said they had watched the Tyson-Seldon fight with Biggie at his home in New Jersey, roughly an hour before the Times said he was in Las Vegas offering the Crips $1 million to kill Tupac. By the next afternoon, the estate of Notorious B.I.G. had produced invoices showing that on the weekend when Biggie was supposed to have been at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, he was in fact working on a recording for Puffy Combs in New York’s Daddy’s House studio. Biggie’s family was even able to provide MTV with a digital tape of the song “Nasty Girl” that the rapper had recorded during that session.

  Five days after the Los Angeles Times published the claim that Biggie had paid Crips to kill Tupac, the newspaper ran a story reporting that the Christopher Wallace Estate had offered evidence that Biggie was in a New York recording studio when Philips had claimed he was in a Las Vegas hotel. Sanders called it “a non-retraction retraction” and complained it had been buried on the lower half of an inside page, while the Biggie-killed-Tupac articles had run on the Times’ front page.

  Voletta Wallace certainly was not mollified. “It was so ridiculous,” she told me. “My son is Notorious B.I.G. If my son is gonna go to Las Vegas, don’t tell me nobody didn’t see him.”

  Sanders and Frank were even more astonished by Philips’s article “FBI Probes Rap Star’s ’97 Murder” exposing Mike Robinson’s attempt to gather evidence against Muhammad Amir. The warning that the article’s publication had put Robinson’s life in danger was swiftly proved accurate by “two or three good attempts on his life,” Valdemar said. One involved a drive-by shooting in which Mike and a group of friends and relatives standing on a corner in the Nickerson Gardens housing project were sprayed by an AK-47 on full automatic. Mike was not hit, but one of his granddaughters was. Two cousins caught bullets also, one in the abdomen, the other in a leg. “Another of Mike’s cousins got his teeth knocked out,” Valdemar recalled.

  Part of what put Mike at such risk was that “he didn’t like hiding,” Valdemar said. “He’d rather meet you face-to-face. But he was also worried about his family. Mike may not have been much of a father, but he was as devoted a grandfather as he could be. He insisted on taking his grandkids to school. Every time he did that, he risked his life.” And now Mike knew he was risking the lives of his grandchildren as well.

  “Chuck Philips was saying that his article had nothing to do with whatever happened to Psycho Mike, but the guy is full of shit,” Phil Carson said. “And one hundred percent it was Berkow who gave Philips the Mike stuff for that article. They were both guilty. And in a way so was I. I gave the LAPD the benefit of the doubt, and I paid for it. But Mike really paid for it.”

  It was mainly to protect his family, “but also himself,” Valdemar said, that Mike began insisting that he would not testify in court if the Wallace family’s lawsuit went to trial. “Everyone knew we were going to have to put Mike on the stand,” Sergio Robleto recalled, “but nobody wanted to tell him.”

  Valdemar retired from the Sheriff’s Department in 2004 and shortly afterward was hired by Robleto as one of his operatives. Among his duties was to serve as a liaison between the Wallace Estate and Mike Robinson. It was Valdemar who drove Mike to the deposition scheduled for February 3, 2005. “Mike was mad because he didn’t want to go and do the thing,” Valdemar remembered. “In the car he started screaming, having a meltdown. We were parked at a mall next to the freeway where I’d picked him up. He shouted in my face, ‘Testifying is gonna get me killed or my family killed. You told me I didn’t have to testify. Now you’re making me testify.’ At one point he threatened to kill me if I didn’t let him out of the car.” Valdemar had brought along a blue ballistic vest that he wanted Mike to wear and it was “a struggle” to get the informant to put it on, he recalled, though Mike finally did.

  Robleto had arranged for the deposition to be held in a suite at the Crowne Plaza in the city of Commerce, a compact community in southeast Los Angeles County that was just north of the blue-collar suburbs Downey and Bellflower. The hotel was part of a complex that included one of Perry Sanders’s favorite places on the planet, the Commerce Casino, where he liked to play high-stakes poker while receiving backrubs from the masseuses who worked for the casino. “Perry was always going off to get a ‘poker massage,’ ” Frank recalled.

  “But Perry didn’t know where the Robinson deposition was going to be,” Robleto said. “None of the lawyers did. We were that concerned about security. We just arranged to pick them all up and drive them to the hotel.”

  “All we knew about Mike Robinson was that he was at some double-secret location,” Rob Frank recalled. “I realized how seriously Sergio and his people took the threat to Mike when they picked us up in three separate SUVs that went in three different directions.”

  Robleto had stationed fifteen armed personnel at various spots in the hotel ahead of Robinson’s arrival. “We knew the other side knew what an important witness Mike was going to be,” he explained. “There were a whole lot of people who wanted him dead.”

  Through Valdemar, Robleto had gotten to know Robinson, and a certain affection had developed between the two men. “On my side for sure,” Robleto said. “There was just something about the guy. I liked his attitude, I guess. I’m all about facts and not real big on speculation. And Mike was like that, too, in his own way. He wasn’t just honest—he wanted to be a hundred percent right.”

  The main precaution Sanders had taken was to arrange for the deposition to be videotaped. He didn’t bother to say what everyone knew: if Mike were killed, that videotape would be the only way to offer his testimony in court.

  The direct examination portion of the deposition went fairly quickly. Mike described hearing from multiple “sources” that the killer of Biggie Smalls was Amir Muhammad, and that Suge Knight had paid for the hit; then he described how he passed that information on to Richard Valdemar and Tim Flaherty. He recounted his two face-to-face encounters with Muhammad and what he had told first the Sheriff’s Department and then the FBI about them.

  When it was his turn to ask questions, Assistant City Attorney Don Vincent repeatedly pushed at places where he thought the witness might slip or trip, but Psycho Mike held steady. The only name of the killer he had heard on the street was Amir’s, Mike said, and that was the only name he’d given to the LAPD detective who’d interviewed him at Wayside. Detective Ball “wrote what he wanted to write” in his report, Mike said.

  Who had told him the killer was Amir? Vincent wanted to know. “Different people,” Mike answered, some from the Southside Crips and also guys from a smaller set called Power Rule. He
’d heard it from Bloods as well, Mike added.

  “These were people that were in jail with you?” Vincent asked.

  “No, sir,” Mike answered. “These are people on the streets.”

  When Vincent asked if he had told the FBI “who you think did” the murder of Notorious B.I.G., Mike answered tersely, “I don’t think anything. I know who did it. Amir did it.” Vincent got under Mike’s skin, though, when he asked about the trip to see Amir Muhammad at his home in San Diego County and why it had been unsuccessful. Mike answered with an accusing look, then said he guessed “somebody told him I was coming.”

  Sanders sat as expressionless as he could, trying not to let Vincent see how pleased he was with the way Mike was handling his interrogation. “Ten minutes into that depo, I knew this guy was going to be an absolutely great witness for us in court,” Sanders said. “He came across as someone who was just going to tell it like it was, and to hell with you if you didn’t like it.”

  Mike even managed to throw a few things at Vincent for which the city’s attorney was clearly unprepared. At one point he spoke about security firms that “hire crooked police officers.” When asked if he knew of “any LAPD officers that were involved in this crooked activity,” Mike replied, “Mack one.” David Mack was “in the same circle” with the Reggie Wrights, Sr. and Jr., Mike added. What circle is that? Vincent wanted to know. “Crooked,” Mike replied. “They take money, they take dope, they do all kinds of things. They kill people for a living.” Police in Los Angeles County had been hearing for years that the Wrights lived as well as they did by stealing from drug dealers and selling their stuff on the street. That Reggie Wright Sr. continued to serve as a sheriff’s deputy was for many Crips and Bloods evidence of how corrupt the cops were.

  When the subject of Rick James’s party house was brought up, Mike mentioned that he’d seen David Mack there once with Amir Muhammad. He’d seen Suge Knight there also.