Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  “So if you went up to Suge Knight and said, ‘Hi, Suge,’ he’d say ‘Hi, Mike,’ right?” Vincent asked.

  “Yeah,” Mike answered, then added, “I don’t know about now because of what you people done to me. He probably would kill me now.”

  Mike showed tremulous emotion only when he was asked why he was helping the FBI and the Wallace family’s attorneys. “I might as well finish it because I’m already exposed,” Mike replied. “I’m done. So I might as well, you know, do the right thing. Maybe somebody might have some kind of peace or justice in their lives by me doing the right thing.”

  Vincent goaded Mike with questions about the risks he was taking by talking about the Biggie murder. The stress and anger in Mike’s voice became increasingly audible. Finally, he asked for a break.

  Sergio Robleto took him into the hotel suite’s bedroom, where Mike sat on one corner of the mattress and “began to weep and weep and weep,” Robleto remembered. “I tried to calm him down, reassure him that we were going to do everything we could to protect him. But he sobbed for half an hour.”

  Then suddenly Mike “jumped up, ran out of the room and down the stairs,” Robleto remembered. “I figured he needed air. I told my guys to stay loose, don’t try to stop him. The freeway was right across the street, and Mike runs down the embankment right onto the freeway. He ran right into the oncoming traffic. At that point we ran onto the freeway chasing him, but he just kept running. He ran on the shoulder for a couple of miles. Then he got off the freeway and ran for another mile. He finally slowed down and we caught up. He was sobbing again and shouting, ‘They’re gonna kill me! They’re after me!’ The only one who could talk to him was Richard Valdemar. Richard calmed him down to the point where he was listening again. That took a couple of hours. Then Richard took him home, because no one else was supposed to know where he was staying.”

  It was the last time Robleto ever saw Mike Robinson.

  Chuck Philips, though, wasn’t done with Mike. On June 3, 2005, just as the case of Wallace v. City of Los Angeles was approaching trial, the Los Angeles Times ran an article by Philips under the headline “Informant in Rap Star’s Slaying Admits Hearsay.”

  The essence of the story was the headline: the secret informant who told the police that Biggie’s killer was a Nation of Islam member named Amir—“or Ashmir,” as Ted Ball’s report had it—had acknowledged in a sworn deposition that his information wasn’t firsthand. What made the article fundamentally deceptive was Philips’s description of how Mike had “admitted” under cross-examination that he was only repeating what others had told him. But Mike had made that clear from the very beginning. “It was exactly what he told me and exactly what I told the LAPD,” said Valdemar, “that Mike had heard it was Amir Muhammad from people on the street. But the Times article made it sound like he had tried to hide that.”

  Philips detailed some of Mike’s background—how he had gone to prison for murder, and earned his membership in the Black Guerrilla Family by stabbing a man fourteen times, and had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. The reporter, though, left out any mention of how successful Mike Robinson had been as a police informant and a witness in court, the long list of criminals and corrupt law enforcement officers he’d put behind bars, and Mike’s consistency when he was questioned by the attorneys attempting to discredit him.

  What most infuriated Sanders was that every bit of Philips’s information had been drawn from Mike’s deposition, a deposition that Judge Cooper had ordered sealed and to which no one had access other than the attorneys on both sides of the lawsuit and their clients. Sanders and Frank had no doubt that someone on the other side had given Philips a copy of Mike Robinson’s “confidential” deposition. “This is how outrageous it’s become,” Sanders said at the time. “They release a sealed transcript immediately before the case it involves is scheduled to go to trial, knowing that the L.A. Times will use that transcript to distort the facts and make our case look ridiculous in the eyes of the public.”

  Sergio Robleto was even more outspoken. The release of the sealed transcript was “tantamount to jury tampering,” he said. Robleto was not given to extravagant statements, but “this case has really gotten to me,” he explained. “I’ve learned things I really wish I didn’t know.”

  No one was more devastated by the article than Valdemar. He was stunned, the former deputy said, that Philips had used his informant’s street name, Psycho Mike. “Before that, Mike at least had some deniability,” Valdemar said. “It was basically his word against the word of Amir Muhammad that he was a government informant. There were a lot of people who didn’t believe it. But once it was in print that the informant was known as Psycho Mike, he was a dead man if he showed up on the streets.”

  For Sanders and Frank, the main consequence of the “Informant … Admits Hearsay” article was that Mike Robinson disappeared immediately from the place where he was hiding out. Even Valdemar couldn’t find him. It meant that Sanders and Frank would be unable to call him as a witness, and would have no choice but to offer only his deposition into evidence—if the judge allowed it. “That article was the single worst thing that happened to our case,” Sanders said.

  Months later, Mike Robinson contacted Valdemar. He was tired of running, Mike said. Did they have any safe place for him? Valdemar found him a house in California City, a town of about thirteen thousand on the desolate eastern edge of the Antelope Valley, closer to Death Valley than to Compton. “A place the term ‘middle of nowhere’ was made for,” Valdemar said. Mike never got comfortable there, though. “He was constantly looking over his shoulder, always on the lookout for the people who would be coming after him,” Valdemar said. “The stress ate him up.”

  Mike lived for only about another year before dying of a heart attack on December 5, 2006. He was forty-nine.

  Valdemar and Tim Flaherty attended Mike’s funeral, the only white faces in a surprisingly large crowd. “What I will always remember is Mike’s grandkids sobbing and hugging the casket,” Valdemar said.

  Valdemar vented his rage and grief in an article for Police magazine in which he wrote, “Chuck Philips did all he could to twist the witness statements, expose the sources and protect his pals at Death Row. His Los Angeles Times editors failed to see that obviously his view was biased … As a result of the Times articles and Chuck Philips, Mike Robinson was attacked physically on more than one occasion. He was shot at, cut in the face and head with a razor, and his front teeth were knocked out. The assailants even mentioned the Times article during one attack … It is my belief that Michael Robinson died as a result of the stress and anxiety caused by his exposure and identification in Chuck Philips’s hit piece.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Special agent Phil Carson’s life and career both began to blow up on the day the attorneys for the plaintiffs’ side in Wallace v. Los Angeles listed him as a witness. According to Carson and two other agents in the FBI’s Los Angeles office, Berkow had twice asked the head of the criminal division at that office, Lou Caprino, to shut down Carson’s investigation of the Biggie murder. Caprino refused both times. When Carson’s name appeared on the witness list, the city attorney’s office got involved. An assistant city attorney named Louis Li arranged a meeting with Carson and his bosses at the FBI office. “Li told us, point-blank, ‘We cannot let Agent Carson testify, because if he does, we stand a better than fifty percent chance of losing upwards of six hundred million dollars in this lawsuit,’ ” remembered Carson, whose recollection was confirmed by another FBI agent at the meeting. “ ‘It would ruin the LAPD, and the relationship between the LAPD and the federal government, including the FBI.’ ”

  When Carson’s FBI bosses equivocated, a larger meeting was organized, one attended by not only the highest-ranking FBI officials in L.A. but also the senior command staff of the LAPD and the attorneys defending the city in the Wallace v. Los Angeles lawsuit. The LAPD representatives and city attorneys spoke at length about the relationship betw
een the police department and the FBI, the various federal programs and task forces the two agencies were involved with together, and the enormous amount of money that had been committed to these projects, remembered Carson and a second special agent who was present. The FBI and the LAPD were “interdependent,” one of those on the city’s side of the table argued, and it would be insane to jeopardize all that “just to solve the murder of a four-hundred-pound black crack dealer turned rapper.”

  “Those were the exact words used,” Carson recalled. A second FBI agent who was at the meeting confirmed this.

  Carson’s bosses acceded to the city’s demand: he would not be a witness in the Wallace v. Los Angeles civil trial, the agent was informed. Officially, it was Caprino who had made that decision, but Carson believed “it went higher up than Lou, to people back in D.C.”

  By then, Carson’s greatest concerns were not about what the LAPD and the city attorney’s office were doing to his case, but about the threats against his career being made by Chuck Philips. Carson recalled, “Philips started phoning me constantly and asking me questions about the case that I couldn’t answer. When I explained that to him, he started calling Cathy Viray, who was the head of the press information unit at our FBI office, and telling her, ‘I’m going to ruin Carson.’ ” Viray, who confirmed Philips’s threats, and Steve Kramer, who was then the assistant chief counsel at the FBI’s L.A. headquarters, both explained to Philips that Carson couldn’t say more than he already had said.

  Philips, though, continued to threaten that he would destroy Phil Carson’s career if he didn’t get answers, remembered Viray.

  Finally—“and this was absolutely unprecedented,” Carson said—Caprino arranged for a conference call during which every one of the supervisors at the FBI office, along with its legal and press teams, would answer what questions they could for Philips.

  The agents who participated in that conference call were filled with dismay and fury when, just days later, an article by Philips ran on the front page of the Los Angeles Times Metro section. “FBI Ends Probe into Killing of Rap Star,” read the headline. In the article, Philips revealed that the FBI had shut down its investigation of the Christopher Wallace homicide, the first time this news had been made public.

  The FBI had decided to drop the probe, Philips wrote, “after learning that Agent Philip J. Carson had discussions with lawyers for Wallace’s mother, Voletta Wallace, and had been subpoenaed to testify in her wrongful-death lawsuit against the city.” FBI officials had already informed Sanders and Frank that Carson would not be permitted to testify in open court. According to Philips, Carson’s bosses had also instructed him to have no further contact with the Wallace family’s attorneys.

  Those lawyers, Sanders and Frank, were enraged by the article. “We had heard, and had to assume, that enormous pressure was being brought to bear on the FBI for something like this to happen,” Sanders said. “Phil Carson called me at one point and said, ‘This is political at the highest levels you can imagine.’ He said he still believed we were right about who was responsible for Biggie’s murder, but was being hassled in a major way by people who wanted him to stop going in that direction.”

  For the record, the head of the FBI in Los Angeles, Richard T. Garcia, stated that the results of Special Agent Carson’s eighteen-month-long investigation had been submitted to the U.S. attorney’s office, which “determined that the evidence was insufficient for [criminal] prosecution.”

  That much was true: Carson had submitted the results of his investigation to the U.S. attorney’s office. By then, he knew the case was being followed at the highest levels of the bureau, Carson said. That had become obvious when the name of FBI director Robert Mueller began to appear in the email chain of memos concerning the Christopher Wallace murder investigation. “The politics of the case had become mind-boggling,” said Carson, who was “stunned” when the U.S. attorney’s office answered his submission of the case with a letter stating it saw insufficient evidence to prosecute.

  “I knew I had the case,” Carson explained. “We definitely had enough to prosecute.” The standard procedure—universally observed—was that when the U.S. attorney’s office turned down an FBI case, it provided a “letter of declination” laying out the reasons for the decision. In this instance, however, the assistant U.S. attorney who had been assigned to the case, David Vaughn, a former Los Angeles County assistant district attorney, refused to provide such a letter.

  “I had a meeting with the assistant director and all my bosses to go over the investigation page by page,” recalled Carson, whose recollection was confirmed by another agent in attendance. “After the assistant director heard and read the evidence, he looked at me and said, ‘Why isn’t this case being indicted?’ I said, ‘Good question. Go ask the U.S. attorney’s office. They won’t explain why.’ He said, ‘Well, don’t you have a letter of declination?’ I say they won’t give me one, and he looks me in the eye for a long time, then says, ‘You get that letter of declination.’ Because at this point he’s not going to let this come back on the FBI. There is obviously a case here that should have resulted in an indictment, and if there isn’t one the U.S. attorney has to take responsibility for it.”

  He asked—and eventually implored—Vaughn multiple times to provide the letter of declination, Carson recalled, and was refused on each occasion. “That just doesn’t happen,” Carson said. “I talked to my fellow agents and to my bosses, and they all said they’d never seen a decision not to prosecute an FBI case where the U.S. attorney’s office had refused to provide a letter of declination. It was unique to this situation.”*

  After the March 11, 2005, publication of Philips’s article “FBI Ends Probe,” Carson had been at least slightly consoled by the anger that spread through the FBI’s Los Angeles office. In particular, his Los Angeles colleagues were offended by Philips’s suggestion that Carson had behaved improperly and had based his investigation on information provided by Sanders and Frank. The section of the article that the FBI agents believed most unfair to Carson, though, was a lengthy paragraph in which, according to Philips, David Mack called Carson “the most inept or laziest agent I had ever met.” Carson, Mack claimed, had offered to seek a reduction of his fourteen-year sentence on the Bank of America robbery conviction if he cooperated with the FBI’s investigation of the Wallace murder.

  “Not one word of that is true,” said Carson, who noted that Philips’s article failed to mention that there was another FBI agent, from the local office in Alabama, with him during every second he spent with Mack at the Talladega Federal Correctional Institution, where Mack was currently incarcerated. Carson’s bosses at the FBI’s Los Angeles office vehemently disputed that Carson had ever offered Mack anything at all.

  He had approached Mack with extreme caution, Carson said. He’d heard early on from Perry Sanders that people the attorney had spoken with seemed to be far more afraid of Mack than they were of Suge Knight. He was especially impressed by two inmates who said they preferred to accept twenty-year prison sentences rather than make a deal to testify against Mack, Sanders said: “They told me, ‘Twenty years is a long time, but dead is forever.’ ” What he’d heard from Sanders had been repeated again and again as he’d moved forward with the Biggie investigation, Carson said. “People I wanted to talk to about Mack told me flatly, ‘No, I say one word about David Mack and I am a dead man.’ ” Rafael Perez’s ex-partner Nino Durden had told him simply, “You don’t fuck with Mack,” Carson recalled.

  When they arrived at the Talladega prison to interview Mack in person, Carson recalled, “the other agent and I had to walk across this huge grass field where there were three little cells on the other side. Mack was in one of them.” He remembered Mack’s long braids and “sadistic smile,” Carson said. “When I looked into Mack’s eyes, I have never been more sure in my life that I was looking at a cold-blooded killer than I was in that moment.” Mack, “a charming guy and a totally frightening one,” had of
course given him nothing, Carson recalled.

  Immediately after interviewing Mack, Carson had taken a call from Paul Paquette: “He tells me he just got a call from David Mack and Mack wants to take a polygraph, but he doesn’t want LAPD to be part of it. And he’ll only do it if these four other people are polygraphed also.” His bosses told him to advise Paquette they weren’t interested at this time and would let him know if they were. Unknown to Carson at the time, Paquette had made up the whole “Mack wants a polygraph” story. That would come out eventually, and Paquette would be removed from the case. In the meantime, though, the threat Chuck Philips posed was at the forefront of his thoughts, Carson said.

  In his March 11 article, Philips reported that there had been a meeting in September 2004 in which FBI officials questioned Carson’s “conduct of the investigation” and expressed their concern “that Carson might have been influenced by the Wallace lawyers and that his contacts with them could embarrass the bureau.”

  When I interviewed him for Rolling Stone, Caprino, who had been Philips’s main source for the “FBI Ends Probe” article, told me his statements had been “grossly distorted and misquoted” by the reporter. “That article really pissed off a lot of people, including me,” said Sergio Robleto, who had met Agent Carson for the first time at Rob Frank’s law office in Colorado Springs, where they were reviewing the discovery materials from the LAPD at the same conference table. “Phil Carson was an absolutely stellar FBI agent, above reproach, incorruptible.”

  Cathy Viray sent a lengthy letter on FBI stationary to the Los Angeles Times demanding assorted corrections and clarifications. After a series of “delays and excuses,” Viray told me, the newspaper informed the FBI that it was refusing to publish the letter. “I don’t know of another instance where the Times has refused to publish a letter sent on behalf of the federal government,” she said. “It really makes you wonder what they’re afraid of.”