Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Yet Parks managed to provide absolutely no information about how the LAPD had determined Amir Muhammad was not involved. “It was one nonanswer after another,” Frank recalled. “When all else failed, he claimed that sharing this or that information would compromise the continuing investigation.” Parks made himself personally vulnerable on only a single point during the deposition, claiming that he had not known about Russell Poole’s “involvement” in the Mack-Muhammad theory of the Biggie Smalls murder until he read about it in the newspaper. Poole told Sanders and Frank that this was a lie and that he could prove it was, because it had been brought up in a meeting with Chief Parks where there were other witnesses.

  Sanders and Frank got very little from questioning either David Mack or Amir Muhammad, a.k.a. Harry Billups, a.k.a. Harry Muhammad. The attorneys had made a decision to drop both men as defendants in the case, in part because neither had any money that was not well hidden, but mainly because, as Sanders said, “we were concerned the jurors would be terrified of them if they were sittin’ in court.” In spite of this decision, neither Mack nor Muhammad was willing to cooperate in any way with the Wallace side—which was not surprising, given that the plaintiffs’ theory of the case was still that Muhammad had been the shooter in a murder Mack had helped to set up.

  Mack’s deposition was at least interesting, though more confusing than anything else. The former LAPD officer was questioned by Frank at the same federal penitentiary in Talladega, Alabama, where Phil Carson had met with him. Mack had been transferred there after being stabbed on the running track at the prison in Illinois where he had begun his fourteen-year sentence for bank robbery. According to his attorney, a group of Hispanic prisoners had attacked Mack after they saw accounts in print and on television that described his career as a police officer and his association with Rafael Perez. According to the attorney, the prisoner who punctured Mack’s lung with a sharp object was upset to learn that Mack and Perez had preyed on gang members in Los Angeles’ Rampart District.

  In Talladega, Mack answered a number of Frank’s questions but responded to most by pleading the Fifth Amendment. Mack of course denied having been involved in the murder of Notorious B.I.G. or possessing any knowledge of Amir Muhammad’s involvement in the crime. He also denied attending any Death Row Records social functions or any other affair where Suge Knight was present, contradicting multiple witnesses who claimed to have seen him with Suge at Death Row parties.

  Obviously, none of that was surprising, said Frank, whose main memory of the deposition was how “physically intimidating” he found the former LAPD officer to be. Some of Mack’s denials, though, left Frank dumbfounded. He denied ever having been interviewed by LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division detectives Brian Tyndall and Greg Grant, which amounted to an accusation that the two had fraudulently created their notes and tapes of that interview, part of the evidence that had helped convict Mack in court. Mack also denied that any police radios had been found when his home was searched after his arrest for bank robbery, though one had been and was logged into evidence at the time.

  Odder still was Mack’s claim that he was not a close friend of Amir Muhammad. Yes, Amir was his children’s godfather, Mack said, but that was because Amir had asked to be. Yes, Amir had visited him once in prison, Mack conceded, but then refused to answer why, if they were not close friends, the man who had been his college roommate would make such a visit. He also refused to disclose what they had spoken about during that visit. He was a practicing Muslim, Mack said, but declined to say how or when he had become one, or whether Amir Muhammad had something to do with it. Mack acknowledged owning a black Chevy Impala in March 1997, but insisted it was never out of his possession for any “significant” period of time. When he was asked if Amir Muhammad had ever borrowed his Impala, Mack was cagey, saying that if Amir had driven the car, he was unaware of it.

  Mack said he was unsure about where he had been between midnight and 4 a.m. on March 9, 1997, the date of the Notorious B.I.G. murder, and said he did not know where Amir Muhammad had been then, either.

  By far the most revealing aspect of the deposition was Mack’s assertion of his right to refuse answering questions that might incriminate him. It was no surprise that he pleaded the Fifth to avoid answering any questions connected to the Bank of America robbery. Mack’s more telling Fifth Amendment claims, though, came when he refused to answer whether attorney Donald Re had represented him in his trial on the bank robbery charges. Re was Mack’s defense lawyer in that case, and there was no risk of self-incrimination in saying so. At the time, attorneys who watched the trial had wondered how Mack could afford one of the most expensive attorneys in L.A. The defendant may have stolen more than $722,000 in the Bank of America robbery, but it was difficult to believe he could access that money from jail, and there was no way a lawyer as smart as Re would risk being paid with stolen funds. What Mack was concerned about became clear only when Frank asked the next question: Had Re been paid for his services with funds provided by Suge Knight? He was refusing to answer based on his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, Mack replied.

  Amir Muhammad, who was deposed at his attorney’s office in Orange County under what was still his legal name, Harry Billups, had split the difference on the question of how close he was to Mack. They were “pretty good friends,” Muhammad said. “Not best friends, but good friends.” He always had been and still was closer to Mack’s wife, Carla, than he was to David, Muhammad added. He contradicted his friend on whose idea it had been for him to become godfather to the Mack children: “He asked me to be godfather.” You didn’t ask him, he asked you? Frank pressed. “Yes,” Muhammad answered. Beyond this, however, the man denied everything and gave up nothing.

  There was a jarring contrast, Frank recalled, between Muhammad’s appearance and the way he tried to present himself. “From the moment he walked into the room I was afraid of him,” Frank said. Muscled up, with a shaved head and a flat expression, Muhammad exuded menace, as Frank remembered him. “You felt this was someone capable of serious violence every time you looked him in the eye.” Muhammad, though, was consistent throughout the deposition in portraying himself as an innocent bystander who was stunned and confused by how he had been drawn into this whole sordid mess.

  “I’m a mortgage broker,” he said several times in answer to Frank’s questions, as if that alone were proof that he could not possibly have been involved in murder.

  Sergio Robleto, though, was already poking holes in Muhammad’s image. The man’s criminal history, Robleto had learned, went back at least to his days as an athlete at the University of Oregon. In 1980, as Harry Billups, Muhammad had been arrested in three different Oregon cities for theft of services—skipping out on restaurant or bar bills. More serious was the record Muhammad had accumulated in California during the 1990s. State records showed a man almost constantly on the move, with addresses in an assortment of Southern California cities under at least four different names, regularly using driver’s licenses and other identification that had been falsely obtained. Most troubling were the incidents stemming from Muhammad’s relationship with a woman named Angelique Mitchell. He had been arrested in Anaheim in 1993 for infliction of corporal injury on a spouse/cohabitant after an altercation with Mitchell. That charge was ultimately dismissed by the Orange County district attorney’s office on the grounds of “furtherance of justice.” But Muhammad had been arrested again in 1994, this time in Fullerton, after Mitchell accused him of beating her in front of her children. The charges of assault, battery, infliction of corporal injury on a spouse/cohabitant, and willful cruelty to a child were again dismissed (and again as furtherance of justice), but only after Muhammad had pleaded guilty to trespass with refusal to leave a property and received a sentence of sixty days in jail, along with twenty-four months of probation.

  The most significant incident involving Mitchell, though, had taken place on October 21, 1998, seventeen months after the Notorious B.I.G. mu
rder, when Muhammad had been arrested in the city of Chino for brandishing a firearm.

  Mitchell had called the Chino police to say that Muhammad showed up without warning at her workplace, a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Pomona. After he saw her climb into a Blazer SUV with her new boyfriend, Mitchell said, Muhammad followed the couple onto the freeway in his black BMW, a vehicle that was the basis of the lease fraud charges that had recently been filed against him in Los Angeles. After tailing them for some distance, the BMW sped up alongside the Blazer, and Muhammad pointed a pistol at them through his open window, Mitchell said. When the Chino police pulled Muhammad over, they found a semiautomatic Beretta loaded with an eight-round clip in his vehicle. Muhammad denied pointing the pistol at the couple, then explained that he was in the process of moving and had forgotten the Beretta was in his car. After providing the police with a falsely obtained California driver’s license in the name of “Harry Muhammad” that bore an address in Fontana, California, he was cited for carrying a concealed weapon and released.

  Six days later, Mitchell and her boyfriend were dead from gunshot wounds to the head. The San Bernardino County coroner’s office ruled the deaths a murder-suicide.

  “The coroner’s verdict was based on one eyewitness, a cop who told this crazy story about how the couple jumped out onto the front porch of this house and the murder-suicide happened right in front of him,” Sanders recalled. “It just didn’t sound right.”

  Robleto, though, had not been able to find anything that tied Muhammad to the killings, other than their proximity in time to the firearm-brandishing incident. “The crime wasn’t well investigated, but there was nothing you could really point to,” he explained. “It was one guy’s word, and there was nothing solid to challenge it with.”

  Still, Sanders said, “Sergio had found enough for us to know that we could put Muhammad on the stand and let the jury get a real good look at what a bad guy he was. I was especially lookin’ forward to askin’ him why he needed all those phony driver’s licenses.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  As the trial date loomed, Robleto, like Sanders and Frank, was working on so many fronts that it left him constantly frazzled. Part of what made his work so exhausting, he said, was that “a number of the witnesses coming forward were Suge Knight plants, sent our way to set us up for failure. Weeding them out became a big part of my job.” What most troubled the investigator, though, was his growing disillusionment with the police department to which he had devoted most of his adult life.

  “The lack of connections that had been made,” Robleto said, “the lack of effort to make those connections—I kept bumping against it again and again. It pained me to say it, but I was literally forced to the conclusion that the Los Angeles Police Department did not want to solve the murder of Christopher Wallace.”

  Discrediting Russell Poole, Robleto had found, was the thrust of the “so-called investigation” that the LAPD had done since the detective’s resignation. “The deeper I looked, the more obvious it was that the detectives assigned to the case weren’t running the case. The city attorneys, Paquette and Vincent, they were the ones in charge. The detectives were actually asking Paquette what they could do. That was a big thing to me, because no one should be interfering with police investigators.”

  Even more disturbing to Robleto, though, was the way the Blue Wall had encircled the Notorious B.I.G. case and was “refusing to let any light in or out.” Only a couple of police officers, both of low rank, had been willing to talk to him about the cops working for Suge Knight and Death Row Records. “One told me there were over thirty officers that worked for Death Row on a list,” Robleto recalled. “He said that one of his command officers had literally hidden it from the police department’s investigators.” Even that officer would talk only with a promise that his anonymity would be protected. Most of the cops Robleto tried to speak with, including those who had worked with and for him, not only refused to talk but treated him as if he were a traitor to the LAPD. “One of the deputy chiefs came up to me pointing his finger right between my eyes. He said, ‘You’re giving Russell Poole credibility. Stop it!’ ”

  Experiences such as that only deepened the respect he felt for his former detective, Robleto said. “I saw how everybody had aligned themselves against Russ. And I knew Russ. He couldn’t back off from something he knew was right. His integrity was four inches before his nose. And he was despised for it when he should have been admired.”

  Robleto was simultaneously shocked and thrilled when he found a search warrant that had been written in 1999, shortly after Poole’s resignation from the department. The author, a Robbery-Homicide Division detective named Buford Watts, had laid out the suspicions that Suge Knight was responsible for coordinating the hit on Biggie. “This affidavit was written to remain confidential, and the LAPD didn’t want us to have it,” Robleto said, “because it strongly corroborated what Russ had been saying.” What made the affidavit so significant was that a good deal of it had been based on statements made by an informant who had been provided to the LAPD by FBI agents working in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Confidential and reliable” was how the man had been described by the feds, who had closed a number of major cases with the informant’s help. After a good deal of searching, Robleto was eventually able to find this “confidential and reliable informant.” His name was Mario Ha’mmonds.

  Ha’mmonds, a former partner in a small rap label called Lock Records, had a long and complicated history of both criminal conduct and cooperation with the authorities. He was presently locked up in San Quentin, where Robleto, accompanied by Richard Valdemar, went to check him out. “I found him extremely credible,” Robleto said. “He was a pretty heavy dude. He knew all the gangsters and who they were related to. He was a treasure house of information.”

  Robleto phoned Sanders and Frank and told them they needed to get themselves up to the Bay Area to depose this guy on videotape. When the attorneys arrived at San Quentin, they found themselves face-to-face with a hulking figure who wore graying dreadlocks and black horn-rim glasses with his prison blues. He was fingering prayer beads and seated in a wheelchair. When the lawyers asked why the wheelchair, Ha’mmonds said he was being treated for a broken neck and liver cancer, among other ailments, and did not believe he was long for this world.

  Nevertheless, he remained a man who could take care of himself; Ha’mmonds had recently been transferred from the Marin County Jail following a bloody battle with another inmate. This man had attacked him with a pen, Ha’mmonds said, after overhearing a phone conversation involving the Biggie Smalls case. Even from his wheelchair Ha’mmonds had managed to inflict what the Marin County Sheriff’s Department described as “great bodily harm” on his assailant.

  “Music, records, film—crime,” Ha’mmonds replied to a question about what kinds of businesses he had been involved in. The man seemed anything but ashamed that he had spent twenty-six of his forty-nine years behind bars. An Oakland native, Ha’mmonds was OG in a fundamental sense, having joined the Black Guerrilla Family while incarcerated in his early twenties. What really had given Ha’mmonds status in the gangster rap world, though, was the time he had spent as an enforcer for the most powerful drug lord in Northern California, Felix Mitchell. He had dropped out of the BGF in 1987, Ha’mmonds said, when he joined a Nation of Islam splinter group known as the Five Percenters,* which anointed him “a Muslim who will commit crimes in the name of Allah,” as Ha’mmonds explained it. Ha’mmonds had quit the Five Percenters, he said, to become an Orthodox Sunni Muslim in 1990, around the same time he decided to inform on his fellow gang members (“debrief,” he called it) in order to escape the suffocating confines of the super-maximum-security prison at Pelican Bay and return to a mainline institution. Most of the information he provided to the government involved “when we had dudes killed or we killed ourselves,” Ha’mmonds told Sanders and Frank.

  He had worked ever since, Ha’mmonds said, as what he liked t
o call an “agent provocateur” and had been well paid for assisting the government in various investigations, in particular those involving Suge Knight and Death Row Records.

  Ha’mmonds said he had been introduced to Knight by Tupac Shakur. He and Pac had known each other since the late 1980s, when the future rap legend was a skinny, scared teenager living in Marin City and working as a dancer with Digital Underground. The two met up in Las Vegas for the Holyfield-Bowe heavyweight title fight in November 1995, Ha’mmonds said, and were gambling with a group that included Knight, Snoop Dogg, and several members of the Dogg Pound at Caesars Palace before adjourning to the VIP room at Suge’s 662 Club. One night, Suge arranged for the two of them to be alone in that room, Ha’mmonds recalled: “Knight said, ‘You’re from up north, right, man? You fuck with Felix and them, right?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he mentioned Christopher Wallace—Biggie Smalls—and he say, ‘You know, that fat punk is giving me a lot of lip and lot of shit on the East Coast. You think you can handle it?’ By ‘handle it’ meaning, ‘Can you arrange to do—assassinate—Christopher Wallace, Biggie Smalls?’ I told him no.” Suge seemed very disappointed, Ha’mmonds recalled: “He say, ‘Aww, I thought you was hard, man.’ ”

  In spite of this exchange, he was still welcome to hang with Suge and his crew, Ha’mmonds said. During a video shoot in L.A., Knight had told him that there was no need to worry about drug busts and such while on location, “ ’cause we got LAPD.” It was in this period that he met David Mack, whom he understood to be a member of Suge’s security team, Ha’mmonds said. “I don’t trust cops, regardless of how cool they is,” Ha’mmonds told Sanders and Frank, and said he avoided Mack. But he felt an immediate connection with another man he met at one of Suge’s parties in Las Vegas, Amir Muhammad. He was impressed, Ha’mmonds said, that Muhammad had greeted him in fluent Arabic.