Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Suge Knight and Mario Ha’mmonds spent a good deal more time together in the late 1990s at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, where they were housed on the same cell block, living just ten feet apart. Both the LAPD and the FBI had started using Ha’mmonds to collect intelligence after learning that he was close to Suge—it was possible they were responsible for where he had been assigned at the prison in the first place. Ha’mmonds said of their first few days on the block together, “Me and Suge reacquainted ourselves from our little escapades in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and we reminisced and laughed and jived and bullshitted about it.”

  Their relationship grew more serious, though, Ha’mmonds said, when Suge began to rely on him for physical protection. Suge had heard that the Rolling Sixties Crips wanted him dead, but at this time Knight “wouldn’t even trust his own Bloods associates,” Ha’mmonds explained, “because a lot of them wanted to do something to him there as well.” Suge turned to the Muslims and to brothers who either were or had been members of the BGF, Ha’mmonds said: “He made sure we had money on our books, made sure that our families was taken care of.” Over time, Suge began to rely on him in almost every detail of daily life in prison. Ha’mmonds recalled, “I would get people to run his errands for him … to run his weed over to different quads, make sure the officer was bringing us what he needed.” Since Suge could barely read or write, Ha’mmonds said, “I used to sign for his packages,” and he spent evenings reading aloud to Knight in the prison yard’s bleachers.

  The murder of Notorious B.I.G. had taken place not long before Knight was moved to the Men’s Colony, and Ha’mmonds recalled that Suge hadn’t needed much time after his arrival to take credit for the killing. “He said, ‘My people handled the business. They took care of him … and he took it like a fat bitch.’ He started laughing, and he said, ‘We just missed Puffy.’ ” At first, Suge maintained that Biggie’s murder was retaliation for the Tupac killing, recalled Ha’mmonds, who told Sanders and Frank he had begun to doubt this story when people associated with the Bay Area rappers Too Short and E-40 offered him money to assassinate Knight, insisting it was Suge who had arranged Tupac’s murder.

  “They asked me, Why am I hanging out with this dude when you know he killed homeboy?” Ha’mmonds recalled.

  Two of the names Suge had mentioned in connection with the murder were Reg and Big Sykes (presumably Death Row director of security Reggie Wright Jr. and Bloods gang member Devon Sykes), Ha’mmonds said. Eventually Suge would name two other members of the team, Ha’mmonds recalled: David Mack and Amir Muhammad. Suge told him that all four had helped him arrange the murder by phone while he was locked up in the county jail in Los Angeles, and he gradually offered details about how the killing had been accomplished: two women who had infiltrated the Bad Boy Records camp provided information about when and where Biggie and Puffy would be exposed, and his team had coordinated events on the night of the murder by using burner cell phones.

  Suge never did tell him who exactly pulled the trigger, Ha’mmonds said. He did, however, ultimately reveal that his story about the Biggie killing being payback for Tupac’s murder was “a smoke screen.” Shortly before Suge was transferred to Mule Creek State Prison he told Ha’mmonds, “Later on, down the line, you’ll see the big picture. It’s about money.” Suge also told him that he had no concern about being charged with Biggie’s death, Ha’mmonds said. “He told me this out of his own mouth, that because LAPD was involved, that this murder would never be solved, and that ‘If anybody says anything against me, I can find out.’ ”

  For Sanders and Frank, Ha’mmonds’s pretrial testimony was about as good as it could get. Still, they knew the man would pose problems as a witness. He was at once a snitch and a career criminal who by his own admission had been involved in other murders. Of greater concern was that, while LAPD records indicated Ha’mmonds had passed along the information about Big Sykes and Reggie Wright Jr. being involved in the Notorious B.I.G. assassination, there was no mention of Mack or Muhammad in those documents. When Sanders asked about this, Ha’mmonds explained that the moment he had brought up Mack and Muhammad in his meetings with LAPD detectives, he was told, “We don’t need to talk about that.” Later, Ha’mmonds said, he came to believe that whatever he told the LAPD was somehow being passed on to Suge Knight. At his two most recent court appearances, Ha’mmonds said, “people from Knight’s camp” had taken seats in the gallery, and both of them had made slashing motions across their throats when he looked at them.

  What put teeth in Ha’mmonds’s claims were the lengths to which the LAPD had gone to hide him from the Wallace Estate’s attorneys. Not only had the police department attempted to withhold documents generated by its interviews with Ha’mmonds, but when it finally did turn these over, the informant’s name was blacked out. “The city and the LAPD clearly understood how damaging Ha’mmonds’s testimony could be to them,” Frank observed. He and Sanders might never have found their way to the informant, Frank said, if not for the fact that, with Robleto’s help, they discovered a single obscure reference in the materials the LAPD surrendered to them. The lawyers threatened to seek a court order if every bit of information relating to Ha’mmonds was not turned over at once. This resulted in the production of documents that revealed the biggest danger the informant posed to the LAPD: the department itself had vouched for his integrity when it used his testimony to obtain search warrants in its investigation of Suge Knight for the murder of Notorious B.I.G.

  During his interrogation by the city’s attorneys, Ha’mmonds put it this way: “I am an honest individual. Even though I’m a criminal, I do not lie. My credibility … must be good, because I’ve made a livelihood out of this. People are in prison … locked up from some of the information that I have contributed to government agencies.”

  “The LAPD has to be asking themselves how they’re going to call him a liar now,” Sanders said, “when they’ve already called him a credible witness.”

  Finding Mario Ha’mmonds was a breakthrough Sanders and Frank desperately needed. The disappearance of Mike Robinson and the inability to locate Kendrick Knox were major blows to their case, the lawyers knew. These were made even more significant by a key ruling against them by Judge Cooper about how the trial should be structured.

  Cooper had decided to break the proceedings into three parts, and the first hurdle the plaintiffs had to get over would be the highest. On the one hand, Sanders and Frank knew they possessed overwhelming evidence that the LAPD had alternately neglected and obstructed an investigation into the possible involvement of LAPD officers associated with Death Row Records in the murder of Notorious B.I.G. But “you can’t sue someone for the failure to fully investigate a crime,” Frank explained. To win their civil rights lawsuit, the attorneys would have to prove that the LAPD was guilty of a “pattern and practice” that had resulted in the rapper’s death. And to do that, Judge Cooper had decided, they would first have to convince the jury that David Mack had been involved in Biggie’s slaying. Only if they were successful in that, Cooper had ruled, would Sanders and Frank be permitted to make the case for an LAPD cover-up.

  On the other hand, they wouldn’t be held to the “proof beyond reasonable doubt” standard of a criminal trial, and would have to convince a jury only that it was more likely than not that Mack and his friend Amir Muhammad were involved in the murder. Mario Ha’mmonds and Eugene Deal, whom they intended to call to the stand as their final two witnesses, would provide plenty of evidence to persuade a jury that it needed to hear the rest of their case, Sanders and Frank believed.

  Robleto, though, knew that the two lawyers were more apprehensive about how their witnesses would perform than they were letting on. “As the trial date approached, everybody was afraid,” the investigator recalled. “All the witnesses for our side, I could tell they were starting to flinch. I had a law enforcement friend who was a good, stand-up guy, but he started refusing to talk to me. I had to tell Perry I didn�
�t think we could put him on the stand.”

  How precarious their case was Sanders and Frank would learn when the first important witness the attorneys intended to call at trial, former Death Row Records bodyguard Kevin Hackie, began to wobble. Robleto had told the attorneys that he found Hackie “quite credible,” especially in his descriptions of seeing David Mack and his former LAPD partner Rafael Perez at Death Row Records parties. Also, Robleto said, he believed Hackie’s anger at the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies that had broken their word to him about providing protection from Suge Knight and the Bloods gang would come through powerfully on the witness stand. The day before Hackie was to be called to testify, though, Sanders and Frank learned via the Los Angeles Times that this key witness had gone sideways. “Witness in B.I.G. Case Says His Memory’s Bad,” read the headline on the Chuck Philips article.

  “I will be in court to testify,” Hackie had told the reporter in an interview at his attorney’s office in Torrance, “but it is a matter of record that I am stressed out and have been on medication for the past five years. My memory is bad. I’m going to answer questions to the best of my knowledge what I remember. But this whole thing has put me over the edge. I am so stressed. I probably won’t even remember our conversation tomorrow.”

  Philips did not report that Hackie had said what “stressed” him was his fear of Knight, the Bloods gang, and the Los Angeles Police Department. Sanders and Frank were able to get the former bodyguard to say all this when he began his testimony the next day. Still, the newspaper called his performance in court “erratic” and emphasized the bodyguard’s repudiation of his previous sworn testimony that David Mack had worked in a “covert capacity” for Death Row Records and that Mack had been given special access to “numerous Death Row functions” reserved for Suge Knight’s closest associates.

  “That was a nasty day in court with Kevin Hackie,” Frank recalled, “to have a witness turn on you like that. And then there was Chuck Philips, sitting in the back of the courtroom with a smug expression.”

  Sanders was so infuriated by the Times’ reporting that he held a press conference in the hallway outside the courtroom on the morning of the trial’s second day. When these proceedings were concluded, Sanders promised that “all evidence gathered, without exception, will be donated to a local public library so the public will be able to access this information without having to rely on the L.A. Times’ spin about what these volumes contain.”

  Robleto, though, was critical of Sanders’s and Frank’s failure to give Hackie greater assurance that he would come to no harm. “He was concerned about safety, wanted certain things done to protect him, and was pissed off when it wasn’t,” Robleto said. “He was afraid. I think they should have done more to protect him.”

  For their part, Sanders and Frank were peeved by what they perceived as their investigator’s hesitation to interview witnesses who had never been contacted by the LAPD. “I was reluctant because I could be considered to be interfering with a police investigation,” Robleto explained.

  Nevertheless, Sanders and Frank were counting on Robleto to be perhaps their most important witness at trial, and were confident he could handle that responsibility. “From his work on cold cases in particular, Sergio could perform a complete autopsy of a police investigation,” Frank observed. “Sergio is such a pro at that. He can take a case apart with such insight. We knew he was going to impress the hell out of the jury, and we were pretty sure the city’s attorneys could never put a dent in him.”

  Robleto would never take the stand, however, because of what was about to happen over the next seven days

  * The Five-Percent Nation is an offshoot of the Nation of Islam that believes white men are devils and black men are gods.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The instigator of it all was Xavier Hermosillo. A longtime Los Angeles social activist and radio host, Hermosillo was also perhaps the best-connected and most influential civilian employee of the LAPD. He had sat in judgment of more disciplinary complaints against police officers than any other person in Los Angeles. Board of Rights hearings, as these proceedings were known, were presided over by tribunals made up of two members of the department’s command staff—almost always captains—and a single civilian who was employed on a contract basis. Hermosillo had been selected for his position because he was not only an outspoken critic of police abuses in Los Angeles’s Hispanic communities, but also a man with a criminal justice degree who felt real sympathy for the difficulty of police work and genuine admiration for those who did it well.

  He was “a homeboy from the housing project,” Hermosillo said, who had known a good many of the LAPD’s black and Latino officers since childhood. “Having grown up with these guys, I knew a lot about who were the good ones and who were the bad ones.” Only by serving on LAPD Board of Rights tribunals, though, had Hermosillo come to know the unscrupulous tactics of Bernard Parks.

  Hermosillo was personally responsible for the fact that Parks was not selected as LAPD chief after the resignation of Daryl Gates in 1992. Because of his position as a hearing officer, and because he had become the confidant of a number of officers disturbed about the abuse of power by certain senior LAPD commanders, Hermosillo was made aware of several instances in which Parks had misused his authority.

  Two of these were “shocking examples” of Parks’s disregard for propriety, Hermosillo said. The first involved the case of a serial rapist on the USC campus. Hermosillo had followed the investigation from afar and knew that the victims were all young white woman and that the perpetrator was a black male. “But there were no real details about the guy,” Hermosillo recalled, “because he’d worn a mask. So it went unsolved for quite a while.” Finally the rapist was literally caught in the act. “They arrested him when he was right on top of this girl,” Hermosillo said, “then found his burglary tools in the backpack he had with him.” The rapist turned out to be a relative of Bernard Parks.*

  Hermosillo wasn’t bothered by the fact that word of the family connection between the LAPD’s then–deputy chief Parks and the USC rapist had been squelched so thoroughly that not a single reference ever appeared in news accounts. “That, I could understand,” he said. What offended him was that Parks had shown up at the LAPD’s Southwest Division headquarters at about 2 a.m. in the hours after the rapist’s arrest to use a provision of the city code that permitted anyone holding the rank of deputy chief or above to take personal custody of a criminal suspect. “Just hours after they pull this guy off the girl he was raping, Bernie walks him back out onto the street, which I found absolutely outrageous,” Hermosillo said. “Then the guy disappears.” The young man would ultimately be recaptured, convicted of the rapes, and sentenced to decades in prison, but “who knows what else he might have done in the time he was loose,” Hermosillo said.

  The second instance of Parks’s abuse of his position that would impel Hermosillo to act against him involved the deputy chief’s daughter Michelle. Hermosillo’s knowledge of the incident had come through his friend Al Rubalcalva, an LAPD Internal Affairs Division sergeant who was also the vice president of the Latin American Law Enforcement Officers Association. It was a messy, complicated story, Rubalcalva explained.

  Michelle Parks was separated from her husband and living with a new boyfriend, but, according to the estranged husband, she had been lending him her automobile on a regular basis while their divorce was pending. One summer evening, the husband showed up at the house to pick up the car while the boyfriend was with her, and Michelle Parks stepped out onto the front porch to shout that the husband was stealing her car. The husband jumped behind the wheel of the car and drove off, with the boyfriend in pursuit in his own vehicle. The chase ran all through South-Central Los Angeles before the husband escaped.

  Two days later, though, the husband was arrested while driving the car in Wilshire Division, Rubalcalva continued. Informed that the vehicle had been reported stolen by its owner, Michelle Parks, the estrange
d husband said, first, that the car was borrowed, and, second, that Michelle was his wife. He then described the car chase that had taken place two nights earlier, a story that included a startling claim: Michelle’s boyfriend had fired a shotgun at him several times during the pursuit, and the husband believed that one of those blasts had hit some innocent bystanders at a bus stop on the corner of Crenshaw and Adams boulevards. The Wilshire detectives reviewed the police reports filed in Southwest Division on the night in question, and indeed found one involving a drive-by shooting at Crenshaw and Adams. They notified Southwest Division detectives, who promptly arrested Michelle Parks’s boyfriend.

  That was when Bernard Parks became involved. Not long after the boyfriend’s arrest, Parks had shown up at Southwest Division to meet privately with Alan Kerstein, the commander of detectives in the division, who was also his longtime friend and protégé. Almost immediately, Michelle Parks’s boyfriend was released from custody on the basis of what Rubalcalva called a “concocted story” that he was chasing an armed burglar and had fired the shotgun in self-defense. Parks’s wife’s brother Cedric Wilder, a Southwest Division detective, was also involved in “the so-called investigation” of the incident, Hermosillo remembered.

  Rubalcalva had learned of the case only because the detective adjutant at Southwest Division had phoned, furious, to describe what had taken place and to give him the relevant report numbers. “I pulled the reports,” Rubalcalva recalled, “and there it all was. I gave the reports to Xavier, and he filed the complaint.”

  Before filing the complaint against him, Hermosillo remembered, he had paid a visit to Parks at his office in LAPD headquarters. “I said, ‘Look, I’ve seen this, I’ve seen that.’ He says, ‘Ignore it.’ I say, ‘Bernie, I can’t support you.’ He looks at me and says, ‘I don’t need your support. I’m gonna be the next chief of police.’ ”