Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  While Sanders and Frank were demanding $1.3 million in sanctions, the city, hoping the court might split the difference, had countered that the amount should be less than a third of that. Judge Cooper ultimately decided on an award of $1.1 million. What seemed to the L.A. media an astoundingly large sum was less impressive to Sanders and Frank. The money covered their costs up to this point, but was well short of an amount that would provide the attorneys with a profit. And now, with the addition of Rafael Perez as a defendant, the scope of the case had been enormously expanded. The city would have to turn over every shred of evidence that related to the crimes and claims of Rafael Perez, Judge Cooper had ruled, but the city’s attorneys were now using any delay tactics available to them, knowing that, for the other side, time was money. Sanders and Frank had brought four Los Angeles attorneys in to assist with the case—Dennis Chang and his associate Catherine Liu, Chris Brizzolara, and Bradley Gage—and would have to share with them the ultimate payday, if there was one.

  Brizzolara and Gage in fact would be doing much if not most of the work on the case from that point forward. Both attorneys recognized from the start that they had joined a lawsuit unlike any they’d been part of before. Brizzolara had litigated dozens of civil rights cases and had worked with attorneys who had handled hundreds more. He believed he knew the lay of the land, but he’d never seen terrain like that created by Wallace v. Los Angeles. “I don’t know of a single other civil case where a public entity has been sanctioned more than a million dollars for its conduct,” he said. “There was an obvious case for obstruction of justice already on the table, but neither the FBI nor the U.S. attorney’s office wanted to pick it up. It was not just an easy case to make—it had already been made. And it just kept growing as we found more and more stuff that the city and the police department had hidden from us.”

  Material obtained from a former cop named Bennie Keys, who had been locked up with David Mack at the Montebello City Jail after Mack’s arrest for the Bank of America robbery, was especially significant. It was Keys who told the LAPD that, within minutes of arriving at the jail, Mack had informed the other prisoners he was a Mob Piru Blood and that they had better not fuck with him. Mack had also boasted that the $700,000 he retained from the bank robbery was “invested” in a way that would at least double his money by the time he got out of prison; that he could do eight years standing on his head and would be a rich man when he hit the streets again. It was Keys as well who reported that Mack had hired a Hispanic gang member to kill his ex-girlfriend and accomplice in the bank robbery, Errolyn Romero, after learning she had made a deal to testify against him.

  All that was in the material the city and the LAPD had turned over in discovery. What the city had not turned over, however, was the statement by Keys in 1998 that Mack had told him that he was at the scene of the Biggie Smalls murder, implying he had been part of it. It was only when they obtained records of a lawsuit Keys had filed against the FBI for failing to put him in the witness protection program, as promised, that Brizzolara and his colleagues learned of what Mack had allegedly told Keys about the Biggie murder.

  “We all knew there was more—probably a lot more—that the city was keeping from us,” Brizzolara recalled. “Figuring out what it was became a big part of our job.”

  Gage, who had been the attorney in a good many cases involving LAPD officers as either plaintiffs or defendants, was the one who suggested trying to obtain the LAPD’s Training, Evaluation and Management System (TEAMS) reports on the various officers they suspected of involvement with Death Row Records and the Biggie murder. Sanders, who had never heard of TEAMS reports, was enthusiastic when Gage explained that these were computer documents that listed all the complaints of misconduct—and their resolutions—involving LAPD officers. The average TEAMS report on a veteran officer was at most two or three pages long, Gage said. The TEAMS reports on David Mack and his friend Sammy Martin were each at least two or three times that length. Gage was boggled, though, when he saw the TEAMS report on Rafael Perez. “It was pages and pages long,” the attorney remembered. “And the complaints against him were for really bad shit. Some of those arose out of the Rampart Scandal, but there were at least seventeen serious allegations that had been made against Perez before Rampart. The LAPD had known for a long time what a bad guy this was.”

  “Stunning stuff,” Brizzolara called the Perez TEAMS report (the details of which were placed under seal by the court). What most amazed him after he spent a few months on the Wallace v. Los Angeles case, though, Brizzolara said, was the role the Los Angeles Times had played in distorting the public perception of what was taking place in the courtroom. “I’d go to hearings, get up the next morning and read the L.A. Times, and think, ‘Were they at the same hearing I was?’ ” recalled Brizzolara, who was learning a great deal about the sway the newspaper held not only in Los Angeles but all across the country. “I grew up in Oklahoma,” he explained, “and I would get calls from people there who read the L.A. Times articles reprinted in their local newspaper. And it was very upsetting to me that people out there believed this stuff was true.”

  Gage said, “People that knew I was on this trial stopped talking to me”—because of the way the case was being presented in the newspaper. “The Times then had so much power and clout in L.A. that they could virtually control the narrative. And they did.”

  “What worried me—and I was pretty sure it was part of the city’s strategy—was the impact on the potential jury pool,” Brizzolara said. “Through Chuck Philips, the city was really poisoning the waters, and it was tough to combat.”

  The vastly changed and immensely larger lawsuit that resulted from Judge Cooper’s declaration of a mistrial received almost no attention from the media in Los Angeles until November 2005, when Rolling Stone published “The Unsolved Murder of Notorious B.I.G.” There were two especially newsworthy aspects of the article for the Los Angeles media. One was the blunt criticism of how the Los Angeles Times had reported on the Biggie Smalls murder and the resulting wrongful death lawsuit. The other was an argument that the mostly fictional Rampart Scandal, ginned up by Rafael Perez, had been used to camouflage the real scandal: a group of police officers in the employ of Death Row Records had become a de facto criminal gang responsible not only for the murder of Biggie Smalls, but also for the killings of a number of young black men, and for the depredation of the Rampart district. This latter point was acute in Los Angeles because before writing the Rolling Stone article I had written the book LAbyrinth, which had taken the city’s media to task both for ignoring evidence of LAPD involvement in the Biggie murder and for giving unthinking credence to Perez’s claims of corruption in the Rampart Division CRASH unit. Rolling Stone, though, created a chink in my argument when an editor removed a paragraph concerning the Times story that had first reported Russell Poole’s theory of the Biggie murder. Marc Duvoisin recognized this as a chance to strike back and sent off a letter to the magazine stating that, because of my failure to mention that article, I had forfeited “any claim to be taken seriously.” I replied that I had acknowledged the Times 1999 article about Russell Poole “first in my book LAbyrinth and again in the article I submitted to Rolling Stone.” The magazine’s editors inserted a note stating, “This citation was cut for space from the final article.”

  Nevertheless, the back-and-forth permitted most of the L.A. media to reduce the story to a spat between a national magazine and the largest newspaper west of the Hudson River, without any actual consideration of the facts. The single exception was the city’s second and much smaller daily newspaper, the Los Angeles Daily News, which printed a front-page story about the Rolling Stone article that focused mainly on the revelation of a link between the Rampart Scandal and the Notorious B.I.G. murder. Sanders, who for several years had shrugged off my contention that the murder and Rampart were connected, told the Daily News that he had changed his mind. “We had never focused on the Rampart aspect,” he told the newspaper. “Now
in hindsight, now that we’ve seen how things unfolded, that theory could make complete sense.” The story’s next paragraph read: “Sanders said Rampart—a scandal that cost the city tens of millions of dollars and led to the federal consent decree levied on the LAPD—got ‘tons of attention’ while ‘cops working with gangsters got almost no attention.’ ”

  The only breaking news in the Daily News story came from Don Vincent, who told the newspaper, “There are no ongoing settlement talks because ‘so much money’ is being demanded, and the city believes it will prevail.” For the first time, Sanders and Frank felt certain that the city would not.

  The two attorneys would admit their surprise that in interviews with jurors after the mistrial they were told they had been winning the case. The most significant event of the trial, as the members of the jury recalled it, had been Sanders’s questioning of Bernard Parks. Now “Councilman Parks,” and the most powerful black politician in the city, Parks couldn’t be quite as opaque in front of a judge and jury as he had been during his deposition. Within his first few questions, Sanders got the former LAPD chief to endorse his theory about cop “tools.” Yes, guns, badges, and radios were all police tools, Parks agreed, as were “camaraderie and special access to other officers.” The moment that the jurors remembered best, though, had come during Sanders’s follow-up questioning of Parks. “Is it fair to say that David Mack is an individual who’s capable of being involved in very, very serious crime and taking the facts to his grave?” Sanders asked. Don Vincent’s vociferous objection turned into the perfect setup for what Sanders would offer in defense of his question. With the court’s permission, he asked Parks to read a passage from his deposition in which he had specifically agreed that David Mack was quite capable of “taking to his grave facts that the police would like.”

  “I was right next to the jury and I could see how riveted they were,” Sanders recalled. “But I didn’t understand what an impact it had on them until we talked to them after the mistrial.”

  Parks’s statement about Mack, combined with testimony from Russell Poole’s former partner Fred Miller that he had taken the case against Suge Knight for orchestrating Biggie’s murder to the district attorney’s office, had made a powerful impact on them, jurors said. Their conversations with the jury affirmed for Sanders and Frank something each had learned again and again over the years, which was that seemingly small victories can echo loudly in a courtroom. One of their big advantages in the abbreviated trial, the attorneys said, had been the fact that their paralegal Audrey Matheny “was the only person in the courtroom who knew how to manipulate the technology,” as Frank put it. Because of Matheny, a single mother raising a young son, “we had our best exhibits sitting on-screen in the courtroom while the other side was questioning witnesses.” The jurors had been amused and affected by the contrast between what they were seeing and what they were hearing.

  They were headed into the second trial far better armed than they had been in the first, Sanders and Frank knew, with perhaps the most important ruling that could be made by the judge already in their favor. The two attorneys understood, though, that their return trip to the courtroom would be a long and arduous journey. The city’s first submission of discovery evidence included eighty-one CDs of new Perez-related evidence that were provided initially to Judge Cooper, then to Sanders and Frank. The CDs contained hundreds of thousands of pages that would have to be pored over before the case could move toward trial. On top of that, many new witnesses, among them Rafael Perez, would have to be deposed.

  Kenneth Boagni, of course, would be first and foremost among these new witnesses. Or so Sanders and Frank hoped. On the day the mistrial was declared, Sanders had sent Bradley Gage to Calipatria to conduct a deposition of Boagni. Nearly the first words out of the prisoner’s mouth, though, were, “I’m not going to give you any testimony.”

  Sanders and Frank, in particular, had been furious during the court hearings that led to the mistrial when Assistant City Attorney Vincent repeatedly identified Boagni as the informant whose claims about Rafael Perez were at issue. Vincent had even paused to spell Boagni’s name aloud during a hearing on June 27, knowing that Los Angeles Times reporters were present. The newspaper published Boagni’s name the next day (along with Vincent’s attacks on his credibility), and the man was naturally upset when officials at the Calipatria prison informed him his life was now at risk. Gage had been met by three attorneys for the city, plus two LAPD officers, when he arrived at Calipatria to depose Boagni. The inmate spoke with furious intensity when he informed Gage that he had been “told by a few people here in this institution about my—about the concern they had about my name being mentioned in the paper as an informant.” When Boagni demanded to know who had disclosed his name to the press, Gage recalled, Vincent told him it had been Perry Sanders. He insisted to Boagni that this was not true, Gage said, but by then the man had made up his mind not to cooperate. “I have concerns about my family,” he said. The deposition was canceled.

  “It has become a clear pattern,” Frank told me when I interviewed him for Rolling Stone. “The LAPD and the city try to hide the existence of witnesses who can help our case, then they try to block our access to those witnesses, and when that fails, they leak the witnesses’ identities to Chuck Philips, knowing he will use that information in the pages of the L.A. Times to hurt our case in any way he can.”

  Three months passed before Boagni agreed to a one-on-one meeting with Sanders. “I kept reaching out and finally he said come see him,” Sanders recalled. “I got on a plane to L.A. the next day and drove out there through the desert to Calipatria.” Though he refused to disclose the details of his conversation with Boagni—“I promised him I wouldn’t share that with anybody”—Sanders did say that he had been reassured by how composed and articulate the inmate was, and that he “might now be the best witness we have.” Just days later, though, Sanders was alerted that LAPD officials were spreading word that Boagni had recanted. Sanders sent a message to Calipatria asking if that was true, and in reply received a letter in which Boagni wrote that he stood by his earlier testimony “100,000 percent.” The letter also made it clear, however, that Boagni was beginning to recognize the powerful position in which recent events had placed him. He had just been visited in prison by an LAPD representative who “made it perfectly clear that if I was to testify, I would bury the city and the LAPD,” Boagni wrote, adding that this same person “made it clear he hoped I wouldn’t depose or testify.”

  This raised the obvious concern, Sanders acknowledged, that the city and the police department might be able to manipulate Boagni with the hope of a reduced prison sentence.

  During the next six months, Sanders and Frank repeatedly told Judge Cooper that they believed the LAPD was still withholding evidence related not only to Perez and Boagni, but also to Mack and Muhammad. The attorneys pointed to new information they were finding in documents they were receiving years after those documents should have been handed over in discovery, including sightings of Muhammad at a 1993 meeting in the offices of Death Row Records and at the party that celebrated Snoop Dogg’s acquittal on murder charges in 1996. They had also found a cryptic reference to an LAPD report that, shortly before his arrest in 1998, Perez had visited an inmate in the Los Angeles County Jail who was cooperating with authorities and warned the man, “Don’t talk about Biggie.” But what they hadn’t gotten from the city, the attorneys said, was the single most important piece of evidence in the case, the “clue sheet” that listed the details of every tip or piece of evidence collected by detectives assigned to the investigation of the Biggie Smalls murder. The LAPD was maintaining that it couldn’t find the sheet. In the clue sheet’s absence, Sanders and Frank were planning to demand that the judge instruct the jury to make the most negative assessment available of the LAPD’s failure to produce that document. What the judge did instead was warn the city’s attorneys that if she discovered that either they or the LAPD were continuing to with
hold documents, there would be “consequences.”

  Judge Cooper got the chance to decide what those consequences were in April 2006, when the city and its police department coughed up what Sanders and Frank recognized instantly as the most significant document they had put their hands on to date. It was a Los Angeles Police Department complaint form for Case No. 01-0190 revealing that, on the basis of allegations by Kenneth Boagni, the LAPD had been forced to open an investigation into whether Rafael Perez and David Mack had “conspired to kill Christopher Wallace.” Because of what Boagni had told them about his conversations with Perez, the department also had been compelled to make a formal record of the allegations that Perez and Sammy Martin were Mack’s accomplices in the Bank of America robbery, and that Perez and Mack together committed “multiple home invasion robberies.”

  The complaint form had been turned over to the plaintiffs’ attorneys only at the insistence of the recently appointed head of the LAPD’s newly formed Consent Decree Bureau, Gerald Chaleff. He was a former president of the Los Angeles County Bar Association who had for years been one of the city’s top defense attorneys, most famous for representing Lyle and Erik Menendez, the Beverly Hills brothers convicted of their parents’ 1989 murder. Now an LAPD employee with the rank of deputy chief, Chaleff said he was determined to make sure there was no repetition of the mistakes that led to the mistrial in Wallace v. Los Angeles. “I was at the city attorney’s office, and I saw this box of stuff there that should have been exchanged in discovery a long time ago,” Chaleff recalled. “The city attorney on the case, Don Vincent, was just sitting on it all. I was shocked and furious. I told him you need to deliver that to the other side right now. I didn’t even know what was in the box. I just knew it must be something pretty important.”