Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Philips swept aside Poole’s investigation, with a sentence that read, “Poole did not interview Mack or Muhammad and he did not produce any evidence to support his theory.” No mention was made of the fact that Poole had been prevented from interviewing Mack and Muhammad by his LAPD superiors. And the statement that the detective had not produced any evidence to support his theory was simply false; Poole had in fact produced a raft of it, as Philips knew. The reporter did briefly mention, however, that Amir Muhammad, the man who Poole believed shot Biggie, had been arrested five days earlier by Department of Motor Vehicles investigators on charges “connected to his possession of four false identifications.”

  “Just your average mortgage broker,” Sanders said, “one who needs four phony driver’s licenses in different names.”

  Sergio Robleto read the Times article from the point of view of one who knew exactly where the story was coming from. “Bill Bratton is more politician than police officer,” he observed. “He knows how to game the system as well as anybody.”

  Robleto, who had consulted with Bratton on what became the consent decree that placed the LAPD under the supervision of the U.S. Justice Department, said he’d realized how adept and opportunistic his former colleague was when Bratton applied for the position of LAPD chief just weeks later. “And of course he got it.”

  He laughed after learning Bratton had recast the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division into what was now called the Professional Standards Bureau, Robleto recalled. Bratton had long been a big believer in the notion that words changed not only perception but also reality.

  Still, he had admired Bratton, Robleto said, until he read in the Times how the chief had responded to Judge Cooper’s declaration of a mistrial in the Wallace v. Los Angeles case. “The failure to turn over some documents does not equal a deliberate cover-up by the LAPD,” stated Bratton, who suggested that “better tracking procedures for case files” were all that was needed.

  “Katz had been caught red-handed,” Robleto said, “and Chief Bratton is saying it was at worst a careless mistake. I lost a lot of respect for him that day.”

  He might have read even more into Bratton’s motives, Robleto said, if he’d known then that the two lead investigators on the Operation Transparency task force the chief had “launched” were detectives Daryn Dupree and Greg Kading. “If I had wanted to make sure a crime never got solved and that the investigation could be used as a cover-up,” Robleto said, “giving the case to a couple of guys with the kind of baggage those two carry would have been exactly my strategy.”

  In 2000, FBI agents conducting a wiretap had overheard Dupree talking on the phone with his wife about a target of a federal drug-trafficking probe. He shouldn’t be using the phone he was speaking to her on during that brief conversation, Dupree had said, because it was “chipped.” What Dupree meant was that he was talking on a burner phone that had been cloned to use an illegally captured cellular account. The feds told the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division, which discovered that Dupree had improperly entered the department’s computer system on eight occasions to obtain information about the girlfriend of the target in the FBI investigation.

  Nevertheless, Dupree escaped prosecution, and Robleto found this “amazing.” The district attorney assigned to the case acknowledged that Dupree had broken the law by using a chipped phone, but reasoned that the detective could argue he had broken into the computer system while investigating a crime. “In the interest of justice,” the memo explained, “disciplinary action against Officer Dupree would be best handled administratively.” At his Board of Rights hearing, Dupree was found guilty on both the chipped phone and the illicit computer access charges and suspended without pay for forty-four days.

  “A troubling result,” Robleto called it. “He should have been fired.”

  There was even less doubt that Greg Kading was a bad cop, Robleto said: “A bunch of federal judges called him one.”

  Robleto was referring to a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that had condemned Kading’s conduct on the morning of March 18, 1999. Kading was a uniformed officer assigned to the LAPD’s Newton Division in South-Central Los Angeles back then. On the morning in question, he had been accompanied by two agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and a California state parole officer when they arrived at what they believed to be the residence of a Four-Trey Crips gang member named Janae Jamerson.

  Jamerson was actually in state prison at the time, but Kading and the others had failed to check his status before arriving at the house.

  The only people in the home were Jamerson’s girlfriend, Darla Motley, and their five-week-old son. Motley, who had been sleeping with her baby, answered the banging on the front door in her pajamas. It was Kading who spoke, Motley said, identifying himself as an LAPD officer, stating that the man standing next to him was Jamerson’s parole officer, then claiming that he and the other officers had a search warrant. In fact, they had no warrant, and the man with Kading was not Jamerson’s parole officer.

  Motley said that Jamerson did not live there and that anyway he was in the penitentiary. Kading responded by telling her that if she did not let them in, she would be arrested and her baby placed in foster care. This latter threat persuaded her to open the security door, Motley said. The moment she did, Kading shoved her aside, drawing his gun as he entered the house with one of the ATF agents. Motley told them her baby was in the back bedroom, and that was where Kading headed,. When she heard her baby screaming, she ran to the bedroom, Motley said, and saw Kading pointing his gun at her son, demanding to know where Jamerson was. Only when the ATF agent stepped through the door did Kading lower his weapon. During a search of the room that lasted twenty minutes, Kading taunted and mocked her the entire time, according to Motley, while she tried to comfort her baby. As he left the house, Kading shouted that she should let Jamerson’s mother know “Newton Street’s been here,” recalled Motley. She moved a few weeks later, afraid to remain in the Newton Division area.

  Motley filed a federal lawsuit against the LAPD accusing Kading of unlawful search and of using excessive force against her infant son. The case made it to the Ninth Circuit, where a panel of judges sided with Motley. The opinion, written by Judge Betty B. Fletcher, was damning in its assessment of Kading’s conduct. Not only had Kading shown “no respect for Motley, her baby, her home, or her privacy,” Fletcher wrote, but he had “lied to Motley” about her boyfriend’s parole officer being present and his own possession of a search warrant. While police officers were to be broadly given qualified immunity for their actions during a search, Fletcher wrote, Kading had forfeited it by “pointing a deadly weapon at a tiny infant.” The judge described his conduct as not simply harassing but “terrorizing.”

  Eventually Kading would win separation from the Motley case by arguing that “the LAPD never trained him to know that pointing a gun at a baby was an improper procedure,” said Robleto, who had looked into the case. “Can you imagine? And this is the guy, along with Dupree, that is put on the task force to investigate the Biggie murder. To me, that tells you all you need to know about what the LAPD was really up to.”

  As much as Sanders hoped he might be, Chuck Philips wasn’t going away—at least not yet. On September 26, 2007, a month after the Perez deposition, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on the front page of its Metro section under the headline “Inmate Recants Story About LAPD Link to Rapper’s Slaying.” The article focused on Waymond Anderson, a former R&B recording star who in April 1997 told Wilshire detectives that Suge Knight had previously offered him the contract on Biggie’s life. Anderson, now serving a life sentence on an arson-murder conviction, later told Robbery-Homicide detectives that the hit on Biggie resulted from a conspiracy that included not only Knight but also Rafael Perez and David Mack.

  But then Anderson began to change his story. Two Los Angeles Times articles by Chuck Philips published in January and April 2007 made a seemingly compelling case that the s
inger had been wrongly convicted. Not long afterward, Anderson claimed during a deposition in the Biggie case that his story of LAPD involvement in the rapper’s murder was a fabrication invented as part of “a scam,” one prompted in part by Perry Sanders’s offer of money if he would implicate Perez and Mack in the crime. Sanders hired a Los Angeles lawyer to send the Times a series of letters threatening a libel suit if it published Anderson’s claims against him. The Times ran the story anyway, replete with phrasing that portrayed Anderson as a credible witness whose “explosive testimony” had been an “unexpected twist” in the Notorious B.I.G. lawsuit.

  Sanders had been quoted in the article as calling Anderson’s allegations against him “100 percent demonstrably false.” “This is wholesale, made-up-out-of-whole-cloth perjury,” Sanders told the Times. Anderson “clearly would like to please Mr. Philips, because he’s singing his song, first, second and third verse and certainly the chorus.”

  Philips retorted that Sanders’s accusations against him were “idiotic,” adding, “This guy clearly doesn’t understand what an investigative reporter does for a living. I don’t make stories up. I report them.” Times editor in chief James O’Shea backed his reporter, calling Sanders’s claims against Philips “utterly groundless.”

  Sanders would learn while sitting with his new bride Lorn Lee at a coffee shop in Santa Monica that the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California had launched an investigation based on the allegations of attempted bribery reported by the Times. “Rob was telling me I might lose my right to practice in California,” he recalled. When Sanders prepared a press release and a court motion to counter Anderson’s allegations, Philips wrote a letter to the inmate telling him, “It’s all bullshit desperation on Perry Sanders’ part. And it will make him look even worse when the truth comes out.”

  But on November 13, 2007, after reviewing the evidence presented by Sanders to refute the claims Anderson had made against him, Judge Cooper issued an order stating that Sanders and his colleagues “provide substantial evidence to prove that Mr. Anderson is a liar,” and dismissing his claims. The Times did not report a word about this ruling.

  Then, in July 2008, during a hearing on his habeas corpus petition in the arson-murder case, Anderson informed the court that his claims against Sanders had been made at the behest of Chuck Philips. Don Vincent was heavily implicated as well.

  Vincent had said to him “that if I kept saying that David Mack and Rafael Perez was responsible for the murder of Biggie Smalls, I would never get out of jail,” Anderson also told the judge. He was threatened by Suge Knight as well, Anderson told the judge, via “kites” (tightly folded letters) smuggled into prison by Chuck Philips. Philips had also brought him materials provided by Vincent. These were an assortment of documents from the Notorious B.I.G. lawsuit, Anderson said, passed on so that he could familiarize himself with the case as part of a scheme “to disqualify Perry Sanders from the Christopher Wallace case.” He made the claim that Sanders attempted to bribe him, Anderson said, only “because Chuck Philips told me to.”

  The Times ran a brief story about what Anderson had said in the habeas hearing that ended with a quote from Philips: “That never happened. I’m flabbergasted by this whole thing. This is the ultimate betrayal.”

  By then, though, there wasn’t much more damage that could be done to Philips’s reputation. He had taken care of that himself with a front-page story for the Times that ran on March 19, 2008, under the headline “An Attack on Tupac Shakur Launched a Hip-Hop War.” Based on “FBI records obtained by The Times,” Philips wrote, the feds were sitting on informant statements that the shooting of Shakur at Quad Studios in 1994 had been arranged by talent manager James Rosemond (better known as “Jimmy Henchman”) in collusion with Jacques “Haitian Jack” Agnant and “promoter” James Sabatino in order to curry favor with Puffy Combs.

  There was one considerable problem with the article: the “FBI records” that had been Philips’s main source were fakes created by James Sabatino using a prison typewriter and a photocopier. The Smoking Gun website figured out within forty-eight hours of the publication of Philips’s article that “the Times appears to have been hoaxed by an imprisoned con man.”

  Jimmy Henchman’s lawyer Marc Lichtman issued a statement reading, “I would suggest to Mr. Philips and his editors that they immediately print an apology and take out their checkbooks.” Puffy Combs’s attorney Howard Weitzman sent the Times a letter that not only demanded a retraction but also warned that the Philips article met the legal standard for “actual malice” that would allow a public figure like Combs to sue for libel.

  On March 27, 2008, nine days after Philips’s article had run on its front page, the Times published a new page-one story under the headline “The Times Apologizes over Article on Rapper.” A statement from Philips was quoted: “In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job. I’m sorry.” His editor, Marc Duvoisin, issued his own statement: “We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck’s. I deeply regret that we have let our readers down.”

  Philips paid the price for his mistake. In July 2008, he was among 150 editorial employees who were let go by the Times as part of a staff reduction meant to address the paper’s increasingly dire financial condition. It was a steep fall for a reporter who had won a Pulitzer Prize nine years earlier.

  Richard Valdemar, still aching over the demise of Mike Robinson, complained bitterly in Police magazine that Philips had not been “outright fired.”

  “The Times never admitted its faults or apologized to the victims of the suspects it protected and witnesses it exposed,” Valdemar wrote. “The Los Angeles Times has the attitude that it has done nothing wrong, and it has nothing to apologize for.”

  Waymond Anderson, whose hopes for release from state prison had been raised by a Philips story that ran under the headline “New Evidence Could Set Singer Free,” would learn on December 11, 2008, that his murder conviction had been affirmed by William C. Ryan, the judge who had heard his habeas corpus plea. Anderson would be spending the rest of his life behind bars.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Three months after the Rafael Perez deposition, the city got serious about asserting investigative privilege to shut down the Wallace v. Los Angeles lawsuit.

  Just two days after Judge Cooper allowed the plaintiffs to add more LAPD officials to the lawsuit, Gerald Chaleff took the witness stand in the locked courtroom of Magistrate Judge Stephen J. Hillman. There, Chaleff made the argument that the LAPD’s “ongoing investigation” in the Christopher Wallace murder would be jeopardized by the sharing of “open clues,” and that therefore a raft of evidence in the case should be sealed and made off-limits to the plaintiffs’ discovery motions.

  “I get a call from Perry, who says, ‘You need to get down to the court right now, because there’s this in camera hearing going on with Chaleff on the stand,’ ” Brizzolara recalled. “So Brad and I rush down there, and sure enough, Chaleff is on the stand laying the foundation for their claim of investigative privilege.”

  But he and Gage couldn’t get into the courtroom; the doors were locked. “I don’t remember a single other case where the judge has locked the courtroom doors to have a hearing,” Brizzolara said. “I’ve gone back into chambers, but never seen a locked courtroom.”

  Eventually the magistrate’s bailiff admitted the two attorneys. Gage, who hadn’t had time even to put on a suit, began to challenge Chaleff with a series of aggressive questions. “Chaleff didn’t like what I was asking him so much that he tried to stand up and walk off the witness stand,” Gage recalled. Hillman made the witness sit back down, but just moments later agreed with a suggestion by the city’s attorneys that he review the disputed evidence in chambers—with Chaleff there to interpret it, and the attorneys for the Wallace family excluded. What Chaleff testified to on the stand can’t be reported, because every word of it was placed under a protective or
der by Hillman, who was handling the case’s evidentiary hearings.

  Hillman’s order, affirmed by Cooper, still stands—nearly eleven years later.

  “All I’m sure of is that whatever Chaleff said in there, which we will never know, made the difference,” Sanders said.

  On January 17, 2008, Hillman issued a ruling that stated, “Based on Gerald Chaleff’s testimony at the November 28, 2007, hearing, the court finds that defendant City of Los Angeles has sufficiently met its threshold burden of assertion that the certain documents at issue are covered by an active investigation privilege invoked by the defendant.”*

  It was the beginning of the end for a lawsuit that had already gone on for six years. Even if they couldn’t believe it, Sanders and his colleagues had seen it coming for a long time.

  From the time the Internal Affairs Division complaint form for Case No. 01-0190 had been produced before Cooper, the city and the LAPD had played a maddening game of hide-and-seek with other documents. “The LAPD withheld forty thousand pages of evidence—all related to Perez—that we had to fight to see,” Gage recalled. The police department insisted for months that it could not find Perez’s daily field activity report for March 9, 1997—the date of the Biggie murder—“then after being threatened by the judge suddenly said they found it, somewhere on the mezzanine level of Parker Center,” Brizzolara remembered. “It was like somebody just happened to notice it lying in a corner.”

  *I offered Chaleff repeated opportunities to explain his arguments to the magistrate and what he based them on. First, he told me he didn’t recall any such appearance before Hillman, and demanded that I give him a date and evidence that such a hearing had taken place. After providing this, I called three additional times to repeat my questions. On each occasion, Chaleff told me he would get back to me later that day with a statement on his own behalf and a response from his friend William Bratton. “I promise,” Chaleff said each time, and each time he failed to call back.