“I figured, ‘Okay, now this guy has a choice. Now that he knows how much of what he’s saying is bullshit, he can go back and try to make it right. But Kading didn’t do anything like that. He just stuck with the bullshit. Whether it was laziness or he doesn’t give a shit, I couldn’t tell you. What I really think, his book was out and he didn’t want to deal with any new information. But saying he ruled out cops in the Biggie murder was disingenuous at best. He knew the LAPD was happy to have him out there saying it had been ‘proven’ no cops were involved. They weren’t going to make an arrest or do anything that would force them to produce evidence and answer questions. They were just going to wait for it to all go away.”
During the interview Kading did reveal at least once significant fact that stunned Sanders: the LAPD had shut down Operation Transparency one month after the dismissal of the lawsuit.
“The strange thing was,” Sanders said, “Kading seemed to know that his so-called investigation had just been used by the LAPD to protect itself from our claim of cop involvement in Biggie’s murder.”
Ribera remembered, “Kading said that Internal Affairs had refused to share any of their stuff with him and that the Risk Management guys had told him he couldn’t have anything connected to our lawsuit. So it seemed like this totally circular situation where Kading ruled out cops being involved because the evidence indicating cops had been involved was kept from him. At one point he more or less admitted that his job had been to come up with some theory of the case that didn’t implicate police officers. And he was fine with that. When I saw that, I knew there was no hope with this guy. He could have cared less what the truth was.”
For Sanders, the bottom line was that Kading had rested his “case closed” argument about Biggie’s murder on the claims of a single dubious witness, Tammie Hawkins. “We had way, way, way more to implicate Mack and Muhammad and Perez in the Biggie murder than he had to implicate the guy he was pointing at. When I actually got in a room with Kading, I couldn’t believe how thin his whole deal was. The guy was almost entirely bluff and bluster. All he had in the Biggie case was a demonstrably false theory that a four-year-old could have beaten in court.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the review of Murder Rap he posted on Amazon.com, Russell Poole began by stating, “Greg Kading has no credibility on this subject matter. He became a task force member on the Biggie case 10 years after the fact.” Poole’s review ended with his observation that “Kading never attempted to interview me regarding the Biggie investigation. He makes a lot of false statements about me & my part in the investigation.”
Poole’s failure to thrive after he left the force had been gradual up to that point. The attention he received following the publication of LAbyrinth in 2002 and his appearance in Nick Broomfield’s movie Biggie &Tupac just a few months later had made Poole into something of a cultural icon, a symbol of the solitary figure pitted against the institutional corruption of a sprawling metropolis. But that image slowly faded over the next few years, leaving him more and more bereft. After several years out of law enforcement, Poole found a new job with the U.S. Marshals Service, working as a bailiff at the federal court in downtown Los Angeles. He savored the sense of connection to the city’s dramatic churn, but the job was a far cry from working as an LAPD homicide detective. There was a sense about him of someone forever attempting to keep hope alive, the hope that what he knew still mattered and that history would not be permitted to rest on a foundation of lies.
“It will all come out, eventually,” he would repeat again and again during those years. “In the end, the cover always comes off a cover-up.” Not enough people in Los Angeles cared what was true, however, and those who helmed the city’s institutions found it increasingly easy to marginalize Poole and to dismiss the threat he posed. He looked more and more like someone following the attenuated thread of a narrative that was fraying into oblivion.
As the Wallace v. Los Angeles lawsuit began to stall and fade away, Poole sought a return to relevance through a partnership with Richard “R.J.” Bond, a data retrieval expert who moonlighted as a documentary filmmaker, one who was obsessed by the murder of Tupac Shakur.
Bond emerged in 2007 with the release of Tupac Assassination: Conspiracy or Revenge, a documentary he produced in association with Frank Alexander, the bodyguard who was supposed to be protecting Shakur on the night he was killed. The crux of the film was a theory that the man who had orchestrated the Tupac murder was Reggie Wright Jr. Wright had prevented Shakur’s favorite bodyguard, Kevin Hackie, from being in Las Vegas and had refused to allow the bodyguard who was supposed to protect him, Alexander, to carry his weapon, according to those interviewed on-screen. Those facts conformed with Russell Poole’s initial suspicion about Shakur’s death. The difference was that Bond and Alexander believed both Suge and Tupac had been targets of a hit arranged by Wright, attorney David Kenner, and Knight’s estranged wife Sharitha as part of a Death Row Records takeover.
It wasn’t a theory that went over well with a number of others who had investigated the Tupac and Biggie murders. Sergio Robleto pointed out how obviously it failed to accord with the physics of what had taken place in Las Vegas: five-foot-eight-inch, 160-pound Tupac Shakur had been hit by four of the thirteen bullets fired at the BMW, while six-foot-two-inch, 300-pound-plus Suge Knight—a much larger target—hadn’t caught a single slug. “Anybody who thinks Suge was the target has to be smoking crack,” Robleto said.
Bond, though, along with Alexander, believed Knight had simply gotten lucky that night. “So they went to plan B,” Bond said. “They reinforced the Crips-killed-Tupac-for-revenge story, then arranged the Biggie murder so they could lay it off on Suge and send him away to prison forever.”
By 2012, Bond was beginning to forge a relationship with Russell Poole, who had been trained by Bond’s father as a cadet at the Los Angeles Police Academy. The two men connected through their belief that the police departments in Las Vegas and Los Angeles had no intention of trying to solve the Tupac and Biggie murders. Bond sent Poole copies of Tupac Assassination and its sequel, Tupac Assassination 2. Poole replied by asking Bond to distill the information in the films into a “case sheet” for him to take to Phil Carson at the FBI. Bond did that, then sent Poole a partial manuscript of the book about the Tupac murder he was trying to write. Gradually, Poole was drawn into both Bond’s investigation and his theory of the case.
In December 2013, Poole and Bond announced that they had obtained a “confession letter” written by a Blood who said Reggie Wright had paid him and two others to kill Tupac. There were compelling reasons to doubt the letter, not the least of which was that it had actually been handwritten by the sister of the informant who had turned it over. Those who had been Poole’s closest allies up this point were appalled by his immersion in what Sanders called “a junk theory.” Sergio Robleto said, “I’m worried about Russ. He’s really getting off track here.”
Both men, and others, suggested that Bond had taken advantage of Poole’s deteriorating condition and need to remain part of the investigation of the Biggie and Tupac murders. Bond, though, was a dogged and resourceful investigator who was turning up facts no one else had found, and Poole admired him for that.
Not long after teaming up with Bond, Poole lost his job at the U.S. Marshals Service. He had suffered a major hearing loss, Poole said, that made it impossible for him to work at the federal courthouse. Few thought it was quite that simple. Poole had been morose since the dismissal of the Wallace v. Los Angeles lawsuit; when a year passed and the case was not refiled, he grew despondent. He was gaining weight and drinking too much. Bloated and red-faced, “Russ didn’t look well,” is how Robleto put it, and Poole’s obsessive focus on the Biggie and Tupac investigations increasingly separated him from both family and friends. Like Robleto, Sanders was sympathetic. “A guy can only take so much,” he said. “Russ has been shredded by what the LAPD and the city have put him through. He keeps trying to beli
eve, but nobody’s given him much reason to. Nobody can stand up forever under the pounding he’s taken.”
Bond was more loyal to and supportive of Poole during this period than any other person. He let the former detective and his wife, Megan, move rent-free into the house in Corona where Bond and his wife, Athena, were living with their children. While Bond worked full-time to support his family and his book and movie projects, Poole scuffled from one temporary gig to another and was burning through savings at a rate that unnerved his wife.
Immersing himself in Bond’s investigation of the Tupac murder became both Poole’s therapy and his avocation. The two men worked as a team to set up a June 2014 meeting with LAPD deputy chief Kirk Albanese at which they planned to brief him on their theory of the case. “Russ and I were so happy,” Bond recalled. “I remember Russ got a haircut that day, and really groomed himself up. We were goin’ to town. We go all the way to the top floor of New Parker Center; get seated in this conference room, still excited; and then Daryn Dupree walks in. I should have stopped the meeting right then and said I needed a minute to talk to Russ. But Russ still believed in the LAPD deep down and so did I, sort of, because of my dad and my grandfather.”
Albanese had been respectful during the meeting, and he and Poole were hopeful something might come of it, Bond said.
Not long after Poole and his wife, Megan, moved out of Bond’s home, she left him, unable to bear the cost of her husband’s unending obsession with the Biggie and Tupac cases. Bond said the couple had separated because Megan was trying to protect her pension, fearing that Russ would spend that money in furtherance of his investigations. It may have been more complicated than that, but by the beginning of 2015 Poole was living out of a suitcase. For a time, he had a room in a San Bernardino hotel where he was doing security work, but he eventually began to move back and forth between the spare rooms at his parents’ home and his adult son’s. At age fifty-nine, he was drinking himself to sleep at night, and his weight was a good fifty pounds more than it had been when he retired from the LAPD. A blood pressure condition brought warnings from doctors that Poole needed to monitor himself on a daily basis. Too proud to apply for Medicaid and too poor to afford his prescribed medications, “Russ was making his own medicines from materials he bought online,” Bond said.
Sergio Robleto found it difficult to connect with Poole by this point. “I wanted to remember Russ the way he was,” Robleto explained, “and I couldn’t pretend enthusiasm for his theory of the Tupac case.” He was left trying to reconcile feelings of sorrow and rage whenever the two of them spoke on the phone, Robleto said. “When it’s threatened, the LAPD is like an elephant stomping through mice, just rolling downhill on anything or anyone that gets in its way,” he reflected. “Russ experienced what it was to try to stand up alone against that. He had no chance. And it caught up with him.”
In August 2015, though, Poole’s spirits were lifted by word that Los Angeles County sheriff Jim McDonnell had agreed to set up a meeting with his homicide investigators to hear what Poole had to say about the Biggie and Tupac murders. The meeting had been orchestrated by Poole’s new collaborator, Michael Carlin, publisher and editor of the Century City News, a weekly shopper that served one of the wealthiest zip codes in Los Angeles. Together, Poole and Carlin had approached a senior deputy in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office named Dave Demerjian with the evidence that supported their theories of the Tupac and Biggie murders.
“Demerjian was about to retire,” Carlin recalled, “and wanted one last big case. He told us he was interested in what we had but would need a homicide investigator to work with him.” Carlin saw an opportunity to secure such an investigator while attending a meeting of Leadership L.A., a training program sponsored by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Carlin was a graduate of the program and so was Jim McDonnell.
McDonnell had been with the LAPD for twenty-eight years and was mentored for a good many of those years by William Bratton. Both men had grown up back east in the Boston area and their connection went back decades. “I remember when Bratton was with Kroll while it was preparing its draft of the consent decree,” Robleto recalled. “Bratton would meet with Jimmy every time he came to L.A. When Bratton decided he wanted to be LAPD chief, Jimmy was his inside guy. They’re both operators.”
McDonnell rose to the number two position in the department while Bratton was serving as LAPD chief, and it was widely assumed he would succeed his mentor. Instead the City Council had chosen Charlie Beck, a shameless political opportunist who had exploited Rafael Perez’s Rampart Scandal narrative to gain a reputation as the division commander who “rehabilitated” Rampart. Furious, McDonnell had accepted the position of chief of police in Long Beach, then run for county sheriff, winning election to the position in 2014.
In early summer 2015, Carlin was in the audience at a Leadership L.A. event where Sheriff McDonnell gave the keynote speech. Afterward he had “cornered” McDonnell, “who didn’t seem too happy about it,” as Carlin recalled, but agreed to set up a meeting for him and Poole with his senior homicide investigators.
“McDonnell knew Russ from the LAPD and sincerely respected him, I think,” Carlin recalled. “For a period of time, the two of us were texting back and forth with the sheriff and getting on conference calls with him. Russ and Jim were reminiscing and seemed really friendly. Then all of a sudden McDonnell stopped replying.” Through his assistant, though, McDonnell helped arrange the meeting Carlin and Poole had been asking for. The two were told that Captain Rod Kusch of the Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau and his top investigator, Richard Biddle, would be there. “Russ was really excited,” Carlin recalled, “and so was I.”
Three or four days before the meeting was scheduled to take place, Carlin recalled, he and Poole learned that the August 24, 2014, shooting of Suge Knight at the 1 Oak nightclub in Las Vegas had been facilitated by an off-duty Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy. (Knight had been shot seven times while attending a party at 1 Oak thrown by singer Chris Brown on the evening of the Video Music Awards ceremony; he later sued Brown for failing to provide adequate security.) Poole made contact with Knight’s attorneys to share what he had learned and to suggest a deal: Suge would cooperate in nailing Reggie Wright Jr. for the Tupac and Biggie murders, and in exchange Poole would persuade the Sheriff’s Department to drop a murder case that had been filed against Knight in Compton. That, Poole and Carlin decided, would be what they pitched at their meeting with Kusch, Biddle, and whoever else was present.
Two days before the meeting was to take place, Poole phoned to tell me how excited he was about it. “I’ve been promised by Jim McDonnell that the Sheriff’s Department will really listen,” he said. “I think this is the best chance left to get a real investigation going.”
The next day, “Russ gets a call from somebody at the Sheriff’s Department to ask what exactly the meeting is about,” Carlin recalled. “Russ starts by telling what we’ve learned about the sheriff’s deputy who walked the shooters into 1 Oak right before the attempt on Suge’s life. The sheriff’s person says, ‘How did you find out?’ Russ told them a little of how we knew, but not everything. So the sheriff’s person says, ‘Look, this is a cop thing, and we’d rather not have Carlin there.’ ”
This had all been explained to him, Carlin said, when Poole called to say he would be going to the meeting alone. “Russ believed he and McDonnell had a great rapport and he told me, ‘I don’t want to disappoint Jim,’ ” Carlin recalled.
An hour before the 10 a.m. meeting at the Sheriff’s Department’s Monterey Park station, Carlin recalled, Poole phoned to say he was in Diamond Bar, stuck in freeway traffic, but thought he could make the meeting on time. A little more than two hours later, Carlin got a call informing him that Poole had died of a massive heart attack during his meeting with Sheriff’s Department officials and investigators. “I believe Russ was murdered during that meeting,” Carlin said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
/> Mostly, what gave traction to Michael Carlin’s unsubstantiated claims about Russell Poole’s death was how little the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was willing to reveal about its circumstances. Poole’s family had received a copy of the medical examiner’s report that listed the cause of death as “cardiac arrest,” but no calls from McDonnell or anyone else in a senior position at the Sheriff’s Department to explain what had happened. Only when she read the medical examiner’s report, Megan Poole said, did she realize that Russ had collapsed as the Monterey Park meeting was coming to an end and that the efforts of those present to revive him had failed. There was nothing in that report, though, about who those present were or what Russ had discussed with them.*
Michael Carlin claimed that McDonnell had phoned him after Poole’s death, with Rod Kusch on the line. “Jim said Rod was in the meeting along with two investigators, but would not name them,” Carlin said. “He said there were a total of six people in the room [but] withheld the names of four people.” McDonnell told him that “at the conclusion of the meeting they were all in the room when Russ had a heart attack and died before he hit the floor,” Carlin said. “He wouldn’t give me any information at all about what was discussed in the meeting.”
This conversation hadn’t prevented Carlin from making online postings in which he claimed to have an inside source who alleged that those in the meeting had used a defibrillator, not to stimulate Poole’s heart but to stop it. When I spoke to Carlin, he told me, “I do not believe Jim McDonnell had anything to do with Russ’s death. This was Death Row behind it.” His “sources” had told him that Reggie Wright Jr. and Daryn Dupree were in the room when Poole died, Carlin said.
Dead Wrong Page 23