Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Richard Bond called Carlin’s claims “tinfoil hat stuff” and offered a theory of what had happened at the Sheriff’s Department meeting that was considerably more plausible: “Russ was desperate to have somebody hear him, and he felt McDonnell owed him, so he went to that meeting alone. Russ had barely enough money to pay for the gas to get there, but this was a mission of the heart for him. Whatever was said at the meeting, I think Russ heard it and knew this was the end of the road, the end of the journey, the end of any hope for vindication. I think the realization hit him like a lightning bolt. And it killed him.”

  Nevertheless, Bond admitted being impressed by at least one solid piece of evidence that supported Carlin’s claims about who was present at the meeting. This was that within two hours of Poole’s death, well before it was being reported in the media, an interview with Reggie Wright Jr. had been posted on YouTube by the Bomb1st.com website. In it, Wright said he knew Poole was dead, then added, “It’s a good day for me because I believe in karma, and you know, all these people that keep coming out with the bullcrap … first was [former Tupac Shakur bodyguard] Michael Moore, then Frank Alexander, and now Russell Poole … All these people is dropping dead there, so I keep telling people, ‘God don’t like ugly, so people learn a lesson from this one … the next person probably is to be an R.J. Bond, but, uh, I don’t know.”

  The only possible explanation for the fact that Wright had learned of Poole’s death “at almost the same time Russ’s family was being told,” Bond said, was that he had heard it from someone at the meeting or high up in the Sheriff’s Department. For Bond, this suggested Carlin’s claim that Daryn Dupree was in the meeting was true: “If Dupree told Kading, Kading would have told Reggie.”

  Of course he had been alarmed by Wright’s suggestion that he would probably be “the next person” to die,” Bond said: “I put it in the same category as Kading’s remark about how I would be a dead man if Poochie Fouse was still alive. I’ve seen Reggie Wright issue ‘orders by insinuation’ before. He makes a suggestion, and someone else acts.”

  The Wright video was taken down from YouTube within twenty-four hours of being posted, and Wright himself was considerably more circumspect when asked in subsequent interviews about Poole. Greg Kading, though, was remorseless. “I apologize for sounding insensitive,” Kading told one interviewer, “but Poole was not promoting ‘truth’ in the Biggie murder. He was promoting unsubstantiated and disprovable theories, which only lead to public confusion about the murders. In [my] documentary you see how easily his original theory was dismantled and his ‘new’ theory is even more implausible. My condolences to the family and friends of Mr. Poole and it is not my intent to disparage him, but my loyalty is to the truth in these murders and to the public who has been eagerly awaiting answers for nearly twenty years.”

  “Sickening,” Perry Sanders called Kading’s remarks. “A guy who has absolutely no interest in the truth, and who didn’t even put a dent in Russ’s original theory of the Biggie shooting, out there talking about how he ‘dismantled’ it.”

  Sanders was particularly incensed by the claim Kading was regularly making in interviews that Biggie’s mom, Voletta Wallace, now “supported” his theory of the case. This assertion was based mostly on sections of a March 22, 2012, article written for the L.A. Weekly by Chris Vogel, who was now serving, effectively, as Kading’s publicist. With “the ground shifting in one of the most baffling cold cases in Los Angeles history,” Voletta Wallace, “while she has not ruled out dirty cops, [now] leans toward Kading’s new evidence.”*

  “I believe everything in [Kading’s] book,” Vogel quoted Voletta Wallace as saying. “So if Greg Kading found out all this truth, why isn’t Suge Knight behind bars? What are the police waiting for? They murdered my son. LAPD, make a goddamn arrest.”

  Vogel had “completely distorted” both Voletta Wallace’s remarks and his own, Sanders said: “Voletta and I both just in essence said, ‘If the case is solved, as your detective says it is solved, prosecute someone.’ Nothing more, nothing less. No embracing Kading. That article was one more part of a disinformation campaign that has gone on for fifteen years.”

  As proof that the article was “invalid,” Sanders pointed to Vogel’s claim that he believed the confession of Theresa Swann was “solid, unimpeachable evidence.” That was “total B.S.,” Sanders said. “I never vouched for Swann in any way, shape, or form.”

  Voletta Wallace said that when Kading had come to see her in Brooklyn, she had refused his offer to meet with his prize witness. “I told him I would only meet with her if she was locked up,” Wallace said. “I told him I would believe his case was true only if the people he said were responsible had been arrested. I was never with Greg Kading, or on Greg Kading’s side. Never! I have always believed and still believe that the one person who truly tried to solve my son’s murder was Russell Poole. If I’m with anyone, it’s Poole, not Kading.”

  Despite the obvious flaws in both his investigation and his book, Kading’s incessant self-promotion, combined with sloppy media coverage, had gradually established his account of the Biggie and Tupac investigations as the prevailing one. That Kading had superseded Poole was made more or less official when the USA Network began airing Unsolved in February 2018, claiming the series was based on Murder Rap. At least half of the show, however, was based on LAbyrinth, which writer Kyle Long and producer Anthony Hemingway had used without my permission. Knowing that I had sold the rights to the companies using it as the basis for the film City of Lies, starring Johnny Depp and Forest Whitaker, and that I therefore couldn’t sue them, Long and Hemingway had taken a calculated risk that Global Road, the company that now owned the book’s rights, wouldn’t sue them.

  In Long and Hemingway and the executives at USA, Kading had found suitable collaborators. The result was a narrative that stuck close to LAbyrinth’s except when it served the Kading chronicle that was the other half of the story line. The big lie of Unsolved, apart from its pretense that Kading’s had been a credible investigation, involved an invented scene that utterly misrepresented both Poole and Kading. It was set up by a false claim that Poole’s storage locker had been abandoned after he stopped paying his bill. Then Kading showed up, as the series had it, and inherited Poole’s files. Not only had nothing of the sort taken place, but Kading had never gained—or for that matter tried to gain—any access to the elements of Poole’s investigation, and had thoroughly misrepresented even what he knew of them in Murder Rap.

  The most telling thing about Unsolved, though, was how carefully it steered away from the actual facts of Kading’s relationship with Reggie Wright Jr., just as Kading himself had in Murder Rap. Only in the various public statements they made after the release of Kading’s book had he and Wright acknowledged—and then only implicitly—what a hand-in-glove pair they were. Kading was the more ambiguous of the two, acknowledging only “working with” Wright on the Biggie and Tupac murder investigations. Yes, he was “protective of Reggie,” Kading acknowledged in one interview. In another he suggested that “people”—meaning Bond and Poole, mainly—should apologize to Wright because he had been interviewed by various law enforcement agencies and had passed several lie detector tests. There was no evidence of this on offer; it was yet another “take my word for it” claim by Kading.

  Wright, though, wanted to revel in how central he was to Kading’s claims of having solved the Tupac and Biggie murders. He and his people were continuing on from the point where his friend Kading had left off, Wright told one interviewer: “We’re going to explore some things that they found out during the Greg Kading investigation. I helped a lot with that investigation.” Whenever an interviewer challenged Wright, or pointed to evidence that implicated him in either the Biggie or the Tupac murder, his response was the same: “Read the Greg Kading book, Murder Rap. It answers that question.”

  Kading, though, had gone silent on the subject of Reggie Wright Jr. in May 2017. That was because Wright and his fa
ther Reggie Wright Sr. had just been indicted by a federal grand jury in Memphis, Tennessee, for operating a large-scale drug ring in coordination with a subset of the Watts-based Grape Street Crips.

  Even a cursory reading of the indictment made it clear the feds had the Wrights cold. The FBI and the DEA had been monitoring the Memphis ring since 2013, focusing on a circle of known drug dealers who operated out of an inner-city apartment complex. What they had discovered was an astoundingly naked operation in which the Wrights were sending heroin, OxyContin, methamphetamine, and marijuana via the U.S. Postal Service directly to their Memphis dealers. Once they got the drugs, the Memphis Crips made deposits of between $5,000 and $10,000 in accounts in the Wrights’ names at either Wells Fargo or Bank of America. No layer of distance between the dealers and the Wrights had been created at all. “Reggie became complacent after Kading came out with his book,” Bond said, “because he knew Kading had his back.”

  The feds had not only the bank records but also video of each and every deposit. It was an unbeatable case and the Wrights knew it. Anyone familiar with Reggie Jr. knew his next move was going to be a snitch deal.

  Suge Knight certainly knew it. At the first court hearing in his murder case after the Wrights’ arrests, Knight had created a darkly comedic scene when he began to demand of the presiding magistrate, “Why can’t I talk to my attorneys?” He could talk to his attorneys, the magistrate replied, but to only one of them directly; whatever he wanted to say to the other lawyers assisting him had to be communicated through his primary attorney. “That’s how it works,” the magistrate explained. Suge continued to protest, then looked around the courtroom until he spotted David Kenner seated among the spectators. “For instance, David Kenner,” Suge said. “He’s here and he wants to talk to me, but you guys won’t let me talk to him.” The law enforcement officials in the courtroom had to cover their smiles; every one of them knew that Suge was desperate to talk to Kenner because only Kenner could help him figure out how to deal with Wright Jr. before Reggie started talking to the feds. That Wright was capable of turning on Suge there could be no doubt after the Kading book was published; it was Reggie who had helped concoct the “Theresa Swann” account that put Biggie’s murder off on Poochie Fouse, working for Suge.

  Knight was just one among many who imagined that the indictments against the Wrights might result, finally, in the closure of the Biggie and Tupac murder cases. Whatever the degree of his involvement, there was little question that Reggie knew enough to make the case against all those who had conspired to kill the two most famous rappers in the history of hip-hop. Would the feds use their leverage to compel Wright’s testimony against Suge Knight in the Biggie murder?

  It quickly began to appear that this was not going to happen. Petty jurisdictional agendas were prevailing over larger questions of justice. “The DEA and ATF in Tennessee made this case,” explained one embittered federal agent, “and neither agency gives a damn about a murder case in California they have nothing to do with. What they want are convictions that build their numbers. And they made sure the U.S. attorney in Tennessee understood that.”

  That Reggie Jr. was negotiating a plea deal as a government informant became apparent when he was separated from all the other defendants in the case—including his father—and scheduled for hearings independent of theirs. Reggie was telling people he had negotiated a deal under which he would serve no more than two or three years, with an additional promise that the prosecution against his father would be dropped. He had used Reggie Sr.’s name without his knowledge to set up some of the bank accounts where the drug money was deposited, Reggie Jr. was now claiming.

  “If it’s true, then one more time the opportunity to solve the Biggie and Tupac cases is squandered,” Bond lamented. “That was probably the last best chance to break those cases open, and it looks like the feds threw it away. The only question is how much encouragement to do that they got from L.A.”

  Whatever deal he had made with the feds, Wright was clearly feeling fairly relaxed about his circumstances, something he signaled in March 2018 by agreeing to an interview with Internet radio host Jesse Surratt. The ostensible reason for the interview was to let Wright rebut reports that he was near death from some sort of ailment. He had developed a blocked esophagus, Wright explained, that led to his becoming dehydrated and losing weight. “All it meant was surgery,” he told Surratt, “not being on my deathbed.”

  The Surratt interview was also about protecting and repairing his public image, as Wright made clear in his remarks about Russell Poole. A lot of people thought he was a bad guy because of the remarks he’d posted on YouTube after Poole’s death, Wright acknowledged, but “I didn’t speak negative on Russell until he came after me with this other stuff”—meaning the accusations Poole and Bond had made of Reggie Jr.’s involvement in the Tupac and Biggie murders. “A straight-up cop,” Wright called Poole, the kind of detective “who wouldn’t plant evidence when he searched my home or where I work.” But he did disapprove of Poole’s obsession with the Tupac and Biggie cases, Wright added: “You don’t retire and leave the police department behind a case. You don’t take it personal. You just move on to the next case.”

  The weirdest and most amusing moments of the interview came when Surratt brought up Tammie Hawkins. “I don’t know who that is,” Reggie lied. “You’re talkin’ about Theresa Swann, right?”

  The interview turned into bilious farce when Wright denied that he and Hawkins/Swann had been a couple when Hawkins gave Kading the Poochie story. Not true, Reggie said: “Just ’cause I rented a house where she was livin’ don’t mean we was livin’ together.” Did he know Suge had herpes? Wright asked Surratt suddenly: “You think I’m gonna mess around with somebody that be with somebody who has herpes?”

  Wright didn’t do any of the bragging about how integral he was to Kading’s investigation that he had done in other interviews. To Surratt, he claimed that he hadn’t known Suge had paid Poochie to kill Biggie Smalls “until I read Murder Rap.”

  “What that told me was that Kading had warned Reggie to back off from telling everyone how involved he was in the so-called investigation,” Bond said. “I was pretty sure I knew how Kading had done that, by telling Reggie that if Suge believed he had fed him the Poochie story, Suge was going to find a way to get to him.”

  If that was true, Wright might have been the last person on earth to see Suge Knight as a credible threat.

  * My own call to the Sheriff’s Department to ask for that information, and for an interview with Jim McDonnell, resulted in a conference call joined by four of the sheriff’s subordinates. McDonnell’s strategic communications director Carol Lin did most of the talking. Lin told me absolutely nothing other than that a meeting had taken place and that it had been arranged as “a courtesy” to Russell Poole. Sheriff McDonnell hadn’t been present, she added. I asked for the names of those who had attended the meeting and a chance to talk to them about what had taken place in it. Without revealing a single name, Lin said she would check on the “availability” of those who were present when Poole died and get back to me. She never did.

  * A consideration of the accusations against Greg Kading by his two most public challengers is found in Appendix B.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Suge Knight had been in the news often during the past decade, mostly because of wounds inflicted on his body or his reputation. Knight for the first time became the public butt of jokes in summer 2005, around the time of the mistrial in Wallace v. Los Angeles, when he was shot in the right thigh while attending a party hosted by Kanye West at the Shore Club West in Miami. While it was never clear that the shooting had been an attempt on Suge’s life—more likely, it seemed, he’d been caught in crossfire—this event revealed his vulnerability on at least two levels: he was no longer shielded by an entourage of thugs, and the lawsuit he filed against West for failure to provide adequate security at the event indicated how desperate Knight had become for money. T
hat Suge now was being mocked by comedians and late-night television hosts was an unmistakable sign that people simply were not so afraid of him as they’d once been.

  This humiliation was followed by a series of incidents that seemed to confirm the oft-repeated claims that Knight was a soft-bellied bully who liked to beat up smaller foes but couldn’t stand his ground against a man the same size. In May 2008, at the Shag Nightclub in Hollywood, Knight had confronted a man he claimed owed him money, then let his bodyguards give the guy a beatdown. The man had popped up a few moments later, though, to throw a punch that put Suge on his back, apparently unconscious, for several minutes, before he was helped to his feet and half-carried from the club to a waiting vehicle. The incident was openly celebrated on a number of hip-hop websites.

  Just four months later, Suge was arrested in a parking lot off the Las Vegas Strip by police officers who said they had come upon him “punching a naked woman with one hand and holding a knife in the other.” The woman was Knight’s then-girlfriend Melissa Issac, who’d grabbed the steering wheel of Suge’s pickup truck after he punched her in the face during an argument. As he had done so often before in Las Vegas, Knight would hire well-connected attorneys who got the criminal charges dismissed. The lawyers, though, couldn’t do a thing about the damage to his public image. Suge liked to whupass not only on smaller men, it was said, but also on even smaller women.

  Only five months after that, Suge was attending a party at the W Hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona, when he got into an altercation with a man who claimed to be the business manager of the rapper Akon. Again, it was Knight who took the beating, one that left him with a broken nose and shattered facial bones.