Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Suge seemed to have become more prey than predator, lacking the resources to protect himself. His descent had been accelerating ever since March 2005, when a Los Angeles judge awarded Lydia Harris a $107 million judgment against Knight and Death Row Records. Harris was the wife of legendary L.A. gangster Michael “Harry-O” Harris, who had been proclaiming for nearly a decade that Death Row was launched in 1991 with $1.5 million in seed money he provided in exchange for a partnership in the label. That Harry-O’s money had been the product of his vast cocaine empire, and that the man himself was serving a twenty-eight-year sentence in state prison for conspiracy to commit murder, had complicated his legal position. So had his refusal to accept a reduction of his sentence in exchange for testifying against Knight in court. Harris’s wife, Lydia, however, found a clearer path: making a convincing case that she was a God-fearing woman who played no part in her husband’s criminal activities and had been almost entirely unaware of them.

  Suge filed his bankruptcy claim barely a year after Lydia Harris’s court victory. In collusion with Reggie Wright Jr. and Tammie Hawkins, he had done his best to conceal the assets he had amassed during the fifteen-year run in which Death Row Records had earned more than $325 million from the recordings of Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, and dozens of other hip-hop artists. The trustee in Knight’s bankruptcy case had tracked down and seized most of that hidden wealth. The Internal Revenue Service, which stood first in line among Suge’s creditors, would collect every penny of the $11.3 million it was owed. Lydia Harris’s attorney stood right behind the government’s. Lydia and Michael Harris would ultimately divide their piece of the pie in a divorce agreement they negotiated at the Monterey County courthouse in Northern California, where Harry-O had been transported from his current residence in San Quentin State Prison.

  Suge had managed to hang on to at least some of his Death Row earnings, but his enormous legal bills were rapidly chewing through that money. By 2010, he was living not in a beachfront Malibu mansion, but in a Las Vegas tract house, from which he ran an assortment of nickel-and-dime enterprises. He rarely showed up in Los Angeles, and found trouble waiting whenever he did. His appearance at an MTV Video Music Awards party in West Hollywood hosted by singer Chris Brown resulted in an attempt on Knight’s life in which he was shot seven times and needed emergency surgery.

  Knight was writhing in fury and humiliation as those he had once terrorized celebrated his fall. It seemed a long time ago that Suge had decorated the foyer of the Death Row Records offices in Los Angeles with an oil painting of Dr. Dre being sodomized by a blond bodybuilder while Puffy Combs, skinny legs sticking out of a pink tutu, stood alongside a porcine Notorious B.I.G. watching with lascivious delight. B.I.G. may have been dead for years, but Puffy’s business empire and celebrity status each continued to grow, while Dre was a mega-celebrity pocketing a big piece of the $3 billion sale of his Beats headphones enterprise to Apple. Suge had demanded 10 percent of the Beats deal but received nothing at all. Strapped, he attempted to impose a $30,000 “tax” on any out-of-town rapper who wanted to work in either Los Angeles or Las Vegas, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, but he lacked the muscle to enforce it. Increasingly, Suge’s badass posturing made him look pathetic rather than fearsome. In 2014, he had attempted to enforce his tax by calling out rapper Rick Ross in a video interview: “You know you owe me that bread, titty man,” he said. “I’m gonna beat the dog shit out of you.” Ross never paid him a penny.

  A year later, there were people who actually professed to feel sorry for Suge. To him, being pitied was far worse than being hated. All his bills seemed to be coming due when, in early 2015, Suge was arrested for murder.

  The circumstances of this crime derived entirely from the combustion of his egotism, his envy, and his desperation. The film Straight Outta Compton, based on N.W.A.’s seminal gangsta rap album, was shooting that winter in southwest Los Angeles County. Suge was infuriated to learn that he was the movie’s villain. It wasn’t so much being portrayed as a psychopathic thug that bothered him, though, as that he wasn’t being paid by the producers of a film in which he was a major character. Determined to do something about it, Suge drove his Red Ford Raptor pickup onto the film’s set on the afternoon of January 29, 2015, blowing past security guards until he was face-to-face with Dr. Dre’s bodyguards. Dre and Ice Cube were among Straight Outta Compton‘s producers. The bodyguards tried to chase him off the set, but Suge refused to budge. The panicked producers sent Cle “Bone” Sloan, a Bloods gang member who was working on the film as a technical adviser, to see what he could do. “Why don’t you leave so we can move forward?” Sloan said he told Suge. “You got the white folks scared.” Knight did leave eventually, but less than an hour later got a call from Terry Carter, a well-known entrepreneur in South-Central L.A. whose businesses included the rap label he had founded with Ice Cube, Heavyweight Records. A self-described “peacemaker,” Carter was said to be friendly with Suge—the two had talked about starting a business together. He asked Knight if they could meet at Tam’s, a burger joint in Compton near the Straight Outta Compton film’s base camp, to talk things over. Suge arrived at Tam’s just minutes later and found Carter waiting with a friend. According to the account Bone Sloan gave to the police, Knight was bad-mouthing him to Carter just as Sloan drove into the parking lot: “He was talking shit and I just popped out like a jack-in-the-box.” Witnesses saw Sloan charge the Raptor’s driver’s side shouting, “Let’s do it!” as he began throwing punches through the open window. Suge threw his pickup into reverse, knocking Sloan down, then put the truck into drive and lurched forward over the fallen man, crushing his ankles. The Raptor kept going until it plowed into the fleeing Carter and rolled over the fifty-five-year-old man’s torso, killing him on the spot. The entire event had been captured on Tam’s surveillance video.

  Suge fled the scene, but turned himself in to the police twelve hours later, at around 3 a.m. The first of Knight’s several attorneys in the case said his client was “heartbroken” over Carter’s death, but soon after this a new lawyer began to argue that Suge had acted in self-defense. Eventually, a claim that Carter had “lured” Knight into an ambush became Suge’s legal strategy. There were people who believed he could make it stick. One of them was the biggest name among the six attorneys Knight went through in the first two years after his arrest, Tom Mesereau. Famous mainly for winning the acquittal of Michael Jackson at his sex abuse trial in Santa Barbara County, Mesereau publicly claimed to be confident that he could prevail in Knight’s case. “I am convinced of Knight’s innocence,” he told Rolling Stone, “and … I look forward to defending him. [Knight] was defending himself at all times, and should not be facing any charge of murder, attempted murder or hit-and-run. If I had been driving the truck, I would not even have been charged with a misdemeanor.”

  Even if Knight did manage to beat the murder charges against him, though, the district attorney’s office seemed confident that a second case would send him to prison for a very long time. Suge had been arrested on robbery charges months before the death of Terry Carter. The alleged crime had taken place in Beverly Hills on September 5, 2014. As Knight stepped through the back door of Film One Studios accompanied by one of his seven children, he found himself face-to-face with a female photographer named Leslie Redden. According to Redden, Suge charged her, warning that he had “a bitch to come beat your motherfucking ass.” When Knight lifted his shirt to show her his waistband, Redden said, she turned to flee but took only a few steps before being confronted by Suge’s friend, comedian Katt Williams, and his female companion. When the woman knocked Redden to the ground, she said, Williams stood over her, screaming that she had better delete the photos of Suge she had taken, before ripping her camera out of her hands. A little more than a month later, Knight and Williams were arrested and charged with one count of robbery.

  Mesereau called that charge “utterly ridiculous,” but Rolling Stone reported th
at the robbery case “may prove harder to beat” than the charges against Knight related to Terry Carter’s death.

  Yet another criminal case had stacked up behind that one during February 2017, when a grand jury indicted Knight for threatening the life of Straight Outta Compton director F. Gary Gray. Still raging about both his portrayal in the film and, especially, not being paid for the use of his character, Suge had sent a barrage of text messages and voice mails Gray’s way, along the lines of, “I will see u in person … u have kids just like me so let’s play hardball.” In other text, Suge reminded the director he was “from Bomton,” meaning he was a Blood, then promising to make sure Gray got some “hugs” from fellow gang members; what Suge meant by “hugs,” Gray knew, was a serious beating. According to the prosecutors, Gray was so frightened by the messages Suge sent him that he spent two days dodging their questions. When they finally put him on the stand in front of a grand jury, the director claimed not to remember any messages from Suge or what they might have meant. The deputy D.A. prosecuting the case, Cynthia Barnes, told the grand jurors that Gray’s performance as a witness only emphasized how terrified Knight had made him:“He’s perjuring himself because he’s that afraid.” The grand jurors had agreed with her.

  It was the charges brought in the death of Terry Carter, though, that were keeping Suge locked up in solitary confinement at the Los Angeles County Men’s Jail. On March 20, 2015, amid the sort of sideshow that had been playing off and on at the Criminal Courts building a few blocks away since the O.J. Simpson trial, Judge Ronald S. Coen had set Knight’s bail at $25 million. Mesereau had left the case months earlier. Two explanations for his departure circulated: One was that Suge had failed to make fee payments as promised. The other was that Knight had attempted to use the attorney to commit crimes—including the elimination of witnesses—from behind bars.

  Two other Knight attorneys had already cycled through the case by the time Suge’s latest lawyer, Matthew Fletcher, began pleading with Judge Coen to reconsider the $25 million bail, complaining about the poor treatment Knight was receiving for ailments that included diabetes, blood clots, and vision loss. As if on cue, Suge, wearing an orange jumpsuit and heavy black-framed glasses, collapsed in the courtroom. Coen was not impressed by what he viewed as an encore performance; Knight had taken to passing out regularly in court and the judge seemed to be among the many observers who thought Suge was faking it. Outside the courthouse, Knight’s supporters staged a protest featuring a woman with a blonde Afro who wore a red dress and shouted, “This is a public lynching! Black lives matter!” Coen, though, refused to budge.

  Knight was still in jail sixteen months later when his attorneys filed papers informing the court they had a witness—professional informant Daniel Timms—who would testify that two sheriff’s deputies had compelled him to testify falsely against Suge in the Carter murder. Knight’s latest attorney, Thaddeus Culpepper, detailed Timms’s story in letters to California attorney general Kamala Harris and U.S. attorney general Loretta Lynch, writing that the informant had been told his wife’s nephew would receive a significantly reduced sentence in a murder case he was facing. Superior court judge William C. Ryan ruled that Culpepper’s claims about Timms were “patently and demonstrably false.” Nevertheless, it was a near certainty that Timms would be called as a witness at trial.

  Fletcher and Culpepper were both back in the news in March 2018, just weeks before Knight’s murder trial was to begin. The two attorneys had been indicted by a grand jury for allegedly urging Suge to pay witnesses to testify in his favor. A month earlier, Suge’s fiancée Toi-Lin Kelly had received a three-year prison sentence for violating a court order by arranging for the sale of the security footage that showed Knight’s truck ramming Sloan and driving over Carter. “I can’t wait to get this footage to you,” Kelly had written to TMZ, seeking a $55,000 payment for the right to show it. Prosecutors were also looking for a way to charge Suge in that case.

  Judge Coen had pledged that Suge’s April 9, 2018, trial date would not be postponed, but it was once again when Suge’s fifteenth attorney was replaced by his sixteenth, Albert DeBlanc Jr. Suge was making trips to the emergency room at Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center almost as often as he was changing attorneys. On April 5, 2018, he was once again rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Yet another “firm” trial date had been set for September 24, 2018. Most savvy observers were willing to take odds that it would be postponed also.

  By late spring 2018, Suge had been in jail for more than three years awaiting a trial that seemed as if it would never happen. He was unlikely ever to live outside a jail or prison cell again. Whether or not that was justice, he couldn’t say, Perry Sanders admitted. On the one hand, there were a lot of crimes that Suge Knight would never pay for, including the murder of Notorious B.I.G., and yet on the other hand he had only one life to spend behind bars, regardless of what he was being punished for.

  “Fair is not the same as right,” Sanders observed, “but sometimes it has to do.”

  EPILOGUE

  Among those who had tried to make the case in Wallace v. Los Angeles, it was the belief that Knight’s accomplices were still walking around free that rankled. At least Reggie Wright Jr. was headed for prison, but his would be only a short stay in a minimum-security federal prison. For a man many—including Sanders—suspected of crimes that should have put him away for life, it was essentially a skate. The only consolation was that Reggie Jr. would be marked forever as a snitch, and that a whole lot of Crips knew it was members of their gang that he had testified against.

  Infinitely more galling was that Rafael Perez continued to live comfortably near the beach as Ray Lopez, not only unpursued by law enforcement in Southern California, but actually protected by it. The Rampart Scandal narrative Perez had mostly made up out of whole cloth had been embraced across the entire spectrum of power and influence in Los Angeles; these days, it was actually taught in history classes.

  David Mack finished his fourteen-year prison sentence in May 2010 and was apparently proving that the money from the Bank of America robbery really was well invested. After taking alternative-energy courses at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, he established a firm that installed solar panels under minority set-aside contracts. He did well enough to purchase a bungalow in L.A.’s pricey Laurel Canyon. Mack was a vocal Bernie Sanders supporter who had actually organized rallies to back the candidate in black communities. The photographs on Mack’s Facebook page depicted a genial granddad posing with his four granddaughters and his wife, Carla, who had remained married to him during all those years he spent in prison.

  Six months before Mack bought the Laurel Canyon house, Harry Billups, a.k.a. Amir Muhammad, a.k.a. Harry Muhammad, purchased a home in Dallas, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. He was still claiming to be a simple mortgage broker.

  That there was no easily observed justice in this world was driven home for Sanders when Sergio Robleto died suddenly of pneumonia in March 2018 at age sixty-nine. The previous year, Robleto had worked as a technical adviser on the film made from my book LAbyrinth. He had donated all his earnings from that job to the family of Russell Poole. “Two of the only three people who ever really tried to investigate the Biggie murder are now gone,” Sanders lamented. “In this case, the good guys keep dropping and the bad guys keep walking away. It’s not right, but it’s the way it is.”

  Nearly as unbearable to Sanders was that Greg Kading’s bogus investigation had been legitimized by a national television network and his claims about who was responsible for Biggie’s murder went largely unchallenged in the media. “It’s absolutely sickening to me,” Sanders said. “Is there anybody in L.A. who cares even a little about what’s right and true?” In May 2018 Sanders was alerted at his Colorado Springs home to a radio interview Kading was doing on Denver’s KOA station. “It was one lie after another,” said Sanders, who was most upset by Kading’s claim that Mike Robinson had recanted his claims about Amir Muhammad, some
thing that had never happened. Sanders remembered when Kading had told interviewers virtually the same story about Eugene Deal’s identification of Muhammad as the likely killer. “Kading has never parsed evidence like a true detective does,” Sanders said. “Instead he takes eyewitness evidence that has never been refuted and just bald-faced lies, saying it was all recanted.”

  Sanders’s associate Sandy Ribera said she was most “horrified” to learn that Detective Steve Katz—“the biggest cover-up artist I’ve ever seen”—was not only still an LAPD detective but also an adjunct professor in the Los Angeles Southwest College Administration of Justice program.

  The truly big-time bad guys in the history of the case had done even better. Almost immediately after retiring as LAPD chief, Bernard Parks won a seat in 2003 on the Los Angeles City Council, one he would occupy for a dozen years as the most powerful black official in the city’s government. He finished fourth in the Democratic primary when he ran for Los Angeles mayor in 2005, and in 2008 was edged out in a runoff election for a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Term limits had forced Parks to surrender his City Council seat in 2015 at the age of seventy-two, but he was managing his retirement on a pair of city pensions that paid him nearly a million dollars a year.

  Michael Berkow also escaped major consequences for his behavior as a member of the LAPD command staff and prospered financially in the years that followed. Berkow left the LAPD in 2006 to take the position of chief of police in Savannah, Georgia. His disgrace was hidden from the citizens there for only a month before the Savannah Morning News uncovered the depositions from the Christle case, in particular the one in which Berkow admitted to sleeping with two of his female subordinates while serving as LAPD deputy chief. When asked about the Christle allegations, Berkow replied, “I categorically deny her assertions and look forward to my day in court. My attention, my energies, my talent is completely dedicated to making Savannah safer. I deeply regret that a bad personal decision in Los Angeles is distracting me from this task.”