Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Sanders, though, knew better than anyone how much he depended on Frank to bring his often scattered attention into focus. Frank, then in his late thirties, disguised his considerable killer instinct with a blond beard, slumped shoulders, and a relentlessly self-deprecating attitude. He publicly played the part of a skilled legal technician who handled most of the briefs and motions, generally but not always deferring to Sanders in matters of strategy and presentation. It was the younger attorney alone, though, who made the decision that instead of taking the short hop to New York, he would first fly to Los Angeles for a meeting with Russell Poole, the former LAPD detective who had been featured in the Rolling Stone article. “I felt the first thing to do was to look at his evidence and see if there really is a case,” Frank explained.

  Frank booked a hotel in Long Beach, about halfway between LAX and Poole’s home in Orange County, and was waiting there the next day when the ex-detective showed up with what he called “my files.” “I thought he’d come in with a two-inch stack of papers,” Frank recalled, “but Russ comes in with boxes. We needed a cart to carry it to my room.” He and Poole spent nearly seven hours going through the documents in the boxes, Frank remembered. “When we were done, I called Perry and said, ‘I don’t know for sure, but this Russell Poole guy sure seems credible to me, and what he’s put together looks like a real case,’ ” Frank recalled.

  “Rob always understates,” Sanders would say later. “If he says something looks like a case, you can be pretty sure it is.” At his partner’s urging, Frank flew back across the country the next day to meet with Voletta Wallace at Terri Baker’s office in Manhattan. The mother of Notorious B.I.G., Frank discovered, was a tall, slender woman of proud carriage who looked him straight in the eye and seemed never to blink, let alone glance away. “Voletta was as impressive as anyone I’ve ever met,” Frank recalled. “She had a grace to her, and a power to her. And her ability to articulate what her son meant to her and so many other people, what had been lost when he died, was remarkable. After the meeting, I reported back to Perry that I still wasn’t sure we had a winning case, but we certainly had a winning client.”

  Before Biggie’s murder, Voletta Wallace said, “I trusted everyone. I trusted the Los Angeles Police Department. I had to believe they wanted to find out who the murderer of my son was.” Almost immediately after reading about former LAPD officer David Mack’s alleged involvement in her son’s death, though, Wallace said, she decided to pursue a civil action. “I wasn’t thinking about the world I was taking on, only that something was not right and I have to make it right. If I have to sue them for that, I was gonna do it.”

  By early 2002, Sanders had weighed what he and Frank had learned from Russell Poole and Voletta Wallace and had arrived at the decision to file a civil rights claim in the federal district court of central California. “We wrote twenty-seven or twenty-eight drafts before we got the one we submitted,” Frank recalled. Said Sanders, “Rob and I both knew it was a long shot, but it was a long shot worth takin’.” The two lawyers were up against a statute of limitations deadline, and in the end had go with the best version they could deliver on time, a lawsuit accusing the LAPD of “policies and practices” that had permitted officers to obtain employment with Death Row Records and enabled at least one of them, former LAPD officer David Mack, to conspire with his friend Amir Muhammad to murder Notorious B.I.G. “Even then we didn’t appreciate the magnitude of what we were getting ourselves into,” admitted Frank.

  They got a quick lesson when the City of Los Angeles answered their suit first with an attempt to “force us out on statute of limitations,” Sanders recalled, then followed with a voluminous filing for summary judgment, the main grounds being that it could not be proved that David Mack—even if he was involved in the murder of Christopher Wallace—had acted under “color of law.” Judge Florence Cooper made a tentative ruling in favor of the city, but she scheduled a hearing to allow the plaintiffs to persuade her to change her mind.

  “I went to Perry and asked, ‘Is this even worth going out to argue?’ ” Frank remembered. “Perry said, ‘Hell yes, it is.’ ”

  What followed was a long and contentious disagreement over how their reply to the city’s motion should be couched. Sanders wanted to contend that if Mack had employed “cop tools and cop knowledge” as an accomplice in the Biggie murder, this satisfied the federal statute’s color of law requirement. Frank did not think that would work. “We sat in a room going back and forth about it for thirteen solid hours,” Frank recalled. Said Sanders, “By the time we finished, my butt was as sore as a butt could be. I didn’t want to sit down for the entire next week.”

  “Long story short, Perry won the argument, and he was right,” Frank said.

  For the next several days, Frank said, he “prepared like crazy,” then flew out to L.A. for the hearing before Judge Cooper. “I went to the courtroom very early to observe the judge, to see how she handles her business,” Frank remembered. He had been sitting for some time before the city’s lead attorney, Paul Paquette, showed up in the courtroom. “He didn’t know who I was, and he was talking to some other attorneys about how this was a bullshit case and the judge was going to dismiss it for sure,” Frank recalled. “He said she should have already. That got to me. If I wasn’t charged up enough already, I was after that.”

  When Frank was given the opportunity to speak, he did, for nearly an hour. “I took the court through a survey of how color of law worked, then argued that as long as the murder was accompanied by some use of authority or knowledge granted by the state—‘cop tools and cop knowledge’—it would satisfy the color of law requirement. And that argument changed her mind. She allowed the case to continue. It was one of those big victories that help you keep going when other things aren’t working out so well.”

  Immediately after that ruling, Sanders hired a tech to set up the website BiggieHotline.com, where individuals could post tips about the murder, anonymously if they chose. “We got a lot of publicity after we filed and after the judge said the case could go forward, so clues started coming in like crazy,” Sanders recalled. What most amazed and frustrated the attorney was the number of people who called or wrote to say they had seen Tupac Shakur alive and well in a Florida parking lot or a Maryland crab market or some other place in just about every state of the union. “A lot of the callers were spooky, strange, and totally useless to us,” Sanders remembered. “We weren’t prosecuting a lawsuit about Tupac’s death. Almost nobody who came in on the hotline said they’d seen Biggie. I guess he was a little more difficult to mistake for somebody else.”

  Right around the time the hotline was put up, Sanders began to hear warnings from Voletta Wallace and Biggie’s widow, Faith Evans, along with their New York attorneys and investigators, that his life was in danger. He tried to shrug it off with the same response he used during the Beats by the Pound lawsuit, Sanders recalled: “They’d ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ Of all the gangbangers who surrounded Master P, they meant. I’d say, ‘Are you afraid?’ They’d say no, and I’d say, ‘Then I’m not afraid. Because if they kill me, you’ll just hire another lawyer, and they know that. But if they kill you, the case goes away.’ ”

  He was shaken, Sanders admitted, after he was contacted on the hotline by a California prison inmate who said he’d been the cellmate of David Mack’s former LAPD partner Rafael Perez and had a good deal of information about Perez’s involvement with the Notorious B.I.G. murder. “I was interested, of course,” Sanders recalled. “But there was something about a girlfriend or wife in Lake Charles who was gonna come and see me, and that scared us off. There are Bloods everywhere, and we thought it was a setup. I was really afraid I was gonna get killed if we agreed to that meeting. So, we didn’t.”

  That would prove to be a problematic decision, though how significant the problem was Sanders wouldn’t know until three years later.

  Heartened by Judge Cooper’s first major ruling, Sanders and Frank were ev
en more encouraged when they learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking into B.I.G.’s murder. Shortly after the publication of the Rolling Stone article, a young agent in the FBI’s Los Angeles office, Phil Carson, received permission to launch an investigation of the murder under federal civil rights laws. Sanders’s anticipation was blunted, though, when Carson phoned to request a meeting in Louisiana, adding that he would be accompanied by two detectives from the LAPD’s Internal Affairs (IA) Division. “You had to figure the LAPD guys were coming to run us off the case,” the attorney explained. “And that if Phil Carson was bringing them along, he probably was going to tell us to go away, too.”

  He was flabbergasted, Sanders admitted, when Carson began the meeting in Lake Charles by saying, “We think you’ve sued the right people for this murder.” To which one of the IA detectives quickly added, “And we believe there are others involved.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Phil Carson had not even been an FBI agent when Notorious B.I.G. was shot to death outside the Petersen Automotive Museum. Carson, a compact man with sandy hair, elfin features, bright blue eyes, and a buff physique, was at that time working in Orange County as a bond trader for Titan Value Equities. He hadn’t entered the FBI Academy until June 1997—three months after the Biggie murder—at the age of thirty-three, yet still had managed to finish first in his class in physical training and defensive tactics. His assignment to the bureau’s Los Angeles office, though, had plunged the probationary agent into the maelstrom of police corruption cases swirling through Southern California. Carson had worked on several such investigations, most notably one centered on Ruben Palomares, an LAPD officer suspected of organizing more than forty home invasion robberies perpetrated by his gang of fellow cops. The investigation conducted by Carson and partners from the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division had compelled a guilty plea by Palomares that resulted in a thirteen-year prison sentence for him on the condition he testify in court against his associates. On the basis of what Palomares told the judge and jury, one of his associates would be sentenced to nearly ninety years in prison.

  Carson would eventually receive the U.S. Department of Justice’s annual Exceptional Service award (presented to him by Attorney General Eric Holder) for his work on the Palomares case, but he was still a young agent in the early stage of his career in June 2001, when “The Murder of Notorious B.I.G.” was published in Rolling Stone. Carson, admittedly “not much of a reader,” had not learned of the Biggie case until a couple of months later when the VH1 network aired a documentary that drew heavily on the magazine article. He was “pulled in” by the implication of David Mack in Detective Russell Poole’s investigation of the Biggie murder, Carson said, because of all the connections he saw to the LAPD corruption cases he had investigated during the previous three years. “It was the number of similarities,” Carson explained. “The tactics, the players, and, especially, the criminal culture that had been cultivated inside the LAPD, in particular among cops working with celebrities.” He wrote a long outline of how the earlier cases he had worked seemed to be intertwined with the Biggie murder, Carson recalled, “then went in to my bosses and said, ‘You guys gotta look at this. I know there’s something here.’ ”

  His FBI supervisors agreed. Carson asked that two LAPD investigators he had worked with on the Palomares case, Roger Mora and Steve Sambar, be assigned to the investigation with him. The police department granted the request. Carson was further encouraged when the LAPD’s number two man, Deputy Chief Jim McDonnell, helped him, Mora, and Sambar set up a ruse that permitted them to examine the department’s investigative file—its “Murder Book”—on the Biggie case. “William Bratton, who had just been appointed chief, said, ‘Hey, I’m new here. I want to see all the unsolved high-profile cases, one being the Biggie Smalls murder,’ ” Carson recalled. “ ‘Give me that entire case so I can peruse it.’ Then what McDonnell did was have it brought over, surreptitiously, to the FBI office. Mora and Sambar and I were sent into a conference room to look through it. McDonnell told us, ‘You can’t make any copies, you can just look.’ ”

  Among the details that jumped out at him, Carson recalled, was the report by Russell Poole in which he described how a large cache of GECO ammunition—the unusual brand of bullets that had been fired in the Notorious B.I.G. slaying—had been recovered from the garage of David Mack after he was arrested for the November 6, 1997, armed robbery of more than $722,000 from the Bank of America branch just north of the USC campus. It was the FBI that had first actually identified the GECO ammunition when the bureau’s agents searched Mack’s home after LAPD officers arrested him. The LAPD, as Poole noted, had simply left the ammunition sitting in the garage without even noting its brand.

  GECO, Carson knew, was German-manufactured ammunition intended mainly for the 9-mm Luger, though it would work in nearly any 9-mm automatic pistol. Seven GECO shell casings had been collected from the scene of the Notorious B.I.G. shooting. GECO bullets, Carson learned from FBI reports, were “extremely rare” in the United States—so rare that there was not a single mention of their use in a crime in the entire FBI database, with the exception of the Christopher Wallace murder. Only two stores in the Unites States sold GECO bullets, Carson discovered: one in New Jersey and the other in Corona, California, the city where Death Row Records director of security Reggie Wright Jr. lived, and where Amir Muhammad had conducted a good deal of his mortgage brokerage business.

  By the time he had finished paging through the Biggie Murder Book, Carson recalled, he was certain of three things: “The first was that one person could not possibly have pulled off this murder by himself, even if he was a police officer. The logistics were just too complicated. You had to know how to move and manipulate law enforcement to be able to do it and get away. There was just no way it could have been done otherwise. The second was that the LAPD had done absolutely nothing on this case for the past two years, since it was assigned to Steve Katz as the lead investigator. The Murder Book was literally collecting dust. The third thing I realized was that Russ Poole had done a lot of great work, work that was right on, and they had shut him down before he could finish his job.”

  Within days, Carson had arranged for Poole’s designation as what the FBI called a “137 source,” essentially making him a confidential witness brought in to aid the investigation. “I got enough money from my bosses to copy Russ’s entire case file,” Carson remembered, “and after I looked through that I was really impressed. I made it clear to my bosses that David Mack and Amir Muhammad were going to be targets of my investigation, along with other police officers, and my bosses signed off on it.”

  He found Poole to be a tremendous asset, Carson said, but also a tremendous pain in the ass. “Russ was a good guy, but he could just not let go,” Carson explained. “And I couldn’t blame the guy, because he had sacrificed so much to try to make this case. But he was always calling me, and saying, ‘Did you think of this? Did you talk to him? Have you considered this? Have you looked at that?’ And sometimes he would get upset with me because I couldn’t tell him things. It was an ongoing investigation, and I’m bound by the FBI’s confidentiality rules. But Russ had a hard time accepting that, and he started to get frustrated with me. And I started to get tired of him.”

  Not long after setting up the Murder Book ruse, Jim McDonnell had been replaced as Carson’s main point of contact with the LAPD command staff by Michael Berkow, recently appointed by William Bratton as his new deputy chief. Bratton had hired Berkow away from his position as chief of police for the city of Irvine, in Orange County, making him “the first outside sworn deputy chief in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department,” as the LAPD website described it. What that press release hadn’t mentioned was that Bratton had placed Berkow in charge of the department’s most sensitive division, Internal Affairs, giving his man control of all claims of LAPD misconduct or corruption.

  Berkow and Bratton agreed to let the Internal Affairs Division in
vestigators, Mora and Sambar, accompany Carson to Louisiana to meet with Perry Sanders. “Roger and Steve were great detectives and really good guys, both totally straight,” Carson said. “So I figured the LAPD had to be pretty committed to this investigation if they would give me a couple of guys like this to work with. Roger and Steve were just as enthusiastic about talking to Perry Sanders as I was. Just like me, they wanted to see what leads Perry was following or not following, but mainly what we wanted was an avenue to people who wouldn’t talk to law enforcement.” Carson and the IA investigators were particularly interested in gaining access to two key witnesses to the Notorious B.I.G. slaying: Eugene Deal, who had been working as the bodyguard for Sean “Puffy” Combs on the night of the murder; and rapper James “Lil’ Cease” Lloyd, who was riding in the same vehicle with Biggie when the shooting happened.

  “And Perry was great about that,” Carson said. “Once he trusted us, he basically gave us everything he had and all the help we asked for.”

  Carson and the two LAPD detectives also traveled to Colorado Springs, to meet Rob Frank and go through the documents he had obtained in discovery. When they returned to Los Angeles, however, Carson learned that Deputy Chief Berkow had pulled Mora and Sambar off the case. “I was stunned,” Carson recalled. “All I knew was that Roger and Steve had shown Berkow everything we’d gotten in Louisiana and Colorado, and he’d immediately told them they were no longer part of the Biggie murder investigation.” Mora and Sambar were not available even to consult on the investigation, although one of them did confide, Carson said, that, “ ‘if this case gets made, the effects could be catastrophic for the LAPD.’ And now Berkow, and presumably Bratton, knew we were making the case.”

  He still could not at that point process the LAPD’s position, Carson admitted. “I had had almost entirely good experiences working with LAPD. As I said, Roger and Steve were top-notch guys. So I wanted to work with LAPD on the Biggie case.” Then Berkow paid a visit to Carson at the FBI office. “He said, ‘Look, I’d like to give you Mora and Sambar back, but we’re short of bodies,’ ” Carson recalled. “ ‘So, what I want you to do is put together a PowerPoint presentation and show me what you’ve done and what you plan on doing, then I’ll see what I can do.’ ”