As a result of the article, the FBI’s Los Angeles office—“on my orders,” Caprino said—informed Philips it would have no further contact with him. In Carson’s view, at that point “Philips says basically, ‘Screw it. Now I’m really gonna go after this guy.’ He was calling Cathy Viray again and again and telling her how he was going to ruin my career.” Viray confirmed this.
Carson appealed to the L.A. office’s assistant director, Rich Garcia, who made another unprecedented decision: he sent the office’s assistant chief counsel, Steve Kramer, along with Viray, to meet with Philips. The rendezvous took place in a corner booth of a downtown bar at just past eleven on a weeknight. “Cathy told me they began by telling Philips, ‘Look, Carson is not a bad dude. We don’t want you to ruin his career,’ ” recalled Carson, whose recollection was confirmed by Viray. “ ‘We’ll try to answer any questions [about the Biggie murder investigation] that we can, but you gotta understand there are limits to what we can tell you.’ ”
Viray called him just before midnight, Carson remembered, and said, “ ‘We just got done meeting with Chuck Philips.’ How did it go?” Carson asked. “And Cathy tells me, ‘You’re done. He’s going to ruin you.’ ”
He decided on the spot that he had to meet with Philips himself, Carson recalled. “I told Cathy, ‘You need to talk to the assistant director and get his okay for that, because nobody else is going to save my career. I have to do it.”
Garcia gave his permission for Carson to meet with Philips. It was after midnight by then. He phoned Philips, but the call went straight to voice mail. “I left a message that ‘I know about the meeting with Steve [Kramer] and Cathy, and I understand you’re going to write an article that’s going to ruin me. And I’d appreciate it if we could at least sit down and you could actually see me and put a face with my name and understand what you’re doing to a real person.’ ”
Philips phoned back fifteen minutes later, said he had just gotten out of the shower, and added, “Boy, that’s a phone call I didn’t expect to get.” He and Carson agreed they would meet early the next morning at a coffee shop near the Los Angeles Times Building. Carson picked Viray up the next morning at around five o’clock and the two were at the coffee shop before six. “When we sit down,” Carson recalled, “Philips immediately starts asking questions about the Biggie case that he knows I can’t answer. And I tell him that he knows I can’t share details of an ongoing investigation, and he’s trying to make my refusal to say things that could get me fired into a reason to ruin me.”
Ten minutes into the conversation, Carson got a call from the woman who had been the face of the FBI in Los Angeles for years, public affairs specialist Laura Eimiller. “Laura asks, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Carson remembered. “I tell her I’m in a meeting and she asks, ‘Who’s with you?’ I tell her Cathy, and she asks, ‘Are you guys meeting with Chuck Philips?’ I say, ‘Yeah,’ and Laura tells me, ‘Well, Mike Berkow just called the assistant director and chewed him a new asshole. He’s pissed off you guys are meeting with Philips. I hand the phone to Cathy and I watch her face change. She starts bawling and telling Chuck Philips, ‘You motherfucker! You’re going to get me fired, you piece of shit!’ She’s losing it. I take the phone and Laura tells me, ‘You guys need to get out of there right now.’ When she hung up, I told Philips, ‘You called Berkow, didn’t you? And you told him about this meeting.’ ”
Philips had to have made that call sometime between one and six in the morning, Carson thought, which said something about the relationship he had with Berkow.
He and Viray got up from the table and left the coffee shop. “I’m literally carrying Cathy down the sidewalk toward our car, and Chuck is chasing after me, saying, ‘Phil, Phil, look, I can explain. Just listen to me. I got something I need to show you, and it’s up in my office.’ I tell him to just get away from me and I keep dragging Cathy away, because she’s turning around to go off on him. And Philips is telling me, ‘Just look at what I have to show you. It will explain everything.’ But I won’t stop. Then he says, ‘Someday I will tell you about how I found out about your operation in San Diego, about Psycho Mike.’ That was the moment when I knew for certain that Berkow had told him.”*
By the time he got back to the FBI office, his “pager was blowing up,” Carson recalled. “Chuck Philips is doing anything he can to get hold of me. The guy won’t quit, and finally that night I answer his call and say, ‘What the hell do you want?’ He says, ‘You need to meet with me and see the stuff in my office I want to show you.’ I’m thinking, ‘Okay, the case is closed, I can’t get a letter of declination, you and Berkow are trying to ruin my career; it’s almost like I have nothing left to lose.”
So he agreed to meet with Philips again early the next morning on the sidewalk outside the Times Building. Philips showed up and the two rode the elevator up to the newspaper’s nearly vacant editorial department. Philips had brought him there not to “see” anything, Carson discovered, but rather to hear. What he wanted the FBI agent to listen to was a series of recorded phone conversations between the reporter and LAPD deputy chief Mike Berkow.
“Berkow is telling him things like, ‘We have to make sure Phil Carson is totally noncredible. If he ever testifies, the LAPD will be destroyed. We have to wreck this case,’ ” Carson remembered. “I mean, these two guys were conspiring not just against me, but against the entire Wallace side of the case, against the murder investigation itself. To Berkow, I was just collateral damage. Ruining my life meant absolutely nothing to him. In one conversation I hear Berkow talking about Mike Robinson, and what he told Philips to shut down the third meeting with Amir Muhammad in Chula Vista, and by that point I was so pissed off that I could barely contain myself. He also tried to show me some photos, but by then I wanted out of there so badly I didn’t look at them. I just walked out, shaking with rage.”
During the next two weeks, Philips called him repeatedly, dozens of times, said Carson, who refused to take the reporter’s calls. Finally, though, realizing the mistake he had made in not looking at the photos, Carson called Philips back from the U.S. attorney’s offices and said he’d like to see them. The reporter showed up minutes later with an envelope full of photographs. “They were the same ones that I had seen the first time I looked at the Biggie Murder Book,” Carson said. “They were from the Petersen, on the night of the party. Philips pointed out various people in cheaper suits that he said were police officers. Then he showed me a picture of Amir Muhammad. I felt literally sick, and I wanted Philips away from me, so I walked away. I should have taken the photos, but I didn’t.”
He realized in a flash what Philips was doing, Carson explained: “He wanted me to be his new inside source, and he was willing to sell out Berkow to land me. The whole thing just made me sick and disgusted, and I knew I was done with it all. I never spoke to either Philips or Berkow again after that day.”
A short time later the FBI agent requested and received a transfer to Orange County. “L.A. was poisoned for me,” he explained. “I didn’t believe anybody in the whole damned city.”
By June 2005, the run-up to the impending trial in Wallace v. Los Angeles had become increasingly frantic and frustrating for the plaintiffs’ side. “It was hard to find people and it was hard to find information,” Rob Frank said. The City of Los Angeles and the LAPD were throwing up every roadblock they could find. What made getting to the people the attorneys needed most wearisome, though, was the cloud of fear that surrounded the case.
One witness Sanders and Frank were certain they wanted to put on the stand was Kendrick Knox, the now retired LAPD senior lead officer who had conducted an investigation of Death Row Records in 1996. Knox’s investigation had established beyond doubt that it was widely known among the police department’s highest-ranking officials, well before the murder of Notorious B.I.G., that a significant number of LAPD officers were working for Death Row Records, in spite of an official policy that forbade it, and that the police department
had deliberately turned a blind eye.
What had begun for Knox as a “civil abatement” case involving conflicts between condo dwellers and gangbangers in the vicinity of Death Row’s Encino, California, recording studios had morphed into an investigation into the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. When the LAPD command staff learned of this, Deputy Chief David Gascon had distributed an intradepartmental memorandum stating that only a single LAPD officer had ever worked for Death Row Records. Knox knew that this was not true, and knew also that Gascon’s boss and longtime ally, LAPD chief Bernard Parks, knew it was not true. Shortly afterward, Knox had been ordered not to discuss his Death Row Records investigation with anyone inside or outside the police department without official authorization. Knox also had been ordered to turn over all the files in his possession that related to Death Row Records. “They closed the lid on him” as Russell Poole put it, leaving Knox so “disturbed and frustrated” that he had given Poole both the notes that had survived his investigation and Kevin Lewis, the informant working for Death Row who had provided him with accounts of what was happening inside the record company. Most of Knox’s work, though, had disappeared when the hard drive on his work computer was wiped clean while he was on sick leave, Knox had told Poole.
This last event had left Knox deeply shaken. The officer became increasingly concerned that information about him and his investigation was being leaked to Suge Knight by other members of the police department. “Knox had become convinced that his life and his wife’s life were endangered,” Sergio Robleto explained.
In the weeks before the lawsuit’s trial date, Robleto and his operatives devoted many hours to surveillance of Knox’s home, but saw no sign of the man. “We heard he had gone to Mexico to avoid our subpoena,” Robleto recalled, “but we wondered how he knew exactly when he needed to be gone in order to do that.”
Sanders and Frank would say publicly that they had no doubt that someone on the other side of the case had alerted Knox that he was about to be subpoenaed and encouraged him to abscond. “However it happened, his disappearance has hurt our case and helped theirs,” Frank said.
* In May 2018, I asked Vaughn, now a defense attorney in Los Angeles, to explain why he had refused to provide the letter of declination. In what sounded like a panicked voice he insisted that he did not know what I was talking about, then said he couldn’t discuss it over the telephone, asked me to send my questions in an email, and hung up. I immediately sent an email to Vaughn at his law firm, laying out the claims made by Carson and other current and former FBI agents and asking him to reply. He never did.
* Michael Berkow’s defense against the accusations made against him by Carson and others is considered in detail in Appendix A.
CHAPTER SEVEN
For Perry Sanders, preparation for the Notorious B.I.G. wrongful death lawsuit was turning into the most surreal experience of a life that had long been lived large. It was quite a bit of fun at the beginning. He and Frank were staying in a spectacular ocean-view condominium in Santa Monica that had been formerly owned by the NFL great Anthony Muñoz and, as Sanders put it, “havin’ a ball.” Sanders was spending at least a couple of nights a week playing poker at the Commerce Casino. Traveling to and from court, he was watched over by the hulking bodyguards the Wallace Estate had hired to keep him safe. That the bodyguards were Bloods gang members confused him at first, Sanders recalled, but he knew Voletta Wallace and Biggie’s widow, Faith Evans, were determined to see him protected, “so I trusted they were the right guys.”
Sanders himself began to take the danger, and the commitment of his bodyguards to protect him from it, more seriously one afternoon while dining at Enterprise Seafood in the Abbot Kinney section of Venice. He was meeting with Lil’ Cease over the meal to talk about the rapper’s trial testimony. “I’m pourin’ champagne for Lil’ Cease when one of my bodyguards sees somebody come in he thinks might be a threat. I got a bottle of champagne in my hand when the bodyguard grabs me by the back of the jacket and literally carries me out to the car, with the bottle still in my hand.”
Lil’ Cease’s manager Wayne Barrow had invited Sanders to the Hollywood Boulevard Club where the rapper’s new album was being previewed. “So I show up with my two bodyguards,” Sanders recalled. “We get out of the car and people are lined up outside the place to get in. The sidewalk is packed from the building to the street in both directions with beautiful people, the most beautiful. I’m thinkin’, ‘We won’t be goin’ there, obviously, ’cause we’ll never get in.’ My driver says, ‘Wait here.’ He goes to the door, talks to the guy there, and next thing you know it’s like the Red Sea partin’. I not only get ushered right in but also right past all the rich and famous people who are already seated at tables on the floor, then led to this private balcony above the dance floor that I have all to myself.”
Below was one of the strangest scenes Sanders had ever experienced. “There are all these movie stars and music stars,” he recalled, “but there are also all these gangsters. I mean, wall-to-wall gangsters. And some of ’em looked pretty damn scary. I turn to one of my bodyguards—this guy who had told me he had been shot six times before he was twenty—and I say, ‘Guys, you don’t seem to be armed. How do I know I’m not going to get whacked when I try to walk out of here?’ And the guy, my four-hundred-fifty-pound guy, tells me, ‘Well, it’s because of who your bodyguards are.’ Then he tells me, ‘Also, because of who your bodyguards are, you can have any woman in here if you want.’ It was right at the beginning of my relationship with Lorn [Lee, the woman he would marry], so I could only look, but it told me one heck of a lot about how far L.A. is from Louisiana.”
The part of the job that Sanders would come to dislike most was dealing with the Los Angeles press. “L.A. is the only place I’ve tried a case where public perception, what’s happenin’ in the media, seems more important than what happens in the courtroom,” he said. “And the media in L.A. follows the Los Angeles Times wherever it leads.” The deluge of negative and biased reporting he had faced from the moment he filed the lawsuit began to wear on Sanders well before the case came to trial. “It’s been a big enough drag to have a whole bunch of very good lawyers against us in this case,” he said, “but to have the biggest newspaper in the state doin’ triple backflips to try to influence the jury against us has made it much more difficult.”
Sanders had no doubt the city’s attorneys were leaking anything that might damage his case to the Times after the newspaper ran a story reporting that the Wallace Estate had tried to settle for as little as $18 million. Sanders refused to comment on that claim, but did say that none of the Times articles had included one crucial detail about every settlement discussion he’d had with the city: his client’s demand that the LAPD devote its resources to solving her son’s murder.
“What I need from this lawsuit is that the person or persons who murdered my son are brought to justice,” Voletta Wallace told me in 2005. “What I need from this lawsuit is honesty. What I need from this lawsuit is to show that humans have integrity, that they’re not cowards, show that they’re not liars, show that they care about the truth.” For Sanders, Voletta Wallace had become an island of calm amid the storm of secrets and lies her court claim had unleashed. “Let it all come out,” she said. “There’s nothing they can surprise me with anymore.”
For the City of Los Angeles and its representatives, their defense had grown steadily more fierce and manipulative, in part owing to the increase in their legal team’s firepower. “They got the case continued on bullshit, and at first we couldn’t figure out why,” Sanders recalled. “I thought it might be just to make it more expensive and time-consuming for us, but then I figured out that it was to buy time to bring in a big-time lawyer.” Without Sanders’s knowledge, the city attorney’s office had gone to the Los Angeles City Council to obtain a $500,000 appropriation to hire “outside counsel.” The lawyer chosen was Vincent Marella, a widely admired—and feared—business attorney
whose list of professional honors and accolades was lengthy. Marella, a former U.S. attorney, had been the lead defense lawyer in the largest federal tax case in U.S. history and had represented an assortment of CEOs and CFOs of major corporations in securities fraud and antitrust cases.
“Up until Marella, we had several city attorney representatives that were seasoned and very good in their own way,” Sanders recalled, “but their style, from the way they dressed to the way they tried a case, was consistent with a more bureaucratic approach. Vince, on the other hand, owned his own fine clothes men’s shop, and he was cut from distinctly different cloth, like the custom-tailored shirts and suits he wore. He had done lots of stuff that was way outside the zone of what even the best attorney workin’ for the city would have done.”
It had pleased Sanders that his Southern accent and good-time grin initially made it difficult for a lot of people in L.A. to take him seriously. The Louisianan was always “fixin’ ” to do this or that. “Bein’ underestimated was probably our biggest advantage at the beginning of the case,” Sanders admitted with a sly smile. Unlike the comically pretentious Paul Paquette, the city’s lead attorney up to that point, Marella had recognized that Sanders was no rube from the moment he showed up in court. “All of a sudden, we had a very smart, tactical sophisticate on our hands,” said Sanders. “It was like we were playin’ a different team.”
Sanders was convinced that Marella had coached former LAPD chief Bernard Parks on how to avoid giving answers that offered any illumination when he was cross-examined by Sanders and Frank during his deposition. The LAPD’s investigation “never pointed clearly at any one suspect,” Parks said, but then conceded a moment later, “I think the closest speculation was that there was one suspect, and it was later found out that he was not involved. I remember it was Amir. And later found out, at least from our investigation, he was not involved.”
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