Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  An equally if not even more telling omission by Kading was Muhammad’s 1998 “gun brandishing” arrest in Chino and the subsequent shooting deaths of the couple he had menaced—again, facts that it could be proved Kading knew about. Muhammad’s arrest by Department of Motor Vehicles investigators for possession of four falsely obtained driver’s licenses also went unmentioned in Murder Rap.

  Kading was even more misleading in his “analysis” of the evidence that Poole believed pointed to Mack as part of the conspiracy to kill Biggie. He began creating his portrait of Poole as a monomaniac who’d lost sight of the forest for the trees by suggesting it was the discovery that David Mack owned a black Impala that most persuaded the detective of Mack’s involvement in the Biggie murder. The truth was that, while hearing about the Impala found in Mack’s garage when he was arrested for the Bank of America robbery was what first interested Poole in that particular dirty cop, the vehicle was not even among the top five pieces of evidence Poole had cited in his outline of the Mack-Muhammad theory of the Notorious B.I.G. assassination. Kading dealt with those more significant clues by distorting them, omitting them, or simply misrepresenting them.

  There was no mention in Murder Rap, for instance, of the fact that the same brand of bullets that had killed Biggie—the GECO ammunition that the LAPD’s own investigative reports described as “very rare”—had been found in David Mack’s home after he was arrested. Kading did acknowledge that Mack had taken sick days just prior to the Biggie murder, but ignored what made that significant in Poole’s eyes—the fact that Mack had taken one other set of sick days during 1997 and 1998, coinciding with the Bank of America robbery. To Poole, this was evidence that Mack “took time off when he wanted to plan and commit major crimes.”

  The fact that key witnesses, including Biggie’s close friend Damion Butler, had stated that they saw Mack at the Petersen Automotive Museum on the night of the murder was also left out of Kading’s critique of the Mack-Muhammad theory.

  What Kading additionally failed to mention was the implication of Rafael Perez as Mack’s partner in setting up the Biggie murder. There was no consideration of the sworn testimony of Kenneth Boagni or Felipe Sanchez, or of the adjudicators who heard that testimony and believed it; no reference whatsoever to the sworn testimony of Mario Ha’mmonds; and not a word anywhere in Murder Rap about the multiple additional clues that pointed to the involvement of Perez in the Biggie slaying.

  At times Kading made statements that were simply false. The most brazen was his claim that only one LAPD officer, Richard McCauley, had ever worked for Death Row. But Kading knew (not least from reading LAbyrinth) that in 1998, under pressure from an LAPD Internal Affairs investigator, Death Row’s director of security, Reggie Wright Jr., had named three other officers working for the label. Kading also failed to mention that Kendrick Knox had identified Mack and Perez as among the several LAPD officers he saw coming and going at Death Row’s studio while he was conducting surveillance of it.

  The strangest and most insidious line of attack Kading made against Poole involved his contention that the detective should have recognized that the investigation of David Mack was an Internal Affairs matter better left to IA detectives. “What Poole saw as a concerted cover-up was instead a well-established precedent, making clear distinctions among all the various investigations in which he had become involved,” Kading wrote. To Sergio Robleto, “That was maybe the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard about how the LAPD operates.” Apart from the fact that the LAPD Internal Affairs Division never investigated Mack in any meaningful way, and in fact contributed considerably to the cover-up Poole had been complaining about back in 1998, Robleto noted, “IA does not investigate homicides. That was Russ’s assignment: to investigate the murder of Notorious B.I.G. And a murder investigation always takes priority over any other kind of investigation. Nothing is or ever should be held back from the detectives on a homicide case. What Kading wrote about that was to me the clearest evidence that he’s nothing but a shill for the LAPD.”

  Kading’s criticism of Poole’s “reliance on jailhouse informants to support his case” was especially hypocritical. In the Torres case, Kading not only had relied almost entirely on jailhouse informants to make his case, but had persuaded them to say what he wanted them to say by offering inducements he had neither the authority nor the ability to deliver. The only “jailhouse informant” Poole had relied on in any significant way was Michael Robinson, known to be one of the most reliable CIs in Los Angeles County history. The contrast between the two detectives couldn’t have been clearer.

  “When I read the book, I thought, this has got to be a gag,” Sanders recalled. “Because anybody who knew the case would have easily seen what a liar Kading was.” What the former detective seemed to be counting on, though, was that most of his readers had no more than a passing knowledge of the Biggie murder investigation, and that those few who were better informed—LAPD officials and assistant city attorneys, mostly—would not be inclined to challenge a narrative that debunked the theory of cop involvement in the slaying.

  It was in his description of how he had “solved” the murder of Notorious B.I.G., though—and along the way Tupac Shakur’s slaying as well—that Kading wove a truly tangled web. Kading’s claim was that he and his partner Dupree had determined that Biggie’s killer was Wardell “Poochie” Fouse, Suge Knight’s thug who had been shot to death in 2003. The only evidence they had to support this was what they had been told, according to Kading, by “a forty-two-year-old single mother of two by the name of Theresa Swann.” Swann, as Kading described her, was Suge Knight’s former girlfriend who had come to Los Angeles from Ohio and lived under an assortment of aliases that included Theresa Reed and Theresa Cross. The story Theresa told, according to Kading, was that Suge had hired Poochie to assassinate Biggie, and that she had actually delivered the money ($9,000) to Fouse while he was locked up by posing as David Kenner’s legal secretary.

  Kading’s account omitted one extremely salient fact: there was no Theresa Swann. No Theresa Reed or Theresa Cross, either. No such person or persons.

  There was, however, a Tammie Hawkins.

  Hawkins was a Suge Knight baby mama who had been one of Suge’s two main accomplices, along with Reggie Wright Jr., in concealing and conveying assets in the aftermath of the Death Row Records bankruptcy filing made in April 2006. Through a pair of companies Knight had set up in her name, Digital Revolution Holdings and Dimples Merchandising, Hawkins had been the pipeline for the hundreds of thousands of dollars Suge was funneling out of Death Row, as well as for the far more valuable master recordings of unreleased songs, including those by Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg.

  Kading had written about his discovery of the masters in a Detroit storage facility as if it were the product of crack work by Dupree and himself. In fact, the two detectives had done little more than follow in the footsteps of the bankruptcy attorney who had been appointed trustee of the Death Row debt, R. Todd Neilson. It was Neilson who had found the $658,848 in cash that had been wired to Hawkins by Knight, and who had traced the missing master recordings to the companies in her name.

  Hawkins was a criminal who had followed her criminal brother to Los Angeles from Detroit. Jerry Hawkins was a member of the Lueders Park Piru Bloods, and it was through him that she had met Suge Knight. Even as Tammie Hawkins was becoming Kading’s sole source of the claim that Poochie Fouse had killed Biggie Smalls, the woman had been the target of a task force assembled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s Commercial Crimes Unit. According to those investigators, Hawkins was one of the leaders of a ring that had been using fraudulent loan applications to buy new automobiles that it then quickly resold. When Hawkins’s house was raided, sheriff’s deputies recovered a pistol that had been reported stolen in Seattle. That house, on Thoroughbred Street in Rancho Cucamonga, a San Bernardino County community in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, had once been the home of Suge Knight and his wife
Sharitha, but in 2001 was purchased by Hawkins at the bargain price of $10,000.

  Kading did not write a word in Murder Rap about how Hawkins had become his witness. In fact, the former detective had not offered solid evidence to support any of his claims, neither LAPD documents nor witness statements. “His whole attitude was, ‘Take my word for it,’ ” Robleto said. “Sorry, there’s no way I’m taking Kading’s word for anything. I would need proof.” Sanders was told by a source he would not name that “Suge’s attorney” had provided Hawkins to Kading. But that made little sense, given that his ex-girlfriend had told the LAPD, according to Kading, that Suge was behind the hit on Biggie. “Why would Suge give Kading a witness who would say he was responsible for the Biggie murder?” Robleto asked.

  Sanders proposed a possible explanation: “Getting the LAPD to arrest him based on bullshit might have been the best way Suge could have protected himself. If the case was filed and he beat it, that would mean he could never be charged again, under double jeopardy statutes.”

  A far simpler and more obvious explanation for how Hawkins had come to Kading was threaded through the pages of Murder Rap: she was fed to him by Reggie Wright Jr. It was clear even without Kading’s acknowledging it that Wright had provided the detective’s main path into the world of Death Row Records. “A valuable resource to law enforcement” is how Kading describes Wright in Murder Rap, writing that the former Death Row director of security had been unfairly placed under a “cloud of suspicion” in the Biggie murder, “despite those allegations being conclusively proven false.” How those allegations had been “proven false,” Kading didn’t say, but that’s his modus operandi throughout the book: to simply claim that this or that had been shown to be true or untrue without offering a shred of proof to support those assertions. What everyone who had investigated Death Row before Kading knew was that Wright had been a dirty cop who became an even dirtier ex-cop, involved in virtually every criminal enterprise associated with the record label. Multiple informants described how Suge and Reggie had financed their operations before Death Row began producing hit records: by ripping off drug dealers, then selling their product on the streets in Compton and surrounding communities.

  In Murder Rap, Kading fails to mention that Wright was an even more significant coconspirator than Tammie Hawkins in helping Knight conceal assets during Death Row’s bankruptcy. The single biggest scam Suge and Reggie had cooked up together in that regard involved the sixteen-floor office building at 6200 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, where the Death Row Records offices had been housed. Valued at approximately $8 million, the building (half a block from the Petersen Automotive Museum) had been transferred from Knight to Wright in early 2006, shortly before the Death Row bankruptcy filing. Neilson, the bankruptcy trustee, had unraveled the scheme and filed suit against Knight and Wright for fraudulent conveyance, eventually claiming all the proceeds from the sale of the 6200 building. That process took several years, however, and in the interim Wright was collecting every penny of the rents on the property. He had also used his ownership of the 6200 building to acquire $1 million loan on a house in Corona, out in Riverside County, at a time when houses in that community sold, on average, for about a quarter of that amount. How Wright, who claimed to live on a disability pension from the Compton Police Department and reported about $45,000 a year in income on his tax returns, could afford to live in a mansion was one more question that didn’t interest Kading.

  Wright and Hawkins had been involved with each other—at least financially—since the late 1990s or before. In 2001, the two had been jointly evicted from a house in Malibu. Wright might possibly have rented the property with Hawkins as a beard for Knight, but that wasn’t evident from the public record.

  According to law enforcement sources, Reggie and Tammie each had turned on Suge in the years after 2006, when they became allies in working against Knight. It was Wright who had pointed Kading toward the idea that Biggie Smalls was killed by Poochie Fouse on orders from Suge Knight, telling the detective that Suge had bought Poochie an Impala—a green Impala—at George Chevrolet in Bellflower.

  Hawkins’s animus toward Suge had spiked in 2010, when her court filing to collect child support for their four-year-old son, Taz Maree Knight, had resulted in a ruling that she should receive just $312 a month. Knight had claimed he was earning only $1,217 a month, an amount that was about a tenth of what he spent on attorneys. Just a few months later, Kading came out with the book in which he claimed that “Theresa Swann” had implicated Suge and Poochie Fouse in the Biggie murder. In short, Kading’s entire case in the Biggie murder consisted of what he claimed he had been told by Reggie Wright Jr. and Tammie Hawkins. Kading barely mentioned that he had arranged for Wright and Hawkins to receive blanket immunity before they became his witnesses. In Hawkins’s case, that immunity extended to her role in the auto theft ring.

  Kading contended in Murder Rap that he had made a winnable case against Suge that was never filed, because of the problems that had spilled over from the George Torres prosecution. There was a delicious irony in Kading’s explanation for why Suge was never charged with Biggie’s murder. Just as Russell Poole had charged a decade earlier, Kading now accused the LAPD of “undercutting the ability of it its own investigators to solve the case.” The difference was that, unlike Poole, Kading wasn’t suggesting that the police department was protecting corrupt cops in order to hide its own culpability. Instead, he accused the LAPD of “a studied disregard for justice”: “It was expedient for them to cripple the case in the interests of avoiding a potentially difficult prosecution,” he explained.

  Another, and more forthright, way of saying the same thing was that Kading and Dupree hadn’t succeeded in making a case sufficient for the D.A.’s office to file on, especially when the detective who would have to explain the investigation on the witness stand—Kading—was certain to be impugned for his conduct in the Torres case.

  Kading lamented that Eugene Deal had never been shown a mug shot of Poochie Fouse, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Deal had already made a positive identification of Amir Muhammad as the killer. But there was so much else he hadn’t accounted for. For instance, why hadn’t Kading shown Poochie’s picture to Lil’ Cease or any of the other witnesses who had seen the killer’s face as he was firing the bullets that took Biggie’s life? Sanders wondered. Why would Poochie Fouse be dressed and groomed like a Nation of Islam member when he went to kill Biggie? And how had he known where the police were that night in the area surrounding the Petersen Automotive Museum and been so successful in avoiding them? Plus, how would Poochie, a low-level thug, come into possession of “very rare” ammunition typically seen only on the East Coast? Poochie was “conveniently dead,” as Robleto put it, so he could never be asked those or other questions.

  Sanders had compiled a long list of the inaccuracies in Murder Rap by the time he contacted Kading in November 2011 to arrange a meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn in Calabasas. The attorney brought along a new associate, a young lawyer from the Bay Area named Sandra Ribera.

  Sanders did most of the talking when their November 3 meeting with Kading began. “My main point, obviously, was to see what it was he’d done to supposedly eliminate cops [as suspects in the Biggie murder],” Sanders recalled. “I went through it point by point, and he hadn’t run down even one of the things I asked about. Not one! So, when he says the first thing he did was absolutely eliminate cops as suspects by running down every piece of supposed evidence, that’s a lie. It’s a blatant lie.”

  What was most interesting to him about the entire meeting, Sanders said, was watching the way Kading changed while he was being questioned: “He started out with this sort of Boy Scout persona—‘I’m just here to help’—but as I began to ask more and more pointed questions, he literally became a different person right in front of my eyes. I’ve never seen a bigger Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation in my life! He started out innocent and charming, but, believe me, that went away fas
t when he was put under pressure. You could see the fury in his eyes. His face was getting redder and redder, and the atmosphere was getting more and more tense. Kading looked like he was about to pop at any second, so I took my foot off the gas and let Sandy ask some questions.”

  Ribera, a self-described “huge fan” of Tupac Shakur, had become obsessed with the case after reading the 2005 Rolling Stone article while on a plane to Hawaii, shortly after her graduation from law school. “I basically stalked Perry for a year until he brought me on the case,” she recalled. Sanders said, “I thought maybe her familiarity with the world of hip-hop would be a help, plus she was willing to work really hard for very little guaranteed money.” It probably didn’t hurt that Ribera’s father had been the chief of police in San Francisco at the same time Bernard Parks was running the LAPD and that the two men had been in frequent communication. Ribera, though, said she never would have asked her father to involve himself in the case. “I was actually surprised that my dad never seemed upset when I got into it,” she said, “even though he was friends with Parks.”

  Ribera had come into the Calabasas meeting with a far more sympathetic attitude toward Kading than Sanders had, as she recalled it, “at least at the beginning.”

  “It was obvious that there was a lot he didn’t know,” Ribera said. “The LAPD had kept a lot from him, including all of the informant interviews. He did know about Mike Robinson, and he admitted to us that Mike was credible, even though he had written exactly the opposite of that in his book. He hadn’t gotten a copy of the Knox declaration, and he wasn’t given access to any of the stuff connected to Boagni. So I was thinking, ‘This poor guy doesn’t realize how the LAPD pulled the wool over his eyes.’ Gradually, though, it became obvious that Kading hadn’t really minded having the wool pulled over his eyes. He didn’t get upset or pissed off at the LAPD when Perry told him all the stuff he didn’t know, but he did get pissed at Perry for pointing it all out and telling him how little he actually knew about the case.