Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Eventually, Surratt recalled, “I went to R.J. Bond to talk about my concerns, and when Kading found out about that, he sent me all of Bond’s information, with a note that read, ‘Be careful who you make friends with.’ ” Kading had attached a number of documents, which he asked Surratt to post on his website. Surratt was astonished to discover that the documents were the entire record of the LAPD’s Internal Affairs investigation of Kading, which included R.J. Bond’s home address. “When I asked Kading how he got the IA report,” Surratt recalled, “he refused to answer.”

  Bond was “panicked” when Surratt forwarded Kading’s email to him. He persuaded Surratt not to post the documents Kading had sent him, Bond recalled, but three other websites contacted by the former detective did put the documents up, unredacted. Kading followed up with a statement: “Bond has no hesitation in making false accusations against people based on unsubstantiated rumors. He’s lucky Suge doesn’t have guys like Poochie around anymore.”

  Bond responded by filing a second complaint with the LAPD, calling what Kading had written “a direct threat.” The department seemed to take this complaint seriously, sending Threat Assessment Unit officers three times to interview Bond at his home in Corona, fifty miles from LAPD headquarters in downtown L.A. He consulted with his father, “who told me, ‘If Kading wasn’t a problem for them, they would never have done that.’ I had my dad come and sit with me each time I was interviewed.” It was no surprise to Bond that this complaint, too, was ultimately dismissed.

  Bond tangled with Kading again after the meeting with Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese at LAPD headquarters that he and Russell Poole had attended in June 2014. Somehow, immediately after the meeting, Kading obtained a copy of the PowerPoint presentation Bond and Poole had made for Albanese and began posting portions of it, along with his commentaries, on a website registered to “Anton Batey.”

  “There was only one way Kading could have gotten that PowerPoint, and that was from Dupree,” Bond said. “Sharing evidence in a murder case with someone who is no longer a police officer is a crime, so I filed another complaint, against Dupree.”

  This time the LAPD really did seem to take Bond’s concerns seriously. When Bond sent an email under the heading “I am in trouble—the letter is out now,” an Internal Affairs investigator named Dollie Swanson responded with an email of her own conceding that the PowerPoint presentation seemed to have been leaked. “I have been pursuing several leads with the help of our information technology personnel, trying to track down how and who accessed your prior complaint,” Swanson wrote.

  Swanson sent Bond a detailed list of questions and scheduled a meeting with Russell Poole, who had filed his own complaint with Internal Affairs. After speaking with Poole, Swanson phoned Bond to say she was applying for search warrants on the computers of Daryn Dupree and Greg Kading. “And that was when the LAPD shut her down,” Bond recalled. “She told me the LAPD brass wouldn’t let her get the search warrants, wouldn’t even let her finish the investigation. After that, she didn’t want to talk to me anymore. When I got her on the phone, she sounded scared. She told me that LAPD was taking the position that the [PowerPoint] had been leaked by someone outside the department.”

  One more time, Bond said, “The LAPD showed me how committed it was to protecting Greg Kading, a cop who had left the department under a cloud if not in disgrace.” There was little doubt that the LAPD was backing Kading when the former detective began leaking an Internal Affairs report that effectively vindicated him in the Torres case. IA had managed this by reducing the entire case to the question of whether Kading had intentionally lied in his search warrant affidavits. Being reckless with the truth and being untruthful were two different things, the IA report noted, before concluding that “there is absolutely no evidence in this investigation to show that Kading intentionally or maliciously misrepresented material facts.” The LAPD had managed to reach such a conclusion by omitting completely any questions about what Kading had promised witnesses to get them to testify as he demanded and whether he had lied on the stand, the two most significant reasons Judge Wilson had excoriated him. The L.A. Weekly reporter Chris Vogel wrote an article that embraced the IA report without the slightest whiff of critical inquiry, and soon Kading was distributing that article across the Internet as well. Even Bond would concede that Kading seemed to possess a boundless energy for self-promotion. He was a constant presence on Tupac and Biggie Internet fan boards, posting something new almost every day. “Kading’s MO is to simply call people names and dismiss them,” Bond says. “He won’t fight with you directly about the evidence; he just calls you a nut job. And he makes it work by just repeating it again and again and again.”

  By then, though, Bond had been joined by Surratt as a vocal critic of Kading. Surratt was relying on Kading’s own words and works to expose him. After his initial interview of Kading, Surratt began posting long pieces that challenged the Murder Rap narrative. In the first, appearing under the title “Greg Kading’s Bias Towards Mack and Muhammad,” Surratt cataloged many of the intentional omissions and deliberate distortions of fact in Murder Rap. He took particular issue with how Kading not only ignored the fact that GECO ammunition had been found in Mack’s garage after his arrest, but also played down how rare the ammunition used in the Biggie murder actually was. Kading had seen the FBI statement that GECO bullets were so uncommon in the United States that the agency couldn’t find them in its database of crimes—except in the Christopher Wallace case, as Surratt knew. Kading was an LAPD “shill,” Surratt wrote, who was refusing to admit the existence of important evidence in the Notorious B.I.G. case “because he doesn’t want people to question if the evidence he has linking Wardell ‘Poochie’ Fouse to Biggie’s murder might be false.”

  A week later, Surratt posted another article that focused on the shiftiest move Kading had made: his attempt to turn the black Impala driven by the Biggie shooter into an aqua-green Impala like the one Poochie drove. For the “incorrect” claim that the shooter’s Impala had been black, Kading was blaming Russell Poole. “There was a misreport of a black Impala that was outside the Petersen that the suspect had apparently driven,” Kading told one interviewer. “And then Russell Poole draws a conclusion: ‘Look, David Mack has a black Impala.’ But what Russell Poole doesn’t do is tell people about how every single witness that was in those cars denied it being a black Impala. They said it was a green Impala.”

  His claims about the green Impala were possibly the single most glaring example of Kading’s dishonesty, in Surratt’s view. Gregory Young and James Lloyd actually had described the Impala as dark green (not aqua-green), but, as Kading well knew, Poole was just one of four detectives who had concluded that the vapor lights illuminating the shooting scene had given the shiny black sedan a greenish cast. Kenneth Story, the driver of the SUV Puffy Combs was riding in that night, told the police that three separate witnesses to the shooting had described the killer’s car as “a clean, black Chevrolet Impala.” The Metropolitan Transit Authority driver whose bus had been westbound on Wilshire when the shooting occurred, and who saw the vehicle after it had passed out from under the vapor lights, confirmed to the police on the night of the shooting that the killer’s sedan was black. And Reggie Blaylock, the off-duty Inglewood police officer who had been in the passenger seat of the SUV right behind Biggie’s at the time of the shooting, had described the killer’s car as “a ’94 or ’95 Chevrolet Impala SS, black, with large wide tires.” None of that, of course, was mentioned by Kading, whose claim that “every single witness that was in those cars denied it being a black Impala” was just one more of his many inaccuracies.

  What most proved Kading’s duplicity in Suratt’s mind, though, was a second reading of the ex-detective’s book. In at least three references to the Biggie shooter’s vehicle in Murder Rap, Kading had described the car as a “black Impala.” Not once in his 2011 book had Kading written that the car was green. His subsequent claim that he had known since
2009 that the Impala was green was, Surratt wrote, “a transparent attempt to draw attention away from David Mack, Amir Muhammad, Rafael Perez, and Reggie Wright.”

  Perhaps that was Kading’s intention. I don’t know. What I do know is that Kading has absolutely no credibility.

  DEAD WRONG ROSTER

  Christopher Wallace a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G. a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, seminal rapper whose March 9, 1997, murder remains unsolved

  Voletta Wallace, mother of Christopher Wallace and main plaintiff in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Faith Evans, widow of Christopher Wallace and co-plaintiff in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Tupac Shakur, seminal rapper whose 1996 murder in Las Vegas, still unsolved, has been linked to the slaying of Notorious B.I.G. seven months later

  WALLACE V. LOS ANGELES

  Perry Sanders, lead attorney for the estate of Christopher Wallace a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G. a.k.a. Biggie Smalls

  Rob Frank, Sanders’s cocounsel on the Wallace v. Los Angeles lawsuit

  Sergio Robleto, former LAPD South Bureau Homicide chief, lead investigator for the plaintiffs in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Chris Brizzolara, associate counsel for the plaintiffs in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Bradley Gage, associate counsel for the plaintiffs in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Sandra Ribera, junior cocounsel for the plaintiffs in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Audrey Matheny, paralegal for Sanders and Frank

  Bruce Stoughton, former LAPD officer working for Robleto

  Terri Baker, New York entertainment attorney pivotal in the decision to hire Perry Sanders as lead attorney in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Paul Paquette, Los Angeles assistant city attorney, original lead defense lawyer in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Don Vincent, Los Angeles assistant city attorney, second chair for the defense in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Vincent Marella, attorney hired by the Los Angeles City Council to take over as lead defense lawyer in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Florence Cooper, district court judge who presided over most of Wallace v. Los Angeles case

  Xavier Hermosillo, political activist, talk show host, and civilian member of LAPD Board of Rights tribunals whose revelations led to the 2005 mistrial in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Kenneth Boagni, prison inmate whose testimony at an LAPD Board of Rights hearing led to the mistrial in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Felipe Sanchez, former prison inmate whose testimony about Rafael Perez agreed with Boagni’s

  Thurston Limar Sr., legendary private investigator who located and served subpoena on Rafael Perez in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  John Yslas, attorney who represented Perez in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Steven J. Hillman, U.S. magistrate who ruled in multiple evidentiary hearings in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Gerald Chaleff, longtime Los Angeles criminal defense attorney appointed to head LAPD Consent Decree Bureau, key witness in suppressing release of clues in Notorious B.I.G. murder investigation

  Jacqueline Nguyen, district court judge who replaced Cooper on Wallace v. Los Angeles case

  FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION AND U.S. ATTORNEY

  Phil Carson, former FBI agent whose investigation of the Notorious B.I.G. murder was stymied by the political intervention of the Los Angeles Police Department and its allies

  Tim Flaherty, FBI agent who served as handler to informant Michael “Psycho Mike” Robinson

  Cathy Viray, head of media relations in the FBI’s Los Angeles office

  Steve Kramer, associate counsel in the FBI’s Los Angeles office

  Louis Caprino, head of criminal investigations in the FBI’s Los Angeles office

  Richard T. Garcia, FBI assistant director, head of the bureau’s Los Angeles office

  Robert Mueller, FBI director during Carson’s investigation of the Biggie murder

  Steve Gomez, FBI agent who worked with Carson on the case

  David Vaughn, former assistant U.S. attorney who first refused to prosecute the case Carson made in the Notorious B.I.G. murder, then refused to provide the standard letter of declination that would explain why that prosecution was declined; now in private practice in Los Angeles

  LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT/LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

  Rafael Perez, former LAPD officer convicted of stealing large amounts of cocaine from the department’s evidence locker; suspected in the murder of Notorious B.I.G.; best known as the progenitor of the Rampart Scandal

  David Mack, former LAPD officer convicted of bank robbery and suspected in the murder of Notorious B.I.G.

  Sammy Martin, former LAPD officer suspected of serving as an accomplice in the Mack bank robbery and in other crimes

  Nino Durden, former LAPD partner of Rafael Perez who contradicted many of Perez’s claims in the Rampart Scandal

  Russell Poole, former LAPD detective who was the lead investigator on the original probe of the Notorious B.I.G. murder

  Fred Miller, Poole’s partner in the Notorious B.I.G. murder investigation

  Bernard Parks, former Los Angeles chief of police accused of extensive malfeasance by Poole and multiple others

  Michelle Parks, daughter of Chief Parks, LAPD clerk-typist, suspected of narcotics trafficking, possibly in association with Rafael Perez, David Mack, and other members of the Bloods gang

  Kendrick Knox, former LAPD senior lead officer whose investigation of police officers working for Death Row Records was shut down by Bernard Parks

  Steve Katz, LAPD detective who took over the investigation of the Notorious B.I.G. murder in 2000, caught concealing evidence that implicated police officers in the murder, leading to the 2005 mistrial in Wallace v. Los Angeles

  Roger Mora and Steve Sambar, LAPD Internal Affairs investigators originally assigned to work with Phil Carson in his investigation of the Notorious B.I.G. murder, until their removal by then–Deputy Chief Michael Berkow

  Michael Berkow, former LAPD deputy chief who left under a cloud after accusations that included the orchestration of a cover-up in the Notorious B.I.G. murder; now head of U.S. Coast Guard’s Investigative Services

  Ya-May Christle, LAPD sergeant who accused Berkow of seizing the computer on which she was “collating” evidence that implicated police officers in the murder of Notorious B.I.G.; awarded millions in a lawsuit against the LAPD

  William Bratton, former LAPD chief and executive at Kroll Associates who appointed Berkow as deputy chief

  Jim McDonnell, former LAPD deputy chief and current sheriff of Los Angeles County

  Richard Valdemar, former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who worked as handler to Michael Robinson and as private detective for Sergio Robleto

  Greg Kading, former LAPD detective assigned to “Operation Transparency” investigation of Notorious B.I.G. in 2006; author of self-published book Murder Rap in 2011

  Daryn Dupree, LAPD detective, partner to Kading in Biggie murder investigation

  Paul Byrnes, former LAPD Rampart Division sergeant accused by Rafael Perez, acquitted in four consecutive Board of Rights hearings

  Cliff Armas, LAPD officer representative for Byrnes and other officers accused by Perez

  Fabian Lizarraga and Gary Farmer, LAPD lieutenant and sergeant (respectively) who prosecuted the case against Byrnes and attempted to block the testimony of Kenneth Boagni and Felipe Sanchez about involvement of Rafael Perez in Notorious B.I.G. murder

  Kenneth Hale and Earl Paysinger, LAPD captains who served with Xavier Hermosillo as adjudicators in the Byrnes Board of Rights hearing

  Shelby Braverman, former LAPD narcotics detective who was incarcerated after learning that Michelle Parks was suspected of transporting narcotics between Los Angeles and Las Vegas

  John Cook, former LAPD Internal Affairs investigator who was removed from Michelle Parks investigation after questioning her aggressively

  Richard Ginelli, former LAPD senior detective and close associate of Bernard Parks who supervised Brav
erman and was eventually arrested for stealing heroin held as evidence by LAPD

  Cliff Ruff, head of the LAPD officers’ union, the Police Protective League, at time of Braverman’s incarceration

  Thomas Wich, Vincent Vicari, Michael Gannon, and Bill Brockway, members of the Rampart Task Force accused of attempting to suppress the testimony of Kenneth Boagni and Felipe Sanchez

  Rod Kusch, head of homicide investigation for Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who was in the room when Russell Poole died

  DEATH ROW RECORDS/SUSPECTS IN MURDER OF NOTORIOUS B.I.G.

  Suge Knight, former CEO of Death Row Records, suspected of ordering the execution of Notorious B.I.G.

  Reggie Wright Jr., former director of security for Death Row Records, suspected of involvement in the murder of Notorious B.I.G.

  David Kenner, longtime, on-and-off attorney for Suge Knight

  Amir Muhammad a.k.a. Harry Billups a.k.a. Harry Muhammad (as spelled throughout the book; the variant Muhammed appears in some sources), Mack’s friend suspected of being the triggerman in the murder of Notorious B.I.G.

  Angelique Mitchell, ex-girlfriend of Amir Muhammad who accused him of multiple assaults and of menacing her with a firearm; killed by a gunshot to the head in what was ruled a murder-suicide

  Tammie Hawkins a.k.a. “Theresa Swann,” informant Greg Kading relied upon to make claim that Biggie was murdered by Wardell “Poochie” Fouse