Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (14 page)

It sounded like a standard evasion, especially considering that, in an earlier interview, he had remembered that Baby Lane, in the company of Keffe D, who also had been in Las Vegas for the prizefight, “was all mad and talking about getting back at the person who had jumped him.” Edwards had obviously been tailoring his recollections to suit the evolving situation, but there were certain facts that were more difficult to finesse. “I don’t consider myself a gang member,” he told investigators with a straight face, “but I hang around all the neighborhood Southside Crips. Since we all grew up together, I consider them my friends.”

It was, of course, a distinction without a difference. Whether or not Corey Edwards was a bone fide gangster, his criminal activity would have certainly qualified him for an honorary membership in any set. He had, for example, been singled out by the Drug Enforcement Agency, among others, for suspected cocaine trafficking. Edwards had, in fact, had a close call several years earlier in connection with the Tupac shooting. His associate, Bobby Finch, had become one of the first victims of the gang war sparked by the murder. Finch lived next door to Edwards in Compton and the word on the street was that the hit had really been intended for Corey. Despite his protests to the contrary, his close connection to the Crips had almost gotten him killed.

In August 2001, after an extensive investigation by federal authorities, Edwards was indicted in Columbus on cocaine conspiracy and money laundering charges. But before DEA agents could establish a link between Edwards and his suppliers, the suspect fled. He had been on the lam ever since. Given his close Southside associations, there was reason to believe that Corey Edwards might have inside information on the Biggie Smalls hit. Short of that, we could try to pry incriminating statements from him about associates who knew more than he did and bring them in to apply the same kind of pressure. Either way, he was worth talking to if we could find him, and that wasn’t going to be easy. He had, for all intent and purpose, utterly vanished five years earlier, and there was no reason to think we’d have any better luck than the DEA agents who had been looking for him ever since.

But we did. Through real estate records we were able to locate the Corona, California, home of Lisa Garner, Corey Edwards’s baby mama, who was caring for his elementary-school-age daughter. We staked out Garner’s house and began some discreet questioning of neighbors, co-workers, and anyone who might have a connection to her and her fugitive boyfriend.

It was Daryn who struck pay dirt when a teacher of Edwards’s little girl told him she would be celebrating her birthday at a local seafood franchise called Joe’s Crab Shack. It seemed at least possible that Edwards would emerge from hiding long enough to make an appearance at the party. There was a hitch, however. At which of the many Crab Shacks in greater Los Angeles would the birthday take place? We checked a map and located the two closest to Garner’s home. The night of the celebration we set up surveillance at both, but neither Edwards nor his family showed up at either one.

As the evening drew on, we racked out brains trying figure out where they might have gone instead. It was Daryn who came up with the idea of looking closer to Compton, Corey’s old stomping ground. We found another Joe’s Crab Shack outlet in Long Beach, not far away from his old neighborhood. Daryn and Alan Hunter hurried out to the location while I stayed behind at one of the other restaurants in case our quarry decided to show up.

Forty-five minutes later I got a call from Daryn. Edwards, along with much of his extended family, was on the premises. As the supervisor of the operation I told him to immediately move in and make an arrest. It was at that point that Hunter intervened. He had a better idea, he told me over the phone. They would wait for the party to break up and then trail Edwards out, meanwhile alerting the nearby Long Beach Sheriff’s Department to pull him over once he was on the road.

I told Hunter what I thought of his plan in no uncertain terms. We had a fugitive drug dealer in our sights and the last thing I wanted to risk was a high-speed chase or worse should he attempt to escape. I felt bad that his daughter would have to see her father hauled away in handcuffs, but it couldn’t be helped.

“You knew it would catch up with you sooner or later,” remarked the birthday girl’s grandfather as Daryn and a still-reluctant Hunter took Edwards into custody. He went quietly, offering no resistance, and, bright and early the next morning, Brennan and I went down to the City Jail at Parker Center to have a talk with him. We were hopeful that we’d get results this time. Edwards was in a world of trouble and it stood to reason that he’d be eager to cut a deal. Before long we deduced how he had managed to elude authorities for so long, mostly by using multiple fake driver’s licenses, each of which was another possible count of up to three years in state prison for perjury. It was another bargaining chip we could use.

But it was all wishful thinking. Like Tray before him, Corey Edwards wasn’t about to cooperate. He’d already given his statement, he told us. He was trying to go straight and start a new life as a boxing promoter. That was all he had to say on the subject. Like every criminal facing a prison sentence, he had done the math and was willing to take a calculated risk to find out what kind of time he would be facing back in Ohio. If the number came up right, he could wait it out. If it didn’t, well, maybe he’d take us up on our offer to help him out if we could. We had hit another dry hole. We were now 0 for 2.

CHAPTER
10

Ballistics

I
T WASN’T VERY LONG AFTER
the task force had been formed that Tim Brennan was promoted to detective in the Sheriff’s Department and transferred out to another assignment. I was sorry to see him go, but I could understand his desire to move on. Although he was a good officer, methodical and thorough, it was clear early on that he was not particularly well suited to the kind of broad based, multi-agency investigation that we were mounting. A street cop, accustomed to the exploits and action that came with the territory, he was more comfortable chasing bad guys than plotting elaborate strategies to crack a big and complex case. Gang life was what he knew, and once he had relayed to us everything he could about the subject, his usefulness was limited.

There was also the fact, because of his connection to the Compton Police, that Brennan’s efforts had been under a cloud long before he was recruited to the team. The suspicion surrounding his loyalty and motives were unfounded: Brennan was totally committed to catching bad guys. To that end, he had lent his expertise to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in their investigation of the Tupac shooting. Brennan had followed up his initial search warrant of Compton gang houses with another in May 1997, still looking for the gun used to kill the rapper. But by that time, it was clear that Las Vegas had gotten leery of Brennan and his persistent attempts to be part of the case.

The reason was simple and, at least indirectly, linked to the legacy of Russell Poole’s investigation. Police from Compton had a tarnished reputation to say the least, all the more so since Poole had attempted to tie cops and Compton gangs together as part of a wider police conspiracy. Compton officers were stigmatized no matter how squeaky-clean they might be, and some of that suspicion was certainly justified. But Tim Brennan’s professional integrity was the equal of any officer I’d ever known.

Not that it mattered. As the scope of gang involvement in the Tupac murder became increasingly apparent, the Las Vegas police adopted an ever more standoffish approach toward Brennan, concerned with the taint he might bring to their case. For his part, “Blondie” only wanted to give them the benefit of specialized knowledge and it must have been disheartening for him when it went unappreciated.

Before he left the task force, however, Brennan would prove to be extremely useful in another key area of our investigation. As part of our pursuit of individuals involved in the case on whom we could apply pressure, he’d been assigned the task of compiling files on every unsolved gang killing involving Mob Piru and Southside Crips that had occurred in L.A. County. Brennan detailed some twenty gang-related homicides. If we could arrest any of the perpetrators, we might just be able to leverage new information on the Biggie killing.

As Brennan’s work progressed, he also uncovered nearly three hundred weapons, seized for a variety of reasons, but yet to be tested for ballistics evidence that might tie them to existing cases. The guns were stored in the evidence locker of the Sheriff’s Department, transferred there after the Compton police force, thanks to the scandals that had engulfed it, was folded into county law enforcement operations.

It was in that weapons cache that Blondie came across a number of guns that caught our attention. They were .40s and 9mms, the same calibers used in the Tupac and Biggie shootings. It was here that the enhanced power that came with being a federal task force came in handy. We contacted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, specifically Agent James Black, who agreed to test-fire the guns we were interested in. The ballistics procedure Black utilized involved discharging a round, recovering the shell casing, and making a digital image of the unique impression produced by the gun’s firing pin. The image was then compared with millions of firing-pin patterns from shell casings recovered at various crime scenes and entered into the ATF’s nationwide database.

Black almost immediately got a match with one of the .40s and when the news came in, the excitement in the task force headquarters was palpable: the test-fired casing matched that of a shell recovered in the Tupac murder case. It didn’t escape our attention that the gun in question had been recovered in the yard of Lisa Garner’s parents; the same Lisa Garner who was the girlfriend of the fugitive Corey Edwards. A family member had found the gun in Garner’s backyard and had turned it in to the police. Edwards had admitted to being in Las Vegas the night of Tupac’s murder. It all added up to what looked like our first major break in the case.

But there was a problem. In any criminal court case, the digital impression of a shell is not necessarily admissible evidence. What are needed to clinch a conviction based on ballistics evidence are the actual casings, from both the test firing and the crime scene. We had only one. The Las Vegas police had the other. Turf battles are regrettably common in law enforcement and we knew we couldn’t just ask them to hand over the evidence we needed. Instead we sent them the gun in question, and asked them to test-fire it directly and compare the casings themselves.

The Las Vegas results came back negative: no match. It was baffling and more than a little frustrating. The chances of the two casing analyses coming up with contradictory results were slim. But our hands were tied. We couldn’t very well ask LVMPD to test the gun again or, better yet, run an independent comparison. That would be tantamount to suggesting that they were either lying or incompetent and we had no reason to suspect that was the case. There was no way around it: protocol had to be observed. We were forced to let the promising lead languish, at least for the time being.

We had to look elsewhere and decided to make a third attempt to turn a potential witness for new information. The target this time was a full-on Crip named Michael “Owl” Dorrough, whose rap sheet included arrests for, among other charges, robbery, carrying a concealed weapon and murder. Once again, there was good reason to believe that he knew more than he had let on, especially as it pertained to Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.

Baby Lane himself was unavailable for interviews. In the months following the beating by Tupac and Suge’s posse at the MGM Grand, the gangster had gained a reputation on the street as the mostly likely triggerman in the rapper’s murder. He was seen as defending the honor of the Crips, but it turned out he was playing both sides. Anderson would subsequently give testimony in a parole violation hearing for Suge stemming from his participation in the assault at the MGM Grand. He insisted under oath that Knight had nothing to do with the attack, recalling that “He was the only one I heard saying, ‘Stop this shit!’” Even the judge felt obliged to note for the record that the witness appeared to be lying through his teeth. It was shortly afterward that Baby Lane opened a well-appointed recording studio in Compton and began cutting tracks with local rappers under his start-up label, Success Records.

But Baby Lane’s music-mogul dreams came to an abrupt end on May 25, 1998, when he and Dorrough, a close Crip associate, drove past a Compton strip mall. There, outside a car wash, they spotted a pair of Corner Pocket Crips, one of whom owed Baby Lane money. In an attempt to collect the debt, a gunfight erupted and all four men were hit in the hail of bullets. Fatally wounded, Baby Lane attempted to flee the scene, accompanied by the bleeding profusely Dorrough and leaving behind the dead Corner Pockets. After a few blocks the car rolled to a stop. An ambulance took the two to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, known as “Killer King” for the high rate of shooting victims that had expired there. Baby Lane was no exception. He was pronounced dead on the gurney.