Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (23 page)

Except that it wasn’t. While we had potentially removed the Crips from our list of likely suspects in the Biggie homicide, proving that the Mob Piru was behind the hit was another matter entirely. “
Rap It Up”
was, in short, a long way from being wrapped up.

With the focus now on one gang, we had no trouble selecting a target for the next phase of our investigation: the Death Row Records founder and major Mob Piru figure, Marion “Suge” Knight. In point of fact, our attention had been turned on Suge since the inception of the task force, seeking evidence that might tie him to that bloody night at the Petersen.

His history gave us plenty to go on. Aside from his life-long law-breaking habits Suge had a certain genius for self-promotion and a gift for spotting talent, both creative and criminal, which made him that much more menacing and genuinely dangerous. A Compton native with real athletic prowess, the burly Knight was known in the neighborhood as Sugar Bear, eventually shortened to “Suge.” By all accounts a promising student, he earned a football scholarship to the University of Nevada, where he played defense. He was recruited to the Los Angeles Rams as a replacement player during the 1987 NFL strike. But Suge’s athletic ambitions proved to be a passing phase. What interested him infinitely more was the burgeoning world of hip-hop music, which by the late eighties was exploding with the advent of hardcore rap. Suge worked briefly as a concert promoter and, thanks to his hulking stature, a bodyguard for, among others, the singer Bobby Brown.

He also evinced a talent for getting into trouble. Shortly after his stint with the Rams he was brought in on a variety of charges, including auto theft, carrying a concealed weapon, and attempted murder. From 1987 to 1995 his criminal record included guilty pleas to two counts of battery; a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon; a guilty plea on two counts of assault with a firearm and repeated parole and probation violations. All the while he was demonstrating a flair for combining his criminal activity with his other ruling passion: music. In one of the earliest forays into the recording industry, he supposedly dangled the white rapper Vanilla Ice from the balcony of a twenty-story building in an effort to convince him to sign over the royalties to his smash hit, “Ice Ice Baby.”

Another story tells of coaxing Easy-E and his manager, Jerry Heller, into releasing Dr. Dre from his Ruthless Records contract with a hot crack pipe and a baseball bat. Not long afterward two fledgling rappers got on Suge’s bad side when they used a recording studio telephone without permission and were stripped naked and pistol-whipped. The tall tales may or may not have been true but they served their purpose: to inspire fear in the hearts of Suge Knight’s rivals.

His success in launching Death Row Records with Dr. Dre is a matter of record: a lot of records. Securing a distribution deal with Interscope Records, Suge presided over one of the most successful start-up labels in recording history, thanks primarily to Dre’s trademark musical gifts. But even as Suge gained respect and riches as an canny entrepreneur, his gangster antics continued apace. He staffed the company’s offices with Bloods, bragging that he was giving society’s outcasts a second chance. And, as he later would do with Puffy Combs and Bad Boy Records, he picked a very public fight with Luther Campbell of the Miami rap group 2 Live Crew, showing up at a 1993 hip-hop convention to confront him with a stolen gun. His most notable achievement, however, was signing Tupac Shakur, the crown jewel of his Death Row roster, using a subtle mix of diplomacy, legal aid and financial incentives. And, like his superstar acquisition, Suge had also unknowingly reached the apex of his career in Las Vegas that September night of 1996. Subsequently arrested for a parole violation in the wake of the MGM Grand incident, Suge, despite Baby Lane’s suborned testimony, was given a stiff nine-year sentence.

Released in 2001, he was back in jail two years later, once again having violated the conditions of his parole. There, he watched helplessly as his Death Row empire crumbled away, assailed by numerous disgruntled investors and deserted by its one time all-star roster, including Snoop Dogg. “I never was afraid of him,” the rapper boasted to
Rolling Stone
magazine. “I was afraid I was gonna have to kill him. That’s what I was afraid of.”

Others had good reason to fear for their own lives. Many of Suge’s inner circle were being picked off with careful deliberation in a sharp escalation of the running feud triggered by Tupac’s murder. The fact that there were sometimes long gaps between the hits, sometimes stretching into years, only made the dread among his associates more palpable.

In the summer of 1997, less than a year after Tupac’s murder, Aaron “Heron” Palmer, one of Suge’s most trusted bodyguards, was cut down while waiting at a Compton stoplight. In rapid succession, “Buntry” McDonald and “Hen Dog” Smith, both also closely allied with Suge, were summarily executed. In early 2000 “V” Buchanan, a Blood drug dealer, was found dead in a Compton graveyard from a single shot to the back of his head. Next up was another of Suge’s closest confidants, Wardell “Poochie” Fouse. Poochie had barely survived an attack in April 2000 when he was ambushed and severely wounded. Three years later he was shot ten times in the back as he rode a motorcycle across a Compton intersection. The killing had been preceded a few months earlier by a late-night attack on the Death Row offices, shattering windows and blowing holes in the stucco of the Wilshire Boulevard building.

“If somebody’s planning to hunt me down,” Suge scornfully remarked in a 2003
L.A. Times
article, “they are going to have to be more serious about their business. They drive by my building…and shoot the front windows out. Look out, they killed my windows! Who do they think they’re kidding?”

The Internal Revenue Service, for one, was not kidding. In 2006 it hit Suge with a $6 million bill for back taxes. Shortly afterward, he filed for bankruptcy. The mortgage holder of the bullet-riddled Death Row headquarters threatened seizure of the office furniture; his skybox at the Staples Center was revoked for missed payments, and his ninety-foot yacht was repossessed. Questioned by creditors, he denied rumors of having a large stash of cash and precious metals hidden away in an overseas bank. He listed among his remaining assets a thousand dollars in clothing, two thousand dollars in furnishings, and eleven dollars in a bank account. The only item of any worth was some jewelry that he valued at $25,000. Whether that included one of the coveted Death Row medallions is unknown.

The downward spiral continued in the wake of Suge’s financial meltdown. In the summer of 2005 he was caught in the crossfire of a shootout at a party hosted by the rapper Kanye West. Wounded in the upper leg, he later sued West for pain, suffering, and the theft of a fifteen-carat diamond earring. A few months later he was badly beaten in Scottsdale, Arizona, by the business manager of the rapper Akon. While the reason for the assault was never made clear, the outcome was as plain as the broken nose and shattered bones in Suge’s face. A few months later he was implicated in the robbery of Akon’s producer Noel “Detail” Fisher, in which $170,000 worth of bling was stolen. No charges were ever pressed in that case, nor in a 2008 incident when he was arrested for aggravated assault in Las Vegas after police arrived outside a strip club to find him beating his girlfriend senseless. Suffice it to say, by the time we began focusing our investigation on Suge, he was a shadow of his former self, running small-time hustles out of a tract home in Las Vegas.

As it turned out, the trail we were following had been well traveled before us. In another side benefit of the case being federalized, we were given access to the voluminous files of an extensive joint operation between the FBI and the ATF, looking into racketeering activities at Death Row and its role as an arm of the Mob Piru’s ongoing criminal conspiracy.

The agencies’ investigation had gotten up and running in 1994 and was given added impetus a year later when Suge and his Death Row posse were involved in a pair of brutal incidents. The first was the murder of a Rolling ’60s Crip stomped to death at the El Rey Theater, where a Death Row party was being held. A participant in the event told the FBI in 1996 that a verbal altercation broke out between the victim and several Death Row associates, leading to the savage assault. According to the witness, Suge had stood on the sidelines, urging on his enforcers with a shout of “Ya’ll get that nigger.”

The second incident was the assault and torture of a New York record promoter named Mark Anthony Bell. According to a statement Bell made to the LAPD in 1995, Suge had invited him to a Christmas party at a rented home in the Hollywood Hills. It was there that Bell was taken to an upstairs room where Suge and some associates tried to force him to reveal the whereabouts of Puffy. Knight, Bell speculated, held Combs responsible for the Atlanta nightclub shooting of Jake Robles earlier that year and was looking for payback. When Bell refused to cooperate, Suge ordered his cohorts to beat him, cautioning them to use “body blows only.” According to Bell’s account, one of the assailants told him, “I could kill you right now if Suge says so.” He subsequently attempted to jump off the balcony after Knight returned from the bathroom with a champagne glass full of urine and tried to make him drink it.

“I don’t piss in champagne glasses,” Suge later remarked. It was as close as he would come to claiming his innocence in the attack.

The incidents were added to a growing list of potential prosecutions stemming from the federal investigation. But the FBI and the ATF had bigger fish to fry, as their case reached beyond racketeering allegations and back down the well-worn track of possible LAPD involvement. The old charge of rogue officers on the Death Row payroll would become an important aspect of the federal probe, as did the connection between Suge and Deputy District Attorney Larry Longo of L.A. County. It was Longo who had recommended a nine-year “suspended” sentence for Suge after his conviction for pistol-whipping the aspiring rap producer Lynwood Stanley and his brother George. To federal investigators the sentence seemed suspiciously lenient, especially considering that after serving a month in a halfway house, Suge moved into Longo’s exclusive Malibu Colony beach home. At the same time, the deputy DA’s daughter, Gina Longo, became the first white artist to be signed to Death Row Records, with a $50,000 advance. Although Longo had been fired as a result of his cozy connection with Suge, the federal task force had good reason to wonder how much further Knight’s influence might have extended into City Hall.

In the end, however, the FBI and ATF investigation ran up hard against the effects of September 11, and the massive reallocation of manpower at the federal level that followed. Directives changed overnight, with the emphasis on homeland security trumping everything. After seven long years, attempts by federal authorities to make a RICO case against Suge Knight had reached an impasse. Yet there was no denying that what had been accomplished was impressive. The agencies, cultivating a wide range of informants, had put together the first coherent picture of how gangs had infiltrated the music industry and used the record business as a front for drug dealing, money laundering, and tax evasion. There’s no question that the foundations of a racketeering case had been laid. But without funding and manpower, it all added up to little more then the mound of files that our task force had inherited. It would be up to us to take the next step.

Suge Knight (center) and his Mob Piru posse, all of whom are deceased except George Williams (standing far right) who is serving a a 25-year prison term.

CHAPTER
19

The Impala

A
S ABUNDANT AS THE
record against Suge Knight might have been, there was a specific category of crimes that we became interested in after taking a look at the seven-year federal investigation. It was immediately clear, from the work they had done, that racketeering was the most promising avenue to pursue.