Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (25 page)

The 1961 Impala with the custom paint job that Suge Knight had planned on presenting to Tupac Shakur shortly before the rapper’s murder.

As it turned out, Suge hadn’t held on to the prized vehicle for very long. When we were finally able to track it down, we found it in hock in the back lot of a Long Beach pawnshop. Considering that by some estimates the ride was worth upward of $75,000, the pawnbrokers had gotten a deal. With the Impala as collateral, they had made a loan for a mere $20,000. We promptly impounded the car and brought it back to Armando Hermosillo. Our plan was to use it as bait to draw out more extortion threats from Suge. Anticipating that eventuality, we installed cameras in Hermosillo’s shop and sat back to wait for our trap to be sprung.

Before that could happen, however, the case would take yet another strange and unpredictable twist.

CHAPTER
20

Stutterbox

J
UST AS THE SEPARATE GEARS
of the investigation that we had set in motion began to mesh, we got a call from an FBI agent who was working with an informant he thought might prove useful to us. His name was Robert Ross. The agent had been actively investigating Ross’ gang, the Main Street Crips, and, he informed us, Ross had been helpful in providing inside information.

Ross went by the name “Stutterbox,” — “Box” for short — a reference to his habit of stammering when he got excited or scared. We made arrangements to meet the informant at a Westside Starbucks, and as we pulled into the parking lot on that crisp November morning, we spotted a man sitting in the driver’s seat of a white Rolls-Royce Phantom.

Daryn and I looked at each other. Could this flamboyant individual be the guy we had come to talk to? But by that time Stutterbox, flashing a large diamond stud earring, had gotten out of the Rolls and was walking toward us. Even if we didn’t immediately recognize him, he seemed to know cops when he saw them.

And that wasn’t all that he knew. Much like Keffe D’s claim, Stutterbox seemed confident that what he had to tell us would blow our minds. And, in fact, his information
did
at first seem to be a game changer. Suge Knight, he revealed, was involved in a multi-kilo cocaine trafficking operation using a Mexican supplier. If we wanted proof, all we needed to do was set up surveillance on a truck driver named Cash Jones.

(Left to right) Robert “Stutterbox” Ross, Suge Knight and Cash Jones. Stutterbox would later be implicated in an alleged extortion attempt against basketball great Shaquille O’Neal.

A onetime Pacoima Piru, Stutterbox continued, Cash Jones was Suge’s primary courier, running dope on a route up and down the West Coast from Washington State to National City, just below San Diego near the Mexican border. Jones, an operator-owner at a trucking firm, had a rig specially built to transport high-end autos — an echo of Kevin Davis’s operation to run dope from California to Virginia using his auto-restoration business. When we asked Ross how he was privy to this information, he told us that he and Jones were old friends. The two, in fact, had met with Suge in Las Vegas in the company of the alleged Mexican dealer.

It was, on the face of it, a credible story and became more so when Daryn and I checked out as many of the details of Stutterbox’s account as we could. Although Cash Jones had a relatively slim rap sheet — a few juvenile offences were all we could find — he had indeed been associated with the Pacoima Piru. But, more than any single corroborating detail, the overriding fact was that Stutterbox was an FBI source. If he was good enough for them, we had more than enough reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Accordingly, we put a GPS device on Jones’s truck, enabling us to track where he was and where he was going at any given time. But he discovered the unit after an impromptu brake inspection at a highway rest stop. Alarmed at the strange black box stuck up under his chassis, he threw it into a field and notified the local police that someone had planted a bomb on his rig. Since we also had a wiretap on his cell phone, we were able to intercept the call, quickly contact the local authorities, and on the spot come up with a quasi-plausible story for them to tell the distraught Jones: a ring of sophisticated car thieves were using trackers to steal vehicles off the back of transport trucks. It was pretty lame, but Jones bought it, probably because there was no other credible explanation being offered.

The fact was, the closer we looked at Cash Jones, the more it became apparent that he was supporting his comfortable lifestyle by simple hard work. When he wasn’t on long-haul trips, he was running a number of small but completely legitimate sidelines, including distributing a men’s magazine called
Straight Stuntin’
. It might have been sleazy, but it wasn’t illegal, and as time went on we gained increasing respect for the truck driver’s entrepreneurial spirit.

At the same time, Stutterbox’s credibility took a sharp dive. Regardless of his FBI connection, his information was proving to be less than reliable. Far from running drugs for Suge Knight, Cash Jones was the picture of legitimate enterprise. Did our informant have some ulterior motive in cooperating with us? We decided it was time to take a closer look into Box.

What we found rocked our world — again. As we were making a routine review of some of the early Biggie Smalls case files, we found the nickname “Stutterbox” linked to the clues provided to Russell Poole by the jailhouse informant Michael Robinson. Robinson had claimed he had solid information that Biggie’s killer was a member of the paramilitary Fruit of Islam and a close associate of a Crip known as Stutterbox. But that was just the beginning. Running a documents check, Daryn discovered that in 1995 Robert Ross had applied for a California driver’s license under another name: Amir Muhammad.

I remember staring in disbelief at the report Dupree handed me. A dozen different thoughts were chasing around my head. Amir Muhammad was, of course, the alias name of Harry Billups, college roommate of corrupt Rampart cop David Mack and the man who, Russell Poole was convinced, had killed Biggie Smalls. The theory had been discredited, or so we thought. Now, suddenly, Amir Muhammad was back, this time in the guise of Stutterbox.

Pouring over the transcript of Michael Robinson’s jailhouse interview, I felt a growing sense of incredulity and the stomach-churning sensation that whatever was going on went deeper than we could ever have imagined. Robinson had insisted that the shooter at the Petersen was a Black Muslim. Stutterbox had made the claim to us that he was a nephew of the Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan. Was Robert Ross Amir Muhammad? Was he an associate of Amir Muhammad’s? And whoever he was, or said he was, why had he suddenly turned up on our doorstep, offering to help with information on a Suge Knight drug ring? Was Stutterbox playing us, trying to get inside the investigation to find out exactly what we knew about who had killed Biggie Smalls and why? And if so, was he trying to throw us completely off the trail in the process?

The driver’s license photo of Robert “Stutterbox’ Ross, as Amir Muhammad. His dual identity would, for a time, lead investigators to believe Biggie Smalls’ killer may have infiltrated the investigation.

It was beginning to look like any of those scenarios, singly or in combination, might be true. In the weeks that followed, as we struggled to make sense of the strange new dimensions the case had taken, the investigation seemed at times to be collapsing in on itself, the same information repeating in different situations and circumstances until it became impossible to know what was real and what was a fantasy formulated by Stutterbox.

The situation reached an extreme when I flew to Atlanta to talk to another informant who claimed to have information on the Main Street Crips. I almost had to laugh when he told me that Stutterbox had been a hit man for Eric “Zip” Martin. The sense of unreality was subsequently ratcheted up when Stutterbox himself came to us with a another news flash: he had it on good authority that Duane “Keffe D” Davis was personally planning to rob one of the principals in the George Torres case I had investigated nearly ten years earlier.

While it was impossible to attribute all these converging signs to mere coincidence, it was equally out of the question that all this would somehow, some way, fit together into a coherent whole. It was just too hard to believe that this entire cast of characters was so completely interconnected in a case that now seemed to have no boundaries or borders, no beginning or end. Our investigation was threatening to come apart at the seams.

But it would only get stranger as Stutterbox increasingly became an enigmatic and sinister presence that, at times, seemed to be laughing at us. Yet regardless of the doubts that surrounded him was the simple fact that he fit some of the criteria for the shooter at the Petersen. Not least among them was his Amir Muhammad moniker and Nation of Islam connections. When we questioned him about the name, he insisted that he had started using it only in 1998, after being converted to the faith in prison. But we had evidence that proved otherwise, in the form of his 1995 driver’s license made out to Amir Muhammad. Why was he trying to hide the fact that he had been known by that name for more than two years prior to the murder of Biggie Smalls?

As it turned out, Ross was harboring even more secrets and lies. Shortly after we started looking into his past and present activities, it was revealed that he was a prime suspect in a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department fraud investigation, involving a crew of several women who cashed bogus checks at local banks. The operation, over which Stutterbox allegedly presided, had netted upward of $11 million at the time of the investigation. As part of its probe, the Sheriff’s Department had obtained the cell phone of one of Stutterbox’s female accomplices. Downloading the photos stored on it, they found — along with a number of nude poses by the woman — a photo of Stutterbox, decked out in even more expensive jewelry and brandishing a handgun with typical gangbanger bravado. Further examination of the weapon revealed it to be a .9 mm, the same type of gun that had taken out Biggie. That wasn’t all. The way Ross was holding the gun, using both hands to brace it and holding it at eye level for maximum accuracy, suggested to us that he was familiar with the use of firearms. Was this yet another indicator that Stutterbox was, in fact, the shooter?

Before we could find the answer, Ross upped the ante when he became the unlikely victim of a kidnapping and robbery, an incredible plot twist in an already improbable story. According to his account, he had been abducted from his Rolls while on the streets of West Hollywood by members of his own gang, the Main Street Crips, supposedly acting on orders of their much-feared leader, Ladell “Del Dog” Rowles. Pistol-whipped and robbed of his bling, he was forced to drive to a South Central neighborhood deep in the gang’s territory, where he was released on the promise that he immediately return with $60,000 in cash.