Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (7 page)

I’d be the first to admit that CRASH used questionable methods to get the job done. In 1992, the world was shocked when the videotaped beating of Rodney King was aired. Within CRASH, such manhandling of known gang members was standard operating procedure. Prior to the King uproar, car chases in the city were a relatively rare occurrence. The simple fact was that most gangsters knew exactly what would happen to them once they were run to ground. After the King incident, vehicle pursuits became a regular occurrence as criminals confronted a police department battered with charges of brutality and racism.

CRASH would itself crash and burn in the late nineties when a major scandal erupted out of the Rampart Division’s CRASH unit. But I have to say that during my time as a CRASH officer, a lot got done to clean up the streets. Angelinos were united in their terror of a virtual gang takeover, and CRASH was an appropriate response to that crisis. Our morale was high and our mission was clear. With CRASH on the streets — becoming in the words of one observer, “the most badass gang in the city” — thugs and, more important, innocent bystanders stopped dying in their dozens.

Over a five-year period my performance was such that I was singled out to become part of a federally run task force focusing on organized gang activity, particularly the vicious Bloodstone Villains Gang operating out of South Central L.A. At that time, gang turf was pretty much divided right down the middle by the 110, with those on one side of the freeway using the Westside designation, while those on the other were considered “East Coast.”

For me, the real value of working with the federal task force, personally and professionally, was in learning the nuances of interagency collaboration. Although I was still operating out of Newton, I was under federal auspices, which meant that I learned up close how lines of authority are established, resources are allocated, and, most important, how turf battles are overcome so that information and manpower can be effectively shared. After four years on the federal task force, I was promoted to detective and reassigned back to the Wilshire Division, where I was naturally given more gang work. It was there that I met a young homicide investigator named Daryn Dupree and realized just how much I still had to learn about the criminal subculture we were both battling.

Smart, professional, and an impeccable dresser to boot, Daryn was born and raised by a single mother in South Central Los Angeles, the heart of Crips territory. There were major drug dealers in his extended family, and Daryn quickly learned how to navigate the ghetto streets, instinctively turning to sports to stay out of gang life. At the same time he developed a deep appreciation for rap music, hearing in it an authentic expression of the streets he knew only too well. Urged on by his mother, he joined the LAPD and was assigned to the Wilshire Division. The truth is, I have never met anyone, inside or outside the force, who understood as much about L.A.’s black gangs — the major players, the economic base, the hierarchies and pecking orders — than Daryn Dupree.

Naturally, given his wealth of inside knowledge, Dupree was eventually selected for the Wilshire Division’s CRASH unit. During his tenure, he expanded his grasp of gangs and gang warfare and was soon tapped by other LAPD investigators as well as the feds for his expertise. In 1997, he was asked to join Wilshire’s homicide unit. One of his trainers for the new assignment was Detective Kelly Cooper, who had worked on the initial Biggie Smalls murder investigation. Before his orientation was finished, Daryn had pumped the veteran dry of every last detail pertaining to the stalled case. It was during this time that Daryn and I became close friends. It didn’t hurt that he was a walking encyclopedia of information about the people I had been trying, for going on ten years, to take off the streets.

It was shortly afterward, in early 2003, that federal agents again contacted me, looking for my help to build a case against a major Los Angeles crime figure. His name was George Torres, and I had first become aware of his vast underworld enterprise during my rookie year at the Newton Division. My senior training officer there had been Detective Joannie McNamara, and during our first week together she had driven me deep into the Southside to view firsthand the headquarters of a man who was the target of a investigation she had been involved in for years. There, at the intersection of San Pedro Street and Jefferson Boulevard, was an immaculately maintained grocery store, painted a distinctive sea foam green and called Numero Uno. From its upstairs offices Torres ran a multi-faceted operation that reached from the meanest streets of the city to its highest echelons of political power.

A semiliterate Mexican immigrant, Torres had transformed a single food cart in South L.A. into an extensive chain of Numero Uno supermarkets. In the process he came to embody the immigrant dream, carefully cultivating a reputation as a committed community leader and becoming one of the largest private landowners in the region. Rubbing elbows with many of L.A.’s civic elite, he would fly a private jet out to Las Vegas for gambling excursions and lavished his seven children with expensive cars, clothes, and educations.

But authorities came to suspect that there was another side to the spectacular rise of the Southside grocery king. As early as the mid-eighties, DEA probes uncovered what they believed to be links between Torres and the Arellano-Felix drug cartel operating out of Tijuana. At the same time, LAPD homicide investigators had begun gathering evidence that suggested Torres’ involvement in a number of unsolved murders throughout the area. There were also persistent rumors that he was supplying more than tortillas and chili peppers to the neighborhood. Agents looked closely at evidence suggesting that Torres oversaw a drug network employing up to thirty street dealers and mules at any one time. A federal criminal probe of George Torres was launched, centered near the Mexican border in San Diego. It was there that detectives established what they believed to be additional criminal links, this time between Torres and the infamous Reynoso Brothers International food distribution network, later to become the focus of a major Mexican drug cartel prosecution.

But the feds weren’t alone in their pursuit of Torres. From almost the beginning of her tenure at Newton Division, Joannie McNamara had developed her own leads pointing to ongoing cooperation between Torres and several black gangs in the area, including the Rolling 20’s Outlaw Bloods and the Five-Trey Avalon Crips, as well as such Hispanic crews as the Ghetto Boys and the Playboys. Joannie’s knowledge of Torres and his operations became so extensive that she would subsequently be loaned out to help in the San Diego investigation. As she continued her intensive work, an informant claimed that there was a contract out on her life, supposedly initiated by Torres himself. When LAPD brass got wind of it, McNamara was suddenly pulled off the case and transferred, over her strong objections, to a safer posting in the San Fernando Valley. Not long afterward, the federal probe stalled and the Torres investigation was put on the shelf.

In many ways, I was carrying on the work that Joannie had begun when, in 1997, I too became caught up in the George Torres case. I helped gather information, develop informants, and interview witnesses in a variety of investigations that had picked up where the initial San Diego-based probe had left off. In cooperation with Jim Black, an ATF agent and close friend, I was able to secure funding and manpower for a dedicated task force and Operation Robin Hood — a bad police pun, playing off “robbin’ the hood,” — was launched, with Black and myself at the helm.

Over the course of the next two years, although we did a lot of good work, results remained frustratingly out of reach. Evidence solid enough to take to the U.S. attorney for prosecution continued to elude us and, as with its predecessor, the steam slowly went out of the investigation. In late 1999, I was promoted to detective and transferred back to the Wilshire Division.

It’s a little-understood fact of police work that initiative and motivation most often originate from the bottom up. The cops who work day in and day out on the front lines are the first to understand who the bad guys really are and how to best bring them down. When those who have worked longest and hardest on a case are transferred or reassigned, the momentum will usually dissipate. They take with them all the painstaking accumulation of evidence, criminal links, witness testimony, and the myriad other details that go into a successful investigation. It can, of course, be intensely frustrating for the officer involved, yet it’s also true that a cop who has committed to catching a bad guy never forgets what he’s learned.

In 2003, I had the opportunity to again focus my attention on Torres when I was asked to join yet another probe into his activities. It was to be the largest investigation yet, a sprawling multiagency effort involving the FBI, the ATF, the DEA, the LAPD, the Sheriff’s Department, and various local jurisdictions. Dubbed Operation Corrido, it looked into everything from conspiracy, tax evasion, and racketeering to murder and drug trafficking. My particular area of responsibility was to investigate all alleged acts of violence attributed, directly or indirectly, to Torres.

There was no shortage of leads to follow. As I started to bear down on the new evidence that had come to light since I last worked the case, I detected what I believed to be a widespread pattern of extortion, directly related to Numero Uno’s strict policy of prosecuting shoplifters to the fullest extent of the law; a law laid down by El Diablo, as Torres was commonly known. Word on the street had it that anyone caught stealing from one of his stores was taken into a back room by security guards and made to pay ten times the amount of the purloined item. If a thief needed additional persuading, the persistent rumors maintained, he would be handcuffed to scaffolding or locked in a freezer. The proceeds were then carefully recorded in ledgers and a Polaroid of the chastened and, in many cases, battered shoplifter was taken and meticulously filed.

Any merchant, of course, has the right to protect himself against thievery and even to keep an account of those who have stolen from him. But if what I was hearing was true, Torres would have been taking that principle to the extreme, in effect running his own private enforcement operation, terrorizing those he caught and making a tidy profit in the process. Further evidence of these activities was procured with a wiretap, over which we heard Torres speak directly to an associate about one of the shoplifter shakedowns. The next step was to request a search warrant of various Numero Uno outlets.

The search warrant naturally required a written application to be submitted to a judge. Preparing such a document is an exacting job, requiring well-honed language skills to put on paper the justification for violating a person’s right to privacy in the pursuit of justice. Any officer worth his badge knows that every word he uses to make his case will be scrutinized, if not by a judge, then certainly by a defense attorney.

The warrant request was granted and we raided nine Numero Uno markets, coming away with more than a thousand Polaroid portraits and numerous ledgers enumerating the sums exacted from each victim. On that basis the U.S. attorney was able to put forward a case of extortion and false imprisonment against Torres, one of fifty-nine counts that eventually made it to a grand jury, including three counts of solicitation of murder, in an indictment handed down in February 2005. At that point my work in Operation Corrido was essentially done. I was free to accept the offer to help reopen the Biggie Smalls murder investigation.

CHAPTER
5

The Conspiracy

W
HEN I RECEIVED THE CALL
from Detective Brian Tyndall, I was under no illusion that my superiors had had a sudden attack of steely determination to bring Biggie’s killer or killers to justice, no matter what it took, once and for all.

The simple fact was that the department was desperately trying to cover its ass. I knew it. Tyndall knew it. And so did everyone else who had managed to keep up with the convoluted twists and turns of the case from the beginning. There were a lot of them. It’s hardly surprising that such a high-profile slaying, played out under the spotlight of celebrity, would have attracted more than its fair share of amateur sleuths and conspiracy theorists. It’s especially true considering that the case had for so long been stalled, with no plausible answers forthcoming.

The Biggie Smalls murder was one of those rare events in criminal history when, in the vacuum created by the lack of closure, everything, no matter how far-fetched, seems somehow possible. When the truth is missing in action, anything can take its place. Biggie’s killing was collateral damage in the long-running war between the Crips and Bloods; it was payback for Tupac Shakur’s bloody demise in Las Vegas; it was an object lesson from the Nation of Islam to the runaway rap world: before it was over, all that would be missing was space aliens, the CIA, or a Biggie-Is-Alive rumor going viral in cyberspace.