03.14.1997

Rap star Biggie Smalls, the "Notorious B. I. G.," was shot dead by a drive-by gunman late Saturday night as he was leaving a star-studded Vibe Magazine party in Los Angeles.

The 24-year-old rapper, whose given name was Christopher Wallace, was sitting in a car outside waiting at a traffic light, when the killers pulled up next to him and unleashed a spray of bullets. Biggie was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Police were still searching for his killers as we went to press. Here's John Norris, in Los Angeles, with a timeline.

JOHN NORRIS: The night began at around 8 p.m. at the Peterson Automotive Museum on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles at a party hosted by "Vibe" magazine, Qwest Records, and Tanqueray gin to celebrate Friday night's 11th annual Soul Train Music Awards.

The guest list was a who's who of the hip-hop world, including Busta Rhymes, Heavy D, Da Brat, Yo-Yo, producer Jermaine Dupree and, of course, Biggie Smalls and the head of his label, Bad Boy Entertainment, Sean "Puffy" Combs.

According to sources we spoke to, the party really got going around 9:30 or 10:00 p.m., and Biggie appeared to be having a great time taking a table near the dance floor and he was chatting with friends. Indeed, no one in the Bad Boy crew appeared to be concerned about being in Los Angeles, despite the fact that in the past, East coast rappers have been worried about traveling West.

In fact, the only discernable problem with the party is that it became overcrowded, and as is often the case in such situations in L.A., the fire marshals were called in and the party was shut down around 12:35 a.m.

As you can imagine, when the party was suddenly shut down, lots of people began to pour out of the party, out of the museum, into the garage, to wait for their valet parked cars including Biggie and Puffy. The stories do become a bit sketchy here, but according to one source who spoke to "USA Today", they both waited here for their cars and Biggie got in his GMC Suburban with two other passengers, reportedly Lil Caesar from Jr. MAFIA and his bodyguard, Damian. They rounded the corner from the garage, and drove right up to the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax.

As best we can determine, Biggie's car came to a stop at a red light at Wilshire and Fairfax when another car, possibly a black Jeep according to an L.A. Times source, drove around to the right side of their car and from it, six to ten shots were then fired from the other vehicle into the passenger side of Biggie's car. Panic obviously ensued and the Suburban drove straight to nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which in good traffic is no more than a five minute drive.

Which means at approximately 1:00 a.m., Biggie Smalls was brought here to Cedars-Sinai hospital, although it's doubtful how much they could do for him, since at 1:15 a.m. Christopher Wallace, also known as Notorious B.I.G. was pronounced dead of gunshot wounds. It wasn't long before distraught fans and friends showed up here to learn the news of Biggie's death.

Meanwhile, back at Peterson's many concerned partygoers went back inside the building fearing an escalation of violence. Apparently, the L.A.P.D. feared the same. They turned out in force, some wearing riot gear. And one witness we spoke to called that show of force, way too much.

by Marcus Errico Mar 26, 1997, 2:45 PM PT

Not much was small about Christopher Wallace. From his 6-foot, 3-inch, 300-lb. bulk to his rap handles of Biggie Smalls and the Notorious B.I.G. to his dramatic assassination in an L.A. drive-by, the man was large. And now from early indications, it looks like his posthumous album Life After Death, 'til Death Do Us Part is going to be huge.

Released Tuesday, the 24-track, double-disc set was supposed to debut at No. 1 even before B.I.G.'s March 9 murder. After the slaying, hip-hop aficionados and curiosity seekers aren't having any problem shelling out 20 bucks for the album, which should follow the trend set by Nirvana, Selena and Tupac Shakur, all of whom topped the charts with posthumous releases.

Based on our purely unscientific first-day sales figures, Death will have a very long shelf life. A clerk at a Washington, D.C. music store said it was "selling like wild" hours after its release. A manager at Tower Records on Sunset said the Los Angeles-outlet sold 150 copies during a midnight promotion. "Death is a commodity, you know," Ramsey Jones, a salesman at the Greenwich Village Tower Records told the Associated Press. Jones claimed that his store sold 105 albums in an hour. "I have to keep stocking it every five minutes."

"Death is a commodity, you know?" said Ramsey Jones, a clerk at Tower Records in Greenwich Village, where he couldn't keep the CD on the shelf. "I have to keep stocking it every five minutes."

At one point, the store sold 105 copies of the double-CD in a single hour, Jones said. Uptown at HMV Records, fans of the Brooklyn-born rapper were just as anxious for "Life After Death."

"It's flying out of here," said manager George Romero. "... This album was going to be big already. After this (the shooting), forget it."

Sales of his debut album, "Ready to Die," more than tripled in the week after the rapper's slaying. "Ready to Die" sold more than 10,000 copies nationwide after the slaying.

Nearly unanimous positive reviews, some teetering on effusive, are certain to help the B.I.G. album's longevity. "A B.I.G. classic," gushed USA Today. "He may have been rap's ultimate cinematic narrator," chirped the Los Angeles Times, which rated Death four out of a possible four stars.

April 28, 1997

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) - The bullet-riddled door of the rented GMC Suburban in which rapper Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down will be sold to raise money for charity.

Budget Rent A Car Beverly Hills rented the green 1997 Suburban to the Los Angeles production company FM Rocks. Notorious B.I.G. was sitting in the passenger seat March 9 when he was killed in a drive-by shooting.

The passenger door was the only part of the vehicle that was damaged.

"Everybody's telling me the door must have some value. We'd like to somehow find a way to sell the door to the highest bidder and then donate the money to charity," Budget co-owner Corky Rice said Monday.

When the rapper's posthumous album "Life After Death" became a national best-seller, it occurred to Rice and partner Jerry Seimons that they had a rare collectible on their hands.

"So many people say it has value. I'm trying to figure out how to turn this terrible incident into something good. If you put the money to good use, I don't think it's in bad taste," Rice said.

Rice said the Challenger Boys & Girls Club in South Central Los Angeles would be the beneficiaries of the money raised.

The value of the door wasn't known.

"I guess if I were to auction something like that, I'd put it out there with a very reasonable-looking estimate, say $3,000 to $4,000," said Michael Schwartz, director of entertainment memorabilia for the Butterfield & Butterfield action house.

Rice and Seimons are willing to sell the $38,000 Suburban as is with the bullet-pocked door in place, but they don't believe anyone would be interested.

"We haven't decided when or where to auction the door," Rice said. "We don't want to be tacky. We want to be in good taste. We don't want to make any profit at all."

Meantime, Death Row Records approached a Nevada resort to offer the bullet-riddled car in which rapper Tupac Shakur was killed last September in Las Vegas.

"We told them we weren't interested," said Aaron Cohn, spokesman for Primadonna Resorts in Primm, Nev. The resort paid $250,000 in 1988 for the bullet-riddled car in which Bonnie and Clyde Barrow were killed in a 1934 shootout.

The Shakur death car isn't the same, Cohen said.

"It's not a piece of American history the way the Bonnie and Clyde car is. But maybe in 20 years," he said.

Oct. 16, 2000

A former LAPD detective charges that the top brass derailed his investigation of the rap star's murder when it pointed to a cop

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LOS ANGELES -- It was L.A.'s boldest gangland killing of the decade. On March 9, 1997, Notorious B.I.G. (aka Biggie Smalls, whose legal name was Christopher Wallace) was gunned down while he was leaving a star-studded Vibe magazine party after the Soul Train Music Awards. Although there were a dozen witnesses and hundreds of clues, the Biggie killing remains one of L.A.'s most notorious unsolved homicides. Now, a former Los Angeles Police detective charges that the department's failure to solve the case may be tied to an unfolding Rampart scandal cover-up.

Last month, former LAPD Rampart task force Det. Russell Poole went public with charges that Chief Bernard Parks suppressed a report he had written on corrupt cops at the Rampart Division a full year before the scandal erupted. Poole, who resigned from the department last year after the LAPD brass ignored his complaints, also filed a lawsuit, claiming his career suffered as a result of his attempts to bring the scandal to light.

A member of LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division elite, Poole was one of the first detectives on the special Rampart task force. His work led to the arrest of officer Rafael Perez, the rogue cop whose confessions later triggered the worst scandal in LAPD history. But Poole charges that Chief Parks suppressed his early report on troubles in the Rampart Division, and that Parks and top LAPD brass refused to adequately investigate dirty cops, even when obvious clues pointed to them.

That reluctance to get to the bottom of police corruption, Poole says in his lawsuit, hampered his investigation of the Biggie Smalls murder. When he began turning up clues that pointed to involvement by David Mack, an LAPD officer and friend of Perez serving time for an armed bank robbery, he was prevented from aggressively pursuing the investigation.

Poole's lawsuit has already made waves in Los Angeles. Days after he filed it, his attorney, Leo Terrell, presented his case at a hearing of the police commission, where he demanded Chief Parks' resignation. Parks issued a statement denying the allegations.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, which has been conducting grand jury hearings on Rampart, called Poole in for more interviews. Prosecutors also filed court papers charging that the LAPD had intentionally hindered the criminal case against four officers in the first Rampart trial, which started last week. Echoing charges made by Poole, the court papers stated that LAPD detectives have failed to conduct thorough investigations and failed to turn over vital information to prosecutors, causing the exclusion of at least five prosecution witnesses. And in a development the DA's office insists is unrelated, the head of its Rampart prosecution team, Dan Murphy, resigned from that post, citing health concerns.

What may be the biggest new Rampart development, however, is the allegation by a former girlfriend of Rafael Perez that she saw Perez and fellow officer David Mack kill two people in the mid-1990s when a cocaine deal went bad. Sonia Flores, 23, made the allegations in an interview with the Los Angeles Times; last week she traveled to Mexico with an assistant U.S. attorney and FBI agents to show them a dump in Tijuana where she said the pair disposed of the bodies.

Sources say federal authorities could seek an indictment against Perez, since the 1999 immunity deal he cut with the DA in exchange for his testimony on the Rampart scandal won't protect him from prosecution if the FBI turns up independent evidence against him. Attorneys for Perez and Mack deny the allegations.

According to Poole, the trail to Rampart, and the Biggie probe, actually started with his investigation of the March 1997 shooting death of Officer Kevin Gaines. Gaines was killed by an undercover narcotics cop, Frank Lyga, after Gaines threatened Lyga with a gun during a traffic altercation. In the ensuing police investigation of the unusual cop-on-cop shooting, Poole uncovered evidence that Gaines was corrupt.

An informant told Poole that Gaines was moving money and drugs for rap music czar Marion "Suge" Knight of Death Row Records. A Death Row insider told him that Gaines and another cop, David Mack, were "confidants" of Knight's. Gaines had been living with Knight's ex-wife Sharitha, who was rapper Snoop Dogg's manager. He was living large -- nice clothes and cars, nightclubs, women -- and had dropped $952 for lunch at a gangster hangout shortly before his death. Gaines was already under investigation by the LAPD's Internal Affairs Division, and would have been fired had he not been killed by Lyga.

Despite what he learned, Poole says in his lawsuit that LAPD higher-ups prevented him from investigating Gaines any further. "I wanted to do a financial investigation on Gaines," says Poole. "You know what the department said? 'No. He's dead. This case is closed.'"

His superiors also kept Poole from taking a harder look at David Mack and his friend, Rafael Perez. Like Gaines, Mack and Perez were living way too well for police officers. Their player lifestyles included fancy clothes, expensive cigars, nightclubs and frequent trips to Las Vegas. Mack was later arrested in December 1997 for the armed robbery of a Los Angeles bank. Mack's two accomplices were never caught and the $722,000 stolen from the bank has never been recovered.

Investigators suspected that Mack's buddy Perez might have had some involvement in the crime. (Perez admitted to partying in Las Vegas with Mack after the robbery but said he knew nothing about the crime.) The ensuing LAPD task force probe led to Perez's arrest on charges of stealing cocaine evidence in August 1998. The Rampart scandal erupted a year later when Perez cut a deal for leniency and agreed to talk.

Meanwhile, Poole and his partner at Robbery-Homicide, Fred Miller, were given the Biggie Smalls case in April 1997, shortly after they started investigating Kevin Gaines. They pursued over 250 leads and interviewed dozens of witnesses, informants and Biggie associates. They began turning up clues that pointed to David Mack. But Poole charges that he was prevented from following these leads because of the LAPD's reluctance to examine even a known dirty cop.

Mack's apparent ties to Suge Knight were part of the puzzle. Many of Biggie's associates believed the rapper was killed on orders from Knight, as retaliation for the September 1996 killing of Death Row's star rapper Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas. Knight was also wounded in that shooting, which remains unsolved. Knight had been engaged in a long-running feud with New York rap mogul Puffy Combs. More than a dozen gangsters had died in this feud, including three of Knight's "executives," his bodyguard Jake "The Violator" Robles as well as, it was widely believed, Tupac.

While some speculated that the murder of Biggie Smalls, who was the top rapper on Puffy's Bad Boy label, was the Death Row clan's payback for Tupac's slaying, another theory held that the killing was related to the ongoing conflict between the rival Crips and Bloods gangs. Some investigators believed these alternate theories could be connected, since Knight was a Mob Piru Blood, their investigation showed, and Combs had ties to LA's South-side Crips.

As in most gangland disputes, drugs may also have been part of the mix. A cop who worked for Death Row security but was in fact an FBI task force undercover agent reported that "Los Angeles Crips and Bloods [including some who worked for Death Row] were transporting kilos of coke to the East Coast, buying them for $18,500 in LA and selling them for $26,000 in New York." Numerous disputes had resulted in the course of this trade.

Another informant told the LAPD that Kevin Gaines and other LAPD officers "provided security for members of Death Row Records during various criminal activities. The officers accompanied the members during drug deals and acted as lookouts and advisors. The officers monitored police frequencies, assisted in choosing locations for drug transactions and gave information on police tactics."

Mack had come to Poole's attention when a Death Row insider identified him and Gaines as "confidants" of Knight. (An attorney for Knight disputes that the rap mogul, now in prison for a 1992 attack on two rappers, even knew Mack.) Poole learned that Mack had grown up in the same Compton neighborhood as Knight. He often sported the same fancy red suits as Knight. After Mack was arrested for the bank robbery in December 1997, he admitted to being a Blood, like Knight. Soon more clues surfaced that pointed to him playing a role in the Biggie killing.

For a variety of reasons, Biggie's murder appeared to be very well planned and not a chance encounter by some rival. For one thing, the shooter, who pulled up alongside Biggie a block away from the museum, was alone in his car. He had to know which vehicle of the motorcade Biggie was in, which seat in that vehicle (it had tinted windows) and in which direction the caravan was headed. Amid the noise and hubbub of Biggie's departure, witnesses also reported hearing police radios, held by unidentified males, which might explain how a lone shooter, a block away from the museum, could know Biggie's location when he came upon the car.

According to police investigative files, Mack was placed at the scene by a member of Biggie's entourage, Damien Butler, who picked him out of a photo lineup. Butler, who walked in and out of the party with Biggie and drove in the same car with him, positively identified Mack as one of the men standing by the carport entrance of the Petersen Auto Museum. Poole discovered from department logs that Mack took a series of "family sick days" off prior to and during the weekend Biggie was killed, just as he had when he committed the bank robbery. (Mack had employed police radios for the bank job, which was also meticulously planned.) Later, when Poole served a search warrant at the home of Mack's close friend Rafael Perez, he seized a number of police scanners and radios.

Some witnesses reported the shooter's car was a dark green Impala, while some said it was a black Impala. The most reliable witness, an Inglewood cop working security for Biggie who followed the car, described it as black. David Mack owned a black Chevy Impala.

Eyewitnesses identified the shooter as a bow-tied African American dressed in the conservative style favored by Black Muslims. Mack was a Muslim, but he didn't match the composite drawing of the shooter made by witnesses. An informant had previously told investigators that Biggie's killer might have a Middle Eastern name, possibly Amir. Investigators noticed that the first person who visited Mack in jail following the bank robbery happened to be a man named Amir Muhammad (also known as Harry Billups). The fact that Billups/Muhammad gave a false address and false Social Security number on the visitor form heightened their suspicions about him.

So did a 20-page police computer search on Muhammad, which turned up a string of eight prior addresses, all with no forwarding. These included addresses in Las Vegas and Eugene, Ore., where Mack and Muhammad went to college. Finally, the ID photo on Muhammad's driver's license (which also had a wrong address) looked like a possible match to the Biggie shooter composite made from two eyewitness accounts: a medium-skinned African American man with a long, angular face.

With all these pieces in front of him, Poole felt it was imperative to at least find Amir Muhammad and interview him. His superiors disagreed. They did not want to pursue a theory that pointed to a cop, he says. The bank robbery detectives who searched Mack's residence discovered a large stash of guns and ammunition and a black Chevy Impala, as well as what they described as "a shrine" to Tupac Shakur at his house. Poole wanted to get a search warrant to seize Mack's car and ammunition, which had been left behind by the bank robbery investigators, but he was not allowed to.

"They told me, 'We're not going to get involved in that.' Their attitude was, 'Mack had already gone down for bank robbery. Let's not get involved in more controversy.'"

Former LAPD Deputy Chief Steve Downing, like many current and former officers, is appalled not only by Poole's allegations, but a growing chorus of similar complaints. A class action whistleblower lawsuit against the LAPD has now been signed by as many as 109 plaintiffs, all of them cops who claim they were punished or harassed for trying to bring attention to officer misconduct. "Anytime you have leads in a case pointing to a cop," says Downing. "it's even more important that it be pursued to the absolute end. And you also have to ask the question: who else is involved? Have any other officers been infected by these activities?"

Indeed, Poole thought it was important to interview Muhammad because he suspected Mack was involved in other crimes besides the bank robbery, and the detective thought Mack's old friend might have useful information. After he went to jail, Mack had attempted to arrange the murder of a girlfriend, a bank teller who helped him plan the bank robbery but then turned on him. He also told an inmate: "I can do my eight years and the money (nearly three-quarters of a million dollars, none of which has been recovered) will be waiting for me when I get out. I've got somebody investing it for me." Whatever the LAPD might learn about David Mack from Muhammad would be useful, Poole reasoned. But the department, he says, didn't want to learn anything.

So after conducting their initial computer search for Muhammad, which turned up the string of false addresses, the LAPD task force did not continue to look for him. "Nobody at LAPD made a real effort to find Billups (Muhammad)," he complains. "They didn't pursue him aggressively the way they should have." Instead, police investigators pursued other theories, but only half-heartedly. "We had hundreds of clues," says Poole, "but we were constantly diverted by stupid clues that were nothing."

Citizens often become police suspects due to as little as one piece of circumstantial evidence linking them to a crime, such as owning a rare make and model car, or having a relationship with a victim and no alibi the night of the crime. By contrast, Poole gathered more than 20 solid clues pointing to Mack, including Mack's relationship with Suge Knight; their ties to the Bloods; Knight's war with Puffy Combs; the sudden sick days Mack took around the time of the murder; the use of police radios; and the fact that Mack was seen at the scene of the killing.

There were inconsistencies in the evidence in the Biggie killing, Poole admits, as well as in the stories told by witnesses. Some thought the shooter was in his 20s, while Muhammad was in his late 30s at the time of the killing. Other informants suggested the killer was a member of the South-side Crips, not someone affiliated with Knight and the Bloods, and that Biggie was killed in a dispute over money. Even the informant who said the killer might be named Amir also listed Abraham and Ashmir as other possible names.

For his part, Amir Muhammad has vehemently denied playing a role in the killing. "I'm not a murderer, I'm a mortgage broker," he told the Los Angeles Times when he finally surfaced earlier this year. But sources say he has yet to be interviewed by police. (His attorney did not return calls to Salon.)

Poole doesn't claim he knows who killed Biggie Smalls. But he has firm ideas about which leads should have been followed. Based on his detective work, he says, Mack and Muhammad qualified as reasonable suspects who deserved to be investigated.

Some suspects in the Biggie killing were eliminated for good reason, like having alibis. According to Poole, Mack was dropped because he was a member of the Los Angeles Police Department. And investigators stopped looking for Amir Muhammad because of his ties to Mack.

While there has been no loud public outcry to solve the crime, friends and family of Biggie Smalls have expressed frustration over the lack of progress in the case. "I'm sick to my stomach over the way this case has been handled," Voletta Wallace, the slain rapper's mother, told the Los Angeles Times late last year. "There is a murderer out there laughing at my family and laughing at the cops. And it makes me furious. I've held my tongue for months now, but I'm fed up with the police just pussyfooting around."

before he was shot and killed early in the morning on Sunday, March 9th, was with the Wild 107 Doghouse of KYLD 107.7 FM, San Francisco. This transcript of the interview has been graciously provided by the radio station.

I'm not the person with the attitudes or the grudges or, I'm not the person to judge somebody when I just meet 'em. If you're cool with me, I'm cool with you. We can do whatever. We could drink, smoke, kick it. I just like to stay to myself and stay with my immediate family because I know that those are the people I can trust, you know, those are the people that know me inside and out, and I know them inside and out. I'm not really too accustomed to making new friends, but we could kick it. If a producer wants to do something, whatever, whatever, we can link up, you know? I mean, there wasn't really a beef to me in the beginning. Now for other artists, it was a personal problem between me and somebody else, it just happen to wager into an East Coast West Coast.

At the same time, I know what people want to hear and that's not all I rhyme about. If there's one thing that I learned about "Ready To Die" was that it's a full, rounded album. I got songs from girls, I got songs from thugs, I got songs from the radio. I tried to put a little bit of everything into everything. I'm not a one-sided person. I can't speak for anybody else if that's what they want to rhyme about, that's what they want to rhyme about. I rhyme about everything. Remember that game, telephone, you used to play when you would say something in somebody's ear and you just keep saying it? By the time it gets back to you it's a completely different story. That's basically how it is but it started from here and got all the way changed by the time it got to the East coast. You know, I had nothing to do with that.

Nobody was there to tell him, yo, you need to slow down, you need to just chill. I went through the same situation this summer where I was just movin' too quick. I was going through problems with Faith and I was just, I had my daughters and I was getting a whole bunch of money and I was in a car accident and just moving too fast. Then I just had to sit down...

It just happened to be a coincidence that he was in the studio. He just, he couldn't really say who really had something to do with it at the time. So he just kinda' leaned the blame on me.

All the rumors...you shouldn't be the one to sit back and listen to rumors. Just take the chance to know the person before you judge the person, that goes with anybody, not just me.