Free Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations by Greg Kading

shuttled from one assignment to another over the next eighteen months, Poole resigned, devoting himself to promoting his theory, including extensive interviews for the book LAbyrinth and appearing in the documentary Biggie and Tupac , an account of his role in “breaking” the case.
    In September 2000, almost a year after he had left the force, Poole filed a civil suit in federal court naming Chief Bernard Parks and the City of Los Angeles as co-defendants and alleging that the chief had violated Poole’s First Amendment rights to go public with his findings. He went on to accuse the LAPD of deliberately closing off his efforts to thoroughly investigate corruption within its ranks. It was a questionable claim on the face of it, primarily because Poole had no right to “go public” with any aspect of the investigation while still a police officer. But in Poole’s mind, as revealed to LAbyrinth author Randall Sullivan, the lawsuit was his attempt to “get the truth out the one way that was left to me.”
    In any event, Poole’s legal maneuverings accomplished exactly the opposite. The civil suit opened the gates to a flood of legal actions and counteractions that would keep the courts busy for years, even as they further obscured whatever truth about Christopher Wallace’s death might have yet been revealed.
    In 2002 Biggie’s mother, Voletta, his estranged wife, Faith Evans, and various members of the Wallace family filed a federal wrongful-death lawsuit, using Poole’s playbook to claim an LAPD cover-up in the killing. “I’m sick to my stomach over the way this case has been handled,” the aggrieved mother would later tell the Los Angeles Times . “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.”
    The LAPD was quick to respond. Shortly after the family’s wrongful-death suit was filed, the department launched Operation Transparency, an attempt to get out in front of whatever might be revealed in the civil case by gathering up every scrap of information existing on the Biggie Smalls investigation. Internal Affairs swept into the Robbery-Homicide headquarters and hoovered up virtually everything in sight that might conceivably have a connection to the case: police reports, detective field notes, witness interviews, forensic findings: the data filled a whopping ninety-two-volume “murder book” of four-inch thick three-ring binders. It was all hauled away and promptly sequestered, which brought the murder investigation itself to a screeching halt.
    But nothing could slow down the courtroom circus into which the civil case would, over the next three years, devolve. For example, it was during the discovery process that the family’s defense team became aware of a cassette recovered from the desk drawer of Detective Steven Katz, confiscated during Operation Transparency. On it, Katz was heard interviewing a jailhouse informant who confirmed that Rafael Perez had worked for Death Row Records and that, further, on the night of the murder he had placed a call to David Mack. The revelation caused an uproar, especially after Katz testified that he had simply “forgotten” about the tape’s existence. “The day before this trial began,” read a statement by the Wallace family in 2005, “we held a press conference and made clear that this trial was intended to hold the LAPD accountable… little did we know at the time what dark secrets lurked in the desk drawers of homicide detectives and little did we suspect that so many lies would be told under penalty of perjury.”
    Presiding over the trial was U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, who seemed to agree that dark secrets were indeed lurking. She called Katz’s claim of forgetfulness “utterly unbelievable” and “very disturbing.” The beleaguered detective was promptly removed from the case, but