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

the judge was far from placated. In a scathing statement just before declaring a mistrial, Cooper went on to assert, “The detective, acting alone or in concert with others, made a decision to conceal from the plaintiffs in this case information that could have supported their contention that David Mack was responsible for the Wallace murder.” To underscore her displeasure, she ordered the LAPD to pay all legal fees associated with the case, as well as imposing a stiff penalty on the department. The total damages came to more than a million dollars.
    But that was hardly the worst news that the city and its increasingly discredited police department would be handed in the 2002 civil judgment. In additional remarks relating to her findings, Judge Cooper let it be known that, if she were to make a ruling then and there, it would be for the plaintiffs to the tune of $500 million. The figure represented the earnings the estate claimed had been lost by Biggie’s death, based on an estimate provided by the Recording Industry Association of America.
    The legal maneuverings would drag on and on. Poole’s First Amendment case continued to wind its labyrinthine way through the courts to no conclusive end. The Wallace family would go on to file an amended suit against the city, once again alleging a police conspiracy in the shooting and this time asserting that the LAPD had “consciously concealed Rafael Perez’s involvement in the murder.” In the estimation of one legal analyst hired by the city, the claims being made by the family, and the evidence being offered to support them, were not particularly compelling. The danger for the LAPD, however, was that together they would amount to “death by a thousand cuts” in the minds of the jury.
    The essential weakness of the Wallace civil suit was underscored when another U.S. district judge summarily dismissed it. But five months later Judge Cooper was back with a reinstatement. What would be called by the Los Angeles Times “one of the longest running and most contentious cases of celebrity justice” on record had taken on a life of it’s own, feeding rampant and increasingly bizarre speculation and unfounded conspiracy theories that further obscured, if that were possible, the tragedy at the heart of the case.
    All those zeros in 500,000,000 had, of course, gotten the LAPD’s undivided attention. There was a very real possibility that the suit would end up being among the most expensive the department had ever had to pay out. So it came as no surprise that the brass wasted no time in putting together a task force to finally solve the nine-year-old case, find the killer, and hopefully exonerate the police in the process.
    I was more than ready to take on the job. The three-year-long George Torres investigation had pretty much wrapped up by then and I had gotten a taste for complex, multifaceted, and high-profile detective work. The specter of a potentially immense judgment made the resurrected investigation that much more of a priority for the department, which meant substantially more manpower and resources would be made available to the task force. I also knew that if we succeeded where others had gone off the rails, it would be a career milestone.
    I would be bringing the sum of my experience and expertise as an investigating officer to the case, particularly as it applied to the intelligence I had been gathering on Los Angeles gangs for going on twenty years. I knew the turf, the players, and the feuds igniting the bloody street wars that had terrorized the city for so long. But it didn’t take an expert to realize that the Biggie murder was, one way or another, gang-related.
    At the same time I was only too aware that the investigation was considered by many to be cursed. There was, first and foremost, Russell Poole’s ruined law enforcement career to consider. But it was the entire Robbery-Homicide Division that had taken the biggest hit to its reputation and prestige.