The process by which the Wallace family had chosen the attorney who would represent them in court had as much to do with how the music business operates as with the way the legal profession works. That was probably why Perry Sanders Jr. of Lake Charles, Louisiana, had gotten the job, Sanders perhaps being the one lawyer in America who could truthfully say he had spent many more hours singing into a microphone than he had speaking from a courtroom lectern.
In Sanders’s mind, it had all started with Rusty Kershaw. In the mid-1990s, Sanders and Kershaw were two of Louisiana’s better-known citizens. A lot of people in the state still thought of Sanders as the musician son of Louisiana’s most famous Baptist preacher, Perry Sanders Sr. Years after he earned his law degree at Louisiana State University, the younger Sanders had seemed more committed to his career as a singer-songwriter and music producer than to establishing himself as an attorney. As a college student in the 1970s, he had performed all across the Southern club circuit, and by the time he passed the bar in 1982 was co-owner of the Baton Rouge recording studio Disk Productions, where he and his two partners supported themselves in some style by composing and recording jingles for companies that included Hilton and Honda. Within a few years he had moved on to Nashville, working in entertainment law by day and as a writer and producer at night, and then to Los Angeles, where he was a partner in the studio West Side Sound. By the end of the eighties, though, Sanders had returned to Louisiana, where he set up a law practice in his hometown, Lake Charles, and made a name for himself with a series of civil rights claims that produced local headlines and environmental lawsuits that turned him into a rich man. The police brutality cases he had won in Lake Charles and New Orleans were especially closely watched in those cities’ black communities, which had a lot to do with how Sanders had been drawn back into entertainment law. The case in which he represented the New Orleans–based rappers Beats by the Pound and won back an assortment of copyrights from Master P’s No Limit Records was especially well known in Louisiana, and only in part for the unlikely success Sanders had achieved. In that case, as in others, the attorney had driven a hard bargain with not only his opponents but also his clients. He took all his cases on contingency and generally paid the costs out of his own pocket. He got paid only if he won, Sanders would point out, but if he won he got paid big. In the lawsuit against No Limit, Sanders had taken half of the copyrights he’d won back.
Rusty Kershaw was an even more favorite son in Lake Charles. The guitarist and his fiddler brother Doug had become regulars on the Louisiana Hayride show during the mid-1950s. By 1957, Rusty & Doug had joined the Grand Ole Opry and were recording a series of songs that made the country charts, including their top ten hit “Louisiana Man.” Outside the South, Kershaw was known for his work on Neil Young’s album On the Beach, in particular for his playing on what a lot of aficionados considered Young’s greatest song, “Ambulance Blues.” In 1992, Young had returned the favor by playing with Kershaw on Rusty’s solo album Now and Then. Though widely loved among other musicians, Now and Then was not a commercial success, and Kershaw’s discouragement had turned into bitterness about what he saw as a failure of support from the Domino Records label. By the time he got Sanders on the phone, Kershaw was complaining that “the producer had taken not only most of the money, but also most of the credit” for the album, as the attorney recalled it.
That producer was one of the best known and most respected in the music business, Rob Fraboni, celebrated for his work with Bob Dylan, the Band, Eric Clapton, and the Rolling Stones, among others. Fraboni actually owned Domino Records, Sanders discovered, a label he had created to record some of his favorite Louisiana artists, Kershaw among them.
Moved by Kershaw’s story and aware that the target of the musician’s ire was a man with deep pockets, Sanders was preparing to file a lawsuit against Fraboni when he made a phone call to his client Charles Vessels, a legendary record promoter who now ran an artist management company out of Beaumont, Texas, just an hour down the interstate from Lake Charles. The two of them agreed that Now and Then was a great record that for some reason had underperformed in the marketplace, Sanders recalled, but as soon as he mentioned that he had accepted Rusty Kershaw as a client and was about to sue the owner of Domino Records, who had also produced the album, Vessels became upset. “He told me, ‘Don’t do that. Rob Fraboni is a friend of mine. He’s also a great guy who would never cheat a musician,’ ” recalled Sanders. “Charles says, ‘Let me make a call.’ ” Only about an hour later, Vessels phoned back to say Fraboni would be flying to Lake Charles the next day and wanted to meet for lunch.
Fraboni, it turned out, was every bit as cool a fellow as Charles Vessels had claimed he was. “He says, ‘Look, I want Rusty to get what he needs. This was just a misunderstanding,’ ” Sanders recalled. “Within minutes we had an agreement—probably the easiest settlement of a case I’ve ever had. I was headed up to New York on some other business, and Rob and I agreed I’d bring all the paperwork and we’d get it signed then.”
While he was in New York, Fraboni asked Sanders if he liked Les Paul. Who doesn’t like Les Paul? asked Sanders, for whom the “father of the electric guitar” was a personal hero. His good friend, the musician and electrical-systems whiz Gregory Ercolino, was close to Les, Fraboni said, and could get Sanders a table on the floor of the tiny Iridium Club in the basement of the Empire Hotel, where Paul was performing. By the time Sanders left New York, he not only owned three Gibson guitars signed by Paul (“To Perry, Keep on Rockin’ ”), but had formed a lasting friendship with Ercolino, who would soon marry one of the other people Sanders had met that night at the Iridium. This was the eminent music attorney Terri Baker, whose long list of famous clients included Notorious B.I.G. Soon both Baker and Ercolino would become significant people in Sanders’s life. It was Baker who introduced Sanders to Dan Pritzker, the owner of the legendary Vee-Jay Records label, whose catalogs included the music of Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, and Little Richard. Vee-Jay had a copyright case that needed to be filed in New Orleans and wanted a Louisiana attorney to handle it, explained Pritzker, who became a big Sanders fan after the attorney won back all the copyrights, trademarks, and master recordings that were in dispute.
In the months after the Vee-Jay case was settled, Sanders and Ercolino traded visits, with the attorney recording his album After Mother at Ercolino’s old farmhouse in upstate New York, “with two open mics and him playing pots and pans and me on Neil Diamond’s old guitar,” Sanders recalled. Ercolino came to Louisiana to stay for two weeks with Sanders in Lake Charles at his converted barn on English Bayou. The two of them spent a lot of those days racing Sanders’s speedboat to the Gulf of Mexico, but their vacation was interrupted by a deposition the attorney had to take in a civil rights case he was prosecuting. Just for a kick, he brought Ercolino along as his “legal assistant,” Sanders recalled, and “Greg thought it was just about the most exciting and interesting thing he’d ever been part of.”
All those pieces were in place in June 2001, when Rolling Stone magazine published my article “The Murder of Notorious B.I.G.” Recalled Sanders: “I get a call from Terri Baker, who asks me, ‘Perry, have you heard that cops might have been involved in the murder of Notorious B.I.G.?’ She said she and Greg were just sitting there flabbergasted. She said, ‘I want you to read this and tell me what you think.’ So she faxed the article to me. I read it and thought, ‘Whoaaa.’ ” He advised Baker that “it would be a tough case to make, because you would have to get the city of Los Angeles on the hook,” Sanders recalled, but also told her that if even half of what had appeared in the Rolling Stone piece was true, there was plenty to work with and a huge upside if they won in court. She would need the family’s approval, Baker said, but she thought he might be the perfect attorney to represent the slain rapper’s estate, given his unusual background, which included handling both civil rights and copyright cases, along with his experience in the music business.
Sanders and his sometime associate, Colorado attorney Robert Frank, were at that moment embroiled in a massive environmental lawsuit against the Schlage Lock Company, however, and neither lawyer was sure he could afford the money or the time the B.I.G. lawsuit would demand. Baker pressed Sanders to meet with Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace. Sanders asked Frank, who was in Boston at the time, to drop down to New York and introduce the two of them to Mrs. Wallace.
That would be no easy task, considering the extreme contrast the pair of attorneys presented. The ebullient Sanders was a singular character in just about every regard, including his appearance. Nearing fifty, he was still athletically built, with a shaved head and hardly any eyebrows. His chiseled features lent him the aspect of an actor who’d been hired to play Lex Luthor as a protagonist. “Perry isn’t just larger than life. He also thinks big picture better than any lawyer I’ve ever met,” Frank said. “It endlessly amazes me how often he makes a brilliant decision without needing to think about it very long, usually based more on intuition than analysis.”
Sanders, though, knew better than anyone how much he depended on Frank to bring his often scattered attention into focus. Frank, then in his late thirties, disguised his considerable killer instinct with a blond beard, slumped shoulders, and a relentlessly self-deprecating attitude. He publicly played the part of a skilled legal technician who handled most of the briefs and motions, generally but not always deferring to Sanders in matters of strategy and presentation. It was the younger attorney alone, though, who made the decision that instead of taking the short hop to New York, he would first fly to Los Angeles for a meeting with Russell Poole, the former LAPD detective who had been featured in the Rolling Stone article. “I felt the first thing to do was to look at his evidence and see if there really is a case,” Frank explained.
Frank booked a hotel in Long Beach, about halfway between LAX and Poole’s home in Orange County, and was waiting there the next day when the ex-detective showed up with what he called “my files.” “I thought he’d come in with a two-inch stack of papers,” Frank recalled, “but Russ comes in with boxes. We needed a cart to carry it to my room.” He and Poole spent nearly seven hours going through the documents in the boxes, Frank remembered. “When we were done, I called Perry and said, ‘I don’t know for sure, but this Russell Poole guy sure seems credible to me, and what he’s put together looks like a real case,’ ” Frank recalled.
“Rob always understates,” Sanders would say later. “If he says something looks like a case, you can be pretty sure it is.” At his partner’s urging, Frank flew back across the country the next day to meet with Voletta Wallace at Terri Baker’s office in Manhattan. The mother of Notorious B.I.G., Frank discovered, was a tall, slender woman of proud carriage who looked him straight in the eye and seemed never to blink, let alone glance away. “Voletta was as impressive as anyone I’ve ever met,” Frank recalled. “She had a grace to her, and a power to her. And her ability to articulate what her son meant to her and so many other people, what had been lost when he died, was remarkable. After the meeting, I reported back to Perry that I still wasn’t sure we had a winning case, but we certainly had a winning client.”
Before Biggie’s murder, Voletta Wallace said, “I trusted everyone. I trusted the Los Angeles Police Department. I had to believe they wanted to find out who the murderer of my son was.” Almost immediately after reading about former LAPD officer David Mack’s alleged involvement in her son’s death, though, Wallace said, she decided to pursue a civil action. “I wasn’t thinking about the world I was taking on, only that something was not right and I have to make it right. If I have to sue them for that, I was gonna do it.”
By early 2002, Sanders had weighed what he and Frank had learned from Russell Poole and Voletta Wallace and had arrived at the decision to file a civil rights claim in the federal district court of central California. “We wrote twenty-seven or twenty-eight drafts before we got the one we submitted,” Frank recalled. Said Sanders, “Rob and I both knew it was a long shot, but it was a long shot worth takin’.” The two lawyers were up against a statute of limitations deadline, and in the end had go with the best version they could deliver on time, a lawsuit accusing the LAPD of “policies and practices” that had permitted officers to obtain employment with Death Row Records and enabled at least one of them, former LAPD officer David Mack, to conspire with his friend Amir Muhammad to murder Notorious B.I.G. “Even then we didn’t appreciate the magnitude of what we were getting ourselves into,” admitted Frank.
They got a quick lesson when the City of Los Angeles answered their suit first with an attempt to “force us out on statute of limitations,” Sanders recalled, then followed with a voluminous filing for summary judgment, the main grounds being that it could not be proved that David Mack—even if he was involved in the murder of Christopher Wallace—had acted under “color of law.” Judge Florence Cooper made a tentative ruling in favor of the city, but she scheduled a hearing to allow the plaintiffs to persuade her to change her mind.
“I went to Perry and asked, ‘Is this even worth going out to argue?’ ” Frank remembered. “Perry said, ‘Hell yes, it is.’ ”
What followed was a long and contentious disagreement over how their reply to the city’s motion should be couched. Sanders wanted to contend that if Mack had employed “cop tools and cop knowledge” as an accomplice in the Biggie murder, this satisfied the federal statute’s color of law requirement. Frank did not think that would work. “We sat in a room going back and forth about it for thirteen solid hours,” Frank recalled. Said Sanders, “By the time we finished, my butt was as sore as a butt could be. I didn’t want to sit down for the entire next week.”
“Long story short, Perry won the argument, and he was right,” Frank said.
For the next several days, Frank said, he “prepared like crazy,” then flew out to L.A. for the hearing before Judge Cooper. “I went to the courtroom very early to observe the judge, to see how she handles her business,” Frank remembered. He had been sitting for some time before the city’s lead attorney, Paul Paquette, showed up in the courtroom. “He didn’t know who I was, and he was talking to some other attorneys about how this was a bullshit case and the judge was going to dismiss it for sure,” Frank recalled. “He said she should have already. That got to me. If I wasn’t charged up enough already, I was after that.”
When Frank was given the opportunity to speak, he did, for nearly an hour. “I took the court through a survey of how color of law worked, then argued that as long as the murder was accompanied by some use of authority or knowledge granted by the state—‘cop tools and cop knowledge’—it would satisfy the color of law requirement. And that argument changed her mind. She allowed the case to continue. It was one of those big victories that help you keep going when other things aren’t working out so well.”
Immediately after that ruling, Sanders hired a tech to set up the website BiggieHotline.com, where individuals could post tips about the murder, anonymously if they chose. “We got a lot of publicity after we filed and after the judge said the case could go forward, so clues started coming in like crazy,” Sanders recalled. What most amazed and frustrated the attorney was the number of people who called or wrote to say they had seen Tupac Shakur alive and well in a Florida parking lot or a Maryland crab market or some other place in just about every state of the union. “A lot of the callers were spooky, strange, and totally useless to us,” Sanders remembered. “We weren’t prosecuting a lawsuit about Tupac’s death. Almost nobody who came in on the hotline said they’d seen Biggie. I guess he was a little more difficult to mistake for somebody else.”
Right around the time the hotline was put up, Sanders began to hear warnings from Voletta Wallace and Biggie’s widow, Faith Evans, along with their New York attorneys and investigators, that his life was in danger. He tried to shrug it off with the same response he used during the Beats by the Pound lawsuit, Sanders recalled: “They’d ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ Of all the gangbangers who surrounded Master P, they meant. I’d say, ‘Are you afraid?’ They’d say no, and I’d say, ‘Then I’m not afraid. Because if they kill me, you’ll just hire another lawyer, and they know that. But if they kill you, the case goes away.’ ”
He was shaken, Sanders admitted, after he was contacted on the hotline by a California prison inmate who said he’d been the cellmate of David Mack’s former LAPD partner Rafael Perez and had a good deal of information about Perez’s involvement with the Notorious B.I.G. murder. “I was interested, of course,” Sanders recalled. “But there was something about a girlfriend or wife in Lake Charles who was gonna come and see me, and that scared us off. There are Bloods everywhere, and we thought it was a setup. I was really afraid I was gonna get killed if we agreed to that meeting. So, we didn’t.”
That would prove to be a problematic decision, though how significant the problem was Sanders wouldn’t know until three years later.
Heartened by Judge Cooper’s first major ruling, Sanders and Frank were even more encouraged when they learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking into B.I.G.’s murder. Shortly after the publication of the Rolling Stone article, a young agent in the FBI’s Los Angeles office, Phil Carson, received permission to launch an investigation of the murder under federal civil rights laws. Sanders’s anticipation was blunted, though, when Carson phoned to request a meeting in Louisiana, adding that he would be accompanied by two detectives from the LAPD’s Internal Affairs (IA) Division. “You had to figure the LAPD guys were coming to run us off the case,” the attorney explained. “And that if Phil Carson was bringing them along, he probably was going to tell us to go away, too.”
He was flabbergasted, Sanders admitted, when Carson began the meeting in Lake Charles by saying, “We think you’ve sued the right people for this murder.” To which one of the IA detectives quickly added, “And we believe there are others involved.”