Phil Carson had not even been an FBI agent when Notorious B.I.G. was shot to death outside the Petersen Automotive Museum. Carson, a compact man with sandy hair, elfin features, bright blue eyes, and a buff physique, was at that time working in Orange County as a bond trader for Titan Value Equities. He hadn’t entered the FBI Academy until June 1997—three months after the Biggie murder—at the age of thirty-three, yet still had managed to finish first in his class in physical training and defensive tactics. His assignment to the bureau’s Los Angeles office, though, had plunged the probationary agent into the maelstrom of police corruption cases swirling through Southern California. Carson had worked on several such investigations, most notably one centered on Ruben Palomares, an LAPD officer suspected of organizing more than forty home invasion robberies perpetrated by his gang of fellow cops. The investigation conducted by Carson and partners from the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division had compelled a guilty plea by Palomares that resulted in a thirteen-year prison sentence for him on the condition he testify in court against his associates. On the basis of what Palomares told the judge and jury, one of his associates would be sentenced to nearly ninety years in prison.
Carson would eventually receive the U.S. Department of Justice’s annual Exceptional Service award (presented to him by Attorney General Eric Holder) for his work on the Palomares case, but he was still a young agent in the early stage of his career in June 2001, when “The Murder of Notorious B.I.G.” was published in Rolling Stone. Carson, admittedly “not much of a reader,” had not learned of the Biggie case until a couple of months later when the VH1 network aired a documentary that drew heavily on the magazine article. He was “pulled in” by the implication of David Mack in Detective Russell Poole’s investigation of the Biggie murder, Carson said, because of all the connections he saw to the LAPD corruption cases he had investigated during the previous three years. “It was the number of similarities,” Carson explained. “The tactics, the players, and, especially, the criminal culture that had been cultivated inside the LAPD, in particular among cops working with celebrities.” He wrote a long outline of how the earlier cases he had worked seemed to be intertwined with the Biggie murder, Carson recalled, “then went in to my bosses and said, ‘You guys gotta look at this. I know there’s something here.’ ”
His FBI supervisors agreed. Carson asked that two LAPD investigators he had worked with on the Palomares case, Roger Mora and Steve Sambar, be assigned to the investigation with him. The police department granted the request. Carson was further encouraged when the LAPD’s number two man, Deputy Chief Jim McDonnell, helped him, Mora, and Sambar set up a ruse that permitted them to examine the department’s investigative file—its “Murder Book”—on the Biggie case. “William Bratton, who had just been appointed chief, said, ‘Hey, I’m new here. I want to see all the unsolved high-profile cases, one being the Biggie Smalls murder,’ ” Carson recalled. “ ‘Give me that entire case so I can peruse it.’ Then what McDonnell did was have it brought over, surreptitiously, to the FBI office. Mora and Sambar and I were sent into a conference room to look through it. McDonnell told us, ‘You can’t make any copies, you can just look.’ ”
Among the details that jumped out at him, Carson recalled, was the report by Russell Poole in which he described how a large cache of GECO ammunition—the unusual brand of bullets that had been fired in the Notorious B.I.G. slaying—had been recovered from the garage of David Mack after he was arrested for the November 6, 1997, armed robbery of more than $722,000 from the Bank of America branch just north of the USC campus. It was the FBI that had first actually identified the GECO ammunition when the bureau’s agents searched Mack’s home after LAPD officers arrested him. The LAPD, as Poole noted, had simply left the ammunition sitting in the garage without even noting its brand.
GECO, Carson knew, was German-manufactured ammunition intended mainly for the 9-mm Luger, though it would work in nearly any 9-mm automatic pistol. Seven GECO shell casings had been collected from the scene of the Notorious B.I.G. shooting. GECO bullets, Carson learned from FBI reports, were “extremely rare” in the United States—so rare that there was not a single mention of their use in a crime in the entire FBI database, with the exception of the Christopher Wallace murder. Only two stores in the Unites States sold GECO bullets, Carson discovered: one in New Jersey and the other in Corona, California, the city where Death Row Records director of security Reggie Wright Jr. lived, and where Amir Muhammad had conducted a good deal of his mortgage brokerage business.
By the time he had finished paging through the Biggie Murder Book, Carson recalled, he was certain of three things: “The first was that one person could not possibly have pulled off this murder by himself, even if he was a police officer. The logistics were just too complicated. You had to know how to move and manipulate law enforcement to be able to do it and get away. There was just no way it could have been done otherwise. The second was that the LAPD had done absolutely nothing on this case for the past two years, since it was assigned to Steve Katz as the lead investigator. The Murder Book was literally collecting dust. The third thing I realized was that Russ Poole had done a lot of great work, work that was right on, and they had shut him down before he could finish his job.”
Within days, Carson had arranged for Poole’s designation as what the FBI called a “137 source,” essentially making him a confidential witness brought in to aid the investigation. “I got enough money from my bosses to copy Russ’s entire case file,” Carson remembered, “and after I looked through that I was really impressed. I made it clear to my bosses that David Mack and Amir Muhammad were going to be targets of my investigation, along with other police officers, and my bosses signed off on it.”
He found Poole to be a tremendous asset, Carson said, but also a tremendous pain in the ass. “Russ was a good guy, but he could just not let go,” Carson explained. “And I couldn’t blame the guy, because he had sacrificed so much to try to make this case. But he was always calling me, and saying, ‘Did you think of this? Did you talk to him? Have you considered this? Have you looked at that?’ And sometimes he would get upset with me because I couldn’t tell him things. It was an ongoing investigation, and I’m bound by the FBI’s confidentiality rules. But Russ had a hard time accepting that, and he started to get frustrated with me. And I started to get tired of him.”
Not long after setting up the Murder Book ruse, Jim McDonnell had been replaced as Carson’s main point of contact with the LAPD command staff by Michael Berkow, recently appointed by William Bratton as his new deputy chief. Bratton had hired Berkow away from his position as chief of police for the city of Irvine, in Orange County, making him “the first outside sworn deputy chief in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department,” as the LAPD website described it. What that press release hadn’t mentioned was that Bratton had placed Berkow in charge of the department’s most sensitive division, Internal Affairs, giving his man control of all claims of LAPD misconduct or corruption.
Berkow and Bratton agreed to let the Internal Affairs Division investigators, Mora and Sambar, accompany Carson to Louisiana to meet with Perry Sanders. “Roger and Steve were great detectives and really good guys, both totally straight,” Carson said. “So I figured the LAPD had to be pretty committed to this investigation if they would give me a couple of guys like this to work with. Roger and Steve were just as enthusiastic about talking to Perry Sanders as I was. Just like me, they wanted to see what leads Perry was following or not following, but mainly what we wanted was an avenue to people who wouldn’t talk to law enforcement.” Carson and the IA investigators were particularly interested in gaining access to two key witnesses to the Notorious B.I.G. slaying: Eugene Deal, who had been working as the bodyguard for Sean “Puffy” Combs on the night of the murder; and rapper James “Lil’ Cease” Lloyd, who was riding in the same vehicle with Biggie when the shooting happened.
“And Perry was great about that,” Carson said. “Once he trusted us, he basically gave us everything he had and all the help we asked for.”
Carson and the two LAPD detectives also traveled to Colorado Springs, to meet Rob Frank and go through the documents he had obtained in discovery. When they returned to Los Angeles, however, Carson learned that Deputy Chief Berkow had pulled Mora and Sambar off the case. “I was stunned,” Carson recalled. “All I knew was that Roger and Steve had shown Berkow everything we’d gotten in Louisiana and Colorado, and he’d immediately told them they were no longer part of the Biggie murder investigation.” Mora and Sambar were not available even to consult on the investigation, although one of them did confide, Carson said, that, “ ‘if this case gets made, the effects could be catastrophic for the LAPD.’ And now Berkow, and presumably Bratton, knew we were making the case.”
He still could not at that point process the LAPD’s position, Carson admitted. “I had had almost entirely good experiences working with LAPD. As I said, Roger and Steve were top-notch guys. So I wanted to work with LAPD on the Biggie case.” Then Berkow paid a visit to Carson at the FBI office. “He said, ‘Look, I’d like to give you Mora and Sambar back, but we’re short of bodies,’ ” Carson recalled. “ ‘So, what I want you to do is put together a PowerPoint presentation and show me what you’ve done and what you plan on doing, then I’ll see what I can do.’ ”
Carson went to his FBI supervisors with Berkow’s request and was relieved when his bosses told him that there was no way they were giving the LAPD the blueprint of their investigation. Carson still hoped to get Mora and Sambar back on the case, so he suggested offering the LAPD brass an olive branch. “Through Perry Sanders, I had access to witnesses who wouldn’t talk to the LAPD, because they thought LAPD was involved in Biggie’s murder. I said we should help the LAPD find out what these people knew.” His boss, Steve Gomez, agreed. Carson placed a call to Katz, the Robbery-Homicide Division detective who had supposedly been in charge of the Biggie investigation for the past two years, and asked if they could look at the Murder Book together. Katz agreed.
“So I go over to LAPD to sit down with Katz and go through the Murder Book,” Carson recalled. “And very quickly I’m in shock.” Numerous photographs that were part of the book when he had examined it at the FBI office were now gone, Carson realized. “These were photos of police officers who were inside the Petersen Museum on the night of the Biggie murder,” Carson recalled, “plus a photo of Big Gene Deal standing with the person he identified as Amir Muhammad outside the museum by Puffy Combs’s vehicle. All of those photos had been removed.”
He couldn’t tell Katz that he knew the photos were missing, Carson explained, because he was not supposed to have seen the Murder Book previously. Only when he found a report in the Murder Book in which Katz had made reference to the missing photographs did Carson ask the detective where those pictures were now. “Katz told me he had no idea what I was talking about,” the FBI agent recalled.
For a few moments, Carson sat stunned, trying to gather his thoughts. “And then I actually tried to convince Katz he should work with me. I tell him, ‘Hey, this is where I am, this is what I’ve got. If you guys want to reengage your Murder Book and work with me on this case, I’m open to it.”
As a result, Carson was invited to what he understood would be a meeting with Katz and Robbery-Homicide’s commanding officer, Captain Al Michelena. His main purpose in going, Carson said, was his hope that he could persuade the LAPD to run a ballistics test on the GECO shell casings recovered from the scene of the Biggie murder and still in the police department’s possession.
“I brought Steve Gomez with me, and when we get to Robbery-Homicide we’re shown into this room where ten or twelve of these old-school, crusty, keep-everything-close-to-the-vest kind of RHD [Robbery-Homicide Division] guys are sitting around the table,” Carson recalled. “And they’re looking at me like I’m the plague. I look at my boss like, ‘I didn’t expect this,’ and he looks back at me like, ‘I didn’t, either.’ The tension was insane. I mean, these guys, if eyes could kill, I’d have been a dead man.”
He quickly realized that the men in the room understood that the FBI believed Russell Poole’s theory of the Biggie case was supported by enough evidence to warrant opening a federal investigation, and that this made him their enemy, Carson recalled: “They get that we don’t investigate homicides unless there’s a federal nexus, and the involvement of police officers is one of the things that creates that federal nexus. So they know we must have some real evidence of police involvement in the Biggie murder. They realize that the FBI has decided to pick this case up where Russell Poole left off, and they’re both terrified by and furious about that. And they let us know that they have absolutely no intention of helping us in any way, shape, or form.”
He and Gomez were each in a daze after they walked out of that conference room, Carson said. “But Steve told me, and I agreed, that we should try to maintain an amicable relationship with the LAPD, if that was possible.”
Shortly after that meeting, Carson was approached by the most decorated television reporter in Los Angeles, Chris Blatchford, with a request that he appear in a special that Blatchford was putting together on the Biggie murder for KTTV, the local Fox network affiliate. “My bosses and I agreed I should do it, because, the thinking was, this is local and it could generate some leads. We didn’t know how many, but at least dozens, we figured. Maybe hundreds.” As part of his ongoing effort to show the police that he wanted to work with them, not against them, Carson approached the LAPD to suggest they set up a joint hotline that would be publicized on the KTTV special.
“So we come to an agreement that I thought even at the time was crazy,” Carson recalled. “I would do the interview, but LAPD would handle the hotline.” A few days after the special aired, Steve Katz informed Carson of the results. “Guess how many leads the LAPD said they got from that special? Zero!” Carson recalled. “Guess how many phone calls the LAPD said they got? Zero. They didn’t even try to pretend. They could have said, ‘Oh we got fifteen calls and twelve were crazies and the other three wouldn’t give their names,’ and we wouldn’t have known for sure they were lying. But they didn’t care.”
Carson would not truly begin to realize what he was up against, though, until he tried to interview Reggie Blaylock, the Inglewood police officer who had been working as part of the Puffy Combs–Notorious B.I.G. security detail on the night of Biggie’s murder. Blaylock, who was at the wheel of the black SUV that was serving as the “trail car” in the Bad Boy Records entourage as it left the Petersen Museum that night, had disappeared from the scene by the time LAPD investigators arrived. Weeks would pass before the LAPD could compel Blaylock to provide a statement. His description of the events surrounding Biggie’s murder ran to six pages but offered almost nothing useful to the investigation. He claimed never to have seen the shooter’s face and could only describe his complexion as “lighter than mine.”
Just as Russell Poole had been, Carson was most troubled by Blaylock’s failure to give chase after the shooting. “You’re a sworn law enforcement officer carrying a gun sitting at the wheel of a vehicle that is right behind a vehicle in which the passenger is shot to death and you don’t go after the shooter?” Carson wondered. “No way does that make sense unless there’s something else going on. So of course I want to ask Blaylock about it. But the LAPD kept him so wrapped up that I could not get to the guy. They literally shielded him from me. That was when I first began to understand that the LAPD was not simply refusing to assist me in my investigation, but was actually doing what they could to obstruct me.”
Perry Sanders and Rob Frank received a bracing lesson in where they stood in the eyes of the Los Angeles Police Department when Judge Cooper granted their first major discovery motion and ordered the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division to share its entire case file on the Notorious B.I.G. murder investigation.
“We arrive at Robbery-Homicide and there’s file cabinets lined up that are filled floor to ceiling,” Sanders recalled. “They put us off in an interrogation room in the corner, and all the cops are outside sneerin’ at us.”
“They were trying to intimidate us for sure,” said Frank. “It was a completely hostile atmosphere. I was waiting for them to lock the door on us.”
In Sanders’s recollection, “It was plenty tense and a total blast. I mean, there we are in the bowels of RHD, in the belly of the beast, and they have to deal with us. I love that stuff.”
The fun ended when the files began to arrive in the interrogation room, one after another, “like on some crazy conveyer belt,” Sanders recalled. “It’s comin’ at us so fast we have to make quick decisions on what to have copied. We’re both speed-readin’ through this stuff that is ninety-nine percent baloney.”
“There were so many horses all we could do was look for zebras,” Frank remembered. “Anything out of the ordinary we grabbed. We could only hope we were guessing right.”
The day was a template for how the City of Los Angeles would answer the Notorious B.I.G. lawsuit, satisfying the letter of the law with as little actual cooperation as possible. Perhaps because he sensed it would be this way throughout, Sanders had earlier decided that a court reporter should be present at the Rule 26 conference. These conferences are face-to-face meetings between the attorneys for the plaintiffs and the defendants in federal cases, held immediately before the discovery process begins. “Under the rules, the city had an obligation to disclose any relevant evidence,” Frank explained. “I went through it painstakingly, asking every conceivable question.” The transcript of the Rule 26 conference eventually came to be among the most significant pieces of evidence placed before the court.
“But we had absolutely no clue it would be that way at the time,” Frank said. “Bringing the court reporter in was an absolutely brilliant decision by Perry.”
“Just a wild-assed hunch,” Sanders said. “I figured I was probably wastin’ money, but somethin’ told me to do it.”
Once they had the Robbery-Homicide files in hand and began to bring in more discovery, much of it based on the list of documents cited in the back of my 2002 book LAbyrinth, Sanders and Frank realized that the next big step was to hire the right private investigator. Everybody he knew in L.A. said that was Anthony Pellicano, Sanders remembered. When he spoke to Pellicano in early 2002, though, the investigator’s aggressive grasping made him uneasy, the attorney said. “Pellicano wanted a twenty-five-thousand-dollar retainer right now,” Sanders recalled. “I mean, he wanted it right now.” Something about how intensely Pellicano demanded the money gave him pause, said Sanders, who by the time he flew back to Colorado Springs a few days later had decided to tell Frank they should go in another direction. Instinctive or reasoned, the decision would prove a wise one. Within the year, Pellicano would be arrested for illegally possessing grenades and plastic explosives, and the subsequent federal investigation would spiral into wiretapping and racketeering charges that added another fifteen years to the P.I.’s prison sentence. More than a dozen of Hollywood’s best-known power players—Michael Ovitz, Brad Grey, and Ron Meyer, among them—would be drawn into the biggest scandal the entertainment industry had seen since the arrest of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. One of those put through the wringer was Bert Fields, considered by many the most powerful attorney in show business, who had used Pellicano as his investigator for years. “I can’t remember how many times Rob thanked me for not getting us into that mess,” Sanders said.
Sanders, in the midst of relocating to Colorado from Louisiana, was house hunting in the Colorado Springs area when Russell Poole phoned to say that he was visiting a relative in Denver and offered to drive down for a meeting. “I had the same reaction that Rob did,” Sanders recalled. “There was a plain decency to Russ that made me feel real good about how he’d come across as a witness in court.” It was Poole who suggested that Sanders and Frank consider hiring Sergio Robleto as a consultant and an expert witness. His former supervising lieutenant in LAPD’s South Bureau Homicide was one of the sharpest and most dedicated cops he’d ever worked with, Poole told the attorneys, and absolutely the best he’d ever worked under.
Seventeen hundred unsolved murders were on the books when Robleto arrived at South Bureau, a number he publicly declared to be “completely unacceptable.” That apparently hundreds of killers were escaping justice in South-Central L.A. created an impression that the LAPD didn’t care about the mostly young black men who were their victims, Robleto said, or the law-abiding people who had to live in fear of gang members with guns. He immediately established an unsolved murder unit, one that he closely supervised, often working right alongside his investigators. Within a matter of months the number of murder arrests in South Bureau skyrocketed, as did the number of unsolved cases that were closed.
This success had made Robleto a hot commodity in the department, where many believed he was destined for an eventual appointment as the LAPD’s first Hispanic chief. Sergio had surprised and disappointed a good many people, Poole told Frank and Sanders, when he resigned in 1995 to take a position at Kroll Associates, the New York–based “risk consulting” firm that had become popularly known in the media as the “corporate CIA.” The attorneys, though, were delighted to learn that Robleto had spent four years (1998–2002) heading up Kroll’s Los Angeles office before leaving to establish his own private investigation agency. Kroll’s fingerprints were all over the LAPD, Sanders and Frank knew. Not only had the company won the contract to monitor the department’s compliance with the consent decree imposed on it by the U.S. Department of Justice in the aftermath of the Rampart Scandal (placing the LAPD under the supervision of a federal monitor), but the man chosen to succeed Bernard Parks as LAPD chief in 2002 was Kroll executive William Bratton, who had formerly served as police commissioner in both Boston and New York. Among many other things, Robleto might help them understand the politics of the LAPD, Sanders and Frank agreed. And if he was as good an investigator as Russ Poole said he was, it seemed there could be no better choice.
The attorneys became somewhat skeptical, though, when Robleto showed up in Colorado Springs to examine the investigative files they’d received in discovery. “I’d talked to Sergio on the phone, laid out our case,” Frank remembered. “He said he’d come out and see me. I assumed he was going to set up a meeting, but he’s at my office at nine the next morning. I shake hands with this short and slightly chubby Guatemalan guy, smiling and jovial, and suddenly I’m not sure about him. I thought maybe he wasn’t serious enough. But he asked to have all the Murder Book files moved to the conference room so he could spread them out and study them, and I figured, why not? Four hours later he comes in to see me and starts asking a series of questions that I hadn’t even thought of and couldn’t answer. And he did it with a precision and clarity that absolutely astonished me.”
That twinkle in Robleto’s eye, Frank and Sanders quickly learned, masked an ability to combine focus and ferocity that they had encountered in few other people. “On top of that, I came to know Sergio as one of the best human beings I’ve ever met,” Frank said. “People think I hate cops, because I’ve sued a lot of them, but I don’t. And I always put Russ Poole and Sergio Robleto at the very top of the list of cops I’ve met.”
Robleto had first become familiar with the Notorious B.I.G. murder investigation and the politics surrounding it back in 2000. That was when Poole had contacted him to ask for support. “Russ said there was an article coming out in the L.A. Weekly about how the LAPD had ostracized him and refused to let him fully investigate the murder,” Robleto recalled. “He knew that making sure every major crime gets fully investigated is something near and dear to my heart. I preached tenacity, as Russ was well aware. Russ was in full battle mode at the time, and he was a pretty intense fellow anyway. He asked me to talk to the reporter writing the article and ‘tell him what you know about me.’ So I did. I told the reporter that Russ was one of the finest investigators I had in South Bureau, that there was none better. He was absolutely tenacious, absolutely honest, absolutely committed. I didn’t fully understand what was going on with Russ at the time, though, so I wasn’t willing to talk about Chief Parks, which may have disappointed Russ a little.”
When he arrived in Colorado Springs, there were fifty-four volumes of the Biggie Smalls Murder Book, Robleto remembered, the most he’d ever seen connected to a single case: enough four-inch blue binders to fill a pair of file cabinets. It took him two solid weeks to read through those and the forty-four boxes of other materials from the LAPD stacked in a conference room. By the time he was done, Robleto was prepared to tell Frank and Sanders that this was by far the most politicized and compromised murder investigation he’d ever seen.
“The most glaring thing, the most shocking, was the number of percipient witnesses who were never interviewed and the number of major clues that were never followed up,” Robleto recalled. “People who had been at the scene at the time of the murder were never interviewed because they were never called back, and then the LAPD lost track of them. That, to me, was unbelievable.”
He recalled another case in South Bureau where there had been a hundred witnesses to a murder, Robleto said. His detectives had interviewed fifty of those before saying they found the killer, Robleto remembered. “I interviewed the rest and found he wasn’t the guy. That’s why you talk to everybody. That’s also why in this case I found myself asking, ‘How it is it possible that they didn’t even bother to call up witnesses who said they knew who committed the crime?’ That’s absolutely deficient. Reckless, almost.
“Leads that name a suspect we call ‘category one’ leads,” Robleto explained. “Seeing how many of those the LAPD investigation just let slide gave a lot of credence in my mind to what Russ was saying about not being allowed to go and follow leads, because of the politics.”
In his entire career, he had never seen a case where the LAPD had “chosen to obfuscate or block a murder investigation,” Robleto said. “To me, that was something to be proud of. But I couldn’t see any other reason why the department had walled off this investigation, telling a detective, basically, ‘Don’t go there.’ ”
What excited Frank was Robleto’s determination that the Notorious B.I.G. assassination was the furthest thing from a gangbanger murder; it had been too well planned and well executed to have been the work of anyone but professionals. “The level of foreknowledge and sophistication in the Christopher Wallace murder was the most significant thing to me,” Frank explained. “Sergio was able to show that whoever committed this murder knew things about Christopher Wallace’s security and whereabouts. That was just amazing. The precision of the killing and the escape afterward suggested this was a far, far cry from some thug murder. It also suggested access to communications equipment and police frequencies. In order to pull up alongside Christopher Wallace’s vehicle when he did, number one, the driver had to have known when the Wallace vehicle was leaving the Petersen Museum. And the spot where the shooting took place had to have been staged, with the communications and the escape route all laid out in advance. There were police everywhere, on the corners and in the parking lots, and more police coming in response to shots fired. And yet no police came across the killer’s car, even made eye contact with it. The killer or killers knew where the police were. That was significant for a lot of reasons, but especially the whole color of law claim we were making. Some aspects of this murder required someone to use authority or pretense of their authority, and it would also have required police communication equipment or its equivalent. There had to be somebody who was either a cop or was helped by cops. This was all part of what we were going to need Sergio to testify about.”
Said Robleto, “The description of the original response in the documents I’d seen was confusing. There were fifteen hundred people packed into a room and sixty police officers on the scene. With that many policemen, how the hell did somebody not notice something was coming down?”
A gunshot fired on Orange Grove Avenue just minutes before the murder was a partial explanation, Robleto said. Russell Poole apparently had been the only LAPD investigator who believed that the Orange Grove shot was not an unrelated event but rather a deliberately staged distraction. Robleto found himself agreeing with his former detective. Other investigators had accepted the explanation of the young man who claimed he had fired the shot after his gun had fallen out of his Ford Explorer’s map pocket to the pavement and he had discharged a round into the air to make sure his weapon was still working. To Robleto, though, this sounded like “a perfect way to stage such a distraction and get away with it.”
What Robleto found most difficult to fathom was that the Robbery-Homicide Division hadn’t taken the case right from the start. He’d learned from the LAPD reports he’d read in Colorado that the RHD captain and one of his lieutenants “were there that first night.” But, recalled Robleto, who had worked in Robbery-Homicide in 1983–84, “they were gone by the next morning and didn’t come back to the case until an entire month had passed. In thirty years I had never seen that: a murder case involving a major celebrity that wasn’t taken over by Robbery-Homicide right out of the gate.”
And in this case the major celebrity was the victim, which made it even harder to fathom. “There was no other possible explanation other than that this was a political decision,” Robleto said. “Clearly this case was beyond the resources of Wilshire Division.” He could see that plainly in the LAPD’s own documents, Robleto said. “You had people removing evidence and handing it over to the police later, which basically makes it useless. There were witnesses who had given a description of the shooter, but no one seemed to follow up on it. I mean, the killer had been identified as either belonging to or wanting to appear to belong to a certain group, the Nation of Islam, but no effort was made to follow up on that until Russ Poole came on the case a month later. They wasted time chasing a theory that the Crips had done it when everything pointed away from that. They had a helluva lot of good clues in Wilshire, but they weren’t able to do much with them, in part because they were overwhelmed. Then when Russ came in, he was being set up to fail almost right from the first.”