What had become clear to Sanders and Frank in the first round of discovery and witness depositions was that the Los Angeles Police Department had no real interest in solving the murder of Christopher Wallace. Nothing made this more evident to the attorneys than their questioning of the detective who had been in charge of the case since 1999, Steve Katz. Sanders and Frank were startled by Katz’s admission that he’d made three trips to Houston in connection with a pair of “primary suspects” named Richard Daniels and Tony Draper, who had been seen driving a Bentley Coupe near the Petersen Automotive Museum on the night of the shooting. What made this so astonishing was that neither Daniels nor Draper had been implicated in the crime by even the tiniest shred of evidence. In dozens of documents, including search warrants, the LAPD had identified the vehicle driven by the killer that night as a black Impala. Katz couldn’t offer an even remotely persuasive reason why the investigation should focus on Draper and Daniels. “All we could think of was that it made Katz look like he was keeping busy, and it gave him and his partner a series of paid vacations in Texas,” Frank said.
Phil Carson put it this way: “My interest had forced the LAPD to start pretending they were investigating the case. They had to do something, even if it was nothing.”
Robleto was even more perplexed than the attorneys by the LAPD’s focus on the two Houston men and their Bentley. “I really tried to understand and be open,” Robleto said. “I still wanted to believe in the police department I’d given most of my career to. But there was absolutely no evidence that pointed to the two Houston guys. And the difference between a Bentley and an Impala SS is huge. Nobody’s going to mistake one for the other.” He was disgusted, Robleto said, when he saw reports on how LAPD investigators had reconstructed the shooting scene in an alley to try to figure out whether the trajectory of the bullets that killed Biggie matched up with the window height of the Bentley better than the Impala’s. “If you look at the street where the murder occurred, you see that the pavement drops toward the curb, where it’s about a foot lower than in the center of the road,” Robleto said. “The vehicle Christopher Wallace was sitting in was on the high part of the road, and the shooter’s car was by the curb on the lower part of the pavement. Yet they did the reconstruction on perfectly level ground. Their approach was at best flawed and at worst stupid. It was a complete waste of time and money, but when you looked through the records of their so-called investigation, it looked like that was exactly what they wanted to do, waste time and money.”
Katz and the LAPD certainly weren’t investing any resources in the theory of the Biggie Smalls murder that Russell Poole had put forth in his original investigation of the crime. For nearly everyone who had followed the case, Eugene Deal’s identification of Amir Muhammad as the “Muslim-looking guy” whom the massive bodyguard had encountered outside the Petersen Museum just before the shooting had been a bombshell. But neither Katz nor anyone else from the LAPD had ever contacted Nick Broomfield, the documentary film director who had shown Deal the photo lineup from which he’d identified Muhammad. According to Katz, Deal “didn’t give a real hundred percent identification, but he said he felt that it was him.” In fact, Deal was definite: “That’s the guy,” he’d told Broomfield. “That’s the guy who came up to me.” When Broomfield asked if that was “definitely him,” Deal nodded vigorously. “Yep,” he said.
When Katz finally did interview Deal, he left the big man embittered and skittish. After they spoke, Deal said, Katz called Deal’s superiors at the New York State Parole Department to report him for working as a bodyguard to Notorious B.I.G. That wasn’t true, said Deal—he was Puffy Combs’s bodyguard on the night of the shooting—but Katz’s claim had been enough to embroil Deal in a protracted dispute with his employer, which accused him of working too many hours outside his regular job.
To Sanders, the strangest part of the Katz depositions had been his explanation for why he had never questioned Amir Muhammad. Katz explained that since the FBI was focused on the “Mack-Muhammad theory” of the case, the LAPD had made a decision to let it handle that part of the investigation.
“Oh, I see, they let us handle it,” Phil Carson would say when Sanders told him what Katz had said. “What about the two years Katz had the case before there even was an FBI investigation?” Wasn’t it true, Frank asked during one Katz deposition, that Phil Carson had sent him a note suggesting that Suge Knight’s attorney David Kenner may have made mortgage payments for David Mack or Amir Muhammad? It was, Katz acknowledged, but the LAPD never looked into that claim.
The LAPD was in possession of documents in which Amir Muhammad had identified his work address as 1297 Steiner Drive in Chula Vista, wasn’t that correct? Frank asked. Had the LAPD determined whether that was correct? No, it hadn’t, Katz answered, “because that is inclusive of some of the things that the FBI is doing.” Had the LAPD made any attempt at all to contact Amir Muhammad subsequent to August 15, 2003? Frank asked. It had not, Katz answered, because the FBI was “working that angle of the investigation.” And besides, the detective added, he didn’t consider Amir Muhammad to be the “primary suspect” in the murder of Christopher Wallace. But Richard Daniels and Tony Draper were primary suspects, Frank observed. Katz’s only reply was a slight smirk.
A moment later the detective said he had recently planned to interview Amir Muhammad, only to be asked by the new commander of the Robbery-Homicide Division, Captain Michelena, to “hold off” for sixty days to let the FBI complete its investigation. But he still planned to interview Muhammad at some point in the future, Katz said. “Does that mean a month, two months, six months?” Frank asked. “I couldn’t tell you,” answered Katz, who then mentioned that he had been considering placing a wiretap on Muhammad.
Why would you do that? Frank asked. Because Muhammad was still a suspect in the murder, answered Katz, contradicting what he had said just moments earlier.
Frank and Sanders would depose Katz at length three times prior to trial, and yet in all those hours there was only a single revelation that either attorney found remarkable. At one point, Katz for some reason mentioned that a hidden microphone had been placed in Suge Knight’s cell while he was being held in the L.A. County Jail. Why had that been done? Frank asked. It was because the LAPD had obtained “information that indicated that he may have been involved in the murder, but not enough to sufficiently arrest him,” Katz answered.
Suge Knight was far more isolated and vulnerable than he had been during the years Russell Poole was investigating him as the man behind the murder of Notorious B.I.G. A good deal of Suge’s new circumstances had to do with the attrition of his thugs. Aaron Palmer, better known as “Heron,” had been the first to fall, shot dead at the wheel of a Toyota 4Runner stopped for a red light at a Compton intersection at dusk on June 1, 1997, less than three months after the Notorious B.I.G. murder. Heron was heading home from a Death Row party when two men jumped out of a blue van and emptied their semiautomatic pistols into him. He was thirty years old.
The next to go down was William “Chin” Walker, who, just after midnight on April 4, 2000, was sitting next to fellow Blood Wardell “Poochie” Fouse in a white Chevrolet van parked on a dead-end street in Compton, when two men ran up on both sides of the vehicle and emptied their pistols though the windows. Walker, in the driver’s seat, had bled out by the time he made it to the hospital. He was thirty-seven. Though gravely wounded, Fouse survived. Three weeks later, Vence “V” Buchanan had been found facedown in a Compton graveyard. Word on the streets was that Buchanan, although a Blood himself, was allied with a renegade group of Death Row bodyguards and drug dealers from the Fruit Town Piru Bloods set that had turned against Suge and the Mob Pirus. V, it was said, had helped arrange the shooting that left Chin Walker dead and Poochie Fouse in a wheelchair for three months.
According to eyewitnesses, men wearing police uniforms had grabbed Buchanan off the street at the intersection of Central and 135th avenues, cuffed his hands behind his back, and forced him into the back of a dark-colored Cadillac. By the time his body was found in the cemetery, V had been tortured, mutilated, and finally executed with a bullet to the back of his head. Alton “Buntry” McDonald, Suge’s number one thug, and his partner David “Brim” Dudley reportedly had made a videotape of Buchanan’s torture and execution that they were playing for audiences of fellow Mob Pirus.
Brim escaped the vengeance of the Fruit Town Pirus for nearly another year before he was shot dead on March 25, 2001, outside Buntry’s house. Just over a year after that, on April 3, 2002, Buntry was filling the tank of his black GMC Denali at the big Shell station at the corner of Rosecrans and Atlantic avenues when two men walked up with pistols and shot him four times in the chest before fleeing in a pickup truck, leaving the hulking gangster dead at thirty-seven.
Henry “Hen Dog” Smith became Suge’s new top thug, but occupied that position for only six months. On the afternoon of October 16, 2002, Hen Dog was wearing a Death Row medallion around his neck and sitting at the wheel of a burgundy Jeep parked next to a fried-chicken stand in South-Central L.A. while his girlfriend used a nearby pay phone. The girlfriend’s infant son was lying on the backseat when a young man stepped up next to the Jeep, leaned in through an open window, fired six shots, then fled on a bicycle. Thirty-three-year-old Hen Dog was dead on the spot.
By the summer of 2003, Poochie Fouse had largely recovered from the wounds he’d suffered in the 2000 shooting that claimed Chin Walker’s life. Early on the evening of July 24, he was riding a motorcycle on Central Avenue when a car sped up from behind him and the young man in the passenger seat began firing. Poochie, now forty-three, was hit ten times in the back and died in a puddle of blood on the pavement.
Even those of Suge’s thugs who survived were unavailable to him because of their prison sentences. Travon “Tray” Lane and Roger “Neckbone” Williams, each of whom had participated in the stomping of Southside Crip Orlando Anderson* on the night of the Tupac Shakur murder, were behind bars after armed assault and weapons convictions.
Knight himself had spent nearly all of the past six years behind bars. He’d done five of those years as part of his sentence for assaulting producers George and Lynwood Stanley at Solar Records in Hollywood. During that period, Suge was held in jails and prisons all over the state. His longest residence was at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, a small town in central California that in earlier incarnations was known as Bed Bug, Freeze Out, and Hardscrabble. In May 2001 Knight landed at the federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon, to be processed back into society.
Upon his release in August of that year, Suge did his best to project an air of confidence about the revival of his renamed record company, Tha Row. “Welcome Home Suge,” read the billboard above Tha Row’s Wilshire Boulevard offices on the day of Knight’s return to Los Angeles. “Better days is coming,” Knight told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s like we’re getting ready for the Super Bowl. Preparing for the game. We’re going to win the big one. Going to sign some new young producers to come up with some tough new stuff.” The reality, though, was that with Tupac Shakur dead, and Snoop Dogg and Doctor Dre moved on to other companies, Tha Row had become a second-tier rap label where the nearest thing to a star was the modestly talented Kurupt.
Within fourteen months of Suge’s release from prison, Buntry and Hen Dog had been shot dead by the Fruit Town Pirus, and Knight himself was a hunted man. In November 2002, fifteen months after his release, Suge was caught up in the net cast by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in the Eric “Scar” Daniel murder case. Daniel, one of the Fruit Town Pirus believed to have pulled the trigger on Buntry, had been shot dead on June 7. The Sheriff’s Department issued arrest warrants in connection with the killing for eight men, all Mob Piru Bloods and Suge Knight associates. One of them was Knight’s bodyguard Kordell Depree Knox, who had been fired from his job as a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy only a couple of weeks earlier. In the course of searching Tha Row’s offices and the nine-thousand-square-foot home in Malibu where Knight was currently living, sheriff’s investigators put together a case that Suge had violated the terms of his parole by associating with convicted felons and known gang members. He was arrested on December 2, 2002, and locked up in Los Angeles County Jail, where he would be spending Christmas.
Suge had seemed to sense immediately that the Sheriff’s Department was overreaching. His arrest was a desperate effort to salvage the bungled investigation of the Scar Daniel murder, Suge told the Los Angeles Times in an interview the day after Christmas. When he last met with his parole officer, Suge said, a gang investigator had showed up to threaten him with a long jail sentence if he didn’t tell what he knew about the killings of Scar, Buntry, Hen Dog, and V Buchanan, among others: “I told him, ‘You better handcuff me right now. Because I don’t know a thing about it.’ ” The Sheriff’s Department admitted that Knight was not a suspect in any of the murders. The case it had made against Suge was based entirely on photographs seized from the Malibu house and Tha Row office that showed Knight posing with various Bloods, all of them making what were described as “gang signs.” The pictures were from a rehearsal for his rapper Crooked I, Suge said. The cops were so clueless that “they think anything with fingers in the air is a gang sign,” he explained. If “I have to stop dealing with people from the hood, I might as well shut down my business,” Knight added. “I can’t turn my back on the people I came up with. Rap comes from the same place that I did—the ghetto.”
Suge sounded more plaintive than defiant when he told the Los Angeles Times, “I ain’t no gangster. I’m too damn old. I’m a grown man trying to run a business.”
What Suge didn’t say was how immensely galling it had to have been that, while he was struggling to sustain a floundering rap label on the West Coast, his hated East Coast rival Puffy Combs was sitting on top of an ever-expanding entertainment empire. Bad Boy Records continued to put out one hit record after another, many of them featuring the owner himself, who these days was calling himself P. Diddy, soon to be simply Diddy. Combs’s Sean John clothing line was being distributed by high-end department stores, while he himself appeared in advertisements for the company in magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair. The Sean John line’s 2001 runway show was the first to be televised nationally, and in 2002 the New York Times had a front-page story on Combs and his company. For several years in succession, Sean John had received a Designer of the Year nomination from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. And now Puffy was talking about adding a line of fragrances. He was no longer dating Jennifer Lopez but was partying regularly in the Hamptons and on the Upper East Side. They were even putting the homely little motherfucker in movies, Suge marveled.
The worst thing, though, was that while Knight remained a favorite target of law enforcement in Los Angeles, Combs seemed to be getting a pass from the cops in New York. Puffy was dealing with at least one lingering headache, however, and that was his connection to the last remaining effort to bring the killers of Notorious B.I.G. to justice. Perry Sanders was determined to depose Combs in preparation for the civil trial in Los Angeles, and Combs seemed just as determined to avoid it. “What happened the night of the murder was the main thing,” Sanders said. “But I also wanted to talk to Puffy about him tellin’ other people who were there, ‘If you’re a witness, you’re fired.’ ” (When he was interviewed by the LAPD in New York, Gregory Young, who had been sitting right next to Biggie when he was shot, stated, “Puffy has told us that if our names even appear on a witness list, we’re out of a job.”)
Sanders tried at first to set up the deposition through Biggie’s former manager Wayne Barrow, who was also close to Combs, but Puffy continued to bob and weave behind his phalanx of lawyers. “So I sent him a letter sayin’, ‘You either voluntarily show up for the deposition or I’m gonna sue you,’ ” Sanders recalled. “Somebody who knew him called me after he got the letter and said you could hear him screamin’ all over New York. This person said, ‘He is so pissed off he doesn’t know what to do.’ ”
Combs would finally agree to sit down with Sanders on June 10, 2004, in his attorney’s offices at 99 Park Avenue in Manhattan. “With almost no advance notice, we had to fly straight out to New York,” Sanders said. Still, the deposition almost didn’t happen. “All these LAPD officers showed up,” Frank recalled, “and Puffy refused to do the depo with cops in the room.” Two of the LAPD officers were detectives assigned to the department’s Risk Management Section, which was coordinating with the city attorney’s office in opposition to the Estate of Christopher G. L. Wallace v. City of Los Angeles lawsuit. The third was Detective Steve Katz. Combs and his attorney were not happy about having Katz in the room. Only when the three detectives agreed to wait outside could the deposition proceed.
During the next couple of hours, Combs proved to be unfailingly polite and consistently unhelpful. He added “sir” each time he answered one of Sanders’s questions, until the attorney told him it was unnecessary. But it took seventy pages of transcript just to get Puffy to identify the people who were with him in L.A. at the time of Biggie’s murder and to acknowledge their relationships to him and to his company. Even then he was vague and uncertain, adding “to the best of my recollection” to nearly every answer he gave. When Sanders asked if he remembered Biggie being booed at the Soul Train Awards ceremony on the night of the murder, something that thousands had witnessed live and millions had seen on television, Combs answered, “No.” He also denied the confrontation with Nation of Islam members that had taken place as he and his entourage were leaving the Shrine Auditorium that night, an incident already testified to by other witnesses. He maybe had seen Mustapha Farrakhan sometime that weekend, Puffy said, but couldn’t remember exactly when. What Combs seemed to most want to make clear, though, was that he was in no way responsible for Biggie’s security: “I wasn’t involved in his whereabouts. He was on my label. I wasn’t his parent or anything like that.”
He had heard “rumors” about an East Coast–West Coast, Bad Boy–Death Row feud, Puffy allowed, but never experienced it personally. “Hype” was how he described the feud, adding, “I didn’t play any role in the hype.” He also had no knowledge of Biggie or Suge Knight or Tupac Shakur playing any role in the hype, Puffy managed to say with a straight face, the same one he wore when he told Sanders, “To be honest, I don’t really know who killed Biggie, to be perfectly honest.”
As Frank would observe, “Generally when a person says ‘to be honest’ twice in the same sentence, they’re lying. But it was obvious pretty quick that we weren’t going to get anything of value out of Sean Combs, so Perry just turned him over to [Los Angeles assistant city attorney] Paul Paquette.”
Paquette got even less cooperation than Sanders had from Combs, who said he couldn’t even remember how many vehicles had been in his entourage the night of Biggie’s murder or what kind they were. “All Puffy wanted was to make sure he didn’t get called as a witness at trial,” Sanders said. “And by the time we finished that deposition, everybody in the room knew he probably wouldn’t be.”
Combs seemed to warm up when the deposition was over. “I sat around with him after and we talked a little,” Sanders recalled. As it happened, Puffy was in the best shape of his life at that moment, training to run in the New York City Marathon five months later. “So he was eatin’ real healthy and whatnot,” Sanders remembered. “That day he was eatin’ some soup. And he had an extra container of tomato soup. So he looked at me, then passed the soup over to me, and said, ‘Here. Don’t say I never did anything for you.’ ”
Sanders’s biggest remaining concern about Sean Combs was that Puffy might have bullied Eugene Deal into silence. The big man suddenly seemed determined to disappear from public view. Efforts to arrange an interview and on-camera deposition had been fruitless. Deal was gruffly defiant on the phone and clearly felt that cooperating with the authorities had cost him far more than doing the right thing was worth. Combs, for whom Deal had worked on and off as a bodyguard nearly as long as he had been a parole officer, had fired him for talking to the cops and to Nick Broomfield. On top of this, the rumors that had been spread about him being some sort of police snitch made his life more difficult and more dangerous. “People that I meet on the street, who was fans of Biggie and Tupac, they look—they look at me in a derogatory manner,” Deal would explain. “I’ve come out and found my car, you know, on flats, windows busted.”
It was only through the intervention of Voletta Wallace that Rob Frank had been able to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Deal in a suite at the New York Hilton. Things began to move in a potentially disastrous direction, though, the moment Sanders showed up to join them. Stepping through the hotel room’s door, Sanders took a look at the size 16 EEE basketball shoes Deal was wearing and immediately informed the big man, “I can whup your ass in one-on-one.”
“What the fuck did that cracker just say to me?” Deal asked Frank. Deal, who stood six feet seven inches tall and weighed over three hundred pounds, had attended the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on a basketball scholarship. Even in his forties, he continued to be one of the most feared playground players in New York City.
“I said I can whup your ass in one-on-one,” Sanders told him.
“You crazy motherfucker,” Deal replied, but now he was smiling.
The contest between Sanders and Deal would take place at Basketball City at the Chelsea Piers in New York. Deal won six out of eight games and broke Sanders’s nose, but loved the way the smaller man battled him. “You showed me somethin’,” Deal conceded.
Deal’s deposition took place on Valentine’s Day 2005. To the immense relief of Sanders and Frank, Deal not only repeated his story about encountering Amir Muhammad outside the Petersen Museum on the night of Biggie’s murder, but also gave the most detailed sworn account yet of what had taken place. Right at the start, Deal debunked the recurring claim that Puffy and Bad Boy had hired Crips to provide security in Los Angeles. Never happened, Deal said. Puffy used only off-duty or retired law enforcement officers.
Deal said he had first come out to Cali in February 1997 to provide security during the shooting of Biggie’s “Hypnotize” video. There’d been some gang members hanging around, some Crips, some Bloods, but no problems. He returned to New York after the video wrapped, but then got a call from Bad Boy’s head of security, Paul Offord, asking him to come back to L.A. and stay until Puffy and Big were ready to leave. So Deal took some vacation time and flew west again.
He still recalled the night of the Soul Train Awards after-party at the Petersen Museum vividly, Deal said. He’d been concerned from the moment Puffy said they’d be attending the party. Part of that was the size of their entourage. With the addition of “some guys from Philly” who’d worked their way into the group, “it was like twenty-three of us that went to that party,” Deal said, which made it difficult to keep track of everybody. Rob Frank steered Deal to the events that took place after the Bad Boy group quit the party and stepped outside the museum. He had made sure the drivers parked right in front of the doors, Deal said. Why? Frank asked. “Because I had a bad feeling about that night,” Deal answered. “I had a feeling that somebody from Bad Boy or one of us had to die because that was our last night in the city. I had got a couple of phone calls from friends and other people that somebody was sending somebody out there to get us.” It made him “extra cautious,” Deal said. “I was on point the whole time.”
His concerns only increased when he saw the “Nation of Islam–looking guy” who was trying to check them out, Deal said. “While the cars was loaded up and Big and them was waiting to get in the cars … I took a walk out the parking garage,” Deal recalled. “I made a right, looked up and down the street. And this guy in blue and white was walking by hisself … and he came into the garage. And then Paul said, ‘Yo, did you see the guy in blue and white?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I got my eye on him.’ ” He recalled a light-skinned black man “dressed like he was from the Nation of Islam” who had strong cheekbones and a square face, and was “serious-looking,” Deal said.
He stayed outside on the sidewalk until all the others were loaded into the cars, Deal said, and that was when he saw the Muslim-looking guy coming “close to Mr. Combs’s vehicle … And he looked me in my eye,” Deal remembered. “I looked him in his eye. He didn’t say anything to me. And I showed him my weapon. He looked at me again and turned around and walked down the street the other way where he came from,” in the direction of Fairfax Boulevard.
When Deal got in the lead SUV, sitting directly behind Puffy, he told Kenny Story, who was driving, “Yo, Kenny, don’t stop at this light. Keep going. Run the next three lights.” Story was running the first of those lights, at the intersection of Fairfax and Wilshire, when he and the others in the vehicle noticed that Biggie’s car wasn’t following, Deal remembered. He looked back and saw that Biggie’s SUV was stopped along the curb on Fairfax, where three young women stood. “Next thing I know I hear Tone [Anthony Jacobs] say, ‘Yo, somebody pulling a gun on Big and them. Yo, he pointing a gun at Big and them.’ ” Story braked to a stop, Deal recalled, and then “next thing you know, I heard something go bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap. Then I’m trying to open the door, and Kenny just stepped on the gas. Me and Tone were screaming at him. Puff ducked down. Me and Tone were screaming, ‘Yo, what you doing, man? They shooting at Big and them. And he said, ‘We don’t know who they’re shooting at.’ We said, ‘Man, they’re shooting at Big. Turn this car around.’ ”
Story did as told, Deal said. “And as he’s turning around, we see the [shooter’s] car going around the corner.” Tone said it was an Impala, Deal remembered. “We stop right in front of Big and them’s car, right. Big’s car look like an airplane now: everybody doors is open except Big’s … We get to the car, see Big right there. Big’s in the car laid back.”
He and Jacobs jumped back into their vehicle with Tone driving now and chased the Impala, Deal recalled: “Tone seen where the car went, turned, you know. So we followed him. We see the car just flyin’ and we goin’ after the car.” But their rented SUV had a governor that prevented the vehicle from accelerating to a speed above ninety miles per hour, Deal explained, “and it’s like every time the truck would get up to a hundred, it would go back down to ninety. So now I say, ‘You know, Tone, we ain’t going to catch him, man.’ You know, the guy was out of there. So we went back.”
When they returned to the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, they saw Puffy and all the others still standing outside the SUV where Biggie lay, eyes wide open, in the passenger seat. “Everybody was askin’, ‘Big, you all right? You all right, Big? You all right?’ I don’t see no blood, I don’t see nothin’.” (An autopsy report stated that Biggie had so much body fat the blood couldn’t seep through to the surface of his skin.) An ambulance had been called, but Story jumped into the driver’s seat of the SUV and told his wounded friend, “Big, I’m going to get you to the hospital,” Deal said. Then Biggie spoke his last words, “Just do it.” Puff sat next to Biggie all the way to the hospital, Deal remembered, telling him, “Big, keep your eyes open. Keep your eyes open.” But by the time they made it to the hospital’s emergency entrance, Biggie’s eyes were closed. They never opened again.
He knew the man he’d encountered outside the museum as they were preparing to leave had been the killer, Deal said, as soon as he and Lil’ Cease had a chance to speak. “Lil’ Cease had said a guy from the Nation of Islam shot Big. And I said, ‘The guy with the blue suit, blue bow tie, and the white shirt with the white handkerchief? With the peanut head?’ ” Lil’ Cease asked how he knew that, Deal recalled, “and I said, ‘He’s the one walked up to Puff’s car.’ ” After he showed the Muslim his gun, Deal told the others, the guy had walked away toward “exactly where the shooting was, that same direction.”
Deal told Sanders and Frank that he had given the LAPD statements on three separate occasions and was convinced the L.A. cops were more interested in discrediting him than in listening to what he said. The first time the LAPD officers showed him the composite drawing they’d made of the suspect, Deal said that he “told them that [it] was not a clear identity of the guy, that they had his bone structure in his face wrong, that he was a lot slimmer and stronger in the face, not fat in the face.”
He’d never seen a photograph of Amir Muhammad, Deal said, until Nick Broomfield showed one to him as part of a six-pack photo-lineup card. Broomfield had waited until the cameras were rolling to let him see the lineup card, said Deal, who immediately recognized Amir Muhammad as the “Nation of Islam–looking guy” he had seen the night of the murder. The LAPD came to New York to interview him shortly after Broomfield’s film was released, recalled Deal, who demanded to know why the police had never showed him a photograph of Amir Muhammad. The last time Steve Katz interviewed him, the detective had told Deal that “they might need [him] to come out to do a lineup or just to come out to L.A. and do a lineup on this individual.” Deal said, “But I’ve never heard from the police after that day.”
* Anderson, shot to death himself in 1998, has been and continues to be the primary suspect as triggerman in the Shakur murder.