The ways in which Gene Deal had been punished for standing up and speaking out infuriated them, Sanders and Frank would say. Nothing the forces of the other side did, though, would enrage the two lawyers like the coordinated effort to discredit and discourage another of their key witnesses, Mike Robinson.
It would not have been inaccurate to say that the Wallace family’s case against the City of Los Angeles had begun with Robinson. In spring 1997, the man known to many as “Psycho Mike” was working as one of the most successful police informants in Southern California. Certainly no other informant was more beloved by his handlers. There were two of these: a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy named Richard Valdemar and a special agent from the FBI’s L.A. office named Tim Flaherty.
Valdemar was Mike’s main point of contact with law enforcement. They had met in the early 1990s. Robinson had been brought to Los Angeles from a state prison up north because it was believed he could help solve one of the most vexing murder cases in the city’s history. This was the 1985 slaying of Sheriff’s Sergeant George Arthur, who had been assigned to the Men’s Central Jail at the time. At just around 10 p.m. on the night of June 1, Arthur was killed during the drive home after finishing his shift at the jail. An assailant hidden in the back of Arthur’s van had attacked him while he was negotiating an on-ramp to the 10 freeway. Witnesses said the van began to careen wildly before colliding at full speed with a center divider. They had seen a second man, bleeding from a head wound, climb out of the wreckage of Arthur’s vehicle and escape. But the witnesses were unable to offer any better description, because it was dark and they were driving past at high speed. Medical examiners first believed Arthur had died from injuries suffered in the crash, until an autopsy revealed that a gunshot had killed him. Evidence of a violent struggle was recovered from the van, along with blood and other “biological evidence” that did not match Sergeant Arthur’s. Still, somehow, the murder would go unsolved for almost fifteen years.
It was a case that Valdemar took personally, because Arthur was his former partner and a close friend. Arthur had gotten involved in a shootout with members of the Black Guerrilla Family gang and survived, but two of the men shooting at him hadn’t. “George was convinced that the gang had put out a contract on him,” Valdemar recalled. “He told me, ‘If anything happens to me, you know who to look at. It’ll be them.’ ”
Mike Robinson, Valdemar had been told, was a former BGF member who had undergone some sort of religious transformation in prison and started warning law enforcement when he believed police officers were being targeted by the gang. Psycho Mike’s story was considerably more complicated than that, as Valdemar would learn. Mike had grown up in Compton as one of eight children, all of them criminals. He started stealing bicycles at “five or six,” Mike said, and at age eight went into the first of several California Youth Authority (CYA) institutions where he would do time. He became a professional auto thief by the time he was twelve and joined the Compton Crips in his teens. Not long after his twentieth birthday, he was convicted of murder. That crime, like everything else about Mike Robinson, contained elements that created a measure of sympathy for the perpetrator. He had been driving a stolen van on a street parallel to Artesia Boulevard when he was flagged down by two of his “aunties,” Mike would explain. They were the ones who told him his twin brother had just been shot to death on the next block by a gang member named Lorenzo. Less than a minute later, Mike had killed Lorenzo with a hail of bullets that left the woman he was with paralyzed. Robinson would spend seventeen and a half years in state prison for that crime.
Mike had endured an upbringing that included horrific abuse by his father. Unable to obtain the slightest traction in school, he was still totally illiterate, in part because of his dyslexia. Yet there was a certain savant quality to him that had been evident even when he was a young boy. While in CYA, he had been featured on the 1980s television show That’s Incredible because of his uncanny ability to completely disassemble a Porsche in less than five minutes. “Mike knew every tool and every part,” Valdemar said. “He was far from stupid.”
He was definitely dangerous, however. While in prison, Mike had satisfied the “blood in” requirement for admission into the BGF by stabbing another inmate fourteen times, then stoically accepting the twenty-eight-month stretch in solitary confinement that was added to his sentence. After he got out of solitary, though, Robinson was a changed man, according to prison authorities. Valdemar attributed this to a prison doctor who had come up with a cocktail of drugs that cured Mike’s chemical imbalance. Mike himself said it was divine intervention. When an interrogator suggested that he had made “a decision to leave [his] life of crime behind,” Mike quickly corrected him: “I didn’t make a decision. God made the decision for me.”
However Mike had become who he was, Valdemar was impressed from the first by the man’s encyclopedic knowledge of the California prison system’s gangs. It turned out that in the George Arthur murder, though, no gang members had been involved. Fourteen years after the crime, DNA evidence would reveal that Arthur had been killed by a fellow deputy, Ted Kirby, in what was apparently a dispute over a woman. Kirby shot himself in the head before he could be arrested. Valdemar’s relationship with Mike Robinson, though, was already so strong that the deputy made a pledge to be at the prison gates when Psycho Mike completed his sentence, and to give him a ride home. Valdemar not only kept that promise, but also became Robinson’s personal advocate after the former inmate was settled in Long Beach. Because Mike could not read or write, he needed help filling out the forms to qualify for disability insurance and Section 8 housing. More importantly, he needed someone who would make sure he got the medications that kept him sane. Valdemar and FBI agent Flaherty assisted with that and also helped Mike obtain the truck that was the foundation of his business, Half Head Towing. In addition, the sheriff’s deputy and the FBI agent put Mike to work as a paid informant, initially for the federal task force that was trying to penetrate the Mexican Mafia. “Mike was just one of many informants we had,” Valdemar said, “but he was one of the most reliable, right from the first, even though people often didn’t believe he could get what he got.”
Mike discovered that his reputation as a violent crazy man was the best protection he could have on the street. He had been diagnosed in prison as a paranoid schizophrenic and encouraged people to call him Psycho. Mike also made sure everyone knew he’d done prison time on a murder conviction. Yet a large part of what made him such a good snitch was that, for Mike, it had become a religious mission; getting as many bad guys off the streets as he possibly could was his way of trying to get right with the Lord, he explained. One way Mike proved his dedication, Valdemar said, was by refusing to touch alcohol or drugs, for fear that they would upset the chemical balance he had achieved through medication.
By his own count, Mike would help put “dozens upon dozens” of criminals behind bars. That number included two federal agents and a sheriff’s deputy who had been criminally charged and convicted in corruption cases where Robinson was the main prosecution witness. “He was that good,” said Valdemar, who would observe that Mike seemed to possess a sixth sense about people with bad intentions. A case that stuck in his mind, Mike’s handler said, was one involving a “white motorcycle gang guy who was building bombs to target a rival gang.” When Valdemar’s colleagues questioned Mike’s claims, he took them to the room he had just rented, from which he was able to look directly into the lab where the motorcycle gang member was assembling the explosive devices. “Nobody believed Mike could testify in court, with all his problems,” Valdemar remembered. “Well, he went and testified in that case and he was better than most policemen. He was exceptional.” Mike had proved this to a wide swath of Southern California law enforcement by the time of his enlistment in the task force that was attempting to put together a racketeering case against the murderous Bloods set who called themselves the Bounty Hunters. Most of the forty-seven arrests in that case had been made on the basis of evidence produced by Mike Robinson. His four days on the witness stand would result in twelve convictions; all of the others he was prepared to testify against had pleaded guilty. By the late nineties, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, the LAPD, the FBI, and the DEA, along with assorted task forces and anti-terrorist groups, had all used him as what they called “a reliable informant.”
Mike had first become involved in the Biggie Smalls murder investigation within days of the killing, when he told Valdemar he knew who had committed the crime: a professional hit man from the Nation of Islam named Amir. “I typed up a report and sent it to Robbery-Homicide Division at LAPD,” Valdemar recalled. By July 10, 1998, when the LAPD sent a detective to interview Robinson, Mike was locked up at the Wayside Honor Ranch, serving time for a parole violation. (The one crime Mike hadn’t sworn off was trafficking in stolen automobiles.)
Valdemar rode out to Wayside with Ted Ball, the RHD detective who was to interview Robinson, but Ball asked him to leave the room after being introduced to Mike, the sheriff’s investigator recalled. Because of that, Valdemar couldn’t be absolutely certain that Mike had not, as Ball wrote in his report, said the Biggie Smalls killer was someone named “Amir or Ashmir” whose real name might be Abraham. Mike would later state under oath that the only name he had given Ball was Amir.
Valdemar believed his informant. “For two reasons,” he explained. “One, the only name he had given me was Amir, and Amir was the only name in the report I sent to LAPD. Also, the report [Ball] wrote blatantly misrepresented what I had told him. When I read the report, I was stunned. I thought he had deliberately changed what I said, but I had no idea why. So I was pretty well inclined to believe it when Mike told me that what he had said was not accurately reported, either.”
It would be almost a year after he got out of Wayside before Mike Robinson encountered Amir Muhammad face-to-face. The “confrontation,” as Mike called it, had taken place during a party at the home of a Death Row Records employee named Rick James. This James was an individual he knew better as “a crook” who sold PCP on the side, Mike said, out of a place on Peck Street in Compton that he’d turned into a sort of party house. He had heard that Amir Muhammad would be at the party that night, Mike recalled. Even though they’d never met, he and Muhammad had heard of each other, Mike said. One of his younger brothers had been a contract killer before being slain himself, Mike explained; prior to his death, this brother told Mike that Amir Muhammad was an assassin for hire also. Muhammad may have been a stranger to him, but “he wasn’t a stranger to my brother,” Mike said. “Two killers was in the same group. He knew who I was.”
It was “a big stripper party” at Rick James’s house that night, Mike recalled, noisy and crowded. He spotted Amir Muhammad standing near the pool table, approached him, and asked him straight out if he’d been the one who killed Biggie Smalls. According to Mike, the first thing Muhammad said was, “Yes, I did it.” Then he smiled and said, “No, I didn’t.” Muhammad was speaking in “a killer’s whisper,” Mike would remember, that dropped even lower when he leaned in and spoke directly into Robinson’s ear: “He said if my brother was alive, I’d be dead. I would not be talking about it.”
Another three years passed before the FBI approached Mike Robinson to ask him what he knew about the Biggie murder. By then, he was certain that Amir Muhammad had been the shooter, Mike recalled, and told that to Tim Flaherty. Soon afterward, his FBI handler brought another agent to his house at the corner of Rosecrans and Madris, Mike said, right across from the Norwalk Auto Auction complex. This new agent was Phil Carson.
“Tim Flannery was a friend of mine,” Carson recalled, “and he told me Psycho Mike was money, the best informant he or anyone else in the L.A. office had ever worked with. Tim and Richard Valdemar gave me a list of all the cases this guy had done, and it was amazing. They one hundred percent believed him when Mike said the killer was Amir Muhammad, and after I talked to Mike so did I.” After Flaherty told Carson that “Mike had taken a liking to me,” the agent remembered, he and Valdemar persuaded the informant to join the Biggie murder investigation.
In March 2004, Carson acquired an address in the San Diego County city of Chula Vista, where Amir Muhammad was currently living. Still being encouraged by his FBI bosses to work with the LAPD, Carson placed a phone call to Steve Katz and told him, “I’ve found Amir Muhammad, and I have a source that’s willing to wear a wire and go talk to him.” Katz scoffed. “He tells me, ‘You didn’t find Amir Muhammad,’ ” Carson recalled, “and I said, ‘Yes, I did.’ Katz goes off to consult with Michelena and Berkow, then they all three come back and tell me, ‘We don’t think Amir Muhammad was involved in this murder and we want nothing to do with this.’ ”
He was perfectly happy with that answer, Carson said: “I’m fine with this being an FBI operation. The LAPD wants to leave it to us, good.” The day before he and Flaherty were to drive down to Chula Vista with Mike, however, “the LAPD calls and says, ‘We want to be part of your source going down there,’ Carson remembered. “And I say, ‘The problem is the source won’t do it if LAPD is part of it. So I can’t include you guys.’ They get all pissed off and I say, ‘Talk to my bosses.’ And the bosses tell them, ‘Look, Phil offered you guys to be part of it, and you said no. So you’re not going to be part of it.’ ”
To appease the LAPD, Carson agreed to provide the department with a transmitter that would permit its officers to listen in on any conversations Psycho Mike was able to have with Amir Muhammad. “Only the transmitters we had back then didn’t work so well,” Carson recalled, “so when I told the LAPD where to be, I knew it was too far away for them to pick up what was being said. But now they did know that Amir Muhammad was in Chula Vista, just not the exact address.”
That first visit was fruitless, though. Muhammad was not at home when Mike knocked at his front door, and a woman answered. After a cordial exchange, Mike left a note with his name and phone number.
Carson, Flaherty, and Psycho Mike made a second trip to Chula Vista a couple of days later. “And this time Amir Muhammad does answer the door,” Carson recalled. “He and Mike had a conversation that never got near the subject of Biggie. Mike keeps it friendly, but Tim and I, listening in, are now certain that these two guys really do know each other, that there’s a relationship between them. They talked about meeting at Rick James’s house, and some of the other people who were there, about women they both knew, stuff like that. Everything Muhammad said coincided exactly with what Mike had told us. Then after a few minutes Muhammad cuts the conversation short. It’s obvious that by then he’s wondering what’s going on, why Psycho Mike is in Chula Vista.”
When Carson returned to Los Angeles, his FBI bosses told him he would have to brief LAPD deputy chief Berkow. “This turns into a big meeting at the FBI, in the office of our ASAC [assistant special agent in charge) Lou Caprino,” Carson said. “Berkow came with Roger Mora and Steve Sambar, and some female lieutenant. I had our FBI legal team, our press information team, my bosses, and my bosses’ bosses with me. We started out talking about the case in general and how I had kept trying to reach out to LAPD to be part of this operation. Berkow snapped. He said, ‘That’s a lie, Carson. I’m tired of this shit. You’ve never reached out to us. You wouldn’t let us be part of this operation. We wanted to be part of it, and you wouldn’t let us.”
To Carson’s immense relief, Roger Mora spoke up: “Phil’s right, chief. He did reach out to LAPD and we told him we didn’t want to be part of it.” Sambar nodded in agreement. “I was so grateful to those two guys,” Carson said. “It took balls to speak out like that to a deputy chief.”
Berkow, though, responded by storming out of Caprino’s office. Carson turned to his supervisor, Mary Jo Marino, and said, “I gotta go out there and talk to this guy.” When Marino nodded, Carson followed Berkow out into hallway. “I said, ‘Chief, I’ve been one hundred percent transparent and always up front with you.’ Berkow won’t even answer. He just looks at me like I’m shit he scraped off his shoe. Then one of my bosses came out after us to say the meeting was over.”
The meeting may have ended, but Berkow’s fury was far from exhausted, and that fury extended through most of the Los Angeles Police Department.
“What people have to keep in mind,” Carson said, “is this: If LAPD is involved in the Biggie murder, and the Biggie murder is solved, LAPD is done. They’re over with. Financially, they cannot survive. They’ll be taken over by the Sheriff’s Department or the federal government, and there will be no more LAPD. For them, this was a battle to survive, not a murder investigation. They don’t want to make the case, because they can’t make the case. That’s what happened with Russ Poole. They saw that ‘This guy is going down the right track and he’s not gonna stop.’ So, they had to stop him. And now they had to stop me.”
A few days later, Carson and Flaherty sent Mike Robinson south again at the wheel of a rented Mercedes sedan, wearing a wire. They had tried to arrange some sort of “chance meeting,” Carson recalled, where Mike might run into Muhammad at a mall or gym or movie theater. Muhammad, though, didn’t keep a regular schedule, and the cost of maintaining surveillance on him was already way over what the FBI had budgeted for the operation. “So we made sure Muhammad was home and sent Mike to his front door a third time,” Carson recalled. On this occasion, Muhammad refused to respond. “Mike calls us and says, ‘He ain’t answerin’ the door.’ And I say, ‘We know he’s there. You keep pounding on that door.’ Because I know we won’t get a fourth shot at him.”
Finally, the same woman who had answered the door the first time opened it again. Mike saw Muhammad inside, his back reflected in a mirror behind the wall he was using to conceal himself. When Mike shouted at him to come to the door and talk, though, Muhammad replied by calling the Chula Vista Police Department.
“Mike did great when the cops showed up,” Carson recalled. “He told him he was with the FBI, that there were agents down the street, and that they have to play along. He really did an excellent job of communicating all this to the cops without alerting Muhammad, and got them to act like it was a normal call. When they came back out to the street I met them, told them what was going on, and told them to just go about business as usual.”
After taking an incident report from Muhammad, the Chula Vista police left. Mike went back to the front door and began knocking again. The door remained shut.
“So finally we give up and start driving back to L.A.,” Carson recalled. “We haven’t gone far when Mike gets a call from the Chula Vista Police Department. The guy on the other end says, ‘Hey, this is Amir. Don’t do anything crazy. I’ll call you back in a couple of hours.’ ” The caller didn’t sound like Amir, though, Mike told Carson. “And it wasn’t,” the agent said. “Somebody else had made that call, somebody I’m pretty sure was working for the LAPD.”
Muhammad was at the Chula Vista Police Department by then, though. Carson learned this just a few minutes later, when he took a call from a detective who said, “Something fishy’s going on here. This guy Amir Muhammad came down here and filed a report claiming Mike Robinson was harassing or threatening him, and gave us Robinson’s name and number, plus the license plate on the Mercedes he said Robinson was driving.”
Carson explained what was going on, “and the detective agreed to cover for us. He got off the phone with me and told Muhammad that the title on the Mercedes Mike was driving had been transferred and belonged to somebody else. And Muhammad tells the detective, ‘You’re fucking lying. Because I called LAPD and gave them the plate and they gave me the name.’
“I hear this, and I think, ‘Muhammad just fucked himself.’ And he fucked the LAPD, too.”
The detective who related all this to Carson finished by saying that he had done as the agent requested and said, “Your name’s Amir Muhammad. Did you used to go by Harry Billups?” According to the detective, the reaction this produced was astonishing. “He tells me that Muhammad’s demeanor changed one hundred percent in an instant,” Carson recalled. “That it was like he became a different person. That he went stone cold and said he didn’t want to talk anymore and he wanted out of there. I could hear in the detective’s voice how amazed he was by it.”
During the rest of the drive back to Los Angeles, Carson became certain he knew what had happened. “I was convinced that Berkow had put surveillance on us the second time we went down to Chula Vista, and that was how the LAPD found Muhammad. I was also sure that after that second trip, somebody from LAPD, at Berkow’s instruction, had alerted Muhammad to what we were up to with Psycho Mike and had told him not to answer the door if Mike knocked again. I’m no conspiracy theorist. It was just that I had been briefing Berkow on our every move, because my bosses had instructed me to. He was the only one besides me and Tim Flaherty who knew what we were doing. Our own bosses didn’t know.”
Any doubts that remained in Carson’s mind when it came to Berkow vanished several days later, on March 20, 2004, when the Los Angeles Times published an article under the headline “FBI Probes Rap Star’s ’97 Killing.” The thrust of the story was that the feds were “pursuing a six-year-old theory” that former LAPD officer David Mack and his friend Amir Muhammad had killed Notorious B.I.G. at the bidding of Suge Knight. None of the facts that implicated Mack and Muhammad in the assassination were mentioned in the article. Muhammad and Knight, though, were given ample space to deny their involvement in the slaying. The section of the article that created consternation, however, was the part that described how the FBI had “wired an informant in an attempt to elicit incriminating statements from” Muhammad at his home near San Diego.
“Even if Mike’s name was never mentioned, Muhammad knew he was the informant,” Valdemar said. “And as soon as Muhammad knew, so did a whole bunch of other very dangerous people.” Mike never really worked as an informant after that day, Valdemar recalled. “You have to understand, Mike never truly trusted cops. His experience in Compton was with people like Reggie Wright, dirty cops who will do anything for money. After that article, he decided all cops were pretty much the same.”
He would remember that Saturday morning “until the day I die,” Carson said. “I’m getting ready to go to the gym and I get a call from Perry Sanders and he’s livid with me. I think Perry’s a great guy and we had gotten along fine up to that point, but he’s furious at me now. He tells me about the article and I have him read it to me.”
The section of the article that most astonished and enraged him, Carson recalled, was a quote from Deputy Chief Berkow, who had told the Times that the informant sent to Amir Muhammad’s home had been part of “a joint FBI-LAPD investigation” and that the LAPD was “cooperating with the feds 100%.”
“That was just a damn lie,” Carson said. “I told Perry, ‘There is no way in hell the LAPD was involved. The only person who would know what we were doing, and who must have been the Times’ source, is the same person directly quoted in the article, Berkow, because I briefed him on it.”
Mike Robinson was even more furious at Carson than Sanders was. He first heard about the Times article, Mike said, when a deputy from the Sheriff’s Special Intelligence Task Force “came and got me early in the morning and told me that I had a contract out for my life.” Since then, “I don’t know where to go,” Mike said. “I’m running from my life. I feel like I have to carry a gun. I don’t trust LAPD. I don’t trust the newspaper.”
He had immediately blamed the FBI agent who had sent him to Amir Muhammad’s home in Chula Vista, Mike said: “I confronted Phil Carson, and I wanted to jump on him.”
When Mike accused him of having “penned me out,” Carson swore it wasn’t him. “I told him, ‘Mike, why would I ever give up an FBI informant?’ Tim and I got him calmed down, but he was worried about his life. And rightfully so.”
Carson was so indignant that he did something extraordinary by FBI standards: he provided Sanders and Frank with a declaration in which he publicly accused the LAPD of having outed Mike Robinson as an informant in order to damage the Mack-Muhammad theory of the Biggie murder. “The declaration was actually written by the FBI, which provided it first to the city attorney’s office, which then passed it on to Perry Sanders,” Carson recalled.
The Times article had contained “information and procedures” that were “singular in nature,” Carson’s declaration read, “known only to me and one person I informed at the Los Angeles Police Department. To the best of my knowledge, no other person, including my peers and supervisors at the FBI, possessed this information.”
Much as Sanders and Frank appreciated what Carson had done, the attorneys were frustrated by the FBI’s refusal to name Berkow as the “one person” at the LAPD to whom Carson had described the San Diego operation. Still, “Phil Carson’s declaration was great to have,” Sanders said. “It would show the jury how far the LAPD was willing to go and how complicit the L.A. Times was in what had happened to Mike Robinson.”
For Sanders, his adversarial relationship with the largest newspaper in California had become the defining struggle of the entire lawsuit. “It’s been so far beyond anything I’ve ever seen or imagined,”he said. “We knew this was going to be difficult. We knew going up against the second-biggest city in the country in court was going to be an uphill struggle. But it’s been made ten times harder by the L.A. Times doing everything it possibly could to undermine our case. And that includes giving free rein to the most corrupt journalist I’ve ever met to work hand in glove with the LAPD to accomplish that.”