Chuck Philips had entered the Notorious B.I.G. story on May 3, 2000, when an article with his byline was printed on an inside page of the Los Angeles Times under the headline “Man No Longer Under Scrutiny in Rapper’s Death.” The story appeared almost five months after the Times had run its one and only story on Russell Poole’s working theory of the Biggie case. Though Poole was “in shock” at how that earlier article had distorted what he’d told the Times reporters—“They made it sound like the case was about to break wide open, instead of describing how the investigation had been thwarted”—the appearance of the story at least made public the idea that police officers working for Death Row Records might have been involved in the murder of Notorious B.I.G. Philips’s article, though, appeared to at once discredit Poole’s theory and depict Muhammad as the innocent victim of an overzealous police investigation. This was not entirely welcome among the newspaper’s staff: Chuck Philips’s editor from the Times Business section and editors from the Metro section had contested the content of Philips’s article to the point of a screaming match in the middle of the newsroom.
The article quoted the current lead investigator on the case, Detective Dave Martin, as saying, “We are not pursuing [the Mack-Muhammad theory] and have not been for more than a year.” Muhammad was quoted as saying, “I’m not a murderer, I’m a mortgage broker,” and described his visit to Mack at the Montebello City Jail as nothing more than an expression of concern after his former college roommate was arrested on bank robbery charges. Philips either hadn’t asked or wasn’t interested in printing the answers to the two most pertinent questions his article raised. The first was why the LAPD wasn’t “pursuing” Poole’s theory. No explanation whatsoever had been offered by Martin. The second, and equally obvious, question was why, if Muhammad’s visit to Mack in jail was an innocent contact between two old friends, the man had used a false address, a false Social Security number, and an out-of-service phone number to arrange it.
In 2005, while researching what became the Rolling Stone article “The Unsolved Murder of Notorious B.I.G.,” I asked Philips why he hadn’t reported this information. The Times reporter at first said he hadn’t been aware of it. When I pointed out that it had been included in the newspaper’s earlier article on the Poole theory, Philips said he was concerned that Muhammad might have ended the interview if he was asked questions that challenged him on those points. What most baffled me—and Russell Poole as well—was that Philips’s article had led the rest of the Los Angeles media to publicly dismiss the Mack-Muhammad theory of the Biggie murder. “It was like the cover-up had been covered up, this time by the media,” Poole said.
Philips’s next article on the Notorious B.I.G. murder was a two-part series appearing in September 2002 on the Times’ front page under the headline “Who Killed Tupac Shakur?” The gist was that the rapper had been murdered by Crips, who had been offered $1 million to do it—by Biggie. On the night of Tupac’s slaying, Philips reported, a Crips “emissary” had visited B.I.G. in the penthouse suite at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, where the rapper promised the money on the condition that Tupac was killed with Biggie’s gun—then placed a loaded .40-caliber Glock on the table.
No one was identified in the article as the source of the claim about the alleged meeting at the MGM Grand. Nearly three years later, when I interviewed them for Rolling Stone, Philips and his editor Marc Duvoisin would say that their sources were two Crips whom Philips had met at a park in Compton; neither journalist would reveal the gang members’ names. I asked if Philips or anyone else at the Times had attempted to obtain some independent verification of Biggie’s presence in Las Vegas on the date of the alleged penthouse meeting and was stunned when Duvoisin said no, no one had.
“You don’t think that if a flamboyant rapper who weighed almost four hundred pounds and traveled with an entourage had been staying at the MGM Grand that weekend, people would have noticed and remembered?” I asked. Duvoisin’s reply left me flabbergasted: the question of whether Biggie was in Las Vegas that night “wasn’t an issue until our article was published,” he said. It took me a moment to gather myself before I said, “That’s right, Marc. Your article made it an issue. And before you made it an issue, by reporting that on a certain date Biggie met with the Crips in Las Vegas and offered them a million dollars to kill Tupac, don’t you think you should have made some effort to establish that Biggie was actually in Las Vegas at that time?”
Within a few days of the publication of the Biggie-killed-Tupac articles, at least some of Duvoisin’s colleagues at the Times were asking that same question. Immediately after Philips’s articles appeared in print, Voletta Wallace was contacted by several of her dead son’s friends, who said they had watched the Tyson-Seldon fight with Biggie at his home in New Jersey, roughly an hour before the Times said he was in Las Vegas offering the Crips $1 million to kill Tupac. By the next afternoon, the estate of Notorious B.I.G. had produced invoices showing that on the weekend when Biggie was supposed to have been at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, he was in fact working on a recording for Puffy Combs in New York’s Daddy’s House studio. Biggie’s family was even able to provide MTV with a digital tape of the song “Nasty Girl” that the rapper had recorded during that session.
Five days after the Los Angeles Times published the claim that Biggie had paid Crips to kill Tupac, the newspaper ran a story reporting that the Christopher Wallace Estate had offered evidence that Biggie was in a New York recording studio when Philips had claimed he was in a Las Vegas hotel. Sanders called it “a non-retraction retraction” and complained it had been buried on the lower half of an inside page, while the Biggie-killed-Tupac articles had run on the Times’ front page.
Voletta Wallace certainly was not mollified. “It was so ridiculous,” she told me. “My son is Notorious B.I.G. If my son is gonna go to Las Vegas, don’t tell me nobody didn’t see him.”
Sanders and Frank were even more astonished by Philips’s article “FBI Probes Rap Star’s ’97 Murder” exposing Mike Robinson’s attempt to gather evidence against Muhammad Amir. The warning that the article’s publication had put Robinson’s life in danger was swiftly proved accurate by “two or three good attempts on his life,” Valdemar said. One involved a drive-by shooting in which Mike and a group of friends and relatives standing on a corner in the Nickerson Gardens housing project were sprayed by an AK-47 on full automatic. Mike was not hit, but one of his granddaughters was. Two cousins caught bullets also, one in the abdomen, the other in a leg. “Another of Mike’s cousins got his teeth knocked out,” Valdemar recalled.
Part of what put Mike at such risk was that “he didn’t like hiding,” Valdemar said. “He’d rather meet you face-to-face. But he was also worried about his family. Mike may not have been much of a father, but he was as devoted a grandfather as he could be. He insisted on taking his grandkids to school. Every time he did that, he risked his life.” And now Mike knew he was risking the lives of his grandchildren as well.
“Chuck Philips was saying that his article had nothing to do with whatever happened to Psycho Mike, but the guy is full of shit,” Phil Carson said. “And one hundred percent it was Berkow who gave Philips the Mike stuff for that article. They were both guilty. And in a way so was I. I gave the LAPD the benefit of the doubt, and I paid for it. But Mike really paid for it.”
It was mainly to protect his family, “but also himself,” Valdemar said, that Mike began insisting that he would not testify in court if the Wallace family’s lawsuit went to trial. “Everyone knew we were going to have to put Mike on the stand,” Sergio Robleto recalled, “but nobody wanted to tell him.”
Valdemar retired from the Sheriff’s Department in 2004 and shortly afterward was hired by Robleto as one of his operatives. Among his duties was to serve as a liaison between the Wallace Estate and Mike Robinson. It was Valdemar who drove Mike to the deposition scheduled for February 3, 2005. “Mike was mad because he didn’t want to go and do the thing,” Valdemar remembered. “In the car he started screaming, having a meltdown. We were parked at a mall next to the freeway where I’d picked him up. He shouted in my face, ‘Testifying is gonna get me killed or my family killed. You told me I didn’t have to testify. Now you’re making me testify.’ At one point he threatened to kill me if I didn’t let him out of the car.” Valdemar had brought along a blue ballistic vest that he wanted Mike to wear and it was “a struggle” to get the informant to put it on, he recalled, though Mike finally did.
Robleto had arranged for the deposition to be held in a suite at the Crowne Plaza in the city of Commerce, a compact community in southeast Los Angeles County that was just north of the blue-collar suburbs Downey and Bellflower. The hotel was part of a complex that included one of Perry Sanders’s favorite places on the planet, the Commerce Casino, where he liked to play high-stakes poker while receiving backrubs from the masseuses who worked for the casino. “Perry was always going off to get a ‘poker massage,’ ” Frank recalled.
“But Perry didn’t know where the Robinson deposition was going to be,” Robleto said. “None of the lawyers did. We were that concerned about security. We just arranged to pick them all up and drive them to the hotel.”
“All we knew about Mike Robinson was that he was at some double-secret location,” Rob Frank recalled. “I realized how seriously Sergio and his people took the threat to Mike when they picked us up in three separate SUVs that went in three different directions.”
Robleto had stationed fifteen armed personnel at various spots in the hotel ahead of Robinson’s arrival. “We knew the other side knew what an important witness Mike was going to be,” he explained. “There were a whole lot of people who wanted him dead.”
Through Valdemar, Robleto had gotten to know Robinson, and a certain affection had developed between the two men. “On my side for sure,” Robleto said. “There was just something about the guy. I liked his attitude, I guess. I’m all about facts and not real big on speculation. And Mike was like that, too, in his own way. He wasn’t just honest—he wanted to be a hundred percent right.”
The main precaution Sanders had taken was to arrange for the deposition to be videotaped. He didn’t bother to say what everyone knew: if Mike were killed, that videotape would be the only way to offer his testimony in court.
The direct examination portion of the deposition went fairly quickly. Mike described hearing from multiple “sources” that the killer of Biggie Smalls was Amir Muhammad, and that Suge Knight had paid for the hit; then he described how he passed that information on to Richard Valdemar and Tim Flaherty. He recounted his two face-to-face encounters with Muhammad and what he had told first the Sheriff’s Department and then the FBI about them.
When it was his turn to ask questions, Assistant City Attorney Don Vincent repeatedly pushed at places where he thought the witness might slip or trip, but Psycho Mike held steady. The only name of the killer he had heard on the street was Amir’s, Mike said, and that was the only name he’d given to the LAPD detective who’d interviewed him at Wayside. Detective Ball “wrote what he wanted to write” in his report, Mike said.
Who had told him the killer was Amir? Vincent wanted to know. “Different people,” Mike answered, some from the Southside Crips and also guys from a smaller set called Power Rule. He’d heard it from Bloods as well, Mike added.
“These were people that were in jail with you?” Vincent asked.
“No, sir,” Mike answered. “These are people on the streets.”
When Vincent asked if he had told the FBI “who you think did” the murder of Notorious B.I.G., Mike answered tersely, “I don’t think anything. I know who did it. Amir did it.” Vincent got under Mike’s skin, though, when he asked about the trip to see Amir Muhammad at his home in San Diego County and why it had been unsuccessful. Mike answered with an accusing look, then said he guessed “somebody told him I was coming.”
Sanders sat as expressionless as he could, trying not to let Vincent see how pleased he was with the way Mike was handling his interrogation. “Ten minutes into that depo, I knew this guy was going to be an absolutely great witness for us in court,” Sanders said. “He came across as someone who was just going to tell it like it was, and to hell with you if you didn’t like it.”
Mike even managed to throw a few things at Vincent for which the city’s attorney was clearly unprepared. At one point he spoke about security firms that “hire crooked police officers.” When asked if he knew of “any LAPD officers that were involved in this crooked activity,” Mike replied, “Mack one.” David Mack was “in the same circle” with the Reggie Wrights, Sr. and Jr., Mike added. What circle is that? Vincent wanted to know. “Crooked,” Mike replied. “They take money, they take dope, they do all kinds of things. They kill people for a living.” Police in Los Angeles County had been hearing for years that the Wrights lived as well as they did by stealing from drug dealers and selling their stuff on the street. That Reggie Wright Sr. continued to serve as a sheriff’s deputy was for many Crips and Bloods evidence of how corrupt the cops were.
When the subject of Rick James’s party house was brought up, Mike mentioned that he’d seen David Mack there once with Amir Muhammad. He’d seen Suge Knight there also.
“So if you went up to Suge Knight and said, ‘Hi, Suge,’ he’d say ‘Hi, Mike,’ right?” Vincent asked.
“Yeah,” Mike answered, then added, “I don’t know about now because of what you people done to me. He probably would kill me now.”
Mike showed tremulous emotion only when he was asked why he was helping the FBI and the Wallace family’s attorneys. “I might as well finish it because I’m already exposed,” Mike replied. “I’m done. So I might as well, you know, do the right thing. Maybe somebody might have some kind of peace or justice in their lives by me doing the right thing.”
Vincent goaded Mike with questions about the risks he was taking by talking about the Biggie murder. The stress and anger in Mike’s voice became increasingly audible. Finally, he asked for a break.
Sergio Robleto took him into the hotel suite’s bedroom, where Mike sat on one corner of the mattress and “began to weep and weep and weep,” Robleto remembered. “I tried to calm him down, reassure him that we were going to do everything we could to protect him. But he sobbed for half an hour.”
Then suddenly Mike “jumped up, ran out of the room and down the stairs,” Robleto remembered. “I figured he needed air. I told my guys to stay loose, don’t try to stop him. The freeway was right across the street, and Mike runs down the embankment right onto the freeway. He ran right into the oncoming traffic. At that point we ran onto the freeway chasing him, but he just kept running. He ran on the shoulder for a couple of miles. Then he got off the freeway and ran for another mile. He finally slowed down and we caught up. He was sobbing again and shouting, ‘They’re gonna kill me! They’re after me!’ The only one who could talk to him was Richard Valdemar. Richard calmed him down to the point where he was listening again. That took a couple of hours. Then Richard took him home, because no one else was supposed to know where he was staying.”
It was the last time Robleto ever saw Mike Robinson.
Chuck Philips, though, wasn’t done with Mike. On June 3, 2005, just as the case of Wallace v. City of Los Angeles was approaching trial, the Los Angeles Times ran an article by Philips under the headline “Informant in Rap Star’s Slaying Admits Hearsay.”
The essence of the story was the headline: the secret informant who told the police that Biggie’s killer was a Nation of Islam member named Amir—“or Ashmir,” as Ted Ball’s report had it—had acknowledged in a sworn deposition that his information wasn’t firsthand. What made the article fundamentally deceptive was Philips’s description of how Mike had “admitted” under cross-examination that he was only repeating what others had told him. But Mike had made that clear from the very beginning. “It was exactly what he told me and exactly what I told the LAPD,” said Valdemar, “that Mike had heard it was Amir Muhammad from people on the street. But the Times article made it sound like he had tried to hide that.”
Philips detailed some of Mike’s background—how he had gone to prison for murder, and earned his membership in the Black Guerrilla Family by stabbing a man fourteen times, and had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. The reporter, though, left out any mention of how successful Mike Robinson had been as a police informant and a witness in court, the long list of criminals and corrupt law enforcement officers he’d put behind bars, and Mike’s consistency when he was questioned by the attorneys attempting to discredit him.
What most infuriated Sanders was that every bit of Philips’s information had been drawn from Mike’s deposition, a deposition that Judge Cooper had ordered sealed and to which no one had access other than the attorneys on both sides of the lawsuit and their clients. Sanders and Frank had no doubt that someone on the other side had given Philips a copy of Mike Robinson’s “confidential” deposition. “This is how outrageous it’s become,” Sanders said at the time. “They release a sealed transcript immediately before the case it involves is scheduled to go to trial, knowing that the L.A. Times will use that transcript to distort the facts and make our case look ridiculous in the eyes of the public.”
Sergio Robleto was even more outspoken. The release of the sealed transcript was “tantamount to jury tampering,” he said. Robleto was not given to extravagant statements, but “this case has really gotten to me,” he explained. “I’ve learned things I really wish I didn’t know.”
No one was more devastated by the article than Valdemar. He was stunned, the former deputy said, that Philips had used his informant’s street name, Psycho Mike. “Before that, Mike at least had some deniability,” Valdemar said. “It was basically his word against the word of Amir Muhammad that he was a government informant. There were a lot of people who didn’t believe it. But once it was in print that the informant was known as Psycho Mike, he was a dead man if he showed up on the streets.”
For Sanders and Frank, the main consequence of the “Informant … Admits Hearsay” article was that Mike Robinson disappeared immediately from the place where he was hiding out. Even Valdemar couldn’t find him. It meant that Sanders and Frank would be unable to call him as a witness, and would have no choice but to offer only his deposition into evidence—if the judge allowed it. “That article was the single worst thing that happened to our case,” Sanders said.
Months later, Mike Robinson contacted Valdemar. He was tired of running, Mike said. Did they have any safe place for him? Valdemar found him a house in California City, a town of about thirteen thousand on the desolate eastern edge of the Antelope Valley, closer to Death Valley than to Compton. “A place the term ‘middle of nowhere’ was made for,” Valdemar said. Mike never got comfortable there, though. “He was constantly looking over his shoulder, always on the lookout for the people who would be coming after him,” Valdemar said. “The stress ate him up.”
Mike lived for only about another year before dying of a heart attack on December 5, 2006. He was forty-nine.
Valdemar and Tim Flaherty attended Mike’s funeral, the only white faces in a surprisingly large crowd. “What I will always remember is Mike’s grandkids sobbing and hugging the casket,” Valdemar said.
Valdemar vented his rage and grief in an article for Police magazine in which he wrote, “Chuck Philips did all he could to twist the witness statements, expose the sources and protect his pals at Death Row. His Los Angeles Times editors failed to see that obviously his view was biased … As a result of the Times articles and Chuck Philips, Mike Robinson was attacked physically on more than one occasion. He was shot at, cut in the face and head with a razor, and his front teeth were knocked out. The assailants even mentioned the Times article during one attack … It is my belief that Michael Robinson died as a result of the stress and anxiety caused by his exposure and identification in Chuck Philips’s hit piece.”