For Perry Sanders, preparation for the Notorious B.I.G. wrongful death lawsuit was turning into the most surreal experience of a life that had long been lived large. It was quite a bit of fun at the beginning. He and Frank were staying in a spectacular ocean-view condominium in Santa Monica that had been formerly owned by the NFL great Anthony Muñoz and, as Sanders put it, “havin’ a ball.” Sanders was spending at least a couple of nights a week playing poker at the Commerce Casino. Traveling to and from court, he was watched over by the hulking bodyguards the Wallace Estate had hired to keep him safe. That the bodyguards were Bloods gang members confused him at first, Sanders recalled, but he knew Voletta Wallace and Biggie’s widow, Faith Evans, were determined to see him protected, “so I trusted they were the right guys.”
Sanders himself began to take the danger, and the commitment of his bodyguards to protect him from it, more seriously one afternoon while dining at Enterprise Seafood in the Abbot Kinney section of Venice. He was meeting with Lil’ Cease over the meal to talk about the rapper’s trial testimony. “I’m pourin’ champagne for Lil’ Cease when one of my bodyguards sees somebody come in he thinks might be a threat. I got a bottle of champagne in my hand when the bodyguard grabs me by the back of the jacket and literally carries me out to the car, with the bottle still in my hand.”
Lil’ Cease’s manager Wayne Barrow had invited Sanders to the Hollywood Boulevard Club where the rapper’s new album was being previewed. “So I show up with my two bodyguards,” Sanders recalled. “We get out of the car and people are lined up outside the place to get in. The sidewalk is packed from the building to the street in both directions with beautiful people, the most beautiful. I’m thinkin’, ‘We won’t be goin’ there, obviously, ’cause we’ll never get in.’ My driver says, ‘Wait here.’ He goes to the door, talks to the guy there, and next thing you know it’s like the Red Sea partin’. I not only get ushered right in but also right past all the rich and famous people who are already seated at tables on the floor, then led to this private balcony above the dance floor that I have all to myself.”
Below was one of the strangest scenes Sanders had ever experienced. “There are all these movie stars and music stars,” he recalled, “but there are also all these gangsters. I mean, wall-to-wall gangsters. And some of ’em looked pretty damn scary. I turn to one of my bodyguards—this guy who had told me he had been shot six times before he was twenty—and I say, ‘Guys, you don’t seem to be armed. How do I know I’m not going to get whacked when I try to walk out of here?’ And the guy, my four-hundred-fifty-pound guy, tells me, ‘Well, it’s because of who your bodyguards are.’ Then he tells me, ‘Also, because of who your bodyguards are, you can have any woman in here if you want.’ It was right at the beginning of my relationship with Lorn [Lee, the woman he would marry], so I could only look, but it told me one heck of a lot about how far L.A. is from Louisiana.”
The part of the job that Sanders would come to dislike most was dealing with the Los Angeles press. “L.A. is the only place I’ve tried a case where public perception, what’s happenin’ in the media, seems more important than what happens in the courtroom,” he said. “And the media in L.A. follows the Los Angeles Times wherever it leads.” The deluge of negative and biased reporting he had faced from the moment he filed the lawsuit began to wear on Sanders well before the case came to trial. “It’s been a big enough drag to have a whole bunch of very good lawyers against us in this case,” he said, “but to have the biggest newspaper in the state doin’ triple backflips to try to influence the jury against us has made it much more difficult.”
Sanders had no doubt the city’s attorneys were leaking anything that might damage his case to the Times after the newspaper ran a story reporting that the Wallace Estate had tried to settle for as little as $18 million. Sanders refused to comment on that claim, but did say that none of the Times articles had included one crucial detail about every settlement discussion he’d had with the city: his client’s demand that the LAPD devote its resources to solving her son’s murder.
“What I need from this lawsuit is that the person or persons who murdered my son are brought to justice,” Voletta Wallace told me in 2005. “What I need from this lawsuit is honesty. What I need from this lawsuit is to show that humans have integrity, that they’re not cowards, show that they’re not liars, show that they care about the truth.” For Sanders, Voletta Wallace had become an island of calm amid the storm of secrets and lies her court claim had unleashed. “Let it all come out,” she said. “There’s nothing they can surprise me with anymore.”
For the City of Los Angeles and its representatives, their defense had grown steadily more fierce and manipulative, in part owing to the increase in their legal team’s firepower. “They got the case continued on bullshit, and at first we couldn’t figure out why,” Sanders recalled. “I thought it might be just to make it more expensive and time-consuming for us, but then I figured out that it was to buy time to bring in a big-time lawyer.” Without Sanders’s knowledge, the city attorney’s office had gone to the Los Angeles City Council to obtain a $500,000 appropriation to hire “outside counsel.” The lawyer chosen was Vincent Marella, a widely admired—and feared—business attorney whose list of professional honors and accolades was lengthy. Marella, a former U.S. attorney, had been the lead defense lawyer in the largest federal tax case in U.S. history and had represented an assortment of CEOs and CFOs of major corporations in securities fraud and antitrust cases.
“Up until Marella, we had several city attorney representatives that were seasoned and very good in their own way,” Sanders recalled, “but their style, from the way they dressed to the way they tried a case, was consistent with a more bureaucratic approach. Vince, on the other hand, owned his own fine clothes men’s shop, and he was cut from distinctly different cloth, like the custom-tailored shirts and suits he wore. He had done lots of stuff that was way outside the zone of what even the best attorney workin’ for the city would have done.”
It had pleased Sanders that his Southern accent and good-time grin initially made it difficult for a lot of people in L.A. to take him seriously. The Louisianan was always “fixin’ ” to do this or that. “Bein’ underestimated was probably our biggest advantage at the beginning of the case,” Sanders admitted with a sly smile. Unlike the comically pretentious Paul Paquette, the city’s lead attorney up to that point, Marella had recognized that Sanders was no rube from the moment he showed up in court. “All of a sudden, we had a very smart, tactical sophisticate on our hands,” said Sanders. “It was like we were playin’ a different team.”
Sanders was convinced that Marella had coached former LAPD chief Bernard Parks on how to avoid giving answers that offered any illumination when he was cross-examined by Sanders and Frank during his deposition. The LAPD’s investigation “never pointed clearly at any one suspect,” Parks said, but then conceded a moment later, “I think the closest speculation was that there was one suspect, and it was later found out that he was not involved. I remember it was Amir. And later found out, at least from our investigation, he was not involved.”
Yet Parks managed to provide absolutely no information about how the LAPD had determined Amir Muhammad was not involved. “It was one nonanswer after another,” Frank recalled. “When all else failed, he claimed that sharing this or that information would compromise the continuing investigation.” Parks made himself personally vulnerable on only a single point during the deposition, claiming that he had not known about Russell Poole’s “involvement” in the Mack-Muhammad theory of the Biggie Smalls murder until he read about it in the newspaper. Poole told Sanders and Frank that this was a lie and that he could prove it was, because it had been brought up in a meeting with Chief Parks where there were other witnesses.
Sanders and Frank got very little from questioning either David Mack or Amir Muhammad, a.k.a. Harry Billups, a.k.a. Harry Muhammad. The attorneys had made a decision to drop both men as defendants in the case, in part because neither had any money that was not well hidden, but mainly because, as Sanders said, “we were concerned the jurors would be terrified of them if they were sittin’ in court.” In spite of this decision, neither Mack nor Muhammad was willing to cooperate in any way with the Wallace side—which was not surprising, given that the plaintiffs’ theory of the case was still that Muhammad had been the shooter in a murder Mack had helped to set up.
Mack’s deposition was at least interesting, though more confusing than anything else. The former LAPD officer was questioned by Frank at the same federal penitentiary in Talladega, Alabama, where Phil Carson had met with him. Mack had been transferred there after being stabbed on the running track at the prison in Illinois where he had begun his fourteen-year sentence for bank robbery. According to his attorney, a group of Hispanic prisoners had attacked Mack after they saw accounts in print and on television that described his career as a police officer and his association with Rafael Perez. According to the attorney, the prisoner who punctured Mack’s lung with a sharp object was upset to learn that Mack and Perez had preyed on gang members in Los Angeles’ Rampart District.
In Talladega, Mack answered a number of Frank’s questions but responded to most by pleading the Fifth Amendment. Mack of course denied having been involved in the murder of Notorious B.I.G. or possessing any knowledge of Amir Muhammad’s involvement in the crime. He also denied attending any Death Row Records social functions or any other affair where Suge Knight was present, contradicting multiple witnesses who claimed to have seen him with Suge at Death Row parties.
Obviously, none of that was surprising, said Frank, whose main memory of the deposition was how “physically intimidating” he found the former LAPD officer to be. Some of Mack’s denials, though, left Frank dumbfounded. He denied ever having been interviewed by LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division detectives Brian Tyndall and Greg Grant, which amounted to an accusation that the two had fraudulently created their notes and tapes of that interview, part of the evidence that had helped convict Mack in court. Mack also denied that any police radios had been found when his home was searched after his arrest for bank robbery, though one had been and was logged into evidence at the time.
Odder still was Mack’s claim that he was not a close friend of Amir Muhammad. Yes, Amir was his children’s godfather, Mack said, but that was because Amir had asked to be. Yes, Amir had visited him once in prison, Mack conceded, but then refused to answer why, if they were not close friends, the man who had been his college roommate would make such a visit. He also refused to disclose what they had spoken about during that visit. He was a practicing Muslim, Mack said, but declined to say how or when he had become one, or whether Amir Muhammad had something to do with it. Mack acknowledged owning a black Chevy Impala in March 1997, but insisted it was never out of his possession for any “significant” period of time. When he was asked if Amir Muhammad had ever borrowed his Impala, Mack was cagey, saying that if Amir had driven the car, he was unaware of it.
Mack said he was unsure about where he had been between midnight and 4 a.m. on March 9, 1997, the date of the Notorious B.I.G. murder, and said he did not know where Amir Muhammad had been then, either.
By far the most revealing aspect of the deposition was Mack’s assertion of his right to refuse answering questions that might incriminate him. It was no surprise that he pleaded the Fifth to avoid answering any questions connected to the Bank of America robbery. Mack’s more telling Fifth Amendment claims, though, came when he refused to answer whether attorney Donald Re had represented him in his trial on the bank robbery charges. Re was Mack’s defense lawyer in that case, and there was no risk of self-incrimination in saying so. At the time, attorneys who watched the trial had wondered how Mack could afford one of the most expensive attorneys in L.A. The defendant may have stolen more than $722,000 in the Bank of America robbery, but it was difficult to believe he could access that money from jail, and there was no way a lawyer as smart as Re would risk being paid with stolen funds. What Mack was concerned about became clear only when Frank asked the next question: Had Re been paid for his services with funds provided by Suge Knight? He was refusing to answer based on his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, Mack replied.
Amir Muhammad, who was deposed at his attorney’s office in Orange County under what was still his legal name, Harry Billups, had split the difference on the question of how close he was to Mack. They were “pretty good friends,” Muhammad said. “Not best friends, but good friends.” He always had been and still was closer to Mack’s wife, Carla, than he was to David, Muhammad added. He contradicted his friend on whose idea it had been for him to become godfather to the Mack children: “He asked me to be godfather.” You didn’t ask him, he asked you? Frank pressed. “Yes,” Muhammad answered. Beyond this, however, the man denied everything and gave up nothing.
There was a jarring contrast, Frank recalled, between Muhammad’s appearance and the way he tried to present himself. “From the moment he walked into the room I was afraid of him,” Frank said. Muscled up, with a shaved head and a flat expression, Muhammad exuded menace, as Frank remembered him. “You felt this was someone capable of serious violence every time you looked him in the eye.” Muhammad, though, was consistent throughout the deposition in portraying himself as an innocent bystander who was stunned and confused by how he had been drawn into this whole sordid mess.
“I’m a mortgage broker,” he said several times in answer to Frank’s questions, as if that alone were proof that he could not possibly have been involved in murder.
Sergio Robleto, though, was already poking holes in Muhammad’s image. The man’s criminal history, Robleto had learned, went back at least to his days as an athlete at the University of Oregon. In 1980, as Harry Billups, Muhammad had been arrested in three different Oregon cities for theft of services—skipping out on restaurant or bar bills. More serious was the record Muhammad had accumulated in California during the 1990s. State records showed a man almost constantly on the move, with addresses in an assortment of Southern California cities under at least four different names, regularly using driver’s licenses and other identification that had been falsely obtained. Most troubling were the incidents stemming from Muhammad’s relationship with a woman named Angelique Mitchell. He had been arrested in Anaheim in 1993 for infliction of corporal injury on a spouse/cohabitant after an altercation with Mitchell. That charge was ultimately dismissed by the Orange County district attorney’s office on the grounds of “furtherance of justice.” But Muhammad had been arrested again in 1994, this time in Fullerton, after Mitchell accused him of beating her in front of her children. The charges of assault, battery, infliction of corporal injury on a spouse/cohabitant, and willful cruelty to a child were again dismissed (and again as furtherance of justice), but only after Muhammad had pleaded guilty to trespass with refusal to leave a property and received a sentence of sixty days in jail, along with twenty-four months of probation.
The most significant incident involving Mitchell, though, had taken place on October 21, 1998, seventeen months after the Notorious B.I.G. murder, when Muhammad had been arrested in the city of Chino for brandishing a firearm.
Mitchell had called the Chino police to say that Muhammad showed up without warning at her workplace, a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Pomona. After he saw her climb into a Blazer SUV with her new boyfriend, Mitchell said, Muhammad followed the couple onto the freeway in his black BMW, a vehicle that was the basis of the lease fraud charges that had recently been filed against him in Los Angeles. After tailing them for some distance, the BMW sped up alongside the Blazer, and Muhammad pointed a pistol at them through his open window, Mitchell said. When the Chino police pulled Muhammad over, they found a semiautomatic Beretta loaded with an eight-round clip in his vehicle. Muhammad denied pointing the pistol at the couple, then explained that he was in the process of moving and had forgotten the Beretta was in his car. After providing the police with a falsely obtained California driver’s license in the name of “Harry Muhammad” that bore an address in Fontana, California, he was cited for carrying a concealed weapon and released.
Six days later, Mitchell and her boyfriend were dead from gunshot wounds to the head. The San Bernardino County coroner’s office ruled the deaths a murder-suicide.
“The coroner’s verdict was based on one eyewitness, a cop who told this crazy story about how the couple jumped out onto the front porch of this house and the murder-suicide happened right in front of him,” Sanders recalled. “It just didn’t sound right.”
Robleto, though, had not been able to find anything that tied Muhammad to the killings, other than their proximity in time to the firearm-brandishing incident. “The crime wasn’t well investigated, but there was nothing you could really point to,” he explained. “It was one guy’s word, and there was nothing solid to challenge it with.”
Still, Sanders said, “Sergio had found enough for us to know that we could put Muhammad on the stand and let the jury get a real good look at what a bad guy he was. I was especially lookin’ forward to askin’ him why he needed all those phony driver’s licenses.”