SPIN
June 1997
by Joe Domanick
Murder Was the Case
Who killed the Notorious B.I.G.? Clues may lead to a disgruntled bodyguard and L.A.'s deadliest gangs.
By Joe Domanick.
As a rap celebrity who always worried about getting enough "shine," the Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. Christopher Wallace, probably would have been pleased with his elaborate, New Orleans-style wake in New York City on March 18, nine days after he was gunned down in a Los Angeles drive-by shooting. Over 400 friends, family members, and hip-hop stars braved the bitter early-morning cold, waiting in a line that wrapped around the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Manhattan's Upper East Side; reporters and hundreds of fans swarmed the surrounding streets. Inside, Biggie's body lay in an open burgundy-colored casket, nattily attired in a white double-breasted suit and matching derby. People wept openly during his memorial service, which included a gospel hymn performed by his estranged wife Faith Evans and a eulogy from Sean "Puffy" Combs, CEO of Bad Boy Entertainment, Biggie's label.
Following the service, a procession of stretch limousines, flower cars, and a sleek black hearse traveled toward Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Biggie grew up. Throngs of people stood behind police barricades to pay their respects, waving, chanting his lyrics, and dumping out 40s in time-honored street tradition. The event was peaceful until the caravan reached Fulton Avenue in Bed-Stuy, Biggie's former beat. Frustrated by the long wait, a few bystanders began fighting, jumping on parked cars, and throwing bottles; the police broke out pepper spray and arrested ten individuals for disorderly conduct. "People were upset and tension was high," says one attendee who got caught in the scuffle. "The ruckus wasn't much of a surprise."
Biggie was killed March 9 in the passenger seat of his blue Chevy Suburban, shortly after he and his posse exited a glitzy party sponsored by Vibe magazine and Qwest Records at the Petersen Automotive Museum on Fairfax Avenue in L.A.'s Mid-Wilshire District. His was the second vehicle in a three-car convoy stopped at a red light; suddenly a dark-green sedan pulled up alongside him, and an African-American assailant in his early 20s whipped out a nine-millimeter handgun and sprayed Biggie's vehicle with at least seven rounds. It was a clean hit with a neat, professional-looking shot pattern. The third convoy car, a Chevy Blazer filled with Bad Boy's security guards--Crips or cops, depending on your source--chased the suspect but lost him after a few blocks. Meanwhile, Biggie was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Hospital and declared dead at 1:15 A.M. At first, it was widely assumed that the murder was payback for Tupac Shakur's drive-by shooting death in Las Vegas almost exactly six months earlier--the sad end to a long-standing personal feud with Biggie that eventually grew into the much-hyped East Coast/West Coast conflict and all-out gang warfare. After all, the police had named a prime suspect in Shakur's murder: Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, a Compton Southside Crip who had received a beatdown from a posse that included Shakur and the Blood-affiliated head of Death Row Records, Suge Knight (who was recently sentenced to nine years in prison for a parole violation), just hours before Shakur was killed. The real shocker, though, came on March 18, when the Los Angeles Times leaked the focus of the Los Angeles Police Department investigation: that one of Biggie's own bodyguards--a Southside Crip hired to protect Biggie when he visited L.A.--shot Biggie over a "personal financial dispute, not on behalf of the gang." The theory generated heated controversy, even within the LAPD. "If they hired that gang, it wouldn't make sense that they killed him," says one of the 18 to 20 investigators working on the case.
Still, it was the best lead the LAPD had. In late March, the police received a home video filmed on the night of Biggie's murder, sent two detectives to interview witnesses in New York, and later released a composite sketch of the suspect: a round-faced black man with close-cropped hair and a bow tie reminiscent of those worn by Nation of Islam members. At press time, the suspect was not identified.
In a press conference shortly after the murder, LAPD Lt. Ross Moen, the homicide detective in charge of the investigation, said he considered the killing to be gang-related; according to a search warrant filed by the Compton police in 1996, the "East Coast's Bad Boy Records" had been employing "Southside Crips gang members as security" because of Bad Boy's "ongoing feud between Tupac Shakur and the Blood-related Death Row Records." Indeed, hours before the Vibe party, Biggie was allegedly seen hanging out with some Southside Crips at a Compton park. Would Biggie and Puffy, who were never gang-bangers and knew little of L.A. gang culture, really hire hardcore Crips as bodyguards? If so, it was a tragic, if understandable, mistake.
Several years ago, according to Dwayne Holmes, a former Crip who is now a community organizer, "Biggie and several other people from the East Coast had developed a friendship with some Southside guys out of Compton, but I don't think that Biggie utilized them as security per se. The guys I know from Southside don't work as security; that's not their thing. It's more like he was hanging out with guys he knew on the West Coast who were both familiar with the area and with his enemies, and who could identify individuals whom he might not know."
"It is not uncommon for many rap artists who come from the local street scene to associate with a [gang] set," says a veteran of the L.A. rap scene. Their function may be security, but it's also the homies hanging with the homies. Local to local hangin' with each other as a form of protection--particularly if they're going to some kind of event--that's normal. This is the first I've ever heard of outsiders coming in and having local folks protect them." "But," the source adds, "it's no surprise that Biggie would utilize someone in L.A. to protect him. He's coming from the East, there's friction between the two coasts--it makes sense."
The already labyrinthine plot thickened when the L.A. Times reported that several witnesses from Biggie's "entourage" claimed the murder suspect first jumped out of his car and casually approached Biggie, who rolled down his window as if to greet him. They said the suspect immediately fired, then reentered his car and discharged a few more rounds as he sped away, a rumor that would seem to add credibility to the disgruntled bodyguard theory. Lt. Moen denies the story. "The ballistics we have indicate that the person who did the shooting was sitting in his vehicle at the time of the shooting," he stresses.
"On the street," complains Dwayne Holmes, "the real is that it wasn't anyone from the South[side Crips] who killed Biggie. It don't take a Colombo to figure out that the murder of Tupac and the murder of Biggie are somehow connected."
On March 30, Puffy issued a statement categorically denying that he or Bad Boy Records ever used gang members as bodyguards. When asked if Biggie may have hired Crips without Puffy's knowledge or authorization, a Bad Boy publicist was evasive. "As a family, Bad Boy did not use them," she says. Puffy claims that he, like Death Row, regularly employed off-duty police officers as security guards; it has been reported that he may have used up to six off-duty Inglewood officers as protection on the night of Biggie's murder.
"Most police departments I'm familiar with wouldn't approve permits for off-duty officers to work security for certain rap groups," Lt. Moen says. Inglewood Police Chief Alex Perez has stated that his department "did not authorize any officers to bodyguard for Notorious B.I.G." However, not only were a few off-duty Inglewood officers allegedly seen working at the Vibe party prior to the murder, sources told the L.A. Times that one of them was driving the Blazer that chased Biggie's assailant. Oddly, no one in that vehicle got his license plate number.
There's an old saying: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." For decades, Compton's Southside Crips have been the arch-rivals of the Mob Piru Bloods, Suge Knight's local set. And Biggie and Puffy had much to fear from Death Row and company. Not only did Shakur constantly taunt and threaten his former friend Biggie, he even accused him of setting up his 1994 robbery/shooting, which Biggie adamantly denied. As for Puffy, Knight claimed he was involved in the 1995 Atlanta murder of close friend and Death Row employee Jake Robles, a Piru Blood. No one was charged with the killing, although some witnesses alleged that one of Combs's bodyguards was responsible. Puffy has always professed his innocence. Three months after the Robles murder, though, Knight was accused for the Al Capone-style assault of an independent record promoter--beating him with champagne bottles, forcing him to drink urine--in an attempt to shake him down for the home addresses of Puffy and his mother. When Puffy sent over a Nation of Islam emissary as a peacemaking move, Knight refused the gesture. Knight was not the first rap impresario to bring gang imagery to hip-hop--former Crips Ice-T and Eazy-E, for instance, both rapped about their gang-banging days, while Snoop Doggy Dogg crossed over from a Crip neighborhood to work with Death Row--but he was the first to make millions parlaying it into mainstream MTV acceptance. Although Knight wasn't an active banger, he grew up in a Blood neighborhood, and was a Blood in the sense that he talked the talk, identified with the homies, and could expect protection if he ever got into a tight spot. "He kept a low profile," says Manual Johnson, a former Blood and an ex-con who remembers Knight from his high-school days in Compton.
But Knight's regular posse consisted of at least five men whom police claim are members of the Mob Piru Bloods. According to the police affidavit that was filed in the wake of Shakur's killing, "Death Row Records [has been] connected with the Mob Piru gang in Compton and the Bounty Hunter gang in Los Angeles." While Knight himself has no gang-related arrests on his rap sheet, he has eight criminal convictions that include gun-related felony assaults. He has always had many enemies--and the security to keep them at bay. "Death Row is currently paying $35,000 to $40,000 a month for security," says Joe Portero, the attorney for rapper theD.O.C., who is now suing his former label Death Row. "That covers their building, individual executives, and artists--some of whom have 24-hour security. I imagine that that amount was even more before Knight went to prison and always had his own bodyguards with him."
Biggie and Puffy were justifiably paranoid, trapped in a beef of someone else's making. They were also businessmen who couldn't remain prisoners of the East Coast. If they traveled to L.A. for press dates and the like, they knew they were sitting ducks unless they had enough muscle to keep Knight's boys away. According to the street system of checks and balances, what better protection than to hire the adversaries of the Death Row brood? The Southside Crips are one of the biggest, most credible sets around, with a rep for aggression and retaliation. Biggie was an outsider to the complex rules of gang life. If he did hire Crip bodyguards, he probably thought of the relationship as a simple financial transaction: Pay them and they'll protect you. With Knight safely in jail, did Biggie suddenly feel he didn't need the Crips anymore, that he could simply walk away with no hard feelings? If so, it was a basic act of gang disrespect, and Biggie probably didn't even know it.
"Gang members can set aside differences when they're doing business," says Janet Moore, the Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney in charge of Compton's Hardcore Gang Unit, "but old situations die hard." She's referring to the shaky 1992 post-riot gang truce, which didn't last long on most of Compton's grim streets. Gang-banging continued unabated, but Tupac Shakur's shooting upped the ante into all-out warfare. "It's on when we get to back to Compton," a Blood reportedly said at Knight's Las Vegas nightclub shortly after he heard that a Southside Crip had just killed Shakur. Back home in L.A., Compton's Blood sets banded together against the Crips and at least 14 people were shot in a rhythmic payback ritual. That was where things stood when Biggie headed to L.A. for a few weeks of R&R last March. The police were turning on the heat, and both the Crips and Bloods were tense. They felt like both Death Row and Bad Boy had played them and they wanted something in return. As Jerry Lewis once said of the goombas, back in the days when the Italian mob ran the clubs, "If you're gonna have [gangsters] in your life, then you'd better have them in correctly. Because having them incorrectly, it ain't gonna be a long haul." It wasn't, and Biggie lost his life in someone else's war.
Will any lessons be learned from his death? The industry is skeptical. Says Bad Boy's director of A&R, Deric D'Angoliettie: "Big's children will hurt forever, I'll hurt forever, Puffy will hurt forever, Big's mom will hurt forever, but the rest of the industry won't care in the long run. They'll find another Biggie to take his place."
With additional reporting from Asondra Hunter and Tracii McGregor.
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