Like a lot of things that take place in Los Angeles, the police scandal that has been the city's biggest story for more than three years is something other than what it appears to be. For months, the Los Angeles media have focused their coverage on the misdeeds, actual and alleged, of officers in the Police Department's Rampart Division. It has become a story about the abuse of confused Hispanic immigrants by a club of gung-ho head-crackers in blue suits whose overweening pride and inßated sense of mission led them to cross the line that separates law enforcers from lawbreakers. So much of the truth has been buried in the process of telling this story that no amount of excavation could unearth it all at this point. And very few people in Los Angeles want to look at what has been covered over, anyway. They don't want to discover that what they understand as reality is actually truth turned inside out. They'd prefer not to be told that what has happened to their police department is much darker and far more disturbing than the story they know. They don't want to recognize that they've been played by sociopathic criminals or snookered by political hacks. They'd rather not learn that assuming the correct position doesn't always put you in the right place. And they definitely don't want to hear what former LAPD deputy chief Steve Downing has been saying: "This scandal isn't about cops who became criminals, it's about criminals who became cops."

Part I: An Incident of Road Rage

The "LAPD Scandal Timeline" published by the Los Angeles Times and subsequently embraced by the rest of the city's media begins with the theft of six pounds of cocaine from a police property room on March 2nd, 1998. While neither that crime nor its date is an arbitrary starting point, they aren't entirely accurate ones, either. Because anyone who traces the largest police-corruption scandal of our time back to its investigative origins will arrive eventually at an incident that took place one year earlier.

It was just past four on the afternoon of March 18th, 1997, when two men, one white, the other black, became embroiled in what appeared to be a traffic dispute. The white man, who drove a battered Buick Regal, wore a gray tank top that showed off his bulging biceps and a baseball cap that bore the insignia of a marijuana leaf. He sported a bushy Fu Manchu, and his long, silver-streaked hair was tied back in a ponytail. The black man, who drove a shiny green Mitsubishi Montero SUV, had a shaved head, and the breadth of his chest showed beneath a green Nike sweatshirt worn open nearly to the navel.

The Buick had just stopped at the intersection of Ventura and Lankershim boulevards when the Montero pulled up on its left and the black man began staring at the white man through his passenger window. The white man lowered his window and asked, "Can I help you?"

"No. Roll up that window, you punk motherfucker," the black man answered, "or I'll put a cap up your ass."

"Do you have a problem?" the white man asked.

"I'm your problem, motherfucker!" replied the black man. "Pull over right now and I'll kick your ass!" He punctuated his threat with a series of gestures that the white man recognized as gang signs, then pointed to the side of the road. The white man nodded and said, "Let's go."

As soon as the Montero parked on the other side of the intersection, though, the Buick sped away. Screaming curses out his window, the enraged black man took off after the Buick, slaloming between cars, even veering into an oncoming lane at one point.

The Montero finally caught up when the Buick stopped for a red light at Regal Place. After the SUV pulled up next to the sedan, other motorists heard the black man's shouts and saw him extend his right arm toward the Buick. The white man, who had been shouting back, suddenly ducked his head and let his foot slip off the brake, causing the car to roll forward slightly. The Montero's windows were tinted, and witnesses weren't sure whether the black man had a gun, but the hand that came out of the Buick's window a moment later, when the white man sat up straight again, was filled with an automatic pistol.

The first bullet passed through the passenger-side door of the Montero and lodged in the black man's gym bag. The second shot struck the man just below his right armpit, punctured his heart and stopped in his left lung. Though only seconds from death, he managed to swing his Montero into the left lane and make a U-turn. A woman working in an office across the street looked up when she heard the gunshots and saw, through the SUV's open window, "the full face of this black man smiling and grinning, a sarcastic laugh-grin . . . holding the wheel with his left hand and pumping his right hand." The Montero coasted into the parking lot of an AM-PM minimart. The Buick pulled into the parking lot a moment later.

Behind the store were two California Highway Patrol officers who had just finished a coffee break when they heard gunshots. The CHP officers swung their patrol cars around the west side of the building just in time to see a white male pointing a handgun at a black male who was slumped forward in the front seat of a green SUV. The CHP officer in the lead slammed on his brakes, swung open his door and crouched behind the vehicle as he drew his sidearm and ordered the white male to drop his weapon. "I'm a police officer," the marijuana-leaf guy shouted back and pulled on the chain around his neck to lift the gold shield of an LAPD detective above his tank top. He was Frank Lyga, an undercover narcotics cop assigned to the Hollywood Area Field Enforcement Section. He had never seen the dead man before. By the time detectives from the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division arrived on the scene, they knew not only the dead man's identity but also that they were stepping into a minefield. The victim was Kevin Gaines, 31, a seven-year veteran of the LAPD, then assigned to patrol duty in the department's Pacific Division. He had been off-duty at the time of his death. The lead investigator on the case was forty-year-old Russell Poole. The son of a retired L.A. County sheriff's deputy, Poole had worked for nearly ten years as a detective at the LAPD's South Bureau and at Wilshire Division before joining robbery-homicide's elite major-crimes unit in 1996. Poole was a stocky, straightforward man with freckled forearms and a cowlick in his reddish-blond hair. His personnel file was packed with praise from supervisors: "Courteous," "professional," "diligent" and "exemplary," they called him. "Sincerely cares," one lieutenant wrote. "Goes that extra mile," a second added. "You can only hope that everyone assigned to your squad will be of the caliber and character of Officer Poole," one evaluation ended.

Poole's assignment to the Kevin Gaines case, however, would send him into a bewildering labyrinth of murder, bank robbery, corruption, bureaucratic intrigue and racial politics. By the time Poole resigned in disgust from the department almost two years later, he would have peered into the darkest corners of the LAPD, discovering many of that troubled organization's most closely guarded secrets. The questionable actions that followed from the death of Kevin Gaines would implicate some of Los Angeles' most influential figures, including the current chief of police and the city attorney who is now L.A.'s leading mayoral candidate. And before his investigation was delayed, diverted and then finally shut down, Poole would uncover powerful evidence that police officers were operating within the Los Angeles Police Department both as members of the Bloods gang and as security for gangsta-rap kingpin Suge Knight, the president of Death Row Records. These officers, Poole suspected, were involved in the unsolved murder of one of rap music's biggest stars, Biggie Smalls.

But nothing Poole would experience was quite so horrible as finding himself immersed in what he now alleges was a cover-up that permitted a self-described "monster" to hold the city hostage.

Part II: The Boy Scout Takes Over

In the first few days after Kevin Gaines' death, the Los Angeles Police Department was both shaken and split by the cop kills cop headlines that appeared in newspapers across the country. Like the city it served, the LAPD had been wracked by dissension and division for most of the 1990s. What began with the Rodney King beating and the subsequent riots after the officers accused in that case were found not guilty had come to a climax after the acquittal of O.J. Simpson and the cheers of black citizens for a man who had quite obviously gotten away with murder.

Poole quickly realized what he was up against. In the aftermath of the shooting, two dozen off-duty black police officers were canvassing the neighborhood surrounding the shooting scene looking for witnesses who would "dirty up Lyga." Detective Lyga's version of events, however, was supported by every bit of available evidence. On the floor of the Montero next to Kevin Gaines' body, the CHP officers found a pistol with a live round in the chamber; it was registered to Gaines. At the time of the shooting, Lyga was returning to his Hollywood office from a surveillance operation that ended shortly before 4 p.m. Somewhere in the vicinity of Lankershim Boulevard, several of Lyga's colleagues heard the detective loudly announce over his radio, "I've got a problem. There's a black guy in a green truck on my ass. I need you guys." A few moments later, in an even louder voice, Lyga said, "I think he's got a gun!" About thirty seconds after that, he was heard shouting, "I just shot a guy! I need help!"

Even though witnesses on the scene gave statements that agreed with Lyga's account in every detail, pressure on the detective continued to mount. As media trucks laid siege to Lyga's home, the Gaines family was hiring attorney Johnnie Cochran, who would file a $25 million lawsuit naming the undercover cop and the city of Los Angeles as defendants. Despite overwhelming evidence that Gaines' behavior had been not only reckless but criminal, LAPD Chief Willie Williams and the assistant chief who would succeed him, Bernard Parks, both of them black, attended the dead officer's funeral, listening solemnly as Gaines was praised as a fine officer and a devoted family man.

A week later, nearly forty black police officers, most of them members of a group called the Oscar Joel Bryant Association, joined Kevin Gaines' family at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church to vent their outrage over Gaines' death. The Inglewood City Council presented the Gaines family with a plaque that recognized the dead man as a "fine police officer" who had been "killed in the line of duty." Online postings described Gaines as a target of LAPD harassment and insisted that "physical evidence points to a cover-up." Louis Farrakhan's The Final Call published an article that all but portrayed Frank Lyga as a cold-blooded killer. The president of the Oscar Joel Bryant Association chimed in to tell the Los Angeles Daily News that a number of white officers had envied Gaines' "lifestyle."

Lyga received almost no support from the LAPD brass until Russell Poole presented them with a piece of evidence that vindicated the undercover officer. This was a videotape shot from a surveillance camera aimed out the front door of the AM-PM minimart where Kevin Gaines had died: The tape clearly showed Lyga's Buick being chased by Gaines' Montero, then recorded the sound of two gunshots shortly after the Montero passed out of the camera's range.

Despite the videotape, investigators from LAPD's Internal Affairs Division continued to probe Frank Lyga's personnel file. Poole, however, was increasingly curious about Kevin Gaines. He began to understand that Gaines' "lifestyle" truly was an unusual one -- especially for a police officer who was supporting a family of four on a salary of less than $50,000 per year -- when he inspected the Montero and found that the vehicle had a customized interior, replete with a TV and a VCR. When LAPD officers ran a check on the vehicle, they discovered it was registered to the address of a production company owned by Death Row Records.

"As I was taking crime-scene notes," Poole says, "we received a tip that Gaines had been living with his girlfriend at an address in the Hollywood Hills." When Poole and his partner drove there, they discovered themselves at the gated driveway of a mansion belonging to Sharitha Knight, the estranged wife of Suge Knight.

Kevin Gaines and Sharitha Knight had met in 1993 at a gas station on La Brea Avenue, just south of the Santa Monica Freeway. Gaines (who had been reprimanded repeatedly for attempting to pick up women while on duty) pulled up in his patrol car next to her Mercedes, Sharitha Knight recalled, and began a casual conversation that grew more intense when she told the officer who she was. Gaines bet the woman a dinner that she was exaggerating. The two began dating exclusively after he paid off. Though married with children, Gaines soon took up residence in the mansion.

Sharitha Knight was serving at the time as Snoop Dogg's manager, and she obtained work for Gaines as the rapper's bodyguard. She recalled only a single encounter between Gaines and her estranged husband. She, Gaines and several of her relatives were in Las Vegas for a concert that had just ended when they stepped outside and were met by Suge Knight and a man she did not recognize, Sharitha said. Suge and his companion pushed their way into the van that the group was traveling in and asked for a ride to their hotel. Gaines, who was driving, put his gun in his lap and asked, "Where you guys want to go?"

"I'll tell you. Just keep driving," Suge replied, then began whispering into her ear, "threatening me, basically," Sharitha recalled. Eventually she realized Suge was directing them to "this deserted spot," she said, and became alarmed. "That man [Gaines] is a police officer," she told her husband, "and I don't think we're going to play games with you." She told Gaines to turn the van around, Sharitha said, and a few minutes later they dropped Suge off at his hotel. From there, Gaines drove straight to the airport and got on a plane to Los Angeles.

If Kevin Gaines wanted to avoid Suge Knight after this incident, however, he went about it in a strange way. At the time of his death, Gaines' wallet contained a ten-day-old receipt from Monty's Steakhouse, a well-known hangout for Death Row Records executives. A number of LAPD officers reported that Gaines had tried to recruit them to work security at Death Row parties. A black gangster claimed that Gaines was an active member of the Bloods; Suge Knight had long been associated with the Mob Piru Bloods, a branch of the gang based in Compton, a largely black city just south of Los Angeles.

As Poole played connect-the-dots, he tried to understand how Gaines had managed to support his exorbitant lifestyle. The receipt from Monty's showed that the dead officer had paid $952 for a single lunch. Also in Gaines' wallet were nine credit cards, each one carrying high limits. Other patrol officers from the LAPD's Pacific Division told Poole that Gaines regularly showed up for work wearing Versace shirts costing $1,000 apiece. His fleet of cars included a BMW, a Ford Explorer and a Mercedes 420 SEL sporting vanity plates that taunted the LAPD's Internal Affairs Division: its ok ia.

Within the rank and file of the LAPD, stories had been circulating for several years that there was a growing cadre of black officers whose involvement with Death Row superseded their loyalty to the department. (Since 1998, half a dozen black LAPD officers have been suspended for accepting employment with Death Row without obtaining the required permits.) Poole heard rumors that Kevin Gaines not only was regularly employed as a bodyguard for Death Row artists but also worked as a drug courier.

What Poole knew about Gaines for certain was that four individuals had reported that the dead officer menaced them during traffic disputes: One man said Gaines brandished his gun and badge; another told officers that Gaines pointed his pistol through the window of his vehicle. Poole also discovered that Gaines had been detained by LAPD officers on three occasions while off duty. The first incident occurred when he stuck his head through the moon roof of a limousine and shouted at some passing cops, "Fuck the police!" Gaines also was caught stealing the personal property of a fellow officer and should have been fired for the offense, but Internal Affairs claimed it had misplaced the file.

The most bizarre incident had taken place in August 1996, when two LAPD patrol cars responded to a 911 call reporting that shots had been fired at Sharitha Knight's Multiview Drive mansion, and that there was a possible victim near the swimming pool. When officers arrived at the address, they were confronted by a belligerent Kevin Gaines, who was handcuffed after he threw his shoulder into Officer Pedy Gonzalez. Gaines said he hated "fucking cops," Gonzalez recalled. When LAPD audio experts listened to the tape of the 911 call (made from a nearby pay phone), they agreed it was Kevin Gaines' voice. Perhaps strangest of all, Gaines had described himself as the suspect: a black male with a muscular build, five-feet-ten, thirty years old.

"Stiffing in a 911 call is a felony," Poole notes. "Any civilian who did what Gaines did would have faced prison time." Kevin Gaines, though, was never charged with any crime. The investigation of his conduct was handed over to Internal Affairs, which proceeded to build a case for Gaines' dismissal from the department with such deliberation that from a distance it looked like a stall. In the meantime, Gaines hired former Rodney King attorney Milton Grimes to file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city, claiming the incident had damaged his "emotional and psychological well-being."

In early March, a black LAPD officer sent Poole a memo alleging that Gaines regularly used the green Montero (which belonged to Sharitha Knight) to transport cocaine to various locations in Southern California. Poole arranged for two narcotics officers and their drug-sniffing dog to search the Montero. "They got a hit," the detective says. "All they could find was dust, though. The narco officers said that because of the way their dog had reacted, they were sure drugs had been transported in this vehicle."

After speaking to several employees of Death Row who said they knew Kevin Gaines and had seen him at Death Row functions, Poole felt he had enough to launch a full-scale investigation into Gaines' background. "My superiors said there was not enough probable cause for a search warrant," he says. "It was total bullshit. The average citizen's home would have been raided by a whole squad of cops on the basis of what we had. All my superiors would tell me is, 'Gaines is dead. Forget about it.'"

Poole, though, had no doubt about the real reason: "Keeping it all in Internal Affairs is how they hush things up," the detective says. "Criminal cops get protected because the department wants to avoid scandal and publicity." And that protection seemed to increase exponentially whenever the criminal cop was black.

The LAPD's new double standard was nowhere so obvious as in the Gaines-Lyga shooting. While Kevin Gaines was repeatedly sheltered from investigation, Frank Lyga remained under a cloud of suspicion long after the evidence submitted by Poole had demonstrated his innocence. Bernard Parks, now chief of police, ordered Internal Affairs investigators to comb through Lyga's personnel package, breaking down his every use of force during his ten years on the department into categories that included the suspects' race. Even after the LAPD's officer-involved shooting unit and a three-man "shooting board" agreed that Lyga's actions had been within department policy, Parks authorized a costly computer-generated 3-D video model of the shooting, then nullified the ruling of the first shooting board and convened a second, this one made up entirely of black officers. That board also cleared Lyga. Although scandalized by the department's handling of the shooting, Poole knew it would be best for his career to let the matter lie. "I couldn't do that, though," he says. "There were just too many questions left unanswered."

In late March, he received an anonymous call from a tipster who suggested that Gaines should be looked at as a suspect in the March 9th killing of Biggie Smalls. That call was one of the main reasons that Poole agreed, on April 9th, 1997, to take over the Smalls murder investigation.

Part III: The Death Row Connection

Biggie smalls, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Christopher Wallace, had been shot to death in Los Angeles one month earlier. His murder was a virtual replication of Tupac Shakur's killing six months before that. Shakur had been riding in a BMW on the Las Vegas Strip when a white Cadillac pulled up alongside and a black male with a Glock pistol fired thirteen shots into the BMW's passenger side. Four of those bullets hit Shakur, who lingered for several days before dying. Biggie Smalls was riding in a GMC Suburban just past midnight on March 9th, 1997, when the driver of a black Chevrolet Impala SS drove alongside the Suburban and sprayed the SUV with shots from a 9mm pistol. Smalls was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center forty-five minutes later.

A lot of people suspected that the two shootings were connected by more than just the violent milieu of gangsta rap. A number of investigators -- Russell Poole would become perhaps the most outspoken -- believed that the man ultimately responsible for both shootings was Suge Knight. Like many of the rappers who worked for him, Knight had grown up in Compton. Once solidly working-class, Compton had been ravaged by two concurrent developments: first, the loss of its manufacturing base, and second, domination by a pair of murderous gangs, the Bloods and the Crips. Corruption was rampant, especially in the school system, which maintained its own police force.

Knight made his jump out of Compton with a football scholarship to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where he was an all-conference defensive tackle. Though he was drafted by the L.A. Rams, Knight appeared on the team's roster only when he crossed picket lines as a replacement player during the National Football League's 1987 strike; he was cut soon after the real pros returned.

Almost as soon as his football career ended, Knight's criminal career began. In October 1987, his future wife Sharitha Golden filed court papers accusing him of grabbing her by the hair and cutting off her ponytail during an argument in the driveway of her mother's house. Two weeks later, Knight was arrested in Las Vegas for attempted murder, grand-theft auto and use of a deadly weapon in the commission of a crime; eventually he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery.

In 1990, Knight used a loaded pistol to break a man's jaw in Las Vegas and pleaded guilty to felony assault with a deadly weapon, yet he managed to walk away with a $9,000 fine and a two-year suspended sentence. By then, Knight was working as a driver-bodyguard-talent scout for a Beverly Hills sports agent who wanted to get into the music business. Soon after he began using the agent's office to audition rap acts, Knight started to talk about forming his own record label. His best listener was a young rapper named Tracy Curry, who performed as the D.O.C. and was hanging with a group of young men from Compton who would become the core members of the group N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitude). These included Eazy-E (who owned N.W.A's label, Ruthless Records), Ice Cube and a young producer-composer named Andre Young, better known as Dr. Dre.

With the D.O.C. (as later with Tupac Shakur), Knight practiced his greatest skill as a businessman: exploiting an artist's vulnerability. When the D.O.C. was hospitalized after a serious car accident, Knight not only visited him daily but became a chauffeur and confidant to the rapper's mother. Knight eventually persuaded the rapper that Eazy-E was robbing him blind. More important, Knight used his relationship with the D.O.C. to capture the attention of Dr. Dre, who soon became convinced he was not receiving anything like a fair share of royalties from N.W.A's hugely successful album Straight Outta Compton and hired Suge Knight as his personal manager.

Eazy-E reported that Knight and his crew came armed with metal pipes and baseball bats when they showed up at his studio in 1991 to demand that Dr. Dre, the D.O.C. and singer Michel'le be released from their contracts with Ruthless Records. Knight denies the story, but something the big man said or did must have made a powerful impression on Eazy-E, who signed away three of his top acts -- including Dre, the leading talent in rap -- for no compensation whatsoever.

With Dre on board, all Knight needed was backing for his record label, and in 1992 he got it, to the tune of $10 million, from Jimmy Iovine and Ted Field of Interscope, an independent company that received its financing and distribution through Time Warner. During Death Row Records' first full year in business, Dre's album The Chronic and Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle both went platinum, and Death Row grossed more than $60 million.

Suge Knight would quickly position himself as the baddest gangsta around. He publicly embraced his membership in the Mob Piru Bloods, and at his office at Death Row's studios in Tarzana, California, the sofa, chairs and cabinets were all deep red. The carpet was red, too, except for the white outline of Death Row's logo: a man strapped to an electric chair with a sack over his head. A guard with a metal detector greeted guests at the studio's front door and kept a list of "security personnel," many of them members of the Bloods gang, who were permitted to bring guns inside. Executives and journalists were kept waiting for hours; when they were finally admitted to Knight's office, he stood up to give them a good view of his six-foot-two, 315-pound physique, then blew cigar smoke in their faces and told them his German shepherd guard dog, Damu (Swahili for "blood"), was trained to kill on command.

During the early Nineties, Knight was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and convicted of misdemeanor battery in Beverly Hills, convicted of carrying a concealed weapon in West Covina and convicted of disturbing the peace in Van Nuys. But the most serious charge filed against Knight involved a 1992 incident that had taken place in a studio at Solar Records. Irritated that a rapper named Lynwood Stanley was using his company phone line, Knight told him, "Say, Blood, don't be on the phone." "Don't be coming at me with that gangbang shit -- I'm not from L.A.," Stanley reportedly replied. His brother George then hustled Lynwood into a nearby lunch room to use a pay phone. Knight came in after them. The big man pointed a loaded gun at Lynwood's head, then beat both brothers senseless. As they tried to run away, Knight continued to pistol-whip them, then ordered them to their knees. When Lynwood refused, Knight fired off a round, smacked the rapper across the temple with the barrel of his gun and forced both men to take off their pants. He was keeping Lynwood's wallet and ID, Knight said, so that if the brothers went to the cops he could have them and their family members killed. The brothers filed a complaint with the police anyway, and in February 1995 Knight was forced to plead no contest to felony assault. Given his criminal history, it looked as if prison time was inevitable. If Suge Knight had learned anything, however, it was that almost any problem went away when you threw enough money at it. Person after person praised Knight to Judge Stephen Czuleger and pleaded with the judge to keep him out of prison. Among those offering testimonials were Lynwood and George Stanley, who recently had signed a $1 million contract with Death Row Records. Also speaking on Knight's behalf was the deputy district attorney assigned to prosecute him, Lawrence Longo, who observed that Knight had become the head of one of the country's largest record companies, a business that employed numerous residents of Los Angeles County, then recommended a nine-year suspended sentence, with five years of probation.

Judge Czuleger -- who did not know that a few months later, Longo's eighteen-year-old daughter was going to sign a recording contract with Death Row, or that a few months after this, Suge Knight would move into Longo's Malibu Colony home, or that Knight's attorney David Kenner would pay the prosecutor's family $19,000 in rent each month -- went along with the deal.

Many people in Los Angeles were confused and frightened by Knight's alliance with David Kenner, a ferociously intense criminal attorney who during the past two decades had represented some of the city's best-known murderers, drug dealers and stock swindlers. The two clearly had developed a relationship that was more than attorney-client, but Kenner (who had been introduced to Knight by the drug lord who reportedly helped Knight get started in business) insisted it was nothing else. All anyone could know for certain was that, with the lawyer at his side, Knight seemed to believe he had become invulnerable.

After a short stretch in a halfway house for the felony-assault conviction, Knight moved back into his Encino mansion and began celebrating his biggest coup to date: the signing of rap's brightest star, Tupac Shakur. Shakur was in New York state's Dannemora prison during the summer of 1995, serving a sentence of up to fifty-two months for a sexual-assault conviction. During the previous three years, he had been arrested eight times, narrowly avoiding conviction in the 1993 shooting of two off-duty Atlanta police officers and barely escaping death when he was shot five times in the lobby of Quad Recording Studios in New York's Times Square. Despite recording three successful albums in this same period, Shakur was broke. Suge Knight recognized an opportunity. Even as Knight battled to stay out of prison himself during that spring and summer, he made a series of trips to Dannemora, eventually convincing Shakur that if the rapper agreed to join Death Row's roster, he would be out of custody in short order. One week after Shakur signed a three-page agreement handwritten by David Kenner, the New York Court of Appeals released him from prison on $1.4 million bail. Interscope put up the money, and when Shakur walked out of Dannemora, Knight and Kenner were waiting outside in a white stretch limousine.

Shakur's first album for Death Row, All Eyez on Me, sold 7 million copies. Knight draped his stars in luscious groupies and ruby-studded jewelry. When David Kenner beat the murder charge that had been filed against Snoop Dogg, Death Row celebrated by purchasing four Rolls-Royces.

But Knight was about to experience a rapid reversal of fortune. And Tupac Shakur, all of twenty-five, had only a few months left to live.

Around the time that word of Knight's financial dealings with the Longo family was leaked to the media (resulting in the prosecutor's firing), Dr. Dre announced that he was leaving Death Row to start his own label. Though Knight would let Dre go, with Shakur it was more complicated. From the outside, the two men appeared to be bonded in battle against a pair of common enemies, Sean "Puffy" Combs of Bad Boy Entertainment and Bad Boy's most successful rapper, Biggie Smalls. Shakur believed that either Combs or Smalls or both had been behind his shooting at the Quad studio, and when Smalls recorded a song titled "Who Shot Ya," Shakur took it as a taunt.

Knight, meanwhile, not only insisted that Bad Boy was stealing money out of his pocket by putting out weak imitations of Death Row's product but blamed Combs personally for the murder of his favorite thug, Jake "The Violator" Robles, in an Atlanta nightclub. (Combs has denied any involvement in the incident.) Shakur reportedly was with Knight and several other men at a Christmas party in a Hollywood Hills mansion where a friend of Combs' was tied to a chair, beaten with broken champagne bottles, then forced to drink his own urine while Knight demanded to be given not only Combs' address but his mother's, too. (Knight claims it never happened.)

By that time, Shakur seemed to be making plans for his escape from Death Row. His big move -- and the one that people predicted would do him in -- was to fire David Kenner as his attorney in late August that year. Knight publicly said that he had no problem with Shakur and invited the rapper to join him in Las Vegas for the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon heavyweight-title fight on September 7th, 1996, and a party afterward at Knight's club, 662. (On a phone keypad, those numbers can spell m-o-b, for "Member of the Bloods.")

Shakur wanted to drive his Hummer to the club, but Knight persuaded him they had business to discuss, and Shakur rode in the passenger seat of Knight's black BMW without his usual company of bodyguards. They hadn't gone far when that white Cadillac came alongside and a black male inside opened up with his Glock. For months afterward, it was rumored that Puffy Combs, or at least someone affiliated with him, was behind Shakur's killing, and that the Death Row crew had answered back with the hit on Biggie Smalls.

Smalls, Combs and their combined New York entourages had flown in to Los Angeles to attend the Soul Train Music Awards on the evening of March 8th. After the awards, the Bad Boy group (which included several armed bodyguards) arrived in a caravan of five SUVs for an afterparty at the Petersen Automotive Museum in L.A.'s Wilshire district. The group left the party at a little past midnight, led by a Suburban carrying Combs. Smalls was in the passenger seat of another Suburban following close behind when both vehicles stopped for a red light at the intersection of Wilshire and Fairfax boulevards. The dark Impala immediately pulled up alongside.

Rapper James "Lil' Caesar" Lloyd, who had been riding with Smalls, said that Smalls and the shooter, a black man who wore a dark suit and a bow tie, made eye contact but spoke not a word. "Every single shot fired hit Big's door," Lloyd said. "They was after him."

By mid-April, when Biggie Smalls' eerily titled new album, Life After Death, was the best-selling record in the country, the LAPD had said little to suggest they were closing in on the rapper's killer. Investigators were focusing on what the Los Angeles Times described as "bicoastal tensions within the rap world," but twenty detectives working full-time for two weeks were unable to produce any solid evidence.

Though the suspicion of investigators in the Smalls murder fell at once on Suge Knight, the cops also lent some credence to a claim that Smalls had been killed by a member of the Southside Crips who claimed the rapper owed him either money or a job. "The story that the Crips did it looked good at first but never led anywhere," Russell Poole recalls. "The brass liked it, though, because it was simple."

Poole already had complicated his own situation by asking why he was assigned to the case four weeks after the shooting. "I can't think of another murder case with that kind of high profile where Major Crimes wasn't called in right from the start," Poole says. "This was a month after the murder, and no one from LAPD had gone near Death Row Records."

The law wasn't exactly leaving Suge Knight alone, however. In December 1996, the Los Angeles Times reported that Death Row's accountant, Steve Cantrock, had signed a document saying he stole $4.5 million from the company. Though he later denied any wrongdoing, Cantrock signed his name, the accountant told federal investigators, while on his knees in the living room of a San Fernando Valley house, surrounded by Knight, Kenner and several other men who made it clear to him that the alternative was death. (Knight has denied making any physical threats against Cantrock.)

Four months later, Tupac Shakur's mother filed a racketeering suit against Death Row, Knight and Kenner, accusing them of conspiring to steal from her son. By then, many of the label's best-known performers, most notably Snoop Dogg, were planning to leave Death Row. And Suge Knight had just checked into a cell at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo.

A couple of hours before Tupac Shakur's murder, Knight, Shakur and several members of their entourage had spotted a Southside Crip named Orlando Anderson (better known as Baby Lane) near the elevators in the MGM Grand and cornered him in a hallway where they beat, kicked and stomped him for several minutes. "Suge couldn't believe they were gonna call that a violation of his probation, but they did," Poole recalls.

By then, Judge Czuleger knew all about Suge Knight's dealings with Lawrence Longo and his family. The new prosecutor on the case was informed by the LAPD that less than a week after Tupac Shakur's murder, a reliable informant told officers that Suge Knight had just delivered a load of AK-47 assault rifles to Bloods members in the Nickerson Gardens housing project. One month later, four Bloods members were arrested as they left the Death Row studio; when the four were searched, police found a semiautomatic handgun and two ski masks. It had become difficult indeed for David Kenner or his stand-ins to argue that Knight was merely a businessman operating in an exotic environment. On February 28th, 1997, Czuleger not only revoked Knight's probation but also ordered that he serve all nine years of his previously suspended sentence.

Part IV: Who Killed Biggie Smalls?

One week after Russell Poole took over the Biggie Smalls murder investigation, the media learned that as many as a dozen law-enforcement officers had been on the scene when Smalls was shot to death. Six cops had been working for Smalls that night. The rapper was being shadowed as well by an assortment of undercover officers from the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The New York cops believed that the same man who shot Tupac Shakur at Quad Studios had killed one of their off-duty officers and might still be working for either Puffy Combs or Biggie Smalls. The ATF officers were part of a federal task force investigating allegations that employees of Death Row Records were involved in money laundering and the sale of stolen weapons.

Members of Biggie's entourage told the police they doubted the murder had been in retaliation for Shakur's killing. If it was about that, they wondered, why hadn't the killer tried to get Combs, too? On the other hand, with his bow tie and dark suit, the shooter looked a lot more like a member of the Nation of Islam security group, Fruit of Islam, than of the Southside Crips. Poole took the Muslim story more seriously when an informant said Biggie Smalls had been taken out by a contract killer named "Amir or Ashmir."

Poole made a pair of trips to Las Vegas in the spring of 1997 to interview detectives working the Shakur case. Las Vegas detectives showed Poole an entire file cabinet stuffed with clues they had collected in connection to the Shakur shooting, but the investigation was going nowhere. Nobody there, Poole concluded, wanted an O.J.-style circus.

"The Las Vegas detectives said their interview with Suge Knight was very strange," Poole recalls. "Knight said he had been cut on the head by a piece of glass, but he kept telling them he was hit with a bullet. They thought it was an act, that he had cut himself. And he kept telling them it was the Crips who killed Shakur, which was weird, because these gangbangers never snitch on each other."

Though he had no hard evidence, Poole continued to believe that the most plausible theory of Biggie Smalls' murder was that it had been ordered by Suge Knight. Poole would construct a timeline documenting the various leads of his investigation. According to the document, in June 1997, a male employee of Death Row told police that he had heard Knight boast about killing Smalls. One month later, another Death Row employee, this one a woman, informed detectives that David Kenner had actually ordered the hit. An inmate at California's Corcoran State Prison, meanwhile, reported that his cellmate, a member of the Mob Piru Bloods, said Knight had hired a fellow gang member to kill Smalls.

Poole was growing disenchanted with the atmosphere in the Robbery-Homicide Division. "We're supposed to be the elite of the LAPD, but there was this country-club atmosphere all through the division," he says. "A lot of the top detectives were older guys just waiting to retire. They had seen what happened to the detectives on the O.J. Simpson case, and none of them wanted to get caught up in something like that."

Poole's colleagues, meanwhile, were starting to consider him a pain in the ass. The guy was irritatingly earnest, some of his fellow detectives complained. On the wall above his desk, Poole had tacked a sheet of paper bearing the homicide investigator's creed: "No greater honor will ever be bestowed on an officer or a more profound duty imposed on him than when he is entrusted with the investigation of the death of a human being. It is his duty to find the facts regardless of color or creed without prejudice, and to let no power on earth deter him from presenting these facts to the court."

"Russell Poole is an extremely tenacious investigator and a man of extremely high standards," says George Castello, a deputy district attorney who worked several homicide cases with Poole during the early 1990s. "The only complaint I've ever heard about the guy is that he just won't quit."

A great deal of what Poole learned about the way "security" functioned at Death Row came from Shakur's former bodyguard Kevin Hackie. According to Hackie, Knight had given a former officer who worked in a Compton school, Reggie Wright Jr., $300,000 to start his company, Wrightway Security. Knight and Wright agreed early on to hire off-duty black police officers to work for Death Row, Hackie said, which, among other things, obviated the need for obtaining gun permits. In July 1997, Poole discovered that one of the LAPD officers who had been working for Death Row was from the Newton Division, and that he had been present in Las Vegas when Shakur was killed. "Somehow, though, the LAPD brass managed not to find out about it until ten months later," Poole recalls.

Shortly after Shakur's death, LAPD officers were at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles for an awards banquet thrown by Knight for Snoop Dogg. When Snoop took the stage to proclaim his Crips loyalty, another member in the audience displayed his blue gang colors and was attacked by a mob of Bloods -- who beat him to death while off-duty police officers were present. According to a Long Beach police officer who had gone undercover (as part of a federally coordinated task force) to work for Wrightway Security, all of the off-duty officers who were there left the El Rey without giving statements to LAPD investigators.

The Long Beach officer made another interesting statement, which was that "Suge Knight used to slap Snoop Dogg around like he was a little girl." Snoop would strike back on May Day 1998, shortly after leaving Death Row to join Master P at No Limit Records. That evening, Master P brought Snoop onstage to perform one song in the middle of a concert at L.A.'s Universal Amphitheater. As soon as Snoop walked away from the microphone, he was surrounded by five gangsters. When one of them punched Snoop in the face, the rapper broke free and ran toward the metal detector behind the stage, where he knew that a pair of deputies from the nearby L.A. County sheriff's substation were posted. After the deputies called for backup, it took another twenty deputies, along with fifty security guards, to break up a mob of young black males that had grown to more than sixty. Once they got Snoop inside the substation, deputies did a pat-down search and found a baggie filled with marijuana in the rapper's hip pocket. The lieutenant who commanded the substation interviewed Snoop personally and relayed the account to Poole. "I think I know who killed Tupac," the lieutenant said.

"I do, too: the guy who was seated next to him," Snoop replied. "You mean Suge Knight?" the lieutenant asked. "Yes," Snoop answered.

Shakur's bodyguard Frank Alexander told Poole why Knight would want Shakur killed: Knight owed Shakur $4 million and didn't want to pay it, especially if the rapper was going to embarrass him by leaving Death Row. "Alexander also said Knight knew he was being videotaped in the beating of Orlando Anderson," Poole says, "and staged that whole thing to give himself cover for Tupac's killing. I eventually came to believe that Anderson was paid to be there and take that beating." Poole never had a chance to interrogate Anderson, though, because Baby Lane was shot dead on a Compton street corner in the spring of 1998. By then, the next-best witness to Tupac Shakur's murder, Yafeu Fula, already had been killed, shot in the head at point-blank range on the grounds of a New Jersey housing project.

"Knight always reminds everybody that he was sitting right there when Shakur got shot," Poole recalls, "but Snoop Dogg, Frank Alexander and Kevin Hackie all said Suge was perfectly capable of taking the chance he would be shot in order to cover up his involvement in the murder. All three also said that Tupac knew he was gonna die soon, because you just don't get out of Death Row alive."

As for the hit on Biggie Smalls, Alexander and Hackie said, it not only served a business purpose for Suge Knight (killing off his main rival's biggest star) but also further distanced him from Tupac Shakur's murder. "They said Suge knew he would automatically be a suspect in the Smalls shooting," Poole says, "and that everybody would say he had it done as revenge for Shakur's death." That all sounded pretty complicated, Poole agrees, "but Hackie and Alexander both told me that Suge Knight was one of the shrewdest gangsters around."

Poole's concern that L.A. cops had been present on the night of the Biggie Smalls killing mounted as he learned more about the illicit nature of Death Row's business dealings. The U.S. Justice Department had already established to its satisfaction that the original seed money for Death Row was provided by Michael "Harry-O" Harris, a notorious Compton drug kingpin who was then in state prison for attempted murder and assorted narcotics convictions. David Kenner had been Harris' criminal attorney, and it was Harris who introduced Kenner to Suge Knight. According to Harris, he met with Knight and Kenner while in prison in 1991 and agreed to put up the money to start a rap label, in exchange for half the company. When Knight and Kenner failed to honor that agreement, Harris threatened to sue Interscope and Time Warner to obtain his half of Death Row's profits.

The Long Beach officer who had gone undercover for the feds said Death Row employees had told him that, before starting the record company, Knight made most of his money by dealing drugs he stole from Hispanic suppliers. And Death Row employees continued to serve as go-betweens for the transport of kilos of cocaine from the West Coast to the East Coast by both Bloods and Crips, the undercover officer said; the gangbangers paid $18,500 a kilo in L.A. and sold it in New York for $26,000 a kilo. "Death Row was making millions," Poole says, "but Suge was spending money even faster than it came in. When I went to Las Vegas, I learned that his bill from the Luxor Hotel for that weekend when Tupac Shakur was killed came to $1.3 million."

Most disturbing and most intriguing to Poole were reports that a cadre of LAPD officers had been working as cross-country drug couriers for Death Row, moving huge amounts of cocaine from west to east. One of these officers was Kevin Gaines, a former Death Row employee told Poole.

Around this same time, a guard at Lancaster State Prison advised the LAPD's Internal Affairs Division that an inmate there (who claimed to have "loaned" Suge Knight the money to start Death Row) said that Kevin Gaines was one of the LAPD officers who worked as "lookouts and advisers" during Death Row-brokered drug deals. Shortly after Gaines' death, the Lancaster inmate told investigators, "Just wait until they search his house and see all the expensive things he got from working for Death Row." Poole was never able to prove the allegations.

When Poole insisted to his superiors that this statement justified warrants to search Gaines' home and financial records, the detective was again rebuffed. But Poole wasn't ready to give up. He went back to the notes from his interview with Kevin Hackie. He wanted to see what the bodyguard had said when asked if he could identify the LAPD officers closest to Suge Knight. All he could be sure of, Hackie said, was that three cops had showed up regularly at Knight's "private parties." Kevin Gaines was the only one whose name he knew. A few months later, Hackie would identify the second officer as David Mack. Hackie did not identify the third officer until more than two years later, when he was shown a photograph of Rafael Perez.

Part V: The Bank Robbery

Like Suge Knight, David Mack had grown up north of Alondra Boulevard in Compton -- Bloods territory. And, like Knight, Mack had left the neighborhood on an athletic scholarship. At the University of Oregon, in the early 1980s, Mack won three Pac-Ten conference titles and an NCAA championship in the 800 meters. After a leg injury kept him out of the 1984 Olympics and cut short his track career, Mack joined the LAPD. He started out on patrol duty in the department's Southeast and Rampart divisions but soon was turned loose on the streets as an undercover narcotics officer. In 1993, he was awarded the LAPD's second-highest honor, the Police Medal, for shooting a drug dealer who had allegedly pointed a gun at the head of his partner, Rafael "Ray" Perez.

Soon after that, Mack gave up his assignment to the Narcotics Bureau to work the graveyard shift in West L.A. He needed to spend more time with his wife, son and daughter, Mack said. But the flexibility of his new schedule also allowed the officer to devote more hours to his extracurricular activities. Among these was his relationship with Errolyn Romero, who was a nineteen- year-old ticket taker at the Baldwin Theater when Mack first asked her out in 1990.

The two still were involved in August 1997, when Romero went to work at the enormous Bank of America branch at Jefferson Avenue and South Hoover Street, just north of the USC campus. Normally the bank kept about $350,000 cash in the vault, but slightly more than double that amount had just been delivered by armored car on the morning of November 6th, 1997, when a black male wearing a three-piece gray suit, sunglasses and a tweed beret, walked into the bank and headed for the bulletproof door that separated the tellers from customers. After the man in the suit told a security guard that he wanted to get into his safe-deposit box, Romero buzzed him through the first gate, then left her window and unlocked a second security door that opened into the vault area. The man immediately shoved Romero to the floor, opened his suit jacket to reveal the Tec-9 semiautomatic assault pistol hanging from a shoulder strap, pointed it at two women counting the cash and told them, "Don't touch those fucking pagers or I'll blow your fucking heads off! I want all the money Brinks just brought! Don't lose your life over money that's not yours."

By the time the robber and his two accomplices abandoned their white van a half-mile away, they had pulled off one of the biggest heists in Los Angeles history. But their execution was far superior to their planning. Within a week, the Bank of America's corporate security division informed the FBI that its USC branch had far more cash on hand at the time of the robbery than was authorized and that the money had been ordered by assistant manager Errolyn Romero. The bank sent Romero to the LAPD's Parker Center headquarters on December 16th, 1997, to take a polygraph test administered by an FBI agent and two detectives from the department's Robbery-Homicide Division. After telling Romero that she had failed the polygraph, the detectives showed her a batch of bank-security photographs of the robber who had been with her in the vault

Visibly upset, Romero would not answer yes or no when asked whether she could identify the man. Instead, she opened her purse, took out a business card and pushed it across the table to the detectives, who were more than a little startled to see that it was emblazoned with an LAPD badge and the name Officer David Mack. Mack was carrying 14 hundred-dollar bills in his wallet when he was arrested that evening. Police found another $2,600 in fifties upon searching his house, along with receipts and invoices for $18,000 in cash purchases that had been made in the six weeks since the robbery -- all hidden under the carpet in a closet. Officers also recovered the Tec-9 pistol and shoulder strap Mack had used in the robbery. What most interested Russell Poole, however, was the black Impala SS parked in Mack's garage next to a wall decorated with Tupac Shakur posters and memorabilia; detectives described it as a sort of "shrine" to the slain rapper.

"As soon as I learned that David Mack owned a vehicle that matched the one used in the Biggie Smalls killing and that Mack had used it in the bank robbery, I asked to have it tested by our forensics people," Poole recalls. "But the brass said they didn't want to step on the FBI's toes. What bullshit! What they didn't want was to find out that one of our officers was implicated in Biggie Smalls' murder."

Poole's interest in Mack only increased with each report he received from the detectives working the bank-robbery case. Like Knight, Mack professed to be a Muslim; Biggie Smalls' killer looked like a Muslim, witnesses had said. A security guard who had worked the door at the Petersen museum party remembered speaking to a pair of Muslims who were loitering near the entrance and said that one of them looked like David Mack. Mack had been seen at numerous Death Row Records functions and was known for dressing in the same red suits that Knight and his entourage favored. At the Montebello City Jail, where Mack was locked up after his arrest, Poole learned that he had told the other inmates they shouldn't fuck with him because he was a member of the Mob Piru Bloods.

Mack did not become the primary focus of Poole's investigation, however, until the detective learned that the first person to visit the officer in jail was a man who went by the name Amir Muhammed.

"'Amir or Ashmir,' our informant had said, was the killer's name," Poole notes. Muhammed had been Harry Billups when he joined Mack on the track team at the University of Oregon.

Poole took a deep breath when he saw the photocopy of the driver's license photo Muhammed had presented at the jail: While Mack looked nothing like the composite drawing of Biggie Smalls' killer, Muhammed bore a distinct resemblance to the suspect. He had signed in as a visitor at the Montebello jail using a false address and Social Security number. When Robbery-Homicide detectives did a computer search on him, they turned up eight prior addresses, each with no forwarding.

During an interview with Smalls' closest friend, Damion Butler, Poole showed him a "six-pack" photo lineup. "I'm sure this guy was standing just outside the door to the museum as we were entering into the party," Butler said, pointing to a photograph in the upper right-hand corner. It was Mack's mug shot.

From the moment of his arrest, Mack had acted more like a gangster than a police officer. Even as detectives from the Bank Robbery squad read him his rights, Mack smirked and told them, "Take your best shot." In custody, he not only warned fellow inmates that he was a member of the Bloods, but boasted that the nearly $700,000 remaining from the bank robbery was "invested" in a way that would double by the time he was released from prison. He could do eight years standing on his head, Mack said, and would be a rich man when he got out.

Soon after his transfer to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, Mack reportedly arranged to have Errolyn Romero killed, but the would-be hit man got nervous at the last minute and went to the police. The FBI and the LAPD promptly had Romero transferred to the special housing unit at the women's jail.

Romero now intended to use a "duress" defense at trial, claiming Mack had intimidated her into cooperating in the robbery. "The weak and those who talk too much get eliminated," Mack told her. Her boyfriend claimed to have shot three people to death while working as an undercover cop, Romero said, and when Mack had described the circumstances of one particular fatal shooting, she told her boyfriend he should have aimed at the man's legs, instead of his body; Mack's reply was that he didn't want the person to testify about the circumstances of the shooting.

On the basis of Romero's story, LAPD detectives re-investigated the shooting, in which Mack allegedly had saved his partner Perez's life, and reported that they had found nothing improper. "I was sure that shooting was dirty," Poole says, "but I couldn't get any of the brass interested in taking another look at it."

Eventually, a pair of eyewitnesses whom the police had failed to interview would come forward to say that the victim, Jesse Vicencio, never drew his gun before Mack shot him dead. Mack and Perez still insist that the shooting was "good." But Poole didn't consider these shooting incidents the most significant entries in Mack's personnel file. What riveted Poole's attention were the dates of Mack's "family illness" leaves. "Most coppers very rarely take FI days," Poole explains. "You only get a few, and most of us save them for a major emergency." But Mack had taken a series of days off that coincided with two events -- one was the bank robbery and the other, Biggie Smalls' murder.

For Poole, this was the strongest evidence yet to implicate Mack in the Smalls shooting. Once again, though, the detective's superiors in the department closed the door to further investigation. And the LAPD not only failed to run forensic tests on Mack's Impala, but it made no search at all for Amir Muhammed, beyond running his name through a computer.

Months later, the Los Angeles Times published an article that -- in a naked contradiction of the paper's earlier reporting on the subject -- would clear Amir Muhammed of any involvement in the Biggie Smalls case. While saying there wasn't sufficient evidence to call Muhammed a suspect, the later Times article did not include any explanation of why he had used a false address and Social Security number when he visited Mack in jail, however, nor did it examine the LAPD's failure to fully investigate Mack and Muhammed as suspects in the Smalls murder.

Part VI: Inventing the Scandal

Poole first heard of Rafael Perez after looking at Mack's personnel file and reading the official account of Vicencio's shooting. Perez had told investigators he owed his life to David Mack and would do anything for him. The lead detectives on the bank robbery, Brian Tyndall and Gregory Grant, had called in Perez for questioning two days after Mack's arrest. A short time later the detectives learned that Perez and another detective in LAPD's Rampart Division, Sammy Martin, left for Las Vegas less than forty-eight hours after the robbery, staying in a $1,500-a-night suite and blowing through $21,000 in a single weekend. On a trip to Lake Tahoe, the three even posed together for a photograph: Mack in his Blood red suit, flanked by Martin and Perez, each holding expensive cigars. Like Kevin Gaines and David Mack, Poole soon learned, Perez had for some time been enjoying a lifestyle that was impossible to support on a $55,000-a-year police salary. He drove high-priced cars, took Caribbean cruises, lost thousands at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas and apparently thought nothing of spending $400 or $500 in an evening to entertain one young girlfriend after another.

Born in Puerto Rico of African and Hispanic ancestry, Perez grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. He enlisted in the Marine Corps straight out of high school and entered the LAPD academy at the age of twenty-one. Driven and intense, Perez had a lithe body and a remarkably handsome face. He advanced quickly within the LAPD. As members of the West Bureau Buy Team, he and Mack had accepted the most dangerous of duties, purchasing narcotics in notorious gang neighborhoods. Perez loved the work. "Just by its nature there is constant danger, a constant rush," the detective who ran the buy team, Bobby Lutz, would tell the Los Angeles Times. "Those guys were on the edge all the time. . . . They lap it up; they relish it."

In 1994, Perez was transferred to the Rampart Division's CRASH unit. Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH, was the LAPD's elite anti-gang unit. The department estimated that Los Angeles was home to 403 distinct gangs, claiming nearly 60,000 members. The year that Perez joined CRASH, gang members committed almost 11,000 crimes in the city, by the LAPD's accounting, including 408 homicides. About ten percent of all the city's gang crimes were occurring in the Rampart Division, eight square miles of decaying apartment buildings and scabrous storefronts located between Hollywood and downtown. Rampart neighborhoods were the most densely populated in Los Angeles, home to perhaps the highest percentage of illegal immigrants in the state. Vendors who peddled oranges and rock cocaine worked side by side, while nannies and gardeners who sent half their paychecks back home waited for buses along the perimeter of McArthur Park, which had become probably the largest open-air drug market in the U.S.

Most of that drug trade was controlled by the Eighteenth Street Gang, by far the city's biggest, with as many as 20,000 members scattered in subgroups, or "cliques," up and down the West Coast, from Tijuana, Mexico, to Portland, Oregon. The gang wove together layers of criminal enterprise that used a system of "tax" collection to link drug trafficking all the way from the powerful, prison-based Mexican mafia at the top to the small-time independent dealers at the bottom. More than 150 murders were tied to the Eighteenth Street Gang between 1985 and 1995. Residents all across the city, and especially in the neighborhoods most affected, wanted the gang dealt with.

In this context, joining CRASH during the mid-1990s was more like becoming a Special Forces fighter in a wartime army than anything resembling traditional police work. An officer's performance was judged almost entirely by how many gangsters he put behind bars. Rampart's CRASH team not only had its own logo -- the aces and eights of Wild Bill Hickock's Dead Man's Hand -- but even its own headquarters in a detective substation a mile from the main division station. We intimidate those who intimidate others, read the motto above the front entrance. Officers worked mostly at night and without any real supervision. If an officer made arrests that led to convictions, he was doing a good job; if not, he lacked the "initiative" that anti-gang work required.

Ray Perez had been a top "producer" as an undercover narcotics cop and continued to make a high number of arrests on the Rampart CRASH unit. And perhaps no other detective on the LAPD could match his effectiveness as a witness in court. Public defender Tamar Toister recalls feeling helpless as she watched Perez testify against her client Javier Ovando in early 1997. Toister figured that both judge and jury might feel sympathy for her client. Perez and his partner, Nino Durden, shot Ovando three times in the process of arresting him, and the nineteen-year-old was left paralyzed from the waist down. Ovando had to be wheeled into court on a gurney at his preliminary hearing and would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

But after Perez described how Ovando (whose gang name was Sniper) had attempted to ambush him and his partner with an assault rifle, Ovando's fate was sealed. "He was better on the witness stand," Toister says, "than any police officer I've ever cross-examined: smooth, sincere, articulate, with just the right amount of emotion." Duly impressed, Judge Stephen Czuleger sentenced Ovando to twenty-three years in state prison -- even more time than the prosecutor had asked for. "That was entirely due to how good Perez had been on the stand," Toister says. "I have to admit, I believed him myself."

Perez's career probably would be thriving still if Poole hadn't started looking into the detective's involvement with Mack at almost exactly the same time a clerk in the LAPD's Property Division discovered that more than six pounds of pure cocaine had been either lost or stolen. Even then, only Perez's bad luck permitted the LAPD to tie him to the missing coke. The dope had been signed out on March 2nd, 1998, to LAPD officer Joel Perez, who was startled by an April notice asking him to return it to the Property Division. He hadn't checked out any three kilos of coke, Joel Perez said. Shown a sign-out sheet bearing his name and badge number, the officer insisted it was a forgery. The property officer who had released the coke, Laura Castellanos, said she didn't remember ever seeing Joel but did recall handing over a carton of narcotics to an Officer Ray Perez. Once detectives put Ray under surveillance, they began to wonder just how large a criminal conspiracy they were dealing with. "Perez and Durden and Sammy Martin were meeting for lunch every day," Poole says. "Then they'd reconnoiter in the middle of the night behind a urinal stall in Griffith Park."

By late spring of 1998, Perez was the target of a specially formed LAPD unit. Today it is called the Rampart Task Force, but back then it was known simply as the Robbery-Homicide Task Force, and its creation was almost entirely a response to the detective work of Poole. "The connections that Russ Poole had made between the David Mack bank robbery and the Biggie Smalls murder, including the possibility that LAPD officers might be involved, were the origin of the task force," says Richard Rosenthal, the first prosecutor assigned to the task force by the district attorney's office. "Then you had the theft of the cocaine, and at that point, Chief Parks says, 'OK, wait. What's going on here?'"

By 1998, task-force detectives realized that Perez had for some time been taking advantage of the LAPD's absurdly loose system for checking out drugs as court evidence. Essentially, all a detective had to do was make a phone call to the Property Division, give his last name and badge number, then ask that the dope be sent to him by courier. The drugs had to be returned, of course, but the Property Division rarely checked to find out whether what they got back was pure cocaine or a bag of Bisquick.

A "close audit" of all narcotics evidence checked out during the previous six months swiftly turned up a second (and earlier) suspicious transfer of cocaine to the Rampart Division, this one involving a pound booked into evidence by Detective Frank Lyga. Poole soon became convinced -- and so did several other detectives -- that Perez had targeted Lyga's coke as retaliation for the shooting of Kevin Gaines. "We all agreed this was just way too big a coincidence," says Poole. In July 1998, while still under surveillance, Perez was photographed in a "romantic embrace" with a juicy-looking nightclub singer whom he knew as Bella Rios. Her real name was Veronica Quesada. During one surveillance operation, Poole and another detective knocked at her door at a time when they knew she would answer.

"Veronica Quesada knows English, but she wouldn't speak it to us," Poole says. "She kept saying, 'No comprendo.' She's no easy mark, I can tell you that." Frustrated, Poole began to look about the woman's living room, where he spotted a photograph of Ray Perez wearing a red sweat suit and flashing a Bloods gang sign. "I remember thinking, 'I knew it,'" Poole recalls. A moment later, Quesada's brother Carlos Romero walked into the apartment carrying a quarter-pound of cocaine. "The brother was so dumbfounded, he just stood there," says Poole. "It might have been the easiest coke bust in history."

Within a couple of weeks, detectives from the task force established numerous links between Perez, Quesada and Carlos Romero. The most significant of these was that in the past year both Quesada and Romero had been convicted of felonies for dealing cocaine, yet each had received a suspended sentence. In both cases, the judges who heard their cases received requests for leniency from Detective Ray Perez.

At the time of her arrest in April 1997, detectives learned that Quesada was in possession of "pay/owe" sheets bearing the initials "RP" and the phone number for the Rampart Division. On the date that the three kilos of cocaine were checked out of the LAPD's Property Division, supposedly by officer Joel Perez, Ray Perez had made a total of eight phone calls to Quesada and Romero. The detective had made more than 160 calls to the same numbers between November 1997 and June 1998. When questioned, Perez explained both his requests for leniency and the phone calls by claiming that Quesada was a "former informant" with whom he had, unfortunately, become sexually involved. "The guy was cool under questioning," says Poole. "But when I saw him one afternoon at the police academy, you could tell he was scared shitless. He was looking around all the time, over his shoulder and behind his back. He knew we were closing in on him."

Part VII: Neutralizing Detective Poole

By the time Perez was arrested, on August 25th, 1998, Poole had come to understand that his superiors in the LAPD saw him as part of the problem, not the solution. Even his transfer to the task force, Poole believed, had been an attempt to contain him. The detective's insistence on a full investigation of the Biggie Smalls murder was at the root of his troubles with the brass. "We had had a series of incomplete investigations," Poole says, "and it was orchestrated to be that way, because policemen were involved. I had become convinced that LAPD officers were involved in the conspiracy to kill Biggie Smalls, and none of brass wanted to hear that."

Poole figured the reasons were pretty simple: "What kind of wrongful-death lawsuit do you think Smalls' wife and mother would have had if it could be proven that LAPD officers were responsible for the murder?"

During the spring of 1998, Poole engaged in a series of confrontations over the handling of the Smalls case, first with the senior detective who was his partner, then with the lieutenant and captain who supervised them. "I told the captain, 'If you want the Smalls case solved, you've got to give it to me alone,'" says Poole. Several days later, Poole found a hand-drawn cartoon on his desk showing a toilet and the plumbing pipes connected to it. The words "You Are Here" were connected by an arrow to a turd lodged in the pipes.

After an aborted attempt to transfer him out of Robbery-Homicide, the captain arranged for Poole's removal by offering him a more prestigious assignment. "He comes to me and says, 'Russ, how would you like to join the task force and be in charge of Biggie Smalls and the connections to Mack and the bank robbery?'" says Poole. "I said, 'I'd love to.' But almost as soon as I joined the task force, they told me I was off the Smalls case.

"Suddenly they wanted me to concentrate on Perez. When they were first forming the task force, the main targets were supposed to be David Mack and any other police officers who might be involved in either the bank robbery or the Biggie Smalls case. And Perez was sort of an afterthought. That's what they said. But it was all bogus. I knew it was coming down from the top, but I had to figure it out on my own."

Poole soon concluded that the main intent of the task force was not to expand the investigation but to limit it. "The first thing I did was read through Perez's reports, about 125 of them, and it's like this guy is Superman, like he has X-ray vision or something, because he's making all these fantastic busts and dope seizures where he seems to see through walls." Again and again, Poole noted, Perez would report that suspects had signed consent-to-search forms. "He had all these dope dealers telling him where their stash was even before they confessed," says Poole. "That never happens. You bust a dealer, they figure, 'Fuck you, find the shit yourself.' Any cop would look at them and know they were fake."

At almost the moment Poole began to think in this vein, his supervisors reduced his role in the Perez investigation so that he could concentrate on an incident involving another member of the Rampart CRASH unit, Brian Hewitt, who was accused of viciously beating Eighteenth Street Gang member Ismael Jimenez. "It became clear pretty fast that Hewitt was a sadist," says Poole. "He really liked beating people up. He got off on it."

Poole's investigation of Hewitt marked a major turning point in the task force's mission. Up to that point, all of the officers under investigation for criminal conduct were black, except Perez, who was of mixed ancestry. Hewitt, however, was a blue-eyed blond. And the case against him was not for murder, bank robbery or drug dealing but for brutality. "It seemed very strange when they moved me over to the Hewitt-Jimenez case," recalls Poole. "I kept wondering, 'What is this about?' Then they partnered me with an officer from Internal Affairs."

Poole went to the task-force commander, Lt. Emmanuel Hernandez, to complain that he was being pressured not to make a criminal case against Hewitt. "What I didn't realize then," he explains, "was that Hernandez and Chief Parks didn't want this case ever to go to court, because they were still trying to cover up an earlier case involving Hewitt and Perez that they should have used to clean up Rampart way back in September 1995."

In that case, Hewitt, Perez and an officer named Stephanie Barr were accused of criminal retaliation against three Eighteenth Street Gang members suspected of slashing the tires on Hewitt's vehicle. The three gangbangers not only were beaten senseless but stripped down to their boxer shorts and forced to pass nearly naked through a crowd of young women. Two of the three filed a complaint the next day with Hernandez, then a Rampart supervisor. One of the two was promptly arrested (by Barr's partner) for allegedly driving a stolen car. That charge was dropped, but one month later, Barr's partner claimed that he had found fifty-five rocks of crack cocaine on the gangbanger.

His complaint against officers Hewitt, Perez and Barr, meanwhile, still was being handled by Hernandez, who had transferred to the Internal Affairs Division, where he worked directly under his mentor, then-Deputy Chief Parks. Internal Affairs moved the investigation along as slowly as possible, failing to interview any of the alleged victims until eight months after the complaint was filed. (Through the LAPD press office, Hernandez and Parks turned down all requests for interviews.) By then, the second of the complainants had been turned over to the INS by a group of officers including Hewitt and Perez, and deported to Honduras. Not until late 1997, almost two years after the original incident, did Hernandez file a report recommending that Officers Hewitt and Barr be given letters of reprimand -- a slap on the wrist that didn't even delay Barr's promotion to homicide detective. Ray Perez was not disciplined at all for his part in the incident.

"That whole quote, investigation, unquote, was about letting the statute of limitations run out so that the thing could be kept from the public," Poole says. "And that's how they wanted the Jimenez thing handled. It came to the task force so Hernandez could stay on top of it and protect Parks. My partner and I were supposed to put together a case that would let them fire Hewitt from the department and bury the whole thing internally. Honesty and integrity to the case is always the most important thing to me, but they could care less about that." As he pursued the Jimenez investigation, Poole heard more and more reports of abuse involving Rampart officers, including claims that CRASH detectives were routinely beating up those who filed complaints against them, planting guns on suspects, having sex with prostitutes and ripping off drug dealers. "You hear this stuff all the time, but it sounded a lot more credible than it usually does," says Poole. The detective was in charge of the evidence on August 6th, 1998, when Ray Perez's home in Ladera Hills was searched by a team from the task force. Huge quantities of live ammunition were recovered, but Poole was more intrigued by the cache of plastic guns and "replica revolvers" Perez kept stored in a box in his basement. "I realized pretty quickly that Perez and the other CRASH guys had been using these fake guns to plant them on gangbangers. They'd take a photograph of the gun, which looked real, then submit it in court as evidence."

Poole suggested that the LAPD should consider bringing in the FBI "to pursue this as a civil-rights case," he says. "But Parks was adamant that we could do it ourselves." The climax of Poole's tenure with the task force came in September, when he was summoned to a meeting attended by Hernandez and Parks, and asked to give an update on the Hewitt investigation. "I told Parks, 'It's much more than this case, chief. You've got a bunch of vigilante cops at Rampart.' And everybody went silent all at once. The chief didn't ask me a single question. He just sat there."

The most uncomfortable moment came when Detective Tyndall brought up the Biggie Smalls case. "I had been told by Hernandez not to say a word about Biggie Smalls, or Mack and Gaines," says Poole. "But near the end, Tyndall says, 'Chief, Russ still believes Mack had something to do with the Biggie Smalls case.' Tyndall didn't have to do that, and it took some balls. Parks just clammed up. He wouldn't say a word. It was very bizarre. When Parks finally spoke to me, all he said was, 'I don't want you to investigate anymore. Give me a report in two weeks.'"

The report Poole turned in was hardly what Chief Parks had hoped for. Forty pages long, it began with the Gaines-Lyga shooting, passed through the Biggie Smalls murder and the Ray Perez dope bust, then culminated with his investigation of Brian Hewitt. What it seemed to suggest was a contamination of the department that had spread from a crew of black cops affiliated with Death Row Records into the Rampart CRASH unit, which had become "basically a police gang."

"Hernandez was furious," recalls Poole. "He tells me, 'The chief doesn't want this stuff in there.' He meant especially the stuff about Biggie Smalls and Death Row Records." Poole's report was edited to two pages by Hernandez, who put his own name on it before sending it to the district attorney's office. Hernandez won't comment, but the LAPD claimed that it had simply eliminated "conjectural materials."

Part VIII: Ray Perez tells his story

Poole still was involved in the Gaines-Lyga case -- as chief witness for the city of Los Angeles in its defense against the lawsuit brought by Johnnie Cochran on behalf of Gaines' family. In May 1999, the detective was in an elevator with Cory Brente, the assistant city attorney who was handling the case, when Brente took a call on his cell phone informing him that Cochran, City Attorney James Hahn and Chief Parks had worked out a settlement. It was one of the most cynical deals in the city's history.

Because municipal bylaws required every legal settlement in excess of $100,000 to be approved by the Los Angeles City Council, Hahn had structured the deal so that Gaines' wife and two daughters each would receive separate settlements totaling $250,000 in all. Cochran, Hahn and Parks all got what they wanted. Cochran not only would receive a percentage but could tell the black community he had stuck it to the mothers one more time. Hahn, who was running for mayor and counting on the support of the black community in the upcoming election, had protected his political interests. Parks had prevented a public airing of Kevin Gaines' conduct and of the LAPD's failure to deal with it. The chief also had made sure that Poole would not be on the witness stand telling people about the cross-pollination between the city's black gangs and its black police officers, and his allegations about how Parks had stifled his investigation of the cops who worked for Death Row Records.

Poole's disillusionment with the LAPD now was nearly complete. "Parks goes in with Hahn and Cochran on a deal to pay off Gaines' family when they know that Gaines is a criminal, a dirty cop and a maniac, not to mention totally in the wrong in this case," says Poole. "Basically, the chief hung Lyga out to dry."

"Parks and Hahn, in concert with Johnnie Cochran, laid me out as a racist killer, a reputation I still have to fight every single day," says Lyga, who has been named as a defendant in twenty-two Rampart-related lawsuits during the past two and a half years, even though he never worked in that division. Like Poole, Lyga was infuriated when he learned the task force had abandoned the theory that Ray Perez stole his cocaine in retaliation for the Gaines shooting. "We already knew that Perez called up Property Division and gave them the ID numbers for the dope that Lyga had booked into evidence," Poole says. "That tells you he knew what he was after." It was quite a coincidence, conceded Rosenthal, but Perez insisted that he had no idea who Frank Lyga was. Impossible, says Lyga, who once supervised a narcotics operation that Perez worked on: "There's no way he doesn't remember me." Lyga also says that detectives who listened to the tapes of the wiretap placed on Perez's home have advised him that the state's star witness can be heard stating that he went after "Lyga's dope" as "payback" for the death of Kevin Gaines. The LAPD refuses to confirm this.

The criminal case against Perez went to trial in December 1998, much sooner than Rosenthal would have liked it to. "I wanted to wait for the financials on Perez," the prosecutor explains, "but the LAPD was anxious to get the thing over." He believed he presented a strong case, "but it was a downtown jury, and Perez was a good-looking, likable guy of mixed ancestry. And he testified very well. I believed he was lying through his teeth, but he did it very convincingly." Perez lied so convincingly that two days before Christmas, the jury reported it was deadlocked, eight to four for conviction. "That hung jury changed everything," says Poole. "When they lost that first trial, the chief panicked and started pushing to make a deal with Perez."

Rosenthal offered Perez a five-year sentence in exchange for full disclosure, adding the condition that Perez submit to a polygraph. The prosecutor also wanted an indication of what Perez intended to reveal. "So we sat down together at the counsel table in the courtroom," says Rosenthal, "and Perez told me, 'I was involved in a use of force that may or may not have been unlawful, but what was unlawful was that we planted a gun on the guy afterward.'"

The next day, Rosenthal and his team went through every shooting case involving Perez "and we knew right away that it was the Javier Ovando case he had been talking about." Rosenthal spent nearly all of that Friday with Perez, who admitted that Ovando had been unarmed when Perez and partner Nino Durden shot the gangbanger, and that they had planted the assault rifle to cover up their mistake. LAPD detectives interviewed Ovando in state prison over the weekend, and on Monday, Rosenthal filed to free Ovando with the first writ of habeas corpus ever obtained by a prosecutor in California. The next day, Rosenthal met with Perez again. This time he gave the prosecutor a list of all the Rampart officers who were "in the loop" -- that is, willing to frame gangbangers with manufactured evidence and then perjure themselves in court.

By the time Perez finished talking, his confession was fifty hours and 2,000 transcript pages long. He had implicated more than seventy fellow officers in crimes that included shooting unarmed suspects and plain brutality. Perez described how one gangbanger was used as a human battering ram until his head punched through a wall, how another was hung from a fire escape by his ankles until he talked. Rampart CRASH officers routinely picked up gang members they thought might give them a problem and delivered them to the INS for deportation, Perez said.

Rampart CRASH, Perez said, had a system for covering up crimes by its officers, one "quarterbacked" by Sgt. Edward Ortiz. Perez told Rosenthal that officers could only join "the loop" if they were "sponsored" by someone already inside. Officers who were in the loop received playing-card plaques whenever they shot somebody, a red two if the suspect lived and a black two if he died.

Though he claimed it was sheer torture to rat out men who had trusted him, no one was more heavily implicated by Perez than his own partner, Nino Durden. Nino was vicious, Perez said, the kind of guy who thought it was amusing to spray pepper mace into the eyes of a passed-out drunk. It was Durden, Perez said, who first talked him into stealing drug money in March 1997. Perez came across as entirely forthcoming about his own career as a drug dealer. Except for the three kilos that had led to his detection, all of the cocaine he stole from the Property Division was delivered by courier to him at the Rampart Station, he said. He replaced that couriered dope with Bisquick (except for the pound checked into evidence by Frank Lyga, said Perez, who claimed that he never returned that package because he thought he was being followed). "The three kilos he was afraid to ask for by courier," says Rosenthal. "Also, they might have tested an amount that large when it was returned."

Poole was stunned when he learned that the district attorney's office had cut a deal with Perez: "My hunch had been proven right, but I was devastated. The whole investigation was flowing along toward some grand conclusion that was going to tie it all together. At least that's what I believed. But as soon as they made the deal with Perez, it was like he became in charge. He decided what parts of the investigation were going to stay alive and which weren't."

Perez implicated almost every detective he worked with at Rampart Station, yet insisted Sammy Martin was clean. "The same Martin who was meeting with Perez and Durden in the dead of night once they knew there was an investigation," says Poole. And Perez maintained that he knew of no criminal activity by David Mack. Even Chief Parks said he believed Perez wasn't telling the whole truth about Mack. Because the inquiry into Perez's activities had become so vast, Richard Rosenthal decided to conduct five polygraphs with the disgraced detective. Perez submitted to the series of exams on separate days between November 30th and December 16th, 1999. Rosenthal received the results five days before Perez was to face sentencing.

The timing was no small problem for the prosecutor, because Perez had failed all five lie-detector tests. "It was very disturbing," Rosenthal admits. "Frankly, I felt that even if Perez lied, he would pass the polys, because he was such a good liar at trial. But I never dreamed he would fail all five."

The prosecutor promptly won a two-month delay of Perez's sentencing hearing and contacted a professor in Minnesota who could explain how Perez failed all five polygraph exams and still be telling the truth. This professor, one of the nation's leading polygraph experts, said that the polygrapher who administered the five exams had made a crucial mistake during the first session by springing a question on Perez he wasn't expecting. "And that could have screwed up the other polys," Rosenthal explains, "because Perez felt he couldn't trust the polygrapher." But Rosenthal declined to ask that Perez submit to examination by a different polygrapher. "First, we had spoken to the judge in chambers, and he made it clear that he gave no credence to polygraphs," the prosecutor says. "Secondly, I felt that Perez would have a built-in excuse if he failed again."

Perez would have failed again, says Poole, "so it was easier just to say the first polygrapher fucked up and give Perez his deal." Judge Robert J. Perry ruled that Perez would do five years, less time served, for the cocaine thefts, and receive immunity for all other crimes to which he had confessed. This meant that, with time off for good behavior, Perez could be a free man again before the end of 2002.

Perez's statement at his sentencing hearing on February 25th, 2000, would be published by newspapers around the world. It was a model of contrition that began with the ex-cop's admission that nothing he might say "would be strong enough or genuine enough to warrant my pardon." The "atrocities" he and other officers in his CRASH unit had committed, Perez told the court, were the result of an "us-against-them" ethos that allowed those in the loop to believe "we were doing the wrong things for the right reasons." At the end of his statement, Perez quoted the mottoes that were posted above the entrances to the CRASH units, then said he would like to add one of his own: "Whoever chases monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself."

Most of the spectators in the courtroom looked moved, and a few wept openly. Among those closest to the investigation, however, there was a palpable sense of unease. Both prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed that this was the best liar they'd ever seen in a courtroom, and yet the vast legal tangle in which they found themselves caught had been created on little more than his word. "No one is ever going to know for sure how much of what Perez said is true and how much is made up," says Poole. "The guy is like some human two-way mirror: He can see out, but we can't see in."

Poole's own police career would end with his resignation from the LAPD eight months later. "My weakness was that I let it all get to me," he says, "this pattern of sabotaging the investigation that I saw again and again. The way it all piled up really affected me emotionally. For the first time in my career, I was witnessing a cover-up in the LAPD, and the whole thing was being orchestrated from the highest levels. So who could I go to, the FBI?"

Only when it became apparent that Internal Affairs was going to fail in its interdepartmental "trial board" prosecution of Hewitt and fellow Rampart Officer Ethan Cohan (who was charged with failing to report the beating of Ismael Jimenez) did Poole receive a subpoena to appear as a witness; it was his testimony that resulted in the firing of both officers. He would never take the stand in open court, however. "My one hope was that when the criminal case against Hewitt got filed, I would be called as the main witness for the prosecution," says Poole. "But it didn't happen that way. Once the case got to the district attorney's office, my supervisor testified as the authority on the case, even though I had put it together."

By that time, Poole was convinced that the Biggie Smalls murder investigation had been "buried." Two months before Ray Perez cut his deal with the district attorney's office, David Mack was sentenced to more than fourteen years in federal prison. Poole continued to insist that Mack was somehow involved in the murder of Biggie Smalls and that Perez had been involved in the bank robbery with Mack, but neither theory was being pursued by police or prosecutors. "There are a lot of coincidences that are extremely suspicious, but suspicion isn't actionable in court," says Richard Rosenthal.

In October 1999, as he prepared to resign from the LAPD, Poole made one more full report to the department's Internal Affairs Division and then passed on most of the evidence he had assembled in the Biggie Smalls murder to William Hodgeman, the former O.J. Simpson prosecutor who had become the district attorney's leading expert on Suge Knight and Death Row Records. "I still hoped that somebody someday would make use of this stuff," says Poole. "The issues and circumstances [of my resignation] have to do with how some investigations I was involved in were handled," he wrote in his letter of resignation. "My concerns were addressed to my superiors but were swept under the rug."

By May 2000, Ray Perez's description of corruption in the LAPD had more or less won the sanction of the federal government. Bill Lann Lee, the chief of the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, threatened the city that month with a "pattern and practice" civil lawsuit against the LAPD unless Los Angeles agreed to a consent decree that would effectively give control of the department to federally appointed auditors. Yet that same month, Perez made a series of appearances at disciplinary hearings conducted by the LAPD's Internal Affairs Division and was shown to be either lying or suffering from impaired memory each time he testified. The captain who conducted one of the hearings, Roger K. Coombs, was so disgusted that he told the media, "Perez has not shown himself to be a credible witness."

"We take Rafael Perez at his word," Chief Parks continued to insist, and Parks protege Emmanuel Hernandez assured reporters that the department had corroborated between seventy and eighty percent of what Perez claimed. Hernandez would provide no information about this corroboration, however, nor would Parks. For his part, Parks continues to insist that Poole's allegations of cover-up are groundless. In a letter last month to New Times Los Angeles, the police chief asked how it was possible that neither the U.S. attorney nor the L.A. district attorney -- both of whom have monitored the investigation for more than a year -- have not come to the same conclusion.

For most of L.A.'s interested parties, the main question had become how much this debacle would end up costing. The city's loosest cannon, civil-rights attorney Stephen Yagman, had obtained from the LAPD a list of 9,845 cases involving 27 Rampart officers implicated in wrongdoing by Perez and, by the end of 2000, had nearly 200 federal lawsuits pending. The Los Angeles Times quoted "legal experts" who warned that the cost of settling the lawsuits would be significantly more than the $125 million projected by James Hahn.

It certainly would be more if Johnnie Cochran had anything to say about it. In February 2000, Cochran hosted a meeting of more than two dozen civil-rights attorneys to discuss coordinating lawsuits, and said afterward, "If we band together, we can get a lot done." In light of Javier Ovando's $15 million settlement, it looked as if a lot would be accomplished whether the lawyers worked together or separately.

Either damage control or exploitation of the scandal had become the tactic of almost every important political figure in Los Angeles. Chief Parks and District Attorney Gil Garcetti, each of whom had been pointing his finger at the other in private for months, let their feud break into the open during March 2000. Parks took the first swing, issuing an order to his detectives that they were to deny prosecutors access to any information regarding the Rampart investigation. Garcetti had given him bad legal advice, Parks said, and was dragging his feet about prosecuting the cases already delivered to his office. Garcetti struck back two weeks later with an offer of amnesty to LAPD whistle-blowers, an idea Parks already had rejected when it was proposed by the Police Protective League.

By autumn, more than 100 felony cases had been overturned on the basis of Ray Perez's statements. But none of his claims had been tested in court. Now, though, one claim finally would be. Prosecutors made what seemed like an odd choice for the first criminal case to be brought to trial based on Perez's story: four Rampart officers accused by Perez of framing Eighteenth Street Gang member Allan Lobos on a gun-possession charge. What made the prosecution's pursuit of this claim so curious was that Lobos had since been convicted of murder and now was serving a life sentence in state prison. When the trial finally began, the decision made more sense: Three of the four officers were white, while ten of the twelve jurors who would pass judgment on them were minorities.

The drama soon would be overwhelmed by the claims made outside the courtroom by one Sonia Flores, a former girlfriend of Perez's who told police that Perez and David Mack shot to death a drug dealer named Chino and an older woman who appeared to be his mother. Mack and Perez wrapped the victims' bodies in plastic bags and carpet, and sealed them with duct tape, Flores said, then drove to Tijuana and buried them in a ravine.

On the morning of opening statements at the trial in Los Angeles, as Mexican authorities were using a backhoe to excavate the ravine, the prosecution announced that its star witness, Rafael Perez, had informed them that if called to the stand, he'd invoke his right against self-incrimination and refuse to testify. Attorneys for the four accused officers could barely contain their glee, and accused the prosecutors of making a "deal with the devil" that backfired on them. The ensuing trial was a bizarre but tedious affair, conducted by a judge who in 1997 had written a letter of commendation praising Perez for his "professional" testimony during a kidnapping trial in her courtroom, and driven by a prosecution team whose "victim" was a convicted murderer. Witnesses with names like Wicked, Rascal, Diablo and Termite attempted to explain to the jury such subtleties as the difference between being a "tiny winy" (drinker) and a "tiny loco" (doper), while one police officer after another claimed not even to remember the incident in question. In their final arguments, defense attorneys ridiculed the prosecution's case as an "embarrassment" to the citizens of Los Angeles, but what the lawyers did not recognize was that they were talking to jurors every bit as inclined to believe career criminals as to put their trust in career cops.

Gil Garcetti, who one week earlier had been voted out of office by a nearly two-to-one margin (losing to a former underling, Steve Cooley, who called the Perez plea bargain the "worst of the century"), received what seemed to be consoling news on November 15th, when the jury delivered guilty verdicts against three of the four accused officers. The prosecution's celebration would be short-lived, however: Within a few days, a white alternate juror told investigators that she had heard the panel's Hispanic foreman say on the first day of trial that the defendants were guilty. At almost the same time, five jurors signed affidavits stating that they had not been able to agree on whether the three officers told the truth when they claimed to have been struck by the gangbangers' car in the alley where the confrontation at issue took place, but had found them guilty after agreeing that the cops had not suffered "great bodily injury." Problem was, the cops never made that claim, despite a report saying they had that was provided to the jury by the prosecution. Three days before Christmas, the convictions were voided and a mistrial declared.

By the time Sonia Flores confessed that she had made up the whole story about Mack and Perez killing Chino and his mother, the truth had become a fragile fossil immured in sediments of deceit, cynicism and sanctimony. Those few fragments that could be pried loose were too contaminated to trust, and the cost of clarification was more than anyone wanted to pay.

This spring, word around the Criminal Courts Building was that the state would not proceed with any more prosecutions connected to the Rampart investigation, leaving any further action to the federal government. A total of five LAPD officers had been fired by then, and another forty disciplined, but during the past several months one cop after another has beaten the charges against him in departmental trial boards. "The only real witness against them is Perez," Poole observes, "and Perez becomes less believable all the time. Yet they're paying these gangbangers millions and millions of dollars on the basis of what Perez says."

Part IX: Poole Strikes Back

If simple truth is ever to be separated from the complex of lies that surrounds it in the Los Angeles police-corruption scandal, the most likely venue will be a trial resulting from the civil lawsuit that Poole filed against the LAPD last September. Poole insists that his motive was to set the record straight. Following a lengthy separation from his wife (one that coincided with his investigation of the Biggie Smalls murder), he moved back in with his family before resigning from the LAPD. Now he operates a successful business that helps high school athletes obtain college scholarships. "My life was better," says Poole, "but I couldn't have peace as long as I thought I had let Chief Parks get away with what he did during that last year and a half I was on the department. I had to try to get the truth out in the one way that was left to me." In his lawsuit, Poole accuses Chief Parks of violating his First Amendment right to go public after he "began to uncover evidence suggesting the involvement of other LAPD officers in criminal activity."

Everyone who has seen Poole's documentation knows that the case will explode on the city of Los Angeles if it ever goes to court. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, the district attorney's office, which for months had shunned Poole, suddenly insisted it wanted to arrange a series of interviews with the former detective and threatened him with a subpoena when he refused.

Chief Parks must be concerned with what Poole's attorneys could do to him on the witness stand. Parks has refused all comment on the lawsuit, save for one brief statement a week after it was filed in which he described Poole's allegations as "totally false" and deplored the fact that Poole had not addressed his grievances through appropriate internal and external channels. He wouldn't answer specific questions, insisting that it would be "irresponsible" to do so before the matter is settled in court. Sergio Robleto, who as an LAPD lieutenant supervised Poole at South Bureau Homicide, warns that if Parks believes he can discredit Poole, the chief will be sorely disappointed. Poole was among the most honest and industrious police officers he ever worked with, says Robleto, who is today a top executive at Kroll Investigations. He was also perhaps the most "thorough" detective he ever encountered. "Everything Poole does, he writes down," says Robleto, who scoffs at the idea that Poole might have exaggerated what took place in meetings with Chief Parks and other high-ranking officers. "You're never going to catch Russ lying." The federal judge who will hear the case already has shown a great deal of interest in Poole's documentation, and the ex-detective's attorneys have won nearly every pretrial hearing, including one that resulted in the judge's order that Parks and other senior officers submit to videotaped depositions. The city is almost certain to make a large settlement offer to protect the chief, and when it does, Poole knows, the onus will be back on him.

"Am I going to let them buy me off, or am I going to keep pushing this until the truth comes out?" Poole says. "That's what they want to know downtown."

He consoles himself with the knowledge that he could never do more damage to the department than what has already been inflicted. The LAPD is an almost entirely demoralized organization. The department has nearly a thousand fewer officers than it did in 1997, and a recent Police Protective League poll suggests that as many as two-thirds of current officers want to quit their jobs. Even with the substantially reduced requirements that have been implemented in the name of diversity, the department is unable to fill its Police Academy classes. Dissension within the LAPD has advanced to the point that the vice president of the Police Protective League has said that the entire Rampart scandal is the result of Chief Parks' determination to protect black officers, an assertion that would have been unthinkable one year earlier.

"We've come to the point where there are two standards in the LAPD now," says former Chief Deputy Downing. "One for white officers and another for minorities. You can't possibly maintain discipline under those conditions."

The league's officers began warning months ago that closing the LAPD's CRASH units would leave gangbangers feeling "they've been given a green light to go back and terrorize people." Such dire predictions were dismissed at first, but Los Angeles has seen a huge increase in violent crime during the past year, with murders up more than twenty-five percent, after eight years of steady decline, with gang members blamed for most of them.

The key witness in one of the alleged CRASH frame-ups was arrested for rape; in July 2000, after making a deal to collect $231,000 from the city of Los Angeles for the beating Brian Hewitt gave him, Ismael Jimenez was accused by federal prosecutors of conspiring to commit two murders during the previous year. The investigation that Russell Poole began back in February 1997, meanwhile, the one that Rafael Perez almost single-handedly turned into the Rampart scandal, appears to have subsided into a terminal limbo. The murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls remain unsolved, and Chief Parks continues to insist they have nothing to do with the criminal conduct that has ravaged his department. "The racial politics of this city have become so ridiculous that the Police Department and the district attorney's office don't want to solve the Biggie Smalls case," asserts Downing. "They're afraid Johnnie Cochran will defend whoever is charged, and we'll have another O.J. situation."

Suge Knight, meanwhile, is scheduled to be released in July from the federal prison where he has been held since February 1997, and is expected to be back in his office at Death Row Records by the first of August. The racketeering probe of Knight and David Kenner by the U.S. Justice Department has been recently described as "inactive," but the Biggie Smalls case refuses to die.

In June 2000, the former Tupac Shakur bodyguard Kevin Hackie was interviewed at the Cornell Co