Skip to main contentThe most disturbing book from a Portland author this year won't be one of Chuck Palahniuk's dystopian novels or a chapbook of vitriolic verse by some existentialist barista. Instead, it's a nonfiction epic of crooked cops, homicidal gangbangers and hyper-violent music moguls--a story that calls into question basic assumptions about American race relations and law.
Journalist Randall Sullivan's LAbyrinth probes the public assassinations of hip-hop stars Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, which occurred in 1996 and '97, respectively. A fictional thriller with LAbyrinth's Byzantine plot, dead-serious social agenda and beyond-the-pale characters would be laughed out of publishing. But Sullivan's book, expanding a 2001 Rolling Stone series, makes a compelling case that law enforcement officials conspired to stymie investigations of the murders' most probable solutions.
Sullivan's thesis could easily seem the sort of paranoid rambling that eventually bleeds into urban conspiracy theory. Rogue LAPD cops directly involved with the murder of Notorious B.I.G.? Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks (soon to be replaced, perhaps with Portland Chief Mark Kroeker) scuttling investigations to protect corrupt black officers? Record impresario/criminal Suge Knight orchestrating the assassination of Shakur, his biggest star?
Even Sullivan concedes it seems farfetched. "But if you've read the book," the Portland native and longtime RS contributing editor says, "you see that the police knew all this. They had it all. Most of the information comes directly out of police documents."
LAbyrinth's publication virtually coincides with last week's filing of a lawsuit against Parks, former police officials and the city of Los Angeles by the family and estate of Biggie Smalls (né Christopher Wallace). The lawsuit alleges that Los Angeles law enforcement failed to intervene as Knight's record label, Death Row, cultivated links with the Crips, the Bloods, the Mafia and rogue cops, meanwhile sparking a bloody feud with East Coast hip-hop stars, including Wallace and Sean "Puffy" Combs.
The Smalls lawsuit charges that cop David Mack and Nation of Islam member Amir Muhammad conspired to murder Smalls on the streets of L.A. LAbyrinth links both men to Death Row, and to the notorious Ramparts scandal that engulfed the LAPD in 1999. The book further alleges that Parks, with the connivance of L.A. media and politicians, misdirected investigations of police malfeasance to cover up cops' links to Suge Knight.
It's an incredible tale, and a controversial one. The L.A. press has attacked Sullivan relentlessly. The author says the Los Angeles Times, which he savages in LAbyrinth, went so far as to demand that Rolling Stone bowdlerize his original articles. If the Times was adamant, the LAPD, according to Sullivan, was pit-bull aggressive. "The very first time I called the LAPD, immediately they began to tell me, 'You better not go down that road, if you do we'll ruin you, your career will be destroyed,'" he says. "They called Rolling Stone and said that anyone involved with the story would be destroyed. We kept asking, why? Tell us what's wrong with the story. Nothing. As if we would go, 'Oh, well, if the police say we shouldn't print it or they'll ruin us, we'll take it out.'"
Sullivan sees such pressure as part of a miasma of coverups fogging the two murder cases. No arrests have been made in either killing. "If Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were murdered by the Italian mob in the '50s, in a public way in front of hundreds of witnesses, is it conceivable to anybody that it would have been swept under the rug the way these two were?" asks Sullivan.
Sullivan says he stumbled onto his story when RS assigned him to write about Ramparts, a murky scandal involving an elite LAPD anti-gang task force. Probing apparent inconsistencies in L.A. media coverage of the blow-up, Sullivan found his way to Russell Poole, a veteran homicide detective who'd resigned from the LAPD after his investigation into the Smalls murder met official resistance. Poole and his trove of LAPD documents soon became the fulcrum of Sullivan's reporting and, eventually, of LAbyrinth's story.
"Finding Poole changed everything," Sullivan says. "His lawyers told him no, absolutely do not let this reporter look at the documents. But Poole contacted me on his own, without his attorneys' knowledge, and arranged to fax me hundreds of pages. Having his eyes to see through gave me a way to contain and channel this very complex story. It gave me sort of a sieve to pass it through, so that was a great help."
Beneath its gripping revelations of corrupt cops and gangsters masquerading as musicians, LAbyrinth addresses far more than the murders of two rap superstars. The bigger picture Sullivan portrays reveals a race-driven lack of accountability. As exposed by LAbyrinth, America's so-called "racial dialogue" amounts to nothing more than a puppet show, complete with unseen hands, both black and white, pulling the strings.
"The problem is that so many people who should be pushing this forward aren't, because they're in conflict," explains Sullivan. "Black leadership isn't pushing it forward. White leadership isn't either, because they're scared what black leadership will say about them. And the awful irony of it is that two young black men have been murdered and no one's going to do anything about it."
speculates that Sean "Puffy" Combs was the original target of the drive-by that killed Biggie Smalls, and that Suge Knight may have been directly involved in the killing of Tupac Shakur.
"Do I believe that Suge was connected to Tupac's murder? I do. But I couldn't say that I proved it or it has been proven. I just think it's been demonstrated that that's the most plausible theory, and it's clear that the Las Vegas police haven't tried to solve the case."--
author Randall Sullivan.
WWeek 2015