Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (28 page)

She leaned forward on the table, her coffee long forgotten. “Listen,” she said. “You’ve got to understand. I did what he told me. That’s all.” She leaned back with a deep sigh. “That’s all I ever did.” As her understanding of the predicament she faced grew, so too did an appreciation of where her choices lay. “I got kids,” she said after a long silence. “I got to make sure nothing happens to them.”

“That’s the most important thing,” I agreed. “Your kids.”

“You got to understand,” she repeated, to no one in particular. “I can’t go to jail. There’s no one to look after them.”

I stood up, my instinct telling me that we had pushed her as far as we could for the moment. We needed to give her time to think things over, to weigh her odds and consider the choices she would eventually have to make. It seemed clear that the cocky attitude she had initially confronted us with was starting to crumble. There was a distinct possibility that she would soon have to face the consequences of the crimes she had willingly, even eagerly, committed. We needed to step back and let that reality sink in.

“You think about it,” I said, standing up with the others. “We’ll be in touch.” I told her, trying not to make it sound like a threat.

But, of course, that’s what it was: a threat to the whole way of life she had chosen for herself. As we drove out of the coffee-shop parking lot, I couldn’t help but wonder what her next choice would be. In my experience people don’t change. Not really. After all, for twenty years Theresa Swann had done Suge Knight’s bidding, vying for his affection. It’s all she knew and I had my doubts, even with the custody of her children at stake, whether she could turn that corner, break free and take the second chance we were offering.

A few weeks later we had a second meeting at another Starbucks, this time in Pasadena. It was just Daryn, Bennett and me for this round, and it was my turn to do the talking. “Listen, Theresa,” I said after she had sullenly turned down my offer to buy her a coffee. “We know you’re in a jam. We understand what you’re up against. But let me ask you something. You’ve lived a life of secrets and lies for so long. Don’t you think it might be better now, just to let it all go?”

She nodded, her eyes cast downward, but it was hard to tell if my words had gotten through or if she was just playing along, looking to exploit any advantage presented by a softhearted cop.

“Theresa,” Daryn said, the reasoned tone of his voice matching my own. “Do you know why we’re here? Why we’re
really
here?”

She looked up at him sharply.

“We’re homicide detectives,” I told her. “We want to know who killed Biggie Smalls.”

Her eyes welled up. She began to cry, as far as we could tell, utterly sincere tears. It was pitiful but it was equally unavoidable. Theresa had brought herself to this moment. The truth had caught up with her. “Can you tell us what we want to know?” I asked, keeping my voice as neutral as the wood paneling around us.

She didn’t answer. Other customers were starting to look over at this woman struggling to control her sobbing. A few slow seconds ticked by. I nudged Daryn and this time we both pushed back from the table, leaving Theresa alone with Bennett. “Maybe you need a few minutes to talk it over with Jeff,” I said. “We’ll be waiting.”

The finality of the moment seemed a little unreal to both of us. Without saying a word, Daryn and I had reached the same conclusion: Theresa was our last shot at solving the case. We could keep trying, of course, keeping digging through the files, keep looking for someone who could tell us something new. But the truth was we had played our hand. There was nothing left for us to do now but wait and see how Theresa played hers.

It didn’t take long before Jeff Bennett emerged through the coffee shop door, a smile on his face.

“She knows,” he told us.

CHAPTER
23

The Shooter

F
ROM THE EXPRESSION
on the FBI agent’s face when he announced the news, I think he expected high-fives all around. But it was way too early to celebrate. Theresa might have information about who killed Biggie Smalls and why, but this wasn’t the time or place for her to tell the story. Now that we had come this far, the next step was to make it official.

A coffee shop was no place for full disclosure. I wanted to give her a chance to decompress and reflect, soberly and at length, on her available choices. I found myself hoping that she really
had
taken my words to heart, that the lying and deception would finally be over for her own good and the good of her children. Of course I’d been trying to coax her into cooperating with us, but I also believed what I’d told her, that she would have a second chance if she came clean, completely and finally.

But that had to be done in a formal setting, according to regulations, the whole nine yards in the full light of day. With Jeff still standing by to provide comfort and support, we arranged for a third meeting, this one to take place at the task force headquarters. We had reason to hope that it might well be the culmination of three years of concerted effort on the part of a team of dedicated law enforcement officers determined to bring a killer or killers to justice. Whatever our individual strengths and shortcomings had been — and there were plenty on both counts — the core of the task force was now a smoothly functioning team. We’d become adept at uncovering leads and following them as far as they could take us, even when, as in the case of Stutterbox, they had led us straight down a rabbit hole. We all had reason to be proud of the work we had done, which made it that much more imperative to bring the case home.

According to police lore, echoed in a thousand movies and TV shows, trained professionals are not supposed to get personally involved in their cases. But, of course, we often do. So it was with the task force. There was a fine line of emotional investment that some of us had crossed a long time ago. We each had our own stake in successfully concluding this investigation. For me, it was a point of pride, a matter of professional integrity. But it also stemmed from a stubborn desire to bring some measure of peace to those who still grieved the victims’ violent deaths. Voletta Wallace deserved to know who had murdered her son. So did Afeni Shakur. We were determined to help bring closure to the mothers of these murdered men.

But, despite the major break we had gotten with Theresa’s tentative agreement to cooperate, neither Daryn nor I were really sure we could provide those answers. We’d both seen too many interviews with witnesses go off the rails, either because the subject still had something to hide or because we’d come in with unrealistic expectations. At this critical juncture in the case, we couldn’t afford to coast by simply assuming that Theresa Swann was going to deliver the killer on a platter. Above all, we had to stay on top of the process as it moved forward. There were a lot of ways the investigation could still go wrong.

It was for that reason that Daryn and I kept checking and rechecking the facts of the case to see if there was something we had, even at that point, overlooked. Our primary intent was to stay ahead of the curve, dumping as much data into our brains as they would hold before we talked to Theresa again. To the degree possible, we wanted to be able to
anticipate
what she was going to tell us. We compiled a list of those who we considered to be the most likely suspects in the Wallace murder from across the broad range of the case. And there was one name that kept reoccurring in a number of important contexts and significant circumstances: Wardell “Poochie” Fouse.

A longtime Leuder’s Park Piru member, Fouse had been one of the early targets of retribution in the gang war that erupted following the killing of Tupac. He had narrowly escaped death in 2000, when he was attacked by a Crip hit squad. He wasn’t so lucky when, three years later, he was shot ten times in the back while riding his motorcycle down a Compton street. Since then, Poochie had become larger in death than he had ever been in life, at least in our case files. He had been identified early on in the FBI and ATF investigation as a frequent enforcer for Suge Knight, suspected of either personally perpetrating a number of homicides or directing others to do the killing.

One telling example came to our attention through a 1997 federal task force interview with a Blood named Anthony Welch. If nothing else, his story pointed out in no uncertain terms the power that Suge Knight wielded at the juncture of rap music and gang life. Welch had recounted to the FBI the fate of William “Rat” Ratcliffe, an aspiring rapper and a member of the Bounty Hunters crew out of the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts. He had been pestering Suge over several months for a recording contract with Death Row Records. At one point, accompanied by ten Bounty Hunters, he had even cornered Knight in a bathroom during a video shoot, demanding to be signed.

Suge had a low tolerance for harassment, telling anyone who would listen that Rat’s days were numbered. True to his word, Suge called in his trusted enforcer. According to Welch, Poochie turned up at a recording studio where Suge was producing a session, and received his marching order: get Rat. A day later Ratcliffe was run to ground on Central Avenue in Compton and summarily executed. When he heard the news, Suge reportedly commented, referring to Poochie, “He doesn’t fuck around. That’s how I want him to do it.”

Of course, considering the company Poochie kept, the capacity to “do it” would hardly have been a distinguishing characteristic. But in contrast with the regular run of Suge’s associates, what made Fouse a person of considerable interest to us was the mention of his name in a series of jailhouse letters dating back to 2004, written by a Fruit Town Piru named Roderick Reed, who was serving time on multiple drug and weapons counts. Reed had struck up a correspondence with none other than Kevin Hackie, the former Compton school officer who had played a part in Russell Poole’s investigation, and would later turn up impersonating an FBI agent in the hospital waiting room where Tupac Shakur lay dying.

Apparently under the impression that Hackie could somehow be of help to him in an ongoing appeal, Reed’s rambling, handwritten correspondence covered a wide range of seemingly random subjects. More often than not, however, he focused on his close connection to a Death Row Records insider who was also serving time for his role as a partner in Reed’s PCP business. Letters that under other circumstances might have been dismissed as the semiliterate attempts of a convict to gain an ally on the outside, were given considerably more weight by Daryn and I, due to his links with the Death Row head. There was at least a chance that Reed actually knew what he was writing about.

And he certainly wasn’t shy about sharing it. In a sequence of letters to Hackie over the summer, Reed repeatedly referred to “Poochie” Fouse as the hit man Suge Knight had used to kill Christopher Wallace in direct retaliation for the shooting of Tupac. “I no about Poochie murder Biggie Smalls,” he wrote in a letter postmarked in late August, while in another, a month later, he worried that he might “dis a pear because I no Poochie murdered Biggie Smalls.”

Naturally there was no way to prove Reed’s allegations. At the time the letters first came to our attention, we had tried to go straight to the source. But the U.S. attorney on the case wanted Reed’s scheduled appeal to run its course. The logic was that we might subsequently need to sign him on as an informant in exchange for sentencing considerations. As a result, we could do little more than file his letters away in hopes that they might come in handy when and if more evidence against Poochie emerged. It was in early May 2009, shortly before our second meeting with Theresa Swann, that just such evidence, circumstantial as it was,
did
turn up, and from a source that could be considered substantially more credible than Roderick Reed.

In the tortuous saga of the Biggie and Tupac investigations, Reginald Wright, Jr., has consistently been maligned. The former Compton police officer had founded Wright Way Protection Services, with funding from Suge Knight, as a firm whose primary clients were the artists and executives of Death Row Records. Within three weeks of Biggie’s death, Wright had been named by an informant as part of a hit squad hired by Suge to carry out the killing. He had been under a cloud of suspicion ever since, despite the allegations being conclusively proven false.

In point of fact Reggie Wright, Jr., had proved a valuable resource to law enforcement, providing important information on the inner workings of Death Row and honestly concerned with the violence and greed that had overtaken the once-promising record company. It was for that reason, in the run-up to our interview with Theresa Swann, that we were interested in gaining Wright’s perspective firsthand.