Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (31 page)

B
Y EARLY JUNE OF 2009,
everything was falling into place. We had Keffe D ready and waiting to resume his contact with Zip Martin, who we had strong reason to believe was the supplier of the weapon used to kill Tupac Shakur. If we could get Zip on tape acknowledging that fact, it would go a long way toward confirming Keffe D’s account of the murder and the rest of the case might then fall into place. At the same time, I had started working on a wiretap request for Suge’s phone, in the hope that we could convince Theresa Swann to make the calls that would elicit information confirming our theory that Poochie had murdered Biggie Smalls at Suge’s behest. Everything was set to go.

As a troubled kid, my adoptive dad, a Pop Warner football coach, had taught me the value of a good sports metaphor, and it was only natural for me to see the results of our team’s hard work in football terminology. I was the task force quarterback and Daryn Dupree was my running back. It was the fourth quarter of the championship playoff and the two-minute warning had just sounded in a game that had seen us relentlessly drive the ball all the way to the one-yard line. Our efforts had been so outstanding that we’d even gotten some of the opposing team to play for us. One final, concerted effort to get over the goal line was all it would take to score the winning touchdown.

But an unforeseen and unwelcome circumstance arose that made it extremely difficult to keep my eye on the ball for that last crucial play. The disruption harkened back to the George Torres investigation I had worked off and on from 1997 up to the time I joined the task force eight years later. As part of the Torres investigative team, I had focused on building a criminal case against the grocery store magnate, culminating on raids of nine Numero Uno markets. There we had gathered evidence pointing to the intimidation of shoplifters through extortion and false imprisonment. I had developed evidence of Torres’ involvement in a number of homicides. The investigation had more or less been wrapped up by the time I joined the revived Wallace investigation.

Nearly sixty counts against Torres had been handed down by a grand jury in February 2005. From that point on, the case took a protracted and convoluted course through the courts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Searight, handling a RICO prosecution for the first time, worked hard to get the trial heard before a U.S District Court judge who had a reputation for being “pro-government.” Unfortunately, Searight hadn’t taken into consideration the judge’s attitude toward all-encompassing RICO prosecutions, which he seemed to feel were examples of unwarranted federal overreach. During pretrial hearings he let it be known that he didn’t care for the “architecture” of the government’s case and went on to comment that the individual RICO charges against Torres should have been handled separately in lower state courts. The prospects for the prosecution were further called into question by another remark the judge made from the bench. “Let’s face it,” he said, “this case is going to be tried on murder. No one is going to jail forever for cheating on their taxes or hiring illegal immigrants. It’s all about these murders, so let’s get it on.”

With those words he effectively narrowed the scope of the prosecution to the three murders I had investigated. The head of Torres’s defense team took note and immediately adjusted their trial strategy, relentlessly focusing on discrediting the homicide charges. Which meant discrediting me.

At the same time, the defense filed a motion to suppress the evidence that we had gathered from the grocery store raids, claiming that probable cause existed for the search of only one store and not all nine. The judge ruled in their favor, basing his decision on what he considered inaccurate statements that I had made on the search warrant request. The disputed passages were taken from wiretap conversations I had monitored and interviews I had conducted with various Torres associates. When writing the affidavit for the search warrant I had, in the words of a subsequent inquiry, “paraphrased the interview… drawing from the conversation as a whole, rather than from a literal dictation.”

On such small pivots whole cases and years of work can stand and fall. In his supporting statement on the motion to suppress, the judge asserted that I had made “inaccurate statements intentionally or with reckless disregard for the truth.” A verbatim account of my interview, he continued, would have “negatively affected the magistrate’s finding of probable cause” in determining the scope of the search.

Spurred by the finding on their behalf, the defense team launched an all-out attack. If I had lied on the search warrant affidavit, what else was I lying about? I was, they claimed, obsessed with George Torres and would do anything to see him put away, including threatening and bribing witnesses. The thrust of the defense’s strategy as it played out in the media was succinctly summed up in the headline of a local paper: “
Detective Greg Kading Was Fixated On George Torres. Did He Go Too Far?”

There is a lot I could say in my own defense. I could point out the daunting complexity of writing a search warrant request that balances the stringent standards for probable cause with the often-urgent requirements of an ongoing investigation. I could insist that the minor misquotations in my affidavit had no substantive impact on the case. But I’m not going to. What I will say is that I made a mistake. I got careless in drafting a document I had written a hundred times before. In doing so, I left myself vulnerable to an attack by Torres’s attorneys and they took full advantage of the opening I had unwittingly provided.

Despite the setback, I was still confident of a favorable outcome in the upcoming trial. That assurance was bolstered by the fact that Searight and his team seemed undeterred by the ruling. The evidence that was thrown out had to do only with the extortion charges. There were still close to sixty counts left on the indictment, ranging from fraud to money laundering to tax evasion. Also still on the docket were the homicides I had investigated. The trial finally got under way, on March 24, just at the point when we were beginning to get traction with Theresa Swann.

From its opening statement the defense team tried to make the case about me. What was less clear was Searight’s plan for countering the attack. Despite my repeated requests that he put me on the stand, the U.S. Attorney continued to insist that we wait until the defense called me. “Every case needs a boogie man,” he told me. “Let’s wait until they try to prove what they’re saying against you. Then we’ll make our move.”

The problem was the defense never intended to have me testify. It was, in fact, imperative to keep me
off
the stand, where I could refute their allegations and defend myself. As a result, the assertions of Torres’s defense team were allowed to go unanswered. After almost a month, the defense rested without having called me. Yet, for all of their legal skill they had failed to convince the jury. On April 20, guilty verdicts on fifty-eight of the fifty-nine counts against Torres, including one of the three murder charges, were handed down. I took each of them as a personal vindication, regardless of the damage that my reputation had sustained. Despite the missteps, Searight had pulled off what appeared to be a major legal victory. We all had reason to feel good about the outcome of our protracted efforts to bring a prosecution against George Torres.

That feeling didn’t last long. Within three weeks of the verdict being read, the defense was demanding the conviction be overturned on the basis on yet another legal technicality. In a 147-page decision effectively voiding the conviction, the judge ruled that procedures had been violated. After spending two years in federal custody, George Torres was a free man. In postmortems on the Torres debacle, several legal specialists, speaking on background, offered their considered opinions as to why the case had gone down in flames, some pointing to Searight directly, claiming he was intimidated by the judge’s appearance of prejudice against the prosecution. Others pointed the finger squarely at the bench. According to one federal prosecutor familiar with the case, “A good defense attorney is going to sense a sympathetic judge and argue every technicality he can. Judges can’t control jury deliberation, but they can control post-trial motions…(The defense) kept pushing to see how far he could go in taking the case apart and he went pretty far.”

Suffice it to say, a jury of George Torres’ peers had found him guilty of fifty-eight criminal counts, including solicitation of murder. His attorney nullified that judgment with a legal technicality. In the process I had become collateral damage.

CHAPTER
26

Perception

B
Y MIDSUMMER OF 2009,
I had effectively put the Torres fiasco behind me. But the outcome of the trial had an unexpected impact on the Biggie and Tupac investigations, even then moving forward into their final stages.

The reputation of Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Searight, who otherwise had impeccable credentials and a near-flawless record as a federal prosecutor, was compromised by the ultimate outcome of the Torres trial, despite the fact that he made the case on its merits and that the dismissal fit the classic definition of losing on a technicality. But I was aware that the damage sustained by Searight might well bleed over into any prosecutable case that we developed against Puffy and Suge. Searight, who had provided invaluable legal oversight for the task force from the beginning, would naturally be taking those cases to trial if we could provide him with the necessary evidence. It was a difficult decision, but in the end I couldn’t risk jeopardizing our chances in court with a prosecutor whose professional standing, rightly or wrongly, had been called into question. I concluded that the best course of action would be to abandon the racketeering aspects of the case and hone in on the murders themselves. After utilizing all the advantages afforded to us by coming under the federal umbrella, now, at the eleventh hour, I was forced to bring the case back under local control.

Accordingly, I reached out to an L.A. deputy district attorney to discuss the possibility of transferring the murder cases to his jurisdiction. After talking over the issue with Searight, the DA told me he had no problem with proceeding on the case himself. That difficult issue resolved, my focus then turned to completing our strategy for bringing the investigations home. I had reason to be hopeful. The task force had managed, against the longest of odds, to reopen two famous, and famously cold, cases to the verge of a successful conclusion. Considering the distance we had come, what was left to accomplish, while still formidable, was within our grasp. Nothing, it seemed, could stop us now.

Until something did.

On July 22, 2009, I arrived at work at 6:00 am as usual to begin my day. Two hours later, Lieutenant Thomas Thompson, my immediate superior, arrived to tell me that Commander Pat Gannon wanted to see me at 9:00. Naturally, I was a bit apprehensive about this sudden summons from the brass and I told Thompson as much.

“Is there a problem?” I asked. “Am I in some kind of trouble?”

“There’s no problem,” the lieutenant tersely responded. I took him at his word and an hour later he was back to personally escort me to Gannon’s office.

I entered the large comfortable room, hung with commendations and photos of the commander posing with various VIPs. Outside the windows overlooking downtown Los Angeles, the morning was coming up bright and clear. Gannon, a seasoned veteran with a personable and understated approach that belied his rank, invited me to sit down.

“Greg,” he began, immediately cutting to the chase, “I want you to know up front that this is coming straight from the chief’s office. This is not my decision. You may not understand it right away, but this is being done to protect you.”

“What’s being done?” I asked in a low voice, my heart suddenly pounding in my chest. Thompson hadn’t been straight with me: there
was
a problem. And from the tone of Gannon’s voice, it was a big problem.

“As of today,” he continued, “you are off the Biggie Smalls task force. You need to know that an Internal Affairs complaint has been generated. We’re looking into it, but in the meantime, you’re suspended from the investigation.”

A stunned silence followed. There were only two times in my career that I cried. One was when a partner got shot in the line of duty. The other was in Pat Gannon’s office. I wanted to shout out loud that the decision to take me off the case — a case to which I had given everything — made no sense. As a career LAPD officer I was accustomed to the often inscrutable policies of departmental bureaucracy. I was familiar with the sometimes queasy blend of policing and politics that resulted in decisions that the rank and file was simply forced to swallow. I had heard too many times that the reason for some irrational action was on a need-to-know basis, above our pay grade, for the good of the department or for our own good. I’d learned to accept all that as an unavoidable condition for doing the work I loved.