LAbyrinth by Randall Sullivan

Author:Randall Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2002-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The biggest difference between the informants who implicated Suge Knight in the killing of Biggie Smalls and those who pointed blame toward the Crips, Russell Poole had noticed, were that the former gave their names. This alone did not make such witnesses credible, of course. Four of the six identified informants who had implicated Knight in Biggie’s murder, in fact, were behind bars.

The first was an inmate at L.A. County’s Wayside Detention Center named Wayman Anderson, who on April 4, 1997, told Wilshire detectives that Knight had offered him a contract on the rapper’s life. The tip produced a flurry of activity, including a lie detector test administered to Anderson. Ultimately, detectives concluded that Anderson probably knew something about the murder of Biggie Smalls, but that he couldn’t be relied upon as a witness in court.

Only a short time later, a county jail inmate named Antonie Sutphen—an employee of Death Row Records prior to his incarceration—told detectives he was one of Suge Knight’s “closest associates” and could provide them with evidence that Biggie Smalls had been murdered by members of Suge’s “goon squad.” Detectives assigned to investigate Sutphen’s story soon found their way to a young woman who told them that she had been the object of a romantic rivalry between Antonie and Suge’s “personal bodyguard” Aaron Palmer, better known as “Heron.” She chose Heron, the young woman said, after he told her that Sutphen was nothing more than a “waterboy” at Death Row. A short time later, the two men had a violent argument, the young woman said, and when Heron backed Sutphen down, Antonie had come up with a story for the police that would implicate Suge’s man in the murder of Biggie Smalls.

A slightly more persuasive account of Biggie’s slaying was offered by an inmate at Corcoran Prison. This man said that Marcus Nunn, a Mob Piru Blood who shared a cell with him at the time of Biggie Smalls’s murder, had confided that Suge hired another Mob Piru to take the rapper out. The Corcoran inmate also claimed to know who had killed Tupac Shakur, and said Suge had been behind that, also. This was all at best secondhand information, however, and Marcus Nunn denied everything.

A Los Angeles County Jail inmate who gave only his first name—“Devin”—phoned the management company of Biggie’s ex-girlfriend L’il Kim (after reading an article about the singer in People magazine), and said he knew for certain that the killer of Biggie Smalls was a Bloods gang member who had received $50,000 for the job from David Kenner. The shooter had fled to Chicago immediately after the killing, Devin said, but now was back in L.A. and working at Death Row Records. The problem for LAPD investigators was that “Devin” had identified the killer only as “Willie Williams”; when Poole ran the name through the LAPD computer, hundreds of convicted criminals with that name popped up on-screen.

Two current Death Row Records employees, one male, the other female, had contacted the LAPD

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