LAbyrinth

Author : Randall Sullivan

Pages : 324pp

Format : Paperback

Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Pub. Date : February 2003

Sales Rank : 131,421

Reviews : From Barnes & Noble

In the fall of 1998, Los Angeles police officer Rafael Perez implicated more than 70 fellow LAPD officers in a conspiracy that involved robbery, brutality, drug dealing, false imprisonment, and perhaps murder. After a series of incomplete investigations, it became apparent to at least one honest homicide cop that police brass wanted the festering scandal to disappear. But, despite threats and resistance, detective Russell Poole would not let the investigation die. Linking the police conspiracy to the murders of hip-hop legends Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, he dug deeper into this hydralike case. Award-winning journalist Randall Sullivan digs even deeper in this electrifying book about an unprecedented police scandal., exploring the role of Death Row Records' Suge Knight in these strange perversions of justice.

From the Publisher

Los Angeles has one of the nation's most controversial police departments. In the fall of 1998, still reeling from the Rodney King and O. J. Simpson debacles, the LAPD took a far more damaging hit when officer Rafael Perez implicated over seventy fellow officers � members of the elite Rampart street-crimes unit � in a conspiracy of robbery, brutality, drug dealing, false imprisonment, and allegedly murder. Now award-winning journalist Randall Sullivan delivers a masterpiece of reportage that reveals how members of the LAPD became caught up in the violent world of Suge Knight and his Death Row Records rap empire. LAbyrinth shows how officers became gangsters, and how officials at the highest levels covered it up. Sullivan has had unprecedented access to Russell Poole, the upright homicide detective whose investigation into two of hip-hop's most infamous unsolved crimes � the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. � led him straight into the darkest corners of his own police force. LAbyrinth introduces such renegade officers as Kevin Gaines, killed by fellow cop Frank Lyga after he threatened Lyga's life; Rafael Perez, who, in retaliation, may have attempted to frame Lyga for drug theft; and David Mack, the highly decorated officer and former Olympic-class track athlete who orchestrated one of the biggest bank heists in Los Angeles history. LAbyrinth is the first book to break down powerful walls of silence raised by an internal-affairs department and a police chief who protected criminal cops in order to avoid making waves in a city torn by racial politics and legalistic intrigue. It is an epic true story of the brutal men who ruled the nation's meaneststreets and an unflinching expose of the incredible reasons why they were not stopped.

Publishers Weekly

Sullivan (The Price of Experience) strikes again in the arena of California true crime, exploring the sordid world of big money, gangsta rap, guns and drugs. Opening with the shooting of a black man by a white man during a traffic incident, Sullivan underscores the not-so-well-known racial tempest brewing on the West Coast especially when he reveals that the shooter was an undercover narcotics investigator and the man killed was an off-duty L.A.P.D. officer who moonlighted for the disreputable Death Row Records. From here, Sullivan outlines the bad and the ugly of the music industry: mafioso-style music label management; the unsolved murders of rap superstars Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.; and a dizzying series of binary oppositions Crips vs. Bloods; West Coast rappers vs. East Coast rappers; Death Row Records' exec Suge Knight vs. Puffy Combs of Bad Boy Records, etc. Unfortunately, the basic material isn't exactly new; journalists Ronin Ro and Cathy Scott, among others, have previously covered the murders of Shakur and B.I.G. Still, Sullivan's reportorial writing style accurately reflects the investigative work of homicide gumshoe Russell Poole while building the drama within the truly labyrinthine political coverups, cop-to-criminal crossovers and the breaks in the L.A.P.D.'s code of silence. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This book documents the criminal investigation of the March 1997 shooting death of an off-duty member of the Los Angeles Police Department by a fellow officer. The investigation steers detective Russell Poole into a complicated inquiry, with connections to the hip-hop music industry, and leads him to discoveries of police corruption. Sullivan (journalist, Rolling Stone) does an excellent job of guiding the reader through the intricate chain of events and along the way intersperses mini-lessons on the history of hip-hop culture and music and gang rivalries. He also reveals interesting insights into the backgrounds of the major players, connecting this scandal to the world of some of the biggest rap stars. Sullivan includes supplementary material that is of great help to the reader: a "roster" of the protagonists and their affiliations and a time line that includes all major events (from 1987 to June 2001) mentioned in the book. An excellent selection for all public libraries, especially those with clientele interested in true crime and/or hip-hop music. Sarah Jent, Univ. of Louisville, KY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Freelance journalist Sullivan (The Price of Experience, 1996) scathingly indicts racial/cultural politics and law enforcement in post-Drug War America. The author shrewdly focuses on the experiences of veteran LAPD detective Russell Poole. Beginning with a seemingly random 1997 traffic shootout between a black plainclothes policeman and a white one, Poole was plunged into a maelstrom of felony investigations involving rap music figures and rogue cops. While the murders of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and Biggie Smalls in 1997 (the latter perceived as retaliatory for the former) exploded against the backdrop of celebrity gangsta-rap culture, Poole's initial investigation of the black officer killed in the shootout collided with departmental secrecy, revealing a cop kept on the job despite numerous unsavory incidents. As Poole's investigation overlapped Smalls's murder, the Death Row Records empire of the notoriously violent Suge Knight was linked to an LA gang, then to a network of cops who performed favors for Knight's criminal associates and who may have been involved in Smalls's murder. Yet Poole found his investigation stymied at every turn by LAPD Internal Affairs and the inner circle of then-Chief Bernard Parks, determined not to impeach the integrity of minority officers in the wake of the Rodney King scandal. Sullivan contrasts Poole's stellar career-fitness reports with the hostility he faced from fellow officers and superiors, especially after connections developed between Death Row, an ex-officer's brazen bank robbery, various murder investigations, and the emerging scandal involving the Rampart CRASH unit. (Poole eventually resigned from the LAPD and filed a civil suit against thedepartment.) Evidently, the drug money that first militarized the LA gangs also provided seed money for cultural behemoths like Death Row and corrupted officers in tactical units like Ramparts CRASH, unleashing further havoc on beleaguered communities. Sullivan uses unadorned prose to convey a complex tale rife with ambiguities. A deftly told, immensely relevant, true-life potboiler from the streets of urban America. Author tour

Read a Sample Chapter

Labyrinth

A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., the Implication of Death Row Records' Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal By Randall Sullivan

Grove Atlantic, Inc.

ISBN: 0-8021-3971-X

Chapter One

It was after dark by the time Russell Poole arrived at the shooting scene. Cahuenga Boulevard, the main thoroughfare linking downtown Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley, was closed off in both directions by yellow police tape and patrol cars with flashing lights. The enclosed area was crawling with brass, captains as well as lieutenants. Poole's squad leader, Lt. Pat Conmay, his partner, Detective Supervisor Fred Miller, and the members of the LAPD's Officer Involved Shooting team were all standing in a group. The Internal Affairs investigators, as always, kept to themselves.

Frank Lyga was still at the scene and had been informed that the dead man was a police officer. "Lyga was very confident at that time," Poole recalled. "He felt certain he had done nothing wrong. I don't think he realized that the fact Gaines was black was going to be as much of a problem for him as it was."

The OIS team drove Lyga back to the North Hollywood station to take his statement. Poole was informed that his assignment would be to investigate a possible charge of assault with a deadlyweapon against the undercover detective. Poole was collecting spent cartridges and making measurements of the shooting scene when he and Miller received a tip that Gaines, although married, had been living with a girlfriend at an address in the Hollywood Hills. The two detectives drove to the Multiview Avenue address and found themselves at the gated driveway of a mansion belonging to the notorious gangsta rap mogul Marion "Suge" Knight, CEO of Death Row Records. Gaines's girlfriend was Knight's estranged wife, Sharitha.

Sharitha Knight already had been informed of Gaines's death, and was cried out by the time Poole and Miller interviewed her. Sharitha's mother, who introduced herself as Mrs. Golden, did most of the talking at first, explaining that her daughter was married to but separated from Suge Knight, and that Kevin was her boyfriend. They had seen Kevin only a few hours earlier, Mrs. Golden told the detectives. He said he was going to the gym and intended to pick up new tires for the Montero on his way home. "Sharitha did say that Kevin had done some 'security work' for Death Row, but she gave no details," Poole recalled.

Sharitha Knight had met Gaines 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 said, and began a casual conversation that grew more animated when she told the officer who she was and described her mansion in the hills above Cahuenga Pass. Gaines bet the woman dinner that she was exaggerating, and the two began dating exclusively after he paid off. Gaines soon took up residence in the mansion, separated by twenty-five miles and two million dollars from the house in Gardena where his wife, Georgia, and their two children lived. Sharitha was working at the time as Snoop Dogg's manager, and obtained work for Gaines as the rapper's bodyguard.

Poole and his partner made no protest when Sharitha Knight cut the interview short after less than half an hour. "This was her boyfriend and she was distraught," Poole explained. "It was a delicate situation."

As he drove back down Cahuenga Pass toward the LAPD's North Hollywood station to interview Frank Lyga, Poole recalled, "I thought to myself, 'This case is going to take me to places I've never been.'"

* * *

Poole already had been to places that few people raised in the suburbs ever see. Now a burly forty-year-old with a sunburnt squint and glints of silver in his reddish-blond hair, Poole had been a slim twenty-two-year-old with freckled cheeks and bright green eyes when he accepted his first assignment with the LAPD, as a patrol officer in Southwest Division, working out of a station near The Coliseum. "The department didn't try to prepare me for what it was to be a white officer in a black neighborhood, because there's no way to do that," he recalled. "But you learn real quick. All of a sudden this shy kid from La Mirada is working ten hours a day in South Central Los Angeles. It's like you've been given a front-row seat on life in the inner city."

At La Mirada High School, situated on the border between Orange and Los Angeles Counties, Poole had been voted most valuable player on a baseball team that won the Suburban League Championship. Pete Rose was his childhood idol, and Poole's teammates tagged him with Rose's nickname, "Charlie Hustle." "I ran everywhere I went, full blast," he explained. "It was the way I was brought up, to give all you had all the time."

His father was a twenty-seven-year veteran of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department who had spent much of his career as a supervising sergeant of the detective bureau at Norwalk Station. "I looked up to my dad," Poole recalled. "He had been in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, and I used to love to look at his medals. We were a very traditional family. My father was the breadwinner, my mom stayed home and took care of us kids. My two sisters shared one bedroom, while my brother, Gary, and I shared another. I thought that was pretty much how everybody lived." His father never encouraged him to become a cop, and Poole kept his dream of playing baseball in the major leagues alive until a torn rotator cuff during his second season at Cerritos College ended his athletic career. Although he graduated with a degree in criminal justice, the young man went to work in a supermarket and was night manager at an Alpha-Beta store when he married his wife, Megan, in 1979. The two had known each other since they were children, and the bride wondered out loud whether her young husband would be satisfied with a comfortable life in La Mirada. Her question was answered less than a year later, in the autumn of 1980, when Russell Poole entered the Los Angeles Police Academy. "I decided that I needed something more stimulating than the grocery business," he explained. Fewer than half of those who entered Poole's Police Academy class would finish with him.

The culture of the LAPD back then was "quasi-military," recalled Poole, who liked it that way. Every day began with a three-mile run that ended with alternating sets of pull-ups and push-ups, followed by wind sprints. "I went into the Academy at a pretty solid 185 pounds and finished at a little over 165," he recalled. "But you learned pretty fast that physical ability wasn't the point-character was. They wanted to see whether you would drop out or keep trying. Would you quit if you got cramps while you were running, or would you grind it out, cry it out, gut it out. A lot of the women in the class impressed me in that way."

Only about a year after Poole graduated, though, a series of lawsuits forced the Academy to make failure all but obsolete. "After that, if you were lousy or wouldn't try hard enough, they'd pat you on the back and say, 'It's okay, we have remedial classes you can take,'" Poole recalled.