LAPD Hid Claims, Judge Says

The LAPD deliberately hid witness statements tying corrupt police to the slaying of Notorious B.I.G., a federal judge said Thursday in granting a mistrial and potentially lucrative attorney fees to the rapper’s family.

U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, in a written order upholding an earlier oral ruling, said the family’s wrongful-death case had been hopelessly disrupted by the Los Angeles Police Department’s concealment of a jailhouse informant’s statements. The informant, cellmate to then-Officer Rafael Perez, the central figure in the Rampart police scandal, said Perez and rogue officer David Mack were involved in the slaying of the rapper, born Christopher Wallace.

Cooper said “voluminous” material unearthed from city files belied the LAPD’s contention that the witness was “just another jailhouse informant seeking favors.” LAPD robbery-homicide Det. Steven Katz’s statement that he “forgot” that some of the documents were in his desk was “utterly unbelievable,” Cooper said.

“The detective, acting alone or in concert with others, made a decision to conceal from the plaintiffs in this case information which could have supported their contention that David Mack was responsible for the Wallace murder,” Cooper said.

Police Chief William J. Bratton said Thursday, in light of all the late information emerging from the case, a mistrial was warranted. But he denied that his department had purposely concealed anything.

“Why would I protect these two scumbags?” Bratton said of Mack and Perez. “I would never cover up anything related to these officers.”

At a separate news conference, Wallace family attorney Perry Sanders said he planned to depose Bratton and other LAPD officials to find what he called “the dark secrets lurking in detectives’ drawers.”

One of the jurors, Ranjiv Perera, said Thursday that the family’s attorneys had not drawn a concrete link between Mack and the slaying during the few days of testimony heard at the trial. He said that “so many of their witnesses didn’t seem to be helping their case, so I was waiting for more to support their claim.”

However, Perera said “there definitely seemed to be something between the off-duty officers and Death Row Records,” a rival of Wallace’s record label.

Sanders said his team of attorneys, which set out to prove that Mack took part in the Wallace slaying, would broaden their case to include Perez and the Rampart scandal.

The mistrial, he said, would give his team a range of legal options, including filing racketeering claims against the city and adding defendants in the case.

Cooper did not set a figure for attorney fees, but asked lawyers to submit briefs arguing how much the city’s “misconduct” had cost the family.

Wallace, a 24-year-old Brooklyn-born rapper, was killed in a car-to-car shooting March 9, 1997, after a party at the Petersen Automotive Museum in the Miracle Mile district.

Criminal investigations by the LAPD and the FBI have produced no arrests. The case remains unsolved, fueling conspiracy theories that allege the LAPD covered up the involvement of corrupt officers in the shooting.

Ex-LAPD robbery-homicide Det. Russell Poole said Wallace’s slaying stemmed from a violent feud between Los Angeles-based Death Row Records and New York’s Bad Boy Entertainment, Wallace’s label.

Wallace was ordered gunned down as payback for the killing six months earlier of Death Row artist Tupac Shakur, said Poole, whose thus far unproven allegations formed the basis of the family’s civil lawsuit against the city.

Wallace’s mother, Voletta; his sister; and his widow, recording artist Faith Evans, sued the city three years ago, alleging wrongful death and civil rights violations.

In her first public comments since the trial began June 21, Voletta Wallace said Thursday that the family’s intentions had “nothing to do with dollars and cents,” but rather with “honesty,” “integrity” and “coverup.”

She declined to say who she believed was responsible for her son’s death but said she had labored with “pain and sweat to find out the truth” about what happened to him.

The trial, which was interrupted in a dispute over the missing documents after only four days of testimony, shed little light on Wallace’s slaying.

The plaintiffs tried to show that ex-LAPD officer and convicted bank robber David Mack orchestrated Wallace’s slaying with the help of college friend Amir Muhammad on behalf of Death Row Records chief Marion “Suge” Knight.

Nine witnesses spoke before the six-man, three-woman jury, but none of them, including a Death Row security guard, were able to link Mack or Perez to the record label or put them at the crime scene.

The case, however, came to a halt June 24 when plaintiffs’ attorneys announced in court that they had received an anonymous tip from an ex-LAPD officer who said that a department informant had tied Perez and Mack to the killing.

The tip led to a search that uncovered statements by informant Kenneth Boagni, who alleged that Perez had told him that he participated with Mack in Wallace’s killing.

Vincent Marella, an attorney for the city, said that the plaintiffs’ attorneys had been given full access to a cabinet full of materials that included the “sum and substance” of Boagni’s claims.

He also said Boagni had no credibility.

“Boagni has changed his story at least twice and the details of what he says that Perez said are diametrically opposed to what the two eyewitnesses to the shooting saw,” Marella said.

Cooper, in a footnote to her six-page order, said that “even if the witness were utterly incredible,” it would not justify hiding information from the family.

Sanders said the police were only too happy to use informants when it suited them.

“It’s sad to see the LAPD swear by informants one day and trash those same informants the next,” Sanders said. “They are now willing to dump them in the grease.”