Biggie Smalls' Mom Wants Grand Jury on Murder

Kading has taken a different road from Sanders to the same destination — pointing at former rap mogul Knight — that doesn't include dirty LAPD officers. Kading says that new, explosive evidence leads to Knight and could be used against him. He claims, but cannot produce any documentation, that the FBI has a tape on which Knight alludes to his and Swann's involvement in the murder.

The question now is, can these disparate forces so close to the Biggie Smalls case persuade the DA to convene a grand jury to delve into a murder mystery long fraught with red herrings and dead ends?

WENN/NEWSCOM

Voletta Wallace is demanding action.

Sean Combs was present the night Biggie died.

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More About

• Voletta Wallace
• Marion "Suge" Knight
• Greg Kading
• Crime and Law
• Hip-Hop and Rap

For celebrity attorney Sanders, the prosecution of Biggie's murder comes down to a simple equation: Two people deemed reliable at one point by LAPD — Swann and jailhouse informant Mario Ha'mmonds — both provided official statements or testimony implicating Suge Knight in masterminding Biggie's death. Therefore, Sanders argues, there should be a clear path toward securing an indictment.

First, there's Swann. Sanders and Kading say she's a strong witness and accept her assertion that, after she spoke to Knight one day in jail, where he was incarcerated on a probation violation, money was transferred into a bank account, which Swann withdrew and gave to Biggie's shooter. Her statements were taken down using proper police protocol and, according to Kading — to whom Swann confessed — she is required under her immunity agreement to testify before a grand jury.

Next, there's Ha'mmonds. Nearly everyone involved says his testimony comes down to the question of reliability — a test, Sanders argues, that Ha'mmonds passes with ease.

In the late 1990s, Ha'mmonds and Knight were both locked up at San Luis Obispo Men's Colony. According to Ha'mmonds' 2005 sworn deposition, he and Knight, who was serving a nine-year sentence for his unrelated beating attack on two aspiring rappers, had met each other several times before winding up inside the same cell block, where they quickly renewed their association. Ha'mmonds, according to Rolling Stone, alleged that Knight took credit for Biggie's slaying, telling Ha'mmonds, "My people handled the business. They took care of him ... and he took it like a fat bitch."

In 1999, LAPD detectives served search warrants on four locations connected to Knight, including the offices of Death Row Records. The cops seized Knight's dark-metallic-purple Chevy Impala. The Los Angeles Times reported that investigators were characterizing Knight as "a key" and "a prominent" suspect.

Nothing resulted from the search warrants at the time. But the primary reason LAPD was able to obtain the warrants against Knight, it later came out, was Ha'mmonds' allegation.

"Years ago," Sanders says, "a search warrant was executed on Mr. Knight's home based on information by [Ha'mmonds] that the LAPD thought was credible enough to get a search warrant from a judge."

Swann and Ha'mmonds, Sanders argues, are two independent sources who led detectives to the same murder suspect.

Sanders, who refers to Knight as "the General," complains that "two different sets of investigators over an almost 15-year period have reached the same conclusion, and we've yet to have a prosecution. And [LAPD] has reached that same conclusion relying on wholly different witnesses, both of whom [LAPD] has vouched for. So given what LAPD believed about the General based on [Ha'mmonds] and what Greg Kading got independently pointing to the same General, it gives me great pause for concern for why there hasn't been a prosecution."

Kading has a hunch about the district attorney's inaction. He says nobody from the DA's office or LAPD is willing to touch Ha'mmonds, or any witness who takes on LAPD by claiming that David Mack was part of the shooting.

"I don't see how Sanders and I can take two different angles to the same destination," Kading says. "Certainly we both agree that Suge Knight is ultimately the big target we'd like to see indicted. However, Sanders loses the DA with Ha'mmonds. ... The prosecution will lose Ha'mmonds as a reliable witness during the whole legal process — and the DA knows it. So even though Ha'mmonds and Swann both finger Knight, because they lead to different shooters, they therefore work against each other, and I don't see how to reconcile the two."

Kading, who is obsessed by the case, having spent from 2006 to 2009 trying to identify Biggie's killer, says his only hope of persuading the district attorney to convene a grand jury is to convince Sanders that Russell Poole's dirty-cops theory is a loser.

Former LAPD detective Russell Poole has no problem with the idea that Suge Knight was behind Biggie's murder.

"I've long said that Suge was the catalyst behind the whole thing," Poole tells L.A. Weekly. "I've been pushing that publicly for years, and Suge has never tried to sue me or never said, really, that I've been wrong."

But Poole firmly believes that Knight persuaded Detective David Mack and Mack's college friend Harry Billups, who later changed his name to Amir Muhammad, to commit the murder. The bedrock of Poole's theory, Kading says, is essentially built on three clues:

First, the getaway car outside the Petersen Automotive Museum that night 15 years ago was a dark Impala, and it was described as black by several witnesses leaving the Soul Train Music Awards after party at the museum. David Mack owned a black Impala and used it to steal more than $700,000 from a bank eight months after Biggie was killed.