Biggie Smalls' Mom Wants Grand Jury on Murder

Second, a jailhouse snitch named Michael "Psycho Mike" Robinson talked to police four months after the shooting and tossed out numerous, vague names of possible suspects, including the name "Amir," which Poole came to believe — and some media reported — pointed to Harry Billups.

Third, when Mack was doing time for the bank robbery, his old friend from the University of Oregon, Billups, who by then had changed his name to Amir Muhammad, visited him in jail. At the jail, Muhammad scrawled a fake Social Security number into the visitors' log. A lot of people might do that in a visitors' log, but Poole believed that Mack's seemingly shadowy friend Muhammad was trying to elude detection.

Biggie Smalls

S_BUKLEY/NEWSCOM

Suge Knight is laying low.

Related Content

• Cop's Book Says Sean Combs, Suge Knight Ordered Tupac and Biggie Killings
  October 6, 2011
• Tupac and Biggie Murders: An Up-to-Date List of Characters, Given New Evidence From Ex-LAPD Detective Greg Kading
  October 3, 2011
• LAPD's Rampart-Era Consent Decree Finally Over
  May 16, 2013
• Silver Lake Reservoir Robbers Target Joggers
  May 13, 2013
• LAPD 'Party Car' in Valley Ready to Bust Your Backyard Shindig
  May 9, 2013

More About

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

These clues, Kading says, formed the foundation of Poole's theory that Knight had tapped Mack to arrange the hit on Biggie, and that Mack had persuaded his college pal Billups to carry out the assassination.

Kading dismisses the three clues as misinterpreted information that never should have led to Mack. He believes that if author Randall Sullivan, who wrote Labyrinth, or documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who made Biggie & Tupac, had not produced such high-profile works espousing Poole's theory, someone might be in prison today.

"The whole Mack thing was a mistake," Kading says. "Poole's well-intentioned attempts to find the truth," he says, morphed into a "convoluted distraction that it seems like we can never overcome, and it's inhibiting any hope whatsoever of getting any resolution."

By 2005, LAPD and attorneys for the City of Los Angeles had thoroughly dismissed the notion that David Mack was involved. The FBI closed its investigation into Mack in January 2005, according to the L.A. Times, and a city attorney said there was "not a shred of evidence" pointing to Mack. Sanders dropped Mack and Muhammad from Voletta Wallace's lawsuit against the city, which alleged that lax police department policies enabled Mack to conspire with Billups to murder Biggie.

Even so, to this day Sanders holds on to the idea that corrupt LAPD cops may have been involved — a widely held theory that has taken root in America, becoming a permanent fixture on hip-hop websites.

Kading directly refutes the three bedrock clues that pointed to Mack and buddy Amir Muhammad/Harry Billups as the culprits.

First, Kading says, the shooter's car was not black, like David Mack's Impala — it was green. Hundreds of news reports and write-ups have stated that the getaway car from which the shots were fired was a black Impala, including Sullivan's book, all but cementing the idea as fact in the public's mind.

So who is right about the crucial clue of the car's color?

Soon after Biggie's death, a woman from Houston said her daughter had videotaped the shooting. Detectives, including Poole, were excited, but it turned out the tape did not include a clear picture of the shooting or the car.

Meanwhile, on the night he was killed, members of Biggie's entourage, who were sitting in the SUV with Biggie, in the lead car with Sean Combs (then known as Puff Daddy) and in a trailing security vehicle, offered descriptions of the shooter's car that disagree over its color. Paul Offord, head of security for Biggie that night, told police it was a "black, Acura-type vehicle." Poole says a bus driver and an Inglewood police officer also described the car as black. However, eyewitnesses Anthony Jacobs, James Lloyd and Gregory Young all told police they thought it was a greenish car.

Kading says the video of the killer's car (which can be seen on YouTube at youtube.com/watch?v=ZppjTxK4Kt0) shows quite clearly that the car was green: 47 seconds into the footage, when the light shifts, the car — parked along the side of the road behind an SUV in Biggie's caravan — is shown as metallic green.

"This is where Poole starts to go wrong," Kading says. "But when you see that it's not a black Impala, you've eliminated one of the key clues leading to David Mack."

Sanders dismisses this notion, however, saying, "The mere fact that Mack's Impala would not be used in the shooting wouldn't clear Mack any more than if my car wasn't used in a bank robbery that I was involved in. It's fallacious reasoning."

Second, Kading attacks the value of a clue from jailhouse informant Michael Robinson.

Robinson had been a longtime informant for the L.A. Sheriff's Department and the FBI. In July 1997, Robinson gave police a rambling interview in which he threw out many names and nicknames of people potentially involved in the case: "Amir," "Abraham," "Ashmir," "Kenny," "Keke" and "Stutterbox." Robinson also mentioned the Southside Crips, PCP, the Fruits of Islam and several addresses in Compton.

When Mack was visited in jail by his friend Amir Muhammad five months later, and Muhammad listed a fake Social Security number on the visitors' log, Kading says: "Russell Poole sees 'Amir' on the visitors log and thinks, 'I have another clue with an 'Amir.' So now Poole's got a jailhouse informant mentioning an 'Amir,' and then he gets an 'Amir' connected to Mack because of the visit."