According to Poole, the trail to Rampart, and the Biggie probe, actually started with his investigation of the March 1997 shooting death of Officer Kevin Gaines. Gaines was killed by an undercover narcotics cop, Frank Lyga, after Gaines threatened Lyga with a gun during a traffic altercation. In the ensuing police investigation of the unusual cop-on-cop shooting, Poole uncovered evidence that Gaines was corrupt.

An informant told Poole that Gaines was moving money and drugs for rap music czar Marion "Suge" Knight of Death Row Records. A Death Row insider told him that Gaines and another cop, David Mack, were "confidants" of Knight's. Gaines had been living with Knight's ex-wife Sharitha, who was rapper Snoop Dogg's manager. He was living large -- nice clothes and cars, nightclubs, women -- and had dropped $952 for lunch at a gangster hangout shortly before his death. Gaines was already under investigation by the LAPD's Internal Affairs Division, and would have been fired had he not been killed by Lyga.

Despite what he learned, Poole says in his lawsuit that LAPD higher-ups prevented him from investigating Gaines any further. "I wanted to do a financial investigation on Gaines," says Poole. "You know what the department said? 'No. He's dead. This case is closed.'"

His superiors also kept Poole from taking a harder look at David Mack and his friend, Rafael Perez. Like Gaines, Mack and Perez were living way too well for police officers. Their player lifestyles included fancy clothes, expensive cigars, nightclubs and frequent trips to Las Vegas. Mack was later arrested in December 1997 for the armed robbery of a Los Angeles bank. Mack's two accomplices were never caught and the $722,000 stolen from the bank has never been recovered.

Investigators suspected that Mack's buddy Perez might have had some involvement in the crime. (Perez admitted to partying in Las Vegas with Mack after the robbery but said he knew nothing about the crime.) The ensuing LAPD task force probe led to Perez's arrest on charges of stealing cocaine evidence in August 1998. The Rampart scandal erupted a year later when Perez cut a deal for leniency and agreed to talk.

Meanwhile, Poole and his partner at Robbery-Homicide, Fred Miller, were given the Biggie Smalls case in April 1997, shortly after they started investigating Kevin Gaines. They pursued over 250 leads and interviewed dozens of witnesses, informants and Biggie associates. They began turning up clues that pointed to David Mack. But Poole charges that he was prevented from following these leads because of the LAPD's reluctance to examine even a known dirty cop.

Mack's apparent ties to Suge Knight were part of the puzzle. Many of Biggie's associates believed the rapper was killed on orders from Knight, as retaliation for the September 1996 killing of Death Row's star rapper Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas. Knight was also wounded in that shooting, which remains unsolved. Knight had been engaged in a long-running feud with New York rap mogul Puffy Combs. More than a dozen gangsters had died in this feud, including three of Knight's "executives," his bodyguard Jake "The Violator" Robles as well as, it was widely believed, Tupac.

While some speculated that the murder of Biggie Smalls, who was the top rapper on Puffy's Bad Boy label, was the Death Row clan's payback for Tupac's slaying, another theory held that the killing was related to the ongoing conflict between the rival Crips and Bloods gangs. Some investigators believed these alternate theories could be connected, since Knight was a Mob Piru Blood, their investigation showed, and Combs had ties to LA's Southside Crips.

As in most gangland disputes, drugs may also have been part of the mix. A cop who worked for Death Row security but was in fact an FBI task force undercover agent reported that "Los Angeles Crips and Bloods [including some who worked for Death Row] were transporting kilos of coke to the East Coast, buying them for $18,500 in LA and selling them for $26,000 in New York." Numerous disputes had resulted in the course of this trade.

Another informant told the LAPD that Kevin Gaines and other LAPD officers "provided security for members of Death Row Records during various criminal activities. The officers accompanied the members during drug deals and acted as lookouts and advisors. The officers monitored police frequencies, assisted in choosing locations for drug transactions and gave information on police tactics."

Mack had come to Poole's attention when a Death Row insider identified him and Gaines as "confidants" of Knight. (An attorney for Knight disputes that the rap mogul, now in prison for a 1992 attack on two rappers, even knew Mack.) Poole learned that Mack had grown up in the same Compton neighborhood as Knight. He often sported the same fancy red suits as Knight. After Mack was arrested for the bank robbery in December 1997, he admitted to being a Blood, like Knight. Soon more clues surfaced that pointed to him playing a role in the Biggie killing.

For a variety of reasons, Biggie's murder appeared to be very well planned and not a chance encounter by some rival. For one thing, the shooter, who pulled up alongside Biggie a block away from the museum, was alone in his car. He had to know which vehicle of the motorcade Biggie was in, which seat in that vehicle (it had tinted windows) and in which direction the caravan was headed. Amid the noise and hubbub of Biggie's departure, witnesses also reported hearing police radios, held by unidentified males, which might explain how a lone shooter, a block away from the museum, could know Biggie's location when he came upon the car.

According to police investigative files, Mack was placed at the scene by a member of Biggie's entourage, Damien Butler, who picked him out of a photo lineup. Butler, who walked in and out of the party with Biggie and drove in the same car with him, positively identified Mack as one of the men standing by the carport entrance of the Petersen Auto Museum. Poole discovered from department logs that Mack took a series of "family sick days" off prior to and during the weekend Biggie was killed, just as he had when he committed the bank robbery. (Mack had employed police radios for the bank job, which was also meticulously planned.) Later, when Poole served a search warrant at the home of Mack's close friend Rafael Perez, he seized a number of police scanners and radios.

Some witnesses reported the shooter's car was a dark green Impala, while some said it was a black Impala. The most reliable witness, an Inglewood cop working security for Biggie who followed the car, described it as black. David Mack owned a black Chevy Impala.

Eyewitnesses identified the shooter as a bow-tied African American dressed in the conservative style favored by Black Muslims. Mack was a Muslim, but he didn't match the composite drawing of the shooter made by witnesses. An informant had previously told investigators that Biggie's killer might have a Middle Eastern name, possibly Amir. Investigators noticed that the first person who visited Mack in jail following the bank robbery happened to be a man named Amir Muhammad (also known as Harry Billups). The fact that Billups/Muhammad gave a false address and false Social Security number on the visitor form heightened their suspicions about him.

So did a 20-page police computer search on Muhammad, which turned up a string of eight prior addresses, all with no forwardings. These included addresses in Las Vegas and Eugene, Ore., where Mack and Muhammad went to college. Finally, the ID photo on Muhammad's driver's license (which also had a wrong address) looked like a possible match to the Biggie shooter composite made from two eyewitness accounts: a medium-skinned African American man with a long, angular face.

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