The Killing of Tupac Shakur (10 page)

Regardless of the real reason for LVMPD’s non-participation, it turned out to be a lost opportunity. After the “Unsolved Mysteries” piece aired on March 14, 1997, without cop interviews, the show received hundreds of tips. One, from a woman who said she was told twice by her friend that he had committed the murder, appeared to be solid. The woman, living in a Southern state, was afraid to give her name. An FBI agent who was in the “Unsolved Mysteries” studio when the program aired, interviewed the woman and spent a lot of time with her on the phone. Las Vegas police were not in the studio, having declined when asked to go to Burbank to be on hand in case any solid tips were called in.

• • •

LVMPD detectives had one willing witness, 19-year-old Yafeu Fula, a rapper from New Jersey. He’d witnessed the shooting from his seat inside the car behind Suge’s and said he’d be able to pick the gunman out of a photo lineup. But instead of detaining him until they could question him in-depth, police let Fula go.

Almost immediately after being allowed to leave Las Vegas, Fula contacted David Kenner, Death Row Record’s attorney. Kenner played hard to get with Las Vegas investigators
for two months. Promises to set up a meeting between detectives and Fula were made, but never kept.

It may have been fear that prompted Fula to enlist Death Row’s lawyer to keep him from being interviewed. After all, had he talked and identified the shooter, he would have been a snitch; people would have found that out during the trial of whomever he fingered, if not before. Furthermore, just telling police he had seen the suspect’s face had been risky.

Fula, it turned out, had good reason to be frightened. Two months almost to the day after Tupac was shot, Yafeu Fula, the lead witness to the shooting, was forever gagged, murdered in New Jersey.

• • •

Detectives’ hopes for a break in the case were raised four months after the death of Yafeu Fula when Frank Alexander and Malcolm Greenridge, bodyguards who were in the car with Fula, came forward, telling a
Los Angeles Times
reporter that they might be able to identify the shooter. The pair, however, criticized Las Vegas police, claiming detectives had never asked them if they’d be willing, in the future, to look at photos of possible suspects when investigators questioned them the night of the shooting.

Both men said they had come forward six months later because they were tired of hearing Las Vegas police say that an arrest had not been made because of uncooperative witnesses. They also said that LVMPD detectives had not contacted them since their initial questioning the night of the shooting. Like other witnesses, the pair complained that they were offended that night by the tactics of the cops who had made them feel like suspects, then held them half the night before questioning them.

Frank Alexander said he was taken to Detective Brent Becker’s unmarked police car and questioned for “I’m guessing it was at least 30 to 45 minutes,” Frank said. “Then the other guys, some of them didn’t want to talk. I couldn’t say
which ones. There were six of us—Malcolm, Yak [Yafeu Fula], Kastro, me, K-dove, and Trebon. K-dove and Trebon were Suge’s guys, two of his homeboys.”

Sergeant Manning said Frank Alexander and Malcolm Greenridge might be able to help detectives crack the case, while also saying that if they did, they’d be changing their stories from what they had originally told detectives. According to Manning, when Alexander was asked on the night of the shooting if he could identify the gunman, he replied, “Absolutely not.” Greenridge, when asked by detectives if he could identify the gunman, answered, “Nope.” Alexander’s original taped interview was 13 pages long after it was transcribed; Greenridge’s was 11. Their answers mostly consisted of general descriptions of the night’s events, without too many specifics.

“They never said they could identify a shooter,” Manning said. “Nowhere during the [initial] taped interview did they say they could recognize or identify anyone in the vehicle, the shooter or otherwise.” Manning noted that he found it curious the pair had complained to a
Los Angeles Times
reporter that they were harassed by police, while at the same time saying they had never been contacted by detectives. “So which is it?” Manning asked.

But Alexander told me, “It wasn’t that we weren’t interviewed by police. It was that there was never any follow-up, no line-up. We wanted to see the shooter brought to justice. It took them until that time for it to happen, after the
L.A. Times
article came out in February of 1997.”

Detectives Becker and Franks traveled to California after the
L.A. Times
’ story appeared so they could re-interview Alexander and Greenridge. Alexander met with the detectives at an Orange County Denny’s restaurant, where he told them the
L.A. Times
story had been “exaggerated.” He also denied saying he could identify the shooter, Manning said. At the restaurant, Alexander viewed suspects from photographs—what cops refer to as a photo lineup—but he couldn’t pick out the gunman.

Greenridge, interviewed the same day as Alexander at another location, also told Becker and Franks that he could not identify the shooter. He told the detectives he didn’t even want to look at the photos.

“We re-contacted them and Greenridge stated, ‘I still say I didn’t see anything,’” homicide Lieutenant Wayne Petersen said. “These guys are responsible for Shakur’s safety and well-being, and the shooting goes down and they don’t get an accurate description of the vehicle. When bullets are flying, who knows what they saw? If anybody out there did see it and didn’t tell us what they saw that night or within a reasonable period after, then they basically screwed us out of a prosecution.”

Lieutenant Petersen emphasized that even if the pair had said they could positively identify the assailant, defense attorneys would ask them, ‘How does your recollection of what happened get better six months after the event?’

“All it did was cause a lot of problems,” Manning said afterward, “problems with everybody thinking we didn’t do what we were supposed to do, and having us have to chase Frank Alexander and Malcolm Greenridge down.”

The investigators called it a wasted trip and a waste of their time. They ended up back where they had started.

• • •

The aggravations weren’t all coming from the outside. During the first week of the investigation, detectives thought they found help from one of their own in identifying members of Tupac’s entourage videotaped during the scuffle by the MGM Grand’s surveillance cameras.

“They [homicide] got a call from a young black Metro patrolman,” an anonymous police source said. “He told them he knew some of the people and could help identify some of them. It turns out he didn’t identify any of them. They think he came in to see what they had. He left homicide and got into a brand-spanking-new Lexus.”

The source said that “investigators believed he might
have been a snake, an informant for those wanting to plant someone inside the investigation.”

Besides the possible betrayal by one of their own, Las Vegas police also had to watch their backs with out-of-town police officers, as well, who might have alliances with gang members.

“Every step of this investigation everybody had to be careful,” the same police source said. “These guys [rappers] employ tons of cops. When this thing hit here, right away the Los Angeles agency down there called and said, ‘Hey, we want to help.’ All they wanted to do was pick their brains for information.”

An LAPD detective, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, said he didn’t believe it was that Las Vegas and Los Angeles-area police didn’t trust each other, but that they had to protect inside information.

“Those kinds of things go on all the time between agencies,” he said. “Everybody’s protecting their information. These are high-profile cases and nobody wants to make a mistake. I don’t know if there’s distrust [from LVMPD]. When all your witnesses live in Los Angeles, it makes it difficult logistically to investigate it in Las Vegas.”

New York City police also had called homicide detectives in Las Vegas looking for information. Sergeant Manning, too, had telephoned NYPD to talk about the first time Tupac was shot, in Manhattan in 1994.

“We talked to numerous people in New York,” Manning said. “The thing that was interesting, every time I talked to someone in New York, I asked, ‘Who’s case is this?’ I talked to someone who said it was his case, then I’d call back and someone else would say it’s their case. I finally asked a lieutenant to help straighten it out. I couldn’t believe they had all these guys in charge of this [one] investigation. The funny thing was, they stopped calling me back after that. Most of them seemed to be on fishing expeditions rather than trying to find out [information] for their investigation. I couldn’t hazard a guess why.”

On the other hand, another police source said, “Compton [police], without even asking, sent a six-man investigative team made up of L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and Compton PD [to Las Vegas]. They were very helpful. They shared information as to who in law enforcement to be leery of, who was working for [various] gang members.” The officers spent two days with homicide detectives in Las Vegas.

A law-enforcement agent elaborated on the dynamics of protecting police investigations from infiltration: “In traditional organized-crime investigations, the old La Cosa Nostra [Mafia] kinds of investigations, police always had to be leery of outside officers until they knew the answers, because that was a very common way for bad guys to get information. If you’re a successful bad guy, you try to develop sources in the good-guy community, that being law enforcement. It’s a possibility [in the Tupac investigation]. It’s always been that way.”

The fact that it was still that way during the investigation into Tupac’s murder was underscored by a peculiar incident in Los Angeles in March of 1997. Detective Frank J. Lyga, an undercover police officer wearing civilian clothes and driving an unmarked police car, radioed his fellow officers that he was being followed and harassed by a motorist who, it turned out, was also an out-of-uniform off-duty cop, Officer Kevin L. Gaines.

The
Los Angeles Times
reported that the confrontation began with Lyga and Gaines staring each other down at a red light. It then escalated into a verbal confrontation.

An unnamed source close to the investigation told the
Los Angeles Daily News
that Gaines had rolled down the window of his car.

He told Lyga to quit staring him down or he would shoot him. That’s when Lyga reportedly drove away and radioed dispatchers that he was having trouble with the motorist. A few blocks later, the officers were again next to each other at a traffic light.

Gaines pulled a handgun on Lyga, who “feared he was about to be shot,” Lyga told investigators. Lyga pulled his
department weapon and fired twice, fatally wounding Gaines, LAPD Lt. Anthony Alba told The Associated Press. Gaines didn’t know Lyga was an officer and Lyga didn’t know Gaines was an officer until Gaines was taken to a hospital, where he died. The Gaines family later expressed serious doubts that Kevin Gaines had provoked the shooting because, they said, he wasn’t the type.

After the shooting, it was revealed that Gaines, a six-year veteran of the LAPD, had been dating and living with Suge Knight’s then-estranged wife, Sharitha Golden Knight (they have since divorced and Knight has remarried). The officer was driving Sharitha’s car when the altercation occurred. It was also revealed that in an earlier incident, Gaines had reported to Internal Affairs that officers had pushed and cuffed him on August 16, 1996, during a search of a home owned by Sharitha Knight.

Kevin Gaines’ widow, who was separated from her husband at the time of his death, hired Johnnie Cochran Jr., O.J. Simpson’s former criminal defense lawyer, to investigate the shooting.

While the Suge Knight connection is intriguing, police have claimed that there was no harassment and that the Suge association was irrelevant.

• • •

False tips are a regular occurrence in any murder case. In a big murder case, they can become a serious nuisance, and the Tupac Shakur case was no exception.

On the morning of March 26, 1997, a man came forward and told homicide detectives that he’d seen everything and could identify the gunman. The man’s story deteriorated during interviews, until he finally confessed that he wasn’t even in Las Vegas at the time.

Sergeant Kevin Manning said a few “wackos” had called in to “confess.” One man left a blow-by-blow confession with minute and descriptive details on the homicide bureau’s voice
mail. There was only one problem: He claimed he did it in December, two months after Tupac was killed.

Another “informant” who was in custody on another charge in Wisconsin swore to police there that he knew who shot Tupac Shakur. He gave the cops specific information on the investigation, “specifics we were looking for,” Manning said. “Police there interviewed the guy. They did a diagram of the crime. He was supposed to be a witness. They faxed his statement to us.” What police in Las Vegas got, however, was a script from the “Unsolved Mysteries” segment about Tupac’s murder that aired in March 1997.

“He copied ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ word for word,” Manning said. “We continue to get hundreds and hundreds of calls from ‘America’s Most Wanted’ and ‘Unsolved Mysteries.’ If they [callers] have too many details, how do we sort out the credible from the uncredible?”

That’s why, Manning continued, police don’t worry about incorrect and inaccurate information circulating; it helps them tell the real witnesses from the fakes.

Some evidence remains sacrosanct. The gun, for example. The only hard evidence police have is from the ballistics. And they don’t give up that information to the media, because only the perpetrators and the cops know the truth. That piece of intelligence was useful when a tip came in on April 11, 1997, from FBI agents in Bakersfield, California. Sergeant Manning tells the story:

“We got a call from the FBI in Bakersfield who had a guy who said he was in the car with the shooter, but he would only talk to an FBI agent. No one else. No other law enforcement. So I said, ‘Okay.’ We gave them some questions to ask. It turned out to be nothing. The guy said he shot into the driver’s side with an Uzi.”