Chapter One
It was after dark by the time Russell Poole arrived at the shooting
scene. Cahuenga Boulevard, the main thoroughfare linking downtown Los Angeles
to the San Fernando Valley, was closed off in both directions by yellow
police tape and patrol cars with flashing lights. The enclosed area was
crawling with brass, captains as well as lieutenants. Poole's squad leader,
Lt. Pat Conmay, his partner, Detective Supervisor Fred Miller, and the
members of the LAPD's Officer Involved Shooting team were all standing
in a group. The Internal Affairs investigators, as always, kept to themselves.
Frank Lyga was still at the scene and had been informed
that the dead man was a police officer. "Lyga was very confident at that
time," Poole recalled. "He felt certain he had done nothing wrong.so I took out my sap and hit the guy across the forehead.to be part of this organization filled with people I could count on, no
matter where they came from."
The OIS team drove Lyga back to the North Hollywood
station to take his statement. Poole was informed that his assignment would
be to investigate a possible charge of assault with a deadly weapon against
the undercover detective. Poole was collecting spent cartridges and making
measurements of the shooting scene when he and Miller received a tip that
Gaines, although married, had been living with a girlfriend at an address
in the Hollywood Hills. The two detectives drove to the Multiview Avenue
address and found themselves at the gated driveway of a mansion belonging
to the notorious gangsta rap mogul Marion "Suge" Knight, CEO of Death Row
Records. Gaines's girlfriend was Knight's estranged wife, Sharitha.
Sharitha Knight already had been informed of Gaines's
death, and was cried out by the time Poole and Miller interviewed her.
Sharitha's mother, who introduced herself as Mrs. Golden, did most of the
talking at first, explaining that her daughter was married to but separated
from Suge Knight, and that Kevin was her boyfriend. They had seen Kevin
only a few hours earlier, Mrs. Golden told the detectives. He said he was
going to the gym and intended to pick up new tiresDeath Row, but she gave no details," Poole recalled.
Sharitha Knight had met Gaines in 1993 at a gas station
on La Brea Avenue just south of the Santa Monica Freeway. Gaines (who had
been reprimanded repeatedly for attempting to pick up women while on duty)
pulled up in his patrol car next to her Mercedes, Sharitha said, and began
a casual conversation that grew more animated when she told the officer
who she was and described her mansion in the hills above Cahuenga Pass.
Gaines bet the woman dinner that she was exaggerating, and the two began
dating exclusively after he paid off. Gaines soon took up residence in
the mansion, separated by twenty-five miles and two million dollars from
the house in Gardena where his wife, Georgia, and their two children lived.
Sharitha was working at the time as Snoop Dogg's manager, and obtained
work for Gaines as the rapper's bodyguard.
Poole and his partner made no protest when Sharitha
Knight cut the interview short after less than half an hour. "This was
her boyfriend and she was distraught," Poole explained. "It was a delicate
situation."
As he drove back down Cahuenga Pass toward the LAPD's
North Hollywood station to interview Frank Lyga, Poole recalled, * * * Poole already had been to places that few people
raised in the suburbs ever see. Now a burly forty-year-old with a sunburnt
squint and glints of silver in his reddish-blond hair, Poole had been a
slim twenty-two-year-old with freckled cheeks and bright green eyes when
he accepted his first assignment with the LAPD, as a patrol officer in
Southwest Division, working out of a station near The Coliseum. "The department
didn't try to prepare me for what it was to be a white officer in a black
neighborhood, because there's no way to do that," he recalled. "But you
learn real quick. All of a sudden this shy kid from La Mirada is working
ten hours a day in South Central Los Angeles. It's like you've been given
a front-row seat on life in the inner city."
At La Mirada High School, situated on the border
between Orange and Los Angeles Counties, Poole had been voted most valuable
player on a baseball team that won the Suburban League Championship. Pete
Rose was his childhood idol, and Poole's teammates tagged him with Rose's
nickname, "Charlie Hustle." "I ran everywhere I went, full blast," he explained.
"It was the way I was brought up, to give all you had all the time."
His father was a twenty-seven-year veteran of the
L.A. County Sheriffs Department who had spent much of his career as a supervising
sergeant of the detective bureau at Norwalk Station. "I looked up to my
dad," Poole recalled. "He had been in the Marine Corps during the Korean
War, and I used to love to look at his medals. We were a very traditional
family. My father was the breadwinner, my mom stayed home and took care
of us kids. My two sisters shared one bedroom, while my brother, Gary,
and I shared another. I thought that was pretty much how everybody lived."
His father never encouraged him to become a cop, and Poole kept his dream
of playing baseball in the major leagues alive until a torn rotator cuff
during his second season at Cerritos College ended his athletic career.
Although he graduated with a degree in criminal justice, the young man
went to work in a supermarket and was night manager at an Alpha-Beta store
when he married his wife, Megan, in 1979. The two had known each other
since they were children, and the bride wondered out loud whether her young
husband would be satisfied with a comfortable life in La Mirada. Her question
was answered less than a year later, in the autumn of 1980, when Russell
Poole entered the Los Angeles Police Academy. "I decided that I needed
something more stimulating than the grocery business," he explained. Fewer
than half of those who entered Poole's Police Academy class would finish
with him.
The culture of the LAPD back then was "quasi-military,"
recalled Poole, who liked it that way. Every day began with a three-mile
run that ended with alternating sets of pull-ups and push-ups, followed
by wind sprints. "I went into the Academy at a pretty solid 185 pounds
and finished at a little over 165," he recalled. "But you learned pretty
fast that physical ability wasn't the pointcharacter was. They wanted
to see whether you would drop out or keep trying. Would you quit if you
got cramps while you were running, or would you grind it out, cry it out,
gut it out. A lot of the women in the class impressed me in that way."
Only about a year after Poole graduated, though,
a series of lawsuits forced the Academy to make failure all but obsolete.
Poole recalled. "They'd get you counseling. They also started lowering
the standards on written tests, in order to encourage diversity and avoid
controversy."
Poole didn't think the department was doing its new
recruits any favors. "When you get out on the streets, nobody's going to
baby you there," he explained. "You are going to be caught in situations
where all you can do is survive."
The more harrowing the circumstance, the more intense
the experience of connection to one's fellow officers, as Poole discovered
soon after his assignment to patrol duty in South Central L.A. "What I
remember most about those early days was how it felt to stop a car and
approach it from the rear," Poole recalled. "The whole key was to stay
alert, but not come on aggressive. On patrol, you had to be ready for anything.
You might go through a whole day totally bored, then plunge into an experience
of complete terror fifteen minutes before the end of your shift."
The most feared part of Southwest Division was an
area called the Jungle, a collection of apartment buildings along Martin
Luther King Boulevard between Crenshaw and LaBrea that was surrounded by
huge, droopy eucalyptus trees. All that low-hanging foliage was what made
the Jungle so dangerous, along with an unusual layout of buildings that
created a lot of places where a suspect could hide until an officer was
almost on top of him. "Anytime we went in there, the only color we saw
when we looked at each other was the blue of our uniforms," Poole recalled.
Before crack cocaine, PCP was the street drug of
choice in the ghetto, and Poole had never been more frightened than the
first time he was attacked by a suspect high on horse tranquilizer. "I
had dropped my guard because at first he appeared to be friendlyHi, officer,
how you doin'?recalled. "My first instinct was to throw out my hands to push his face
back, but he caught my left forefinger in his mouth and bit it all the
way down to the bone. My partner was trying to hit him upside the head
to get him to release, and finally he did, but we went to the ground and
the guy was spitting and scratching and punching and kicking. He was shredding
our shirts and uniforms, scratching our arms and faces. I had deep cuts
all over my face and so did my partner. Blood was everywhere and my finger
was dangling, barely attached.
"Pretty soon we were surrounded by this big crowd
of people, all black, and this was very scary for me, because I was fairly
new and had never been in a situation like that. We didn't have handheld
radios back then, so I looked up at this one older black man and said,
Please get on that radio and request help.
I didn't want to draw my gun
so I took out my sap and hit the guy across the forehead.
It didn't even
faze him. So I hit him a second time, as hard as I could, and that split
his head open. Right about then I started hearing those faint sirens from
far away, gradually getting louder and louder. Nothing ever sounded better
to me. And in a couple of minutes there were like twenty LAPD patrol cars
on the scene, with cops of all colors, and the crowd was breaking up. I
remember thinking, This is what they meant by backing each other up and
being there when another officer needs you. It made me feel really good
to be part of this organization filled with people I could count on, no
matter where they came from."
One of Poole's first mentors was a black training
officer named Richard Lett, "a shy, nice man who had about fifteen years
on the job." During the entire time they worked together, Poole recalled,
the two of them never spoke once about communicating across racial lines.
"He saw that I take people as they come, and so he really didn't think
it was necessary," Poole recalled. "I was making friends of all races and
I felt this was my education in life. My time as a patrol officer taught
me how to connect with people from very different backgrounds, and I learned
not to make general assumptions about anyone."
Everything changes in 1991
though, when the videotaped beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers at the end of a vehicle pursuit was broadcast on local television. Poole was at home ironing a shirt the first time he saw it: "I remember thinking, Oh, shit, I wonder how many times they're gonna play that?" I never imagined it would be hundreds and hundreds. That wasn't the LAPD I knew, but it became the LAPD to the rest of the world, and that was awful to live with. It created terrible tensions within the department. Getting along with both civilians and your fellow officers along racial lines suddenly became a lot more difficult. Even people you thought were friends weren't saying Hi when you passed them in the hallway."
The riots that followed the acquittal of the four officers accused in the Rodney King beating at their first trial in Simi Valley only increased racial divisions within the LAPD. The department maintained a mobilization plan for such emergencies, but for some reason it wasn't implemented. Chief Daryl Gates had been relieved of duty (by the first black president of the Los Angeles Police Commission), and then reinstated, but his position was weakened. "Everybody wanted to be the new chief," Poole recalled. "All these deputy chiefs were practically begging Gates to retire so they could take over, and the early response to the riots was controlled by some of these same people, who really didn't mind if the LAPD looked bad, because it would make Chief Gates look bad. We had subcommanders pulling units out of the area around Florence and Normandie when they should have been pouring in."
When Gates, who had been attending a function in Mandeville Canyon, finally arrived at the LAPD Command Post in the bus depot at 54th and Van Ness, he was astonished to find captains and lieutenants standing around in groups. When a black captain approached him carrying a coffee cup, Gates slapped the cup out of the man's hands and shouted, "What the fuck is happening? Why aren't my men out there deployed?"
Even before the rioting stopped, word of this incident had spread through the department, "and people of different races were even more uncomfortable with each other," Poole remembered. By the time Gates was replaced by the LAPD's first black chief, Willie Williams, an import from Philadelphia, the department had become an institution seething with thinly veiled resentments. White officers did not doubt that Williams had won the job with the color of his skin, while black officers wondered why the position hadn't gone to the LAPD's highest-ranking African American, Assistant Chief Bernard Parks.
To a lot of people, and for the longest time, it had looked as if Bernie Parks might be the one man who could reconcile the contradictory legacies that he had inherited from his two most notable predecessors, William H. Parker and Homer Broome. During the 1930s and '40s, Parker had occupied the unenviable position of a clean cop in a dirty department. The LAPD of that period was almost astonishingly corrupt; Los Angeles's mayor sold hiring and promotion exams out of his office in City Hall, while vice officers earned the bulk of their income by protecting prostitutes, pimps, and pornographers. At one point, the LAPD's head of intelligence was sent to San Quentin for bombing the car of an investigator who had been hired by civic reformers to ferret out crooked cops. When Parker was appointed Los Angeles Police Chief in 1950, conditions within the department changed dramatically. Parker's insistence on integrity was so adamant that he fired officers for the sort of infractions that wouldn't have resulted in an admonishment a few years earlier. The LAPD's new chief even demanded that his officers pay for their own coffee. Parker, who coined the phrase "thin blue line," also made the LAPD over into an ultra-efficient police force renowned for the discipline, mobility, and aggressiveness that allowed it to cover the enormous geographical area of Los Angeles with fewer than one-fifth the number of officers employed by the New York Police Department. By the early 1960s, LAPD officers believed that they belonged to the best police department in the world, and by most measures they were right.
Racial sensitivity was not a theme that resonated particularly well with Chief Parker, however. Parker was no racist, but the mission he gave LAPD officers to "stop crime before it happens" inevitably led to a concentration of police forces in South Central Los Angeles. Then, as now, black males committed a hugely disproportionate amount of crime in Los Angeles and across the country. For the LAPD of William Parker, that was the essential point, and the chief was not particularly interested in complaints against white cops who beat the black suspects they had charged with "contempt of officer."
May 17, 2002, 3:05PM
LAbyrinth
A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur
and Notorious B.I.G., the Implication of Death Row Records' Suge Knight,
and the Origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal
By Randall Sullivan
Atlantic Monthly Press
Copyright © 2002 Randall Sullivan.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-87113-838-7