Sixteen years ago, Randall Sullivan’s groundbreaking book, LAbyrinth, explored the role the Los Angeles Police Department may have played in the 1997 murder of Christopher Wallace, the legendary rapper known as Notorious B.I.G. At the time of his death, Wallace was embroiled in an ongoing beef with West Coast rap figures at Death Row Records. Sullivan’s investigations, published in the pages of Rolling Stone and in his 2002 book, indicated that officers inside the LAPD were moonlighting as security for Death Row Records and may have been involved in arranging a hit on Notorious B.I.G.
In the years since LAbyrinth was released, the story has been made into a film, City of Lies, directed by Brad Furman, while Sullivan continued his investigation into the murder and the cover-up. His new book, Dead Wrong (Atlantic Monthly Press, June, 2019), details evidence of a wide-ranging effort involving some of the most powerful men in law enforcement to cover-up the murder of Biggie Smalls and to quash a civil lawsuit the Wallace family estate has filed against the City of Los Angeles, a suit that could potentially cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the following exclusive excerpt, Sullivan chronicles the work of Phil Carson, the FBI special agent assigned to investigate links between LAPD police corruption cases and Wallace’s murder. Carson’s investigation was undermined by members of the LAPD, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times named Chuck Phillips. While Carson’s investigation was ongoing, a Times story written by Philips outed a key FBI informant connected to the case. After that article was published, family members of the informant were shot in drive-by incidents. Carson believed that details of the case were being leaked to Philips by the deputy chief of the LAPD, Michael Berkow.
In this passage from Dead Wrong, Sullivan details what happened when Carson was named as a witness for the Notorious B.I.G.’s family in their wrongful death suit against Los Angeles.
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Special agent Phil Carson’s life and career both began to blow up on the day the attorneys for the plaintiffs’ side in Wallace v. Los Angeles —a wrongful-death suit filed in by the family of the Notorious B.I.G. against the city of Los Angeles—listed him as a witness. Carson was the FBI agent assigned to investigate potential links between LAPD corruption cases and the rapper’s 1997 murder in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. According to Carson and two other agents in the FBI’s Los Angeles office, Michael Berkow—then the LAPD deputy chief—had twice asked the head of the criminal division at that FBI office, Lou Caprino, to shut down Carson’s investigation of the Biggie murder. Caprino refused both times. When Carson’s name appeared on the witness list, the city attorney’s office got involved. An assistant city attorney named Louis Li arranged a meeting with Carson and his bosses at the FBI office. “Li told us, point-blank, ‘We cannot let Agent Carson testify, because if he does, we stand a better than fifty percent chance of losing upwards of six hundred million dollars in this lawsuit,’” remembered Carson, whose recollection was confirmed by another FBI agent at the meeting. “‘It would ruin the LAPD, and the relationship between the LAPD and the federal government, including the FBI.’”
When Carson’s FBI bosses equivocated, a larger meeting was organized, one attended by not only the highest-ranking FBI officials in L.A. but also the senior command staff of the LAPD and the attorneys defending the city in the Wallace v. Los Angeles lawsuit. The LAPD representatives and city attorneys spoke at length about the relationship between the police department and the FBI, the various federal programs and task forces the two agencies were involved with together, and the enormous amount of money that had been committed to these projects, remembered Carson and a second special agent who was present. The FBI and the LAPD were “interdependent,” one of those on the city’s side of the table argued, and it would be insane to jeopardize all that “just to solve the murder of a four-hundred-pound black crack dealer turned rapper.”
“Those were the exact words used,” Carson recalled. A second FBI agent who was at the meeting confirmed this.
Carson’s bosses acceded to the city’s demand: he would not be a witness in the Wallace v. Los Angeles civil trial, the agent was informed. Officially, it was Caprino who had made that decision, but Carson believed “it went higher up than Lou, to people back in D.C.”
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By then, Carson’s greatest concerns were not about what the LAPD and the city attorney’s office were doing to his case, but about the threats against his career being made by Chuck Philips, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Carson recalled, “Philips started phoning me constantly and asking me questions about the case that I couldn’t answer. When I explained that to him, he started calling Cathy Viray, who was the head of the press information unit at our FBI office, and telling her, ‘I’m going to ruin Carson.’” Viray, who confirmed Philips’s threats, and Steve Kramer, who was then the assistant chief counsel at the FBI’s L.A. headquarters, both explained to Philips that Carson couldn’t say more than he already had said.
Philips, though, continued to threaten that he would destroy Phil Carson’s career if he didn’t get answers, remembered Viray.
Finally—“and this was absolutely unprecedented,” Carson said—Caprino arranged for a conference call during which every one of the supervisors at the FBI office, along with its legal and press teams, would answer what questions they could for Philips.
The agents who participated in that conference call were filled with dismay and fury when, just days later, an article by Philips ran on the front page of the Los Angeles Times Metro section. “FBI Ends Probe into Killing of Rap Star,” read the headline. In the article, Philips revealed that the FBI had shut down its investigation of the Christopher Wallace homicide, the first time this news had been made public.
The FBI had decided to drop the probe, Philips wrote, “after learning that Agent Philip J. Carson had discussions with lawyers for Wallace’s mother, Voletta Wallace, and had been subpoenaed to testify in her wrongful-death lawsuit against the city.” FBI officials had already informed Sanders and Frank that Carson would not be permitted to testify in open court. According to Philips, Carson’s bosses had also instructed him to have no further contact with the Wallace family’s attorneys.
Those lawyers, Sanders and Frank, were enraged by the article. “We had heard, and had to assume, that enormous pressure was being brought to bear on the FBI for something like this to happen,” Sanders said. “Phil Carson called me at one point and said, ‘This is political at the highest levels you can imagine.’ He said he still believed we were right about who was responsible for Biggie’s murder, but was being hassled in a major way by people who wanted him to stop going in that direction.”
For the record, the head of the FBI in Los Angeles, Richard T. Garcia, stated that the results of Special Agent Carson’s eighteen-month-long investigation had been submitted to the U.S. attorney’s office, which “determined that the evidence was insufficient for [criminal] prosecution.”
That much was true: Carson had submitted the results of his investigation to the U.S. attorney’s office. By then, he knew the case was being followed at the highest levels of the bureau, Carson said. That had become obvious when the name of FBI director Robert Mueller began to appear in the email chain of memos concerning the Christopher Wallace murder investigation. “The politics of the case had become mind-boggling,” said Carson, who was “stunned” when the U.S. attorney’s office answered his submission of the case with a letter stating it saw insufficient evidence to prosecute.
“I knew I had the case,” Carson explained. “We definitely had enough to prosecute.”“I knew I had the case,” Carson explained. “We definitely had enough to prosecute.” The standard procedure—universally observed—was that when the U.S. attorney’s office turned down an FBI case, it provided a “letter of declination” laying out the reasons for the decision. In this instance, however, the assistant U.S. attorney who had been assigned to the case, David Vaughn, a former Los Angeles County assistant district attorney, refused to provide such a letter.
“I had a meeting with the assistant director and all my bosses to go over the investigation page by page,” recalled Carson, whose recollection was confirmed by another agent in attendance. “After the assistant director heard and read the evidence, he looked at me and said, ‘Why isn’t this case being indicted?’ I said, ‘Good question. Go ask the U.S. attorney’s office. They won’t explain why.’ He said, ‘Well, don’t you have a letter of declination?’ I say they won’t give me one, and he looks me in the eye for a long time, then says, ‘You get that letter of declination.’ Because at this point he’s not going to let this come back on the FBI. There is obviously a case here that should have resulted in an indictment, and if there isn’t one the U.S. attorney has to take responsibility for it.”
He asked—and eventually implored—Vaughn multiple times to provide the letter of declination, Carson recalled, and was refused on each occasion. “That just doesn’t happen,” Carson said. “I talked to my fellow agents and to my bosses, and they all said they’d never seen a decision not to prosecute an FBI case where the U.S. attorney’s office had refused to provide a letter of declination. It was unique to this situation.” [1]
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After the March 11, 2005, publication of Philips’s article “FBI Ends Probe,” Carson had been at least slightly consoled by the anger that spread through the FBI’s Los Angeles office. In particular, his Los Angeles colleagues were offended by Philips’s suggestion that Carson had behaved improperly and had based his investigation on information provided by Sanders and Frank. The section of the article that the FBI agents believed most unfair to Carson, though, was a lengthy paragraph in which, according to Philips, David Mack called Carson “the most inept or laziest agent I had ever met.” Carson, Mack claimed, had offered to seek a reduction of his fourteen-year sentence on the Bank of America robbery conviction if he cooperated with the FBI’s investigation of the Wallace murder. (Mack is the former LAPD officer suspected of being involved in the murder of Notorious B.I.G.; when Carson met with him he was in a federal prison in Illinois serving a fourteen-year sentence for bank robbery.)
“Not one word of that is true,” said Carson, who noted that Philips’s article failed to mention that there was another FBI agent, from the local office in Alabama, with him during every second he spent with Mack at the Talladega Federal Correctional Institution, where Mack was currently incarcerated. Carson’s bosses at the FBI’s Los Angeles office vehemently disputed that Carson had ever offered Mack anything at all.
He had approached Mack with extreme caution, Carson said. He’d heard early on from Perry Sanders that people the attorney had spoken with seemed to be far more afraid of Mack than they were of Suge Knight. He was especially impressed by two inmates who said they preferred to accept twenty-year prison sentences rather than make a deal to testify against Mack, Sanders said: “They told me, ‘Twenty years is a long time, but dead is forever.’” What he’d heard from Sanders had been repeated again and again as he’d moved forward with the Biggie investigation, Carson said. “People I wanted to talk to about Mack told me flatly, ‘No, I say one word about David Mack and I am a dead man.’” Rafael Perez’s ex-partner Nino Durden had told him simply, “You don’t fuck with Mack,” Carson recalled.
“When I looked into Mack’s eyes, I have never been more sure in my life that I was looking at a cold-blooded killer than I was in that moment.”When they arrived at the Talladega prison to interview Mack in person, Carson recalled, “the other agent and I had to walk across this huge grass field where there were three little cells on the other side. Mack was in one of them.” He remembered Mack’s long braids and “sadistic smile,” Carson said. “When I looked into Mack’s eyes, I have never been more sure in my life that I was looking at a cold-blooded killer than I was in that moment.” Mack, “a charming guy and a totally frightening one,” had of course given him nothing, Carson recalled. Immediately after interviewing Mack, Carson had taken a call from Paul Paquette: “He tells me he just got a call from David Mack and Mack wants to take a polygraph, but he doesn’t want LAPD to be part of it. And he’ll only do it if these four other people are polygraphed also.” His bosses told him to advise Paquette they weren’t interested at this time and would let him know if they were. Unknown to Carson at the time, Paquette had made up the whole “Mack wants a polygraph” story. That would come out eventually, and Paquette would be removed from the case. In the meantime, though, the threat Chuck Philips posed was at the forefront of his thoughts, Carson said. In his March 11 article, Philips reported that there had been a meeting in September 2004 in which FBI officials questioned Carson’s “conduct of the investigation” and expressed their concern “that Carson might have been influenced by the Wallace lawyers and that his contacts with them could embarrass the bureau.”
When I interviewed him for Rolling Stone, Caprino, who had been Philips’s main source for the “FBI Ends Probe” article, told me his statements had been “grossly distorted and misquoted” by the reporter. “That article really pissed off a lot of people, including me,” said Sergio Robleto, who had met Agent Carson for the first time at Rob Frank’s law office in Colorado Springs, where they were reviewing the discovery materials from the LAPD at the same conference table. “Phil Carson was an absolutely stellar FBI agent, above reproach, incorruptible.”
Cathy Viray sent a lengthy letter on FBI stationary to the Los Angeles Times demanding assorted corrections and clarifications. After a series of “delays and excuses,” Viray told me, the newspaper informed the FBI that it was refusing to publish the letter. “I don’t know of another instance where the Times has refused to publish a letter sent on behalf of the federal government,” she said. “It really makes you wonder what they’re afraid of.”
As a result of the article, the FBI’s Los Angeles office—“on my orders,” Caprino said—informed Philips it would have no further contact with him. In Carson’s view, at that point “Philips says basically, ‘Screw it. Now I’m really gonna go after this guy.’ He was calling Cathy Viray again and again and telling her how he was going to ruin my career.” Viray confirmed this.
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Carson appealed to the L.A. office’s assistant director, Rich Garcia, who made another unprecedented decision: he sent the office’s assistant chief counsel, Steve Kramer, along with Viray, to meet with Philips. The rendezvous took place in a corner booth of a downtown bar at just past eleven on a weeknight. “Cathy told me they began by telling Philips, ‘Look, Carson is not a bad dude. We don’t want you to ruin his career,’” recalled Carson, whose recollection was confirmed by Viray. “‘We’ll try to answer any questions [about the Biggie murder investigation] that we can, but you gotta understand there are limits to what we can tell you.’”
Viray called him just before midnight, Carson remembered, and said, “‘We just got done meeting with Chuck Philips.’ How did it go?” Carson asked. “And Cathy tells me, ‘You’re done. He’s going to ruin you.’”
He decided on the spot that he had to meet with Philips himself, Carson recalled. “I told Cathy, ‘You need to talk to the assistant director and get his okay for that, because nobody else is going to save my career. I have to do it.”
Garcia gave his permission for Carson to meet with Philips. It was after midnight by then. He phoned Philips, but the call went straight to voice mail. “I left a message that ‘I know about the meeting with Steve [Kramer] and Cathy, and I understand you’re going to write an article that’s going to ruin me. And I’d appreciate it if we could at least sit down and you could actually see me and put a face with my name and understand what you’re doing to a real person.’”
Philips phoned back fifteen minutes later, said he had just gotten out of the shower, and added, “Boy, that’s a phone call I didn’t expect to get.” He and Carson agreed they would meet early the next morning at a coffee shop near the Los Angeles Times Building. Carson picked Viray up the next morning at around five o’clock and the two were at the coffee shop before six. “When we sit down,” Carson recalled, “Philips immediately starts asking questions about the Biggie case that he knows I can’t answer. And I tell him that he knows I can’t share details of an ongoing investigation, and he’s trying to make my refusal to say things that could get me red into a reason to ruin me.”
Ten minutes into the conversation, Carson got a call from the woman who had been the face of the FBI in Los Angeles for years, public affairs specialist Laura Eimiller. “Laura asks, ‘What are you doing?’” Carson remembered. “I tell her I’m in a meeting and she asks, ‘Who’s with you?’ I tell her Cathy, and she asks, ‘Are you guys meeting with Chuck Philips?’ I say, ‘Yeah,’ and Laura tells me, ‘Well, Mike Berkow just called the assistant director and chewed him a new asshole. He’s pissed off you guys are meeting with Philips. I hand the phone to Cathy and I watch her face change. She starts bawling and telling Chuck Philips, ‘You motherfucker! You’re going to get me fired, you piece of shit!’ She’s losing it. I take the phone and Laura tells me, ‘You guys need to get out of there right now.’ When she hung up, I told Philips, ‘You called Berkow, didn’t you? And you told him about this meeting.’”
Philips had to have made that call sometime between one and six in the morning, Carson thought, which said something about the relationship he had with Berkow.
He and Viray got up from the table and left the coffee shop. “I’m literally carrying Cathy down the sidewalk toward our car, and Chuck is chasing after me, saying, ‘Phil, Phil, look, I can explain. Just listen to me. I got something I need to show you, and it’s up in my office.’ I tell him to just get away from me and I keep dragging Cathy away, because she’s turning around to go off on him. And Philips is telling me, ‘Just look at what I have to show you. It will explain everything.’ But I won’t stop. Then he says, ‘Someday I will tell you about how I found out about your operation in San Diego, about Psycho Mike.’ That was the moment when I knew for certain that Berkow had told him.”
By the time he got back to the FBI office, his “pager was blowing up,” Carson recalled. “Chuck Philips is doing anything he can to get hold of me. The guy won’t quit, and finally that night I answer his call and say, ‘What the hell do you want?’ He says, ‘You need to meet with me and see the stuff in my office I want to show you.’ I’m thinking, ‘Okay, the case is closed, I can’t get a letter of declination, you and Berkow are trying to ruin my career; it’s almost like I have nothing left to lose.”
So he agreed to meet with Philips again early the next morning on the sidewalk outside the Times Building. Philips showed up and the two rode the elevator up to the newspaper’s nearly vacant editorial department. Philips had brought him there not to “see” anything, Carson discovered, but rather to hear. What he wanted the FBI agent to listen to was a series of recorded phone conversations between the reporter and LAPD deputy chief Mike Berkow.
“To Berkow, I was just collateral damage. Ruining my life meant absolutely nothing to him.”“Berkow is telling him things like, ‘We have to make sure Phil Carson is totally noncredible. If he ever testifies, the LAPD will be destroyed. We have to wreck this case,’” Carson remembered. “I mean, these two guys were conspiring not just against me, but against the entire Wallace side of the case, against the murder investigation itself. To Berkow, I was just collateral damage. Ruining my life meant absolutely nothing to him. In one conversation I hear Berkow talking about Mike Robinson, and what he told Philips to shut down the third meeting with Amir Muhammad in Chula Vista, and by that point I was so pissed off that I could barely contain myself. He also tried to show me some photos, but by then I wanted out of there so badly I didn’t look at them. I just walked out, shaking with rage.”
During the next two weeks, Philips called him repeatedly, dozens of times, said Carson, who refused to take the reporter’s calls. Finally, though, realizing the mistake he had made in not looking at the photos, Carson called Philips back from the U.S. attorney’s offices and said he’d like to see them. The reporter showed up minutes later with an envelope full of photographs. “They were the same ones that I had seen the first time I looked at the Biggie Murder Book,” Carson said. “They were from the Petersen, on the night of the party. Philips pointed out various people in cheaper suits that he said were police officers. Then he showed me a picture of Amir Muhammad. I felt literally sick, and I wanted Philips away from me, so I walked away. I should have taken the photos, but I didn’t.” (Carson suspected Muhammad, a friend of Mack, of being the triggerman in the Notorious B.I.G. murder.)
He realized in a flash what Philips was doing, Carson explained: “He wanted me to be his new inside source, and he was willing to sell out Berkow to land me. The whole thing just made me sick and disgusted, and I knew I was done with it all. I never spoke to either Philips or Berkow again after that day.”
A short time later the FBI agent requested and received a transfer to Orange County. “L.A. was poisoned for me,” he explained. “I didn’t believe anybody in the whole damned city.”
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[1] In May 2018, I asked Vaughn, now a defense attorney in Los Angeles, to explain why he had refused to provide the letter of declination. In what sounded like a panicked voice he insisted that he did not know what I was talking about, then said he couldn’t discuss it over the telephone, asked me to send my questions in an email, and hung up. I immediately sent an email to Vaughn at his law firm, laying out the claims made by Carson and other current and former FBI agents and asking him to reply. He never did.
Excerpted from Dead Wrong: The Continuing Story of City of Lies, Corruption and Cover-Up in the Notorious B.I.G. Murder Investigation. Used with permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2019 by Randall Sullivan.
