THE TRUTH BEHIND THE HIT ON BIGGIE
Rap star's killer hired by Suge and aided by cops: fed, filmmakers
DEATH Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight financed the hit on Brooklyn rapper Notorious B.I.G. — an execution carried out by Nation of Islam convert and hired hit man Amir Muhammad with the help of corrupt Los Angeles cops, according to an FBI agent who worked the case and sources who have seen sealed court documents.
“All the evidence points to Amir Muhammad. He’s the one who pulled the trigger,” retired FBI Agent Phil Carson, who worked the case for two years, claimed to The Post. “There were plenty of others who helped orchestrate it [and] allowed him to pull the trigger.”
Carson called the alleged coverup “the biggest miscarriage of justice in my 20-year career at the FBI.”
“I had evidence that LAPD officers were involved, and I was shut down by the LAPD and city attorneys inside Los Angeles,” he said.
The Notorious B.I.G., who was born Christopher Wallace and also went by Biggie Smalls, was 24 when he was gunned down on a Los Angeles street in the early morning of March 9, 1997.
The events that followed have frustrated fans and the Wallace family for nearly three decades, swirling with accusations of a widespread, official coverup.
But Carson and film producer Don Sikorski, whose 2018 movie, “City of Lies,” dramatized the slaying, its investigation and the aftermath, told The Post the murder itself is no mystery.
“All the answers are in black and white,” Sikorski said, claiming that he and “City of Lies” director Brad Furman were among the few people who have read the sealed court files behind the unsolved murder.
A 2003 FBI report obtained by The Post that outlines the case for prosecutors supports the claim Carson and the filmmakers make today.
“Amir Muhammad, aka Harry Billups, the godparent to LAPD Officer David Mack’s two children, has been identified by several sources as the trigger man,” reads a formal FBI request, written by Carson, that the investigation be given a Los Angeles case-file number.
“Mack is a registered owner of a 1995 Black SS Impala with chrome wheels, the exact description given as being driven by Wallace’s shooter.”
The original target was not Biggie, said Carson, but Sean “Puffy”
Combs, who was in the vehicle ahead of Biggie’s SUV the night of the murder. Carson said that he shared this information with Combs and that the record-label exec was “pretty freaked out” to learn he was the intended hit.
Sikorski and his production team now demand that law-enforcement officials in California renew the investigation and solve what the filmmaker calls “the JFK assassination of the rap world.” They’re joined in their effort by Carson.
The civil case filed against the LAPD by the Wallace family in 2002 contains much of the evidence about the murder but remains sealed under order of a federal judge.
The criminal investigation into the murder officially remains open, according to the LAPD. But Sikorski and Carson say there has been little to no activity on the case for years.
BIGGIE was born in Brooklyn in 1972 and as a teenager descended into a life of crime, including arrests for gun possession and dealing crack.
But his rap skills were legendary on the streets. The Source magazine profiled Biggie in a 1992 feature about unsigned talent. Upstart entertainment executive Combs read the article and met Biggie for the first time at Sylvia’s, the soulfood landmark in Harlem.
His meteoric rise to fame began when he signed in 2013 with Combs’ Bad Boy Records.
Biggie’s first album, “Ready to Die,” was released a year later and spawned a series of hits, including the now-iconic track “Juicy.” His second and final album, “Life After Death,” has sold more than 11 million copies.
He remains larger than life, nearly a quarter-century after his murder. Rolling Stone and Billboard both named him the greatest rapper of all time, while New York City street vendors still hawk T-shirts bearing his likeness.
One person who did not appreciate Biggie was West Coast music mogul Knight.
Biggie’s lightning-fast ascendancy had helped fuel the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry of the 1990s, pitting Knight’s LAbased Death Row Records against Combs’ New York-centered Bad Boy label.
The animosity turned to bloodshed in September 1996, when Death Row superstar Tupac Shakur was shot dead after attending a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas. Shakur’s murder, like Biggie’s, re
mains unsolved.
Six months later, Biggie left a party following the Soul Train Music Awards in LA. He sat in the back of a black GMC Suburban, the second vehicle of a three-car caravan, when it stopped at a red light at the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard.
Witnesses told police that a dark Chevy Impala pulled up next to Biggie’s car and that the shooter, wearing a blue suit and bow tie, blasted several rounds into the SUV. Biggie was hit four times, the final shot piercing vital organs, and pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Carson told The Post that the driver of Biggie’s SUV, Greg “G Money” Young, had little security experience and that he should have kept driving through the red light, especially at that hour of the morning, to protect the safety of the people in the vehicle.
Biggie and the rest of the East Coast entourage went to Los Angeles that week already harboring concerns about a potential Tupac revenge hit.
“Biggie became a stationary target,” Carson said.
MUHAMMAD, a friend of corrupt LA cop David Mack, fired the shots, Carson claimed, citing eyewitness testimony and financial evidence connecting him to the murder. Muhammad was briefly a suspect but was never charged. Now 61, he is believed to be a real-estate broker in Georgia and goes by his given name, Harry Billups.
According to Sikorski, all evidence “points to Amir Muhammad as the killer.”
“When you read those [sealed] documents, there is overwhelming evidence that paints for you exactly who did the murder and why [the LAPD] covered it up,” he said.
Investigators, Sikorski said, believed Mack and Rafael Perez, another crooked LAPD cop on Death Row’s payroll, were deeply involved. Their names are on the legal filings the Wallace family made in their civil suit against this city, said Sikorski, and he believes that if this evidence sees the light of day, the family would win hundreds of millions of dollars.
Muhammad and Mack did not respond to messages seeking comment.
“Suge Knight financed the murder,” Carson said. “Suge was ticked off that his cash cow Tupac was murdered. Suge had an accountant that was part of Death Row Records who helped do the financial side of things to pay for the murders.” The cost of the hit is not known. Knight also festered over the belief that his friend Jake Robles was killed by a Combs bodyguard, Anthony “Wolf ” Jones, at a 1995 party in Atlanta. No charges were filed in that murder. Jones was shot dead in 2003, also in Atlanta.
Knight is currently serving a 28year prison sentence after pleading no contest to voluntary manslaughter following a 2015 hit-andrun death during the filming of the movie “Straight Outta Compton.”
Sikorski’s film “City of Lies” stars Johnny Depp as decorated former Los Angeles Police Detective Russell Poole — a real officer who died in 2015 after years of being frustrated by superiors in his pursuit of answers in the Biggie murder.
Forest Whitaker plays fictional journalist Jack Jackson, a character based upon real-life author Randall Sullivan, whose 2003 book, “LAbyrinth,” chronicled the murder and the scandal that followed.
The film debuted at a film festival in Italy in 2018 but has only recently been widely released.
“City of Lies” suggests that Knight orchestrated the murder from prison and was insulated by Mack and other corrupt LA cops on his payroll and that Muhammad pulled the trigger. It’s the same theory that was put forth by Poole and in the “LAbyrinth” book.
The movie “nailed it,” Carson said.
Mack and Muhammad, then still known as Billups, attended the University of Oregon together in the early 1980s. Mack was a track star, and Billups played football.
Five months after Biggie’s murder, the cop was convicted of an August 1997 robbery in which he stole $722,000 from a Bank of America branch in Los Angeles. The money — which informants told the FBI was meant to go to Muhammad — was never recovered.
Mack was released from prison in 2010. He has publicly denied his involvement in the Biggie murder.
A portion of the files obtained by The Post says that “the LAPD itself had alleged that Mack and Perez were involved in the Wallace homicide” and that “the city [of Los Angeles] attempted to block all discovery into who had been aware of the [internal investigation] and/or laid finger on it.”
Carson claims that he brought his case, with the blessing of his superior officers, before the local US Attorney’s Office but that they declined to prosecute for fear of its impact on the city of Los Angeles and its police department. At the time, the LAPD was trying to repair its reputation in the aftermath of the videotaped 1991 beating of Rodney King and the widespread riots that followed the 1992 acquittal of the four officers involved.
The former agent told The Post that he’s speaking up now to finally get the justice that eluded him while with the FBI.
“I knew one day I was going to tell the truth,” Carson said. “What I went through at the time from the LAPD was sheer hell.”
Sikorski claims the contents of the FBI reports are known to key law-enforcement officials, including former LAPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who also twice headed the NYPD, and current LA top cop Michael Moore.
Carson and the filmmakers say enough evidence exists to finally solve the Biggie murder.
“We demand to know the status of the ongoing investigation,” Sikorski told The Post, “as well as request that acting US Attorney Tracy Wilkison of the Central District of California and Assistant Director Kristi Koons Johnson of the FBI Los Angeles Field Office open an investigation, look at the evidence and file the appropriate charges.”
The offices of Moore, Wilkison and Koons Johnson declined to comment.