The Unsolved Mystery of the Notorious B.I.G.

As a former New York resident and an avid hip hop fan, Notorious B.I.G. cassette tapes (and eventually cd’s) littered the floor of my childhood bedroom, where I learned all about ‘Do or Die Bedstuy’ from a heavy-set nigga from Brooklyn.  Then a shockwave was sent through the hip-hop world on March 9^th, 1997, when Christopher Wallace was gunned down in his GMC Suburban outside the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.  In over 10 years since his death, the open murder investigation remains unsolved and his killer has yet to be brought to justice.  Admittedly it got buried into the depths of my day-to-day thought process, but a recent Rolling Stone article by Randall Sullivan brought to light some important new details in the death of Brooklyn’s greatest. Sullivan’s article is 13 pages long, so we at Audionugs are proud to sponsor the unofficial cliffnotes!

On July 6, 2010, Mrs. Wallace filed a wrongful death suit against the LAPD. When the suit was declared a mistrial by Judge Cooper, it was because of a series of anonymous late night phone tips, the lockdown of the LAPD’s homicide division, and the magical appearance of hundreds of pages of evidence that incriminated many LAPD officers. Cooper, on the steps of the court house, explained that she believed that the LAPD deliberately concealed mass amounts of evidence that attested to the involvement of rogue officers in the death of Biggie Smalls.  During the original murder investigation, there had been a looming conspiracy theory that Death Row’s Suge Knight and the Bloods murdered both Tupac and Biggie; however, new evidence points to the involvement of rogue LAPD officer David Mack, who doubled as a member of Death Row security and had been at the scene of the crime on March 9.

Two weeks earlier, when Tupac Shakur had been attending a boxing match in Las Vegas with Suge Knight and other members of Death Row, Suge had asked Tupac to join him alone in his BMW as they left the fight.  Some members of Tupac’s security team could not understand why Suge had wanted different travel arrangements, and they’re worst fears were confirmed minutes later after Tupac was shot 13 times.Death Row then launched a smear campaign to put Tupac’s death on Biggie, who had a rock solid alibi placing him in New York at the time of the LA rapper’s death, but was nevertheless brought into the hype surrounding the East-West rap beef.  While Suge Knight was taken to jail for being implicated in the murder, which had been ordered based on Tupac’s desire to leave Death Row as he launched his own label, he continued to run Death Row’s day-to-day operations and began planning a hit on Notorious B.I.G.


Using testimonies from a one-time prison roommate of Knight in March 1997, Suge Knight had asked a number of high-profile gang assassins to take out Biggie Smalls, but it wasn’t until he approached members of a Nation of Islam splinter group that he was able to find someone willing to take on the job.  Enter Amir Mohammad into the picture, a one-time member of Louis Farrakhan’s personal bodyguard, who over the years had escaped a number of domestic battery and assault charges, and became a prominent hitman in a violent offshoot of the Nation of Islam.  Donning the typical sharply tailored suit and bowtie, Mohammad was pulled over 48 hours after Biggie’s death driving the same Black Impala seen by witnesses on the night of the rapper’s death.  The witness testimony from Knight’s prison inmate also mentioned conversations that Knight had with members of the Bloods gang in jail in which he bragged about taking out the Brooklyn rapper, and even joked that ‘We almost got that little bitch Puffy too”.  Once Suge’s tacit involvement in Biggie’s death became known within the hip-hop community, members of the Bay Area rap scene that included hyphy king E40 ordered a hit on Suge Knight, offering $50,000 to anyone who would take out the LA gangster-rap mogul.

In the past 10 years, LAPD officers, including the lead investigator in Biggie’s murder, had deliberately hid hundreds of pages of court documents tying officers to the Death Row records security team, who used their position of power to pull off major drug deals, act as enforcers to Suge Knight, and provide security for the nefarious Watts-based Bloods gang.  Stories ranging from stolen heroin from evidence lockers to LAPD officers being ID’d at drug deals and murder scenes were uncovered, and obviously painted the city’s police force in the worst light since the horrific beating of Rodney King.

Either way you look at it, significant amounts of new evidence should assist the Wallace family in bringing Biggie’s killer to justice, and I can only hope that the LAPD will do some significant house-cleaning in response.  Anyways, because it is Monday, enjoy Biggie mashups from your favorite DJs, including two unreleased tracks that I recently put together….







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