By the time detectives from the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division arrived on the scene, they knew not only the dead man's identity but also that they were stepping into a minefield. The victim was Kevin Gaines, 31, a seven-year veteran of the LAPD, then assigned to patrol duty in the department's Pacific Division. He had been off-duty at the time of his death. The lead investigator on the case was forty-year-old Russell Poole. [...] Poole's assignment to the Kevin Gaines case, however, would send him into a bewildering labyrinth of murder, bank robbery, corruption, bureaucratic intrigue and racial politics. By the time Poole resigned in disgust from the department almost two years later, he would have peered into the darkest corners of the LAPD, discovering many of that troubled organization's most closely guarded secrets. The questionable actions that followed from the death of Kevin Gaines would implicate some of Los Angeles' most influential figures, including the current chief of police and the city attorney who is now L.A.'s leading mayoral candidate. And before his investigation was delayed, diverted and then finally shut down, Poole would uncover powerful evidence that police officers were operating within the Los Angeles Police Department both as members of the Bloods gang and as security for gangsta-rap kingpin Suge Knight, the president of Death Row Records. These officers, Poole suspected, were involved in the unsolved murder of one of rap music's biggest stars, Biggie Smalls.
One wonders why--or if--Los Angeles alone produced this sort of police culture.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
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12/19/2001: vive la france
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