Dead Wrong: The Continuing Story of City of Lies, Corruption and Cover-Up in the Notorious BIG Murder Investigation

“[An] engrossing, damning tale of widespread unchecked corruption in one of the nation’s largest police departments, one that deserves attention . . . Exhaustively researched . . . The most thorough examination of these much-publicized events.”―Boston Globe, on LAbyrinth

In 2002, acclaimed journalist Randall Sullivan’s groundbreaking book LAbyrinth ignited a firestorm with its startling disclosures about corruption in the LAPD. It told the story of Russell Poole, a highly decorated LAPD detective, who uncovered a cabal of “gangsta cops” tied to Marion “Suge” Knight’s notorious rap label, Death Row Records, and allegedly to the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. Over twenty years later, no one has been held accountable for their killings.


Now Dead Wrong tells the story of the last sixteen years in the B.I.G. investigations, and uncovers the conspiracy of silence that met the estate’s wrongful death suit against the City. Back in 2001, an eyewitness identified the man who shot Biggie as Amir Muhammad, a man who was former LAPD officer, Death Row associate, and convicted bank robber David Mack’s college roommate and the only man to visit him in prison. Poole’s investigation was repeatedly directed away from Mack and Muhammad, and the wrongful death lawsuit sought to make the city explain why―but instead, investigators encountered a disturbing pattern of selective investigation, hidden evidence, and possible witness tampering. Exclusive interviews with the FBI’s lead investigator of the Biggie murder demonstrate a conspiracy that went to the top, and which implicates some of the most powerful men in law enforcement nationally. A gripping investigation into murder, police corruption, and the corridors of power in Los Angeles, Dead Wrong is full of shocking revelations about a mystery that continues to hold us twenty years on.