Notorious B.I.G. Investigation About To Get Juicy

As New York magazine reports, today’s a big day in the ongoing investigation of Notorious B.I.G.’s 1997 murder: His family’s estate is pursuing a wrongful-death claim against the L.A.P.D.–they allege that the police bungled their own investigation, hoping to cover up departmental corruption–and lawyers are now set to depose two potential witnesses:

The first is a former internal-affairs officer, Sergeant Ya-May Christle, who claims that information about the case was scrubbed from her computer and that “more than a foot worth of discovery information” was withheld from Biggie’s lawyers. That would support Wallace’s family’s claim that the LAPD intentionally hid evidence relating to the murder.

The second new witness is Rafael Perez, the former LAPD detective and convicted cocaine thief, whose testimony about brazen criminality in the LAPD’s anti-gang-violence division ignited the largest police-corruption case in L.A. history. Perez is being deposed because one of his cellmates told a cop that Perez had confessed to him that he was in the vicinity of Biggie’s murder.

With Perez about to talk, now’s a good time to catch up on the L.A.P.D.’s complex Rampart scandal of the late-’90s, which tied together dirty cops, drug lords, and Suge Knight (Randall Sullivan’s Rolling Stone piece on the B.I.G. murder from 2005 is a good place to start). Meanwhile, no word yet on how the tenth anniversary of Biggie’s death will be marked–though we can only hope that it doesn’t involve another lackluster “duets” album.

Big News in Notorious Case [Nymag.com] The Unsolved Mystery Of the Notorious B.I.G. [Rollingstone.com]