By Michael Douglas Carlin
michaeldouglascarlin@gmail.com
Today as I sit and reflect on the
events of the last couple of days I get a chance to put it all in perspective
without emotions clouding my judgment or being manipulated by information being
released through various media outlets or on YouTube.
Russell always had doing what is
right as his priority – he had the truth as his sword and justice as his shield.
Russell Poole was a dear friend. He was a no-nonsense cop that bled blue. He
respected police and the role of the homicide investigator in bringing
perpetrators of crimes to justice. For 19 years he worked for the Los Angeles
Police Department as a dedicated member of a well-respected team. He did
everything he could to maintain the integrity of that team. When the leadership
of that team placed a greater emphasis on shielding criminals than
investigating them Russell Poole tendered his resignation.
Russell and I made a pact that we
were not going to tell anyone about the meeting with the Sheriff’s Department.
The investigator called Russell the day before the meeting to generally get an
idea of what would be talked about and to confirm the meeting. We were starting
to get traction in the case. Russell and I had several social meetings with
Dave Demerjian from the DA’s office about the case choosing to meet over a beer
rather than cause a stir by Russell’s visit to the DA’s Office. We had given Dave
a copy of Tupac:187 and he was unenthusiastic about the idea of reopening
the case. When Russell and I compiled the Tupac Murder Facts he started to show
genuine interest, “Russ, I need an investigator from inside of law enforcement
to move forward on this case.”
Both Russell and I had been in
contact with Sheriff Jim McDonnell about the case and we began with a
conference call. Jim had recently taken over the department and was buried just
getting the lay of the land. He became unresponsive to either of Russell or my
text messages or voice messages simply because he was being pulled in so many
different directions.
Leadership LA was hosting an event
where McDonnell would be the guest speaker so as an alumni I attended and
cornered McDonnell and told him that we needed someone from inside of the
Sheriff’s Department to work with the DA’s office. Jim reluctantly agreed to
get us an investigator and then scurried off to a meeting with Vice President
Biden. I followed up with his executive aide, Lieutenant Kerry Carter with an
email that included both of our emails and telephone numbers. They called
Russell to schedule a meeting for August 19, 2015 at 10 a.m.. Russell was asked
to come alone.
At 9:02 a.m. Russell called me and
we talked for 7 minutes. He told me he was stuck in traffic around Diamond Bar.
On the phone he told me that he would be staying at his son’s condo to visit
the doctor on Thursday. He was going to have his blood pressure medicine
adjusted. We talked about the upcoming meeting and he promised to call me the
minute he got out of the meeting. He said, “if anything happens to me you have
to get the information we compiled out there.”
Noon rolled around and I assumed he
was extending this into lunch but was encouraged that it was taking longer than anticipated.
I even thought that maybe he was being offered a job with the Sheriff’s
Department. At 3:51 p.m. I sent another text message, “still going???” A while
later I sent, “Damn!” and then a little while later, “Must be a great meeting.”
I had no idea what was actually happening. At 5:28 p.m. I got a text from one
of our confidential informants telling me, “I just heard Russell has died, what
the f***!!!!” I went on to Google and saw the news and that it had been posted
24 minutes earlier. I was devastated. The friend I was with started to scour
the web while I made some telephone calls. Six minutes later, I was listening
to Reggie Wright Jr.’s interview on Bomb1st.com. Now the questions were racing
in my mind. How did Wright get a video posted so quickly. It is a 13.32-minute
interview so walk that back. It had to take time to call it in, to put the
background up, to publish it, to post it, and for it to aggregate into the
search engines. For a time it was appearing in the first couple of listings on
Google. We clicked on the video to listen to it a second time and the video had
all of a sudden become private and couldn’t be played.
Did Wright know Poole wasn’t going
to be walking out of the Sheriff’s office alive? It all certainly seemed fishy
to me. Almost like the Kevin Hackey interview Poole had conducted, earlier in
his career, where Hackie tells of Wright knowing about the murder of Bobby
Finch just 3 minutes after it happened. Hackie called Reggie to give him the
news and Reggie already knew. Hackie said, “how do you know” about this this it
just happened 3 or 4 minutes ago. In the case of Bobby Finch either Wright had
a tremendous information network or he was behind the murder. Here again Wright
either has a tremendous network or he has something to do with this.
My mind was racing. I remembered
that the corrupt Compton Police Department had been absorbed into the Sheriff’s
Department instead of being disbanded and that corruption had festered and
expanded. I thought about the inside information that Russell and I had learned
that an off-duty Sheriff had let the shooters into the nightclub on the August
24th, 2014, the night Suge Knight was shot and had driven them to LAX the next day. There was a time
when I was distrusting of everybody in law enforcement and I was sure that I needed
to leave town. Wright’s intimation was that anyone that continues to
investigate him is going to end up dead.
Some of what Wright had to say was
right on the money. Some of what he was saying was misinformation. Russell
Poole was not meeting with Suge Knight! Russell was not meeting with the female
investigator that Reggie Wright Jr. referenced. He was talking to the Sheriff’s
about the Tupac and Biggie murders trying to get an investigator within the
department interested in looking into these murders. The Sheriff’s investigator
had contacted Russell the day before the meeting to get a general sense of the
subject matter and Russell told them about knowing that an off-duty Sheriff had
been caught on videotape opening the door for the two shooters at the 1Oak club
in West Hollywood and that the same off-duty Sheriff had been caught on
videotape dropping the shooters off at LAX. The investigator was surprised that
Russell had obtained the information and according to Russell he confirmed that
the information was true. What made Russell think that the Sheriff’s were the
logical choice was the fact that they control Suge Knight and that they have
two very challenging cases – one where Suge was the victim and one where Suge
is the suspect. The odds of a successful prosecution of Suge Knight, in light
of all the evidence that we have, is slim at best. Information about bungling
the investigations of both of those crimes is going to come to light especially
with attorney Tom Mesereau on Suge Knight’s defense team. Russell then said,
“look you have two dog cases that are going to cause the department
embarrassment and you have the two biggest mysteries in music history that
could make the department shine. Why not cut a deal with Suge now while you
have influence over him to get him to cooperate with bringing the killers of
Tupac and Biggie to justice.” After the telephone call Russell called me and
relayed all of the information to me. He was genuinely excited about going to
the meeting the following morning because he felt there was going to be
movement in the case.
What Reggie Wright Jr. is right
about is the jurisdiction issues that were discussed and I only learned that
yesterday (August 20, 2015), when I received a telephone call from the
investigator and Jim McDonnell.
Both of them called me to offer
their condolences and to let me know what had happened. Apparently at the end
of the meeting, Russell had begun to feel distressed and paramedics were
called. They did everything they could for him but he passed away. Think about
all of the safest places to have a heart attack. I would rate Sheriff HQ as the
second safest place because there are so many people around that are trained in
CPR. There is no way that Russell should have died on the 19th at
Sheriff HQ of a heart attack – he should have survived. But that isn’t the case
as we all know.
The call from Jim and the
investigator was very heart felt and I appreciated it tremendously. We had a
ten-minute call. I made it clear that I am a civilian and that I did not expect
them to share with me anything they are doing or not doing on an investigation.
The investigator brought up the jurisdiction issues that Reggie Wright Jr.
talked about on his Bomb1st interview in almost the same way. I asked the
investigator, “why Reggie Wright Jr. had sensitive information about the cases
just minutes after the meeting happened?” He told me that information had to
have come from Russell as he was probably talking to everybody about this. I
called bullshit! I told him that Russell and I had made a pact to not discuss
this with anyone and that there must be a leak at the department.
Russell was
adamant that in order to actually let investigators do their jobs there had to
be a willingness to investigate and we needed to give those investigators every
opportunity of success. So there was clearly no leak from Russell.
So there are still unanswered
questions about this and as always we only want the truth wherever that leads.
How does Reggie know intimate details about what goes on inside of the
Sheriff’s Department HQ? I can probably guess as his father and many of the
officers Wright has known since he was a child were absorbed into the Sheriff’s
that this gives him many information sources. He could have heard about it
minutes after the meeting or he could have heard about it after the
investigator talked to Russell the day before. We are living in a different era
as Lee Baca had told me, “nobody is working anymore, they’re all on their cell
phones.” Social media, texting, voice messaging has changed the game. The
investigator could have immediately called Wright or it could be innocent and
he could have conveyed that Poole was coming in to a colleague who shared it
with someone that shared it with someone until somebody called Wright.
Sheriff Sherman Block did some
great things for the community and the Sheriff’s Department. He set up youth
programs that continue until this day. Lee Baca expanded those programs. They
give the Sheriff’s a deep reach into the community to avert problems before
they happen and to deal quickly with problems when they do occur because of
that reach. Jim McDonnell now sits in leadership over the Sheriff’s and he understands
the importance of his department’s connection with the youth. He encourages his
officers to talk to the youth and simply ask them how they are doing – to let
them know that somebody cares about them – and as he said on the 22nd,
when he spoke to Leadership LA’s Alumnus, “it doesn’t cost a dime and it may be
the only person this year who shows they care.”
Lee Baca pointed out to me, “In all of the years of the African-American Community doing demonstrations against the police, there has never been a demonstration against the LA County Sheriff’s Department.” He credits the youth programs.
I once ran a company with 100
employees. There were 100 headaches. You multiply that by 18,000 and you begin
to understand the tremendous responsibility Sherman Block, Lee Baca, and Jim
McDonnell have shouldered. While Baca was at the Sheriff’s Department he
expanded the responsibility to include the MTA and Community Colleges.
McDonnell walked into the 2nd largest police force in the nation
right behind NYPD.
Russell’s father was a Sheriff. Lee
Baca gave the eulogy at Russell’s Father’s funeral less than six months ago.
Russell was excited that there would finally be traction in this case. He had a
vision for solving it. That vision did include Suge Knight but not as Reggie misrepresented
that Russ had been meeting with Suge. Suge is under a protective order and
cannot have meetings with civilians. So there was no way Russell could have met
with Suge. No, Russell’s vision for solving the case hinged on the integrity of
the majority of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s who are hard working honest people
that put their lives on the line every day. Russell previously worked with Jim
McDonnell when they were both at LAPD and he had a tremendous respect for
McDonnell.
He knew that McDonnell was going to
root out the corruption that exists within the Sheriff’s. With 18,000 employees
there is no way to control every single employee who takes an extra fifty or
hundred-dollar-bill from a bust but there are standards to apply that give the
Sheriff’s a whole new opportunity to be seen a whole lot different than they
have been seen before and McDonnell is setting the bar high. He chose not to
clean house when he arrived so that any whose enthusiasm had waned would have
the opportunity to “get their heads back into the game.”
His 3.2 Billion Dollar budget seems
like a lot but when you think about the facilities, vehicles, and personnel it
doesn’t take long to soak up that budget. So McDonnell must find solutions to
problems that don’t require money. Getting his 18,000 employees heads all in
the game will multiply his reach within the department but it will also
multiply his reach into Los Angeles.
Russell, the man that investigated
the Rampart Scandal and made LAPD police corruption public, believed in this
vision. He believed Sheriff’s are in the right place to solve this case and in
spite of the jurisdiction issues he believed they should be handed the baton. He
believed in Sheriff Jim McDonnell. That is why he was at the Sheriff’s
Department Headquarters taking a meeting with a homicide investigator.
I share Russell’s vision for this
case and his support for the Sheriff’s department. Can I say for certainty that
someone there didn’t give him something tainted? No, I can’t! But I can also
say that even though Russell was hiking six miles a day that he was overeating
and upon occasion I had partaken in a few too many alcoholic beverages with
him. He was starting to make life changes and he had just begun to eat better, drink less, and I noticed a new excitement in his voice. Some of
those changes may have been changing his body chemistry to where he needed to
adjust his blood pressure medication. Keep in mind he was planning on seeing
his doctor the next day.
I sent a message to Sheriff Jim
McDonnell thanking him for his telephone call yesterday and saying how much it
meant to me that he personally reached out. I also said, “Russell’s ghost will
haunt the new HQ to root out any and all corruption… He is now your partner
from the other side.”
So there Russell was working on a case – doing
what he loved! The new Sheriff’s facility was only opened a short time before
Russell walked through those doors armed with information that he felt would
solve the case. He was bringing resolution to something that had eaten at him
for 19 years. In the heat of battle, this Knight of Malta, was taken on the
field of battle. He lived a life of honor and he died a hero’s death at the
most important law enforcement facility in Los Angeles. This was a magnificent
death for an American Patriot who added his blood to the millions of others
that have contributed to building a “more perfect union.” Goodbye friend, I
will miss you!!!Read Russell Poole's final words on #Tupac & #Biggie murders
smashwords.com/books/view/602470
