LAbyrinth

About this book

Los Angeles has one of the nation's most controversial police departments. In the fall of 1998, still reeling from the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson debacles, the LAPD took a far more damaging hit when officer Rafael Perez implicated over seventy fellow officers -- members of the elite Rampart street-crimes unit -- in a conspiracy of robbery, brutality, drug dealing, false imprisonment, and allegedly murder. Now award-winning journalist Randall Sullivan delivers a masterpiece of reportage that reveals how members of the LAPD became caught up in the violent world of Suge Knight and his Death Row Records rap empire. Labyrinth shows how officers became gangsters, and how officials at the highest levels covered it up. Sullivan has had unprecedented access to Russell Poole, the upright homicide detective whose investigation into two of hip-hop's most infamous unsolved crimes -- the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. -- led him straight into the darkest corners of his own police force. Labyrinth introduces such renegade officers as Kevin Gaines, killed by fellow cop Frank Lyga after he threatened Lyga's life; Rafael Perez, who, in retaliation, may have attempted to frame Lyga for drug theft; and David Mack, the highly decorated officer and former Olympic-class track athlete who orchestrated one of the biggest bank heists in Los Angeles history. LAbyrinth is the first book to break down powerful walls of silence raised by an internal-affairs department and a police chief who protected criminal cops in order to avoid making waves in a city torn by racial politics and legalistic intrigue. It is an epic true story of the brutal men who ruled the nation's meanest streets and a nonflinching expose of the incredible reasons why they were not stopped.