L.A. Lawyers Hit Back at B.I.G.'s Family

Wed., Jun. 7, 2006 5:05 PM PDT by Natalie Finn

Did not, did too. Did not, did too?

Lawyers representing the city of Los Angeles filed papers in L.A. Superior Court Tuesday accusing the family of slain rapper Notorious B.I.G. of going to "odious" and "absurd" lengths "to satisfy their ambition to extract hundreds of millions of dollars" from the city.

This action comes a week after the family's legal camp called the city's allegation that they had deceived the court during last year's wrongful death trial "a desperate attempt to prevent additional discovery about police misconduct."

The family of Christopher Wallace (aka Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls) sued the city in 2002, arguing that rogue LAPD officers played a part in the Ready to Die rapper's 1997 shooting death.

The case went to trial in 2005 but Judge Florence-Marie Cooper declared a mistrial in July after Perry Sanders, the family's attorney, announced he had received an anonymous tip that the LAPD was withholding evidence about the involvement of two particular policemen. Namely, someone allegedly told Sanders over the phone that former LAPD officer Rafael Perez had talked to a jailhouse informant about Notorious B.I.G.'s killing, which has remained unsolved.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the authorities were hard-pressed to explain why that info, along with hundreds of pages of personnel and disciplinary files, was not turned over to the plaintiffs.

Ruling that the city had deliberately concealed evidence, Judge Cooper ordered it to cough up $1.1 million to cover the family's legal fees and other expenses earlier this year. The L.A. City Council approved the payout in March.

Late last month, however, a private lawyer working for the city showed the judge a report prepared in 2002 by an investigator hired by Biggie's family that detailed an interview the P.I. conducted with a jailhouse informant, who claimed to have evidence linking the hip-hop artist's killing to Perez and another former cop, David A. Mack. (Both Perez and Mack are currently serving prison terms for other crimes).

This report prompted Judge Cooper to demand that Sanders explain why he had claimed to know nothing about this informant during the trial, saying that she was "so angry" she could "hardly even speak."

Sanders responded last week by saying that he didn't know that the informant had contacted his defense team until after he told the court he didn't know about him. Sanders also said that he gave the defense all of his relevant materials, including info about the investigator's report. "The record speaks for itself," he told the Times.

The city attorneys apparently had no qualms about letting their opinion of the plaintiffs be known. In the brief filed Tuesday they also stated that, "when the rhetoric and ad hominem are stripped away, plaintiffs' response is revealed as no response at all."

Dorothy Wolpert, one of the lawyers repping the city, suggested that perhaps the plaintiffs claimed they received an anonymous tip because they were "not happy with the way the trial was developing." She asked Judge Cooper to schedule a new trial "as soon as [the court's] calendar will allow."