When the cars stopped at a traffic light, a dark Chevy Impala pulled up alongside Biggie's ride. The driver, a black male in a suit and bow tie, rolled down his window and fired seven shots from a blue steel 9mm semi-automatic into the green SUV's front passenger door. Four of the bullets hit their mark. Biggie, 24, was pronounced dead less than an hour later, shortly after he arrived at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Although there were a dozen witnesses and hundreds of clues, the Biggie killing remains one of L.A.'s most notorious unsolved homicides. Now, a former Los Angeles Police detective charges that the department's failure to solve the case may be tied to an unfolding Rampart scandal coverup.

Last month, former LAPD Rampart task force Det. Russell Poole went public with charges that Chief Bernard Parks suppressed a report he had written on corrupt cops at the Rampart Division a full year before the scandal erupted. Poole, who resigned from the department last year after the LAPD brass ignored his complaints, also filed a lawsuit, claiming his career suffered as a result of his attempts to bring the scandal to light.

A member of LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division elite, Poole was one of the first detectives on the special Rampart task force. His work led to the arrest of officer Rafael Perez, the rogue cop whose confessions later triggered the worst scandal in LAPD history. But Poole charges that Chief Parks suppressed his early report on troubles in the Rampart Division, and that Parks and top LAPD brass refused to adequately investigate dirty cops, even when obvious clues pointed to them.

That reluctance to get to the bottom of police corruption, Poole says in his lawsuit, hampered his investigation of the Biggie Smalls murder. When he began turning up clues that pointed to involvement by David Mack, an LAPD officer and friend of Perez serving time for an armed bank robbery, he was prevented from aggressively pursuing the investigation.

Poole's lawsuit has already made waves in Los Angeles. Days after he filed it, his attorney, Leo Terrell, presented his case at a hearing of the police commission, where he demanded Chief Parks' resignation. Parks issued a statement denying the allegations.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, which has been conducting grand jury hearings on Rampart, called Poole in for more interviews. Prosecutors also filed court papers charging that the LAPD had intentionally hindered the criminal case against four officers in the first Rampart trial, which started last week. Echoing charges made by Poole, the court papers stated that LAPD detectives have failed to conduct thorough investigations and failed to turn over vital information to prosecutors, causing the exclusion of at least five prosecution witnesses. And in a development the DA's office insists is unrelated, the head of its Rampart prosecution team, Dan Murphy, resigned from that post, citing health concerns.

What may be the biggest new Rampart development, however, is the allegation by a former girlfriend of Rafael Perez that she saw Perez and fellow officer David Mack kill two people in the mid-1990s when a cocaine deal went bad. Sonia Flores, 23, made the allegations in an interview with the Los Angeles Times; last week she traveled to Mexico with an assistant U.S. attorney and FBI agents to show them a dump in Tijuana where she said the pair disposed of the bodies.

Sources say federal authorities could seek an indictment against Perez, since the 1999 immunity deal he cut with the DA in exchange for his testimony on the Rampart scandal won't protect him from prosecution if the FBI turns up independent evidence against him. Attorneys for Perez and Mack deny the allegations.

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