In November 1999, shortly after he resigned from the LAPD, Poole met with Los Angeles Times reporters Scott Glover and Matt Lait and told them his story: how the LAPD refused to investigate dirty cops, from Kevin Gaines to David Mack to Rafael Perez. He told them about Mack's possible ties to the 1997 killing of rapper Biggie Smalls (aka The Notorious B.I.G.). And most importantly, he told them about the suppression of a 40-page report he had written about corruption at the Rampart Division. He gave them a copy of that report. At the time, Poole didn't want to be quoted or go on the record. He gave Glover and Lait his information and documents and told them they should look into it.

Without having Poole on the record, Glover and Lait could not report his allegations without independent corroboration, which they set out to obtain. After some digging, and with the documents Poole provided them, they soon had enough to do a piece on one part of Poole's story -- the murder of Biggie Smalls. Their Dec. 9, 1999 front-page Times story reported that Amir Muhammad, a friend of officer David Mack, was a suspect in the rapper's killing.

Poole was flabbergasted: In fact, he'd told them the LAPD wasn't looking for Muhammad -- because of his ties to former police officer Mack. There was also nothing in the story about his troubles getting the LAPD to investigate dirty cops like Gaines, Mack and Perez, or the suppression of his 40-page Rampart report.

Scott Glover and Matt Lait would not comment about their conversations with Poole, citing a policy of source confidentiality. But Lait insists that the L.A. Times would not have published the story if the reporters had not confirmed, independently, that Muhammad was an active suspect. Their LAPD sources, he says, indicated that Muhammad had not been eliminated as a suspect. They also learned that Muhammad's photo had been shown to witnesses of the rap star's shooting after Poole was off the case.

After their Biggie piece ran, Glover and Lait were chided by Poole for not telling his whole story. The reporters told him they were still working on it, seeking independent corroboration for his allegations. By late March, Poole had taken his story and documents to the Los Angeles district attorney's office. Realizing his claims against the LAPD would become public eventually, he called Glover and Lait and told them he would go on the record. Still, the reporters were not ready to go with the story. "We wanted to nail it all down," says Lait.

Then, on May 3, 2000, the Los Angeles Times ran another piece by business reporter Chuck Philips. Philips, who covers the music industry, reported that detectives on the Biggie case did not in fact consider Muhammad a suspect when the Times ran its original story. Amir Muhammad, who was located by Philips, said he was a mortgage broker who had nothing to do with the murder. He did not, however, speak with police investigators. He described himself as an old friend of Mack's family and godfather to his children, who visited him in jail just after Mack was arrested for the December 1997 bank robbery.

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