Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations by Greg Kading

launched, with Black and myself at the helm.
    Over the course of the next two years, although we did a lot of good work, results remained frustratingly out of reach. Evidence solid enough to take to the U.S. attorney for prosecution continued to elude us and, as with its predecessor, the steam slowly went out of the investigation. In late 1999, I was promoted to detective and transferred back to the Wilshire Division.
    It’s a little-understood fact of police work that initiative and motivation most often originate from the bottom up. The cops who work day in and day out on the front lines are the first to understand who the bad guys really are and how to best bring them down. When those who have worked longest and hardest on a case are transferred or reassigned, the momentum will usually dissipate. They take with them all the painstaking accumulation of evidence, criminal links, witness testimony, and the myriad other details that go into a successful investigation. It can, of course, be intensely frustrating for the officer involved, yet it’s also true that a cop who has committed to catching a bad guy never forgets what he’s learned.
    In 2003, I had the opportunity to again focus my attention on Torres when I was asked to join yet another probe into his activities. It was to be the largest investigation yet, a sprawling multiagency effort involving the FBI, the ATF, the DEA, the LAPD, the Sheriff’s Department, and various local jurisdictions. Dubbed Operation Corrido, it looked into everything from conspiracy, tax evasion, and racketeering to murder and drug trafficking. My particular area of responsibility was to investigate all alleged acts of violence attributed, directly or indirectly, to Torres.
    There was no shortage of leads to follow. As I started to bear down on the new evidence that had come to light since I last worked the case, I detected what I believed to be a widespread pattern of extortion, directly related to Numero Uno’s strict policy of prosecuting shoplifters to the fullest extent of the law; a law laid down by El Diablo, as Torres was commonly known. Word on the street had it that anyone caught stealing from one of his stores was taken into a back room by security guards and made to pay ten times the amount of the purloined item. If a thief needed additional persuading, the persistent rumors maintained, he would be handcuffed to scaffolding or locked in a freezer. The proceeds were then carefully recorded in ledgers and a Polaroid of the chastened and, in many cases, battered shoplifter was taken and meticulously filed.
    Any merchant, of course, has the right to protect himself against thievery and even to keep an account of those who have stolen from him. But if what I was hearing was true, Torres would have been taking that principle to the extreme, in effect running his own private enforcement operation, terrorizing those he caught and making a tidy profit in the process. Further evidence of these activities was procured with a wiretap, over which we heard Torres speak directly to an associate about one of the shoplifter shakedowns. The next step was to request a search warrant of various Numero Uno outlets.
    The search warrant naturally required a written application to be submitted to a judge. Preparing such a document is an exacting job, requiring well-honed language skills to put on paper the justification for violating a person’s right to privacy in the pursuit of justice. Any officer worth his badge knows that every word he uses to make his case will be scrutinized, if not by a judge, then certainly by a defense attorney.
    The warrant request was granted and we raided nine Numero Uno markets, coming away with more than a thousand Polaroid portraits and numerous ledgers enumerating the sums exacted from each victim. On that basis the U.S. attorney was able to put forward a case of extortion and false imprisonment against Torres, one of fifty-nine counts that eventually made it to a