A prison inmate who implicated a former Los Angeles Police Department officer in the murder of Notorious B.I.G. says he lied about the officer’s involvement, a move that provides another twist in a complex and unsolved killing.
Waymond Anderson, a former R&B artist now serving a life sentence for murder in a separate case, said in an Aug. 20 deposition that he lied as part of a scam to win a monetary settlement from the city.
Anderson’s deposition, first reported Wednesday in the Los Angeles Times, states that he was offered a portion of any settlement if he testified that former police Officer Rafael Perez told him that another ex-police officer, David Mack, was involved.
Both Mack and Perez have long denied any involvement in the March 9, 1997, murder of the New York rapper, also known as Biggie Smalls.
“I don’t know David Mack, I don’t know Rafael Perez,” Anderson said in the deposition. “It was a lie, and I’m ashamed of it.”
B.I.G., whose real name was Christopher Wallace, was 24 when he was gunned down while leaving a music industry party at a Los Angeles museum.
Wallace was one of the country’s most influential hip-hop artists, and theories have proliferated for years about who might have been behind his murder and why.
His family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit seeking damages from the city. It accuses the Police Department, and specifically Mack, of responsibility for Wallace’s death.
Perry R. Sanders Jr., the Wallace family’s lawyer, denied the allegation.
“This is wholesale, made-up-out-of-whole-cloth perjury,” Sanders said.
Both Mack and Perez have long since left the Police Department.
Mack is serving a federal prison sentence for bank robbery.