LAbyrinth: A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.

LAbyrinth is the best-known book linking the murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. to the Los Angeles Police Department. Its author, Randall Sullivan, was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone for more than two decades. While researching the LAPD’s Rampart scandal in 2000, he met retired homicide detective Russell Poole; the encounter produced first a Rolling Stone article and then this book. It is in English.

The facts

What it’s about

Sullivan follows Poole, who inside the LAPD pursued leads suggesting that police officers were moonlighting for Death Row Records and had ties to Suge Knight. The book connects this trail to the 1997 murder of Biggie, to Tupac’s death in Las Vegas and to corruption in the Rampart CRASH unit. As the book tells it, Poole ran into resistance from the department’s leadership, quit the force and sued the LAPD.

Verdict

Investigative journalism with a disputed central thesis. Kirkus Reviews called it a deftly told, highly relevant true-crime story, and the publisher quotes praise from Entertainment Weekly, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. In Salon, however, Eric Boehlert argued that the conspiracy narrative rests largely on a single witness, Poole, and fails to deliver the evidence. No court has ever confirmed that LAPD officers were involved in the killings; the theory should be read as the author’s interpretation.

The book became the basis for Brad Furman’s feature film City of Lies, starring Johnny Depp as Russell Poole and Forest Whitaker as a journalist. The film was pulled shortly before its planned 2018 US release, premiered at a festival in Italy in December 2018 and was finally released in the US in March 2021. For the current state of the investigation into Tupac’s death, see the Death section.