The Unsolved Mystery of the Notorious B.I.G. David Corio/Redferns/Getty Those who arrived as spectators at the Federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles on July 6th expecting to observe the fourth day of testimony in the Notorious B.I.G. wrongful-death suit swiftly discovered that they were on hand to bear witness to something else: history. In an announcement that stunn ed everyone who had been following the case in the media, presiding judge Florence-Marie Cooper abruptly suspended the proceedings and called a mistrial. Only a handful in the courtroom knew of the remarkable events of the previous days: an anonymous late-night phone tip; the extraordinary lockdown of a Los Angeles Police Department division; a stash of secret, incri minating documents. But the following day, Judge Cooper issued a written ruling statin g that she had come to belie ve the LAPD had deli beratel y concealed a massive amount of evidence that attested to the involvement of rogue officers in the rapper's slaying. L.A. Times Responds to Biggie Story The implications of the judge's decision extended far beyond the mystery of B.I.G.'s unsolved murder. For months, Los Angeles' most prominent political figures and police officials, along with the city's most influential media, had been insisting that this legal claim by B.I.G.'s family was nothing more than a nuisance suit, based on an outlandish conspiracy theory that attempted to tie a group of LAPD officers —affiliated with Suge Knight's Death Row Records and the Bloods gang — to not only the murders of B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, but also to the origins of the biggest police-corruption case in Los Angeles history, the so-called Rampart scandal. Yet here was one of the most respected district court judges in Southern California declaring in open court that the LAPD's lead investigat or on the B.I.G. murde r case for the past six years had deli beratel y concealed hundreds of pages of documents. The contents of these pages not only supported the conspiracy theory, but also implicated the central figure in the Rampart scandal —the disgraced detective who was the source of the whole sorry, sordid affair — as one of those involved in the rapper's death. This article appeared in the December 15, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive. The judge's declaration of a mistrial provided one of those breathtaking moments when the facade