Harry Billups and the Unsolved Murder of Notorious B.I.G.

Harry Billups, who later took the name Amir Muhammad after converting to the Nation of Islam, is a former University of Oregon football player and Southern California mortgage broker who was publicly named as the suspected gunman in the 1997 murder of Notorious B.I.G. He was identified in that role by an LAPD detective, a retired FBI agent, and a 2003 FBI report, but he was never arrested or charged, and he has denied any involvement.¹

Who Harry Billups Is

Billups earned football letters at the University of Oregon in 1979 and from 1981 to 1983.² He graduated in 1984 and began brokering mortgage loans in Southern California, a career he kept up for years.¹ At some point he converted to the Nation of Islam and began going by Amir Muhammad.³

The single relationship that later put his name in the investigation dates to his college years: at Oregon he became close friends with David A. Mack, who would go on to join the Los Angeles Police Department.⁴ Billups was godfather to Mack’s two children.⁵

How His Name Entered the Investigation

Christopher Wallace was shot and killed on March 9, 1997, while sitting in an SUV at Fairfax and Wilshire in Los Angeles after leaving a party at the Petersen Automotive Museum. Witnesses described the gunman as a Black man in his early twenties wearing a bow tie, driving a dark late-model sedan alone.⁶

Eight months later, in November 1997, David Mack robbed a Bank of America branch in Los Angeles of $722,000. He was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in federal prison.⁷ During that investigation, detectives learned that Mack owned a 1995 black Chevrolet Impala SS with chrome wheels, matching the description of the vehicle seen fleeing the Wallace shooting.⁴

Several things then drew attention to Billups specifically. A jailhouse informant told detectives the killer had an “Arabic-sounding name.” When police pulled a driver’s license photo of Muhammad, they thought he resembled the composite sketch made the day after the murder. Damien Butler, who had been in Wallace’s motorcade, picked Mack from a photo lineup as someone he had seen outside the Petersen the night of the shooting. Detectives noted that Mack and Muhammad met in prison on December 26, 1997, and that Muhammad dropped out of public view soon after.⁴

A gun belonging to Mack was test-fired and compared against the weapon used in the Wallace shooting. It did not match.⁴ Billups was treated as a formal suspect only briefly.

Detective Russell Poole’s Theory

The most developed public accusation against Billups came from LAPD detective Russell Poole, who worked the Wallace case and the parallel corruption inquiry into the department’s Rampart Division. Poole’s theory: Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight paid for the hit as retaliation tied to the earlier murder of Tupac Shakur, corrupt LAPD officers David Mack and Rafael Perez helped arrange it, and Billups was the shooter.⁸

Poole’s work fed into a larger corruption picture. The LAPD’s Rampart Corruption Task Force confirmed that Mack, Perez, and Officer Kevin Gaines had all been on the Death Row Records payroll, moonlighting as security for the label.⁸

Journalist Randall Sullivan turned Poole’s findings into the 2002 book LAbyrinth, which argued that the Wallace and Shakur killings were staged to look like products of the East Coast–West Coast rivalry when they were actually orchestrated hits. Sullivan’s book also noted that a key informant supporting the theory later took his claims back.⁹ The book was later adapted into the 2021 film City of Lies, with Johnny Depp playing Poole.¹⁰

The FBI Agent’s Allegations

Retired FBI agent Phil Carson, who worked a federal task force on the case, has publicly backed most of Poole’s account. In a 2003 FBI report obtained by the New York Post, Carson wrote that Muhammad was “identified by several sources as the trigger man.” Carson alleged that Knight financed the killing through a Death Row accountant, and that FBI informants indicated the $722,000 Mack stole from the Bank of America branch was meant for Muhammad. That money was never recovered.⁵

According to Carson, the intended target that night was Sean “Puffy” Combs, who was riding in the vehicle ahead of Wallace’s SUV. Carson has said his investigation was shut down by the LAPD and city attorneys, calling the handling of the case “the biggest miscarriage of justice” of his 20-year FBI career.³

Film producer Don Sikorski and director Brad Furman, who worked on City of Lies, say they have reviewed sealed court files from the Wallace civil litigation. Sikorski has called the evidence “black and white” and “overwhelming” and said it names the killer and documents a cover-up.⁵ Those files remain sealed, and the description of their contents cannot be verified from the public record.

A Competing Suspect

Not every investigator agreed Billups was the shooter. Retired LAPD detective Greg Kading has argued that the gunman was Wardell “Poochie” Fouse, a gang member connected to Suge Knight, hired by Knight for the same retaliatory reasons tied to Shakur’s killing.¹¹ Two rival theories have circulated from within the same department for more than two decades.

Billups’s Denial

In May 2000, Billups spoke to the Los Angeles Times. “I’m not a murderer, I’m a mortgage broker,” he said. He denied involvement in the killing and rejected the claim that he had gone into hiding, saying he had lived and worked in the same Southern California area for years, belonged to the same fitness club, and played golf and tennis at the same spots each week. “I’m a businessman, not a gang member, and I lead a private life,” he told the paper. He also noted that police had never contacted him and treated that as evidence he had nothing to do with the murder.¹

Why He Was Never Charged

In 2002, Wallace’s mother Voletta Wallace and his widow Faith Evans filed a wrongful death suit against the City of Los Angeles, Suge Knight, and several former LAPD officers, alleging police involvement in the killing and a cover-up.¹² Mack and Muhammad were originally listed as defendants but were dropped from the case before trial after the FBI and LAPD concluded they were no longer suspects.⁹

The civil case moved through years of turbulence. In 2005, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper declared a mistrial after finding that the LAPD had intentionally withheld a large number of documents from the family’s attorneys, and she ordered the city to pay $1.1 million in legal fees as a sanction. An amended suit filed in 2007 alleged a specific police conspiracy in the killing. In April 2010, a federal judge dismissed the case without prejudice.¹³¹²

No criminal charge has ever been filed against Billups in connection with the shooting.

Where He Is Now

Recent reporting places Billups in Georgia, working as a real-estate broker.⁵ The LAPD lists the Wallace case as officially open, though Carson and others say there has been little real movement in years. The September 2023 arrest of Duane Keith “Keffe D” Davis for the murder of Tupac Shakur revived interest in both cases, but investigators in the Shakur matter testified that Davis is not believed to be tied to the Wallace killing.¹⁴

A Note on the Georgia Court Case

A 1997 Georgia Court of Appeals decision, Billups v. State, involves a Robert Billups charged with firing a rifle at a house in Clarke County in June 1996; the appellate court reversed the aggravated assault prosecution on double jeopardy grounds after his earlier reckless conduct plea.¹⁵ The available record does not establish whether that Robert Billups is the same person as Harry Billups.

1
Los Angeles Times. Mysterious Man at Center of Rap Mystery
2
University of Oregon Athletics. All-Time Oregon Lettermen
3
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. FBI Agent Alleges Suge Knight Ordered 1997 Killing of Notorious BIG
4
Los Angeles Times. Ex-Cop Eyed in Rapper Killing
5
New York Post. Ex-FBI Agent, Biggie Filmmakers Say Sealed Court Docs Reveal Killer
6
Washington Post. Police Suspect Conspiracy in Slaying
7
PBS Frontline. LAPD Connections
8
EBSCO Research Starters. Police Corruption Revealed: Los Angeles’s Rampart Division
9
Capital Xtra. Who Killed Biggie Smalls
10
Rolling Stone. City of Lies Trailer
11
Fox 5 New York. The Notorious BIG Murder Remains Unsolved 25 Years Later
12
CBC News. Biggie Smalls Wrongful Death Lawsuit Dismissed
13
New York Times. Lawsuit Over Rapper’s Killing Is Dismissed
14
ABC7. Notorious BIG Murder Remains Unsolved
15
FindLaw. Billups v. State, No. A97A1201