The Murder of Biggie Smalls
Christopher Wallace — known professionally as the Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls — was one of the most celebrated and commercially dominant rappers in hip-hop history when he was shot and killed in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997. He was twenty-four years old. The shooting occurred just after midnight as Wallace departed a music industry party at the Petersen Automotive Museum, when an unidentified gunman in a passing dark-colored Chevrolet Impala fired multiple rounds into his SUV. Wallace was struck four times; he was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center shortly thereafter. His death came just six months after the September 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas, and the two murders were frequently linked in the public imagination as products of the bitter East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry that had consumed the music industry in the mid-1990s. Investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department pursued numerous leads over the years, including theories that implicated Death Row Records founder Suge Knight, rogue LAPD officers connected to the hip-hop industry, and various Crips gang members. No arrest was ever made. The investigation became one of the most troubled and scrutinized in LAPD history. A civil lawsuit brought by Wallace's estate alleged that LAPD officers had directly participated in or covered up the murder, and that the department had impeded its own investigation. Federal judges overseeing the civil litigation at various points expressed frustration with LAPD's handling of evidence and witnesses. Millions of dollars in potential settlement funds were raised and then clawed back as the litigation meandered through courts for over a decade. Notorious B.I.G. was posthumously awarded multiple platinum certifications and his catalog continued to generate massive commercial success. His 1994 debut "Ready to Die" and his posthumous double album "Life After Death" are considered among the greatest rap albums ever recorded. His murder, like Tupac's, became a defining unsolved mystery of American popular culture — a case where the investigation's failures seemed to match the outsized tragedy of losing one of music's brightest talents to street violence.