Zero doubt about Orlando. I’m like 75% on the poochie shyt. All we have is the wife testimony on Poochie right? Nobody else spoke his name I don’t think
But in contrast with the regular run of Suge’s associates, what made Fouse a
person of considerable interest to us was the mention of his name in a series of jailhouse letters dating
back to 2004, written by a Fruit Town Piru named Roderick Reed, who was serving time on multiple drug
and weapons counts. Reed had struck up a correspondence with none other than Kevin Hackie, the former
Compton school officer who had played a part in Russell Poole’s investigation, and would later turn up
impersonating an FBI agent in the hospital waiting room where Tupac Shakur lay dying.
Apparentiy under the impression that Hackie could somehow be of help to him in an ongoing appeal,
Reed’s rambling, handwritten correspondence covered a wide range of seemingly random subjects. More
often than not, however, he focused on his close connection to a Death Row Records insider who was
also serving time for his role as a partner in Reed’s PCP business. Letters that under other circumstances
might have been dismissed as the semiliterate attempts of a convict to gain an ally on the outside, were
given considerably more weight by Daryn and I, due to his links with the Death Row head. There was at
least a chance that Reed actually knew what he was writing about.
And he certainly wasn’t shy about sharing it. In a sequence of letters to Hackie over the summer,
Reed repeatedly referred to “Poochie” Fouse as the hit man Suge Knight had used to kill Christopher
Wallace in direct retaliation for the shooting of Tupac. “I no about Poochie murder Biggie Smalls,” he
wrote in a letter postmarked in late August, while in another, a month later, he worried that he might “dis a
pear because I no Poochie murdered Biggie Smalls.”
Naturally there was no way to prove Reed’s allegations. At the time the letters first came to our
attention, we had tried to go straight to the source. But the U.S. attorney on the case wanted Reed’s
scheduled appeal to run its course. The logic was that we might subsequendy need to sign him on as an
informant in exchange for sentencing considerations. As a result, we could do little more than file his
letters away in hopes that they might come in handy when and if more evidence against Poochie emerged.
It was in early May 2009, shordy before our second meeting with Theresa Swann, that just such evidence,
circumstantial as it was, did turn up, and from a source that could be considered substantially more
credible than Roderick Reed.
From Murder Rap book.
Reed's source is George Williams (Monkey Man) who used to be in Suge's inner circle.
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