STILL IN CONTEMPT
Even a real estate huckster like Susan McDougal would have a hard time selling this Los Angeles home: a 6-ft. by 9-ft. cell in the county jail with a metal-frame bed and no television or reading material. This was where McDougal, a former partner with Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater Development Corp., spent the week before Christmas. She was awaiting a pretrial hearing related to charges that she embezzled money from the family of renowned conductor Zubin Mehta. But last Friday she was granted permission to return by year's end to the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, to complete tests for possible breast cancer. There she has been serving a sentence of up to 18 months on a contempt of court citation for refusing to testify before independent counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury--a matter on which she has shown no signs of relenting.
According to McDougal attorney Bobby McDaniel, the former friend of Bill told her Belgian-born mother the night before she went off to jail of her decision not to testify. Her mother, who had served in the Resistance during World War II, supported the decision, telling her daughter, "If I could stand up to Hitler, you can stand up to Kenneth Starr." As if that weren't formidable enough, McDougal also faces a two-year sentence for her conviction on four felony counts related to Whitewater--a conviction that is being appealed.
STILL NO ARRESTS
On November 6, two months after rap superstar Tupac Shakur died in a storm of bullets while driving with his record-company owner, Marion ("Suge") Knight, Sergeant Kevin Manning of the Las Vegas police turned on his television to find Knight chatting with a correspondent for ABC. "If you knew who killed Tupac," asked the reporter, "would you tell the police?" "Absolutely not," answered Knight.
Manning, who is directing the Shakur murder probe, reacted with disgust. "That, to me, tells the whole story," he says. "Essentially, it's a suspended investigation. We have some suspects, but without a witness saying they were there, we can't do anything." Though Shakur was shot in front of Knight and a carful of retainers, only one, backup musician Yafeu Fula, indicated to police that he saw anything. Unfortunately, Fula was shot and killed in an apparently unrelated drug altercation before he could be interviewed.
"Fula was our biggest hope," says Manning, who at least thinks he knows who didn't shoot Shakur. He dismisses the idea that Shakur was victim of a rivalry with East Coast rappers. He doubts the murder was gang related, despite Knight's longtime affiliation with the Bloods. Manning believes Shakur died because of "somebody being dissed," but that the somebody was not the victim of the beating administered by Knight, Shakur and friends hours before the shooting and captured in a hotel-security videotape. Confusing? One thing seems clear: Shakur's undying popularity. His posthumous album, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, has sold over 1 million copies since its release last month.
LIDDY'S TURN