X-rated biography.....
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By Geoff Boucher
Los Angeles Times
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The tale of the rapper and the prosecutor is a twisted one now, bent into strange shapes by scandal, celebrity and murder music, but once it was a story of straight lines and simple roles.
When they first met in 1994, the rapper, Anerae Brown, was one of four gang members on trial for a spasm of early-morning violence that left a 42-year-old grandmother dead in her home. The button-down Pete Harned was the star of the Sacramento County district attorney's office and savvy enough to know he would win convictions if he could put the 17-year-old rapper's lurid music on trial as well.
The judge allowed Harned to play Brown's music twice in court. Recorded under the stage name X-Raided, the music was brash, explicit and relentlessly violent. In one especially damning line, Brown declared he would be "kicking down doors" and "killin' mommas." Harned argued that this was practically a prediction of the slaying of Patricia Harris. The community activist had been shot through the heart in March 1992 when gang members stormed her home searching for rivals, and police said Brown was the ringleader. When the music was played in court, Harned could read victory in the jurors' horror.
The trial had been a complex one with a separate jury for each defendant, but finally, four years after the crime and his arrest, the verdict came back guilty for X-Raided. The rapper was shuttled off to prison and, presumably, a 31-year sentence of obscurity. Harned buckled his briefcase on a key career victory and embraced Harris' relatives. In this epic battle, Harned was their lone crusader.
There was no reason for Harned to think he would ever see X-Raided again. But four years later, a letter with a prison postmark reconnected them.
Prison celebrity
Today, the 28-year-old Brown sits in Corcoran State Prison and fills his hours and notebooks with rhymes of gang life. His music is no idle handiwork. Despite the efforts of his jailers and the California attorney general, Brown, while behind bars, has managed to covertly record and release nine albums, the most recent in July. The modest sales make him unknown to most music fans, but X-Raided is an underground hero to some and a celebrity of the prison yard. "The music," he says, "takes me over these walls."
Indeed, the inmate may enjoy more freedom than the man who prosecuted him.
Harned is no longer a prosecutor; he lost that beloved job amid a child pornography scandal. He restarted his career as a defense attorney in a tiny office one right-turn away from the offices of the Sacramento district attorney. He spends his days defending murder and robbery suspects, but two years ago, he quietly began a side project in business law, specifically the music industry. In his moonlighting role, he has one client: X-Raided, the rapper and murderer.
The attorney even has an X-Raided CD perched beside his law books. "I just can't stand rap music, and I don't have to listen to the stuff to work with it," he said. "But I had to put it there. Isn't that something? I'm so proud of him."
Saving for Johnnie Cochran
For a man six years into a 31-year sentence, Anerae Veshaughn Brown gets around: Folsom, Salinas Valley, Mule Creek and, the latest state prison, Corcoran, north of Bakersfield. "They keep moving me because they say I cause trouble," he said in an interview just before his move last year to Corcoran. "I disagree. Trouble causes me." He hopes his music will fund his freedom. "Money speeds up everything. I want my albums to make enough to pay Johnnie Cochran or an affiliate of his to help me. I just need to get my music out there. I'll be the biggest story in hip-hop."
Asked about his latest work, X-Raided knitted his eyes, bobbed his head to a beat no one else could hear and began rhyming:
Might survive with black eyes and torn clothes
Or meet my end in the pen, servin' a sentence for sins committed
If I lose my soul I'll send my men to get it
Never break the law again, player, but I intend to bend it
Brown's total of 10 albums have combined to sell 309,000 copies in the United States, according to SoundScan, which is more than many artists but less than, say, Eminem sells in an average week. Brown is not rich, but his music has earned him more than $100,000 while behind bars.
He was only 16 when he finished his first recording, an underground project with Sacramento rapper Brotha Lynch Hung, and he was signed within a year to an independent label in Northern California. His first solo work, Psycho Active in 1992, created a buzz in south Sacramento that a gifted new rapper was claiming the Crips as his gang affiliation.
Los Angeles Times
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The tale of the rapper and the prosecutor is a twisted one now, bent into strange shapes by scandal, celebrity and murder music, but once it was a story of straight lines and simple roles.
When they first met in 1994, the rapper, Anerae Brown, was one of four gang members on trial for a spasm of early-morning violence that left a 42-year-old grandmother dead in her home. The button-down Pete Harned was the star of the Sacramento County district attorney's office and savvy enough to know he would win convictions if he could put the 17-year-old rapper's lurid music on trial as well.
The judge allowed Harned to play Brown's music twice in court. Recorded under the stage name X-Raided, the music was brash, explicit and relentlessly violent. In one especially damning line, Brown declared he would be "kicking down doors" and "killin' mommas." Harned argued that this was practically a prediction of the slaying of Patricia Harris. The community activist had been shot through the heart in March 1992 when gang members stormed her home searching for rivals, and police said Brown was the ringleader. When the music was played in court, Harned could read victory in the jurors' horror.
The trial had been a complex one with a separate jury for each defendant, but finally, four years after the crime and his arrest, the verdict came back guilty for X-Raided. The rapper was shuttled off to prison and, presumably, a 31-year sentence of obscurity. Harned buckled his briefcase on a key career victory and embraced Harris' relatives. In this epic battle, Harned was their lone crusader.
There was no reason for Harned to think he would ever see X-Raided again. But four years later, a letter with a prison postmark reconnected them.
Prison celebrity
Today, the 28-year-old Brown sits in Corcoran State Prison and fills his hours and notebooks with rhymes of gang life. His music is no idle handiwork. Despite the efforts of his jailers and the California attorney general, Brown, while behind bars, has managed to covertly record and release nine albums, the most recent in July. The modest sales make him unknown to most music fans, but X-Raided is an underground hero to some and a celebrity of the prison yard. "The music," he says, "takes me over these walls."
Indeed, the inmate may enjoy more freedom than the man who prosecuted him.
Harned is no longer a prosecutor; he lost that beloved job amid a child pornography scandal. He restarted his career as a defense attorney in a tiny office one right-turn away from the offices of the Sacramento district attorney. He spends his days defending murder and robbery suspects, but two years ago, he quietly began a side project in business law, specifically the music industry. In his moonlighting role, he has one client: X-Raided, the rapper and murderer.
The attorney even has an X-Raided CD perched beside his law books. "I just can't stand rap music, and I don't have to listen to the stuff to work with it," he said. "But I had to put it there. Isn't that something? I'm so proud of him."
Saving for Johnnie Cochran
For a man six years into a 31-year sentence, Anerae Veshaughn Brown gets around: Folsom, Salinas Valley, Mule Creek and, the latest state prison, Corcoran, north of Bakersfield. "They keep moving me because they say I cause trouble," he said in an interview just before his move last year to Corcoran. "I disagree. Trouble causes me." He hopes his music will fund his freedom. "Money speeds up everything. I want my albums to make enough to pay Johnnie Cochran or an affiliate of his to help me. I just need to get my music out there. I'll be the biggest story in hip-hop."
Asked about his latest work, X-Raided knitted his eyes, bobbed his head to a beat no one else could hear and began rhyming:
Might survive with black eyes and torn clothes
Or meet my end in the pen, servin' a sentence for sins committed
If I lose my soul I'll send my men to get it
Never break the law again, player, but I intend to bend it
Brown's total of 10 albums have combined to sell 309,000 copies in the United States, according to SoundScan, which is more than many artists but less than, say, Eminem sells in an average week. Brown is not rich, but his music has earned him more than $100,000 while behind bars.
He was only 16 when he finished his first recording, an underground project with Sacramento rapper Brotha Lynch Hung, and he was signed within a year to an independent label in Northern California. His first solo work, Psycho Active in 1992, created a buzz in south Sacramento that a gifted new rapper was claiming the Crips as his gang affiliation.
The cover of Psycho Active shows Brown's face with a .38-caliber handgun pressed to his temple. The follow-up album a year later was made inside the Sacramento County Jail and recorded over phone lines as Brown awaited trial for the Harris murder. That audacity inspired a frenzy of local media coverage and outrage.
The Harris murder had already been big news in Sacramento.
Harris was gunned down in what appeared to be a botched attempt by gang members to shoot her two sons, reputed members of the Meadowview Bloods.
The arrests came within days. There were five suspects, 15 to 17, all Crips. The youngest among them would testify that the raid was engineered by X-Raided, their leader and charismatic neighborhood celebrity.
"Mastermind, that's what they said I was," Brown said. "They took turns during the trial. Either I was an idiot or I was a mastermind."
Detective Aldert Robinson, a 25-year veteran of the Sacramento police force, said X-Raided was just a poseur in over his head. "Brown was an up-and-coming rapper trying to make some music," Robinson said. "During those days, that's when gangsta rap was really starting to take off, and a lot of these guys decided that maybe you had to be involved in what you were rapping about to give yourself some legitimacy. Walk the walk."
'Strangest thing of all'
Brown's mother, Shirley "Jaz" Brown, says her son was a bright youngster always jotting in his notebooks. He was schooled at home, where R&B was always around but his dad was not. Rap became his passion, and as his reputation grew, his mother sensed something was going wrong. She wanted him to join her for a much-needed vacation in March 1992, but then let him stay in Sacramento because he had a party celebrating a new single.
Before the murder, Jaz Brown was a clerk at the Sacramento County Courthouse, but she quit when X-Raided became a famous defendant in the corridors. By June 2000, Jaz Brown had a new title, CEO of Madman Records, the new label for X-Raided and other rappers. She ran the business from a tidy Sacramento apartment, but its true command center was her son's cell.
The rapper himself was merely a "consultant," and with good reason. A year earlier, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's office had sued X-Raided under the Son of Sam law in an attempt to seize his music profits and set them aside for the family of his victim.
But the Son of Sam case against X-Raided stalled, and the California Supreme Court later struck down the law. Still, in 2000, the rapper was not about to take chances with his money. He brought in some professional help to set up the business. The man for the job, he decided, was an old rival.
"Yeah, the prosecutor. It's twisted, I know that, it sounds twisted," X-Raided said. "But I like it twisted. Everything is strange. But that may be the strangest thing of all."
A prosecutor's rise and fall
Pete Harned is a Nat King Cole fan. To him, rap is a torrent of ugly words. But when he was tapped for the Harris murder case, he steeled himself and listened to every X-Raided song.
The Harris murder seemed like it might never be resolved in court. Each defendant had a court-appointed defender already dealing with a mountain of work, and the original prosecutor had transferred to another department after working on the case for two years. His replacement was Harned, who was determined to give the Harris family some resolution.
The youngest of the five arrested suspects had pleaded guilty to ensure he would be tried as a juvenile, and he agreed to testify against his cohorts, who would all be tried as adults. Christopher McKinnie and Roosevelt Jermaine Coleman were accused as accomplices, Brown and the remaining suspect, Samuel Maurice Proctor, were tried as the triggermen.
The Harris murder had already been big news in Sacramento.
Harris was gunned down in what appeared to be a botched attempt by gang members to shoot her two sons, reputed members of the Meadowview Bloods.
The arrests came within days. There were five suspects, 15 to 17, all Crips. The youngest among them would testify that the raid was engineered by X-Raided, their leader and charismatic neighborhood celebrity.
"Mastermind, that's what they said I was," Brown said. "They took turns during the trial. Either I was an idiot or I was a mastermind."
Detective Aldert Robinson, a 25-year veteran of the Sacramento police force, said X-Raided was just a poseur in over his head. "Brown was an up-and-coming rapper trying to make some music," Robinson said. "During those days, that's when gangsta rap was really starting to take off, and a lot of these guys decided that maybe you had to be involved in what you were rapping about to give yourself some legitimacy. Walk the walk."
'Strangest thing of all'
Brown's mother, Shirley "Jaz" Brown, says her son was a bright youngster always jotting in his notebooks. He was schooled at home, where R&B was always around but his dad was not. Rap became his passion, and as his reputation grew, his mother sensed something was going wrong. She wanted him to join her for a much-needed vacation in March 1992, but then let him stay in Sacramento because he had a party celebrating a new single.
Before the murder, Jaz Brown was a clerk at the Sacramento County Courthouse, but she quit when X-Raided became a famous defendant in the corridors. By June 2000, Jaz Brown had a new title, CEO of Madman Records, the new label for X-Raided and other rappers. She ran the business from a tidy Sacramento apartment, but its true command center was her son's cell.
The rapper himself was merely a "consultant," and with good reason. A year earlier, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's office had sued X-Raided under the Son of Sam law in an attempt to seize his music profits and set them aside for the family of his victim.
But the Son of Sam case against X-Raided stalled, and the California Supreme Court later struck down the law. Still, in 2000, the rapper was not about to take chances with his money. He brought in some professional help to set up the business. The man for the job, he decided, was an old rival.
"Yeah, the prosecutor. It's twisted, I know that, it sounds twisted," X-Raided said. "But I like it twisted. Everything is strange. But that may be the strangest thing of all."
A prosecutor's rise and fall
Pete Harned is a Nat King Cole fan. To him, rap is a torrent of ugly words. But when he was tapped for the Harris murder case, he steeled himself and listened to every X-Raided song.
The Harris murder seemed like it might never be resolved in court. Each defendant had a court-appointed defender already dealing with a mountain of work, and the original prosecutor had transferred to another department after working on the case for two years. His replacement was Harned, who was determined to give the Harris family some resolution.
The youngest of the five arrested suspects had pleaded guilty to ensure he would be tried as a juvenile, and he agreed to testify against his cohorts, who would all be tried as adults. Christopher McKinnie and Roosevelt Jermaine Coleman were accused as accomplices, Brown and the remaining suspect, Samuel Maurice Proctor, were tried as the triggermen.
In the end, three were found guilty on murder and murder-conspiracy charges, and given life sentences. Proctor was acquitted. The Harris family was distressed to see anyone go free but happy to see the case end.
For Harned, closing the case built on a successful law-and-order career that began with a high school job at the state Department of Justice. By the time he graduated from California State University in Sacramento, he was working in the state agency's Bureau of Organized Crime. By December 1985, he had a law degree earned in night classes at Lincoln Law School and a post in the district attorney's office of his hometown.
By 1996, he was one of the prosecutors who handled capital cases for the agency's homicide team and also prosecuted sex-crime cases. Then, on a summer morning in 1996, his computer crashed and his life's work went with it.
The repairman who pried open Harned's home computer reported to police that he found a CD-ROM inside with images of child pornography. The scandal quickly bloomed, and Harned was fired and charged criminally. "My untimely demise," he says with a practiced casualness.
Harned explains it like this: He ordered a CD-ROM from the Netherlands with erotic images of young men. Among those images were models younger than 18, but Harned insists he was oblivious to that. Harned had never made it a secret he is gay, but neither had he made it a visible part of his work life. Now he found himself explaining his private life and, more pressing, defending himself from criminal charges.
As he had so many times before, Harned won in the courtroom. A judge ruled that the detective who secured a search warrant for Harned's home had misrepresented the disc's content, both in the amount he viewed and in the nature of its explicit content. The charges were dismissed.
Harned retained his license to practice law, but the episode cost him more than a few friends. One day in 2000, though, Harned found a surprising new one in the morning mail. "I got a letter from Anerae Brown. He said he saw on TV news what had happened. He wanted to tell me to stay strong and that he knew I would be OK. I could not have been more stunned."
An improbable alliance
The rapper explains that he respected the prosecutor's strength and appreciated that during the murder trail, Harned's attacks never seemed personal. The correspondence between the unlikely pair continued, and then, when Brown left Black Market Records to start Madman, he asked Harned to handle the paperwork.
"My answer was no for a variety of reasons," Harned said. "It seemed more than a little strange. It is not an area in which I'm professionally trained. I've always worked in criminal law. But what bothered me most was my previous relationship with him. I explained to him very clearly that this would look very unusual to a lot of people and raise a lot of eyebrows."
Brown answered that Harned was the only attorney he trusted. That was enough for the disgraced prosecutor. "I cannot afford, morally, to judge my clients. I can't decide if they are morally bankrupt or evil or good or bad. I am not a moral arbiter. I am a lawyer. If I took only good, decent people who did no wrong, these doors would be shuttered, I guarantee you."
Tour from a widower
Still, Harned, now 43, admits that the faces of the Harris family flashed through his mind.
Patricia Harris has been reduced to a name in archived court documents, but the closer you get to her home, the more powerful her memory lives. The people remember her, said Betty Scroggins, a volunteer at Meadowview Community Center, where Harris was a fixture. "There was a lot of pain at her loss," she said. "As for the one who did it and the thing he does, well, I'd rather not comment on that."
The front door of the Harris home shows no sign of the violence that took place a decade ago, but the man who opens it is not far removed from that painful night. William C. Harris was married for 25 years, but he was not home the night his wife was killed.
"The first two or three years, it was an illness," he said. "My mind would get bad."
Moving slow, he walks through his home, mapping out the madness of that 1992 night. "She came all the way to here; that's when they shot her," he said, pointing to a spot near the living room. Then he points again, to a spot beneath a framed copy of the Lord's Prayer. "They found the splashes of blood on the wall, there."
As the grim tour ends, William Harris points down a hall that is off-limits to visitors. "They found her in the bedroom. She crawled all the way back. That's what bothered me. She wanted help. She was dying, in a panic. She wanted help. And there was no help. I wasn't here. I was lost in my guilt."
William Harris is willing to talk, but he's not sure what to say. He offers snapshots, real and remembered, of his lost wife. He was a young saxophone player from Stockton working in R&B clubs, and she was the sister of a singer. She was 17 when they married. Through the years, she worked with the PTA, had five kids and, at the time of her death, 11 grandchildren.
The widower rarely leaves home. He has a hard time sleeping in their bedroom. The kids are gone now, moved out, and he says he is of little good to them. "I taught them life is a minefield," he says, "and it's stacked against you."
When X-Raided was on trial, William Harris accused him of killing purely to promote a rap career. Later, when the albums recorded in prison were released, the widower lashed out publicly at the injustice of it all. Now, though, his rage is seeping away.
William Harris did not know Harned was working for X-Raided. When told, he paused for a long moment and then shook his head. "I don't know what to say about that. Harned did all right by us. But I don't understand that. There's a lot I don't understand anymore."
Later, Harned accepted that vague verdict. Then changed the subject to the future. X-Raided wants to set up a new record label. Harned's role, if any, is uncertain. He said recently that he might consider a job as an executive there.
"I've never been one to rule things out," he said.
And what of X-Raided's dream of cashing in with his rap and hiring a hotshot defense attorney for an appeal -- did Harned's new friendship with his onetime quarry convince him the rapper might have been wrongly convicted?
"We've never really discussed it, but no," Harned said, suddenly sounding like a prosecutor again. "He did it. He's guilty."
For Harned, closing the case built on a successful law-and-order career that began with a high school job at the state Department of Justice. By the time he graduated from California State University in Sacramento, he was working in the state agency's Bureau of Organized Crime. By December 1985, he had a law degree earned in night classes at Lincoln Law School and a post in the district attorney's office of his hometown.
By 1996, he was one of the prosecutors who handled capital cases for the agency's homicide team and also prosecuted sex-crime cases. Then, on a summer morning in 1996, his computer crashed and his life's work went with it.
The repairman who pried open Harned's home computer reported to police that he found a CD-ROM inside with images of child pornography. The scandal quickly bloomed, and Harned was fired and charged criminally. "My untimely demise," he says with a practiced casualness.
Harned explains it like this: He ordered a CD-ROM from the Netherlands with erotic images of young men. Among those images were models younger than 18, but Harned insists he was oblivious to that. Harned had never made it a secret he is gay, but neither had he made it a visible part of his work life. Now he found himself explaining his private life and, more pressing, defending himself from criminal charges.
As he had so many times before, Harned won in the courtroom. A judge ruled that the detective who secured a search warrant for Harned's home had misrepresented the disc's content, both in the amount he viewed and in the nature of its explicit content. The charges were dismissed.
Harned retained his license to practice law, but the episode cost him more than a few friends. One day in 2000, though, Harned found a surprising new one in the morning mail. "I got a letter from Anerae Brown. He said he saw on TV news what had happened. He wanted to tell me to stay strong and that he knew I would be OK. I could not have been more stunned."
An improbable alliance
The rapper explains that he respected the prosecutor's strength and appreciated that during the murder trail, Harned's attacks never seemed personal. The correspondence between the unlikely pair continued, and then, when Brown left Black Market Records to start Madman, he asked Harned to handle the paperwork.
"My answer was no for a variety of reasons," Harned said. "It seemed more than a little strange. It is not an area in which I'm professionally trained. I've always worked in criminal law. But what bothered me most was my previous relationship with him. I explained to him very clearly that this would look very unusual to a lot of people and raise a lot of eyebrows."
Brown answered that Harned was the only attorney he trusted. That was enough for the disgraced prosecutor. "I cannot afford, morally, to judge my clients. I can't decide if they are morally bankrupt or evil or good or bad. I am not a moral arbiter. I am a lawyer. If I took only good, decent people who did no wrong, these doors would be shuttered, I guarantee you."
Tour from a widower
Still, Harned, now 43, admits that the faces of the Harris family flashed through his mind.
Patricia Harris has been reduced to a name in archived court documents, but the closer you get to her home, the more powerful her memory lives. The people remember her, said Betty Scroggins, a volunteer at Meadowview Community Center, where Harris was a fixture. "There was a lot of pain at her loss," she said. "As for the one who did it and the thing he does, well, I'd rather not comment on that."
The front door of the Harris home shows no sign of the violence that took place a decade ago, but the man who opens it is not far removed from that painful night. William C. Harris was married for 25 years, but he was not home the night his wife was killed.
"The first two or three years, it was an illness," he said. "My mind would get bad."
Moving slow, he walks through his home, mapping out the madness of that 1992 night. "She came all the way to here; that's when they shot her," he said, pointing to a spot near the living room. Then he points again, to a spot beneath a framed copy of the Lord's Prayer. "They found the splashes of blood on the wall, there."
As the grim tour ends, William Harris points down a hall that is off-limits to visitors. "They found her in the bedroom. She crawled all the way back. That's what bothered me. She wanted help. She was dying, in a panic. She wanted help. And there was no help. I wasn't here. I was lost in my guilt."
William Harris is willing to talk, but he's not sure what to say. He offers snapshots, real and remembered, of his lost wife. He was a young saxophone player from Stockton working in R&B clubs, and she was the sister of a singer. She was 17 when they married. Through the years, she worked with the PTA, had five kids and, at the time of her death, 11 grandchildren.
The widower rarely leaves home. He has a hard time sleeping in their bedroom. The kids are gone now, moved out, and he says he is of little good to them. "I taught them life is a minefield," he says, "and it's stacked against you."
When X-Raided was on trial, William Harris accused him of killing purely to promote a rap career. Later, when the albums recorded in prison were released, the widower lashed out publicly at the injustice of it all. Now, though, his rage is seeping away.
William Harris did not know Harned was working for X-Raided. When told, he paused for a long moment and then shook his head. "I don't know what to say about that. Harned did all right by us. But I don't understand that. There's a lot I don't understand anymore."
Later, Harned accepted that vague verdict. Then changed the subject to the future. X-Raided wants to set up a new record label. Harned's role, if any, is uncertain. He said recently that he might consider a job as an executive there.
"I've never been one to rule things out," he said.
And what of X-Raided's dream of cashing in with his rap and hiring a hotshot defense attorney for an appeal -- did Harned's new friendship with his onetime quarry convince him the rapper might have been wrongly convicted?
"We've never really discussed it, but no," Harned said, suddenly sounding like a prosecutor again. "He did it. He's guilty."
