Johnny Depp wears a TAG Heuer Link

Russell Poole worked the murder of the Notorious B.I.G. for nearly two decades, and the theory he could never let go of was the one his department least wanted to hear: that Death Row Records boss Suge Knight had paid corrupt LAPD officers to kill Christopher Wallace and bury the case. Johnny Depp plays Poole in City of Lies, Brad Furman's adaptation of Randall Sullivan's book LAbyrinth, scripted by Christian Contreras, with Forest Whitaker as Darius "Jack" Jackson, a journalist chasing the same questions twenty years on. The film ends where the real story did. Poole walks into the L.A. Sheriff's Department to try to reopen the investigation, suffers a heart attack, and dies.

The watch on Poole's wrist comes with a thinner file than anything else in the case. The French watch site Montres de Luxe identified it as "un chrono TAG Heuer Link en acier sur bracelet acier," a steel TAG Heuer Link chronograph on a steel bracelet. No second source has matched the call: the crowd-identification site Spotern still carries Poole's watch as an open request, and the available production stills keep Depp's wrists out of sight, hands in pockets against a brick wall, cuffs over the case binder. The Link reading is plausible and uncontradicted, and it is exactly one report deep.

The film had its own trouble getting seen. Shot from December 2016 to May 2017, it was set for a September 2018 release and pulled a month beforehand, reportedly over a lawsuit between Depp and the film's location manager. Saban Films picked up the rights and finally released it on March 19, 2021, where it opened to 275,049 dollars across 501 theaters, with reviews split almost exactly down the middle.