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L.A. Times Hoaxed into Diddy-Tupac Link?
03/26/2008 12:00 PM, E! Online
Apparently the Los Angeles Times should have Combed a little deeper before it reported on evidence contained in a batch of newly discovered FBI files that connected Sean "Diddy" Combs to a 1994 shooting assault on Tupac Shakur at a New York recording studio. The paper confirmed Wednesday it is launching an internal investigation into those so-called records in light of The Smoking Gun's revelation that most of the documents that fueled the Times' report were fabricated, forged by an incarcerated Florida conman who fancied himself a hardcore hip-hop insider. "Questions have been raised about the authenticity of documents that we relied on for a story on the assault of Tupac Shakur in New York," Times editor Russ Stanton said in a statement. "We are taking this very seriously and have begun our own investigation." According to The Smoking Gun, convict James Sabatino, whose own father described him in a letter to a federal judge as a "disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug," filed what looked like an FBI interview report along with civil court documents related to an ongoing lawsuit against Combs. The 31-year-old Sabatino, who's currently behind bars in Pennsylvania on a fraud charge, is suing the hip-hop mogul for $16 million over an alleged botched business deal. Among the indicators that the documents were bogus: they were riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, composed by typewriter rather than computer, contained blacked-out sections and had FBI filing numbers not found in the bureau's database. "Beyond ridiculous and completely false" was how Combs described the March 17 article by Pulitzer Prize-winner Chuck Philips, which alleged, based on mostly anonymous sources and "confidential FBI files," that two former associates of Combs orchestrated the shooting and beating of Shakur in retribution for his refusal to join Combs' Bad Boy Records label—and that Combs, who was in the studio several floors above where the beatdown took place, knew about it beforehand. It was this attack on Shakur that authorities say launched the East Coast-West Coast war that resulted in the deaths of Shakur, a Death Row Records artist, in 1996 and, less than a year later, Bad Boy rapper Biggie Smalls. "Neither [Notorious B.I.G.] nor I had any knowledge of any attack before, during or after it happened," Combs continued. "I am shocked that the Los Angeles Times would be so irresponsible as to publish such a baseless and completely untrue story." The article was first posted online as a web-only exclusive and then an abridged version was published in the Times' print edition two days later, despite an unequivocal demand from Combs' legal camp to keep the story out of the paper. In a letter addressed to Times publisher David Hiller and dated March 18, L.A.-based attorney Howard Weitzman asked for a retraction of the online story, stating that Philips had "absolutely no information that would allow readers to determine for themselves the reliability of the anonymous sources used in the Article." The lawyer also called it "telling" that the purported confidential FBI informant was not among the anonymous sources directly cited by the writer. "The Times has not only defamed Mr. Combs, but failed its readers by printing a story of dubious ongoing news value…that breached its own journalistic standards in its use of anonymous sources," Weitzman continued. Finally, he informed Hiller that Combs was retaining the right to take further legal action. The paper said that, as of Tuesday, it had not yet responded to the retraction demand.
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