I Was Right When I Called Bullshit On The LA Times

Here's the basic summary of what happened

On March 17th, Chuck Philips wrote a piece for the LA Times detailing Tupac Shakur's ambush and shooting at New York's Quad Studios back in 94. For those a little hazy on their east coast/west coast beef history, this is or less what started it all. Tupac survived the shooting, checked himself out of the hospital, went to court to hear the his guilty verdict in a sexual assault case, then to prison. But after that night, he blamed Puff and Biggie for setting him .

Philips' article argues Pac was right all along. He was set up. His article relying on FBI documents and an anonymous source contends Puff got with James "Henchmen" Rosemond(whose about to got to prison on a ten-year bid for stomping a DC radio dj who made a joke about his blue tooth ear piece), a hip-hop talent manager/thug along with Jimmy Sabatino, a fat Italian kid who used his father's mafia connections to get himself into the rap world. The deal was to lure Tupac to the studio to drop a guest verse, and have their hired goons jump him when he got off the elevator.

Problem was, Tupac wouldn't give up his jewels, He reached for his shit and the thugs pulled their guns and started firing. According to the fabulous journalistic flair, Tupac gets back in the elevator after getting shot, takes it up to the floor Biggie is on, gets out, sits on the couch, rolls a blunt, and Puff yells, "get the fuck out of here."

I read this, called my friend Jordan and told him on the spot, this is bullshit. This is the same guy that wrote an article claiming Biggie actually flew to Vegas and paid some crips a half a million dollars to kill Tupac that night. Never mind there is no record of Christopher Wallace buying a ticket for any airline, never mind Biggie's estate was able to come up with a credit card statement from his account of purchases made in New York on that night, and never mind Puffy had Biggie so tied up contractually that the only money he saw at the time was from touring and he was about as close to a mil as I am right now.

Point is, he had his bullshit sources then, but he still went ahead and ignored all common sense and wrote it. And the LA Times went against even more common sense and published it. But they never learned their lesson.

Now, Philips writes this brand new piece of bullshit and his main sources are a classified FBI document and an unnamed anonymous tipster. Both reek. The original LA Times articles had a link to the FBI documents and it was clear as day to me these documents were a complete fabrication. The Smoking Gun did a number on this and really got into how shitty they were; spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, not to mention they were written on a typewriter and the FBI has not used typewriters in 30 years.

Turns out, the whole thing was an elaborate con by Jimmy Sabaition, whose father described him as "needing attention like he addicts need drugs." He wants Puffy to pay him 170,000 for who knows what, and Diddy won't do it. I guess this is Sabatino showing Diddy what he's capable of. And what he's capable of is scary. He's capable of getting the LA Times, the paper with the second largest readership in America, to print a total hoax, absolute fiction.

Chuck Philips, you claim you were taken advangae of. You claim you were naive and should have done more researchinto the authencitity of the documents provided to you. But you are full of shit. You one a Pultizer Prize. You've been duped once before in a high profile article about the same subject. I don't beleive for a second you woudl let yourself be taken advanage of again. I think you are a fucking liar. I think you thought you could get away with writig a story that you knew to be false, that you knew was fiction, and that you knew would damage a lot of reputations and possibly incite a great deal of violence. You are a fucking fraud and I hope this little adventure costs you your fucking job.



Anyone interested in reading a quality piece of journalism about the LAPD, Tupac,Biggie, etc, should check out this out. It's not a piece of hip-hop journalism, it's a very in depth look at how high-profile cases are investigated in a corrupt police department.