The Smoking Gun has posted a story saying the LA Times was “hoaxed” in its blockbuster Tupac story last week.

That feature, which the LAT now says was the largest hit-getter it has ever posted online, detailed the background of a 1994 New York assault in which rapper Tupac Shakur was shot five times. The Times story named the men behind the shooting and spoke, anonymously, to the folks who the paper said did it.

The paper said the attack was supposed to have merely been a beating, but matters escalated once guns were drawn. Most damningly, the paper said rapper and impresario Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, who was the Notorious B.I.G.’s producer, knew in advance that the attack was going to happen.

The Smoking Gun story begins like this:

Last week’s bombshell Los Angeles Times report claiming that the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio was carried out by associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs and that the rap impresario knew of the plot beforehand was based largely on fabricated FBI reports, The Smoking Gun has learned.

It continues:

The Times appears to have been hoaxed by an imprisoned con man and accomplished document forger, an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs’s trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud.

Emphases added. The piece, heavily reported and fully 5000 words long, zeroes in on two elements that could turn out to be embarrassing for the LAT and its star reporter, Chuck Philips.

(The Times itself just posted a story saying it would make an internal investigation of the documents’ authenticity.)

For the first, TSG got its hands on the FBI records the Times used to undergird its assertion that a confidential informant told the bureau a) that Tupac had been set up and b) who did it. (The LAT even posted copies of them online.) The paper said the two behind the attack were a manager named James Rosemond and another man, James Sabatino, whom the paper described as a “promoter.”

TSG, however, contends that the records were forgeries—and crude ones at that, created by Sabatino, from jail (!). The site, in what seems to a devastating debunking of the evidence, said the documents aren’t in the FBI file systems; that they appear to have been generated from a typewriter, rather than a computer (the site says there are strikeovers, for example); that there are many typographical errors and misspellings; that they use acronyms the FBI doesn’t use; and that the typing matches other legal submissions from Sabatino behind bars.

Secondly, there is the issue of Sabatino himself, who is not quoted in the LAT story but is said to have been one of the two masterminds of the attack. The rest of the TSG story details the insane history of Sabatino, a white kid who appears to have been a compulsive scam artist, a rap mogul wannabe and, possibly, mentally deranged. (For unclear reasons, he began sending death threats to Bill Clinton and other officials while in a British prison, for example.)

Sabatino’s methods are so crude, and has spent so much time behind bars, that it can charitably be said that he seems an unlikely protagonist in a story whose other principals include Shakur, Puffy, Biggie and Suge Knight. For example, Philips wrote:

[Jaques] Agnant and Sabatino helped plan the attack, working out the timing, arranging for the three assailants to be driven to the studio and mapping out their escape route, according to the informant and the other sources. Sabatino informed Combs and Wallace in advance that a trap had been laid for Shakur, the sources said.

Still to be seen is whether the story wipes out the assertions of the Times story entirely. Philips in his original opus wrote: “Others with knowledge of the incident corroborated the informant’s account in interviews with The Times and gave additional details.”

But read closer and things become murkier. If the TSG is correct, Sabatino concocted the documents and there is no “informant.” But Philips wrote:

The FBI documents do not name the informant. The Times learned his identity and verified that he was at the Quad on the night of the assault. When contacted, the man said the FBI records accurately convey what happened, and what he told investigators. He and the other sources interviewed for this article discussed the events of Nov. 30, 1994, on condition that their names not be published.

Their accounts are consistent with Shakur’s own. In interviews and on recordings, the rapper blamed Rosemond, Combs and their associates for the attack and promised to get even.

Did Sabatino line up a fake informant for Philips as well? If nothing else, Philips did not delve deeply enough into Sabatino’s background; a small fraction of the TSG material would have ofered a much different portrait of the alleged conspirator. For example, Philips wrote:

Shakur also became acquainted with Sabatino, a 19-year-old Italian American who co-promoted rap conventions with Rosemond. Sabatino had Brooklyn roots of a different kind that gave him cachet in the hip-hop world: His father was a captain in the Colombo crime family, according to federal authorities.

TSG said the elder Sabatino was not known to Mafia investigators, and that he was instead the manager of a Florida restaurant.