Chuck Philips is the reporter from the Los Angeles Times who was shamed this week when it came out that he had built his latest blockbuster story on forged documents. I’ve been a fan for a long time, since his dogged exposés of music-business nonsense in the late 1990s. When no one else seemed to care, he and his partner at the time, Michael Hiltzik, took on payola in the radio business and rafts of malfeasance at the organization that puts on the Grammys, NARAS.

(Among other things, the pair revealed that the group’s much-touted charitable arm, MusiCares, wasn’t much of a charity)

So it’s been difficult to watch a stalwart suffer through the ongoing debacle. But based on a close reading of what his story actually said and what we’ve learned elsewhere and in the paper’s apology, this debacle may be just getting started.

Philips, a probing and serious reporter, should be given credit for refusing to give up on the many unsolved crimes that have been left in the wake of the Tupac Shakur/Notorious B.I.G. feud.

That said, the L.A. Times apology story issued yesterday, acknowledging the forged documents, leave many unanswered questions. Read over closely, the apology story can be seen to have been carefully, even gingerly worded. We still don’t know many things.

Here are the questions the paper’s promised full investigation will need to address.

1) The Times apologized for using the false documents, which were revealed in a devastating report on the Smoking Gun on Wednesday. But is the paper retracting the story? As of now, it remains up on the site with the apology report above it. The paper did not say if it was standing by the rest of the original report or not.

Many articles on the imbroglio have referred to the story as a retraction. (The NYT hed was “Newspaper Says Article on Rapper Was False” and used the word “retraction” in the body; many others have followed suit), but that’s not how I read it. Indeed, the story carefully says the original report was “partially based” on the forgeries.

2) This creates new problems. As I wrote yesterday, here is the most difficult-to-parse passage in Philips’s story, emphasis added:

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.

As we have seen, the documents were forgeries, apparently created by a comically inept con man, James Sabatino, who’s been in jail for the past ten years. They purported to be the views of the “informant” Philips refers to—who (oddly enough, if Sabatino did forge them) points the finger at Sabatino as one of the conspirators of the attack on Tupac Shakur in a New York recording studio in 1994.

Who was the informant, and how did he confirm an account from a forged document?

The possible answers all raise new questions. Stay with me: A) The “informant” could be in on the conspiracy with Sabatino to fool Philips. This seems elaborate, and requires Philips to have been duped multiple ways, but is in keeping with Sabatino’s breathtakingly rococo flim-flamming. B) It’s possible that Sabatino himself was the informant and told Philips so, explaining that the FBI wrote about him in the third person in the forged documents to conceal his identity. C) Philips found the forged documents, identified Sabatino as the informant, and used him as confirmation. But, since Philips apparently found the documents in a court filing Sabatino himself made, this explanation would require a huge naiveté on Philips’ part and a great deal of creative dissembling on Sabatino’s. D) Finally, I suppose it’s remotely possible that the informant did exist and did talk to the FBI, and that Sabatino knew about this, but that he forged the documents because he couldn’t produce them himself—in other words, that they were forgeries of documents that in some variant did existed somewhere. The original Smoking Gun exposé of the Times’ mistake, however, contains assertions that make this unlikely.

In the end, though, none of these seems plausible, given the detail Philips supplies. The informant confirmed the documents. He was at the studio the night of the shooting. Philips verified his identity.

This issue is the one in which the Times and Philips seem the most vulnerable. It’s hard to conceive of an answer to the question “Who was the informant?” that doesn’t increase the paper’s embarrassment.

3) Which brings us to the next question: Was Sabatino, in the end, the main source for the story? Was he in a sense used as a double source, confirming his own, forged, information? Consider this passage:

[Shakur associate 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.

Shakur’s friend Randy “Stretch” Walker was in on the plan, the sources said. In the hours before the attack, Shakur and Rosemond argued several times over the phone about how much Shakur would be paid. After the dispute was settled, Walker notified Agnant when Shakur was en route, the sources said.

Around 11:30 p.m., Sabatino effectively locked down the 10th floor, quietly intercepting anyone who tried to leave, the FBI informant and the other sources said.

According to the Smoking Gun story, Sabatino was a marginal, ridiculous figure on the scene who was not even at the studio that night. The one person on the entire planet who seems to consider Sabatino a major player in anything is Sabatino. If, in the end, Sabatino was Philips’s main source for the account, the entire story becomes a little comical. (Try inserting the word “Sabatino” for “sources” and “the other sources” in the emphasized passages above.)

4) The story the LAT originally published goes farther, however: Philips wrote:

Others with knowledge of the incident corroborated the informant’s account in interviews with The Times and gave additional details.

He also said he identified the actual attackers and had contact with two of them:

The three men identified by the sources as Shakur’s assailants are all serving time in federal penitentiaries for unrelated crimes. The Times is withholding their names because they have not been charged.

In correspondence with The Times, one of the men said that Rosemond orchestrated the ambush. Another was cryptic. He wrote that the statute of limitations for the assault had expired, and he offered to produce, for an unspecified fee, the medallion stolen from Shakur.

The third inmate denied involvement in the attack.

Do these corroborations (whose existence are also implicit in the use of the plural in the phrase “the other sources” elsewhere in the story) stand on their own? The reason serious news operations require multiple sources is that it lessens the chances that a particular assertion is false. They are, in effect, insurance. The question is, was the LAT’s insurance good in this case? That, too, the paper needs to make clear to readers.

5) The paper should address the conflicts between what it reported and what TSG contended. For example, in Philips’s story, Sabatino is a rap promoter and close associate of Combs:

Sabatino became a fixture in Combs’ circle. He went on the road with B.I.G. and joined Combs on his 1997 “No Way Out” tour, helping him stage lavish private parties and land corporate sponsorships.

In the TSG story he is a buffoon.

Philips’s story places Sabatino at the studio the night Shakur was killed. TSG, by contrast, includes this withering passage:

[I]n the reams of copy about the 1994 attack, Sabatino’s name has never appeared anywhere. The first time a publication linked him to the Shakur ambush came last week in the Times, thanks to one of the FBI “302s” obtained by the country’s fourth-largest newspaper.

The New York Police Department probe of the Quad Studios incident was headed by Detective Joseph Babnik […]. In an interview, Babnik, now retired, told TSG that Sabatino’s name “does not ring a bell” and that he could not recall anyone with that surname being connected to the Shakur case. Asked if he would have recalled a rotund white teenager being present at Quad Studios that night, Babnik said yes, adding that the only white witnesses he recalled interviewing were employed in technical capacities at the recording studio.

6) Finally, the Times needs to address why basic background research was not done on a major story’s protagonist. How did it miss sharing with readers the true character of Sabatino, a good chunk of whose background could have been ascertained in a rudimentary Google or Lexis search? (Most notably, a lengthy feature on Sabatino’s buffoonish career was published by the Miami New Times in 1999.)

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For the last five or six years, Chuck Philips has been delving into a story that most journalistic outlets have shunned: the destructive, debilitating, bloody gang war between east and west coast rappers.

It’s amazing seeing Sean Combs being able to play the victim in the wake of the forged documents debacle. He’s now threatening the Times with a libel suit. The last time Combs got involved with the law, one of his entourage, a rapper named Shyne, shot a gun three times in a crowded nightclub, wounding three people. (He shot one woman in the face, and was sporting hollow-point bullets. Nice.)

Combs then took off—he jumped in a car with Jennifer Lopez, flirted with tragedy by running eleven Manhattan red lights at high speed, and was found to have an unregistered gun in his car. He managed to beat the resulting charges, but his buddy Shyne got ten years.

That doesn’t mean Combs conspired to shoot Tupac Shakur, but it does remind us that, while most of the entertainment press focuses on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, there are a few reporters out there who spend long years on the tough story.

What I hope will happen for Philips’s sake is that he can demonstrate that the rest of his sourcing for the story was sound and that the overall thrust of the original investigation was true. He can then take his lumps for getting scammed by Sabatino (and possibly others), ward off any libel threats from Combs and Co., and rebuild his reputation. If he can’t, for Chuck Philips and the Los Angeles Times, the apology will have been only the beginning.