The Los Angeles Times and reporter Chuck Philips—who posted a web-only investigative piece March 17 that purported to reveal who was behind the nonfatal shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur in New York in November 1994—have now formally retracted the story and its allegations.

A crushing analysis in the Smoking Gun made a strong case that the paper had relied on false documents and unreliable testimony from a con man; before, the paper had only acknowledged that some of the material the story was based on was faked.

The retraction as published this a.m is devastating; it says the paper relied on a bad source—a man named James Sabatino, whom the paper portrayed as a player in the rap world and a key architect of the assault on Shakur. In reality, Sabatino, who was a teenager at the time of the assault, was apparently in reality a rap-scene wannabe and a con man of no little industriousness, if not success, who has spent most of his adult life behind bars.

To make matters worse, the paper noted prominently that Sabatino and his purported partner in crime, James Rosemond, were close associates of rapper and impressario Sean “Puffy” Combs.

The Times now believes that Sabatino fabricated the FBI reports and concocted his role in the assault as well as his supposed relationships with Combs, Rosemond and [Shakur friend Jacques] Agnant.

Consequently, The Times specifically retracts all statements in the article, and in its related publications, that state or suggest in any way that Rosemond, Agnant and Sabatino orchestrated or played any role in the assault on Shakur or that they lured him into an ambush at the Quad studios.

To the extent these publications could be interpreted as creating the impression that Combs was involved in arranging the attack, The Times wishes to correct that misimpression, which was neither stated in the article nor intended.

The last sentence is going to figure in what seems will be an upcoming libel trial, as Puffy moves to defend his good name. The way the Times writes it, it doesn’t look that bad, until you read the next graf of the retraction:

The Times also reported that Sabatino told Combs in advance that Shakur was going to be attacked. The Times now believes that Sabatino had no involvement in the attack and that he never spoke to Combs about it. Any statements or implications suggesting that Combs was given advance knowledge of the assault on Shakur, or played any role in it, are specifically retracted.

Parsed carefully, those two grafs don’t technically contradict each other, but I wouldn’t want to be the one who will have to keep that distinction straight in the mind of a jury. More on that in a minute.

If you can believe it, the retraction gets worse:

In addition, The Times was mistaken in reporting that Rosemond has served prison time for drug dealing and was convicted in 1996 of drug offenses. The Times specifically retracts those statements.

Pile those problems up, and its hard to see how this failing, in an era when journalistic imbroglios, year after year, capture the public imagination, is not the worst journalistic screwup we have yet seen. The CBS disaster involving President Bush’s skating of his National Guard obligations was based on forged documents, but the underlying story wasn’t fully discredited; the fabrication scandals at the NYT and the New Republic were caused by sociopaths against whom it is hard for any paper to defend, given the trust journalism is based on.

But in the LAT Shakur story, the documents were faked; the main source was a loon; the paper seems not to have done anything like due diligence in investigating the character and record of the guy doing the allegations; it didn’t do due diligence to ascertain the documents it had were reliable; it used all of that evidence to smear the names of several other prominent people; and on top of that also seems to have smeared one of those folks further by reporting that he done time for drug offenses.

And Combs now has the cause and the time and the money to make the paper rue the day it ever got on this story.

There will be more to say about this in coming days, but there is one more key point here; as I wrote a while back, the over-arching question is who the multiple sources were the paper used to buttress the allegations from Sabatino and the FBI documents he apparently forged. Those documents were supposedly from an FBI informant; Philips reported that:

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.

Emphasis added. The mind boggles at how that graf will be discussed in a courtroom. The LAT retraction had this to say on the subject of the informant:

The Times has since concluded that the FBI reports were fabricated and that some of the other sources relied on—including the person Philips previously believed to be the “confidential source” cited in the FBI reports—do not support major elements of the story.

Conspicuously absent from the retraction is who that informant was. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

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.

A few potential scenarios:

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.

A), B) or C) remain possibilities, and all are beyond unattractive. The worst case scenario is that Philips essentially used Sabatino as the confirmation of Sabatino’s false allegations.

I’ve said before that Philips was a journalistic hero of mine, and it should not be forgotten that he is a rare breed and a guy who has spent his career working on the hard stories. And I’m not a lawyer. But it’s hard not to see how the Times is not vulnerable to a libel suit of potentially epic proportions.

Combs and Rosemond are public figures, but Agnant doesn’t seem to be. Even for the high standards of establishing libel against a public figure, it certainly looks like the Combs & Co. have strong case of recklessness to make. The lawyers will put up a big photo of Sabatino in 1994 in the courtroom (he was 17 at the time, white, and pudgy) and detail his pathetic and crazy history of wild stories, a history Philips apparently didn’t know about and in any case did not share with readers. Then they move to the purported FBI documents, which the paper didn’t authenticate; from there will come a discussion of Philips’ confirming sources, some and possibly all of whom don’t exist. The fact that he also falsely tagged Rosemond as a convicted drug dealer is not going to help matters either.

Truth is of course a defense; that doesn’t seem an option here. All the paper can really do is plead that it was the victim of a hoax. What will come next isn’t going to be pretty. There’s no recent journalistic scandal I can think of that brings a publication close to this level of vulnerability.

—

Previously:

At the LA Times, the pain may be just beginning

Did the LAT get hoaxed on its Tupac bombshell?

Also:

The LAT’s apology and its original story.

The Smoking Gun’s expose of the hoax.