… to, of all people, his nemesis Patterico.

Even if you’ve been following the tangled strands of this issue—which range from the killings of Tupac and Biggie Smalls to corruption in the LAPD to the crazy Anthony Pellicano trial to other crime-related exposes Philips wrote over his many years as an LA Times investigative reporter—you may find this hard going.

Patterico says he’ll be doling parts of the 90-minute chat this week. The first entry is mostly about Philips’ defense of letters the reporter wrote to a prisoner named Alexander Proctor, who was involved in the government’s case against Pellicano.

Basically, Patterico says Philips was trying to get Proctor to testify more favorably toward Pellicano, by for example repeatedly stressing that a key conversation Proctor’d had with another witness hadn’t been recorded.

The implication is apparently that Philips was not-so-subtly hinting that Proctor could change his story without being confronted with damning evidence that he had done so.

I’ve read the thing twice and can’t get my mind around it. I wouldn’t write letters like that. And there’s something a bit off the point about one or two of Philips answers. And for all I know the darkest suspicions of Patterico and Philips’s other critics—that Philips was on Suge Knight’s payroll, that he was working not to get the truth out but to advance Pellicano’s agenda—are true.

Certainly Philips ended up in a weird rabbit hole after his many years of covering the Tupac/Smalls cases, and Patterico has undermined his other work about a convicted murderer named Waymond Anderson as well.

All that said, investigative reporting is a difficult business. (Sometimes it all goes wrong, as Philips knows.) And some of the stuff bruited about by Patterico & Co. is pretty pathetic. (I think this is the umpteenth Philips-related blog post I’ve read that discusses whether he waved at Pellicano at the guy’s wedding, or bothered to pull a paper and pen out of his pocket at a court hearing he attended.)

Patterico says he’ll post about what Philips said about the Anderson and Tupac cases later this week.