The anonymous blogger Patterico makes a significant addition to his ongoing jihad against former LA Times reporter Chuck Philips here.

The exhaustive (and somewhat exhausting) entry is an analysis of Philips’ relationship with a rapper named Waymond Anderson, who was portrayed in a series of Philips articles as innocent of the murder he’s serving a life prison term for.

Patterico dug up a lengthy deposition Anderson gave, which he says Philips had partially reported on in the past. The part he didn’t report on, according to Patterico, contains Anderson basically saying a lot of patently crazy stuff about his case and the murders of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, two other pet subjects of Philips’.

Philips had used Anderson as a source in at least two important articles; Patterico’s point is that a) anyone reading the full testimony could see he was a loon and b) by not sharing the crazy stuff with readers Philips was covering up his blockbuster source’s iffy bona fides.

Ironically enough, Anderson has recently been embarrassing Philips in an entirely different way.

Lots, lots more in Patterico’s full entry.

Hitsville previous writings on the Chuck Philips case are here.

LAT reporter Chuck Philips added a colorful footnote to his already colorful career today when a story in the Times reported that a convicted murderer at a hearing charged under oath that Philips had passed on threatening notes from Suge Knight to the inmate during jailhouse visits.

The charge doesn’t look that serious; the story details the convict’s long history of claims and retractions. Ironically enough, Philips wrote a 2500-word-long article questioning the validity of Anderson’s murder conviction last year:

[…P]rosecutors persuaded a jury that the entertainer known as “Suave” was a ruthless drug dealer who had torched a home near the USC campus, killing a man to avenge an unpaid drug debt. Anderson was sentenced to life in prison without parole for first-degree murder.

Now, after nearly 13 years behind bars, he has asked the state Court of Appeal to throw out his conviction, contending that new evidence shows he could not have committed the crime.

Two witnesses who identified him at the trial as the arsonist have given sworn statements saying that they lied under pressure from police.

Philips-hating blogger Patterico, an anonymous LA prosecutor, goes nuts with the story here.

Philips is quoted denying the allegation:

“That never happened,” said Philips, who has written several stories about Anderson’s murder conviction suggesting that Anderson may be innocent. “I’m flabbergasted by this whole thing. This is the ultimate betrayal.”

Knight, the founder of Death Row Records, could not be reached for comment.

And Philips told the paper he had talked to Anderson recently:

In recent weeks, Philips said, he has kept in regular contact with Anderson’s family, though he has not been covering the hearing for the newspaper. Over the weekend, Philips said, Anderson’s wife set up a conference call with Anderson from jail.

Anderson, he said, asked for his help. Philips said he told him he could do nothing more.

“He just said, ‘I’m hung out here all by myself.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what I can do. There’s nothing I can do,’ ” Philips said.

Philips was one of the Times staffers who accepted a recent buyout offer; he left the paper last week. With another reporter he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for exposing corruption at NARAS, the organization that puts on the Grammys.

Earlier this year, however, he suffered a massive humiliation days after he published a blockbuster investigative piece alleging that rap impressario Sean Puffy Combs had known in advance of an ambush on rapper Tupac Shakur in New York in 1994. The piece was refuted by the Smoking Gun web site and later formally retracted by the paper.

———-

Previously in Hitsville:

Big Trouble in LA: The Times retracts the Tupac story

At the LA Times, the pain may be just beginning

Did the LAT get hoaxed on its Tupac bombshell?

What will become of Chuck Philips?

Dark Deeds!: The Chuck Philips/Anthony Pellicano connection

Also:

The LAT’s apology and its original story.

The Smoking Gun’s expose of the hoax.

The pseudononymous Patterico, at Patterico.com, ties one of his favorite topics, the nefariousness of Chuck Philips, to the recent conviction of Anothony Pellicano on racketeering and wiretapping charges.* [Link via kausfiles.]

Philips is the LAT Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose blockbuster story about the non-fatal 1994 shooting of Tupac Shukur ran aground on the information given him by an imprisoned con man. The paper first acknowledged that the story was based on falsified information and then formally retracted it and apologized.

Patterico has been suspicious of Philips for years. (Hitsville, I should note again, is a fan of Philips’, though I know him not at all. As I have written previously, however, I think there’s a good case to be made that he and the LAT have not heard the end of the Tupac debacle.)

Anyway, Patterico has a statement from Anita Busch, the reporter who found a threatening note on her car and started the process in motion. She wants an investigation of Chuck Philips’ Pellicano reporting, charging that he had a too-close relationship with the private eye. She has a sophisticated point to make:

To Pellicano and his wealthy clients, ‘winning’ meant completely obliterating someone’s life and livelihood. They saw the media as just another weapon in their arsenal and used and abused it to go after anyone in their crosshairs. For example, they used their PR connection to plant items in the New York Post’s Page Six to slam victims like Bo Zenga and Garry Shandling. And when their targets became FBI agent Stan Ornellas and U.S. attorney Dan Saunders, they tried to smear and discredit these decent men in the pages of the L.A. Times. The Pellicano case coverage in the L.A. Times as reported by Chuck Philips (who told the NY Times that Pellicano was his longtime news source) should be examined. It’s a case study of how Pellicano worked his media relationships to try to destroy his adversaries.

Patterico says that, specifically, the LAT was the only paper that cast aspersions on those investigating Pellicano. The rest of evidence is pretty thin; Philips is said to have gone to Pellicano’s wedding, and to have been at the reading of his verdict earlier this week, in both cases not taking notes. Philips could be the secret godfather of Pellicano’s pet parrot or barely know the man; this sort of stuff is evidence of neither.

(Patterico also has a long discussion of a couple of married LAT editors and what one of them may or may not have said about hiring Pellicano to investigate the Busch threat, and a response from one of them, which you are welcome to peruse at your leisure.)

On the other hand, a good investigative reporter, particularly one of the ones going after the very dirty stories Philips specialized in, sometimes has to hang out with some very dirty people. You want them going to the hoods’ weddings.

That may be why the Times is standing by Philips. On the surface, he was hoodwinked by a professional con man and it seems as if, for now at least, the paper is acknowledging that great reporters can make mistakes.

The only problem with this is that there are still some very key questions the paper hasn’t yet explained to readers. (I’m not one who thinks that the press owes readers every little bit of behind-the-scenes detail. But while the paper has been quite open about the problems of the story, and retracting it, there remain some very difficult questions that haven’t been answered. An overview here.)

Of course, looming over this is the potential of a lawsuit from Puffy, rap agent James Rosemond, or associate Jacques Agnant, all of whom were slurred in the original Philips story. The paper may be suiting up for a big legal attack, and that probably explains why it is not volunteering any more information to readers.

Sean Combs is definitely a public figure, but he may have his own reasons not to take the case to trial. (He may be working on a settlement with the paper behind the scenes, however.**) Rosemond and, particularly, Agnant have a better argument to make about not being public figures, with the standards for a libel judgment correspondingly lower.

Rosemond has a special case to make in that, besides being branded as the guy who set up Tupac for the assault in which he was shot, he was also mistakenly said to have done prison time for drug dealing, which the paper retracted as well. Again, I’m not a lawyer, but the failure to do simple fact-checking of such a volatile accusation will not look good in court.

* One part of the Pellicano story I’ve always adored, but which is often overlooked in the slew of incredible charges that have transpired since, is that fact that, once the cops got onto him six years ago, they searched his office and found … a significant quantity of C-4 explosive and two live hand grenades. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but has remained in jail after being indicted on the wiretapping charges.

** The legal problems the paper is facing could mean we may never know how exactly the story went awry. Couldn’t the paper settle with all three characters, and agree to keep the details secret? That might be good for the paper in the business and legal senses, bad in the journalistic one. Sam Zell, of course, inherited this mess. What will his call be?

———-

Previously:

Big Trouble in LA: The Times retracts the Tupac story

At the LA Times, the pain may be just beginning

Did the LAT get hoaxed on its Tupac bombshell?

What will become of Chuck Philips?

Also:

The LAT’s apology and its original story.

The Smoking Gun’s expose of the hoax.

The star LA Times reporter, hoodwinked by a jailed con man, is still in limbo a week after the paper retracted a major investigative piece that purportedly named the people behind the nonfatal 1994 shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur in NYC. E&P talked to LAT editor Russ Stanton, who said

Philips “remains active and on the payroll,” but added “what he is going to be doing in the future is still in the process of being defined.”

The story continues:

Having to face such a controversy after just a month at the helm, Stanton said the incident had made for a challenging beginning, but did not blame anyone but the paper itself. “I think we did what we were supposed to do; we made a pretty big mistake, we owed up to it on day one,” he said.

———-

Previously:

Big Trouble in LA: The Times retracts the Tupac story

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.

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.

Billboard talks to the other man accused in Chuck Philips’ LA Times story about the 1994 assault on rapper Tupac Shakur, Jimmy Rosemond. Rosemond is currently the manager of the Game and other rappers. He says a couple of interesting things:

[T]he five-shot theory doesn’t work for me. […] Tupac was walking around laughing. I only saw one bullet hole, so this whole five-shot theory never made sense. Tupac was walking around, he had a little bit of blood dripping from his head and he was laughing, rolled up a spliff and waited for the ambulance. It was just irresponsible on Chuck Phillips’ part to throw me under the bus like that from information he gathered from government informants that had lengthy sentences.

And he says this about James Sabatino, the center of the hoax that has embarrassed the LAT and Philips:

I don’t even know who James Sabatino is and for me to conspire with him to do anything … is ridiculous. He’s 30 years old now, so this guy was 16 or 17 years old when this incident happened? I’m 43 year old man. Then I was in my 30s and I was hanging out with a 16-year-old? There is no way.

Rosemond says he’s going to be suing. We’ll see. Philips gave this background and opportunity for denial from Rosemond in the original story:

Rosemond, who has served prison time for drug dealing and weapons offenses, has been described by Vibe magazine as “one of the most respected and feared players in hip-hop.” His Czar Entertainment represents rappers Shyne, Too Short, Gucci Mane and the Game.

Rosemond has long denied any role in the Quad incident. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but his lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, dismissed the new information as “ancient double-hearsay allegations.”

Lichtman noted that Rosemond had never been charged or questioned in connection with the attack — a sign, Lichtman said, that federal authorities have “discounted” what the informant told them. Rosemond “was not involved in the assault and will not be prosecuted for it,” Lichtman said.

While we won’t know for sure until the paper reveals the results of its internal investigation into the story, a libel case doesn’t seem like a sure thing. Leaving aside the high bar of showing Philips acted with “reckless disregard,” as I noted last week, while the Times and Philips have apologized for “partially” basing the story on what it acknowledges were forged documents, they have not as yet formally retracted its allegations.

—

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.

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.)

———

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.

The Los Angeles Times and star investigative reporter Chuck Philips were the subjects of a humiliating apology from the paper for basing an investigative report on false documents.

The apology is here.

The original Philips story detailed a conspiracy against and attack on rapper Tupac Shakur, who was ambushed in the lobby of a New York recording studio in 1994 and shot five times. Shakur survived, but the assault sparked a rap gang war that ultimately left him and rival rapper the Notorious B.I.G. dead.

The LAT story was partially based on FBI documents the paper now acknowledges were forgeries.

Yesterday, the Smoking Gun web site published a devastating 5000-word refutation of the documents, convincingly detailing not only their falsity but also the strange character behind them, a compulsive con man and rap wannabe who seemed to have spent most of his short adult life in jail for one hare-brained scheme after another.

From the LAT apology story:

“In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job,” Philips said in a statement Wednesday. “I’m sorry.”

In his statement, [Deputy Managing Editor Marc] Duvoisin added: “We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck’s. I deeply regret that we let our readers down.”

The thrust of the original story was that two New York rap folks set Shakur up that night; the attack was supposed to be a beating, but guns were drawn and shooting resulted. The paper also said that producer Sean “Puffy” Combs knew about the attack in advance. Combs has denied it and is now threatening to sue.

In the wake of this debacle, however, at least four clear questions remain.

In the original story, Philips wrote:

The [now discredited] records—summaries of FBI interviews with the informant conducted in July and December 2002—provide details of how Shakur was lured to the studio and ambushed. Others with knowledge of the incident corroborated the informant’s account in interviews with The Times and gave additional details.

Were those corroborations part of the fraud? Sources telling a reporter what he wanted to hear? Or are they evidence on their own that the thrust of the story was valid?

Question two: Here’s the most troubling passage in the LAT story, and one that was not explained in the apology:

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.

I asked Philips if he still stood behind that assertion in the story; will post his answer if he responds.

Third, what exactly was Sabatino’s real career in the rap world? The Smoking Gun expose is an indelible portrait of an incompetent con man—one with almost a compulsion to scam, but undercut by a comic array of personal qualities that undermine this compulsion, ranging from ADD to what might charitably be described as unclear thinking.

In Philips’ story, he is a “promoter”; there is little hint of the, ah, pungency of his career. Still, it asserted this:

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.

During the tour, Sabatino used fake credit cards to run up tens of thousands of dollars in charges for hotel suites, limousines and helicopters for the Bad Boy entourage. He was arrested in London and extradited to the U.S. He is serving an 111⁄2-year prison term for wire fraud and racketeering.

The TSG story says only that he was jailed in London for “ripping off the Four Seasons hotel.” Was Sabatino an associate of Combs or not? The LAT apology didn’t address that issue, either.

Which brings up the final and perhaps most problematic issue of the story: How much did Philips rely on Sabatino as an unnamed source? The apology story says he trusted the fake FBI documents because he found them in a court filing. (Unfortunately, it was a Sabatino court filing.)

In the original story, Philips wrote that Sabatino “declined to comment.” But was he a major behind-the-scenes source? Could he be the “informant” himself, confirming the accuracy of the documents he forged? Still to be heard from the Times is whether the remainder of the Philips’ original contentions were sound—or whether the extent to which he relied on Sabatino as a major but unnamed source has compromised the rest of the story.

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.

LA Times investigative reporter Chuck Philips ties rapper and impresario Puff Daddy to the nonfatal shooting of the hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur at a NY recording studio in 1994. His piece includes an elaborate web presentation.

Philips and his colleague Michael Hiltzik won a Pulitzer in 1999 for their investigations of corruption at NARAS (the group that puts on the Grammys) and payola in the radio industry.

Here’s the heart of the story:

[N]ewly discovered information, including interviews with people who were at the studio that night, lends credence to Shakur’s insistence that associates of rap impresario Sean “Diddy” Combs were behind the assault. Their alleged motives: to punish Shakur for disrespecting them and rejecting their business overtures and, not incidentally, to curry favor with Combs.

The piece also has this juicy tidbit:

A member of Shakur’s posse cooperated with the rapper’s enemies, relaying their offer of a $7,000 payment and keeping them informed of his whereabouts on the night of the assault, according to the informant and the other sources.

Reading Philips’ story will probably provoke a familiar feeling to anyone who has tried to follow this story since its lurid beginnings 14 years ago. Shakur is one of the compelling figures of his era, until you think about him for more than about ten seconds, and remember the sexual assault charges (for which he went to prison) and the assault charges (for which he went to jail), and the various shootings that occurred around him, one of which killed a kid.

Philips says Shakur’s behavior around the time was becoming “increasingly provocative.” He continues: “He brandished weapons in public. Even friends thought he was out of control.” Indeed, in the assault, Shakur pulled his own weapon—and shot himself in the groin with it.

That’s part of the story’s compelling minute-by-minute account of the attack. Philips names talent manager James Rosemond and promoter James Sabatino as the men behind it:

In the years after the mayhem at the Quad, Rosemond tried to dispel persistent rumors that he arranged the attack. He protested his innocence in Vibe magazine and appealed to Shakur, in vain, to cease his public accusations.

In 1996, Rosemond was convicted of drug and weapons offenses and sentenced to five years in prison. Released three years later, he reinvented himself as a talent manager. His turbulent past gave him street cred and helped attract a clientele of rappers to his Czar Entertainment. Two years ago, he was convicted of assaulting a radio disc jockey in Washington, D.C. He remains on probation for the offense.

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.

During the tour, Sabatino used fake credit cards to run up tens of thousands of dollars in charges for hotel suites, limousines and helicopters for the Bad Boy entourage. He was arrested in London and extradited to the U.S. He is serving an 11½-year prison term for wire fraud and racketeering.

Who were the shooters in the 1994 attack? Philips has this to say:

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.

Puffy’s real name is Sean Combs; he’s also called himself a string of things like Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, and Diddy; he’s an artist, producer and head of a business empire that sells clothes and other things. He was the producer for the Notorious B.I.G., also known as Biggie Smalls, whose real name was Christopher Wallace.

The B.I.G. camp and the Tupac camp had had a years-long blood feud going by the time of Tupac’s 1994 shooting. Tupac was shot again, and killed, two years later while driving in Las Vegas.

Smalls himself was shot and killed in similar fashion six months later, in Los Angeles.

In September 2002, Philips presented an account of the Shakur murder in Vagas. He reported that Smalls had paid the Southside Crips $1 million and provided the gun for the shooting. Philips named the murderer as well: Orlando Anderson, who was killed later in an unrelated gang incident.

Earlier: I asked Philips about the story Sunday. He replied:

My editor at the LA Times, Marc Duvoisin, came up with an idea last week for this unprecedented web experiment … We are going to drop an investigative report about the shooting of rap star Tupac Shakur exclusively online.

The cops never solved this crime. We track down the 3 assailants and some of the people who orchestrated the crime and dug up some confidential FBI reports. I reported the story and Marc Duvoisin, the best editor at the LA Times, edited it and suggested that we try publishing it directly on the web. He enlisted nearly a dozen free thinkers at the website to put together an interactive online presentation that looks hipper than anything a newspaper has ever tried.

Here’s the LAT press release:

In a web-only presentation, Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer Chuck Philips deconstructs the 1994 ambush of Tupac Shakur at the Quad Recording Studio in New York—the first shot of a lethal, bi-coastal feud that culminated in the killings of Shakur and rap’s other leading star, Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G.

Until the night he was murdered in 1996, the rap star insisted that associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs were behind the brutal ambush at the Quad. New evidence—FBI records and exclusive interviews with individuals who were at the studio that night—support his suspicions. Accompanied by a vivid photo-gallery of the cast of characters, copies of confidential documents, an interactive timeline and audio of lyrics and videos from Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., Philips pieces together a case that has left many in the music world as well as law enforcement officials baffled.

Be sure to check out the story first thing Monday morning by visiting www.latimes.com/tupac. Philips is also scheduled to conduct a live chat with readers on Tuesday.