American lawyers are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of a massive lawsuit following the revelation on Wednesday that the Los Angeles Times was the victim of a hoax when it reported that the rap mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs was behind a gun attack on another rapper, Tupac Shakur, in 1994.
The Times reported last week that the attack on Shakur at the Quad recording studios in Manhattan, when he was pistol-whipped and shot three times, was carried out by associates of Diddy and that the rap impresario knew of the plot beforehand.
The newspaper’s report, written by Chuck Philips, was based on FBI reports filed with a federal court in Miami. But the documents have been exposed by The Smoking Gun (TSG) website as fakes, put together by an imprisoned con man, James Sabatino, who is an accomplished document forger.
Sabatino, 31, is a fantasist, says TSG, who has long tried to insinuate himself into important events in hip-hop history, including the shooting of Shakur and the murder in 1997 of another rap star, the Notorious B.I.G.
In his fantasy world, Sabatino has ‘managed’ hip-hop stars and conducted business with Combs, Shakur and others. In fact, says TSG, he is “little more than a rap devotee, a wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida” currently doing time for fraud.
The purported FBI reports were filed by Sabatino in connection with a lawsuit against Combs in which he claimed he was never paid for rap recordings in which he said he was involved (another fantasy).
How did Chuck Philips, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent six months compiling his report, fall for Sabatino’s hoax? He says he believed in the authenticity of the documents in part because they had been filed in court. But TSG claims the Times overlooked numerous misspellings and unusual acronyms that should have cast doubt on the documents’ authenticity.
Also, the documents appeared to have been prepared on a typewriter. A former FBI supervisor told TSG that the bureau ceased using typewriters about 30 years ago. TSG also discovered that the documents could not be found in an FBI database.
The LA Times has apologised to readers and is to launch an internal review.
Tags: hoax, LA Times apologises over Diddy hoax, music news, P. Diddy, Sean 'Diddy' Combs, Tupac Shakur, who shot ya
