Smoking Gun Web Site Says FBI Records Linking Combs to Shakur Assault Are Fake
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Los Angeles Times began an internal investigation yesterday into allegations that it unwittingly relied on fabricated FBI documents, created by a con man, in a report on the shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur.
The move follows a report by the Smoking Gun, a Web site that specializes in law-enforcement records, that said the Times "appears to have been hoaxed" by "an accomplished document forger" in its story last week tying the 1994 wounding of Shakur to associates of rap mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs.
William Bastone, the Smoking Gun's editor, said he immediately "thought something smelled" after looking at the FBI documents posted on the paper's Web site -- particularly the fact that they appeared to originate from a typewriter, although the bureau's agents switched to computers about 30 years ago.
If the documents are indeed bogus, it would be a huge embarrassment for the Times, reminiscent of the black eye that CBS received for using what the network presented as National Guard records in Dan Rather's 2004 report on President Bush's military service.
Russ Stanton, who took over as Times editor in February, declined to be interviewed for this story, and a spokeswoman said no one at the paper would answer questions. Stanton said in a statement that "questions have been raised about the authenticity of documents that we relied on for a story on the assault of Tupac Shakur in New York. We are taking this very seriously and have begun our own investigation."
In a statement last week, Combs called the Times report "beyond ridiculous" and "completely false," saying he had no advance knowledge of the attack on Shakur. "I am shocked that the Los Angeles Times would be so irresponsible as to publish such a baseless and completely untrue story." Combs's lawyer demanded a retraction.
The story, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Philips, said that "newly discovered information . . . lends credence to Shakur's insistence" at the time that associates of Combs set him up when he was beaten and shot at a Manhattan recording studio. (Shakur survived, but was fatally shot in Las Vegas in 1996.) One of the two men allegedly involved in setting up the rapper, the Times said, was promoter James Sabatino, a ninth-grade dropout now in prison for unrelated crimes.
The Smoking Gun reported that it was Sabatino who created fake FBI interview summaries, known as 302s, that the Times said reflected agent discussions with a "confidential informant." The Web site said Sabatino included a virtually identical document in his own lawsuit against Combs, filed from federal prison in Allenwood, Pa.
"They did not look like any FBI 302s that I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of them, thousands and thousands of pages," Bastone said. Beyond that, he said, the information in the purported documents "is demonstrably false. The idea that you have a roly-poly, 18-year-old white kid who was present the night Tupac Shakur got shot in New York -- and in the decade that's passed since, his name never came up in connection with this -- is a little bit crazy."
It's unclear why Sabatino would create documents implicating himself in a criminal investigation, but the Smoking Gun story suggested that he wanted to portray himself "as a feared hip-hop figure who muscled and conned rappers into deals."
The crime, which was never solved, triggered a bitter feud between East Coast and West Coast rappers. Sabatino, now 31, is serving an 11 1/2 -year sentence for wire fraud and racketeering related to the use of fake credit cards for thousands of dollars in expenses during a rap music tour.
Sabatino's father, according to Bastone's report, once described him in a letter to a federal judge as "a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug."
The Smoking Gun, which says it consulted several law-enforcement experts, raised a number of troubling points about the authenticity of the Times' documents. One, Bastone said, is that the agents' names and the titles of the files themselves were blacked out, making them impossible to verify. Another is that the documents are riddled with misspellings as well as acronyms not typically used in such reports.
Bastone also said that font sizes and instances of one letter typed over another -- so-called overstrikes -- show the documents were typewritten, and that there are similarities to Sabatino's own court filings. For instance, the word "making" appears as "makeing" in both sets of documents. The Web site said inmates routinely have access to typewriters.
While FBI reports can be located by the names of individuals and companies that are mentioned, Bastone said his sources report that the documents cited by the Times do not exist in the bureau's database.
FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said yesterday that "the FBI just received the documents and we're looking into it."
In his lawsuit against Combs over $175,000 in disputed expenses, Sabatino says he does not deny being at the New York studio when Shakur was shot. But no news account has ever mentioned him as being present, and the New York detective who headed the probe told the Smoking Gun he could not recall any suspected involvement by Sabatino.
Sabatino also says in the suit "it was reported" that Los Angeles police had named him as a "person of interest" in the 1997 murder of Christopher Wallace, the rapper known as the Notorious B.I.G. But the Smoking Gun said there are no such news reports.
Bastone said he called Philips, with whom he has cooperated in the past, shortly after the reporter's story was published March 17 to say that the documents "just did not ring true to us." He said Philips assured him he had sources who had vouched for them. On Tuesday, Bastone said, he again called Philips and a deputy managing editor, and they expressed concern about his findings.
The Shakur story, which the Times initially broke online, has gotten nearly 1 million hits, more than any other report on the paper's Web site this year.
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