By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 28, 2008

After spending months digging into the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur, the Los Angeles Times took just over 13 hours to admit that it had been duped.

The newspaper apologized yesterday for relying on what it now acknowledges were apparently bogus FBI documents that the Times reporter never attempted to verify with the bureau. The story, which tied the 1994 wounding of Shakur to associates of another major rap figure, Sean "Puffy" Combs, prompted threats of legal action from attorneys for Combs and a talent manager implicated in the piece.

"In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job," Chuck Philips, the story's Pulitzer Prize-winning author, said in a statement. "I'm sorry." Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin also took responsibility, saying: "We should not have let ourselves be fooled. . . . I deeply regret that we let our readers down."

William Bastone, a veteran journalist who runs the Smoking Gun Web site, told Philips a day after the story was published last week that he had misgivings about the authenticity of the purported FBI document. "I'm hoping they're going to do some kind of detailed after-action report because there are still very significant questions about how this happened," said Bastone, whose report led to the apology.

Philips told his paper that he tried to check out the documents with the U.S. attorney's office in New York, which declined to comment, and a retired FBI agent, who said the papers looked legitimate, but he did not put the question directly to bureau officials.

The Smoking Gun said the phony documents were created by a con man, James Sabatino, now serving an 11 1/2 -year prison term for fraud, who, oddly enough, was implicated in the story as having been at a New York recording studio when Shakur was wounded. Sabatino was 18 at the time. Shakur was murdered two years later. Like the earlier shooting, that case has never been solved.

The story represents the biggest debacle at the Times since 1999, when the paper damaged its credibility by sharing profits with the Staples Center from a special magazine issue on the sports arena. It is also the most prominent blunder involving unverified documents since CBS News retracted its 2004 report about President Bush's National Guard service.

The Tupac piece was published a month after Russ Stanton took over as editor, in the wake of the parent Tribune Co. firing the paper's top editor for the second time in 15 months during disputes about budget cuts. Bob Steele, a scholar at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said newsroom cutbacks may have had an impact, noting that the Times account said the story was read only by Duvoisin and two copy editors.

"For a paper like the L.A. Times to blow it, on what appear to be fake documents, is a very grievous journalistic error," Steele said. He credited the paper with quickly making amends but said "that doesn't erase the error."

Michael Parks, who was editor of the Times during the Staples controversy, said he always insisted that he and another top editor read all front-page stories in addition to the primary editor. While praising Philips as a usually thorough reporter, "they should have done more checking," said Parks, now director of the University of Southern California's School of Journalism. "Fake documents are not new, as CBS found out. . . . This calls into question in readers' minds whether they can believe things in the paper."

Stanton, who had been the paper's innovation editor, declined interview requests for the second straight day.

Howard Weitzman, a lawyer for Combs, now a businessman with his own clothing and fragrance lines, said yesterday: "The Los Angeles Times apology is, at best, a first step. But it doesn't undo the false and defamatory nature of the story, or the suspicion and innuendo that Mr. Combs has had to endure due to these untruthful allegations and the irresponsible conduct of this particular reporter."

In a letter to the Times publisher, Weitzman said he believes the "sole source" for the article was Sabatino, the imprisoned con man, and that the paper published the allegations either knowing that the allegations "were false or in 'reckless disregard' for the truth" -- the legal definition of "actual malice," a condition to establish libel. He said Combs may sue the Times.

Jeffrey Lichtman, a lawyer for rap-industry manager James "Jimmy Henchman" Rosemond, said the Times acted with "actual malice" and that his client is considering a lawsuit. The story said Rosemond and Sabatino set up Shakur in the attack.

In a letter to the Times late last year, Lichtman recalled, "I told them, publish it and you're going to get sued." He said the story "has done lasting damage, put Rosemond's life in danger," and called the Times "an arrogant, ridiculous, garbage, yellow-journalism newspaper."

Times spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan said the paper is investigating its mistakes in the matter but that yesterday's apology amounts to a retraction.

Bastone, by consulting former law-enforcement officials, quickly determined that the purported documents were typewritten; the FBI switched to computers three decades ago. He also found the papers filled with acronyms not generally used by the FBI and misspellings that matched errors in a lawsuit against Combs that Sabatino filed from prison.

A major unanswered question, Bastone said, is the identity of the confidential source who provided the documents to Philips. "Did that person actually exist," he asked, "or was it some kind of straw person that Jimmy Sabatino enlisted in this con he pulled off?"

Philips told the Times that he believed the purported summaries of FBI interviews were authentic because he had heard many of the same details in his reporting. Philips said in his statement that he "approached this article the same way I've approached every article I've ever written: in pursuit of the truth. I now believe the truth here is that I got duped."