Digging up the Past

The Los Angeles Times recently retracted an article that linked the 1994 shooting of famous L.A.-based rapper Tupac Shakur to rapper Sean Puffy Combs, saying it “relied heavily on information that The Times no longer believes to be credible.” The paper’s report initially cited FBI documents that turned out to be forgeries made by James Sabatino, a con man with no real connection to the East Coast-West Coast rap feud.

The LA Times made its decision in response to an investigation prompted about two weeks ago by The Smoking Gun, a collection of public documents on crimes, celebrities, politicians and the FBI.

“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,” The Smoking Gun said.

The NY Times article listed some dubious characteristics of the documents:

-The documents cannot be located in the FBI’s own database, but they have been traced to Mr. Sabatino on other occasions.

– Mr. Sabatino says that the FBI gave him the files during a 2002 case, but a source told The Smoking Gun that “the FBI had no role whatsoever in the case.”

-The documents appear to be typewritten, complete with overstrikes and other telltale signs of a piece of office equipment not used regularly by the FBI for decades. The documents are riddled with abbreviations that were unknown to FBI veterans who reviewed them, and with misspellings that are also seen in other documents Mr. Sabatino has filed in court.

The funny thing is that the author of the original article, Chuck Philips, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. I guess even the best of us make mistakes. Still, especially with an event as prominent and contentious as the shooting of Tupac, someone should have given those documents an in-depth analysis to ensure they were valid. At least the LA Times made an effort to correct the story, even though it is years after the fact.