L.A. Times Apologizes for Rapper Story – washingtonpost.com

Consider this a follow-up to our post only a couple of days ago. It’s amazing how fast things can change. In our previous post, we had covered the LA Times’ article about Puffy’s denial of his involvement with the first 2Pac shooting.

Turns out his denial was the truth, much as we had suspected.

The LA Times, in reaction to a report on the Smoking Gun, has admitted that its report was wrong. Apparently, the “FBI Documents” they relied on were forged by a federal inmate. James Sabatino is a well known conman and a huge fan of rap music. I guess he loved it so much he really really wanted to involve himself. He managed to forge a bunch of documents that linked him to the Pac/Biggie feud. What a nutter.

The worst part of things for the LA Times is that one of their star reporters, a Pulitzer prize winner, was the author of the article. Unfortunately that doesn’t save them from this faux pas.

The Smoking Gun, which says it consulted several law-enforcement experts, raised a number of troubling points about the authenticity of the Times’s 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.

Pretty insane that someone would make up documents to tie himself to a criminal investigation. But hey, I guess some people will do anything to get famous.