The LA Times Scandal Around Chuck Philips

Hardly any journalist dug into the murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. as stubbornly as Chuck Philips. And hardly any case shows more drastically how a single forged source can ruin an entire investigation. In 2008, the Los Angeles Times completely retracted one of Philips’ articles. The basis of his story was fabricated FBI files. (The attack the text was about is described on the page Shooting 1994.)

A Pulitzer Winner with a Direct Line

In the 1990s, Philips wrote about the music industry for the Los Angeles Times. He knew Tupac personally: in August 1995, he conducted a long conversation with the rapper (documented at Interview of August 25, 1995). In 1999, he and his colleague Michael Hiltzik won the Pulitzer Prize in the Beat Reporting category for a series on corruption in the music business.

The 2002 Series: An Unproven Murder Allegation

In September 2002, the paper published Philips’ investigation “Who Killed Tupac Shakur?” over two days. A year of work went into the text, which made two core claims: Tupac had been shot by members of the Southside Compton Crips in revenge for the beating of Orlando Anderson at the MGM Grand; and Anderson himself had fired. In addition, Philips claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. had offered the Crips a million dollars for the murder, provided his own pistol, and was in Las Vegas on the night of the crime.

Biggie’s family reacted with outrage, rejecting the account as false and defamatory. They presented documents indicating that Biggie was in a New Jersey studio at the time of the crime. While The New York Times did not consider these papers conclusive, Philips relied on anonymous sources-and leveled the gravest allegations against people who were already dead. The accusation against Biggie was never proven.

The paper never retracted the 2002 series. A portion of it matches what investigators heard years later from Duane “Keffe D” Davis, such as the role of the Southside Crips and the revenge for the brawl in the casino lobby (see The brawl at the MGM Grand and Investigations). The accusation against Biggie, however, remains among the unproven theories to this day.

Puffy, Jimmy Henchman, and the Quad Studio

Six years later, on March 17, 2008, a new Philips article appeared on the Los Angeles Times website: “An Attack on Tupac Shakur Launched a Hip-Hop War”. The text was not about the murder in Las Vegas, but about the attack at the Quad Recording Studio in New York in November 1994. Philips wrote that people from Sean “Puffy” Combs’ circle had organized the crime, including manager James “Jimmy Henchman” Rosemond. The text also suggested that Combs had known about it in advance. Anonymous sources and alleged internal FBI reports, so-called 302s, served as proof.

Combs objected immediately. In a statement, he called the story “beyond ridiculous” and completely false. Neither Biggie nor he had known about the attack before, during, or after it happened.

An Old Typewriter Brings the Forgery to Light

Nine days later, on March 26, 2008, the website The Smoking Gun dismantled the article. The alleged FBI documents were forgeries by James Sabatino, an imprisoned man convicted of fraud who had posed as a confidant of rap stars for years. The papers contained numerous spelling mistakes and were typed on a typewriter the FBI had not used in decades.

On the same day, Philips and the paper apologized. “In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job,” Philips stated. Editor-in-chief Russ Stanton announced an internal review.

The formal retraction followed on April 7, 2008. The paper concluded that Sabatino had fabricated the FBI reports, as well as his own alleged role in the attack and his connections to Combs, Rosemond, and others. Other sources did not support the article’s main statements either. In the summer of 2008, Philips lost his job during a round of layoffs at the paper.

Late Claims and Harsh Verdicts

The story did not end there. On June 15, 2011, the website AllHipHop published a letter from inmate Dexter Isaac, who was serving a life sentence for another murder. Isaac wrote that he had been one of the perpetrators at the Quad Studio. Rosemond had hired him and paid him $2,500 along with the stolen jewelry. Rosemond’s lawyer dismissed this as an attempt by a lifer to gain an advantage.

Philips felt vindicated. A few days later, in June 2011, he demanded that the Los Angeles Times retract its 2008 retraction; the paper did not comment on the matter. Philips insisted to the very end that the core of his story had been correct, and said the editors had pushed him to use the documents. In 2012, he reported in the Village Voice that Rosemond had admitted his involvement in confidential conversations with prosecutors. Rosemond’s lawyer “categorically” denied this, and The Smoking Gun reported the opposite, citing other sources (news item of June 25, 2012).

Rosemond was convicted of cocaine trafficking in Brooklyn in 2012 and found guilty in a separate trial in 2017 for a murder-for-hire from 2009. He was never charged for the attack on Tupac; the crime’s statute of limitations had long expired. Whether he was involved has never been settled in court to this day, and the presumption of innocence applies to him as it does to all others named in this matter. Combs has never been accused or charged in connection with either the 1994 attack or the Shakur murder case.

Philips stayed with the subject. On September 13, 2012, he published a text via Twitter and his own website (news item). He died in January 2024 at the age of 71.

Dangerous Sources and Unsolved Mysteries

The reporter’s downfall drastically shows how risky official-looking but unverified papers are. At the same time, a forgery does not necessarily make every other claim in a text false-even if Isaac implicated Rosemond in 2011, it did not make Sabatino’s papers genuine. Conversely, the retraction of the article does not prove that every detail was fabricated.

Above all, both of Philips’ major articles relied heavily on anonymous sources. The gravest allegations were directed against men who were either dead or never charged. The trail that decades later actually led to a criminal trial ultimately came not from newspaper reports, but from the statements of Duane Davis himself (more at The Trial of Duane Davis and Suspects at a Glance).