Chuck Philips Demands L.A. Times Apology on Tupac Shakur

Philips wrote in his retracted story in 2008 that Rosemond, a New York hip-hop executive, ordered a trio of thugs to rough up Shakur. Philips tells the Weekly that four unnamed people corroborated his story: two of the three alleged attackers and two Rosemond associates.

But Philips’ story was sabotaged by James Sabatino, the self-styled hip-hop promoter who turned out to be a fraud. (Our sister paper, the Miami New Times, called him the “Con Kid.”) Sabatino included his own fictional backstory while composing fake FBI documents that lined up with Philips’ findings regarding the attack on Shakur: that Rosemond, aka Jimmy Henchman, designed the 1994 assault.

Chuck Philips

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More About

• Tupac Shakur
• Chuck Philips
• Dexter Isaac
• Hip-Hop and Rap
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

The faked FBI documents passed muster with many people besides Philips, he says: a federal judge, Times editors, another Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter and Karlene W. Goller, the paper’s famed First Amendment attorney.

Times editors felt more comfortable using the documents — rather than unnamed criminals —  as a tent pole on which to hang such hefty allegations, Philips tells the Weekly. “They’re just jumping up and down,” he recalls. Because the FBI documents came from a court file, they were “privileged,” which meant the Times could not be found liable for publishing them.

The documents became the centerpiece of Philips’ 2008 piece. He says he told his editors, “ ‘I don’t know who the fuck [Sabatino] is.’ All I knew is these documents were saying the same thing I was reporting.”
Looking back, editors “fucked up my story,” Philips tells the Weekly.

Will the Los Angeles Times apologize for its harshly worded retraction, which pointed the finger at the reporter, and issue the front-page retraction Philips demands now that Isaac has come forward to corroborate Philips’ reporting?

Jeffrey Klein, former senior vice president and general manager of news at the Times, and now at USC Annenberg’s Center on Communication Leadership, says he didn’t follow the details of the 2008 retraction. But he says the burden should be on the editors more than on the reporter.

“The editor’s job is to second-guess, to protect credibility by challenging the veracity of the story,” Klein says. “Editors should be more cautious than reporters.”

Klein says Philips and his editors made an “understandable mistake” in 2008.

“If you have documents that align with what you have with your sources, that tends to give you a great deal of strength in your belief that it’s accurate,” says Klein.

But the FBI documents quickly raised the eyebrows of TheSmokingGun.com’s William Bastone, an acquaintance of Philips’.

“Eleven our time in the morning, the day the story ran,” Philips recalls, “[Bastone] called me. He says, ‘There’s something off with these documents.’

“Ten days later, he knocked me off my seat,” Philips says.
Bastone said the papers were typewritten (the FBI does not use typewriters) and contained unusual grammatical errors and acronyms.

Bastone tells the Weekly that Isaac’s confession from prison doesn’t necessarily vindicate Philips. He says Philips’ name won’t be fully cleared unless Rosemond is formally accused in the 1994 attack on Shakur — which might never happen.

“Jimmy, I say to you: I have kept your secrets for years,” Isaac wrote in his recent confession. “In 1994, James Rosemond hired me to rob 2Pac Shakur at the Quad Studio. He gave me $2,500, plus all the jewelry I took, except for one ring, which he wanted for himself.”

One big problem for Philips is that the feds now are focused on Rosemond’s alleged L.A.-to–New York cocaine business, not on what happened in 1994. Rosemond was collared Tuesday in Manhattan by federal agents. NYPD authorities tell the Weekly they have yet to interview Isaac.

Rosemond’s attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, scoffs at Isaac’s allegations. “Whatever anybody thinks of the situation, Dexter Isaac is an admitted, cold-blooded executioner who put two bullets into a man who was begging for his life,” he tells the Weekly.

After the 2008 story was published, Lichtman publicly threatened the Times with an “epic lawsuit” for libel. When the story was later retracted, Philips apologized for trusting the documents. But he never said, or believed, that the core of his story was wrong. A few months later, Philips says, he was “thrown under the bus” — essentially told to leave the Times under the cover of a wave of layoffs.

The day he was pushed out the door, Philips claims Times editors told him they signed a settlement with Rosemond for $200,000. Rosemond and Philips have engaged in an online flame war over who is the liar.

“Quite a few journalists felt the Times acted in its own best interest, ignoring the work of a reporter whose track record included a Pulitzer Prize,” Joe Saltzman, a journalism professor at USC, says. “But the same attributes it takes to win a Pulitzer — a doggedness to uncover every fact, an aggressive reporting stance that relies on unorthodox methods to get information — can backfire and make a reporter persona non grata to a conservative newspaper.”