Suckered!

How does a prestigious newspaper like the LA Times get hoodwinked by a jailed felon and con man who forged FBI reports on an ancient typewriter? The reference, of course, is to the now totally debunked story the Times carried linking Sean "Diddy" Combs with the 1994 ambush shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur in the lobby of a recording studio here in New York. The sham was quickly and meticulously exposed by The Smoking Gun Website, which deserves as much credit as the Times does blame.

The original story, written by a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, has enough holes in it to make a piece of Swiss cheese envious. It apparently came from the fertile mind of one James Sabatino. This guy, who has been fabricating music industry chops for well over a decade, has a rap sheet longer than Yao Ming's arm. He has, at one time or another, posed as an executive of Coca Cola, Blockbuster,Paramount Pictures, Sony Music, Warner Bros., Viacom, and the Miami Dolphins.

He apparently typed the FBI reports used to dupe the Times on a 30 year old typewriter he accessed in prison (he's not eligible for parole until 2012). The 31 year old has done time in an astonishing number of facilities, both here and abroad. Yet this is the person the LA Times relied on to build its mythical story. 

What's obvious here is that a story that was reportedly six months in the making should have been subject to a rudimentary vetting that would have, as one example, noted numbers of spelling errors in the alleged FBI documents. Those errors were remarkably similar to those in a court filing by....guess who....James Sabatino!

The LA Times has apologized for this bit of shoddy journalism, as well they might. That alone may not be enough to keep Diddy's army of lawyers at bay when lawsuit time rolls around, as it certainly will. But the central question remains.

What was the paper thinking?