FBI reports referenced in a recent Los Angeles Times story linking associates of Sean "Diddy" Combs to a 1994 attack on rapper Tupac Shakur appear to be fakes, the agency said Friday.
James Sabatino, a convicted con man in federal prison sentence for fraud, filed the documents last fall in Miami federal court as part of a $19 million lawsuit against Combs, claiming Combs never paid him for arranging a recording and video session by the late Notorious B.I.G.
The documents were said to be an FBI agent's reports on interviews conducted in 2002 of confidential informants linking Sabatino and associates of Combs to the 1994 shooting of Shakur in New York City.
"We have no record of these documents in our system," Agent Stephen Kodak told the Associated Press. "They don't appear to be legitimate."
Howard L. Weitzman, Combs' attorney, said his client and Sabatino never had a business relationship. "It should be clear that Mr. Sabatino has a vivid imagination, to say the least, and his credibility quotient is zero," Weitzman said in an e-mail.
Sabatino, 31, is currently serving an 11-year sentence for identity theft and fraud at a federal prison in Pennsylvania. His father once said in a letter to a judge that his son "is a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug."
Meanwhile, a statement was released over the weekend from the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation containing what it says is a response from the late rapper's mother, Afeni Shakur, to the Los Angeles Times article.
"We will continue to work to save the lives of our young people and to offer peaceful alternatives to violence and conflict resolution," the statement quotes Afeni Shakur as saying. "That is what we have done since the murder of my son, and that is exactly what we will consciously continue to do."
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