A new article on the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur will implicate two associates of Sean 'Diddy' Combs, and claim the Bad Boy hip hop mogul had advance warning of the attack on Shakur. It's not the first time Combs has been linked to the shooting, of course, but the article in the LA Times could refocus attention on Diddy's role in the hip hop tensions of the mid-nineties which later led to the still unsolved murders of both Shakur and Diddy collaborator Notorious BIG.
The article's author, Chuck Phillips, has told AllHipHop.com that he believes allegations made by Shakur against rival hip hoppers after and in relation to the shooting were, in the main, accurate. He also says that Combs, Czar Entertainment chief Jimmy Rosemond and various of their associates were at the Quad Recording Studio in New York near where Shakur was shot on the night of the shooting, and he reckons people there were involved in setting up the shooting, while others, while not actively involved in ordering or implementing the attack on Tupac, were aware of it.
Phillips especially asks questions about a man called Sabatino, the son of a reputed captain in a Colombo crime family, who he says was the person who informed Combs of the planned attack on Shakur while at the Quad studios that night. Sabatino, Phillips says, later became a close associate of Combs, working for his Bad Boy company until his imprisonment on unrelated charges years later. That said, he admits that Combs may not have been aware of the extent of the planned attack on Tupac.
He says: "I don't believe that Puffy set Tupac up [to be shot]. According to these people I have interviewed and according to these documents, he knew about it. But he didn't know they [Shakur and his associates] were going to get shot. They knew he was going to get beat up. Then it kind of went haywire when it all happened".
On the significance of the 1994 shooting in later hip hop traumas, Phillips concludes: "Tupac's shooting at the Quad was really a catalyst for everything that happened afterwards including his own death and including the death of Biggie. It started the whole thing off and if you lay it out in a timeline which I do, you can just see; it's obvious and kind of sad for two guys to be this talented. I ended up with a much larger story than I imagined".