White Prison Inmate James SabatinoDupes L.A. Times
News reports last week claiming that the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio was carried out by associates of Sean "Diddy" Combs and that the rap impresario knew of the plot beforehand was based largely on fabricated FBI reports.
Per The Smoking Gun, it appears the Los Angeles Times has been hoaxed by an imprisoned White con man and accomplished document forger, an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs's trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion "Suge" Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud.
James Sabatino, 31, has long sought to insinuate himself, after the fact, in a series of important hip-hop events, from Shakur's shooting to the murder of The Notorious B.I.G.. In fact, however, this cat was little more than a rap devotee, a wildly impulsive, overweight kid from Florida.
The Times relied on "FBI records recently obtained by The Times" and interviews with several unnamed sources in its reexamination of the November 30, 1994 shooting of Shakur at Quad Studios near Times Square. Included in the paper's online package was a PDF of two key FBI interview reports cited in the 2800-word story, which was six months in the making and written by veteran reporter Chuck Philips, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for his coverage of corruption in the entertainment industry.
In addition to the documents posted on the Times site, a third purported FBI interview report was included by Sabatino in court papers he filed four months ago in U.S. District Court in Miami. In that civil case, Sabatino is suing Combs for $16 million over an alleged soured business deal from nearly a decade ago. According to Sabatino's complaint, which he prepared and filed himself from the Allenwood federal penitentiary in White Deer, Pennsylvania, Combs stiffed him on a $175,000 payment for audio and video recordings Sabatino made in 1994 of The Notorious B.I.G. (real name: Christopher Wallace).
But those FBI reports, dubbed "302s" due to the numbered government form on which they are prepared, are nowhere to be found in the bureau's computerized Automated Case Support database, TSG has learned. The ACS system allows investigators to search various bureau indices to determine whether particular individuals, groups, or topics have been referred to in FBI "302" reports or various other bureau documents.
The suspect documents contain information supposedly provided to agents in the FBI's New York office by an unnamed "confidential source." The records, which Sabatino himself has distributed, conveniently contain black redaction marks covering up the name of the agent (or agents) who prepared the "302s" as well as the corresponding FBI case number. However, since the documents are filled with the names of individuals and corporations, they can be tracked within the FBI system by working backwards (by subjects as opposed to case number or agent name).
And while Sabatino claims to have been provided the FBI reports during the discovery phase of a 2002 criminal case, a federal law enforcement official involved in that successful prosecution told TSG that the probe was headed by Secret Service representatives and that the FBI had no role whatsoever in the case. The official added that, at the time, investigators "had no inkling" of Sabatino's supposed role in the rap music world and never saw investigative reports detailing his purported involvement with hip-hop's leading figures or its assorted bloody disputes.
Additionally, an examination of the three documents revealed that the bodies of the respective "302s" were actually created on a typewriter (the "frame" of the reports is consistent with an authentic "302" template). In some instances, you can see where one letter was typed on top of an existing character, a so-called overstrike. In an interview, Bruce Mouw, a former FBI supervisor who headed the bureau's pursuit of John Gotti, estimated that agents ceased using typewriters about 30 years ago.
Most telling, though, are the obvious similarities (type size, font, line spacing, individual character renderings) between the purported "302s" and certain court filings created by Sabatino while he has been incarcerated at Allenwood (he was transferred last May from a Florida prison to the high-security penitentiary in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains). As with all other Bureau of Prisons (BoP) facilities, Allenwood provides inmates with access to photocopying machines, office supplies, and typewriters, according to the BoP's 2008 Legal Resource Guide. Inmates, the guide states, are "permitted a reasonable amount of time...to conduct their own legal research and to prepare legal documents."
A comparison of the "302s" and Sabatino's own court filings shows that the authors of each set of documents share remarkably similar spelling deficiencies. For instance, the word "making" appears as "makeing" in both the "302s" and Sabatino's pro se court pleadings. Similarly, the authors also have difficulty with the word "during." It appears as "durring" in both sets of documents.
After a reporter provided Philips and Marc Duvoisin, the deputy managing editor who edited the Times story, an account of TSG's findings, Duvoisin said that the newspaper would launch its own investigation to determine if the FBI documents cited in its story are real.
The first mention of the existence of the purported "302s" came in filings Sabatino made late last year in a civil lawsuit against Combs. According to the convict, he received the explosive "302s" during "discovery, trial, and other proceedings" in a federal fraud prosecution brought against him in New York in August 2002. That case, though, never went to trial. Sabatino pleaded guilty to two felonies in August 2003 and was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
While he described the contents of four separate "302s" in his court papers, Sabatino attached only two of those reports to a November court motion. One of those documents was posted on the Times web site, along with another report that was referred to in Sabatino's filings, but not included as an exhibit. So, between Sabatino and the Times, three of the four purported FBI reports have been made public (those documents can be found here, here, and here). Details from the fourth supposed "302," dated July 1, 2002, are included in recent Sabatino court filings.
Notably, the convicted felon publicly filed the two "confidential" FBI records as exhibits to a motion seeking a court order barring Combs from distributing the documents to journalists. The bizarre motion surfaced six weeks after Sabatino filed his original October 4 complaint, which made no mention of "302s," Shakur, or any confidential FBI source. But that document does contain some of Sabatino's traditional flights from reality.
Along with claiming that he had been promised a "creative consultant" credit on Wallace's posthumous album "Born Again," Sabatino charged that Combs had delayed paying off his outstanding $175,000 debt because, in late-1998, "it was reported that the Los Angeles police had named [Sabatino] a 'person of interest' in the murder of Christopher Wallace," according to a December 6 court filing.
Of course, no news reports back this claim.
And then there's the small matter of Sabatino's whereabouts on March 9, 1997, when Wallace was gunned down while seated in a GMC Suburban outside the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. While he enjoys repeating the "theory" that he mysteriously bailed on a planned meeting with the rapper that fateful night, Sabatino was actually 2400 miles away from the crime scene. He was imprisoned in Miami's Federal Detention Center, where he still had six months to serve on a two-year sentence for separate felony convictions.
It is not Bureau of Prisons policy to allow cross-country furloughs. Even to attend the Soul Train Music Awards.
In his lawsuit against Combs, Sabatino denied prior knowledge of the plot to ambush Shakur, but added that he "does not contest that he was present at Quad Studios" on the night of the shooting. However, in the reams of copy about the 1994 attack, Sabatino's name has never appeared anywhere. The first time a publication linked him to the Shakur ambush came last week in the Times, thanks to one of the FBI "302s" obtained by the country's fourth-largest newspaper.
The New York Police Department probe of the Quad Studios incident was headed by Detective Joseph Babnik, who worked robbery cases out of the Midtown North precinct. In an interview, Babnik, now retired, told TSG that Sabatino's name "does not ring a bell" and that he could not recall anyone with that surname being connected to the Shakur case. Asked if he would have recalled a rotund white teenager being present at Quad Studios that night, Babnik said yes, adding that the only white witnesses he recalled interviewing were employed in technical capacities at the recording studio.
Shakur, who never hesitated to point fingers at those he suspected of setting up the Quad Studios shooting, never once mentioned Sabatino's supposed role in the attack.
In a three-page "302" dated December 30, 2002, the FBI's supposed confidential source reported first meeting Shakur through Sabatino in late-1993. Sabatino, born October 24, 1976, would have been 16 or 17 at the time of the Shakur introduction. The source went on to report that in February 1994, the 17-year-old Sabatino was rebuffed by Shakur when the teenager spoke to the performer about a "business offer." In short order, Sabatino and an associate devised a plan to "set up" the disrespectful Shakur, whom they decided needed to be "dealt with."
The "302" purportedly describing the behind-the-scenes machinations leading up to Shakur's assault also includes a narrative flourish that somehow escaped prior investigative or journalistic excavation. As has been widely reported, after Shakur was shot in the lobby of the Seventh Avenue building, he stumbled into an elevator and headed upstairs. When the elevator doors opened on a floor where members of the Combs entourage were milling about, a bleeding Shakur exited. Sabatino, the FBI source claimed, responded by yelling, "Get that piece of shit out of here!" Though the agent who authored the report (you know, the one whose name was conveniently redacted) actually spelled the third word in that sentence "peice."
Coincidentally, an examination of Sabatino's court filings shows that he, too, has a pronounced difficulty spelling words with the i-e and e-i couplings. He and the unnamed FBI agent apparently never memorized the old "i before e except after c" mnemonic device.
Court records show that the teenage Sabatino was living with his father in Boynton Beach, Florida around the time of the November 1994 Shakur shooting. In fact, a 1999 profile ("Con Kid") of Sabatino in Miami New Times opens with a scene from early-November 1994 in Florida. Sabatino, then 18, is masquerading as a Sony Music executive and palling around backstage with Julio Iglesias at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.
Another "302," which Sabatino included as a motion exhibit in his Combs lawsuit, quotes the FBI's confidential source as saying that they met Combs through Sabatino in late-1991. At the time, Sabatino would have been only 14 or 15. Amazingly, such precociousness on his part went unremarked upon (or unnoticed) by the entertainment press. And to think, just years earlier, music journalists were falling all over themselves to chronicle how Rick Rubin, a relative graybeard at 21, was co-founding Def Jam from his room at NYU's Weinstein dormitory.
In fact, according to a suspect December 30, 2002 FBI report, the confidential source said that Combs even enlisted Sabatino, 18 at the time, to serve as his envoy to "broker a 'peace agreement'" between Combs's firm, Bad Boy Entertainment, and Suge Knight's Death Row Records. Sabatino, apparently the James Baker of b-boys, was sent West because, the FBI source noted, Combs felt he "would hold a little influence over Knight due to Sabatino's father, Peter Sabatino, a/k/a Fat Pete, a member of the Colombo crime family and his relationship with a individual in Las Vegas (NFI)."
After meeting with Knight in California, Sabatino reportedly told the source that the "situation" was resolved, apparently due to the teenager's efforts. But when problems resurfaced later, "the source stated that Sabatino told him that it was all Combs fault and that Combs did not do what he said he would." Here, the negligent FBI agent authoring the report made the mistake of identifying the confidential source's gender through the careless use of the pronoun "him," thus narrowing the field of informant possibilities by half.
While hip-hop chroniclers have never recorded Sabatino's 1995 shuttle diplomacy on Combs's behalf, The New York Times Magazine did report in January 1996 that Combs sent Mustafa Farrakhan to speak with Knight (who refused to meet with the Bad Boy agent). Perhaps Death Row's boss just preferred negotiating with a 5' 5", 220-pound Italian-American kid rather than Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan's son.
The Times reported that Sabatino told Combs and Wallace beforehand about the plot to ambush Shakur at Quad Studios, and that talent manager Jimmy Rosemond, working with Sabatino, was an architect of the assault. Shakur was shot several times during the 1994 attack and was robbed of his jewelry, which reportedly included a $40,000 gold medallion. After the Times story was published, Combs and Rosemond issued statements attacking the paper's reporting and vehemently denied orchestrating the attack on Shakur or knowing about it ahead of time.
It appears that the real purpose of the suspect "302s" is to portray Sabatino as a feared hip-hop figure who muscled and conned rappers into deals. The entertainers were drawn to him "because he is a member of La Cosa Nostra" and such Mafia ties were "glamorized in the Hip Hop world," reported the confidential source. The documents Sabatino supposedly did not want disseminated--but which he himself filed publicly--conferred upon him the kind of rap world status that he has long coveted.
Sabatino has frequently claimed to have managed a number of leading hip-hop acts, including Notorious B.I.G., Lords of the Underground, and Heavy D and the Boyz. Du Kelly, a member of Lords of the Underground, described Sabatino as a "scam artist" who briefly tried to befriend the group's manager. Kelly said that he recalled Sabatino as a "short, Caucasian, little chubby fat guy" whose "father was supposed to be Mafia or something." Sabatino was "just a con artist who tried to get close to artists, but he was a nobody," said Kelly. He added that Sabatino also tried to get near the Wu-Tang Clan, "but I heard they beat him up."
Sabatino's convoluted and bizarre motion to gag Combs, of course, was immediately denied. Judge Stephen T. Brown ruled that the federal inmate's request was moot since the "allegedly confidential documents...are attached to this motion as exhibits." While the prodigious jailhouse litigant surely expected this defeat, he succeeded in drawing attention to the Combs lawsuit, the "302s," and, of course, himself.
But unlike Sabatino's own prior outlandish and unsupported claims about his entertainment industry resume (he once said he regularly consulted with music industry legend Clive Davis and even co-produced Combs's 1997 album "No Way Out"), the information about him in the "302s" came with the shiny imprimatur of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its valuable confidential source, who, the documents noted, "is in a position to testify."
And now The Los Angeles Times has added to the myth, describing "promoter James Sabatino" as a Tupac Shakur antagonist who toured with The Notorious B.I.G. and "became a fixture in Combs's circle...helping him stage lavish parties and land corporate sponsorships."
While Sabatino's "302" gambit might seem inexplicable, especially for someone already in prison (he has a November 2012 release date), it appears fairly typical for a man who has spent most of his adult life behind bars and appears to have little impulse control.
The bizarre story continues...
Per The Smoking Gun, it appears the Los Angeles Times has been hoaxed by an imprisoned White con man and accomplished document forger, an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs's trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion "Suge" Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud.
James Sabatino, 31, has long sought to insinuate himself, after the fact, in a series of important hip-hop events, from Shakur's shooting to the murder of The Notorious B.I.G.. In fact, however, this cat was little more than a rap devotee, a wildly impulsive, overweight kid from Florida.
The Times relied on "FBI records recently obtained by The Times" and interviews with several unnamed sources in its reexamination of the November 30, 1994 shooting of Shakur at Quad Studios near Times Square. Included in the paper's online package was a PDF of two key FBI interview reports cited in the 2800-word story, which was six months in the making and written by veteran reporter Chuck Philips, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for his coverage of corruption in the entertainment industry.
In addition to the documents posted on the Times site, a third purported FBI interview report was included by Sabatino in court papers he filed four months ago in U.S. District Court in Miami. In that civil case, Sabatino is suing Combs for $16 million over an alleged soured business deal from nearly a decade ago. According to Sabatino's complaint, which he prepared and filed himself from the Allenwood federal penitentiary in White Deer, Pennsylvania, Combs stiffed him on a $175,000 payment for audio and video recordings Sabatino made in 1994 of The Notorious B.I.G. (real name: Christopher Wallace).
But those FBI reports, dubbed "302s" due to the numbered government form on which they are prepared, are nowhere to be found in the bureau's computerized Automated Case Support database, TSG has learned. The ACS system allows investigators to search various bureau indices to determine whether particular individuals, groups, or topics have been referred to in FBI "302" reports or various other bureau documents.
The suspect documents contain information supposedly provided to agents in the FBI's New York office by an unnamed "confidential source." The records, which Sabatino himself has distributed, conveniently contain black redaction marks covering up the name of the agent (or agents) who prepared the "302s" as well as the corresponding FBI case number. However, since the documents are filled with the names of individuals and corporations, they can be tracked within the FBI system by working backwards (by subjects as opposed to case number or agent name).
And while Sabatino claims to have been provided the FBI reports during the discovery phase of a 2002 criminal case, a federal law enforcement official involved in that successful prosecution told TSG that the probe was headed by Secret Service representatives and that the FBI had no role whatsoever in the case. The official added that, at the time, investigators "had no inkling" of Sabatino's supposed role in the rap music world and never saw investigative reports detailing his purported involvement with hip-hop's leading figures or its assorted bloody disputes.
Additionally, an examination of the three documents revealed that the bodies of the respective "302s" were actually created on a typewriter (the "frame" of the reports is consistent with an authentic "302" template). In some instances, you can see where one letter was typed on top of an existing character, a so-called overstrike. In an interview, Bruce Mouw, a former FBI supervisor who headed the bureau's pursuit of John Gotti, estimated that agents ceased using typewriters about 30 years ago.
Most telling, though, are the obvious similarities (type size, font, line spacing, individual character renderings) between the purported "302s" and certain court filings created by Sabatino while he has been incarcerated at Allenwood (he was transferred last May from a Florida prison to the high-security penitentiary in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains). As with all other Bureau of Prisons (BoP) facilities, Allenwood provides inmates with access to photocopying machines, office supplies, and typewriters, according to the BoP's 2008 Legal Resource Guide. Inmates, the guide states, are "permitted a reasonable amount of time...to conduct their own legal research and to prepare legal documents."
A comparison of the "302s" and Sabatino's own court filings shows that the authors of each set of documents share remarkably similar spelling deficiencies. For instance, the word "making" appears as "makeing" in both the "302s" and Sabatino's pro se court pleadings. Similarly, the authors also have difficulty with the word "during." It appears as "durring" in both sets of documents.
After a reporter provided Philips and Marc Duvoisin, the deputy managing editor who edited the Times story, an account of TSG's findings, Duvoisin said that the newspaper would launch its own investigation to determine if the FBI documents cited in its story are real.
The first mention of the existence of the purported "302s" came in filings Sabatino made late last year in a civil lawsuit against Combs. According to the convict, he received the explosive "302s" during "discovery, trial, and other proceedings" in a federal fraud prosecution brought against him in New York in August 2002. That case, though, never went to trial. Sabatino pleaded guilty to two felonies in August 2003 and was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
While he described the contents of four separate "302s" in his court papers, Sabatino attached only two of those reports to a November court motion. One of those documents was posted on the Times web site, along with another report that was referred to in Sabatino's filings, but not included as an exhibit. So, between Sabatino and the Times, three of the four purported FBI reports have been made public (those documents can be found here, here, and here). Details from the fourth supposed "302," dated July 1, 2002, are included in recent Sabatino court filings.
Notably, the convicted felon publicly filed the two "confidential" FBI records as exhibits to a motion seeking a court order barring Combs from distributing the documents to journalists. The bizarre motion surfaced six weeks after Sabatino filed his original October 4 complaint, which made no mention of "302s," Shakur, or any confidential FBI source. But that document does contain some of Sabatino's traditional flights from reality.
Along with claiming that he had been promised a "creative consultant" credit on Wallace's posthumous album "Born Again," Sabatino charged that Combs had delayed paying off his outstanding $175,000 debt because, in late-1998, "it was reported that the Los Angeles police had named [Sabatino] a 'person of interest' in the murder of Christopher Wallace," according to a December 6 court filing.
Of course, no news reports back this claim.
And then there's the small matter of Sabatino's whereabouts on March 9, 1997, when Wallace was gunned down while seated in a GMC Suburban outside the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. While he enjoys repeating the "theory" that he mysteriously bailed on a planned meeting with the rapper that fateful night, Sabatino was actually 2400 miles away from the crime scene. He was imprisoned in Miami's Federal Detention Center, where he still had six months to serve on a two-year sentence for separate felony convictions.
It is not Bureau of Prisons policy to allow cross-country furloughs. Even to attend the Soul Train Music Awards.
In his lawsuit against Combs, Sabatino denied prior knowledge of the plot to ambush Shakur, but added that he "does not contest that he was present at Quad Studios" on the night of the shooting. However, in the reams of copy about the 1994 attack, Sabatino's name has never appeared anywhere. The first time a publication linked him to the Shakur ambush came last week in the Times, thanks to one of the FBI "302s" obtained by the country's fourth-largest newspaper.
The New York Police Department probe of the Quad Studios incident was headed by Detective Joseph Babnik, who worked robbery cases out of the Midtown North precinct. In an interview, Babnik, now retired, told TSG that Sabatino's name "does not ring a bell" and that he could not recall anyone with that surname being connected to the Shakur case. Asked if he would have recalled a rotund white teenager being present at Quad Studios that night, Babnik said yes, adding that the only white witnesses he recalled interviewing were employed in technical capacities at the recording studio.
Shakur, who never hesitated to point fingers at those he suspected of setting up the Quad Studios shooting, never once mentioned Sabatino's supposed role in the attack.
In a three-page "302" dated December 30, 2002, the FBI's supposed confidential source reported first meeting Shakur through Sabatino in late-1993. Sabatino, born October 24, 1976, would have been 16 or 17 at the time of the Shakur introduction. The source went on to report that in February 1994, the 17-year-old Sabatino was rebuffed by Shakur when the teenager spoke to the performer about a "business offer." In short order, Sabatino and an associate devised a plan to "set up" the disrespectful Shakur, whom they decided needed to be "dealt with."
The "302" purportedly describing the behind-the-scenes machinations leading up to Shakur's assault also includes a narrative flourish that somehow escaped prior investigative or journalistic excavation. As has been widely reported, after Shakur was shot in the lobby of the Seventh Avenue building, he stumbled into an elevator and headed upstairs. When the elevator doors opened on a floor where members of the Combs entourage were milling about, a bleeding Shakur exited. Sabatino, the FBI source claimed, responded by yelling, "Get that piece of shit out of here!" Though the agent who authored the report (you know, the one whose name was conveniently redacted) actually spelled the third word in that sentence "peice."
Coincidentally, an examination of Sabatino's court filings shows that he, too, has a pronounced difficulty spelling words with the i-e and e-i couplings. He and the unnamed FBI agent apparently never memorized the old "i before e except after c" mnemonic device.
Court records show that the teenage Sabatino was living with his father in Boynton Beach, Florida around the time of the November 1994 Shakur shooting. In fact, a 1999 profile ("Con Kid") of Sabatino in Miami New Times opens with a scene from early-November 1994 in Florida. Sabatino, then 18, is masquerading as a Sony Music executive and palling around backstage with Julio Iglesias at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.
Another "302," which Sabatino included as a motion exhibit in his Combs lawsuit, quotes the FBI's confidential source as saying that they met Combs through Sabatino in late-1991. At the time, Sabatino would have been only 14 or 15. Amazingly, such precociousness on his part went unremarked upon (or unnoticed) by the entertainment press. And to think, just years earlier, music journalists were falling all over themselves to chronicle how Rick Rubin, a relative graybeard at 21, was co-founding Def Jam from his room at NYU's Weinstein dormitory.
In fact, according to a suspect December 30, 2002 FBI report, the confidential source said that Combs even enlisted Sabatino, 18 at the time, to serve as his envoy to "broker a 'peace agreement'" between Combs's firm, Bad Boy Entertainment, and Suge Knight's Death Row Records. Sabatino, apparently the James Baker of b-boys, was sent West because, the FBI source noted, Combs felt he "would hold a little influence over Knight due to Sabatino's father, Peter Sabatino, a/k/a Fat Pete, a member of the Colombo crime family and his relationship with a individual in Las Vegas (NFI)."
After meeting with Knight in California, Sabatino reportedly told the source that the "situation" was resolved, apparently due to the teenager's efforts. But when problems resurfaced later, "the source stated that Sabatino told him that it was all Combs fault and that Combs did not do what he said he would." Here, the negligent FBI agent authoring the report made the mistake of identifying the confidential source's gender through the careless use of the pronoun "him," thus narrowing the field of informant possibilities by half.
While hip-hop chroniclers have never recorded Sabatino's 1995 shuttle diplomacy on Combs's behalf, The New York Times Magazine did report in January 1996 that Combs sent Mustafa Farrakhan to speak with Knight (who refused to meet with the Bad Boy agent). Perhaps Death Row's boss just preferred negotiating with a 5' 5", 220-pound Italian-American kid rather than Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan's son.
The Times reported that Sabatino told Combs and Wallace beforehand about the plot to ambush Shakur at Quad Studios, and that talent manager Jimmy Rosemond, working with Sabatino, was an architect of the assault. Shakur was shot several times during the 1994 attack and was robbed of his jewelry, which reportedly included a $40,000 gold medallion. After the Times story was published, Combs and Rosemond issued statements attacking the paper's reporting and vehemently denied orchestrating the attack on Shakur or knowing about it ahead of time.
It appears that the real purpose of the suspect "302s" is to portray Sabatino as a feared hip-hop figure who muscled and conned rappers into deals. The entertainers were drawn to him "because he is a member of La Cosa Nostra" and such Mafia ties were "glamorized in the Hip Hop world," reported the confidential source. The documents Sabatino supposedly did not want disseminated--but which he himself filed publicly--conferred upon him the kind of rap world status that he has long coveted.
Sabatino has frequently claimed to have managed a number of leading hip-hop acts, including Notorious B.I.G., Lords of the Underground, and Heavy D and the Boyz. Du Kelly, a member of Lords of the Underground, described Sabatino as a "scam artist" who briefly tried to befriend the group's manager. Kelly said that he recalled Sabatino as a "short, Caucasian, little chubby fat guy" whose "father was supposed to be Mafia or something." Sabatino was "just a con artist who tried to get close to artists, but he was a nobody," said Kelly. He added that Sabatino also tried to get near the Wu-Tang Clan, "but I heard they beat him up."
Sabatino's convoluted and bizarre motion to gag Combs, of course, was immediately denied. Judge Stephen T. Brown ruled that the federal inmate's request was moot since the "allegedly confidential documents...are attached to this motion as exhibits." While the prodigious jailhouse litigant surely expected this defeat, he succeeded in drawing attention to the Combs lawsuit, the "302s," and, of course, himself.
But unlike Sabatino's own prior outlandish and unsupported claims about his entertainment industry resume (he once said he regularly consulted with music industry legend Clive Davis and even co-produced Combs's 1997 album "No Way Out"), the information about him in the "302s" came with the shiny imprimatur of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its valuable confidential source, who, the documents noted, "is in a position to testify."
And now The Los Angeles Times has added to the myth, describing "promoter James Sabatino" as a Tupac Shakur antagonist who toured with The Notorious B.I.G. and "became a fixture in Combs's circle...helping him stage lavish parties and land corporate sponsorships."
While Sabatino's "302" gambit might seem inexplicable, especially for someone already in prison (he has a November 2012 release date), it appears fairly typical for a man who has spent most of his adult life behind bars and appears to have little impulse control.
The bizarre story continues...