TheSmokingGun.com is reporting that documents used to form the basis of a recent LA Times article linking Sean "Diddy" Combs to the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur in New York were "fabricated FBI reports" prepared by James Sabatino.

The online exclusive article written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chuck Philips claimed that the 1994 shooting was orchestrated by Hip-Hop music executive Jimmy "Henchman" Rosemond and James Sabatino, son of a captain in the Colombo crime family.

It was claimed that the shooting was organised as payback for Shakur refusing to sign with Bad Boy Records with Henchman as his manager and his refusal to accept a part of the rape charges he was facing with Rosemond’s friend Jacques "Haitian Jack" Agnant. It was also claimed that Diddy and Christopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace knew about the shooting before it took place.

Diddy and Rosemond both dismissed the report within 24 hours of it being published.

TheSmokingGun.com describes Sabatino as a "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."

A PDF file containing two FBI reports were including in The Times’ story along with a third FBI interview which Sabatino filed in court four months ago when he sued Diddy for $16 million claiming he had not been paid for old recordings and video footage of Notorious B.I.G. dating back to 1994.

According to TSG, none of the presented FBI documents can be found on the bureau’s computerized Automated Case Support database and that they do not fit the FBI’s guidelines as far as acronyms, phraseology and they were also littered with spelling and grammatical errors.

After readying TSG’s report The Times has announced plans to launch its own investigation into the authenticity of the FBI documents. Both Phillips and his supervisor, deputy managing editor Marc Duvoisin, have already issued apologies.

"In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job," Philips said. "I’m sorry."

"Questions have been raised about the authenticity of documents that we relied on for a story on the assault of Tupac Shakur in New York," L.A. Times editor Russ Stanton said in a statement. "We are taking this very seriously and have begun our own investigation."

"We published this story with the sincere belief that the documents were genuine, but our good intentions are beside the point," Stanton said in a statement.