Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Tupac/Biggie-nut Chuck Philips might have relied a bit too heavily on FBI documents for his recent big story in the LA Times, in which he alleges Sean Combs knew that Tupac Shakur was going to be attacked in NYC in 1994 before it happened. The Smoking Gun found that the FBI documents were forged by "James Sabatino, 31, [who] 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, Sabatino was little more than a rap devotee, a wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida whose own father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as 'a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.'" Way to go, Philips.

According to TSG, the forged FBI documents were riddled with spelling and grammar errors" and created on a typewriter, which FBI agents haven't used in 30 years. Sabatino is currently serving time at the Allenwood Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. When provided with the information, representatives from the LA Times said they would launch their own investigation. Philips apparently worked on the story for six months before it was published last week.

Chuck Phillips, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning LA Times journalist who is hated around New York for his controversial stories about Tupac — in 2002, he fingered Notorious B.I.G. for Tupac's death, and on Monday he alleged in a story that both Diddy and Biggie knew about an infamous 1994 attack on Tupac at NYC's Quad City Studios before it happened — defended his reporting in a live chat on MTV.com yesterday.

Philips noted that he wasn't originally pursuing the Quad Studios incident for a story. In the chat, he explained that he was in New York last year reporting and "stumbled" on the story after discovering the names of the three assailants who purportedly attacked and robbed Shakur. Philips never confirmed what story he was chasing, but in a separate interview, he said he was investigating information regarding the 1997 murder of the Notorious B.I.G.

Phillips said he also has two more stories coming, one of which will probably be about Biggie's death. For his part, Diddy has vehemently denied having any involvement about the Quad City attack.