The Smoking Gun has uncovered a conspiracy that falsely implicated Diddy in an attack on rap legend Tupac Shakur. The LA Times claimed last week to have unearthed official FBI documents that tied Diddy to a planned shooting of Shakur in 1994, two years before his death. While the LA Times did not state that Diddy had any direct connection to Shakur’s murder, the implication was clear – he had a hand in intimidating him because he would not join Diddy’s growing record label.

I totally believed that story, because you can see Diddy planning a hit on someone like the mafia. He’s an arrogant asshole and just seems like the type. Diddy of course denied any involvement.

The documents tying Diddy to the crime against Shakur weren’t real, though. They were forged by a prison inmate with too much time on his hands. The guy is a con man who wants to be famous and has access to a typewriter.

Here are the highlights, paraphrased from the story on The Smoking Gun:

• The LA Times was given supposed FBI filings or “302s,” tying Diddy to the crime. The FBI never investigated the Tupac case, it was investigated by Secret Services.

• There is no record of any of those 302 documents in the FBI database.

• The inmate, James Sabatino, 31, also filed a civil suit against Diddy for supposedly not paying him $175,000 for 1994 recordings he made of Notorious B.I.G.

• The spelling, grammatical errors, and typewriter font used for both Sabatino’s civil case and the FBI documents are the same.

• The faked FBI documents include abbreviations and awkward phrasing that are not used in regular FBI filings and are full of obvious errors.

• In the documents, Sabatino tried to paint himself as a tough guy with ties to rap luminaries. His role in the rap underworld was completely fabricated. He was just a teen when some of the events occurred.

• Sabatino’s rap sheet includes a long history of impersonating executives to get free goods, and get comped at hotels and sports events. While in jail he defrauded Nextel into sending him over 1,000 cell phones by pretending to be an entertainment executive and having the phones shipped to his friends on the outside.

The Smoking Gun notes how easily the LA Times was duped by the faked FBI documents, which they even included as PDF downloads on their website. They say the errors made it obvious that the documents were fabricated.

The LA Times has issued an apology and is conducting an internal investigation to try and figure out how they were duped. The author, Chuck Philips, is a Pulitzer prize winner and has also apologized for relying on falsified documents for his article. Tupac’s murder has never been solved.