This interview of Chuck Philips, done after his recent Tupac story was published, but before it was discredited, is notable for the numerous questions to which Philips had no answer:

DX: Your report was the first time I’d seen the name James Sabatino connected with this case. If he was intimately involved in a plot that left Tupac shot multiple times why is his name just now surfacing publicly in relation to this crime over 13 years after the shooting?

CP: Well, I don’t know the answer to that.

and this:

DX: I guess my question is really just Sabatino was so young at the time and so I’m just wondering what the magnet would be for these established artists to want a 19-year-old to be their manager?

CP: I don’t know the answer to that. It seems to me that would be… I don’t think he had any connections in the music business. I never heard of him. I mean, at the time when I was writing about all those people back then that name [never surfaced]. I’d never heard James Sabatino’s name until last year.

and this:

DX: Let’s flesh this out a little more though, if Sabatino knew Tupac and was allegedly in cahoots with Henchmen in the ’94 shooting, why then was Sabatino not named by ‘Pac as part of the plot in “Against All Odds”?

CP: I don’t know.

Maybe the most disturbing thing is his cavalier attitude about other questionable statements by the informant named in the documents. The interviewer expresses considerable doubt about the informant’s claim that Sabatino acted in association with Suge Knight, and Philips says: “That [part of the informant’s statement] wasn’t really that important to me. The main thing I was looking at was what [he said about what] happened in the Quad.”

So if the informant lied about something else, that’s just not important?

Many red flags were missed.

We’re not done with this story — not by a longshot.

Stay tuned.