There are a few things we know for sure about Tupac and Biggie. They are both dead. (Or if Tupac is alive, as so many people continue to believe, he isn\'t coming forward.) Both were shot down before their times in murders that continue to be unsolved. Above and beyond that what do we really know about who killed either of them?

It\'s a question that Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Phillips attempted to answer in Friday and Saturday\'s Los Angeles Times, when he reported that he\'d solved at least one of the murders. He now knows who Tupac\'s murderer was and voila! It turned out to be none other than the Notorious B.I.G.

According to Phillips, Biggie was in Las Vegas the night Tupac was shot. After Tupac\'s crew had an altercation with a member of the Crips, they went to B.I.G. and asked him to financially contribute to the retaliation hit they were already planning.

I hate to criticize another journalist\'s reporting. But the first part of the two-part article was disturbing not just in its information, but in its lack of journalistic checks and balances. This information putting the blame on Biggie was almost entirely based on interviews with several unidentified Southside Los Angeles Crips. None of these individuals are named, and more strangely than that, none are quoted. A responsible journalist can get information on background - which supports his story and aids in establishing the facts. When people crucial to the story don\'t want to give their names, journalists will often still quote them but without attribution. That a story of this length has all information on background with none of these Crip eyewitnesses either identified or quoted seems incomplete at best, considering the seriousness of these allegations.

Another key assertion in the Phillips piece is that Biggie was in Los Vegas the night of the Tyson-Selden fight and was laying low in a suite at the MGM Grand. Ostensibly he had come to Vegas to hang out, but didn\'t attend the fight, according to Phillips.

That\'s where the theory goes seriously awry. How could Biggie and his ever-present entourage have been in Vegas that night and no one know it for six years? Not only was B.I.G. over 300 pounds, he was famous. Somebody would have seen him somewhere, even if it were cleaning or room service staff at the hotel. Not one single person has ever intimated that Biggie was in Vegas that night. At that point, despite the East Coast/West Coast beef, he had no reason to lay low. Tupac hadn\'t been shot yet. If Biggie came to party, he could have avoided anywhere that Pac might have been and still had plenty of choices. Phillips provides no proof of B.I.G.\'s entrance or exit to either L.A. or Vegas anywhere around those dates, nor does he produce any corroboration of any kind that he was there. Again, it\'s solely on the word of the Southside Crips gang.

To this day, I\'ve always wondered about the most credible witnesses of all in the Shakur killing - the car full of women that Tupac was flirting with seconds before he was shot. Just about every story about the incident mentions them. Did anyone ever talk to these women who had the closest view of what happened? No one from the police department (as Phillips points out in the much more believable Part 2 of his piece) ever talked to Tupac\'s close friend Yafeu Fula, who was in the car behind Tupac\'s that night and said he might be able to identify the shooters. Conveniently, he was shot dead himself in New Jersey two months later.

In my opinion, the most revealing piece written to date about Tupac\'s murder appeared in the New Yorker magazine shortly after his death. The lengthy story, written by business writer Connie Bruck, advances a theory that follows the money trail in the wake of Tupac\'s murder. Bruck was one of the first to report that Tupac was planning to leave Death Row. Given the fact that Forbes magazine just reported Tupac as one of the most profitable dead artists of all time, the theory advanced by this piece and other reporting seems to fit. Given his penchant for recording quickly and with the amount of unreleased material available at the time of his death, many believe that Tupac was killed because there were people who stood to gain financially. And that makes sense.

A Puffy intimate once told me outside of Daddy\'s House studio that Tupac and Biggie were killed because of money, jealousy and women. That\'s what I\'ve always believed. Human nature being what it is, you don\'t need a whole bunch of Southside Crips to promote a gangland war that enveloped Biggie and Pac. All you need is what we see in hip-hop every day - stupid beefs, insults and threats flying over women, greed, huge egos gone mad, and money valued over integrity and human life.

I hope that Voletta Wallace, Afeni Shakur and all those who loved Biggie and Tupac have the chance someday to find resolution and closure by finding their sons\' killers. But at this point, I don\'t think The Los Angeles Times and Chuck Phillips have done anything but fan the flames of disinformation and dissension that ruled hip-hop then and unfortunately are still prevalent today.