You'd expect any album this sprawling to include some lackluster filler. The ambitious album, intended as somewhat of a sequel to Ready to Die, picking up where its predecessor left off, sprawled across the span of two discs, each filled with music, 24 songs in all. a few years to follow up his milestone debut, Ready to Die (1994), with another album, but when he did return with Life After Death in 1997, he did so in a huge way. and rapper Tupac Shakur, who was gunned down six months earlier.īiggie would have turned 49 years old on May 21 this year.It may have taken the Notorious B.I.G. The 2018 film “City of Lies,” based on the book “LAbyrinth” by Randall Sullivan, examines the investigations by the Los Angeles Police Department of the murders of B.I.G. Meanwhile, Carson and others who have examined the facts independently are calling for the case to be reopened. While the LAPD investigation into the killing officially remains open, there has been little to no activity on the matter for many years. Dre tells fans he’s ‘doing great’ after brain aneurysm “I had evidence that LAPD officers were involved and I was shut down by the LAPD and city attorneys inside Los Angeles,” Carson told the Post. He described it as a cover-up and “the biggest miscarriage of justice in my 20-year career at the FBI.” More than 24 years after both shootings, Carson said his investigation into Biggie’s death was stifled at the time by numerous roadblocks and uncooperative elements inside the Los Angeles law enforcement community.
Today Muhammad is 61 years old, goes by Billups, and is said to be working as a real estate agent in Georgia. Mack, who was released from prison in 2010, has publicly denied the claims of further wrongdoing. Mack and Officer Rafael Pérez were deeply involved in what came to be known as the Rampart scandal, where widespread police corruption was found among LAPD officers, some of whom had been hired by Death Row Records to serve as security guards. Explore MAY: First museum honoring hip hop music breaks ground in New York The heist netted $722,000, which was never recovered, and informants told the FBI that the loot had been intended as blood money to pay off Muhammad for the hit. Muhammad was reportedly a longtime friend of David Mack, a former Los Angeles police officer on Death Row’s payroll, who served time in prison for a robbery at a Bank of America branch in Los Angeles in August 1997, five months after Biggie’s murder. Explore 2020: Rapper FBG Duck shot to death in brazen Chicago ambush “The story made it sound like I was some mystery assassin who committed this heinous crime and then just dropped off the face of the Earth - which is the furthest thing from the truth,” Muhammad said at the time.Ĭarson, however, said his claims about Muhammad are supported by eyewitness testimony and other circumstantial evidence, including the man’s shadowy connections and events that occurred around the time of the shooting that raised further suspicions. Muhammad, whose birth name is Harry Billups, told The Los Angeles Times in a 2000 interview that “I’m not a murderer, I’m a mortgage broker,” after a story was printed that pointed to his alleged involvement. Muhammad’s name had surfaced previously in the B.I.G murder investigation after he briefly became a suspect in the case, however he proclaimed his innocence and was never charged by authorities. There is no evidence that B.I.G had anything to do with Tupac’s slaying.īoth deaths served as a tragic final act in an ongoing East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry that came to signify rap music throughout the 1990s, and which pitted Knight’s LA-based Death Row Records against the Bad Boy label run by Sean “Puffy” Combs in New York.
The amount of money paid for the hit is not known. Suge had an accountant that was part of Death Row Records who helped do the financial side of things to pay for the murders.” Explore 2020: Kentucky governor apologizes to Tupac Shakur for thinking jobless claim was joke “Suge was ticked off that his cash cow Tupac was murdered. “Suge Knight financed the murder,” Carson told the Post.