Chuck Philips is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the Los Angeles Times, he's also the man who shocked the hip-hop community and the world in September of 2002 with his two-part investigative report on the murder of Tupac Shakur. The first part of his piece introduced claims that had never previously been made public, namely that the Notorious B.I.G. supplied a bounty and the murder weapon for the execution of his then rival, Tupac Shakur.

For the first time since his piece was published, Chuck Philips offers new insight into the alleged involvement of Biggie Smalls in Tupac's murder and elaborates on the half of his piece that was erroneously overlooked by us all. Read carefully!

ALLHIPHOP.COM: You expressed to me previously your frustrations with the lack of focus placed on the second part of your piece, so what I want to do is go through that part of your piece and just give you quotes from the piece and have you expand on each one for our readers. Alright, the first quote is: "Las Vegas police were slow to grasp that the roots of the killing lay in a feud between rival gangs in Compton, and were slow to act once they did realize it."

CHUCK PHILIPS: This was basically about MOB Piru Bloods and Southside Crips, and you know Tupac was with some MOB Piru Bloods who beat up a Southside Crip member at unfortunately for him a time when Las Vegas was full of Southside Crips. There were a lot of Southside Crips there that night, and they retaliated. And if you go back and read through some of the original press releases and watch some of the news footage from then, the police did not think that the beating of Orlando Anderson in the lobby of the MGM Hotel had anything to do with it.

ALLHIPHOP: "Gang killings are extremely difficult to solve because there is usually little evidence and few witnesses are willing to talk. Shakur's associates were particularly unlikely to volunteer information."

CHUCK PHILIPS: I've done a lot of stories about gang killings and it is very difficult to get people to talk because the people that really know about the killings usually are in the gangs themselves, and/or have relatives in the gang, or live in the neighborhood where the gang operates, and it is not a safe thing for these people to talk. One of the biggest code violations in a gang is to snitch, to speak to anybody about anything related to a crime. Even the Mothers and the Grandmothers, the really sweet, church-going people are not fond of the police in these gang neighborhoods. They feel the police will not help them, do not help them, to prevent these crimes, and the police expect them to risk their lives to help solve these crimes. And frequently the police don't protect witnesses in these cases. This crime was particularly difficult because the gang members who committed it didn't live in Las Vegas, most of them; the gang was based in Compton, California.

ALLHIPHOP: "Las Vegas police worried that the Compton investigators were too close to the gangs and their rap-industry patrons and might leak information."

CHUCK PHILIPS: At the time of the shooting the guy who ran the gang unit in Compton, Reggie Wright Sr., who everyone I talked to said was one of the best gang detectives there is, his son, Reggie Wright Jr., worked for Suge Knight. Reggie Wright Jr. used to be a Compton cop, and he went and ran a security agency for Suge Knight. So the police from Las Vegas were very apprehensive to take information from or tell anything to the Compton police officers, because they thought Reggie Wright Sr. was going to tell Reggie Wright Jr. and Reggie Wright Jr. was going to tell Suge Knight. There were a lot of people involved in the investigation who were very suspicious of Suge Knight because he wouldn't talk. So there was speculation, and there's still speculation as you know, and other theories that Suge Knight set this murder up. I don't believe that to be true at all and my sources said that that is not at all what happened.

ALLHIPHOP: "Immediately after the shooting, the assailants returned to Compton, where they bragged to their friends and girlfriends. The Compton gang unit was soon deluged with tips implicating the Crips and "Baby Lane," Anderson's gang nickname."

CHUCK PHILIPS: Well, you've read the affidavit right? http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/tupaclv1.html

ALLHIPHOP: Yes I have.

CHUCK PHILIPS: The affidavit pretty much spells that out, how that went down. And I've interviewed a lot of people, the officer who wrote it, and a number of other detectives in that unit, as well as the police in Las Vegas, and they got calls in Las Vegas about Baby Lane. They got calls from people in prison out here who heard about the shooting the next day and the name Baby Lane from the Southside Crips came up from them immediately. That happens a lot of times with gang killings, they got even more tips because Tupac was such a huge star.

ALLHIPHOP: "Las Vegas police had heard about the beating in the MGM Grand lobby and reviewed a security videotape of it. But they did not know who Anderson was or why the incident mattered."

CHUCK PHILIPS: Yes, that's true. They just didn't know who it was. All of the sourcing, all of the information surrounding this shooting lied in Compton, it didn't lie in Las Vegas. They would have to take special trips to go there.

ALLHIPHOP: "A week after the shooting, Compton gang investigators reviewed the videotape at the request of Las Vegas police. They identified the beating victim as Anderson, explained his gang affiliation and said the bodyguards seen flailing at him were Bloods." "Las Vegas police stuck to their position that the beating was irrelevant. (Sgt. Kevin) Manning told an interviewer, 'It appears to be just an individual who was walking through the MGM and got into an argument with Tupac…He probably didn't even know it was Tupac Shakur'"

CHUCK PHILIPS: I think they just didn't understand the connection. They were getting calls that this was a hit that came out of New York. They were inundated with phone calls as to what the murder may have been about. They didn't even know until sometime after this how big of a star Tupac actually was, so to them he was just another murder victim. And with these kind of cases, if you miss a certain opportunity sometimes it never comes back to you. And in this case one of the witnesses who said he would help them got shot and killed. Even though he may not have been willing to testify, he still could have been shown the video to see if he could identify Orlando as the shooter, they never showed him that video. I think they just didn't understand the value of the videotape, even though they were told by the Compton police how important that was.

ALLHIPHOP: "Having ruled Anderson out as a suspect, Las Vegas police did not try to track him down for questioning or show his photograph to members of Shakur's entourage…Police also failed to retrieve additional security video that might have captured Anderson's movements after he was beaten."

CHUCK PHILIPS: I was told by various gang members that some of the people involved in this shooting, their movements were captured on video cameras. You have to capture that tape within a week if I remember correctly before they reuse the tapes. Those tapes were available to the police. I don't believe they would have captured the actual shooting but there were cameras in the various hotels were they stayed, they entered certain rooms, there were cameras in the hallways, and all of that footage was lost.

ALLHIPHOP: "From their first moments on the scene, Las Vegas police unintentionally alienated the witnesses most likely to be able to identify the rapper's assailants."

CHUCK PHILIPS: They did that. According to the people I interviewed the police harassed them, and these were people who didn't do anything and were very upset that Tupac was shot. And possibly they could be the only witnesses, everybody in those cars, and it doesn't help you any to throw those guys down on the ground and mistreat them. And the police never apologized, they never tried to court or woo back any of the people they did this to.

ALLHIPHOP: "There was one witness willing to help: a 19-year-old rapper named Yafeu "Kadafi" Fula…Fula was among the dozen or so members of Shakur's circle who remained in Las Vegas after the shooting, keeping vigil at University Medical Center, where Shakur was on life support. During that week, detectives made no attempt to follow up with Fula."

CHUCK PHILIPS: That's what I was told, and I believe that's true. And the only time police did interact with him there was a disturbance at the hospital because the police were starting to hassle someone that the Outlawz knew, and they approached the police car and the police turned on them, threw them all down and handcuffed them. And if I'm not mistaken they busted Fula for weed, and they didn't take him into custody, but here you have a guy who has told you that he'll help if he can and how do you treat him, you throw him down on the ground and handcuff him.

ALLHIPHOP: "Early on the morning of Oct. 2, 1996, Compton police, FBI agents and members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department swept through Compton, arresting nearly two dozen gang members…Orlando Anderson was among those sitting in the Compton police lockup…Two Las Vegas detectives took part in the roundup at the invitation of Compton police. One of them questioned Anderson for about 20 minutes…The visiting detectives brushed aside a suggestion that they question the other gang members."

CHUCK PHILIPS: That's based on interviews with everybody that was there that day. The Las Vegas police claimed that they allowed Compton police to interview on their behalf, some of the Compton cops said that wasn't true, they told Vegas you're allowed to ask anything that you want. Some of the Compton police felt that the Vegas detectives weren't wholeheartedly interested in this case. The raid took place to end the gang war that had broken out after Tupac's shooting, but they also felt that they could round up the people who were in the shooter's car that night, and they rounded up the people they believed were in that car and also people who knew who was in that car, and Vegas never interviewed those people.

ALLHIPHOP: "In Las Vegas, one of Shakur's bodyguards had gotten off a shot at the white Cadillac as it fled. The word on the street in Compton was that the Crips brought the car to the stereo shop to have the damage repaired…The Compton gang investigators then canvassed every rental agency in the area…They found that a Carson agency had rented such a car to a man with possible ties to the gang underground…They took a photograph of the car and detailed their findings in a report…Compton investigators say they gave this additional information to Las Vegas police. Manning said his detectives never received it."

CHUCK PHILIPS: We ran a picture in the paper of what was believed to have been the car that carried the people that killed Tupac. I don't think Las Vegas police have ever even looked at that car.

ALLHIPHOP: Now, that covers the second part of your piece, but I do have just a few questions that tie into the first part of your piece. First, did you see the December 2002 issue of Vibe magazine that ran a timeline countering your claim of the Crips meeting up with Biggie before the shooting?

CHUCK PHILIPS: Yes I did. I completely disagree with that timeline. I believe what I reported is what happened.

ALLHIPHOP: Without divulging names, can you tell me how many sources you had that implicated Biggie?

CHUCK PHILIPS: I don't want to say how many I had, but I had more than one. I never write a story with just one source. I believe that everything I wrote in the piece is true. I know there is more to what happened than I wrote, and we'll see what happens in the end. The most critical misunderstanding of the story was that there was never like a phone call that came from New York, it was never like Biggie ever set that night for that to happen, it was a whole chain of circumstances that depended on the thing that happened before it. It was all kind of spontaneous, how one thing moved into the next. If Orlando hadn't gotten beat up then the Crips wouldn't have jammed Biggie and whoever else was in the room, and then had the opening not appeared on the street at the moment it happened it wouldn't have happened on that corner, it may have happened later that night or it may have never happened. All I would see is these headlines, "Biggie ordered this, blah, blah, blah," and it was more like Biggie got jacked for this thing.

ALLHIPHOP: The reason that I wanted to interview you, is to bring the readers who may have dismissed your piece based on the Biggie stuff back to it to see all of the information they missed regarding the investigation.

CHUCK PHILIPS: A lot of people don't know about all of the work I've done covering this. This story took almost two years to do. And prior to this story if you go back and pull all of the stories written on Tupac and Biggie, my name is on a whole lot of the stories that were breaking stories. My whole goal with all of the pieces was to find out who did it, not to create a disturbance or to throw mud on anybody. I was as shocked as anybody else when these were the things that came up.

ALLHIPHOP: Is there any physical evidence that you can give to our readers that can substantiate your sources claim that Biggie was in Vegas that night?

CHUCK PHILIPS: You have to realize that when you get information from sources you can endanger those people's lives by divulging that information. You have to protect that information. A good reporter will never reveal anything that would lead anyone to their source.

ALLHIPHOP: Finally, I believe you've already made this pretty obvious, but for the sake of clarity, who do you believe murdered Tupac Shakur?

CHUCK PHILIPS: I believe the Southside Crips killed him.