According to a report in the New York Post citing a retired FBI agent who investigated the case, former rap music mogul Suge Knight, the founder of Death Row Records who is serving a 28-year prison sentence for intentionally running over and killing a man in 2015, hired an assassin to carry out the slaying of rapper Notorious B.I.G. in 1997.
Former federal investigator Phil Carson identified the assassin as Amir Muhammad, a Nation of Islam convert who allegedly received assistance from rogue employees within the Los Angeles Police Department who allegedly helped cover up the crime, which remains unsolved to this day.
Christopher Wallace, commonly known as Biggie Smalls, was shot and killed in a car at a red light after leaving the Soul Train Music Awards in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997. He was 24 years old at the time. Wallace was hit by four 9 mm bullets fired from a black Chevy Impala that had driven up alongside his GMC Suburban.
“Every piece of evidence points to Amir Muhammad,” Carson said, who worked on the case for two years and just talked with the Post about his conclusions. “He was the one who fired the shot… Others played a role in orchestrating it [and] allowing him to pull the trigger.”
Carson claims Knight recruited Muhammad for the hit in vengeance for the murder of Tupac Shakur, one of the world’s most renowned rappers at the time, who was gunned down six months before B.I.G. was killed after attending a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas.
Carson informed the Post that “Suge Knight financed the murder.” “Suge was furious that his cash cow Tupac was assassinated. Suge had a Death Row Records accountant who assisted with the financial side of things in order to pay for the murders.”
It is unknown how much money was paid for the hit.
There is no indication that B.I.G. was involved in Tupac’s murder.
Both killings marked the tragic conclusion of an extended East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry that came to define rap music in the 1990s, pitting Knight’s Los Angeles-based Death Row Records against Sean “Puffy” Combs’ New York-based Bad Boy label.
Muhammad’s name had previously surfaced in the B.I.G murder inquiry when he briefly became a suspect in the killing, but he maintained his innocence and was never charged.
‘I’m not a murderer’
After a report about his alleged involvement was published, Muhammad, whose real name is Harry Billups, told The Los Angeles Times in a 2000 interview, “I’m not a killer, I’m a mortgage broker.”
“The story made it sound like I was some mysterious assassin who committed this heinous crime and then vanished from the face of the Earth — which is completely false,” Muhammad said at the time.
Carson, on the other hand, maintains that his assertions concerning Muhammad are backed up by eyewitness testimony and other circumstantial evidence, such as the man’s shady connections and incidents that occurred around the time of the shooting, which prompted additional suspicions.
Muhammad was apparently a longstanding acquaintance of David Mack, a former Los Angeles police officer on Death Row’s payroll who did time in jail in August 1997, five months after Biggie’s murder, for a robbery at a Bank of America branch in Los Angeles.
The robbery netted $722,000, which was never recovered, and sources told the FBI that the money was meant to pay Muhammad for the hit.
Mack and Officer Rafael Pérez were both extensively implicated in the Rampart incident, which exposed widespread police corruption among LAPD officers, some of whom had been employed as security guards by Death Row Records.
Mack, who was released from prison in 2010, has stated that he is not guilty of any additional misconduct.
Muhammad is now 61 years old, goes by the name Billups, and works as a real estate agent in Georgia.
