The story begins just before dawn on November 25th, 2006. Sean Bell is hours away from getting married to fiance Nicole Paultre Bell and wrapping up an all-nighter bachelor party with his friends. He walks out of the Kalua Club in Queens as it’s closing, a strip club with complaints of guns, drugs and prostitution. Meanwhile, undercover detectives are inside the club, and plainclothes officers are stationed outside. An argument breaks out just as Bell begins to leave with his friends. One of them, Joseph Guzman, is seen going to Bell’s car, at which point the officers assume the worst: he is going to get a gun. Cops follow Bell and his two friends and call for backup.

This is where the drama unfolds. Bell, Guzman, and Trent Benefield get into the car, Bell in the driver seat. The detectives draw their weapons. Benefield and Guzman would later testify that they never heard the painclothes detectives identify themselves as police, sending Bell into a panic to get away. Detectives, believing Bell is trying to run them down, open fire. A total of 50 bullets were fired among the five NYPD officers, three were charged with crimes. (A video demonstration of how quickly Oliver could have fired off 31 rounds, including a pause to reload can be seen here.) Benefield and Guzman are wounded and Bell lays dead. No guns were found among the friends. Nicole Paultre Bell, Benefield, and Guzman file a wrongful death lawsuit with the federal court in an attempt to provide justice for Bell and his loved ones.

Fast forward. Tears streamed down Nicole Paultre Bell’s face as she fled the courtroom today. Justice Arthur Cooperman announced earlier this morning, the verdict clearing Detectives Michael Oliver and Gescard Isnora of manslaughter, assault and reckless endangerment in the death of Sean Bell. Detective Marc Cooper was cleared of reckless endangerment.

No doubt an argument greater than that which triggered the fatal events was seen outside the courtroom, after the verdict. Some quotes…

The officers charged:

“I want to say sorry to Bell family for the tragedy,” Cooper said.

Isnora thanked the judge “for his fair and accurate decision today.”

Oliver praised Cooperman “for a fair and just decision.”

The outraged community, which you can see here:

“This case was not about justice,” declared Leroy Gadsden, chair of the police/community relations committee of the Jamaica Branch NAACP. “This case was about the police having a right to be above the law. If the law was in effect here, if the judge had followed the law truly, these officers would have been found guilty.

“This court, unfortunately, is bankrupt when it comes to justice for people of color.”

Patrick Lynch, president of the New York Police Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said “there’s no winners; there’s no losers” in the case.

“We still have a death that occurred. We still have police officers that have to live with the fact that there was a death involved in their case,” Lynch said.

“You can’t be proud of wearing that hat. You can’t be proud of wearing that badge,” a black woman shouted at a black police officer. “You must stop working for the masters! Stand down! Stop working for the masters!”

“Fifty shots is murder. I don’t care what you say. That’s what it is,” another woman said.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a statement saying, “An innocent man lost his life, a bride lost her groom, two daughters lost their father, and a mother and a father lost their son. No verdict could ever end the grief that those who knew and loved Sean Bell suffer.” source.

I keep trying to think of all the iconic lyrics from NWA to Tupac, and nothing matches the grief of this situation. Just rest in peace, Sean Bell. Your death isn’t in vain as long as you will be remembered.

I’m really glad I got a text from our good friend and balls champion earlier today. You see, I was about to go out on the street and slang, and I was about to do it all wrong. My boy told me to look up “Thug life Commandments,” and I’m glad he did. In Thug Life’s “Ten Crack Commandments Interpreted by True OGs,” we learn the tips of the trade, and ways to continue to follow the true American entrepreneurial spirit without getting shot or locked up.

Take for instance Rule #5. I was about to start selling meth to college freshmen out of my bedroom, but now I know better.:

5th Commandment
Never Sell No Crack Where You Rest At

If you sell crack where you lay yo head, yo crib gon become a target fo 5-0, jackers, addicts and niggas who rob slangas. To avoid this heat, git you some crack houses, Find abandoned cribs in da hood and tak’em over. Fortify yo shit wit security bars, steel doors and security cameras and git you some young and up and coming hoods to be yo lookouts.

Not sure how well this translates from crack to meth, but it’s a good start, and some decent guidelines for sure. This is the shit that the characters in The Wire kinda gloss over. It’s like they figure you should already know this shit because you grew up with it. That’s fucked. Us suburban middle class-raised white folks sure have a major disadvantage. KnowaddimeSane?

So remember that story in the LA Times a couple of weeks ago linking Sean “Diddy” Combs to the shooting death of rapper Tupac Shakur? Apparently it’s bullshit:

The Times appears to have been hoaxed by an imprisoned con man and accomplished document forger, an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs’s trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud.

The con man, James Sabatino, 31, has long sought to insinuate himself, after the fact, in a series of important hip-hop events, from Shakur’s shooting to the murder of The Notorious B.I.G.. In fact, however, Sabatino was little more than a rap devotee, a wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida whose own father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as “a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.” Sabatino is pictured in the above mug shot.

The author of the story was, of course, none other than Chuck Phillips, who previously won a Pullitzer for his reporting on corruption in entertainment industry, who just the other day, defended his sourcing on the story to MTV News:

“I often get approached by a lot of people, and then I talk to a lot of people who I thought knew someone and I find out they’re lying,” Philips said. “It takes a lot of time to develop. I’m not gonna write it just because someone says it. I have to, in my mind, have double or triple sourcing on something and people who hadn’t spoken to each other and I can assure myself that they haven’t spoken to each other. Because I’ve had two people try to set me up. … I would catch them. But if you have three, you never get tripped up. I learned that writing about the music business, because I’d write about big deals that were coming out or a firing that would happen five days before it happened. And you had to be right about that sh–, because those guys would sue your ass. But in this case, I don’t write anything until I feel it’s confident, it’s true. I know all kinds of stuff I don’t write about. But then if I know that it’s true, I’m gonna write about it. But I never tell anybody what it is, because it’s unfair if it’s not true. And there are people that will lie to you. Same thing happens in the music business, when I wrote about that. Same thing happened in the government. The police lie to you all the time. Police write up documents that are completely false, and you can print that. As a journalist, if they write up a police report that’s false, you can put that on the front page of the newspaper and not be sued, because it’s a police document.

“People are talking about that document,” Philips added. “I had all of the information before I got the FBI document. [Editor’s note: Philips obtained FBI records cited in Monday’s story that said an informant told authorities in 2002 that Jimmy Rosemond and James Sabatino set up Shakur.] And when I got the FBI document, that was really like frosting on the cake for me. Because in this document, by somebody who I had never spoke to, I did speak to them eventually before the story ran, but who I didn’t know or speak to, he said almost the same thing that I found out. So for me, it’s just another resource, but for everybody who reads it, ‘Oh, it has to be true. The FBI is sourcing it.’ “

Um, RONGGGGGGGGGGGGGG