The Biggest Unanswered Questions About Biggie's Death

In the early morning hours of March 9th, 1997, rap music star Christopher Wallace — aka Biggie Smalls — took four bullets in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. Wallace was in town to promote the release of his new album, titled Life After Death. Of the four shots that struck the rap star, the one that struck his hip proved fatal. The Notorious B.I.G. was pronounced dead after an unsuccessful attempt at emergency surgery.

It was a shocking moment in music history, as no one expected a star as well-known as Biggie Smalls might die by a drive-by shooting. While drive-bys weren't uncommon In L.A. at the time, rarely did they involve someone quite so famous. The killing hit close to home for rap fans in particular, since Tupac Shakur had been gunned down in a similar manner just six months earlier.

Nowadays, plenty of questions still linger about Biggie's death. The homicide investigation into the shooting went cold not long after it started, and nobody was ever charged for the crime. That hasn't stopped people from wondering, though. In 2010, The New York Times described a "cottage industry of criminal speculation" surrounding his murder, and all told, there have been dozens of books, documentaries, and biopics investigating the events of that fateful night. The most recent of these, Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell, is set to debut on Netflix on March 1st.

Much of this speculation has revolved around the relationship between Biggie and Tupac, and the rivalry between East Coast and West Coast rappers that each of them cultivated. The two artists first met when Biggie was still hoping to break into the music industry. By then, Tupac was a platinum-selling artist and Biggie wanted him to be his manager. Tupac declined the offer, but the two hit it off and quickly became friends.

Both men came from similar backgrounds and grew up in neighborhoods where crime was prevalent. They struck up a mutual respect club, with Tupac praising Biggie's rap skills. They'd crash at each other's places when in town, and Biggie often turned to Tupac for advice.

Their friendship didn't last, however. In 1994, Tupac made his way to a recording studio in Times Square for a session with Biggie and his producer Sean "Puffy" Combs. On his way up, someone shot him five times. Biggie swore up and down he never put out a hit on Tupac, who survived the incident — but Tupac himself disagreed. He reached out to Suge Knight of Death Row Records and began work on a diss track, cementing the burgeoning East Coast/West Coast feud. Biggie responded with a number of diss tracks of his own.

After Tupac was murdered, Biggie went on the record that he wanted to end the hip-hop feud he and Tupac had helped begin. Some, however, believe he himself had something to do with Tupac's death. The elephant in the room here, of course, is "Who then killed Biggie Smalls?"

Many theories have been floated over the years. The prevalent one is that his death was a coordinated hit, taken out in retaliation for Tupac's death six months earlier. An LAPD officer named Russell Poole, who worked as the lead investigator on Biggie's murder, believed that corrupt police officers may have had something to do with it, coordinating efforts with Suge Knight and Death Row Records. Ominously, Poole was ordered off the case before retiring in 1999.

Poole was in the process of writing a book about both killings when he died of a heart attack in 2015. Other theorists have suspected the two rappers found themselves caught up in the middle of a gang war between the Crips and the Bloods, with some reports suggesting Biggie paid off gang members to shoot Tupac.

Few of these theories have really gone anyway, though. Russell Poole's investigation led Biggie's mother to file a wrongful death suit against the City of Los Angeles in 2005 and 2007, but the first ended in a mistrial, and the second was dismissed after a lengthy bureaucratic back and forth. At this point, it's unlikely that the world will ever find out the truth about Biggie or Tupac's deaths — but, from the looks of it, that won't stop people from trying.

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