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James Rosemond's Lawyer: My Client Did Not Hire Anyone To Shoot Tupac

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- The lawyer for a hip-hop mogul accused in an online post of orchestrating a plot to rob rapper Tupac Shakur in the mid-1990s says the claims are outrageous and false.

Attorney Jeffrey Lichtman said Thursday his client James Rosemond did not hire anyone to rob and shoot Shakur.

The accusations about the 1994 robbery and shooting were posted online at allhiphop.com and are attributed to Dexter Isaac, who says he was hired by Rosemond. Isaac is serving a life sentence in an unrelated murder-for-hire-case. Rosemond is wanted by federal authorities on drug charges.

According to the website, Isaac says he was paid $2,500 by Rosemond to rob Shakur outside a studio in Manhattan in 1994. Shakur suffered gunshot wounds but eventually recovered. He was later killed in 1996 in an unsolved slaying.

Earlier, New York City police said they were investigating the online post. Police spokesman Paul Browne said if police determined the post was legitimate, they would seek to interview the prisoner.

Much of the purported confession is laced with bitterness directed at Rosemond, who Isaac says hired him to carry out the crime. Isaac says Rosemond has wrongly accused him of being a government informant.

"Now I would like to clear up a few things, because the statute of limitations is over, and no one can be charged, and I'm just plain tired of listening to your lies," Isaac purportedly writes, adding that the mogul also allowed him to keep some of the jewelry he stole from Shakur.

"I still have as proof the chain we took in the robbery," he writes.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, a person by the same name as in the post is serving life in prison and is housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

The online confession also mentions Sean "Diddy" Combs, who at the time went by "Puffy."

"Now I'm not going to talk about my friend Biggie's death or 2Pac's death, but I would like to give their mothers some closure. It's about time that someone did, and I will do so at a different time," Isaac writes. Then he turns his attention to Rosemond and Combs. "Jimmy, you and Puffy like to come off all innocent-like, but as the saying goes: You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time."

Isaac then asks Rosemond "Are you going to flip on Puffy when the feds get you?"

A message requesting comment from AllHipHop.com was not immediately answered.

Do you believe this purported confession? Sound off in our comments section below…

(TM and Copyright 2011 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2011 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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