NEW DOCUSERIES

Who Killed Biggie And Tupac? Questions Remain Over 25 Years Later

Over a quarter-century after two superstar rappers were murdered, rumors and theories about their deaths continue to run rampant. Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur were considered the best rappers of the East and West Coast, respectively, until they were both gunned down within six months of one another. On Sept. 7, 1996, Tupac, 25, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas; six months later, on March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace, known as Biggie Smalls (or the Notorious B.I.G.), was gunned down in his vehicle shortly after he left an industry party in Los Angeles. Many investigators still believe the two rappers’ slayings were somehow connected, and if they solved one, they might be able to solve the other. “The shooter is most likely dead,” former LAPD captain Kevin McClure once told the Los Angeles Times, speculating whoever killed Biggie was likely a hired gang hitman. In addition to the gang theory, in Biggie’s case, there are those who have suggested corrupt cops with the Los Angeles Police Department were somehow involved. The mystery of who is responsible for fatally shooting the hip-hop icons is the subject of Who Killed Biggie and Tupac?, which premiered last week on ID and Discovery+.

ABC-TV’s The Naked City Helped Make

30-Minute Crime Dramas A Big Hit

In 1958 the fledgling (aka not very profitable) ABC-TV Network debuted The Naked City, a half-hour crime drama based on the 1948 Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. Like it’s big-screen forerunner, the series—a collaboration between independent producer Herbert B. Leonard and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant—was shot almost entirely in the buildings and streets of New York City. While programs filmed in color had been popping up on America’s prime-time schedule ever since the mid-1950s, they stuck with black-and-white, giving their new Tuesday-night drama the same stark, semi-documentary flavor that had distinguished the 96-minute movie. As J. Kingston Pierce wrote in Crime Reads last week, “The Naked City was really a quasi-anthology, human-interest series that explored what it was like to be a metropolitan copper—the taxing hours, the erratic and enfeebling angst, the often heart-rending choices. But stories drew multiple dimensions, too, from the transitory characters: two-bit grifters, guttersnipes hungry for the community of fellow miscreants, bookmakers, sticky-fingered scrubwomen, and punch-drunk boxers. Crimes supplied entry points into each episode; however, it was the effects those crimes had on ordinary people and individual policemen that were of cardinal importance—a fact reflected in the series’ concluding line: 'There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.'”

This New Anti-Tracking Tool

Detects If Someone Is Following You

In recent years there’s been an explosion in the number of ways people can be tracked by domestic abusers, stalkers, or those in the murky worlds of drug dealer or espionage. Stalker-ware and spyware can be installed directly on people’s phones and cars, giving attackers access to location data, messages, photos, videos, and more. Meanwhile, physical trackers—such as Apple’s AirTags—have been used to detect where people are in real time. These tools give ex-spouses, jilted lovers, or sociopaths a physical means to follow his/her prey to see where a potential victim might be living, or a location he/she might be headed. To help people determine whether their movements are being monitored, former Department of Homeland Security agent Matt Edmundson developed an anti-tracking tool that scans for nearby devices and alerts the user if the same phone is detected multiple times within the past 20 minutes. The same system also sends an alert if a car is tailing the user. Edmondson built the system using parts that cost around $200 in total, and recently presented it at a Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. He’s also open-sourced its underlying code.

How A Cagey Con Man Fooled Dozens

Of Wealthy, Well-Educated Targets

He said he was rich beyond belief. A billionaire. “The second Bill Gates.” Close friends with Steve Jobs, the Sultan of Brunei, and Carlos Slim, once the richest man in the world. As Mark Seal reported last week in Air Mail, Alexandre Despallières claimed to be all of the above, as well as a member of the Rothschild family and the nephew of former French president Jacques Chirac. [And related to Elizabeth Taylor.] He claimed to have a degree in psychiatry and a deep knowledge of pharmacology, and also owned his own American independent movie studio. He worked with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Altman, knew Madonna and Elton John, and ran a multi-national IT-and-telecom-munications company, which had offices and thousands of employees worldwide. This web of identities and lies ultimately entangled wealthy, highly educated people in Paris, Beverly Hills, New York, London, Sydney, Normandy, and beyond—and all of them learned the hard way that their sophisticated and worldly friend was none of the things he claimed to be. The just-released Audible Original, Love Until Death: The Sudden Demise of a Music Icon and a Trail of Mystery and Alleged Murder, tells "the twisted tale of the twisted man who dispensed love, lies, and, allegedly, poison to a world of true believers."

New Docuseries Examines Why So

Many Comedians’ Lives End in Tragedy

The new docuseries Dark Side of Comedy from Variety’s Vice-TV examines the lives of a number of comedians—from Chris Farley to Richard Pryor—who were consumed by the fame monster. As reported by Daily Beast Entertainment Critic Nick Schager, the program “looks into the underbelly of its chosen showbiz field via installments on Chris Farley, Andrew Dice Clay, Freddie Prinze, Artie Lange, Maria Bamford, Roseanne Barr, Greg Giraldo, Brett Butler, and Richard Pryor. While spanning decades, genders and races, these exposés aren’t as diverse as they initially appear, in large part because certain core commonalities soon emerge: childhood traumas; struggles with the sudden pressures and expectations of spotlight success; exploitation and enabling perpetrated by an industry that views its marquee draws as simply cash cows to be used and discarded as needed; and jaw-dropping substance abuse that in some cases led to suicide attempts and/or death. The impression imparted by these nightmares is that fame is an awful curse that no one should covet—sex, money, and adoration be damned.”

Coming January 10, 2023:

Greenwich Mean Time

When photojournalist Monica Cross literally stumbles into the site of an old airplane crash at the edge of a Himalayan glacier, she is exposed to a dark and deadly secret that was meant to remain hidden forever. Unaware that her life is in grave danger, she attempts to get home to New York while the Greenwich Global Group—a dark-web, murder-for-hire outfit—pulls out all stops to make sure she never gets there. Spanning ten time zones, nine countries, and four continents, Greenwich Mean Time is a tightly spun thriller that plays out against a sinister plot designed to change the course of history for all time.