Johnny Depp's film City of Lies, which is about the murder of The Notorious B.I.G., was shockingly pulled one month before its scheduled release.
The word around Hollywood was the movie was shelved because Depp's erratic behavior had made him unmarketable.
A lot of folks aren't buying that. A new article in The Daily Beast details suspicions that the film was really shut down because the LAPD was concerned the movie would expose widespread corruption in the department and possibly revive Biggie's mom Voletta's $400 million wrongful death lawsuit against the LAPD, which was dismissed in 2010 with the option to refile.
“As bad as the crime was in the Biggie murder, and all the other corruption, the cover-up far exceeds, I think, what the crime was,” said a former FBI agent, who asked not to be identified. “I think when this movie comes out, there’s going to be a lot of people scrambling and running for the hills because they’re not going to want to have to answer some questions about the corruption that was going on at LAPD.”
The former agent believes a City of Lies release could revive Voletta Wallace’s civil suit, which would “absolutely completely bury and ruin LAPD and more importantly, would shut down all the different task forces that LAPD had with the FBI as well as other federal agencies, [from which] they get all that federal grant money. Not to overstate it, it would basically shut down LAPD. They could not afford to take that hit.”
According to the article, City Of Lies filmmaker Brad Furman had access to files on Biggie's murder that nobody on the outside had ever seen.
“We went down the rabbit hole, and I saw everything,” Furman said. “I got in in a way that nobody has ever gotten in.”
You can check out the whole article here.