The murder of Notorious B.I.G., already one of the more frustratingly complex cases in recent memory, just got quite a bit more convoluted.

Notorious B.I.G.

A prison inmate who had implicated a former Los Angeles Police Department officer in the March 1997 shooting death of the rapper has renounced his story and accused B.I.G.'s family and their attorney of bribing him to link police to the murder.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Waymond Anderson, who is serving a life term for murder, said in a recent deposition that he lied about LAPD involvement in the slaying as part of a scam in which he would have received a percentage of any settlement from the city in the wrongful death lawsuit brought by B.I.G.'s mother, Violetta Wallace and his widow, Faith Evans.

Anderson said he was offered the bribe to tell detectives that former Los Angeles Officer Rafael Perez had told him that another ex-officer, David Mack, was involved in the murder. But in a recent deposition, he repudiated his earlier statements.

"I don't know David Mack, I don't know Rafael Perez," Anderson told lawyers representing relatives of the slain rapper, whose real name was Christopher Wallace.

The two officers "had no involvement with the...murder," Anderson said under oath. At various points in the deposition, he said, "It was a lie, and I'm ashamed of it," and, "I did what I had to do to survive."

Wallace's wrongful death lawsuit against the city had become the primary source of any activity in the unsolved murder of B.I.G., who was gunned down outside the Petersen Automotive Museum in the Mid-Wilshire District after a music industry party on March 9, 1997.

His reversal sends the case into disarray. The family's lawyer, Perry R. Sanders Jr., vigorously denied Anderson's claim that he offered to pay him to lie in court about Perez and Mack, calling the allegations "100 percent, demonstrably false.

"This is wholesale, made-up-out-of-whole-cloth perjury," he told the Times.

In another strange twist, Sanders told the paper that Anderson appeared to have been acting at the behest of a Times reporter, Chuck Philips, who has written extensively about Wallace's death and raised questions in those stories about the theory that the LAPD was involved in B.I.G.'s slaying.

Sanders said Anderson "clearly would like to please Mr. Philips, because he's singing his song, first, second and third verse and certainly the chorus." In a court filing after the deposition, two attorneys working with Sanders on the Wallace case suggested that an unidentified "third party" had induced Anderson to commit perjury.