Clayton Hill, a former member of the Nation of Islam and currently incarcerated at a federal prison in Chicago, has come forward and
told HipHopDX.com that he played an accessory to the murder of rapper Notorious BIG after the fact, and knows who shot and killed the rapper.
BIG, or Christopher Wallace, was killed while driving away from a party in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997. Hill claims that, acting under orders from a higher-up at Muhammad Mosque #15 in Atlanta, he met at a Greyhound station a man from Los Angeles who called himself Dawoud Muhammad and took from him possession of a firearm that he claimed he used to shoot the rapper.
"[Dawoud Muhammad] stated to me that he was on the run for the murder [of The Notorious B.I.G.]," Hill
told HipHopDx.com. "He disclosed that he was the shooter of The Notorious B.I.G. because he (Dawoud) was a former Blood gang member and was paid to do so."
Hill will soon release the e-book, "Diary of an Ex-Terrorist," about his time with the Nation of Islam.
"I told [Dawoud Muhammad] I had instructions to collect some property from him," he writes in that book. "He must have been given the same instructions because he didn't hesitate or show any signs of doubt as he bent over and removed a trash liner out of a waste can and handed it to me to hold open. He reached into the duffle bag he brought with him and pulled out a semi-automatic hand gun that could have been a .9 millimeter or a .40 caliber wrapped in a white undershirt. Carefully he placed it into the trash bag making sure his hands never touched any of the exposed parts of the gun."
Recently, the long-frustrated inquiry into BIG's murder was "re-invigorated" by new evidence,
CNN reported in January. At the center of the case is former LAPD Detective Russell Poole, who resigned from the force in 1999 after feeling as if his investigation was being stonewalled from within.
Poole claimed that former LAPD officer David Mack, a Tupac superfan, and Amir Muhammad carried out the shooting of BIG,
as ordered by Death Row Records founder Suge Knight, who was incarcerated at the time. Shakur was murdered months before, part of the east coast-west coast rap rivalry, and Knight, some speculate, may have been seeking revenge.
Months later, Mack was sent to prison for bank robbery. Poole insisted that officers in the LAPD, working off duty for Death Row, thwarted the investigation, telling CNN that he, "was getting too close to the truth."
In 2005, a paid informant who said that Knight ordered the murder
pulled back his testimony, saying that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and his identification was fraudulent.
When HipHopDx.com asked Hill whether his memory of Dawoud Muhammad matches pictures of Amir Muhammad, Hill said, "I have looked at the pics... and although I cannot say conclusively and with absolute certainty because that was 14 years ago, Amir Muhammad looks like the person who used the name Dawoud."
Hill claims -- and a HipHopDx.com source confirmed -- that he met with the government about the content of his confession, though his inability to identify the killer in photos hurt his credibility, at least in terms of usability in court. Hill is currently serving time for Conspiracy to Defraud the United States and Identity Theft.
