New Leads In L.A.'s Biggie Smalls Murder Investigation?

Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls.

But authorities have given rapper Christopher Wallace's family some hope this week, indicating to CNN that there could be a promising new lead in the case.

That that evidence is, however, is being kept under wraps.

Sources from a federal-local task force looking into the 1997 shooting death of Wallace outside the Peterson Automotive Museum on the Miracle Mile following a Vibe magazine after-party told CNN the case has been "reinvigorated" because of new information.

At the same time former LAPD Det. Russell Poole, who retired after working the case and, he alleges, being thwarted, possibly by cops who worked off-duty for Suge Knight, regurgitated his claims that Knight and his head of security, Reggie Wright Jr., orchestrated the car-to-car shooting that took Wallace's life that March evening.

Knight and Wright have denied the allegations.

Poole says David Mack, a rogue cop who robbed a bank and got caught up in the LAPD's Rampart Scandal, had the same kind of car as the one used in the shooting.

The theory would fit into the East Coast-West Coast rivalry of the 1990s that pitted Wallace's label mates in the East against Suge Knight's crew, including Tupac Shakur, in California.

Shakur was gunned down in Las Vegas as he rode in a car with Knight six months earlier.

Former LAPD Chief Bernard Parks, now a city councilman, says the claim that the department under his watch ignored such possible investigative paths is "absurd."