Call it a B.I.G. break.
The mother of slain rapper Notorious B.I.G. has dismissed from her wrongful-death lawsuit a man she considered the top suspect in the murder of her son.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Voletta Wallace decided to drop Harry Billups, otherwise known as Amir Muhammad, from her suit after he maintained his innocence in a pretrial deposition and offered to take a lie-detector test to prove he didn't kill the rapper, whose real name was Christopher Wallace.
Neither side released details of the confidential settlement that led to Muhammad's dismissal from the complaint, but sources told the Times money played no part in it.
While police never questioned Muhammad in the shooting, Voletta Wallace had long fingered him for gunning down Biggie following an after-party for the Soul Train Music Awards in 1997.
Muhammad's dismissal reshuffles the complaint a bit. Still named as defendants in the suit are the City of Los Angeles and a former member of LAPD's Finest, David A. Mack, who's currently serving a 14-year prison sentence for bank robbery.
According to her suit, filed in 2002, Wallace alleged the city failed to properly investigate her son's murder after one of its own officers, Mack, came under suspicion. The also suit claimed Mack, acting on orders from rap kingpin Marion "Suge" Knight" of Death Row Records (now known as Tha Row), hired old college roommate Muhammad to gun down Biggie as payback for the Las Vegas drive-by shooting death of Tupac Shakur the year before.
No evidence has ever been found to link Biggie with Tupac's death, despite a theory floated by the Los Angeles Times two years ago.
The Times also reported that one of Mack's fellow inmates told investigators that Biggie's killer used a Middle Eastern-sounding name. Muhammad, who visited Mack in prison, become the focus.
Hoping to implicate Muhammad, the FBI wired an informant who approached Muhammad last December and tried to coax him into talking about the murder, but Muhammad didn't say anything to cast doubt on his story.
Voletta Wallace has said she'd be willing to settle with the city for $105 million, then scaled it back to $18 million. The city council has rebuffed her demands.
Wallace, Muhammad and their attorneys were not available for comment Friday.
With Wallace's chief suspect no longer factoring in her suit, she might have an uphill battle trying to prove to jurors that there was a conspiracy to kill the Brooklyn-born rap star.
Earlier this month, a judge granted Wallace's attorneys' request to postpone the trial until April to give them more time to pursue leads in the case. The judge also issued an order dividing the trial into three phases with the first requiring Wallace's legal team to convince a jury that Mack did, in fact, arrange the killing.