Attention wears off for elaborate hitman accusations
Thursday 16th August 2007
Phil Laak’s name has been dragged through the mud, but he has come up clean. Laak’s accuser, Tom Grant, went silent after alleging that Laak hired a hit man to kill him. Public opinion on blogs and forums has come down on Phil’s side, with Grant looking like a blackmailer and a fantasist.
This bizarre story sounds good enough to have been cooked up as an effort to smear not just Phil, but poker in general, particularly as it comes just as Laak’s name was headline news for beating the poker computer. Others have suggested that it is just a means of generating publicity for Laak and Esfandiari’s forthcoming show ‘I bet on you.’ Are they really that scared of a flop?
The whole thing sounds deeply suspect, but anyone looking for a fictional plot here it is:
According to Grant, Laak injured two children in a motorbike accident when living in Thailand. Grant paid off the children’s families and then he and Laak set up a business exporting religious artefacts from Thailand to the US. This is where a wild imagination might substitute ‘religious artefacts’ for ‘heroin’.
The story is that the business went wrong, and Phil was so upset about losing his money that he hired a hit-man to kill his business partner. Grant claimed that instead of killing him the hit man gave him half the money. Grant then went on to expose Laak, withdrawing his allegations once he’d been paid to keep quiet.
