This Pacman thing is getting messy. In case you didn’t see the news last week, the police finally caught the guy who is alleged to have actually fired the shots in the infamous Las Vegas strip club incident. Now, we find out the guy has been “extorting” money from Pacman.  I use the word extort in quotes because it’s very unclear – at least to me - why Pacman was being extorted. There are two quotes in the article that kind of contradict each other in terms of the alleged extortion.

 Here’s Pacman’s lawyer:

 "He paid $15,000 to his friends, who advised him that if he didn't pay the money then this guy would come after him," said Robert Langford, Jones' lawyer in Las Vegas.

 So in this case, the threat of violence was the cause of money being paid. I don’t know but this sounds strange. Pacman has been cooperating with police, so we are told, so if the guy was contacting Pacman wouldn’t he have told the police about it? And if money was being transferred to the guy, if the police were involved, wouldn’t they have set up a sting to catch the guy? But everybody says the money was paid, so was Pacman communicating with the guy through intermediaries and failed to notify the police about this? This would seem to be something the police would be very interested in and yet money was paid. I can’t figure that out.  

Later in the article, we get this quote from the police report.

About a week later, someone began contacting Jones by telephone seeking money for "services rendered," according to the police report filed to obtain Edwards' arrest warrant. A childhood friend also contacted Jones, urging him to pay the money, the document said.

That sounds like someone is trying to say that the alleged shooter was getting money from Pacman to keep his mouth shut about something that happened at the strip club incident. That’s a whole different game than using the threat of violence to get money.

I don’t know, I can’t figure this out at all. All I know is that the stink around Pacman never seems to get washed away. I’m sure Roger Goodell will be interested in all this.

My question is who knew about these payments? Did the police know? If they did, why didn’t they do something about it? If they didn’t know, why didn’t Pacman tell them? He is supposed to be cooperating with the investigation and this would be something very germane to the investigation. Maybe he didn’t tell them until after his plea deal was arranged and it helped lead to the alleged shooter’s capture. It’s all very strange. I’m sure we’ll learn more in the next day or so.

In the meantime, the Titans must be kicking themselves for not trading Pacman when they had the Cowboys on the hook. His value, unless there are some solid explanations to all this, is plummeting. They will have to give him away unless some logical explanations are provided. Now, you have the specter of Goodell not reinstating Pacman any time soon.

Again, I might not have the whole story or I’m just reading between the lines where nothing is actually written. Maybe this is much ado about nothing. But the Pacman mess is becoming very tough to clean up.

Hat tip to CowboysBawler4 for his FanPost  and to groves for his FanPost.