From Newsday’s Tom Rock :
A Philadelphia man is being charged by federal investigators with trying to blackmail Giants coach Tom Coughlin, threatening to expose a fictitious sexual relationship with two women if he did not pay $20,000 to $30,000.
“The only thing I’ll say is that I received two different letters, I turned them over to the league authorities as was recommended, and it’s in their hands,” Coughlin said yesterday. “That’s all I can tell you. Whoever leaked this information and put it out there did not inform me that this was going to take place.”
The story wasn’t so much leaked as made public in court documents filed yesterday. Those documents say Herbert Alex Simpson, 30, sent the letters, which also included a threat that Coughlin’s life would be made “a living hell by doing something to [his] family.”
As you’d expect, the Smoking Gun has the affidavit in question. I’m no Howie Spira, but $30K seems like not an awful lot of money to demand in such a case, and I’m hopeful that as this story unfolds, we’ll learn that Simpson was simply trying to raise cash for his Giants PSL.