Talk about misunderestimating. You know if blackmailing billionaires was as simple as just asking for the money, well, we’d all have a little more running around money. But it don’t work that way. Billionaires don’t get to be billionaires by opening their wallets. As we reported last week, Page Six gossip monkey Jared Paul Stern walked right into a trap when he demanded $100,000 up front and a $10K monthly retainer to keep billionaire Ron Burkle out of the paper’s notoriously catty boldface wars — all of which was captured on a hidden camera and turned over to the Feds. Stern says this is all just a big misunderstanding. That six figure hush money payment he was demanding? Merely a media consulting fee. But wait, it gets better — in the prototypically Philly-shoots-self-in-foot way we’re all so painfully familiar with: Burkle is the union sugar daddy that’s backing up the Newspaper Guild’s $2.2 billion bid to buy the Inquirer, Daily News and 10 other papers recently freed from the evil clutches of Knight-Ridder put on the open market by the McLatchy Gang. Turns out the guy blackmaiing him was…wait for it…born right here in Philly.
Previous: Thin Line Between Extortion And Gossip No Longer Blurry
Related: Blackmail Now Comes In Small, Medium And Livin’-Large-At-The-Expense-Of-Others sizes.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 10th, 2006 at 1:06 pm.