Knicks in trouble!

Isiah (Thomas) has to start me, I've got so much (stuff) on Isiah and he knows it. He thinks he can (get) me. But I'll (get) him first. You have no idea what I know.

Stephon Marbury, New York Daily News 11/14/2007

The best blackmailers are those you've never heard of. They were able to quietly establish the value of their damaging information and now live lives of anonymity in a comfortable gated community or a South American nation like Peru. (Or they have seamlessly maintained their starting point guard spot despite a rapidly diminishing skill set.)

Irrationality and hubris might make for good copy, but they are never the blackmailer's friend. Luckily for producers and consumers of news, Stephon Marbury and Judith Regan -- two of the most irrational and prideful people of note that we have -- have both just gone public with their blackmail.

Marbury's is still in its shout-it-out-on-the-team-plane infancy, while Regan's has progressed to legal briefs and claims of secret tape recordings. There is now a good chance we will get to bear witness as both blackmail attempts play out.

And maybe Marbury does know something explosive about Isiah's personal life or mismanagement of the Knicks. And maybe there is something to the suspiciously topical, aggressively placed and vaguely defined charge Regan has made, in a lawsuit filed yesterday, alleging Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation encouraged Regan to give investigators misleading information on her former boyfriend Bernard Kerik, so as to protect the presidential aspirations of Rudy Giuliani.

But I tend to doubt any of it is too incriminating -- which is why this all wasn't hashed out behind closed doors.

There is also a good lesson here: Never hire crazy people.