Timothy Rankin, an Albany, NY, bar owner, was recently charged with hiring a man to beat up a restaurant critic for the local paper, according to an Associated Press story. The newspaper, the Albany Times Union, had previously reported on the bar owner's troubles with the law, including failure to pay taxes, allowing underaged drinking and running up parking tickets.
To be fair, the stories were written by other reporters for the paper, so why Steve Barnes, the staff food writer, was the one singled out for retribution is unclear. Just Desserts assumes that if Rankin really was behind the attack, he simply went after the top-of-mind editorial enemy on the paper. The AP doesn't report on whether Barnes had ever given Rankin's joint a bad review, but does it really matter? Just on general principle alone, it probably seemed like the right thing to do…