From time to time, among the peyote-driven snake-femme battles and botched Rolling Stone assignments, Hunter Thompson managed to Take Care of Bidniss when he decided his associates’ missteps had reached catastrophic levels. A source sends us proof positive of one such episode, in which Thompson takes the meat grinder to attorney George Tobia for apparently bungling negotiations with New York publishing house Simon & Schuster over the 1998 publication of “The Rum Diary”:
In another declassified communique written two days earlier, the Master of the Cannonball Sendoff informed Tobia of his fate while simultaneously filling him in on leisure plans for the day and demanding an estimate of his “exact profit expectations” from the soon-to-be-released “Fear and Loathing” film adaptation. The last graph alone speaks volumes about a man who knew he had the juice to disregard formality and spent the bulk of his career doing just that:
For his part, Tobia seemingly made good with Thompson after the dustup: At present, the Boston lawyer continues to represent HST’s estate — 19 years after the two met while Tobia was handling the estate of another writer who rejected conformity in savage fashion: Jack Kerouac.
