‘Pacman’ charged in LV

NFL standout Adam "Pacman" Jones and two associates have until midday Friday to turn themselves in on charges stemming from a February strip club brawl that led to gunfire, Las Vegas police said.

"If they don't surrender by Friday noon, we will hunt them down," Capt. James Dillon said Wednesday after prosecutors charged the trio in the melee at Minxx.

The district attorney's office filed two counts of felony coercion against the 23-year-old Tennessee Titans cornerback, who is serving a one-year league suspension for his many run-ins with the law around the country. Each count carries a one- to six-year prison sentence.

Prosecutors also charged Jones bodyguard Robert Reid, 37, with one count of coercion and Jones associate Sadia Morrison, 25, with five felonies, including coercion and battery with a deadly weapon.

The three were charged with coercion because they used threat or force to prevent the club's bouncers from doing their jobs, authorities said.

Prosecutors expected a judge to approve arrest warrants by today.

Neither Jones' lawyer, Robert Langford, nor his agent, Michael Huyghue, returned calls for comment.

Also on Wednesday police released photos of a man who was in Minxx before the shooting. Dillon called the man a "person of interest."

Investigators have yet to identify the gunman who opened fire outside the club after bouncers broke up the brawl and moved everyone outside. Three people, patron Natalie Jones and club employees Aaron Cudworth and Tom Urbanski, were shot. Urbanski, a Las Vegas real estate agent moonlighting at the club to put his wife through law school, was paralyzed from the waist down.

Trouble at the club, 4636 Wynn Road, started in the early morning hours of Feb. 19 at the tail end of NBA All-Star weekend. Jones and his entourage of about six others came in about 2:30 a.m. and sat at a private booth, according to a police report.

Jones, who had a plastic garbage bag filled with cash, tossed money into the air toward the strippers, which is known as "making it rain." Police later recovered more than $81,000 from the strip show promoter who fled the club with the bag.

When a stripper started grabbing the cash, she got into a fight with another stripper who knew Jones and believed the money was hers, the report said. Jones jumped into the fight, grabbing the second stripper by the hair and punching her in the face two or three times, the report said.

Cudworth grabbed Jones in a bear hug from behind and tried to calm him while club manager George Petraski asked Jones to follow him to the front door. Jones started walking toward the door but stopped, jumped on the stage and said he wouldn't leave, the report said.

He turned to Cudworth and said, "I'm gonna (expletive) kill ya. ... Matter of fact, all you's are gonna get it," before taking a swing at Cudworth, the report said.

Cudworth grabbed Jones again. While they wrestled, the 400-pound Reid lunged at them and knocked them to the ground, the report said. Petraski escorted Reid from the club while Cudworth and Jones continued fighting. During the ongoing scuffle, Jones bit Cudworth on the ankle and Morrison hit him over the head with a champagne bottle, police said.

When four bouncers tried to throw Morrison out, she attacked them with a chair, bit one on the arm and punched another in the face before they got her outside, the report said. She returned holding a stanchion like a battering ram but was again thrown out, the report said.

Meanwhile, Cudworth sent Jones out a back door. Jones told the bouncer he would shoot him, before huddling with several members of his entourage in a garbage area, the report said. When the group emerged, Jones pretended to have a gun in his waistband while another man told Cudworth he was "dead," the report said.

A cocktail waitress overheard one man tell Jones, "Let's smoke this fool," the report said.

Minutes later the gunman walked to the front of the club and opened fire.

Police questioned Jones once after the shooting, but he hasn't cooperated with the investigation since, police said. Detectives submitted the case to prosecutors in late March, but prosecutors asked for more investigation.

"We wanted to make sure we have all of our i's dotted and t's crossed in this case," District Attorney David Roger said.

Police resubmitted the case last week.

Investigators believe Jones was involved in another Las Vegas strip club altercation a few days before the Minxx shooting, and associates of Jones were involved in a shooting outside an Atlanta-area strip club earlier this week, Georgia authorities said.

Las Vegas police were cooperating with Georgia authorities looking for any connection between the shooting there and the Minxx incident, Roger said.