Has NBC no shame?

Just weeks after featuring a child molester as one of the participants in its popular late-night poker show “Poker After Dark,” the American television network NBC this week is featuring a drug trafficker on the same program!

What next, a one-on-one poker showdown on NBC between Ronald Reagan assassin John Hinkley and John Lennon assassin Mark Chapman?

With serial killer David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz as the dealer?

All this week, NBC is airing on “Poker After Dark” a special made-for-TV tournament among six top poker pros: Phil “Poker Brat” Hellmuth Jr., Daniel “Kid Poker” Negreanu, Jen Harman, Ken Light, Scotty Nguyen and Mike “The Mouth” Matusow.

The winner of the tourney receives $120,000.

The inclusion of Matusow on the program is shocking, not just because he recently served six months in prison for drug trafficking for selling coke and pills to an undercover cop, but because earlier this year, “Poker After Dark” ran a week of shows featuring Shahram Sheikhan, a convicted child molester known as the “Poker Pervert” who served nine months in prison for sexually molesting two underage children.

After Sheikhan appeared on the show in January, there was outrage in the poker community, and even some mainstream national magazines in the USA blasted NBC for giving the poker-playing pedophile airtime on national television.

The controversy even resulted in the sleazy Sheikhan being disinvited from a charity poker tournament in California run by Los Angeles County sheriffs.

So with all that outcry, what does NBC do?

It puts another social misfit/ex-con/degenerate/blight on society on the program, showing once again it doesn’t know–or care–about the sleazy pasts of its television performers.

And also that it doesn’t give a damn about giving another black eye to a game–poker–that already carries more baggage than a team of hotel bellhops.

Poker pro Ernest Scherer III of California is currently the police’s prime suspect in the recent murder of his parents.

If he’s convicted, don’t bet against NBC trying to get him on the show next.

(E-mail Tom Somach at tomsomach@yahoo.com.)