from www.thesmokinggun.com – The Michigan man indicted for allegedly trying to extort nearly $700,000 from John Stamos claims that the FBI has either destroyed or lost photos showing the actor with cocaine and strippers, according to court records.

Scott Sippola, 31, contends that the purported photos were in a folder in his Marquette home when FBI agents raided the residence last December following his arrest.

However, after a subsequent inspection of evidence seized during the raid, Sippola’s lawyer reported that the “unflattering photographs” were “missing from the folder,” according to a motion filed yesterday in U.S. District Court.

An earlier Sippola motion claims that the photos showed Stamos “with cocaine” and “with strippers.” Sippola argues that the existence of the compromising photos supports his defense that he was not seeking to blackmail Stamos, but instead was making a legitimate business offer to sell the compromising images to the former star of TV’s “Full House.”

Of course, Sippola sought to arrange this supposedly legal transaction by using an alias (“Brian L”) in his e-mails to Stamos, one of which raised a concern about a proposed face-to-face meeting at a Michigan airport: “i told you there was no way I am meeting some random guy who could be a cop for all I know at an airport to get the money.”

Prosecutors contend that Sippola and codefendant Allison Coss, Sippola’s 23-year-old girlfriend, were never in possession of any “compromising”–or even “moderately embarrassing”–photos of Stamos.

Coss met Stamos in Florida in 2004, and kept in contact with the star “primarily through email,” according to investigators. Though “Brian L” claimed to have obtained compromising photos of Coss and Stamos taken in 2004, he never e-mailed the actor “any such photos…to convince him that compromising photos existed,” noted prosecutors.