Archive for the ‘Law’ Category
Headline of the day.
Friday, May 20th, 2022You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#89 in a series)
Tuesday, May 17th, 2022This is one of the oddest hyena watches I’ve ever done. One reason is that I’ve never seen someone accused of “illegal registration of a helicopter”. (As we will see, there’s slightly more to the story than that.)
The city of Anaheim sold land to the Los Angeles Angels for a new stadium. There’s already been one issue with the land sale violating California affordable housing law.
Now, the state attorney general has asked a court to put the deal on hold. Why?
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Okay, so we’ve got obstruction of justice and witness tampering, as well as bribery. I’m guessing the false statements probably involve lying to the Feds. As for the fraud:
Where does the helicopter come in?
The evidence, according to the affidavit, also showed Sidhu pursued an Arizona address to register his helicopter, despite the fact that he lived in Anaheim and based the helicopter out of Chino.
Had he registered the helicopter in California, he would have owed $15,888 in sales tax. Had he registered the helicopter in Arizona, he would have owed a $1,025 vehicle tax.
I’d tend to call that “tax fraud” myself, though I also have trouble throwing stones at someone who tries to lower their tax bill (especially in California).
It should be noted that:
- Mayor Sidhu has not actually been charged with any crimes yet, though the release of the FBI affidavit makes me think this is coming soon.
- Nobody from the Angels has actually been accused of a crime yet.
The other odd aspect of this story is that I got tipped off to it by Field of Schemes. Neil deMause is a little more to the left than I’d like, but we find common ground in being opposed to giving tax dollars to sports franchises. This is the first actual political corruption story I’ve ever picked up from him, so take a bow, Mr. deMause.
Edited to add 5/18: Well, we have an actual indictment. But not against Mayor Sidhu: against Todd Ament, the former head of the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce.
According to federal officials, Ament – with the assistance of an unnamed political consultant who federal officials describe as a partner at a national public relations firm – devised a scheme to launder proceeds intended for the Chamber through the PR firm into Ament’s bank account, authorities say.
Federal officials say Ament and the PR consultant defrauded a cannabis company that believed it was paying $225,000 for a task force that would craft favorable legislation regarding cannabis.
The way I’m reading this, the charges against Mr. Ament aren’t directly related to Mayor Sidhu or the land deal: but the Feds had Mr. Ament nailed on those charges, and used them as leverage to flip Mr. Ament, who is strongly believed (based on poor document redaction) to be “Cooperating Witness #2” in the Sidhu affidavit.
Obit watch: May 13, 2022.
Friday, May 13th, 2022Fred Ward. Damn.
Credits include the titular character in “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins”, “Sgt. Hoke Moseley” in “Miami Blues”, “Quincy M.E.”, “Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann”, “Tremors”, “The Right Stuff”, and “Det. Harry Philip Lovecraft” in “Cast A Deadly Spell”.
Bruce MacVittie. Other credits include “Waterfront”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Spenser: For Hire” and “The Equalizer”.
Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, head of state of the U.A.E. As always, don’t look to me for geo-political takes, as I know nothing.
I have not found a good obit yet, but Randy Weaver apparently passed away. Here’s Reason‘s take.
That sniper was Lon Horiuchi. Lon Horiuchi murdered Vicki Weaver.
The RRTF report to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) of June 1994 stated unequivocally in conclusion (in its executive summary) that the rules that allowed the second shot to have been made did not satisfy constitutional standards for legal use of deadly force. The 1996 report of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information, Arlen Specter [R-PA], chair, concurred, with Senator Dianne Feinstein [D-CA] dissenting. The RRTF report said that the lack of a request by the marshals to the Weavers to surrender was “inexcusable.” Harris and the two Weavers were not believed to be an imminent threat (since they were reported as running for cover without returning fire).
The later Justice task force criticized Horiuchi for firing through the door, when he did not know if anyone was on the other side of it. While there is a dispute as to who approved the rules of engagement which Horiuchi followed, the task force condemned the rules of engagement that allowed shots to be fired without a request for surrender.
Obit watch: May 3, 2022.
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022I know this sounds like the setup to a joke, but it isn’t: Ric Parnell has passed away.
Mr. Parnell was perhaps best known as “Mick Shrimpton”, one of Spinal Tap’s many drummers.
Mr. Birney’s theater career began in earnest in 1965, when he won the Barter Theater Award, enabling him to spend a season acting in shows at the prestigious Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va. He moved on to the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, and in 1967 he played Antipholus of Syracuse in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of “A Comedy of Errors.”
Mr. Birney made his Broadway debut two years later in Molière’s “The Miser.” And in 1971 he starred in a Broadway production of J.M. Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Mr. Birney played Christy Mahon, who enters an Irish pub in the early 1900s telling a story about killing his father.
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He also did a lot of TV work, including a recurring role on the first season of “St. Elsewhere”. Credits other than “Bridget Loves Bernie” include one of the spin-offs of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s, “FBI: The Untold Stories”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, Serpico on the “Serpico” TV series, “McMillan & Wife”, and “The F.B.I.”
Ron Galella, photographer and historical footnote. He was one of the early “paparazzi” – indeed, it seems to me that he was one before the term came into common use.
He was perhaps most famous for relentlessly photographing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Mrs. Onassis waged a running court battle with him throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, testifying in one court hearing that he had made her life “intolerable, almost unlivable, with his constant surveillance.” Mr. Galella in turn claimed the right to earn a living by taking pictures of famous people in public places.
In 1972, a judge ordered him to keep 25 feet away from Mrs. Onassis and 30 feet away from her children. A decade later, facing jail time for violating the order — hundreds of times — Mr. Galella agreed never to take another picture of them. And he never did.
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Obit watch: May 2, 2022.
Monday, May 2nd, 2022It was a busy weekend, so I’m playing catch-up on a lot of stuff here.
For the record: Naomi Judd. THR.
Klaus Schulze, musician.
Jacques Perrin, French actor. Credits include “Z”, “Cinema Paradiso”, and “The Young Girls of Rochefort”.
Neal Adams, comics guy.
During his Batman run, Adams and writer Dennis O’Neil brought a revolutionary change to the hero and the comics, delivering realism, kineticism and a sense of menace to their storytelling in the wake of the campy Adam West-starring ’60s ABC series and years of the hero being aimed at kiddie readers.
He created new villains for the rogue’s gallery — the Man-Bat and Ra’s al Ghul as well as the latter’s daughter, Talia, who became Batman’s lover. The father and daughter, played by Liam Neeson and Marion Cotillard, were key characters in the trilogy of Batman movies directed by Christopher Nolan.
Joanna Barnes. Beyond “Parent Trap” and “Auntie Mame”, she had a fair number of 70s TV credits, including “The Name of the Game”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “McCloud” (and, interestingly, “Cool Million”, a short-lived show in the “Mystery Movie” wheel), “Quincy M.E.”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Fear I to Fall“, season 2, episode 12.)
Jossara Jinaro. Credits other than “ER” include “Doctor Who: Alternate Empire” and “The Devil’s Rejects”.
Rachelle Zylberberg, aka “Régine“, disco entrepreneur. At one point, she supposedly owned 23 clubs. (“Some of her clubs, she explained, were franchises owned by local entrepreneurs who paid up to $500,000 and gave her cuts of the action to use her name.”)
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Saluting Bastille Day in New York, the patriots included Gov. Hugh L. Carey, Ethel Kennedy, Margaux Hemingway, Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner (at the time, the chairman of the United States Bicentennial Commission), and Senator George S. McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate.
“If anyone had second thoughts about celebrating an event that theoretically ended the privileged class, in a room some 40 times as crowded as the Bastille dungeon on that fateful day, no one made them audible,” The New York Times reported. “To be fair, it was somewhat difficult to make anything other than isolated words audible.”
Kathy Boudin is burning in Hell. Peter Paige, Edward J. O’Grady, and Waverly L. Brown were unavailable for comment.
Department of Dumber Than a Bag of Hair.
Wednesday, April 27th, 2022Oh, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Don’t ever change.
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Detailing an ongoing criminal probe of the leak, Villanueva displayed a poster with large photographs of Tchekmedyian, his political rival Eli Vera and sheriff’s Inspector General Max Huntsman with arrows pointing from the two men to the reporter.
“The three individuals that we want to know a lot about,” Villanueva said. “These three people have some important questions to answer.”
Villanueva exhibited a list of possible felonies under investigation, including conspiracy, burglary and unauthorized use of a database. When pressed by reporters on whether he was investigating Tchekmedyian specifically, the sheriff replied, “All parties to the act are subjects of the investigation.”
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At 6:46 p.m., Villanueva issued a statement reacting to what he called an “incredible frenzy of misinformation being circulated.”
“I must clarify at no time today did I state an L.A. Times reporter was a suspect in a criminal investigation,” he said. “We have no interest in pursuing, nor are we pursuing, criminal charges against any reporters.”
All of this is over a video that got leaked, showing a deputy kneeling on an inmate’s head for three minutes.
Obit watch: April 23, 2022.
Saturday, April 23rd, 2022Over at his place, Murray Newman has put up a really nice obit for his friend and mentor Gil Schultz. I encourage you to click over and read it.
David Carter, chief of police for the University of Texas Police Department. Before that, he was with APD for 28 years, reaching the rank of chief of staff.
Mikhail Vasenkov, Commie.
When they were arrested, Mr. Vasenkov and his wife, Vicky Pelaez, a journalist, had been living undercover in a Soviet-owned two-story brick and stucco house in suburban Yonkers, N.Y., since immigrating from her native Peru in 1985.
They and eight others, part of a network of so-called illegals, were rounded up in a multiyear F.B.I. investigation, called Operation Ghost Stories, and pleaded guilty to failing to register as agents of a foreign government. They were then deported, flown to Europe on July 9, 2010, and swapped for four Russians who had been imprisoned in Moscow on charges of spying for the United States and Britain.
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When the spies were rounded up, the F.B.I. said that while “their intent from the start was serious, well-funded by the S.V.R.” — the Soviet intelligence service — “and far-ranging,” they “never got their hands on any classified documents.”
Whether for the benefit of eavesdroppers or because he was getting paid regardless, Mr. Vasenkov was recorded by federal agents telling his wife matter-of-factly that his Soviet handlers “say my information is of no value,” adding, “If they don’t like what I tell them, too bad.”
Cynthia Albritton. She was better known as “Plaster Caster”, and that’s all I’m going to say. Those of you unfamiliar with the whole “plaster caster” thing can click over to the obit for the details.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#88 in a series)
Wednesday, April 13th, 2022South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was impeached yesterday.
That doesn’t mean he’s out of office, just that he’s going to an impeachment trial in the state Senate.
The impeachment is tied to a traffic accident in 2020.
…he initially told authorities he thought he had struck a deer or another large animal.
He actually hit a man, Joseph Boever, who died.
Ravnsborg, who took office in 2019, initially told aides and a 911 dispatcher he did not know what he hit on a rural highway as he was returning home from a Republican dinner in September 2020. He went back to the scene the next day and found the body of 55-year-old Boever, who had been walking on the highway’s shoulder.
The Highway Patrol concluded that Ravnsborg’s car crossed completely onto the highway shoulder before hitting Boever, and criminal investigators said later that they didn’t believe some of Ravnsborg’s statements.
Ravnsborg pled to two traffic related misdemeanors in the accident, but apparently there are a lot of people who don’t believe his story. Including Governor Kristi Noem, who is also a Republican: Ravnsborg claims she’s out to get him because he’s been investigating her.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#87 in a series)
Tuesday, April 12th, 2022Brian A. Benjamin, the lieutenant governor of the state of New York, has been indicted on federal bribery charges.
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In a grand jury indictment last November, prosecutors said that Mr. Migdol began to steer thousands of dollars worth of fraudulent contributions to Mr. Benjamin in October 2019, just a month after the state senator filed to run for comptroller. They accused him of making straw donations in the name of individuals, including his 2-year-old grandchild, who did not consent to them, and of reimbursing others for the cost of their contributions.
At the time, the prosecutors did not comment on Mr. Migdol’s motive, or explicitly name Mr. Benjamin. But they said his scheme was designed to help the candidate tap into New York City’s generous public campaign matching funds program and secure him tens of thousands of dollars in additional campaign cash.
Edited to add: Well, that was fast. Mr. Benjamin is now the former lieutenant governor.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#86 in a series)
Monday, April 11th, 2022In haste, for two reasons. One is that I have other things to blog.
The three people charged are Chief of Staff Alex Triantaphyllis, Wallis Nader, and Aaron Dunn. The charges are related to a “COVID-19 communication contract” which…
My second reason for blogging in haste is: Lawrence is on this story like flies on a severed cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation. You should really go over to his site for coverage on this, especially since he’s linking to more local sources.
Obit watch: April 8, 2022.
Friday, April 8th, 2022Jimmy Wang Yu, martial arts movie guy.
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Another notable Wang film from this period was Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976), which Quentin Tarantino would rank as one of his favorite films and that would later influence RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists.
By the 1980s, Wang’s career began to slow down, and he was better known for the scandals in his private life. There were reports of domestic abuse, continued reports of his alleged links to Triads and in Taiwan, he was charged with murder in 1981, but the charges were dropped due to a lack of evidence.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#85 in a series)
Friday, April 8th, 2022I missed this story until Reason covered it.
The ex-police chief of San Angelo, Texas, was convicted of “receipt of a bribe by an agent of an organization receiving federal funds” and three counts of “honest services mail fraud”.
A police chief – even an ex-chief – being convicted of bribery and “honest services” fraud is noteworthy enough. But this crosses over into a whole new level of weird.
That’s not the weird part. The weird part: Dailey-Wells Communications had contracted with the former chief’s Earth, Wind, and Fire cover band to play at their corporate events.
No, you are not having a stroke. Yes, you read that right: the police chief’s Earth, Wind, and Fire cover band.
This appears to be the band’s Facebook page, but it hasn’t been updated since August of 2020. The website seems to be defunct.
Obit watch: April 7, 2022.
Thursday, April 7th, 2022A frequent commentator on television and radio, as well as a prolific writer, Mr. Boehlert never shied away from searing critiques of what he saw as bias in the mainstream press and the circular impact of media on politics.
After more than a decade as a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media monitoring group, Mr. Boehlert had in recent years started his own newsletter, Press Run, as a vehicle for his commentary.
According to reports, he was hit by a train while bicycling.
Justice John Michalski, “an acting justice of the [New York] State Supreme Court”.
But last month, Justice Michalski came under renewed scrutiny, and his cases were once again reassigned, after federal and state investigators raided his home. He had not been charged with any crime, but he had drawn the authorities’ attention because of his ties to Peter Gerace Jr., the owner of a strip club in Cheektowaga, another Buffalo suburb.
Mr. Gerace was charged in federal court in Florida last year with sex trafficking, drug distribution and bribery of a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent. He denies the charges, and the case has since been transferred to the Western District of New York.
The former agent, Joseph Bongiovanni, has been charged with bribery, obstruction and conspiracy. An indictment detailing the charges against the two men says that Mr. Bongiovanni’s associates included people “he believed to be members of, connected to or associated with” organized crime.
Another man identified in the indictment as having links to organized crime is Michael Masecchia, a longtime Buffalo schoolteacher now facing up to life in prison after pleading guilty to gun and drug charges.
According to reports, the judge committed suicide. He had tried to kill himself last year on the same day Mr. Gerace was indicted.
Rae Allen, actress. Other credits include “Lou Grant”, “Soap”, and “The Untouchables”.
Historical note, NOT suitable for use in schools.
Monday, April 4th, 2022This post is strictly in the interest of history. I am not posting this for any prurient reasons: it just seems like an appropriate bit of history, especially since I recently mentioned Leslie Van Houten.
To be clear, these are not post mortem photos: they were taken when Ms. Tate was 21. She was 26 when the Manson family murdered her.
Cabrejas, 46, had been searching for camera equipment to photograph a solar eclipse when she came across the pics.
“They had been sitting in our garage for years until I came across them cleaning his stuff,” the West Los Angeles native told SWNS.
She added that the photos were “totally a casual thing, from before she was even famous.” Tate was just starting to build her career at the time and was going to a plethora of auditions.
I am, of course, in the interest of respecting copyright and intellectual property, not reproducing the photos here. You can click through to the linked NY Post article if you wish to view a selection of them.
Quick note from the California legal beat.
Wednesday, March 30th, 2022Eligible for parole in California: Frederick Woods. Mr. Woods was one of three men involved in the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping.
Richard and James Schoenfeld (brothers) were paroled in 2012 and 2015 respectively.
Mr. Woods, who was 24 at the time of the kidnapping, was given a sentence of seven years to life in prison. He began serving his sentence in 1978 and has been held at the California Men’s Colony, a state prison in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
The panel’s decision is subject to review by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who has 30 days to let it stand or refer the application to the full parole board. Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, cannot override the decision because Mr. Woods was not convicted of murder.
Not eligible for parole: Leslie Van Houten.