Archive for the ‘Law’ Category

Obit watch: May 9, 2021.

Sunday, May 9th, 2021

Tawny Kitaen, 80s figure.

With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the music video for Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”

She once described working with Paula Abdul, who was a choreographer at the time, on the set of one video.
As Ms. Kitaen recalled, Ms. Abdul asked her what she could do, and Ms. Kitaen showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” And then, Ms. Kitaen said, she left.
“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”

She married David Coverdale, the frontman of Whitesnake, in 1989. The couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a pitcher with the Anaheim Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim). They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.

Tawny Finley, in a declaration to the Orange County Superior Court, claimed Finley used steroids among other drugs. She also claimed he bragged about being able to circumvent MLB’s testing policy. When told of his wife’s accusations, which also included heavy marijuana use and alcohol abuse, Finley replied: “I can’t believe she left out the cross-dressing.”

Ed Ward, music critic. He wrote for “Crawdaddy” and “Rolling Stone”:

Mr. Ward’s review of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” (1969) in Rolling Stone demonstrated his tough side: He called “Sun King” the album’s “biggest bomb” and its second side “a disaster.”
“They’ve been shucking us a lot lately and it’s a shame because they don’t have to,” he wrote. “Surely they have enough talent and intelligence to do better than this. Or do they?”

Mr. Ward was fired from Rolling Stone after a few months (he didn’t get along with Jann Wenner, the publisher), then became the West Coast correspondent for the rock magazine Creem, a post he held for most of the 1970s. He left in 1979 to write about the thriving music scene in Austin as a music critic at The American-Statesman.
“Ed brought a reputation to Austin as an unflinching critic — Rolling Stone had a lot of clout — and he was not diplomatic in his writing,” said his friend and fellow writer Joe Nick Patoski, who described Mr. Ward as cantankerous and difficult. “Early on, there was a reaction to some of the things he wrote and it started a ‘Dump Ed Ward’ movement that had bumper stickers and T shirts.”

Over the next decade, Mr. Ward was a music and food critic (sometimes, while he was still at The American-Statesman, under the pseudonym Petaluma Pete) for the alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle; one of three authors of “Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll” (1986), in which he focused on the 1950s; and, in 1987, one of several founders of the South by Southwest music, film and technology festival in Austin.

He returned to Austin in 2013 and set to work on “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963,” which was published in 2016. A second volume, taking the music’s history up to 1977, was published in 2019. But his publisher declined to publish a third one because the second book’s sales had not been as good the first one’s.

Ernest Angley, televangelist. Or, as I liked to call him, “the man who took over Rex Humbard’s soup kitchen“.

These last two by way of Lawrence: George Jung, cocaine smuggler.

Japanese composer Shunsuke Kikuchi. Among his credits: “Dragon Ball”, “Dragon Ball Z”, and several “Gamera” films.

Well!

Friday, May 7th, 2021

A federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of a former U.S. representative from Florida who had been accused of running a sham charity and had served time in prison, with the judges finding that a juror had been wrongfully dismissed for saying that the Holy Spirit had told him that the former congresswoman was innocent.

Previous coverage of Corrine Brown.

More:

But the court’s majority found on Thursday that the judge who had presided over Ms. Brown’s case in U.S. District Court in Jacksonville had violated her constitutional right to a unanimous jury verdict when he removed a juror and replaced him with an alternate during the panel’s deliberations.
Shortly after deliberations had begun, the juror told the other members of the jury he had received divine guidance, prompting another juror to bring his comments to the attention of Judge Timothy Corrigan.
In a majority opinion, the appeals court wrote that Judge Corrigan had not had cause to dismiss the unidentified juror, known as Juror No. 13, whom he had questioned about the role of his faith in deliberations.
“We ask whether Juror No. 13’s religious statements amounted to proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he could not render a verdict based solely on the evidence and the law, thereby disqualifying him, despite substantial evidence that he was fulfilling the duty he had sworn to render,” the court’s majority wrote. “They did not.”

The decision was 7-4.

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 400

Wednesday, May 5th, 2021

This popped up in my feed, and you know I had to post it here: “TRS-80 Color Computer: Radio Shack’s $399 Micro from 1980!”

It me. Mine had 4K of memory: not 4 GB, or 4 MB, but 4,096 8-bit bytes of memory, and used cassette tape for storage.

Bonus #1: I’m marginal about using this one, but it calls back to an earlier blog entry: “The Norco Shootout, 40 Years Later”.

Not officially part of the content here, but: the “Behind the Badge” channel posted the Norco documentary in one (54 minute) chunk. I linked to that in my previous Norco post, but that version divides the video up into three chunks.

Bonus #2: Here’s something we hope you really like (especially you, RoadRich): a video on “Use of Force” from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC).

Bonus #3: This is short, but I thought it was worth putting up here. Simon Sinek on “The Most Toxic Person In The Workplace”.

Quick update from the legal beat.

Friday, April 30th, 2021

Five people have been arrested on charges related to the shooting of Lady Gaga’s dog walker.

Three of them were actually involved in the robbery, according to police:

Detectives do not believe the men were targeting the dog walker because of the dogs’ owner, the police said. Evidence, however, suggests that the men knew that the dog breed was valuable and that this was the motivation for the robbery, according to the police.

The other two are charged as accessories after the fact. One of them is the woman who returned the dogs.

The fark?!

Wednesday, April 28th, 2021

Greg Newman, the elected DA for Henderson, Polk and Transylvania counties in North Carolina, has been removed from office.

…Newman engaged in “willful misconduct in office” and “conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice which brings the office into disrepute,” under N.C. General Statute 7A-66.
The decision was made nearly two weeks after a three-day removal hearing April 12-14 in Henderson County Superior Court.

The term “willful misconduct in office” has been defined as “the improper or wrongful use of the power of his office by a judge acting intentionally, or with gross unconcern for his conduct, and generally in bad faith,” Ervin wrote in his 30-page order.
“Conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice,” is defined as “conduct which a judge undertakes in good faith but which nevertheless would appear to an objective observer to be not only unjudicial conduct but conduct prejudicial to public esteem for the judicial office,” Ervin wrote in his order, citing multiple instances presented in the hearing with which he agreed.

The process was started by a group of victims who felt ex-DA Newman wasn’t taking child rape and murder cases seriously:

Peggy McDowell filed the G.S. 7A-66 affidavit without a lawyer, but she was supported by more than a dozen families who said they were seeking justice on their own because Newman had been acting out of self-interest rather than in the best interest of the public.
One was her daughter, Joanne McDowell, a former UNC law student, who now lives in Canada. Joanne McDowell claimed she had to flee the country to protect her child from sexual abuse by his father and four years later was charged by Newman with felony child abduction, which she calls a “vindictive charge.”
“Newman’s expulsion proves that endemic corruption plagues North Carolina’s legal system,” McDowell said. “For years, Newman’s victims begged for relief from the N.C. Attorney General, N.C. State Bar, and N.C. Court of Appeals, but these institutions repeatedly protected the wrong people. Now that ongoing harm has been established, N.C. must assist Newman’s victims and investigate systemic corruption.”
Valerie Owenby, now 22 and living out of state, also supported the removal petition and was a witness at the hearing. She claims she had been raped from ages 5-12 by a Hendersonville neighbor, James Sapp, but Newman pleaded down the felony to a misdemeanor in 2015 without notifying her or her parents and without letting her face the accused in court.

Newman is the third DA to be removed from office in North Carolina. (The other two were Jerry Spivey in 1995, and Tracy Cline in 2012. Mike Nifong was disbarred in 2007, and then resigned, so he technically doesn’t count here.)

(Hattip to President Dawg.)

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 388

Friday, April 23rd, 2021

Two for today. Our first one is lower quality because it is vintage, but fits in with an ongoing theme.

This is a training film from the San Diego Police Department, made sometime in the late 1940s according to the notes.

To make up for the low quality of the previous video, here’s a much higher quality bit of history, also totally unrelated to the po-lice.

“Oil Men: Tales From the South Texas Oil Patch”.

Yeah, it is about an hour long, which is why I waited to post this until closer to the weekend.

Obit watch: April 15, 2021.

Thursday, April 15th, 2021

Frank Jacobs, one of the old time “Mad” magazine guys.

Working with artists like Mort Drucker (who died last year), George Woodbridge and Gerry Gersten, Mr. Jacobs parodied movie musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof” (which he turned into a sendup of suburbia in “Antenna on the Roof”); critiqued the policies of President Ronald Reagan in a line-by-line satire of Poe’s “The Raven”; wrote obituaries of comic-strip characters like the hapless office worker Dilbert (who suffocated from a lack of ventilation in his cubicle) and the working-class layabout Andy Capp (whose death was caused by a drunken driver); and devised Christmas carols for dysfunctional families.

A fan of musical theater, Mr. Jacobs teamed with Mr. Drucker to turn “West Side Story” into “East Side Story,” a musical battle at the United Nations between gangs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet premier (and gang leader) Nikita Khrushchev sang:

When you’re a Red
You’re a Red all the way
From your first Party purge
To your last power play!
When you’re a Red,
You’ve got agents galore;
You give prizes for peace
While they stir up a war.

John Naisbitt, Megatrends guy.

Finally, Burt Pugach died on Christmas Eve last year, though his death was not widely reported until now.

I wrote a little about this case when his wife died, but that was a long time ago. In brief: Mr. Pugach was married, and carrying on an affair with Linda Riss. She found out he was married and broke it off. He wasn’t having any of that and continued to pursue her.

Finally, he hired thugs – he claims to “beat her up”. The thugs threw lye in her face and left her blind. Mr. Pugach was disbarred, his wife divorced him, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, released after 14 years…

…and after being released, he married Linda Riss, and they stayed married until her death in 2013.

Mr. Pugach left a legacy of recriminations and legal challenges over changes in his will that left a majority of his $18 million in assets to his caregiver. The latest version of the will disinherited several friends and reduced a planned bequest to the foundation for the visually impaired that he had established to honor his wife, Linda Riss Pugach, who died in 2013.
His assets have been frozen while the challenges are adjudicated, said Peter S. Thomas, a lawyer for the foundation, and Peter Gordon, who had drafted earlier versions of Mr. Pugach’s will. Those earlier versions had provided about $10 million for the foundation and roughly $5 million for Shamin Frawley, the 52-year-old caregiver with whom Mr. Pugach (pronounced POO-gash) had been living in Flushing since last year.

Obit watch: April 14, 2021.

Wednesday, April 14th, 2021

Ray Lambert, another Amercian badass, has passed away at 100.

A native of Alabama, Staff Sgt. Lambert was leading a unit of medics with the Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the Army’s First Division. He had taken part in the invasions of North Africa and Sicily and had already earned three Purple Hearts and two Silver Stars before his war came to an end on the morning of June 6, 1944, on Omaha Beach.
He was in the first wave of Allied forces as they crossed the English Channel and stormed German defenses strung along the coast of northern France, beginning the long offensive that would culminate in Germany’s defeat. His brother Bill, also a medic, was with him.
In heavy surf, Ray Lambert was helping a wounded soldier when a landing craft’s ramp dropped on him, pushing him to the bottom. The water was deep as the medics scrambled off the craft.
“When we went under the water, they had barbed wire and you had to try to get through that,” Mr. Lambert said in an interview in 2019 with the American Homefront Project, a public radio effort, “and there were mines tied to that. So we had a lot of guys get tangled up. A lot of the underwater mines went off and killed some guys.”
But he made his way to the beach to tend to the wounded, amid withering fire from German bunkers above.
At one point he scanned the beach for something behind which he could safely treat the wounded. He spotted a lump of leftover German concrete, about eight feet wide and four feet high.
“It was my salvation,” he said. (A plaque installed in 2018 recognizes the concrete as “Ray’s Rock.”)
“Again and again, Ray ran back into the water,” President Trump told a crowd gathered for the ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery, on a bluff overlooking the beach. “He dragged out one man after another. He was shot through the arm. His leg was ripped open by shrapnel. His back was broken. He nearly drowned.”
As Mr. Trump spoke, Mr. Lambert sat behind him wearing a purple “D-Day Survivor” cap. At the end of his speech, the president turned to him and said, “Ray, the free world salutes you.”
Only seven of the 31 soldiers on Mr. Lambert’s landing craft survived. He and his brother, who was also badly wounded, were hospitalized in England.

Mary Ellen Moylan, early and influential ballet dancer who worked with George Balanchine. Noted here because this is one of those odd ones: she actually died almost a year ago, but her passing went unnoticed until recently.

Lee Aaker. This is a sad one. He was a child actor: he played “Rusty” on “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin”, and appeared in “Hondo” and “The Atomic City”, among other credits. His last one in IMDB was an episode of “The Lucy Show” in 1963, when he was 20.

Aaker had suffered a stroke and died April 1 near Mesa, Arizona, Paul Petersen, the former Donna Reed Show star who serves as an advocate for former child actors, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Aaker had battled drug and alcohol abuse during this life and was alone with one “surviving relative that could not help him,” Petersen said, adding that Aaker’s death certificate lists him as an “indigent decedent.”
For Petersen, it marked another sad end to the life of a Hollywood child actor. “You are around just to please everyone,” he said, “and when there’s nothing left, they are done with you.”

Lawrence sent over an obit from ZeroHedge, and the NYT now has it as breaking news: Bernie Madoff is burning in Hell.

Bad boys, bad boys…

Tuesday, April 13th, 2021

I’ve written a lot previously about the LA County Sheriff’s Department (motto: “dumber than a bag of hair“). But not in a while: I haven’t been following the LAT as much, as it is basically unreadable unless you pay for it.

This came across Hacker News, however, and is a Justice Department press release, so I can cover it here.

Marc Antrim, who used to be a LACSD deputy, was sentenced to 84 months in federal prison on Monday.

Why? He conspired to rob a marijuana warehouse.

Antrim pleaded guilty in March 2019 to a five-count information charging him with conspiracy to distribute marijuana, possession with intent to distribute marijuana, conspiracy to deprive rights under color of law, deprivation of rights under color of law, and brandishing a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime.

I love “conspiracy to deprive rights under color of law” and “deprivation of rights under color of law”. Those are two of my favorite charges in the Federal system.

More details:

During the early morning hours of October 29, 2018, Antrim and his co-conspirators dressed as armed LASD deputies and approached the warehouse in an LASD Ford Explorer. Upon arrival, Antrim flashed his LASD badge and a fake search warrant to the security guards to gain entry to the warehouse. To perpetuate the ruse that they were legitimate law enforcement officers, Antrim and two fake deputies sported LASD clothing, wore duty belts, and carried firearms. One fake deputy also visibly carried a long gun to further intimidate the guards into submission.
At the beginning of the two-hour robbery, Antrim and his co-conspirators detained the three warehouse security guards in the cage of the LASD Ford Explorer. Soon after the guards were detained, a fourth man arrived at the warehouse in a large rental truck, and all four men began loading marijuana into the truck.
When Los Angeles Police Department officers legitimately responded to a call for service at the warehouse during the robbery, Antrim falsely told the LAPD officers that he was an LASD narcotics deputy conducting a legitimate search. To facilitate the sham, Antrim handed his phone to one of the LAPD officers so that the police officer could speak to someone on the phone claiming to be Antrim’s LASD sergeant. The individual on the phone was not Antrim’s sergeant, and Antrim did not have a legitimate search warrant for the warehouse.

At the time of the robbery, Antrim was a patrol deputy assigned to the Temple City station, but he was not on duty, was not assigned to the department’s narcotics unit, was not a detective, and would not have had a legitimate reason to search a marijuana distribution warehouse in the City of Los Angeles.

Six other people have been convicted and sentenced, including the ever-popular “disgruntled warehouse employee” who is serving 14 years. Former deputy Antrim testified at his trial, which is one reason why he only got seven years.

The big question in my mind: when is the movie coming out, and who’s going to play former deputy Antrim?

Memo from the legal beat.

Tuesday, April 13th, 2021

Two recent stories from the Statesman that I find interesting, but haven’t sorted out yet. So they’re noted here with minimal comment.

1. The Pflugerville Police Department (Pflugerville is a small-ish suburb of Austin) hired a new chief in 2017. She left in February and got a six-figure payout (including unused sick leave and vacation time).

Did she leave because she was a Hispanic lesbian (that’s an actual statement from the article) fighting a “good old boy” system?

As an example, Robledo pointed to complaints by Alicia Fitzpatrick, a patrol officer since 2019, who accused a small group of officers in the Police Department of targeting and undermining her professional credibility to prevent her from being selected for specialized assignments.
Fitzpatrick similarly said that a good ol’ boy network dominated the department and that the network complains that female officers receive preferential treatment for promotions and are not subjected to the same disciplinary consequences as their male counterparts. She said the same “subculture” had an agenda to remove Robledo as chief, according to written reports.
In response, the city manager hired an outside investigator, the Austin Institute, to evaluate the department’s workplace culture. The institute’s December 2020 report was not made public but was recently obtained by the Statesman. The investigation confirmed that the subculture Fitzpatrick described exists within the Police Department.
“Given the voluminous amount of evidence that supports a finding of hostile work environment, gender bias and discrimination by Sgt. (Tyler) Summers, Sgt. (Richard) Thomas, Sgt. (Nathan) Hubel, Cpl. (Mark) Neff and Dispatcher (Alana) Kamp in targeting Officer Alicia Fitzpatrick … comparable misconduct, atrocious judgement, and behavior at such an unacceptable level has serious consequences in all police departments and should not be tolerated from a Sgt. of the Pflugerville Police Department,” the report said.

Or was she forced out because she was a bad leader?

Two former officers, in interviews with the Statesman, dismissed the notion that the department was unkind to anyone other than white men. Instead, they said Robledo caused the hostile work environment with her style of leadership and said she destroyed the careers of some of its longtime employees.
Reiff, who was not involved in either investigative report, said he received a dishonorable discharge after a 22-year career as an officer. In his dealings with the chief, he said, she often belittled officers and behaved with hostility toward them if they questioned policy changes, even if they were only seeking to clarify her new rules.
“I can attest to it personally when I was once working a homicide. She came into the conference room and the investigations division and told us, ‘Don’t f— this up,’” Reiff said. “You’re the chief of police. What do you think saying something like that does to everybody?”
He said the morale in the Police Department was so low and the stress so constant under Robledo that it was common for the officers to discuss how they did not feel comfortable.
“Nobody wanted to come to work. Everybody would have rather been off or was looking to get out,” Reiff said. “When she would get angry, she’d always say it was her passion coming through. But if another officer demonstrated the same type of behavior she did, it was a problem. Someone being afraid isn’t pushing someone to do better. She was a bully, and she hid behind her authority to push people around.”

2. Millie Thompson was elected as a County Court of Law judge in Hays County last fall.

Now she’s suing the other two judges.

Apparently, she wants her own court coordinator, specifically for her court, rather than court coordinators being appointed by (and answering to) the court as a whole.

The employee whom Thompson attempted to fire — Chris Perez — is one of two court administrators who wrote to human resources to report that they were victims of a hostile work environment under Thompson, according to documents the American-Statesman obtained via an open records request.
“I love my job and the people that I work for and with,” Perez wrote in the email to HR. “However, the stress of this situation — and that includes the fact the Judge Thompson’s actions have already led to the resignation of two extremely valuable employees as well as the retirement of a 30+ year veteran employee of this office — is causing me extreme anxiety.”
Closed records on personnel matters make it unclear which employees have resigned since Thompson took office.
Thompson attempted to fire Perez because of a docket scheduling issue, Perez told the Hays Free Press/News-Dispatch. Thompson missed a hearing because she was unaware of it. Perez emailed Thompson about the hearing, and it was listed on the judges’ calendar.
However, Thompson’s attorney, George Lobb, said Perez didn’t make enough attempts to communicate that schedule to her.

For what it may be worth (I’m trying to be objective and honest here) Judge Thompson is a Democrat, and the other two judges are Republican.

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 378

Tuesday, April 13th, 2021

I started out doing police training videos, but those have become thin on the ground. So when a new one shows up in my feed it is a cause for celebration.

Especially this one. I believe it is called “Out Numbered” and dates to 1968 according to the notes. Those same notes also point out that it features “Martin Milner of Adam 12 Fame”.

I want to point out that, while a lot of people knew Mr. Milner best from “Adam-12” (and I include myself in that category) he had a much broader and more interesting career beyond one cop show: “Route 66”, “Sweet Smell of Success”, both “Dragnet”s (the 1950s one and the late 1960s-early 1970s one)…

Bonus #1: totally unrelated to police work, but something I found kind of cool. This is a vintage (1969, maybe) promo film by Canadair for their CL-215 water bomber.

Bonus #2: “Testing a $600 survival tool”.

$600? At that price, not only should it include a tent, but it had better be setting up that tent for me automatically. And making me breakfast in the morning and dinner at night.

Obit watch: April 10, 2021.

Saturday, April 10th, 2021

James Hampton. He was “Hannibal Dobbs”, the bugler on “F-Troop” and knocked around movies and TV quite a bit: “The Rockford Files”, “Sling Blade”, “The Longest Yard” (the original)…

…and, yes, “Mannix”. (“Hardball”, season 8, episode 24, the very last episode.)

Ramsey Clark, attorney general under LBJ.

He went beyond lawyering. In 1972, with the war in Vietnam dragging on, Mr. Clark met with Communist officials in Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, and publicly criticized American conduct of the war. That began a pattern: In 1980, months after Iranian revolutionaries had attacked the United States Embassy in Tehran and taken Americans hostage, he went to that city with nine other Americans, in violation of a travel ban, to help resolve the crisis and participate in a conference in which he criticized the United States for having supported Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi before he was deposed.
Six years later he met with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and denounced United States airstrikes against that country.
In November 1990, as the United States prepared for the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Clark, who had criticized the American deployment of forces in the gulf, consulted with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The next year he filed a complaint with the International War Crimes Tribunal accusing President George Bush of war crimes.
In 2011, he condemned NATO’s bombing campaign against Qaddafi’s government. In 2013, he said Iran had no intention of building a nuclear bomb and denounced sanctions against that country. Later, he protested lethal attacks by unmanned American drone aircraft on other nations.

Martina Batan, NYC contemporary art dealer. But there’s a bit more to the story than that.

Her brother was murdered at 14. His death devastated Ms. Batan: the case has never been solved.

When she was 53, Ms. Batan decided to kick up the dust of her past and hired a private detective to look into the 1978 murder case. The events that transpired were documented in “Missing People,” directed by David Shapiro, who followed Ms. Batan for four years. The investigation uncovered vital new information about the murder, but it also added to her despair.

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 374

Friday, April 9th, 2021

Time for some more true crime. Or “crime” in this first case.

At the end of WWII, some of Hitler’s SS men made off with an estimated $130 million in Nazi gold.

“SS Bank Heist – Berlin 1945”.

Bonus #1: Well, this is interesting. Somebody posted a full episode of the series “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories” (with Pernell Roberts) to the ‘Tube.

“The Hijacking of TWA Flight 541”. I picked up on this because it is one part of a story I find kind of interesting. Back in 1978, a 17-year-old girl named Robin Oswald hijacked a plane. Why? She was trying to get her mother’s boyfriend, Garrett Brock Trapnell, out of the Federal prison in Marion.

Why didn’t her mom do it? Because her mom was dead: Barbara Ann Oswald tried to break Trapnell out of Marion by hijacking a helicopter. When the chopper landed in the prison yard, the pilot grabbed the gun and killed Ms. Oswald.

The whole Garrett Trapnell story is really kind of crazy. Beyond the helicopter escape, he was a bank robber, con man, aircraft hijacker…and bigamist. There’s a book about him that I’d love to find: The Fox Is Crazy, Too (no affiliate link, because Amazon prices are insane).

(And for those of you concerned about me exploiting a 17-year-old: she was tried as a juvenile and did minimal time. Robin Oswald actually appears briefly in shadow talking about Trapnell’s hold over her, and how she was a dumb kid at the time: Roberts mentions that she’d led a “productive life” since then.)

I miss this series. It was tight and informative: I find “The FBI Files” to sometimes be a little on the long side. Somebody needs to release this series on DVD, or get streaming rights.

Bonus #2: I miss the series so much, how about another episode? This one is about one of those product tampering scares from the 1980s. But there’s a twist…

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 365

Wednesday, March 31st, 2021

Man, one year of this. And I haven’t missed a day of being a lazy, shiftless blogger.

I thought today I’d do a sort of call back to the video that started it all, but from a different time – the 1980s – and a different source – the US Air Force. Even though it is an Air Force video, I consider it to be closer thematically to “Vehicle Ambush: Counterattacks”.

“Terrorism: A Survivable Threat”.

Bonus #1: “5 Police Cars Most Police Wish They Still Drove”.

Bonus #2: I’m not a huge fan of Jay Leno’s Garage, but since I’m doing cop stuff, and since I’ve written some in the past year about the California Highway Patrol, I thought I’d put this up: “Classic California Highway Patrol Cars”.

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 361

Saturday, March 27th, 2021

When I win the lottery, one of the things I want to collect is a complete run of the “Notable British Trials” series. I have a few paperbacks which contain edited versions of some of the trials, but I don’t have any complete volumes, reprint or otherwise.

One of the paperbacks I do have contains the trial of William Joyce. Students of history may know him better as “Lord Haw Haw“.

“The Story of Lord Haw Haw and his Trial”, a 2015 BBC radio documentary. Since this is radio, you could put it on as background while you do something else.

Bonus: As long as we’re talking about trials, here’s a little something from the “Timeline” folks: “The Origins of Witch Trials”, part 1:

Part 2: