Archive for the ‘Law’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Random notes: March 11, 2020.

Wednesday, March 11th, 2020

Great and good FOTB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl sent us a note yesterday: Hookers & Blow are touring.

Or is it “Hookers and Blow is touring”? “Hookers and Blow” is a singular collective noun, so it seems like it should be “is”, but somehow that rings false to my ear.

ANYWAY, “Hookers & Blow” is a band. Specifically, “the now legendary project formed by long time Guns N’ Roses keyboardist Dizzy Reed and Quiet Riot guitarist Alex Grossi”. Sadly, their tour is not taking them out of California: but they do have a new single coming out on March 23rd, which I’ve already pre-ordered.

Thanks, Karl! Looking forward to seeing you on the 29th!

In related news: 23 years for Harvey “I’m going to give the NRA my full attention” Weinstein. This is actually buried pretty far down the NYT front page: though, to be fair, the stuff above it is all corona virus or election news.

Interestingly:

In the days following news reports about how he used his power to sexually assault women, Harvey Weinstein made a desperate plea for help in emails to two dozen influential people, including the billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos.

Posted in Law, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 4, 2020.

Wednesday, March 4th, 2020

I’m dropping into the obscure here, but I have reasons.

Rafael Cancel Miranda. Mr. Miranda was one of the four men who shot up the US Capital on March 1, 1954.

Mr. Cancel Miranda, a hero to many who favor independence for Puerto Rico but a terrorist to many others, was 23 when he and three companions attacked the Capitol, spraying gunfire from the gallery into the House chamber and injuring five congressmen as 243 House members were debating a bill involving migrant workers from Mexico.
The four — the others were Lolita Lebrón, Irvin Flores Rodríguez and Andres Figueroa Cordero — were not satisfied with the agreement that had made Puerto Rico a United States commonwealth in 1952, believing that it was a sham and that the island essentially remained an occupied colony.
Ms. Lebrón waved a Puerto Rican flag briefly and shouted about independence as the attack unfolded and House members sought cover. The four were overpowered and arrested.
Although the scene was chaotic, Mr. Cancel Miranda, at least, was convinced that most of those injured “got hurt by my gun,” as he put it when he was freed in 1979.
“No congressman in particular was the target,” he said then. “It was just an effort to shoot up the place. If we aimed to kill, believe me, that would have happened.”

All four men served “lengthy prison sentences”, at least by NYT standards. Wikipedia says that Mr. Miranda was sentenced to 85 years.

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentence of Mr. Figueroa Cordero, who had cancer and died in 1979. President Carter freed the other three in 1979, though they had never sought clemency, considering themselves political prisoners.

Mr. Miranda was the last surviving member of the quartet.

I’ve been going back and forth about this one, and came down on the side of inclusion. Not because this person was famous, but because this is another example of the kind of thing the paper of record does well: the obit for the person who was important to the community in some way, without necessarily being famous.

In this case, Matvey “Falafel” Natanzon, backgammon player.

His illness prematurely ended a roller-coaster career during which he went from sleeping under a bench in Washington Square Park, where he lived for nearly six months after college, to mastering backgammon, a board game that combines rolls of the dice with strategic checker moves.

…

In his short pants, sweatshirt and knitted wool hat, Mr. Natanzon could look like an amiable loser to his easy marks, as he baited them with his nonstop babble and swaggering hubris.
He would graduate to winning (and, on rarer occasions, losing) tens of thousands of dollars in as little as an hour; achieve celebrity status in a game that had migrated from black-tie casino tables to cheesy hotel ballrooms, where baseball caps worn backward were de rigeur; and be named the top player in an unofficial ranking by his peers, known as the Giants of Backgammon.
“Falafel is, without a doubt, backgammon’s No. 1 commentator and is probably its best-known celebrity,” Joe Russell, the chairman of the backgammon federation’s board, said when he awarded Mr. Natanzon the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. “He has been in the top 10 of the Giants list seven straight times, and has been voted No. 1 twice and No. 2 once.”

He was 51. A brain tumor got him.

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 2, 2020.

Monday, March 2nd, 2020

I was going to make this a special true crime edition, but I got overtaken by events.

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE.

It was a time when successful, lavishly paid corporate executives were more admired than resented. Mr. Welch received a record severance payment of $417 million when he retired in 2001. Fortune magazine named him the “Manager of the Century,” and in 2000 The Financial Times named G.E. “the World’s Most Respected Company” for the third straight year.
Mr. Welch’s stardom extended beyond the business world. In a 2000 auction for the rights to his autobiography, Time Warner’s book unit won with a bid of $7.1 million, a record at the time. “Jack: Straight from the Gut,” written with John A. Byrne, was published the next year and eventually sold 10 million copies worldwide.

…

He attacked bureaucracy and made sweeping payroll cuts, creating a more entrepreneurial, if more Darwinian, corporate culture. He led the globalization of G.E.’s business, both expanding sales and manufacturing overseas. And he made G.E. far more dependent on finance, as banking and investment grew as a share of the American economy.
Mr. Welch distilled his management concepts into one-sentence nuggets. “Control your destiny, or someone else will.” “Be candid with everyone.” “Bureaucrats must be ridiculed and removed.” “If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by.”
His goal at G.E., Mr. Welch wrote in his autobiography, was to create “a company filled with self-confident entrepreneurs who would face reality every day.”

…

Mr. Welch was also attacked when he was leading G.E., especially for slashing the G.E. work force, which earned him the nickname “Neutron Jack.” But most of the second thoughts about him and his management legacy have arisen in recent years. The superstar chief executive, laser-focused on enriching shareholders, is often criticized today as a symbol of corporate greed and economic inequity.
The widely diversified corporation that Mr. Welch built is also out of favor, an idea underlined by G.E.’s precipitous decline in the last few years.
The New York Times business columnist James B. Stewart wrote in 2017, “Hardly anyone considers Mr. Welch a management role model anymore, and the conglomerate model he championed at G.E. — that with strict discipline, you could successfully manage any business as long as your market share was first or second — has been thoroughly discredited, at least in the United States.”

Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s.

Linda Wolfe, writer. She started out writing short fiction, and was clipping true crime stories to use in novel plots…

A turning point of sorts came in 1975, when twin doctors, both gynecologists, were found dead in their trash-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It turned out that Ms. Wolfe had been the patient of one of them, years before — only briefly, but that was enough to propel her to investigate the case and turn to a life of writing about crime.
“This will sound callous,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1994, but she felt lucky that she had had “the ‘good fortune’ of knowing somebody involved in the kind of story I had been clipping.”
Both doctors had been barbiturate addicts and had died not of an overdose but of the drug’s typically severe withdrawal syndrome. Ms. Wolfe, by then working at New York magazine (she worked there for 25 years as a contributing editor, writer and restaurant reviewer), wrote a journalistic account of the case, “The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists.” Her article inspired the David Cronenberg movie “Dead Ringers” (1988), which starred Jeremy Irons.

She became a prominent true crime writer.

She would go on to write several books and magazine articles that delved behind some of the nation’s most sensational headlines. Her articles included “The Professor and the Prostitute” (1983), about a Tufts University professor who bludgeoned to death the prostitute he loved, and “From a Nice Family” (1981), about a teenager in Dallas who killed his mother and his father, who was the president of Arco Oil and Gas.
One of her best-known books was “Wasted: The Preppie Murder” (1989), so called because the perpetrator, Robert E. Chambers Jr., had bounced around various elite schools and lived on the Upper East Side. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the 1986 strangulation death of Jennifer Levin in Central Park after they had had sex behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was released in 2003 after serving 15 years in prison and subsequently went back to prison on drug charges.

I read parts of The Professor and the Prostitute quite a while back: it shows up pretty frequently at Half-Price Books. I might have to grab a copy next time I’m there.

Finally, Dr. Charles Friedgood. I’d never heard of him either, but this is one of those interesting true crime stories (for multiple reasons). Dr. Friedgood was convicted of killing his wife in 1975.

While he admitted that he had injected his wife, Sophie Friedgood, 48, with a painkiller, Dr. Friedgood insisted that he had not intended to kill her. She had suffered a stroke in 1959, when she was 33, and had become an invalid.
Dr. Friedgood was convicted of second-degree murder after prosecutors proved to a jury that he had deliberately given his wife an overdose at the family’s 18-room home in Great Neck, N.Y., where they had reared their six children.
Her cause of death was recorded as a stroke, but the police grew suspicious because Dr. Friedgood had signed the death certificate himself and rushed the body out of state for immediate burial in accordance with Jewish religious custom.
Five weeks later, he was arrested at Kennedy International Airport with more than $450,000 of his wife’s cash, negotiable bonds and jewelry. Prosecutors said he had intended to fly to Europe to join his paramour, a Danish nurse who had sometimes cared for Mrs. Friedgood and with whom he had fathered two children. He had begun his affair with the nurse in the late 1960s.

He was sentenced to 25 years to life. He was released on compassionate grounds in late 2007, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He’d served 31 years and was 88 when he was released.

He lived another 11 years after being released. According to the NYT, he died in May of 2018 at the age of 99, but his death had not been reported until now.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 28, 2020.

Friday, February 28th, 2020

Freeman J. Dyson, noted physicist.

As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper — worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize — that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great achievements of modern science.
But it was as a writer and technological visionary that he gained public renown. He imagined exploring the solar system with spaceships propelled by nuclear explosions and establishing distant colonies nourished by genetically engineered plants.

…

Dr. Dyson called himself a scientific heretic and warned against the temptation of confusing mathematical abstractions with ultimate truth. Although his own early work on QED helped bring photons and electrons into a consistent framework, Dr. Dyson doubted that superstrings, or anything else, would lead to a Theory of Everything, unifying all of physics with a succinct formulation inscribable on a T-shirt. In a speech in 2000 when he accepted the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Dr. Dyson quoted Francis Bacon: “God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.”
Relishing the role of iconoclast, he confounded the scientific establishment by dismissing the consensus about the perils of man-made climate change as “tribal group-thinking.” He doubted the veracity of the climate models, and he exasperated experts with sanguine predictions they found rooted less in science than in wishfulness: Excess carbon in the air is good for plants, and global warming might forestall another ice age.
In a profile of Dr. Dyson in 2009 in The New York Times Magazine, his colleague Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate, observed, “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

He was also skeptical of the “nuclear winter” theory.

He considered himself an environmentalist. “I am a tree-hugger, in love with frogs and forests,” he wrote in 2015 in The Boston Globe. “More urgent and more real problems, such as the overfishing of the oceans and the destruction of wildlife habitat on land, are neglected, while the environmental activists waste their time and energy ranting about climate change.” That was, to say the least, a minority position.
He was religious but in an unorthodox way, believing good works to be more important than theology. “Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason,” he said in his Templeton Prize acceptance speech. “The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.”

…

Any advanced civilization, he observed in a paper published in 1960, would ultimately expand to the point where it needed all the energy its solar system could provide. The ultimate solution would be to build a shell around the sun — a Dyson sphere — to capture its output. Earthlings, he speculated in a thought experiment, might conceivably do this by dismantling Jupiter and reassembling the pieces.

He was also one of the folks behind Project Orion.

In the late 1970s Dr. Dyson turned full force to writing. Anyone with an interest in science and an appreciation for good prose is likely to have some Dysons on the shelf: “Disturbing the Universe,” “Weapons and Hope,” “Infinite in All Directions,” “The Sun, the Genome and the Internet.”
He also entered literature in a different way. He appeared in John McPhee’s book “The Curve of Binding Energy” (1974), a portrait of Ted Taylor, the nuclear scientist who led the Orion effort, and in Kenneth Brower’s “The Starship and the Canoe” (1978). In a memorable scene, Mr. Brower wrote of Dr. Dyson’s reunion with his son, George, who had turned his back on high technology to live in a treehouse in British Columbia and build a seafaring canoe. George Dyson later returned to civilization and became a historian of technology and an author. Dr. Dyson’s daughter Esther Dyson is a well-known Silicon Valley consultant.

Statement from the Institute for Advanced Study. This is a great line:

In 1956, Dyson began a three-year association with General Atomic, where he worked to design a nuclear reactor that would be inherently safe, or, as colleague Edward Teller put it, “not only idiot-proof, but PhD proof.”

I’m going to have to start using “PhD proof” more often in conversation.

This is eloquently stated, and seems like a good note to end on:

“No life is more entangled with the Institute and impossible to capture—architect of modern particle physics, free-range mathematician, advocate of space travel, astrobiology and disarmament, futurist, eternal graduate student, rebel to many preconceived ideas including his own, thoughtful essayist, all the time a wise observer of the human scene,” stated Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor. “His secret was simply saying “yes” to everything in life, till the very end. We are blessed and honored that Freeman, Imme, and their family made the Institute their home. It will be so forever.”

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Physics | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#63 in a series)

Thursday, February 27th, 2020

Catherine Pugh got three years of prison time, and three years of probation. She also has to pay $669,000 in restitution.

Baltimore Sun, which is being really obnoxious.

I’m still unable to find any “Healthy Holly” books on Amazon. There’s one copy of “Exercising Is Fun” available, at a price of $19,560.41: I’m pretty sure that’s someone (or some bot) gaming Amazon’s system, and that’s not a legit offer.

(While I’ve been keeping an eye out, since I knew she was being sentenced today, hat tip to Lawrence, who emailed me the story while I was busy picking up barbecue for the office.)

Posted in Books, Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 25, 2020.

Tuesday, February 25th, 2020

Hosni Mubarak, deposed Egyptian leader. Hat tip to Lawrence on this, and I’m going to defer to him on any geopolitical angle: I just don’t know enough about Middle Eastern affairs.

John Franzese, Mafia guy.

Prosecutors portrayed him in his prime as one of the Mafia’s top “earners,” generating many millions of dollars in loot, and as one of its most fearsome killers. In 1967, prosecutors asserted that an informer had heard Mr. Franzese boast that he had been involved in 40 or 50 underworld executions.
At his last trial, in 2011, prosecutors said a turncoat had secretly recorded him graphically describing how hit men should dismember and dispose of bodies to evade arrest. “I killed a lot of guys,” he was quoted as saying in a pretrial hearing. “You’re not talking about four, five, six, ten.”

…

His first felony conviction — on federal charges of masterminding four nationwide bank robberies — came in March 1967. Nine months later, in December 1967, he was the subject of a state trial in Queens on charges of ordering the death of a suspected government informer, whose body, with 17 stab wounds and six bullet wounds and weighted with two concrete blocks, was discovered in Jamaica Bay. He was found not guilty.
After appeals lasting three years in the bank robbery case were denied, Mr. Franzese, in 1970, began serving an indeterminate term of up to 50 years. He was paroled in 1978, but, in a series of revolving-door parole violations, he spent about 20 of the next 30 years in federal penitentiaries.

He was convicted of extortion in 2011, sentenced to eight years, and was released in 2017. In the “who’d thunk it” department (hi, Borepatch!), Mr. Franzese was 103 when he died (apparently of natural causes, though his family declined to give details).

Diana Serra Cary, also known as “Baby Peggy”. I’d never heard of her, and I apologize for the long quotes, but I think this is a sad story (though maybe with a happy ending). She was a famous child star in silent films:

Her name was Peggy-Jean Montgomery, and she was a precocious 2½-year-old in 1921 when Century Studio cast her as Baby Peggy, opposite Brownie the Wonder Dog. America soon fell in love with the chubby-cheeked little girl as she fled burning buildings, held thugs at bay with a pistol and clung to the underside of a train.
A Century fire in 1926 and decaying celluloid have left only a few of her vintage films in museum archives, in the Library of Congress and on the internet, including “Playmates” (1921), “Miles of Smiles” (1923), “Helen’s Babies” (1924) and “Captain January” (1924). But silent film aficionados say she could evoke terror, joy, pity and sorrow with the best of them, and was a good mimic, too, satirizing adult stars of the day, including Rudolph Valentino and Pola Negri in “Peg o’ the Movies” (1923).
By age 5 she had made more than 150 pictures, mostly short comedies and melodramas, for Century, Universal and Principal Pictures, and was a multimillionaire. Home was a Beverly Hills mansion near Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. A $30,000 chauffeur-driven limousine took her to work every day.

…

“I had identity problems from the time I was growing up,” Ms. Cary recalled in a 1999 interview with silentsaregolden.com. “Baby Peggy was very powerful. She was very popular. Nobody knew who I was — I mean, me. So I had this terrific personality that the whole world knew, and then I had me to deal with. So I couldn’t get my head together, and I couldn’t be me as long as I was carrying her.”
In 1925, Baby Peggy’s career crumbled. A $1.5 million contract was canceled, and she was virtually blacklisted in Hollywood after her father, a cowboy stuntman and stand-in for the Western star Tom Mix, had a bitter falling out with a studio boss over her salary. She made one last picture, “April Fool,” in 1926, and then found no more work in Hollywood. She was washed up, a 7-year-old has-been.

,,,

For several years after her film career faded, Baby Peggy performed on a grueling vaudeville circuit to support her parents in the style to which they had become accustomed. They squandered much of her $2 million fortune on hotels, luxury cars and travel. The rest was lost or embezzled by a stepgrandfather who absconded, or it evaporated in the stock market crash of 1929. The home in Beverly Hills was sold, as were the cars, jewels and other luxuries.
As the Depression deepened, the family moved to a ranch in Wyoming. Dirt poor and struggling, they pawned everything of value. A friend lent the family $300, and against Peggy’s wishes they returned to Hollywood and put her back to work, now as a teenager in the talkies. From 1932 to 1938, she appeared in eight films as an anonymous extra or in small roles credited to Peggy Montgomery.

…

After graduating, she eloped in 1938 with her first boyfriend, Gordon Ayres, a movie extra. They were divorced in 1948. She was a switchboard operator and a bookstore clerk, and then managed a gift shop in Santa Barbara. She told no one of her past, and took the name Diana Serra. In 1954, she married Bob Cary, an artist, and took his surname. They had a son, Mark. Her husband died in 2001. Besides her son, she is survived by a granddaughter, Stephanie.
The Carys settled in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he painted and she became a freelance journalist, writing magazine articles. In 1970, they moved to La Jolla, part of San Diego, and she began a new career as a film historian. Her first book, “The Hollywood Posse” (1975), was a well-received account of stunt riders in film. Her second, “Hollywood’s Children” (1978), recounted the often troubling stories of child actors.
But it was the years of work on her memoir, “Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy? The Autobiography of Hollywood’s Pioneer Child Star” (1996), that proved therapeutic and redemptive. She re-examined her life in silent films, her parents’ conduct in frittering away her fortune, the studios’ harsh working conditions and the fates of child stars who, like her, were left impoverished, emotionally scarred and largely forgotten.
In “Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood’s Legendary Child Star” (2003), she wrote about her old friend, who sued his mother and stepfather in 1938 for spending his more than $3 million in earnings on furs, diamonds, homes and expensive cars.

…

In recent years, Ms. Cary also appeared at silent film festivals, lectured, gave interviews and appeared in documentaries about her career, including Vera Iwerebor’s “Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room,” which was shown on Turner Classic Movies in 2012.

She was 101 years old, and is considered (at least by the paper of record) to have been the last surviving child star of that era. (“About a dozen other silent-era actors survive, but most were uncredited extras or ensemble players in series like the “Our Gang” pictures of the 1920s.”)

Posted in History, Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Noted for the record.

Monday, February 24th, 2020

As a now convicted felon, Harvey “I’m going to give the NRA my full attention” Weinstein will no longer be able to legally own firearms.

Apparently, though, he will be allowed to vote after he is released from prison (once he is on probation or parole). Since he hasn’t been sentenced yet, who knows when that will be: but I suspect it won’t be before the 2020 elections.

Edited to add: by way of Popehat on the Twitters, Scott Greenfield explains sentencing in New York as it relates to Harvey Weinstein:

(This is a thread. If I understand it correctly, there’s no option for him to get probation on the class B felony, and there’s a minimum term of five years.)

Posted in Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Flaming hyenas updates.

Tuesday, February 18th, 2020

A couple of quick things from the weekend that I’m just now getting around to:

Catherine Pugh’s sentencing hearing in the “Healthy Holly” scandal was last week. The government is asking for five years. Her lawyers are asking for a year and a day.

The statement of facts accompanying Pugh’s plea in November described how Pugh defrauded businesses and nonprofit organizations out of nearly $800,000.
Prosecutors said Thursday that Pugh’s “personal inventory” of Healthy Holly books never exceeded 8,216 copies. But through a “three-dimensional” scheme, they say, she was able to resell 132,116 copies for a total of $859,960. She gave another 34,846 copies away.
“Corporate book purchasers with an interest in obtaining or maintaining a government contract represented 93.6% of all Healthy Holly books or $805,000,” prosecutors said.

Also, this would kind of amuse me, if it wasn’t so sad:

Included in the sentencing memorandum is a scene from an April raid on Pugh’s home. FBI agents came to seize, among other items, her personal cellphone. Prosecutors say Pugh handed over a red, city-issued iPhone, but investigators said they wanted her personal phone, a Samsung. She told them she had left it with her sister in Philadelphia.
An agent then called the Samsung phone.
“Almost immediately, the agents heard a vibrating noise emanating from her bed. Pugh became emotional, went to the bed and began frantically searching through the blankets at the head of the bed. As she did so, agents [started] yelling for her to stop and show her hands,” prosecutors wrote.
Pugh had grabbed the phone from underneath her pillow, and the agents took it from her.

In other news, remember Mohammed Nuru, indicted San Francisco Director of Public Works? This broke over the weekend: the current mayor says she used to date him, “20 years ago”.

I wouldn’t consider that “bad” or “newsworthy” by itself, but this is: she also took “a gift” from him.

The mayor said her 18-year-old car broke down and Nuru took it to a private mechanic who fixed it up. Nuru also helped her get a rental car. Breed said the value of those favors was about $5,600.

But she claims this isn’t “a gift that she had to report under the city’s ethics laws”, even though accepting gifts from your underlings is questionable in any environment, and possibly illegal under ethics laws.

Also, and I say this without snark, having been in this position myself recently: Mayor Breed, if your 18 year old car is going to cost $5,000 to fix, maybe you need to be looking at another car instead.

Posted in California Über Alles, Cars, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 17, 2020.

Monday, February 17th, 2020

It was another busy weekend, and there were several obits that meet at the intersection of crime and death. I’m trying to tread very carefully here, and I think I’m going to put the more crime related ones after a jump.

A.E. Hotchner has passed away at 102. Interesting guy: he was a close friend of Ernest Hemingway (“…Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s widow, tried unsuccessfully to stop publication of what turned out to be Mr. Hotchner’s most famous book, “Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir” (1966), which included closely observed and painfully revealed details of the paranoia and distress that preceded Hemingway’s suicide.“) and of Paul Newman: the two men co-founded Newman’s Own.

Tony Fernandez.

Fernandez won four straight Gold Gloves with the Blue Jays in the 1980s and holds club records for career hits and games played.

He was a five time All Star player.

He was a .288 hitter with 94 homers and 844 RBIs in 2,158 big league games. He remains the last Yankees player to hit for the cycle in a home game, accomplishing the feat in 1995.
Fernandez finished with 2,276 hits, 1,057 runs, 414 doubles, 92 triples, 246 stolen bases.

He did at 57 of kidney failure.

For the hysterical record: Barbara Remington. (Previously.)

Father George Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory.

Recognized among astronomers for his research into the birth of stars and his studies of the lunar surface (an asteroid is named after him), Father Coyne was also well known for seeking to reconcile science and religion. He applauded Pope Francis for addressing the role that humans play in climate change, and he challenged alternative theories to evolution like creationism and intelligent design.
“One thing the Bible is not,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1994, “is a scientific textbook. Scripture is made up of myth, of poetry, of history. But it is simply not teaching science.”

…

During Father Coyne’s tenure, the Vatican publicly acknowledged that Galileo and Darwin might have been correct. Brother Consolmagno said it would be fair to say that Father Coyne had played a role in shifting the Vatican’s position.

…

“God in his infinite freedom,” he wrote, “continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves.”
He went further by finding fault with intelligent design.
“If they respect the results of modern science, and indeed the best of modern biblical research,” he wrote, “religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly.”
He added, “Perhaps God should be seen more as a parent or as one who speaks encouraging and sustaining words.”

He was the director from 1978 until he retired in 2006.

In the Times Magazine interview, Father Coyne was asked, “How can you describe the universe as a vast empty infinitude, largely uninhabited, and still believe in — ”
“The centrality of man in the universe?” he interjected, completing the reporter’s thought.
“There’s no doubt about it,” he went on. “To our own knowledge of ourselves, we are unique in creation because of our self-reflexivity. I can know myself knowing. I am having a conversation with you, and I can remember that conversation. To this, the Catholic Church comes along and says, ‘The reason this is true is because you have an individual soul.’”

Caroline Flack. I had never heard of her, but apparently she was the host of a British reality TV show called “Love Island”. In December, she was charged with domestic assault of her boyfriend and suspended from the show.

She was 40 years old, and apparently committed suicide.

Two previous contestants died by suicide, Sophie Gradon in 2018 and Mike Thalassitis in 2019. Their deaths stirred a debate in Britain over the ethics of reality television and the duty that broadcasters have to care for contestants.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

After the jump, the more legal related entries…

(more…)

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Today’s bulletin from Bizarro World.

Friday, February 14th, 2020

(Also, possible defensive gun use, but it is too early to be sure.)

I ran across this story in the Statesman yesterday, but I’m linking to the Dayton Daily News coverage instead, as it makes my head hurt less. (Which is a shame, as the author of the Statesman story is someone RoadRich and I met in our Citizen’s Police Academy class.)

Cutting to the chase: guy in Ohio comes home and is confronted in his driveway by his ex-wife’s current husband with a gun. Guy has an Ohio CCW permit, pulls out his own gun, and shoots current husband dead.

Ex-wife then shows up in the driveway as well, and pulls a gun on her ex-husband. Whereupon he shoots her dead too.

“I shot them, they came up and had a gun pointed at my wife’s head,” the man told the dispatcher while asking for authorities to get to his 3443 Grinnell Road home as quickly as possible.
Fischer said that about five years ago the homeowner told the sheriff’s office that he believed his ex-wife, Cheryl Sanders, was trying to hire someone to kill him. That was the only threat that the sheriff’s office received.

…

A camera system was set up in the area of the shooting, said Sheriff Gene Fischer. A phone found in Sanders’ [current husband – DB] car was reportedly receiving that video.

The whole husband/wife apparently (and allegedly) ambushing the ex-husband seems bizarre enough to me. The local spin on this Ohio story is that current husband and wife lived in Bee Cave (a suburb of Austin, just down the road from Lakeway). Also, the wife was a former stunt woman:

According to her online biography, Cheryl Sanders said her career as a stunt woman in the 1980s and ’90s included being a double for Brooke Shields, Sharon Stone, Rene Russo, Kathleen Turner and other A-list actresses. She did stunt double work for Jessica Alba in 2016.

And, by the way: Dave Chappelle was not involved in this incident. Really.

Posted in Guns, Law, Media | Comments Closed

Texican standoff.

Monday, February 10th, 2020

I keep hoping for a gunpoint standoff between some Federal law enforcement agency and some local government: pot, guns, it doesn’t matter to me what causes the standoff. I just like the idea of two law enforcement agencies pointing guns at each other: “Let’s settle this Federalism question once and for all, mofo!”

Why do I bring this up? Well, there was a story on the Statesman website yesterday about a possible standoff between the FBI and the Austin Police Department. Here’s what’s going on:

I’ve written before about the 1991 yogurt shop murders and the impact they had on the Austin psyche. Almost 30 years later, this something that’s still talked about, debated (was it crooked cops?), and cited as a defining moment for the city. I think part of what makes this the case is that there’s been no solution.

But there’s a new DNA technology called Y-STR. Apparently, with this technology, it’s possible to narrow down recovered DNA to just the male only component of the sample. So APD sent DNA samples to a lab and got a Y-STR profile, which doesn’t match any of the existing suspects or their family members. So they expanded their search:

They accounted for many of the customers at the shop that evening and got DNA samples from them. There was no match. They used yearbooks from the girls’ schools to build lists of their classmates, and then covertly gathered DNA samples from many of them off discarded soda cans or cigarette butts. Again, there was no match. Worried that first responders might have contaminated the scene, they tested every man who had gone into the burned-out yogurt shop. Still, no match.

Then they submitted the profile to an online Y-STR database…

The National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida operates the U.S. Y-STR Database containing 29,000 samples for population research. Its website says it has samples from “government, commercial and academic resources throughout the United States” and that “all forensic laboratories and institutions are invited to contribute.”
Today, the website contains a disclaimer, saying that it does not function as a law enforcement database and “cannot be used to identify a particular individual whose sample is in the database. All donors are anonymous (and samples) cannot be traced back to specific individuals.”

And they got a hit. But there’s a problem: the owners of the database, and the FBI, won’t release the data on who submitted the sample. (The FBI is involved because the sample was submitted by one of their forensic analysts.)

Montford said agency officials cited a 1994 federal law that created a national forensics database that law enforcement officials use for investigations. That law, they said, required officials to protect the identity of anonymous donors whose DNA was submitted to the Florida database for population research.
“They basically say, ‘We would love to help you, but we have a federal statute that says we can’t release it,’” Montford said.

Why would you put a law like that in place? Well, the DNA in the database can’t be used for a unique identification: at best, it would narrow the field down to “thousands of men” who have the same profile. APD seems to be fine with that: after all, cutting down the possible number of matches from about half of the people who lived in Austin in 1991 to a thousand or so might be useful. But the FBI and the people who run the database seem to be afraid of the possibility that innocent people might become suspects.

At their wits’ end, De La Fuente and other prosecutors began considering a subpoena for the information. They say they are still weighing such an unprecedented step, but fear the litigation would cost untold time and money.
In a statement to the Statesman, the bureau said, “The FBI did not perform forensic testing in this case and cannot speak to this case.”
The FBI acknowledged that it had provided anonymous male profiles to the Florida university for a study into how many of those profiles exist in a specific population and were legally allowed to do so. But the bureau said, “These profiles are not suitable for matching to an individual.”

Posted in Austin, Cops, FBI, Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 9, 2020.

Sunday, February 9th, 2020

Let’s get down to it.

Paul Farnes. He was 101, and the last surviving RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.

…for three months, through the end of October, the R.A.F. battled the Luftwaffe for supremacy in the skies over Britain. Flying a Hurricane fighter for the 501 Squadron, Mr. Farnes, a sergeant pilot, proved supremely adept at attacking German aircraft.
In August alone he shot down three Junkers Ju Stuka bombers, a Dornier 17 light bomber and a Messerschmitt 109E fighter.At the end of September, as Mr. Farnes maneuvered his malfunctioning Hurricane back to the R.A.F.’s Kenley base, he spotted a German bomber flying directly at him at about 1,500 feet.
“I thought, ‘Good God,’ so I whipped out and had to reposition myself and managed to get ’round behind him,” he said in an interview with the website History of War in 2017. “I gave him a couple of bursts, and he crashed at Gatwick just on the point between the airport and the racecourse.”

…

Aerial warfare against the Germans meant breaking away from the squadron, finding something to shoot at, firing away, then breaking away to safety. But by Mr. Farnes’s account it was also enjoyable, because he was able to combine his love of flying with the mission to protect Britain.
“The C.O. would quite often pick the next members of the squadron that had to be at ‘readiness,’ and the two or three who weren’t picked would be pretty fed up,” he told History of War. “If you weren’t picked, you’d think, ‘Why can’t I go?’ I’m sure one or two must have felt, ‘Well, thank God I’m not going!’ But a lot of us were quite happy to go.”

Robert Conrad. THR. Variety.

I was a little young for “Wild Wild West” in first run; if it was syndicated in Houston when I was a kid, I don’t remember it. It could have been on the station we were never able to pick up (the same one OG “Star Trek” was on). And “Hawaiian Eye” was before my time. But if you’re my age or a little on either side of it, this was like candy for us:

He also appeared multiple times on “Mission: Impossible” and other series, either as the lead of some less than successful ones (“High Mountain Rangers”) or doing guest shots. He did do a “Mannix”. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4.) And I didn’t know this, but he played G. Gordon Liddy in the TV movie version of “Will”.

Orson Bean. Variety. THR. Interesting guy: I remember him from “Being John Malkovich” and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on some of those old game shows on Buzzr. In the 1960s, he founded a progressive school in New York City.

Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)
When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.

In the 1980s, he settled down again and resumed acting. He was 91 years old when he died: he was hit by a car while walking, fell, and was run over by a second car (according to Variety).

After the jump, more obits.

(more…)

Posted in 1970s, Books, History, Law, Mannix, Movies, Nixon, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#62 in a series)

Monday, February 3rd, 2020

My apologies: I missed this story last week, and only found out about it when Legal Insurrection covered it.

Mohammed Nuru, the San Francisco Director of Public Works, was charged last week with “public corruption”. Also charged: Nick Bovis, a local restaurateur.

The complaint unsealed against San Francisco Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru and longtime restaurateur Nick Bovis focuses on an aborted attempt in 2018 to bribe a San Francisco airport commissioner for retail space.
It also alleges other schemes in which Nuru is accused of trying to help his friend score contracts to build homeless shelters and portable toilets, along with a restaurant at the city’s new $2 billion transit station.

“homeless shelters and portable toilets”. You. Don’t. Say.

Nuru is also accused of accepting free labor at his vacation home and a John Deere tractor as well as lavish gifts from a developer, including a $2,070 bottle of wine.

…

Nuru, who has worked inside City Hall for the past 20 years, has been the focus of several NBC Bay Area investigations that exposed questionable contracts, Nuru’s ballooning street-cleaning budget, and serious safety violations within public works.

…

As the top official since 2012 in charge of a city public works operating budget exceeding $500 million, Nuru is tasked with cleaning up San Francisco streets, which critics note remain cluttered with feces, trash and used needles amid a homelessness crisis.

I. Can’t. Even.

Nuru was initially arrested in late January and agreed to cooperate with officials, but violated his agreement not to discuss the case and was re-arrested, Anderson said. He lied to officials about not discussing the case, Anderson said.

Here’s the criminal complaint if you’re interested. I haven’t gone through all of it yet.

Posted in California Über Alles, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 3, 2020.

Monday, February 3rd, 2020

A little bit of catch up:

Mary Higgins Clark, noted suspense author.

Peter Serkin. I swear I’ve heard this name somewhere before, but I can’t place where. He was a pianist, came from a prominent musical family, and was a child prodigy.

Yet, though he was proud of his heritage, Mr. Serkin found it a burden. Like many who came of age in the 1960s, he questioned the establishment, both in society at large and within classical music. He resisted a traditional career trajectory and at 21 stopped performing, going for months without even playing the piano.

…

Throughout his career, he presented recital programs that juxtaposed the old and the new: 12-tone scores and Mozart sonatas; thorny pieces by the mid-20th-century German composer Stefan Wolpe and polyphonic works from the Renaissance. Admirers of his playing appreciated how he drew out allusions to music’s past in contemporary scores, while conveying the radical elements of old music.
He played almost all the piano works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Wolpe. He also introduced dozens of pieces, including major works and concertos, written for him by composers like Toru Takemitsu, Charles Wuorinen and, especially, his childhood friend Peter Lieberson.

…

Though Mr. Serkin never completely shook off the early perception of him as “the counterculture’s reluctant envoy to the straight concert world,” as the Times critic Donal Henahan called him in an admiring 1973 profile, over time he reconciled to the ways, even the dress protocols, of that classical world and developed productive associations with artists like the Guarneri String Quartet, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (who had married Peter Lieberson) and the conductors Seiji Ozawa, Herbert Blomstedt, Robert Shaw and Pierre Boulez.

…

Mr. Serkin relished teaching, and held posts at institutions including the Mannes School of Music and the Juilliard School in New York, and, in recent years, Bard. He so enjoyed spending summers teaching at the Tanglewood Music Institute that he bought a home in the Berkshires and lived there for years.

Just in this morning: Bernard J. Ebbers, convicted WorldCom CEO.

Posted in Books, Law, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

We hanged one of those the other day…

Wednesday, January 29th, 2020

I totally missed this story until I went over to Derek Lowe’s blog. In fairness, I think a lot of other folks have, too, and the NYT headline didn’t help much:

U.S. Accuses Harvard Scientist of Concealing Chinese Funding

It wasn’t just a “Harvard Scientist”. It was the chairman of the chemistry department. And he got taken away in handcuffs.

Dr. Lieber, a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, has not been accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials, but rather of hiding — from Harvard, from the National Institutes of Health and from the Defense Department — the amount of money that Chinese funders were paying him.

…

Dr. Lieber, 60, was charged with one count of making a false or misleading statement, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He appeared in court on Tuesday wearing the outfit he had put on to head to his office at Harvard: a Brooks Brothers polo shirt, cargo pants and hiking boots. He appeared subdued as he flipped through the charge sheet. Mr. Levitt, his lawyer, said it was his first opportunity to read the charge against him.

How much do you want to be that this is another example of “Really. Seriously. Shut the f–k up.“?

But wait! There’s more!

Dr. Lieber was one of three scientists to be charged with crimes on Tuesday.
Zaosong Zheng, a Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught leaving the country with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, according to the authorities. They said he had admitted that he had planned to turbocharge his career by publishing the research in China under his own name. He was charged with smuggling goods from the United States and with making false statements, and was being held without bail in Massachusetts after a judge determined that he was a flight risk. His lawyer has not responded to a request for comment.
The third was Yanqing Ye, who had been conducting research at Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering until last spring, when she returned to China. Prosecutors said she hid the fact that she was a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army, and continued to carry out assignments from Chinese military officers while at B.U.

Derek Lowe’s blog entry has a link to the criminal complaint, which I haven’t read yet, but he summarizes.

I am having difficulty picturing the reaction in the Harvard administrative offices to the news that the chair of their chemistry department was being hauled off by the FBI.

(Subject line hattip: supposedly said by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to someone who introduced himself as a Harvard professor, referring to the Parkman-Webster murder case.)

Posted in FBI, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »