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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

This week in fraud.

Monday, January 27th, 2020

A couple of stories came to my attention over the weekend, and I thought they’d make an interesting diversion from the endless parade of obits.

1) Back in 1973, David Rosenhan (a social psychologist at Stanford) published what became one of the most famous papers in psychology. Summarizing:

Rosenhan himself and seven mentally healthy associates, called “pseudopatients”, attempted to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals by calling for an appointment and feigning auditory hallucinations…
All were admitted, to 12 psychiatric hospitals across the United States, including rundown and underfunded public hospitals in rural areas, urban university-run hospitals with excellent reputations, and one expensive private hospital. Though presented with identical symptoms, seven were diagnosed with schizophrenia at public hospitals, and one with manic-depressive psychosis, a more optimistic diagnosis with better clinical outcomes, at the private hospital. Their stays ranged from 7 to 52 days, and the average was 19 days. All were discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia “in remission”, which Rosenhan considered as evidence that mental illness is perceived as an irreversible condition creating a lifelong stigma rather than a curable illness.

(I would link to his paper, “On Being Sane In Insane Places” here, but I can’t find a trustworthy non-paywalled version. If someone else can, please leave a link in the comments and I’ll update.)

This caused a great deal of consternation in the profession, and led to the creation of the DSM and other changes.

Susannah Cahalan (the author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a book I haven’t read yet but plan to) got interested in Rosenham’s paper and the story behind it:

‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’ was the only significant scholarship he ever produced, and he lived off this famous paper throughout his career. It occurred to her that it would be fascinating to track down as many of the pseudo-patients as she could, and to explore the circumstances under which Rosenhan had come to undertake his study.

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness is her new book (it came out in November) about Rosenham and his experiment. I haven’t read it, so I can’t really spoil it, but the title probably gives away a lot:

With two and a half exceptions, even as skilful an investigative reporter as Cahalan was unable to locate the pseudo-patients. Rosenhan himself was easily identified as the first of them. His files included his admission as ‘David Lurie’ to Haverford State Hospital in Pennsylvania. (He was then teaching at Swarthmore College.) And internal clues in the files enabled her to track down Bill Underwood, who had been a Stanford graduate student at the time. Another pseudo-patient, Harry Lando, surfaced — once also a graduate student and now an academic — but he only half counts, for, as a usually overlooked footnote in Rosenhan’s paper recounts, one pseudo-patient had been dropped from the study, and this was he. As for the rest: nothing, nada, no trace.

…

In a larger sense, it scarcely matters, because Cahalan uncovered so much other evidence of Rosenhan’s malfeasance and lies. He claimed, for example, to have carefully coached his volunteers before sending them forth. Bill Underwood and Harry Lando emphatically denied this. Lando appears to have been dismissed from the study, not because he violated protocol, but because, as Rosenhan incredulously noted about his confinement, ‘HE LIKES IT!’ And then some of the things Lando reported about his experiences reappeared in the published paper attributed to a different pseudo-patient.
Most damning of all, though, are Rosenhan’s own medical records. When he was admitted to the hospital, it was not because he simply claimed to be hearing voices but was otherwise ‘normal’. On the contrary, he told his psychiatrist his auditory hallucinations included the interception of radio signals and listening in to other people’s thoughts. He had tried to keep these out by putting copper over his ears, and sought admission to the hospital because it was ‘better insulated there’. For months, he reported he had been unable to work or sleep, financial difficulties had mounted and he had contemplated suicide. His speech was retarded, he grimaced and twitched, and told several staff that the world would be better off without him. No wonder he was admitted.

In summary (this is the reviewer talking, not me):

…the evidence she provides makes an overwhelming case: Rosenhan pulled off one of the greatest scientific frauds of the past 75 years, and it was a fraud whose real-world consequences still resonate today.

2) Randy Constant was a farmer. He bought and sold orgainc grain, and raised fish commerically. In 2017, he was named to the list of “10 Sucessful Farmers to Watch” published by “Successful Farming”.

And about the same time he was named to that list, the FBI raided his home and businesses.

Records showed that in 2016 he sold 7 percent of all the corn labeled organic and 8 percent of all the soybeans carrying that designation. More than $19 million worth that year, $24 million the year before and so on every year before that back to 2010 at least.
It was impossible for him to have done that legitimately. He didn’t have access to enough organic crop acres to supply so many bushels.

…

With the FBI’s assistance, the USDA would go on to prove that Constant was a swindler on a grand scale: More than $140 million in fraudulent sales between 2010 and 2017 for grain that was likely worth half that.
The Star’s subsequent reporting found that, in fact, his scheme stretched back further than that, to 2007 or 2006.
Constant scammed grain buyers, meat producers and millions of American consumers for a decade or more. The organic beef and poultry countless Americans were eating during those years wasn’t organic after all.

And what did he do with the money?

Not only did he bankroll extravagant family vacations every summer — counting kids and grandkids, he’d treat a dozen to stays at luxury resorts like Hilton Head, South Carolina — Constant also admitted to using the grain sales money to pay for sex with prostitutes and wagering at casinos.
He took more than 20 trips to Las Vegas, often alone, during the seven-year period covered in his indictment. There he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal profits on gambling on the Vegas strip, hiring female escorts and providing financial support to three women with whom he had extramarital affairs.
He shared a bank account with one of them, and spent $110,000 on her car payments and other bills, a trip to Spain and surgery to enhance her breasts.
“During a roughly seven-month period in the course of the scheme,” Constant admitted in court records, “another account in my name and under my control incurred more than $250,000 in Las Vegas-related expenses.”

(As Lawrence said when I read him that quote, “The rest of it he just wasted.”)

The Kansas City Star piece is long, but I think it’s worth reading. It covers not just Constant and what may have motivated him, but also the flaws in the government’s system of certifying organic crops.

Constant pled guilty to one count of wire fraud and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He committed suicide before his sentence began.

Posted in Books, Food, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 24, 2020.

Friday, January 24th, 2020

Carol Serling, Rod Serling’s wife.

She was the associate publisher and consulting editor of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, a monthly magazine, in the 1980s. She was a consultant to “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1983), a segmented film adaptation whose four directors included Steven Spielberg. In one segment she had a cameo role as an airline passenger in a remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the 1963 episode in which a terrified fellow passenger believes he has spied a gremlin cavorting on the wing outside his window.

…

Ms. Serling cemented Rod Serling’s place in the academy by donating many of his television scripts and movie screenplays to Ithaca College in upstate New York, where he had taught courses in creative writing and film and television criticism. The gifts helped the college establish its Rod Serling Archives. She also helped create scholarships and an award at the college, where she was a trustee for 18 years.

Jo Shishido, Japanese actor.

After plastic surgery to fatten the cheeks of the handsome young actor, Shishido became known for playing prominent heavies in action films.

He was in a whole bunch of Japanese films, including Seijun Suzuki’s “Branded to Kill” and something called “A Colt Is My Passport“. (I can’t lie: I love that title.)

He also played “Captain Joe” in a Japanese TV series called “Star Wolf“. And if that rings a faint (or even not-so-faint) bell for you, I’m so, so sorry: “Star Wolf” was later cut together and dubbed into two movies: “Fugitive Alien” and “Fugitive Alien II“, which, in turn, became MST3K episodes.

(I thought about embedding the forklift song here, but it was Ken, not Captain Joe, that they tried to kill with a forklift.)

Sonny Grosso, legendary NYPD detective. One night, Mr. Grosso and his partner, Eddie Egan…

…out for drinks at the Copacabana nightclub, spotted known drug dealers adulating an unidentified man, whom they later discovered owned a greasy spoon luncheonette in Brooklyn.
They followed him on a hunch, and the trail led to a French smuggler who was shipping 100 pounds of heroin — some of it stolen from a police vault — to the United States. Mr. Grosso determined the magnitude of the cache by weighing the Frenchman’s 1960 Buick Invicta when it arrived by ship and again when it was about to be transported back to France.

At the time, this was a record seizure. And speaking of bells ringing, yes, this was the “French Connection” case. Mr. Grosso’s character was “Buddy Russo” (played by Roy Scheider). (Eddie Egan was, of course, renamed “Popeye Doyle” and played by Gene Hackman, just in case you haven’t seen the movie.)

A product of East Harlem and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Grosso rose to the rank of detective first grade in the New York Police Department faster than any predecessor. He followed his 22 years on the force with a second career as a television producer and consultant for television shows about law enforcement, including “Kojak,” “Baretta” and “Night Heat,” and for the movie “The Godfather,” in which he played a detective named Phil.
Until he died, Mr. Grosso carried his off-duty .38-caliber Colt revolver, the very same gun that was taped to the tank of a toilet and fired (using blanks) by Al Pacino in a mob hit in “The Godfather.”

…

Yes, he happened to be a regular at Rao’s, the tiny cliquish eatery on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem that has occasionally had unsavory associations. But it also happens to be a neighborhood hangout, just around the corner from where he was born.
Even there, drama intruded one night before Christmas in 2003, when a patron who objected to the singing of one of Mr. Grosso’s dinner guests was shot dead by another customer.

…

Recalling the crime-ridden city of decades earlier, Mr. Grosso explained how the police, and his partner in particular, had responded to the drug dealing that stoked homicides to record highs.
“It was a war then, and you had to act differently,” he said. “The junk epidemic was bursting out of Harlem.
“That’s why Eddie acted crazier than the people we were chasing. He had one philosophy: ‘It’s our job to put the bad guys in jail; don’t worry about the prosecutors and the judges.’ He was a madman, but he made sure I got home every night.”
“Those days,” Mr. Grosso said a little nostalgically, “we were just allowed to be cops.”

(Eddie Egan died of cancer in 1995.)

Posted in Cops, Law, Movies, NYPD, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Quick flaming hyenas update.

Saturday, January 11th, 2020

Michael Shayne Wolfe, the mayor of Hempstead, Texas, has been officially indicted on one count of “theft of service by a public servant”.

(Previously.)

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 9, 2020.

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

The great Buck Henry.

He was a co-writer of “The Graduate”, co-created “Get Smart” with Mel Brooks, did guest stints on “Saturday Night Live” in the early days (and was the first five-timer), created “Quark”, wrote the screnplays for “Catch-22” and “The Day of the Dolphin”, co-wrote the legendary disaster “Town and Country“…man, what a career.

(Edited to add: NYT obit wasn’t up previously. It is now.)

Mike Resnick, noted SF writer. Lawrence has an excellent obit up at his site, and pretty much says everything I was going to say. I won’t say we were personal friends (I don’t think he would have passed Lawrence’s “pick me out of a police lineup” test) but he was a good and erudite guy who got me into Theodore Roosevelt and “Duck, You Sucker!” (among other things). His passing leaves the world a smaller, colder place.

Edited to add: found this, by way of Dean Bradley’s Twitter, and thought it was a nice tribute to Mr. Resnick.

Edited to add 2: Michael Swanwick on Mr. Resnick.

I had not heard of Adela Holzer before her obit showed up in the paper of record, but her story is too good to ignore. She was married to a “shipping magnate” and was an early investor in the musical “Hair”. (Depending on which account you believe, she put in $57,000 and made $2 million, or she put in $7,500 and made $115,000.) She went on to produce the notorious flop “Dude“.

In 1975, she was riding high. Then she wasn’t. By the next spring, she had produced three new Broadway flops: The Scott Joplin opera “Treemonisha” held on for almost two months, but both “Truckload” and “Me Jack, You Jill” closed in previews. She followed those with “Something Old, Something New,” starring Hans Conried and the Yiddish theater star Molly Picon; it closed on opening night, Oct. 1, 1977.

Then it got worse. You may ask: how much worse can it get than having your show close on opening night? This much worse:

At that point, theater was the least of Ms. Holzer’s problems. She had declared bankruptcy seven weeks earlier. She had been arrested on fraud charges over the summer and was free on $50,000 bail, awaiting the first of the three criminal trials that would shape the rest of her life.
The indictment, which finally came in 1979, was for a classic Ponzi scheme: paying her earliest victims “profits,” which were really just funds from her next group of investors, and so on. One of those early investors was Jeffrey Picower, who was later implicated in the Bernie Madoff scandal, a much larger Ponzi scheme.

She served two years in prison. Ms. Holzer tried to make a comeback in the 1980s with a musical about Joseph McCarthy that never opened.

She was soon arrested again, on grand larceny charges. It was revealed that she had told numerous associates that their investments — in oil and mineral deals — had been guaranteed by the banker David Rockefeller, to whom she claimed to be secretly married. That lie was bolstered by at least one fake marriage license and by a framed silver photo of him at her bedside. It was later reported that the photo had been clipped from a magazine.

She served four years (of an eight year sentence) for that.

Things had changed in 2001, when she was arrested yet again, this time charged with 39 counts of fraud. At the time, she was using a different surname, Rosian — she was living with a man named Vladimir Rosian on the Upper West Side — and the stakes were much lower. She had been charging immigrants $2,000 to $2,700 each, falsely telling them that she had influence on immigration legislation and could help them gain permanent resident status.
This time she was sentenced to nine to 18 years. When she was released in June 2010, she was in her 80s.

Noted:

Ms. Holzer’s resistance to truth telling apparently knew no boundaries. “If she told me the sun was shining, I’d go out to look — and I’d take an umbrella,” Michael Alpert, who had been her theatrical public relations representative, told Vanity Fair in 1991.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Law, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Another one down, another one down, another one from the legal beat…

Friday, December 20th, 2019

You may recall that, back in July, I wrote about the somewhat bizarre case of Jenna Garland, who was charged criminally with violations of the Georgia Open Records Act.

Guilty.

The charges against the press secretary, Jenna Garland, were misdemeanors, and Judge Jane Morrison of Fulton County State Court set the fines at $750 per violation.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

And another quick update from the legal beat.

Wednesday, December 18th, 2019

Remember Thomas J. Spota, the former DA of Suffolk County? Bag of sex toys, porno DVDs, and cigars stolen out of the police chief’s car? Charged with covering up the chief’s beatdown of the alleged thief?

Convicted. Along with his deputy.

Posted in Law | Comments Closed

Tweet of the day.

Tuesday, December 17th, 2019

No particular reason, other than I really needed a laugh today (after dealing with, among other things, car insurance companies), and this filled the bill:

(Related note: I remember when the first part of this story was circulating on Twitter a couple of weeks ago:

And the general theme of the comments was, “Yeah, his conduct was kind of unprofessional. But, on the other hand, he was dealing with Allstate.”)

Posted in Law, Music | Comments Closed

Update from the legal beat.

Tuesday, December 17th, 2019

I’ve written before about VonTrey Clark, the APD officer who hired thugs to kill his pregnant mistress (Samantha Dean, a victim services coordinator with the Kyle Police Department) then fled to Indonesia when his plot unraveled.

He pled guilty yesterday.

Clark waived his right to a trial by jury with the understanding he was waiving the right to call witnesses. Clark then signed a document stating he confessed to the crime. The prosecutors read the document Clark signed, which stated Freddie Lee Smith killed Dean. The document stated that Smith’s gun misfired, Smith returned and fired the gun again and then the scene was staged to look like a drug deal gone bad.

Under the terms of the plea agreement, he’ll spend life in prison without parole and waives the right to appeal.

Kimberly Dean, Samantha’s mother, read an impact statement following Clark’s guilty plea on Monday. She spoke about how Samantha was a daddy’s girl, a hero and a gift from God. She said Samantha was smart, independent, loyal and a true and a fighter who had fought and beat cancer. She also spoke of her love for her granddaughter, Madeline Rose Dean.
“We are two less people because of you. I am the mother to Sam and grandma to Madeline. There isn’t enough paper to write down all my feelings. There are no apologies grand enough to minimize my disgust for your existence,” Kimberley said. “You have issued all of us a life sentence.”

Posted in Austin, Cops, Law | 1 Comment »

Random gun crankery, some filler.

Wednesday, December 11th, 2019

Col. Cooper, call your office, please.

Scout rifles. You know, for kids. Seen at Cabela’s over the weekend.

(Okay, technically, it isn’t a true Scout rifle. Beyond the fact that it is a toy gun, it is also lever action, while a true Scout would be a bolt gun. Cooper discussed the possibility of a lever action Scout, but I believe he considered that a pseudo-Scout. Also, I’m not clear what “caliber” it is “chambered” in. On the other hand, it probably does make weight and length for a Scout, and it does have the Scout style “scope” and mount…)

(Semi-related stupid. By way of Mike the Musicologist.)

Speaking of semi-related stupid, I could spend a lot of time and effort, and increase my blood pressure, by going after the latest stupid statement about guns from Art “Dammit” Acevedo.

But I don’t have to, because Lawrence sent me this handy Twitter thread that does the same thing.

But of course Art’s department was busy executing innocent civilians.

Speaking of the elusive MtM:

I wanted to title this “The Hat Squad”, but I got the picture back, and…where’s my hat? Obviously, I had it on in the other photo, but why wasn’t I wearing it in this one? And what did I do with it?

Posted in Christmas, Cops, Guns, Law, Stupid | Comments Closed

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