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You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#152 in a series)

Thursday, October 9th, 2025

Woo hoo! This is one of those flaming hyenas that makes me want to break out the AK-47 (with the shoulder thing that goes up) and do the happy dance in the backyard.

Letitia James, the corrupt attorney general of the corrupt state of New York, has been indicted.

Text of the indictment from the NYT (archived).

Statement from the Department of Justice.

It looks like there’s two counts: bank fraud, and “making false claims to a financial institution”.

James, 66, bought the three-bedroom, one-bathroom home in August 2020 for roughly $137,000, most of which was financed with a $109,600 loan that prohibited it from being used as a rental investment property, prosecutors alleged.
That allowed her “to obtain favorable loan terms not available for investment properties,” they noted in the five-page filing, saving her “approximately $18,933 over the life of the loan.”
When a Post reporter visited the Norfolk home in April, neighbors said they had never seen James at the property.
Meanwhile, her income tax forms designated the home as a rental that brought in thousands of dollars in additional income.

You may remember the corrupt Ms. James from her long legal battle with the National Rifle Association, which ended up with…not much of anything, really. Or her legal battle against Donald Trump, which also ended with not much of anything, really.

Posted in Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Update.

Monday, September 29th, 2025

I know I said on Friday I’d try to address the Yogurt Shop Murders after today’s press conference.

I didn’t get a chance to watch the press conference today due to continuous meetings. I’m sure there’s a recording somewhere that I will try to watch.

My other issue is that yesterday was a rough day for me, and I haven’t had time to do much with the murder story because I’m trying to clean up from that.

I drove down to Kyle yesterday since it was a kind of off day for my regular church, and I thought I’d visit a friend at her church.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to connect with her, but that was okay. That also wasn’t the issue.

On my way back from Kyle, one of my car tires catastrophically failed on the Southwest Parkway.

Then I had an appointment at 4 PM at the Apple Store in Barton Creek Mall to get my iPhone battery replaced. I made the appointment and waited around for about 90 minutes while they replaced the battery. Everyone was very nice (the Apple employee who checked me in was especially awesome), and I got my phone, got in my car, started driving out of the parking lot, decided to call home and see if I needed to pick up food…

…and nobody could hear me. I checked with a couple of other people, and it wasn’t just one phone. It seems that, when they replaced the battery, Apple broke the microphone on my phone, so I can’t make calls. (Well, technically, I can make calls: I just can’t talk to anybody.)

So now I need to get in touch with Apple and figure out the next steps to get the microphone fixed. This is complicated by the fact that I have 2FA software on my phone that I need for work, so I can’t be without it for more than a few hours.

I just bought a new Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio with some of my bonus money, and enabled cell service on it. I’ve tested, and in a pinch, I can use that to make voice calls. But it isn’t an ideal solution.

I did manage to get an appointment today with Discount Tire to get my tire replaced. They were efficient and nice…

…and it turns out they don’t have the Michelin tires I want. They thought they had one in stock, and told me I could come back in a day or two for the second one. Then it turned out they couldn’t find the one, either.

So they slapped a loaner tire on my car, and I get to come back in a few days to get the two tires done.

There were, however, two redeeming points. The tire that failed was under warranty, so they’re replacing it for free. They suggested I might want to get a second tire done, since it had more wear on it than the other three. I kind of resisted that at first. But then I asked about doing something to replace the doughnut spare on the car, which I’ve put some wear on and no longer trust.

Discount offered me a spare full-size wheel at a reasonable price, and offered to take the more worn – but still good – tire off, replace it with a new tire, and mount the old tire on the new wheel. Thus giving me a non-doughnut spare, which I think is swell, as I hate driving on those.

But I still have to go back to Discount once they get everything together, which is more time out of my schedule. Good thing this isn’t one of my busy weeks.

I’ll try to have some commentary up about the murders in the next few days. In the meantime, “New DNA technology key to solving 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders” from KXAN. It looks like the new technique is Y-STR DNA testing. As I’ve said before, I wish I knew more about DNA testing than I do, and I can’t really comment on the soundness of the methodology. The article also states that there is ballistic evidence which ties these murders to a case in Kentucky and several other crimes.

The connection of the suspect to Texas remains unclear to me. And I hate to be cynical, because the reports are making this sound like good police work.

However, if this turns out wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time. Four other men were convicted in 1999, but were cleared in 2009 after Y-STR profiling excluded them. It could be that they have the right guy this time. It could be that they’re clearing a cold case by playing “pin the tail on the dead guy”. At the moment, I’m leaning more in the direction of this being the right guy, but I can understand the cynicism some people in my circle have expressed.

(Previously on WCD.)

Posted in Apple, Austin, Cops, Law | 3 Comments »

Crime watch.

Friday, September 26th, 2025

I’m going to make this short, because it broke at the end of the day today and there’s more to come.

The Austin Police Department says that they have identified a suspect as the Yogurt Shop Killer.

Police identified the suspect through DNA and ballistics testing.

…

On Dec. 6, 1991, Austin firefighters responded to a fire at the yogurt shop. The structure call would sadly reveal the quadruple homicide case, when the bodies of four teenage girls were found.

APD says they plan to hold a press conference on Monday to provide more information, so I’ll probably wait until Monday night to do a longer write-up. But I wanted to get at least this out now.

The identified suspect killed himself in 1999.

Posted in Austin, Cops, Law | 1 Comment »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyenas! (#151 in a series)

Wednesday, September 17th, 2025

This is a bit of a round-up post, and some of these are a little outside of the normal flaming hyenas.

Joel Engardio, Supervisor for the Sunset District of San Francisco, got booted from office in a recall election yesterday.

Former Supervisor Engardio has not been accused of a crime – yet, as far as I know. His fundamental problem was that he supported closing the “Great Highway”.

The election is a culmination of a more than yearlong saga that began in June 2024 when Engardio, alongside four other supervisors, placed a measure on the November ballot to permanently ban vehicles on a two-mile stretch of the city’s westernmost coastal boulevard between Lincoln Way and Sloat Boulevard, also known as the Upper Great Highway.
Residents who said they relied on the highway to drive around their neighborhood moved to recall Engardio, outraged by what they perceived as a “betrayal.” Engardio has argued throughout the recall campaign that his district should judge him based on his entire record and not a single policy disagreement.

Crime news of the weird.

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025

Remember Buford Pusser?

This is not Buford Pusser. This is Joe Don Baker playing Buford Pusser in the original “Walking Tall”.

This is the real Buford Pusser.

There’s a chance that some of my younger readers might have heard of him from the misguided remake of “Walking Tall” with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. For those who are unfamiliar with the story, Mr. Pusser was the sheriff of McNairy County, Tennessee from 1964 to 1970. He’s famous for trying to clean up the county single-handedly, fighting the Dixie Mafia and the “State Line Mob”. On August 12, 1967, a person or persons unknown allegedly ambushed Mr. Pusser and his wife, Pauline. Mrs. Pusser was killed, and Mr. Pusser was badly injured.

Mr. Pusser died in 1974 as a result of a single-car accident. There were suspicions that it wasn’t an “accident”, but nobody was able to prove anything. The official investigation said he was driving drunk and wasn’t wearing a seat belt when his Corvette hit an embankment and ejected him.

As sheriff, Pusser was credited with surviving seven stabbings and eight shootings.

I’m trying to be careful in my wording here because of what happened last week: McNairy County prosecutors announced “they had amassed enough evidence…to present an indictment to a grand jury in the killing of…Pauline Mullins Pusser”.

58 years later, the prosecutors office is saying Buford killed his wife and allegedly staged the whole thing.

This raises many questions.

Mr. Davidson said that the case file revealed “physical, medical, forensic, ballistic, and re-enactment evidence that contradicts his version of events,” referring to Sheriff Pusser’s statements to law enforcement officials and others about his wife’s death on Aug. 12, 1967.
On that day, Sheriff Pusser got a call in the early morning about a disturbance. In his version of events, his wife volunteered to ride with him as he responded to the call.
Sheriff Pusser said that as they drove along a country road, a car pulled up and a gunman opened fire, killing Ms. Pusser and wounding him.
He needed several surgeries and was hospitalized for nearly three weeks.

There doesn’t seem to be any question, from what I can tell, that he was seriously injured.

Doctors said he was struck on the left side of his jaw by at least two, or possibly three, rounds from a .30-caliber carbine. He spent 18 days in the hospital before returning home, and needed several more surgeries to restore his appearance.

The prosecutors say his wounds were self-inflicted, and “the gunshot wound on Sheriff Pusser’s cheek was a close-contact wound“.

It isn’t clear, but it seems to be implied in the article that prosecutors believe something other than a .30 caliber carbine was used. I have a lot of trouble imaging shooting yourself once, much less “two or three times” in the jaw with a .30 caliber carbine. Not just the whole “shooting yourself” factor, but also just physically getting the gun into position to do it without slipping and putting a bullet in your brain. The thought does occur to me, though: taking the idea that Mr. Pusser was shot with .30 carbine rounds at face (ha!) value, it could have been done with an Enforcer, which is a weird .30 carbine pistol thing. (It could also have been a Ruger Blackhawk in .30 carbine.)

Dr. Michael Revelle, an emergency medicine doctor and medical examiner, determined that Ms. Pusser was more likely than not shot outside the car and then placed inside it.
He found that skull trauma she suffered did not match the crime scene photographs from inside the car. Blood spatter on the hood of the car also contradicted Sheriff Pusser’s statements to the authorities, he said.

I have a lot of respect for crime scene investigators and cold case detectives. But “blood spatter” evidence (I assume from photographs) in a 58-year-old case? Blood splatter evidence already has a lot of problems.

A ballistics expert, Dr. Eric Warren, determined that the physical evidence pointed to a staged crime scene.

What evidence is he looking at? Just ballistics evidence, or more than that? Crime scene experts sometimes get out over their skis and testify to things that aren’t in their field of expertise. Not saying that’s what is going on here, but the question is worth asking.

Ms. Pusser’s family seems to buy into the prosecution’s theory.

Investigators also talked with members of Sheriff Pusser’s family but did not describe those conversations. They also declined to discuss the weapon that was used, and whether it matched up with the autopsy findings.
They said that the case file would have more specifics, and that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation would make public the entire file once redactions are made.

I’ll really enjoy reading that case file. As it is now, I don’t know what to think. It could be that Buford killed his wife and staged the crime scene, but I feel like there are all kinds of holes that can be punched in that theory. But what’s the motivation of the prosecutor’s office to frame him 58 years later? The State Line Mob and the Dixie Mafia were pretty much broken up years ago, so the prosecution probably isn’t under their control.

I wonder if maybe this is one of the problems with cold case investigation. There’s a temptation once you’ve got some evidence together to say, “Oh, yeah, we think so-and-so did it, but he’s dead, so we’re closing the case and blaming him.” I really wonder if the case against Buford Pusser would actually hold up in court. We’ll never know.

Buford Pusser named one man as being the person who contracted the killing, but nobody was ever able to make a case against him for that crime. The guy is a real scumbucket, though: he was convicted of another murder in 1972, sentenced to life in prison without parole, and (while serving that sentence) arranged to have a judge whacked. And that’s another rabbit hole worth going down, but that’s also another story for another day.

Posted in Guns, Law, Ruger | 6 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#150 in a series)

Friday, August 15th, 2025

150 of these, and we have a good one for number 150.

LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans, has been indicted on Federal charges.

The indictment accuses Cantrell of a slate of crimes including wire fraud, conspiracy to obstruct justice, false statements, obstruction of justice and lying to a federal grand jury.

Also indicted: Jeffrey Vappie, who was a former New Orleans Police Department officer, the mayor’s bodyguard, and apparently her boyfriend. He had previously been indicted in 2024, but the grand jury issued a “superseding indictment” against him.

Here’s a list of the allegations against them:

Count 1: Conspiracy
Counts 2-13: Wire Fraud
Count 14: Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice
Count 15: False Statements
Count 16: Obstruction of Justice
Count 17 and 18: False Declaration Before Grand Jury

Obit watch: August 15, 2025.

Friday, August 15th, 2025

Gerry Spence, legendary lawyer and author. He was 96.

Among the people he defended or represented: Karen Silkwood.

She had died in 1974 in a car crash on her way to talk to a reporter about flaws in safety practices in the production of plutonium at a Kerr-McGee plant in Oklahoma, where she had worked and become contaminated. Representing her family in their suit claiming negligence, Mr. Spence won $10.5 million in damages. (The case was later settled for $1.38 million — about $6.6 million today.)

Randy Weaver.

While rejecting Mr. Weaver’s racist beliefs, Mr. Spence argued that his client had acted in self-defense and raised doubts about whose bullet had killed the agent. The jury acquitted Mr. Weaver of all major charges but convicted him of failing to appear at a 1991 weapons trial. He was sentenced to time served; Mr. Spence did not appeal.

Imelda Marcos.

The 1990 New York racketeering trial of Mrs. Marcos made headlines for months. Prosecutors produced thousands of pages of bank records, telexes, receipts, memos, contracts and reports, calling them a trail of thievery. But Mr. Spence broke through with simplicity, calling his client “a lonely widow” and “a small, fragile woman” whose only crime was being “a world-class shopper.” She was found innocent.

…

Mr. Spence often boasted that he had never lost a criminal case with a jury trial, as either a defense lawyer or a prosecutor, and that he had not lost a civil case since 1969. That was not actually true, but it was not far off. He was known to lose now and then, and several of his notable civil verdicts were overturned on appeal.
But in the tradition of Perry Mason, he seemed unbeatable — not only to courtroom foes but also to lawyers who attended his seminars, and to Americans who read his best-selling books and tuned in to his television programs and network commentaries, most notably on the O.J. Simpson murder case.

I remember seeing a “60 Minutes” profile of him some years back. I can’t find that now, but there’s a two-part interview with him on the ‘Tube.

Masaoki Sen. He was 102.

Mr. Sen was best known for serving as the 15th-generation grand master of the Urasenke, one of the three main schools of Japan’s tea ceremony. After inheriting the role from his father in 1964, he used it as a platform to promote peace, often while speaking of his own experiences during the war.
Traveling the world to engage in a sort of tea-ceremony diplomacy, Mr. Sen used the ancient art, whose roots lie in Zen Buddhism, to call for an end to all wars. He was known for the phrase “peacefulness through a bowl of tea.”

He was also a former kamikaze pilot.

After leaving Doshisha University in 1943 he was drafted to the Imperial Navy, where he trained to be a pilot. When his unit was asked to form a “special attack” squadron to carry out suicide missions, Mr. Sen was one of the volunteers.
“I thought I was ready to die,” Mr. Sen said in a 2021 interview with a Japanese newspaper. “But I was just a greenhorn of 20 or 21 years of age. I didn’t know what death meant.”
While many young men in his unit flew off to ram their aircraft into Allied ships, Mr. Sen was never sent. Historians say the Japanese military often spared the oldest sons, especially from historically significant households.
After the war, Mr. Sen asked a former commander why he was never sent. The older man answered: “Just think of it as fate.”
Unlike many war veterans, Mr. Sen spoke openly of his experiences and sorrow for comrades who never returned. He also made no effort to disguise his anger toward his nation’s leaders who sent them on one-way missions.
“We were told to die because others would fill our ranks,” he said in another interview. “But who wants to die?”

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

Bagatelle (#138)

Saturday, July 19th, 2025

“Justified” is full of timeless wisdom about how one should lead their life.

One of the best examples of this is Raylan’s Rule:

Raylan Givens: Any problem, that’s someone else’s fault. You ever hear of the saying, “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole”?

Another good example of this:

Art Mullen: I got a call this morning from AUSA David Vasquez. Wants to talk to you about you shooting Boyd Crowder.
Raylan Givens: What’s there to talk about? He pulled first. There was a witness.
Art Mullen: But you see, ten days ago you shot a man in Miami. Put it like this: you were in the first grade; bit a kid every week? They’d start to think of you as a biter.

“They’d start to think of you as a biter.” What brings this to mind?

A summer associate at white-shoe firm Sidley Austin began biting colleagues and roaring at them on her first day — and by the time she was canned, her body count had reached double digits, insiders told the legal news site Above the Law.
The bites were not “in an aggressive, ‘we’re beefing’ way” – but rather, “a faux-quirky manic pixie dream girl crossed with the Donner party vibe,” the outlet reported.
“Though I’ve seen pics of the results post-Biglaw Biter, and ‘nibble’ is probably too tame a word,” the article’s author noted.

…

A jaw-dropping account of the chomping spree posted to X said the girl sank her teeth into 10 colleagues, including other summer interns, associate lawyers and even an HR rep at the firm’s Seventh Avenue offices.

…

The firm declined to comment. But an insider told The Post the intern bit only five employees and that exaggerations were now flooding the internet.

Posted in Bagatelle, Law, TV | 2 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#149 in a series)

Friday, July 18th, 2025

In April of last year, the Detroit Lakes (Minnesota) Police Department responded to a report of a break-in. When they responded, they found a woman in the basement of a home, “dressed in black and carrying a flashlight covered with a sock”.

The woman was State Senator Nicole Mitchell. The home was her stepmother’s.

On Friday, a jury in northern Minnesota convicted Ms. Mitchell of burglary and possession of burglary or theft tools, felonies that can carry prison sentences.

Ms. Mitchell told the police…

…she had entered the house to collect sentimental items, including one of her late father’s flannel shirts. “I have never done anything like this,” she said during the arrest, body camera footage showed.

…

After the arrest, Ms. Mitchell issued a statement denying that she had stolen anything. She said then that she entered the house to check on a family member suffering from “Alzheimer’s and associated paranoia.” During the trial, she and her lawyers insisted she was acting out of concern for her ailing relative.

…

On the witness stand this week, the stepmother described being awakened by someone in her home and calling the police. She acknowledged having Alzheimer’s and at times gave testimony that seemed to contradict body camera footage.
Ms. Mitchell testified in her own defense for several hours on Thursday. She said she had not been at the house to get her father’s belongings, as she initially told police officers, but instead to check on her stepmother’s well-being.

I’m actually slightly sympathetic to Ms. Mitchell and her problems caring for an aging relative with Alzheimer’s. But it sounds like she told one story to the responding officers (who were wearing body cameras) and a different story at trial. That never looks good to the jury. And she could have called the police for a welfare check, too, if she was concerned.

The burglary charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison upon conviction, and the burglary tools charge carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison.

There’s a lot of discussion in the NYT coverage of what this means for ~~Al Franke~~n the Minnesota senate. The Democratic party (to which Ms. Mitchell belongs, and this is actually noted in the second paragrpah) holds a one-seat majority in the Senate.

Already this year, special elections have been held to replace a Democratic senator who died and a Republican senator who resigned after being accused of arranging to meet with an underage prostitute. Another special election filled a House seat after a judge determined that the Democrat who won the regular election did not meet residency requirements. Then last month, State Representative Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, was assassinated and State Senator John A. Hoffman, a Democrat, was shot and wounded in what the authorities described as targeted political violence.
If Ms. Mitchell leaves office, the Senate would be evenly divided until Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, calls a special election for voters to choose a replacement, which could happen before lawmakers return to the Capitol in 2026.

More coverage from the Star-Tribune:

[Becker County Attorney Brian] McDonald said she never placed a welfare call. Instead she drove 220 miles in the middle of the night, dressed in all black and packed flashlights, latex gloves and a small pry crowbar device used to break into the basement window.
“Who packs a freaking prybar just in case?” McDonald said to the jury.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Today in fraud.

Friday, July 18th, 2025

Well, technically, Wednesday in fraud, but let us not quibble.

Brett Lemieux killed himself on Wednesday. He was 45.

Mr. Lemieux founded “MisterManCave”, a sports memorabilia site. I believe this is the site.

Before he killed himself, he made a post to Facebook claiming he’d sold “more than four million counterfeit items and surpassed $350 million in sales”. The Facebook account is down now, but the NYPost has an image of the post.

Lemieux was able to pull off the alleged large-scale counterfeit scheme by faking holograms, authentication stickers for sports collectibles, of some of the most prominent companies in sports memorabilia: Panini, Fanatics, Tri-Star, James Spence Authentics, Mill Creek Sports and GT Marketing, among others.
Lemieux would use the fake holograms to sell counterfeit memorabilia at a far lower price than the market, and he profited handsomely from that tactic.
In the Facebook post, Lemieux said he released 80,000 pieces of memorabilia into the market when Kobe Bryant died in 2020.

I care even less about sports memorabilia than I do about sports, but I am a connoisseur of fraud. And this is big fraud. I actually think this story is being underplayed right now: if Mr. Lemieux put four million counterfeit items out there on the memorabilia market with forged holograms, I think this is going to have a massive impact on the market.

“People have known about this guy. They’ve known his work. They know what he’s been up to,” well-known sports memorabilia expert Steve Grad told WRTV Indianapolis
“He has been at it for years and years. And he’s driven down the price of things. You know, you look at a Tom Brady autograph and Tom Brady’s value is affected drastically by this individual.”

But has anybody asked Ja Morant Guy for his opinion?

(“Ja Morant signed basketballs” on MisterManCave.)

Sightly more seriously, FotB RoadRich and I have been discussing the rules for crooks. It looks like Mr. Lemieux followed Rule 1: if you’re going to steal, steal big.

But it doesn’t look like he figured out Rule 2: have an exit plan. Steal enough money so you can live out the rest of your life comfortably in a country with no extradition treaty with the United States.

On a somewhat related to fraud note: Lloyd Howell resigned as executive director of the NFL Players Association on Thursday.

Howell’s tenure had come under scrutiny after several recent reports from ESPN and the “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast.
In May, ESPN reported that the FBI was investigating the financial dealings of the NFLPA and the MLB Players Association related to a multibillion-dollar group-licensing firm, OneTeam Partners. According to sources, the report triggered the NFLPA to hire Ronald C. Machen of law firm Wilmer Hale to review Howell’s activities as executive director. The FBI investigation, which is being conducted in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, New York, is continuing, sources said.

Even better, Mr. Howell’s expenses are being examined. In particular…the strippers. Always with the strippers.

…Howell charged the union for two visits to strip clubs, including a $738.82 car service that took him from the airport to one of the clubs.

…

One receipt, obtained by ESPN, shows Howell was picked up in a sedan by a car service at Fort Lauderdale International Airport on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023, at 10:26 p.m. The car’s first stop was at a nearby Miami Gardens address. The receipt shows only one other stop, nearly eight hours later.
At 6 a.m., the car dropped off Howell at his luxury condominium in Sunny Isles Beach, the receipt shows.
Later, a union finance worker noticed the car service’s exorbitant cost. The employee searched online for the Miami Gardens address, discovering it was Tootsie’s Cabaret.
The 76,000-square-foot venue bills itself as the world’s largest strip club — “full nude No. 1 rated.”

…

During this year’s NFLPA summit on Feb. 21, Howell accompanied the employees to the Magic City strip club for an outing that incurred $2,426 in charges including cash withdrawals, ranging from $200 to $525, from a club ATM, sources and documents show. They used two “VIP rooms.”
According to the expense report, the purpose of the strip club outing: “Player Engagement Event to support & grow our Union.”

…

The employee noted on a March 23 expense report: “$736 = This was the final amount I was charged to close the tab for both secluded sections for our Player Members. This included Food, Alcoholic Drinks, fees, taxes, and gratuity.” No players’ names are listed on receipts or the reports.

Posted in Law, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

What is this I don’t even have any words.

Thursday, July 17th, 2025

A New York City police officer who previously worked for Wells Fargo was charged on Thursday with spending $87,000 in bank customers’ money on personal bills that included BMW payments and a gluteus-building program called Booty by Jacks.

The Booty by Jacks website.

The complaint does not indicate whether the subscription for Booty by Jacks, described on its website as “the world’s best glute-building program,” was for Officer Rodriguez Acosta. The Booty by Jacks Instagram account, which has more than 730,000 followers, says: “We Help Women Lose Fat, Build Muscle & Look Incredible in a Bikini.”
Subscriptions range from $33 a week for workout training alone to $47 a week or $127 a month for programs that combine fitness and nutritional guidance and other services. The website shows what are presented as several sets of before-and-after photos of swimsuit-clad female customers. There are also versions of the programs for men.

Posted in Bagatelle, Cops, Law, NYPD | Comments Closed

Note from the legal beat.

Tuesday, July 8th, 2025

A story I missed over the weekend:

Nearly Half of America’s Murderers Get Away With It

…the Louisville police do not arrest anyone in roughly half of murder cases. I spoke to family members of a dozen victims. They all conveyed a similar sentiment: that the police had abandoned them and theirs. “The police don’t really care,” said Deondra Kimble, David’s aunt. “They’ve proven it to me.”

…

Louisville is representative of a national issue. In the United States, people often get away with murder. The clearance rate — the share of cases that result in an arrest or are otherwise solved — was 58 percent in 2023, the latest year for which F.B.I. data is available. And that figure is inflated because it includes murders from previous years that police solved in 2023.
In other words, a murderer’s chance of getting caught within a year essentially comes down to a coin flip. For other crimes, clearance rates are even lower. Only 8 percent of car thefts result in an arrest.

…

Why does America solve so few crimes? Experts point to five explanations.

Number two on the list, is, of course, “guns”. There’s even a handy little graph of “Gun homicide rates, 2023”, that includes the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Spain, and Australia. Not included: Switzerland.

What this story brings to mind, though, is David Simon’s great book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. My copy is in a box somewhere, so I’m going off memory here: Lawrence can probably fill in the lacunae. (I’d buy the Kindle edition for reference, but they want $14 for that.) There’s a several page section where Simon breaks down the numbers for one year’s worth of homicides. (I believe it was 1988.)

Some of the homicides were things like vehicle accidents (remember, there’s a difference between “homicide” and “murder”). Some were self-defense incidents. Some were cases where the killer died in the act (such as arson or a murder-suicide)…

…and at the end of the day, as best as I recall, your chances of even being charged with a homicide in Baltimore that year were about one out of three. And your chances of getting a sentence of more than ten years were basically zero: you had to do something awful (like molesting and killing a child) to get more than that. And a ten year sentence, with the parole laws in effect at the time, plus time spent in prison before trial, and good time credit, meant that you were likely to get out of prison after three years.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

And for what it’s worth, the Austin Police Department cleared 100% of their homicide cases for 2023. I don’t think 2024 figures are in yet, but APD has been consistently above 90% clearance since 2014.

Posted in Austin, Cops, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Diddy squat.

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025

I won’t say that I didn’t care about Diddy. I did care, to the extent that it was a mildly interesting true crime story, and this is hookersnblow.com. Beyond that, meh.

But: the Wikipedia entry on the Mann Act is interesting, especially the section on “Notable prosecutions under the Mann Act“.

I’m sure everyone remembers Jack Johnson (though I didn’t remember Donald Trump pardoned him in 2018). Others: Frank Lloyd Wright (charges dropped), Charlie Chaplin (acquitted), Charles Manson (charges dropped), and Chuck Berry (convicted, sentenced to three years, served one and half).

Posted in Bagatelle, Law | Comments Closed

Flaming hyena update.

Tuesday, June 17th, 2025

Former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Brian K. Williams pleaded guilty Monday to a federal charge linked to a fake bomb threat he made to City Hall last year.
Williams entered a plea in downtown Los Angeles to a single federal count of threats regarding fire and explosives, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Previously.

LAPD officers responded to City Hall to investigate the threat Williams reported. Police searched the building and did not locate any suspicious packages or devices. Williams described to police the threatening call he claimed to have received, showed them the record of an incoming call that appeared as a blocked number on his city-issued cell phone and said it was the unknown man who conveyed the threat, court papers show.
In fact, that incoming call record was the call Williams had placed to himself from the Google Voice app on his personal cell phone, federal prosecutors said.

Hattip: Mike the Musicologist.

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

Obit watch: June 8, 2025.

Sunday, June 8th, 2025

Sunny Jacobs.

Some people might quibble about notability. But I think there’s an interesting story here, though not the one some people want to tell.

Ms. Jacobs spent nearly 17 years in prison in Florida, five of them on death row, for the murders of two law enforcement officers in February 1976 at a rest stop near Fort Lauderdale.
Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire.
Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated.
It was this story that formed the basis of Ms. Jacobs’s subsequent, celebrated tale — that she had been an innocent, a “28-year-old vegetarian hippie,” as she told The New York Times in a 2011 Vows article about her marriage to a fellow former inmate, the Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023.
A product of a prosperous Long Island family, Ms. Jacobs said she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, as had Mr. Tafero, when the killings took place. Responsibility for them, she said, lay with another passenger in the car, Walter Rhodes, who had also been convicted of petty crimes and who later confessed to the killings of the two officers (though he subsequently recanted, confessed and recanted again, multiple times).

Ms. Jacobs became a cause célèbre. There was an off-Broadway play, “The Exonerated” (which actually deals with six people, not just Ms. Jacobs) that was turned into a TV movie. There was also another TV movie that I think focuses on Ms. Jacobs, though information is hard to find.

Barbara Walters once devoted a sympathetic segment to Ms. Jacobs on the ABC News program “20/20.” And Ms. Shields, along with the actresses Marlo Thomas and Amy Irving, attended Ms. Jacobs’s wedding to Mr. Pringle, in New York, at which Ms. Shields wept and said: “Despite everything they have been through, they are not bitter or jaded. They never closed their hearts.”

Except…there’s more to the story.

A young former reporter, Ellen McGarrahan, who had witnessed Mr. Tafero’s execution for The Miami Herald and was haunted by it, spent much of the next 30 years digging into what had actually happened that day at the rest stop. She published her findings in a well-received 2021 book, “Two Truths and a Lie.”
Ms. McGarrahan’s meticulous, incisive research — she left journalism to become a professional private investigator after witnessing the execution — contradicts Ms. Jacobs’s story on almost every point.
Ms. Jacobs, Mr. Tafero and Mr. Rhodes existed in a murky underworld of violence, drug dealing, gun infatuation and petty crime, Ms. McGarrahan found.
By the time of the fatal encounter with the Florida state trooper Phillip Black and his visiting friend, the Canadian constable Donald Irwin, Ms. Jacobs’s charge sheet was already long: arrests for prostitution, forgery, illegal gun possession, contributing to the delinquency of a minor (her then-4-year-old son, Eric), and drug dealing.
After the killings, a loaded handgun was found in her purse. Several weapons — two 9-millimeter semiautomatic handguns, a .38-caliber Special revolver, a .22-caliber Derringer, a .32-caliber revolver — were found in the various cars linked to Mr. Tafero and Mr. Rhodes, Ms. McGarrahan wrote.
Two eyewitnesses, truckers who were at the scene of the killings, said in court testimony that Mr. Rhodes couldn’t have been the shooter because they saw that his hands were in the air. Forensic evidence suggested that a Taser shot, setting off the volley of fatal gunfire between the two parties, came from the back of the car, where Ms. Jacobs was sitting with her children.
Ms. McGarrahan posits that Ms. Jacobs may have at least fired the Taser, which she had purchased months earlier.
“The state’s theory was that Sunny fired the Taser and the gun at Trooper Black while he was attempting to subdue Jesse,” Ms. McGarrahan wrote, and that “Jesse grabbed the gun from Sunny and continued firing at both Trooper Black and Constable Irwin.”
According to a Florida Supreme Court opinion in the case, as Ms. Jacobs was being led away after her arrest, a Florida state trooper asked her, “Do you like shooting troopers?”
Ms. Jacobs was reported to have responded, “We had to.”

I haven’t read Two Truths and a Lie, but a copy is on the way from the ‘Zon.

Ms. McGarrahan, reflecting on the saga that she had spent so many years uncovering, said in an interview that with Ms. Jacobs, “the myth has become the truth.”
“She made herself into the victim,” Ms. McGarrahan added. “It removes the actual victims.”

Officer Down memorial page for Trooper Phillip A. Black. Ontario Police Memorial Foundation page for Corporal Donald R. Irwin.

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Whipped Cream Difficulties

Archive for the ‘Law’ Category

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#152 in a series)

Update.

Crime watch.

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyenas! (#151 in a series)

Crime news of the weird.

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#150 in a series)

Obit watch: August 15, 2025.

Bagatelle (#138)

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#149 in a series)

Today in fraud.

What is this I don’t even have any words.

Note from the legal beat.

Diddy squat.

Flaming hyena update.

Obit watch: June 8, 2025.

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