Archive for the ‘Law’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Obit watch: May 9, 2025.

Friday, May 9th, 2025

For the historical record: David H. Souter, former Supreme Court justice. WP (archived).

James Foley, director. The Saturday Movie Group has seen “Glengarry Glen Ross” and I thought it was pretty good. Other credits include “At Close Range” and “After Dark, My Sweet”.

“Rescue: HI-Surf”, the lifeguard series on one of the broadcast networks. I never saw an episode, just promos. But it looked a lot like a version of “Baywatch” that took itself way too seriously.

Also among the dead: “Lopez vs. Lopez” and “Night Court”. I greatly admire John Larroquette. But I also greatly admired Harry Anderson, and I just couldn’t see watching a “Night Court” without him.

“The Real Housewives New York City”. Between Pope Leo XIV and this being cancelled, I think it’s been a good week.

Posted in Law, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Fog and smoke, smoke and fog.

Friday, April 25th, 2025

I don’t know what to make of this story. I don’t feel like it qualifies for flaming hyena status yet, but I do feel like it is noteworthy.

Up until yesterday, Matthew Bruderman was the chairman of Nassau University Medical Center. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Bruderman announced he was cooperating with the FBI and Department of Justice in an investigation. Specifically, Mr. Bruderman claims that New York state and Long Island have stolen at least $1 billion from the organization.

Bruderman said he believes the officials’ ultimate goal was to financially strangle the public hospital, paving the way for state and local leaders to shut it down, take over the land currently owned by the public-benefit corporation that runs it and have it redeveloped for profit.

Wednesday night, Mr. Bruderman’s house was burglarized. However, the only thing allegedly taken was…documents tied to the investigation.

Bruderman wasn’t home at the time of the robbery and only found out after police called to inform him they had recovered a binder with his name on it in a car driven by an unidentified couple, he said.
“I was confused because that was the binder I had on my desk when I left,” he said.
Bruderman said he later found his backdoor pried wide open.
The binder, he said, contained “sensitive” materials related to the ongoing federal investigation, including documents and records tied to the financial misconduct he claims to have uncovered while reviewing hospital finances and state reimbursements.

Things that make you go “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”:

At the heart of the alleged scheme is a little-known federal program called the Disproportionate Share Hospital Fund — meant to help keep afloat struggling hospitals such as NUMC, which treat large numbers of low-income patients on Medicaid and Medicare.
Under the program, the federal government agrees to give hospitals tens of millions of dollars in funding as long as their state matches the investment.

…

According to [Bruderman’s] review of internal financial records, previous hospital leadership allegedly “borrowed” what was supposed to be the state’s matching share from an offshore account tied to a Cayman Islands trust, originally set up to cover the medical center’s legal bills.
That money would be temporarily transferred into the hospital’s general fund just long enough to fool the feds into thinking New York had paid its share — unlocking the federal portion of the funding, he claimed.
But once the federal funds cleared, the state’s contribution would allegedly be moved right back offshore.
That would mean those matching funds vanished into the shadows in a conspiracy that could’ve included top officials.

More things that make you go “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”: Mr. Bruderman was fired on Thursday.

Bruderman, who was unpaid in his position as chairman, told The Post he was shocked by his firing and is the victim of a political scandal.
“I was told if I didn’t resign today, like a coward, I would be removed. I was told [Gov.] Kathy Hochul wanted my head for exposing the corruption and previously supporting Lee Zeldin. I was told I don’t understand how powerful these people are and the lengths they would go to hurt me. I refused to resign and they had no choice but to remove me,” Bruderman told The Post.

Again, I don’t know what to make of this. A lot of the coverage seems to be from Mr. Bruderman’s point of view, and I won’t rule out the possibility that he’s trying to divert attention away from his own activities. On the other hand, I’m absolutely not going to rule out the idea that New York state and Nassau County officials are as crooked as a three-dollar bill, and have been doing exactly what Mr. Bruderman claims.

In other news, and I guess this qualifies as a flaming hyena: Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan has been arrested by the FBI.

Flores Ruiz, 30, had appeared before Dugan April 18 for a pre-trial conference on three misdemeanor battery charges.
ICE agents showed up outside the courtroom with a federal warrant for Flores Ruiz’s arrest but were asked by court officials to wait until the hearing had ended before cuffing him, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, citing law enforcement sources.
Before the agents could enter, Dugan allegedly directed Flores Ruiz and his lawyer out a side door and through a private hallway to avoid apprehension.

Judge Dugan is charged with “obstruction of justice and concealing a person from arrest”. The NYTimes has additional coverage, including a link to the charging document, but share links aren’t working for me right now. I’ll try to update later.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Flaming hyena update.

Friday, April 18th, 2025

Looks like Tania Fernandes Anderson is going to take a plea. (Previously.)

And one of the local TV stations has video of her and some other folks removing items from her office prior to her plea deal.

One day after the furniture was removed from City Hall, a $67.12 U-Haul charge was posted on the councilor’s campaign finance report.

Is that legal? Can you use campaign funds for a U-Haul to move stuff out of your office before you go to the big house?

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

I know you’re probably expecting a flaming hyena…

Wednesday, April 16th, 2025

…but I just can’t. I’m laughing too hard right now.

(You may remember Ms. James for her prolonged legal battle against the NRA.)

Also, she’s only been “referred” for possible prosecution, not actually indicted yet. When the indictment comes up, I’ll get out the marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate, so I can make S’Mores over the bonfire of Letitia James and her political ambitions.

Posted in Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#146 in a series)

Friday, April 11th, 2025

Oh, New Jersey. Notable for the Joyce Kilmer Service Area…and corruption.

39 people were indicted today for their parts in what’s described as a “sweeping gambling case that was part of a two-year investigation that uncovered illegal operations in Woodland Park, Garfield, and Totowa that netted $3 million in illegal profits, the AG alleged.”

One of those people is George Zappola, who is allegedly a leader in the Lucchese Mafia family. Some other Lucchese captains and soldiers were also indicted.

Also indicted: a councilman from Prospect Park.

Prospect Park Councilman Anand Shah, 42, allegedly managed illegal poker games and ran an online sportsbook tied to four members of the mob family, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin alleged at a press conference in Newark on Friday morning.

More:

On Wednesday, cops raided four illegal poker clubs connected to the Lucchese family, two of which were run out of the backrooms of restaurants. They also searched a business in Paterson that was storing gambling machines and the homes of seven people who were allegedly managing the gambling operation.
The raid led officials to discover more poker clubs and dozens of people who hosted poker games, worked at the clubs, or managed bettors on an illegal online sportsbook on sites outside the US, Platkin said.

…

The websites allowed the mobsters to use the internet and technology to carry out the same criminal activities La Cosa Nostra had been doing the old-fashioned way since the 19th century, Platkin said.
Shah is charged with racketeering, conspiracy to promote gambling and money laundering and other charges for which he could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the top charge.

Whale sushi!

He is not accused of using his office to carry out the alleged crimes and is not accused of being a made member of the Mafia — but rather an associate of it, officials alleged.

This seems simultaneously small-time and stupid. How much money can there be in the “rake” from poker games? And with the existence of actual real sportsbooks that advertise constantly on television, who uses a Mob sportsbook? People who can’t get an account with a legal one? What percentage of the market is that?

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#145 in a series)

Thursday, March 27th, 2025

Some people might say that Robert Farley, the police chief of North Bergen, New Jersey, has an unusual sense of humor.

Other people might say that he’s an a–hole. Including some of his own officers, who are planning to sue the department.

The chief’s sense of humor includes such hits as:

Michael F. Derin, who worked as a special captain in an administrative role, accused the chief of chasing him around the office before cornering him and poking him with a hypothermic needle through his jeans and into his penis in August 2024.
“When I told chief Farley I was unhappy with his actions, he told me that I didn’t know how to take a joke,” Derin wrote in a notice of claim – the precursor to a lawsuit.

And:

“Chief Farley has, on several occasions, pulled his pants down and defecated on the floor in front of his entire office staff,” Guzman wrote in his notice of claim.
One time he even pooped in the trash can of an office he was moving out of so the next police official moving into the space would find it, Guzman alleged.

And:

“Chief Farley has also tampered with office coffee by adding prescription medications such as Adderall and Viagra, causing staff to inadvertently experience the effects of these substances without their consent,” Guzman wrote.

And:

Farley was also accused of sneaking hot peppers into officers’ food, sending sex toys and gay pride flags to the home of a cop and tossing eggs “in fits of anger” in the legal documents.

And:

Derin, a former detective in the department, also claimed Farley shaved his body hair over people’s property and their food.

These are just allegations, of course. And there are more of them, but those are relatively minor: the usual retaliation and harassment.

North Bergen stood by its police chief amid the accusations, telling NBC News the town “has full confidence in Chief Robert Farley’s leadership.”

Edited to add 3/28: The NYPost has a follow-up story. While these are still allegations, the story includes some photos that would tend to support the claims.

Warning: I don’t usually have to put a content warning on flaming hyenas. But these photos include a shirtless Chief Farley shaving himself (or pretending to shave himself) over a subordinate’s desk. These photos also include a pile of poop, allegedly from the chief, though it is unclear to me if any DNA testing was done to establish that.

Posted in Cops, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Very quick legal update.

Thursday, March 20th, 2025

Carl Erik Rinsch has been charged federally with fraud.

The director allegedly “orchestrated a scheme to steal millions by soliciting a large investment from a video streaming service, claiming that money would be used to finance a television show that he was creating,” said Matthew Podolsky, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a statement. “But that was fiction. Rinsch instead allegedly used the funds on personal expenses and investments, including highly speculative options and cryptocurrency trading.”

Previously on WCD. You may also remember him as “the guy who invested a bunch of the money NetFlix gave him in Dogecoin”.

Posted in Law, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 20, 2025.

Thursday, March 20th, 2025

George Bell, actor, Harlem Globetrotter, and the tallest man in America.

He was 7’8″, and passed away at 67. He also served honorably with the Norfolk Sheriff’s Office for close to 14 years.

Nadia Cassini, Italian actress. Lawrence emailed this obit and added the observation that she was “the woman in ‘Starcrash’ who wasn’t Caroline Munroe”. IMDB.

Mark Dobies, actor. Other credits include “Nash Bridges”, “CSI: Miami”, and “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”.

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

Obit watch: March 5, 2025.

Wednesday, March 5th, 2025

Congressman Sylvester Turner (Dem. – Houston).

Turner took over the seat of the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in January after serving two terms as mayor of Houston from 2016 to 2024. He was born and raised in Acres Homes, Houston, and attended the University of Houston and Harvard Law School.

…

Turner will be remembered for his decades-long service to Houston and its residents. He has represented his community at Houston City Hall and the Texas House of Representatives, notably fighting for the people of Houston’s historically black neighborhoods. Turner represents Texas’ 18th Congressional District, a historically significant seat once held by civil rights icons such as Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland, Craig Washington and Sheila Jackson Lee.

…

In 2015, Turner was elected the 62nd Mayor of Houston and was re-elected in 2019. Turner forged a path forward for Houston during some of the city’s most turbulent times, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey.

Lawrence.

Edited to add: The NYT did not have a story up when I posted, but they do now. I don’t see any coverage in the WP.

Edited to add 2: WP coverage, but it really doesn’t add anything.

James Harrison, big damn hero.

…Mr. Harrison was one of the most prolific donors in history, extending his arm 1,173 times. He may have also been one of the most important: Scientists used a rare antibody in his plasma to make a medication that helped protect an estimated 2.4 million babies in Australia from possible disease or death, medical experts say.

…

Mr. Harrison’s plasma contained the rare antibody anti-D. Scientists used it to make a medication for pregnant mothers whose immune systems could attack their fetuses’ red blood cells, according to Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
Anti-D helps protect against problems that can occur when babies and mothers have different blood types, most often if the fetus is “positive” and the mother is “negative,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. (The positive and negative signs are called the Rhesus factor, or Rh factor.)
In such cases, a mother’s immune system might react to the fetus as if it were a foreign threat. That can lead babies to develop a dangerous and potentially fatal condition, hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, which can cause anemia and jaundice.

…

In Australia, scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne are working to create a synthetic version of the drug using what some have called “James in a Jar,” an antibody that can be made in a lab.
But for now, human donors are essential: The anti-D shots are made with donated plasma, and Mr. Harrison was one of about 200 donors among the 27 million people in Australia, Lifeblood said.
“It wasn’t one big heroic act,” Jemma Falkenmire, a spokeswoman for Lifeblood, said in an interview as she reflected on Mr. Harrison’s 64 years of donations, from 1954 to 2018. “It was just a lifetime of being there and doing these small acts of good bit by bit.”

FiveThirtyEight.

According to the Journal, the entire site is being axed and all 15 of its employees will be handed pink slips.

Selwyn Raab, journalist and author. He did a lot of reporting on the Mafia, and on people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes.

One was George Whitmore Jr., who had been imprisoned for the 1963 murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, roommates in an Upper East Side apartment — “career girls,” as the tabloids called them.
Mr. Raab, working first for the merged newspaper The New York World-Telegram and The Sun and then for NBC News and the New York public television station WNET-TV, uncovered evidence showing that Mr. Whitmore was elsewhere on the day of those murders and had no part in an unrelated attempted rape with which he was also charged.
Mr. Whitmore said that the police had beaten him, and that he had no lawyer during the interrogation. In 1996, his case was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark ruling that upheld a suspect’s right to counsel.
Mr. Raab wrote a book about the case, “Justice in the Back Room,” which became the basis for “Kojak,” the CBS series about a police detective, played by Telly Savalas, which ran for five years in the 1970s. “I’m not a detective,” Mr. Raab said. “I just look for the most reasonable approach to a story.”
He joined The Times in 1974 and worked there for 26 years. Reporting for the paper, he uncovered evidence that helped free Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the middleweight boxer who was imprisoned for 19 years in the 1966 shooting deaths of three people in a bar in Paterson, N.J.
The Carter case was another instance of police coercion and prosecutorial overreach, one that also led to the conviction of another man, John Artis. Mr. Carter, who died in 2014, became something of a folk hero, his cause championed in a 1976 Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane,” and in a 1999 film, “The Hurricane,” in which Mr. Carter was played by Denzel Washington.

Posted in Books, Heroism, Law, Obits, Politics, Texas, TV | Comments Closed

Of making many books there is no end…

Thursday, February 27th, 2025

It has been a difficult week. I thought it might cheer me up some to catalog more gun books for the library. As the saying goes, “I’ve suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn.”

This time, though, I have one that’s only sort of tangentially a gun book, and one that’s not a gun book at all. I’ll get into the reason for that one later.

Van Halen mode on.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Cops, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Law, Mixology, O'Connor | Comments Closed

You’ve gone down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#144 in a series)

Wednesday, February 26th, 2025

Mike the Musicologist asked me if this qualified. Technically, I’m not sure it does, as I usually reserve flaming hyenas for criminal indictments.

But this is noteworthy, and since I suspect criminal indictments are coming…

There was a Democratic primary in Cook County, Illinois, yesterday. (There may have been primaries elsewhere, but I’m not that up on Illinois politics.)

Cook County includes Dolton, home of Mayor Tiffany Henyard.

How did Tiff do?

She lost. Badly.

With 17 of 17 precincts reported and 100% of the vote counted, per the Cook County Clerk website, [Jason] House won the primary with 3,896 votes (87.91%), compared to Henyard’s 536 votes (12.09%).

I think we can call that a landslide. As a matter of fact, I think we could even call that an avalanche.

For those who are unfamiliar with Ms. Henyard…I wish there was one central source for her that wasn’t Wikipedia. She’s served one term as mayor of Dolton, and that term has been chaotic. Fights at council meetings, the town running out of money, allegations of misuse of public funds, and the list goes on and on.

I note that NBC5 Chicago has a “Dolton” tag. And an hour-long documentary about Dolton and Mayor Henyard. This is one of those stories where, just when you think it can’t get any crazier, it does.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Bagatelle (#128).

Monday, February 24th, 2025

I shared this with Lawrence on Saturday, and he was amused (in the “WTF?!” sense):

“Georgia man sentenced to 20 years for bombing woman’s home, planting python to eat her daughter”.

In case you were wondering: 20 years. Federal time, so there’s no parole.

(Also on the “WTF?!” front, a very quick review of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”: pretentious navel-gazing crap.)

Posted in Bagatelle, Explosives, Law, Movies, Reptiles, Snakes | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#143 in a series)

Thursday, February 20th, 2025

There was an interesting report in yesterday’s NYT. Because I want to be more than a Times digest service, I’ve tried to add additional context from the local news.

Hanceville is a city in Cullman County, Alabama. The 2020 census population was 3,217, and the town employs eight police officers.

Five of the police officers, including the chief, were indicted by a grand jury on Wednesday. The grand jury also recommended the complete abolition of the police department, and stated the department is “a threat to public safety”.

So what’s the backstory? It seems that, either due to malice or incompetence, the police department has trouble securing and accounting for evidence.

“One of the most concerning things that we discovered in this process was that Hanceville Police Department’s evidence room was not secure,” said [Cullman DA Champ] Crocker. “Criminal evidence must be secured in order to have that evidence for prosecution and to ensure due process. This evidence room was anything but secure.”
During the news conference, Crocker showed a photo of the evidence room, pointing out a hole in the door and a broom against the wall.
“This is someone who works there, and you can see this individual has this stick in his hand and is pushing it in the door, in the hole to jimmy open the door, and the grand jury watched a lot of videos, this is from security camera footage, showing this evidence room was routinely accessed by individuals who were not authorized to do so, going in and out using the stick through the hole in the wall,” explained Crocker.

One of the people who accessed the evidence room was a 911 dispatcher. He was found dead in his office the same day. “Evidence” was found in his office, and the autopsy showed he overdosed on “fentanyl and other drugs”.

The chief is charged with “two counts of failure to report ethics crime and tampering with evidence.” The other officers are charged with:

* “two counts of computer tampering, two counts of using office for personal gain, tampering with evidence, and two counts of solicitation to commit a controlled substance crime.”
* “two counts of computer tampering, two counts of using office for personal gain, tampering with evidence, and two counts of solicitation to commit a controlled substance crime.”
* “tampering with evidence.”
* “four counts of unlawful distribution of controlled substance and two counts conspiracy to unlawfully distribute a controlled substance.” That officer’s wife (who is not employed by the department) is also charged with “two counts of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance and two counts conspiracy to unlawfully distribute a controlled substance.”

It sounds like the officer and his wife had a thing going where they were supplying anabolic steroids to two of the other indicted officers. One of the officers used his department issued cell phone to get steroids from those two, and went to the hospital while on duty to get steroid shots from Mrs. Indicted Officer. He also allegedly misused law enforcement databases to get information on two “Does”. Another one of the officers illegally accessed law enforcement databases to get information on a murder investigation, and also got steroid shots from Mrs. Indicted Officer while on duty.

NYT coverage (by way of archive.is).

Coverage from AL.com.

Posted in Cops, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 17, 2025.

Monday, February 17th, 2025

Eleanor Maguire passed away in early January. She was 54. Cancer got her.

I think this is a fascinating obit. She was a cognitive neuroscientist who did a lot of early and influential work using MRI scanning to study the brain, especially the hippocampus.

Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future.
“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. “She changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.”

She was watching TV one night and came across “The Knowledge“, about London taxi drivers and their qualifying exams. (That’s a rabbit hole worth going down if you’re unfamiliar with it.)

In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing them about the shortest routes between various destinations in London.
The results, published in 1997, showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as the drivers described their routes — meaning that specific area of the brain played a key role in spatial navigation.
But that didn’t solve the mystery of why the taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire kept digging. Using M.R.I. machines, she measured different regions in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with those in the brains of people who weren’t taxi drivers.
“The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects,” she wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, she found, correlated with the length of a cabby’s career: The longer the cabby had driven, the bigger the hippocampus.

…

She followed up with other studies. One showed that the hippocampi of bus drivers — whose routes were set rather than navigated from memory — didn’t grow. Another showed that prospective taxi drivers who failed their tests did not gain any hippocampus volume in the process.
The implications were striking: The key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable.
In a roundabout way, Dr. Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”
This technique involves visualizing a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized information. Dr. Maguire studied memory athletes — people who train their brains to memorize vast amounts of information quickly — who used this method, and observed that its effectiveness was “reflected in its continued use over two and a half millennia in virtually unchanged form.”

…

In studying patients with damage to the hippocampus, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire found that they couldn’t visualize or navigate future scenarios. One taxi driver, for instance, struggled to make his way through busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Other amnesiacs couldn’t imagine an upcoming Christmas party or a trip to the beach.
“Instead of visualizing a single scene in their mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathers, the patients reported seeing just a collection of disjointed images, such as sand, water, people and beach towels,” the journal Science News reported in 2009.
The hippocampus, it turns out, binds snippets of information to construct scenes from the past — and the future.

(See also.)

Jim Guy Tucker, former governor of Arkansas. You may remember him from such hits as Whitewater.

He had been among the most promising figures in Arkansas politics and a rival to Mr. Clinton in Arkansas’s Democratic Party. But he was forced to resign as governor in July 1996, after serving less than two years of his term.
Two months earlier, he had been convicted in a federal court in Little Rock. He had been prosecuted by independent counsel, a team led by Kenneth W. Starr, for receiving a fraudulent loan from a small business development company, Capital Management Services, in the mid-1980s.
In August 1996, Judge George Howard Jr. of Federal District Court in Little Rock sentenced him to four years’ probation — Mr. Tucker avoided jail because of testimony about a serious health condition — and ordered him to pay $294,000 in restitution to the Small Business Administration. By then Mr. Tucker had already quit the governor’s mansion; he would never hold office again.

…

The loan — for $150,000, according to the historian Jeannie M. Whayne of the University of Arkansas — should never have gone to Mr. Tucker’s water and sewer services company. Other sources say nearly $3 million was lent to Mr. Tucker and his co-defendants, James B. and Susan McDougal, who were also convicted in May 1996.
Capital Management Services “was supposed to make loans to companies where at least half the owners were ‘disadvantaged’ in some way,” the veteran Arkansas journalist Ernie Dumas, described as the dean of the Arkansas political press corps by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, wrote in an unpublished manuscript.
But David Hale, the banker who ran Capital Management Services and was the key witness for Mr. Starr’s prosecution team, “never told any of his borrowers that, and few, if any, of them would have qualified,” Mr. Dumas wrote. “Tucker and the McDougals learned of the special designation, for disadvantaged people, at the trial.”

…

At the end of 1996 he received a liver transplant, which he credited with saving his life. Two years later, Mr. Starr was after him again, and Mr. Tucker pleaded guilty to tax fraud “to avoid going to prison,” Mr. Dumas wrote.
“The Justice Department and the I.R.S. eventually acknowledged that Starr had charged Tucker with violating a section of the federal bankruptcy code that did not even exist at the time of a cable-television transaction in the 1980s,” Mr. Dumas added. “The government eventually concluded that it might owe Tucker money but could not discern how much. It sent him and his wife a check for $1.44, which he framed and put on his wall.”

Ron Travisano, noted advertising guy.

FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Kevin Lacey, “pilot, philanthropist, businessman and Discovery Channel character”. He was part of the cast of “Airplane Repo”.

Rich met him a few times at fly-ins (and sent over a photo, which I don’t have his permission to reproduce here), and says he was a really down-to-earth guy with a lot of stories. As Rich put it, he was the kind of person you could just walk up and talk to.

Facebook.

Posted in Law, Neuroscience, Obits, Planes, Politics, TV | 2 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#142 in a series)

Friday, February 7th, 2025

Information about this one has been hard to find. Mike the Musicologist sent me a press release from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the stories I turned up in Internet searches seem to be lightly rewritten from that.

Pearson, Georgia is a small town, with a population of 1,821 per the 2020 census. Robert “Buster” Johnson is the mayor.

“Buster” was busted yesterday.

I’m just going to quote the list of charges here:

  • Criminal Attempt to Commit Hindering or Apprehension or Punishment of Criminal
  • 3 counts of Influencing Witnesses
  • Criminal Solicitation to Commit False Statements and Writings
  • Criminal Solicitation to Commit False Official Certificates or Writings by Officers or Employees of a State and Political Subdivision
  • 2 counts of False Statements and Writings
  • Criminal Attempt to Commit Theft by Taking
  • Conspiracy in Restraint of Free and Open Competition
  • 4 counts of Conspiracy to Defraud State and Political Subdivision
  • Theft by Deception
  • 3 counts of Bribery
  • 2 counts of Theft by Taking
  • Fraud, Forgery, and Theft in Connection with Registration of Title to Land
  • Filing False Documents
  • 4 counts of Violation of Oath of Office by Public Officer

Go big or go home, you know? Also, “Violation of Oath of Office by Public Officer”? Didn’t know that was a crime in Georgia, or anywhere else, but I fully support the existence of this as a criminal charge.

Any public officer who willfully and intentionally violates the terms of his oath as prescribed by law shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years.

So what the heck happened? As I said previously, details are hard to come by, but the GBI press release says:

The investigation began when the Alapaha Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office received complaints of Mayor Johnson participating in fraudulent activities. The District Attorney subsequently requested the GBI to look into these allegations. During the investigation, agents uncovered a scheme to have an incarcerated person released from jail through fraudulent documentation, obtaining kickbacks from city contracts, theft of municipal land, and bribery of city employees.

Here’s a story from WALB, which doesn’t add much, except that some folks don’t like Buster.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »