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You’re smoking in a no-smoking zone, you tax-fattened hyena!

Thursday, November 13th, 2025

And I’m looking forward to full on flames.

Headline on the front page of the NYPost:

Dem rep’s $1.2 million DC home target of DOJ mortgage fraud criminal referral

We’re almost getting to the point where “politician charged with mortgage fraud” is the new “car bomb explodes in Beirut”.

But this one is special.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) was hit with a federal criminal referral for alleged mortgage and tax fraud related to his purchase of a $1.2 million home in Washington, DC, that he claimed as a primary residence, The Post has confirmed.

You may remember Eric Swalwell for such hits as “banging a Chinese spy”:

In January 2023, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) kicked Swalwell off the House Intelligence Committee, following reports three years prior that a suspected Chinese spy had infiltrated the congressman’s campaign — and got close to him.
Fang Fang, also known as Christine Fang, was a purported honeytrap who entered the US from China as a college student in 2011 — but allegedly spent the next four years wooing state and federal lawmakers to potentially obtain sensitive government intelligence.
At least two mayors of midwestern US cities had a romantic or sexual relationship with her, a US intelligence official and former elected official told Axios in 2020.

You may also remember Rep. Swalwell for threatening to use nuclear weapons against gun owners.

If Rep. Swalwell is convicted (and as much as I despise the man, he is still entitled to the presumption of innocence) he will, of course, lose all rights to own guns. I assume this includes any access he may have to nuclear weapons.

Posted in Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 4, 2025.

Tuesday, November 4th, 2025

Diane Ladd. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “Carnosaur”, “White Lightning”, “Then Came Bronson”, and “The Fugitive”. And the pool of living “Alice” actors gets even smaller.

Former vice president Dick Cheney. WP (archived).

Victor Conte. I’m not sure how many people will remember that name: he was the founder of Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), the people who provided “performance enhancing drugs” to various athletes “including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track champion Marion Jones”.

The federal government’s investigation…yielded convictions of Jones, elite sprint cyclist Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield along with coaches, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Politics, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#153 and #154 in a series)

Thursday, October 30th, 2025

Dalya Attar is a state senator in Maryland.

Dalya Attar has been indicted on federal charges of, believe it or not, extortion. Most of the time, it is mail or wire fraud, often in conjunction with bribery. Extortion is so rare, let us savor that for a moment. The indictment was handed down October 23rd, but I’m only seeing reports of it today.

Reports say that there were two people who were “detracting from or negatively influencing her election campaigns”.

The conspiracy purportedly involved planting tracking and recording devices and, after obtaining footage of the unnamed victims “in bed,” threatening its release with demands.

This dates back to 2020, when she was working on her re-election to the Maryland House of Delegates. Reports say she had a falling out with a consultant who had previously worked on her 2018 campaign. The consultant became a vocal critic of Ms. Attar, and Ms. Attar wanted her to be “a non-issue in my mind”.

Ms. Attar allegedly conspired with her brother and a Baltimore police officer.

…and others involved in the plot allegedly placed a tracker on the consultant’s car and installed hidden cameras in a smoke detector in an apartment the victim used to rendezvous with her married paramour.
“Damn, I wish I had [the man’s] stamina,” Finklestein stated in a WhatsApp voice message after installing the cameras, according to the indictment.

…

In December 2021, Joseph Attar allegedly met with the man who’d had an affair with the consultant at a Baltimore-area shopping center and claimed to have “hours of footage of you in bed with [her] … the only thing you need to do is very simple, is go to [the consultant] and tell her, leave Dalya alone. Don’t bring her up anymore to anyone. Stay out of this election … and make sure she doesn’t do anything against Dalya.”
According to the indictment, Joseph Attar also told the man that if he didn’t do what he asked, “I’ll share this video with everybody you know, everyone she knows, every Rabbi in town, your kids, your wife, her daughters … I already have all her daughters’ phone numbers, right? And every shadchan [matchmaker] in Israel who is trying to set up her daughters, I’ll share these videos with.”

Sen. Attar wasn’t elected to the Senate: she was appointed in January, but she is currently running for the seat.

Court filings show, however, that the senator is in custody, as are her brother, who is a real estate developer, and Finkelstein, whose police powers were suspended in 2022 but is still employed by the city.

I’m linking to the Sun’s coverage, but it is kind of thin right now. “This article will be updated.” The NYPost is a little more detailed, but also “This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.”

LaMar Cook is a staffer for Maura Healey, the governor of Massachusetts.

LaMar Cook has been charged with various crimes.

“unlawful possession of a firearm”. As we all know, Bob, Massachusetts never met a gun control measure it didn’t like.

“unlawful possession of ammunition”. See above.

And “trafficking over 200 grams of cocaine”. Way over 200 grams. Try eight kilos of cocaine. Which he had delivered to the state office building he worked in.

His arrest is also linked to parcels seized at the Hotel UMass in Amherst, where Cook was previously employed, containing about 13 kilos of the drug.

As a great philosopher once said, “Cocaine is a hell of a drug.“

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

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 »

Obit watch: September 22, 2025.

Monday, September 22nd, 2025

Playing catch-up from the last few days:

Marilyn Hagerty. If you’ve been around the Internet for a while, that name may ring a bell with you.

Ms. Hagerty wrote a restaurant review column (“The Eatbeat”) for the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald. In 2012, she wrote a review of the new (and first) Olive Garden in Grand Forks. It went viral on the Internet.

When the article first began to ricochet across social media, the initial consensus was that the writer was a kindly Midwestern grandmother who had lost the script. This seemed to be the view of an out-of-town reader who sent her a one-word email: “Pathetic.”
In fact, Ms. Hagerty was following a script of her own. It was her long-running custom to provide factual rundowns of the dining options in Grand Forks, a college town near the Minnesota border that has fewer than 60,000 people and few restaurants intent on culinary innovation.
She covered truck stops, diners and fast-food joints, some of them more than once. Although she wrote about places serving Vietnamese and Somali cuisine in Grand Forks, Eatbeat readers craving a new thrill generally had to look for it in Fargo, about 80 miles to the south.
“If you were going to review the fine dining here, you’d be done in three weeks,” Ms. Hagerty once said of her community.

What she said. It bothered me at the time, and it still bothers me. Why not seriously engage with and critique with what Olive Garden has to offer? (Back when we were still doing regular reviews, the Saturday Dining Conspiracy also reviewed our local Olive Garden, and our logic was the same: why should they be above criticism?)

Reaction to the review shifted as it became clear that Ms. Hagerty didn’t give a flying breadstick what the cynics thought. Within days, she was in New York, being welcomed by the national media. She gave interviews to “CBS Sunday Morning,” NBC’s “Today” morning program and Anderson Cooper’s syndicated talk show.

…

“My son is full of prunes,” she said.

She was 99.

Jim Edgar, Republican governor of Illinois during the 1990s.

Marian Burros, noted food writer. She worked at various times for the Washington Post, Washington Star, and the NYT.

She might offer a recipe for, say, Martha Washington’s Great Cake, usually in the weekly De Gustibus column, which she took over in 1983, while reporting on a sodium labeling bill being debated in Congress or regulatory battles over the wording of federal dietary guidelines.
From her home base in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, she became a close observer of the White House kitchen, reporting on a succession of presidential chefs, inaugural meals and the dining styles of new administrations. She took a particular interest in the White House vegetable garden planted by Michelle Obama.
On the pleasure side of the equation, her plum torte was one of the most popular recipes in the history of The Times, reprinted every September from 1983 to 1989.

“The Story Behind Our Most Requested Recipe Ever” (archived). Recipe (archived).

Martha Washington’s Great Cake (archived).

Ms. Burros alerted readers of The Post to the potential dangers of food dyes derived from coal tar, notably Red Dye No. 2, which the Food and Drug Administration banned in 1976. And, in a widely reprinted article, she revealed that Fresh Horizons Bread, marketed as a low-calorie alternative to regular bread, contained large amounts of powdered cellulose.

Posted in Food, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

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.

More from the NYT:

The city as a whole favored the change, ensuring its passage. In April, it officially became a new park — called Sunset Dunes — and it is dotted with benches, murals, exercise equipment, hammocks and a children’s play structure shaped like an octopus.
There are pianos there, too, and on a recent day, a man played Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” as people strolled and roller skated past him. Wooden signs point people to nearby shops and cafes, many of which say business is up since the park opened.

…

But residents in Mr. Engardio’s district never loved the idea of losing a thoroughfare for the sake of a park. Nearly two-thirds of the Sunset District voted against the measure and resented the fact that residents farther from the beach got a park at the expense of nearby residents’ convenience.
Some Sunset residents relied on the street to travel in and out of the city. Others felt that the Sunset District had to bear the brunt of added cars on their neighborhood streets. The data has been mixed on the traffic impacts, but advocates of the park say such frustrations were overblown.
Many Sunset District residents say that the park is not used much on the weekdays or during the area’s notoriously chilly, foggy spells. John Crabtree, a volunteer for the campaign to recall Mr. Engardio, said he drove the Great Highway one last time on its last day in operation and felt sad to be losing it.
“It was an iconically beautiful drive,” he said. “People had a relationship with it, and it meant something. People were connected to this piece of infrastructure because it was part of living out here. It was part of the Sunset.”

Meanwhile, on the other coast:

A major strip club group bribed a state auditor — including with lap dances — to avoid paying more than $8 million in New York City sales taxes over the last 14 years, prosecutors charged Tuesday.
The State Attorney General’s Office unsealed a 79-count criminal indictment against the company, RCI, and five of its executives, accusing them of engaging in a naked, tax fraud scheme.
The affair was so brazen, a top RCI accountant even allegedly made at least 10 trips from Texas to New York to treat the former auditor at the company’s Manhattan jiggle joints, Rick’s Cabaret, Vivid Cabaret and Hoops Cabaret and Sports Bar, court papers state.

“naked, tax fraud scheme”. New York Post, I see what you did there.

RCI and the top execs allegedly bribed the auditor with a slew of lascivious treats starting in 2010, including at least 13 free multi-day trips to Miami “with complimentary hotel stays, restaurant meals, and up to several thousand dollars’ worth of private dances per day at RCI-owned strip clubs,” the indictment states.
The company bigwigs texted each other about haggling over how much cash they should bribe the crooked auditor with — and how much of a tax discount they should demand in return, the AG’s office alleged.
“We need to talk about New York and dance dollars,” RCI president Eric Langan texted to CFO Ahmed Anakar, the filing claims. “We are going to be hit by 3m in sales taxes soon.”
In exchange for cash, trips and dining, the state worker — who hasn’t been publicly identified — gave RCI favorable treatment during six state audits, the indictment states.

“dance dollars”. I can not tell a lie: I love that phrase.

Robert P. Burke was sentenced to six years in prison yesterday.

Mr. Burke was a former four-star admiral in the Navy, and “was once the Navy’s second-highest-ranking officer”. Oddly enough, this is not fallout from Fat Leonard: this was a separate sleazy deal. He…

…ordered his staff to award a $355,000 contract to Next Jump, a New York-based technology and work force training company, prosecutors for the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said. He also tried to persuade another senior admiral to do the same, prosecutors said. In exchange, Next Jump offered Admiral Burke a position with a yearly base salary of $500,000 and a grant of 100,000 stock options for when he retired, according to prosecutors.

…

According to prosecutors, from August 2018 through July 2019, Next Jump provided a work force training pilot program to a small part of the Navy that was under Admiral Burke’s command at the time. But the Navy terminated its contract with Next Jump in late 2019 and directed it not to contact Admiral Burke.
In July 2021, Mr. Kim and Ms. Messenger met with Admiral Burke in Washington, D.C., where they offered him the job and stock options in exchange for a government contract. According to prosecutors, the three also agreed that Admiral Burke would push other Navy officials to award another training contract to Next Jump estimated to be in the “triple digit millions.”
Admiral Burke ordered his staff in December 2021 to award a $355,000 contract to Next Jump to train personnel under his command in Italy and Spain, prosecutors said, which was completed in January 2022. In their sentencing memo, prosecutors said the training was “widely disparaged,” receiving mostly negative reviews.

…

Admiral Burke retired in July 2022, and that October began working at Next Jump with a yearly starting salary of $500,000 and a grant of 100,000 stock options, prosecutors said.

Finally, and close to home, Lawrence has a good story up. Urban Alchemy is an organization that ran homeless shelters in Austin. They lost their contract with the city…because they were apparently falsifying records. I’m not sure if it was malice or stupidity (I know, why not both?) but I encourage you to wander over to his blog and read the coverage.

Posted in Law, Politics | 1 Comment »

Branded!

Sunday, September 7th, 2025

Some background on this: the City of Austin introduced a new logo this week.

I’ve seen people describe this as looking like the Albertson’s logo, and like a stylized freeway overpass.

The whole total project cost is an estimated $1,117,558 and is a part of the Austin Strategic 2023 Plan approved back in 2018. Here’s the breakdown of how that money is being spent:
Brand Vendors: $640,000
Public Awareness Campaign: $115,000
Consolidated city-wide design software for all departments: $75,582
Support staff and legal counsel – salary and benefits for a Brand Project Manager (temporary City employee) and external legal review: $186,976

A friend of the blog, who wishes to remain monogamous anonymous sent around a rant on the subject. I asked for his permission to republish it here, and it follows after the jump. I’ve edited it slightly at his request to remove possibly identifying information.

(more…)

Posted in Austin, Guest, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 18, 2025.

Monday, August 18th, 2025

Terence Stamp. THR. Tributes.

Other credits include “Big Eyes”, “The Limey”, “Bowfinger”, and “The Hit”.

Dan Tana, who ran one of those famous LA hangouts for the stars (until he sold it in 2009). NYT (archived).

Dobrivoje Tanasijević was born on May 26, 1935, in Cibutkovica, a small town outside Belgrade, where he grew up. His father, Radojko, was a restaurateur. His mother, Lenka (Miloseviv) Tanasijevic, resourcefully kept the family afloat during World War II, when Radojko was arrested. He was considered an ally of the old ruling classes by the Yugoslav Communists, and he wound up becoming an accountant at one of the restaurants he had owned.
In the early 1950s, Dan, still a teenager, was on the farm team of Red Star Belgrade, a professional soccer club. The team traveled to Belgium, where he got into a fight with the chaperone. He and a couple of friends promptly defected.

…

Regulars during the 1970s described a particularly rowdy era: the musician Nils Lofgren serenading strangers with an accordion while high on acid; a fight between an agent and a producer over a third man’s wife that left enduring blood stains on the restaurant’s carpeted floor.
“Our best clients are the regulars who come at least once or twice a week,” Mr. Susser told The New York Times in 2005. “Even a studio chief might not get a booth at the last minute if they haven’t been in for a while.”

…

The restaurant’s hipness depended somehow on its orthodoxy. The interior and the menu remained locked in midcentury America’s imagination of an Italian restaurant — including after a fire in 1980, when customers pleaded with Mr. Tana to exactly replicate the old saloon, and after Mr. Tana sold it to a friend in 2009.

…

The average experience of a night at Tana’s went something like this:
You walked under a green awning into a space so dark your eyes took a second to adjust. The décor was repeatedly described as “bordello red”: red Naugahyde booths, red-and-white checked tablecloths, red Christmas-tree lights on the ceiling and, everywhere, mounds of marinara sauce.
Your table, lit by candlelight, would generally occupy a dark, recessed corner. Your waiter would not be the Los Angeles archetype — a beautiful but incompetent aspiring young actor — but instead, dressed in black bow tie, a professional, courteous gentleman from the former Yugoslavia.
Mr. Tana himself, though frequently attending to his international soccer interests in London or Belgrade, where he had homes, might also stop by your table to greet you. He had an athlete’s build — six feet tall, broad shouldered — but also the sophistication of a confident speaker of Russian, German, French, Italian, English and Serbo-Croatian.
“His manners are old world: He is one of the few men who can carry off kissing a woman’s hand,” Los Angeles magazine reported in 1997. “He does it swiftly, smoothly and without hesitation, the same way he lights your cigarette.”

Ronnie Rondell, stuntman. He has a pretty massive body of credits, but would be known to many people as “the guy on fire on the cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here'”. He also did stunt work on “The Night Stalker”, “To Live and Die in L.A.”, and one of the movies based on a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

On May 23, 1969, Mr. Rondell married Mary Smith in Palm Springs, Calif. The couple had two sons, R.A. Rondell and Reid Rondell. Both children became involved in the stunt industry.
In 1985, Reid Rondell, 22, was killed when his helicopter crashed during the filming of the CBS television series “Airwolf.” A producer, Donald Bellisario, informed Mr. Rondell of the death, according to a news report at the time. “He was obviously broken up by it, but he told me, ‘You know, it goes with the territory,’” Mr. Bellisario said.

Tristan Rogers, actor. Other credits include “Cover Up“, “Mancuso, FBI”, “Delgo“, and “Fast Track”.

Jules Witcover, political columnist and reporter.

From the days of manual typewriters to the age of laptop computers, Mr. Witcover interpreted America’s political scene as an analyst and eyewitness to history. He swapped tales with presidents; covered presidential campaigns, beginning in 1960; recorded the rise and fall of Richard M. Nixon; and was steps away when a gunman killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel in 1968.
Mr. Witcover’s column, “Politics Today,” written five days a week for years with Jack Germond, appeared in The Washington Star from 1977 to 1981, when The Star folded. It then ran in The Baltimore Sun and up to 140 other papers from 1981 to 2005, when it was terminated in a cutback, and was later syndicated three times a week by Tribune Media Services. Mr. Germond died in 2013, but Mr. Witcover continued writing it until he retired in 2022.

…

He was featured in “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse’s 1973 book about pack campaign journalism, the old road show of poker games, pounding typewriters and all-night boozing. He fit right in, but he was one of the heavyweights.
“Witcover was deadly serious about his craft,” Mr. Crouse wrote. “He had given a great deal of thought to his own role as a political journalist, and was extraordinarily sensitive to the role that the whole press corps played, to its problems and failings.”

Posted in Food, Media, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

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

More from WWL TV:

The indictment alleges that Latoya Cantrell, the Mayor of New Orleans, and Jeffrey Paul Vappie, a member of her Executive Protection Unit (EPU), developed a personal relationship in October 2021. To conceal their relationship and maximize their time together, they allegedly created a scheme to defraud the City of New Orleans by engaging in personal activities while Vappie was on duty and being paid for providing protection.
As part of the scheme, it is alleged that Cantrell had Vappie accompany her on at least 14 out-of-state trips, falsely claiming she needed protection for safety concerns. These trips reportedly cost the City of New Orleans over $70,000, not including Cantrell’s own travel expenses. The indictment also claims that Vappie and Cantrell used a city-owned apartment in the Pontalba Building for personal use, with Vappie frequently spending time there while on duty.
The document states that Cantrell and Vappie took several actions to impede inquiries and a federal grand jury investigation into their relationship and scheme. These actions included:

Using an encrypted messaging platform
Deleting electronic evidence
Making false statements to federal law enforcement agents and a federal grand jury
Lying to colleagues and making false public statements

More:

The indictment caps a federal investigation of Cantrell, first reported by WWL Louisiana in 2022. A grand jury started hearing the evidence from federal prosecutors in February 2024 and returned an indictment last September against building inspector Randy Farrell, charging him with conspiring to bribe Cantrell with about $9,000 in gifts in 2019, including NFC Championship Game tickets, a lunch at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse and a cell phone, in exchange for causing the firing of a city official who had been investigating Farrell for alleged fraud.

The WWL story also includes the full indictment.

As noted in the press coverage, Ms. Cantrell is actually the first sitting mayor of New Orleans to be indicted. Ray Nagin was indicted, convicted, and did time, but that was after he left office.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 22, 2025.

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025

Sgt. Jake Larson (United States Army – ret.). He was 102.

In January 1942, he was stationed in Northern Ireland as part of the Army V Corps, also known as the Victory Corps. It played critical roles in the D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge.
As an operations sergeant, Mr. Larson assembled the planning books for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy. He ran onto Omaha Beach while German machine gunners sprayed the beach with gunfire.
He told The New York Times in 2019 that he remembered jumping off his landing craft into frigid water up to his neck amid explosions. He hid behind a pile of sand and asked a soldier if he had any dry matches to light a cigarette, as his were all wet.
“I looked again and there was no head under the helmet,” Mr. Larson said. “I thank that guy today. In that instant I had the ability to get up and run.”
He said that he weighed 120 pounds at the time.
“I don’t think the Germans were capable of shooting a toothpick, so I made it to shore,” he said. His unit, though, suffered significant losses.

During the pandemic, his grand daughter set up a TikTok account for him.

Mr. Larson had 1.2 million followers on TikTok on his channel, “Story Time with Papa Jake.” He amassed more than 11 million likes on the page.

…

The first video was posted in June 2020, and about 225 more followed as he quickly gained hundreds of thousands of followers.
Initially, he recounted in detail the preparations for D-Day, the operation itself, and the aftermath. But soon he added a recurring feature in which he opened letters and packages from his followers, and shared their contents in videos.

…

Mr. Larson was the last surviving member of his company.
“I am the last man,” he told The Times, while wearing a pin on his hat with the shield and motto of his military regiment, “To the last man.”

The Luckiest Man in the World: Stories from the life of Papa Jake on Amazon.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner. NYT (archived). IMDB. This is being well covered everywhere, and I have nothing to add. Except maybe: be careful swimming.

Jimmy Hunt, actor. Interesting story: he retired from acting at 14, and died at 85. IMDB.

Edwin Feulner, Heritage Foundation guy.

Tom Troupe, actor. Other credits include “Planet of the Apes” (the TV series), “The F.B.I.”, “Kelly’s Heroes”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. He was “Ben Holland”.)

Eileen Fulton, actress. Other credits include “Nero Wolfe” (the 1959 series), “Naked City”, and “Our Private World”.

Posted in 1970s, Heroism, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

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 Franken 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

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

Obit watch: June 27, 2025.

Friday, June 27th, 2025

Fred Espenak, astrophysicist. He was known as “Mr. Eclipse”.

During five decades of chasing eclipses, Mr. Espenak wrote several books about them, notably “Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses” (2006), ​​a two-volume, 742-page treatise written with the Belgian meteorologist Jean Meeus; operated four websites devoted to celestial statistics, including MrEclipse.com; and witnessed 52 solar eclipses, 31 of which were total.

…

In the early 1990s, Mr. Espenak began writing NASA’s eclipse bulletins with the Canadian meteorologist Jay Anderson. He also started a website for the space agency devoted to eclipse data. His goal: simplify and democratize complicated data so nonscientists sky gazers could geek out on the data, too.
All the while, he kept chasing eclipses — traveling to Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Aruba, Turkey, Zambia, Antarctica, Spain, Libya and beyond.

Lalo Schifrin. He was 93, and dang, what a career.

(Edited to add 6/28: NYT obit, which just went up today.)

The workaholic Schifrin received Oscar nominations for his scores for Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Fox (1968), Voyage of the Damned (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Sting II (1983) and for the song “People Alone” from The Competition (1980).
He scored Dirty Harry (1971) and the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988), all starring Clint Eastwood — the filmmaker presented him with his Oscar — and served as the composer on all three of the Rush Hour films.

…

His résumé also included work on Coogan’s Bluff (1968) — that kicked off his long association with Eastwood and director Don Siegel — Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Charley Varrick (1973), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Telefon (1977), The Nude Bomb (1980), Black Moon Rising (1986), Money Talks (1997), Something to Believe In (1998), Tango (1998), Bringing Down the House (2003) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004).
An inspired Bruce Lee worked out to the show’s score in his gym in Hong Kong before signing Schifrin as the composer and orchestrator on Enter the Dragon (1973). As a bonus, Lee gave the musician his first martial arts lessons, for free.
Schifrin concocted a jazz waltz in 3/4 time for the theme to the Mike Connors series Mannix — also produced by Geller — and played the Moog synthesizer on the opening music for another 1960s’ CBS drama, Medical Center.
Schifrin also was responsible for the themes for T.H.E. Cat, Petrocelli, Starsky & Hutch, Bronk and Most Wanted. And his “Tar Sequence” music from Cool Hand Luke was adopted by ABC affiliates for their Eyewitness News broadcasts.

IMDB.

Bill Moyers.

But he resisted opening up about himself. He occasionally spoke about his Johnson years, but he never consented to be interviewed by Robert A. Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has spent more than 40 years on his five-volume Johnson biography.

Rick Hurst, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Return of the Killer Shrews”, “Supertrain”, and “Murder, She Wrote”.

Carolyn McCarthy, former Congresswoman from Long Island and prominent gun control advocate.

I bet you thought I wasn’t going to post this, didn’t you? Yes, I’ve used it before (though not in this version) but for my money, I think this is the greatest TV theme of all time. (Though I admit it does have some stiff competition.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Guns, Mannix, Music, Obits, Politics, TV | 5 Comments »

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