Whipped Cream Difficulties

Five teenage boys disappeared on the night of August 20, 1978, in Newark.

Their bodies have never been found.

In July of 2008, Philander Hampton, a convicted drug dealer and thief, told the local police that he had witnessed his cousin, Lee Anthony Evans, murder the boys. Specifically, Hampton claimed that Evans thought the boys had broken into his apartment; Hampton and Evans rounded the boys up, Evans allegedly shut them all in a closet, and then set fire to the abandoned building.

The building was totally destroyed. Searches with dogs and sonar did not turn up any bodies.

Hampton pled guilty to the murders, but under the terms of his plea agreement, he could be released next year.

Evans denied the murders, and represented himself at trial. (An attorney was appointed to assist him.)

The jury acquitted Mr. Evans of all the charges earlier today.

I find this interesting because:

1. It was a sensational crime. Five teenage boys vanish at once and are never found?
2. The prosecution rested their case almost entirely on the testimony of a convicted drug dealer and thief. That’s pretty much all they had going for them; they did try to introduce evidence that the judge had barred, and the judge appropriately reprimanded them.
3. When’s the last time you’ve heard of a defendant who represented himself being successful? Sure, it happens, but rarely, especially in a sensational murder trial.

In other news, the jury in the case of Paul Bergrin couldn’t reach a verdict, and a mistrial has been declared.

“Who is Paul Bergrin?” you cry. He was Newark’s “lawyer to the stars”, where “stars” are defined as “big time drug dealers”. In this case, Bergrin was charged with arranging the murder of an FBI informant so that his client would be able to beat drug charges; the government also alleged that the murder was intended to hide Bergrin’s involvement in supplying large amounts of cocaine to a local gang.

Mostly, this gives me an excuse to link to Mark Jacobson’s piece for New York, “The Baddest Lawyer in the History of Jersey“, which provides an astonishing summary of the allegations against Bergrin.

“Someone got killed, and they were trying to put it on me,” remembers Clay, as he asked to be called. “First-degree murder, can’t fuck with that, so I got Paul. He was the biggest name out there. He drove his Bentley down Clinton Avenue, and it was like, ‘Don’t you punks even think about jacking that.’ Everyone said he was wide open. But I didn’t know how wide open until that day. I’m in his office two minutes. He says he’s looked at my case, and only one witness can hurt me. Then he says, ‘Okay, what are we going to do about this person? She’s a user, right? Why don’t we give her a hot shot? Just stick her.’ ”

It is worth bearing in mind that the allegations against Bergrin are allegations, and haven’t been proven yet. Bergrin is set to stand trial for a grocery list of other charges (“witness tampering, murder-for-hire, fraud, cocaine trafficking and running a high-end prostitution ring”), and can still be retried on the murder and murder conspiracy charge.

Cigarette taxes in New York City (this is combined city and state tax) are at $5.85 per pack.

This has led folks to find clever ways around the system: mail order cigarettes, until the government cracked down on that, sales of single smokes, cigarette smuggling…and now, roll your own cigarette shops.

Jonathan Behrins, a lawyer for the companies that own the shops, said Monday that the stores were not obligated to charge cigarette taxes because “we are not producing cigarettes for resale.”

“We are selling the contents that produce the cigarette,” he said, “and it’s up to the user to make them.”

I’m sure it comes as no great shock to anyone that the city disagrees, and is suing the shops in federal court.

“By selling illegally low-priced cigarettes,” said the city’s lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, “defendants not only interfere with the collection of city cigarette taxes, they also impair the city’s smoking cessation programs and impair individual efforts at smoking reduction, thereby imposing higher health care costs on the city and injuring public health.”

Awwwwww. I feel bad for the Bloomberg administration. No, wait, that’s still heartburn. Never mind.

James Arthur Ray has been sentenced for his negligent manslaughter conviction in the Sedona sweat lodge deaths. (Previously.)

He got two years. That should be enough time to finish a self-help book.

Kirby Brown, Liz Neuman, and James Shore were unavailable for comment.