Archive for June 18th, 2014

You’re NOT going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! Yet.

Wednesday, June 18th, 2014

The first trial of Malcolm A. Smith has ended in a mistrial.

The decision came after a week and a half of testimony that included reports of cash-stuffed envelopes delivered as bribes, boozy visits to strip clubs and a scheme that teamed a developer desperate to reduce his own likely prison sentence with an undercover federal agent known as Raj.

Strippers. Always with the strippers. What happened?

Judge Kenneth M. Karas of United States District Court granted Senator Smith and one of his two co-defendants a mistrial because federal prosecutors had failed to turn over promptly to the defense more than 70 hours of wiretapped conversations, about a third of them in Yiddish, and translating and digesting them would require jurors to serve longer than some could manage.

(Previously.)

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 18, 2014.

Wednesday, June 18th, 2014

Stanley Marsh 3, “legendary West Texas eccentric“.

This is Marsh’s most famous creation:

And Marsh spent the last years of his life entangled in civil suits and criminal accusations involving his alleged abuse of young men.

Texas Monthly has the best coverage I’ve been able to find so far. Nothing in the papers of record yet, and the DFW papers are just running the AP obit.

Daniel Keyes has also passed away at the age of 86. Keyes was most famous for the novella “Flowers for Algernon”, later expanded into a novel, turned into the movie “Charly”, and the subject of countless popular culture parodies.

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