You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#61 in a series)

November 20th, 2019

Remember Catherine Pugh, the former mayor of Baltimore? The “Healthy Holly” scandal?

She’s just been indicted on 11 counts of “fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy”.

In a grand jury indictment made public Wednesday, prosecutors allege Pugh defrauded area businesses and nonprofit organizations with nearly $800,000 in sales of her “Healthy Holly” books to unlawfully enrich herself, promote her political career and illegally fund her campaign for mayor.
Though her customers ordered more than 100,000 copies of the books, the indictment says Pugh failed to print thousands of copies, double-sold others and took some to use for self-promotion. Pugh, 69, used the profits to buy a house, pay down debt, and make illegal straw donations to her campaign, prosecutors allege.

I don’t have a lot of time to dwell on this at the moment (I’ll be leaving work in about 15 minutes and hoping I don’t have to deal with the presidental motorcade) but I may update later this evening or tomorrow.

(Hattip to Mike the Musicologist. Apparently, there are several web sites reporting she’s been convicted, but the Sun’s coverage is just reporting an indictment.)

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Step 1: go big.

November 20th, 2019

I’ve noted before that I don’t like linking to ESPN. But this is too good a story, and I haven’t seen coverage of it elsewhere.

Jeff David was the former “chief revenue officer” for the Sacramento Kings from 2011 to 2018. During that time, he managed to line his pockets. And not just with his regular salary.

He embezzled over $13 million dollars.

While he’s a crook, I’ve got to give the guy some props for complying with my rule number one: if you’re going to steal, steal big. $13 million is hardly penny-ante: that is the kind of money that I believe could set you up in a country without an extradition treaty for the rest of your life.

However, it seems like his downfall was an unwillingness to uproot his family and move permanently to one of those places. Or, rule number two:

Posted in Clippings, Law, Sports | Comments Closed

DGU

November 19th, 2019

Two local defensive gun use stories that I want to note (without much comment) for reasons:

1. Uber Eats driver gets into a standoff. Noteworthy because the Statesman is highly specific about the guns:

Palomino then pointed a black, semi-automatic Glock handgun at the man, the court documents say.
The delivery man pulled out a Sig Sauer P238 handgun and pointed it at Palomino.

2. Running gun battle in South Austin Sunday night.

The incident happened in and outside of the Mustang Pawn Shop near the Stassney Lane intersection. A witness says that shortly before 7:00 p.m. several men, armed with assault rifles got the drop on an employee. Once inside they smashed a jewelry display and grabbed what they could. When they ran out, the store owner reportedly gave chase with a shotgun.
A shootout followed, which apparently smashed a window at a business across the street. The violent confrontation was justified according to a neighbor, who didn’t want to give his name but knows the store owner.

The store owner apparently disabled one vehicle the robbers were using, but they managed to get away in a second vehicle.

Some of those who spoke to FOX7 said they sought cover by falling to the floor. Others said they are frustrated by the growing crime problem.
“It’s an overflow of gang wars and little thugs that are running around that have access to all the guns, and how they do it is, they just kick the door in and take them,” said the neighbor.
The solution, according to the resident, is simple but potentially deadly.
“Start shooting back, all the people around here, are pretty much armed.”

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

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#60 in a series)

November 19th, 2019

Dennis Tyler, the mayor of Muncie, Indiana, was arrested by the FBI yesterday.

Tyler is charged with theft of government funds, according to a federal criminal indictment that was unsealed Monday. He is accused of accepting a $5,000 cash payment after allegedly steering “lucrative” excavation work to a local contractor.

…

With his arrest, Tyler joins at least six other Muncie city officials or business leaders taken into custody in connection to a corruption probe launched in 2016 by federal authorities related to bid-rigging, fraud, money laundering and other organized crime.
He is also the fourth person to be arrested in connection to the investigation so far this year.

The linked article goes on to detail the long sordid history of the Muncie corruption scandal, and is worth reading.

Hat tip on this to Lawrence, who also did the legwork so I didn’t have to. Yes, Mayor Tyler (a Democrat) is also a member of Crooked Mayors Against Legal Gun Owners!

Is anybody keeping a count of crooked mayors against guns?

Posted in Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 19, 2019.

November 19th, 2019

Vera Clemente, Roberto Clemente’s widow and keeper of the flame.

When he died, Roberto Clemente had been planning to create a sports center for children in Puerto Rico, and Ms. Clemente had planned to teach there.
In short order, she established the Ciudad Deportiva Roberto Clemente (Roberto Clemente Sports City), which he had envisioned as a place where young people could play sports, but where they could also learn other skills, like reading, and attend programs, like drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinics. Since then, hundreds of thousands of youths have taken part in its activities.
“When he died, I felt the responsibility to at least make a reality of a sports city, to give children the opportunity not just to become stars but good citizens,” Ms. Clemente told The New York Times in 1994. “My main purpose was to do what he was planning to do.”
She said she was compelled to carry out her husband’s wishes not only because of the way he died but also because of the way he had lived.
“If he had died in a common way, people would still remember him,” she said. “But Dec. 31, it was a special day, and his was a special mission. I admire him for that, as a person, as a human being. So his image I keep alive. I feel happy doing what I am doing.”

…

After Hurricane Harvey, she flew to Houston during the 2017 World Series to present the award to Anthony Rizzo, the Chicago Cubs’ first baseman, who was a cancer survivor and who had established a foundation to help children with the disease.
While in Houston, she took time out to volunteer at a food bank to help families recovering from the hurricane.

Posted in Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: November 18, 2019. (Also: historical note, suitable for use in schools)

November 18th, 2019

Werner G. Doehner. He was 90 years old.

Mr. Doehner was the last survivor of the Hindenburg disaster. His father and sister died: his mother and brother lived.

“There were many facets to my dad,” Bernie Doehner said. “He was a bit of a dinosaur, a connoisseur of old operas and classical music. He was into remote-controlled airplanes and lots of traveling, but he valued the education of his kid above everything else.”

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 11, 2019.

November 18th, 2019

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Cincinnati

At this point in the year, we’re averaging 0.3 winless teams. I’m still cautiously optimistic about the Bengals chances.

The final six games are:

  • Pittsburgh at home (ESPN gives the Steelers a 66% chance of winning).
  • The Jets at home (this one worries me: ESPN gives the Jets a 53& chance).
  • on the road in Cleveland (the Browns are given an 81% chance of winning).
  • New England at home (91% chance of winning for the Patriots).
  • on the road against Miami (another worrisome game: ESPN is calling it 53% for the Dolphins).
  • and Cleveland again at home (69% chance of winning for the Browns).

So if they get past the Jets, things look good until week 16.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Recent acquisitions (some bibliohoplophilia)

November 16th, 2019

Half-Price Books had another one of their coupon sales last week (the 4th through 10th).

Unfortunately, this was a busy week for me between voting and Wurstfest and meetings and other things, so I didn’t get as much of a chance to shop as I would have liked. Also, the gun book pickings have been kind of slim recently. Even the big central Half-Price has gotten rid of a lot of their fancy leather-bound books.

The only gun book that I found was A Varmint Hunter’s Odyssey by Steve Hanson for $10+tax after coupon. This is another one of those books published by the (now sadly defunct) Precision Shooting Press, and as I’ve written before, I like to snap those up when I find them.

Other than that…I found a nice trade paperback copy of Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James to replace my old hardback. I enjoy this book (though James sometimes makes me go “What?!”) and didn’t realize that the trade paperback had some additional material. (Including James’s list of his 100 top true crime books.) $4.24+tax after coupon.

And I also found a good copy of The Annotated Tales Of Edgar Allen Poe by Stephen Peithman for $6+tax after coupon. Oddly enough, I did not have a collection of Poe’s short works previously, and it is a well known fact that I’m a sucker for annotated books…

…so now I’ve got my eye out for a copy of The Annotated Poe by Kevin J. Hayes. Because you can never have enough Poe.

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | 2 Comments »

Today’s bulletin from the Department of WTF?!

November 15th, 2019

Lucky Miller was the police chief of Mannford, Oklahoma (which is somewhere near Tulsa).

I say “was” because Chief Miller was killed while attending a law enforcement conference in Florida.

The department’s detective is charged with killing him.

On Sunday around 9:50 p.m., the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office responded to complaints at the Hilton Pensacola Beach hotel, where deputies found Chief Miller unresponsive on the floor, and Mr. Nealey lying a short distance away, mumbling, according to a police report.
Sgt. Melony Peterson, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office, said in an interview that the cause of death had not been determined and that an autopsy was being performed. She said the two men had been drinking before the fatal encounter.

Apparently, this wasn’t a shooting:

A hotel worker went to check on the situation and knocked on the door several times, but “only heard a grunting noise.” The worker entered the room and found Mr. Nealey sitting on top of Chief Miller, who was lying on the floor, according to report. The worker yelled at Mr. Nealey to get up, and then pulled him off the chief.
By the time the police arrived, Chief Miller was dead. His face was beaten and his right eye was completely swollen, but there were no other apparent injuries, according to the police report.

In other news, which I didn’t get a chance to note yesterday: the former DA of Suffolk County, NY, is on trial. One of his deputies is also being tried. I’ve written about this before: guy stole a bag of “cigars, sex toys, and pornographic DVDs” out of the police chief’s car, police chief arrested him, handcuffed him to the floor of an interrogation room, and assaulted him, and the DA and his deputy are charged with helping to cover up the chief’s actions.

Posted in Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 14, 2019.

November 14th, 2019

Ronald Lafferty died earlier this week. He died of natural causes, as opposed to being executed by a firing squad.

I think it’s more likely than usual that this name will ring some bells with folks. Mr. Lafferty was a religious fanatic: he was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for “increasingly extreme religious views” (yes, he did believe in polygamy) and founded a new sect, School of the Prophets. He and his brothers (who were also members of the sect) claimed that they received messages from God.

Mr. Lafferty said one of those messages told him that his ex-wife, who had left him and taken their six children to Florida, had been the bride of Satan in a previous life.
In another message, he said, he was told that four people caused his excommunication and divorce, including his brother Allen’s wife, Brenda, and their 15-month-old daughter, Erica, “who he believed would grow up to be just as despicable as her mother,” according to court documents.
God told him to kill all four of them, Mr. Lafferty said. So on July 24, 1984 — a state holiday that commemorates the arrival of Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley — Mr. Lafferty and a group of followers, including his brother Daniel, went to Brenda’s house in American Fork, Utah.

Mr. Lafferty and his brother Daniel killed Brenda and the baby. They abandoned their plan to kill the other two on the list. Ronald and Daniel were arrested in Nevada about a month later. Daniel is serving a life sentence.

Mr. Lafferty’s mental competence to stand trial quickly became an issue in the case and would be the focus of his subsequent appeal efforts.
He was convicted of both killings and sentenced to death in 1985. But in 1991, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit vacated Mr. Lafferty’s convictions and ordered a new trial after finding that the wrong legal standard had been used to determine his mental competence.
Prosecutors again charged Mr. Lafferty with the killings, but a competency hearing in November 1992 found him to be mentally unfit to stand trial owing to mental illness. He was sent to a state psychiatric hospital until a new competency hearing was held in February 1994 and he was found competent to stand trial.
In April 1996, he was again convicted of the killings, and again sentenced to death.

The reason I say this will ring some bells is that the Lafferty murders were at the center of Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, a book which I’ve read and liked. (And, no, it did not strike me as being “anti-religion”. Anti-“religious fanatics killing women and babies”, maybe, but not anti-religion.)

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

The most fun I’ve had recently with my clothes on…

November 14th, 2019

…or, for that matter, off.

I’ll start with the musical interlude. I rather like this, though the banjo player should put on a damn shirt.

So, last night, I was down at the Austin Film Society. (It sounds more amusing if you say it with kind of a snooty accent.) What was I doing there? Getting some culture into my system…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Endorsements, Movies, Music, Rhode Island | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 13, 2019.

November 13th, 2019

Zeke Bratkowski, Green Bay Packers quarterback. He didn’t quite get the level of fame he probably deserved as he spent most of his time backing up some guy named Starr.

By way of Lawrence: Charles Rogers, first round NFL draft choice (and second overall pick) in 2003.

The 6-foot-3, 220-pounder had just 36 catches for 440 yards with four touchdowns in 15 games before he left the league in 2005.

Also by way of Lawrence: Virginia Leith. Possibly an obscure figure, but some folks may remember her as “Jan” (or “Jan In the Pan”) from “The Head Brain That Wouldn’t Die”, which was (of course) a MST3K.

Interestingly, she also did guest shots on some of the better cop shows of the 1970s: “Baretta”, “Starsky and Hutch”, “Barnaby Jones”. “Police Woman”.

Frank Giles, former editor of The Sunday Times of London. He may be best remembered as the man who published the Hitler diaries, though he claimed he knew they were fake and Rupert Murdoch ordered them published anyway.

Posted in 1970s, History, Media, Movies, Nazis, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 11, 2019.

November 11th, 2019

pigpen51 left a very kind and much appreciated comment on the last obit watch. In that vein, someone who I feel like i should remember, but is probably just a little outside the fringes of my consciousness:

Maria Perego. She created Topo Gigio.

Ms. Perego, who worked alongside her husband, Federico Caldura, came up with the 10-inch-tall Topo Gigio in the late 1950s. Topo Gigio was a sort of cross between a puppet and a marionette; three puppeteers, hidden in a black background, moved various body parts with rods.
According to “Sundays With Sullivan: How ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ Brought Elvis, the Beatles, and Culture to America,” a 2008 book by Bernie Ilson, Mr. Sullivan saw a tape of the puppet from Italian television and booked Topo Gigio for a series of appearances on his popular Sunday-night CBS variety show. The first, the book said, was on April 14, 1963.
Ms. Perego and two other puppeteers were on hand to impart the movements, and a fourth provided Topo Gigio’s voice — but, Mr. Ilson wrote, Mr. Sullivan had not realized that someone would also have to serve as the puppet’s straight man. Mr. Sullivan, who was famously wooden on camera, stepped into that task for the initial appearance, figuring he would arrange for a professional comic to take over for later ones if the bit caught on.
“It was evident from the very first appearance, however, that the chemistry between Sullivan and Topo Gigio worked extremely well,” Mr. Ilson wrote. “The exchanges between Sullivan and the mouselike puppet revealed another side of the host, a warm and humanizing element.”
Mr. Sullivan remained in the role of sidekick for what the book says were some 50 appearances by Topo Gigio over the years. (Other sources give higher numbers.) The appearances often ended with the mouse saying, in a thick Italian accent, “Eddie, kiss me good night.”

A little late on this, but: Ernest J. Gaines. (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Lesson Before Dying)

Laurel Griggs. Nobody should die at 13.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Your loser update: week 10, 2019.

November 11th, 2019

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Cincinnati

Not much more to say than that, really.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 8, 2019.

November 8th, 2019

Louis Eppolito is burning in Hell.

Some of you probably remember that name, either because you’re true crime buffs or else you’re regular readers of this blog.

For those who don’t recall the name, Eppolito was one of the “Mafia Cops“: two NYPD officers who made deals with the Mob to provide confidential information and even whack guys.

Nineteen eighty-five was also the year Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa began their relationship with Mr. Casso’s circle. A career criminal with ties to Mr. Casso hired them that year to kill a Long Island jeweler to keep him from testifying in an F.B.I. inquiry.
The detectives used a confidential police database to find the jeweler’s home address, the type of car he drove and his license plate number. They pulled him over and asked him to come to the precinct station house.
Instead, they took him to a building in Brooklyn, where Mr. Caracappa and another man killed him. Mr. Eppolito acted as a lookout.
It was the first of the eight killings they would participate in over the next several years on Mr. Casso’s orders. They received $4,000 a month and up to $65,000 for individual murders, prosecutors said.
The other victims included a Brooklyn man gunned down mistakenly because he had the same name as a rival of Mr. Casso’s; a Luchese gangster; two Gambino soldiers; and two F.B.I. informers.

Stephen Caracappa, Mr. Eppolito’s partner in crime, died in 2017: somehow I missed hearing about this.

The good book on this case is The Good Rat by the late great Jimmy Breslin. I’m not recommending or endorsing it, but Eppolito’s Mafia Cop is still widely available: you can even purchase a Kindle edition. (Yeah, that is an affiliate link: it’s not like Eppolito is going to benefit from sales now, and I’m pretty sure anything he earned while alive went towards compensating the families of his victims.)

Posted in Books, Cops, Law, NYPD, Obits | 1 Comment »

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