Archive for the ‘Cops’ Category

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You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#111 in a series. Also, random gun crankery.)

Saturday, October 21st, 2023

There is no joy in this one.

Larry Vickers pled guilty to federal firearm charges yesterday.

“But,” you say, “Larry Vickers isn’t a political figure.” Right you are, Bob.

Mr. Vickers was charged with four other men: Sean Sullivan, James Tafoya, Matthew Hall, and James Sawyer. Mr. Hall was the chief of police in Coats, North Carolina, and Mr. Sawter was the chief of police of Ray, North Dakota. This is where the flaming hyenas come in.

Sullivan was the owner and operator of Trident, LLC, located in Gambrills, Maryland, and was also an Intelligence Analyst with the Department of Homeland Security Investigations.

He was a Fed?! I know, I know, quel fromage! But really?

Sullivan and Trident were Federal Firearms Licensees (“FFLs”) and Special Occupational Taxpayers (“SOTs”), which allowed them, in certain circumstances, to possess, import, manufacture, and deal in fully automatic firearms (machineguns) and other regulated firearms. Tafoya and Vickers owned and operated firearms related businesses in New Mexico and North Carolina and were also FFLs and SOTs.

Allegedly, all of these guys came up with a really clever scheme.

The indictment alleges that, beginning in at least June 2018 through at least March 2021, the defendants conspired to acquire machineguns and/or other restricted firearms, such as short-barreled rifles, by falsely representing that the firearms would be used for demonstration to law enforcement agencies, including the Coats Police Department and the Ray Police Department. The indictment further alleges that Hall, Sawyer, and other conspirators signed law letters with no expectation that the weapons would ever be demonstrated to their respective law enforcement agencies.
The defendants allegedly intended to impermissibly import into the United States and resell the machineguns and other firearms for profit or to keep for their own use and enjoyment. Sullivan allegedly submitted the false law letters to the ATF seeking to import the machineguns and other restricted weapons. Once the firearms were received, Sullivan allegedly kept some of the machineguns and other restricted weapons and transferred some of the weapons to Vickers, Tafoya, and other conspirators.

Now, everyone else hasn’t gone to trial, and should be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

In addition to the indictment, Larry Vickers pleaded guilty yesterday to participating in the conspiracy to import and obtain machineguns and other restricted firearms and admitted that he received some of the imported machineguns and other weapons. As detailed in his plea agreement, Vickers kept some of the machineguns and other restricted weapons in his personal collection and transferred other machineguns and restricted weapons to other FFLs and third parties. Vickers also pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions against a foreign firearms manufacturer between July 2014 and March 2021, in the Southern District of Florida.

So just not illegal import of restricted firearms, but also sanction violations. “Between July 2014 and March 2021” makes me wonder who the sanctions violations were against.

I haven’t seen any coverage of this anywhere, including the usual gun blogs. The only reason I know about it is that Mike the Musicologist sent me a link to the Justice Department press release. I feel kind of bad for Mr. Vickers, who also was dealing with cancer a while back. But this doesn’t sound like BATFE “paperwork” violations. This sounds like a pretty serious conspiracy to illegally import restricted weapons under cover of the law enforcement exemption.

While I object to the idea that what these people did should be against the law, the fact remains that it is, and they apparently (“all suspects” etc) tried to camouflage it as “only ones”. You know, “we’re the only ones competent enough to have full-auto weapons. We’re the only ones competent enough to carry a Glock.”

That, I do resent.

Posted in Cops, Guns, Law, Politics | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: September 13, 2023.

Wednesday, September 13th, 2023

Howard Safir, former NYPD commissioner and gun grabber.

In the final years of his life, Safir, who founded his own intelligence and security firm, has advocated for stricter policing on guns.
Last year, he floated the idea that those who purchase firearms in the city should be required to conduct yearly safety check-ins so authorities can make sure the weapons aren’t lost or sold off to unknown parties.

Neil Currey, noted bodybuilder. He was 34.

Brandon Hunter, former forward for the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic. He was 42.

Mike Williams, former NFL wide receiver for Tampa Bay and Buffalo. He was 36, and died as a result of injuries sustained in a construction accident.

Posted in Cops, Law, NFL, NYPD, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 8, 2023.

Friday, September 8th, 2023

And speaking of police: William Phillips has passed away, and this is one of the most interesting obits I’ve read in a bit.

Who was William Phillips? He was a cop with the NYPD. He was also corrupt.

He acknowledged that he partook in police corruption as a patrolman in the 1960s and early ’70s. When not golfing at a country club, flying his plane, taking ski trips, playing the horses or darting around town in his red sports car, he was walking a beat in Gucci loafers and collecting bags of cash from brothels, gamblers, drug dealers and others “on the pad” — cop slang for payoff lists.
Finally, he was caught by investigators taking bribes from Xaviera Hollander, the madam who wrote the best-selling 1971 book “The Happy Hooker.” Mr. Phillips wore a wire and went under cover to avoid prosecution. He joined Officer Frank Serpico and Detective David Durk as star witnesses at the hearings of the Knapp Commission, which detailed endemic police corruption in New York.

(On a side note, Xaviera Hollander is still alive, according to Wikipedia. She’s 80. And she has a website.)

Then it gets weird.

Mr. Phillips may have been a hero to the public, but a homicide detective who saw him testify on television told prosecutors that he resembled the sketch of a man wanted in a cold murder case. Reports later emerged that the detective who had started the inquiry was a close friend of a police lieutenant who, believing that Mr. Phillips had identified him as a grafter, killed himself.
Mr. Phillips was arrested and charged with murdering a pimp and a prostitute in a Manhattan brothel at about 8:30 p.m. on Dec. 24, 1968. But from the start, evidence against him was contradictory. A half-dozen relatives and friends gave Mr. Phillips hour-by-hour alibis, placing him in three homes on a round of preholiday visits from 4 p.m. until past midnight.

The only evidence the prosecution had was the testimony of a man named Charles Gonzales, who was patronizing the prostitute at the time of the murder. Mr. Gonzales was also shot by the killer.

A drinker and a former mental patient, Mr. Gonzales described the killer as older, grayer and shorter than Mr. Phillips and with a “pockmarked Italian face.” He had initially picked someone else out of a lineup that included Mr. Phillips.

Mr. Phillps was tried twice. F. Lee Bailey defended him the first time: “…the jury deadlocked 10 to 2 for acquittal. Jurors said they had not believed Mr. Gonzales.” Mr. Phillips was convicted in the second trial. The conviction was overturned on appeal by New York state appellate courts (“It was later revealed that a juror had applied for a job with the Manhattan district attorney’s office during the trial, and that the prosecutors did not tell the judge until after the verdict.”) but the Supreme Court allowed the conviction to stand.

His options exhausted, Mr. Phillips became a model prisoner and a jailhouse lawyer. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees with perfect grades from the State University of New York, wrote legal briefs and taught law classes for inmates, ran a prison library, worked for charities and, with an unblemished record, became one of the state’s oldest inmates.

…

When he became eligible for parole after 25 years, his records were filled with recommendations for his release from wardens, college deans, judges and federal agents. Manhattanville College, in Westchester County, offered him a job. But the parole board denied his application. His defenders said it was because he had refused to admit guilt.
At another hearing, in 2003, he acknowledged being guilty of “reprehensible conduct” but not of murder. Parole was again denied. The board called Mr. Phillips “a criminal of the worst kind whose danger to public safety is in the highest degree.”
He appealed, and Justice Alice Schlesinger of State Supreme Court in Manhattan called the board’s ruling “perverted” and “contrary to the law.” She asked, “Does the board honestly believe that Mr. Phillips, a 74-year-old man, half-blind from cancer, who has helped countless people and learned and taught the principles of law to many, truly is a continuing threat to society?”

Another judge ordered his release in 2006, but the parole board argued sucessfully that the judiciary didn’t have that authority.

Finally, he told the board what he thought it wanted to hear, saying he was guilty and voicing regret. He was released in 2007, ending 32 years in prison.

…

The authorities over the years have agreed that the commission helped break a culture of police corruption. But the immediate fallout was minimal.
Dozens of officers were charged, while top police and city officials were not. Many prosecutions were dropped because Mr. Phillips’s murder conviction destroyed his credibility as a witness and to some extent undermined the findings of the commission.

I don’t know if he was guilty or not, and the paper of record certainly puts their own pro-Philips spin on things. But I think at the very least there was reasonable doubt.

“The entire case they had against me was the identification that I was a 5-foot-8 pockmarked Italian,” he said. “Do I look like a 5-foot-8 pockmarked Italian?”
He was six feet tall and, friends said, had a ruddy Irish face.

Posted in Cops, Law, NYPD, Obits | Comments Closed

DEFCON 31 news flash.

Friday, September 8th, 2023

By way of Hacker News, and I only discovered this 15 minutes ago so I haven’t had time to go through all of it yet:

“Snoop unto them, as they snoop unto us”.

Here’s the original description:

BLE devices are now all the rage. What makes a purpose built tracking device like the AirTag all that different from the majority of BLE devices that have a fixed address? With the rise of IoT we’re also seeing a rise in government and corporate BLE surveillance systems. We’ll look at tools that normal people can use to find out if their favorite IoT gear is easily trackable. If headphones and GoPro’s use fixed addresses, what about stun guns and bodycams? We’ll take a look at IoT gear used by authorities and how it may be detectedable over long durations, just like an AirTag.

The first link will get you to slides, video of the talk, files, and code. As you know, Bob, Bluetooth is a thing for this blog, so this is relevant to my interests…

Posted in Bluetooth, Cops, DEFCON, DEFCON 31, Law, Radio | 1 Comment »

Brief police beat news.

Monday, August 21st, 2023

Austin Police chief Joseph Chacon is stepping down and retiring from APD after two years as chief.

I really don’t have anything much to say about this: Chief Chacon didn’t do anything in his time to really rise to my attention, either positively or negatively. There are things to be said about poor police response time, ongoing issues with the homeless, and other things going on within the department. But I feel like many of those issues are the results of poor decision making by our city government, and were out of Chief Chacon’s control.

I wish him well in his next endeavors, and I think a Fist Rockbone Brian Manley for mayor/Joseph Chacon for city council ticket would be a fantastic idea.

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

Noted.

Thursday, July 27th, 2023

Scott Cobb will be paroled in August after 34 years in prison.

NYPD officer Edward Byrne was unavailable for comment.

Posted in Cops, Law, NYPD | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 9, 2023.

Friday, June 9th, 2023

James G. Watt, former Secretary of the Interior and notorious Beach Boys hater.

As planning for the 1983 Independence Day celebration on the National Mall began, Mr. Watt said that pop-music groups retained in recent years had attracted “the wrong element” — presumably young people drinking and taking drugs. The Mall’s most prominent band had been the Beach Boys, popular since the 1960s.
Mr. Watt, a Pentecostal fundamentalist who did not smoke or drink alcohol, proposed the Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton, whose signature song was “Danke Schoen,” and military bands, saying they would better represent the patriotic, family-oriented themes he preferred.

…

After leaving the government, Mr. Watt was a lobbyist for builders seeking contracts from the Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1984 to 1986. In 1995, he was charged with 25 counts of perjury and obstructing justice by a federal grand jury investigating fraud and influence-peddling during his lobbying at HUD. But the prosecution’s case deteriorated, the felony charges were dropped and he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor and was sentenced to a $5,000 fine and 500 hours of community service.

Carroll Cooley, historical and legal footnote, has passed away at 87.

Mr. Cooley was a detective with the Phoenix Police Department. In that capacity, he was the person who took Ernesto Miranda’s original confession.

He wasn’t handcuffed because he was not yet under arrest, Detective Cooley said during a speaking engagement in 2016 quoted in an article in The Arizona Republic, and he wasn’t told that he needed a lawyer because there was no legal requirement to do so.

…

The Miranda case was by far the most significant of Detective Cooley’s law enforcement career. Mr. Miranda was convicted of rape and kidnapping by a Superior Court jury in June 1963; the conviction was upheld nearly two years later by the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled that his confession was admissible despite his not having had a lawyer present.
In late 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review four cases, including Mr. Miranda’s, in which indigent men had confessed after being interrogated. The next year, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the Fifth Amendment required the police to advise suspects that they had the right to remain silent once they were in custody and to have an attorney present during interrogations. The rights, almost from the day of the decision, became known as the Miranda warning.
Mr. Miranda’s conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, but he was retried on rape and kidnapping charges and found guilty again in 1967. (The confession was not used in that trial.) He was paroled in 1972 and stabbed to death four years later in a barroom fight. After his death, it was reported that he had been trading on his legal celebrity by selling Miranda warning cards for $1.50 each.

…

In 1976, he defended his actions in the Miranda case to The Republic, saying that Mr. Miranda’s confession had been written voluntarily and that Mr. Miranda knew his rights.
“He was not un-knowledgeable about his rights,” he said. “He was an ex-convict and served a year in prison” — for auto theft — “and had been through the routine before.”

Noreen Nash, actress. Other credits include the original “Dragnet” TV series, “77 Sunset Strip”, and ‘Yancy Derringer”.

On the advice of her son, she decided to quit show biz in 1962 and went back to study, enrolling at UCLA and graduating in 1971 with a Bachelor’s Degree in history. In 1980, she published her first novel, ‘By Love Fulfilled’, set in the 16th century and following the life of a physician at the court of Catherine de Medici. This was followed by ‘Agnès Sorel, Mistress of Beauty’ in 2013 and an autobiographical work of recollections, ‘Titans of the Muses: When Henry Miller Met Jean Renoir’ in 2015.

Posted in Books, Cops, History, Law, Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 6, 2023.

Tuesday, June 6th, 2023

Astrud Gilberto, of “The Girl From Ipanema” fame.

Jim Hines. He set a world record by running the 100 meter dash in 9.95 seconds at the 1968 Olympics: that record stood for 15 years.

Roger Craig, noted split-fingered fastball pitcher.

Bobby Bolin, former pitcher for the Giants (also the Brewers and the Red Sox).

Bolin made his MLB debut in 1961 and was on the 1962 pennant-winning Giants, appearing in two games in the World Series against the Yankees, a series San Francisco would lose in seven games.
The sidearmer went a career-best 14-6 in 1965.
The following season he set career-highs with 10 complete games and four shutouts despite a pedestrian 11-10 record.

Mike the Musicologist sent over an obit for Kaija Saariaho, composer. He says some of her late works are appealing: I am unfamiliar with them myself.

George Riddle, actor. Other credits include “Arthur” and “The Trial of Standing Bear”.

Burning in Hell watch: Robert Hanssen, notorious spy.

Posted in Cops, FBI, Law, Movies, Music, Sports, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 1, 2023.

Monday, May 1st, 2023

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author. (When Bad Things Happen to Good People and other books).

Detective Troy Patterson of the NYPD.

One night in 1990, three punks tried to hold Officer Patterson up. The robbery went bad, and Officer Patterson was shot in the head. He’d been in a vegetative state for the past 33 years.

Patterson was promoted to detective in 2016.
The three suspects — Vincent Robbins, Tracey Clark and Darien Crawford — were later arrested in the unprovoked shooting.
Robbins, now 53, was convicted of assault and attempted-robbery charges and sentenced to a prison term of five to 15 years. He was released in 2000, state records show.
Clark, the alleged gunman in the shooting, also went to trial in the case. The outcome of the case is not immediately available, nor are any details of the charges against Crawford.

Tim Bachman, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive. You may recall that his brother, Robbie, passed in January.

Mike Shannon, former player and later broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals.

John Stobart, artist.

A product of Britain’s Royal Academy of Art, Mr. Stobart moved to the United States in 1970, when conceptual art, Op Art and minimalism were riding high in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.
Affable, unassuming and unfailingly candid, Mr. Stobart would have none of it. “I’ve never bought it, and the general public has never bought it either,” he said of abstract art in an interview with The Boston Globe in 1986. “That’s a lot of baloney, that stuff.”
Instead, he conjured the past as a master of richly detailed historical works brimming with schooners, brigs and sloops, their sails flapping under moody clouds, with shore lights twinkling in the distance.
Working out of studios in the Boston area, Martha’s Vineyard and several other locations, Mr. Stobart, who lived in Medfield, Mass., employed the same taste for exhaustive historical detail as Patrick O’Brian, the prolific Anglo-Irish author known for his bracing tales of naval heroics.
He left no detail to chance, traveling to the locations he painted, consulting old daguerreotypes of harbors and ships and going out to sea on various watercraft to learn the most arcane points about their engineering and behavior on the water.

…

By the mid-1980s, he had written the first of his three books, “The Rediscovery of America’s Maritime Heritage,” and thanks in part to a lucrative operation selling first-edition prints, was making up to $2.5 million a year. In recent years, his originals were selling for $15,000 to $400,000 through the Rehs Galleries in New York.

The obit reproduces some of Mr. Stobart’s paintings. I’m probably a sucker for representational art, but I like what I see there, and would be happy to have an original Stobart on my wall.

Posted in Art, Boats, Books, Cops, Law, Music, NYPD, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 4, 2023.

Tuesday, April 4th, 2023

Sister Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou.

She was a world-class pianist:

…music that drew on her classical training but seemed to partake of rhythm and blues, jazz and other influences. The relatively few who discovered it knew they had found their way to something singular.
The musician Norah Jones was one who did, especially after hearing the album “Éthiopiques 21,” a collection of Sister Guèbrou’s piano solos that was part of a record series spotlighting folkloric and pop music from Ethiopia.
“This album is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard: part Duke Ellington, part modal scales, part the blues, part church music,” Ms. Jones told The New York Times in 2020. “It resonated in all those ways for me.”

As you may have guessed from the “Sister”, and the categories on this post, she went in a different direction:

She had a chance to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and seemed on the way to a career as a concert pianist, the BBC documentary says, but that prospect fell through for reasons Sister Guèbrou would not detail. That led her to a spiritual reassessment of her life, and by her early 20s, she was a nun. She spent 10 years in a hilltop monastery in Ethiopia.
“I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she told Ms. Molleson. “No shoes, no music, just prayer.”
She returned to her family and by the 1960s was recording some of her music; her first album was released in Germany in 1967, according to the website of a foundation established in her name to promote music education.
She made several other records over the next 30 years, donating the proceeds to the poor. In the mid-1980s, she left Ethiopia and settled into an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, spending the rest of her life there. Information on her survivors was not available.

She was 99.

Sharon Acker passed over the weekend.

The “Perry Mason” mentioned in the headline was actually “The New Perry Mason”, in which she played “Della Street” opposite Monte Markham’s Perry Mason. It lasted one season. Other credits include three “Quincy, M.E.” appearances, “The Rockford Files”, “Hec Ramsey”, “The Bold Ones: The Senator”, and a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Roy McGrath. Mr. McGrath was the former chief of staff for the governor of Maryland. Three weeks ago, he went on the run: the day his corruption trial was supposed to start. He was charged with “wire fraud, embezzlement, misconduct in office and improper use of state funds”.

Authorities tracked him down in Tennessee yesterday. There was a confrontation with FBI agents, and Mr. McGrath was shot. He died in a local hospital. At this point, it isn’t clear if his wound was self-inflicted or if he was shot by the FBI.

Posted in 1970s, Cops, FBI, Law, Music, Obits, Politics, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

(Sort of an) obit watch: December 9, 2022.

Friday, December 9th, 2022

I wanted to break this out into a separate entry because it didn’t feel like it belonged with the previous one. Also, it’s another one of those “not quite an obit” things.

Philadelphia’s “Boy in the Box” has been identified.

The boy, then believed to be between 4 and 6 years old, had been beaten to death, an autopsy later revealed. But clues were scant, and copious efforts over decades to solve the crime proved futile. The unknown victim became known as “The Boy in the Box.” Others called him, more gently, “America’s Unknown Child.”
His name is now known: Joseph Augustus Zarelli. Born on Jan. 13, 1953, he was 4 when he died, Philadelphia police officials said Thursday, at a news conference where they described a breakthrough using DNA and genetic genealogy techniques that have revolutionized cold case work in recent years.

He was found in a cardboard box in February of 1957.

He was unclothed, and had been wrapped in a flannel blanket, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. His hair had recently been “cut in a way that suggested it was not the work of a skilled barber,” and his fingernails had been trimmed, according to the national system.

…

Capt. Jason Smith said officers did not yet know who killed the boy or the circumstances of how he had died, and that investigations would continue.
“We have our suspicions as to who may be responsible, but it would be irresponsible of me to share these suspicions as this remains an active and ongoing criminal investigation,” Captain Smith said.

I remember this case getting a lot of coverage from John Walsh on the old America’s Most Wanted. I’m glad they have a name for the child now.

Posted in Cops, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2022 (supplemental).

Friday, September 23rd, 2022

Senior Austin Police Department Officer Anthony “Tony” Martin passed away this morning.

According to news reports, he was returning home from work when he hit a car that turned left in front of him.

The Austin Police Honor Guard says Martin had been with APD since 2006, and during his career served in a variety of assignments including on patrol, Motors, and DWI units. He is survived by his wife Amberlee, a son, two daughters, and one granddaughter.

Posted in Cops, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

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