Archive for the ‘Cops’ Category

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The (Houston) Chronicle of our times.

Friday, August 23rd, 2019

Two stories from HoustonChronicle.com (not chron.com, which is basically imitation Buzzfeed these days):

Gerald Goines, the Houston Police Department officer at the center of the botched drug raid scandal, has been charged with two counts of felony murder. His partner, Steven Bryant, has been charged with tampering. (Apparently, that’s “tampering with a government record”, though I saw some early reports claim it was “witness tampering”.)

Lawrence has been on the botched drug raid story like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst exhibition, so I’m going to direct you over there for coverage and background. If the HouChron is too obnoxious for you (in terms of subscriptions and ad-blockers) here’s coverage from KHOU (with equally obnoxious auto-play video).

Because the murder occurred in the course of another alleged felony – tampering with a government record – Goines was charged with felony murder. Unlike a regular murder charge, felony murder doesn’t require showing that the defendant intended to kill. Instead, prosecutors just have to show that, while committing another felony, the defendant committed an act clearly dangerous to human life – in this case, the execution of a no-knock warrant – and that it resulted in a death.

In other news, the paper would like for you to know that you can buy guns.

Okay, that’s not quite 100% fair. You can buy Bushmaster M4 assault rifles.

Okay, that’s still not quite fair. You can buy Bushmaster M4 assault rifles…from DPS employees who bought them from the agency.

The firearm is one of over 5,200 the department has sold its employees over the past three years, often at a price below the market rate. With few restrictions on the sales, more than 60 officers have taken home at least four guns each, ranging from 9mm pistols to high-powered rifles equipped with accessories worth thousands of dollars.

The paper apparently found two – yes, two – M4 rifles for sale on “online gun forums” “recently”. That’s two out of “over 1,000” sold since September of 2016. DPS has also sold “over 2,000 SIG Sauer P226 pistols”, and a total of 5,254 guns during that time. So it looks like there’s about 2,000 guns not accounted for in this count. Shotguns? “high-powered rifles equipped with accessories worth thousands of dollars”?

The Texas Department of Public Safety offers employees several opportunities to buy firearms that have been issued to them, including pistols, rifles and shotguns. While Texas state law allows outgoing police officers to buy a single service weapon, DPS lets its retiring troopers purchase up to three.

So it sounds like you can buy up to three guns on your way out the door. But:

There is no limit on how many of those retired weapons an officer can buy thoughout his or her career.

Does this mean you can buy more after you retire? That’s how I read it: it sounds kind of like how my Dad got an old Ford F100 pickup, by signing up for the waitlist at Brown and Root and paying $800. Except for guns.

Also according to the paper: the SIGs were going to DPS troopers for $350 each, and the Bushies were going for “$401-$601 each”. It’s not clear what the difference is between the $400 and the $600 Bushies, but: Mike and I have spent the past few weekends at gun shows, and you can get a pretty nice Smith and Wesson M&P-15 (not the M&P15-22, but the .223/5.56 one) for under $600 if you shop carefully. Right now, CDNN will sell you a SIG P320 for $350, and they have P226s with a factory optic for “too low to print – call”. (I would, but they’re closed now.) At least one DPS guy who was selling his Bushie (the ad’s been taken down now, according to the paper) was asking $975 for his.

I only note this story because it seems like a giant nothing burger, except for (maybe) the question of whether the state is getting a good deal by letting retired troopers buy these guns, instead of selling them to licensed gun dealers for credit towards replacements. But if CDNN is selling AR pattern rifles to the public for $600, and SIGs for $350, I doubt DPS is going to get anything close to that on a wholesale deal with any vendor.

Posted in Cops, Guns, HCDA, Law, Politics, Texas | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 20, 2019.

Tuesday, August 20th, 2019

NYT obit for Cedric Benson.

Statement from APD.

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

It’s Baltimore, gentlemen.

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019

The gods will not save you from being mugged. Even if you are a police.

(Hattip: Dean Bradley on the Twitters.)

Posted in Cops, Law | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#56 in a series)

Sunday, June 30th, 2019

“This defendant is a walking crime-spree,” Michael Wheat, a special federal prosecutor, told the judge in court, saying she holds sway with police and has tampered with grand jury witnesses in the past.

Wow. “A walking crime-spree.” That’s pretty harsh. Who is the defendant?

Katherine Kealoha. She was a prosecutor in the Honolulu DA’s office. She is also married to the former Honolulu chief of police.

And both of them were convicted of consipracy and obstruction of justice on Friday. Also convicted: two officers with the Honolulu PD.

This whole case is kind of bat guano insane, and Hawaii is not my usual beat. So I didn’t find out about this story until yesterday, and completely missed any run-up to it. This particular set of convictions were the result of the Kealoha’s staging the theft of a mailbox. No, really. A mailbox.

The five defendants were accused of conspiring to frame Gerard Puana, Katherine Kealoha’s estranged uncle, for the alleged theft of the Kealohas’ Kahala mailbox in 2013 and then lying to federal authorities to cover their scheme.
Prosecutors said the Kealohas were trying to smear Puana and Katherine Kealoha’s grandmother Florence Puana because they were catching on to the fact that the Kealohas had used the proceeds from a reverse mortgage on Florence Puana’s home to bankroll a lavish lifestyle.

(Noted: one of those five, former HPD Major Gordon Shiraishi, was acquitted on all charges.)

So that’s a little more understandable, I guess? They tried to frame the uncle (who they didn’t get along with anyway) to keep the money faucet flowing.

The government said Katherine Kealoha used the money to pay for a Mercedes-Benz, a Maserati, a trip to Disneyland and other expenses including utility bills and a $23,976 breakfast at the Sheraton Waikiki to celebrate Louis Kealoha’s selection as chief.

I know real estate in Hawaii isn’t cheap, but how much did they get out of this reverse mortgage?

Prosecutors said Katherine Kea­loha burned through $135,000 of Florence Puana’s money in six months.

By the way…

The Kealohas face a second trial on Oct. 21 on charges of bank fraud, aggravated identity theft and obstruction of justice in connection with the alleged theft of a $167,000 inheritance of two children for whom Katherine Kealoha served as financial guardian.

And the insanity doesn’t end there.

Kealoha also faces charges related to allegations that she and her brother, Rudolph Puana, trafficked in opioids and that Kealoha used her position as a deputy prosecutor to hide it.

More (I apologize for the length, but this does give a fairly detailed account):

During the trial, prosecutors portrayed Katherine Kealoha as the ringleader of the conspiracy. She invented an alias, Alison Lee Wong, to forge documents, and tried to have her grandmother declared incompetent to silence her, prosecutors told the jury.
Jurors watched a deposition from Puana’s mother, Florence Puana, who was unable to testify in court because of her failing health.
Gerard Puana testified that Katherine Kealoha came to them with an idea about taking out a reverse mortgage on her grandmother’s home to help buy a condo her uncle wanted. Kealoha said she would consolidate her debts — which prosecutors described as massive — and promised her uncle and grandmother that she would pay off the loan.
Wheat noted that Kealoha tampered with potential witnesses, including sending letters trying to convince them Alison Lee Wong is a real person.
“Well, it’s pretty clear who Alison Lee Wong is,” Seabright said. “It’s Katherine Kealoha.”
Kealoha had an innocent man incarcerated and tried to silence her grandmother “after engaging in an outright theft of their money,” Seabright said.
“To be clear, it was her own grandmother she did this to,” he said.
She also got her firefighter boyfriend to lie about their affair to a grand jury and convinced the man whose childhood trust she controlled that his mother would go to jail if he didn’t lie and say Kealoha gave him his money, Seabright said.

And a little sting at the end:

Kealoha will “adapt” at the Honolulu Federal Detention Center, he said, adding that like he did, she will be able to trade her legal expertise for “food and candy.”

Posted in Cops, Law | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 10, 2019.

Monday, June 10th, 2019

Nicky Barnes, the other (after Frank Lucas) legendary NYC heroin dealer of the late 1960s and 1970s.

I would use the “bad week for dope dealers” joke, but Mr. Barnes actually died in 2012: his death was not reported until late last week.

Mr. Barnes estimated that he had earned at least $5 million selling heroin in the several years before his 1977 conviction — income he had augmented by investing in travel agencies, gas stations, a chain of automated carwashes and housing projects in Cleveland and Pontiac, Mich. He also marketed something called a flake-burger, made from remnants of butchered beef.
By the time he audaciously agreed to be photographed for the cover of The Times Magazine and an article inside, he had a record of 13 arrests as an adult and no convictions.

Unfortunately, being profiled in the Times Magazine and called “Mister Untouchable” caused a certain amount of tsuris on the part of Jimmy Carter, who ordered the Justice Department to go all out after Mr. Barnes. In 1977, he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.

While he was imprisoned, though, his wife and former business parters took over his herion empire and began running it into the ground. Mr. Barnes ended up agreeing to testify against all of them, and was released from prison because of his cooperation in 1998.

After his release, Mr. Barnes entered the Witness Protection Program.

He told neighbors and colleagues, if they asked, that he was a bankrupt businessman, worked at a Walmart and dreamed of opening a Krispy Kreme franchise. He drove to work in a used car, lived in a mostly white neighborhood and put in a 40-hour workweek.

Because he was in witness protection, his death was not reported at the time. Apparently, it only came to light now because various people got to wondering what had happened to Mr. Barnes after Mr. Lucas died: Mr. Barnes’s daughters and anonymous sources confirmed his death.

David Bergland, 1984 Libertarian Party presidential candidate.

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

Obit watch: June 3, 2019.

Monday, June 3rd, 2019

Leah Chase, New Orleans restaurateur.

I haven’t managed to eat at Dooky Chase yet, though I have heard of it (probably by way of Calvin Trillin). As much as I prefer to link to local obits, I like the way the NYT puts it:

Mrs. Chase possessed a mix of intellectual curiosity, deep religious conviction and a will always to lift others up, which would make her a central cultural figure in both the politics of New Orleans and the national struggle for civil rights. “She is of a generation of African-American women who set their faces against the wind without looking back,” said Jessica B. Harris, who is an author and expert on food of the African diaspora and who said Mrs. Chase treated her like another daughter. “It’s a work ethic, yes, but it’s also seeing how you want things to be and then being relentless about getting there.”

…

Mrs. Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.
“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”

…

Mrs. Chase believed in corporal punishment, opposed abortion and believed women should dress modestly. But she was always a champion of women, especially young women coming up in the kitchens of America’s restaurants. Her frequent advice to them was, “You have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

I love this, too:

During that period, Mrs. Chase started catering the openings of fledgling artists so they could offer hospitality to people who had come to admire – and, perhaps, buy – their creations. She helped them pay their bills, and she hung their works in the restaurant.
This love of art, born when she studied art in high school, led to service on the boards of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Arts Council of New Orleans. Mrs. Chase also sat on the boards of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

…

Mrs. Chase regularly provided food for nonprofit organizations’ fundraisers and refused to submit bills, said Morial, the widow of one New Orleans mayor and the mother of another.
“She provided food for the Amistad Research Center and would not take money. That was her contribution,” said Morial, an Amistad board member. “We’d tell her this was a fundraiser. She said, ‘I know, and you need all the money you can raise.’”

My feelings about baseball are well known, but I thought this was an interesting obituary: Marc Okkonen.

Mr. Okkonen, a commercial artist and baseball aficionado with an appreciation for vintage apparel, spotted flaws in the purported uniforms of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs and wondered why they were not precise replicas of the originals from 1939, when the movie takes place. Given how thoroughly documented baseball’s history is, he thought, accurate details would not have been too difficult to uncover.
But, to Mr. Okkonen’s surprise, he could find no single volume containing images of historic uniforms, so he set out to fill that void. He spent the next five years poring through books, microfilms and archives, including those at the Library of Congress and the Baseball Hall of Fame, to find images of every home and road uniform worn by all major league teams, starting in 1900.

And then he wrote that book: Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide. This is the kind of obsessive historical study that I find admirable, in the same way that (for example) some people document the minute details of Smith and Wesson history…

(Eight days and a wake-up in country, and then I’m off to the S&WCA symposium.)

Roky Erickson, noted psychedelic musician with the 13th Floor Elevators. I wish I had more to say about this, but I pretty much missed the psychedelic era. Also, the treatment of Roky Erickson (and Daniel Johnston) locally seemed, to me, to be kind of “let’s point and laugh at the weirdo”. Not everyone was that way: I’m sure there were some people who were motivated by compassion and love of the music, but I felt like that was an undercurrent running through the scene. Perhaps some of my musician readers will have more to say on the subject.

(Edited to add 6/4: NYT obit for Mr. Erickson.)

Last and least: infamous heroin dealer Frank Lucas, whose life was adapted into “American Gangster”.

Richard M. Roberts, who led the prosecution of Mr. Lucas in New Jersey, had befriended him in recent years but was under no illusions about what he did long ago. “In truth,” Mr. Roberts told The New York Times in 2007, “Frank Lucas has probably destroyed more black lives than the K.K.K. could ever dream of.”

Posted in Books, Clothing, Cops, Food, Law, Movies, Music, NYPD, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 25, 2019.

Thursday, April 25th, 2019

Wow. Lots going on.

This is breaking news: Lawrence beat me to it (because I had to wait for my lunch hour to post).

Former Williamson County DA Jana Duty was found dead in a South Texas condo yesterday.

I have a WCDA tag for reasons: if you go back and look, or read Lawrence’s post, you’ll see that former DA Duty was controversial and apparently had some issues during her tenure. But this is still a sad and awful thing.

Mark Medoff, playwright. He was best known for “Children of a Lesser God”, which won multiple Tony awards and was the basis for the Oscar winning Marlee Matlin movie.

This one is for Mike the Musicologist: Heather Harper, soprano.

An unanticipated performance in 1962 brought Ms. Harper international attention when, on 10 days’ notice, she substituted for Galina Vishnevskaya in the premiere of Britten’s “War Requiem.” The work was written to dedicate the new Coventry Cathedral in England, the original 14th-century structure having been bombed into ruin during World War II.
As a gesture of reconciliation, Britten, a pacifist, had intended the soloists to be the tenor Peter Pears (an Englishman), the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (a German) and Ms. Vishnevskaya (a Russian). But the Soviet government refused to allow Ms. Vishnevskaya to travel to Coventry for the premiere. Ms. Harper, just turned 32, took her place and triumphed.

She did a lot of work with Britten (including Ellen in the 1969 BBC production of “Peter Grimes”) but she had a larger repertoire, including singing “Lohengrin” at Bayreuth.

Fay McKenzie, actress. Her story is interesting:

Ms. McKenzie made her screen debut in 1918, when she was 10 weeks old, cradled in Gloria Swanson’s arms in “Station Content,” a five-reel silent romance. Her last role was a cameo appearance with her son, Tom Waldman Jr., in “Kill a Better Mousetrap,” a comedy, based on a play by Scott K. Ratner, that was filmed last summer and has yet to be released.

She was also in five Blake Edwards movies and five Gene Autry movies. Ms. McKenzie was 101 when she passed.

Ken Kercheval. He did a lot of TV work (no “Mannix”, though) and was probably most famous as Cliff Barnes on “Dallas”. (He was also in “Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell“, which I’d kind of like to watch. Lawrence, however, does not seem to care much for movies involving demonic dogs.)

Finally, Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg. Noted:

As the crown prince, he fled Luxembourg with the grand ducal family after Germany invaded the country in May 1940 and found refuge in France, Portugal, the United States and Canada before moving to Britain to join the Irish Guards, a regiment of the British Army, as a private in 1942.
He participated in the Allies’ invasion of Normandy in 1944 and fought in the Battle for Caen there. Three months later he took part in the liberation of Brussels.
Among other honors, he received a Silver Star from the United States, a War Medal from Britain and the French Croix de Guerre. He was promoted to colonel in the Irish Guards in 1984 and was made an honorary general of the British Army in 1995.

Posted in 1970s, Cops, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV, Wagner, WCDA | 2 Comments »

Brief notes from the legal beat.

Thursday, April 4th, 2019

Following up on a few things:

The Waco biker trials turned into a huge nothingburger.

All charges have been dropped against Chauna Thompson. You may remember her as the Harris County Sheriff’s deputy who was fired and indicted after her husband choked a man to death during an altercation outside a Denny’s. Her husband has been sentenced to 25 years. (Previously. Previously. Previously.)

From the Department of Well, That Will Show Them: The Texas Department of Corrections has banned all chaplains, regardless of religion, from the death chamber. (Previously. More from Reason.)

Posted in Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Bad cop! No doughnut!

Friday, March 29th, 2019

Lawrence emailed me about this yesterday: while I think some other people have picked up on this, it still seems to be worth covering.

Paterson, New Jersey police officer (in uniform) slaps the s–t out of a hospital patient lying in a bed. The same officer also previously punched the same man while he was in a wheelchair.

Ruben McAusland was sentenced Wednesday to more than five years in prison for drug dealing and assaulting a hospital patient. McAusland was on duty and in uniform during the March 18, 2018 incident.

How do we know this happened? One of his fellow officers took cell phone video.

Police officer Roger Then recorded video of the assault with his cell phone. Then has pleaded guilty in the hospital assault.

Earlier this month, the Columbus (Ohio) police department disbanded their vice unit. This is the same vice unit that arrested Stormy Daniels, an arrest that Internal Affairs deemed “improper”.

Three out of ten officers in the unit had been suspended, and one – Andrew Mitchell – is under indictment:

…on federal charges of abusing his role as a law enforcement officer, obstructing justice, witness tampering, and making false statements to investigators. According to the indictment, he had kidnapped multiple women and coerced them into sex in exchange for their release from his custody.

Last August, Mitchell shot and killed a woman during a prostitution arrest. He was already being investigated by the department.

On the side, former officer Mitchell (he retired after the indictment) is a landlord. Arguably, he’s a slumlord:

The former tenants interviewed by The Appeal described their buildings as neglected and pest-ridden (the city has filed 37 violations on his properties since 2015 for problems like housing code violations and environmental issues). Mitchell also was known for frequent evictions—381 since 1996, according to county records.

Mitchell is said to own fifteen properties. Assuming he’s owned all of those since 1996, that’s over one eviction per year per property. That seems rather high to me, but this might explain it:

Mitchell apparently was in the practice of renting to desperate women who didn’t have much money, pressuring them to have sex with him in exchange for free or discounted rent, and evicting the ones who wouldn’t.

Sometimes, I just don’t know what to say.

Unrelated to bad police side note that I don’t have anyplace else for: the Supreme Court granted Patrick Murphy a stay of execution.

The State may not carry out Murphy’s execution pending the timely filing and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari unless the State permits Murphy’s Buddhist spiritual advisor or another Buddhist reverend of the State’s choosing to accompany Murphy in the execution chamber during the execution.

Posted in Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 28, 2019.

Thursday, March 28th, 2019

Chron Eye For The Killer Guy:

Raised by a single mother who avoided taking care of him, [Patrick] Murphy was beaten and abused as a child, according to court records. His grandmother taught him to shoplift at a young age, and by 17 he’d run away and moved into a homeless shelter.

What did Mr. Murphy do? He’s one of the Texas 7, who broke out of prison in December of 2000, went on the run, and killed Irving Police Officer Aubrey Hawkins while stealing guns from an Oshman’s.

When it was over, Hawkins lay dead in the parking lot, shot 11 times and run over by an SUV as the men fled.

Part of the argument is that Mr. Murphy didn’t actually pull a trigger: he was just a lookout, and it was five other guys who shot Officer Hawkins. But he was still convicted and sentenced to death based on…yes, the law of parties. (Still want to do that podcast some day.)

Even though Murphy went along the day of the killing, his lawyers say he didn’t want to take part in the crime, pointing out that he left as soon as he told the others of the officer’s arrival. Now, they say, executing him would be cruel and unusual punishment.

Pull the other one, guys: it has bells.

(The execution is currently delayed while the Supreme Court evaluates Mr. Murphy’s claim that he’s entitled to a Buddhist spiritual advisor in the death chamber.)

On a much happier note: up yours, Andrew Cuomo. Up yours, Bill de Blasio.

A federal judge ruled today that New York’s notoriously nonsensical law criminalizing “gravity knives”—which groups have said for years is used by New York City to selectively prosecute people, especially the working class and minorities, for carrying common folding knives—is unconstitutionally vague.

Posted in Cops, IANAL, Knives, Law | Comments Closed

Notes from the legal blotter.

Tuesday, March 19th, 2019

Mildly interesting, though the Statesman is short on details (perhaps because law enforcement is not giving those out):

State officials cancelled liquor permits for Club Casino, 5500 South Congress Ave., and Zota’s Night Club, 4700 Burleson Road, on March 8., TABC officials said.

The bars were shut down “after a months-long investigation into human trafficking, narcotics and drink solicitation” involving both TABC and the Travis County Sheriff’s Office.

More interesting: APD fired officers Donald Petraitis and Robert Pfaff yesterday.

Why? February of last year, the two officers arrested a man named Quentin Perkins:

Petraitis and Pfaff filed reports that said Perkins had tried to walk away from them and glanced back as if he were planning to run. However, video footage from the incident presented during the officers’ trial showed that Pfaff used a stun gun on Perkins despite Perkins being on his knees with his hands raised.
Parts of the officers’ reports are “simply not true,” Police Chief Brian Manley wrote in their disciplinary memos, which were released Monday.

…

Manley also accused Pfaff and Petraitis of coordinating a false story.
“I find it improbable that both officers came up with a similar version of events, which included things that did not happen … as well as not recalling what actually did happen. … I have serious concerns that Officer Pfaff and Petraitis got their stories straight before they spoke with (a supervisor) and prepared their reports and the probable cause affidavit,” he wrote.

…

The disciplinary memos also say a police academy supervisor told the Austin police internal affairs unit that the stun gun use under these circumstances was unreasonable.

Even more interesting: the two officers were charged criminally as a result of this incident…and were acquitted of all the charges. Which is an additional illustration of something they tell the students in our Citizen’s Police Academy classes: you can do everything within the bounds of the law…and still get fired for violating APD policy, if that’s the way the chief wants to go. (And if you actually violated policy. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to tell the Taser story.)

Edited to add: I was going to include a link to the chief’s memo, but the city of Austin has reorganized the website and made the disciplinary memos extremely hard to find. DuckDuckGo to the rescue, but: the most recent one posted is from January 10th.

Edited to add 2: How bad does a jail have to be before even the people who run it quit? This bad.

In addition to the carbon monoxide issue, Barnett cited exposed electrical wiring, mold, bad plumbing, and an instance where a snake fell on an inmate’s head.

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

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#52 in a series)

Tuesday, January 8th, 2019

I don’t mean to seem lazy, but I can’t put it much better than Reason‘s “Hit and Run” did:

Chicago Alderman and Notorious Nanny-Stater Ed Burke Charged in Federal Corruption Scheme

I know: a corrupt Chicago alderman? Who’d thunk it? From the Tribune:

A federal criminal complaint unsealed Thursday charged Burke with attempted extortion for allegedly using his position as alderman to try to steer business to his private law firm from a company seeking to renovate a fast-food restaurant in his ward. The charge carries a maximum of 20 years in prison on conviction.
The complaint also alleged Burke asked one of the company’s executives in December 2017 to attend an upcoming political fundraiser for “another politician.” Sources identified the politician as Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who is running for Chicago mayor.

I missed this story, but there was an FBI raid on Burke’s office a few weeks ago:

Prosecutors revealed during the 10-minute hearing that the FBI found 23 guns in the raids on Burke’s City Hall and ward offices in November. As a condition of his bond, Burke, a former Chicago police officer, was ordered to surrender the firearms and any others he may own within 48 hours of his release.

This is amusing: I can’t tell if Burke was a member of Crooked Mayors Against Self-Defense (or if he was even eligable, being an alderman) but he was a big time gun grabber:

But while he was trying to deny residents of one of America’s most violent cities the right to defend themselves and their property, he was protected day-and-night by a team of four Chicago police officers. Having personal bodyguards is not a typical perk of a city alderman, but it’s one Burke has enjoyed for decades, at taxpayer expense, due to threats made against him in the early 1980s.

Of course, innocent until proven guilty, yadda yadda, but: they caught him on the wire. I’m looking forward to Alderman Burke going to prison for a long, long time.

Posted in FBI, Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

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