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Tuesday, October 5th, 2021

Here’s a surprise for you:

Federal investigators on Tuesday morning raided the Manhattan office of one of New York City’s main police unions in connection with an ongoing investigation, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, represents about 13,000 active and retired police sergeants in New York. Its headquarters were searched as part of an investigation by the F.B.I. and the public corruption unit in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, the people said.

The home of the union’s president, Edward D. Mullins, was also searched.

Though the focus of the investigation into the Sergeants Benevolent Association is unclear, it comes as Mr. Mullins faces departmental discipline over his conduct on social media. Known in recent years for making brash and incendiary remarks on Twitter, particularly about Mayor Bill de Blasio, Mr. Mullins declared war on the mayor last year after two officers were shot, accusing Mr. de Blasio of promoting anti-police attitudes.
Mr. Mullins is being brought up for department discipline over his posts on Twitter, including for sharing a police report documenting the arrest of Mr. de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, during protests over police brutality and racial justice in New York last year. The Police Department does not typically release internal reports, and the one that Mr. Mullins shared contained personal information about Ms. de Blasio.
A disciplinary hearing on the charges started last month and is scheduled to resume on Oct. 27. Mr. Mullins’s lawyer, Andrew C. Quinn, has defended his conduct as free speech and as part of his obligation to advocate on behalf of the union’s members.

…

Mr. Mullins also faces internal discipline over tweets in which he used profane language against Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the former city health commissioner, and Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman who represents the Bronx.
Mr. Torres, who has called for Mr. Mullins’s resignation over what he has described as racist, misogynistic and homophobic remarks, tweeted on Tuesday that Mr. Mullins had received a “first-class raid” from the F.B.I.
Mr. Mullins has also drawn scrutiny for his outspoken right-wing politics in a city where Democrats significantly outnumber Republicans. Both the sergeants’ union and its larger sister union, the Police Benevolent Association, have been run mostly by conservatives whose views are not widely shared by many in the metropolis they police.
Mr. Mullins has praised former President Donald J. Trump, a Republican who was deeply unpopular among city residents. He also came under fire from liberal lawmakers after giving an interview to Fox News surrounded by paraphernalia linked to QAnon, a fringe conspiracy theory popular among Trump supporters.

(Side note: “one of New York City’s main police unions”? You may be asking: how many police unions does NYC have? Mike the Musicologist asked me that same question a while back, in relation to a different scandal. Other than the Sergeants Benevolent Association, there’s also the Police Benevolent Association, which represents the line officers, and the Detectives Endowment Association, which represents the detective ranks. It isn’t clear to me if the command ranks (above sergeant) and the civilian staff have their own unions.)

Edited to add 10/6: Sergeant Mullins resigned his union presidency last night, after I posted this. The Post reports that he remains a NYPD sergeant, and that he made “$88,757 from the union and $133,195 from the NYPD” last year.

When was the last time there was a shootout on a train? Maybe the Long Island Rail Road, but was that a shootout?

Posted in Cops, FBI, Law, NYPD, Trains | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 11, 2021.

Wednesday, August 11th, 2021

Alex Cord. He may have been best known as “Archangel” in “Airwolf”, but he had a significant body of work going back to the 1960s. No “Mannix”, but a lot of other cop shows, and multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, among other credits.

Patricia Hitchcock. Yes, Alfred’s daughter.

Born on July 7, 1928 in the UK to famed film director Alfred Hitchcock and his infamously loyal wife, Alma Reville, the legendary duo’s offspring would go on to appear in a string of her pop’s projects including “Stage Fright” (1950), “Strangers on a Train” (1951) and the aforementioned “Psycho” (1960). She also guest-starred in 10 episodes of the classic TV anthology series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” from 1955 to 1960.

She had a few other credits, but retired in the 1970s.

Tony Esposito, Hall of Fame goalie for the Chicago Blackhawks.

Walter Yetnikoff, legendary head of CBS Records.

In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Yetnikoff somewhat reluctantly let Ron Alexenburg, the head of CBS’s Epic label, sign the Jacksons. Epic had wrested the group from Motown Records (which retained the rights to the group’s original name, the Jackson 5), and though Mr. Yetnikoff wasn’t overly impressed with the Jacksons’ initial albums for Epic, he cultivated a relationship with the group’s key member, Michael, supporting the young singer’s interest in expanding into solo work.
In 1982, that encouragement resulted in “Thriller,” still one of the top-selling albums in history.

…

Other megahits released during Mr. Yetnikoff’s tenure included Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” in 1977, the ambitious Pink Floyd double album “The Wall” in 1979, Mr. Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1984, Mr. Jackson’s “Bad” in 1987 and a series of hit albums by Mr. Joel, including “The Stranger” (1977) and “Glass Houses” (1980).

Unfortunately, he was one of those people who didn’t just have issues: he had a lifetime subscription and a complete run of bound volumes.

…his ascension was accompanied by numerous affairs, which he detailed, along with his substance abuse, in his autobiography. Other record executives from the period wrote their stories, too, but Mr. Yetnikoff’s was in a class by itself. It was, Forbes said, “a portrait of such out-of-control megalomania that any music executive today, no matter how egotistical or ruthless, has to look better by comparison.”

…

In 1990, Mr. Yetnikoff, having offended too many people with his outrageous behavior, was dismissed by Sony, the company that at his urging had bought CBS Records only three years earlier. He had gone into rehab in 1989 and kicked the booze and drugs that had been his more or less daily diet throughout his reign, but getting clean didn’t make him any more tolerable.

…

Tommy Mottola, once a friend and later, as Mr. Yetnikoff’s successor at CBS Records, viewed as an enemy, put it this way in his own autobiography, “Hitmaker: The Man and His Music” (2013): “The treatment center had removed the alcohol and drugs from Walter’s life — but not the underlying problems that Walter had been using them to anesthetize.”

Brian Mulheren. He was the man in the NYPD in the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, and to quote the NYT, he was a “veteran detective who as an audacious, deft and indefatigable one-man emergency management liaison between City Hall and the New York Police and Fire Departments became known as ‘Mr. Disaster’ and the ‘Night Mayor’…”

Mr. Mulheren played an outsize role for a first-grade detective. He was armed with a gold shield, but his uniform, such as it was — it typically consisted of a rumpled beige trench coat and a crumpled Irish tweed hat — was devoid of the stars and bars that define status on the police force.
Yet by sheer force of personality and the connections he had cultivated, he was deferred to by city commissioners and by police supervisors who outranked him when he arrived, often first, at the scene of a crisis in his black Lincoln Town Car, which was crowned with a forest of antennas that linked him to every emergency radio frequency in the city.
In the 1970s and ’80s, he served as City Hall’s wake-up call when an officer was shot or a firefighter was felled. Before the city established a full-fledged emergency management department, he seamlessly and almost single-handedly coordinated interagency strategies.
“He was one of those rare people who kept the N.Y.P.D. and the Fire Department together,” John Miller, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, said in an interview. “He basically created the organized response to chaos that we replicated and have used ever since.”

…

Mr. Mulheren was credited by Officer Steven McDonald’s family with saving his life when he was shot in Central Park by a teenage bicycle thief in 1986 and rushed in a patrol car to Metropolitan Hospital, where doctors said he was unlikely to survive.
In 2016, Mr. McDonald told Columbia, the Knights of Columbus magazine, that he vividly remembered Mr. Mulheren’s dauntless intervention.
“You might think he’s not going to make it, but we’re going to Bellevue,” Mr. Mulheren announced on his own initiative, according to “New York’s Finest,” a forthcoming book by Michael Daly.
“He had no rank or high station but stepped forward and said, ‘No, he’s not going to die; he just needs a second chance,’” Mr. McDonald recalled. “I believe that was the Holy Spirit speaking through Brian to everyone there. Just like that like they loaded me up on a special ambulance and flew down to Bellevue Hospital, where they saved my life by the grace of God.”

…

In another emergency, when a firefighter was overcome and no ambulance was immediately available, Mr. Mulheren was said to have commandeered a city bus, told the passengers to debark and ordered the driver to take the injured man to the hospital.
Serving mostly under Mayors John V. Lindsay, Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins, Mr. Mulheren, a police buff since childhood, insinuated himself into the department’s decisions to buy smaller patrol cars to economize on gas; change their color from green, black and white in the early 1970s to “grabber blue” with white accents to make them more visible and less intimidating; modernize lights and sirens; air-condition the cars; and improve radio communications. He also encouraged the Fire Department to requisition a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber to treat burn victims.

He was 73 years old, and passed away due to COPD. His family attributes his condition to inhalation of debris at the WTC site after the 2001 attacks.

Posted in 1970s, Cops, Law, Movies, Music, NYPD, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 311

Friday, February 5th, 2021

As I’ve said before, I don’t like using TV shows here unless it is a short video to make a point, or a documentary series.

I’m fuzzing things a bit here, but I think it is justified. Also, it pushes some of my buttons.

Between 1962 and 1963, there was a television series called “GE True“. It was called “GE True” because it was sponsored by General Electric, and featured stories from True magazine that were adapted for television. Gene Roddenberry was one of the scriptwriters, and the series was produced and hosted by Jack Webb. Webb directed some of the episodes: some others were directed by William Conrad.

It was 25 minutes long (though some episodes were multi-part ones) and there were 33 total episodes. A small number of episodes have been uploaded to the ‘Tube.

I’ve written before about Earl Rogers, Clarence Darrow, and the LA Times jury bribery trial. From “GE True”, original airdate January 13, 1963, “Defendant: Clarence Darrow”. Robert Vaughn plays Earl Rogers, and Tol Avery (a prolific actor I was previously unfamiliar with: for the record, he appeared three times on “Mannix” before his death in 1973) plays Darrow.

Bonus #1: “V-Victor-5”, co-written by Gene Roddenberry. On a hot summer day in NYC in 1933, a lone off-duty NYPD officer in the days before radio cars, and surrounded by a hostile crowd, holds five armed and dangerous fugitives at gunpoint until backup arrives…two hours later.

(I know the YouTube title says “Commando”, but this one is really “V-Victor-5”. Also, there’s a punchline at the end that I won’t spoil for you.)

Bonus #2: “Commando”.

Oh, wait. Wrong “Commando”. Sorry. This is the right one.

“In 2013 the Jack Webb Fan Club of Los Angeles started a campaign to get the series released on DVD.”

Yes, please!

Posted in Cops, History, Law, Mannix, NYPD, TV | Comments Closed

I may have spoke too soon.

Thursday, November 19th, 2020

This might be the headline of the day:

Rapper with flamethrower in custody over NYC bus stunt

More context:

Authorities said Dupree G.O.D was arrested on charges of reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon. There was no information on when he would be arraigned. He was in police custody Wednesday night.
The musical artist was filmed earlier this month in an unauthorized stunt that he said was part of a tribute video for the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan. The clip gained attention on social media after a police union tweeted it as an example of the city becoming less safe.

And of course:

I’m really not sure I see the “reckless endangerment” part of that charge. It seems to me that he was pointing it away from and above people. As for the “criminal possession of a weapon” charge, well, maybe, given that this is NYC.

Posted in Art, Cops, Firings, Hysteria, Law, Media, NYPD | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: January 24, 2020.

Friday, January 24th, 2020

Carol Serling, Rod Serling’s wife.

She was the associate publisher and consulting editor of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, a monthly magazine, in the 1980s. She was a consultant to “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1983), a segmented film adaptation whose four directors included Steven Spielberg. In one segment she had a cameo role as an airline passenger in a remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the 1963 episode in which a terrified fellow passenger believes he has spied a gremlin cavorting on the wing outside his window.

…

Ms. Serling cemented Rod Serling’s place in the academy by donating many of his television scripts and movie screenplays to Ithaca College in upstate New York, where he had taught courses in creative writing and film and television criticism. The gifts helped the college establish its Rod Serling Archives. She also helped create scholarships and an award at the college, where she was a trustee for 18 years.

Jo Shishido, Japanese actor.

After plastic surgery to fatten the cheeks of the handsome young actor, Shishido became known for playing prominent heavies in action films.

He was in a whole bunch of Japanese films, including Seijun Suzuki’s “Branded to Kill” and something called “A Colt Is My Passport“. (I can’t lie: I love that title.)

He also played “Captain Joe” in a Japanese TV series called “Star Wolf“. And if that rings a faint (or even not-so-faint) bell for you, I’m so, so sorry: “Star Wolf” was later cut together and dubbed into two movies: “Fugitive Alien” and “Fugitive Alien II“, which, in turn, became MST3K episodes.

(I thought about embedding the forklift song here, but it was Ken, not Captain Joe, that they tried to kill with a forklift.)

Sonny Grosso, legendary NYPD detective. One night, Mr. Grosso and his partner, Eddie Egan…

…out for drinks at the Copacabana nightclub, spotted known drug dealers adulating an unidentified man, whom they later discovered owned a greasy spoon luncheonette in Brooklyn.
They followed him on a hunch, and the trail led to a French smuggler who was shipping 100 pounds of heroin — some of it stolen from a police vault — to the United States. Mr. Grosso determined the magnitude of the cache by weighing the Frenchman’s 1960 Buick Invicta when it arrived by ship and again when it was about to be transported back to France.

At the time, this was a record seizure. And speaking of bells ringing, yes, this was the “French Connection” case. Mr. Grosso’s character was “Buddy Russo” (played by Roy Scheider). (Eddie Egan was, of course, renamed “Popeye Doyle” and played by Gene Hackman, just in case you haven’t seen the movie.)

A product of East Harlem and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Grosso rose to the rank of detective first grade in the New York Police Department faster than any predecessor. He followed his 22 years on the force with a second career as a television producer and consultant for television shows about law enforcement, including “Kojak,” “Baretta” and “Night Heat,” and for the movie “The Godfather,” in which he played a detective named Phil.
Until he died, Mr. Grosso carried his off-duty .38-caliber Colt revolver, the very same gun that was taped to the tank of a toilet and fired (using blanks) by Al Pacino in a mob hit in “The Godfather.”

…

Yes, he happened to be a regular at Rao’s, the tiny cliquish eatery on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem that has occasionally had unsavory associations. But it also happens to be a neighborhood hangout, just around the corner from where he was born.
Even there, drama intruded one night before Christmas in 2003, when a patron who objected to the singing of one of Mr. Grosso’s dinner guests was shot dead by another customer.

…

Recalling the crime-ridden city of decades earlier, Mr. Grosso explained how the police, and his partner in particular, had responded to the drug dealing that stoked homicides to record highs.
“It was a war then, and you had to act differently,” he said. “The junk epidemic was bursting out of Harlem.
“That’s why Eddie acted crazier than the people we were chasing. He had one philosophy: ‘It’s our job to put the bad guys in jail; don’t worry about the prosecutors and the judges.’ He was a madman, but he made sure I got home every night.”
“Those days,” Mr. Grosso said a little nostalgically, “we were just allowed to be cops.”

(Eddie Egan died of cancer in 1995.)

Posted in Cops, Law, Movies, NYPD, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 8, 2019.

Friday, 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 »

Obit watch: September 23, 2019.

Monday, September 23rd, 2019

Christopher Rouse, Pulitzer prize winning contemporary composer. I confess that I don’t know very much about his work, but he was a favorite of several close friends of mine.

(Edited to add: NYT obit.)

Davo Karnicar, a man who skied down Everest. He wasn’t “The Man Who Skied Down Everest” in the documentary (that was Yūichirō Miura, who is still alive at 86), but he skied non-stop from the summit to base camp – a 12,000 foot descent in four hours and 40 minutes. (Mr. Miura only descended 4,000 feet.)

His brother Andrej lost eight toes to frostbite during their descent on Annapurna in 1995. A year later, Davo lost two fingers to frostbite during a storm that killed eight climbers — a disaster detailed by Jon Krakauer in his book “Into Thin Air.”
And in 1997, Karnicar’s brother Luka and four other members of his rescue team died when a safety line connected to a helicopter broke during a training exercise.

…

In 2009, his fellow climber Franc Oderlap, who had accompanied Karnicar to Everest in 2000, was killed by falling ice while they were testing equipment on Manaslu, in the Nepali Himalayans. Karnicar was uninjured. In 2017, Karnicar climbed as far as base camp at K2 but abandoned his quest when he hurt his back.

According to the NYT obit, Mr. Karnicar was killed in a tree cutting accident at his home.

John L. Keenan, chief of detectives with the NYPD. He was most famous for leading the manhunt for the “Son of Sam”. There’s also an interesting historical side note:

…he took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge while in a Counter Intelligence Corps unit of the Fourth Infantry Division. He fought alongside J.D. Salinger, who was writing what became “The Catcher in the Rye” during lulls in combat and became a lifelong friend.

…

When Chief Keenan was honored at a retirement party at Antun’s restaurant in Queens in the summer of 1978, Mr. Salinger came down from his home in rural New Hampshire, where he zealously guarded his privacy, to join in the tribute.
Departing from the focus on police work, which had attracted some 300 officers to the party, Mr. Salinger told the crowd that Chief Keenan had been “a great comfort,” especially in a foxhole.

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

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

Christmas gun crankery.

Tuesday, December 25th, 2018

The NYT apparently decided they were going to use the run-up to Christmas to be cranky about guns.

I didn’t link to that Andrew Ross Sorkin piece the other day about using credit card purchases to (supposedly) flag possible mass shooters (and I won’t link it here) because:

  1. Busy.
  2. I felt like it got pretty thoroughly discussed and discredited on Twitter before I had a chance. Here’s one good example. The only thing I’d add that I really haven’t seen metioned elsewhere is: if you want to weaponize the financial system, don’t be surprised when the weapon is turned on you, Mr. Marijuana Dispensary Owner or Ms. Sex Worker.

In other gun news from the paper of record, they (and supposedly a congressional committee and “federal agencies”) seem to have it in for CZ USA. Why?

Three years ago, Sandy McDonald began finding the rifles, left behind by poachers, scattered near the dead rhinos he found in the game reserve he owns in Mozambique, just across the border from South Africa.
Mr. McDonald immediately recognized the weapons. They were .375-caliber Safari Classics, made by CZUB or just CZ, a firearms manufacturer based in the Czech Republic. Upon closer inspection, Mr. McDonald noticed something else on the rifles. Carved into the metal were the words “CZ-USA, Kansas City, KS,” suggesting that the weapons were from the American subsidiary of the arms company.

Yes: CZ rifles are supposedly ending up in the hands of poachers.

“Coming from a firearms background I recognized that these were rifles that are quite common in the U.S.,” Mr. McDonald said. “It left me wondering how they got out of the U.S. and into the hands of Mozambican poaching syndicates.”

How many CZ Safari Classics have you seen at the gun shop lately? “Quite common”? But I agree with Mr. McDonald: where are these rifles coming from, in such quantity that poachers appear to be just throwing them away? Are rhinos really so valuable that the rifles (which, remember, are imported) are basically disposable?

Neither CZ nor its American subsidiary has been accused of a crime by federal authorities.

…

But CZ officials said the guns that were found at poaching scenes were manufactured in the Czech Republic, not the United States. The company denied that any of the rifles came from its subsidiary in the United States — or that it had done anything wrong. And company officials said the weapons were legally sold to suppliers in Mozambique.
“Although the firearms were marked ‘CZ-USA,’ the U.S. entity CZ-USA had nothing to do with the rifles,” Petr Kallus, a company executive, wrote in a response to questions from The New York Times. “Rather, the marking ‘CZ-USA’ was applied to the rifles by CZUB as an international brand name only.”

You know, I don’t do a lot of hunting or poaching, especially of African game. However, I had the distinct impression from what I’ve read that many poachers are using surplus military weapons, like AK-47s, to do their dirty work. Not sporting rifles imported from the Czech Republic. Any poaching experts out there that can confirm this?

Next up: a few weeks ago, a guy held up two men in a New York City building, firing a shot during the holdup, and fled the scene. As he was running away, he ran into two NYPD officers. One of them gave chase. The suspect fired on the police officer, and the officer shot back.

And shot. And shot. And shot. All told, he expended 27 rounds and reloaded his Glock once. The officer eventually hit the suspect twice (in the neck and foot) disabling him.

The officer also hit five parked cars and one woman in the belly. A 12 year old girl was also hit by bullet fragments.

Unlike the two stories above, I think this is actually a fairly thoughtful and reasonable story: among other things, it talks about how difficult it is to shoot well under stress, especially with someone shooting back at you, and it doesn’t suggest the gentleman in question was a choir boy. (He was found with the gun and two kilos of coke.)

I don’t want to throw stones at the NYPD officer in question. I’m not sure my performance would have been much better in the same situation. On the other hand, I like to think I wouldn’t have been spraying shots on a crowded street, either.

John C. Cerar, a former deputy inspector who commanded the New York Police Department’s firearms and tactics section, said the way Officer Gomez shot while running was an anomaly in New York City, where officers are trained to control their fire.
“We tried to get police officers to be realistic that you’re better off firing from cover,” he said. “Less shots have to be fired if you’re in a good position. Shot placement is so much more important than the amount of shots fired.”

Two more things:

[The officer] had never fired his weapon in five years on the force, the police said.

Never? Not even in qualification?

The officers did not activate their body cameras during the incident.

Posted in Christmas, Cops, Guns, Law, NYPD | Comments Closed

If you like your revolver, you can keep your revolver.

Friday, June 1st, 2018

The New York Police Department is getting rid of their revolvers.

“What’s that?” you say. “I thought the NYPD all carried Glocks or SIG with the NY-2 trigger.”

Mostly right you are, Bob, and you’re also a perceptive reader of my blog. But NYPD grandfathered in officers who chose to continue carrying revolvers after the department transitioned to semi-auto pistols in 1993. Yes, there are NYPD officers still on the job, still carrying revolvers, after 25 years.

More than 2,000 city police officers still held on to the revolvers over a decade after Sig Sauer and Glock pistols became standard. Their numbers dwindled with each wave of retirements, to 160 by the time the Police Department announced in November that it was phasing out revolvers completely and permanently.

The paper of record estimates that “about 50 officers” are still carrying revolvers. The department decided in November that everyone would transition to semi-auto pistols by the end of August.

“After this class, the days of seeing a police officer out there carrying a swivel holster or a .38 holster with a .38 in there are basically nonexistent,” Inspector Richard G. DiBlasio, the commanding officer of the Firearms and Tactics Section, said. “It’s tradition and some people don’t want to let go of it, but tactics is always number one.”

…

But the change has been met with resistance from officers reluctant to set aside the revolvers that they regard as old friends for unfamiliar pistols that have twice the capacity but are susceptible to jamming. Officer Mary Lawrence, a crime prevention officer in the 103rd precinct in Queens, said that was never a concern with the Smith & Wesson revolver that she has used over her 26 years with the department.
“I’m proud of this uniform that I’m wearing and I’m proud of my gun that I carry because it’s been reliable to me,” she said. “I didn’t think that I needed extra firepower at all.”

The Firearm Blog actually covered this when the announcement was made in November, but I’m blogging the NYT story here because I think it’s an interesting piece of “human interest” journalism (hysteria about “increasing gun violence” aside). Especially that photo at the top of the article.

I wish someone could ask Jim Cirillo if he would feel undergunned with his Model 10 today, and if he thinks “gun violence” has increased since the early 1970s. (Also, I hope someone picks up the reprint rights to Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights now that Paladin is out of business.)

Posted in Books, Cops, Guns, NYPD | Comments Closed

Random notes, mostly legal, March 15, 2018.

Thursday, March 15th, 2018

When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have samurai swords.

In the immortal words of Hank Williams, Jr., it’s just a family tradition.

Interesting #1:

Exonerations caused by official misconduct: 84
Well over half of the people exonerated last year were initially convicted because of official misconduct, such as officers threatening witnesses, analysts falsifying tests or officials withholding evidence that would have cleared the defendant.

No-crime exonerations: 66
In just under half of the exonerations last year, defendants were wrongfully convicted in cases in which no crime was committed. This included more than a dozen drug possession cases, 11 child sex abuse cases and nine murder cases.

On a totally unrelated note, the state of Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains and it’s hard to get drugs for lethal injections, has decided to start using nitrogen gas instead. (Subject to judicial approval.) I’ve seen other folks call for this as being a much more painless and humane alternative to lethal injection, but OK seems to be the closest to actually doing this.

(Yes, I know: “You know what else is a painless and humane alternative to lethal injection? Not executing people.” And yes, that seems especially relevant in light of the previous item. One of these days, I will write that essay for you guys on the death penalty and my complicated feelings about it.)

Herman Bell has been granted parole. Mr. Bell, along with Anthony Bottom and Albert Washington (members of the Black Liberation Army), executed NYPD officers Joseph A. Piagentini and Waverly M. Jones on May 21, 1971.

In a statement condemning the decision, Commissioner James P. O’Neill recalled how Mr. Bell and his co-conspirators “shot Officer Piagentini 22 times, including with his own service revolver — as the dying officer pleaded for his own life.”

Mr. Bell has been in prison for 47 years. Mr. Washington is still in prison. Mr. Bottom died in 2000.

Toys ‘R’ no longer us.

Headline:

Claire Foy, Queen on ‘The Crown,’ Was Paid Less Than Her Onscreen Husband

Body:

Mr. [Matt] Smith came to Netflix as an established actor in Britain, most notably as the titular character on the BBC staple “Doctor Who” from 2010 to 2013 — a fact that informed the producers’ decision around salary, they said at the conference.

Aside from a role in 2015 in the Golden Globe-winning BBC mini-series “Wolf Hall,” Ms. Foy, 33, was a relative unknown when she was cast in “The Crown.”

The show’s producers have promised that, from now on, “Nobody gets paid more than the queen.” Oh, by the way: they’re also recasting the show: the queen will now be played by Olivia Colman.

You know, you would think that Sorkin and company would have worked out all the permissions issues before actually trying to stage the play…

Posted in Austin, Cops, Law, NYPD, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

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