Archive for February 3rd, 2020

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#62 in a series)

Monday, February 3rd, 2020

My apologies: I missed this story last week, and only found out about it when Legal Insurrection covered it.

Mohammed Nuru, the San Francisco Director of Public Works, was charged last week with “public corruption”. Also charged: Nick Bovis, a local restaurateur.

The complaint unsealed against San Francisco Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru and longtime restaurateur Nick Bovis focuses on an aborted attempt in 2018 to bribe a San Francisco airport commissioner for retail space.
It also alleges other schemes in which Nuru is accused of trying to help his friend score contracts to build homeless shelters and portable toilets, along with a restaurant at the city’s new $2 billion transit station.

“homeless shelters and portable toilets”. You. Don’t. Say.

Nuru is also accused of accepting free labor at his vacation home and a John Deere tractor as well as lavish gifts from a developer, including a $2,070 bottle of wine.

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Nuru, who has worked inside City Hall for the past 20 years, has been the focus of several NBC Bay Area investigations that exposed questionable contracts, Nuru’s ballooning street-cleaning budget, and serious safety violations within public works.

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As the top official since 2012 in charge of a city public works operating budget exceeding $500 million, Nuru is tasked with cleaning up San Francisco streets, which critics note remain cluttered with feces, trash and used needles amid a homelessness crisis.

I. Can’t. Even.

Nuru was initially arrested in late January and agreed to cooperate with officials, but violated his agreement not to discuss the case and was re-arrested, Anderson said. He lied to officials about not discussing the case, Anderson said.

Here’s the criminal complaint if you’re interested. I haven’t gone through all of it yet.

Posted in California Über Alles, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 3, 2020.

Monday, February 3rd, 2020

A little bit of catch up:

Mary Higgins Clark, noted suspense author.

Peter Serkin. I swear I’ve heard this name somewhere before, but I can’t place where. He was a pianist, came from a prominent musical family, and was a child prodigy.

Yet, though he was proud of his heritage, Mr. Serkin found it a burden. Like many who came of age in the 1960s, he questioned the establishment, both in society at large and within classical music. He resisted a traditional career trajectory and at 21 stopped performing, going for months without even playing the piano.

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Throughout his career, he presented recital programs that juxtaposed the old and the new: 12-tone scores and Mozart sonatas; thorny pieces by the mid-20th-century German composer Stefan Wolpe and polyphonic works from the Renaissance. Admirers of his playing appreciated how he drew out allusions to music’s past in contemporary scores, while conveying the radical elements of old music.
He played almost all the piano works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Wolpe. He also introduced dozens of pieces, including major works and concertos, written for him by composers like Toru Takemitsu, Charles Wuorinen and, especially, his childhood friend Peter Lieberson.

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Though Mr. Serkin never completely shook off the early perception of him as “the counterculture’s reluctant envoy to the straight concert world,” as the Times critic Donal Henahan called him in an admiring 1973 profile, over time he reconciled to the ways, even the dress protocols, of that classical world and developed productive associations with artists like the Guarneri String Quartet, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (who had married Peter Lieberson) and the conductors Seiji Ozawa, Herbert Blomstedt, Robert Shaw and Pierre Boulez.

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Mr. Serkin relished teaching, and held posts at institutions including the Mannes School of Music and the Juilliard School in New York, and, in recent years, Bard. He so enjoyed spending summers teaching at the Tanglewood Music Institute that he bought a home in the Berkshires and lived there for years.

Just in this morning: Bernard J. Ebbers, convicted WorldCom CEO.

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