You know the deal: I want to give everyone an opportunity to get their obits (and, more importantly, corrections) up.
Archive for September, 2024
Pete Rose obits tomorrow.
Monday, September 30th, 2024Dumber than a bag of hair watch.
Monday, September 30th, 2024“Dumber than a bag of hair” is how I have previously described the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. They have a long history of corruption and incompetence, some of which I have documented here.
Today’s example is a criminal indictment brought to us by the FBI by way of Brian Krebs.
The whole thing is slightly confusing, and I’d recommend reading the Krebs article, but in brief: the FBI has been investigating a crooked cryptocurrency guy who founded a platform called “Zort”.
But that’s not the part that jumped out at me. What jumped out at me is: crypto bro apparently had LASD deputies “on his payroll”.
The FBI later obtained a copy of a search warrant executed by LASD deputies in January 2022 for GPS location information on a phone belonging to E.Z., which shows an LASD deputy unlawfully added E.Z.’s mobile number to a list of those associated with an unrelated firearms investigation.
“Damn my guy actually filed the warrant,” Iza allegedly texted someone after the location warrant was entered. “That’s some serious shit to do for someone….risking a 24 years career. I pay him 280k a month for complete resources. They’re active-duty.”
And relevant to Lawrence’s interests: “E.Z.” is apparently a man named Enzo Zelocchi. Mr. Zelocchi is one of the two listed directors, and the star of, “Angels Apocalypse”, “once rated the absolute worst sci-fi flick on IMDB”.
I’m not seeing any reports that LASD officers have been charged. Yet. Kind of makes me wonder if some of them rolled, perhaps in hopes of doing time in a white-collar resort prison.
Obit watch: September 30, 2024.
Monday, September 30th, 2024He was a good Texas boy who did some acting in addition to his music career. There’s plenty of press coverage around this, but a few credits that aren’t covered in the articles: “Lone Star”, “Millennium”, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”, “Heaven’s Gate”, and let us not forget…
(I know both Lawrence and I have said this before, but “Passion & Poetry: Sam’s Trucker Movie”, which is on the blu-ray edition of “Convoy”, has a lot of Kristofferson in it. And I think it is almost more interesting than the movie itself.)
Dikembe Mutombo, Hall of Fame NBA player. ESPN.
I kind of disliked that commercial because I felt it made him look like a jerk (yes, I know it was playing off his signature move). But:
Mutombo often joked about how much in fines his showmanship had cost him under the league’s no-taunting rule. But four years into retirement he received ample payback, starring in an acclaimed Geico commercial created for the 2013 Super Bowl. In that 30-second spot, in full uniform, he wagged his famous finger at people in various everyday activities.
He told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the commercial had reestablished recognition “for me and for my foundation. I thank God for it.”
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Mutombo’s mother, Biamba Marie, died at home in 1998 after having a stroke; he had been unable to get hospital care for her due to a government-enforced curfew. That year, he invited business and political insiders to a dinner in Washington to announce a fund-raising campaign for a hospital in Kinshasa to provide treatment for the poor. Over the next several years, he struggled to raise money, even from people within the N.B.A., two notable exceptions being Ewing and Mourning.
“I thought it would be easy, that I would call up all the rich people I knew from being a basketball player and the whole thing would take nine months,” he told The New York Times weeks before the 300-bed hospital, named for his mother, opened in September 2006, on land donated by the government. He said that he had to pay squatters to vacate the property and that he had donated roughly $15 million to the project.
“This is going to be the proudest day of my life,” he said during the ceremonial opening.
John Ashton, actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “Police Squad!” (In color), and “Columbo”.
Your MLB loser update.
Sunday, September 29th, 2024The NFL loser update won’t post until Tuesday. (0-3 Tennessee plays the early Monday night game.)
But the MLB season mostly wrapped up today.
How did the White Sox do?
Shockingly well down the stretch. They swept the LA Angels Tuesday-Thursday of last week, and won two out of three against the Detroit Tigers (who ESPN had as heavy favorites for all three games). Where was this team earlier in the season?
But they did manage to drop one to Detroit, and you know what that means…
…their final record was 41-121, breaking the mark set by the 1962 Mets, and making them arguably the worst team in the modern (1901 and later) era of baseball.
“arguably”? Well, 121 losses in a season is a record. But 41-121 works out to a winning percentage of .253. That comes in fifth on Wikipedia’s list of worst MLB teams if you sort by percentage. Ahead of the Sox are:
- The 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, .235 (36-117)
- The 1935 Boston Braves, .248 (38-115)
- The 1962 Mets, .250 (40-120)
- The 1904 Washington Senators, .252 (38-113)
So what’s the best way to determine the worst? Sheer number of losses, which puts the 2024 Sox at the top of the heap? Or does it make more sense to use winning percentage, which evens out the fluctuations cased by the variable number of games per season over the past 123 years, and by some games being cancelled and not made up? (If you notice, none of those numbers adds up to 154 or 162. I haven’t looked at the other records, but as I understand it, one of the 1962 Mets games was a tie, so it should be 40-120-1, and one was rained out and not made up.)
I don’t know. But I think in any case, the achievement of the 2024 White Sox is worth celebrating, even if they didn’t remove all doubt about who is really the worst. There’s always next year.
Fun with snack food!
Sunday, September 29th, 2024I could take this over to Lawrence’s, but I have two very good reasons not to.
One, Lawrence would tell me “Get this s–t out of my house.”
Two, I can post it here, where perhaps a handful of people who were on old school USENET will get a small chuckle (maybe) out of it. Heck, for all I know, he might even show up in the comments.
Obit watch: September 27, 2024.
Friday, September 27th, 2024Dame Maggie Smith. THR. Tributes. Other credits include “Richard III” (1995), “Murder By Death”, “Death on the Nile” (1978), “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”, “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”, and voice work in “Sherlock Gnomes” and “Gnomeo & Juliet”.
Barbara Leigh-Hunt, actress. Other credits include “Oh Heavenly Dog”, “The Plague Dogs”, and “Longitude”.
Muriel Furrer, Swiss cyclist. She was 18. Her death was a result of head injuries she sustained in a crash yesterday during the UCI World Championships.
Frank Coppa died in October of 2023, but his death was not announced until recently.
In 2002, he was serving time for securities fraud when he was indicted on racketeering and extortion charges. Facing an even longer prison sentence, he notified the F.B.I. that he wanted to cooperate with the government.
It was the first time a Bonanno member had flipped, violating the mafia’s solemn oath of loyalty, Omertà.
Mr. Coppa’s decision to cooperate with federal prosecutors, knowingly putting his life at risk, led at least 10 other members to do the same and ultimately helped the government convict Joseph Massino, the Bonanno boss, of seven murder charges and immobilize his mafia family.
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Mr. Coppa also detailed his role in the death of Dominick Napolitano, a Bonanno member, known as Sony Black, who was executed in 1981 for unwittingly connecting the family with an undercover F. B.I agent, Joseph D. Pistone, who used the alias Donnie Brasco. Mr. Pistone later wrote a book about that experience and was played by Johnny Depp in “Donnie Brasco,” a 1997 film adaptation.
The night of Mr. Napolitano’s murder, Mr. Coppa testified, he had bought fried chicken for the hit men as they prepared for the execution, at a Bonanno member’s house in Queens.
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Among law enforcement officials, Mr. Coppa was known as a clever wise guy. He made millions of dollars for himself and the Bonanno family in pump-and-dump schemes, boosting the value of penny stocks to quickly turn a profit. He also shook down underworld figures outside the Bonanno family who were engaging in securities fraud.
“He was one of the smartest mob guys you’re ever going to meet,” a former F.B.I. agent involved in the case said in an interview on the condition of anonymity so that he could speak about the investigation. “He understood how to engineer these financial frauds. He was at a completely different level when it came to most of these guys.”
Your tax-fattened hyena follow-up.
Thursday, September 26th, 2024I’ve been struggling all day to get time to myself to go through the coverage.
Right now, it looks like the charges against Mayor Adams involve…wait for it…yes, the Turks! I think I called that one.
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Mr. Adams had “sought and accepted improper valuable benefits” since at least 2014, when he was Brooklyn borough president, according to the indictment.
The benefits included luxury travel — free and discounted Turkish Airlines tickets and free meals and hotel rooms — from wealthy foreigners and at least one Turkish government official, prosecutors said. He traveled on the airline even when it was inconvenient, they said, including a 2017 flight to France from New York that first stopped in Istanbul.
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Gracie Mansion was raided early this morning. And the feds took Mayor Adams cell phone (phones?). Again.
Reports I’ve seen say he doesn’t have to resign, and he can’t be recalled by the electorate. The only person who has the authority to remove him is Governor Hochul, and she hasn’t shown any inclination to do so yet.
“Here Are the Charges Eric Adams Faces, Annotated“. Yes, I’m burning a gift link for you, my loyal readers. But this is big.
Summary: Conspiracy to commit wire fraud, solicit foreign contributions and accept bribes (1x), wire fraud (1x),
solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national (2x), and bribery (1x). That link includes the actual indictment, both annotated by the paper of record and the original unannotated PDF.
“Eric Adams promised to be a mayor such as New Yorkers have never seen. Much about him remains head-scratching.” Well, I wouldn’t say “never seen”, but most New Yorkers today probably weren’t alive during the days of Tammany Hall and “honest graft“. (Yeah, okay, Tammany Hall didn’t officially dissolve until 1967, but my impression is that it had ceased to be an influential organization long before that.)
Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do…
Thursday, September 26th, 2024Both Lawrence and I have been intermittently covering the Harding Street Raid in Houston and the fallout from it. To briefly refresh your memory, the Houston Police Department killed two people in a drug raid that turned out to be based on a falsified search warrant.
Yesterday, Gerald Goines, the (now former) HPD officer at the center of the raid, was found guilty of two counts of felony murder.
More from Reason, which has also been on this case like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation. Reason notes that Goines was also convicted of tampering with a governmental record.
The jury is considering punishment. The maximum for felony murder is life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Goines’ lies in this case were part of what Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg described as a “pattern of deceit” going back more than a decade. The Harding Street raid prompted Ogg’s office to re-examine some 1,400 drug cases involving Goines, a 34-year veteran who had a habit of framing suspects by inventing drug purchases. “The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has overturned at least 22 convictions linked to Goines,” the Associated Press reports.
[Art] Acevedo, who initially hailed Goines as a “hero,” has insisted that the Harding Street raid did not reflect “a systemic problem with the Houston Police Department.” But Ogg saw things differently. “Houston Police narcotics officers falsified documentation about drug payments to confidential informants with the support of supervisors,” she said in July 2020. “Goines and others could never have preyed on our community the way they did without the participation of their supervisors; every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was circumvented.”
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#132 in a series)
Wednesday, September 25th, 2024NYC Mayor Eric Adams indicted.
The indictment is sealed, and it is unclear what charge or charges Mr. Adams will face.
This is still developing. I expect much much more tomorrow morning.
(Hattip: Mike the Musicologist.)
Watching the hyenas…
Wednesday, September 25th, 2024Yesterday was an interesting day for political hyenas, flaming or otherwise.
David Banks, the NYC schools chancellor. announced he’s resigning at the end of the year. This doesn’t seem to be linked to any specific allegations of corruption yet, but:
The announcement came just weeks after federal agents seized Mr. Banks’s phone as part of a bribery investigation involving his brothers and fiancée — and it promised to roil not just the nation’s largest school system but also a mayoral administration already reeling from at least four separate federal corruption inquiries.
The schools chancellor’s resignation is the fourth in less than two weeks among top officials in Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, following the resignations of the police commissioner and the city’s top lawyer and a statement from the health commissioner saying he would leave office at the end of the year.
This next one could almost be a “News of the Weird” entry:
Fire marshals? What kind of crime could they commit on the job?
In this case, the three accused individuals responded to a crashed 18-wheeler. They are accused of siponing off diesel fuel from the truck’s tank into a “55-gallon drum in the bed of their hazmat vehicle.”
But wait, there’s more:
Additionally, the 18-wheeler carried frozen items, such as duck meat, high-end cheese, croissants, butter, and venison.
“After draining the saddle tank of the 18-wheeler, [deleted] and approximately three other members of his hazmat company proceeded to unload product from the trailer of the 18-wheeler and put it into their own vehicles to keep for personal use,” the affidavit states.
They’re also accused of stealing items from another truck crash. In addition, the indictment claims that the men were doing fire inspections, approving permits, and doing fire investigations without any licenses to do so. Also, one of the men is accused of using his fire marshal’s gear to gain “early access” to scenes for his non-profit “South Liberty County Hazardous Materials Team”.
Why? Well, turns out the NJSP has a habit of using disciplinary investigations as a weapon.
A separate review done by the attorney general’s Office of Public Integrity and Accountability highlighted two troubling episodes involving a retired lieutenant, Joseph Nitti, who had worked in the agency’s internal affairs unit.
After receiving an anonymous letter containing a complaint that a trooper had made a racist comment about a senior Black officer, Mr. Nitti “squandered police resources” trying to identify the tipster rather than investigating the accuracy of the concern, according to the attorney general’s office.
Mr. Nitti, who according to state treasury records retired last year with a $8,893 monthly pension, obtained typewriter samples and video from the area near a post office where the envelope had been mailed and evaluated fingerprints found on the letter. Against orders, he also submitted it for DNA testing. Then, at the lieutenant’s urging, the Black officer who had been the reported target of the racist comment was brought up on bogus internal affairs charges.
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Finally, Stewart Rosenwasser died yesterday. Mr. Rosenwasser was a former judge and prosecutor in New York (I believe in Orange County). He was indicted on Monday for taking $63,000 in bribe money.
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The plot targeted Martin Soudani and his mother, Eman Soudani, who were allegedly involved in embezzling $1.6 million from Mout’z Soudani, a wealthy former restaurateur, the indictment said.
On March 8, 2023, Rosenwasser, as an Orange County assistant district attorney, charged Soudani’s kin with grand larceny for allegedly stealing the money from Mout’z Soudani and had arrest warrants issued.
When they appeared in court, defense lawyers asked that Rosenwasser recuse himself from prosecuting the case because he had represented Mout’z Soudani in the 1990s and that presented a conflict of interest.
Rosenwasser denied the claim and remained on the case.
But by June 2023 the DA’s office was getting wise and Rosewasser was replaced on the case, the indictment said.
By March 2024, the case against Soudani’s sister had been dropped and his nephew agreed to plead guilty to grand larceny in the embezzlement case in exchange for a prison sentence of one to seven years.
Martin Soudani and Eman Soudani later filed a $22.5 million lawsuit claiming the cases against them were tainted.
Mr. Rosewasser resigned earlier this year. The FBI was coming to arrest him yesterday on the charges in the indictment, and he allegedly decided to open fire on the agents. SWAT responded, and Mr. Rosewasser was found dead when the police entered his home. The FBI claims he committed suicide, but it isn’t clear to me if an official determination has been made yet.
Your NFL loser update: week 3, 2024.
Tuesday, September 24th, 2024NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
Cincinnati
Jacksonville
Tennessee
Three weeks into the season, three teams left. Right now, I’m liking Jacksonville’s chances to go 0-17. They play Houston next week. Houston is a big favorite, and is coming off a pretty embarrassing loss to Minnesota, so I’m liking Jacksonville to go 0-4.
In other news, and as noted on Sunday, the White Sox are now at 36-120, for a .231 winning percentage. Looking at this another way, in order to lose only 119 games and avoid tying the 1962 Mets…they can’t do it. (I think they would have to win approximately 116% of the remaining games.)
More seriously, if the Sox go 2 and 4 (.333 winning percentage) for the remaining games, they will finish at 38-124, for a .234 winning percentage. The lowest winning percentage in the modern era is .235 by the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, who went 36-117.
I am hoping for 125 losses. Why? Someone mentioned the other day that 2025 is the 125th anniversary of the White Sox…and they’ve ordered all kinds of memorabilia with the number “125” displayed prominently. That could be…awkward.
(It seems to me to be a little fuzzy, though, when the anniversary is. I guess you could call 2025 the 125th if you count when they moved to Chicago, which is not unreasonable. But they didn’t become the modern Sox until 1901.)
Obit watch: September 23, 2024.
Monday, September 23rd, 2024Mercury Morris, one of the great NFL players. ESPN. NYT (archived).
Morris made no secret of the fact that he was filled with pride about the 1972 Dolphins being the first — and still only — undefeated and untied team in NFL history, pulling off a truly perfect season.
He also tried to make this clear: No, the Dolphins were not rooting against the teams that came close to matching their feat of perfection or had champagne on ice waiting for the moment that the last unbeaten team in a season gets defeated.
“And for the record, we DO NOT TOAST every time an unbeaten team loses,” Morris posted on social media in 2015, when the Cam Newton-led Carolina Panthers started 14-0 before losing the next-to-last game of their regular season. “There’s no champagne in my glass, only Canada Dry Ginger ale! Ha!”
Kathryn Crosby, der Bingle’s wife who had a pretty successful career of her own. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Anatomy of a Murder”, “The Phenix City Story”, and “The Night the World Exploded”.
Tongsun Park, who was at the center of the 1970s “Koreagate” scandal.
In 1978, he was indicted on charges of conspiracy, bribery and making contributions as a foreign agent, and he fled the country. He returned with a promise of criminal immunity to testify in Congress and before a grand jury.
He said that he had passed money to 31 members of Congress — up to $273,000 in one case — and while he denied acting on behalf of the South Korean government, a former Korean intelligence officer told Congress under oath that Mr. Park was working for Korean intelligence as part of an influence-buying operation code-named Ice Mountain.
But the accusations, splashily covered in the post-Watergate period, largely fizzled out. Only three of the 31 current and former congressmen Mr. Park named were indicted, and only one, Richard T. Hanna, a California Democrat, was convicted. He served a little over a year in jail.
The House, which considered disciplinary action against 11 sitting members, ended up reprimanding just three, in what critics called an example of Congress’s inability to discipline its own members.
He later got caught doing illegal lobbying for Saddam Hussein, and served five years for that.
Shortly after I posted Friday’s obit watch, the NYT posted their Nelson DeMille obit.
KMart. Sort of. The last “full-sized” store in the United States, in Bridgehampton, New York, is closing in October. There is one store left in Miami, but it is described as being the size of a CVS, not a full-sized store. There are also other stores in places like Guam and the Virgin Islands.