Archive for December 19th, 2024

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#136 in a series)

Thursday, December 19th, 2024

You know, there’s been so much corruption in the Eric Adams administration, I’ve kind of lost track myself.

But being as this is possibly the most corrupt administration in the history of New York City, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: do I feel like doing two flaming hyenas in one day?

Well, do I, punk?

Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the former top aide to Mayor Adams, was officially indicted today, along with her son and two “businessmen”.

Allegedly, they were getting paid by check, “which her son cashed and used to buy a Porsche and other luxury items”.

Ms. Lewis-Martin, her son, Glenn Martin II, and the businessmen were charged in a four-count indictment with participating in “a long-running bribery, money-laundering and conspiracy scheme.” The indictment accuses Ms. Lewis-Martin of using her official position to “illegally influence Department of Buildings and other city decisions” in exchange for the cash and other benefits for her and her son.

…

Prosecutors also accused Ms. Lewis-Martin and her son of accepting financial support from the two businessmen for a clothing line and a Chick-fil-A franchise in exchange for her using her city position to assist with their projects.
As evidence, prosecutors quoted from telephone conversations involving Ms. Lewis-Martin, her son and others, suggesting they may have wiretapped one or more of the defendants’ phones.

…

The businessmen charged alongside her were pursing construction projects that included work on a rooftop bar, the Glass Ceiling, and a hotel, both in Manhattan, and they had asked her to help move the projects through the city’s tangled bureaucracy.
After Mr. Dwivedi and Mr. Vaid paid Mr. Martin $100,000 in August 2023, he deposited the money into a joint account he shared with Ms. Lewis-Martin, prosecutors said. Each businessman made a $50,000 payment to Mr. Martin; one had the words “personal loan” written in the check memo, according to prosecutors, who called that an attempt to conceal a bribe and said the defendants had not provided any evidence that loan payments were ever made.

…

Prosecutors, in their narrative, included as an exhibit a picture of Mr. Martin in sunglasses, grinning in front of a gleaming black 2023 Porsche Panamera, a big red bow affixed to the hood. He paid $113,000 for the car, “something neither he nor Lewis-Martin could have funded without the bribe money,” the prosecutors wrote.

…

Prosecutors said Ms. Lewis-Martin used her son as an intermediary in an attempt to cover up her actions. Mr. Martin, 38, a professional D.J. who uses the name “Suave Luciano,” has worked at city events overseen by Mr. Adams’s administration, both when Mr. Adams was mayor and Brooklyn borough president.

Noted:

During the same period she was using Signal to field requests from Mr. Vaid and forward them to city buildings officials, Ms. Lewis-Martin set her Signal messages to disappear after an hour, prosecutors said.

COMSEC! Hurrah! Obviously not a perfect effort, but it has been so rare to see someone even trying to secure their communications, attention must be paid.

Oh. Her lawyer vigorously denies the charges:

“To think that a high-ranking city official would take a bribe in the form of a check deposited into a bank account defies common sense,” he said. “We look forward to the citizens of the City of New York, who Ingrid has served so admirably for decades, clearing her name after a trial.”

Ms. Lewis-Martin resigned over the weekend, apparently in anticipation of the indictment.

Posted in Law, Politics | No Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#135 in a series)

Thursday, December 19th, 2024

I would like to remind everyone that the “flames” in “you’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena” are metaphorical, not literal. Most of the time.

Why do I feel a need to put that reminder out there?

A deputy mayor of Los Angeles had his home raided by the FBI yesterday.

“A questionable LA politician? Quel fromage!” I know, right? But the reason is interesting, and you will rarely (I hope) see this combination of categories together.

The deputy mayor is suspected of phoning in a bomb threat to City Hall. He was…

…appointed in February 2023 to oversee public safety in Los Angeles. The role, the mayor’s office said at the time, would include oversight of the Police Department, the Los Angeles Fire Department, the Port of Los Angeles Police, the Los Angeles World Airports Police and the Emergency Management Department.

So he has close ties with law enforcement. According to the report, the LAPD initially determined that he was the likely originator of the threat, but turned the case over the FBI because of his law enforcement ties. (I would also think that bomb threats, especially ones against municipal buildings, would fall under Federal purview. But I Am Not A Lawyer.)

Additional coverage from the LAT, but it really doesn’t add much.

I’m not naming him here, even though he is named in the articles, because he hasn’t been charged with a crime yet and is entitled to the presumption of innocence. Honestly, though, making a bomb threat is a pretty stupid crime. These days, phone calls and other electronic communications are easily traceable. Unless you’re very very careful and practice good OPSEC and COMSEC, you’re going to get caught. I think most bomb threats these days are phoned in by teenagers who wouldn’t know OPSEC and COMSEC if it walked up and bit them. Which is generally what happens.

Posted in California Über Alles, Explosives, Law, Politics | No Comments »

Things you may have wondered about. (#7 in a series)

Thursday, December 19th, 2024

This is another one of those “okay, maybe not”: I certainly wasn’t wondering. But in case someone else was:

How much would the Griswolds have spent lighting up their house in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”?

Spoiler:

Hypothetically, Mr. [Gil} Quiniones [president and chief executive of ComEd] said if the lights worked and the power stayed on for at least eight hours a day, using C9 incandescent bulbs, it would have cost the family $287 a day or $8,885 per month, based on what ComEd charges customers in 2024.

This is assuming that they used standard incandescent lights, and that the lights worked:

Most electricity experts and dedicated fans who have tried to calculate how much power and money all those lights would have required 35 years ago have come to a similar, sobering conclusion.
There’s no way a typical 1989 home could have powered 25,000 incandescent lightbulbs.
One Reddit user laid out a theory, solved through various equations and simulations on a spreadsheet, that determined if Clark bypassed the home’s circuit breaker, the house’s copper wires would vaporize and “every wire in the house will immediately ignite.”

…

A blogger used the spinning power meter depicted in the film to estimate that the lights would have caused a 25 percent load increase on the Chicago power grid.

Also, just for the record, there is no “auxilliary nuclear” switch. Though if I was a president with ComEd, I’d have my people wire one up…that does absolutely nothing. Except maybe light an LED. It’d have to be one of those giant knife switches, though, like something out of “Frankenstein”.

Speaking of LEDs…

If the Griswolds used modern LED lights, popularized in the past two decades and about 90 percent more energy efficient, he said it would still cost the family about $34 a day or $1,054 a month. That final bill would not include the rest of the home’s power usage.

…

About 360 miles east of Chicago, a family in Wadsworth, Ohio, has been lighting up their home in almost the exact Clark Griswold-fashion — without breaking the bank each year, causing brownouts or bothering their neighbors.
For over a decade, Greg and Rachel Osterland, along with their two children, have decorated their home with 25,000 lightbulbs (not one more or less, according to Mr. Osterland) to raise money for cystic fibrosis research. Hundreds of people went to watch the house’s lighting this year, complete with audience drumrolls and a rendition of “Joy to the World,” just like Clark sings in the movie.

…

As a lifelong fan of the movie, Mr. Osterland has done the math quite a few times. He determined that if the Griswolds lived in his area in 2024 and used the C9 incandescent bulbs, they would have paid about $4,656 a month for 175,000 watts of electricity. Although, like others, Mr. Osterland realized that there’s no way a regular house could have taken on that much power without some kind of a boost.
So instead of Clark’s imported Italian twinkle lights that are likely incandescent bulbs, Mr. Osterland uses LED lights that all plug into one outlet. After buying their home in 2008 the couple saved up for years to buy the lights to replicate the Griswold house, which cost them about $12,500.

…

Powering the light display for about six hours a day for 30 days costs the Osterlands about $25 a month. Mr. Osterland estimates that the lights use about 600 watts of electricity in a month, much less than the hundreds of thousands of watts used by the Griswolds.

Posted in Christmas, Movies, Wondering | 1 Comment »