Obit watch: October 3, 2024.

October 3rd, 2024

Jay J. Armes passed away on September 19th. He was 92.

I had been thinking about him recently, wondering if he was still around and enjoying a comfortable retirement, or if he was still working.

I’m not sure how many people remember him, but he was a pretty famous private investigator in El Paso.

Described as “armless but deadly” by People magazine, Mr. Armes appeared to live the life of a superhero. In the 1970s, the Ideal Toy Corporation even reproduced him as a plastic action figure, with hooks like those he began wearing in adolescence after an accident in which railroad dynamite exploded in his hands.

…

In May 1946, Julian and an older friend were horsing around one afternoon with a teenager who had a pair of railroad blasting caps. Julian was holding them when they blew up, shooting him into the air, mangling his hands and nearly killing him.
A few months later he was fitted with prosthetic hooks.

He tried acting for a bit, but went into PI work.

Mr. Armes (pronounced arms) catapulted to investigatory stardom in 1972 after Marlon Brando hired him to find his 13-year-old son, Christian, who had been abducted in Mexico. Working with Mexican federal agents, Mr. Armes said he found the boy in a cave with a gang of hippies.
He told other daring tales of triumph: flying on a glider into Cuba to recover $2 million for a client; helping another client escape from a Mexican prison by sending him a helicopter, which he said inspired the 1975 Charles Bronson movie “Breakout.”

He was a self-promoter. Perhaps a bit too much of one.

After Newsweek, People and other national publications chronicled his adventures, the Texas Monthly writer Gary Cartwright went to El Paso to write a profile of Mr. Armes. His article — headlined “Is Jay J. Armes For Real?” — is widely regarded as a classic of magazine writing.

The Cartwright article is linked from the obit, but Texas Monthly is kind of skirty about reading without a subscription. Here’s an archived version. Brutally summarizing (you should really read the whole thing), Mr. Cartwright found a lot of inconsistencies between what Mr. Armes claimed and what could be documented.

Mr. Armes’s son said in an interview last week that Mr. Cartwright’s article was a “hatchet job” and that it was retaliation for his father’s unsuccessful campaign for sheriff of El Paso County against a friend of the writer. Mr. Cartwright died in 2017.
In 2016, the public radio program “Snap Judgment” revisited the Texas Monthly article and the puzzle of Mr. Armes.
The private eye couldn’t tolerate even hearing Mr. Cartwright’s name.
“He’s got a wilted hand, and I guess he had an inferiority complex,” Mr. Armes told “Snap Judgment.” “He saw Jay Armes had accomplished all this. So, he had to write a cutthroat story. Don’t tell me about anything about this corrupt Gary Cartwright. Don’t even mention his name to me.”

…

He told interviewers that he appeared in more than three dozen movies and television shows. But he is credited as an actor with just one TV appearance on the Internet Movie Database — a 1973 episode of “Hawaii Five-O” in which he played an assassin.

“Hookman”, season 6, episode 1. He was a violent criminal who was out for revenge against the four cops that caused him to lose his hands…one of whom was Steve McGarret. I admit, I haven’t seen every episode of the good “Hawaii Five-O”, but I have seen this one, and I would agree it is one of the best of those I’ve seen. Mike Quigley seems to agree with me.

(It was remade for the bad “5-0” (season 3, episode 15), but without Mr. Armes.)

He had some notable successes and seemed to earn enough money to support his lifestyle. In 1991, he was credited by authorities with tracking down the body of Lynda Singshinsuk, a Northwestern University student who had gone missing. Mr. Armes also persuaded the suspect, Donald Weber, to confess to killing her.
“Without Mr. Armes’s assistance, there is a significant possibility that Mr. Weber would not be brought to justice,” a prosecutor told The Chicago Tribune.

I found two action figures on eBay. One is $61.19 and it doesn’t look complete. The other one is $149.99. I can’t tell how complete it is, but it does have the “briefcase” with the various “hands”.

In other news, Masamitsu Yoshioka has passed away. He was 106.

His death was announced on social media on Aug. 28 by the Japanese journalist and author Takashi Hayasaki, who spoke with Mr. Yoshioka last year. He provided no other details.

He was “the last known survivor among some 770 crew members who manned the Japanese airborne armada that attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941”.

He explained last year in an interview with Jason Morgan, an associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, for the English-language website Japan Forward, “I’m ashamed that I’m the only one who survived and lived such a long life.”
Asked in that interview if ever thought of visiting Pearl Harbor, he at first replied, “I wouldn’t know what to say.” He then added: “If I could go, I would like to, I would like to visit the graves of the men who died. I would like to pay them my deepest respect.”

This made me snort:

He participated in the attack on Wake Island on Dec. 11, 1941, and a raid in the Indian Ocean early in 1942. (As Professor Morgan put it, he “was involved in many additional campaigns for the liberation of Asia from white colonialism.”) But when Emperor Hirohito announced his nation’s surrender, Mr. Yoshioka was on an air base in Japan.

“…the liberation of Asia from white colonialism”.

The Rape of Nanjing.

“Now I think of the men who were on board those ships we torpedoed. I think of the people who died because of me,” Mr. Yoshioka said. “They were young men, just like we were. I am so sorry about it; I hope there will not be any more wars.”

Bob Yerkes, stuntman. IMDB.

His backyard was equipped with rigs for high falls, mats to practice flips and a springboard powered by compressed air that launched people end-over-end. He is said to have invented the airbag for stunt use.
“There will never be another backyard like Bob’s where you could train for free or even live for free if you needed a place to stay,” Williams wrote.

Posted in 1970s, History, Law, Movies, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: October 2, 2024.

October 2nd, 2024

John Amos. NYT (archived). Other credits include “The Rockford Files: Shoot-Out at the Golden Pagoda”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, and “Hunter”.

Frank Fritz, of “American Pickers”.

Burning in Hell watch: Song Binbin, commie.

A daughter of a prominent general in the People’s Liberation Army, Ms. Song was enrolled at Beijing Normal University Girls High School when she and classmates responded to Mao’s call for young people to turn against intellectuals, educators and others who supposedly held bourgeois values.
On Aug. 5, 1966, students attacked Bian Zhongyun, a 50-year-old mother of four who headed the school. She was kicked and beaten with sticks spiked with nails. After passing out, she was thrown onto a garbage cart and left to die.
Her death has been widely described as the first killing of a teacher during the Cultural Revolution, a violent spasm establishing Mao’s cult of personality, with masses waving his Little Red Book of his writings.

…

Two weeks after Ms. Bian’s death, more than one million young Red Guards thronged Tiananmen Square, where Ms. Song had been selected to pin a red armband around Mao’s left sleeve as they stood atop the towering Gate of Heavenly Peace. A photograph of the moment appeared across the country. Praised by Mao, Ms. Song, at 19, became a kind of celebrity in China.
But the whirlwind of the Cultural Revolution soon turned on Ms. Song’s family. Her father, Song Renqiong, was purged from the Communist Party in 1968, and Ms. Song and her mother were put under house arrest. The Cultural Revolution ended only when Mao died in 1976.

…

On Jan. 12, 2014, Ms. Song visited her old school and expressed remorse, bowing before a statue of Ms. Bian and delivering a 1,500-word speech. “I am responsible for the unfortunate death of Principal Bian,” she said, according to The Beijing News. (Ms. Bian’s title was officially deputy principal, but she was referred to as the principal because she was serving in that role at the time in an acting capacity.)
In 2004, Wang Youqin, a schoolmate of Ms. Song’s who later became a historian at the University of Chicago, published “Victims of the Cultural Revolution,” a book that included a description of the death of Ms. Bian and of Ms. Song’s role in the turmoil at the girls’ high school.
After Ms. Bian’s death, Ms. Wang wrote, “Every school in China became a torture chamber, prison or even execution ground, and many teachers were persecuted to death.”
Ms. Song denied that she had participated directly in the beating; she said, in fact, that she had tried to stop others who did. But she acknowledged that she and a fellow student were Red Guard leaders and that they were among the first to post so-called big-character posters — publicly displayed signs handwritten in a large format — denouncing teachers.

…

Some commenters stressed that Ms. Song should bear a greater burden because of her prominence among the Red Guards. “It’s meaningless to say you witnessed a murder and then say you don’t know who the killers were,” said Cui Weiping, a retired professor of literature who writes about China’s past, as quoted by The New York Times in 2014.
One person who was unsatisfied was Ms. Bian’s widower, Wang Jingyao. He had taken photos of his wife’s battered body after her death as well as of the posters that her tormentors had hung in their apartment after breaking in. One sign threatened to “hack you to pieces,” another to “hold up your pigs’ ears.”
“She is a bad person, because of what she did,” Mr. Wang told The Times in 2014, when he was 93. “She and the others were supported by Mao Zedong. Mao was the source of all evil. He did so much that was bad.”

Posted in 1970s, History, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: October 1, 2024.

October 1st, 2024

Pete Rose. NYT (share link). ESPN. MLB.

As everyone knows, I am not a baseball fan. And if I was a baseball fan, I would be pulling for the Astros, Rangers, or Indians Guardians.

But I’ve always felt a little sorry for Pete Rose. He did pretty much the worst thing you can do in baseball, and what happened to him is a result of his own actions. But I think he probably got crapped on more than he deserved, and I kind of wish people had shown him a bit more compassion. The ban from baseball was an appropriate response, but maybe he didn’t deserve to be a pariah and the butt of jokes.

Posted in Obits, Sports | 6 Comments »

Your NFL loser update: week 4, 2024.

October 1st, 2024

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:

Jacksonville

Four weeks in, one team remaining. And I don’t like Jacksonville’s chances of going 0-17. This week they play Indianapolis (2-2) at home: ESPN has Jacksonville as a slight favorite.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | No Comments »

Pete Rose obits tomorrow.

September 30th, 2024

You know the deal: I want to give everyone an opportunity to get their obits (and, more importantly, corrections) up.

Posted in Obits, Sports | No Comments »

Dumber than a bag of hair watch.

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 the feds say investors in Zort soon lost their shorts, after Iza and his girlfriend began spending those investments on Lamborghinis, expensive jewelry, vacations, a $28 million home in Bel Air, even cosmetic surgery to extend the length of his legs.

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”.

1.4, Lawrence.

The FBI said that after the incident at the party, Iza had his bribed sheriff deputies to pull R.C. over and arrest him on phony drug charges. The complaint includes a photo of R.C. being handcuffed by the police, which the feds say Iza sent to R.C. in order to intimidate him even further. The drug charges were later dismissed for lack of evidence.

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.

Posted in California Über Alles, Cops, Law, Movies | No Comments »

Obit watch: September 30, 2024.

September 30th, 2024

Kris Kristofferson. THR.

He 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.”

…

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”.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | No Comments »

Your MLB loser update.

September 29th, 2024

The 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)

Since the 20th century, the number of games in a Major League Baseball season has remained relatively consistent, with each team playing between 150 and 162 games. From 1920-1960, each team in the American League and National League played 154 games a season. In 1961, each American League team played a 162-game schedule. In 1962, the National League teams also added eight games to the schedule. Each of the 30 MLB teams today continues to play a 162-game schedule.

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.

Posted in Loser, Sports | No Comments »

Fun with snack food!

September 29th, 2024

I 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.

(“One of his better-known works is the typography for Philip K. Dick’s novel Gather Yourselves Together.”)

Posted in Food, Geek | No Comments »

Obit watch: September 27, 2024.

September 27th, 2024

Dame 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.

…

Mr. Coppa, known as Big Frank, spent two days on the witness stand describing a world seemingly drawn from a Mario Puzo novel, with characters nicknamed Bobby Wheelchairs, Sally Bagel, Gene the Hat, Patty from the Bronx and Little Nicky Eyeglasses.

…

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.

…

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.”

Posted in Cycling, Law, Music, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Your tax-fattened hyena follow-up.

September 26th, 2024

I’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.

The indictment, which was unsealed on Thursday morning, follows an investigation that started in 2021 and has focused at least in part on whether he conspired with the Turkish government to receive illegal foreign campaign contributions and whether he took official actions on its behalf.

…

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.

…

In exchange, prosecutors said, Mr. Adams pressured officials at the New York Fire Department to permit a new Turkish consulate building in Manhattan despite safety problems. A Fire Department official overseeing the safety assessment said he was told he would lose his job if he did not follow the order.

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.)

Posted in Law, Politics | No Comments »

Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do…

September 26th, 2024

Both 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.”

Posted in Cops, Law | No Comments »

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