And Throw Away The Key!

Yesterday, in the post about polls, we saw how 45% of Democrats say they are more likely to vote for Biden in the primary because of "his role in passing sweeping crime legislation during the 1990s." Presumably they are unaware of the controversy around the horrible legislation Biden wrote in the '90s. I'm sure he'd like to keep it that was but, as part of his pathetic campaign/apology tour, he has gone back and further-- depending on the color of the audience he's speaking to-- from saying "oops; I made a boo-boo" to saying "lock 'em up, muthafucka!"

Yesterday, Holmes Lybrand did a little fact-checking on Biden, a nortorious and uncontrollable lair. Let me interject here that PolitiFact has been fact-checking Biden forever and they have found that half the stuff he says are lies or partial lies. That's intolerable, although it's with pointing out in passing that there is a worse liar-- a much worse liar-- than Biden: Trump who has lied in over 84% of the public statements he's made that were fact-checked by PolitiFact.

On Tuesday, Biden was lying to an audience of Democratic primary voters in Nashua, New Hampshire. When asked about his 1994 crime bill and how it seemed to target minority communities living in poverty for mass incarceration, Biden got all self-righteous and indignant: "Folks, let's get something straight. This idea that the crime bill generated mass incarceration-- it did not generate mass incarceration." That's pure and very typical-- and oft-repeated-- Biden lie on a Trumpian scale of gaslighting.

Here are some facts and figures Biden always overlooks: "Following passage of the 1994 crime bill, incarceration rates in the U.S. continued to rise for more than a decade. Experts however say it's hard to determine how much of this increase came as a result of the 1994 bill, since incarceration rates had been steadily rising since the early 1970s. From 1973 to 2009, the incarceration rate in the U.S. more than quadrupled, from 161 people to 767 per 100,000 nationwide, according to a study by the National Research Council. It's hard to pin that trend on one particular piece of legislation."

One of the largest crime bills ever passed, 1994's Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act strengthened law enforcement across the country, providing federal money for new cops and prisons, as well as tightening up federal sentencing guidelines. It included a federal "three strike" provision mandating life imprisonment for certain felons convicted of violent crimes, and expanded the death penalty to include 60 additional crimes. The bill also included a ban on 18 different types of semiautomatic assault weapons for the next decade.

At the Nashua event on Tuesday, Biden argued that federal prisoners make up a small share of the total prison population in the US-- which is true. Federal prisoners account for roughly 10% of the total number of people incarcerated in the US.

The point Biden appeared to be making was that the 1994 bill couldn't have created or greatly attributed to mass incarceration, since it only applied to violations of federal law, not state crimes.

But that misses the broader impact that federal policy can have on the way that states incarcerate, including the influence of federal money. As a report from the Brennan Center notes, the 1994 crime bill "provided funding for 100,000 new police officers and $14 billion in grants for community-oriented policing, for example."

"It is fair to say that the trajectory of increased incarceration had already begun before the 1994 crime bill," Kara Gotsch, director of strategic initiatives at the Sentencing Project, told CNN Tuesday before noting that the way Congress and the President "influence state policy is through money."

The 1994 crime bill tried to do just that in offering grants for new prisons to states who imposed truth-in-sentencing (TIS) policies, which impose mandatory minimums for time served.

Initially, the crime bill required states to pass laws mandating violent offenders serve at least 85% of their sentence before those states could receive TIS grant funds.

Even still, the influence of these federal funds shouldn't be overstated. The data is murky on how much the federal grants influenced how states make decisions on sentencing policy.

For example, a study from the Urban Institute found that out of the 16 states that changed their TIS laws following the 1994 crime bill and that qualified for federal TIS funding, "the changes were often influenced more by ongoing state reform processes rather than the federal incentive grant program."

The study says that states were already imposing their own minimum sentencing laws before the 1994 crime bill, and at most the bill "may have contributed to modest changes in sentencing structure" for a small number of states.

"The impact was as much rhetorical," said Bertram "as it was a bill that increased the number of people in prison."

Bernie was in the House when Biden had joined other conservatives to crack down on crime-- and Bernie was preaching for a different approach, one that wasn't based on mass incarceration. Bernie's positions are popular today... but they weren't in the '90s. Bernie famously explained how the ghastly, punitive crime bill in 1991 was not about preventing crime but about retribution, vengeance and punishment. On the House floor: "What we’re discussing now is an issue where some of our friends are saying we’re not getting tough enough on the criminals. But my friends, we have the highest percentage of people in America in jail per capita of any industrialized nation on Earth. We’ve beaten South Africa. We’ve beaten the Soviet Union. What do we have to do, put half the country behind bars?"

He's always been advocating for policies aimed to get to the root causes of crime. He was ahead of his time-- way ahead:

It is my firm belief that clearly there are people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic, and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect society from them.

But it is also my view that through the neglect of our government and through a grossly irrational set of priorities, we are dooming today tens of millions of young people to a future of bitterness, misery, hopelessness, drugs, crime, and violence. And, Mr. Speaker, all the jails in the world-- and we already imprison more people per capita than any other country-- and all of the executions… in the world will not make that situation right.

We can either educate or electrocute. We can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails. Mr. Speaker, let us create a society of hope and compassion, not one of hate and vengeance.

From NJ to Maine, Big Rat Bastard Gummers of a feather flock together: Part 2, Our old pal, the Big Rat Bastard Gummer of NJ

Yes, it's not one but two Big Rat Bastard Gummers, last week in Becky's Diner in Portland, Maine, where the Pine State's gummer endorsed the gummer of the Garden State for president.

by Ken

In yesterday's Part 1, we focused on the twice-elected "Idiot Thug Running Maine," a figure who to an almost unique degree combines rolling-in-the-aisles buffoonery with the ability to strike terror in the hearts of citizen students of American government and American society. A man who might be the fraternal twin of the original Big Rat Bastard Gummer of NJ.

The original Big Rat Bastard Gummer is now devoting time -- precious time he could be spending corrupting, influence-peddling, and browbeating terrorizing people who disrespect him (e.g., by speaking the truth) -- to waiting for an apology from "the liberal media." On Monday Erik Wemple chronicled this startling development on washingtonpost.com's Erik Wemple Blog, in a post called "Chris Christie asks media to apologize for bridge coverage. Journalists say no way":

In a Fox News interview yesterday, Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a recently declared presidential candidate, called on the media to apologize for its coverage of the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge. Speaking to Fox News Sunday substitute host Shannon Bream, Christie said, “And you know what happens when the media, Shannon, gets crazy over a story, like they got crazy over Bridgegate and were convicting me the day afterwards of heinous acts. Now, when they realize that there’s no truth to what they said, now they say, ‘Oh, he didn’t do anything, but he created an atmosphere,'” said Christie. “Well, you know, that’s what the liberal media does when rather than saying ‘I’m sorry,’ which is what they should say.”

"Journalists," Erik wrote, "are not saying anything of the sort," and he's got the quotes to prove it:

• "Steve Kornacki, the MSNBC host who has provided extensive coverage of the scandal says: 'From my standpoint, I have nothing to apologize for.' "

• "Martin Gottlieb, editor of The Record of North Jersey (formerly known as the Bergen Record), says: 'We've never reported anything without reporting it fairly and exhaustively. I'm very, very proud of the way we've done this.' "

• "Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, writes in an e-mail: 'I think our coverage of the governor has been fair. So can't imagine a reason for an apology, but happy to hear if he has a complaint.' "


THERE'S A REASON WHY NONE OF THESE
GENTLEMEN IS IN A RUSH TO APOLOGIZE

They and their organziations haven't done anything that calls for an apology. On the contrary, they've been doing their job.

As usual -- as in most every time the Big Rat Bastard Gummer opens hs big rat bastard mouth -- the Krispyman is lying his stinking guts out in that little Fox Noise vignette with Shannon Bream. No one with a working brain has suggested anything that could be remotely construed to mean that "he didn't do anything." There just isn't yet direct evidence of a link between the boss and all the appointees of his who have been implicated by those amazing e-mails in the scheme to shut down the Fort Lee approach to the George Washington Bridge, to punish Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich for declining to endorse the Big Rat Bastard Gummer's reelection campaign.

As MSNBC's Steve Kornacki pointed out to Erik Wemple:

In the weeks leading up to the explosive e-mail revelations, notes Kornacki, Christie was dismissive of reporters who pried into the alleged wrongdoing. He even joked about his role in the matter. “Unbeknownst to everybody, I was actually the guy out there — I was in overalls and a hat — but I actually was the guy working the cones out there,” he riffed. Media organizations, however, stayed on the trail. “There was something to this story and Chris Christie had insisted there wasn’t,” says Kornacki, who calls Christie’s fixation with his own non-involvement a “straw man.”

The fact is, the degree of Krispy administration involvement in Bridgegate which can already be demonstrated via the e-mails is simply staggering. These are all people who were appointed by him, were close to him, and were presumably doing the jobs he put them in their positions to do -- far-right governance via intimidation and brazen disregard for ethics or law.

The Bi Rat Bastard Gummer conveniently forgot to mention on TV that he had already thrown a turdload of KrispyKrats under the bus, and that already two of them have been indicted and another has pled guilty in Bridgegate-related charges. (Maybe the reason he's so confident that none of them can successfully throw him under a bus is that the bus hasn't been built that he can be thrown under, not to mention the number of people who would have to be involved in such a throw-under.)


FAR FROM BEING COMPLETED, THE SCOPE
OF KRISPY INVESTIGATIONS IS GROWING

Covering not just Bridgegate but such Krispy horrors as his administration's threat to withhold Sandy relief funding for Hoboken (from the federal government, not even state money) if Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer didn't go along with one of his multimillion-dollar influence-peddling schemes, his systematic transformation of the already far from pure Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a traditional politcal patronage dumping ground, into both a funder and an enforcer of his agenda to promote white-collar crime (well, the right kind of white-collar crime, the kind that benefits KrispyKronies and rich people he'd like to make KrispyKronies). That's just to name some of the high points.

The Record's Martin Gottlieb touched on this in his conversation with Erik Wemple.

When asked about the thrust of the Christie reporting, Gottlieb noted that his paper has tracked the allegations into all kinds of fertile tributaries, including this piece from last weekend about how the Port Authority is under siege from investigators: “More than 15 officials — including three in-house attorneys — have lawyered up amid an escalating investigation into the Port Authority’s decision to redirect $1.8 billion in toll money from its Hudson River crossings to fix roads in New Jersey.”

“The story keeps moving,” adds Gottlieb. “What he’s doing now doesn’t seem very exceptional in terms of blaming the press,” he continues, “but I think the facts are what they are.”

And this worthless pile of putridity, the Big Rat Bastard Gummer of NJ, has the effrontery to claim that he's owed an apology? In what demented and degraded universe is he living?

And the Rat Bastard has the pure gall to go on Fox Noise to accuse "the liberal media" of slandering honest folk and then refusing to apologize? I'm sorry, he's just not that stupid. He must know perfectly well that "liberal media" apologize all the time when they get stories wrong. It's his pals in the far-right-wing media, notably the Fox Noisemakers, who make it their goal to destroy political enemies by whatever means necessary, not giving a damn when they cross into blatant fictionalizing (aka "lying").

Instead of demanding an apology, not to mention mounting a campaign for the presidency, this grotesque buffoon should be going on TV to announce his resignation owing to his intolerable corruption and unremitting assault on decent New Jerseyans. That's what he needs to say, but an apology wouldn't be unwelcome.


NEWS FROM THE KRISPY KAMPAIGN

Washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri shared these "Rejected Chris Christie slogans," explaining: "Through some acts of imagination and a variety of derring-do, I got a look at what might have become his slogans. I think he picked the strongest one." This is how you can tell it's satire: why, the very idea of the Big Rat Bastard Gummer going with the truth -- ha ha ha!

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Crime Watch: Dunkin' Donuts robbery foiled by bat-wielding Bangladeshi MBA

East Harlem Dunkin' Donuts employee Imtiaj Ahmed Belal, who has an MBA from Metropolitan University in Bangladesh, brandishes the famous bat with which he drove off the would-be robber. (Do they play much baseball in Bangladesh?)

by Ken

We can add this tale to the fairly specific genre of Annals of Crime in Dunkin' Donuts, which is headed by the story that so tickled the late Tommy Magliozzi of Car Talk fame: the DD robbery that was foiled when most of the people in the place turned out to be cops, thereby vindicating Tommy's frequently voiced characterization of cops as doughnut-eaters. (I guess today people like Rudy Giuliani would denounce Tommy as "anti-police." Which, as a matter of fact, he kind of was.)

This story features a less familiar archetype: a DD counter person with an MBA from Bangladesh who brandishes a baseball bat at the perp.

Donut Shop Employee Chases Off Robber With Baseball Bat

By Gustavo Solis on March 20, 2015 7:57am

This is a screen grab of what's supposed to be a video of the attempted robbery. Maybe you'll have better luck getting it to play onsite than I did.

EAST HARLEM — Baseball season came early to an East 116th Street Dunkin' Donuts when a cashier squared off with a would-be robber, chasing him away with a bat, security video shows.

Imtiaj Ahmed Belal, who has been working the graveyard shift at the doughnut chain near Lexington Ave. for the last four months, said he was startled when the man came in about 1:30 a.m. on March 11, pulled out a sharpened screwdriver, waved it in his face and started pointing to the cash register.

“I was so nervous,” said Belal, 28. “I have never had something like this happen before in my life. He kept shouting, 'Hurry up, open the cash register, open the cash register.’”

Belal, who said he holds an MBA from Metropolitan University in Bangladesh, headed toward the register. But instead of handing over the cash, he grabbed a baseball bat from behind the counter, the recording shows.

He waved the bat in the air and shouted at the man.

The bald robber, who was dressed in a dark blue jacket and carried a white bag, seemed to reconsider when he saw the lumber.

The would-be thief put his hands up and backed away as Belal, who said he'd never before been in a fight or played baseball, gave chase. Police said Thursday the investigation is ongoing, and there have been no arrests.

Prior to March 11, Belal said his biggest headaches at work had been customers who tried to sleep on tables and teenagers who'd attempted to swipe soda from the fridge.

He moved to New York eight months ago to be with his family, but is now hoping to make crime prevention a full-time career.

“I want to try to enter the NYPD,” he said. “The police here are so helpful. When I called they came right away and they call me whenever they have an update.”

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"The Jinx" still seems to me to have been a rotten idea for a TV series. Was I wrong?

This is just a screen grab. If you want links
you should be able to find 'em yourself.

by Ken

"Gut-wrenching, remarkable television," eh?

Further, from the blurb for the respective entry on today's NYT "Today's Headlines" e-newsletter, I learn further: "HBO pioneered a new kind of appointment television on Sunday night." Okay then, please cancel my appointment.

I really can't say anything about The Jinx itself. I didn't have any interest in watching it, and I still don't. And The life and times of Bobby Durst still seems to me a wretched idea for a TV miniseries. And yet . . . and yet . . . .

This bit from the New York Times's Charles V. Bagli and Vivian Yee's "Robert Durst of HBO's 'The Jinx" Says He 'Killed Them All"" may provide some sense of how I looked at the project before it aired:

The amount of press coverage Mr. Durst has generated is topped only by the volume of work he has made for his lawyers and police investigators in Westchester, Los Angeles, Galveston and beyond. Yet he had rebuffed overtures from journalists until he saw “All Good Things,” a lightly fictionalized film the producers had previously made of his life in 2010, and approached them to tell his story.

“I will be able to tell it my way,” he said in the second episode of “The Jinx.”

Well, Bobby, it didn't quite work out that way, did it? As by now everyone knows, The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst was about as far from a whitewash as it could be.

I should explain that the last time Howie wrote about the 2000 murder of his close friend Susan Berman, in a December 5 post called "Odd The Way The 1% Get Away With Their Crimes -- Even Murder Sprees. Are We In Russia?," he explained that he always knew the man who's assumed to have murdered Susan by everyone who knew her, and also by a lot of other people who've looked into the case, as "Bobby," one of Susan's "rich friends."

I always knew him as "Bobby," another of Susan Berman's rich friends. Now he's Robert Durst. I didn't know any rich people-- only poor people like myself-- when I was hanging out with Susan, except for her and the rich friends she introduced me to.

So "Bobby" it'll be. However, since the case spans an enormous amount of time, and a weird assortment of detail, it might be well to go over some basics. Here's the start of the above-referenced NYT report by Charles V. Bagli and Vivian Yee:

Since his first wife vanished more than three decades ago, Robert A. Durst, the eccentric and estranged son of one of New York’s most prominent real estate dynasties, has lived under the suspicious gaze of law enforcement officials in three states.

They have followed his path from New York City to Los Angeles, where one of his closest friends was found dead in her home in 2000. They have tracked him to Galveston, Tex., where he fled after investigators reopened the case of his wife’s disappearance, and where he posed as a mute woman and shot and dismembered a neighbor in 2001.

Mr. Durst was acquitted in the Texas killing, and was never arrested in the disappearance of his wife or the death of his friend. But on Saturday, he found himself in custody once again, arrested on a charge of murder as he walked into a New Orleans hotel he had checked into under a false name.

On Sunday night, in the final moments of the final episode of a six-part HBO documentary about him, “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” Mr. Durst seemed to veer toward a confession that could lift the shroud of mystery that surrounds the deaths of three people over the course of three decades.

“What the hell did I do?” Mr. Durst whispers to himself in an unguarded moment caught on a microphone he wore during filming. “Killed them all, of course.”

In the years since his wife, Kathleen Durst, disappeared in 1982 after spending the weekend at the couple’s country home in Westchester County, Mr. Durst has bounced in and out of jail for other crimes, cut ties with his family, remarried, and sued his brother for a $65 million share of the family fortune. Through it all, he has maintained his innocence in the disappearance of his wife, while also denying any role in the 2000 death of the Los Angeles friend, Susan Berman.

His arrest on Saturday in a Marriott on Canal Street in New Orleans was in connection with Ms. Berman’s death, though the Westchester authorities said they were still investigating him in his wife’s case. Mr. Durst was walking toward an elevator and mumbling to himself when F.B.I. agents intercepted him at the hotel, a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said. He had checked in under the name Everett Ward, not the first time he had used an alias.

Mr. Durst is believed to have left Houston in a Toyota Camry on March 10, headed for New Orleans. Investigators involved in the case said they feared that the renewed attention brought by “The Jinx” would lead him to try to flee the country. . . .

WHEW! GOT ALL THAT?

I realize I'm poaching on Howie's turf here, and perhaps he may yet have more to say about it. He's just begun a really grueling week of treatments, though, and I can claim a sort of semi-personal semi-interest in the subject, having heard Howie talk about Susan for a lot of decades (he's figured I must have met her, just as over time I met so many of his friends), and since her murder I've heard him talk a lot about Bobby.

Already, you'll note, that title he put on his December post, "Odd The Way The 1% Get Away With Their Crimes -- Even Murder Sprees. Are We In Russia?," is looking less certain as it applies to Bobby, and this is at least in part thanks to both the attention focused on the case by The Jinx and more specifically to what may be fairly important evidence turned up by the filmmakers in the course of their years of digging into the case.

One fan of the show is former Westchester County D.A. Jeanine Pirro, whose office spent six years investigating the disappearance of Kathleen Durst, the first of Bobby's suspected victims, in 1982. She told the Times team:

These two producers did what law enforcement in three states could not do in 30 years. Kudos to them. They were meticulous. They were focused. They were clear.

It might be more interesting to hear Ms. Pirro talk about why the Jinx-makers were able to do what she and the authorities in California and Texas were unable to do: pin the crimes on Bobby. But I guess that's unfair. The filmmakers spent ten years on the case, and it was their only case.

It still troubles me, to put it mildly, to think that this is the shape of things to come in the world of crime-solvingnow the only way we can get crimes investigated -- if they have the stuff of "gut-wrenching, remarkable television" (or radio, for that matter, in the case of NPR's Serial)

That said, I've discovered in the Times piece and in a NYT joint phone interview with Jinx co-writers Andrew Jarecki (who also directed) and Marc Smerling (who was the cinematographer and editor) that there are in fact pretty good answers to questions about the project that I once thought smugly were patently unanswerable.

Like, what made Jarecki and Smerling think this should be a project to begin with? Well, it turns out that they didn't. What happened is that Bobby was impressed enough with their fictionalized film account of his story that he came to them. After all the time they'd invested, they found themselves in a position where the subject himself was apparently prepared to talk to them about it. What were they supposed to do? Tell him to take a hike?

And when they went into the "project," it really wasn't a project. They had no idea where it would go -- just, I imagine, that after all they'd invested in the subject, they couldln't afford not to find out. Marc Smerling says:

We didn’t know that was going to happen in the beginning. In reality, we were making a documentary about Bob Durst, and then the relationship between Andrew and Bob became closer as the film went on. Then we found new pieces of evidence, and everything changed. It became an investigation, and all of a sudden, we were in the film. That was not planned.

Another obvious question concerns what they knew and when, and how they could have kept such explosive matters as the letter and the "confession" to themselves. After all, these were crimes they were dealing with. And the answers are that they thought long and hard about what they could reveal to the authorities and when, because of all sorts of legal ramifications and complications, but in fact they eventually did begin sharing what they knew, and what they shared clearly had a major impact on the investigation of Susan Berman's murder and Bobby's eventual arrest.

The NYT interview (by Bruce Fretts) goes into considerable detail about the life and complications of the project, including the obviously crucial matter of their relationships with their subject, and the filmmakers shed all sorts of light on how and why they did what they did over the course of it. As for nondisclosure of what they were sitting on for the last two episodes of The Jinx, well, I give them credit for keeping their own counsel and not trying to stage a publicity coup with it. They seem to have been confident enough in the integrity of their work that they didn't need to do their own PR offensive to counter, for example, the misimpression that the series was going to whitewash Bobby.

All in all, it still seems to me to have been a lousy idea for a TV series. And yet it seems to have been done in a remarkably responsible way, and to have achieved some impressive results. Don't ask me what the moral is.

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Who Was Protected In Michael Grimm's Sweet Plea Bargain Deal?

The Michael Grimm saga has always been special for me-- not because my sister lives on Staten Island or because his congressional district includes a part of the Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in-- but because, in 2005-06-- when I was looking into the "disappearance" of a $400,000 that GOP serial criminal Tom Kontogiannis paid Duke Cunningham to get Bush to pardon him-- a reader informed me that an otherwise unknown crooked FBI agent who had gone over to the Gambino Crime Family, Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm, was involved in the "missing" Bush bribe. The media, of course, covered the whole thing up. And then, seemingly out of the blue just a few years later, the Mafia's boy "Suits" beat sad-sack Blue Dog Mike McMahon and was suddenly a Republican serving in Congress.

Yes, in Congress-- with a trail of criminal behavior beyond the ken of most run-of-the-mill bribe-taking congressmen. He also knows where a helluva lot of FBI bodies are buried-- at least metaphorically-- and it was an awkward minuet, that also involved the Israeli government, in making sure he could seem to be held accountable for something without pushing him to go ballistic enough to bring down the FBI-- and God knows who and what else. The plea bargain in Brooklyn Federal Court this morning was sweet. The 20 felony indictments-- for the charges that are relatively minor as part of the career of crime that has defined his entire life-- carry as much as 20 years in prison. 

The judge asked him if anyone had threatened him into taking the plea agreement and he answered, "No, your honor." She followed up with, "Do you understand the criminal charge to which you will be pleading guilty?" He responded, "Yes, your honor." She then reminded him, ominously, that there is "no parole in the federal system." He pled guilty to criminal tax evasion.

We won't know the sentence until June 8 but there was a good deal of media speculation locally that the plea deal didn't force him to give up his House seat.

Rep. Michael Grimm may not spend a day behind bars even if he pleads guilty Tuesday to a federal tax-evasion charge as expected, legal experts said.

Grimm's lack of criminal history, his military service and years of service as an FBI agent should weigh in his favor, said experts.

"When somebody who's never been arrested before comes to the table with Michael Grimm's achievements, it's very likely he'll receive a probationary sentence," said Mario F. Gallucci, a Willowbrook-based criminal defense attorney and former state prosecutor.

"I would not be the least bit shocked if he didn't get sent to prison," said a legal source.

Yeah... tell it to ex-Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., who faced a very different media narrative... and is in prison now.

After a stunning reelection victory last month-- over a typically incompetent and unqualified nebbish Steve Israel recruited-- what Grimm did was plead guilt to just one serious felony charge (tax evasion on over a million dollars in gross receipts from a money laundering operation/"health food" restaurant on the Upper East Side), although, relative to his career in crime-- which the mass media keeps substituting "his record of public service," he plead guilty to the equivalent of an unkempt hang-nail. When he was indicted on the 20 felony counts, he told the media, "I know who I am, and I know what I’ve done for this country… I know I’m a moral man, a man of integrity. We’re going to fight tooth and nail until I am fully exonerated."

Both during the election and since, Grimm had bragged that Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), the crooked chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who has pumped considerable money into Grimm when other GOP leaders were keeping him at arm's length, was reinstating him on the committee he had been forced to resign from. That reinstatement now comes into question, as Bob Costa and Paul Kane pointed out in the Washington Post Monday evening.

If Republican House leadership were to ask Grimm to resign when Congress returns in January, and he stepped down, a special election would be held to fill the seat.

Should Grimm decline to ­resign, House GOP leaders believe the House’s code of conduct could force him to abstain from congressional activities, according to a House Republican aide who requested anonymity to speak freely about internal discussions.

The aide pointed to a clause in Rule 23 as a guide for the leadership as it considers its response. The clause states that a member who has been convicted of a crime “for which a sentence of two or more years’ imprisonment may be imposed should refrain from participation” in committees and from “voting on any question at a meeting of the House,” until the member is “reelected to the House after the date of such conviction.”

During the election, Grimm promised voters that if he was found guilty-- and I guess that admitting guilt is covered in that-- he would resign from Congress. "If things don’t go my way, right? And I had to step down in January," he told a radio interviewer, "then there will be a special election, and at least the people of Staten Island and Brooklyn can then have qualified candidates to choose from." Qualified candidates? That may be a stretch considering what the party machinery is looking at, but at least neither Grimm nor Recchia would be among the choices.

Will Boehner force him to resign? He certainly wants him to but he'll go slow and won't go public unless Grimm balks. It's hard to imagine him ever taking another vote in the House or being on a committee, despite Hensarling.

The House Ethics Committee has deferred its own investigation into Grimm at the request of the FBI who doesn't want anyone looking too closely into any of the related matters involving Grimm's long and complicated criminal career. Presumably, if Grimm decided not to resign, they would stop pussyfooting around and launch a real investigation. The committee's new chairman, Charlie Dent (R-PA, isn't likely to let the matter slide and could a recommendation of expulsion, which would formally require a vote by the full House, would be likely. Last Member expelled was Jim Traficant a conservative Democrat (and crackpot) in 2002.

A poll this morning in the Staten Island Advance indicates a small majority think Grimm should be able to continue on in Congress unless he's actually behind bars. He left the court house on his own recognizance; no bail was asked and no passport was surrendered, even though he has extensive ties to both Cypriot and Israeli organized crime. On his way out he told the media he will NOT resign from Congress.

The DCCC is eagerly recruiting the Blue Dog Grimm originally beat, Mike McMahon, to run-- certain to turn off progressive voters who will, once again, have no choice but to sit on their hands at home. McMahon isn't as awful as Recchia... but he isn't any good and not worth voting for. The DCCC is pressuring him to run but he's telling intimates that Obama is so hated in the district that no Democrat can win and that he won't run. That doesn't stop the Beltway media from reporting that it's a done deal and that he's the candidate. When will the DCCC ever learn? Never. A more likely Democratic nominee is Assemblyman Michael Cusick. The Republicans have two candidates, Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotaki and state Senator Andrew Lanza.

Cheney's Still Not Arrested-- Liu Tienan Just Got A Life Sentence

As close to prison as Cheney will ever get

Despite our best hopes, of course there is no chance Cheney or any of his criminally-minded torturers will be held accountable form anything in the Torture Report. And there's no chance the Wall Street banksters will be held accountable for pillaging the economy. And, worst of all, there's no chance any Members of Congress will be held accountable for writing the laws that create and sustain such a system. Could this really be anything like what Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, John Jay, Patrick Henry, George Washington and John Adams had in mind when they sacrificed so much to start a new nation conceived in Enlightenment principles and values?

Sunday we looked at how much more seriously China takes political corruption against society. Even though-- it is often a battle between pythons and crocodiles. Before I get into the latest good news from China, let me clarify Sunday's story with an update from a close from in Beijing. Zhou and Xi are both powerful men. And in China nothing gets done unless you grease the person who could help you get something done. Everyone does it; it's simply the way things go. Both guys are corrupt and probably have roughly the same amount of extorted moola. My guess is that Xi has more.

Xi is a 2nd generation guy, from Money, who made his way up the ladder by help from his relatives. For now, we can call him George Dubya. Zhou was a poor kid who worked his way up the ladder and who is relatively well respected by the people. He got into an argument where he refused to kiss Xi's ass at a meeting of big shots. A heated exchange occurred. People were starting to take sides...

Upon leaving the meeting Zhou's driver zoomed out and almost hit Xi, forcing him to dodge the car and he fell on his back. Remember a while back that Xi was missing and recouping from a "bad back" (couldn't meet with Hillary)-- well, now you now it wasn't from golf. It gave Xi impetus and time to concoct a plan, flimsy at best but a plan.

When people like a political opponent of Xi's, something always happens to them. Bo Xilai, a trumped up case of he and his wife poisoning their English partner. And now, a similar treatment is being extended to the peoples favorite and respected Zhou Yongkang. So... things aren't what they seem, huh?

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Liu Tienan, the former head of China’s energy agency was sentenced to life imprisonment for taking 36 million yuan ($5.8 million) in bribes to approve projects.

Liu and his son Liu Decheng took the money from 2002 to 2012, receiving it in stocks, cars, cash, and a phantom job for his son drew a salary, it said. The court ordered the confiscation of all Liu’s personal assets.

“Liu believes the punishment is harsh,” Li Fabao, Liu’s lawyer, said by phone immediately after the sentence was announced. “He did everything because of his son. He’s spoiled his son, and he now regrets that.”

The case of Liu Decheng, who gave testimony at his father’s trial, will be handled separately, according to the postings.

Liu is the latest “tiger” to be punished in President Xi Jinping’s two-year anti-corruption campaign to bolster his power base and curb the graft that he’s warned could erode the party’s legitimacy. More than 80,000 officials have been punished for breaking party rules, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said last week.

Liu was also former deputy head of the National Development and reform Commission, China’s top planning body, until he was stripped of his position in May 2013. The agency approves infrastructure projects and controls energy prices.

Zhuang Deshui, professor of public administration with Peking University, said the punishment meted out to Liu is intended as a strong deterrent for other officials.

“Liu’s case is high profile and will have a big impact,” Zhang said. “So the sentence could be made not only from a judicial perspective based on the criminal acts, but also after taking into consideration its influence.”

At today’s hearing, Liu stressed he had voluntarily provided information about his case and hadn’t put up a legal defense.

“I don’t have anything to say for myself because I caused huge loss for the country and the party,” according to the court’s records on the Weibo social media service. He also “broke down in tears for his fall from grace,” it said.

The court’s postings also showed several testimonies from the son against him. One case involved the son receiving a Nissan Teana as a gift after his father approved a heavy-polluting chemical plant in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo.

So what's the real story behind this one? I'm sure it's not as filthy and devastating as Cheney walking around free.

Just kidding

Tales of the Inscrutable Criminal Mind: Remember, kids, crime doesn't pay -- unless you're rich, powerful, and VERY careful

After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake disaster, the James Perse store on Bleecker Street did a "Japan Window." Last week the store became the site of one of the annals' more perplexing heists.

by Ken

I confess that in tonight's tale it was the "with underwear" in the head that made me click through to this true-crime report by DNAinfo New York's Danielle Tcholakian. I don' know why, exactly, or what I expected to find, but the underwear -- while it's definitely in there -- turns out to be the least of the perplexities of this story, in which the $28 boxers and $85 T-shirt are literally the least of the haul.

(1) THERE ARE VICTIMLESS CRIMES, AND THEN THERE'S --

Man Steals Whole Outfit, With Underwear, Then Immediately Turns Himself In

By Danielle Tcholakian on October 10, 2014

WEST VILLAGE — A man walked out of the James Perse designer clothing store on Bleecker Street last week wearing an entirely new $1,674 outfit that he didn't pay for — and then walked right into the police precinct around the corner.

Matthew Redington, 33, walked into the James Perse at 361 Bleecker St. at about 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 2 and picked out an $85 T-shirt, a $135 sweatshirt, $195 sweatpants, $595 sweater, $127 socks, $509 tweed boots and $28 boxers, police said.

Redington went into the dressing room and put all of the clothes on. He then walked out of the store and, as baffled employees watched, headed right around the corner into the 6th Precinct stationhouse on West 10th Street, police said.

It was unclear why Redington walked into the precinct. An employee who followed him explained the situation to officers, police said.

Redington was charged with petit larceny and criminal possession of stolen property, according to court records, and released without bail. He is due back in court on Nov. 12.

The court-appointed attorney assigned to him at arraignment did not immediately respond to a phone message left for comment, and it was unclear if Redington had made arrangements for a new attorney since his arraignment.

The James Perse store declined to comment.

I'm going to confine my comment to: Huh???


(2) ON A MORE SERIOUS NOTE:
ANNALS OF INSIDER TRADING


U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara says yes, we prosecute insider trading. They just don't necessarily get the guys at the top.

With a weekend coming up, and perhaps time for some more leisurely reading, I highly recommend taking advantage of The New Yorker's apparently still-continuing policy of letting the magazine's content all hang out for free online and reading a riveting and extensively as well as minutely reported account by Patrick Radden Keefe of what's described on the contents page as "the biggest-ever hedge-fund scandal": "The Empire of Edge: How a doctor, a trader, and the billionaire Steven A. Cohen got entangled in a vast financial scandal."

It took three years for the feds, first, to figure out whodunnit, and then another couple of years for the feds to bring him to trial -- and, yes, get a conviction, but only of the trader, Mathew Martoma, and not the hedge-fund magician, Steven A. Cohen, under whose auspices, and for whose hedge fund, S.A.C. Capital Advisers, Martoma perpetrated the deed that eventually landed him a 9½-year prison sentence.

The deed was especially incredible to the people who knew Artoma's unlikely co-conspirator, a scion of the University of Michigan medical community, superstar neurologist Dr. Sid Gilman. Martoma induced Gilman to cough up confidential information about a drug study he was involved with, information that was used, first, to sink S.A.C. heavily into the stock of the two companies responsible, Eland and Wyeth for the Alzheimer's drug being tested, which was being talked about as "the next Lipitor," and then, when the second phase of the drug trial produced equivocal results to stealthily siphon all their money out of then two companies' stock, in fact shorting the stock, betting against it, so that S.A.C. wound up with more than a quarter-billion dollar profit instead of something like a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar loss.

That the case was pursued at all has a lot to do with the unusual position of Preet Bharara, as of 2009 the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which was that yes, we prosecute insider trading. His position is unusual because insider trading, in addition to being awfully hard to actually prove beyond the proverbial reasonable doubt, normally carries no stiffer penalties than fines that inside traders a mere cost of doing business when weighed against the potential cash value of inside information that can provide what is known as "edge," as in having edge. And it turns out that Steve Cohen's hedge-fund magic had a lot to do with insider trading, with his traders being put under unrelenting pressure to get themselves "edge."

It was clear to observers from the start that something very strange happened the day after Dr. Gilman, on behalf of Elan and Wyeth, announced the mixed results of the test of the efficacy of bapineuzumab, popularly known as "bapi," which had been shown to help some patients in the study but not others. As Keefe notes, investors don't go wild over a drug that helps some people and not others, and both companies' stock took a big hit. New York Stock Exchange monitors noted the stunning reversal in S.A.C.'s position in the companies, and consequently of their fate, and reported it to the SEC, and eventually Martoma's careful, intensive cultivation of Sid Gilman was unraveled.

Keefe gives us the background of all the players in the drama, and still can't explain how the aging medical lion let himself be drawn into such a mess. Now 81, he has lost pretty much everything he built up; he has been pretty much wiped clean from the memory of the University of Michigan.

As Keefe explains, once the link between S.A.C. and Dr. Gilman was established, and the mechanism of the insider-trading connection puzzled out, the man the feds wanted was Steve Cohen, but they didn't get him. Prosecutors assumed that, much the way an organized-crime case is broken by getting the goods on lower-echelon people and flipping them upward to the top, Mathew Martoma would give them Cohen. But he didn't. Keefe explores the possible reasons why, but also notes that quite possibly his testimony wouldn't have done it, since a guy like Cohen is unlikely to leave smoking guns lying around when it comes to breaking the law.

Dr. Gilman, as noted, lost everything, and Mathew Martoma is in the process of having the same happen to him. Not Steve Cohen, though.

After deliberating for three days, the jury convicted Martoma of two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy. Rosemary wept as the verdict was read. The guidelines for his sentence would be based not just on the $9.3-million bonus he had received from S.A.C. in 2008 but also on the two-hundred-and-seventy-five-million-dollar profit that S.A.C. had made on the bapi trades. Yet Cohen was not charged with those trades, or even named as an unindicted co-conspirator. The judge, Paul Gardephe, went so far as to ask the attorneys to avoid discussing Cohen altogether, because he had not been charged with any crime. “General questions about how Steve Cohen conducted his trading, I think, are very dangerous,” he told them. “They represent a risk of opening the door to a broader examination of how Steve Cohen did business. . . . And I think we all agree that that is not a path we want to go down.” (In a subsequent ruling, Gardephe left little doubt about his own views, concluding that Cohen’s trades in July, 2008, “were based on inside information that Martoma had supplied.”)

During the trial, Cohen was photographed at a Knicks game, sitting courtside with the art dealer Larry Gagosian. According to a recent article in New York, Cohen told his children that he felt betrayed by his subordinates. “People in the company have done things that are wrong, and they’re going to pay for what they did,” he said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Do yourself a favor and read the whole beautifully pieced-together story.

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No fair! We the people demand perp-walk pix of "Mikey Suits" Grimm! (And where's Rudy Giuliani when we need him?)

Hey, Mikey Suits! Your picture here?

"A perp walk is a common custom of American law enforcement, the practice of taking an arrested suspect through a public place at some point after the arrest, creating an opportunity for the media to take photographs and video of the event. The defendant is typically handcuffed or otherwise restrained, and is sometimes dressed in prison garb. . . . Law enforcement agencies often coordinate with the media in scheduling and arranging them."

-- Wikipedia

"As a former FBI agent, Representative Grimm should understand the motto: fidelity, bravery and integrity. Yet he broke our credo at nearly every turn."

-- from a statement by FBI Asst. Director George Venizelos

by Ken

So the big day finally arrived! DWT congressional fave "Mikey Suits" Grimm, the only Republican in NYC's congressional delegation, turned himself in to the feds, as planned, for the unsealing of what turned out to be a festive 20-count indictment.

Howie, who of course has been keeping tabs on Mikey, wrote about the progress of his case Saturday and will have a good deal more to say about where it's headed, probably tomorrow, so let me just note that, as sources have been suggesting, the charges in the indictment deal not with the investigative activity (including indictments) swirling furiously around Mikey's campaign-financing carnivals but with a whole heap of alleged naughtiness centered around Beefcake Mikey's Manhattan eatery, Healthalicious. Here's how Christian Science Monitor Washington Editor Peter Grier's shorthands the legal fun 'n' games on CSM's "DC Decoder" blog:

According to court documents unsealed Monday Representative Grimm engaged in a complex scheme that hid more than $1 million in Healthalicious receipts from tax authorities. Employees were paid with bills skimmed from the restaurant cash register; some got more than half their pay in cash, according to federal authorities. Grimm kept a separate set of books that tracked the restaurant’s true financial condition, and lied under oath when questioned on the matter after former employees sued, saying they had not been paid minimum wage.

Not surprisingly, the lying liars of the Right-Wing Noise Machine are squealing their piggiest squeal about poliitically motivated prosecution -- not so much in defense of their boy Mikey as in squealy dudgeon about the timing of the indictments, suspiciously soon after the deadline for candidates to file for the congressional primary, meaning the GOP in Staten Island and Brooklyn is stuck with their Mikey on the ballot.

I guess RWNM-ers would have preferred to have Mikey indicted after being reelected.

What I really want to talk about today is the denial of our rights as citizens to be showered with pictures, lots of pictures, of Mikey doing some sort of traditional perp walk. You know, in handcuffs, maybe with his jacket pulled up stylishly over his head? Leg irons, while not traditional, would have been a suitably jolly touch.

Wikipedia

Pay no attention to the whining about perp walks being "criticized as a form of public humiliation that violates a defendant's right to privacy and is prejudicial to the presumption of innocence." Seriously now! This is America. Do we really believe in any stinking "defendant's right to privacy"? As for "the presumption of innocence," get real -- that's just artsy-fartsy Ivy League elite talk.

Focus instead on this:

Within the United States the perp walk is most closely associated with New York City. Originally only those accused of violent street crimes were subjected to it, but since Rudolph Giuliani had accused white-collar criminals perp-walked in the 1980s, it has been extended to almost every defendant.

I assume we can expect to hear from Rudy G any moment howling for Mikey Suits perp-walk pix in the grand tradition he established in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office.

Or maybe not, now that Rudy G has pretty much gone over to the other side, with his massive consulting empire devoted to showing people how to use the law to get around or simply vault over, you know, the law. You could say that Rudy G blazed the path of using our legal institutions, and the criminal justice system in particular, as a sort of White-Collar Crime Academy -- to help train the Right Kinds of Criminals to do the Right Kinds of Crimes.

It's the path followed by such criminal luminaries as NJ Gov. Kris "NJ Fats" KrispyKreme, who used his time running his NJ U.S. Attorney's office as a training ground for organizing the kind of intimidation and corruption he would make his trademark as governor (cf. NJ Fats's Guys and the Port Authority of NY and NJ). And then there's Mikey Suits himself, who seems to have used his time in the FBI to prepared himself for his future approach to "the law."


A Fairly Grim Mikey Suits speaks at a press conference after leaving the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse in New York today. Mikey pled not guilty and vowed to fight "tooth and nail until I am fully exonerated.” Still to be announced is which of his antagonists he has designated for being broken in half like a boy and which for being thrown off a balcony -- apparently his preferred threats for those who disrespect him.

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Congress' Most Corrupt Member Thinks Chelsea Manning Got Off Too Lightly

Just over a year ago, we reported how House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon had a serious conflict of interest stemming form the 6-figure gambling debts he had racked up in Sheldon Adelson's Las Vegas casino. This is especially dangerous in light of Adelson's status as a billionaire being completely in the hands of the Chinese government. I was assured by a Republican Member of the House Armed Services Committee that McKeon was being investigated on several levels and that he had personally spoken with Boehner and asked him to fire McKeon as committee chair. But, as is almost always the case inside the Beltway when it comes to powerful, crooked congressmen, nothing has come of it. The roots of the problem go back to the McKeon family's bankruptcy and his ill-fated mortgage deal with Counytywide

McKeon, who poses as a devout Mormon, is addicted to gambling. And he's a loser. What McCarthy's staffers have leaked is that he's lost very large sums of money at Adelson's casino. He hasn't reported these losses-- which is a crime. He gets the highest national security briefings, briefings the man he owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to is very interested in. He's always welcome at the Venetian Hotel on the Strip, where he's a well-known figure... and where he keeps getting deeper and deeper in debt to Adelson (and Red China). I might add, tangentially, that although there isn't a single casino in CA-25, McKeon is one of the top recipients of gambling contributions in the House ($34,700 so far... the year is young) and that he has a record of supporting the agenda of the big casino companies that bribe him patriotically donate large sums of money to his political career

Of course, when it comes to other people, McKeon is a real law and order kind of guy... no mercy! In reporting on the Bradley Manning sentencing, CNN quoted some remarks by McKeon:

Buck McKeon, criticized what he called a light sentence compared to the life terms some convicted spies have received.

"Bradley Manning betrayed his country, his obligations as a soldier and the trust of all Americans. He put the lives of our troops and our allies in danger," McKeon, R-California, said in a written statement.

"Given the vast damage he did to our national security and the need to send a strong signal to others who may be tempted to disclose classified information, this is a dangerous conclusion," McKeon added.

So far no comment from ole Buck about Bradley asking to start hormone therapy so that he can live the rest of his life as a woman, although McKeon is notoriously anti-gay and acted as the financial funnel between the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City and right-wing hate groups in California working to overturn marriage equality.

In any case, let's remember McKeon's statement about 35-year "light sentences" when he has his turn before the bar of justice for selling state secrets to China... rather than honorable whistleblowing on a corrupt, unaccountable system. McKeon should be held accountable for his career of criminal behavior by the same standards he would use to judge Bradley (or Chelsea) Manning.

JPMorgan Executives Caught Stealing Millions From California Electricity Users

If you watched the History Channel series, The Men Who Built America you may recall that JP Morgan backed Thomas Edison and made a bid to control the electric industry in America. The clip above is just an introduction and doesn't go into Morgan's ruthlessness. Today JP Morgan is an even more powerful Wall Street firm than the founder could have ever imagined-- and, once again, ruthless in its quest to make money from electricity. Like Enron before them, the Morgan criminal banksters are manipulating California's electricity markets to enrich themselves while rate payers are fleeced.

In an official notice, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission alleged that the bank had engaged in "eight manipulative bidding strategies" in California and Midwestern markets.

The strategies led to payments to JPMorgan "of tens of millions of dollars at rates far above market prices," according to the notice. JPMorgan is expected to pay a massive fine related to the allegations.

The strategies allegedly worked like this. In California, for example, the bank would bid to deliver electricity to a utility the next day at a low price of $30 per megawatt hour. When the next day came, JPMorgan would change its offer to a much higher price of $999 per megawatt hour, assuring the power did not get bought, according to the notice.

California ISO, the state's power-grid operator, would then have to compensate the bank for the cost of making the bid, under California's "make whole provision," which requires ratepayers to cover certain costs incurred by energy sellers.

Still too big to jail? Fines-- paid by shareholders-- don't do anything at all to put a stop to the criminal behavior of these Wall Street sociopaths. I know the sensitivities of most of us don't allow for firing squads but... what about some hard prison terms for the top executives? That would put a stop to this kind of behavior-- at least for a while.This is from a press release I got yesterday from Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey. And this is what Blue America was talking about when we promoted the idea of this incredible team:

Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward J. Markey today asked the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission how his agency was protecting consumers and prosecuting JPMorgan Chase following the agreement by the company to pay $410 million in penalties and surrendered profits to settle allegations of market manipulation in electricity markets. In a letter sent to FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff, the two Massachusetts Democrats ask how FERC determined the financial punishment for JPMorgan, how harm to consumers was evaluated, and whether this incident is part of an increasing trend of energy market manipulation.

“While this fine is large in absolute terms, the total penalties are equal to roughly 1.3 percent of JPMorgan’s 2012 profits,” write the Senators. “We are concerned about whether the settlement includes adequate refunds to defrauded ratepayers and also concerned that the individual executives who sought to impede the Commission’s investigation will not be punished. It is critical that government settlements provide appropriate relief for consumers and deter future law-breaking.”

...According to FERC allegations, a JPMorgan energy-trading unit engaged in 12 deceptive bidding strategies in wholesale energy markets from September 2010 to November 2012 in California and the Midwest, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overpayments from the grid operators. Of the $410 million JPMorgan will pay, $125 million consists of disgorged profits that will go to ratepayers in California and the Midwest and $285 million civil penalties.

Is he a hero or not a hero? No, not the NSA guy! I mean the Tiffany's bandit, of course!

The flagship Tiffany & Co. store on Fifth Avenue

by Ken

There's something about this heist story which has the odd effect of making a person smile. Of course it has entirely to do with the identity of the victim: Tiffany & Co. But that doesn't entirely explain the smile-producing effect. Sure, there may be no business in the country which serves as a more perfect emblem of upper-class privilege and excess, and you know its insurance will cover the loss, but that doesn't by itself make the story amusing, or at any rate titillating, does it?

The event actually took place at Tiffany's flagship Fifth Avenue New York store around 3pm Friday, but seems only lately to have picked up steam. Here's the New York Observer's bemused take, presumably from Saturday:

FEED HIM TO THE YAKS

He’s Crazy About Tiffany’s! Thief Steals $100,000 in Necklaces From Jewelry Icon

By Elaina Plott

It should have taken him at least four seconds to walk from the counter to the door, but this bandit did it in two.

One dark, handsome, rich-looking man with passionate natures and too many teeth is wanted for pocketing $100,000 worth of necklaces from Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue store.

The thief, wearing a dark-colored suit and tie, swiped the duds around 3 p.m. yesterday, police said. Surveillance video shows him chatting up the salesclerk, asking to see two pricey chains from a display. The clerk placed them on the counter and soon turned around, leaving the bandit ample opportunity to scoop up the necklaces and walk swiftly out the door.

The footage also shows a security guard patrolling the door the suspect strolled through, but he doesn’t seem too concerned. The incident prompts questions on the state of Tiffany’s security force, but reps for the jewelry maven declined to comment.

NYPD has yet to make an arrest.

When the story was reported on the radio this morning, on my current news-radio station (well, at night they carry Yankees games), it occasioned banter from the on-air people, to the effect of: How in tarnation does a guy march out of Tiffany's with a fistful of necklaces? Must be an inside job!

How often do you hear that kind of personal involvement in a breaking news story? Okay, too often. What I mean is, here they are, just making up stuff about the story -- and it's sort of what you're thinking anyway.

I suppose that in addition to the unexpectedness of a Tiffany's snatch-and-vamoose story, there's something amusing in the "comeuppance" aspect -- serves 'em right, the polo-playing bastards!

Here's some of the report posted near midnight last night on the CBS 2 New York website:

People catching a glimpse of the world famous store Tuesday night were stunned.

"He's got some guts," said Lizzy Barter of Chelsea, "because I'm pretty sure they have him on many cameras."

"Wow … $100,000?" added Banal Naeem of the Upper West Side. "If I'm not going to be blown away by that, what else am I going to be blown away by?"

CBS 2 showed security expert Ralph Martell the video. He said the theft occurred quickly and easily because of the high-end jewelry store's elegant style.

"Unfortunately, these are crimes of opportunity," said Martell, of Cambridge Security, "especially in an environment like that where you're expected to walk into a wonderful shopping experience. How does security create an environment where they're protecting the goods?"

Police on Tuesday night were trying to track down the thief who made a smooth getaway out the revolving doors at Tiffany's.

Martell believes NYPD investigators may have their own questions for the employee behind the counter.

"I would imagine NYPD is looking at the video and right about now questioning most of the staff at the store," he said.

Martell would not speculate on the possibility of the theft being an inside job, but he said, "My suspicion is something went wrong, whether it was in the policy or there's some involvement on the part of the employee."

Naturally one has to wonder about the significance of the bandit being a well-dressed black man. It's mentioned in all the accounts, of course, and it's a detail that sticks out, but I'm not sure that's "it" either. I don't know, maybe we all need something to take our minds off . . . well, you know. And here's a story that may not be actual entertainment, but in which, at least, nobody gets hurt, except the wallet of the rich polo-playing bastards, or rather their insurance company.

With everyone voicing suspicion of the Tiffany's counterperson, you have to wonder how stupid he would have to be to have been involved, but then, this isn't an Age of Smartness we're living in. Meanwhile, it's worth remembering, though, that in the days between the event and its becoming, well, a story, no progress seems to have been made in apprehending the guy who pulled it off in full view of the store's security cameras.

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"Let's do it," says Gail Collins. "Let's privatize." And NJ's Gov. Wide Load is feeling some heat from the halfway-house scandal

Both Gail Collins (who's written a book about the subject) and Paul Krugman wrote NYT columns this week that mentioned NJ's Governor Wide Load as a featured player in the state's privatization scams.

"As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?"

-- Paul Krugman, in his Friday NYT column,
"Prisons, Privatization, Patronage"

"I recently wrote a book in which I tried to juice up the subject [of privatization] by suggesting that readers might want to Iimagine a privatizer as a cross between a pirate and a sanitizer -- a guy with an eyepatch and a carpet steamer. This was a desperate attempt at, um, humorization. I am so ashamed."

-- Gail Collins, in her Thursday NYT column,
"Political Private Practice"

by Ken

Can NJ's Gov. Chris "Wide Load" Christie, the patronage saint of white-collar crooks, dodge the heat of the state's privatized-halfway-houses scandal?

I always try to be careful in writing about the stupendously popular Governor Wide Load. I never want to characterize him as a tool of the 1%. He's a different kind of Republican slime. Oh, I'm pretty sure he would roll over for a 1%-er in a heartbeat if it was made worth his while. But I always think of Governor Wide Load as the patronage saint, not of the economic elites, but of the humbler white-collar crooks. You know, the guys 'n' gals who toil grifting off their economic betters, quite frequently the government.

That's pretty much how Governor Wide Load ran the U.S. attorney's office when he was one of Karl Rove's foot soldiers in the Bush regime's War Against Justice. You can be sure that Wide Load was never on any stinking list of Bush USAs targeted for removal for the cardinal sin of, you know, occasionally doing their job. Bush regime USAs, after all, were expected to be not just cheerleaders but facilitators for the regime's national crime wave. Somehow, instead of winding up under indictment and heading off to the Big House, Wide Load was rewarded, via illegal collusion from Master Karl, with a clear shot at the NJ governorship.

But his heart is still with the white-collar grifters. And unfortunately some of his boys have been getting their behinds caught.

In recent days both Gail Collins and Paul Krugman have written NYT columns about the gummint privatization scam inspired by their paper's "terrifying reports," as PK put it --

privately run adjuncts to the regular system of prisons. The series is a model of investigative reporting, which everyone should read. But it should also be seen in context. The horrors described are part of a broader pattern in which essential functions of government are being both privatized and degraded.

Gail, who notes that she has in fact written a book on privatization, waits till near the end of her column, "Political Private Practice," to stick the fork in Governor Wide Load, and even reduces him to parentheses.

Republican governors are big privatization fans. (Did I mention that some years before he became governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie was a lobbyist for the company that's the biggest player in that halfway house system? Well, I have now.) Rick Perry tried to build a humongous highway through Texas in a public-private partnership that would have severed the state with a toll road as wide as four football fields. He dropped the idea after his own political base revolted under the theory that the road was going to be part of a "NAFTA superhighway" that would strip the country of its sovereignty and turn us into citizens of the North American Union. Really, it's always something.

As to former Republican governors who would like to be Romney's running mate -- there are no words for the privatization passion. Except those of Tim Pawlenty, who recently said that "if you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn't need to be doing it."

Paul, however, got Governor Wide Load into the second paragraph, referencing the New Jersey halfway houses:

In 2010, Chris Christie, the state's governor -- who has close personal ties to Community Education Centers, the largest operator of these facilities, and who once worked as a lobbyist for the firm -- described the company's operations as "representing the very best of the human spirit." But The Times's reports instead portray something closer to hell on earth -- an understaffed, poorly run system, with a demoralized work force, from which the most dangerous individuals often escape to wreak havoc, while relatively mild offenders face terror and abuse at the hands of other inmates.

Paul is shortly led to ask what's behind the nationwide passion for privatizing.

You might be tempted to say that it reflects conservative belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning. And that’s certainly the way right-wing politicians like to frame the issue.

Gail helpfully tosses in a quote President-in-waiting Willard Inc.

"When you work in the private sector and you have a competitor, you know if I don't treat the customer right, they're going to leave me and go somewhere else, so I'd better treat them right," Romney said in a round-table discussion with veterans in South Carolina. This is the exact road he was going down on the dreaded day when he said he enjoyed firing people.

Now Paul picks up from that way that "right-wing politicians like to frame the issue" of privatization, as a reflection of "conservative belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning."

But if you think about it even for a minute, you realize that the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency.

And, sure enough, despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not materialized.” To the extent that private prison operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.”

Gail points out that the NJ halfway houses --

costs about half as much per inmate as a regular jail. This may be in part because the prisoners keep escaping. More than 5,000 have run, walked or wandered off since 2005. That placed a sometimes tragic burden on the victims of the crimes the escapees later committed, but it must have definitely reduced upkeep. Perhaps you could call it inmate self-privatization.

Oops!

Paul meanwhile reflects:

Privatized prisons save money by employing fewer guards and other workers, and by paying them badly. And then we get horror stories about how these prisons are run. What a surprise!

And he wonders "what's really behind the drive to privatize prisons, and just about everything else."

One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. We hear a lot about the hidden debts that states have incurred in the form of pension liabilities; we don’t hear much about the hidden debts now being accumulated in the form of long-term contracts with private companies hired to operate prisons, schools and more.

Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic in any case.

But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?

And he points out that the privatization scandals are buried deep enough to require substantial efforts of investigation, as in the case of the NYT series on "New Jersey's halfway-house-hell."

You shouldn’t imagine that what The Times discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation.

Of course undermining government is the basic business of right-wing government -- that and making a pretty penny off it. Gail honors the election season by regaling us with "some examples of privatization disasters."

Texas tried to turn eligibility screening for social services over to a private company, creating all sorts of messes until it gave up the experiment. The most apocryphal story involved a privately run call center that told applicants to send their documentation to a number that turned out to be the fax at a warehouse in Seattle.

The hottest new wrinkle for private companies eager to tap into public school funding is charter cyberschools. A study at the University of Colorado's National Education Policy Center found that only about a quarter met federal standards for academic progress.

Here in New York, we have been experiencing a long-running privatization adventure in which an attempt to streamline employee timekeeping that was supposed to have cost the city $63 million wound up with a slightly unsleek tab of $700 million.

John Donahue, the faculty chairman of the master's in public policy program at Harvard, says the best candidates for privatization are functions where performance is relatively easy to evaluate, like construction or food services. On the worst-case end, he points to "having mercenaries run your war for you," which we know something about, given the fact that our military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan sometimes involves more people working for private contractors than actual members of the military.

Gail notes that privatization --

has such a long history that it's a wonder we still have any public sector left. The Ancient Greeks did it. The Han dynasty did it. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even Harvard Ph.D.s do it.

Let's do it. Let's privatize.

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