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FIRST AMENDMENT DANGERS

In Business, Law, Social commentary on June 13, 2013 at 12:07 am

WARNING: Believing that the First Amendment gives you the legal right to express your opinion may be hazardous to your career.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Of course, that refers only to Congress.  It says nothing about employers–and especially those self-appointed pseudo-gods who claim to be the personification of virtue and infallibility.

If you doubt it, just ask Johnny Cook, who until recently worked as a bus driver for the Haralson County Middle School in Georgia.

In late May, a sixth-grade student boarding Cook’s school bus said he was still hungry.  Cook asked why, and the student said he hadn’t been given any lunch.

The reason: He had been forty cents short for buying a reduced lunch.  So he hadn’t been given anything, not even the peanut butter offered to everyone else.

Furious, Cook vented his spleen on his Facebook page on May 21:

“This child is already on reduced lunch [program] and we can’t let him eat. Are you kidding me? I’m certian  there was leftover food thrown away today.

“But kids were turned away because they didn’t have .40 on there account. As a tax payer I would much rather feed a child than throw it away. I would rather feed a child than to give food stamps to a crack head.”

Just two days later, Cook was fired over that post.

Johnny Cook and friends

The “official reason,” as given by Superintendent Brett Stanton, was that Cook had violated the school’s social media policy by daring to express his opinion publicly.

The policy states:

“Students who post or contribute any comment or content on social networking sites that cause a substantial disruption to the instructional environment are subject to disciplinary procedures.

“Employees who post or contribute any comment or content on social networking sites that causes a substantial disruption to the instructional environment are subject to disciplinary procedures up and including termination.”

This is similar to the policies–and atmosphere–of the Joseph McCarthy “smear and fear” era of the 1950s.  You didn’t have to actually be proven an actual Communist, or even a Communist sympathizer.

All that was neeeded to condemn you to permanent unemployment was to become “controversial.”  That way, the employer didn’t have to actually prove the employee’s unfitness.

The Almighty Employer need only declare: “Your usefulness to me is over.”

Consider the statement offered by Superintendent Stanton:  “I can assure you it did not happen,” he told the CBS affiliate in Atlanta.

And how could he be so certain?  Because, said Stanton, he had thoroughly investigated the incident.

“The video surveillance footage clearly shows that the student never went through the lunch lines at the county middle school,” Stanton said.

Therefore, Stanton said, the boy couldn’t have been offered the bagged lunch for students in his situation.

When asked if someone should have noticed the boy wasn’t eating lunch, he had a ready excuse for that: “When you have almost 1,000 students, it’s very difficult to notice.”

Stanton wouldn’t discuss Cook’s termination because it’s a personnel matter, but did say the school district has a strict Facebook policy.

CBS Atlanta contacted the sixth-grader’s family–who backed up Cook’s story.

Cook, who is married and the father of two kids, told CBS Atlanta that he felt in his “heart of hearts the kid was telling the truth.”

A petition has been posted to Change.org demanding that Cook be reinstated.  It has so far gained more than 10,000 signatures.

Nor is Cook the only victim of employers who have no regard for the First Amendment.

Ashley Warden, a waitress at an Oklahoma City Chili’s insulted “stupid cops” on her Facebook page.   In 2012, her potty-training toddler pulled down his pants in his grandmother’s front yard–and a passing officer gave Warden a public urination ticket for $2,500.

Warden was quickly fired.  In an official statement, Chilli’s gave this excuse:

“With the changing world of digital and social media, Chili’s has Social Media Guidelines in place, asking our team members to always be respectful of our guests and to use proper judgement when discussing actions in the work place.  After looking into the matter, we have taken action to prevent this from happening again.”

Put more honestly: “We have taken action to prevent” other employees from daring to exercise their own First Amendment rights.

Employers need to be legally forced to show as much respect for the free speech rights of Americans as Congress is required to.

Until this happens, the workplace will continue to resemble George Orwell’s vision of 1984–a world where anyone can become a “non-person” for the most trivial of reasons.

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NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI VS. OSCAR PISTORIUS

In Entertainment, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on June 10, 2013 at 12:00 am

He’s the O.J. Simpson of South Africa–a gifted athlete charged with cold-blooded murder.

For Oscar Pistorius, life began as a struggle, on November 22, 1986.  Born with fibular hemimelia (congenital absence of the fibula) in both legs, at 11 months old, he was forced to undergo the amputation of both legs below the knee.

But still he persisted to lead an active–even an extraordinary–life.  As a child and teenager, he played rugby union, water polo and tennis, and took part in Olympic wrestling.

After a serious rugby knee injury, Pistorius was introduced to running in January, 2004, while undergoing rehabilitation at the University of Pretoria’s High Performance Centre.

Fitted with racing blades, he has been dubbed “Blade Runner” and “the fastest man with no legs.”   He took part in the 2004 Summer Paralympics in Athens and came in third in the 100-metere event.

At the 2012 Summer Olympics, he became the first double leg amputee to participate in the Olympics.  He entered the men’s 400-meters and 4 x 400 meters relay races.

Oscar Pistorius

At the 2012 Summer Paralympics, he won gold medals in the men’s 400-metre race and the 4 X 100 metres relay.

And then, having achieved so much against so much adversity, he found himself facing trial for a ghastly crime: The February 14 murder of his 29-year-old girlfriend, model and paralegal Reeva Steenkamp, whom he shot three times through a locked bathroom door.

Reeva Steenkamp

Pistorius claims he thought Steenkamp was a nighttime intruder. The state alleges that he and his girlfriend  argued before her death and he intentionally killed her.

The case has been postponed to August 19, 2013.

Throughout South Africa, women believe the odds are high that Pistorius will escape justice for murder owing to his sports celebrity status.  And those women may well turn out to be right.

According to one study, South Africa has “the highest rate [of violence against women] ever reported in research anywhere in the world.”

According to statistics, a woman gets raped in South Africa every four minutes. Only 66,196 incidents were reported to police in 2012 and their investigations led to only 4,500 convictions.

In fact, the murder of Pistorius’ girlfriend happened one day before she planned to wear black in a “Black Friday” protest against the country’s disgracefully high number of rapes.

“If data for all violent assaults, rapes and other sexual assaults against women are taken into account, then approximately 200,000 adult women are reported as being attacked in South Africa every year,” said Lerato Moloi of the South African Institute for Race Relations.

The real figure is considerably higher, she said, since most cases never are reported.

The rate of murders of women in South Africa is equally appalling:

  • A woman is killed by an intimate partner every eight hours in South Africa.
  • No perpetrator is identified in 20 percent of killings, according to a study published by the South African Medical Research Council.
  • That is double the rate of such murders in the United States.

If Pistorius wins acquittal because of his status as a celebrity athlete, Niccolo Machiavelli will nce again be proven a relevant prophet for our time.

Niccolo Machiavelli

In The Discourses, his seminal work on how to preserve freedom within a republic, Machiavelli warns: “Well-ordered republics establish punishments and rewards for their citizens, but never set off one against the other.”

Specifically:

“The services of Horatius had been of the highest importance to Rome, for by his bravery he had conquered the Curatii.  But the crime of killing his sister was atrocious, and the Romans were so outraged by this murder that he was put upon trial for his life, notwithstanding his recent great services to the state.”

While Rome might seem guilty of ingratitude, writes Machiavelli, “the people were to blame rather for the acquittal of Horatius than for having him tried.

“And the reason for this is, that no well-ordered republic should ever cancel the crimes of its citizens by their merits….

“Having established rewards for good actions and penalties for evil ones, and having rewarded a citizen for good conduct who afterwards commits a wrong, he should be chastised for that without regard to his previous merits.

“And a state that properly observes this principle will long enjoy its liberty, but if otherwise, it will speedily come to ruin.

“For if a citizen who has rendered some eminent service to the state should add to the reputation and influence which he has thereby acquired the confident audacity of being able to commit any wrong without fear of punishment, he will in a little while become so insolent and overbearing as to put an end to all power of the law.”

Americans learned the truth of this after the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson for the slasher-murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and a waiter-eyewitness, Ronald Goldman.

In September, 2007, he led a group of men into a hotel room at the Palace Station casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, and, at gunpoint, seized sports memorabilia which he claimed had been stolen from him.

He was arrested and eventually convicted for criminal conspiracy, armed robbery, kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon.

On December 5, 2008, Simpson was sentenced to 33 years in prison with the chance of parole in  nine years, in 2017.

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WITNESS-SECURITY: A BLOODSTAINED HISTORY: PART FOUR (OF TEN)

In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement on June 8, 2013 at 12:05 am

Joseph Valachi was the first member of the Mafia to talk publicly about its secrets.

But before that happened, he had to be persuaded to open up.  The men who first got that assignment were agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

But the sessions between him and the agents went badly.  He blamed them for his imprisonment on drug charges in 1960.  And he believed they had deliberately created a rift between him and his cellmate, “Boss of all Bosses” Vito Venovese.

Then the FBI intervened.  Under pressure from Attorney General Robert Kennedy to combat the crime syndicates, the Bureau took an aggressive interest in Valachi.

Seeing him as a potential breakthrough in organized crime intelligence, the FBI cited its greater area of jurisdiction and successfully lobbied the Justice Department to take charge of the new informant.

Valachi’s disclosures proved worthless as prosecution evidence.  They were too dated, and too many of the leading mobsters who figured in them were now dead or retired.

But as strategic intelligence, they were invaluable.

Valachi provided federal lawmen, for the first time, with an insider’s account of the history, membership and operations of organized crime.

Many veteran law enforcement agents were shocked: The shadowy world of the Cosa Nostra was far more extensive and powerful than they had dared imagine.

More important, in Joseph Valachi himself, the Justice Department finally had tangible proof of an organized crime network.  The very existence of the Mafia had long been hotly debated within law enforcement.

Chief among the believers in such a criminal empire had been Harry Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Anslinger’s certainty that the Mafia existed grew out of his agents’ constant struggles against mobsters importing narcotics into the United States.  His agency had compiled elaborate dossiers on many of these mobsters, and had sent many others to prison.

By far the most important “debunker” of this belief was J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Hoover insisted that there was no “national crime confederation,” only loosely-knit groups of criminals whose apprehension was best left to local law enforcers.

J. Edgar Hoover

Hoover’s refusal to admit the existence of the Mafia has long been the subject of heated debate.  Some theorists believe he feared that his “Boy Scout” agents would be corrupted by Mafia bribes.

Others argue that he had been compromised by Mafia bribes or blackmail (the latter through his alleged homosexual relationship with Clyde Tolson, his second-in-command at the FBI).

Still others claim that Hoover simply couldn’t accept that other federal, state and local police agencies had discovered a criminal empire that his own agents had somehow overlooked.

A major reason for the continuing debate over the existence of organized crime lay in the refusal of mob informants to testify as courtroom witnesses.  Abe Reles had been an exception, but he had given his testimony twenty years ago, and only for the State of New York.

More importantly, Reles never appeared before a Senate investigating committee—and on live television.

Joseph Valachi did.  In September, 1963, he became the Senate’s star witness in its hearings on organized crime and narcotics trafficking.

By that time, the mob was offering $100,000 for his life.  To guarantee that no one collected on this contract, federal lawmen turned the Senate Caucus Room into a bodyguards’ convention.

Before Valachi entered the room, FBI agents and deputy U.S. marshals screened the audience for suspicious types or known underworld figures.  While Valachi testified, marshals and capital police filled most of the first eight rows behind him.  Other lawmen were scattered throughout the building.

Joseph Valachi

Whenever Valachi left the witness chair, twenty deputy marshals accompanied him everywhere—even  during trips to the restroom.  And after each day’s proceedings, a fast-moving caravan of police cars returned him to his heavily-guarded cell at the District of Columbia Jail.

During the nearly three years that federal agents interrogated Joseph Valachi, the Justice Department spent more than $167,908 guarding, transporting and maintaining him.

But the money was well-spent: when Valachi died in 1971 at La Tuna Federal Prison, near El Paso, the cause was a heart attack.  And federal lawmen had proven they could guarantee protection for those who betrayed the secrets of the Mafia.

Other organized crime witnesses for the Justice Department didn’t fare so well.

In 1965, two years after Valachi’s appearance before the Senate, Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who had succeeded Robert Kennedy, informed a shocked Congress: “We must dismiss [organized crime cases] because key witnesses or informants suffer ‘accidents’ and turn up, for example, in a river wearing concrete boots.

“Such accidents are not unusual.  We have lost more than twenty-five informants in this and similar ways in the last four years.  We have been unable to bring hundreds of other cases because key witnesses would not testify for fear of the same fate.”

Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain

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WITNESS-SECURITY: A BLOODSTAINED HISTORY: PART THREE (OF TEN)

In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement on June 7, 2013 at 12:03 am

Eight years after the death of Arnold Schuster in 1952, the lack of a witness security program cost the life of James V. Delmont, a member of the Stefano Magaddino Mafia Family of Buffalo, New York.  After slipping from underworld grace, Delmont went on the run for his life.

On June 25, 1959, he appeared at the Miami field office of the FBI, offering a rare trade: Mafia secrets for any intelligence the Bureau had on his pursuers.  But the FBI didn’t know what to do with its would-be informant.  One agent advised Delmont to re-enter the Mafia as an FBI plant.  Delmont angrily rejected that idea, and again took flight.

On May 25, 1960, he made a similar offer to agents of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.  They wrote him off as a crank.

Ten days later, Delmont’s body, bearing the marks of a classic Mafia execution (several bullets fired directly into the back of the head), turned up in a field in East Los Angeles.  The Intelligence Division of the Los Angeles Police Department conducted a vigorous probe into the slaying, but couldn’t positively identify Delmont’s killers.

Commenting on the significance of the Delmont case, LAPD Sergeant Peter N. Bagoye, an expert on organized crime, noted: “If any police officer still doubts the existence and power of the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, or whatever you want to call it, just let him read this case.

“This man Delmont spent a year and traveled thousands of miles to escape the vengeance of the Mafia.  He left a trail of letters and conversations behind-the first known case in which there is any existing blueprint of how the Syndicate works.”

In 1961, after Robert F. Kennedy became Attorney General, the Justice Department mounted the first effective campaign in its history against organized crime.  As part of this effort, the agency began wrestling for the first time with the complex difficulties of creating a protection program for organized crime witnesses.

Robert F. Kennedy

By September, 1963, Kennedy—appearing as a witness during Senate hearings on organized crime and narcotics trafficing—could  cite a number of successes by federal lawmen in safeguarding witnesses.

“How long,” asked Maine Senator Edmund S. Muskie, “can the Justice Department protect people who agree to testify?”

“We have taken steps, Senator, to even move people out of the country,” answered Kennedy.  “We have provided them with positions and work in other cities where nobody will really have any contact with them.  We have arranged to move their families and have their names changed.

“I think we have procedures now where, if an important individual comes forward and is willing to testify, we can give him that kind of protection.”

Such an individual proved to be Joseph Valachi, an aging Cosa Nostra hitman and narcotics trafficker.  In 1962, Valachi was an inmate at Atlanta Federal Prison, serving two concurrent sentences totaling thirty-five years for narcotics trafficking.  His cellmate was Vito Genovese, then the most powerful Mafia boss in the country.

Vito Genovese

Genovese had been convicted of narcotics conspiracy in 1959 and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment.  Now he began suspecting—wrongly—that Valachi was an informer.  The reason: After Valachi’s second trial for narcotics trafficking, he had been repeatedly interviewed—against his will—by federal narcotics agents.

One night, in a scene right out of a B-grade Mafia movie, Genovese summoned Valachi to his cell for a private talk.

“You know,” said Genovese, “we take a barrel of apples.  And in this barrel of apples, there might be a bad apple.  Well, this apple has to be removed.  And if it ain’t removed, it would hurt the rest of the apples.”  Then he gave Valachi the fabled “kiss of death,” signifying that he was now marked for murder.

Valachi survived what he believed were attempts to poison his food and lure him alone into a shower where he could be stabbed to death.   But he knew his luck could not last forever.  He decided to take at least one of his enemies with him.

On June 22, 1963, he beat another inmate to death with an iron pipe.  Only later did he learn that he had killed the wrong man: John Joseph Saupp, a forger without ties to the mob.  It had been Saupp’s bad luck to bear a striking resemblance to another prisoner whom Valachi believed had the contract to kill him.

Valachi grew depressed over having killed the wrong man.  He also knew he couldn’t spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement.  Desperate, he offered himself as an informant to Robert Morgenthau, the New York U.S. Attorney.  Morgenthau, in turn, put him in contact with agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

The agents quickly transferred Valachi from Atlanta Federal Prison to the first of a series of military bases.  But the sessions between him and the agents went badly.  He still blamed them for his imprisonment in 1960.  And he believed they had deliberately created a rift between him and Geno

Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain

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TWO ANNIVERSARIES–ONE GLORIOUS, THE OTHER TRAGIC

In History, Politics, Social commentary on June 6, 2013 at 12:01 am

“For it is the doom of men that they forget.”

–Merlin, in “Excalibur”

June 6–a day of glory and tragedy.

The glory came  69 years ago–on Tuesday, June 6, 1944.

On that morning, Americans awoke to learn–from radio and newspapers–that their soldiers had landed on the French coast of Normandy.

In Supreme Command of the Allied Expeditionary Force was American General Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Overall command of ground forces was given to British General Bernard Montgomery.

Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion to liberate France from Nazi Germany, proved one of the pivotal actions of World War II.

It opened shortly after midnight, with an airborne assault of 24,000 American, British, Canadian and Free French troops.  This was followed at 6:30 a.m. by an amphibious landing of Allied infantry and armored divisions on the French coast.

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel–the legendary “Desert Fox”–commanded the German forces.  For him, the first 24 hours of the battle would be decisive.

“For the Allies as well as the Germans,” he warned his staff, “it will be the longest day.”

The operation was the largest amphibious invasion in history.  More than 160,000 troops landed–73,000 Americans, 61,715 British and 21,400 Canadians.

Initially, the Allied assault seemed likely to be stopped at the water’s edge–where Rommel had always insisted it must be.  He had warned that if the Allies established a beachhead, their overwhelming advantages in numbers and airpower would eventually prove irresistible.

German machine-gunners and mortarmen wreaked a fearful toll on Allied soldiers.  But commanders like U.S. General Norman Cota led their men to victory through a storm of bullets and shells.

Coming upon a group of U.S. Army Rangers taking cover behind sand dunes, Cota demanded: “What outfit is this?”

“Rangers!” yelled one of the soldiers.

“Well, Goddamnit, then, Rangers, lead the way!” shouted Cota, inspiring the soldiers to rise and charge into the enemy.

The allied casualty figures for D-Day have been estimated at 10,000, including 4,414 dead.  By nationality, the D-Day casualty figures are about 2,700 British, 946 Canadians and 6,603 Americans.

The total number of German casualties on D-Day isn’t known, but is estimated at 4,000 to 9,000.

Allied and German armies continued to clash throughout France, Belgium and Germany until May 7, 1945, when Germany finally surrendered.

But those Americans who had taken part in D-Day could be proud of having dealt a fatal blow to the evil ambitions of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

So much for the glory of June 6.  Now for the tragedy–which occurred 45 years ago.

Twenty-four years after D-Day, Americans awoke to learn–mostly from TV–that New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy had died at 1:44 a.m. of an assassin’s bullet.

He had been campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and had just won the California primary on June 4.

This had been a make-or-break event for Kennedy. He had won the Democratic primaries in Indiana and Nebraska, but had lost the Oregon primary to Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy.

If he could defeat McCarthy in California, Kennedy could force his rival to quit the race.  That would lead to a showdown between him and Vice President Hubert Humphery for the nomination.

(President Lyndon B. Johnson had withdrawn from the race on March 31–just 15 days after Kennedy announced his candidacy on March 16.)

After winning the California and South Dakota primaries, Kennedy gave a magnaminous victory speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles:

“I think we can end the divisions within the United States….We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country.  And I intend to make that my basis for running over the period of the next few months.”

Then he entered the hotel kitchen–where Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian from Jordan, opened fire with a .22 revolver.  Kennedy was hit three times–once fatally in the back of the head.  Five other people were also wounded.

Kennedy’s last-known words were: “Is everybody all right?” and “Jack, Jack.”  Then he lost consciousness–forever, dying in a hospital bed 24 hours later.

Kennedy had been a U.S. Attorney General (1961-1964) and Senator (1964-1968).  But it was his connection to his murdered brother, President John F. Kennedy, for which he was best-known.

His assassination–less than five years after that of JFK–convinced many Americans there was something “sick” about the nation’s culture.

One of the best summaries of Robert Kennedy’s legacy was given in Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960’s, by historian William L. O’Neil:

“…He aimed so high that he must be judged for what he meant to do, and, through error and tragic accident, failed at….He will also be remembered as an extraordinary human being who, though hated by some, was perhaps more deeply loved by his countrymen than any man of his time.

“That too must be entered into the final account, and it is no small thing.  With his death something precious disappeared from public life.”

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WITNESS-SECURITY: A BLOODSTAINED HISTORY: PART TWO (OF TEN)

In History, Law, Law Enforcement on June 5, 2013 at 12:00 am

The testimony of Abe “Kid Twist” Reles’ propelled seven Mafia assassins or lieutenants into the electric chair—a feat never before or since equaled.  Among these was Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, whose execution, in 1944, makes him to date the only mob boss to suffer the fullest penalty of the law.

Reles’ career as a witness earned him the hatred of mobsters throughout the nation.  The Mafia put out a $100,000 contract on him and hoped that one of its hitmen proved lucky or skillful enough to collect on it.  But no hitman ever tried, for Reles was too carefully guarded, and the mobsters knew it.

When he wasn’t testifying in court, Reles was quartered in a secured room on the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island.  There he dined on thick steaks and cold beers and listened to ballgames on the radio.  Eighteen officers of the NYPD, working in three, eight-hour, six-man shifts, protected him at all times.

Despite these precautions, the witnessing career of Abe “Kid Twist” Reles ended abruptly on November 12, 1941.  Sometime around dawn, Reles “fell” to his death from one of the windows of his sixth-floor room.

Abe Reles in death

The sudden death of the prosecution’s star witness scandalized the NYPD.  Local newspapers questioned the integrity of the officers on the Reles security detail.  Both the police and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office launched investigations to learn whether Reles had died as the result of an accident—or  murder.

But the NYPD quickly moved to protect itself from blame.  Its final report shifted blame for Reles’ death from his bodyguards to the victim himself.  According to this version: Reles, a “notorious” practical joker, had tied two bedsheets together and slipped out of his window to play a trick on his guards.

He intended to enter a vacant room, just below his own, and then walk back upstairs to surprise his protectors.  Unfortunately, his makeshift rope snapped, and he plunged to his death forty-two feet below.

Two bedsheets, knotted together, were in fact discovered near Reles’ corpse.  That seemed to support the police theory of the rope-ladder escape attempt.  But the police could not explain why Reles had landed twenty feet from the wall.

More than twenty years later, Joseph Valachi, an aging Mafia hitman, became the Justice Department’s own version of Abe Reles.  Before dying—of a heart attack—Valachi offered his own view on what had happened to Reles: “I never met anybody yet who thought Reles went out that window on purpose.”

The next important organized crime witnesses to die while under “protective custody” by local police was Peter La Tempa, a cigar store salesman with rackets connections.

His testimony could have supported that of another witness, Ernest “The Hawk”  Rupollo.   Rupollo’s  testimony  linked  Vito Genovese, one of the nation’s most-feared Mafia bosses, with the murder of a Genovese henchman, Ferdinand Boccia, in 1934.

But La Tempa never got the chance to testify.  On January 15, 1945, he swallowed what he thought were pain-killers for his gallstones.  A New York toxicologist later reported there was enough poison in La Tempa’s bloodstream “to kill eight horses.”  At the time of his death, he was being held under police guard in a Brooklyn jail cell.

The circumstances behind La Tempa’s murder were never satisfactorily explained.  The police claimed they couldn’t determine how poison pills had been substituted for the victim’s regular medication.  Nor was anyone ever indicted—exactly the scenario that had followed the equally mysterious death of Abe Reles.

With La Tempa dead, the testimony of Ernest Rupollo could not be corroborated.  The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office dropped the murder charge it had leveled against him to compel his testimony.  Prosecutors declared him a free man, but the Mafia declared him a hunted one.

For eighteen years, Rupollo somehow eluded his pursuers.  Finally, on August 17, 1964, his bullet-riddled body, weighted with chains and concrete blocks, washed ashore in New York.  Four Mafia figures were later fried for the murder, but were acquitted.

Yet another witness to come forward—and die for it—was Arnold Schuster, a shoe salesman. One night in early 1952, he spotted Willie “The Actor” Sutton, a notorious bank robber, on the New York subway.  Schuster tipped off police, who arrested Sutton.

For several days, the mild-mannered Schuster became a minor celebrity.  Then he became a dead one: on March 8, 1952, two gunmen shot him down on the street.

The murder baffled police; Sutton was known as a loner without ties to killers or organized crime.

More than ten years later, the truth finally emerged.  According to Joseph Valachi, the man responsible for Arnold Schuster’s murder was Albert Anastasia, the former boss of Murder, Inc.

Only the untimely death of Abe Reles had prevented Anastasia’s own in the electric chair.  In 1952, he was still one of the most-feared Mafia chieftains in the nation.

Albert Anastasia

Anastasia had seen Schuster being interviewed on television and had flown into a rage.  “I hate squealers!” he had screamed to three of his executioners who were in the room at the time.  “Hit that guy!”

As Valachi saw it, the killing of Arnold Schuster was simply Anastasia’s way of doing a favor for a fellow criminal, even though he had never met Sutton.

Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain

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WITNESS-SECURITY: A BLOODSTAINED HISTORY: PART ONE (OF TEN)

In History, Law, Law Enforcement on June 4, 2013 at 12:03 am

Witness-protection has a long and bloodstained history–with the blood belonging to early witnesses against the Mafia.

Fortunately, that has since changed.  Today the Witness Security Program, operated by the U.S. Marshals Service for the Justice Department, is the world’s most sophisticated and effective means of protecting organized crime witnesses.

But before there was the Program (otherwise known as WITSEC), witness-security was provided by local police departments.

Abe “Kid Twist” Reles became the first important mobster to betray the secrets of the Mafia—and the first to die for doing so.

Abe Reles

Since his first arrest at sixteen in 1924, Reles had been in almost constant trouble with the law.  His police record listed forty-two arrests, including six for murder.  He had been sent to prison six times.

What his police record failed to disclose was that, for the last ten years, he had been a highly-paid assassin for Murder, Inc., the execution squad of the New York Mafia.

Then, in early 1940, Reles and two of his fellow killers were arrested and indicted for the 1936 gangland slaying of Alex “Red” Alpert.  Now facing almost certain conviction and death in the electric chair, Reles decided to cut a life-saving deal, even if it came at the Mafia’s expense.

On March 31, 1940, more than forty days after his arrest, Reles sent his wife to the office of Brooklyn District Attorney William O’Dwyer.  Her message: “My husband wants an interview with the law.”

The politically-ambitions O’Dwyer ordered Reles’ immediate release from his cell in the Tombs in Manhattan.  Guards then rushed the killer to the office of the district attorney.

There Reles demanded a private interview with O’Dwyer to propose a nonnegotiable deal: he would tell the prosecutors everything they wanted to know about the Mafia.  More importantly, he agreed to testify in court against his fellow mobsters.

In exchange, he demanded the immediate dropping of all charges against him.  He also insisted on immunity from prosecution on the basis of any testimony that he or anyone else might give.  Finally, once his career as a witnesses ended, he must be granted his complete freedom.

O’Dwyer quickly agreed to these conditions.  Then he ordered that his new prize witness be placed under heavy, constant police guard.

Abe Reles opened his confessions with the details of 50 gangland murders.  His photographic memory cited the names of the victims—and their killers.  He also remembered the names of those who had ordered the killings.  And he supplied names of others who could corroborate his testimony.

Altogether, Reles’ first  gush of testimony lasted 12 days and filled 25 stenographic notebooks.

For the first time, prosecutors learned how the Mafia had turned murder into a lucrative, smoothly-operating business.

In 1930, the chiefs of the five most powerful Mafia “families” in New York had created an execution squad to enforce underworld discipline. Its targets were informers and rival mobsters.

Commanding this squad were the dreaded labor racketeers Albert “The Lord High Executioner” Anastasia and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter.

For ten years, the squad’s killers roamed the nation, carrying out perhaps as many as 9,000 executions.  Police were baffled; there didn’t seem any motive for the killings.  The victims lacked any known ties to their killers, and the assassins usually lived far from the scenes of their carnage.

“Lepke” Buchalter not only turned murder into a business, he adopted business terms to serve as an underworld code.  An assignment to murder was a “contract”; a “hit” was the actual murder; and the “bum” or “mark” was the victim.

Each killer was known as a “hitman,” and earned $1,000 to $5,000 per hit.  The amount depended on the status of the victim and the risks involved in his execution.

The killers drew on their own expense accounts and coverage by generous injury insurance and family-care funds.  In the rare event of their arrest, highly-paid attorneys rushed to their defense.  And they could count on their fellow assassins to remove any troublesome prosecution witnesses.

The Mafia not only had its own execution squad; it also ran a “hideout network” for mobsters on the run from the law.  Such fugitives could quickly obtain jobs—and even new identities—through organized crime groups in other cities or states.

If necessary, they could go permanently underground as “legitimate” employees of mob-owned unions or businesses.  As a result, organized crime boasted a “new identities” program vastly superior to anything existing for organized crime witnesses until 1967.

Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain

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SYRIA: A WARNING FROM HISTORY

In Entertainment, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 1, 2013 at 4:48 pm

On May 27, Arizona U.S. Senator John McCain secretly entered Syria and met with commanders of the Free Syrian Army, who are fighting forces loyal to “President” Bashar al Assad for control of the country.

He was the first U.S. senator to travel to Syria since civil war erupted there in 2011.  And after he left, he told CNN that he was more convinced that the United States must become more involved in the country’s conflict.

Earlier this year, on March 21, House Foreign Affairs ranking Democrat Eliot Engel (D-NY) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) introduced the “Free Syria Act of 2013,” calling on the Obama administration to arm the Syrian rebels.

Not so fast, says Dr. James J. Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute.  A Washington, D.C.-based organization, it serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community.

In a June 1 column entitled, “Stop the Madness,” Zogby lays out the essential truths about this increasingly confusing self-slaughter:

“What began as a popular revolt against a brutal and ossified dictatorship, Syria has now degenerated into a bloody battlefield pitting sects and their regional allies against each other in a ‘dance unto death.’

“On the one side, is the Ba’ath regime, supported by Russia, Iran, Hizbullah, and elements in the Iraqi government.

“Arrayed against them are a host of Syrians (some of whom have defected from the armed forces and others who have formed militias receiving arms and support from a number of Arab states and Turkey) and a cast of thousands of foreign Sunni fighters (some of whom have affiliated with al Qaeda) who have entered Syria to wage war on behalf of their brethren.”

And then Zogby warns:

“This deadly zero-sum game is both dangerous and fatally flawed, because in reality this is a war that no one can win, and the consequences of continuing it will only make the situation worse.”

The neocons of the George W. Bush administration plunged the United States into an unprovoked war against Iraq in 2003.  After Baghdad quickly fell, Americans cheered, thinking the war was over and the troops would soon return home.

They didn’t count on Iraq’s descending into massive inter-religious strife, with Shia Muslims (who comprise 65% of the population) squaring off against Sunni ones (who make up 35%).

Suddenly, American soldiers found themselves fighting a two-front war in the same country: Fighting an Iraqi insurgency to throw them out, while trying to suppress growing sectarian warfare between Sunnis and Shia.

Once again, Americans are being urged to plunge headfirst into a conflict they know nothing about–and in which they have absolutely no stake.

It’s all very reminiscent of events in the 1966 epic film, “Khartoum,” starring Charlton Heston as British General Charles George Gordon.

In 1884, the British Government sends Gordon, a real-life hero of the Victorian era, to evacuate the Sudanese city of Khartoum.  Mohammed Achmed, a previously anonymous Sudanese, has proclaimed himself “The Madhi”  (The Expected One) and raised the cry of jihad.

The Madhi (played by Laurence Oliver) intends to drive all foreigners (of which the English are the largest group) out of Sudan, and exterminate all those Muslims who did not practice his “pure” version os Islam.

Movie poster for “Khartoum”

Gordon arrives in Khartoum to find he’s not fighting a rag-tag army of peasants.  Instead, the Madhi is a highly intelligent military strategist.

And Gordon, an evangelical Christian, also underestimates the Madhi’s religious fanaticism: “I seem to have suffered from the delusion that I had a monopoly on God.”

A surprised Gordon finds himself and 30,000 Sudanese trapped in Khartoum when the Madhi’s forces suddenly appear.  He sends off messengers and telegrams to the British Government, begging for a military relief force.

But the British Government wants nothing to do with the Sudan.  It had sent Gordon there as a sop to British public opion that “something” had to be done to quell the Madhist uprising.

The siege continues and tightens.

In Britain, the public hails Gordon as a Christian hero and demands that the Government send a relilef expedition to save him.  Prime Minister William Gladstone finally sends a token force–which arrives in Khartoum two days after the city has fallen to the Madhi’s forces.

Gordon, standing at the top of a staircase and coolly facing down his dervish enemies, is speared to death.

When the news reaches England, Britons mourn–and then demand vengeance for the death of their hero.

The Government, which had sought to wash its hands of the poor, militarily unimportant Sudan, suddenly has to send an army to avenge Gordon.

As the narrator of “Khartoum” intones at the close of the film: “For 15 years, the British paid the price with shame and war.”

Americans have been fighting in the Middle East since 2001–first in Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda, and then in Iraq, to pursue George W. Bush’s vendetta against Saddam Hussein.

The United States faces a crumbling infastructure, record high unemployment and trillions of dollars in debt.  It’s time for Americans to clean up their own house before worrying about the messes in other nations–especially those wholly alien to American values.

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“MAN ON FIRE” REVISITED

In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Politics on May 31, 2013 at 8:21 pm

Yanira Maldonado has been released from a Mexican jail.

She and her husband, Gary, had traveled from Arizona to Mexico to attend a funeral.

They were returning to Arizona when their bus was stopped and searched.  Mexican soldiers claimed they found 12 pounds of marijuana under her seat.

Gary Maldonado believes the soldiers were seeking a bribe in return for letting his wife go free.

But then the Mormon mother of seven got an unusually lucky break.

On May 30, security camera footage in court showed Maldonado and her husband boarding a bus in Mexico–and carrying a purse, two blankets and two bottles of water.

Her defense attorney, Francisco Benitez, argued that the images proved that nothing they were carrying could hold the amount of marijuana that Maldonado was accused of smuggling.

The Mexican soldiers who arrested Maldonado didn’t appear in court. They were scheduled to appear on May 29  but didn’t show.

Yanira Maldonado said she didn’t think that she was directly targeted: “Someone smuggled those in there, and I probably sat in the wrong seat.”

To anyone who has seen “Man on Fire,” the 2004 Denzel Washington movie, the possibility that Maldonado was framed in an extortion attempt does not seem far-fetched.

In fact, it’s an everyday occurrence in Mexico, where corruption permeates every aspect of that country’s “war on drugs.”

In “Man on Fire,” Washington plays Marcus Creasy, a former Special Forces soldier hired to bodyguard Pita Ramos, the precocious nine-year-old daughter of wealthy parents.

But in a shootout with kidnappers, Creasy is gravely wounded and Pita (Dakota Fanning) is snatched.  Believing her murdered, Creasy sets out to avenge the child he has grown to love as his own.

He draws up a Who’s Who list of criminals engaged in serial kidnapping.  And, in doing so, he learns that the biggest criminal gang of all is the Mexican police.

It’s called “La Hermandad” (The Brotherhood).

Creasy snatches a corrupt cop and tortures him (by cutting off several fingers) into giving up the names of some of his top associates.  Then Creasy shoots him in the head and moves on to his next target.

Watching all this activity is the Mexican version of the FBI: The Agencia Federal de Investigacion (AFI).  Its director, Miguel Manzano, plans to use Creasy to unravel the kidnappers’ network.

While Creasy coolly disposes of one kidnapper or corrupt cop after another, Manzano and his agents keep close tabs on the action.  They will let Creasy do the dirty work and move in when the time is right.

After several grisly action sequences–including one where Creasy ambushes police with a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) launcher–Creasy learns the unthinkable: Pita is actually alive.

He kidnaps the brother of the leader of “La Hermandad”–Daniel Sanchez–and offers him a trade: You give me Pita and I’ll give you your brother.

Just as he has brutally traded on the love of others for the lives of their snatched relatives, so, too, must Sanchez now accept such an arrangement.

The trade-off goes down, with Pita rushing into the arms of her overjoyed mother, and with Creasy surrendering himself to members of the Agencia Federal de Investigacion.

Daniel Sánchez is later killed by Miguel Manzano during an AFI raid.

“Man on Fire” is an unrelentingly brutal portrait of a thoroughly corrupt nation.

  • Pita’s Mexican father sets up his own daughter for a bogus kidnapping to cheat the insurance company out of the money it’s prepared to pay for “kidnapping insurance.”
  • His attorney cheats the kidnappers of the ransome money they had demanded, intending to keep this for himself.
  • Two Mexican policemen make up the kidnapping gang that snatches Pita.
  • A member of the Mexican Attorney General’s office–who’s assigned to its anti-kidnapping squad, no less–is in on the plot to seize Pita.
  • Other members of the Mexican police routinely assist kidnapping gangs in return for a portion of the ransom money.
  • Even the Agencia Federal de Investigacion, while portrayed as incorruptable, llows Creasy to eliminate cops and kidnappers as he leads the AFI closer to the head of the criminal network.

One of the few moments of levity–no doubt unintended–in an otherwise humorless movie comes at the start of its end-credits: “A SPECIAL THANKS TO MEXICO CITY, A VERY SPECIAL PLACE.”

“I love Mexico,” Maldonado told reporters after safely arriving in Nogales, Ariz.  “My family is still there. So Mexico… it’s not Mexico’s fault. It’s a few people who you know did this to me,” she said.

Perhaps a more accurate analysis of the conditions prevailing in Mexico was given by William von Raab, the U.S. Commissioner of Customs from 1981 to 1989.

In 1986, testifying before a Senate committee on the extent of narcotics corruption in Mexico, Raab said: “There is an ingrained corruption in the Mexican law-enforcement establishment.

“Corruption is so pervasive, that one has to assume every Mexican official is corrupt unless proven otherwise.”

Raab’s assessment should be required reading for every American planning to vacation “down Mexico way.”

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MEXICO: A FAILED NATION-STATE

In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Politics on May 29, 2013 at 5:27 pm

In Nogales, Mexico, a judge is deciding whether to free an Arizona woman–accused of drug smuggling–from a Mexican jail.

On May 22, Mexican soldiers arrested Yanira Maldonado–mother of seven–as she and her husband, Gary, were returning to Arizona after attending a family funeral in Mexico.

During a search of their bus at a military checkpoint in the northwestern state of Sonora, soldiers asked everyone to get off.

At first, Gary Maldonado was told that marijuana had been found under his seat and found himself arrested.   After his father contacted the U.S. Consulate in Hermosillo, authorities said they were mistaken and released Gary.

Then they charged his wife, claiming they had found 12 pounds of marijuana under her bus seat.

Gary Maldonado said he believes Mexican soldiers at the checkpoint wanted a bribe.

It’s entirely likely that this is the case.

Anyone who reads Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, will certainly think so.

Written by Investigative Reporter Charles Bowden and published in 2010, Murder City provides a terrifying–and almost lethally depressing–view of what happens when a city–and a country–disintegrates.

Ciudad Juárez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border town, it now resembles a failed state. Notorious as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad or Mogadishu.

It’s so overwhelmed with the violence of drug trafficking that its leading citizens—police, politicians, even the drug lords—find it safer to live in El Paso.

Hundreds of millions of narco-dollars flow into Juárez each week, and the violence and corruption that follow yield 200 to 300 murders each year.

Among the casualties of that violence:

  • A reporter–who has dared to expose cartel-corrupted members of the Mexican Army–is forced to flee to the United States with his young son.
  • A beautiful woman who became the mistress of one drug cartel leader is gang-raped by members of a rival cartel.
  • A teenage killer for the cartels is now being hunted for having run afoul of his murderous bosses.

This is a city–and a country–where virtually no one is safe.

  • Mexican police pay big bribes to be assigned to narcotics enforcement squads.  The reason: Not to suppress the rampant drug trafficking but to enrich themselves by seizing and selling those narcotics.
  • Residents awaken at dawn to find bodies of the drug cartels’ latest victims dumped on streets–their hands, feet and mouths bound with silver and gray duct tape.
  • Mexican policewomen are often snatched off the streets and raped–by members of the Mexican Army.
  • Honest policemen–and even police chiefs–are routinely gunned down by cartel members.

If there is any one story in Murder City that symbolizes the total corruption of a society awash with drugs and the profits they produce, it is this:

A Mexican priest serves as confessor to drug lords.  They, in turn, believe their confessions to be safe, as they are supposed to be heard only by the priest and God.

But one of the drug lords wears a large gold crucifix, which the priest secretly covets.

So he turns from drug lord confessor to police informer–and the Mexican police raid the next drug lord gathering and confiscate a large quantity of narcotics.

The police don’t intend to turn in the seized narcotics.  Instead, they will sell these for their own profit.

And as a reward for his cooperation, the priest is given the large gold crucifix–which he blesses and consecrates to his God.

Who, exactly, is behind all these killings?

And why?

And who, if anyone, is in charge of Juárez–or Mexico?

Bowden states it is difficult to answer such questions because the Mexican press has been thoroughly corrupted by drug cartel monies or terrorized by drug cartel hit squads.  Reporters have been murdered–by the cartels and the army–for writing anything about killings, the army or the cartels.

The world of Murder City is a nightmarish one:

  • Members of drug cartels live like kings.
  • Their bribes and violence have corrupted all branches of the Mexican government, military and police forces.
  • Ordinary Mexicans live in grinding poverty, thanks to American factories paying starvation wages

When you leave its pages, you are grateful that you can safely put its evil behind you–unlike the residents of Juarez who remain trapped in its web.

Meanwhile, there is a lesson in this book–and in the case of Yanira Maldonado–for anyone with common sense to learn: Stay out of Mexico.

During the 1980s, when Americans were being routinely kidnapped in Beirut, still others–as if bent on suicide–were getting passpords to travel to Lebanon.

For residents of this failed nation-state called Mexico, it’s too late.  Such endemic corruption can never be fought successfully.

But for Americans who do not live there, the message should be clear: “Keep out.  Enter at your own risk.”