Sunday, December 5: The A.D.D. Detective
CRIME NEWS
by Leigh Lundin
News time again and this month it’s potluck or potpourri, depending upon your definition. As usual, the terms ‘alleged’ and ‘accused’ apply and people aren’t guilty until proved otherwise, your mileage may vary.
New York, New York. Marque Gumbs sounds like a French cartoon, but it’s the name of a guy who found a way to scam New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, according to authorities. The hospital paid him to purchase and install toner cartridges. He made a bit of pin money by ordering nearly four million dollars in extra cartridges and selling them on the street. What a pathetic criminal.
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Tammy Banovac wasn’t packing… well, actually she was packing, but not that sort of explosive. Thinking she would avoid the TSA grope pat-down, she showed up for her security check in black bra and panties.
It’s unclear when patting becomes petting, but her first pat-down took an hour, so long that she missed her flight. She returned the next day again in lingerie, and TSA again decided she needed another extensive pat-down.
Richmond, Indiana. Angela Boyd asked a church if they could hold a funeral for her 15-year-old daughter who’d been raped and killed by her father. The woman arrived with a cremation urn and a plastic collection jar. After stirring eulogies, Angela Boyd’s brother showed up and announced the daughter and father were alive and well in another state, far away from crazy Angela, and his sister lied. Not nice.
Paterson, New Jersey. Okay, big surprise (yawn), voter fraud in New Jersey, the state that votes for candidates in prison. Candidate Rigo Rodriguez won the election, then lost, then won it again, then lost the hard way and is going to jail with his wife, Lissette, and their campaign manager. In October, Superior Court Judge Thomas Brogan found no evidence of election impropriety (wink, wink), but Kenneth McDaniel appealed to the Attorney General who did. Rodriguez gives a whole new meaning to ‘councilman-at-large‘.
FLORIDA
Celebration, Florida. Disney designed and built the town of Celebration, between Orlando and Kissimmee. Until recently, the most notable crimes have been high prices and pink plastic flamingos appearing on lawns in the middle of the night– lawn decorations are forbidden by covenant. Unfortunately, Celebration’s experienced its first murder, in fact two deaths within days of each other. Sad, but perfect planning cannot account for human frailty.
Port Charlotte, Florida. Mother-of-the-month Robin Renee Broderick, took her 9-year-old son to a crack-cocaine deal, according to police reports. Really. Don’t ask me what she’s thinking– this is Florida.
Paisley, Florida. You may remember a year earlier Karen Fronek-Spencer allegedly gave her grandmother an Alice B Toklas ‘marijuana cookie’, sending granny on a trip– to the hospital. Don’t ask me what she’s thinking– this is Florida.
INTERNATIONAL
Cuernavaca, Mexico. Edgar, the 12-year-old American El Ponchis (‘The Cloak’) and his two sisters (las Chavalas, ‘The Girls’) were arrested on charges of being executioner and disposers for the Radilla drug cartel, executions that apparently included Degollar beheadings. In related news, Mexicans clamor to keep illegal ‘Merican immigrants out.
The Guy Who Hacked 100 US Government Computers
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. Gary McKinnon has Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, combining limited mental capacity with OCD. Gary got a bee in his bonnet that the US was hiding files on secret free-power sources and UFOs. Unfortunately, he hacked into something like a hundred US Army, Navy, Air Force, Defense Department, and NASA computers searching for such information. As the military and NASA readily acknowledge, he didn’t vandalize and he may not have stolen anything. Nonetheless, our government is insistent he be brought to the US and prosecuted, where he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Gary has great sympathy within his own country, the computer community, and those who understand such disorders as Gary’s. The two British Prime Ministers and the British ambassador asked Ambassador Hillary Clinton to seek US forbearance. According to WikiLeaks, the White House is not in a forbearing mood, angry with Scotland’s release of convicted Lockerbie bomber, Ali Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, subsequently welcomed home by Libya. This may not be the best time to ask, but it appears nothing will be gained by locking McKinnon away in a US prison.
And Finally …
How Not to Play with a Loaded Pistol
Naperville, Illinois. I don’t make the news; I just report it. You’re on your own with this story.
Real life sets a tough standard for fiction.
You could be surprised how often we catch people in parking lots.
You got to feel some sympathy for TSA but you also got to feel sympathy for passengers. Your body gets invaded either choice.
What a range of strange – crimes of every shade and hue.
Regarding the pistol-packin’ mama, what calibre?
Extremely interesting array of crimes!
However I take issue with the last one.
Couldn’t have been from Texas. First, she’d never be in a 2002 Chysler Minivan with a 9mm Sig Saur! Quite high gun taste for the wheels.
Second, Glocks or S@W big honker pickups with the very least an extended cab.
And never would a totin’ mommie leave her kids in a motel to do that.
I’ll just bet you she was from Florida.
Do you know her?
LOL
Just messin’ with you (on the last part anyway).
You have shown again that people will always find a way to do something crazy.
I wonder why the blonde returned for another pat down.
Instead of putting the guy from Scotland in jail, the U. S. should hire him to hack China’s computers.
Louis, your suggestions are brilliant.
alisa, good points. If I hadn’t read Illinois, I’d have guessed Florida myself.
ABA (laughing), I’m not sure and I don’t think it wise to answer.
ev, several friends used to teach for Florida Tech Centers (adult ed) and I gather the security guards had difficulty getting some to depart… including the occasional teacher.
My short version of Lockerbie, a fuller account is at adifferentviewonlockerbie.blogspot.com holds that that atrocity was the product a deal between the US and Iran to give the latter country its one and one only revenge for the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus by the Vincennes. It gave Iran its traditional qesas revenge and ensured that HW Bush was smoothly elected as President. Had the deal not been done, the Iranians might well have launched their threatened attack on between 5 and 12 US aircraft, for the iranians never regarded the downing of IR-655 as other than deliberate, and were deeply offended by the response of HW Bush at the UN, and the award of medals to the crew of the ship. The CIA and Pasdaran became bedfellos in crime, reprising the long story of Iran-contra.
As a qesas revenge it had to be carried out by a kinsman of the deceased, and so an Iranian named Behbehani was sent to London to break into T3 at Heathrow and place an imitation of a type of device used by the PFLP GC. (The timing of the Lockerbie bomb exactly copies a such a device.) But it could not be such a an actual PFLP GC device as Iran would not co-operate with an Arabic group across the Sunni/Shia divide. But in the need to produce a cover up story, a PFLP GC attribution was considred by the CIA. A claim that in actuality Iran had paid the PFLP to blow up an American plane for them, would be too remote and tenuous to prove.
But with the 1st Gulf War on the horizon, the PFLP GC under Syrian protection became sacrosanct and so the ludicrous claim against Libya was dreamt up.