Orlando Muslim Terrorist, Interviewed By FBI Three Times, Linked To Domestic Suicide Bomber

[From article]
The dead Orlando terrorist who murdered at least 49 people at an Orlando nightclub was investigated by the FBI for terror links twice - and was linked to American suicide bomber Moner Abu Salha.
Agents did not charge Omar Mateen on both occasions and concluded he 'only had minimal contact' with Florida man Abu Salha who blew himself up for the Al Nusra Front in Syria 2014.
Mateen was also investigated by the FBI for making 'inflammatory remarks' to his colleagues alleging that he had terrorist ties – but again no further action was taken.
He kept his job with a global security firm, G4S, and was able to legally buy guns that were used in the worst mass shooting in American history that killed 49 and injured 53 others inside the Orlando gay nightclub.
Mateen called 911 to pledge allegiance to ISIS during the massacre and also praised the Boston bombers.
It is also claimed that Mateen had connections with a former U.S. Marine and undercover FBI agent turned radical Muslim cleric who was released from jail last year despite warnings that he was recruiting potential terrorists.

[. . .]
Marcus Dwayne Robertson, also known as Abu Taubah, managed to convert 36 people to his poisonous version of Islam during his four years in jail, and was considered so dangerous that he was kept shackled with his own security detail away from other inmates.
Mateen was a member of the Timbuktu Seminary, an educational website run by Robertson that police believe is used to dispense his radical teachings, sources told Fox News.
Robertson and several associates were rounded up for questioning early Sunday, sources added.
After serving as a Marine for six years, Robertson went on to become a bank robber, before turning FBI informant after his arrest in exchange for a short prison sentence.
He was dismissed by the FBI in 2007 after allegedly attacking his CIA handler, and then began preaching Islamic extremism.
Thrown in jail for tax fraud back in 2011, prosecutors attempted to have ten years added to his sentence last year after discovering documents preaching terror among his possessions. However, a judge freed him. 

[. . .]
An FBI spokesman said at a press conference later in the day that Mateen purchased multiple guns in the past few days.
The spokesman said that the investigations by the FBI were closed and that's why the 29-year-old gunman was able to purchase the weapons.
The federal agency said Mateen was first interviewed in 2013 after he made 'inflammatory remarks' to a colleague.
'The FBI first became aware of Mateen in 2013 as he made inflammatory comments to coworkers, alleging possible terrorist ties,' Ron Hopper an FBI special agent said during a press conference.
'The FBI thoroughly investigated the matter including interviews of witnesses, physical surveillance and records checks.
'In the course of the investigation, Mateen was interviewed twice.
'Ultimately we were unable to verify the substance of his comments, and the investigation was closed.'
In 2014, Mateen came to the FBI's attention again and agents interviewed him about a potential connection he may have had with American suicide bomber Moner Abu Salha, who lived about 30 minutes away in Vero Beach, Florida.



'We determined that contact was minimal and didn't to constitute a substantive relationship or threat at that that time,' Hopper said.
In addition, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said that Mateen purchased two weapons legally within the last week.
'He is not a prohibitive person so he can legally walk into a gun dealership,' the representative from the ATF said. 'He did so within the last week or so.'[. . .]
Mateen, a Muslim and father to a three-year-old son, was born in 1986 in New York and married Sitora Alisherzoda Yusufiy, who was born in Uzbekistan, in 2009.
Mateen's father, Seddique Mateen, told NBC News: 'We were in Downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music. And he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry.
'They were kissing each other and touching each other and he said, 'Look at that. In front of my son they are doing that'. And then we were in the men's bathroom and men were kissing each other.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3637797/Orlando-gay-club-shooter-Omar-Mateen-investigated-TWICE-FBI.html

ISIS killer was linked to American suicide bomber and had been interviewed by the FBI THREE times
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
The FBI named Orlando gay club shooter Omar Mateen, 29, a person of interest in 2013 and again in 2014
Investigation was first opened in 2013 when he made 'inflammatory remarks' to colleagues alleging possible terrorist ties
FBI interviewed witnesses, looked at physical surveillance and records checks and also interviewed him twice, but closed investigation
Second investigation was opened to see if he had ties to American suicide bomber Moner Abu Salha, but no links were found and case was closed
Sources say Mateen also used website Timbuktu Seminary, run by radical Islamic cleric Marcus Dwayne Robertson, also known as Abu Taubah
He purchased weapons used in the shooting, which killed 49 people, legally within the last week
FBI says Mateen may have 'leanings to radical Islamic terrorism' and it is being investigated as 'an act of terrorism'
Mateen's father claims the attack has 'nothing to do with religion'
He said his son became angry after seeing two men kiss in public
See more of the latest news on the Orlando shooting at Pulse gay club
By MATT HUNTER FOR MAILONLINE and JENNY STANTON and REGINA F. GRAHAM and ANNETA KONSTANTINIDES and JOSE LAMBIET IN FLORIDA and MARTIN GOULD IN PORT ST. LUCIE, FLORIDA and LOUISE BOYLE IN ORLANDO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 11:47 EST, 12 June 2016 | UPDATED: 09:58 EST, 13 June 2016

NYPD Officer Under Investigation Kills Himself

[From article]

An NYPD commander who was grilled by the FBI and had boxes of records seized by Internal Affairs cops amid a widening corruption probe put a gun to his head and killed himself on Friday, sources said.
Inspector Michael Ameri, 44, head of the Highway District, “felt his career was in jeopardy” as the feds and IAB eyed unauthorized escorts for members of the Orthodox Jewish community, the sources said.
“They went to his stationhouse [Thursday] to get the escort logs. After that, someone called him,” a law enforcement said, referring to the unit’s facility on Grand Central Parkway in Queens.
IAB cops took two years worth of police escort files in the surprise raid.
“He was very distraught about the visit. He felt his career was in jeopardy and he couldn’t deal with the stress and the not knowing when everything was going to come to a head,” said another source.
Ameri — the divorced father of a teenaged son — was found dead in his department-issued black Ford Taurus at 12:42 p.m. by Suffolk County homicide cops alongside Bergen Point Golf Course in West Babylon, about four miles from his house, sources said.
Witnesses told police Ameri’s car had been parked on the southbound shoulder of the road for more than 5 hours before his body was found inside.
Investigators are examining whether cops provided police escorts for funerals and other events in exchange for cash and gifts — including from businessman Jona Rechnitz and Jeremy Reichberg.
[. . .]



One of Ameri’s closest friends in the Highway District put in his retirement papers on Wednesday, the same day the escort records were removed, sources said.
A source said Ameri was so spooked by the probe that he distanced himself from the Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community.

[. . .]
Lichtenstein, a Borough Park Shomrim patrol leader, was arrested by the feds on April 17 on charges he paid off cops for the gun permits.
[. . .]
Ameri was named commanding officer of the patrol unit, which investigates serious accidents, in May 2014.
Previously, he was commanding officer of the 78th Precinct in Park Slope, where he was friendly with Mayor de Blasio, who lived in the neighborhood.
He was considered a key player in implementing de Blasio’s Vision Zero program to reduce traffic deaths.
[. . .]
Investigators are looking at the escort allegations along with other potential corruption, including cops taking cash for expediting gun permits and getting luxe perks such as a flight so Las Vegas — with a hooker on board — from the Rechnitz and Reichberg.
Two NYPD cops suddenly retired from the gun-licensing division to start a business helping people get pistol permits — at the same time Lichtenstein was allegedly bribing officers in that Brooklyn unit.
Another cop was stripped of his gun and badge after he tried to retire last month — prompting his suspension because he was still a target of the federal corruption probe.

http://nypost.com/2016/05/13/cop-questioned-in-nypd-corruption-probe-kills-himself/

Cop questioned in NYPD corruption probe kills himself at golf course
By Jamie Schram, Danika Fears and Bob Fredericks
New York Post

May 13, 2016 | 3:04pm | Updated

New York City Mayor Investigated By Four Agencies For Corruption

Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney SDNY

[From article]
At least five investigations are underway concerning corruption in or around New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. So far, the investigations have revealed that two members of the mayor’s inaugural committee gave lavish gifts to top NYPD brass in exchange for favors, including the opportunity to hang around in police circles and get speedy access to gun permits. A lobbyist with close ties to de Blasio was involved in a shady real estate deal that leveraged city approval to make millions for inside investors. Next, it emerged that the mayor’s closest advisors had asked major donors to funnel money through county political committees to Democratic candidates for state senate in 2014. This kind of fundraising is against the law if the donations are coordinated. Investigators are also looking into coordination between the mayor’s 2013 campaign, his political nonprofit organization the Campaign for One New York, and the operations of anti-horse-carriage group NYCLASS, which was organized as an independent campaign group. Finally, authorities are examining allegations that “straw donors” contributed large sums to de Blasio’s mayoral campaign.
A range of entities are investigating these overlapping charges, including the office of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance; the New York State Board of Elections; New York State’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE); and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, among others. In sum, every law enforcement agency with oversight over New York City government is asserting shared jurisdiction and examining some piece of what is shaping up to be one of the largest municipal political scandals in history.



In response, Mayor de Blasio has taken a page from his former boss Hillary Clinton’s playbook and claimed that the whole thing is a frame-up orchestrated by his political enemies. [. . .] The implication is that Governor Andrew Cuomo—a fellow Democrat but otherwise no friend of de Blasio’s—is directing JCOPE’s probe. JCOPE is a legally constituted state commission empowered to investigate matters pertaining to ethics and lobbying; no provision exists by which officials can opt out of its investigations. And the idea that Bharara is taking his marching orders from Albany is ludicrous: there is every reason to assume that Cuomo himself may be in Bharara’s sights.
De Blasio suggests that he has been targeted on ideological grounds, because he has spoken so much truth to power. [. . .] Going further to burnish his revolutionary credentials and solidify his support among African-American voters, de Blasio praised the election of Sadiq Khan (“this ray of light”) as mayor of London. “A lot of people in this room have studied history and know something about colonialism and imperialism,” he said. “How wonderful—yes, a bit ironic—but more important a statement of progress that the place that used to be the capital of colonialism has elected a Muslim man as its mayor.”
In radio interviews, de Blasio has complained about unfair double standards. [. . .] a lot of people are doing a lot worse and not getting much examination.”
[. . .]



Perhaps trying to rally progressives and divert attention from his proliferating scandals, de Blasio renewed calls for a boycott of fast-food restaurant Chick-Fil-A, whose owner reportedly opposes same-sex marriage. [. . .] Several Chick-Fil-A franchises operate in Manhattan, and more are scheduled to open; protests were originally organized against the restaurant in New York City in 2012, prior to its expansion here.
[. . .]



As investigations and allegations of the mayor’s corruption continue to mount, expect him to continue blaming others, making vainglorious noises about his commitment to righteousness, and practicing clumsy legerdemain to divert attention from his problems. It has always been clear that de Blasio is not an effective manager of the city; what’s also becoming apparent is that he is not even good at managing his own image.

http://city-journal.org/html/deflecting-de-blasio-14438.html

Deflecting with De Blasio
The progressive New York City mayor tries to draw attention away from his administration’s mounting scandals.
Seth Barron
May 9, 2016

* * *



[From article]
This was how the mayor welcomed them on Monday: “I’m certainly not going to patronize them and I wouldn’t urge any other New Yorker to patronize them.”
Chick-Fil-A will survive. But as long as de Blasio’s trashing eateries in order to stroke special interests — common sense be damned — why won’t he take on other restaurants which might offend certain ethnic and gender sensitivities?
Italian-American joints often hang photos of Italian mobster-playing actors such as Marlon Brando and James Gandolfini, and even of real-life murderer John Gotti. The stereotype-promoting pictures at Capri on Mulberry Street left this Italian-American mortally wounded. The attitude of the mayor, my fellow paisano? Omerta.
You’d at least think a restaurant which posed a clear and present danger to public safety might draw his ire. But when the Carnegie Deli reopened recently after a 10-month shutdown, he cheerily tweeted a celebratory photo of a pastrami sandwich.
Never mind that Carnegie Deli was closed by city officials for illegally siphoning gas — the same kind of stunt which blew up an East Village building last year, killing two people and injuring 19.
But de Blasio prefers to pick and choose only those eatery beefs that satisfy his appetite for sucking up.

http://nypost.com/2016/05/08/de-blasios-chick-fil-a-boycott-is-a-clucking-travesty/

De Blasio’s Chick-Fil-A boycott is a clucking travesty
By Steve Cuozzo
May 8, 2016 | 11:21am

New York Post

* * *

http://nypost.com/2016/05/06/de-blasio-blames-cuomo-for-state-ethics-probe/

De Blasio says ethics probe is a witch hunt led by Cuomo
By Yoav Gonen, Kirstan Conley and Danika Fears
New York Post
May 6, 2016 | 7:32pm

New York State Exposing Substantial Corruption

State House of New York, Albany

Curious, isn't it, that this journalist does not mention journalists as part of the solution to corruption. Nor does he see them as a part of the problem. How are journalists not as corrupt as the politicians they fail to hold accountable? And what about all of the Inspectors General, high paid lawyers whose mission is to expose and to curb corruption? What are they doing? Is the New York system of overdue exposure of corruption better than how it is done in Massachusetts, where they never expose or investigate corruption? 

[From article]
From City Hall to Albany, the sewer runneth over. It is no longer adequate to talk of a few bad apples. We are suffering through a bumper crop of rottenness.
In normal times, the fall of Sheldon Silver, sentenced yesterday to 12 years in federal prison, would be drama enough. Yet the former Democratic leader of the Assembly is joined in infamy by Dean Skelos, the former Republican leader of the state Senate, whose sentencing comes up next week on the con- man calendar.
The comeuppance of the bosses of both legislative houses and both parties in the same year is, as far as I can tell, unprecedented in modern times. Even the legendary thieves of Tammany tended to leave space between dramatic downfalls.
[. . .]



Mayor Bill de Blasio is in a serious jam, as both state and federal prosecutors have hisfundraising-and-favors operation in their cross hairs. Another sordid chapter would be written if the mayor himself is hit with criminal charges.
Then there’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who looked as if he had escaped a federal probe only to see a close friend and former aide suddenly land in very hot water about money paid to him by companies with state business. There’s no telling where the case will lead.
How did all this happen? How did New York become such a swirling cesspool?
For answers, it is fitting that we turn to a cartoon character. It was Pogo who declared, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
[. . .]
First, we have developed the very bad habit of electing people of low moral character.
Having foolishly decided that integrity is not a necessary virtue in politics, we are reaping the results. If we don’t care about integrity, why should the pols?
The Legislature is especially a comfort zone for crooks. The dozens of lawmakers hauled out in handcuffs in recent years would make a bipartisan diversity specialist proud.
Democrats and Republicans, blacks, whites and Latinos, upstate and down, the Convicts Club doesn’t discriminate. Get caught stealing and you’re admitted.
Second, this deregulation of public morals is not the whole story. The other part is greed — ours.
[. . .]
Corruption is not cheap; it affects everybody and raises the cost of living and working in New York, not to mention the cost of cynicism.
How to clean up the stables? By all means, we should support tougher ethics laws and stiffer penalties for those who break them. Politicians who violate their offices must not be rewarded with taxpayer-funded pensions. And it’s time that Albany try term limits, which would prevent the accumulation of the vast power that Silver and Skelos abused.
Yet there already are sensible laws on the books, and they’re not proving to be much of a deterrent. So another, better law will not be a silver bullet.
Vigilance from voters, and self-discipline, is the answer. We have to make it clear that integrity is mandatory, and prove we mean it by demanding less from government by way of handouts.
Shrinking the size of government is the best way to shrink its power, and the corruption of that power. Instead of looking for endless favors, what if we focused on ending government’s favor bank?
What if we elected people who promised not only integrity, but also modesty about the offices they seek? What if we said we don’t expect bureaucrats to solve all of life’s problems?
In that case, less government would be more. More honest and more worthy of our trust.
Either way, we get the government we deserve.

http://nypost.com/2016/05/04/ny-is-a-corruption-filled-cesspool-and-we-have-ourselves-to-blame/

NY is a corruption-filled cesspool — and we have ourselves to blame
By Michael Goodwin
New York Post
May 4, 2016 | 12:02am

Canadian Mother Investigated For Allowing Her Children to Play Unsupervised in Her Back Yard

[From article]
Apparently, Canadian child services agencies aren't any better than their American counterparts.
A Winnipeg mother received the surprise of her life when a child services agent showed up at her front door telling her they had received a complaint of "unsupervised" children on her property.
The mother was under scrutinty because she let her three children play alone in their fenced in backyard.
[. . .]



Children's services agencies have been under fire for allowing children to live in homes where they are beaten and abused. So the answer is to swoop in and investigate anyone who doesn't sit on their children 24 hours a day?
We are seeing this kind of draconian reaction from government agencies more and more. Parents are arrested for letting their children walk home from school or play in a park by themselves. Is it any wonder by the time they get to college they need "Safe Spaces"?
The child service agencies have a a tough job. But the answer won't be found in badgering parents who want to teach their children to be independent. There might be no more anguishing or important job for parents than learning how to let go of their kids and allow them to discover who they are. This kind of "supervised" independence should be encouraged, not snuffed out.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/04/canadian_mom_investigated_for_letting_her_children_play_alone_in_backyard.html

April 24, 2016
Canadian mom investigated for letting her children play alone in backyard
By Rick Moran

Hillary Clinton Email Investigation Proceeds Via Attorney General

[From article]
Interviewed by Chris Wallace of Fox News (transcript here, video embedded below), President Obama pulled down the blindfold on Lady Justice and signaled that there was no crime at all when Hillary Clinton set up an unsecured private server and left classified information vulnerable to hacking by the world’s intelligence services.  He also created a new category of classification: “top secret top secret” as opposed to mere “top secret,” which he averred to Chris Wallace might be information that could be gleaned from public sources. All in all, it was a remarkable performance, in which the president of the United States in effect told the Justice Department not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.  There was plenty of boilerplate contending that he was not doing so:
[. . .]
But the president of the United States is on record that this is piddling stuff. Loretta Lynch, head of the Justice Department, serves at his pleasure. In a blatant example of "whom are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?," he claims:
"I can guarantee ... I can guarantee that not because I give Attorney General [Loretta] Lynch a directive, that is institutionally how we have always operated," Obama said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. "I do not talk to the Attorney General about pending investigations. I do not talk to FBI directors about pending investigations. We have a strict line and always have maintained it. I guarantee it."
"I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI, not just in this case but in any case --.period," he added. "Nobody gets treated differently when it comes to the Justice Department because nobody is above the law."
Nope. The fix is in. If the FBI makes a criminal referral, and Lynch declines to prosecute, we are headed for a crisis that will echo Watergate.
Side note: The left has a new tactic for minimizing misdeeds that are inconvenient for it to confront. Naming the issue once is now a way of trivializing it. Only when repeated is it real. Thus, we need to worry about only “top secret top secret” or, as Whoopi Goldberg put it, “rape rape.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/04/obama_tells_loretta_lynch_to_not_prosecute_hillary_on_classified_email_crimes.html

April 11, 2016
Obama tells Loretta Lynch not to prosecute Hillary on classified email crimes
By Thomas Lifson

https://youtu.be/OSvRXs6iQbc

Video of the complete interview: [about 15 minutes]

Brief History of NYPD Corruption

In New York City they used to empanel a commission every twenty years. Mollen was over twenty three years ago. In Massachusetts they never investigate the police or the FBI.

[From article]
[Very long first sentence]
With crazy homeless people randomly smashing, slashing, and stabbing passersby, graffiti spreading across the city with no one bothering to clean it, racial tensions stoked by race hustlers in Gracie Mansion, welfare rolls mushrooming, a reborn pay-to-play political culture, school discipline so dead that public education fails more than ever, police demoralized by a mayor who not only doesn’t have their back but publicly slanders them, while the city council weakens the quality-of-life policing tools that brought New York back to life under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, you have to wonder if any element that created the urban dystopia of Mayors John Lindsay, Abe Beame, and David Dinkins is still missing. And sure enough, now even police corruption is back. With five top cops recently demoted, and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton telling the New York Post that investigations by his Internal Affairs Bureau and the FBI are turning up evidence that stinks as foully as that uncovered by the 1970s Knapp Commission investigation into corrupt cops, but that he can’t talk about it while the probe continues, you can only imagine what’s about to hit the fan. All we need now is a brush with municipal bankruptcy and a president who responds by telling New York to drop dead, as the Daily News’s famous 1975 headline put it, and the recurring nightmare will be complete.
[. . .]
let’s recall what the commission headed by Whitman Knapp, a lawyer, ex-prosecutor, and later a federal judge, turned up, in hearings so riveting in 1971 and ’72
[. . .]



There were “grass-eating” corrupt cops, small fry who took a monthly $5 or $10, adding up to $6.2 million a year citywide, from bodega owners to overlook Sunday beer sales or $2,000 annually from individual liquor store owners to let customers double park while they ran in for a bottle; and “meat eaters,” who stole drugs from dope dealers or took big bribes to suppress evidence of felonies, including a $50,000 payoff to destroy wiretap tapes nailing a heroin kingpin. We heard of two dope-addict police informers who would steal goods to order for cops in exchange for drugs that the officers purloined from the NYPD evidence room. We heard from a detective who took fat payoffs from East Side brothel boss Xaviera Hollander, the Happy Hooker, in exchange for warning her when a police raid was imminent, that corruption was systemic—with entire precincts, from the captain on down, sharing a monthly “pad” of payments from numbers racketeers, totaling up to $15 million a year, to look the other way while they publicly took bets. At least one cop thought that the deal included arresting competing gamblers, so that the NYPD’s function wasn’t so much to prevent crime as to license it, as the New York Times put it when the scandal first broke. And we learned that two police whistleblowers, Frank Serpico and David Durks, couldn’t stir Mayor Lindsay’s Investigation Department chief or one of his deputy mayors to take action to clean up the mess. When Serpico complained about corruption he had seen to his captain, the commander replied that he could go to the commissioner, and “by the time this thing is through, you’ll be found floating in the East River, face down. Or you can just forget about the whole thing.” But Serpico didn’t forget it and got shot in the head, non-fatally, in a drug bust some thought a set-up by his fellow cops.
[. . .]
It wasn’t just that minority communities knew, in those pre-Compstat days, that the NYPD didn’t care about crime in their neighborhoods. They saw that not only were the police not part of the solution, but they were also a key part of the problem.
[. . .]



in hearings chaired by ex-judge Milton Mollen in 1992 and 1993. “Today’s corruption is not the corruption of Knapp Commission days,” the Mollen Commission’s report noted. “Corruption then was largely a corruption of accommodation, of criminals and police officers giving and taking bribes, buying and selling protection. . . . Today’s corruption is characterized by brutality, theft, abuse of authority and active police criminality.” Unlike the old corruption, which was systemic and infected the entire NYPD, the new corruption festered in only a few precincts and involved only a limited number of cops. Nevertheless, declared the commission, “From the top brass down to local precinct commanders and supervisors, there was a pervasive belief that uncovering serious corruption would harm careers and the reputation of the department.”
[. . .]

 

Michael Dowd—whom the New York Post later headlined as THE DIRTIEST COP EVER—tells of being sent in 1984 to protect a woman from her abusive husband while she got her clothes from her apartment. After the woman left, Dowd and his partner, Chickie, found that the husband had a huge bag of marijuana, two guns, and perhaps $20,000 in stacks of bills. So they helped themselves to $8,000, telling the dreadlock-coifed husband that it was his lucky day that nothing worse was happening. And so began Dowd’s criminal career, two years after graduation from the Police Academy, where the chief lessons he learned were “cover your ass” and that a good cop is one “who would never give up another cop.”
[. . .]



In November 1986, a scandal in the 77th Precinct in north Brooklyn—where 12 cops, including a sergeant, had been arrested and a 13th had killed himself—scared Chickie straight. The Seven-Seven cops had made a practice of calling in fake 911 reports of robberies in progress at a specific address, so that they could smash into the premises with axes and sledgehammers borrowed from the neighboring firehouse and steal whatever valuables they could find, including drugs and loaded guns, which they sold to pushers. So Dowd inducted his new partner, Kenny Eurell, into his criminal enterprise, mainly providing protection for a Dominican drug lord for $8,000 a week. When the kingpin underpaid him, Dowd raided his business with extra zeal, until the drug boss put out a contract on his life—called off after Dowd confronted him and offered to duel at 20 paces, then and there. A yet bigger drug lord, who sold Colombian cocaine out of a string of bodegas, then hired the pair for $24,000 down and $8,000 a week to warn him of impending raids, harass his competitors, and guard his shipments. “We were like their Brinks,” said Dowd. “They had a police escort.”
[. . .]

 

A Mollen Commission member asked Dowd if he considered himself an NYPD cop or a drug trafficker. “Both,” Dowd replied, explaining in a later interview, “It wasn’t like you were hurting people. You were hurting fucking drug dealers.”
[. . .]

 

Nevertheless, the squalid scandal he revealed at the 30th Precinct in West Harlem—the Dirty Thirty—was emphatically real. The corrupt cops—called Nannery’s Raiders for the sergeant who supervised them and ultimately became their crime boss—adopted the Seven-Seven’s tactic of making fake 911 calls about robberies in progress at dope dealers’ apartments, which they would batter open to steal cash and drugs to sell at half-price out of the police station itself. Like Dowd, they took protection money from drug kingpins, anywhere from $600 to $1,000 a week.
http://city-journal.org/html/nypd-blues-14400.html

NYPD Blues How big is the impending scandal?
Myron Magnet
April 17, 2016

Science Journalism, A Human Activity

Thorough discussion of problem areas of science reporting. Never mentioned is the lucrative system of social control sans due process protections, psychiatry.

[From article]
Last May, when This American Life acknowledged that it had run a 23-minute-long segment premised on a fraudulent scientific study, America's most respected radio journalists did something strange: They declined to apologize for the error. "Our original story was based on what was known at the time," host Ira Glass explained in a blog post. "Obviously the facts have changed."
It was a funny admission. Journalists typically don't say that "facts change"; it is a journalist's job to define and publicize facts. When a reporter gets hoodwinked by a source, she does not imply that something in the fabric of reality has shifted. She explains that she was tricked.
With science coverage, though, the situation seems to be different—which is why Glass' remark, while unusually blunt, wasn't actually wrong.
This American Life had been deceived by a political science researcher at the University of California–Los Angeles, Michael LaCour. His paper, based on falsified data, had slipped past peer review and landed in the pages of Science, the country's most prestigious scientific journal. This American Life declined to comment for this article, explaining that they might return to the incident in a future episode. But it's not hard to read the implicit what-could-we-do? shrug in Glass' statement. Science had spoken. Science had changed its mind. "Obviously the facts have changed."
The LaCour study, which focused on canvassers' ability to change voters' minds, was an especially subtle piece of fraud. It was hard to catch. LaCour had produced a result that was unusual, dramatic, optimistic, and, as Glass noted during the episode, different from 900 other similar papers that LaCour's colleagues had reviewed. No journalists—as far as I can tell—went looking for aberrations; in the end, a couple of graduate students caught him after they tried to replicate his methods.
As various commentators have observed, there's probably no field of journalism that's less skeptical, less critical, less given to investigative work, and less independent of its sources than science reporting. At even the most respected publications, science journalists tend to position themselves as translators, churning the technical language of scientific papers into summaries that are accessible to the public. The assumption is that the source text they're translating—the original scientific research—comes to them as unimpeachable fact.
There is little about the scientific method that supports these broadly accepted journalistic assumptions. Science is messy, and scientists are imperfect. And as scientific communities deal with rising retraction rates, a reproducibility crisis, continued influence from industry liaisons, new pressures on graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, a shaky peer review system, and a changing publication landscape, the need for watchdogs is stronger than ever.
[. . .]
In the United States, science reporting took its shape shortly after World War I, when the newspaper magnate Edward Scripps founded Science Service, a non-profit wire service that would deliver science coverage to American newspapers.
[. . .]



Today, most science coverage still follows a press release model. Articles focus on individual studies, as they come out. Reporters rarely return to research years down the line. Articles provide little context or criticism, and they usually frame the story within a larger narrative of human progress.
Deepening the resemblance to PR, scientific journals often provide embargoed versions of papers to select journalists ahead of publication. Among other things, that means that the journals control which outlets cover their research first.
Today, science journalists’ motivations "align very nicely with what the scientists themselves want, which is publicity for their work," says Charles Seife, a veteran science reporter and a professor in New York University's Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. "This alignment creates this—almostcollusion, that might even be unethical in other branches of journalism." In short, more than other fields, science journalists see themselves as working in partnership with their sources.
[. . .]
The publicity-journalism culture has vulnerabilities. In 2014, John Bohannon, a writer for Science magazine, and Gunter Frank, a German clinician, set out to demonstrate the low standards of science reporting by running a flashy study with awful methods, and then waiting to see who would cover it. Their study purported to show that chocolate aided weight loss. The methods failed to meet even the most basic standards of good nutrition research—they had a sample size of 15—but Bohannon and Frank found a for-profit journal willing to publish their findings. Then they sent out a press release. A number of publications, includingShape magazine and Europe's largest daily newspaper, Bild, published the results. A year after Bohannon revealed that the study was a hoax, only one of those publications has retracted their coverage, he says.
[. . .]
Covering science isn't the same as covering, say, politics, of course. Politicians are competing for a limited pool of resources. They're playing zero-sum games, and they have strong incentives to conceal and deceive. Scientists, at least in theory, have incentives that are aligned with those of journalists, and of the public. We all want to learn more about the universe. It's a beautiful goal.
[. . .]
But approaching science as an exercise in purity, divorced from other incentives, Seife says, "ignores the fact that science doesn't work perfectly, and people are humans. Science has politics. Science has money. Science has scandals. As with every other human endeavor where people gain power, prestige, or status through what they do, there's going to be cheating, and there are going be distortions, and there are going to be failures."
[. . .]
Here's the uncomfortable side of this story: A substantial portion—maybe the majority—of published scientific assertions are false.
In rare cases, that's because of fraud or a serious error. The number of scientific papers retracted each year has increased by a factor of 10 since 2001.
But even accepted research methods, performed correctly, can yield false results. By nature, science is difficult, messy, and slow. The ways that researchers frame questions, process data, and choose which findings to publish can all favor results that are statistical aberrations—not reflections of physical reality. "There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false," wrote Stanford Medical School professor John Ioannidis in a widely cited 2005 paper.
Social psychology is in the midst of a reproducibility crisis. Many landmark experiments don't hold up under replication. In general, the peer review process is supposed to control for rigor, but it's an imperfect tool. "Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public perception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth," wrote a former Nature editor in that journal in 2006.
At the same time, the conditions in which research takes place can incentivize scientists to cheat, to do sloppy research, or to exaggerate the significance of results. Simply put, science does have politics. There's intense competition for funding, for faculty jobs, and for less tangible kinds of prestige.



Meanwhile, corporations spend small fortunes trying to influence academic researchers. In recent years, there has been a profusion of for-profit journals that either don't use peer-review or have a fake peer-review process, making it harder to establish the reliability of sources.
That's an uncomfortable image of the scientific process—uncomfortable because it's so out of step with popular presentations of scientific authority. Science magazines and sections rarely cover these issues.
Science reporters don't usually look at research funding, nor do they critically evaluate the quality of the studies that they cover. Often, they lack the time or technical knowledge to dig into stories. In other cases, they may just be worried about challenging expert authority.
All communities require watchdogs though. And while they are rare, promising models of investigative science journalism do exist.
[. . .]
After an investigation that cast doubt on the effectiveness of the antiviral drug Tamiflu, the BMJ appointed its first investigations editor, Deborah Cohen, who had trained as a doctor before moving to journalism. In her role at the BMJ, she dug into the research-backed claims of sports drink makers, and she investigated the safety of a popular diabetes drug. To demonstrate how flimsy the British government's regulation of new surgical implants had become, Cohen created a fake company, with a fake hip implant, and got it approved for medical use in the European Union.
[. . .]
At Retraction Watch, started in 2010, Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus track retracted papers across disciplines. Oransky describes "this ecosystem that ... likes to paint the shiny, happy, new, novel, amazing breakthrough narrative onto everything. And retractions don't fit into that narrative, because they're about when things go wrong. And nobody likes admitting it."
[. . .]



Take the use of anonymous sources. In order to check the quality of new studies, diligent science reporters will call up other people in the field and ask for their opinions on the research. In small, close-knit scientific communities, though, people have strong incentives to speak positively about their colleagues' work. After all, the person you criticize in the New York Times today may be peer-reviewing a submission of yours tomorrow.
[. . .]
then there's the money. Science journalism usually focuses on the end result, and almost never refers to finances. But funding decisions affect everything from study design to the shape of entire research programs. Often, troubling data is sitting out in the open. Charles Seife, the NYU professor, has uncovered malfeasance by cross-referencing lists of federal grant recipients with lists of doctors who receive money from drug companies.
[. . .]
And then there's the money. Science journalism usually focuses on the end result, and almost never refers to finances. But funding decisions affect everything from study design to the shape of entire research programs. Often, troubling data is sitting out in the open. Charles Seife, the NYU professor, has uncovered malfeasance by cross-referencing lists of federal grant recipients with lists of doctors who receive money from drug companies.
[. . .]
Does an institution's strength come from a sense of omniscience? Or does it come from acknowledging its faults, and showing that it can address them, even as it produces useful results?
"I think that science is robust enough of a worldview and a method for truth-finding that you can beat it up as much as you want. It's going to come out just fine," Bohannon says. "You don't have to tiptoe around that thing."

http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/journalists-should-hold-scientists-accountable

How Journalists Can Help Hold Scientists Accountable
Amid the so-called replication crisis, could better investigative reporting be the answer? Maybe it’s time for journalists and scientists to work more closely together.
MICHAEL SCHULSON

MAR 22, 2016

Long Island, NY Greedy Cousins Murder Uncle. Police Incompetenece, or Intentional Negligence

John Frankowski Jr. and Kim Delaney (left) claim their cousin Jonathan Roman (top right) killed their father, John S. Frankowski Sr. (bottom right), at the request of their aunts.Photo: Edmund J. Coppa ; AP

[From article]
A middle-aged momma’s boy who was sentenced to 18 years to life behind bars Monday for murdering his uncle was actually the puppet of a greedy family “cabal,” a Long Island lawsuit charges.
The children of victim John S. Frankowski, Sr. claim in the civil suit that their cousin, convicted killer Jonathan Roman, 44, was acting at the direction of his mom Sandra Roman and aunt Annmarie Porter.
The sisters wanted their brother Frankowski dead to land another $100,000 apiece on top of the $200,000 each they were already getting from their late mother’s estate, according to the documents.
[. . .]
Frankowski’s son, John Jr., added of his relatives, “Clearly they’re a bunch of bumbling buffoons.
“But obviously, had it not been for [our investigation], I truly believe that Jonathan and the rest of family, in their mind, thought they were going to get away with murder.”
Jonathan Roman was slapped with the hefty prison term Monday after reading a statement in a Nassau County court in which he said he was sorry for his crime.
“I was using cocaine and smoking pot, I definitely wasn’t thinking clearly that day. I was speaking to my uncle for a while, I brought up an issue with the house and my uncle, and I began to argue. My uncle started to fight with me. Next thing I know, my uncle is dead,” the killer said.
Judge David Sullivan said, “This obviously is a cowardly and heinous act.”
Meanwhile, the victim’s son,w ho traveled from Florida for the sentencing, lamented, ”My dad will only be stories to my children.
“I lost myself after my father was murdered,” he said.
[. . .]
After John Sr. went missing in early 2014, Sandra Roman left his son a voice mail asking him to call her. In the background of the March 2 call, her son Jonathan Roman can be heard saying “the f–king eyeballs are out” — an unsettling reference to the medical examiner’s testimony during Roman’s trial that the 71-year-old’s eyeballs bulged out when the killer choked him to death, court documents state.
That same night, surveillance video from across the street showed Roman lugging a body out of his uncle’s house in a tarp and stuffing it into the trunk of his mom’s car, the suit says.
The elderly man’s mangled corpse was found buried in a 6x6x4 shallow grave in the woods behind Sandra Roman’s house five days later.
The paper also charge retired Naussau County Detective Ronald Dandrea with helping to try cover up the murder, telling Sandra’s other son, Stanley, that “police would not look for John S. Frankowski Sr. because he was ‘old and white.’ ”
[. . .]
After John Sr. went missing in early 2014, Sandra Roman left his son a voice mail asking him to call her. In the background of the March 2 call, her son Jonathan Roman can be heard saying “the f–king eyeballs are out” — an unsettling reference to the medical examiner’s testimony during Roman’s trial that the 71-year-old’s eyeballs bulged out when the killer choked him to death, court documents state.
That same night, surveillance video from across the street showed Roman lugging a body out of his uncle’s house in a tarp and stuffing it into the trunk of his mom’s car, the suit says.
The elderly man’s mangled corpse was found buried in a 6x6x4 shallow grave in the woods behind Sandra Roman’s house five days later.
The paper also charge retired Naussau County Detective Ronald Dandrea with helping to try cover up the murder, telling Sandra’s other son, Stanley, that “police would not look for John S. Frankowski Sr. because he was ‘old and white.’ ”

http://nypost.com/2016/02/29/sisters-had-their-brother-killed-for-200k-inheritance-family/

Sisters had their brother killed for $200K inheritance: family
By Julia Marsh, Reuven Fenton and Emily Saul
New York Post
February 29, 2016 | 12:05am

NYPD Eliminates Organized Crime Bureau

Does new structure make it more likely that one or another detective chief and/or the CODs may proceed with an investigation? Does it improve likelihood of fighting high tech crime while FBI drags its feet. Are there enough NYPD officers trained to investigate the new focus on computer crimes, with huge corporate data brokers facilitating them? See, e.g., Marc Goodman's new book, Future Crimes. 

[From article]
The NYPD is finally dumping the unit responsible for investigating the mafia.
The Organized Crime Control Bureau will be a thing of the past under the department’s strategic reorganization that goes into effect citywide in March, officials said.
“What we’re moving towards is a unified investigations model,” NYPD Chief of Department James O’Neill said during a briefing at NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza in lower Manhattan.
“In each Patrol Borough there’s going to be an investigations chief and reporting to that investigations chief is going to be the precinct detective squads, Narco, Gang and Vice,” he said.
Each Detective Chief, AKA Super Chief, instead of reporting to the commander of the patrol borough will report to Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce, O’Neill said.
“So all the investigative entities are going to move to the chief of detectives office,” O’Neill said. ‘Basically, we’re eliminating the Organized Crime Control Bureau.”
Boyce will be in charge of all the department’s investigative resources except for the Internal Affairs Bureau and Intelligence, which deals with counter-terrorism.
“Narcotics is not the issue it was back 20 years ago,” Boyce said. “Now we have gangs that are driven by credit card fraud.”
Under the new system, investigators can go directly to the investigative chief and report problems with narcotics, gangs, crews and get solutions, O’Neill said.
“This will give us the laser like focus on the issue at hand,” O’Neill said. “Sometimes that’s where the frustration was. Gang would be doing great work here, Narco would be doing great work here. But we need to better coordinate our resources to be better focused and to continue to push crime down.”
The NYPD has reported the lowest crime data in January last month and has been experiencing a decrease in shootings. The number of homicides increased in 2015 over 2014, however.

http://nypost.com/2016/02/09/nypd-shuts-down-mafia-investigation-unit/

NYPD shakes up Mafia investigation unit
By Tina Moore
New York Post
February 9, 2016 | 6:33pm

New York Giants Jay Bromley Interviewed By Manhattan's SVU, About Rape Allegations

New York Giants' Jay Bromley

[From article]
New York Giants defensive tackle Jay Bromley is facing possible assault charges after a woman accused him of raping her during a date that went horribly awry in a Midtown hotel.
[. . .]
Bromley and the woman have both spoken with investigators, with detectives from the NYPD Special Victims Unit interviewing Bromley Saturday, sources said.
The woman and Bromley [. . .] met via Instagram, ­according to sources.
Bromley, 23, picked up the 26-year-old woman at her Brooklyn home Friday, and the two hit a hookah bar in Manhattan.
They ended up in a room at the Hyatt Herald Square hotel in Midtown early Saturday.
“She said she willfully performed oral sex on him,” a source said. But then “something took place where she didn’t want it to take place.”
The woman started vomiting, and the sexual contact stopped,
[. . .]
An infuriated Bromley then forcibly grabbed the woman, turned her around and began having sex with her against her will, the woman alleged to police investigators.
“The victim told Mr. Bromley to stop, but he kept going,” the source said.
[. . .]
The woman was treated at Roosevelt Hospital. Saturday afternoon, detectives escorted a woman, her head and face covered by the hood of her jacket, in and out of the hotel.
A credit card in Bromley’s name was used to pay for the room, a police source confirmed.
[. . .]
Bromley, who grew up in ­Jamaica, Queens, played in 16 games for the Giants last season and notched 36 tackles.
The Syracuse University star signed a four-year, $3 million contract and is set to make $605,000 for the 2016 season.
[. . .]
Bromley was a crack baby born to a drug-addicted mom. His pimp father was sentenced in 1994 to 8¹/₃ to 25 years in prison for manslaughter after beating a prostitute and tying her to a basement radiator.
When Bromley was 3 months old, he was abandoned on a stranger’s doorstep in Jamaica. His father’s sister took in the boy with her family and raised him as her own.
He played football at Flushing HS and earned a scholarship to Syracuse University.
“They’re not going to give away money for sob stories, I don’t care how bad someone’s story is,” Bromley told The Post for a 2014 profile. “They ain’t just drafting people just because they got good stories.”
“You don’t forget where you come from or the things you see growing up.”

http://nypost.com/2016/01/30/giants-defensive-tackle-jay-bromley-accused-of-rape/

Giants’ Jay Bromley accused of raping date, hitting her with car
By Jamie Schram, Tina Moore and Larry Celona
New York Post
January 30, 2016 | 10:33am | Updated

NYFD Commissioner Defends Having Firemen Clear Snow From His Home

FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro leaves his Queens house Tuesday.

Photo: Dennis A. Clark

[From article]
City investigators will look into FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro’s use of two fire crews to clear snow from the front of his Queens home in the blizzard’s aftermath, sources said on Tuesday.
The Department of Investigation decided to conduct the inquiry after reading about Nigro’s apparent abuse of power in The Post, the sources said.
The DOI will “review” why a pair of trucks were sent to Nigro’s private residence in Whitestone on Sunday morning — making them unable to respond to emergency calls, the sources said.
The review is the first step before any potential full-blown investigation is launched. Such reviews are not standard procedure and are done on a case-by-case basis, the sources said.
Hours after The Post exclusively reported about the shoveling on Tuesday, Nigro personally went to Engine Co. 320/Ladder Co. 167 and told them he was disappointed that the story got out.
[. . .]
Faye Smyth, who was supervising the fire operations dispatch center in Queens when the call came in, told The Post that having two trucks go to the house is “not the normal response.”
She said the protocol is to send one unit to a “lock-in” — when someone calls 911 to say they are trapped by the snow.

Nigro’s home in Queens, with a clear walkway, on Sunday.

Photo: Dennis A. Clark

But the run to Nigro’s house was logged as “administrative” and the call to dispatch came directly from the firehouse, allowing them to send two trucks.
That kind of manpower is typically used by dispatchers only if “they also needed medical attention,” Smyth said.
She said the dispatch center sent firefighters to dig out about 20 homes in Queens Sunday morning – and that the ones handling Nigro’s home weren’t needed elsewhere at the time.
[. . .]
At Nigro’s house on Tuesday, veteran FDNY investigator Randall Wilson — whose office conducts internal probes and reports directly to the commissioner — was spotted talking to the department commissioner’s wife, daughter and son-in-law.
While the FDNY said Wilson was simply there to keep the family members safe, sources said he was also likely probing how the story was leaked.
If an investigation is launched internally by the department, the firefighters who did the heavy lifting would be forced to go through an intensive questioning and have their phone records pulled, sources said.
Nigro issued a department-wide order last May promising to “investigate these improper releases of information and do all we can to identify those responsible.”
http://nypost.com/2016/01/27/fdny-chief-in-hot-water-for-personal-snow-job/

FDNY chief in hot water for personal snow job
By Shawn Cohen, Larry Celona and Chris Perez
New York Post
January 27, 2016 | 12:39am

Clinton Lawyers Provided Access to Classified Emails, No Oversight From Government Investigators

This is what happens when lawyers with relaxed rectitude run the government. The same thing happened in 2009, when Harvard University black studies professor Henry Gates, Jr. was arrested by city police. A private attorney met with the city solicitor, not a state prosecutor, without arraignment, and dismissed the charge without having jurisdiction to do so. It is how lawyers abuse their privileges and when confronted they assert they are officers of the court. Ahem! It raises the question of how thoroughly the White House and its acolyte, Eric "White people are cowards" Holder corrupted the Department of Justice. J. Christian Adams revealed what was done in the civil rights division in his book, Injustice. Also see John Fund and Hans van Spakovsky's book, Who's Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk. Hope that a less corrupt president is elected in  2016 and makes an attempt to clean up the mess. 

[From article]

Clinton’s private lawyer got his way when he pushed back after being asked to delete all copies of a classified email—a level of deference an expert calls ‘far from the norm.’
The State Department put up virtually no resistance when Hillary Clinton’s private lawyer requested to keep copies of her emails—even though those emails contained classified information, and even though it was unclear whether the attorney was cleared to see such secrets.Experts on the handling of classified information tell The Daily Beast that the seemingly chummy arrangement between Clinton’s lawyer and her former State Department aides was “quite unusual.”
[. . .]
Patrick F. Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management, who had worked under Clinton, asked Kendall to delete all electronic copies of the message in his possession. (Copies were sent to the State Department.)
But Kendall resisted, saying he needed a full record of his own of the 55,000 pages of emails Clinton had sent, in order to respond to information requests from a House committee investigating the 2012 attacks on U.S. officials in Benghazi, Libya, and from the inspectors general of the State Department and the intelligence agencies.
“I therefore do not believe it would be prudent to delete” the email from the “master copies” that Kendall’s firm was maintaining, he wrote.
There is no indication that Kennedy, who oversees physical and information security for the State Department, protested the private lawyer’s position or tried further to persuade Kendall to delete the classified email.
[. . .]



“There are a number of attorneys around who handle clients and cases involving classified information. They are almost never allowed to retain classified material in their office, whether they have a safe or not. Sometimes they are not even allowed to review the classified information, even if they are cleared for it, because an agency will say they don’t have a ‘need to know.’ In any event, the deference shown to Mr. Kendall by the State Department was quite unusual.”
[. . .]
The arrangement with Kendall has been previously reported. But the documents reveal new details about what was happening inside the State Department as officials moved ahead with the unorthodox setup.
At one point, a State Department lawyer questioned whether Kendall or one of his associates, Katherine Turner, was qualified to receive and maintain classified information.
[. . .]



The question of whether Kendall should be allowed to keep classified email received new scrutiny in July 2015, after investigators found additional Clinton emails that they thought contained classified information.
At the time, Grassley said that at least two emails contained “top secret, sensitive compartmented information.” Investigators found that Clinton’s emails contained information from at least five intelligence agencies.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/01/15/how-the-state-department-caved-to-hillary-clinton-s-lawyer-on-classified-emails.html

01.15.16 12:01 AM ET
Updated 12:00 p.m. Jan. 15, 2016

How the State Department Caved to Hillary Clinton’s Lawyer on Classified Emails
WRITTEN BYShane Harris, Tim Mak

Massachusetts Governor Recruited To Study Chicago Police

[From article]
Imagine Deval Patrick advising anybody about anything, but most especially about law enforcement? How long does Mayor Rahm Emanuel have to leave that knee-slapper up on his city website before he wins the joke?
Of course this is about what Tom Wolfe used to call “steam control” — keeping the lid on the “community.” Emanuel broomed this cop shooting under the rug until after he was safely re-elected last spring.
Now Deval is brought in to stand behind the mayor and be what he always has been — window dressing.
Do you suppose he held out for the same per diem he was planning to grab from Boston 2024 — $7,500 a day?

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/howie_carr/2015/12/carr_deval_patrick_s_advice_as_good_as_his_record_a_joke

Carr: Deval Patrick’s advice as good as his record — a joke
Howie Carr

Wednesday, December 02, 2015

Boston Herald

Cambridge Police Investigate Sudden Death of Harvard University Student

Harvard University's Lowell House

[From article]
The death of a Harvard College student is being investigated by local law enforcement, although no foul play is suspected, a dean of the school said yesterday.
Luke Tang, a student from Harvard’s Lowell House, died early yesterday, Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana told students and staff in an email.
“While the circumstances of Luke’s death are being investigated by local authorities, there is currently no reason to believe that foul play was involved,” Khurana wrote.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2015/09/authorities_probe_death_of_harvard_college_student

Authorities probe death of Harvard College student
Sunday, September 13, 2015
By: Brian Dowling
Boston Herald

Cambridge Police Investigate Indecent Assaults Near Harvard Square

If none of the indecent assaults occurred on Harvard University property how do campus cops obtain jurisdiction? And how do indecent assaults differ from decent assaults?

[From article]

The Cambridge Police Department are cautioning women who live, work or frequent the Harvard Square area to be aware of a recent increase in indecent assault and batteries.
Officers are currently investigating a report that a woman was indecently assaulted while walking near the intersection of Garden Street and Massachusetts Avenue near Harvard Square on Sept. 8 at approximately 8:30 p.m. The victim said a man bumped into her with his shoulder and then grabbed her butt.

http://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/article/20150914/NEWS/150918053

Cambridge Police: Increase in indecent assaults in Harvard Square
Posted Sep. 14, 2015 at 12:47 PM
CAMBRIDGE Chronicle

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey Awaits Requests to Investigate Sale of Body Parts by Planned Parenthood From Fetuses

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey Awaits Requests to Investigate Sale of Body Parts From Fetuses by Planned Parenthood 

Is that how it works? The elected Attorney General does not act unless requested to do so? 

[From article]
A spokeswoman for state Attorney General Maura Healey declined to comment on a possible probe, adding that as of last night their office had not received any formal requests to do so.
[. . .]
A spokeswoman for state Attorney General Maura Healey declined to comment on a possible probe, adding that as of last night their office had not received any formal requests to do so.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_politics/2015/07/local_pols_join_chorus_calling_for_planned_parenthood

Local pols join chorus calling for Planned Parenthood investigation
Thursday, July 16, 2015
By: Matt Stout, Chris Villani and Lindsay Kalter
Boston Herald

Lawrence, MA Police Investigate Murder-suicide

Matilde Gabin, 33, was shot twice by Nelson Delarosa, 63

[From article]

Authorities are investigating an apparent murder-suicide in Lawrence late last night in which they said a 63-year-old man shot and killed his "longtime girlfriend" in the driveway of her Park Street home, then committed suicide.
Carrie Kimball-Monahan, spokeswoman for Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett, said Matilde Gabin, 33, was shot twice by Nelson Delarosa. Her murder remains under investigation.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2015/07/authorities_probe_apparent_murder_suicide_in_lawrence

Authorities probe apparent murder-suicide in Lawrence
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
By: Laurel J. Sweet
Boston Herald

Pennsylvania Woman,34, Kidnapped When She was Nine, Seeks Her Abductor

Ms. Heller also shared an artist's sketch of the suspect in her attempt to get to the bottom of her kidnap

[From article]
A woman who was kidnapped as a child is determined to hunt down her abductor 30 years later after a police investigation reached a dead end.
Kelly Heller was nine years old when she was snatched on May 31, 1981 in Upper Saucon Township, Pennsylvania.
Ms Heller, 43, told NBC that she had been stuffing newspapers to be delivered by her brothers when one brother came to tell her than a man outside their home was running a contest for the paper and wanted to speak to her.
She ran outside and got into the man's car who then quickly drove off. He first told her they were going to a park and then to play hide and seek.
She told NBC: 'He grabbed me down below and he told me to take my clothes off and I said no.'
The man put her in a headlock and punched her several times in the face before abandoning her in a field.
She went to the nearest home for help where the neighbor called the police.
Despite a full police investigation and plenty of press attention at the time, no one was ever arrested for the kidnapping.
Now, 34 years later, Ms Heller has decided to try to solve her own case.
She said that she remembered being interviewed, aged nine, following her ordeal but that no one ever contacted her again.
She has tried to get documents from the Bethlehem police department but information was redacted.
She now hopes her social media campaign on Facebook will generate more leads and finally solve the crime.
Ms Heller posted on the page: 'Thank you all so much. I am overwhelmed by your support. I am almost in tears here. Help my voice be heard & continue to share my story!! I won't be anybody's victim anymore!!'
According to Ms Heller's post detailing the kidnapping: 'This was not random. I was targeted. My kidnapper knew our names. If anybody has any information or can help in any way please let me know. I just need closure.'
Bethlehem police said the investigation is ongoing.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3120357/Woman-trying-solve-kidnapping-34-years-later.html

Kidnap victim turns Nancy Drew and decides to solve her own abduction 34 years after man drove her to a field and beat her up aged nine
Kelly Heller was snatched in May 1981 in Upper Saucon Township, Pennsylvania when she was just nine
She was abducted from her home by a man in a car who claimed he was running a competition for a newspaper
He told her to take her clothes off but she refused. He punched her in the face and abandoned her in a field
By LOUISE BOYLE FOR DAILY MAIL ONLINE
PUBLISHED: 14:19 EST, 11 June 2015 | UPDATED: 15:45 EST, 11 June 2015

New York State's Highest Court Rules Medical Examiner Not Required To Return All Body Parts To Families

[From article]

Medical examiners don't have to return to families all organs from autopsied bodies or even tell them parts are missing, the state's highest court ruled Wednesday.
The case involves a New York City couple who buried their 17-year-old son after a 2005 car crash, not knowing his brain had been removed. Two months after the funeral, Jesse Shipley's high school class saw his brain in a labeled jar during a morgue field trip.
The Shipleys got it back and had a second funeral. A jury awarded them $1 million for emotional distress. A midlevel court upheld the city's liability in 2010 but reduced the award to $600,000.
The Court of Appeals, divided 5-2, reversed that decision Wednesday, dismissing the family's claim and concluding that state law and burial rights don't require returning parts that can be legally removed during an autopsy.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TEEN_MISSING_BRAIN?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-06-10-11-05-23

Jun 10, 3:22 PM EDT
NY COURT: MEDICAL EXAMINERS DON'T HAVE TO RETURN ALL ORGANS
BY MICHAEL VIRTANEN
ASSOCIATED PRESS