Murder One

It must have been just an imaginary shudder I thought went through Jack Abramoff today. He is under indictment for wire fraud and other crimes, but sometimes having options is not that big a comfort. Florida, for example, gives the condemned the choice of lethal injection or the electric chair.

This point must have become a bit more immediate with the arrest for murder and conspiracy of three men linked to the Gambino crime family. James V. Grimaldi and Susan Schmidt have laid this and much else out in a very nice Washington Post Story.

The chain of events got underway when Abramoff and Kidnan bought Santa Cruz Casinos from (the late) Gus Boulis. The murdered man was a former partner who had been complaining that Jack and his business partner (and old College Republican buddy) Adan Kidan had cheated him out of several million dollars. The problem for the partners is that a nice fat ($240,000) money trail leads from their enterprise to the alleged perps. Their troubles are not theirs alone. Republican Congressmen Tom ("Jack who?) Delay and Bob ("I was duped") provided some political muscle to make the original casino deal happen.
Abramoff is at the center of a federal investigation into lobbying for Indian tribes and influence-peddling in Washington. Abramoff used contacts with Republican Reps. Tom DeLay (Tex.) and Robert W. Ney (Ohio) and members of their staffs as he worked to land the SunCruz deal, interviews and court records show.
This is just another bit of bad news for a couple of guys whose day might already have been spoiled.
On Aug. 11, Abramoff and Kidan were indicted by a federal grand jury in Fort Lauderdale on five counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy relating to their $147.5 million SunCruz purchase. Prosecutors alleged that Abramoff and Kidan faked a wire transfer of $23 million -- the down payment they had agreed to put into the deal for the fleet of Florida-based day-cruise casino boats.
Coincidence, no doubt, but:
Abramoff and Kidan were traveling on business abroad at the time of Boulis's murder.
Jack has a lot of old College Republican buddies who have also been enmeshed in his schemes - Karl Rove, Grover Nordquist, and Ralph Reed for example. It's just possible that the prosecutors might suspect that Jack now has some incentive to start talking.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more