Tag: crime

Most expensive subway

7x more expensive than anywhere else. time for some union-busting.

An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.

The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 6km tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify 700 jobs that needed to be done. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

Running a fake bar

that’s some interesting undercover work

When Zekman was poached by a rival paper, the feisty Chicago Sun-Times, she proposed a daring project that would go down in the annals of journalism history as both a feat of reporting and a focal point for ethics debates still raging today. For years, Zekman had been collecting tips about city employees extracting bribes from local businessmen, but couldn’t get sources to go on the record; she figured the only way to get the story would be to get inside the system. So she convinced her paper to buy a bar. They would staff it with newspaper workers, run it like any other watering hole (with some notable exceptions that included concealed photographers), and wait to see what happened.

Police and systemic storytelling

police spend a large part of their time distributing crime to the sorts of people who seem likely to be criminals — the poor and marginal — and the prediction is prophetic: these people turn out to be criminals as soon as they are stopped and forced to turn out the contents of their pockets or glove boxes. Leave them alone, and most would never be “criminal” at all.

Font Detectives

What does international political corruption have to do with type design? Normally, nothing—but that’s little consolation for the former prime minister of Pakistan. When Nawaz Sharif and his family came under scrutiny earlier this year thanks to revelations in the Panama Papers, the smoking gun in the case was a font. The prime minister’s daughter, Maryam Sharif, provided an exculpatory document that had been typeset in Calibri—a Microsoft font that was only released for general distribution nearly a year after the document had allegedly been signed and dated.

Carl Icahn Raid

Icahn eventually succeeded in gaining control of the Trump Taj Mahal casino. In 2014, a bankruptcy-court judge expressed concern that Icahn Enterprises would just close the place, and insisted that company executives testify that they had no plans to shut the casino down. Initially, Icahn promised to invest $100M in the ailing facility. But he ended up embroiled in yet another bitter union fight, and refused to yield on demands from casino employees for better pay and health benefits. Eventually, Icahn shuttered the casino. The casino’s demise put 3000 people out of work. In March, 2017, Icahn found a buyer: Hard Rock International. 1 day earlier this summer, former employees queued up alongside treasure hunters and curious passersby on the boardwalk outside the beleaguered casino. A liquidator had arranged a fire sale of the items inside. People carted home used bed linens and scuffed armchairs and statuary of fake gold. They looked for souvenirs bearing the Trump name, but there weren’t any.

FBI skills

Ryan should have trusted his instincts. Johnson and his colleagues were not documentarians. They were undercover FBI agents posing as filmmakers. By the time they sat down with Ryan, Johnson and his team had spent 8 months traveling to at least 5 states to film interviews with 24 people about the Bundy standoff, all part of an FBI effort to build criminal cases against the Bundys and their supporters.

the fbi is more incompetent than a bunch of inbred farmers

Bail Reform Tipping Point?

Lawsuits have been largely successful in court, thanks in part to actions taken by President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, which issued an amicus brief on the issue last year. In that brief, it argued that “a bail scheme that imposes financial conditions, without individualized consideration of ability to pay and whether such conditions are necessary to assure appearance at trial, violates the Fourteenth Amendment” and its equal protection clause and is thus unconstitutional. Although new US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has expressed skepticism about past efforts on jail and criminal justice reform, the shift to a new administration is unlikely to affect the changes that are taking place around bail reform, experts say.

Lion King

Wow, quite the story

The group of conspirators was so close with Francis that they all nicknames, according to the indictment. The team called Fat Leonard Lion King, L.K. or Boss. “Defendants referred to themselves collectively … by terms such as ‘the Cool Kids,’ ‘the Band of Brothers,’ ‘the Brotherhood,’ ‘the Wolfpack,’ the ‘familia’ and ‘the Lion King’s Harem,’” the indictment added. For a few years, the Lion King’s Harem tore up the Pacific like a group of rowdy teenagers. The 7th Fleet’s Judge Advocate General sent an ethics message to the 7th’s leadership warning them to remember that taking gifts, especially gifts from contractors, was a no-no. The Cool Kids forwarded the message to the Lion King so he knew to keep their relationship a secret. “The next day,” the indictment stated. “During the [command ship] USS Blue Ridge’s port visit to Hong Kong, [the Cool Kids] and others dined and drank at Francis’s expense at the Petrus Restaurant in Hong Kong at a cost to Francis of $20435.”