Tag: crime

Fine dining hustle

Around Christmas in 2013, a friend of Merrihue’s alerted him to a Bloomberg News piece about an unranked contender, which Bloomberg called the “most exclusive restaurant in the US” It described a gourmet operation—in Earlton, New York, 30 min south of Albany—in the basement of a woodland home. Once called Damon Baehrel at the Basement Bistro, the place was now simply called Damon Baehrel, after its presiding wizard and host, who served as forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper. Baehrel derived his ingredients, except meat, fish, and dairy, from his 48K m2 of yard, garden, forest, and swamp. He made his oils and flours from acorns, dandelions, and pine; incorporated barks, saps, stems, and lichen, while eschewing sugar, butter, and cream; cured his meats in pine needles; made 10s of cheeses (without rennet); and cooked on wooden planks, soil, and stone. He had christened his approach Native Harvest. The diners who got into the restaurant raved about it online. But at the time it was booked through 2020. “We spend our lives looking for places like this”.

Walmart Crime

It’s not unusual for the department to send a van to transport all the criminals Ross arrests at this Walmart. The call log on the store stretches 126 pages, documenting more than 5000 trips over the past 5 years. Last year police were called to the store and 3 other Tulsa Walmarts just under 2000 times. By comparison, they were called to the city’s 4 Target stores ~300 times. Most of the calls to the northeast Supercenter were for shoplifting, but there’s no shortage of more serious crimes, including 5 armed robberies so far this year, a murder suspect who killed himself with a gunshot to the head in the parking lot last year, and, in 2014, a group of men who got into a parking lot shootout that killed 1 and seriously injured 2 others.

Mafia Art World

Step inside a world of high art, low cunning and prices beyond your wildest imaginings. The Banker’s Guide To The Art Market is a revealing, wry and rare look behind doors that are closed to most of us. Propelled by the newly rich of the financial world, London’s art market has soared to historic highs.

The film deconstructs this extraordinary phenomenon and looks back over a century of the market’s twists and turns to try to explain it, talking to outspoken collector Jeffrey Archer – ‘I couldn’t afford to buy my own pictures’ – maverick dealer Kenny Schacter – ‘when money is introduced it brings out the worst in people’ – and gallerist Nicholas Logsdail – ‘You’ll never go wrong, if you buy from a good gallery’. We don’t think you will look at a painting in quite the same way again.

$35B fraud

The SEC temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd., citing “potentially manipulative transactions” in a stock that soared to $35B even though it hasn’t filed financial results in years.

How does this kind of total nonsense slip through? is it just technical incompetence (accounting was supposed to be in computer-readable formats years ago) or is it just regular bankster fraud? probably both.

Insider traders

Insider traders appear to be pretty careful in choosing their accomplices. Of the known pairs of people who provide and act upon private information (“tipper and tippee”), 64% met before college, and 16% met in college or graduate school. Another 23% are family relations — more siblings and parents than aunts and uncles, despite the added capital that the latter might have provided. Tips are also commonly shared among people with ethnically similar surnames: Of 24 tips coming from people with Celtic surnames, for example, 14 went to individuals who also had Celtic surnames.

The Lazarus File

In 1986, a young nurse named Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in Los Angeles. Police pinned down no suspects, and the case gradually went cold. It took 23 years—and revolutionary breakthroughs in forensic science—before LAPD detectives could finally assemble the pieces of the puzzle. When they did, they found themselves facing one of the unlikeliest murder suspects in the city’s history. When Lazarus arrived in the interrogation room, Stearns and Jaramillo abandoned the story of a suspect talking about stolen art, and explained that her name had come up in a case involving an ex-boyfriend of hers, John Ruetten. Knowing she was married to someone else, they’d selected a place where they could speak privately, away from gossiping colleagues. Stearns and Jaramillo interviewed Lazarus for more than 1 hour, coming at her in an oblique manner that left it unclear whether they were speaking with her as a possible witness or a criminal suspect. The conversation meandered, but every digression led back, inevitably, to the murder of Sherri Rasmussen. It was only after Jaramillo asked Lazarus if she’d be willing to give them a DNA swab and noted, “It’s possible we may have some DNA at the location,” that she wanted to contact a lawyer. Declaring herself “shocked,” the veteran detective stood and walked out, 68 minutes after she’d sat down. Lazarus got only as far as the jail’s hallway, where she was stopped by other RHD detectives and placed in handcuffs.

The mob controls food carts

Today’s mobile food vending business is one of day laborers and shift workers who, despite hustling all week long, may not earn minimum wage.

Even for bosses like Sharif, financial autonomy is not guaranteed. Though Sharif owns the actual food cart—“I built it 3 years ago” —a portion of his earnings is sent to “a guy in New Jersey.” That guy is in all likelihood “Mr. Q.” While Sharif owns the food cart and his own vendor’s license, it’s Mr. Q who controls the mobile food vending permit—a tiny piece of adhesive plastic that makes this cart more than just a griddle on wheels. Without it, Sharif has no business. Sharif and Steve are just 2 of the 1000s of unwitting lawbreakers in a black market for cart permits that operates in plain sight of the city’s enforcement agencies. That black market is worth an estimated $15M to $20M a year, costing the city millions of $ in potential fees while making it harder for immigrant entrepreneurs to build equity and take the first step up the economic ladder.

how the food cart system in nyc works. still unexplained: why are the carts in midtown so terrible, giving tourists a completely wrong impression about what new yorkers eat?