THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† If It Weren’t For The Honor Of The Thing …: San Francisco voters rejected a ballot proposal to rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W Bush Sewage Plant by 69 percent to 31 percent. Even the hyper-liberal citizens of Frisco thought that was a sh*tty thing to do to a soon-to-be former president.
† Minister Makes Off With Wedding Gifts: Rev. Shey-Rima Silveria, who officiated at the October 2007 wedding of Kitty and Shawn Sonnenschein in Portland, OR and filched $1,500 worth of Home Depot gift cards the couple had received from friends and family, was sentenced to two years bench probation, ordered to pay $1,500 in restitution and a $300 fine on top of that, reports The Associated Press.
[Hat Tip: The Heel, an Ivy-educated attorney with a prestigious New York firm, and occasional contributor to this blog.]
† Employers Hiring Forged Documented Aliens Are Lawbreakers In Other Ways, Too: Agriprocessors has filed for bankruptcy court protection after where St. Louis-based First Bank moved to foreclose on its plant and assets, claiming the Postville, IA, kosher meatpacker had defaulted on a $33 million, reports The Associated Press. The Chapter 11 filing puts the kibosh on First Bank’s legal action as the company will be allowed to restructure, seek other financing and come to terms with 397 secured and unsecured creditors that are owed between $50 million to $100 million. According to court documents the privately owned Agriprocessors reported annual earnings of $300 million before the ICE raid in May, which the company blames for its financial woes, reports The New York Times. Others beg to differ:
Iowa labor experts said the company created many of its own troubles by hiring large numbers of illegal immigrants and paying them wages far below the industry standard, and by maintaining contentious relations with state labor authorities and fiercely resisting unions.
“They left themselves exposed by their utter refusal to play by the rules,” said Mark Grey, a sociology professor at the University of Northern Iowa who studies recent immigration to Iowa.
Union officials said the Postville plant stood out from other Iowa packinghouses for the frequency of its labor violations.
“If there was a hall of shame for employers in this industry, Agriprocessors would have its own wing,” said Mark Lauritsen, international vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union that has long tried to gain a foothold at the plant.
The Stiletto agrees with Grey – but to a point. It’s not that Agriprocessors refused to “play by the rules” it’s that they refused to obey the law. The company’s owners deserve everything that’s coming to them, including jail time.
† The Gospel According To Jeremiah Wright: Speaking at a forum about race and religion in CT, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor in Chicago, complained that the media used him as a “weapon of mass destruction” in an attempt to derail Obama's campaign for the presidency, reports The Associated Press. He claims that the media’s relentless airings of video clips that were on sale at Trinity United Church of Christ showing him screaming “God damn America!” and “USA of the KKK” were taken out of context. The Stiletto can’t imagine the context in which those words would take on a different meaning.
† What’s Next For Spitzer: Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney Michael J. Garcia will not pursue criminal charges against former NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) for any offense related to his patronizing high-priced hos supplied by Emperors Club VIP, reports New York Law Journal. While an investigation by the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service determined that Spitzer had laundered more than $1 million through a phony bank account set up by the call girl ring to hide the true nature of the payments, he had not used any public or campaign funds. In addition, Garcia said that his office had a “longstanding” policy not to charge people with soliciting prostitutes, and pointed out that the Justice Department policy only prosecuted people under the Mann Act, 18 U.S.C. §2421-2424 if minors were being prostituted. These factors combined led him to conclude that “the public interest would not be furthered" by filing criminal charges.”
This would be the same Garcia who extracted guilty pleas from Mark Brener, who ran the club, and Cecil Suwal, who helped him, as well as booking agents Tanya Hollander and Temeka Lewis. Three of the four pleaded guilty to prostitution conspiracy or promoting prostitution, and money laundering. Hollander also pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiring to violate the federal Travel Act, 18 U.S. Code §1952, which makes it a crime to transport someone across state lines for prostitution, and is scheduled to be sentenced on November 25th. The four co-conspirators face sentences from six months to five years.
The New York Times editorial board thinks he’s suffered enough (“shame and lost status are now officially punishment enough”) and that his “real sentence” is “his new life in relative isolation, his realization that his many enemies have been gloating over his downfall, and his survival as a handy punchline for late night television” and that “he has not even come close to getting off scot-free.” As far as The Stiletto is concerned, Spitzer’s status in this sordid affair was that of pathetic john who patronized prostitutes, which makes him no more entitled to leniency than the bookers and hookers connected to the case.
† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Is Kozinski The Victim Of A Vendetta?): An ethics panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has issued an order that puts a hold on the investigation of Beverly Hills attorney Cyrus Sanai’s complaint against Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski regarding allegedly sexually explicit images on a personal Web site on the grounds that “no exceptional circumstances” exist to warrant a transfer to a similar panel convened by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia - as ordered by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, reports Bloomberg News.
† Updates To Previous Posts (You Can’t Hide Your Prying Eyes): At her arraignment in U.S. District Court, former UCLA Medical Center employee Lawanda Jackson pleaded not guilty to charges that she sold information from Farrah Fawcett's medical records to the National Enquirer for $4,600, reports The Associated Press. A state investigation determined that since 2003 UCLA hospital workers had been inappropriately accessed the records of 1,041 patients, including celebrities.
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