Hollywood Fall Guy

Late last week the Hollywood wiretap case involving Anthony Pellicano came to an end with guilty verdicts for wiretapping, racketeering, and other charges. The good New York Times piece points out that all the potential big fish got away. Maybe this is a script with "third-act problems," but more likely it's a good version of an even more familiar noir script. Possible top targets were never indicted, including Michael S. Ovtiz, the entertainment lawyer Bert Fields, Brad Grey, current studio chief at Paramount, as well as Pellicano customers Chris Rock, Courtney Love, Alec Gores (billionaire acquisitions specialist, Freddy De Mann, Madonna's former manager, Adam D. Sender, a hedge fund manager. In the noir script, folks like this have enough clout to pressure top law enforcement folks to show quick, definitive evidence against them or lay off. In the noir framework, it's not a huge shock that the government failed "to deal any crushing blows to people in power." One legal academic is quoted as saying “If the government has no plans to go higher than Pellicano, this is a depressingly pedestrian effort that shows a lack of ambition." But with all that money getting deposed and put in the witness box, all the ambition in the world doesn't amount to much.

The Problem With Prison

Growing doubts about the value of prison as the country's main mode of crime reduction have hit the Wall Street Journal. A good piece by Gary Fields on Tuesday, May 6th, points out that violent crime is growing again, but that a surprising explanation has cropped up. April 2008 was about 20 percent deadlier than April 2007, and that "the usual reasons - the economy, poverty, gangs and crews, and the availability of firearms" have something to do with it, but can't by themselves explain this sharp a rise.

The explanation that has been "little explore" is "the migration of the prison culture back to the streets. As nearly 700,000 convicts a year return home, some of them may be bringing prison culture with them. 'This is part of the price we're paying for 20 years of mass incarceration,' said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at New York City's John Jay College of Criminal Justice" (A 16).

What Kennedy means by "prison culture" is the centrality of "respect." "Disrespect can lead to lethal responses at the slightest provocation. . . . There are now many people on the streets who live by a prison code, as the prison population has ballooned to 2.2 million from 330,000 in 1980."

This too is not a total explanation, but mass incarceration has its own noir "blowback" that is finally getting some public attention.

Drug Sting Nabs 75 Students at San Diego State U.

The LA Times coverage of this bust suggested an EME connection, and it's interesting to think of possible connections between specific college frats and the hardcore drug syndicates in Mexico, who some observers believe control the country's federal government, not to mention large swathes of territory, e.g. much of Tijuana. See also Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, which explains how the Napoli-area "System" and its leading clans have allowed semi-autonomous dealers to access nice middle-class clients like college students without visible mob strings attached.


***

Story by SARA LIPKA, Chronicle of Higher Education
Wednesday, May 7, 2008

A yearlong undercover drug investigation has resulted in the arrests of 75 students at San Diego State University and 21 other people accused of being involved in illegal drug sales there, university and law-enforcement officials announced on Tuesday.

Eighteen students were arrested on Tuesday, and 15 others were arrested in recent weeks, the student newspaper, The Daily Aztec, reported. The other arrests were made over the past 12 months.

During the investigation, officers have seized $100,000 worth of marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy pills, hallucinogenic mushrooms, methamphetamine, and illicit prescription drugs, according to the district attorney's office for San Diego County. The officers also seized four guns, brass knuckles, and $60,000 in cash.

The university's police department started the investigation after a student died of a cocaine overdose in May 2007, the district attorney's office said in a written statement. Federal drug agents joined the investigation about five months ago. During the investigation, another student, from San Diego Mesa College, died of a drug overdose in a San Diego State fraternity house near the campus.

The officers in the investigation infiltrated seven San Diego State fraternities and made more than 130 undercover drug buys, both on and off the campus, officials quoted in news accounts and in the district attorney's statement said.

The officials said that students had coordinated the deals mainly by text messages. In one case, a member of the Theta Chi fraternity sent a mass text message to his "faithful customers," informing them of a "sale" on cocaine after a brief waiting period while he and his "associates" traveled to Las Vegas.

The university's president, Stephen L. Weber, told The San Diego Union-Tribune that faculty and staff members were not informed that the undercover investigation was being conducted on and near the campus.

"This was not a difficult decision," he said. "We needed to do something about it. We're talking about drug trafficking. That's the thing we were not prepared to turn our backs on. We had to deal with this."

San Diego State has suspended all the students who were arrested, pending due-process reviews, Mr. Weber said in a written statement on the university's Web site.

The university is also looking into whether any fraternities were involved organizationally, beyond the actions of individual members. If it finds that they were, Mr. Weber told reporters, those fraternities will be kicked out as campus organizations.

In a statement issued later in the day, the university announced that six fraternities had been placed on "interim suspension," pending hearings.

Among the students arrested were an undergraduate majoring in criminal justice and a master's candidate who was a month away from a degree in homeland security and who worked as a community-service officer under the supervision of the campus police.

In his own statement regarding the arrests, Mr. Weber called the investigation "a big step forward towards a safer environment for our students, faculty, staff, and neighbors."

"Illegal substances are inconsistent with our values and with the pursuit of our mission," he said. "Certainly today's arrests underscore the scope of the challenges universities face as we fight this major societal problem."

Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/2757n.htm

Hollywood High School

The New York Times has good coverage of the endless Pellicano wiretap-and-intimidation trial, with former Hollywood and Disney president Michael super agent Ovitz testifying yesterday morning, and the threatened reporter Anita Busch testifying in the afternoon. Timeless dialog includes this:

You believe (Ovitz) was the client who hired Mr. Pellicano to put the fish on your car?” asked attorney Chad Hummel, who represents one of the defendants, former Los Angeles police Sgt. Mark Arneson.

“Yes,” Busch said.

Ovitz, on the other hand, insisted "“Absolutely no, I never instructed him (Pellicano) to do anything illegally."

Of course it's not exactly illegal to leave a fish on somebody's car. What law does that break?

Ovitz calls Hollywood "the campus" and not in the sense of a college campus, because that is too adult. Hollywood, he says, is in fact like high school.

His testimony seems to prove it. Back in 2002, he flipped over rumors that were making him look bad and became dependent on Pellicano's mysterious powers to make it stop. Pellicano the private eye supposedly gave "very good advice," Ovitz said. "Frankly, when a lot of people abandoned the ship, he didn't. He was always an open ear."

Pellicano seems to have become the sad and frightened Ovitz's priest, therapist, friend, and confessor. It's probably not a coincidence that Ovitz paid him $25,000 per case, and an additional $75,000 over the course of that year.

Crime Spree Drew Street: The Sequel

There's another stock gang story in the LA Times today. It covers Drew Street in the Glassell Park area of Los Angeles, and is a retread of the story they did after a daytime shootout last month.

Check it out and then ask yourself these questions:

- the "Satellite House" seems to have been a major drug distribution point. Does the article find out who owned it, or operated it?
- who owned or operated the overbuilt and undermaintained housing that was constructed after the early 1980s?
- Drew Street appears to have been a base of operations for organized crime. Why does this article replace the Avenues gang and the "Eme" cross-border crime syndicate with a focus on one woman, Maria Leon, and her thirteen children?
- what is the function of references to the village of Tlalchapa - Leon's origin - in the Mexican state of Guerrero, called "one of Mexico's most violent regions"?
- are these statements meant to explain Drew Street's trafficking and violence in a causal way?

"Tlalchapans moved into many of the new apartments, said former Drew Street residents. As they did, neighbors said, fights, parties and heavy drinking became more common."

As more Tlalchapans arrived on Drew Street, "it was the law of the revolver," Flocelo Aguirre said.

Police task forces, gang sweeps, arrests -- even a 2002 gang injunction -- have done little to break the bonds of family and culture that breed criminal activity on Drew Street, officials said.

If so, is the author saying that Drew Street crime comes from Tlalchapan's culture of crime?

The piece is fun pulp fiction, but if you tried to do urban policy, sociology, or crime detection with its type of information (stereotypes, general trends, a "usual suspect," and no specifics about individual associations, building ownership, etc material), you would fail. There's no syndicate, police force, crooked urban officials, payoffs and deals, all the usual stuff that make something like the Drew Street system operate.

Hollywood Pellicano Case Overview

Here's a link to a good backgrounder on the Pellicano wiretapping case that has been roiling Hollywood for several years. It focuses on the reporter, Anita Busch, who first turned up the story during an investigation of organized crime activity in Hollywood. She seems to have gotten a little too close to that invisible point where moguls and mobsters converge: she was wiretapped and threatened and, when she told her sources they may have been overheard on her phone, he career was effectively ended. Part of the case finally went to trial last year, and it continues.

Spitzer Saga Continues

You won't have forgotten Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York who stepped down earlier this month in the wake of revelations that he'd used money parked in a shell company to hire the services of a prostitute employed by a company called "Emperor's Club VIP," which advertised its service on line and touted its 1-5 Diamond ranking system for the women it made available.

Two core questions have never been addressed by our not-so-brilliant media, which suffers from collective attention deficit disorder.

1. did Spitzer just start hiring hookers recently - maybe via a little extra job stress while being governor? Or was he hiring hookers for a long time, including during the period when he was busting their employers? In other works, was New York's most self-righteous D.A. in recent history screwing and arresting the same people at the same time, in time-honored crooked-cop tradition?
2. did Spitzer have contact with any of the people that work behind the scenes in organized prostitution? Most prostitution rings, as far as I know, are controlled by organized crime.
   

Today's New York Times has an article that turns over the second of these overlooked pieces of the puzzle. The call girl Spitzer saw in Washington D.C., aspiring R&B singer Ashley Alexandra Dupre (pictured here), knows a guy called Anthony Scibelli, who has been named in a large-scale federal indictment of the Gambino crime family. Scibelli's lawyer describes him as not a mobster but a "hard-working contractor," one who also apparently "has contacts in the music business." Scibelli supposedly just wanted to help Spitzer's famous "Kristen" (Dupre) with her singing career. The lawyer denied this help involved having sex with her.

Is it just a coincidence that Dupre knows both the former governor of New York and an alleged member of the Gambino syndicate? Maybe. But we are definitely only part-way down this particular rabbit hole.