Before he started writing, James Ellroy was busted for being drunk and disorderly, DUI, petty theft and trespass. He was hassled as a suspicious pedestrian, was caught squatting, had police shot-guns shoved in his face, and was eventually locked up with pimps, killers, drug addicts and winos.
His diet was bennies and booze, and jail time was his “health retreat”:
I abstained from booze and dope and ate three square meals a day. I did push-ups and worked trusty details and got a little muscle tone going. I hung out with stupid white guys, stupid black guys and stupid Mexican guys—and swapped stupid stories with them. We had all committed daring crimes and fucked the world’s most glamorous women. An old black wino told me he fucked Marilyn Monroe. I said, “No shit—I fucked her too!”
Jail taught Ellroy a few truths—he was big, but not tough; he committed crimes, but was no criminal—but he knew he could ride it out.
I worked the trash-and-freight detail at the New County Jail and the library at Wayside Honor Rancho. My favorite jail was Biscailuz Center. They fed you big meals and let you read in the latrines after lights-out. Jail was no big fucking traumatic deal.
I knew how to ride short stretches. Jail cleaned out my system and gave me something to anticipate: my release and more booze and dope fantasies.
One day Ellroy woke-up tied to a hospital cot, his wrists bloodied by the restraints. He was 27, and near death—an abscess the size of a fist on his lung.
‘If it’s not working, then get the hell out.’ Ellroy once told me. ‘If your life isn’t working the way you want it, then do something to change it.’
We were in a car, driving down the curve of road from the Griffith Observatory. It was Fall 1994, and he was giving me advice he had learned on a hospital gurney some 20-years earlier. We had been filming an interview for a TV documentary. For a week Ellroy had given a guided tour of his life: El Monte where his mother had been murdered, Hancock Park and the houses he had B&E’d, the panty sniffing, the pill-popping, the drinking, the parks where he jacked-off, the Sav-On where he stole Benzedrine inhalers to get buzzed, the empty apartments where he lived off booze and drugs, bad sex and fantasies.
Then it all stopped. He woke-up in hospital, and knew he was no longer invincible. And that’s when Ellroy started writing.
If there is a Hell, Roger Mahoney will spend all of eternity roasting in it
The Los Angeles archdiocese is broke and still paying off a $175-million loan it received to pay victims of child molester priests in a civil settlement agreement six years ago. But they’ve got a plan.
In the midst of renewed public outrage over its handling of the priest molestation cases, the Los Angeles Archdiocese is considering a $200-million fund-raising campaign. The archdiocese has hired a New York company, Guidance in Giving, to study the feasibility of a capital campaign that would shore up the church’s finances.
The archdiocese is $80 million in debt, according to a recent church financial report. In 2007, the archdiocese agreed to a record $600-million settlement with with over 500 alleged victims of priest abuse. The consultants conducting the six-month study are interviewing every pastor in the archdiocese, as well as lay leaders.
A spokesman for the church said initial feedback has been “very positive.” The funds used would “be put into various endowments earmarked to support the pastoral priorities of the archdiocese, as well as for the general repair and upkeep of our parish churches and schools,” spokesman Tod Tamberg said in a statement. The campaign would be the archdiocese’s first in 60 years.
I’m sure it will be a resounding success! Why of course an organization that has recently agreed to an over half a billion dollar payoff to 508 victims of predatory priests should feel “very positive” about the prospects of raising that much money!
How many people would think, “Oh those guy are all right. They’re just tryin’ to put their kiddie fiddling days behind ‘em. Where’s my checkbook, I want to show my support”?
It’s delusional.
The Los Angeles Archdiocese posted 12,000 pages of priest personnel files online that revealed many instances of high Church officials covering up for the priest abusers.
Why did it take Republican Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett—formerly the state’s attorney general—almost three years before he launched an investigation into convicted pedophile and child abuser Jerry Sandusky after the first accuser had come forward?
That’s what Kathleen Kane, Pennsylvania’s new attorney general, would like to know, too. Kane has launched a full investigation into Corbett’s rather odd handling of the case of the politically-connected former Penn State football coach—surely Sandusky should have been arrested immediately or at the very least brought in for questioning with TEN YEARS of damning evidence against him—something that’s been hanging around the unpopular Republican like the stench of a stale fart. A special prosecutor, Kane told the New York Times, would be named within a matter of days.
During that time, Corbett was campaigning for governor, and board members for The Second Mile, the charity founded by Sandusky, contributed more than $200,000 to his campaign. Once he was elected, Corbett’s administration approved a $3 million grant to the charity, which was later rescinded.
Corbett has been haunted by questions about the Sandusky case, and says it took 33 months to arrest Sandusky because at first there was only one accuser and investigators didn’t think they could win a conviction. Kane, who specialized in child sex abuse cases as a former county prosecutor, countered, “It’s never taken me that long” to build a case against a molester.
Kane has been careful to stress that she’ll accept whatever conclusion the special prosecutor comes to, since some see a political element in the investigation. Kane is a popular Democrat, and Corbett is a Republican with low approval ratings and an election coming up in 2014. The investigation could complicate Corbett’s reelection bid, though his involvement in the toxic abuse scandal would probably be a major issue either way.
Personally, I can’t wait to here how Corbett justifies personally approving a $3 million taxpayer-funded grant to Sandusky’s Second Mile charity, when he KNEW that Jerry Sandusky was under investigation for multiple child rapes!
Last year, Jerry Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of child abuse and sentenced to at least 30 years in prison If Gov. Corbett is shown to have “slow-walked” the matter so as not to rock the boat on his own election prospects, this guy is fucking toast politically (and as a human being). Meanwhile, the Sandusky scandal drags on with several Penn State officials still awaiting trial.
Here’s hoping that they, and Gov. Tom Corbett, get what they deserve. It’s highly probable that Jerry Sandusky continued to molest kids while Corbett and his prosecutors dawdled. Had Corbett worried more about Sandusky’s child victims than his own political future, he wouldn’t be in this mess. Good on Kathleen Kane for taking this bastard on.
A Gun For George is a new 17-minute short film produced by Sheffield’s Warp Films, written and directed by Matthew Holness, star of British comedy shows Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace and Man To Man With Dean Lerner.
This is good news for fans of cult UK comedy and Garth Merenghi in particular. A very niche show, riffing on late 70s and early 80s horror and exploitation cinema—with a large dose of Lars Von Trier/Stephen King’s The Kingdom thrown in for good measure—it has nevertheless managed to amass a sizable cult following, helping launch the careers of Richard Ayoade, Matt Berry and Alice Lowe (who last year starred in the delicious black comedy Sightseers, one of my film highlights of 2012).
But what of its elusive star, Matthew Holness? The titular hero of Darkplace has been noticeably absent from our TV screens in the intervening (almost) decade since the show first aired.
Well, he’s back. And this time he plays a failed pulp fiction writer given to flights of wild self-aggrandizement and outbursts of futile anger, who lives mostly in a fantasy world of his own creation, and whose talent simply doesn’t match up to his self-belief.
Sound familiar? Isn’t that pretty much the exact same character he played in Darkplace? Well, yes and no.
The mood of A Gun For George is more sombre than the trashy, spoofy fun of Darkplace, and while some of the same comedic motifs are in place (pretence triumphing over talent (or not), confusion over fantasy and reality and intimate knowledge of genre conventions) the overall experience is rather different. In A Gun For George, Holness plays Terry Finch, a down-on-his-luck, not-very-popular author of pulp crime novels, most of which revolve around a lone avenger-character called The Reprisalizer. The switch in setting from exploitation/horror pastiche to crime fiction drama mirrors a change in tone towards something more doleful, and the cultural references seem rooted more in the mid 70s than the early 80s.
I’m also not sure if it’s a comedy, despite the innate humor of Holness’ performance. There’s an undercurrent of brooding darkness at play that sucks you in. Here the audience is asked to empathize with the characters and their story, rather than just a tick list of genre tropes. A couple of minutes in and I was a bit astounded that Holness has come back with a slight variant on his first show, but by the end I was convinced that it had the strength to stand firmly on its own merits.
A Gun For George views like a pilot, and I for one would be very happy to see this turn into a full-length TV series. Here’s the trailer.
You can watch the full 17-minutes of A Gun For Georgehere, and you can visit the Terry Finch/Reprisalizer website (recommended) here.
It’s not like you have to be Lt. Columbo to put two and two together here, unless of course there was a second anti-gay Christian lawyer convicted of making kiddie porn in New Hampshire yesterday. From the AP report:
The allegations were almost too heinous and far-fetched to be believed. A New Hampshire lawyer who graduated at the top of her class and credited her success to Christianity was accused of using her 14-year-old daughter as a sexual pawn, at one point even engaging in a sexual act with the girl on camera.
But believe them a jury did, convicting the woman Thursday of eight counts of exploiting the teenager, who is now in foster care. Her attorney called no witnesses during barely a day of testimony, only imploring jurors in his closing arguments to put aside their emotions as they deliberated.
In a recorded phone conversation with her daughter from jail in December, the woman told her, “I should have been the mom, not the friend.”
Something like that, Lisa…
A Canadian man Kevin Watson testified that he had sex with mother and daughter in a motel room in Niagara Falls, Ontario, just three weeks after the girl had turned fourteen, over Memorial Day weekend of last year. A second man, Brandon Ore, of Lebanon, N.H., testified that he met them after he responded to a personals ad placed by “two girls, 18 and 33, looking to party.”
Ore actually moved in with Biron and the girl in July 2012, but said that weeks went by before he realized that they were mother and daughter, and that the girl was just 14.
Ore soon moved out and turned himself in to local police, which was the initial cause for the lawyer’s arrest.
“The partying was out of control, the sex was out of control and she was charging high rent,” Ore said.
Biron is a lawyer in Manchester and a torch-bearer of religious freedom..
Mother of the year Biron is lucky she’s safe (for now) in jail. I’d imagine that otherwise torch-bearers of a different sort might have paid Lisa an unfriendly visit.
Take a good look at the face of Lisa Biron, a New Hampshire attorney who provides pro bono legal work for the anti-LGBT Christian group, the Alliance Defense Fund, a coalition of Christian lawyers. Fighting gay rights and woman’s reproductive rights are the main focus of the group’s litigation.
Biron has been found guilty—it took a jury just one hour to convict her—on eight felony charges involving child endangerment and producing child pornography. Via WMUR:
A Manchester lawyer has been found guilty of exploiting a 14-year-old girl to produce child pornography, The Associated Press reported. Lisa Biron, 43, was accused of videotaping the girl having sex with two men. Biron faced eight federal indictments on charges of child sexual exploitation, transporting a child across state lines to produce child pornography and possession of child pornography, and was convicted on all of them after the jury deliberated for less than an hour. The trial began Wednesday, with prosecutors calling to the stand two men who said Biron videotaped them having sex with the 14-year-old. The final witness for the prosecution was an FBI agent who specializes in computer forensics. He testified that he retrieved pornographic images from a computer that had Biron listed as the owner. He said a confiscated iPhone also had a sexually explicit video involving the girl.
According to the Joe.My.God blog, as Biron was being led away post-sentencing, she was overheard speaking to her father and blaming her 14-year-old victim, saying that “she had a part in this”!
John Wayne Gacy gives some Christmas cooking tips while being interviewed at Anamosa State Penitentiary in Iowa. Gacy was serving a 10 year sentence for sodomy and used his considerable skills in the art of the cavity search by stuffing dozens of turkeys in the prison cafeteria’s kitchen. His tender and saavy approach to hearts, gizzards and livers, quickly propelled him to the position of head cook.
After serving only 18 months of his sentence, Gacy was released from Anamosa and moved to Chicago where got a job as a short-order cook and worked his way up to managing three Kentucky Fried Chickens before getting into the clown business. A career trajectory not unlike Guy Fieri’s.
Shortly after this interview was conducted, Gacy’s father died from cirrhosis of the liver on Christmas Day 1969. Could this have been the karmic blow that sent Gacy spiraling down the food chain into the murky depths where evil dwells?
Gacy’s last meal was 12 deep-fried shrimp, a bucket of Original Recipe chicken from KFC, french fries and a pound of strawberries followed by a shot of sodium thiopental.
Next week: Lee Harvey Oswald’s recipe for stuffed cabbage.
Before bouncers or doormen became codified, legislated and organized into a multi-million-dollar security industry, anyone could turn-up on the door of a bar or a club, so long as they were willing to put the boot-in or take ‘a doing’ from some disgruntled patron. Back in the 1970s, everyone seemed to take turns at standing on door. My brother made a brief career of it, in velvet jacket and bow tie, before becoming an accountant.
Once, even I had my stint on the door of a club with a pal called Mike. While I was out of my depth, Mike had experience. He wore steel toe-caps, had a cycle belt wrapped around his waist, and carried a chib tucked-in his boots. I hoped my interest in modern literature and the films of Ken Russell would dissuade any would-be trouble-makers. Thankfully little happened other than escorting a few drunks off the premises. But it was an experience and I’d discovered it wasn’t my calling. Mike went on to join a chapter of the Hell’s Angels, while I went off to college.
I was reminded of my puny attempts at bouncing by this rather wonderful film report, from the late great Bernard Falk, on the training of Glasgow bouncers during the 1970s. Meet Cherokee, Dirty Harry, Big Billy, and Little Billy, who are trained to deal with troublesome customers in a gentle, polite and effective fashion, at a ‘rent-a-bouncer academy’ by black belt Judo champion, Brian Voss.
Randolph Linn, an Indiana man who pleaded guilty to arson charges today in a Federal Court in Ohio, revealed his motives to the judge in a plea bargain for the Sept. 30 incident at a Perrysburg Township mosque. Linn, drunk on 45 beers by his own estimate, poured gasoline on the second floor prayer room of the Greater Toldeo Islamic Center and started a fire. Luckily no one was there. Linn could clearly be identified in security cam footage and was caught swiftly by the FBI after a tip came in from a woman who knew him and was aware of his hatred for Muslims. He was in possession of three guns when he was arrested.
The 52-year-old truck driver claimed that he’d become “riled up” after seeing images of wounded soldiers on television. “Every day you turn on the TV, you see Muslims trying to kill Americans,” said Linn, who settled on the mosque in Toledo that he knew from his truck route.
When a federal judge asked Linn if he thought all Muslims are terrorists, Linn answered: “I’d say most of them are.”
When the judge then asked him if he knew any Muslims or what Islam is, one member of the mosque who was present at Linn’s hearing told WNWO-TV:
“And he said, ‘No, I only know what I hear on Fox News and what I hear on radio.’”
Predictable, but that still doesn’t make it any less sad. At least no one was hurt.
Linn also said:
“Muslims are killing Americans and trying to blow stuff up. Most Muslims are terrorists and don’t believe in Jesus Christ.”
Linn apparently had second thoughts during the drive home. “Coming back, I thought, `What in the heck did I do?’
He added “I feel bad I did it,” and “It’s a little too late now.” Ya think?
Fox News had this asshole’s head so twisted up that he actually believed in his tiny little mind that he was a good patriotic American performing an heroic act. Fox News whipped up so much hate and rage in this poor buffoon that he literally couldn’t handle it and now he’s going to spend the next two decades rotting in a Federal penitentiary.
This isn’t the first time Fox News has inspired some loser to do something potentially homicidal (‘memba Byron Williams, the obsessed Glenn Beck fan and Oakland freeway shooter? What about good old boy, Kenneth B. Kimbley Jr., another ardent Glenn Beck follower?).
With a guilty plea like Randy Linn’s, well, that ‘s a gift: it’s time for American Muslims to take Fox News to task in some sort of very expensive class action suit. They slander Muslims with impunity, convincing killer dum-dums like Randy Linn that all Muslims are terrorists and providing a forum for folks like that hateful harpie Pamela Geller. We know what motivated this lunatic—he told us—hatred, ignorance and Fox News, not necessarily in that order.
Mark first met “The Rat” while he was working on one of his books:
‘While researching Six Degrees of Paris Hilton, from out of the blue I received an email from someone claiming that he knew more about one of the criminals I was writing about than anyone. Intrigued, I phoned him, and soon realized that it was HIS story I wanted to tell…
‘“The Rat” and I have remained friends through the years, and I trust him with my life. Once, when I had to confront a pair of Russian mobsters operating out of a pawn shop front, The Rat flew down from Seattle to simply stand behind me and look intimidating. Only a true friend would do something like that.’
Mark also tells Dangerous Minds that “The Rat” will be going public this Thursday, when he will reveal his true identity for the first time on camera.
Here is an extract from Mark’s article on “The Rat”:
The first sign that something was wrong was when a car followed him onto his street – a one-way cul-de-sac at the top of Nichols Canyon in the Hollywood Hills where the mansions start at a million dollars. He was driving back from Bad Boys Bail Bonds, where he’d just dropped three grand to spring one of his drivers who had gotten popped in Santa Monica on a routine haul. Earlier in the day, he had pulled off the kind of transaction that some dealers go their whole lives without seeing – 300 pounds of primo weed for $1 million, which had netted him a cool $90,000 for two hours work. His senses heightened, he could feel the vibe going sour as he steered his discreet rental car past his own driveway. Another 60 feet, and suddenly there were searchlights washing every street corner – at least 30 undercover police cars – with a helicopter swooping down on top of him in case he decided to make a run for it down the open cliff face.
“I hadn’t done a deal in six months,” says Oz (most names in this story have been changed), a 48-year-old ex-marijuana trafficker and big-time baller who once dominated the I-5 corridor from British Columbia to Tijuana, was responsible for 70 percent of the marijuana smoked in Los Angeles and saw $4 million move through his operation every two weeks. “They take me inside – they’re stripping the house, and here’s my $90,000 all out on the table. I said, ‘Dude, just shoot me now. I don’t blame you guys, but I’m not going to rat on any of my people, so I’d prefer to be dead.’ The Fed says, ‘No, man, I can’t do that. But we need to talk.’”
Cruising through the Hills in a tricked-out Lincoln Navigator, on loan from a fellow drug runner who got out of the game when he found religion, Oz can’t help but point the sites of his former glory: The Russian tanning salon in Hollywood where you could order up Vicodin or steroids on demand; the Melrose Avenue tattoo shop that moves 50 to a hundred pounds of weed a week; the Mexican restaurant that serves up kilos of coke with its carne asada. But he is less expansive when describing his life since the 2004 bust that curtailed his hand-built empire – and his uneasy resurrection as an undercover informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency. In the world he lived in for over 20 years, the worst thing you could be was a rat – a turnabout of fate that obviously weighs heavy on him. In the past three years, Oz has survived three suicide attempts – not counting his choice of livelihood.
Still retaining the hard angles and displaced muscle mass from his early years as a bodybuilder and protracted steroid enthusiast, Oz today most resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger if you put him through a threshing machine and then tried to spot-weld the bigger pieces back together. He’s had his bicep torn off from trying to break a guy’s neck in a bar, all his teeth are capped from being broken off in fights and he’s literally got screws in his head to hold his skull in place. He earned the sometimes nickname “Shrek” from taking so many punches to the face that his eyebrows calcified into scar tissue, leaving a large protruding ridge in his forehead. And in the kind of colorful anecdote that no doubt made it easier for him to do his job, he once bit his best friend’s ear off in the back seat of a limo.
“I have a short man’s complex,” admits the 5’8, 220-pound brawler, still capable of flashes of intense anger and pervasive menace, as well as intense emotion over the secondary victims of his chosen lifestyle. “I realized at one point that most people were my friends because they were scared of me. I’ve never killed anybody, but I’ve hurt a lot of people – and every one of them deserved it.”
My DM colleague, Marc Campbell has passed on this episode of Media Mayhem, with Mark Ebner, which contains the first on-camera interview with ‘The Rat’.
