posted: November 1, 2007 3:42 EST
By Michael Clancy, Village Voice
It wasn't much of shock this morning when prosecutors dropped the case against Lindley DeVecchio, the former FBI agent accused of collaborating with mobsters on four murders.
The case was teetering on collapse Tuesday afternoon after the Voice published Tom Robbins' "Tall Tales of a Mafia Mistress", sending both the defense and prosecutors scrambling. The story revealed that the prosecution's star witness, Linda Schiro, contradicted her sworn testimony at the trial in interviews she had in 1997 with Robbins and another reporter, Jerry Capeci. On the stand, she said DeVecchio had a hand in four rubouts. In those interviews, she said DeVecchio only helped ice Patrick Porco.
The Daily News noted that Robbins, whose stories put ex-Giuliani administration official Russell Harding in the clink, has the distinction of writing stories that got one man locked up and helped another guy get out.
• • •
Listen to "The Schiro Tapes."
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posted: September 20, 2007 9:40 EST
Turns out that the late punk impresario was loaded, and a fight is brewing.
By Michael Clancy, Village Voice
Here's a shocker: Hilly Kristal turns out to have been a millionaire. Just weeks after the legendary former CBGB owner passed away, his heirs—who thought Kristal was broke—are finding out that the old punk impresario was worth a surprising $3.7 million.
And that kind of money, naturally, is not going to be divvied up without a mosh pit of family infighting.
Kristal's son, Dana, isn't happy at the way his sister Lisa Kristal Burgman, for example, encouraged his mother, Karen Kristal, three years ago to sign away any rights to the corporation that ran CBGB—Karen, 82, was already showing signs of senility and may not have realized what she was giving away.
Through the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Karen was a fixture at the door of CBGB and behind its bar. In that time, she developed a reputation, among patrons, bouncers, bartenders, and musicians alike, as a bit of a humorless hard-ass. Skinheads obeyed her command. The Ramones hid their joints when they saw her coming.
"I was more scared of Karen than I was of the skinheads," said George Tabb, a founding member of the False Prophets, former CBGB employee, and longtime Kristal family friend, as well as a reporter who covered the scene at the club for Maximum Rock'n'Roll. "They all had this respect for her. She put on the matinees—it was her idea, and that basically started the whole hardcore movement in New York."
But there was a reason that Karen Kristal was so tough: Her name was on CBGB's liquor license, and she wholly owned the club's parent company. It had been that way since 1973, when Hilly's on the Bowery became CBGB.
In fact, the corporation that did business as CBGB & OMFUG was named after her. The "Sareb" in Sareb Restaurant Corp. is an amalgam of Sara Rebecca, her given name. She began going by "Karen" after she married Hilly because she thought an alliterative name would help her acting career, and she kept the name after their divorce in the late '60s to have the same last name as her children.
Karen remained the president of Sareb Restaurant Corp. until January of 2005, when she signed over the liquor license and her entire interest in the company—10 shares, or 100 percent of Sareb—to Hilly. She received no compensation, according to a letter furnished by Dana Kristal. State Liquor Authority records confirm the transaction.
When presented with the letter last week, Karen stared at it for a moment with confusion and said, "Did I sign this? That's my signature?"
read on . . .
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