Murder
November 1st
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: November 1, 2007 3:40 EST
A witness for the prosecution of an ex-FBI agent once told a different story
By Tom Robbins, Village Voice
Linda Schiro, the key prosecution witness in the startling murder trial of former FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, took the stand Monday, and it was hard not to find her deadly story convincing.
In a soft voice and a strong South Brooklyn accent, Schiro, 62, nervously but soberly laid out how Lin DeVecchio had regularly visited the homes she shared in Bensonhurst with the love of her life, a swaggering Mafia soldier and secret government informant named Greg Scarpa Sr. On four of those visits, Schiro said, DeVecchio had provided Scarpa with the lethal information that her gangster lover then used to murder four people.
To hear Schiro tell it, there wasn’t much difference between the gangster and the FBI agent. “You know, you have to take care of this, she’s going to be a problem,” she quoted DeVecchio as saying prior to the 1984 murder of a beautiful girlfriend of a high-level member of Scarpa’s Colombo crime family who was allegedly talking to law enforcement.
She had the agent, a smirk on his face, talking the same way in 1987 about a drug-addled member of Scarpa’s crew. “You know,” Schiro said DeVecchio told Scarpa, “we gotta take care of this guy before he starts talking.” The crew member was soon dead as well.
When Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach called the first break of the day, reporters polled one another as to whether this crucial witness was believable.
“If I was him,” said one old hand, pointing at the defendant, “I’d be getting on the A train right now, headed for JFK and a plane someplace far away. He’s dead.” A veteran reporter sitting next to him nodded in agreement.
The first time I heard Linda Schiro, she also sounded convincing.
That was 10 years ago, when Schiro sat down to talk with me and Jerry Capeci, then and now the city’s most knowledgeable organized-crime reporter. But the story she told us then is dramatically different from the one she has now sworn to as the truth.
read on . . .
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October 18th
posted: October 18, 2007 4:02 EST
Two hard-boiled murder investigators get their man — a fellow cop — 16 years later.
By Christine Pelisek, LA Weekly
For Frank Salerno and Louie Danoff, two hard-boiled detectives working out of the Hall of Justice downtown, the last thing they needed was a complicated case. It was 1991, and the murder rate was skyrocketing to historic highs, with 2,054 homicides in Los Angeles County that year alone. Salerno, a veteran homicide dick who caught plenty of high-profile cases, like the Hillside Strangler, the Night Stalker and the strange drowning of Natalie Wood, was ready to retire early due to high blood pressure. His partner, Louie Danoff, was another toughie as the clue manager on the Hillside Strangler and Night Stalker task forces, and a seasoned gang-homicide detective.
At 50, Danoff, nicknamed “Louie the Hat” because of his love for fedoras, was already a classic burnout case with barely a life outside the job. “I was losing my identity,” says the now-66-year-old Danoff, looking like an older and crankier version of Kojak, even with his mustache and glasses. “I reached the point that I was spinning. I’m working, but I can’t complete anything. I don’t know if I can walk away from this job. I’m going to work myself to death. I’m not getting any satisfaction out of it.”
And so the partners, both Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies, weren’t necessarily looking forward to the case dealt them 16 years ago — a “no body” case, by far the most difficult in which to get a conviction, or even a resolution. In the spring of 1991, he and Salerno were handed a puzzler: the disappearance three weeks earlier of Ann Racz, a churchgoer and devoted 42-year-old mother who vanished on April 22 after heading to McDonald’s to pick up a snack for her children. She had solid ties to her Valencia community; her friends and family were baffled. Yet her newly estranged husband, John, claimed she had gone on a vacation.
“I thought I was ready,” says Danoff, biting into a beef burrito at Ordonez Mexican Food Restaurant in Montebello one recent day. But instead, after he and Salerno dug into the case, “I start panicking. I told Frank, and he said, ‘Louie, this will be all right.’ All this shit was hitting me at once.”
It wasn’t merely that they had no body. In addition, there was no physical evidence and no witnesses to suggest that Racz (pronounced “Race”) was a victim of foul play.
Family and friends insisted Ann wouldn’t walk away from her children, ages 7, 11 and 14. But there was an even more complicated and unwelcome twist: Her husband, John Racz, now 61, whom the two detectives immediately liked as the main suspect, was one of their own — an ex–Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sergeant. The wily former deputy played a cat-and-mouse game in a saga spanning 16 years, during which the detectives conducted more than 50 interviews, filled 30 notepads, issued five search warrants, and even used several psychics to find Ann Racz’s body. The case outlasted both detectives, who retired and turned the investigation over to two younger women, who became the “closers.”
“This case was more to me than just a case,” says the gruff Danoff. “It was a recovery and at the same time it was a dagger in the back. It was totally stressful. It has been a really hot-and-cold thing.”
But while it nearly did Danoff in, Ann Racz got justice last month when John Racz was convicted for her cold-blooded slaying and sentenced to a hefty 25 years to life in prison. Ann’s sister, Emiko Ryan, who endured so many pitfalls, stalls and dead ends during the investigation, can barely describe her relief: “I was worried that nothing was going to happen.” Certain that John Racz was Ann’s killer, Ryan says, “We were convinced, and we knew that Louie Danoff was convinced, so we just couldn’t let this go. It was the least I could do for her.”
read on . . .
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September 24th
posted: September 24, 2007 7:28 EST
Joe Konopka was an anti-drug crusader. Terry Frazier was a bondage escort with a drug habit. Two months ago, their lives collided.
By Mary Spicuzza, SF Weekly
It was a classic Joe Konopka moment. The anti-drug activist and his friend Freddy Batres were out patrolling the streets of Konopka's neighborhood one evening looking for "Fat Tony," one of the Haight's major dealers. The two were side by side but it was Konopka, founder of "Residents Against Druggies" or RAD — a group devoted to pushing drugs out of the Haight — who saw a deal going down and got on his two-way radio to bring police out to the scene.
What Konopka did next still amazes Batres to this day, some 10 years later. "Joe went right in front of him and started talking to (Fat Tony) nicely until the police arrived," Batres says.
The dealer was arrested on outstanding warrants, and Batres remembers the night as a turning point on RAD's controversial war on drugs in the Haight, a famously tolerant neighborhood widely known as the birthplace of hippie counterculture. "I got a lot of respect for that man," Batres says, adding that crime in the neighborhood dropped dramatically after Joe put the dealer in jail.
But that was back in the mid-1990s, during the heyday of Konopka and his Residents Against Druggies crusade when Joe believed he could parlay his activism into a seat on the Board of Supervisors. RAD gradually stopped patrolling and faded away —just as Joe Konopka did about seven years ago. That was when he lost his second bid for the Board of Supervisors, in 2000. Afterward, he all but vanished from the public eye until this past July, when the 65-year-old Konopka was found dead inside the Ashbury Street home he shared with his wife of more than 30 years, Ethel.
When homicide inspectors arrived at the couple's house that night — after emergency dispatchers received two 911 calls from Konopka's cell phone — they saw Konopka lying facedown on the bed in the master bedroom wearing black leather fur-lined restraints on his wrists and ankles. A black hood covered his face and head. A rope tied to the bed was wrapped around his feet, up to his wrists, and around his neck.
A week later, police arrested a 40-year-old drug user who, according to a friend, became a bondage and discipline, or B&D, escort mainly to finance his heroin habit. But what's unclear is whether this was a bondage session gone wrong or, as prosecutors say, murder.
read on . . .
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posted: September 24, 2007 6:17 EST
This oily business of dealing with evil foreign leaders.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Cold War, warm feelings: Reagan chats with the Taliban in the White House in 1983.
New York's tabloids and assorted pols came unglued yesterday about the very idea of Iran's crackpot hardliner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanting to visit Ground Zero.
Where were they when Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime boils people to death, was courted by George W. Bush and Mayor Mike Bloomberg?
Don't let your own blood boil at the thought of a bad guy visiting our sacralized 9/11 site. Condemn it, if you want, but Ahmedinejad was just trying to score political points, as our own pols do all the time at Ground Zero. He got what he wanted: The angry U.S. reaction will play well back home in Tehran, especially with the radical mullahs who really run Iran and like to stir up hatred for the "Great Satan."
Do we even have to say that in international politics, enemies today are pals tomorrow, and vice versa, and that the reasons almost always have to do with greed for money and natural resources?
On the other hand, it would be nice if our press at least reported these events. The Uzbek despot Karimov laid a wreath at Ground Zero in 2002, and there was literally not one word in the U.S. press about it at the time — I'm not talking about criticism or praise but any words at all. Nothing.
So Karimov is not a bad enough guy to get you worked up? Saddam Hussein was brown-nosed by Don Rumsfeld in December 1983. There's no reason to condemn Rumsfeld for that; it was just oil politics — just like the oil politics that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played when they seized upon the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq.
After all, when Texas oil execs questioned Cheney in 1998, when he was still at Halliburton, about the physical dangers of pursuing oil in turbulent parts of Asia, the future vice president and de facto commander in chief told them:
"You've got to go where the oil is. I don't worry about it a lot."
Saddam is gone, but we still don't really have Iraq's oil. We do, however, have such evil people as the Taliban to deal with, right? Well, the Taliban were hailed as Afghan freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan during their triumphant visit to the White House on March 21, 1983. Reagan said at the time:
"To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us a great lesson - that there are things in this world worth defending.
"To the Afghan people, I say on behalf of all Americans that we admire your heroism, your devotion to freedom, and your relentless struggle against your oppressors."
That's ancient history, huh? In fact, they were still our pals 14 years later. In late 1997, the Taliban were wined and dined at the homes of Bush's pals, the Houston oil execs, during Dubya's reign as the hangingest governor in U.S. history.
The oil schnooks were buttering up the Taliban for pipelines and other bidness, of course. See Wayne Madsen's "Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team" for details.
At least that courting of the Taliban less than 10 years ago was reported at the time. Of the many words in the mainstream press, my favorites are from a December 14, 1997, story by Caroline Lees in the Telegraph (U.K.), in which she describes the Taliban officials' visit to Unocal vice president Martin Miller's palatial Houston home:
After a meal of specially prepared halal meat, rice and Coca-Cola, the hardline fundamentalists — who have banned women from working and girls from going to school — asked Mr Miller about his Christmas tree.
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posted: September 24, 2007 5:57 EST
A shy St. Louis poet pens subversive detective stories set in his communist homeland.
By Malcolm Gay, Riverfront Times
Qiu Xiaolong came to writing the hard way: As the son of a confirmed capitalist during China's Cultural Revolution, he was forced to write his father's confession speech. The year was 1968 — two years into Chairman Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Qiu had looked on as his father penned a confession speech, mounted a small stage, and owned up to his sins before a group of Red Guards — groups of communists empowered by Mao to try "class enemies" at independent tribunals.
This time was different. Qiu's father had recently undergone cataract surgery: "He could hardly move because he was blindfolded, so I was called into the hospital to help him write the confession and help him stand before Chairman Mao's portrait. At that time it was just something I had to do," Qiu recalls. "But afterward, when I thought about it — ironically, you may say that this kind of gave me confidence: My writing may not be that bad, because nobody found fault with my writing."
It's little wonder this episode remains vivid. Qiu's creative and personal life has long been shaped by the politics of his native China. It was politics that first pushed him to write and study poetry, and later induced him to immigrate to the United States. Politics compelled him to write in English, and, ultimately, prompted him to switch genres.
These days, Qiu, 53, lives in an immaculate home at the end of a well-tended St. Louis County cul-de-sac, where he bangs out some of the world's most acclaimed...detective novels. His 2000 debut, Death of a Red Heroine, and the others are about much more than chasing down perps, though. Qiu's poetry-quoting anti-hero, Inspector Chen, navigates the corrupt world of Chinese officialdom, exposing the Communist Party's privileged bureaucratic class. Along the way, Qiu limns a portrait of China in transition, and the fine line many average Chinese must walk between appearing loyal to party ideals while embracing the modernizing influence of the West.
read on . . .
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posted: September 24, 2007 1:39 EST
John Racz insists his missing wife was on a 16-year vacation.
By Christine Pelisek, LA Weekly
A SAN FERNANDO SUPERIOR COURT judge has sentenced a former Sheriff’s sergeant and elementary school teacher to 25 years to life in prison for the 1991 murder of his estranged wife. A stunned John Racz, 61, who did not testify during the two-month trial, spoke briefly to Judge Ronald Coen and a packed courtroom that included his three adult children and the detectives who pursued him in a saga that spanned 16 years.
“I did not kill my wife,” he proclaimed on September 14 in front of the judge and members of the jury who returned to hear the sentence. Racz, who was wearing a Los Angeles County orange jail jumpsuit, claimed that his wife “left on her own.”
The case was unusual in many ways. It pitted Racz against his former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department peers. Homicide detectives never found a body, physical evidence or witnesses to prove that the vanished woman, Ann Racz, was murdered. The trial, which concluded last month with a first-degree murder conviction, was based solely on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of dozens of family members, friends — and a pastor who testified that he saw scratches on Racz’s face after his wife’s April 22, 1991, disappearance.
It was a tale of betrayal, anger, greed and cunning. Ann Racz was a regular churchgoer and devoted 42-year-old mother who had solid ties to her Valencia community. She vanished during a quick trip alone to McDonald’s. Her friends and family were baffled, but her husband claimed she had gone on a surprise vacation. Family and friends were adamant that Ann wouldn’t walk away from her children — ages 7, 11 and 14.
Detectives soon found out that Ann Racz was about to leave her ex-cop husband, and that she had served him with divorce papers three days before she disappeared. She had recently moved into a condo with her kids, and a divorce hearing was set for May, the month after she went missing.
read on . . .
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posted: September 24, 2007 1:35 EST
The jury that hangs together gets hung.
By Steven Mikulan, LA Weekly
September 21 — FIVE MONTHS AFTER IT BEGAN, Phil Spector’s murder trial, once a model of decorum and correctness, lays in the wreckage of a hung jury.
The jurors and alternates met as strangers last spring, but after nearly half a year, they’ve become a kind of judicial family that always eats together and moves as one group, arriving and leaving the court through security elevators and stairwells, under the watchful eyes of bailiffs. With their identities kept secret, we in the media have glibly nicknamed panel members for their fashion quirks or known professions. There’s White Shirt, Windbreaker and The Scarf, along with Topsiders and Dateline. But above all there is the Engineer — so called not because he resembles the narrator from Miss Saigon, but because he really is a civil engineer.
This 30-something man drew most of our interest throughout the trial for his Zen-like demeanor, thoughtful neckties and prodigious note taking. Many pegged him to be the future jury foreman, and it came as no surprise when he was so chosen by his peers. Eight days after his election, the Engineer sent the note to Judge Larry Paul Fidler that threw this trial into turmoil: "We have reached an impasse and cannot reach a unanimous verdict."
When the Engineer went further and announced that he and his fellow jurors were deeply fractured along a 7-5 split, prosecutors Alan Jackson and Pat Dixon looked devastated. Day in and day out, whenever the jurors and alternates had filed past the bar, they had drawn affectionate smiles from both sides’ counsels. No more. As jurors left the courtroom Tuesday, Jackson and Dixon stared into space. What had gone wrong? Had jurors been persuaded or befuddled by the defense’s tortured theory of extended blood back-spatter? Had their visit to Spector’s Pyrenees Castle, where Lana Clarkson died, somehow endeared them to the music producer?
read on . . .
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September 18th
posted: September 18, 2007 3:40 EST
Listening to Phil Spector's basement tapes.
By Steven Mikulan, LA Weekly
THE DAYS ARE LONG NOW in Department 106, as jurors deliberate Phil Spector's fate behind closed doors. Friday morning (September 14) arrived with grave disappointment when some panel members filed in wearing jeans and T-shirts — indicating they were more likely to spend the weekend at Lake Havasu than announce a verdict and face the media.
In the courtroom, a few journalists read newspapers or whispered comments to each other while trying not to draw reprimands from bailiffs or court media handlers. Occasionally, we'd drift upstairs to the 18th-floor press office next to the D.A.'s office, where there's a TV and DVD player. Vanity Fair's Dominick Dunne obtained and donated for viewing a 1967 I Dream of Jeannie episode co-starring Phil Spector as himself. The L.A. Times' Peter Hong delivered Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Lana Clarkson's first film) and the Godfather trilogy (intra-oral gunshot homicide in the second film); City News Service's Ciarán McEvoy brought in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which also features a gun-in-mouth murder. More important, the Meyer movie's freakish, homicidal character, Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell, was supposedly modeled on Spector.
Dunne caused a stir Friday when a group of TV and radio reporters heard him discuss, outside the courtroom, videotapes made by Spector and his then-assistant, Michelle Blaine, in which Spector walked through possible alibi scenarios. Dunne, in his October Vanity Fair article, wrote about how these tapes were rumored to have been shot at the Beverly Hills Hotel over the course of eight days immediately following Clarkson's death — but declared the rumor to be untrue. (The tapes were actually made a year later and not at the hotel.) Nevertheless, local media, in the dry white season of waiting, jumped on the news as though it were true.
Friday was also the day O.J. Simpson arose from the ashes of oblivion, when he was accused in Las Vegas of coercing the return of sports memorabilia that he claimed belonged to him but was in the unlawful possession of a collector. The L.A. media went into meltdown mode over this story, which, in an ironic twist, veteran Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch, who covers Spector's trial every day, recounted a conversation she'd had with Simpson, in which the Juice told his side of the Las Vegas debacle. Suddenly, Deutsch's voice was heard every 15 minutes on radio — not about Spector, but Simpson, a specter who still haunts this town.
The instant eclipse of Spector by Simpson demonstrated just how little the music producer's trial means to the public, and reminds me of the time nearly every reporter covering Robert Blake's murder trial two years ago fled Blake's courtroom to watch the arrival of superstar Mel Gibson at another room in the Van Nuys courthouse.
read on . . .
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posted: September 18, 2007 12:57 EST
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Here's a question, raised in 1979 by the mellifluous Mighty Diamonds:
Who's gonna bodyguard ya, Mr. Bodyguard?
I want to know who.
Thirty years later, the answer's clear: The Pentagon, that's who. At best we'll get the "rogue security contractor" excuse from the Bush regime for Sunday's cacophonous killing of 11 Iraqis in Baghdad by the North Carolina mercenary army Blackwater.
That excuse has worked before. As I wrote in July 2004, it was used by the Pentagon after the Abu Ghraib tortures came to light. SecDef Don Rumsfeld blamed "rogue" soldiers.
Our memories are short when it comes to the mercenaries employed by the Bush regime. As I pointed out in August 2004, private "interrogators" from CACI were employed by the Pentagon at Abu Ghraib, where all that "fear up" went down.
After this latest incident of privatized violence, we have Blackwater saying its boys were ambushed. Blackwater has 1,000 "troops" in Iraq and guards Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Yes, they guard Crocker, and the administration guards them. Monday's Washington Post concisely captured the two versions of the latest Blackwater escapade. Here's the first:
The shooting started at noon on Sunday when a car bomb exploded near a State Department motorcade traveling through the western Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad near Nisoor Square, U.S. officials said. Following the explosion, Blackwater employees guarding the diplomats exchanged fire with armed attackers, Blackwater and U.S. officials said.
The subsequent battle killed at least nine people and wounded 14, Iraqi police and hospital workers said. [An Iraqi official] put the death toll at 11.
Followed by the second version:
"We were shocked when we saw these fighters getting out of their SUVs and shooting randomly at people," said Sgt. Mohammed Juwad Hussein, an Iraqi army soldier who said he was manning a checkpoint in Baghdad near the scene of the fighting. "We didn't know who they were targeting or who they wanted to shoot."
They wanted to shoot them some Ay-rabs, pal. The way I see it, the Mighty Diamonds sang about the possibility of dreadlocked Rastafarians someday making bodyguards pay the price:
One of these days it a go dread (dreader than dread)
Ev'ryone looking a place to hide 'em head (well dread)
But don't worry, Blackwater bodyguards, the Bush regime will shelter you. Iraq's citizens are the ones who can't hide. As of this morning, IBC's "documented civilian deaths from violence" totals somewhere between 72,596 and 79,187.
Yes, the Blackwater "incident" was notable. But as the IBC "recent events" list notes, on that same Sunday, many other Iraqis died, and not at the hands of American mercenaries, whom our press continues to euphemistically label "contractors" or "bodyguards."
One of the victims was a 12-year-old boy who was killed in Diwaniya during a raid by U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to news reports assembled by IBC. Wonder what happened there?
In any case, this particular bloody Sunday was predestined. IBC's list of 38 people who were killed just the day before includes this entry:
Baghdad: car bomb kills 11 outside bakery, Amil; 11 bodies.
And this one:
Karma: 3 bodies.
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