The press
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 29th
posted: October 29, 2007 9:05 EST
Glenn Beck gloats while L.A. blazes
By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly
WHERE I LIVE, ON THE EDGE of Topanga Canyon, our cars are dusted with ash and our nostrils tickled with the scent of charred wood. We’ve got one eye on a darkened skyline and the other on the tube, lest we be warned to get out, and get out now.
It’s hardly the first time much of L.A. or — in this case — entire swaths of California have been ablaze. Every five or 10 years, it seems, some sort of biblical inferno sweeps through and brazenly reminds us who, or what, is really in charge. By nature’s whim, a population sometimes lulled into believing that it alone — or at least its representatives — determines the course of history is humbled by forces it cannot comprehend or properly anticipate.
But this round of wildfires coincides with a time in which more than hillsides and homes are being incinerated. There’s also a part of our national character that’s been consumed. This week’s firestorms bear no blame for the ongoing degradation of our civic culture. They merely and starkly illuminate it.
I refer to the comments made last week by CNN host Glenn Beck on his nationally syndicated radio show. As the news buzzed that flames in Malibu were roaring down the hillsides and licking the Pacific, driving some Hollywood big names into a panicked exile, Beck could hardly contain his delight.
“We all love America. We just disagree on how we should function, what we should do, big government, small government. It doesn’t mean you hate America,” he told his audience. “I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.”
Ordinarily, I’d laugh off such a jackass remark. But it’s not so funny when the soot is falling in your own yard, when as many as a half million people in 265,000 households have been forced to evacuate, when a thousand homes have been wiped out, when one victim has died and at least a dozen others have suffered burns, when firefighters say they are stretched beyond limits and are worried about losing further control of the more than 15 separate raging fires, when a state of emergency has been declared, and when the governor has mobilized 1,500 National Guard troops to help stem the disaster.
You really have to wonder what sort of nitwit would get on the radio and gloat over this catastrophe. What sort of pea-brain actually believes that capitalist millionaires like Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen are America-hating firebrands who merit getting burned out of their homes?
Glenn Beck, of course, is the one who really hates America. At a minimum, he openly detests an American democracy that allows the sort of tepid, and — yes — often self-serving, hypocritical and annoying, public political activism of a Barbra, a Cher and some of their beachside neighbors. But they really are a joke, not a threat to be vaguely compared to Osama bin Laden.
read on . . .
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October 26th
posted: October 26, 2007 2:21 EST
The spooky truth behind the media's favorite 'spy.'
By Chris Thompson, Village Voice
It was a morning a little more than a year ago: A dapper, gray-haired gentleman was discussing his recently published novel with the two hosts of Fox & Friends, the morning show on the Fox News Channel. Anchors Tiki Barber and Kiran Chetry appeared enthralled by the author, Juval Aviv, who said that his book was actually a barely disguised account of the life and alleged 1991 murder of millionaire media tycoon Robert Maxwell.
Aviv provided his bona fides: He runs a Madison Avenue corporate-espionage firm named Interfor and had been hired to investigate some aspects of Maxwell's complex finances. But during his investigation, Aviv had discovered explosive truths. Maxwell, Aviv said, had actually been a spy for the Russian, British, and Israeli intelligence agencies, and had paid with his life when his spymasters discovered that he'd double-crossed them. Aviv claimed to his Fox News hosts that the revelations in his book were so stunning that he'd had to novelize the tale to protect himself. If he'd told the actual truth, he hinted, he'd have been killed.
"I couldn't write it as a nonfiction," said the Israeli man in his accented English. "It had to be fiction. I don't think I would have survived the nonfiction version of it."
Barber and his co-anchor looked duly impressed. And why not? Here was the real deal, a former Israeli spy who had reportedly spent the 1970s hunting Palestinian radicals around Europe and the Middle East, whose life story was so terrible that he could only allude to it. "You were a top assassin for Mossad, which is Israel's secret service," said Chetry. "In your book, the main character has a situation where he's supposed to knock off 12 leading terrorists and kill them."
"Yes," Aviv said.
"How realistic is that?"
"It's very realistic." Laughing modestly, he added: "I can't talk about it."
It was just another day in the life of Juval Aviv, an "international security expert" and post-9/11 media celebrity who has parlayed his mysterious past into countless appearances on local and national television. Most famously, Aviv has promoted the idea that he was the lead Mossad assassin tasked with avenging the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in a secret operation that was portrayed in Steven Spielberg's 2005 film Munich. It was Aviv that actor Eric Bana was supposedly playing, though his name in the movie was "Avner."
At least that's what Aviv wants people to believe.
Aviv has chatted on air with ABC's George Stephanopoulos and CNN's Mary Snow. Bill O'Reilly has consulted Aviv on preparedness and homeland security. Fox business anchor Neil Cavuto has often invited him onto his show Your World with Neil Cavuto to discuss everything from Middle Eastern politics to the latest dispatch from Osama bin Laden.
Thanks in part to Aviv's high TV profile, his company Interfor has won some of the most lucrative corporate-espionage contracts in the business. Earlier this summer, for example, Hollinger hired Aviv to trace assets allegedly hidden by the disgraced media tycoon Conrad Black. Life as a former spook is apparently very lucrative.
But throughout Aviv's rise as one of New York's biggest corporate spies and as a terrorism expert on television, there have been nagging questions about his legitimacy. Is this guy really who he says he is? Officially, the Israeli government says that Aviv is full of it.
read on . . .
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October 22nd
posted: October 22, 2007 6:33 EST
El Nuevo Herald’s Gonzalo Guillén is the latest victim of Bush buddy Álvaro Uribe.
By Chuck Strouse, Miami New Times
Gonzalo Guillén is on the lam. His wife and son are in hiding.
Colombian President Álvaro Uribe publicly belittled the reporter. Strangers repeatedly threatened to murder him. His bodyguard disappeared.
"I got a call at my home ... a guy said, 'We can kill you,'" Guillén recalls from Lima, Peru, where he's been laying low for five days. "Then the threats started coming fast. Five calls at my home, e-mails, 24 death threats in 48 hours. I was afraid for me, for my family. I left the country in a sprint."
Sound like a spy thriller?
It ain't.
Guillén has for seven years been a reporter for Miami's El Nuevo Herald, one of America's top Spanish-language publications. He's one of two Colombian journalists whom President Uribe has dumped on in the past two weeks. Daniel Coronell, a columnist for the well-known magazine Semana, also went abroad after the president publicly called him "a coward, a liar, a swine, and a professional slanderer." In this South American country, where vigilante justice rules, insults can mean bloodshed.
"Outrageous," comments Joel Simon of New York's Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). "President Uribe knows that to say this kind of thing opens the doors for [thugs] to potentially kill."
Venezuela and Cuba got most of the ink and opprobrium at last weekend's meeting of Latin American journalists in Miami. News of Hugo Chávez's closing an opposition TV station in Caracas, as well as restrictions on reporters and jailing of critics in Havana, was lapped up like milk by a gatito.
But it's even more difficult to report the truth in Colombia, which will receive $756 million in U.S. foreign aid this year. At least 39 journalists have been whacked for doing their jobs there in the past 15 years. These days, many reporters avoid criticizing the government. Why risk being murdered? More than 3,000 cases of self-censorship were recently documented in the country.
read on . . .
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posted: October 22, 2007 2:48 EST
County attorney fires special prosecutor
By Bill Jensen, Village Voice Media
Published online October 19, 2007, 4:00 p.m. MST
At a press conference on Friday afternoon, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas announced that all charges against New Times, its owners, editors and writers have been dropped — and that special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik has been dismissed.
The shocking move came a day after Phoenix New Times published a story highlighting a grand jury subpoena demanding New Times hand over an unprecedented amount of reporter notes, personal information about Web site visitors and other intrusive materials.
"We tried to make a modest stand for our readers, our reporters and our Constitution," said Michael Lacey, co-owner and executive editor of New Times/Village Voice Media. "Sometimes law enforcement prevails in their view of the Constitution; sometimes the Irish prevail in theirs."
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posted: October 22, 2007 2:45 EST
By Tony Ortega, Village Voice
The owners of The Village Voice were thrown into jail last week, and I wish I could say that it was my fault. Instead, I have to give that credit to my former Phoenix New Times colleague, John Dougherty.
It was Dougherty who, in 1993, first pointed out that the then brand-new sheriff of Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix), a clown named Joe Arpaio, was a menace. But over the years 1995 to 1999, that beat was all mine.
By late 1995, two years into his tenure, Arpaio had already perfected his shtick as “America’s Toughest Sheriff.” He craved the attention of out-of-town journalists like the rest of us crave oxygen, and to get it, he turned the county’s jails into a sideshow.
Arpaio’s big lie was that he was tough on criminals. But even the most cursory attempt at real reporting revealed a very different truth: Arpaio not only endangered the lives of inmates—most of whom were simply awaiting trial, and the majority of the rest serving time on traffic violations—but he also endangered his own employees with his policies and wasted county money and resources on attention-getting nonsense. And, increasingly, he was becoming a very, very paranoid despot.
I managed to uncover stories about deaths in Arpaio’s jails, assaults on inmates (including one paraplegic inmate whose neck was broken by sadistic guards), and the dirty tricks that “America’s Toughest Sheriff” aimed at his political opponents—despite the fact that Arpaio blocked every one of our (perfectly legal) public-records requests and fired employees whom he even suspected of speaking to New Times.
When I moved to New Times Los Angeles in 1999, John Dougherty returned to the Arpaio story and really turned up the heat. Though the constant parade of television journalists arriving breathless with admiration for Arpaio’s “courage” never slowed, Dougherty pressed ahead with the real story: that there has hardly been a more untrustworthy politician in Arizona, and perhaps in the rest of the country as well.
Taking advantage of post-9/11 privacy statutes, for example, Arpaio had convinced the county to remove from public view records of the million-dollar commercial real-estate transactions he was making. How, Dougherty wondered, was a modestly paid county sheriff making those kinds of deals? Arpaio blocked every attempt to answer that question, and then did something even more outrageous: He convinced the county attorney to charge New Times and Dougherty with a felony for including his home address in the Internet version of a story about his real-estate dealings.
As New Times pointed out, that address is available in multiple places on the Internet from various official and government sources that anyone, to this day, can access.
Taking advantage of a pliant county attorney and the thug he’s hired to go after New Times, Arpaio is waging a war against my former colleagues’ First Amendment rights. Although Dougherty has since moved on and I’m now editor of The Village Voice, New Times journalists Steve Lemons and Paul Rubin and editor Rick Barrs continue to expose Arpaio for the megalomaniac that he is.
In the 14 years that those of us at New Times have spent countering the bad journalism done by countless sycophantic reporters who have bought into the sheriff’s fraudulent reputation, we never had to be told that the owners of our company, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, fully support us.
And that was never made more clear than last week, when Lacey and Larkin were hauled off to Arpaio’s jail after daring to speak out about the sheriff’s latest outrage: Through the county attorney’s lapdog, a grand jury has been conned into doing Arpaio’s dirty work. Although it was technically illegal to do so, Lacey and Larkin went public in a story this week about the draconian subpoena that New Times has been hit with, which calls not only for records about every story the paper has written about Arpaio, but also the identities and other information about every person who has ever looked at the New Times website since 2004.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in D.C., has described the subpoena as “frightening in its scope.” Even those reporters who may have bought Arpaio’s line of bull in the past must see what an abuse of power this is, and how it threatens the journalism being done by papers that dare to question public officials.
I hope my colleagues in the press understand how important this battle is.
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posted: October 22, 2007 2:43 EST
Joe Arpaio, Andy Thomas and Dennis Wilenchik hit New Times with grand jury subpoenas
By Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, Phoenix New Times
This newspaper and its editorial staff — both current and former — are the targets of unprecedented grand jury subpoenas dated August 24.
The authorities are also using the grand jury subpoenas in an attempt to research the identity, purchasing habits, and browsing proclivities of our online readership.
It is, we fear, the authorities' belief that what you are about to read here is against the law to publish. But there are moments when civil disobedience is merely the last option. We pray that our judgment is free of arrogance.
These are the issues as we understand them.
In a breathtaking abuse of the United States Constitution, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, and their increasingly unhinged cat's paw, special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik, used the grand jury to subpoena "all documents related to articles and other content published by Phoenix New Times newspaper in print and on the Phoenix New Times website, regarding Sheriff Joe Arpaio from January 1, 2004 to the present."
Every note, tape, and record from every story written about Sheriff Arpaio by every reporter over a period of years.
In addition to the omnibus subpoena, which referred to our writer Stephen Lemons directly, reporters John Dougherty and Paul Rubin were targeted with individual subpoenas.
More alarming still, Arpaio, Thomas, and Wilenchik subpoenaed detailed information on anyone who has looked at the New Times Web site since 2004.
Every individual who looked at any story, review, listing, classified, or retail ad over a period of years.
The seemingly picayune matter of Sheriff Arpaio's home address getting printed at the bottom of an opinion column on our Internet site — and the very real issue of commercial property investments the sheriff hid from public view — have now erupted into a courtroom donnybrook against a backdrop of illegal immigration disputes, Mexican drug cartels, the Minutemen, political ambition, and turf disputes between prosecutors and the judiciary.
read on . . .
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October 11th
posted: October 11, 2007 2:34 EST
By Nikki Finke, LA Weekly
What was feared has come true. I reported here last month about an early controversy surrounding the Israeli movie The Band's Visit after it swept that country's Ophir Awards (that country's Oscars). Normally, this means the pic would be Israel's submission for the Academy Award's Best Foreign Language Film. But rivals were claiming that the political movie, about an Egyptian police band that mistakenly ends up stranded overnight in a small Israeli town, has more than 50% English dialogue and therefore must be ruled ineligible for the nomination.
Now Haaretz, the Israeli news agency, is reporting that The Band's Visit has indeed been disqualified. Israeli journalists say the Israeli Academy will appeal, but in all likelihood Beaufort, the runner-up for Israel's Ophir Award, will be the film nominated. But The Band's Visit's Oscar hopes could still be alive: Sony Pictures Classics, which bought the Cannes award winning film's foreign rights, may also enter the pic's Israeli writer and director Eran Kolirin in the Best Original Screenplay category.
(See my previous item "Early Controversy Over Israeli Oscar Entry.")
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posted: October 11, 2007 2:24 EST
The warfare on the Columbia president's alleged perversion of academic freedom.
By Nat Hentoff, Village Voice
With his achievements including the execution of women for alleged adultery, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent visit to Columbia University unsurprisingly kicked up a furor here and around the world, much of it aimed at the university's president, Lee Bollinger, for inviting him.
While waiting for the show to go on, a Fox News camera outside Alfred Lerner Hall focused on a couple of students, one of whom ran down a list of some of the guest's crimes against his own people and against Americans. She angrily blamed Columbia for giving Ahmadinejad "a chance to legitimatize himself."
Standing next to her, another student disagreed, saying, "Justice Louis Brandeis used to say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. What's happening right now at Columbia is a testament to that."
The second student walked away aware, I'm sure, that his was a decidedly minority view in the city, the state, and the nation. I heard no presidential candidate of either party supporting Bollinger, while there were bipartisan denunciations of him by politicians, many editorial writers, and other Americans who believe in freedom of speech—except for speech they hate.
For example, Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, a long and valiant practitioner of free speech, wrote in USA Today (September 24) that having Ahmadinejad at Columbia was "a perversion of free speech." On the same day, USA Today's lead editorial was titled: "Let Iranian President Speak—To Showcase U.S. Values." (Instructively, USA Today's editor is Ken Paulson, former head of the First Amendment Center—a resource of mine—based at Vanderbilt University.)
Until now, I have not mentioned the free speech rallying cry, "the First Amendment," because Columbia is a private university and the First Amendment doesn't kick in unless there is action by an agent or agency of the state (local, state, and federal) to repress speech.
But the warfare on Lee Bollinger's alleged perversion of academic freedom has indeed become a First Amendment issue—thanks to Sheldon Silver, speaker of the New York State Assembly, and the most powerful behind-the-scenes operator in Albany.
On September 24, a front-page story in The New York Sun reported that because Lee Bollinger refused to bow to public pressure to cancel the radioactive invitation, Silver and other lawmakers "are considering withholding public funds [in the future] from [Columbia]" in protest. Said the assembly's Wizard of Oz: "We have an obligation because of the U.N. to allow [this sponsor of terrorism] to come to this country . . . We don't have to give him a forum. . . . He's clearly responsible for the deaths of Americans both in Iraq and elsewhere. And he remains as much a threat to the world as anybody today."
Added another summer soldier of the free exchange of ideas, David Weprin, chairman of New York City Council's Finance Committee: "We should," he told the Sun, "look at [our funding of] everything involving Columbia, whether it be capital projects, city and state, or other related things that we do in the city for them."
And that's a lot. The Sun's Jacob Gershman noted: "Albany awards Columbia millions of dollars a year in student financial aid. . . . Last year, Albany awarded the school $10 million for a nanotechnology center and $12 million for a cancer center in Washington Heights."
In solidarity with this proposed punishment of Lee Bollinger by our holders of the public purse, should patients at the Washington Heights cancer center now try to go elsewhere? And should this contemplated punishment of Columbia set a precedent for an Enemies' List in Albany, other states, and Washington to prevent taxpayers' money going to institutions harboring, however briefly, enemies or those linked to enemies of the United States? I expect Dick Cheney would help update such a list.
read on . . .
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