Read All About It In the Sunday Papers-Aug. 23 Edition

LEAD STORY-Miami Herald: How Cyberthief Committed ‘Heist of the Century’

Nobody does crime reporting like the Miami Herald does crime reporting. Albert Gonzalez stole to his heart’s content, while on the Secret Service payroll.  What happens when snitches go terriblyterribly wrong:

On May 7, 2008, federal agents swept through Miami-Dade looking for evidence that one of their best informants was also one of the world’s biggest cyberthiefs.

 Searching three homes and a luxury hotel room in South Beach, they found 14 computers, $400,000 in cash, six firearms, expensive jewelry — and even stumbled on a marijuana grow house.

 What they missed was the most compelling evidence in Albert Gonzalez’s life of crime: a three-foot drum buried in his parents’ backyard stuffed with $1.1 million wrapped in plastic bags. The money — like so many other pieces of evidence — wasn’t unearthed until this year by federal agents still unraveling a case that continues to confound even the most seasoned cyberspace investigators.

 Federal agents announced after last year’s raids that Gonzalez had orchestrated the largest credit-card heist in the nation’s history — 41 million cards stolen from Americans. But last week, they came back with even more evidence to show Gonzalez had masterminded a fraud three times as large.

 You won’t believe just how ingenious this guy was. And the true crime writing style perfected by the Miami Herald team makes this a perfect summertime read.

LATimes: Junk Food Tax Way to Trim Waistlines and Deficits?

 Excellent article by Karen Kaplan weighing all the pros and cons of such an idea.

 With increasing vigor, public health experts and think tanks are calling for extra taxes on foods and drinks that are heavy in calories and light on nutrition. New York Gov. David Paterson proposed an 18% soda tax last year as a budget-balancing measure, only to abandon it three months later in the face of stiff public opposition. Lawmakers in at least five other states have gone on the record in support of the idea.

 However, for many reasons, some in the ‘unanticipated consequences’ category, this is far from a slam dunk.

 Which makes this a perfect article to read and to comment upon here.

 Houston Chronicle: Galveston Bay, One Year After Hurricane Ike

 Why the storm was worse than previous storms, and why it wasn’t even worse:

 “The bay is definitely resilient,” said Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation, an advocacy group. “For years and years, we’ve had hurricanes come through the system, and the bay has recovered. But the more human-made pressure we put on the system can make it more difficult for the bay to rebound.”

The recent development boom along the upper Texas coast could impede the recovery because dams and jetties are stealing much of the sediment that used to naturally rebuild marshes and barrier beaches.

“We’re still very much in an erosional state,”  (coastal geologist James) Gibeaut said. “It’s not something that will turn around. We won’t have natural beach growth.”

Some scientists said it will take months and even years to fully understand how Ike affected the bay’s complex ecosystem, which is home to an astonishing array of life.

Consider that the storm washed countless household cleaners, pesticides and other chemicals into the bay. Those containers will decompose and foul the water with toxic compounds.

Of all the impacts from Ike and earlier storms, man-made pollution “is the only thing that the critters haven’t adapted to,” said Jim Lester, vice president of the Houston Advanced Research Center and a Galveston Bay expert.

Nevertheless, Ike could have wreaked far worse havoc:

Galveston Bay was spared in part because the storm’s late eastward drift over Galveston Island at landfall pushed the brunt of the surge over the Bolivar Peninsula and a bit farther up the Texas coast. The worst of the storm missed Harris County and the heavily industrialized Ship Channel.

But future storms there could be catastrophic b/c:

What’s different is the larger human footprint on the Galveston Bay system.

These days, the three-county region that surrounds the bay is home to more than 4 million people, a major port and several refineries and chemical plants. More than 60 percent of Texas’ wastewater flows into the bay.

By some estimates, Ike caused $15 billion in damage just to the three counties — Galveston, Harris and Chambers — along the bay.

Galveston County, for one, has seen booming growth in recent years. Its population is projected at nearly 300,000 by 2030, up from about 200,000 in 1980.

“If there wasn’t a human element here, a hurricane would be a non-issue,” said Stokes, the bay foundation president.

The problem isn’t so much that the bay area has grown, but where it has grown. The rise of resorts, trophy houses and subdivisions along the shoreline have caused the loss of coastal habitat that absorbs a storm’s energy.

There’s lots more interesting data for scientists, demographers and just plain curious readers to glean from this excellent story. Highly-recommended for those who want to be a little more knowledgeable today than they were yesterday.

The (UK) Independent: How Augusto Pinochet Hid His Millions

Nixon and Kissinger’s favorite mass murderer and Chilean dictator didn’t have to play by the same rules. Not when he had friends in high places and money-laundering banks to do his bidding:

Though the Pinochet family protects the details of its wealth with the help of bankers and advisers from Britain and other countries, the pile of assets in cash, gold, government bonds and shares controlled by the family of the late dictator is now believed to amount to as much as £1bn.

The report by Brilac, the Chilean police task force, says that the freeze on the dictator’s funds issued in 1998 by the Spanish investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzon, who was seeking the ex-dictator’s extradition to Spain on charges of torture and murder, was in effect ignored by the financial sector in Britain, despite the fact that Britain was under an obligation to enforce it.

Lest the nationalists amongst us feel left out:

The Brilac report shows that Riggs, the Washington bank that did much of Pinochet’s business, ran a London branch near St James’s Palace, which – asset freeze or no asset freeze – was used as a moneybox by the detained ex-dictator. Riggs was taken over by a bank in Pittsburgh in 2005 after its activities for the world’s tyrants and tax-dodgers were denounced by the US Senate. The Brilac report says that when Pinochet closed his account at the branch (held under the name of Althorp Investments, one of his BVI companies) in May 2002 it contained $219,285.74.

General Pinochet overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973 with plenty of US involvement. For the best account of ‘foreign policy’ during the Nixon/Kissinger years, the Bibliophile Who Ruminates suggests Seymour Hersh’s “The Price of Power”, which should be on any DL Reading List. Here’s a helpful review.

And, here’s how, in part, Pinochet amassed his huge fortune with the enthusiastic involvement of the American government:

Much of General Pinochet’s fortune was generated by his drugs and arms dealing and from privatisations encouraged by the International Monetary Fund and right-wing economists after he seized power in 1973. 

Pinochet decreed these privatisations before any regulation was put in place over the new private monopolies. Consequently they were wildly profitable. In chemicals and iodine the state-owned Soquimich company, with annual profits of $67m, was made over to Julio Ponce, then Pinochet’s son-in-law. The state insurance agency, ISE, was handed to Jorge Aravena, another son-in-law. Paper mills, telephone companies and energy concerns were also given out to family members and hangers-on.

People ask El Somnambulo all the time why he seems so angry. ‘Bulo replies that he knows no other way to respond to stuff like this.

Financial (UK) Times: Loser Claims Afghan Election Rigged

Seriously, did anybody expect that this wouldn’t happen?:

A bitter dispute over the results would be a blow to the credibility of elections that the US and its allies hope will help boost local and international support for their mission in Afghanistan in spite of the growing strength of the Taliban insurgency.

International observers said on Saturday a low turnout in the south of the country, where Nato forces have sought to push back Taliban insurgents in recent months, reflected the success of attacks by militants on polling day and threats to maim voters.

With all of the controversy over health care, climate change and everything else the Rethugs are trying to tie up in knots, Afghanistan is where the Obama Administration is likely to meet its Waterloo. This has ‘quagmire’ written all over it. At least the Asia Times has a more optimistic spin over prospective negotiations.  ‘Bulo hopes they’re right.

Dallas News: Attend the Tale of Icky Twerp

The hearbreaking story of a beloved children’s show star in Texas.   Anybody of a certain (read ‘bulo’s) age likely can recall Sally Starr, Chief Halftown, Sawdust Sam, and the like.  Icky Twerp was Ft. Worth’s version, and he engaged in the kind of slapstick that was the perfect lead-in to the  Popeye cartoons and Three Stooges shorts he featured:

In the manic world of Icky Twerp, somebody was always getting conked on the noggin or falling off a ladder or knocking over a painstakingly assembled grocery display.

The action was relentless. Stuffy bosses bawled out hapless underlings. Sidekicks in gorilla masks skidded onstage and off, played banjos, beaned each other with umbrellas.

The show’s unforgettable star was created and played by a prolific local TV wunderkind named Bill Camfield. North Texas kids – the sort who fell down laughing when somebody got a pie in the face – could not get enough of Icky Twerp.

But almost none of them knew the private Bill Camfield. The lunatic merriment never betrayed a clue that, even at the peak of his productivity and popularity, the man behind Icky Twerp led a life of almost unbearable sadness: After a poverty-scarred childhood, he was battered by illness, alcoholism and the deaths of the people he loved best.

El Somnambulo is not sure why he’s drawn to stories like these. Perhaps it’s because he doesn’t think people like Bill Camfield should be forgotten. Or his childhood heroes–Sally Starr, Chief Halftown, and Sawdust Sam.

Please excuse the Beast Who Channel Surfs as he goes off in search of a Three Stooges marathon.