My Wife is Cheating on Me, But I Have a Job Offer in Bournemouth

I don't know where these people are getting my email address.

This morning I opened up my email only to be deluged with the usual flood of clickbait and spam. Five different people wanted me to know that my wife was running around behind my back. Their warnings were accompanied by a photo of a slutty-looking dame young enough to be my granddaughter in the arms of some guy. Click here to find out more. Luckily, I am not yet so far around the bend as to think I have a wife, even in the modern day when women are allowed to have them. Actually I have a husband. He’s not cheating on me. He knows it would hurt my feelings.

So I didn’t click on that one. Nor did I click on any of the emails that offered to spray away my baldness, two sprays every morning. Nor the cures for diabetes (a false disease, they claim. All you need is the right attitude. Click here and we’ll explain everything.) Nor yet on the promises to restore my eyesight. Throw away your glasses! Click here!

I have succeeded in automatically sending all the solicitations from the Party straight to my junk mail folder, ten or fifteen of them every day. The burden of their message is that the kabillionaire Koch brothers are buying up all the elections. To counteract the efforts of these evil men I must send the Party five dollars at once. Never mind how silly it is to imagine that the discretionary income of an old lady on Social Security is going to counterbalance the wealth of the Kochs. That’s not even why I won’t send them money. I won't send them money because I know they would use it to hire more people to bombard me with emails. If elections really are for sale, then I guess they’re going to have to go to the wealthy.

A number of years ago there was a congressman in a neighboring district who was plainly in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. I researched to see what Big Pharma had donated to his campaign, and it turned out to be $250,000. The value of our house. “How cheap!” I cried. “Harold, let’s sell the house and buy a congressman.” “What would we do with a congressman?” We decided we’d rather have the house. But I digress.

The daily job offer from Bournemouth is a curious thing. It's one of a number of solicitations that come to my mailbox from the UK. I once ordered a book directly from a British publisher. The book was great. It came in a big mailbag with customs markings all over it. But evidently the publishers sold my email address to various other entities in the UK, shopping and travel sites, even a newsletter for landlords on how to deal with government regulations and brutalize the tenants. All useless to me. I’m too far away to spend a weekend at a Scottish castle and I don’t deal in pounds.

I must confess that the reason I read my mail at all, aside from the occasional notes from relatives and friends, is to see the latest fashions being offered by the likes of Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus. Most folks would probably consider that stuff to be spam. Still, by following it carefully, I can occasionally pick up a great bargain to swank around Lambertville in. Then there's Shoebuy, which has these great sales.

Shoes. Now you're talking.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Why Do Writers Like to Cook?

Yesterday a group of us got together to cook and eat and talk.  Oh, and drink wine.

I know a many writers who like to cook, so I invited a few over to do all of the above.

Here is a photo essay of how it went, pictures courtesy of Gerald Bartell.

The question arose, why do so many writers like to cook?  My quick answer—you do it standing up.

Another possibility, eating the resultant output often involves also drinking wine.

What do you think?

The festivities began with a trip to the fabulous DiPalo Italian grocery on Grand Steet.

Essential ingredients in hand

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DiPalo Italian wine store--a great rose' frizzante and a nice Frascati

Gerald Bartell, he can write and take great photos,
but he can also sauté'!

Main course coming along nicely

Richie Narvaez and his fiancee Denise, he pours, she supervises, and bakes
sensational cakes

Treats to keep up the cooks' energy levels.

I demonstrate the old fashioned way to serve polenta.

The first of a several toasts!

Let the feasting begin, including Tim McLaughlin and Renette Zimmerly

Annamaria Alfieri

The Tale of Two Jacks: The Gangster and the President II

Denis Foley, a forensic anthropologist and historical archeologist, is author of the true crime thriller Lemuel Smith and the Compulsion to Kill (NK Burns Pub., 2006). He has a passion for researching the Irish in America whether they be gangsters, martyrs or rebels; most recently “On Tour and Exiled; James Connolly in America 1902-1905” in the 2013 issue of Saothar, the Journal of the Irish Labor History Society. He is working on his debut novel, Murder Most Irish, set in the Bronx and the Inwood Section of Manhattan. This is part two of his Tale of Two Jacks.

Robert Knightly

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Part 2: A President Killed by Gangsters?

The Joe Kennedy-Dan O’Connell connection was cemented again in early 1960 when Joe called Dan to get his endorsement of his son’s run for the presidency during the Democratic Primaries. The two business partners came to an agreement and John F. Kennedy got Albany’s delegates. Later, JFK himself telephoned Dan at his home to say thanks. Robert Kennedy visited Dan O’Connell to get his blessing for his run for Senator from New York in 1968. In a lighter moment, Erastus Corning 2nd’s campaign manager once described the Albany Machine as an organization that would be prosecuted today under the RICO Act. Another Irish-American, Joe Kennedy, might also fall under the statute. Franklin Roosevelt when challenged on his appointment of Joseph Kennedy to the Securities & Exchange Commission reportedly said, “Sometimes it takes a crook to catch a crook.”

Although Joe Kennedy Sr. himself had been mentioned as a presidential contender, the business practices on Wall Street of Roosevelt’s former Ambassador to Great Britain and his isolationist leanings prior to WW II tarred his candidacy as not to be taken seriously. Yet, the senior Kennedy’s illicit contacts with alcohol distributors such as Dan O’Connell and the underworld lords in the Midwest and Middle Atlantic States served his son’s Presidential ambitions.

In his 2007 memoir Point to Point Navigation, published by Random house, Gore Vidal, Jacqueline Kennedy’s distant relative and Kennedy White House insider, repeats the idea of a Mafia conspiracy surrounding the death of JFK. Among the first to embrace this tale was Thomas Hartmann and Lamar Waldron in Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, The Plan For a Coup in Cuba and the Murder of JFK. Hartmann and Waldron tell how three Mafia godfathers, Carlos Marcello (New Orleans), Santo Trafficante (Tampa, Fla. and Havana, Cuba) and Johnny Roselli (Chicago), while in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, organized a plot to kill Fidel Castro, called Plan for a Coup in Cuba, code-named the C Day Plan. The three gangsters thought themselves immune from federal prosecution because they were working for the CIA.

During the 1960 elections, Joseph Kennedy reputedly paid off mobsters in Chicago and Philadelphia to deliver inner city wards to his son. Afterward, the gang leaders anticipated an unofficial truce between the new Democratic Administration and themselves. Attorney General Robert Kennedy broke that truce, as Gore Vidal saw it, to seek glory and self-aggrandizement; others believe Robert Kennedy had become genuinely outraged by the extent of mob corruption in American life when he was Chief Counsel to the McClellan Committee’s Investigation of Organized Crime. Naively, perhaps, Robert Kennedy decided to expose and prosecute the underworld as well as labor leaders like Jimmy Hoffa who had Mafia links. When he did this, he put himself and his elder brother in harm’s way. In retaliation, the mobsters initially decided to kill Robert Kennedy, but Carlos Marcello reportedly told Santo Trafficante: “When a dog bothers you, you don’t cut off its tail.” Thus, the murder plot against the Thirty-Fifth President of the United States was hatched. As early as 1962, Trafficante predicted the assassination during a meeting about a Teamster’s loan. Trafficante also told wealthy Cuban exile, Jose Aleman: “Mark my words, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him.” When Aleman suggested Kennedy would be re-elected, Trafficante allegedly said, “No, Jose, he is going to be hit.”

The trio reputedly targeted the President twice before Dallas. Once on November 2,1963, in Chicago but the motorcade was called off, and again aborted in Tampa on November 18,1963, just four days before Dallas. The gangsters’ plot to murder Kennedy was incompletely investigated and subsequently discounted by the Warren Commission, the conspiracy theorists believe. They point to Commission member Allen Welsh Dulles, longest-serving director of the CIA (1953–1961), who had to be aware of the unsavory Mafia-CIA link, having orchestrated earlier assassination plots against Castro. According to biographer Evan Thomas, in Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon and Schuster, 2002), Robert Kennedy reportedly told his closest aide that Carlos Marcello had ordered his brother’s death. The future Senator from New York and Presidential candidate himself could not reveal publicly the nature of The C Day Plan and Mafia involvement for fear that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind. This is the substance of the claims of the conspiracy theorists.

America loves its presidents and gangsters. The Irish American community worshiped John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, and vicariously enjoyed Legs Diamond’s exploits. Legs’ parents were born in Ireland. Gentleman Jack dated gorgeous showgirls and defied authority. He appeared immortal. The poor Irish exiles, experiencing the endless toil and low status of immigrants, arguably yearned for the independence, glamour and recklessness of the gangster and the legitimacy conferred upon themselves by having one of their own as President.

The deaths of the two Jacks, one shot at close range and the other from a distance of 531 feet, illustrate how America’s illusions can suppress the truth. Legs Diamond died in Albany, shot by the Albany police. Evidence that Dan O’Connell ordered the hit wasn’t revealed, although many in Albany knew, until Pulitzer Prize-winner William Kennedy published O Albany in 1983, and confirmed at length in a filmed interview in the WMHT documentary Prohibition Story: All Over Albany, in 2011. A dying Detective McElveney reportedly told his daughter Betty, when she questioned him as to the circumstances of the Legs Diamond murder: “Fitz knows and he ain’t talkin’, God knows and he ain’t talkin’, and I ain’t talkin’.” But he did talk, they say, when drunk and in the company of his friends at Albany’s Fire Engine Company Four.

Legs’ Watervliet policeman-bodyguard was tactful enough to be absent the night Dets. McElveney and Fitzpatrick executed Legs in his bed. Those who swear by the truism What Goes Around Comes Around wouldn’t blink an eye on hearing that, in 1945, McElveney shot to death his former partner Fitzpatrick, then the Albany Chief of Police, in his office on Eagle Street, over a long-simmering grievance. He pled guilty to Murder 2nd Degree and was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but only served eleven, pardoned by Gov. Averill Harriman in 1957. John McElveney died of cancer in 1968.
In 1977, the Congress set up the Select Committee on Assassinations to reexamine JFK’s murder in Dallas. The New York City Medical Examiner, Michael Baden, was picked to head a team of eight other vastly experienced pathologists. After months of reviewing the forensic evidence, the Committee issued a “hybrid report” (from which Baden dissented): three shots were fired by Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository and a single shot by an unidentified shooter from the grassy knoll above Dealy Plaza. Dr. Baden’s verdict: “People will go on believing what they want to believe.”

© 2015 Denis Foley, PhD, Curator, Lewis Henry Morgan Institute, SUNY-IT, Utica-Rome

Sources:

Baden, Michael, M.D., Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner (Random House, 1989).
Hartman, Thomas and Waldron, Lamar, Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, The Plan For a Coup in Cuba and the Murder of JFK (Counterpoint Press, 2008).
Kennedy, William: Legs (Penguin Books, 1975); O Albany (Viking Press, 1983).
Leamer, Laurence, The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (Harper Collins, 2001).
Levine, Gary, Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond: Anatomy of a Gangster (Purple Mountain Press, 1995).
Robinson, Frank S., Machine Politics: A Study of Albany’s O’Connells (Transaction Press, 1977);
Robinson, Frank S., Albany’s O’Connell Machine (The Washington Park Spirit, Inc., 1973).
Thomas, Evan, Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon and Schuster, 2002).
Vidal, Gore, Point-to-Point Navigation (Doubleday, 2006).
Foley, Denis: Field Notes (1981-2015).

On Royalties for Library Books: A Fantasy

I browse the website for The Guardian quite a bit and am struck by how many articles there are on reading trends in the U.K. These sorts of stories about reading pop up occasionally in the United States. The news is usually gloomy. No one reads literary fiction or poetry. No one reads for pleasure. There are too many other ways people can be entertained and informed. Why bother reading a book?

What’s interesting is that many of the Guardian stories are based on what people borrow from the library, not what they buy. The latest of these stories appeared in January. There are no real surprises in the names of the people whose books are checked out most often: James Patterson, Dan Brown, Lee Childs, Harlen Coben. Mark Billingham, a writer probably better known in Britain than in the States, was also on the list. So we have the usual suspects or the usual creators of suspects. (Years ago I visited a book shop in Edinburgh and said to the bookseller, “Your bestseller list doesn’t look any different than the one in the States.” “How depressing,” she replied)

The good news for writers in the United Kingdom (and Canada and Scandinavia) is that royalties are paid when a writer’s books are checked out of the library. It’s known in the UK as the Public Lending Right. The most recent figures I could find indicated that a writer got about 8 cents per checkout and there was an annual cap of about $!0,000. Imagine the boost this gives writers. A perfectly wonderful, out-of-print book could continue to make money for its author.

I have been to many mystery conferences where enthusiastic, literate people come up to a mystery writer and say, “I just love your books; I always check them out of the library.” It’s always great to have readers and writers inevitably respond positively to people to love their work. But I’m guessing most of us would rather hear: “I just love your books. I buy them immediately in hard cover. And I give copies for my 50 closest friends, too.”

Of course, these programs in the UK and elsewhere are government sponsored. Alas, we know how people feel about government sponsored programs in this country (unless it’s Social Security or Medicare. Believe it or not some people are unaware that Medicare is a government program). But I digress.

And all is not skittles and beer in the UK. Libraries there are suffering from budget cuts. Some communities have established alternative libraries where it turns out the royalty arrangement does not apply.

It’s a shame that in the United States, people (or at least many people who pursue politics) think of books, plays, art and music as “frills.” I think a lot of the folks making policy in cities, towns, state capitals and Washington D.C. would find that their lives and their minds improved if they decked themselves out in more frills.

© 2015 Stephanie Patterson

****My information about Public Lending Right came from The Guardian, Wikipedia and the blog, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

American Hustle

I was in my second year of high school in the late ‘70s when seven Congressmen (six Representatives and one Senator) were getting “stung” in the ABSCAM operation. I hardly paid attention. It’s like that, I guess, when you are a teenager. I was more concerned with whether this one particular girl I had a huge crush on would accept my invitation to the Prom, frankly, and my indignation was mostly centered not on official corruption, but on why I was not getting a chance to start on the basketball team, and also about how so many of my peers had succumbed to the tawdry allure of disco.

So the movie American Hustle (David Russell, 2013) was fun, nostalgic, and an eye opener for me in many ways. It was like a garishly colored newsreel documentary of the decade, and a funny, but still keenly acute, contemplation of the dark side of the American Dream. I had forgotten about all the good music the decade produced (excluding disco) and how bad the clothes and hairstyles were. And I hadn’t thought, all those years ago, about how the ‘70s were the end of the big economic boom produced by our victory in WWII. Yes, the ‘70s: A time of cynicism, inflation, hard times, the end of the ideal of peace, love, truth and beauty. The hippies and yippies still existed, but their dreams of utopia had been co-opted by the youth of the era as an excuse to get high and get laid, and the hell with social justice (what’s that? I imagine my callow self saying to anyone asking me that question at that time).

Times were hard, but I didn’t pay for anything but tickets to the movies, beer, the occasional Stephen King novel, and albums (Supertramp, Springsteen, The Eagles, et al), so I didn’t much care. But there were people who did care, cared very much, about the bottom line, about success, about having a lot of zeros at the end of their bank balances. And, like always, there were people willing to acquire those zeroes through means that were anything but cricket.

It seems to me that the American Dream is about, among other things, re-inventing yourself, and about living in a meritocracy where your talent and hard work will be rewarded. This reinvention in the classical model did not have to do with being a grifter, a flim-flam man or woman, but with throwing off your past, your mistakes, and getting a fresh start. Go west, young man, west from Europe, a less upwardly mobile place, to America, and then move west again across this brave new country. To some this was about new opportunities, but to others it was about selling snake oil. No luck stealing horses back in the old country? Move to New York and sell pieces of the Brooklyn Bridge. In danger of getting your legs broken from doing that? Move west and become a phony doctor or preacher or spiritualist, and just hope you hit it big before you reach the Pacific, and find yourself with your back to the ocean, faced with everyone who has been chasing you since your corrupt journey began.

To be a confidence man you have to have confidence. It is what gives others confidence in you, and what allows you to go ahead and make believe you are something you are not, not stopping to worry about getting run out of town on a rail, thrown in the slammer, or being fitted for a pair of cement overshoes. Confident is what Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) is, and reinvention is what he is all about. The child of a failed Bronx businessman, he carries the scars from witnessing that failure into an adult life as con artist (or at least that is his excuse for what he does, and maybe he even believes it, after having told the story so many times). You get the impression all the fraud is more about identity than it is about real physical poverty, though. Even after his scams allow him to acquire some legitimate dry cleaning emporiums he is still always looking out for the main chance, the big score, the brass ring, the ultimate rip-off.

The opening of the movie establishes the vast distance between what he seems to be and what he is brilliantly, showing a pallid and overweight Rosenfeld doing a very meticulous combination comb-over and rug installation for his balding pate. He is going to try to entrap the Mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Carmine Polito (played by Jeremy Renner with an hysterical kind of mobbed up pompadour that belonged back in the ‘50s when he wore it in the ‘70s), into accepting a bribe from an Arab sheikh (an FBI agent with a Mexican background who knows no Arabic), as Polito peddles his political influence concerning the coming of gambling to Atlantic City to the ersatz King. Renner does a great job, convincing us that Polito is truly and utterly convinced that since some of his constituents will benefit from all this he is not a crook, but some kind of benefactor. It reminds one of the old saw about the guy from Tammany Hall who lectured about clean graft and dirty graft.

Then we flash back, and learn that Rosenfeld and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), a hardscrabble kid from Albuquerque who has reinvented herself as an Englishwoman named Lady Greensly, have been nailed for fraud by Richie DiMaso, an FBI agent and ostensible good guy who cons himself into thinking he is saving America from the jackals, but who in his darker moments ruthlessly climbs up the ladder at work (the FBI) while paying no attention to those he hurts, or scams, on the way up. Part of the fun of the movie is the way appearance and reality coalesce. Prosser tells both Rosenfeld and DiMaso that she is playing the other of the two, and you don’t know who she is really allied with, if it is either of them. One of the more poignant parts of the movie concerns the “love” the two con artists may feel for one another—both Rosenfeld and Prosser know anything can be faked, and yet both still want to believe in each other, in love. In the “real thing.” Whatever that is.

DiMaso tries to con them into thinking he will let them go after they help him catch some bigger fish. And as they go trolling, they begin to catch bigger and bigger ones. The mayor of Camden NJ is a small fry compared to some of these, and certainly to the creatures still lurking in the depths. And some of those monsters down there promise not to come docilely into the boat. Richie knows this, and warns DiMaso that soon they will be playing with people who play for keeps, but DiMaso, blinded by ambition (and who puts his hair in curlers, in hilarious counterpoint to Rosenfeld’s rug and comb-over routine), is hearing none of it.

The movie, which turns at some point into a pretty benign shaggy dog story (I never really thought anyone was going to get whacked, and they don’t) about who can pull off the biggest con, has great acting. It must be hard to act like someone who is acting, but Cooper and Bale and Adams pull it off. Each one tells him or herself that what he or she is doing is really for someone else. And of course, they are full of shit. But like a good televangelist, they manage to delude themselves as well as those they are duping. And when Rosenfeld tells DiMaso that everything is grey, not black and white, you realize, uncomfortably, that most of the time that is right. Everyone is selling something, and the best way to get something for nothing is to take advantage of someone who thinks they are getting something for nothing. And this kind of deception is not the sole province of criminals. Even if we are not breaking the law, we constantly, even if we don’t realize it, adjust our image to reflect back to people what we think they need to see in us, to have them see in us what will allow us to get what we want from them. And the late 70’s were nothing if not superficial and glitzy, all about appearances. Studio 54. The Bee Gees (thank God for the divine counterbalance the Ramones and the Sex Pistols provided). The coming of Ronald Reagan, movie star, to the White House. Style over substance.

So, is life really all about who you are inside, or what you look like on the outside? Take a look at who goes to jail and who gets off in this movie. There may be some answers to that question found there.

© 2015 Mike Welch