A Bentley, A Yacht And Piles Of Cash: A Key Witness At The Federal Racketeering Fraud Trial In New Jersey Describes the Lavish Lifestyle Of Salvatore Pelullo

Veteran organized crime reporter George Anastasia is covering the federal racketeering fraud trial in Camden, New Jersey for Bigtrial.net.

He's been on the witness stand for a week and during that time he's offered the jury a behind-the- scenes look at what authorities allege was the $12 million ripoff of FirstPlus Financial.

He's admitted to falsifying records, padding expense accounts and "moving money around" to make it appear as if it came from or was going to legitimate business deals.

He sailed on the $850,000 yacht that was bought with cash from the scam, he said. He arranged some of the paperwork for the purchase of a $217,000 Bentley Continental GT that also figures in the fraud. He fabricated records to make a $40,000 trip to Europe appear like a business expense. And he set up "sideways accounts" that allowed his boss to funnel money to two mistresses.

Those were just some of the things that he saw and did while working for Salvatore Pelullo before, during and after the takeover of FirstPlus, a troubled Texas-based mortgage company, said Cory Leshner, who described himself as Pelullo's "personal assistant." 

"I thought of Mr. Pelullo as a father figure," Leshner told the jury. "And he thought of me as a son." And that, he said at another point, "made me feel proud...I was willing to do whatever he asked."

Leshner, who has pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge and faces up to five years in prison, is due  back on the stand when the trial resumes tomorrow.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.bigtrial.net/2014/03/a-bentley-yacht-and-piles-of-cash-key.html#more

Band Of Brothers' South Philly WWII Veteran "Wild Bill" Guarnere Dies

David Chang at CNSPhilly.com reports that William "Wild Bill" Guarnere died.

Friends and family are mourning the death of a national hero. William "Wild Bill" Guarnere, a South Philly native and World War II vet who was portrayed on the television miniseries, “Band of Brothers,” died on Saturday at the age of 90.

Both Guarnere's family through their website, and Jake Powers, a historian who runs a Band of Brothers tour company, confirmed his death.

Born in South Philadelphia on April 28, in 1923, Guarnere was a non-commissioned officer with the legendary Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the 101st Airborne Division during World War II.    

... After enlisting in the paratroops in 1942, Guarnere eventually joined Easy Company, earning the nickname “Wild Bill” for his daring battlefield exploits. Guarnere’s time in World War II was dramatized in the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers" in which he was played by actor Frank John Hughes.

Guarnere’s time in the war ended when he lost his right leg while trying to help a wounded soldier. He received the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts.
After the war, Guarnere played an active role in several veterans’ organizations and Easy Company reunions.

In 2007, Guarnere wrote the national best-seller "Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends: Two WWII Paratroopers from the Original Band of Brothers Tell Their Story" with fellow unit member and Philly native Edward “Babe” Heffron as well as journalist Robyn Post. Heffron died last December, also at the age of 90.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.csnphilly.com/article/wwii-vet-bill-guarnere-dies

  

You can also read an earlier post on the death of "Babe" Heffron via the below link:

 

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/12/band-of-brothers-wwii-veteran-edward.html 

Happy Birthday To Mickey Spillane

  

Happy birthday to the late crime writer Mickey Spillane.

 

Acccording to Biography.com:

 

Mickey Spillane was born on March 9, 1918 in Brooklyn. He was a writer of pulp detective fiction whose first novel, I, The Jury, introduced the character Mike Hammer. Hammer appeared in a series of mystery novels and film adaptations (most notably Kiss Me, Deadly). Spillane claimed to write solely for money and his books--highly sexualized and sadistic--were huge popular hits. He died in 2006.     

 

I read Spillane's books when I was a  pre-teen and I liked the tough guy stuff and the girls. I later re-read a couple of the books and although I still found them to be entertaining, I realized that he was certainly not in the same league as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

 

But I like that he didn't care. I like his "f**k you" attitude. I like that he was an unabashed conservative.

 

 

 The web site Thrillingdetective.com offers a look back at Mickey Spillane

 

Spillane became, easily, the best selling private eye writer of his time and Hammer became a multi-media juggernaut, appearing on radio and in films, a daily newspaper comic strip and not one but two popular television series, as well as, of course, thirteen best-selling novels, stretching from I, the Jury in 1947 and wrapping up with Black Alley in 1996.

Spillane became something of a media star himself himself, playing the part of Hammer in the 1963 film version of The Girl Hunters and appearing as a spokesman for Miller Lite beer TV ad for almost two decades.

 

... He was also something of a rarity in publishing -- he was unapologetically conservative, an "unconditional believer in good and evil" who seemed to delight in rattling cages in his fiction, slamming Communists and liberals and anyone else he took exception to.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/spillane.html 

Defendant Jailed For Contempt In Racketeering Fraud Trial

Veteran organized crime reporter George Anastasia is covering the federal racketeering fraud trial of Nicodemo Scarfo and Salvatore Pelullo for Bigtrial.net.

The judge didn't think it was funny.

But apparently some of the defendants did.

As a result, one of them has ended up in jail. John Maxwell, the former CEO of FirstPlus Financial and a defendant in an ongoing racketeering fraud trial, was cited for contempt of court, had his bail revoked and was carted off to the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia Thursday. He's been a "guest" at the federal facility ever since, joining co-defendants Nicodemo S. Scarfo and Salvatore Pelullo who have been denied bail and have been jailed since their arrests in November 2011.

Maxwell was apparently laughing during the cross-examination of Cory Leshner, a former top business associate of Pelullo's who has emerged as a key prosecution witness in the now two-month old trial. Leshner will be back on the stand when the trial resumes Monday.

Maxwell will be back at the defense table along with Scarfo, Pelullo and four other co-defendants, including Maxwell's brother William, a lawyer who was special counsel to FirstPlus while the alleged $12 million fraud took place. The other four defendants are free on bail. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.bigtrial.net/2014/03/defendant-jailed-for-contempt-in-fraud.html#more

Benjamin Black's "Black-Eyed Blonde" Offers Soft-Boiled Raymond Chandler

I don't much care for continuation novels. The authors have passed on and their iconic characters, like James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, get plenty of exposure on film and TV. Do we really need to see these well-known characters continue in print as well? A continuation novel is especially hard to accept when the original writer has a singular voice and style. 

Case in point is the new continuation novel featuring Philip Marlowe, the late Raymond Chandler's iconic private eye. Is there a more singular, stylish writer than Chandler?

David L. Ulin, the Los Angeles Times book critic reviewed the Marlowe continuation novel.

Raymond Chandler is among our most stylized writers, an innovator of what we might call high noir, with its cut-glass imagery, its cynical world-weariness (although never ennui). Such a posture defines him — or, more accurately, his detective, Philip Marlowe — as a wise-cracker with repartee as sharp as a fedora's brim.

And yet, the more I read (and re-read) Chandler, the more I appreciate his vision of Los Angeles, the "big angry city" he described as "no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness" in his 1953 novel "The Long Goodbye."

This issue of place, it turns out, is one of the challenges faced by Benjamin Black's "The Black-Eyed Blonde," a new Marlowe book written under the auspices of Chandler's estate. Black is the pseudonym of Man Booker-winning author John Banville, who since 2007 has published a series of crime novels that take place in Dublin, where he lives. As he admits in the acknowledgments, Southern California is a less familiar territory, and one it appears he had no particular inclination to learn.

... That becomes most glaring when Black turns to the city: "I got up from my desk and took my pipe to the window and stood looking out at nothing in particular. In an office across the street, a secretary in a tartan blouse and wearing earphones from a Dictaphone machine was bent over her typewriter, tapping away. I had passed her in the street a few times. Nice little face, shy smile; the kind of girl who lives with her mother and cooks meat loaf for Sunday lunch. This is a lonely town." It's a pleasant pastiche, although it doesn't earn its closing line — but it can't compare to the depth, the nuance, of the real thing.

"When I got home," Chandler writes in "The Long Goodbye," "I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. … Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs."

If it seems unfair to hold "The Black-Eyed Blonde" to such a standard, it's a standard the book demands. Why take on the territory of Chandler when Chandler was so perfectly himself? "The Black-Eyed Blonde" is a competent enough little mystery; the missing persons case leads to murder and betrayal, and the privileged are revealed to be corrupted, as we knew they were.
But that's the thing about Chandler — the mystery was never quite the point.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-benjamin-black-20140309,0,6408768.story?track=rss#axzz2vJl3XG10

You can also read my column on Raymond Chandler via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/11/on-raymond-chandlers-influence-on-crime.html 

George Smiley Was My Father, Says John Bingham's Daughter

Neil Tweedie at the British newspaper the Telegraph spoke to former MI5 officer John Bingham's daughter Charlotte.

John Bingham, seventh Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook in the County of Mayo, always drank at the bar holding his glass in his left hand, despite being right-handed. The reason was to be found in his right pocket. “He always had a knuckleduster among the change,” explains his daughter, Charlotte.
 
“As a child, I just thought everybody did.”

There was the sword stick, too. And a revolver. And lock picks, for a little light breaking and entering. “I was about five when I found the revolver,” says Miss Bingham. “It was in a chest and my mother said, 'Go and get me this manuscript.’ And I pulled it out and underneath was hidden this gun, and I picked it up – as children do – and said, 'Ah! Look, a gun. What fun.’
 

“I became aware of what he did for a living when I was 18. He told me about this secret life. He would say to my mother, 'I can’t do such and such tonight.’ She’d say, 'Why not?’, and he’d say, 'I’ve got to do a burglary.’ ”
 

John “Jack” Bingham was one of the most effective intelligence officers produced by the security service, MI5, during the Second World War. 

... Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People are successful on page and screen because of their seeming approximation to reality, presenting the secret world as a cynical layman would imagine it to be: shabby, morally ambiguous, an arena in which cruel and ultimately pointless games of life and death are played out. In le Carré’s world, there are few really good guys.
 
Jack Bingham did not concur. Until his death in 1988 he retained an iron belief in the rightness of his cause, the defence of the British way of life. Imperfect it may have been, but it was better than all the rest. The agents Bingham ran in war and peace, fighting firstly fascism and then communism, were to him people of courage and honour, often humble and unselfish, acting for the best of intentions.

Le Carré, believed Bingham, ignored this noble aspect of secret work, seeking to establish moral equivalence between East and West. Jack, who enjoyed a successful subsidiary career as a crime writer, was dismayed by his former colleague’s reworking of history and told him so.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10683288/George-Smiley-was-my-father.html

Note: John Binham is the subject of Michael Jago's book, The Man Who Was George Smiley: The Life of John Bingham.  

To Have And Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion

Martin Morse Wooster at the Weekly Standard offers a review of Philip Greene's To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion.

Ernest Hemingway drank far more than most people, and probably more than was good for him. He loved liquor so much that when he was in his late 50s, and a diabetic, his doctors tried to ration his alcohol consumption—to a liter of wine a day.

But Hemingway was far from being an uncontrollable drunk. He did most of his writing in the mornings, and he made sure not to drink while he was writing. Nor did he drink late at night.

 

Moreover, Hemingway well understood the problems that uncontrolled alcohol consumption could cause for a writer’s career: Reminiscing about F. Scott Fitzgerald, who often was barely able to control his drinking, Hemingway recalled, “I told Scott that being a rummy made him very vulnerable—I mean, a rummy married to a crazy is not the kind of pari-mutuel that aids a writer.” 
 

Drinking was an essential part of Hemingway’s character and of his fiction.

 

Here, Philip Greene provides a highly entertaining look at what Hemingway drank, where he drank, and the characters Hemingway encountered while drinking.   

 

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

 

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/moveable-thirst_784263.html?page=1