Spectre: New James Bond Film Trailer Released

The new Spectre James Bond film trailer has been released. You can watch the trailer via the below link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTDaET-JweU

After Nearly 20 Years, International Fugitive In Multi-Million Dollar Fraud Scheme Apprehended In Greece And Extradited To United States To Serve Prison Sentence

The U.S. Justice Department released the below information:

A former New York businessman, who disappeared the same day a federal jury sitting in the U.S. District Court in Newark, New Jersey, began deliberating in his tax evasion and fraud trial, was caught while in Greece more than 18 years after his conviction, and appeared in federal court in the District of New Jersey on Friday, July 17, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General Caroline D. Ciraolo of the Justice Department’s Tax Division. 

Gideon Misulovin, 58, whose last known address was in New York City, was extradited from Greece to the United States to serve his 10-year prison sentence.  He has been incarcerated in the United States since his return on July 16.           

On March 7, 1996, a jury convicted Misulovin of conspiracy to impede and impair the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the ascertainment and collection of more than $6.5 million in federal motor fuel excise taxes, wire fraud and money laundering stemming from a scheme to conceal the unpaid diesel fuel excise taxes from state and federal tax authorities.

During trial, Misulovin was free on $500,000 bail and attended each day of the trial.  He failed to appear in court March 4, 1996, for the parties’ closing arguments.  U.S. Senior District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise of the District of New Jersey in Newark issued a warrant for his arrest.  On June 25, 1997, Judge Debevoise sentenced Misulovin in absentia to serve 10 years in prison and a three-year term of supervised release, and to pay a $150,000 fine.  The court also ordered Misulovin to pay restitution in the amount of $200,000 to the United States and $100,000 to the state of New Jersey.

The evidence at trial established that from 1988 through Jan. 31, 1993, Misulovin and his co-conspirators sold untaxed diesel fuel in a series of paper transactions using wholesale companies.  Some of the companies were shams and called “burn” or “butterfly” companies.  As part of the scheme, the sham company would assume the federal and state tax liability and then vanish, allowing the conspirators to keep the excise taxes they collected from truck stops and service stations.

The case, part of a then-nationwide motor fuel excise tax enforcement effort, was investigated jointly by the Motor Fuel Task Force and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the District of New Jersey.  In an effort to infiltrate the bootleg gasoline industry, task force agents set up an undercover business called RLJ Management that competed directly with the defendants’ operation.

At the conclusion of the undercover operation, in November 1992, federal agents seized Misulovin’s assets, including approximately $70,000 in cash from his residence and $277,000 from his business bank account. 

Misulovin’s co-defendant and co-conspirator, Arnold Zeidenfeld, of Brooklyn, New York, pleaded guilty prior to trial and testified for the government.  Gurmit Singh and Manbir Singh, of Matawan, New Jersey, who operated truck stops in southern New Jersey, also pleaded guilty for their roles in the scheme.

In August 2014, based on an Interpol Red Notice, Misulovin was detained in a Greek airport using an alias and traveling with an Israeli passport.  He was subsequently arrested pursuant to a U.S. request for a provisional arrest, and after contested extradition proceedings, was found extraditable in 2015.  

The task force included attorneys from the Tax Division and agents from the IRS Criminal Investigation and Examination Divisions, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the New Jersey State Department of Taxation and Finance.  Seth D. Uram, formerly a Trial Attorney in the Tax Division and now an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Portland, Oregon, and Trial Attorney Charles A. O’Reilly of the Tax Division prosecuted the case.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Ciraolo thanked the Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs, the FBI’s New Jersey Field Office and the Greek Ministry of Justice for their assistance in apprehending and extraditing Misulovin.  Ciraolo also thanked the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the District of New Jersey for their substantial assistance. 

FBI: Financial Fraud And The Hair Show That Never Was

The FBI website reports on a fraud scheme involving a fictional hair show

Tamira Fonville’s job might be described as “recruiter.” For a time, she profited substantially by enlisting college-age women to participate in a hair show. The problem was, there never was any show, and everything about Fonville’s line of work was a fraud.

She and her partner—both of whom are now in prison—regularly traveled the Interstate 95 corridor from New York to Washington, D.C., visiting shopping malls and other places where young women were known to spend time.

Using a series of phony names, Fonville would interest the women in the hair show, offering to pay for their services. But to pay them, she said, she needed their debit card numbers and access to their accounts.

With that access, she would not simply clean out their accounts. Instead, her partner and mastermind of the scam, Ricardo Falana, would deposit bogus checks into the legitimate accounts, and then immediately begin withdrawing funds before the bank realized the fraud.

“It was a crazy, hit or miss scheme,” said Special Agent Sean Norman, who investigated the case from the FBI’s Philadelphia Division. “But they did it at such a high volume that they made a lot of money for several years. There was approximately $600,000 in actual losses to banks and other financial institutions.”

On a typical recruiting trip, Fonville might talk with 20 or 30 women and would follow up with text messages using disposable phones whose numbers could not be traced. If she ended up with three or four willing participants, that was enough.

“Some took the hair show bait and handed over their debit cards and PINs,” Norman said. “Others who were skeptical got a different pitch,” he explained. “They were told: ‘I can make money appear in your account. You will get some money, I will get some money, and the bank won’t lose anything.’”

With access to legitimate accounts not tied to him, Falana deposited forged checks of up to $10,000 and then withdrew money before the bank realized the checks were bad. Many of the victims were coached to tell bank investigators that their debit cards had been stolen and their PINs were written on the cards.

“The majority of the account holders knew they were doing something fraudulent,” Norman said. “They thought they were going to get something out of it, but they got nothing.”

For a time, the money rolled in, and Fonville “got addicted to the lifestyle,” Norman said. According to court documents, between 2008 and 2013, Fonville personally benefited from the scheme to the tune of more than $230,000. She used some of the proceeds to pay for plastic surgery, the car loan on her $30,000 Chevrolet Camaro, and the $2,100 monthly rent on her New York apartment. She would later tell investigators she viewed the scam as a career.

Fonville also fraudulently obtained food stamps, Medicaid, and benefits from a New York child care program, and she received deferments on almost $100,000 in student loans because she claimed she had no income. But then she lied on her car loan application, stating she was an employee of Mesa Airlines and had a salary of $65,000 per year.

Eventually, some of the women whose accounts had been used came forward and told the truth. Norman was able to trace withdrawn funds to Fonville and Falana, and Falana was identified on surveillance video depositing what turned out to be bogus checks. Norman also used E-ZPass toll receipts to link the pair’s recruiting trips to account holders and subsequent fraudulent transactions on their accounts.

“After the pieces all fit together,” said Norman, who is a certified public account and specializes in financial fraud investigations, “their actions were highly predictable.”

Fonville was arrested in August 2014. She pled guilty the following month to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and three counts of bank fraud and was sentenced in April to 15 months in prison. Falana pled guilty to similar bank fraud charges in October 2014 and in February received an 80-month sentence.

In the end, Norman said, “they blew all the money and had nothing to show for it.” 

Market Talk: Exploring South Philly's Italian Dialect

Being half-Italian and a life-long South Philly resident, I found Emma Jacobs' piece at hiddencityphila.org to be interesting and amusing.

If you walked through the streets of South Philadelphia’s Bella Vista neighborhood at the turn-of-the-20th-century, you’d probably smell sweet garlic frying, tomato simmering in onion and fat. You would overhear conversations all around you in what you might think was Italian, but were really in Sicilian, Neapolitan, or Calabrian–southern dialects almost as distinct as Italian is from Spanish. These immigrants went to shop on South 9th Street below Christian, still known as the Italian Market.

In the Market’s legacy shops today, one can find grocery store staples of modern Italy: the imported version of Nutella without the corn syrup sweetener, tiny bitter sodas called chinotto, fine pastas by Casale and La Fabbrica in the original Italian packaging, bags of elegant ladyfinger cookies, and glass jars of anchovies and Calabrian hot peppers. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of olive oils, infused with a range of ingredients from rosemary to truffles.

You won’t, however, overhear much Italian being spoken in line at shops like Talutto’s, Claudio’s, and Di Bruno Brothers. Instead, the remnant sounds of South Philly-Southern Italy immigrant days bubbling over the counter like the passwords to a secret club: “tublini,” “man-ih-gawt,” “galamad.” 

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

http://hiddencityphila.org/2015/07/market-talk-exploring-south-phillys-italian-dialect/

Note: You might also be interested in South Philly native Dom Irrera's video on "How to Talk South Philly Italian" via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/01/dom-irrera-teaches-us-how-to-talk-south.html

Soviet Leaders And Intelligence: Assessing The American Adversary During The Cold War

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review in the Washington Times of Raymond L. Garthoff's Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary During the Cold War.

As any observer of the old Soviet Union realized, espionage and related activities occupied a prominent role in the Communist nation from its very founding. Several generations of writers — both fiction and nonfiction — have prospered with accounts of spy rings, ranging from the Philby cabal to the Red Orchestra.

But what use did Soviet leaders make of the massive amounts of material that flowed into Moscow? Several prominent examples exist of ignored intelligence, notably the multiple reports that reached Joseph Stalin about the imminent Nazi invasion in 1941. Rather than heed the warnings, Stalin scrawled obscenities on the reports and cast them aside.

Now comes Raymond Garthoff with a scathing indictment not only of the Soviet intelligence services, but the use made by the leadership of the information they gathered. The KGB (and its siblings) violated a basic tenet of the intelligence profession: Beginning in the Stalin era, and continuing to the end of the Cold War, the spies told their bosses what they wanted to hear, rather than the truth.

Mr. Garthoff is uniquely qualified for such a study. He became a “Soviet-watcher” during his academic years and worked for the CIA and the Rand Corp. before becoming a foreign service officer. In retirement, he served at the Brookings Institution. Much of his book is based on personal conversations with Soviet officials — including intelligence officers who spoke candidly about their own service — and declassified Soviet documents.

As Mr. Garthoff relates, much of the Soviet problem stemmed from a lack of skilled analysts to make informed sense of the intelligence gathered by field operatives. Historically, the CIA had roughly a 1:1 ratio of analysts to operations officers. The KGB, in the 1970s and 1980s, had a comparable ratio of about 1:10. (In later years, according to defected KGB Col. Oleg Gordievsky, the number of analysts increased five-fold, to more than 500.)

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/19/book-review-soviet-leaders-and-intelligence-assess/ 

Actor Alex Rocco, Mobster Moe Greene in 'The Godfther," Dies at 79

Mike Barnes at the Hollywood Reporter offers a report on the death of Alex Rocco, who portrayed the character Moe Greene in the classic crime film, The Godfather appeared in another crime classic film, The Friends of Eddie Coyle.  

Alex Rocco, the veteran tough-guy character actor with the gravelly voice best known for playing mobster and Las Vegas casino owner Moe Greene in The Godfather, has died. He was 79.

Rocco died Saturday, his daughter, Jennifer, announced on Facebook. No other details of his death were immediately available.

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

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/alex-rocco-dead-godfather-actor-809754?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=hollywoodreporter_breakingnews&utm_campaign=THR%20Breaking%20News_now_2015-07-19%2010%3A02%3A34_RGajewski

 

Life On The Mississippi: The American Queen Steamboat Will Transport You Back To The Time Of Mark Twain

Mark Twain is one of my favorite writers. I love his novels, especially The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but I love even more his memoirs and semi-autobiographical books, like Roughing It, and Life On The Mississippi. 

When I was a Defense Department administrative officer some years ago I attended a public affairs conference in Memphis, Tennessee. The week-long conference was interesting and the nightlife was even more so.

I enjoyed Memphis' music and bar scene on historic Beale Street every night. I passed on visiting Elvis Presley's Graceland, but I was thrilled to have visited a Steamboat-restaurant docked on the Mississippi River.

I enjoyed the fine southern cooking and while I ate and drank I felt as if I went back into time. I half-expected ole Sam Clemens, aka Mark Twain, to walk into the dinning room, attired in his customary white suit with his ever-present cigar in his hand. I only wished that he had, and I wished that the steamboat had left the dock and headed on down the river.

Now, according to Lynn Houghon at the British newspaper the Daily Mail, one can go back to that era and cruise the Mississippi by boarding a steamboat called the American Queen. 

Straightening my black fishnet stockings and smoothing the ribbons on my red taffeta dress, I peer from behind the thick velvet curtains skirting the proscenium of the Grand Saloon.

Flickering gas lamps are enveloped in smoke that curls up from fat, hand-rolled Cuban cigars. 

Ladies dressed in lace and finery sip mint juleps and fan themselves. On stage, the banjo picker strums Civil War ballads. None of this is happening, but imaginations run wild on a voyage up the Mississippi River.

This trip, on the six-deck American Queen, departs from New Orleans and ends in Memphis, Tennessee.

Several of the 436 passengers are aficionados of steamboating. 'All the boys in my hometown in Missouri had one ambition: to be steamboat men,' says Mark Twain. 

This Mark Twain is an actor, who gives two well-received performances.

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a video clip via the below link: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3166235/All-hail-American-Queen-Step-steamboat-transport-time-Mark-Twain-costume.html