A close friend who works in homeless services sent me a couple of stories today, and he prefaced those stories with a disclaimer that his gut just got a weird feeling abut the whole hing.
Okay, except that I happen to know to trust this person's gut instinct pretty much always.
America's "disappeared": The homeless of the big cities
By Wayne MadsenOnline Journal Contributing Writer
Jul 8, 2009, 00:18
(WMR) -- They were always seen by all who passed by, broke and idle in a number of Washington, DC, parks and grassy nooks. After 9/11, however, they began to disappear and in large numbers. They were the familiar faces of Washington's homeless.
From Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to Virginia Avenue across from the State Department, and Franklin Square, amid the city's glass and steel towers housing DC's power elite to tony Georgetown, many homeless people, both those truly down on their luck and those who were mentally ill, began to disappear.
As one Washington homeless advocate told this editor, These people simply vanished.
The disappearance of homeless people from the streets of Washington began under the administration of Mayor Anthony Williams and continues in force under that of Adrian Fenty. Both African-American mayors, Democrats but beholden to deep-pocketed land developers in a city that rarely elects Republicans to office, began to quietly make it tougher for the homeless to survive in the nation's capital. Last year, Fenty announced that the Franklin School Shelter at 13th an K Streets would be phased out, leaving the homeless residents of that shelter little choice but to move to the streets.
Last August, a number of homeless activists picketed Fenty's home over the plans to close the Franklin shelter. WMR was told by one spokesperson for the homeless that one of the protesters, John McDermott, has also now vanished. The spokesperson added that there are many cases of people known to live on the streets of Washington simply disappearing without a trace.
Some major cities, including New York and Atlanta, have been discovered to be dumping their homeless residents on other smaller towns and cities. Others threaten their homeless with prison unless they leave town with usually a one-way bus ticket provided.
However, there is no evidence that Washington, DC, has been dumping homeless on other cities or paying their transportation out of town. The homeless spokesperson interviewed by WMR said that DC's homeless are simply vanishing without a trace. DC officials in charge of the homeless are very tight-lipped when asked about the fate of unaccounted for homeless in the city.
Although the best-case scenario is that these unfortunate people have, in fact, been relocated to other areas, the spokesman ended the interview on a chilling note. He said with federal camps and a high demand for any usable body parts by the lucrative transplant industry, he feared the worst may have befallen some of DC's invisible residents.
END
Okay, so this is weird enough, yes? Then my friend passed slong the one directly below to me, saying it "creeped me out" after he'd read it.
Probably just a coincidence....
Yeah, that's prolly it....
But I gotta tell ya, it creeped me right out too, right after I read it, and I'm still a whole lot creeped out by it, too....
Mayors, rabbis arrested in NJ corruption probe
Thu Jul 23, 2009 4:32pm EDT
By Edith Honan
NEWARK (Reuters) - Dozens of New Jersey politicians, officials and prominent rabbis were arrested on Thursday in a sweeping federal probe that uncovered political corruption, human organ sales and money laundering from New York to Israel, officials said.
The 10-year investigation, dubbed "Operation Bid Rig," exposed influence-peddling and bribe-taking among a network of public officials and a separate multimillion dollar money-laundering ring that funneled funds through charities operated by local rabbis, said the U.S. Attorney's office in Newark, New Jersey.
The cast of the 44 arrested featured Hoboken, New Jersey, Mayor Peter Cammarano, who took office three weeks ago in the industrial city visible across the Hudson River from New York.
Others accused were mayors of nearby Secaucus and Ridgefield, state Assemblymen, a deputy mayor, city council members, housing, planning and zoning officials, building inspectors and political candidates.
"New Jersey's corruption problem is one of the worst, if not the worst, in the nation," said Ed Kahrer, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's white collar crime and public corruption program in New Jersey, who has worked on the investigation since it began in July 1999.
"It has become ingrained in New Jersey's political culture," he said, calling corruption "a cancer."
Central to the investigation was an informant who was charged with bank fraud in 2006 and posed undercover as a real estate developer and owner of a tile business who paid off officials to win project approval and public contracts in northern New Jersey, according to documents in the case.
The public officials stand accused of taking bribes for pledging their help getting permits and projects prioritized and approved or steering contracts to the witness.
"CULTURE OF CORRUPTION"
In scenes that could have been lifted from the hit TV series "The Sopranos," about New Jersey organized crime, they met in diners, parking lots, even bathrooms, officials said.
"The politicians willingly put themselves up for sale," said Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra. "The victims are the average citizens and the honest business people in this state. They don't have a chance in this culture of corruption."
The public corruption uncovered by the informant led him to the separate money-laundering network by rabbis who operated between Brooklyn, Deal, New Jersey, and Israel, authorities said. They laundered some $3 million for the undercover witness between June 2007 and July 2009, authorities said.
"These complaints paint a disgraceful picture of religious leaders heading money laundering crews acting as crime bosses," Marra said. "They used purported charities, entities supposed set up to do good works as vehicles for laundering millions of dollars in illicit funds."
HUMAN KIDNEY SALES
Rabbis accused of money-laundering were Saul Kassin, chief rabbi of a large Syrian Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn; Eliahu Ben Haim, principal rabbi of a synagogue in Deal; Edmund Nahum, principal rabbi of another synagogue in Deal; and Mordchai Fish, a rabbi at a synagogue in Brooklyn.
The probe also uncovered Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, who is accused of conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant. According to the complaint, Rosenbaum said he had been brokering sale of kidneys for 10 years.
"His business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000," said Marra.
Several of the public officials were accused of taking bribes of just $10,000, authorities said. Cammarano, at 31 the youngest ever mayor of Hoboken, was charged with taking $25,000 in bribes, including $10,000 last Thursday.
Most of those accused were arrested in a sweep across New Jersey by more than 300 federal agents early on Thursday and were slated to appear in court in Newark throughout the day.
The first 12 of the defendants, including Cammarano, appeared shackled before U.S. Magistrate Judge Madeline Cox Arleo. Cammarano rocked back and forth in his chair but betrayed no emotion.
They were granted bail ranging from $100,000 to $500,000.
(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols and Ellen Wulfhorst; Writing by Ellen Wulfhorst; Editing by Doina Chiacu)
