Shooting un Connecticut

August 3, 2010

Workplace Shooting in Connecticut Leaves 9 Dead

By LIZ ROBBINS

Nine people are dead after an employee summoned for a disciplinary hearing opened fire at a beer distributor in Manchester, Conn., on Tuesday morning, the police said. One of the dead was the suspected gunman.

The cavernous warehouse of the company, Hartford Distributors, was at its busiest at 7:30 a.m., with about 100 drivers, sales people and executives in the building during a shift change. That is when the gunman — identified as Omar Thornton, 34, a truck driver — was brought in to look at a videotape after being accused of stealing beer, according to officials.

He was offered a chance to resign or be terminated, the police said, and started shooting as he was being escorted out.

“He came in to meet with the company and after that, all hell broke loose,” said John Hollis, a Connecticut Teamsters representative, said of Mr. Thornton.. “He pulled the gun and ran through the warehouse.”

The shots hit drivers, union representatives and company executives, according to relatives and friends of the victims. . Mr. Thornton killed the president of his local union, Bryan Cirigliano, who was there to represent him, according to Christopher Roos, the secretary-treasurer of Local 1035.

“There are eight deceased and the suspect as well,” said Sgt. Sandy Ficara of the Manchester Police Department . “That is the final count.”

Another fatality was Victor James, 60, who had worked for 30 years hauling Budweiser and was looking forward to retirement, said his mother, Gloria Wilson. “He was very much loved,” Ms. Wilson, 86, said from the Windsor, Conn., home she shared with her son.

Lt. J. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police, which is conducting the investigation with the Manchester Police, said the suspect “probably” turned the gun on himself.

Sergeant Ficara said, “It’s been a crazy scene out there.”

Mr. Hollis, a legislative affairs representative for the Connecticut Teamsters, called the suspect “a bottom guy” because he was the last man hired, and said he brought a union representative from Local 1035 for the hearing.

Joanne Hannah, who said her daughter Kristi had been dating the suspect for the past eight years, said that Mr. Thornton, who is black, had been having problems with co-workers. “Things were being put on the bathroom walls,” including “a hangman noose,” Ms. Hannah said.

She added that Kristi and Mr. Thornton spent Monday night at her daughter’s house and that Ms. Hannah’s son, who also spent the night there, woke them both up to go to work.

Ms. Hannah had to cut the conversation short because she said her home was filled with detectives.

Mr. Roos, said the local union had no record of complaints by Mr. Thornton.

“We have no grievance in terms of racial discrimination,” he said. “He never filed anything with the union. As far as I know there was never a state claim or a federal claim. Mr.Thornton was brought into the office about a disciplinary issue and that was it. There was a question of theft.

“He was being brought in to look a videotape about what was going on,” he continued. “That was it. He was going to be asked questions. This is what happened afterwards.”

Public records show that Mr. Thornton graduated from East Hartford High School in 1996. He ran into financial trouble several years later and filed for bankruptcy in Connecticut in 2000. At the time, Mr. Thompson owed money to a dozen creditors, including American Express, Sprint and Sallie Mae.

On his Facebook page, Mr. Thompson counted among his likes and interests Hoffman’s Gun Center & Indoor Range in Newington, Conn. The message from A person who Mr. Hollis said Mr. Thornton had been the last in the company to be hired within the previous three years.

The relatives who those who died tried to remember them in life. Ms. Wilson said she was notified of her son’s death early Tuesday morning.

Mr. James had two daughters and four grandchildren, Ms. Wilson said.

“He was full of jokes all the time, but the nice kind of jokes,” Ms. Wilson said. “He would imitate people — movie stars and things. He did a really good job of it.”

The death toll increased throughout the chaotic morning. At first, officials confirmed three dead. The total was believed to have increased after investigators searched the family-owned warehouse about 10 miles east of Hartford. Three of the injured, all with multiple gunshot wounds, had been transported to Hartford Hospital, and one victim died later in the morning, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

The spokeswoman, Rebecca Stewart, said one patient at the hospital remained in critical condition.

One victim who was treated at the hospital and was later released was the grandson of the company’s founder, Steve Hollander, an executive with the company, said Mayor Sydney T. Schulman of Bloomfield.

Mr. Hollis said the State Police told him they confronted the suspected gunman and ordered him to drop the gun. Lieutenant Vance said, “There was no police discharge of weapons.”

Lt. Joe San Antonio, a spokesman for the Manchester police, said that when officers responded to an emergency call they searched the building and found the suspect shot.

Buses transported employees from the warehouse to Manchester High School, where union representatives and Ross Hollander, the owner of Hartford Distributors, were comforting families of the victims, Mr. Hollis said.

In a statement, Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut called the shootings a “senseless act of violence.”

“In the wake of this tragedy,” Ms. Rell said, “we are all left asking the same questions: How could someone do this? Why did they do this?”

Hartford Distributors, one of the state’s largest wholesalers of beers and wines, was founded in 1944 and has been owned and operated by the Hollander family since the 1960s. The company, which has more than 100 employees, was based in East Hartford until a move to Manchester 16 years ago.

One employee, who did not want to be identified, walked out of the high school on Tuesday afternoon and quickly got into his car. “It was a sad day,” the man said. “I was in there.”

Bill Bartlett, retired from Hartford Distributors, was at the high school comforting his former colleagues. “I lost a lot of friends today,” he said.

Robert Davey contributed reporting from Manchester, Conn., and Christine Haughney, Isolde Raftery and Michael M. Grynbaum from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 3, 2010

An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of Sgt. Sandy Ficara.

Artículo de Stanley Fish

AUGUST 2, 2010, 9:00 PM

‘Law & Order’ Probably Doesn’t Like You

By STANLEY FISH

Stanley Fish on education, law and society.

Tags:

“Law & Order”, Television

Nothing personal. But now that Dick Wolf’s “Law & Order” has called it a day — or rather a 20-year run — it is time to notice what may be its most remarkable feature; not the brilliant formula that offers both the comfort of predictability and the promise of constant surprise (an episode almost never ends up where it seems to be going at the beginning), not the ability of the show to survive major cast changes without missing a beat, not the considerable accomplishment of making the arcane vocabulary of the law ( “fruit of the poisoned tree,” “asked and answered,” “prejudicial,” “allocute,” “goes to relevance”) as familiar to TV viewers as the jargon of sports, but the extraordinarily long list of professions, classes and category of persons it doesn’t like.

Begin with rich people. “Law & Order” hates rich people; they are arrogant, they are condescending, they consume conspicuously, and, worst of all, they believe they are above the law. In one episode, the head of a foundation is informed of a $400,000 problem. She retorts, “$400, 000 is less than I spend on sweatpants.” In another episode (“Venom”), a 64-year old woman who is bent on protecting her 27-year old husband says to one of the district attorneys: “You have no idea of what a woman in my position can do.” Actually they have a very good idea. Time and again wealthy people manipulate the system by getting well connected friends to intervene in cases or by hiring high-priced lawyers who know how to put up procedural roadblocks forever.

The heroes of the show live and work in the shadows, not the limelight.

Worse than rich people are the children of rich people. They are spoiled, cruel, believe they can get away with anything and often do. Typically these kids go to expensive private schools, which, at least in “Law & Order,” are populated by blazer-wearing snob administrators and teachers who kiss up to the even snobbier parents of over-privileged brats.

When those brats get into trouble — usually by picking on weak, vulnerable classmates or by beating up gays, homeless people or immigrants — they are treated by psychiatrists-to-the wealthy who are adept at manufacturing excuses for bad behavior and giving those excuses fancy diagnostic names. Let off the hook, these same scions of the privileged class go to college where they join fraternities and sororities and devise engines of cruelty and psychological destruction that Goebbels might admire.

You get the idea. Here are the police and the people in the justice system trying to keep the streets safe and here is a crowd of wealthy high-and-mighty types who refuse to live by the rules, think the world is theirs for the taking, and proceed to take it with the help of sycophants who do their bidding out of greed and fear.

They’re not the only ones. Doctors in the “Law & Order” world are not always rich, but they are almost always charlatans and hucksters who push addictive prescriptions, use their own semen to impregnate infertile patients, and prescribe experimental drugs without informing patients of the risks. Priests and rabbis and evangelicals are worse: they are pedophiles and hypocrites; they prey on the public, deceive their followers and practice all of the deadly sins they preach against.

Then there are the high-roller businessmen, developers, drug manufacturers, executives all of whom are busy devising schemes to cheat the government, defraud shareholders, endanger the public and betray colleagues.

What links those who inhabit these various categories is that they are not ordinary folks. “Law & Order” hates people who stand out. The real heroes of the show are those who soldier on day after day, like the detectives who display a world-weary cynicism that is perfectly understandable given the world they deal with every day. They are far from perfect — Lennie Briscoe (played byJerry Orbach, who died in 2004) is a reformed alcoholic, failed husband and father and resident Thersites; Mike Logan (Chris Noth) is bitter, edgy, dark; Ed Green (Jesse Martin) is a compulsive gambler — but they keep on going, wresting small victories from the darkness that increases every time they try to dissipate it. They live and work in the shadows, not in the limelight.

The limelight is for actors, rock stars, athletes, artists, dancers, high-profile academics, writers, all of whom are objects of great suspicion because the special talents they have translate often into claims of special treatment. In an episode titled “Genius,” a Norman Mailer-like writer speaks in defense of his murderous protégé: “Art gives form to life; true genius should be coddled and forgiven.” “Law & Order”— I speak of it as of it were a person; it is certainly a spirit — doesn’t want to coddle anyone and forgiveness is low on its list of preferred virtues. Genius means trouble; creativity is antithetical to boundaries; and boundaries are what the police and the prosecutors patrol.

Not that law enforcement personnel are given a free pass. Lawyers who do not work for the people, but function as hired gunslingers, are portrayed as devious and venal. F.B.I. agents are careerists who are more interested in protecting their territory than in pursuing justice. Judges take bribes, sexually harass members of their staff and use the bench as an instrument for settling personal scores or advancing political agendas.

And as for political agendas, politicians are uniformly slimy. If the investigation of a crime gets within 10 miles of a congressman’s office, you can be sure he did it. During Jack McCoy’s brief tenure as district attorney he goes head-to-head with the governor who appointed him, an Eliot Spitzer type who interferes with a case because it has produced revelations that are embarrassing to him. McCoy loses; he didn’t have a chance.

It is no surprise that the series ended a couple of years after Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) was promoted. As an assistant district attorney he is the show’s (flawed) moral center, in part because while he is in a position of authority, he is not too high. He is in the middle, positioned so that he can interact with the nitty-gritty details of the criminal justice system and safeguard its integrity in the face of assaults on it from other precincts, including quite often the precincts occupied by his superiors who as political appointees cannot always be trusted. As district attorney, McCoy seems always to be wishing he were still in his former job, a job to which he was completely and unambiguously dedicated. (He was constantly turning down lucrative offers to go into private practice).

That dedication often leads him to perform acts that are morally questionable. He pressures innocent people so that he can get to others; he hides and distorts evidence; he intentionally misleads both his courtroom opponents and his own staff; he has affairs with his assistants; he is insufferably self-righteous; and he is never seen out of the office without a drink in his hand.

It might appear, then, that “Law & Order” doesn’t even like its own main character, but the show is not “The Sopranos” or “Mad Men” or “Damages.” It is quite clear that in his own mind McCoy’s bending of the rules is forced on him by the ever rising tide of corruption and influence; the legal system is always in danger of being overwhelmed; and in order to save it, he reasons, one must violate its principles of fairness, impartiality, and transparency. Often in office exchanges someone — at times McCoy — will say in response to a suggested strategy, “but that will make us no different from them.”

In fact they are in the end no different from them except in a determination to play their roles in a government of laws, not of men. Men (and women) however are always trying to capture the government’s procedures and bend them to their will. That is the bottom line message of the series: the liberal state is committed to a regime of justice that is not a respecter of persons, but persons — especially persons who have managed to distinguish themselves in some way — are forever working to undermine it. From episode to episode “Law & Order” is engaged in a staying action against the forces that threaten its ideals, forces that live and have their being in the walks of life that afford the time and the resources to pursue nefarious, self-serving, agendas. The only way to be O.K. in Dick Wolf’s world is to have a job that is steady but doesn’t pay very much, to drive a five year old car you’re still paying off, to live in a small house with a large mortgage, to have an education that helps you get by but doesn’t give you any fancy ideas, to attend a house of worship that is the center of your social life, and to have almost no leisure time. Unless you fit that profile, “Law & Order” probably doesn’t like you.

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Ética - Rangel Charles B.

uly 22, 2010

House Panel Finds Evidence That Rangel Violated Ethics Guidelines

By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — After a nearly two-year investigation, a House investigative panel has found that Representative Charles B. Rangelviolated a range of ethics rules, dealing a serious blow to Mr. Rangel, a Harlem Democrat, in the twilight of his political career.

The investigative panel did not disclose any details about the nature of the violations that it found, but one House official who has been briefed on the findings said that they included the most serious allegations that had been examined.

“All I know is that it was a majority of them,” the House official said, asking not to be identified as the ruling is supposed to remain confidential for one week.A lawyer involved in Mr. Rangel’s defense, who also asked not to be named, disputed that characterization, adding that the case is not over yet.

“He has not been found guilty of anything,” the lawyer said.

The committee had been investigating claims that Mr. Rangel improperly rented four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem at a price well below market value, despite rules forbidding House members from accepting gifts worth more than $50.

It also had been investigating allegations that he improperly used his office to provide legislative favors for an oil-drilling company that pledged a $1 million donation for an academic center named for Mr. Rangel and improperly failed to report taxable income received from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic.

The case involving the 80-year-old representative has been closely watched by both parties and House candidates across the country. Republicans have sought to highlight Mr. Rangel’s problems to underscore what they see as Democratic arrogance and corruption.

In March, Mr. Rangel stepped down from the powerful chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee in what he characterized as a temporary move and an effort to spare his Democratic colleagues from being tarred with his problems.

The findings by the investigative subcommittee — composed of two House Democrats and two Republicans — is not the end of the inquiry. The full House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, announced Thursday that it had created a special subcommittee to rule on the findings, which will meet for the first time next Thursday.

This is the first time since 2002 that the Standards committee has taken such a step. The last case involved former RepresentativeJames Traficant Jr., who was expelled from Congress after taking bribes.

The case could end with a simple admonishment of Mr. Rangel, which is the most common action by the Standards Committee, or a more serious action, including even his expulsion from the House.

Mr. Rangel could not be immediately reached for comment. But his office released a statement saying he would “be glad to respond to the allegations at such time as the Ethics Committee makes them public.”

“I am pleased that, at long last, sunshine will pierce the cloud of serious allegations that have been raised against me in the media,” the statement read. Already this year, Mr. Rangel had been admonished by the Standards Committee on a separate matter involving trips he and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus took to the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008 that were indirectly paid for by corporate sponsors such as Pfizer, Verizon and AT&T, in violation of House rules.

But the allegations in the so-called CaribNews case were relatively tame compared to the broad range of wrongdoing that has been the subject of the special investigative committee that concluded its work Thursday.

The investigative panel began its work in September 2008 after newspaper reports about Mr. Rangel’s multiple rent-stabilized apartments, which he maintained even though he had received tax breaks in Washington after claiming that he kept his primary residence in the capital.

The investigative panel also examined whether Mr. Rangel had improperly used his position as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee to preserve a tax loophole worth more than half a billion dollars for a an oil company that had pledged a $1 million donation for an academic center named for Mr. Rangel. Also on its agenda was a question of whether Mr. Rangel unreported taxable income the congressman received from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic.