The story about the fraud case against Vision System is several months old. What little news coverage the story received has subsided, but the case is still working its way through the courts–and hopefully those arrested are still in jail. After obtaining a couple of the court documents I decided to revisit the case.

In February 2009 the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested 11 people in 7 states. [11 arrested, indicted in multi-state visa fraud operation]–ICE Press release] The suspects are all of Indian origin but at this time I don’t have information on their immigration status.[Indians involved in major US H-1B visa racket, Times Of India, February 13, 2009] Many government agencies were involved in the investigation including the Department of Labor, Postal Inspection Service, Department of State, Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa.

Several companies including Vision Systems are accused of visa fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy.

Patrick Thibodeau wrote a Computerworld article about the Vision Systems arrests, although you wouldn’t know it by the title of the article: “H-1B workers outnumber unemployed techies”. He had a comment that was quite alarming: (more…)

When you are falsely accused of racism, don’t apologize.

Here are headlines from WashingtonPost.com:

Obama’s Backyard Summit
Officer says there was “no tension” at meeting with scholar, but there were no apologies either.

Beer Summit Goes Flat
Milbank: It wasn’t a cure for what ales us. | Q&A, noon

NYTimes.com:

Over Beers, No Apologies, but Plans to Have Lunch
President Obama, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Sgt. James Crowley met, drank and agreed to meet again.

(Are you taking notes, Dr. Watson?)

I’m reading Joan Didion’s 1968 collection of articles, Slouching towards Bethlehem, one of the influential minor masterpieces of early New Journalism, along with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the works of Tom Wolfe.

Didion’s characteristic tone is that of an un-self-medicating Hunter S. Thompson. On a hot night in Death Valley, she writes:

There is some sinister hysteria in the air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come.

That kind of thing is a lot funnier coming from Thompson than Didion. But I shouldn’t make fun of her since Slouching Towards Bethlehem is, as she would say in her Hemingwayesque prose style, a good book. There is good writing in it, and good reporting. (For example, her depressing 1967 title story about Haight-Ashbury hippies was written three months before the Summer of Love).

I stumbled upon a classic iSteve nugget in Didion’s 1966 Saturday Evening Post article about how WWII changed Hawaii socially, which would have made an amusing addition to America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance.” (more…)

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Obama’s pseudo-regular guy Beer Summit raises an interesting angle:

A responsible press would encourage Obama to smoke more and drink less.

Obama comes from two long lines of alcoholics: His father died driving drunk. His half-brother David died driving drunk. His half-brother Roy was an alcoholic before discovering teetotaling Islam and changing his name to Abongo. His maternal grandfather Stan was a barfly.

Back during the Pennsylvania primary, Hillary was always gulping down boilermakers, hoping (I imagine) to provoke Barack Jr. into responding in kind to demonstrate his regular guyness and then going off on a Barack Sr.-style bender. (Barack Sr.’s standing order at his favorite Nairobi bar was two double shots of Jack Daniels as soon as he walked in the door.)

With that kind of genetic background combined with his stressful job, the President should avoid drinking.

On the other hand, the President does need to self-medicate his fragile emotional state right now, so let him do it with cigarettes. So what if he dies of lung cancer at 75 rather than of something else at 85? We’re paying him to be President in his 40s.

The fairly arbitrary exercise of judges’ power to cite, fine, and even imprison for “Contempt of Court” hasn’t much been criticized in four decades. The last time I can recall a harsh spotlight being shone on the institution of “contempt of court” was when the antics of the Chicago Seven (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mr. Jane Fonda, etc.) at the end of the Sixties overwhelmed the irate judge.

As I’ve suggested before, “contempt of cop” needs to remain in a legal grey area below the certainties of “contempt of court.” Yet, the concept can’t be dismissed out of hand. Policemen aren’t judges, although they need to share in some of the awful majesty of the law to do what needs to be done effectively and safely. Moreover, they deal with people in much more, uh, exuberant settings than a courtroom, so cops should (and typically do) cut people more slack than judges do.

On the other hand, judges don’t really need as wide a variety of ways to enforce order as policemen do, since courthouse procedures are carefully planned around order and safety. For example, the last time I served on a jury, when I arrived early in the courtroom, there would often be a defendant there to see his lawyer make some minor motion, such as asking for a delay in the trial. A high proportion of the seemingly harmless defendants were manacled to the 300 pound defense table.

So, I end up where I started: arresting people for contempt of cop is less defensible than arresting people for contempt of court, but it’s by no means ridiculous, either. It’s one of those gray areas that the law needs, but can’t be too proud of either.

By the way, it’s striking how the ambiguous Gatesgate case generates so much more media comment than the similar but unambiguous Fire Department of New York disparate impact discrimination decision in Vulcan Society. You might think that conservatives would jump all over this slur of the FDNY, since everybody loves a fireman. Yet, there’s been almost total silence. (Other than one particular outpost …)
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In Lawrence Block’s novel, Tanner On Ice, Evan Tanner wakes up after being frozen for 25 years, going directly from Nixon’s first term to Clinton’s second, and being surprised to see that that Communism has died everywhere but Cuba, while in America, there have been changes. For example, his adopted daughter, last seen aged eleven, now is an adult who occasionally uses language that even adult women didn’t use in 1972:

These days the nicest sort of woman said words formerly reserved for male company. They even said them in magazines and newspapers, and on television.

On the other hand, there were words you couldn’t say anymore, like Oriental and girl. I could sort of understand why women didn’t want to be called girls, although I didn’t see why they wanted to make such a fuss about it. (And they seemed to be making less of a fuss now than they had ten years ago.) But how did Oriental get to be a bad word?

“It’s a matter of political correctness,” Minna explained. “I thought about doing a thesis on it, but I was afraid it wouldn’t be politically correct itself. It’s fascistic, a sort of fascism of the academic left, and it’s all based on the idea that we need euphemisms to hide the fact that we know we’re superior.”

“Superior to whom?”

“To the people we use euphemisms for,” she said. “Look how we keep changing what we call black people. First the polite thing to call them was colored people. Then it was Negro. Then that was an insult, and you had to call them Black.”

“Right.”

“And then that was wrong, or at least it wasn’t right enough, and the proper term was people of color.”

“What’s the difference between that and colored people?”

“I don’t know, Evan. I think people of color means anybody who isn’t white.”

“There’s a word for that,” I said, “assuming you absolutely require one.”

“Non-white.”

“That’s the one.”

“But then you’re defining people by what they’re not, and that’s supposed to be demeaning. Anyway, the current name for black people is African-American.”

“Not Afro-American?”

“No.”

“Because that had its turn a while back, although it never did catch on in a big way. African-American? That’s seven syllables.”

“I know.”

“Black is only one syllable. I have a hunch I know which one I’ll be using.”

“African-American might last,” she said. “Because it’s so cumbersome most people won’t use it. As long as most people don’t use it, it can remain politically correct.”

“How’s that?”

“The whole point,” she said, “is to show that you’re not like other European-Americans, and that you don’t—”

“European-Americans? White folks?”

“Right, people of non-color. You’re not like them, and you don’t call black people by the same insulting term they do.”

“Insulting because they use it.”

“Exactly. Once all the rednecks start calling blacks AfricanAmericans, the P.C. people will have to come up with something else. But that may not happen for a while, because African-American is such an awkward phrase to say.”

“Especially for a redneck,” I said. “Speaking of which, how do they feel about being called rednecks?”

“I don’t think they give a f—,” Minna said, “but I don’t think it’s because they’re more enlightened than everybody else. I don’t think they’re paying attention.”

“Well, good for them,” I said.

Steve Sailer will be a guest on the Chuck Wilder Show today at 4:34 p.m. ET (1:34 p.m. PT) to discuss the Gates arrest controversy as a “teachable moment” about race in America. The show can be streamed live here.

Throughout StupidGate, whenever anybody rhetorically says, “Officer Crowley should have left as soon as Professor Gates showed ID demonstrating he’d broken into his own house!” I’ve had in the back of my mind a vague recollection that I’ve heard something somewhere about a man who broke into his old house after his wife had changed the locks on him.

Therefore, a cop shouldn’t just leave, especially when the angry, agitated man is acting much like a man whose wife has changed the locks. And, when the man won’t answer the cop’s question about who else is in the house, the cop has to hang around while Dispatch checks the name of the householder he called in for restraining orders, warrants, and the like. (Maybe they should have thicker skins, but cops really don’t like it when you loudly hurl abuse at them while they’re on the radio checking on these matters.)

I couldn’t remember the story, so I kept coming up with thought experiments scenarios in which a rich Texas oilman breaks into his old house in order to hurt his future ex-wife.

But then it finally occurred to me that this isn’t just a thought experiment. In fact, it was not only one of the most notorious crime stories of my lifetime, but , heck, I even worked for the man’s legendary Houston defense attorney Racehorse Haynes in 1980 as a research assistant, pulling together his scrapbook on this case for use in an autobiographical book Racehorse planned to write with Rice sociologist William Martin.

It’s the story of oil heir T. Cullen Davis, who may still be the richest man ever tried for murder in the United States. In 1976, he broke into his former $6 million dollar mansion and settled down to wait for his separated wife and her new boyfriend to get home.

When his young stepdaughter surprised him, he took her to the wine cellar and executed her. He then waited for his primary targets. When the couple walked in, Davis shot both, killing the man but only wounding his tough, gold-digging wife.

Two young people who were friends of the family walked up the driveway of the 180 acre estate. Davis shot one, and the girl ran off and flagged down a passerby. The wounded wife crawled off down the hill on the other side. Both witnesses immediately and separately told neighbors, “Cullen’s up there shooting everybody.”

Racehorse Haynes got Cullen Davis acquitted.

A few years later, Davis was back in jail for paying a hitman $25k to kill the judge in his divorce settlement case. The man went to the FBI, who got the judge to climb in the trunk of a car, covered him with ketchup, and took a Polaroid. They then wired the supposed hitman for sound and filmed him on video as he showed Davis the picture of the supposedly murdered judge and accepted the cash in return.

Racehorse got him off again.

I lost track of Cullen Davis after that, although I do recall one year the Forbes 400 issue did a Where Are They Now? feature on former members. Davis was now recognized as America’s Poorest Man based on having the most negative net worth of anybody in America. The funny thing is, though, that when you are worth $-800 million, you still live pretty well.

Racehorse is doing fine in his early 80s. He told the ABA Journal:

For instance, he’s represented three doz­en women in what he refers to as “Smith & Wesson divorces,” which are cases where the husband had been abusive, leading the wife to kill in self-defense. “I won all but two of those cases,” he says. “And I would have won them if my clients hadn’t kept reloading their gun and firing.”

I remember some of those very Texan cases from my job summarizing Mrs. Haynes’ scrapbook of his newspaper coverage: like Sicilian grand opera set to the twang of steel guitars.

After a meeting at Racehorse’s house in Houston in 1979, he insisted on driving me back to my car, which was only parked a block way. That’s because he had just bought a whale-tail Turbo Porsche. He floored it and we accelerated down his quiet street (in River Oaks?) for three blocks, topping out at 85, then, like a rocketship in a Robert Heinlein novel, decelerated for three blocks back to zero. I pointed to some random car, got out, thanked him, then, after he had turned the corner, walked the five blocks back to my Datsun 310.

Sen. Fred Thompson played Racehorse in a 1992 miniseries “Bed of Lies” about a doctor client of his who was accused of poisoning his wife, the daughter of a very rich, very angry man. Racehorse got the doc off, but a hit man rubbed him out later. Haynes and Thompson are equally charming, but Haynes is a high-energy bantamweight, while Thompson, as we saw in the Presidential primaries last year, is not.

Dennis Franz of NYPD Blue played Racehorse in a 1995 miniseries about Cullen Davis, aptly entitled “Texas Justice.” Once again, curious casting.

The beginning of my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Countless pundits have debated whether the Henry Louis Gates Jr. brouhaha is about race or class.

In truth, Barack Obama’s maladroit but heartfelt interjection of his own prejudices into the controversy stemmed from a quite precise intersection of race with class. Obama spoke out in defense of Gates’s tantrum because they are both members of the tiny (but increasingly potent) black overclass.

Obama’s feelings of class solidarity haven’t been widely discussed, largely because they are rather boring. In a world bedazzled by black entertainers and athletes, and troubled (but intrigued) by black criminals, the black upper class goes almost unnoticed as they engage in respectable rituals such as relaxing at Martha’s Vineyard, where “Skip” Gates has summered for 27 years and the Obamas will be vacationing next month.

This Affirmative-Actionocracy’s access to power and wealth stems largely from their claim to theoretically represent 40 million African-Americans, particularly the foreboding and puzzling black underclass. Yet, they try to associate with less lofty blacks no more than necessary, and they especially don’t want their daughters to marry them. Hence the constant inward socializing.

Read the rest there and comment on it here.

Thanks to commenters for finding the picture of Henry Louis Gates riding his “adult tricycle” while summering on Martha’s Vineyard.