Eric Adams · Mormons · A Groundhog Day BET-CRP
Plus the commercialization of documentaries
the true crime that's worth your time
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Can’t make it work? Been there. Thanks for reading; you’re always welcome in the comments. Speaking of that, if you haven’t stuck your head into yesterday’s recs thread, that one’s free, as always; come by, tell us how to live. — SDB
Another item for the amateur Adams-watcher! The January 30 New Yorker had a wonderfully paced and woven longread on NYC Mayor Eric Adams and one of his higher-profile unsavory associates, “The Mayor And The Con Man” (in the print mag, it was called “Friend Of The Mayor”). Correspondent Eric Lach gets into it on not just Bishop Lamor Whitehead, whom we’ve mentioned in passing here before, but on Adams’s culinary closeness with the Petrosyant brothers, and Adams’s constitutional resistance to observing basic political proprieties:
On January 1, 2022, Adams was sworn in. He soon appointed to important posts an array of friends and close connections. For his deputy mayor for public safety, he chose Philip Banks III, a former N.Y.P.D. official who had resigned in 2014, amid a federal investigation into favor trading and bribery. For his chief of staff, he picked Frank Carone, a Brooklyn Democratic Party power broker who has drawn scrutiny for his business dealings. He tried to install his brother to run mayoral security at a salary of two hundred and ten thousand dollars a year. (An ethics board forced him to knock the salary down to a dollar.) He appointed Timothy Pearson, another N.Y.P.D. friend, to be a senior adviser on public safety, even as Pearson continued to work an outside job—at the same racino for which Adams had been investigated. Lisa White, the former treasurer of the One Brooklyn Fund, with whom Adams once shared an apartment, was installed as deputy commissioner for employee relations at the N.Y.P.D., at an annual salary of roughly a quarter million dollars.
From there, Lach gets into Whitehead’s almost unbelievably brazen malfeasances — and this is well beyond your run-of-the-mill Gotham- or Garden State-pol matter-of-factness — and, I think, does a good job subtly illuminating what I see as the difference between the two men.
To start with, I think one thing they have in common is that neither of them is a con, exactly — Adams because, if Hizzoner will forgive me, what might seem like disingenuity in these matters of influence-peddling and corruption is merely Adams not being very bright. I’ve heard Adams speak at a couple of fundraisers, and he’s not an idiot; he’s just…not very bright. Doesn’t think shit through, apparently can’t be persuaded to most of the time.
Whitehead gets called a con, because for most people “con man” and “fraudster” are synonymous, and I have no kick with that, but to me, the term “con” implies “confidence artist.” There is a plan; there is another plan, in case that one doesn’t work; there is some care taken, not to arouse suspicion or not to get caught…any care at all. Whitehead appears to have a certain aptitude for availing himself of situations he can squid-ink — marks just want to be shut of him; prosecutors can’t quite nail down what he did — and the behavior is fraudulent, but he’s not a con artist. He wants a thing; he sets up a mark or agency with twine and Big League Chew to get that thing; he does some yelling if necessary; he takes the thing and leaves. “I dare you to call the law” is not “a plan.” It’s…stealing and being a cock about it.
A distinction without a difference, I agree, but we’re just talking here. Point is, it’s a credit to Lach’s piece that I kept thinking about it, so now that you’ve got free reads to burn in the Condé-verse, I’d recommend this one. — SDB
I thought it might be fun to Bet-Crap someone with a starring role in Groundhog Day. And it might be! But it might also be a nightmare, because the best candidate for BET-CRPery in the topline cast is Stephen Tobolowsky, and the man has two hundred and eighty-five IMDb credits. (Just a reminder that the Best Evidence True-Crime Résumé Percentage gauges how true-crimey an actor or creator’s c.v. is; more info here!)
That is a lot of credits, but Tobolowsky is also reigning king of the Hey, It’s That Guy!s, and combining those factors makes a prediction difficult to make with any confidence, but: the hell with it, 7 percent.
[limbers up, guzzles some seltzer] All right, let’s do this.
Cocaine and Blue Eyes (1983) // jfc, already with the maybes! This puppy is a TV movie that very clearly isn’t based on a true story, but it has a narcotic right in the title and it stars OJ Simpson. …No, I know, but: OJ Simpson. Anyone want to chase this down and review it for us? Simpson’s not the only name. …Right, got it: 0
Mississippi Burning (1988) // I’d forgotten he figured so heavily in this one, but it’s a real case; I’ll award the “name figure” points although the film changed Samuel Holloway Bowers’s name to Clayton Townley; and while Tobolowsky wasn’t in line for any awards, the film is an all-timer, so that’s: 4
Roe vs. Wade (1989) // Man, this got a lot of nominations — but none for Tobo, and I don’t think he’s a name figure in the case: 1
Great Balls of Fire! (1989) // The movie seems unwilling to treat with Jerry Lee Lewis as a sexual predator, so it’s not really true crime. Just wanted to mention again that that shteez is not a goddamned love story: 0
The Marla Hanson Story (1991) // With Cheryl Pollak as Hanson; Tobo plays an unnamed defense attorney: 1
Deadly Medicine (1991) // The Genene Jones TV movie (well, one of them); it’s not clear to me that Tobolowsky plays a name, so: 1
When Love Kills: The Seduction of John Hearn (1992) // Whoooole lotta actors who should have known better in this bad boy on the so-called Soldier Of Fortune murders. Tobolowsky plays a detective: 1
Murder In The First (1995) // Not the first time we’ve seen MIT1st in a BET-CRP (ergo not the first time I’ve disappeared down a “they never found a trace of Henri Young?” wikihole): 1
The Insider (1999) // This feels like true crime, but I don’t know that we can actually classify it that way. I’ll go ahead and give Tobo the point since I think between the whistle-blowing and the torts of it all, it counts: 1
Law & Order: Criminal Intent S02.E06 “Malignant” (2002) // Supposedly ripped from the headlines of the Robert Courtney case. I vaguely recall the episode, which also stars Jon Bernthal, but can’t really say if Tobolowsky’s Halliwell maps onto the guy, so: 1
Law & Order: SVU S12.E02 “Bullseye” (2010) // This one ostensibly from two cases, a videogame-addiction/child-neglect case and one other; I think Tobo plays an attorney: 1
…and S20.E20 “The Good Girl” (2020) // Ostensibly from the Rosalynn McGinnis case, though it’s also unclear who Tobo plays: 1
And that’s…it! I really thought we’d see more pertinent network-miniseries stuff in the eighties, but his genre work in that decade was fairly prestige-y material I confess I’d forgotten about — and while you could say Tobolowsky is known for saying yes to just about any series-TV guest shot or short film, he’s not getting the doc-narration offers you might expect, apparently. In any case, 13 points divided by that kingly 285 total entries leaves us with a 4.5 BET-CRP…and that’s probably high, depending on how constitutionally conservative you are re: Law & Order entries. But: now we know! — SDB
That BET-CRP took literal hours plural, so let me wrap up with a few more stories of interest in brief(-er than I’d planned).
“Reality Check” [Vulture] // h/t once again to Sarah Weinman for tipping me to this Reeves Wiedeman longread, whose subhed does the work for me: “The boom — or glut — in streaming documentaries has sparked a reckoning among filmmakers and their subjects.” Here’s a snip on the m.o. shift (as it were) sparked by the oft-cited maw of streaming:
A genre that had always existed in part to inform and enlighten was now primarily a commercial product. That meant documentarians had more work, which was nice, but the projects often came with shorter deadlines and notes from streamers pushing directors to juice opening sequences with a little extra tension, as if these were spy thrillers that could be punched up rather than representations of real life. A decade after journalism suffered through its own period of disruption, its onscreen cousin entered a kind of clickbait era of its own: Make it fast, see what works, repeat.
Later in the piece, Wiedeman takes us through what happened in 2018 when “an experienced director who asked that I not use his name — the doc world loves nondisclosure agreements — was hired to make an hour-long episode of a true-crime series for Netflix.” Ridic executive notes involving Gladiator ensue. (Anyone able to un-blind this item?
My first thought on the series was Dirty Money, but subsequent clues about a “decades-old murder” probably rule that out.) There’s also, predictably, stupid naming-convention tricks, an algorithm that’s supposed to figure out the next hot doc topic but only comes up with “tornadoes,” and an actually compelling conversation with Joe Berlinger about creative control and the difference between a true doc and a celebrity-produced infomercial. Fantastic, maddening read.
“An alleged $500 million Ponzi scheme preyed on Mormons. It ended with FBI gunfire.” [Washington Post] // Thanks to reader Claire for joining the WaPo daily email blast in bringing this to our attention; as we occasionally say around here, if this hed doesn’t bring you in on its own, I doubt I can convince you, but I’ll throw in a sidebar snip on the origins of the piece:
Las Vegas investigative reporter Jeff German was slain outside his home on Sept. 2; a Clark County official he had investigated is charged in his death. To continue German’s work, The Washington Post teamed up with his newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, to complete one of the stories he’d planned to pursue before his killing. A folder on German’s desk contained court documents he’d started to gather about an alleged Ponzi scheme that left hundreds of victims – many of them Mormon – in its wake. Post reporter Lizzie Johnson began investigating, working with Review-Journal photographer Rachel Aston.
“German injected patient to death because he was hung over” [Switzerland Times] // A floridly alcoholic nurse who, per Bild, “sometimes consumed a bottle of Jägermeister and ten beers immediately after getting up” is accused of injecting patients with the wrong meds. Sometimes, as the hed notes, it’s because “Mario G.” just wanted some quiet; other times, it was more of a power play, with Mario enjoying the “helplessness” of the doctors he worked with to explain their patients’ new and sometimes fatal symptoms.
The piece is of interest IMO for two reasons, the first being the awkward English translation that, perhaps inadvertently, prioritizes certain bits of information; I’m thinking specifically of the decision to use “German” as the headline descriptor, versus “nurse” or “alleged angel of death.” The second is that
The well-known writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger († 93) was one of the nurse’s patients. Of the six accused cases of attempted murder, three are due to attacks on Enzensberger at the beginning of November 2020, but he all survived. During the third attack, the nurse Enzensberger is said to have injected six ampoules of adrenaline, triggering a life-threatening increase in heart rate.
Contrary to his living will, the doctors gave Enzensberger artificial respiration and, according to the indictment, were able to save his life. Enzensberger died last November, two years after the attacks, at the age of 93 of natural causes.
If this additional information does not fairly shriek for a Werner Herzog-directed docudrama called The Nurse and the Poet, I don’t know anything anymore. — SDB
Coming up on Best Evidence: New true-crime players and a Dan Cassino book review.
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