Favre · Fort Bragg · Fortune Seller
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“Great,” there’s an update to the Brett Favre kerfuffle (“ker-Favre-fle”? …I’ll see myself out) I wrote up the other day. MississippiToday.com’s Anna Wolfe dropped a story Tuesday on a series of recently-unearthed receipts: “Never-before-seen text messages show former Gov. Phil Bryant tried to shepherd a proposal to use welfare funds on the construction of a new volleyball stadium for retired NFL player Brett Favre – a project prosecutors have called a scheme to defraud the government.”
Nancy New, the founder of a nonprofit in charge of “spending tens of millions of flexible federal welfare dollars outside of public view” and a friend of Bryant’s wife, is now cooperating with prosecutors as part of a plea deal. Bryant’s team, from what I can tell, tried to get the texts gag-ordered, and when that didn’t work, Bryant accused New of being more interested in favorable pre-trial publicity than in “civil justice.”
Kind of a big ask from the public given that New dragged her kid into the scheme (said kid is also charged), but on the other hand, it’s pretty easy to look, you know, less bad than Brett Favre:
Favre’s attorney Bud Holmes denied that the athlete knew the money he received was from the welfare fund. “Brett Favre has been honorable throughout this whole thing,” Holmes said Monday.
When Mississippi Today asked Favre by text in 2020 if he had discussed the volleyball project with the governor, Favre said, simply: “No.”
Not sure what repels me more, the fraud itself; the lack, at this writing, of charges brought against Favre; or the inevitable redemption tour we’ll all have to live through starting in 2025. — SDB
The R Kelly jury returned a verdict yesterday. Two co-defendants skated on conspiracy charges, and Kelly didn’t get convicted of every count — but it was most of them. The account of the evidence linked above is tough going and my thoughts, as always, go with Kelly’s victims, but also with the jurors who had to watch sex tapes in order to do their civic duty.
But if you scroll down, there’s a chart breakdown of the verdicts at the bottom, followed by commentary responses. Nothing on sentencing on these charges, but
Kelly already has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after he was convicted last year of racketeering and sex trafficking charges in federal court in New York.
Kelly also is still awaiting trial in Cook County in sexual assault and sexual abuse cases involving four women, three of whom were girls at the time of the abuse. He also faces charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Minnesota.
I can’t imagine he isn’t sentenced with an eye to sending a message, and I can’t imagine he’s ever getting out. — SDB
And another major-case update…talking true crime at a friend’s birthday the other night, I had to admit I’d lost track of where “we’d left” Adnan Syed’s quest for a new trial, and it’s just as well, because events would have overtaken me anyway — namely, that Baltimore prosecutors have moved to vacate Syed’s conviction. Per the Sun, Syed’s
legal saga rocketed to international prominence by way of the hit podcast “Serial.”
The development means Syed, now 42, could get a new trial or go free after serving more than 20 years in prison for the 1999 killing of his ex-girlfriend which he always maintained he never committed.
As I write this — the afternoon before you read it, as it happens, so you may already have downloaded all sorts of news and speculation about the headline already! — there’s no information in terms of a timeline for what’s next, but events may have overtaken me again by the time we publish this; the Sun piece promises updates, so the link above is probably the best direct source on the story.
But true-crime Twitter is already dug in on a couple of key alternate suspects, and you can’t go wrong with my esteemed colleagues at Crime Writers On… as a starting point for what’s new.
In the meantime: I feel like our esteemed commenter Heather M. put it in my head to do a Serial S01 re-listen, and it seems like an even better idea now. Anyone want to join? — SDB
Speaking of joining — anyone want to switch from a free subscription to a paid one? A paid sub drops the drawbridge at Paywall Castle, and there’s over three years of bonus reviews and extras back there!
Not to mention that our contributors work as hard as we do; we’d love to pay them (closer to) what they’re worth, and your dollars really help with that.
“I already subscribe; can I treat someone else to a sub?” In point of fact, yes!
That’s a new-ish feature, and I confess I don’t totally know how it works — but one of our generous readers has used the feature to plus-one a friend behind the paywall. Give it a try, let us know how it goes. — SDB
If you’d like to try international true crime for a change of pace, Fortune Seller: A TV Scam hits Netflix next Wednesday the 21st. The Italian docuseries looks at Wanna Marchi, “the undisputed queen of Italian teleshopping,”
who, along with her daughter, Stefania Nobile, made millions by hawking everything from a slimming cream and other cosmetic products, to amulets for protection against evil, to… lucky numbers. (Seriously.)
Fortune Seller looks like a solid option if you need a break from heavier topics; shop the trailer below to see if it’s for you. — SDB
This is not a snarky question: is Fort Bragg on a hellmouth? The latest wrenching true-crime news from one of the largest armed-forces installations in the world — which miiiiight consider whether naming itself for a Civil War general 1) of the Confederacy 2) who sucked at the job in the first place is perhaps not helping to avoid the malocch’ — comes in the form of a Rolling Stone longread on overdose deaths on the base. A snip from Seth Harp’s investigation:
And many Fort Bragg soldiers have died recently under similar circumstances — quietly, in their barracks, in their bunks, in a parked car, or somewhere off-post, from no outwardly apparent cause. According to a set of casualty reports obtained by Rolling Stone through the Freedom of Information Act, at least 14 — and as many as 30 — Fort Bragg soldiers have died in this way since the start of 2020. Yet there has been no acknowledgment from the Army or reporting in the national press on any aspect of this phenomenon, nor word one from any member of Congress. Only the families of the victims have been informed — discreetly, and in private.
[Matthew] Disney’s memorial service was in July. “We were getting ready to go into the chapel,” [Disney’s mother Racheal] Bowman says, and Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, came into the room and personally informed her that the results of a toxicology report were in. The cause of death was acute fentanyl intoxication.
Disney appears to have ingested a counterfeit Percocet, and that’s just one of the ways Fort Bragg has compiled what Harp calls “a seemingly unprecedented wave of fatalities” — 109 in 2020 and 2021, many of them by suicide, but with a significant percentage of them murders, several of those notably ghastly. Harp wrote up several of those for Rolling Stone last April, including “the one with the beheading” that has since seen charges filed, but the bad news never stops at Fort Bragg, really:
A murder allegedly committed in Longs, SC by an active-duty Fort Bragg soldier earlier this year
A shooting that killed Staff Sgt. Keith Wright Jr. and wounded four others
The murder of Sarah Lewis days before Christmas — and her baby’s due date — and the failure of authorities to check her husband’s escalating behavior
The six weeks that claimed four wives’ lives in 2002
The skinhead double-murder case in 1995
And let’s not forget this mofo
A few of the links above lead to vintage longreads that, while I recommend them, are none of them easy sledding — and I think I’ve overlooked half a dozen other major, majorly bleak cases out of Fort Bragg. Based on a list from the installation’s Wikipedia page, for every one good (or at least not traumatic) notable event, there are seven or eight murders or airshow disasters. And when the joint isn’t life-threatening or homophobic, it’s apparently tweeting drunk and then claiming it got hacked?
North Carolina, you gave me my beloved spouse and I have tried to like you, but you need to get Fayetteville correct immediately. — SDB
I missed this piece from NPR on the “morally dubious podcaster” as scripted cultural trope when aired last month. Quoting Vulture’s Nicholas Quah and my esteemed colleague Linda Holmes of Pop Culture Happy Hour, among others, it talks about a number of fictional true-crime podcasters — and one or two of their “slimy” real-life counterparts — we’ve also talked a lot about here, including Only Murders and Cinda Canning; Vengeance; and Crime Junkie.
You read the transcript or listen to the piece; either way, it’s more of a quick hit/trend piece and doesn’t get into a ton of depth. And I don’t think it needs to — I wouldn’t say there’s a “why” to get at here; the increasing number of podcasters in fictional crime, whether it’s TV or film or YA noir, is reflecting the world since, well, Serial.
I did like Linda’s blogging comp, though.
LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: So you can start a podcast tomorrow with very little equipment, right?
ULABY: That means, she says, a lot of people who are not journalists can suddenly fill the space - talented people, celebrities, people whose voices were traditionally marginalized.
HOLMES: But then you also do get in podcasting, as was the case in blogging, a certain amount of grifting and people whose stuff is kind of gross, as well as just people who aren't following - I don't know - the rules that you would want them to follow.
It’s just the life cycle of online culture/media, right? It starts out, whatever “it” we’re talking about, as a new unregulated thing that has lots of potential for innovation and also misuse; it gradually starts to become more codified, and it’s at around that point that it shows up on an SVU episode as something a cretin played by Kevin Tighe is leveraging to traffic minor children, and the detectives all shake their heads at whatever social-media platform the rest of us acclimated to years prior (RIP the @icetsvu account on Twitter); then it’s just…there, part of things.
Although now that I think of it, SVU should really shift to a season-long arc centered on a murdered crypto influencer (TV’s current favorite punching bag/red-herring suspect) and the Vidocq-casters whose parallel investigation is causing problems for the squad, especially when it turns out Noah is one of them!!1!
…Okay, time to wrap this edish before a court declares me incompetent to assist Eve. — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Holes is back. Should you care?
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