March 2, 2023

"Melrose Place" · A Manson girl · The Ballad Of Nanette The Laundry Cart

Plus the Oscar streaker and bad re-enaccents

the true crime that's worth your time

Almost had a crime story of my own to share today — involving, as befits my personal brand, a petty theft. My esteemed shop associate Woodland Jane and I were standing near the entrance to the shop, with the door open; the rattly laundry cart — aka “the state bird of New York City” — WJ uses to trundle inventory between our “HQs” to process it was standing on the sidewalk. I won’t get too granular about the unwritten rules governing unattended items in the liminal public/private space, how close to the sidewalk you have to leave something on the stoop for passersby to consider it fair freebie game, etc. etc.; every community has their own1, but suffice it to say that Nanette2, pulled over next to the stoop and in the eyeline of two people chatting by an open door, didn’t qualify.

All of a sudden: furtive movement, and the telltale clatter of Nanette not just rolling but hurtling down the block, yoinked by a kid (or babyfaced and short adult).

Us in unison: “The fuck??”
WJ: “HEY!”
SDB: “HEYYY!!”

And then we’re charging after it without a thought. Benedict Cartensnatch is mere yards from the corner — a major thoroughfare — and the rush-hour foot traffic coming out of the subway station thereon, so he pulls up and tries it with “oopsie, I thought it was free!” I’m all “right, that’s why you were sprinting off” and relieve him of Nanette, and he strolls off as casually as he can, probably fixing to disappear into the subway, which, fine, it’s just a cart and no harm done in the end.

Not five seconds later, before WJ and I can even remark on the fact that…you know, it’s just a cart, and while we don’t condone the porch piracy Nextdoor would have us believe is rampant in this Zip, we at least get it; unless the cart was intended to aid and abet in the collection of nicked packages, this theft is kind of a baffler, but then again sometimes teens are just bored/dumb? There’s the woop woop of a 68th Precinct squad car trying to get down the block in a hurry. My knee-jerk response to sirens is to turn to whomever is nearby and joke, “Your ride’s here!” so I turned to shout it over my shoulder, and I see Benedict, back in track-meet mode and taking the subway stairs in two jumps, and I legit felt bad for the kid/small adult.

I mean, it was a little funny imagining what Benedict must have thought when he immediately heard a siren — “So the Bea Arthur-sounding one’s literally a witch; fuck this” — but mostly it was depressing and guilt-inducing. Obviously the cops weren’t there for Benedict, who knows what cruller they were late for up 4th Ave., and neither WJ nor I would have called the law over a cart, even one as faithful as Nanette. The whole thing is utterly South Brooklyn suburbs in its trifling-osity, and/or reads like an in-episode red-herring arc on Only Murders.

But at the same time, I can’t stop thinking about the springboard potential of the story — how a Starlee Kine or a Radio Free Bay Ridge special correspondent could start from an almost parodic, American Vandal “eight episodes on that time my roommate ‘ALLEGEDLY’ left a single, hateful Chips Ahoy instead of just finishing the box, owning it, and replacing them” standpoint, but then evolve the story into all the issues it touches on, here and nationwide:

• the over-reporting of/on crime, and the subsequent musing by these same publications on why everyone’s freaking shit over a non-existent crime “wave”

• the not-unrelated “The Nextdoorening”: fearful residents extrapolating incorrectly from “my aunt’s catalytic converter got stolen” to “it’s The Warriors out here”

• what “out here” is, in fact, these days — a smorgasbord of crime-adjacent topics that locally include

  • economic insecurity, rising prices, and the recent expiration of pandemic SNAP benefits

  • the commercialization of legal marijuana and its effect on grey markets

  • the compassion deficit w/r/t our addicted neighbors, with local businesses understandably weary of folks nodding out in their planters of an evening, but consequently resistant to the idea that this isn’t a problem with a broken-windows-policing solution

    • look, guy dealing from under the hood of his [obnoxious luxury brand redacted], if you want [determined neighbor with hilarious Halloween yard display redacted] to quit calling the law on you, quit parking on that hydrant

  • tensions in a diverse-on-paper neighborhood whose communities a) don’t interface that much, including at the school level, and b) notably include

    • more than one “tradition-forward” religious group;

    • Asians, still getting targeted;

    • “waste management professionals”;

    • and retired city workers, including a decent number of cops.

I could go on. “…Please don’t.” Yeah yeah yeah, there’s a point and I’m gettin’ to it.

And it’s this: I would love to get after a story like this — I don’t really have the reporting chops for it, but I know people who do, plus not knowing what the nosy fuck I’m doing has never stopped me before — but I barely have the time for the umpteen jobs I have now, never mind one I’d have to start from Go on with no guarantee that the time spent pays off. But stories like this, the little stories that speak for, or take your hand and walk towards, the big stories, are what true crime is for at its best, and why the genre is worth engaging with even when some of the specific output is cynical garbage.

I have a lifelong and not-great habit of saying aloud, “You know what would be cool? [XYZ]” and then just…trying to make [XYZ] happen when nobody else speaks up, but on the other hand, that’s why Best Evidence and the shop exist, it’s why I know the irreplaceable Woodland Jane (and invaluable y’all), so if you want me to rough out a season of “Cart Imitating Life: An Extremely Local And Podcast That Is Also So Budge, Buntsy Has To Sing The Theme Song, Kill Us Now,” go ahead and

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but true crime and its worthwhile stories are all around us, every day. There are worse uses of our t.c.-consumer time than thinking about how we’d tell this one, or how like to see it told (Rotoscope? I’m listening, people!).

And confidential to Benedict: sorry to scare you, but dude, those carts are literally never “free” unless they’re at the edge of the curb and broken. Be safe. — “the tall one”

A few New Yorker hits for you now that everyone’s reset their free-stories counts for a new month! Let’s start with “How the Biggest Fraud in German History Unravelled,” which isn’t the most tempting NYer headline, but I can’t outdo the sales pitch my esteemed colleague Craig Calcaterra made for the article yesterday, so…I won’t. Hit it, Calcs!

It’s “The Big Short” mixed up with “The Smartest Guys in the Room” mixed up with “Wolf of Wall Street” mixed up with “All the Presidents Men,” mixed up with any number of international spy/crime movies, with scenes set in Germany, Bahrain, New York, London, Russia, the Philippines, Libya, and a half dozen cities all around the globe. The story has porn. Russian oligarchs falling out of windows or being poisoned. It has people getting punched in the head with brass knuckles while walking their dog. Near the end there’s a quote from a super rich guy lamenting the fact that, when he was high on coke, he was lured out of a London club with a beautiful woman in what turned out to be a blackmail/sting operation that cost him tens of millions and the thing he regrets the most about it is that, in the secretly-recorded sex tape that dropped, he still had his socks on and that such a thing is “a bad look for a guy my age.”

I also quite enjoyed “Ballad Of The Oscar Streaker” from last month. Michael Schulman’s mini-biography of the titular Robert Opel, who flapped past David Niven en route to immortality at the 1974 Academy Awards ceremony, isn’t a true-crime story because of the streaking. Opel, a gay activist and performance-art shit-stirrer, believed the powers that be had conspired to allow the murder of Harvey Milk — and was murdered himself, possibly by “rogue cops who were carrying on the ‘queer extermination work’ of Dan White.”

Every time I read an account of that time in the Bay Area, I’m struck all over again by the floridly insane volume of major-case horrors inflicted on San Francisco and its people and electeds in such a short span of time. That reminds me that I need to dig into Mike Weiss’s Double Play.

And finally, Kimon de Greef’s “The Dystopian Underworld of South Africa’s Illegal Gold Mines” is an evocative, claustrophobic look at tertiary effects of apartheid, and how easily organized crime finds ways to kudzu itself into troubled industries. (A 2015 piece by William Finnegan for the mag reflected similar brutal conditions in Peru.) — SDB

It’s a close one at the top of the March bonus-review poll. I’m not entirely opposed to a tie this month, but if you’ve got a preference for which “vintage” TV movie I review, now’s the time to make your voice heard.

Vote now!

But if you don’t have a paid subscription, you won’t get my review, so now might also be a good time to join us behind the paywall, if you haven’t already. (If you have already, check out my February 2023 review of By Hands Now Known.)

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Can’t unpinch enough pennies for that? We get it, believe me. But if you like what we do, we’d love it if you’d tell a friend (or discerning enemy) about us! — SDB

Someone needs to do a documentary on this disastrous Rewind Con from 2016 (and/or a bunch of other similarly appalling cons/fests) and call it Before The Fyre or something like that. The background: my esteemed work wife Tara Ariano and I broke down another month of 9021OMG episodes for our Again With Them podcast, and that included a reference by Tori Spelling to “An Incident” at a long-ago con — serious enough that their production, whose attitude towards editing/sound levels/saving the two bonehead co-hosts from themselves is at best casual 98 percent of the time, bleeped out an implicated person’s name.

Enter noted Laura Leighton archivist Anthobuzz on our Discord, tipping us to a Comics Beat deep dive on the con in question. Heidi MacDonald waded into various FB and Reddit rumor threads to get a sense of the fiasco.

We’ve run many many stories in the “When a con is crap” category where people were in over their heads from day one – or else running a con from day one.

Putting aside for a moment — but only one moment — the fact that the site has a whole category devoted to con mediocrities, it did sound to me like Rewind suffered from the excessive ambition of the amateur, versus having an intent to deceive, but fraud statutes don’t necessarily care why Patrick Muldoon didn’t get paid, if you know what I’m saying. Anyway, see y’all in the Comics Beat archives! — SDB

Or at the Hamptons Mystery & Crime Festival? DPB just forwarded an email blast for the inaugural “Hamptons Whodunit” con. I like attending these things about as much as I like trying to get from here to the 516 on a weekend — so, not a lot — but if any of y’all were interested in going, the true-crime/non-fic section alone is a pretty deep bench (Raymond Kelly and Casey Sherman (Helltown), just for starters, plus a guy who calls himself a historian and “town crier,” which is kind of rad; Michael Connelly is also a featured guest).

LMK if you’re considering it; if it sucks, we could always go into town and get a DB Cooper3 and do book club. — SDB

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Linda Kasabian, Manson Family “wheelman” and star witness for Vincent Bugliosi’s prosecution, has died.

“Given a choice between Susan [Atkins, who died in 2009] and Linda as the star witness for the prosecution, I much preferred Linda: She hadn’t killed anyone,” Mr. Bugliosi wrote in “Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders” (1974, written with Curt Gentry), his best-selling account of the case. “But in the rush to get the case to the grand jury, we’d made the deal with Susan and, like it or not, we were stuck with it. Unless Susan bolted.”

Once “Susan bolted,” the prosecution gave Ms. Kasabian conditional immunity — it would be revoked if she did not testify fully and truthfully — and she became the centerpiece of the trial of Mr. Manson and the three women.

As of New York Times press time, no cause of death had been given for Kasabian, 73, who was no longer using that name. The NYT obit does furnish a link to a 2009 TV documentary, The Family: Inside the Manson Cult, which is evidently one of the few properties in which Kasabian consented to speak about her experiences.

…All right, fine, but we all agree that we’re not expecting much, right? Okay then…

The crime
Yeah, this I’m not doing again.

The story
I didn’t finish The Family, but I did get far enough into it (34 minutes; the runtime is 86) — and I’ve seen enough other Mansoniana — that I think I have a good enough sense of it to tell you whether it’s worth your time, and: maybe?

I considered quitting at minute 3.4, thanks to a pretty flagrant factual error in a chyron that isn’t going to help The Family with case-heads:

Not to be that guy, but Spahn Ranch is in Chatsworth, more than 20 miles from Benedict Canyon. All the effort the production went to with a fully cast re-enactment, vintage cars, the Western set, not to mention getting Linda Kasabian (“disguised,” barely, to protect her privacy) and Catherine “Gypsy” Share and Vincent Bugliosi for talking-head interviews, and you biff a deet even a case “civilian” like me clocks right away?

But I persisted, and there are things to appreciate here. The Family does commit to the re-enactments, and while the casting isn’t entirely successful — Adam Kennedy Wilson as “Charlie” is too tall, serving too much Van Der Beek in the face, and trying too hard with a Foghorn Leghorn accent — the writing/direction don’t go too far with the girls acting super-off-putting and spacy, a frequent credibility problem for Manson properties. Bugliosi and others give capable and efficient capsule bios of other name figures, and outline Manson’s dingbat racist “philosophies” without fanfare.

And Kasabian gives some insight — not a ton; a lot of rationales for dumb shit people did in the late sixties boils down to “you had to be there,” and I wasn’t — into what led her out of her second marriage at age 20, why she trusted other Spahn residents with her toddler, and Manson’s whole deal with Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher. Granted, the commentary here contains unchallenged observations like “he was really a brilliant musician” (llol; no) but Kasabian also notes that Manson was crazy nervous when meeting and playing for Melcher. Mansonworld completists may find something new in The Family, and it’s not a tiresome sit.

But there may not be enough there for everyone, and the relentless centering of Manson’s racist-baby bullshit, in a doc marketed as a woman’s take on the story…I didn’t feel like I needed to keep going. That said, it’s on YouTube for free

so if you try it, let me know how you go. — SDB

Friday on Best Evidence: Murder-house demolition and Con Girl.

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