Sunday Morning Comin' Down, Vol 1
Gleanings from bookings at the Harris County Jail; also, some Civil Court oddities
I used to do these weird crime round-ups all the time…Here is another one. If there is demand I will do more.
Source: Harris County District Court Records
They booked a guy into jail under the name "Oklahoma Red." I have no idea why they did so -- they have his real name attached to previous cases. But it's cool - I really wish they would list everybody's street name just because I would like to read them then and there instead of having to track them down on Facebook.
Seabrook police must have been really bored. They drove a Dickinson dude named Steven Scanlon all the way downtown because (allegedly), and I quote, “on or about July, 15, 2021, [he] did then and there unlawfully, intentionally, and knowingly tattoo Spencer Allison, hereafter known as the complainant, a person the defendant had reason to suspect was under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs at the time of the tattoo.”
Really? You can get arrest for inking up a drunk?
Scanlon, via Facebook.
Okay, maybe this Allison character was passed out drunk and the tat was forced on him…Or maybe it’s a really shitty tat and Allison is enough of a rat to go to the cops with a sob story out of vengeance….Or maybe Allison is very young (but not a juvenile, because that would be another crime) and has rich helicopter parents. At any rate, this is the first time I’ve seen anyone jailed for this particular misdemeanor. Oh well. Now that they aren’t hauling in all those people for little sacks of pot, those jail bunks won’t be filling themselves.
A young man named Xyzatrian was jailed for having a gun in his car; this while he is out on bond for shooting a young woman with a paintball gun. Were it legal to play, “Xyzatrian” would have a base value of 27 points in Scrabble.
All 4’0” and 131 pounds of Maria Cristina Gil stands accused of assaulting a constable…He claims she bit him.
A Wayne went down with a substantial amount of cocaine on his person…He also reportedly has a face-tat. Wayne + face tat = 100 percent likelihood of criminality…In fact there are two who fit this description arrested over the course of just a few days…
A Liberty County Wayne allegedly swiped a utility vehicle and trailer from his boss. Waynes number four and five and are accused of copper theft and stalking, respectively. A sixth Wayne was a victim — his old lady whacked him over the head with a baseball bat. Yeah, yeah…he probably deserved it. (Face tat status unknown for the last four.
As for Crystals, a Krystal stands accused of identity theft, a Kristal was driving around in somebody’s car who wanted it back, and a third — with the trad spelling — had a mess of meth. I suspect the Crystal Crime Wave might be on the wane, as the name went out of style pretty fast and women tend not to stick to criminality deep into middle age and beyond as so many men do.
Can you imagine all the salty language coming from the backseat as Caddo Parish deputies hauled young Tiffany Cussins back to Shreveport to face the music from her DWI?
The Harris County justice system refers to single-serving portions of LSD as “abuse units.”
I love intensely ethnic names of different backgrounds mashed up together, such as Juan Tyrone Eichelberger, a Black San Diego Padres pitcher in the early 1980s. His Harris County Jail competitor of the moment is the Serbian/Paddy Yaroslav William Moloney.
Jaheim is the latest name from sports or pop culture to pop up on an inmate and make me feel old. The Jersey crooner’s debut came out in 2001 and now there are kids by that name old enough to get arrested.
A Ukrainian man, last name Potiomkin, stands accused of being heavily intoxicated at the helm of his battleship. Or car…He ties with a Sudanese man as the lock-up’s two most exotic captures.
Another tiny terror: a 4’10, 99-pound woman was booked for prostitution. No biggie, but something else on her rap sheet is: the naughty little 31-year-old elf got popped for burglary of a habitation on Christmas Day last year.
I am just getting back into this and it seems like there is a very high number of people going to jail for violating protective orders. I am assuming this is because there are a higher number of protective orders out there thanks to what I would surmise as a likely rise in domestic violence cases stemming from the cooped-up conditions of the pandemic.
Most Texan name: Carldale McCarter
A Kingwood man on probation for meth tried to slip some fake pee-pee past his county observer. I do not think this gambit has worked, ever, and yet counterfeit urine and even purpose-built sham talliwhackers remain a thriving cottage industry. Who says American optimism is dead?
Civil Court Highlights
Houston Goes Hollywood Noir
Sam Perroni, a former federal prosecutor and Arkansas trial lawyer turned Inspector Javert of the Natalie Wood case, has brought his crusade to reopen an official inquiry into the actress’s mysterious drowning 40 years ago.
Stymied earlier this year in gaining access to confidential records on file at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Perroni has filed suit to force sheriff Alex Villanueva’s hand.
Perroni, who hints that he is nearing completion of Cover Up, his purportedly explosive re-examination of the case, has filed suit here to “compel and therefore subpoena the Texas witness, Elaine Finstad, to obtain her deposition and obtain information regarding Ms. Finstad’s access in November 2000 to a box or boxes consisting of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department’s ‘murder book’ for Ms. Wood, as discussed in her daughter Suzanne Finstad’s republished book Natalie Wood: the Complete Biography.”
In this instance, a “murder book” refers to the LA cops’ case files on Wood’s demise. As some of you will remember far more clearly than I can, mystery shrouded Wood’s drowning off Catalina Island in 1981. Then-hubby Robert Wagner claimed she just up and left their yacht on a dreary night to sail around in a dinghy. The yacht’s captain said that both Wood and Wagner were intoxicated and fighting; Wagner denied a spat took place. Oh, and Christopher Walken was also aboard.
“Accidental drowning” was the original coroner’s verdict, and though many were skeptical from the outset, those suspicions intensified in 2011 when yacht captain Dennis Davern confessed that he had lied to police in the immediate after math of Wood’s drowning. Contradicting his 1981 statement, Davern now said that Wood and Wagner had quarreled aboard the yacht — he claimed Wood’s flirting with Walken enraged the aging Wagner. Both of them were intoxicated — the trio had spent long hours drinking at a bistro on shore.
Her friends and family never bought the accidental drowning bit. Wood was afraid of water, her friends said, and she would never take to the sea in a tiny boat in the wee hours of an overcast night alone. And what of those fresh and unexplained bruises on her right forearm, left wrist, and right knee, and that scratch on her neck or that scrape on her forehead? How did those get there?
All of that was enough to persuade L.A. County Coroner Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran to amend Wood’s report, calling it “accidental drowning and other undetermined factors.”
As of 2018, Wagner has been listed as a “person of interest” in Wood’s death.
And Perroni has been picking at those strands for many years now. As you can surmise from the nature of this suit — he is attempting to compel the testimony of an 89-year-old woman in hopes that remembered something important from viewing these case files over her daughter’s shoulder decades ago.
So how about that? Houston gets a little PT in the Hollywood Babylon game.
For the love of Pete, knock it off
Okay, because the guy I am writing about now seems to be the litigious sort, I am going to flat out state that the next paragraph is just me generalizing about pro se lawsuits and the subject matter is not meant to portray the mind of Benjamin Ka Lots of mentally ill people file lawsuits and aside from details, they run toward the same basic plot: some petty tyrant — a neighbor, city inspector, local TV celebrity — is just the flashpoint for a vast conspiracy targeting the plaintiff, running up through the mayor’s office, the Pentagon, the White House, the Kremlin, and Buckingham Palace, along with the secret meeting caverns and druidical groves of the Illuminati, Lizard People, Knights Templar, Freemasons, Sleezstacks and Rosicrucians. This conspiracy may literally leave the planet to include intergalactic aliens from planet X-989, and the plaintiff will almost always demand billions or even trillions of dollars at the end of dozens of pages of pleadings, often as not scrawled in pen.
While terrifying, the schizophrenic mind can be comfortingly predictable in some ways.
So, again, I am not saying that Benjamin Karimi Esq., is mentally ill. I am merely stating that he is filing what is, in my opinion, a very bizarre lawsuit that is as succinct and mundane as those of the crazy people are grandiose and sprawling.
Except for some boilerplate formalities, here is the whole thing:
So many questions, but chief among them — Why that precise sum?
Per the information at his Texas Bar page, Karimi is adept at alternative dispute resolution…And I guess suing her for assault is an alternate way to resolve such a non-issue as this: him almost tripping a busy waiter doing her best to feed an ungrateful nation of spoiled rotten post-pandemic children.
Muscle Car Madness
Authorities go nuclear in fight against deadly stunt driving
Here’s a good story for some enterprising reporter in the world of real journalism…
Intermittently over the years I have been a fan of asset forfeiture lawsuits: that’s when the State of Texas sues your car or your money so they can take it for their own. It’s weird — they don’t sue you, so you have these suits called The State of Texas vs Approximately $49,876 or The State of Texas vs One 2012 Hyundai Elantra or some such. Not sure why it works that way….Anyway, your cash or your car (or other property) ends up in the docket when the state believes that you have either used that car or earned that money in the commission of a felony.
First, a little background on an era coming to a close, though not through any sense of decency from our cops nor newly-discovered backbone from our lawmakers:
Back about five or ten years ago, these were almost all drug cases, though there would be some very lucrative windfalls for the local cops when they’d take down an eight-liner mogul…I remember one Korean immigrant had over a half-million crammed into his couch in his west Houston townhouse, the takings from his many fly-by-night “game rooms.”
The drug cases are pretty much bullshit. Well, more often than not, these people are drug dealers or couriers, but the procedure is bullshit and in many cases likely unconstitutional.
For one thing, the state’s star witness cannot be cross-examined because in almost all cases that star witness is a drug dog. In every probable cause report on which these cases are built, some narc squad cop will say his dog “provided a positive alert” on the money, meaning the dog effectively told the cop, “this cash smells like drugs.” Or so the cop will claim. So even if you get caught with cash and no drugs, that dog will fuck your shit up, and there is nothing your lawyer can do about it. (Surely some lawyer somewhere has tried to put one of these dogs on the stand, right?)
It’s a system rife for abuse and corruption. First, there’s the age-old factor of potential corruption at the crime scene: how much of that cash winds up in evidence, as opposed to the cops’ pockets?
Secondly, I noticed a pattern: lots of the more successful drug dealers were getting in and out of jail very quickly, far more rapidly than you would think given the potentially harsh sentences they could have received due to Drug War hysteria…It was almost as if they were getting slapped on the wrist because someone wanted these slick hustlers back out there earning for them.
And so it seemed to me that state law enforcement had found a way to effectively tax the illegal drug trade without legalizing drugs. When a known drug kingpin gets out of jail, let him do his thing for a few months, wait for a big payday, and then pounce. Repeat as necessary.
Which they are incentivized to do, because they get to keep most of those revenues for themselves. That’s right, the millions and millions of dollars in cash and goods the state of Texas seizes from these drug dealers does not go into some public fund, say, for drug rehabilitation or education. Instead most of whatever assets they snatch revert to the arresting law enforcement agency…Which is how they can afford to keep upgrading their weaponry, vehicles, and tactical equipment, install fancy gyms in their squad houses, and in one case, buy themselves a margarita machine.
Maybe it was a tactical margarita machine…
Anyway, that’s an old story, but so far as I know, nobody’s pulled at that string about how it amounts to taxation without legalization. Which it totally does.
However, as we said, technology is enabling the drug dealers to stay one step ahead of the cops here. Apps like VenMo and CashApp are revolutionizing the way drugs and money change hands and this is where I would also go into some long spiel about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and Blockchains if I understood them, but I don’t — not really — and so I won’t. But I am sure that there are people out there who can tell you what a game-changer all that mumbo jumbo is too.
So…that’s a lot of money slipping out of the hands of the police, and in order to maintain the lifestyle to which they are accustomed, they’ve had to find a brand new area of human misbehavior to target.
Which they have. It’s a stupid and dangerous form of drag racing called “hostile street takeovers,” which enables them to go after cars in far greater numbers than they did only two years ago.
Basically, these entail a car club or several or just some random fly-by-night acquaintances randomly descending on a nearly-deserted street, intersection, or parking lot. There most of the cars will form a circle, wagon train style, and watch as drivers in high-powered muscle cars spin tight donuts and burnouts and other stunts in the center of the ring, sometimes with passengers hanging out of the windows.
Basically idiot kids doing dumb things and occasionally killing each other. Back in February, two teens and a 35-year-old man were killed when a 22-year-old Magnolia man lost control of his Camaro while burning out in a parking lot at 290 and West Little York.
I am not gonna sit here and tell you I was above such idiocy 35 years ago because I wasn’t, even if it took slightly different forms, but I am also not going to even try to defend this behavior, and pretty much anything the cops want to do to stamp it out is alright with me. (No, I don’t want them shot. I said “pretty much anything.”)
And they are: HPD, the sheriff’s office, DPS and the local constables and other smaller forces have formed a task force to crack down on the practice, but Greater Houston is a vast planetoid, seemingly mostly covered with semi-abandoned parking lots.
From the Chron article linked above:
The incidents are often fluid, Shelton said, with drivers taking off before police respond to the scene, only to converge at a different location to continue pulling stunts. Cars often cross jurisdictional lines, prompting the need for communication among the agencies involved in the joint initiative. The drivers prefer high quality, smooth concrete thoroughfares with easy access from feeder roads, Shelton said, but “it happens everywhere.”
“It’s lawless activity. It’s wreaking havoc on the public,” said Shelton, a District 4 patrol captain. “It’s not uncommon for us to find weapons on the drivers or even the people there — they like to shoot them in the air. And you got underage drinking going on, and then you got this car that’s slinging in the pit, and then next thing you know somebody could be injured or killed — and it does happen.”
Earlier this year, when and if they were caught, they were charged with serious moving violations like racing and reckless driving, or weapons charges and DWI when applicable.
None of which was enough. Enter our old friend asset forfeiture. Over the last year or so, and increasingly over the past few months, police have infiltrated some of these takeovers and in addition to ticketing and/or arresting the drivers, they are seizing their cars. Not impounding them — keeping them forever and ever, or at least forcing their sales.
By my count, the State of Texas seized 45 vehicles in Harris County in 2019. The rate is increasing every year: for all of last year, it was 125, and with not quite two-thirds of the year in the books this year, the number stands at 90.
And I am okay with it.
Far more than a fine, a few days in the pokey, or a couple of weekends picking up trash by the highway, losing your car might make you think twice before you stomped on the accelerator and yanked your wheel all the way to the side in a paring lot surrounded by hooting and hollering idiots brandishing their cellphones in portrait and not landscape mode.
So, let’s walk through the state’s case against these maniacs:
To qualify as an asset forfeiture case, there must be an underlying felony. Believe it or not, almost nothing those drivers do in that video above qualifies as felonious behavior — and so to kick it up above “reckless driving,” it must be charged as “deadly conduct,” which is a Class A misdemeanor, the most serious kind.
However, because these kids communicate with each other to arrange these unlawful congregations, prosecutors are hoping to stick them with “engaging in organized criminal activity,” which is a felony, even if the crimes they are organizing to commit are not.
Per the Texas penal code, “deadly conduct” is defined as when “recklessly [engaging] in conduct that places another in imminent danger of serious bodily injury.”
I would say that is clearly the case in these examples.
“Engaging in organized criminal activity” is defined as having “the intent to establish, maintain, or participate in a combination or in the profits of a combination or as a member of a criminal street gang, [a] person commits or conspires to commit one or more of the following…”
And there follows a long itemized list of crimes that qualify, one of which is deadly conduct.
And so now the asset forfeiture cases are piling up again. A way, way inordinate number of them involve Dodge Chargers. Of the 215 cars seized since the beginning of last year, there have been 25 Chargers, and 11 Challengers, the two-door version of the former. The Confederate flag may be anathema, but the General Lee’s ghost lives on. Yeeee-haaa.
This being Texas, second place belongs to Chevy Silverado, with 20 seizures over the last two years.
Honorable mention goes to Chevy Camaros and Ford Mustangs, with 23 between them.
I guess we really are living in a Muscle Car Renaissance.
A few of this year’s cases are now complete. Apparently so far the state of Texas is undefeated, which can take the shape of several different outcomes. After those it’s a mishmash.
If the car belongs to the parents of the guilty driver, state usually cedes the car back to the parents, who are on the hook for court costs and storage and towing charges, which are bound to be considerable by the time the verdict comes down. Towing fees max out around $300 but storage costs $600 per month. These cases tend to take at least two months to wind their way through court, so that’s another $1200 minimum, plus whatever damage your engine has suffered sitting there idle for weeks.
In one sad case, Leandro Argueta-Velasquez, 21-year-old driver of a 2020 Camaro he apparently purchased with PPP money, died suddenly about a month after his arrest and the seizure of his car. Wells Fargo Auto was thereby allowed to sell the car, with any profits above the lien to be handed over to the state of Texas as contraband. While Wells Fargo paid for storage and towing, young Leandro’s grieving parents were liable for court costs. Harsh.
If the car is a heap of crap and it’s paid for, the state might well sell it back to you. Three guys with 20-year-old rides were able to buy their heaps of junk back from the state for $500-$1500 (to be pocketed by the cops), plus all those fees, plus having to re-sticker their car. The state strips valid tags and makes you go get them again.
I think I would as soon have let them keep it.
And man, of the 35 cars seized in such cases, 8 are Dodge Chargers. Might as well rename them the Dodge Waynemobile at this point.
The number of Protective Order violations is almost certainly up because the State has finally implemented a system in which Protective Orders (often as a condition of Bond release or as a sentencing condition on Family Violence offenses [which are not limited to just family members]) are now shared between jurisdictions. As crazy as it sounds, until very recently that was not the case. There's been a big uptick of arrests even out here in presidio County for Violation of Protective Order. Incidentally, about a third of the time I see this at the jail it's because the perpetrator and victim are back together and found together.
“Wayne” or “Earl” as a word probably share the same origins as “felon.”
About drunk and tattoos. One cannot consent to anything while drunk. An unwanted touching is an assault. And it is a slow day. Are tattoo artists licensed? They aren’t supposed to ink people who can’t consent.