This morning University Park Police took Cynthia Martinez into custody for a second time, for working as a masseuse without a license. That’s the type of business she claimed to have been operating when she was arrested last month for prostitution.
Does this mean the cops aren’t entirely confident in their prostitution charges against her?
UPDATE: University Park Police Chief Gary Adams answers my question: “Not at all.”
The cat disappeared from the Chiro Design Group and ended up in a Chicago suburb. Poor guy opens his box of supplies, sees tufts of fur and some creature inside:
“My first reaction was, I didn’t know what kind of animal he was, so I closed the box back up,” said Brett St. Aubin, clinic director at Chiro One Wellness Center of Woodstock.
As an assistant U.S. Attorney, she played a major role in the prosecution of Don Hill, et al. After a bipartisan commission studied the possible candidates, senators John Cornyn and Kay Hutchison selected her from the list (by tradition, senators approve U.S. attorneys for their states). But there’s a hitch. Oddly, it’s from Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Austin, who seems to think that if there’s a Democratic White House, Democrats like him ought to have the prerogative of making recommendations, not the state’s two senators, who happen to be Republicans. What makes that odd is that Saldana is a Democrat, and, judging by the verdict in the Hill case, an able and effective one at that. I’ve known Doggett since he was at UT, and this is the kind of game he loves. Fortunately for Saldana, I can also report that, like Tim with golf, as much as Doggett loves the game, he is not often very good at it.
(I tried to get the inside scoop on this dogfight from a really, really, really good source, but he wisely has neglected to return my phone calls — as I would ,too, if my wife’s appointmet was the bone over which the dogs were fighting.)
An alert FBvian points us to news that the DMN has launched an e-edition. “What?” you ask? “Hasn’t the paper been online for years?” Yes, but this version offers 3-D page turning! It’s free for subscribers and $12.95 per month for non-subscribers. I’m a subscriber, but the system doesn’t recognize me, so I can’t check it out. But if I weren’t a subscriber, I couldn’t imagine paying $12.95 per month just to get some fancy page-turning effect. [scratching head]
Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted of deliberately burning down his house in order to murder his three children, and he was executed for the crime. We have asked why Gov. Rick Perry is so afraid of questions that have been raised about this case. As this Nightline report makes clear, the answer is that the fire was an accident, not arson at all, which means Texas executed a man for a crime that was not committed. Worse than that, the proof of this was presented to the governor before the execution took place, and he ignored it.
Barrett Wissman, you’ll recall, is the former hedge fund manager and partner of Clark Hunt’s who has plead guilty to felony securities fraud. He owes the feds $12 million in fines, and he’s supposedly helping the government figure out the dirty business surrounding state pension funds and how they invest their billions. Well, the feds aren’t the only ones who want a piece of Wissman. A woman named Hilary Kramer has filed suit in New York against him and Hunt, claiming that they destroyed her Greentech hedge fund. Problem is, Kramer’s lawyer says he can’t find Wissman.
Yesterday, Howard Sirota sent a note to me and other journalists who have written about Wissman, saying that Sirota’s process servers can’t find Wissman in New York or Dallas. How can that be? It wasn’t that long ago that Wissman’s lawyer, Bill Brewer, told the WSJ that his client, when he isn’t working with investigators, is basically just spending quality time with his family in Dallas, playing the piano, and keeping in shape. So Wissman ought to be easy to find. Right?
I’ll leave comments on, just in case anyone has a Wissman sighting to report.
Today D Magazine will officially vacate the building that it has called home for nearly the entirety of the Aughts. Most of us have already emptied out our desks. We’ll be “working from home” while a moving crew and our soon-to-be-suffering IT department get our new downtown office set up. We’d like your business to be as unproductive as ours while that happens.
1. The Oak Lawn Avenue building we’re leaving is Hampton Court. That name is shared by a 16th-century English palace originally built for Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, a key adviser of King Henry VIII. The king later took possession of Hampton Court himself and expanded it. Excuse enough for us to do a little jousting.
2. For the last three years, I have had a dream of a commute to work. I live close enough to our office that I walk nearly every day. But come Monday, I’m back to relying on an automobile. Strangely, because I am opting for a less-expensive parking option downtown, I’ll actually have to walk a greater distance from the parking garage to our downtown office than I currently walk from my home to our Oak Lawn building. And so a little practice walking under difficult circumstances could still be helpful.
3. We’re relocating to St. Paul Street, in a building called St. Paul Place. To help familiarize you with the D Empire’s new patron saint, see if you can avoid being martyred. You may need to brush up on your Baltimore Catechism, or maybe just Wikipedia.