WELL, IT'S NOT a face that inspires much confidence, a phrenologist might say, but it's also a face that represents the Obama administration's lack of commitment to anything resembling sensible gun policy. Most Americans probably hoped for at least a ban on military-type assault rifles and banana clips, but...
MIKE THOMPSON was appointed head of a congressional task force on gun murder following the slaughter of innocents last month. Thompson, recently interviewed by the Press Democrat, "refused to use the phrase 'gun control.' The two words “create a divide that’s not bridgeable,” Thompson said," veering off into the usual gun guy's weasel-lipped gibberish about the Second Amendment alleged guarantee that cretins and mass killers have the right ordained by God Himself to buy and possess guns that shoot a whole lot of bullets real fast.
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT seems pleased that Thompson will host a panel discussion this Thursday with Sonoma County Sheriff Steve Freitas, District Attorney Jill Ravitch, county mental health director Mike Kennedy, and Superintendent of Schools Steve Herrington, following which there will certainly be a round of kumbayas and a group hug. This particular charade commences at 6:30 p.m. and runs to 8 p.m. at the Sonoma County supervisor's chambers. These events are always organized in a way to keep public "input" to a minimum, so what we get is 90 minutes listening to five professional blatherers talk about what a swell job their agency is doing as they verbally wring their hands before concluding nothing can be done, and isn't it all just a darn shame?
BUT JILL RAVITCH, lately of Mendocino County and presently Sonoma County's DA, got off a line that indicated she's not entirely reality-based herself. “We are not a society full of psychopaths,” she told the PD.
A FEDERAL MAGISTRATE decreed Monday that Oakland and San Jose landlords could not stop a medical marijuana dispensary with locations in each city from selling cannabis. But both landlords face federal seizure of their properties for renting to Harborside Health Center, the nation's largest marijuana dispensary with 108,000 registered and certified patients. The two landlords have gone to federal court to stop the dispensary from "any unlawful activity," which, under federal law, includes selling cannabis.
IN OTHER WORDS, the federal government won't let the owners evict the tenant, but if the tenant continues to sell marijuana the government will take the property!
SHIELA DAWN TRACY puts a lot of time and effort into her reporting on pseudo-public radio KZYX, a mostly tax-supported non-profit radio station run by incompetents, nasty incompetents, who run the institution as if they owned it. The way ersatz public radio is organized in Mendocino County, the public is left out. In theory, the station has a board of directors, but since KZYX's fraudulent beginnings the board has simply been an extension of management. (KMUD, by contrast, was democratically organized and continues to be fully accountable to the public it serves, and that public now includes several thousand Mendocino County residents who've given up on KZYX.)
FROM SHEILA'S REPORT: "At this point, with 20 minutes left in the meeting, it was time for the public to speak. (As always there was no "public" present.) Board member Herring attempted to limit my time to five minutes, which prompted Kisslinger to make a rather intimidating speech, his voice booming across the three feet that separated us. He stated that I had a ‘bully pulpit’, being defined by him as being able to talk as much as I wanted. He continued, speaking for himself, that he didn’t want to hear about my problems with the Board. He didn’t want to hear about my problems with John. In fact, he didn’t want to hear about my problems at all and if I persisted, he would leave. What he would like to hear was any comments that would improve the way the station operates."
THIS MICHAEL KILLLINGER character is obviously a bullying jerk. Surely, he couldn't have been paid to "facilitate" a meeting with a half-dozen people present, and what kind of "facilitator" does all the talking?
IF YOU SEE SHIELA around, tell her you appreciate her persistence in the face of this kind of thing, because she gets it from Coate and Aigner, too.
AS PREDICTED, Mendocino County's federal subpoena hearing has been put over until Tuesday, the 29th of January at 2:30. It had been scheduled for Friday the 4th. The hearing will be held in the lavish temple of justice at 450 Golden Gate, San Francisco. By the 29th presumably, Judge Wilkins will be back from Barbados or her tennis lessons or her husband's three-week golf weekend in Scotland. Whatever, wherever. There's never any explanation for delays although they typically inconvenience lots of people inside and outside the justice process.
IF YOU CAME IN LATE, the feds have subpoenaed all records having to do with Mendocino County's attempt to bring some order to, and revenue from, the County's number one ag product, marijuana. Mendocino County filed a motion to have the subpoena quashed on grounds that it lacked specificity.
WILL THIS WORK? WILL IT HELP? As the County attempts to beat back the US Attorney’s wide-ranging subpoena for medical marijuana program records, the County's legal brain trust is also preparing to revise the policy that provoked the subpoena. Mendocino County wants to keep the program’s medical information info confidential.
ACCORDING to the agenda for the Board’s January 8, meeting, County Counsel Tom Parker proposes to amend the cultivation program ordinance (Code Section 9.31) to make it very clear that the County always meant to treat “all medical marijuana use information received by and/or generated by the operation of Chapter 9.31 … as confidential medical information to the fullest extent authorized by California and Federal law from 2008 to the present as well as prospectively. This is a declaration of past, current and prospective legislative intent for all versions of Chapter 9.31 dating back to 2008.”
RETROACTIVE CONFIDENTIALITY because that’s what we always meant? An interesting argument but not very convincing, and undoubtedly inspired by the County's lawyers desperate for any hook that might help overturn the federal subpoena. The idea of invoking “confidentiality” as a response to a federal subpoena seems novel (at least to us rubes) because “patient medical confidentiality” has always been intended to keep private parties from obtaining medical information without the consent of affected party.
BUT THE GOVERNMENT'S umbrella confidentiality rule (HIPAA-Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) has big loopholes such as this one: “Law Enforcement Purposes. Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes under the following six circumstances, and subject to specified conditions: (1) as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; (2) to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person; (3) in response to a law enforcement official’s request for information about a victim or suspected victim of a crime; (4) to alert law enforcement of a person’s death, if the covered entity suspects that criminal activity caused the death; (5) when a covered entity believes that protected health information is evidence of a crime that occurred on its premises; and (6) by a covered health care provider in a medical emergency not occurring on its premises, when necessary to inform law enforcement about the commission and nature of a crime, the location of the crime or crime victims, and the perpetrator of the crime.”
WHICH SEEMS TO HINGE on the word “may.” One interpretation is that the County “may” disclose the data without fear of criminal penalties against disclosure. But it could also mean that the County doesn’t have to disclose if they don’t want to.
CLEARLY, the County and the individual growers who signed up for the 9.31 program are worried that the feds are looking to shoot some slow moving fish in Mendo’s see-through marijuana barrel. You’d think that if the feds wanted to deal with real marijuana crime they’d have better areas to look — their own Mendocino National Forest comes to mind.
THE AVA'S ACE Courthouse reporter, Bruce McEwen, is looking for a Ukiah-area berth from which to resume reporting on crime and punishment in Mendocino County. He can pay a modest rent (very modest) and, being a man of many practical parts, can also do fix-it tasks and house painting to pull his fair share of his rent load. If you have something, please call the paper at 895-3016 or write to us at AVA Boonville 95415 or e-mail us at ava@pacific.net.
OUR NEW CONGRESSMAN, Jared Huffman, has been appointed to the House Resources Committee. Huffman has worked as an attorney on environmental matters. He's also a mainstream Democrat, i.e. Republican Lite, which means more of the same on all the big issues — blank check for plucky little Israel; "compromise" on so-called entitlements; death-by-drone for Arabs; wars without end on the same Arabs; Joe Biden; Wes Chesbro, and so on until the end, which would have to be near given the quality of the leadership.
THE ART CLASSES taught by Linn Bottorf at the C.V. Starr Center are an absolute bargain and a major gift to the Coast community given Bottorf's knowledge and gifts as a teacher. We're not surprised by this comment by one of his students, Tyler Pirro: "I took Linn's art class last semester at the CV Starr Center. I found Linn to be encouraging (much needed for the "I-can't-even-draw-a-straight-line" artist that I am...), supportive with a good sense of humor. Art has always been stressful and I found myself looking forward to going to class! While each of us were at a different level of experience, I was made to feel like I was contributing to the class and learning something! I have never taken art classes before because I didn't feel worthy of spending a lot of money on something I never felt I could do." Classes meet every Tuesday/Thursday beginning Tuesday, January 8 to Thursday, February 14. 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Ages: 18+. Cost $50.00 ($4.16 per class)
MICHAEL ALLEN was an Assemblyman from Marin. Until he lost election, Allen represented Marin and an area of Sonoma County that included Santa Rosa. A smarmy fellow of the shallow personality type preferred by the Duopoly, especially Democrats, Allen was out-smarmed by a Marin Democrat just like him. But the Democrats liked Allen, admired his stroke as he went with the flow, swooned at the way Allen put the nambo into the pambo with his election slogan of “Bringing Us Together.” (The libs won't be content until they have us all in uniforms for a coast-to-coast hug.) So, as soon as he got dumped by his political twin, the Demos appointed Allen to the state's Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board where he'll make $128,000 a year for one meeting a week.
HOW MANY TIMES have we seen this kind of thing on the Northcoast? — dis-elected or termed-out Democrats immediately placed in a cush, high paying public job? The Republicans do the same, of course, but Democrats have a lock on the Northcoast so we see more of their nest-feathering around here. Assemblyman Dan Hauser got himself a public job running a railroad (of all things) when he finally left office for Patty Berg, a Eureka social worker, and big party donor, foisted off on us after Hauser. Then there was Virgina Strom-Martin (I got it, Strom. No you take it, Martin) who went from elected office to some nebulous, tax-funded position she still occupies. The egregious Wes Chesbro, in between stints as Assemblyman and State Senator, sat on the state's garbage board doing absolutely nothing for more than a hundred grand a year. Once they're in, they're in. We never see the backs of these characters.
THE MENDOCINO GREEN PARTY seems to have disappeared, not that it was ever politically visible around here. The election of Obama made being a Democrat fashionable again, and even if a few locals remained registered Greens — Supervisor Hamburg, for instance — there was never any local difference between the two parties as they functioned on the Northcoast.
THE FINAL Bushay Campground killer, William Crocker, represented by Ukiah Attorney Al Kubanis, pled guilty Thursday to first-degree murder and attempted murder for an agreed upon sentence of 25 years-to-life. The formal sentencing will be held in Dept. B, Mendocino County Courthouse, on February 1st at 1:30.
ALL FOUR of those charged with the campground murders have now been convicted, either by trial or plea.
FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE COME IN LATE on this Only-In-Mendocino case we are reprinting the original account of the trial of the first two defendants by Bruce McEwen which appeared in our June 13, 2012 edition:
GOOD TO READ that Linda Williams of the Willits News has re-visited the unsolved 2005 murder of Les Crane, a Laytonville marijuana crusader shot to death in his home by a group of four invaders, maybe more. The constant reminders of Mendocino County atrocities help keep the victims alive, in that their families and other persons close to the victims know that the crime has not been forgotten.
DO THE COPS FORGET? No. It's our experience that they don't forget, that they don't relegate major crimes to the Hopeless File, although that indeed seems to be what has happened to the Bari Bombing. In that one, the local authorities never even opened a file, probably because Ukiah assumed its resolution was a matter for the Oakland Police Department and the FBI, and let me know when you hear of the overwhelmed Oakland cops solving a complicated crime. Ditto for the FBI. In the Bari matter, the FBI made the ludicrous announcement early on that they would not continue to investigate the Bari case “because no one will talk to us.” Bari herself had almost immediately applied for limited immunity from prosecution and lots of people, including Bari's first attorney, Susan B. Jordan, were saying that the feds ought to take a look at Bari's ex, Mike Sweeney. It was simply untrue that no one would cooperate with the investigation. There wasn't a real investigation to cooperate with. Susan Jordan was replaced by the malleable Dennis Cunningham for daring to state the obvious that Bari's ex-husband was the likely perp. And we know that the bomb was constructed in Mendocino County because the person who built it wrote to the Press Democrat saying so, and even described the device in a way only the person who manufactured it could know. Twenty-three years down the road the Bari case is solvable via the DNA extracted from the confession letter but, so far, no one in authority seems interested and, of course, there's the usual idiot chorus among the dimmer sectors of Pacifica listeners still stuck in Blue Meanie mode who prefer (need) to believe the corporate-federal nexus did it.
THE MURDER OF LES CRANE is unusual in the number of persons involved. Usually, when a group of mopes do a serious crime, one of them is soon arrested for something else and, eager for a reduced sentence for that something else, the mope trades inside information on, say, Crane's messy dispatch. But that hasn't happened.
NOR HAVE THE AUTHORITIES given up on the murders of Ukiah's Susan Keegan and Fort Bragg's Katlyn Long. We're confident the Keegan prosecution will occur this year, and we maintain hope that Miss Long's killer, a tweeker dude constantly in trouble that seems to be occurring with increasing frequency, will at last be held to account for his crime.
WE'D FORGOTTEN that Ukiah 'Sativa' Morrison worked for Crane. Morrison has just moved in on the unsuspecting Dorothea Dorman on Radical Ridge north of Ukiah after three successive evictions. He's been in and out of the Mendo news for years as a negative advertisement for marijuana, and if I were a cop I would have debriefed him long and hard about the Crane matter. There's also speculation that the people who killed Crane also killed Chris Giauque. These people are said to comprise a kind of Laytonville-Spy Rock mafia with whom it is unwise to mess.
IN THE NOVEMBER 19, 2005 edition of the Ukiah Daily Journal, reporter Laura Clark described the Crane murder:
“Les Crane, 39, owner of Mendo Spiritual Remedies in Laytonville and Hemp Plus Ministry in Ukiah, was shot to death at his Laytonville home early Friday morning.
Mendocino County Sheriff's Detective Commander D.J. Miller said Crane was killed about 2:30 a.m. in the home invasion. 'The investigation has disclosed it appears to be robbery motivated. An undisclosed amount of currency and processed marijuana was stolen,' Miller said.
Yellow tape surrounded the Road 307 residence Friday, where investigators from the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office, evidence technicians and members of the County of Mendocino Marijuana Eradication Team could be seen taking photographs and measurements, and periodically carrying armfuls of marijuana from a building.
Law enforcement at the scene would not disclose any more information, but a sign in the driveway spoke volumes: 'Mendo Spiritual Remedies. In God we trust, Rev. Les Crane . God Gave it to us and no one can take it away. Welcome to our church.'
In the midst of all the activity, a man drove up and said to one of the sheriff's officers: 'I just came by to see Les, but maybe this is a bad time.'
A visit later in the day to the Hemp Plus Ministry revealed the darkest details of what happened to Crane.
'Reverend Crane was killed last night; I was there,' said a visibly shaken Jennifer Drewry, as she sat inside the cannabis distribution center Friday afternoon, cradling her left arm, which was broken and in a sling from the beating she took during the ordeal.
'I was there while they were killing him,' Drewry, Crane's fiancé said, before recounting the ordeal, which could be described as nothing less than horrific.
'Les was in bed sleeping. I was sleeping in another bedroom,' she said, noting she woke up to the sound of footsteps. 'Four to six guys ... they were wearing all black with black masks. ... They busted down the door and all you could hear them saying was 'This is a raid, this is a raid, this is a raid,' she said, noting the voices sounded young.
First, one of the men walked in and beat another of the home's residents, 20-year-old Sean Dirlam — also known as "The Count" — while he slept, she said.
Then she said she opened her door and one of the men — this one not wearing a mask — hit her over the head. 'The men in the masks stayed with Les, killing him and taking his medical marijuana and his money. I was on my hands and knees praying to God, too loud I guess, so the one guy told him to shoot me, but he missed, and then I heard five or six other gunshots. I was too scared to look up after that, so I waited until it was quiet and then I ran into Les's room. He was lying there; he could still talk. There was a lot of blood. The Count was hiding, talking to 911. .... It had to be 15 minutes before anyone showed up. It was a long time ... I was out of my mind. They wouldn't let me sit with him,' she said referring to emergency personnel. 'I told them they are torturing me; he's dying ... I knew I only had a couple minutes; he was dying,' she said, noting Crane was shot in the back of the head, in an arm and in his abdomen. 'There was so much blood I couldn't see all the holes,' she said.
'He just asked me to marry him two weeks ago. I was planning a wedding; now I have to plan a funeral,' Drewry said. 'They ruined my life and took my dreams away from me — all for money and greed,' she said, by this time sobbing.
Crane supplied medical marijuana to more than 1,000 people in Mendocino County. Mendo Spiritual Remedies serves more than 800 people in the Laytonville area and Hemp Plus Ministry, which opened about two months ago in Ukiah, already has 350 clients, according to those who worked there.
Christina Bagby — who referred to herself, Crane and his friend, Ukiah Morrison, as reverends — works at the Ukiah ministry.
'We believe that cannabis is the tree of life. In the Bible it does say the tree of life will be called upon to heal the nation. We believe that tree is cannabis. We promote hemp awareness.'
Morrison also works there, and like Bagby, spoke nothing but kind words about Crane.
'He was very thankful to be alive and to help the community. That was his only objective in life — to help others,' Morrison said of the man he called his best friend. 'He spent $7,000 of his own money to buy 350 turkeys both for Ukiah Food Bank and Laytonville Food Bank,' he added.
Quoting from the Bible, Morrison said: 'Greater work than I have done, shall you do. Les Crane embodied that and he helped uplift the community. ... He was definitely my super hero and mentor. He was like a father to most of us.'
Laytonville residents The Daily Journal spoke with Friday said Crane did indeed do some good in the community: His teen center was clean and sober and the teens did use it. He also gave to charities.
Other residents said Crane hung out with what some perceived as undesirables — for instance other large scale pot growers. Some described him as loud and boisterous and said he had his share of scrapes with the law ... that he was courting trouble.
In October, District Attorney Norm Vroman brought cultivation of marijuana charges against Crane, who adamantly proclaimed his innocence.
'Anyone that is a patient that would like to stand up, please join me and stand up against the tyranny,' Crane said at the time. 'It isn't a controlled substance to me. This is a medicine and those laws do not apply to patients.'
Morrison and Drewry both believe Crane's killer was somebody he knew.
'As he was breathing ... after he had been shot several times, I asked him, Who did this to you? and he said, They came to see The Count today, Drewry said, adding, 'They came to rob the marijuana there and a safe. They took it all.'
'He always told Hemp Ministry workers, Don't hesitate to open the safe; it's not worth a life,' Morrison said, noting Crane was trusting because the money was irrelevant to his cause. Crane's door was probably unlocked, Morrison said. However, Morrison added, 'He was not an idiot; he knew his work was risky.'
Crane came to Mendocino County several years ago with $100 and a dog after selling his tie-dye business in Florida. He had heard Mendocino County had passed Measure G supporting legalization of marijuana in the county for personal use. He turned the $100 into a sizable profit that harvest year and took that nest egg and started the dispensary and then opened a youth center in Laytonville.
'He was a true American. I don't want him to be forgotten. I just heard him say the other day, The more you give out, the more you receive to give out the next day,' Morrison said.
Law enforcement officials are seeing more violence sparked by marijuana.
'This time of the year there is always the potential for violence in marijuana grows due to the quantity of marijuana and the large sums of money that are exchanged,' Miller said.”
DEEP IN THE HILLS east of Boonville a major American writer works in what can only be described as splendid isolation on his latest novel, American Tropic, to be released January 15th. Thomas Sanchez is best known for Rabbit Boss, a major book in both the literary and bestseller sense published in 1973, and the only book I know that describes in detail the archetypal experience of California Indians. Rabbit Boss should be taught in schools as literature and history, but seeing as how we're into a third, maybe fourth generation of non-book-reading citizens (and teachers), Native American history anymore is a mish-mash of myth and politically correct bushwa even if it does happen to get mentioned during class hours. Sanchez is also the author of King Bongo; The Zoot Suit Murders; Mile Zero; Day of the Bees, and a bunch of screen plays.
IN MENDOCINO COUNTY, Native American history goes something like this: “Once upon a time there were happy brown people who were real good at making baskets. They made cool baskets for ten thousand years then they like kinda disappeared or something when the pioneers arrived and Mendocino County history began. These pioneers were wandering bands of white criminals soon hired by the State of California to murder and enslave Indians because the Indians had killed a stallion belonging the founder of Hasting's Law School. But to this day Mendocino's founding thugs are celebrated in County museums from Willits to Boonville, and especially celebrated in the fairly large museum in Ukiah. In Mendocino County there's been only one honest book about our history, the aptly titled Genocide and Vendetta, which neatly sums up what happened, but is pretty much unavailable and, natch, ignored by the schools.
A FEW YEARS AGO, a Hastings Law School student called to ask me if her law school was named after an Indian killer. She said she was one of about a dozen Indians studying law at Hastings. "Is it true? Did he get the State of California to offer bounty payments for all the Indians that could killed in Northern California?" Not all the Indians in the state, I qualified, just the Indians in the Eel River drainage where the Judge's ranch was located near Covelo at a place called Eden Valley; the Judge himself spend most of his time in Sacramento and Benicia. As California's first State Supreme Justice, Hastings was a connected guy. He said 'Jump' the state legislature jumped.
JUDGE HASTING'S Mendocino County ranch was run by a 6'7" psychopath called Texan Boy Hall, a man considered an extremist even by the other first-wave Mendo killers. Hall, on behalf of Hastings, had hired Indians displaced from Eden Valley by Hastings to carry Hastings' furniture from Mendocino where it had been off-loaded after arriving by ship. The Indians said they'd do it in return for a kind of shirt they coveted, and duly humped all Hastings' stuff from Mendocino almost to Eden Valley, a very tough gig in those days. Hall failed to produce the shirts and gunned down the Indians who complained that they'd been stiffed. In retaliation for not getting the promised shirts, the surviving foot-teamsters killed an expensive stallion with which Hastings had hoped to start a marketable herd. Hastings went to the state legislature to complain that the Indians of inland Mendocino County and Southern Humboldt were seriously in the way of progress, i.e., his horse breeding operation in the hills between Willits and Covelo. The state legislature duly hired a man named Jarboe and told Jarboe the state would pay him and his crew a nice fee for every Indian scalp they produced. Jarboe set about an ethnic cleansing of the vastness lying between Hull Mountain to the south and what is now Highway 36 to the north. For a year Jarboe's Rangers murdered every Indian they could find. Jarboe's work so impressed Ukiah's founding fathers they appointed him the town's first lawman. Judge Hastings died in 1893, leaving a million dollars to the University of California whose grateful trustees named their law school after him.
I HEARD from a lawyer friend that he'd met a young guy named Hastings and, when the kid confirmed he was indeed a descendent of old Serranus, lawyer-friend told this kid that his illustrious great grandfather had not been a very nice person, proceeding to tell the boy the above story. The kid was shocked. He said his family didn't know anything about any of this. The Native American law students did some woofing about getting the name of the law school changed but never did anything specific to that end, so far as I know.
DJANGO UNCHAINED. Is it a good movie? Yes. Is it a great movie? I don't know, I'm not an auteur. On my friend Michael Donnelly's rave review I trundled out to see for myself. I'm glad I did. Walking home afterwards, I came up with, “Folks, think of Django as The Wild Bunch Meets Slavery, The Institution.” Throw in Jamie Foxx as High Noon, plus absolutely brilliant acting in all the roles large and small, great music, and dialogue that's funny as hell, and it's better than anything any of us have seen lately on the silver screen. Donnelly is correct. It's a great movie. Ironically, to me anyway, the only interlude that wasn't up to the high standards of the rest of the Django cast was filmmaker Quentin Tarantino's insertion of himself as one of the gun boys. He should have stayed behind the camera. That's the only nit I'd pick. Django is not for everyone, of course. The two ladies, sixty-ish, seated next to me gasped throughout, so absorbed in the action that they seemed to think it was real. Lots of people applauded when it ended. Walking out I asked one of the gasping ladies what they'd thought of it. “Except for all the blood and gore, I liked it,” she said.
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