September 29 Update: FELON MAYOR EDITION

That perp walk couldn't happen to a nicer person (whose lawyer, right behind him, apparently also represents Elon Musk)

In case you haven't heard, New York City's Cop Mayor Eric Adams is formally under federal indictment as of September 26 for a slew of corruption and straw donor allegations that New Yorkers saw play out in real time over the past three years of news coverage. . Can't say it wasn't coming, and I've won a couple bets over whether or not this once-in-a-generation piece of work would catch a charge before the end of his mayoralty. It's unclear what will happen to Hizzoner, whose administration has been beset by a number of high-profile resignations (NYPD Commissioner, Department of Education Commissioner, Health Commissioner), but there is already a succession plan in place for his own demission, which might come as early as next month. Meanwhile, the feds are still raiding Eric's cronies, making it all the more likely that additional indictments are in the works.

Make certain to thank all those media outlets who hyped up that pandemic crime spike and pearl-clutching over the 2020 George Floyd uprisings to convince NYC voters that a former member of the country's laziest and least competent police department was the answer. But also save a thought for his egotistical, feckless opponents, who didn't do their homework on what can happen in a ranked-choice election.

Lots of moving parts in my world, including a presentation at the Online News Association conference in Atlanta last week with my colleague Kevin Nguyen of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on tracking down the four horsemen of the internet (extortioners, pedophiles, extremists, and hackers). Thanks much to an engaged and inquiring audience.

A former member of the Atomwaffen Division that I helped expose back in 2018 and get drummed out of the Marine Corps was also indicted last week on civil rights charges related to his participation in the infamous 2017 Neo-Nazi rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia. It's quite rewarding to see cases still getting made on that reporting more than half a decade later. Watch this space next week, there should be a new project or two that sees the light of day.

Let's get to it

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-There's been reams of reporting in the past decade about Russia's 'hybrid warfare' strategy, which seeks to destabilize antagonistic regimes in its former Soviet satellite states and Western nations through a combination of disinformation and 'active measures' - either underwriting far right political parties (France's Rassemblement National, Germany's Alternatif fur Deutschland) or enlisting extremists and petty criminals to sow violence and disorder. A sprawling collaboration by several Eastern European news outlets, including my former collaborators at VSquare, mined leaked documents to outline these efforts in the halls of the European Parliament in Brussels, and on the streets throughout the Baltic Nations.

-If you want white-collar crime, there's no better publication for it than the Financial Times, which this week ran a double-barreled report on a Chinese-backed venture capital firm invested in dozens of Silicon Valley startup firms. Hone Capital, according to the series, was a conduit for industrial espionage, using its investments in more than 360 companies from 2015 to 2018 as a means to obtain and exfiltrate trade secrets back to China in order to fuel that country's rival tech sector. The FBI are investigating, and while no charges have yet been filed, there's enough smoke in the air for this story to see the light of day. Watch this space.

-Should you prefer your crime sagas a little more gritty, then look no further than this doozy of a report from the Los Angeles Times about a cryptocurrency executive who enlisted former and active members of the LA Sheriff's Department in a macabre shakedown scheme. The feds got wind of this operation, and their court paper makes for fascinating reading. I got a laugh out of the involvement of deputies from LASD's gang unit in this matter - Operation Safe Streets is definitely a cowboy outfit and has one hell of a checkered past.

-The clean energy boom is also inspiring a rush for the primary resources required to manufacture wind turbines, battery cells, wiring and other renewable energy components. That means more extraction, oftentimes in the same regions that have been most heavily impacted by fossil fuel drilling for the past hundred years and change. Grist put together an excellent report about the work of oil majors like Exxon Mobil in developing Arkansas' lithium deposits, oftentimes in communities known as oil towns for decades. A sobering reminder than everything comes with a price.

-The assassination of Lebanese militia leader and Shi'ite cleric Hassan Nasrallah on Friday in an Israeli airstrike which flattened several buildings in a Beirut suburb and left six others dead could well lead to a broader regional war between Benjamin Netanyahu's far right government, Hezbollah and its allies in Syria and Iraq. However, there are questions about how Israel's longtime foe was successfully targeted after decades of evading attempts on his life, particularly during the 2006 conflict. The FT takes a long look at Hezbollah's internal vulnerabilities that developed during its involvement in Syria's civil war and the evolution of Israeli human and signals intelligence, which also made possible the remote detonation of thousands of pagers and handheld radios earlier this month in what can only be described as a wanton act of state terrorism.

-After a week like this, New Yorkers are right to question just who is actually running the largest city in the United States, what with one indictment already filed against the Cop Mayor and at least four other investigations (three federal, one state) still underway against Eric Adams, his advisors, and the NYPD (which apparently shook down nightclubs in Lower Manhattan for protection money). The city has essentially been running on autopilot for the past three years, with city services undergoing marked declines while Eric's cronies lined their pockets with steered contracts and no-show, no-work 'jobs.' Should Adams actually resign, his plan of succession is....unclear. The City ran through the potential scenarios and possible appointments should the pressure become untenable. It makes for grim reading, and is an excellent case in point for breaking up the closed primary system that means fewer than one million voters in a city of nine million decide who will end up running the most Byzantine and complex municipalities in the country.

BOOK - For those interested in the deep relationship between American law enforcement and the extreme right, I can't recommend Jessica Pishko's recent "The Highest Law in the Land" enough. Pishko's book looks at the Constitutional Sheriff movement, a theory expounded by the Claremont Institute (who else?) that claims Sheriffs are the ultimate guardians of the Constitution and not beholden to federal law or primacy.

There's a longer history here that ties back into the pre-Revolutionary origins of the office, its role in maintaining and propagating the pre-Emancipation racial hierarchy of the United States, and the essential role of Sheriffs in reinforcing Jim Crow and suppressing the Civil Rights Movement. It's easier to understand zealots like former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and current Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco with this backdrop - and makes clear why this movement poses such a fundamental threat to democracy as we know it

FILM - Director Alan Pakula's 'paranoia trilogy' of the 1970s helped forge the cultural legacy of that hangover decade in American history, when the Vietnam War morass, Watergate, and a comedown from the youth rebellion of the late '60s was marked by a cynical term in politics, music, and film. The latter two films of the trilogy - The Parallax View (1974) and All The President's Men (1976) - are masterpieces in their own right. However, Klute (1971) is a more focused and down-to-earth narrative than the aforementioned political thrillers.

Donald Sutherland portrays a small-town Pennsylvania detective who ventures to New York City in search of a missing businessman. The trail leads to a high-end call girl, played by New Left royalty Jane Fonda. Sutherland's character taps Fonda's phone, and eventually is drawn into a relationship with her as he tries to locate the missing executive, who may be the perpetrator in a series of attacks and killings of sex workers. Klute is an atmospheric film as well as a canonical neo-Noir: the shot framing, color and soundtrack all add to the sense of disorientation and unease that follows Sutherland's journey. First saw it at 19, and it's stayed with me ever since.

MUSIC - There are certain eras and moments in time for music that I always wish I could have experienced in person. The sound systems of Jamaica and London in the early 1980s are definitely at the top of that list. This 1982 recording of seminal producer Jack Ruby at a school yard in his hometown of Ocho Rios is the best example I've found to date of the range and quality of artists from that golden age in Jamaican music. Ruby sadly died in 1989, but left a massive legacy though his work with artists like Burning Spear and Gregory Isaacs. If you've seen Rockers (which I flagged in a prior edition of Bleeding Edge earlier this year), Ruby makes an appearance alongside his colleagues. That film is absolutely worth your time.