When you declare war, what you get are soldiers, not cops

Many years ago, one of our Presidents, it might have been Johnson (actually, Jamie, it was Nixon, in 1971; sorry) declared a "War on Drugs." The dynamic of law enforcement was set on a new path -- or back on an old one reminiscent of the days of prohibition and anti-labor activities. In some places, it began even earlier. Not long after I was discharged from the Army, I was living in Greenwich Village, on MacDougal Street, sort of the Main Street of the Beat/Hippie/Folkie world at the time. I was managing a coffeehouse across the street that was, at that time, known as "The Cafe Feenjon" but had existed since the late '50s as "The Commons, "The Fat Black Pussycat" and perhaps other names now forgotten, at least by me.

Now all of this is to set the stage for a bit of history. In the late '60s -- I left the Army in September of '69 and moved to New York in early '70 to place it all in a chronological context -- the civil rights movement was taking a decidedly un-civil shift. There were the Black Panthers, The Black Liberation Army, The Symbionese Liberation Army and other, lesser-known Black radical groups and a lot of fringe folk with no real ties to any group, just a serious case of the mads with white people. In NYC, cops were being killed in larger numbers than anyone could remember. The Mafia pretty much had a rule that cops were off the table as targets because a cop-killing brought a lot of heat down in an area and often right into the middle of a healthy business operation. This was not a Good Thing. But the Black Militants had no such scruples. In one instance, in 1972, an undercover police officer was fatally shot at the #7 Mosque of the Black Muslims in Harlem. Two cops, one black and one white, were gunned down on the outskirts of the Polo Grounds Projects, a public Housing development on the site of the old NY Giant's baseball stadium -- and one-time polo field. The NYPD, fearing a continuation of what had been dubbed "The Long Hot Summer" re-energized the Tactical Patrol Force, originally created in 1959 to deal with a rise in crime rates.

By the time the unit was brought up to strength, staffed by young men, six feet tall and athletic in build, the City had cooled down and the incidents of the previous year seemed to be part of history. Once re-activated, however,  TPF had to be used and it was, including in several incidents where a situation was created by officers in the target precinct triggering the call-out of TPF. They were also used for "crowd control" including keeping weekend foot traffic in Greenwich Village moving. They were not popular with many of the locals. I had a friend who served, for a time, with TPF until their use in incidents provoked to justify the use of TPF finally got to him.

Not long after, even small towns began to get "tougher on crime" and the feds were right there with Vietnam War surplus equipment. Many were offered helicopters and those that could field a pilot and a place to tie the 'copter down took the government up on their offer. As I said, war had been declared on drugs and the federal government, long unable to really make much of a dent in the drug trade, enlisted local law enforcement in numerous task forces and gave them military-surplus equipment with which to fight that war.

LAPD created SWAT in 1967 in response to the rise in racial tension during the Watts riots in 1965. (http://www.policemag.com/Videos/Channel/SWAT/2010/04/LAPD-s-Chief-Gates-on-Creation-of-SWAT.aspx is a brief comment on the formation of SWAT by Retired Chief Daryl Gates.) SWAT is, in a very limited fashion, a useful tool when dealing with barricaded subjects, violent, armed offenders and the like. But, as was true of TPF, once you have the tool, the tendency of bureaucrats is to use the tool in order to justify the expense.

Much is made in the press and the blogosphere of police departments getting what they always seem to call "tanks" but are usually armored personnel carriers of some type. Armored vehicles can serve a very useful, even critical, function in law enforcement. When dealing with the situations described just above, having a mobile armored base from which to operate or with which to move on a subject who is armed can be critical. It can save lives, allowing the officers to shield emergency responders while they remove an injured person. However, using an armored vehicle to serve every warrant? Along with the full SWAT team? Nah, I don't think so. But, they do.

There were a couple of Facebook postings recently from a friend -- who I would say is a trifle to the left of me on many subjects -- about the recent bestowing of military equipment as freebies to local cops. One is this, http://www.businessinsider.com/program-1033-military-equipment-police-2011-12#ixzz1fhfo82jd. The other was http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/12/05/120511-news-militarized-police-1-6/

In the second story, one of the recipients of the federal largess, Chief of Police Bill Partridge, who heads a 50-officer department in Oxford, Ala., said “If you’re quick on the trigger on the Internet, usually you can get what you want,” Partridge said, noting his department visited the program’s website “weekly or daily” to check for gear. “My philosophy is that I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

The problem here being that recent history has shown us that "having it" is almost a guarantee of "using it" sooner or later and not always in the most appropriate manner.

I like "big boy" toys. I have been a shooter most of my life, from about eight, when I went to the shooting galleries in Times Square and Coney Island to pop targets in the arcades with .22 Shorts fired from old rifles. I like things that go whir and clank and bang as much as the next guy, and when I got to shoot fully-automatic weapons on some one else's dime at a conference in Seattle, I was a happy camper. All that said, I find the militarization of our police, to the extent to which it has progressed since the late '50s, is just plain wrong and it is also counter-productive.  Cops have, as the articles mention, become pretty much an occupying army, distanced from the community they are supposed to serve. 

I wore the nearly ubiquitous black battle-dress uniform and high-top boots, carried a high-capacity semi-auto pistol in a large caliber -- .45 ACP -- and was trained on other weapons, as well. There was a riot helmet in my locker and a 36-inch riot baton as well. I always wore my vest, even when I worked plain-clothes. But I was available to talk to the people who worked on my beat at the county hospital or the mental health clinics or, prior to that in the housing projects and the county welfare offices. I didn't let down my guard, but I tried, consistent with that, to be open and available to the people with whom I dealt. I had learned the concept of "Community Oriented Policing" long before it became a buzzword for a federally-funded program from a beat cop who worked in the 6th Precinct and patrolled the streets of Greenwich Village in the late '60s. Jimmy was approachable, pleasant to deal with and alert to what was going on. He was in stark contrast to the TPF cops who lorded it over the citizens, bohemian and tourist alike, on those crowded summer streets.

There is a major fundamental difference between the police and soldiers, although both are armed and may use similar equipment. The police, ideally, keep the peace and arrest wrong-doers. Soldiers maintain peace by killing the enemy and occupying territory. There is a huge difference. So, while I can see the need for some of the military-grade tools that local cops are getting and using today, I think a lot more discretion needs to be exercised in their use and a lot less use made of some if it.

When you declare war, what you get are soldiers, not cops

Many years ago, one of our Presidents, it might have been Johnson (actually, Jamie, it was Nixon, in 1971; sorry) declared a "War on Drugs." The dynamic of law enforcement was set on a new path -- or back on an old one reminiscent of the days of prohibition and anti-labor activities. In some places, it began even earlier. Not long after I was discharged from the Army, I was living in Greenwich Village, on MacDougal Street, sort of the Main Street of the Beat/Hippie/Folkie world at the time. I was managing a coffeehouse across the street that was, at that time, known as "The Cafe Feenjon" but had existed since the late '50s as "The Commons, "The Fat Black Pussycat" and perhaps other names now forgotten, at least by me.

Now all of this is to set the stage for a bit of history. In the late '60s -- I left the Army in September of '69 and moved to New York in early '70 to place it all in a chronological context -- the civil rights movement was taking a decidedly un-civil shift. There were the Black Panthers, The Black Liberation Army, The Symbionese Liberation Army and other, lesser-known Black radical groups and a lot of fringe folk with no real ties to any group, just a serious case of the mads with white people. In NYC, cops were being killed in larger numbers than anyone could remember. The Mafia pretty much had a rule that cops were off the table as targets because a cop-killing brought a lot of heat down in an area and often right into the middle of a healthy business operation. This was not a Good Thing. But the Black Militants had no such scruples. In one instance, in 1972, an undercover police officer was fatally shot at the #7 Mosque of the Black Muslims in Harlem. Two cops, one black and one white, were gunned down on the outskirts of the Polo Grounds Projects, a public Housing development on the site of the old NY Giant's baseball stadium -- and one-time polo field. The NYPD, fearing a continuation of what had been dubbed "The Long Hot Summer" re-energized the Tactical Patrol Force, originally created in 1959 to deal with a rise in crime rates.

By the time the unit was brought up to strength, staffed by young men, six feet tall and athletic in build, the City had cooled down and the incidents of the previous year seemed to be part of history. Once re-activated, however,  TPF had to be used and it was, including in several incidents where a situation was created by officers in the target precinct triggering the call-out of TPF. They were also used for "crowd control" including keeping weekend foot traffic in Greenwich Village moving. They were not popular with many of the locals. I had a friend who served, for a time, with TPF until their use in incidents provoked to justify the use of TPF finally got to him.

Not long after, even small towns began to get "tougher on crime" and the feds were right there with Vietnam War surplus equipment. Many were offered helicopters and those that could field a pilot and a place to tie the 'copter down took the government up on their offer. As I said, war had been declared on drugs and the federal government, long unable to really make much of a dent in the drug trade, enlisted local law enforcement in numerous task forces and gave them military-surplus equipment with which to fight that war.

LAPD created SWAT in 1967 in response to the rise in racial tension during the Watts riots in 1965. (http://www.policemag.com/Videos/Channel/SWAT/2010/04/LAPD-s-Chief-Gates-on-Creation-of-SWAT.aspx is a brief comment on the formation of SWAT by Retired Chief Daryl Gates.) SWAT is, in a very limited fashion, a useful tool when dealing with barricaded subjects, violent, armed offenders and the like. But, as was true of TPF, once you have the tool, the tendency of bureaucrats is to use the tool in order to justify the expense.

Much is made in the press and the blogosphere of police departments getting what they always seem to call "tanks" but are usually armored personnel carriers of some type. Armored vehicles can serve a very useful, even critical, function in law enforcement. When dealing with the situations described just above, having a mobile armored base from which to operate or with which to move on a subject who is armed can be critical. It can save lives, allowing the officers to shield emergency responders while they remove an injured person. However, using an armored vehicle to serve every warrant? Along with the full SWAT team? Nah, I don't think so. But, they do.

There were a couple of Facebook postings recently from a friend -- who I would say is a trifle to the left of me on many subjects -- about the recent bestowing of military equipment as freebies to local cops. One is this, http://www.businessinsider.com/program-1033-military-equipment-police-2011-12#ixzz1fhfo82jd. The other was http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/12/05/120511-news-militarized-police-1-6/

In the second story, one of the recipients of the federal largess, Chief of Police Bill Partridge, who heads a 50-officer department in Oxford, Ala., said “If you’re quick on the trigger on the Internet, usually you can get what you want,” Partridge said, noting his department visited the program’s website “weekly or daily” to check for gear. “My philosophy is that I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

The problem here being that recent history has shown us that "having it" is almost a guarantee of "using it" sooner or later and not always in the most appropriate manner.

I like "big boy" toys. I have been a shooter most of my life, from about eight, when I went to the shooting galleries in Times Square and Coney Island to pop targets in the arcades with .22 Shorts fired from old rifles. I like things that go whir and clank and bang as much as the next guy, and when I got to shoot fully-automatic weapons on some one else's dime at a conference in Seattle, I was a happy camper. All that said, I find the militarization of our police, to the extent to which it has progressed since the late '50s, is just plain wrong and it is also counter-productive.  Cops have, as the articles mention, become pretty much an occupying army, distanced from the community they are supposed to serve. 

I wore the nearly ubiquitous black battle-dress uniform and high-top boots, carried a high-capacity semi-auto pistol in a large caliber -- .45 ACP -- and was trained on other weapons, as well. There was a riot helmet in my locker and a 36-inch riot baton as well. I always wore my vest, even when I worked plain-clothes. But I was available to talk to the people who worked on my beat at the county hospital or the mental health clinics or, prior to that in the housing projects and the county welfare offices. I didn't let down my guard, but I tried, consistent with that, to be open and available to the people with whom I dealt. I had learned the concept of "Community Oriented Policing" long before it became a buzzword for a federally-funded program from a beat cop who worked in the 6th Precinct and patrolled the streets of Greenwich Village in the late '60s. Jimmy was approachable, pleasant to deal with and alert to what was going on. He was in stark contrast to the TPF cops who lorded it over the citizens, bohemian and tourist alike, on those crowded summer streets.

There is a major fundamental difference between the police and soldiers, although both are armed and may use similar equipment. The police, ideally, keep the peace and arrest wrong-doers. Soldiers maintain peace by killing the enemy and occupying territory. There is a huge difference. So, while I can see the need for some of the military-grade tools that local cops are getting and using today, I think a lot more discretion needs to be exercised in their use and a lot less use made of some if it.

Eleven, Eleven, Eleven

It's Veterans Day, again. When I was working, it was one of the few holidays I took off. Of course, when I was a cop, holidays were too lucrative to take off. Under our old contract, we got paid for the day regardless if we took it off or worked. If we did work, we got paid at time-and-a-half, so the temptation to whore the overtime was great. I wasn't as bad as some, but I worked almost all the paid holidays, taking off only Veteran's Day and my birthday, which I took as a floating holiday. Today, I asked Ana, my wife, if I could sleep in. I prepped potatoes for home-fries last night and, except for fending off the ravenous cat at 5 AM, I got my wish. Of course, since I seldom sleep more than four or six hours these days, I'd been up at three something and was reading until nearly six, but I turned the light off and rolled over before Ana's alarm went off at seven.

What I was reading was the account of one soldier's experience in Iraq back in the early days of the Iraq War. John Crawford, a National Guard sergeant with prior service in the 101st Airborne, arrived in Iraq with the first invasion forces and ended up spending a year and a half in Baghdad. His stories, episodic and reading as if he was telling them over beers or a campfire, were oddly familiar. His experiences mirrored those of so many of my contemporaries who had served in Vietnam, complete with the crushing boredom, terrible living conditions, horrible weather and, if you substitute sand for the tropical muck of Southeast Asian, a familiar environment, hostile to people, especially those raised in the US of A.

The other feat similarity is that the command authority -- the Chain of Command -- has learned just about nothing about how to fight an unconventional enemy in the intervening years. His take on officers rings with a familiar tone to that which I heard from troops who spent far more time in Vietnam than I did. I was there briefly, up close to the DMZ, near Hue at a place called Phu Bai. The Army Security Agency had a forward listening post there to monitor the Lao Neutralist forces when they shifted too far East for our radio net in Thailand to reliably pick up. I was never actually in combat there -- the First Marine Division had it pretty well secured and we were in their area of operations when we were there, but many of the Marines with whom I spoke had.

Our library -- the one named for Tony Hillerman, our own Erna Ferguson Library being remodeled -- had a display of books about the military on a table. I picked up Crawford's The Last True Story I Will Ever Write and the story of the formation of Delta Force by Eric Haney, one of the founding members of Delta. I figured that I could forgo John Ringo's military Sci-Fi novels for a bit and read something real. Of course, Ringo, himself an Airborne veteran, he of the 82nd, writes stories that ring quite true, even if they are set in far off places in future times or in a former Soviet Georgia that is mostly created out of his imagination, but also rings true.

I left the Army in the fall of 1969, before my 25th birthday. I was angry at the great green machine for a variety of reasons and had determined not to re-enlist, although they dangled some nice incentives, including a shot at Warrant Officer's school in six months after a promotion to staff sergeant. I actually had to think about that for a few minutes before turning it down. I'd had enough of Army life and was under the misapprehension that civilian life would be vastly different. When I was drafted, in '65, I had only had a small taste of adult life. I turned 21 in basic training at Fort Dix and most of the time between graduating high school had been spent in activities I had chosen more for pleasure than for gain. I went to classes at Columbia, not fully enrolled, but auditing classes with the intention of doing so,. I'd been accepted, but wasn't sure what I wanted to do. While I pondered, the local draft board was deciding to make my choice for me.

Basic training did a decent job of scraping the civilian veneer off me and re-plating me with Army green, at least a surface coat. Inside I was still me, but I could pass for a soldier. With some they did a better job, getting to the marrow of some of my generation and really making them GIs through and through. From what I have read, the military has been far better -- perhaps since Roman times -- at creating soldiers from civilians than they have been at turning them back into civilians when their time of service -- be it two years, a three-year-hitch, four years like mine or a career of twenty years -- was up. We now have a nice, neat medical term for the results called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD for short. It manifests differently in people and some are only mildly affected by it. But, in the worst cases, it can lead to suicide, homicide, alcoholism, drug-dependence, homelessness and a host of other ills.

I lost track of the number of homeless wrecks with whom I dealt as a cop at the Hospital who were genuine veterans with PTSD. There were some poseurs for sure, but far more with stories that rang true and with that look in their eye and tone in their voice that spoke of having seen things they couldn't unsee but wished they could.

Recently, Ana's office hired a new person to handle billing, mostly dealing with the insurance carriers, including Medicare, that pays for the most of their client's treatment for a variety of mental ills. He is a young man, in his late twenties, a disabled and medically retired veteran of the Iraq war. He, like so many of his contemporaries -- and like John Crawford -- entered the military mostly to have a shot at a better education after their hitch was up. The commercials on TV and the print ads speak loudly and grandly of all the benefits that are there for only a few years of your time. It's an All-Volunteer military, unlike the mixed-bag when I served. Inducements are needed. But, almost like the case that led to the Bonus Army after WW I, many of these promises have not been kept or have been kept at greatly reduced rates. This young man had his stipend reduced and had to find a full-time job and reduce his college time drastically. So much for the promises. 

The news is quick to pick up stories of the worst cases, the junkies, still wearing parts of their issue uniforms when they are found OD'd in some dark place. Or when they can't deal with the very different pace and stress of civilian life and act, as they had been trained, with quick violence, often against a loved one. But these are the worst cases and perhaps nothing could have been done for them. In my opinion, the military, the VA didn't really try as hard as they could. The government has been quick to cut benefits to veterans in tight economic times. Even Bush, who was himself sort of a veteran, did it and our current community-organizer-in- chief, with no experience of the military, has done even more. He gives lip-service in thanking our troops, but has kept them at the sharp end far longer than he promised and has done little to improve the lot of those returning, after innumerable stop-loss extensions, to civilian life.

So, on this day we remember those who served -- and I remember, vaguely, when it was still Armistice Day, celebrated on this day to commemorate the end of World War One at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. I know the significance of the poppies handed out for a donation to a veteran's organization, symbols of all of those fallen in the poppy fields in Flanders.

I ask you to write to your congress critter and ask them what they are doing for veterans beside mouthing noble words. And I ask you to remember someone you knew who isn't there because they fell in service to their country.

"Absent Friends!"

Serendipitously 5:16 AM

     My sleep rhythm is all over the place these days and I find myself at the keyboard at 4:10 in the morning, listening to Charlie Hunter playing solo about two years ago in Oakland. Hunter is a guitar player who mostly plays a seven-string guitar/bass hybrid. It is amazing to watch him play, running bass lines, lead arpeggios and rhythm backing simultaneously.

     He's played as a leader, sideman and accompanist. Some of this band work was with Garage a Trois with Skerik, a sax player that has to be heard -- and seen -- to fully appreciate. This clip is of them taking on Jimi Hendrick's If 6 Was 9 which I think Jimi would have approved of.

     I don't listen to a lot of music these days, except in the wee hours when I stumble across something I like and then wander along the serendipitous trails following where the muse leads me. Yeah, muse. I'm not much of a musician, but I do feel the pull of a muse that guides me to music to listen to. And, once I am a ways down that trail, I often forget where the point of entry was. Like, how I found Charlie Hunter. I was re-reading an email that mentioned Charlie Mingus and his introduction to Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the late multi-instrumentalist jazz player. But, how I got from Kirk to . . . oh, yeah, Charlie Hunter used to play with a group called T.J. Kirk that fused elements of the music of Thelonious Monk, James Brown and Kirk. They originally called the group James T. Kirk, honoring not only the musicians who inspired them but the iconic Star Trek commander. When they signed with Warmer Brothers, the name became an issue, since Kirk's name was copyright to another entity, so they shuffled it around to T.J. Kirk. This clip is from 1995 at the SF Wine Festival on the Embarcadero.

T.J. Kirk, San Francisco, 1995

     So, this is the way I whiled away some time at o'dark-thirty on a Sunday morning. When I was younger and in another city, I was often up at this hour, listening to music either live, in the clubs and coffee houses in NYC's Greenwich Village, on the radio or on my hi-fi system -- an odd combination of devices that spun a vinyl disc under a sharp object and took the tiny electrical current thus produced and sent it to a couple of tube preamplifiers and amplifiers. Tubes are those things that light up in an amp that aren't LEDs. So, yeah, I'm an old guy, sue me.

     Music happened all the time back in those days. I imagine in some circles it still does, but I fell out of that orbit some time ago and haven't found my way back to it, except at odd hours sitting at my laptop keyboard, with my Sony earbuds in place.

     So, to return to this odd odyssey, one of the places I was sent to hear Charlie Hunter's music was NPR. Now, I don't listen to NPR all that often, since I don't share the political views expressed there. But they have some damn good music, so I end up there fairly often for sounds. While there this morning, I noticed a listing for someone named Rachael Yamagata. How could I not investigate a female vocalist with a name like that? I'm a sucker for female vocalists, fascinated by exotic-looking women and attracted, if only in a rather vague, platonic way, to dark women with blue eyes. Ms. Yamagata hits on all points. So I listened to an hour of her from the World Cafe in Philadelphia. I like her. I don't buy CDs any more, but I will ad her to my play list on Pandora, for sure. You can listen to her at http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=140821897&m=140954599 I also found some videos of her on YouTube like this one.

     So, at something like 5:13 -- real close to the magic hour of 5:16 AM from the poem of the same name by my friend Shepard Sherbell from back in the day when many of us only saw sunrise from the back side -- I'm going to try and see if I can find some sleep.

Potential Passing of Prince Street Pizzaria - Reminiscence

     I got an email from my old guidance counselor from Rhodes Prep with whom I have been in contact for some time. He always has interesting stuff to share. This one triggered memories. I'll quote a bit of it, and for the rest, there is a link to the NY Times article:

It did not call itself the flagship Ray’s Pizza because it never really had a fleet. It was not Original Ray’s or Famous Ray’s or Original Famous Ray’s or Real Ray’s or Ray’s on Ice or any of the other cloned shops sprinkled like shredded mozzarella all over town. It was simply Ray’s Pizza, and in the great pizza wars of New York City, it was respected as having been the first, standing more or less above the fray at 27 Prince Street in Little Italy, with tree limbs holding up the basement ceiling and an owner whose name wasn’t even Ray. 

And now, it seems, barring any surprises, Ray’s Pizza — the original that was so original it did not have the word “original” in its name — appears doomed to close at the end of the month. 

This is not a popular topic at Ray’s right now. 

“I don’t want you to put that this is the end,” said Helen Mistretta, the manager who, seven months before her 80th birthday, is in no mood for weepy nostalgia. “It’s the end of 27 Prince, not the end of Ray’s of Prince Street.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/nyregion/rays-pizza-the-first-of-many-counts-down-to-last-slice.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

      My first pizza experience was a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint in my old neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens in NYC. It was on 77th Street, just up from 37th Avenue, on the east side of the street. I don't know if it had an official name, but we all called it "Ritchie's Place" because the owner and pizza maker was named Ritchie. He was a Jewish guy from the Bronx, in his mid twenties or early thirties. He wanted a small business and this one was available. Ritchie was open from lunch time until early evening and later in the summer. In his white t-shirt and baker's pants, with a dusting of flour he certainly looked the part.

     For a quarter, you could have a slice of cheese pizza and a small Coke, a good deal for the kids at P.S. 69, half a block away on the south side of 37th Avenue. I worked with Ritchie for a bit, learning how to make pizza. I was just entering junior high, so I couldn't have been more than 13. The pizza dough was made in a bakery in Brooklyn, as I recall and was delivered daily as rounds wrapped in plastic film. Ritchie used a big grinder -- what's called a "Buffalo Chopper" I came to learn -- to make the shredded mozzarella and the sauce came out of a large #10 can from Italy. To my taste, with no frame of reference, it tasted perfectly fine. On a whole pie, Ritchie could add ingredients, like pepperoni or sausage. At some point, he added heroes to the menu, with the meatballs and sausage sourced from a supplier in Little Italy. I developed a taste for sausage heroes there that remains to this day.

     When I started hanging out in the Village a few years later -- call it '62 or '63 until I got drafted in -65 --  I tried a number of places, but my favorite -- and I liked their Sicilian slices the best -- was on the NE corner of Bleecker Street at Thompson. It was pretty large and had tables, but I can't remember ever eating at one. We usually got a slice and a Coke and either ate at the counter, standing, or took the slice and soda and walked. (Checking Google Earth, it is now a place called "The Red Lion" which offers live music and such. Times change.)

     We walked a lot, back then. When Cathy and I -- she was the love of my life at that time, winter of '63 through the following summer --  lived on E6th and Ave. D, we would walk to the Village Where we lived was still considered the Lower East Side; the real estate people hadn't gotten around to renamed it the "East Village" yet. (It wasn't far, in fact, from the infamous "Alphabet City" which had, especially in the crack era of the mid-'80s, a truly horrific reputation. Even when I lived there, my aunt, who edited The Villager, the neighborhood alternative to The Village Voice and far more of a typical small town paper, was appalled that I was living, with my girlfriend, in such a dangerous neighborhood. We never saw it that way. It was, for a time, home.)  

     We called our journey "Westering" since that is generally the direction we were going. We'd usually cut over to 3rd or 4th Street to make the journey, since 6th didn't go through, ending at the Bowery or 3rd Ave. whichever you called it. I think on maps it was 3rd Ave. at that point, but we tended to think of it as the Bowery until the Astor Place/St. Mark's Place junction.

     Our destination was one or another of the coffeehouses we frequented or where we knew a friend was playing a gig. Our "official" gathering place was the back room of what was then Café Rienzi. At other times it had been The Commons and The Fat Black Pussycat and it would become Café Feenjon in the early '70s. (I was night manager, working from 7 until sun-up. At the time, I lived across the street at 107 MacDougal, above the Gaslight and the Kettle of Fish. No long walks, then.)

     At Rienzi's, we often had the large round table and the entire back room to ourselves, as long as we kept it clean and didn't pull the waitress back there when it was busy. We were regulars and comfortable enough there to get our own drinks and food from the counter and bus our own mess. If we wandered over on weekend afternoons, we often sat in the front room, often at window-seat tables as a draw for the tourist trade. One of our number came up with the idea, based on that, of renting us out to would-be hipsters for their parties, often at addresses well out of the Village. It as said of some of us that we would get nosebleeds above 14th Street, but we got over them. We were getting about 20 bucks for an evening as local color at a party. We pretty much considered ourselves Bohemians or, as some of us said, "Baby Beatniks" since were a decade or two younger than the real beats like Kerouac, Ginsberg and that crew. Back then, "Hippie" was an insult. Some of us still think it is, but that's a topic for a whole other posting.

     Now, after that meander down memory lane, or as Dylan called it, "my back pages," let us return to pizza. I contend that there is no decent "New York-style" pizza outside NYC, and that is because pizza is just flour -- which is pretty much the same anywhere, made from heartland wheat -- water, olive oil, salt, packaged yeast and whatever airborne yeast (what the French call le sauvage, wild yeast) gets into it. The only stuff that is specific to a place is the water and the wild yeast. At one time, a pizza maker in Berkeley actually trucked in NYC tap water to make a "true" New York pizza, but the cost versus price was just too lopsided and they stopped. I like pizza from elsewhere -- the California Pizza Kitchen pizzas are good, and I've had other pizza that was fine -- but it ain't real NY pizza if is isn't made in NYC!

     I mourn the passing of Ray's of Prince Street, even if I can't remember ever eating there. It is part of the history of Little Italy, a place that is being subsumed by Chinatown and the real estate market below Houston Street. The same thing is happening in San Francisco. Only a few of the old places still exist in what was once a thriving and vital Italian neighborhood. You hardly ever see an old noni with a basket for her marketing and the accents on the air are not Italian. 

     One of the last of the old places, DiMaggio's Steak House has closed. It used to be Fior d'Italia  and re-opened under the new name after a kitchen fire in 2005.  Fior d'Itlaia is the oldest Italian restaurant in SF -- they say in the country, but I have my doubts --  and has been in six locations since opening in 1886. It is still open on Mason Street, in the historic San Remo hotel in North Beach, not far from Bay Street.  (As DiMaggio's, it was owned by a Lebanese businessman with a fairly fat wallet. So at the end, it wasn't really part of the old Italian tradition except in name and menu.)

Familiarity, Contempt and Its Fallout

     I got an email from Stephen P. Wenger, one of his daily "Deadly Use of Force" postings. One of the included entries was from his friend, John Farnum, who is, among other things, a defensive firearms instructor. Here is that exchange, with added comments from me:

     This is John Farnum's mention of an incident in West Virginia on 30 August:

1 Sept 11

Blame-shifting as "SOP:"

In West Virginia last Tuesday, three wounds were inflicted, on two deputies, by a single bullet.  The 45-caliber bullet (45ACP or 45GAP, unclear as to which), fired from a Glock (model unknown), produced a hand-wound on one deputy and an additional hand-wound on the second deputy, as well as a separate hip-wound.  Both deputies were hospitalized, but none of the wounds appear to be life-threatening.

The discharge was accidental and took place at the home of one of the deputies, as the pistol in question was being "worked on."  Both wounded deputies are also Department Armorers!

In a statement to the media, the Undersheriff said the department-owned pistol in question "malfunctioned," causing the accidental injuries.

Oh, please!

I strongly suspect the pistol did not "malfunction," but, in fact, functioned perfectly, just as it is designed to!  It was allowed to point in an unsafe direction as someone, or something, simultaneously applied pressure to the trigger.

[Sounds like a pretty good assesment of the situation to me. Wonder why it took two of them to work on the gun in the first place?]

The culprit here (as is nearly always the case) is likely careless gun-handling, not defectively-designed, nor "malfunctioning" guns.  Otherwise, one would wonder why all these police departments continue to knowingly buy "faulty" guns.

And, careless gun-handling will never be eliminated, nor even addressed effectively, when we, apparently as a matter of policy, continue to excuse/deny our own carelessness/negligence, invariably shifting blame, robotlike, in another direction.

How is it that we're supposed to solve a problem, when we're prohibited from even mentioning the problem?

Guns will be in our lives, continuously, forever!  We have to learn how to live with them.  The "always-unloaded/never-ready" philosophy has served us poorly, as its exponents routinely treat/handle guns like toys.  Accidents happen when "dangerous" guns get mixed in with "safe" ones, as they do, without fail... as we see!

We need to always think of our guns as what they are: deadly weapons, there to protect us, not just as instrumentalities of recreation, there merely to amuse and entertain, like a golf club or tennis racket.

In short, we need to get serious.  We need to always be taking [care] of business... or, get out of business!

John Farnum, DTI

     This story was reported in the local press in the Charleston Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.com/policebrfs/201108300516 and The Intelligencer/Wheeling News Register http://www.theintelligencer.net/page/content.detail/id/558604.html
With two deputies out for an unspecified time, that reduces the Sheriff's strength by about 8%

     And, this is my reply to Stephen:

Stephen,

     As the old saying goes, "familiarity breeds contempt." Cops, as a class, are no more gun-savvy than they are radio-savvy or car-savvy. For many of them, the gun is just another piece of insurance they carry against the time when it is needed and the less thought given to it, the better. We've all heard stories of older cops in low-crime beats with rounds firmly cemented in place in an ammo slide by verdigris. I've actually seen it. I've inspected guns that had obstructions in the barrel and quite a few guns, especially when we went to auto-loaders, that didn't have a round chambered, which was our standard mode of carry: a round chambered, gun in whatever safe mode was available. Since the issue semi-auto in our department was a Glock 22, that meant that the gun was ready to go with a trigger pull against the NY2 trigger. ( The N.Y.2 trigger spring is even harder than the N.Y.1 trigger spring. The user will obtain a continuous very hard revolver-like increase of the trigger pull weight from  7 lb. to  11 lb. It makes shooting the Glock similar in trigger feel to cycling a double-action revolver.)

     When I was an assistant instructor and a Field Training Officer, I noticed that most officers, including veteran ones, often had trouble qualifying without a bit of practice. In a potentially lethal confrontation, the bad guys don't give warm-ups. (And some officers could never qualify on the first go-'round. Since we followed the City model of "no officer left behind" those who couldn't qualify the first time got a second try. If they failed that, they were disarmed, but kept working. There was, theoretically a limit to the number of tries, but I don't know that, in my time, we ever got there. (The worst case was a female officer who had to go back 37 times. She got lucky on number 38 and barely qualified.) Some guys will not give a thought to the status of their weapon -- or radio or car -- unless they are given orders to do so and even then, they will often fudge it. I know of numerous instances where officers had gone into an area on a hot call without doing a radio check to make sure that, if they called for backup, the call would be heard.

     Towards the end of my career, I was at work one day, doing paperwork. I had forgotten that I needed to qualify that quarter until I got a radio call from the watch commander reminding me that it was the last day. I had been assigned to a satellite location and was remiss in keeping track of qualifying on the unit bulletin board. So, I told the people where I was assigned desk space and some duties that I'd be driving to the range, got into my car and went out. I was in plainclothes, carrying my Glock 21 in a pancake concealment holster under a sport coat. I'd done some practice like that, but not a lot. I know, bad on me.

     I signed up for a relay, drew my ammo and, when my time came, stepped up to the line. After we went to auto-loaders, practice and qualifying was done with duty ammo, so you always shot what was in the gun and your two magazines first, then reloaded one or all of the three mags if you needed more. As I recall, the total number of rounds was based on the magazine capacity, with no segment requiring more than the basic load. I had a load of 40 rounds --13+1 in the gun; 13 in each of two magazines. We had a chance to reload magazines from cover if needed. In the days when not all officers had yet been issued an auto-loader, the course was based on the standard multiple of six, 48 or 60.

This is not the target, but is for illustration; shot with a 681 S&W w/158gr RNL

46 out of 48 are in the blue; all shots count

     We were using those man-shaped cardboard targets with a blue "Coke bottle" running from the eyes to the groin. All hits on the target, anywhere on the target, were scored as hits and you needed a 75% score to pass. I didn't manage to put every round into the blue, but all of my hits were center mass, or within the head on the failure drills at 5 yds. It was not my best score, but it was a realistic one. All of my hits were on target; 98% of them were in areas that would incapacitate the opponent, almost all of those in the blue. I say this not to brag, but to describe what I believe is the minimum qualification for anyone carrying a gun for serious social encounters. (I no longer remember where I got that phrase, but I like it.)

     I've only had one Negligent Discharge, when an Olympic-grade air-pistol discharged before I had brought it up to sight level. I had only thought of touching the electronic trigger. That was enough to twitch my finger. I learned a valuable and inexpensive lesson. Of all the guns I've taken apart to work on in the military, law enforcement and on my own bench or that of my gunsmith friends, I've never worked on a loaded one unless the round was stuck in the gun, and then I was very, very careful of where the muzzle pointed. I work very hard not to let my familiarity breed contempt for what is a deadly tool.

Murcielaguita Negra con Alma Blanca

     Back what seems like a hundred years ago and was really closer to 25 or so, I sold cars for a living. I took the job for a couple of reasons. I needed the money and there weren't a lot of jobs out there for which I had the skill-set. And, they offered to put me through a fairly lengthy training course. I felt that if the car bizz turned sour, I could use the training, especially in how to close a deal, in a lot of different jobs.

     I would be working for a large, multi-line dealer in Berkeley. The training went fairly well and I sold a few cars. As I recall, I was in the middle of my class in sales when we graduated. I went, first, to our Nissan lot. We were working out of a trailer on the lot while the new facility was being built, adjacent to the service shop a block away. The "Big Plan" was to move all the brands under one roof, a converted steel factory and warehouse near the junction of the 13 and Interstate 80, for those of you who know Berkeley. But that was still a ways off.

 

     I didn't do too badly selling cars and, when a position as assistant manager opened up at the firm's Dodge-Chrysler-Plymouth-Peugeot-Isuzu dealership down the street, I moved my stuff down there. I did pretty well as an assistant manager and learned more about the business from a couple of savvy guys. I could close another salesman's deal far better than I could my own, because the part of the business I hate was the whole shuck-and-jive of back-and-forth over the price of the car. When the time came to sit down and "do the numbers" I'd gotten to know my buyers and the decent and compassionate person who lives inside me had trouble with slamming them into a deal that would be good for us and maybe not so good for them. But with the clients of other salesmen? Piece of cake.

     Jump ahead a few years. I wasn't selling cars anymore, but I still had the general business model and techniques pretty well in hand. The car I had bought from the dealer at cost when the demo program folded for lack of ready cash, had decided to give up the ghost. So, my lady and I went looking for a car. We needed a wagon or SUV and I was looking at something like a Ford Explorer. None of them could be had -- this was at the peak of their early popularity -- for the price we wanted to pay and the SF Credit Union would give us, so we kept looking. After checking out the Toyota Camry Wagon and deciding we might like one of those, we walked down the street to that dealer's Subaru showroom. I'd had a friend who had a Subaru and loved it. So, I found a wagon and we took a test drive. We weren't ready to commit, just yet, so we went home.

     As it turned out, my lady got a terrible headache, so I went back on my own. I told the manager that I'd worked for one of the bigger dealerships in town and we cut to the chase. He had a wagon, loaded, in white that was sitting on his showroom floor and costing him money. He said, "Take the car, show it to your lady and come back and we can work the final numbers. But, I know I can get you this car, out the door for what you want to pay." So, I took the car home and talked to my lady. The color didn't thrill her, but we decided to drive back to the dealership, headache and all, and see if we could close the deal. Long story shorter -- we got the car for $1,500 below invoice and paid less out the door -- tax, tags, dealer prep and all -- that we'd been expecting. They were what is called a "motivated seller" since after a certain point, a car that doesn't sell costs the dealer more then they can make in profit. They don't buy the cars. They're what is called "floored" which means that some bank actually owns the car and charges the dealer a percentage each month to keep it on his lot.

     That car, named Nanook ( an Inuit word for the master of white bears in the shamanic tradition)  Nanook is sure-footed on ice, being AWD and is white. That suggested the name and when we found a polar bear fetish at Palms Trading in Albuquerque, the name was permanent. It's first trip, while still redolent of new car smell, was out to New Mexico and the whole Four Corners deal, a real shake-down and a two-week tourist holiday. That trip was, to a large extent, what made me willing to move to Albuquerque twenty-some years later.

     When my lady and I split up, I kept Nanook since she didn't drive. It served me well and got us out here on the Great Move two years ago. But the winter of 2010 caused this polar bear a lot of grief. At 17, he didn't do all that well anymore and we knew it was only a matter of time. Our mechanic went over it and couldn't really find any single problem causing it to do poorly in the below-zero weather, but found a lot of things that were akin to the maladies of old age in a person. We found out that we were looking at around $7,000 to bring Nanook back to good health, $7,000 we didn't have. So, a search for a new -- or newer -- car ensued in a casual and leisurely way, mostly on the Internet.

     While Nanook was laid up at the mechanic's during the winter, we rented a KIA Soul. We weren't looking for anything special, just a cheap economy car. Ana likes high cars and has been wanting one since her mini-van got totaled a few years back. The Soul is higher than the usual sedan or wagon, being what they call a CUV, or "cross-over utility vehicle." It drove well, Ana liked the seat height -- and so did I; no falling into a low seat and having to lever myself out again -- and it got good mileage. So the Soul was on the "definite" list for when we actually went looking for our next car.

     Finally ready to actually look for a car, we went to the KIA dealer a couple of weeks ago and found a left-over 2010 that was close to our budget. Ana had talked to the credit union and had an idea what they'd finance. We couldn't make a deal. I asked the manager on duty to see the invoice, after telling him that I used to be in the business and that when I sold cars, the mark-up was something in the 14% ballpark and that had been the basis of my offer. He said, "Well, times have changed and KIA tries to keep their cars affordable, so there isn't a lot of mark-up." He was right; it was about 7%. We told the salesman we'd be in touch. He was a nice kid in his first week in the job -- so he said. Car salesmen are not, as a species, the most truthful people, which is another reason I got out of the industry.

     We drove up the street to the Hyundai dealer. There were a couple of Hyundai's we were interested in, but they had none used and the new ones were a bit over our budget. The salesman, a 17-year vet of the business, told us he did have a KIA Soul on his lot and we went and looked at it. We both drove it at his insistence and it was nice, just as we remembered from the rental. It was a 2010 with a bit more than 25K on the clock. We sat down and did numbers. He gave us a price, I countered, low balling an out-the-door price. We looked a ways apart, but the salesman turned us over to his "finance guy" whose card called him a "business manager." I had told the salesman that I knew the business and I repeated it to the next in line.

     After several hours of number crunching, the "business manager" got us down to a 100% loan deal, with a lot of extras thrown in, assured us he could get us "bought" by either our credit union or some one else and handed us the keys and a lot of paperwork. We were both a little reluctant, but the payments, even at 100%, were about what we'd talked about, as was the duration of the loan and even the interest. We both liked the car -- another white one, which was the only thing Ana didn't like about it -- and buoyed by the business managers absolute assurance that he could get the deal done, we drove home in what we hoped was our newer car.

     Time passed and we heard nothing from the dealership. And then, a week after we drove away, the bomb dropped. We could have the car with all the extras -- extras on which the dealership makes money, sometimes more than the profit on the actual car, something I knew, but chose not to think too much about -- but we needed to come up with $7,000 down. Ana was outraged and majorly disappointed. I was just angry. We'd both allowed ourselves to be manipulated into doing something we shouldn't have done. And we both knew better.

     We told the money guy to back all the "Extras" out of the deal and re-figure the numbers. He did and we still needed $3,500 down to make it work. That is exactly what the credit union had told us before we got pie-in-the-skyed by the "business manager." We found a way to come up with the down and still make the thing work. I gave them a number, out-the-door, which they came close to. We signed another set of papers and gave them a check for the down and Murcielaguita Negra con Alma Blanca was ours. And the credit union's, of course.

     My family has always named cars and other motorized devices, like lawn mowers. My aunt had a grey Plymouth Cranbrook called "Pigeon." Her lawnmower was called "Victor" for some reason that has gotten lost in the mists of time. My dark-blue '49 Mercury, very similar to the one in the James Dean movie Rebel Without Cause became known as "Rebel." So, when Ana put a small black bat fetish in the car, I looked up the proper Spanish for a little black bat with a white soul. After Googling translations, I found a Spanish translation forum and got the colloquial form: Murcielaguita Negra con Alma Blanca. I tend to call her Blanca but Ana has called her Murcie since the bat went on the dashboard. She's a "she" because Murcie is sort of a female-sounding name.

     And we've both learned a lesson or two. The first is not to take the car on the promises of the dealer's people. The second is not to buy from that dealership again. Not that any of the others are better. But these guys only get one bite at this apple.

 Murcielaguita Negra con Alma Blanca

 

Ain't Necessarilly So

 Folks,

     The material below came to my email inbox from a friend of long standing. I read it and then decided to do a little checking, because the conclusions at the end didn't seem quite right. A lot of people would consider this racist or at least racially insensitive. Those of us who have dealt with people like this might see it differently. One must also wonder, exactly in what business Flair was an entrepreneur? (I feel like I can call him that; it feels like I've known him, or someone very much like him,  at some time or place.) Could it have been in the recreational drug business? That is often the root cause of young men dying before their time of gunshot wounds. ( I learned later -- see below -- that Allen and another man, both suspects in earlier homicides, were shot in one of NOLA's housing projects, so it could have been drugs or pay-back)

      Speaking of his family, I would surmise that, since his father is listed as Burnell Thompson, while his last name is Allen, his mother's name, that he is perhaps illegitimate? As are his brothers, Mattnell, Burnell and Lester? At least his momma named the boy Burnell after his daddy. Or we can assume he is the father of at least some of them. I guess that as a middle-aged white fella, I shouldn't have negative opinions about the doings of an extended Black family in my former home of New Orleans, but since I assume that my tax dollars helped keep this loose-knit family together, perhaps I should be allowed to have an opinion. Enough is enough. This isn't what FDR intended when he began the welfare state in the '30s as a safety net. No one expected or intended that people would live, breed and raise generations in those nets. Nor should they.

      Further on this, lest anyone think it is something Snope's worthy, here is this, from the Times-Picayune newspaper obits: 

"001296    Allen - Larmondo 'Flair' Allen Died On February 8, 2004. Devoted Friend Of Kawanner, Kiyshell, Joann, And Jeanne. (I'm guessing that these might be his Babies' Mamas?)  

Son Of Burnell Thompson And Esther Allen. Step Son Of Bruce Gordy. Grandson Of Delores & J. C. Allen, And Anna Laura & Wil Thompson. Father Of Larmondo, Jr., Christian, Kwan, Deidra, Larmonshell, Larmonshea, Larmomdriel, Larmonja, Darriell And Koreyell. Brother Of Mattnell, Burnell A., Lester, Burnell T. Edgar, Danta, Reshe, Wil, Shannail, Lekiksha, Gwendolyn, Jessica, Katina, Brandy And The Late Jerry. Friend Of Brenda And Dianne. Brother-In-Law Warren Craig. God Son Of Agnes Randolph. (I count ten children to Larmondo's credit in this, BTW.)

Relatives And Friends Of The Family Are Invited To Attend Funeral Services At Majestic Mortuary, 1833
O.C. Haley On Saturday, February 14, 2004 At 11:00 Am. Visitation Will Begin At 9:00 Am. Interment
Providence. Majestic Mortuary In Charge. Times Picayune 02-14-2004"

      And this, also from the Times-Picayune:
 

"New Orleans, La., — This evening, members of the New Orleans Police Department are investigating the murder of two men, ages 25 and 22-years of age. The 25-year-old local man has been identified as Larmondo Allen. The other victim was identified as 22-year-old Edward Taylor.  The offense occurred shortly before 11:00 p.m., at 2339 Martin Luther King Boulevard (Guste Public Housing Development).

According to investigators, COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) officers were patrolling the development and heard several gunshots and later found the men in the development.  Taylor was observed lying in the courtyard, suffering apparent multiple gunshot wounds to the head and body.  Allen was seen lying, a short distance away from the first victim, on a concrete stairway and near the second floor balcony.  He suffered an apparent gunshot wound to the chest.  Both men were pronounced dead on the scene.

Both men were convicted felons, Taylor had a Second Degree Murder Warrant for his arrest in connection with the January 7, 2003 murder of 26-year-old Aaron Jones who was killed in the 1500 block of Bienville Street.  The NOPD aired his photograph on January 14, 2004 in connection with this case.

Allen also has previous arrests, and in May of 2003 he was arrested on two (2) counts of attempted murder and one count of First Degree Murder.  In December and October of 1999, he was arrested on two separate First Degree Murder cases."

      As for the appended comments about the welfare largesse, I really had to wonder, since as I recall, the payments per child are not anywhere near that large. I called a friend who works for the SF Department of Human Services and knows a lot about the system for some info. She didn't have the information at her fingertips -- a rare occurrence -- so she directed me to the internet. 

     A quick check of the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services website discloses that the maximum grant under their Family Independence Temporary Assistance Program (FITAP) which "provides cash assistance to families with children when the financial resources of the family are insufficient to meet subsistence needs" is $512 for all 10 of his kids. Now, since I don't believe they were all living together, you would have to look at the chart at http://www.dss.state.la.us/index.cfm?md=pagebuilder&tmp=home&pid=139 to figure out how much money each kid's mom would get. 

     Add SNAP -- the new program that replaced food stamps -- and you can add $1500 a month, assuming all the kids were living with one mom, which I doubt. For more detail, see http://www.dss.state.la.us/index.cfm?md=pagebuilder&tmp=home&pid=93. Even adding in some monthly average for health care and we'd still be far, far short of the $1,500 per child mentioned.

      And, do note, that according to LADCFS, "The goal of FITAP is to decrease the long-term dependency on welfare assistance by promoting job preparation and work. Public assistance is no longer a lifetime benefit but an opportunity to become independent after a financial crisis." That would lead me to believe that the welfare people would be looking to transition the moms into a working situation as soon as possible. Now, that's theory and I don't know what practice is like in NOLA. I do know that it isn't always successful in my experience in California, but that's a story for another time.

      Give me a lead and I'll run with it. You know me. I still find the piece falls short of out-and-out racism, until you get to the erroneous statements at the end about the $162,000 that Allen would get. I don't know how much it costs to raise a kid in NOLA, but I doubt that the moms of Flair's ten kids are sitting pretty and living the life of luxury the author paints. Not at all. And if Larmondo never worked at a straight job -- and I doubt that he did -- I doubt that his kids, even if they are legitimate, can collect any social security survivor benefits.

      Here's the clip I got in that email:

SAD  NEWS  OUT  OF  NEW  ORLEANS     It seems that every couple of days   New Orleans loses one of its treasured ENTREPRENEURS. Lets get the players straight before we go on with this. LARMONDO "FLAIR" ALLEN His Companion:     Kawanner Armstrong His Sons:     Christian Allen, Kwan Allen, Larmondo Allen, Jr., His Daughters:   Deidra Allen, Larmenshell Allen, Lamonshea Allen, Larmomdriel Allen, Larmerja Allen,  Korevell Allen   AT AGE 25  -  He had 9 Children (Could Kawanner Armstrong Possibly Be The Mother Of All Of His Kids?)     His Father:         Burnell Thompson     His Mother:       Esther Allen     His Stepfather :   Bruce Gordy     His Brothers: Burnell Thompson,  Edgar Thompson      Wil Willis      Danta Edwards      Reshe Edwards      Mattnell Allen      Burnell Allen      Lester Allen His Sisters:   Shannail Craig     Lekiksha Thompson     Gwendolyn Carter     Jessica Willis     Katina Gordy   Grandparents:     Delors Allen     J.C. Allen        Anna Laura Thompson   Will Thompson So let’s see, now:      His Father, Burnell Thompson, fathered his brothers Burnell, Edgar and his sister Lekiksha.   His Stepfather, Bruce Gordy, fathered his Sister Katina.   His Mother, Esther Allen, must have been unwed when she gave birth to: Larmondo, Mattnell, Burnell and Lester.   We don't know who fathered Wil Willis and Jessica Willis, or Dante and Reshe Edwards.   Lets hope sisters Shannail Craig and Gwendolyn Carter are married. GOT THE ABOVE ALL STRAIGHT? ******************** NOW, THE REST OF THE STORY He's 25 and has 3 sons and 6 daughters   NINE welfare recipients collecting $1500 each..... That equals $13,500 a month !!!  Now add food stamps, Free medical,  free school lunches,  on and on and on AND ON. Do the math, that's $162,000 + a year. Anyone out there, sittin' on their butt while reading this e-mail, making that kind of money? Now that, to me, is a real Entrepreneur. (AND  BECAUSE OF THEIR FATHERS DEATH, ALL OF THE KIDS WILL PROBABLY COLLECT SOCIAL SECURITY UNTIL THEY ARE 18) And people wonder what is wrong with our country.