In Las Vegas, sports betting is legal and that makes it a haven for sports fans each year during popular sporting events, including March Madness. At The Mob Museum, the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, visitors will learn about the history of the sports wire and how sports betting came to be part of the Las Vegas casino experience. This year, they will also get up close and personal with Tim Donaghy, former NBA referee and “Personal Foul” author, whose intimate knowledge of the game landed him in prison—and made him a sports media celebrity.
On Tuesday, March 19 at 10:30 a.m., Donaghy will present one of his NBA referee jerseys to the Museum during a news conference. From 1 to 4 p.m. that afternoon, he will sign copies of his book, “Personal Foul,” in the Museum and be available to discuss sports betting tips with guests. On the following day, Wednesday, March 20 at 6:30 p.m., he will speak in the Museum’s courtroom about the experiences detailed in his book. Following the presentation, he will sign copies of “Personal Foul” and answer questions from guests.
In his career with the NBA, Donaghy tracked personal relationships that existed between referees and players, coaches and owners to successfully pick games correctly 75 percent of the time.
Since being published in his book, “Personal Foul,” Donaghy’s story has been featured by more than 100 programs, including “60 Minutes,” ESPN, Fox's “Your World” and on CNN Headline News. Additional media exposure has included The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated and countless radio appearances and interviews.
He currently appears on more than a dozen current radio shows as well as on television. He recently picked games successfully during the NBA playoffs on ESPN Radio in Miami and Dallas at a rate of more than 78 percent. Today, Donaghy remains in demand as an NBA insider, appearing regularly on numerous sports talk shows throughout the United States.
Friday, March 15, 2013
Edwin Ernesto Rivera Gracias, Member of MS-13 Gang, Added to Top 10 Fugitive List
Edwin Ernesto Rivera Gracias, wanted for the murder of a 69-year-old Colorado man who was dumped on the side of the road after being brutally beaten and stabbed, has been named to the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
A reward of up to $100,000 is being offered for information leading directly to the arrest of Rivera Gracias, who is a member of the violent Mara Salvatrucha gang—MS-13—and is believed to be in El Salvador. “Today we are asking for media and public assistance in bringing this dangerous fugitive to justice,” said James Yacone, special agent in charge of our Denver office.
Special Agent Phil Niedringhaus, who leads the FBI’s violent crimes squad in Denver, noted, “MS-13 is one of the most violent gangs in the United States, and Rivera Gracias appears to have embraced that lifestyle.”
The fugitive, a Salvadoran national, is approximately 29 to 33 years old with brown hair and brown eyes. He is 5’10” tall, weighs about 170 pounds, and has a variety of tattoos, including “MS-13” across his back, “LA” on his right forearm, and “Nena” on his left hand.
The murder he is charged with occurred in August 2011. The victim—a long-time family acquaintance of Rivera Gracias’ teenage girlfriend—was choked, beaten, and stabbed. His body was then dumped in the mountains outside of Denver, where it was later discovered by a bicyclist.
The investigation soon focused on Rivera Gracias and accomplices, including his girlfriend, explained Special Agent Russ Humphrey, a member of the FBI’s Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force, who worked the case. “The murder was vicious,” Humphrey said.
Rivera Gracias fled from Denver to Los Angeles and is now believed to be in his native El Salvador. Intelligence analysts with our MS-13 National Gang Task Force helped to positively identify Rivera Gracias, who also goes by the names Ernest Rivera and Edwin Rivera.
Rivera Gracias has ties to other MS-13 gang members in Colorado, Los Angeles, and El Salvador, and may attempt to gain entry to the U.S. using fraudulent identification. He may also visit Mexico and Guatemala.
“Elevating Rivera Gracias to the Top Ten list sends a message,” said Special Agent Niedringhaus. “No matter where you are as a fugitive—in the U.S. or anywhere in the world—we are coming after you.”
He added, “The FBI has put significant resources into fighting MS-13, and our gang task force works closely with our international partners to gather intelligence to help dismantle this transnational group. I think our chances of catching Rivera Gracias are excellent, especially with the substantial reward being offered.”
If you have any information concerning the whereabouts of Rivera Gracias, please contact the FBI’s Denver Field Office at 303-629-7171 or your nearest law enforcement agency or U.S. Embassy or Consulate. You can also submit a tip online.
Since its creation in 1950—63 years ago today—498 fugitives have been on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and 467 have been apprehended or located, 154 of them as a result of citizen cooperation.
A reward of up to $100,000 is being offered for information leading directly to the arrest of Rivera Gracias, who is a member of the violent Mara Salvatrucha gang—MS-13—and is believed to be in El Salvador. “Today we are asking for media and public assistance in bringing this dangerous fugitive to justice,” said James Yacone, special agent in charge of our Denver office.
Special Agent Phil Niedringhaus, who leads the FBI’s violent crimes squad in Denver, noted, “MS-13 is one of the most violent gangs in the United States, and Rivera Gracias appears to have embraced that lifestyle.”
The fugitive, a Salvadoran national, is approximately 29 to 33 years old with brown hair and brown eyes. He is 5’10” tall, weighs about 170 pounds, and has a variety of tattoos, including “MS-13” across his back, “LA” on his right forearm, and “Nena” on his left hand.
The murder he is charged with occurred in August 2011. The victim—a long-time family acquaintance of Rivera Gracias’ teenage girlfriend—was choked, beaten, and stabbed. His body was then dumped in the mountains outside of Denver, where it was later discovered by a bicyclist.
The investigation soon focused on Rivera Gracias and accomplices, including his girlfriend, explained Special Agent Russ Humphrey, a member of the FBI’s Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force, who worked the case. “The murder was vicious,” Humphrey said.
Rivera Gracias fled from Denver to Los Angeles and is now believed to be in his native El Salvador. Intelligence analysts with our MS-13 National Gang Task Force helped to positively identify Rivera Gracias, who also goes by the names Ernest Rivera and Edwin Rivera.
Rivera Gracias has ties to other MS-13 gang members in Colorado, Los Angeles, and El Salvador, and may attempt to gain entry to the U.S. using fraudulent identification. He may also visit Mexico and Guatemala.
“Elevating Rivera Gracias to the Top Ten list sends a message,” said Special Agent Niedringhaus. “No matter where you are as a fugitive—in the U.S. or anywhere in the world—we are coming after you.”
He added, “The FBI has put significant resources into fighting MS-13, and our gang task force works closely with our international partners to gather intelligence to help dismantle this transnational group. I think our chances of catching Rivera Gracias are excellent, especially with the substantial reward being offered.”
If you have any information concerning the whereabouts of Rivera Gracias, please contact the FBI’s Denver Field Office at 303-629-7171 or your nearest law enforcement agency or U.S. Embassy or Consulate. You can also submit a tip online.
Since its creation in 1950—63 years ago today—498 fugitives have been on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and 467 have been apprehended or located, 154 of them as a result of citizen cooperation.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Mistress of JFK & Sam Giancana to be Portrayed by @ChristinaBLind in the "Ride the Tiger" Play
Christina Lind will change dresses often as she brings Judith Exner to life on a New Haven stage. She also aims to change how history views the mistress of both JFK and the don of the Chicago mob—to get beyond the wardrobe and the good looks.
Lind plays Exner in Ride the Tiger
, which premieres Long Wharf on March 27 and runs through April 21. Willilam Mastrosimone’s play, directed by Gordon Edelstein, explores how sex and roughhouse politics intersected in the once-storied Camelot of JFK’s brief presidency.
Exner remained quiet for 15 years about her love affair with JFK. When it was revealed in the context of Senate hearings on U.S. intelligence gathering in the 1970s, Lind says she was character-assassinated as a gold-digging slut.
Lind doesn’t buy that character-assassination for a moment. Nor have other writers who have subsequently frayed the JFK myth.
This is Exner’s first posthumous trip on a major theatrical stage, Lind intends to seize the opportunity. She’s on a mission to change the way history views Exner. "She was vilified for being caught up in a river she couldn’t control,” Lind said in an interview a week into rehearsals, when the many dresses she’ll be wearing were not yet quite finished.
The play goes back and forth between Joe Kennedy’s plotting the rise of his senator son into the presidency; Frank Sinatra’s gigs in Las Vegas, where his pal JFK takes note of Exner; and Sam Giancana’s various digs as he murders his way through the drug trade and maybe trying to help JFK and the CIA knock off Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. By some accounts, Exner carried messages between the mobster and the president.
Mastrosimone’s play is a whirlwind of intrigue. It offers a behind-the-scenes look at the 1960 presidential campaign, where Giancana allegedly fixed union support for JFK in the expectation that the young prez’s brother Bobby would take off the Department of Justice heat. When that didn’t happen, Giancana allegedly expected some other kind of payback or threatened to retaliate.
For example: In the second act, Sam says to Judy: “Bobby wants to fight organized crime, he should indict his fuckin’ brother. The Bay of Pigs was a crime. And it was organized.”
Or Jack to Judy in a moment of post-coital truth-telling: “You know, Judy, we’re more alike than I thought. We ride the tiger just to say we did it.”
There’s a lot of history mixing with racy, messy, and intriguing might-have-beens.
The through line is Exner, a rich young California woman who early on married an actor and whose social circle was the wealthy and the powerful. In other words, Lind points out, she was no poor social climber.
Actors are always looking for windows that let them inside a character. Lind (pictured) is a young actress who’s best known for her work as Bianca in the daytime soap All My Children. Exner is the first real character she has portrayed. Lind said she feels a sense of artistic “responsibility” to portray the character’s complexity, not the black and white.
Lind read in Exner’s biography, Judith Exner: My story, that Exner absolutely never let the powerful men in her life pay for her. “She was self-sufficient, wouldn’t let people buy her stuff. She booked her own flights.”
Those would be airplane flights for her cross-country trysts with the young new president, who is portrayed in this play as a sexual athlete who needs Exner—or Marilyn Monroe or any number of other women—either to distract him from his presidential burdens or to relieve the extreme back pain from his PT-109 wartime injuries.
“She wanted what everyone wanted, to be loved. And they used her. And before she knew it, she was used up. Affairs with powerful people are not black and white. She had power herself,” reflected Lind.
That power was perhaps rooted in Exner’s beauty. In her intense dark eyes and, in the view of some, a Jackie look-alike quality. “She was not a slut or easy. I feel she had a great personality, a charisma too. She had a sway over these men. JFK was a prince, and he had something like love for her,” Lind argued.
Lind noted that her colleagues [Douglas Sills as playing JFK, John Cunningham as Jack’s dad Joe, Jordan Lage as mobster Giancana] have a different challenge: to portray with freshness characters people already know.
Exner is different. In the received history as well as in the play, “all the other characters characterize her as a certain thing,” Lind observed. She called it “a great privilege for me to reveal her in this way. These details about her have been ignored by history, as is the case for many women, especially those who were in submissive position with powerful men. It’s easier to call them home-wreckers than to examine their psychology.”
Lind was asked how she would want Exner, who died at age 65 in 1999, to respond to the play if she were in the audience. “I would want her to tell me, ‘Thank you for understanding me,’” Lind responded. “That’s my greatest wish.’”
The young actress, who is about the age Exner was in the 1960s, splits her time between Brooklyn and L.A. She has several other roles percolating for her next steps in her career, she said. She declined to name them, to avoid hexing her chances. Then she went back to her colleagues to resume running lines for Judith Exner.
Thanks to Allen Appel.
Lind plays Exner in Ride the Tiger
, which premieres Long Wharf on March 27 and runs through April 21. Willilam Mastrosimone’s play, directed by Gordon Edelstein, explores how sex and roughhouse politics intersected in the once-storied Camelot of JFK’s brief presidency.Exner remained quiet for 15 years about her love affair with JFK. When it was revealed in the context of Senate hearings on U.S. intelligence gathering in the 1970s, Lind says she was character-assassinated as a gold-digging slut.
Lind doesn’t buy that character-assassination for a moment. Nor have other writers who have subsequently frayed the JFK myth.
This is Exner’s first posthumous trip on a major theatrical stage, Lind intends to seize the opportunity. She’s on a mission to change the way history views Exner. "She was vilified for being caught up in a river she couldn’t control,” Lind said in an interview a week into rehearsals, when the many dresses she’ll be wearing were not yet quite finished.
The play goes back and forth between Joe Kennedy’s plotting the rise of his senator son into the presidency; Frank Sinatra’s gigs in Las Vegas, where his pal JFK takes note of Exner; and Sam Giancana’s various digs as he murders his way through the drug trade and maybe trying to help JFK and the CIA knock off Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. By some accounts, Exner carried messages between the mobster and the president.
Mastrosimone’s play is a whirlwind of intrigue. It offers a behind-the-scenes look at the 1960 presidential campaign, where Giancana allegedly fixed union support for JFK in the expectation that the young prez’s brother Bobby would take off the Department of Justice heat. When that didn’t happen, Giancana allegedly expected some other kind of payback or threatened to retaliate.
For example: In the second act, Sam says to Judy: “Bobby wants to fight organized crime, he should indict his fuckin’ brother. The Bay of Pigs was a crime. And it was organized.”
Or Jack to Judy in a moment of post-coital truth-telling: “You know, Judy, we’re more alike than I thought. We ride the tiger just to say we did it.”
There’s a lot of history mixing with racy, messy, and intriguing might-have-beens.
The through line is Exner, a rich young California woman who early on married an actor and whose social circle was the wealthy and the powerful. In other words, Lind points out, she was no poor social climber.
Actors are always looking for windows that let them inside a character. Lind (pictured) is a young actress who’s best known for her work as Bianca in the daytime soap All My Children. Exner is the first real character she has portrayed. Lind said she feels a sense of artistic “responsibility” to portray the character’s complexity, not the black and white.
Lind read in Exner’s biography, Judith Exner: My story, that Exner absolutely never let the powerful men in her life pay for her. “She was self-sufficient, wouldn’t let people buy her stuff. She booked her own flights.”
Those would be airplane flights for her cross-country trysts with the young new president, who is portrayed in this play as a sexual athlete who needs Exner—or Marilyn Monroe or any number of other women—either to distract him from his presidential burdens or to relieve the extreme back pain from his PT-109 wartime injuries.
“She wanted what everyone wanted, to be loved. And they used her. And before she knew it, she was used up. Affairs with powerful people are not black and white. She had power herself,” reflected Lind.
That power was perhaps rooted in Exner’s beauty. In her intense dark eyes and, in the view of some, a Jackie look-alike quality. “She was not a slut or easy. I feel she had a great personality, a charisma too. She had a sway over these men. JFK was a prince, and he had something like love for her,” Lind argued.
Lind noted that her colleagues [Douglas Sills as playing JFK, John Cunningham as Jack’s dad Joe, Jordan Lage as mobster Giancana] have a different challenge: to portray with freshness characters people already know.
Exner is different. In the received history as well as in the play, “all the other characters characterize her as a certain thing,” Lind observed. She called it “a great privilege for me to reveal her in this way. These details about her have been ignored by history, as is the case for many women, especially those who were in submissive position with powerful men. It’s easier to call them home-wreckers than to examine their psychology.”
Lind was asked how she would want Exner, who died at age 65 in 1999, to respond to the play if she were in the audience. “I would want her to tell me, ‘Thank you for understanding me,’” Lind responded. “That’s my greatest wish.’”
The young actress, who is about the age Exner was in the 1960s, splits her time between Brooklyn and L.A. She has several other roles percolating for her next steps in her career, she said. She declined to name them, to avoid hexing her chances. Then she went back to her colleagues to resume running lines for Judith Exner.
Thanks to Allen Appel.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Is Piz Rizza Playboy Material?
When "Mob Wives Chicago" star Pia Rizza found out there were naked pictures of her being shopped to various media outlets ... she knew the drill -- RELEASE THE PHOTOS HERSELF!!!
Pia told TMZ ... she took the racy pics -- which she allowed TMZ to publish -- sometime last year, while still filming "Mob Wives" and sent them to her boyfriend to get some feedback on whether she had the right stuff for Playboy. But Pia told TMZ... the pics somehow got into the wrong hands -- and someone was trying to sell them without her permission.
Pia says she wanted the pics posted for two reasons:
1. She doesn't want anyone making money off of HER image
2. Yeah, she wants Playboy to notice
Thanks to TMZ.
Pia told TMZ ... she took the racy pics -- which she allowed TMZ to publish -- sometime last year, while still filming "Mob Wives" and sent them to her boyfriend to get some feedback on whether she had the right stuff for Playboy. But Pia told TMZ... the pics somehow got into the wrong hands -- and someone was trying to sell them without her permission.
Pia says she wanted the pics posted for two reasons:
1. She doesn't want anyone making money off of HER image
2. Yeah, she wants Playboy to notice
Thanks to TMZ.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Stacy Dittrich Discusses "Searching for Sandra: The Story Behind the Disappearance of Sandra Cantu" on Crime Beat Radio
On Thursday, March 14th, Veteran Police Officer Stacy Dittrich (www.stacydittrich.com) will be a guest on Crime Beat Radio to discuss her book, Searching for Sandra: The Story Behind the Disappearance of Sandra Cantu.
Crime Beat is a weekly hour-long radio program that airs every Thursday at 8 p.m. EST., on the Artist First World Radio Network at artistfirst.com/crimebeat.
Crime Beat is a weekly hour-long radio program that airs every Thursday at 8 p.m. EST., on the Artist First World Radio Network at artistfirst.com/crimebeat.
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