Author: admin

Admin’s note: It should go without saying that Joe Gibbons is a patron saint of this site, along with a host of others like Uncle Ted. Maybe we should put up a “Saints” page.

Out of Rikers and facing a bank robbery charge in Providence, he’s trying to complete his masterpiece of ‘autobiographical fiction’ that began with buying a dime bag

“Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth.”—Isabella Gardner, founder of Boston’s Gardner Museum.

In February 2017, Joe Gibbons sat in a Greenwich Village restaurant and calmly confessed to a role in the largest art heist in American history.

Gibbons, a filmmaker and former MIT lecturer now in his mid-sixties—back in circulation after pleading guilty in 2014 to a Manhattan bank robbery and spending a year in jail—had already confessed and would soon be charged with another bank robbery, this one in Providence, Rhode Island.

He was sitting with a Pulitzer-winning journalist, Stephen Kurkjian, and a novelist, Charles Pinning, both of whom had traveled from New England and knocked on his door that afternoon. Their visit came weeks after an assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts had called Gibbons’ lawyer to inquire about his possible involvement in the Isabella Gardner Museum heist.

LINK: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-sociopath-scholar-who-made-films-of-his-crimes-tried-to-confess-to-americas-most-famous-art-heist

Admin’s note: A lot of Uncle Ted nostalgia lately, hm?

Jamie Bartlett’s Christmas Reading – Books and blogs to understand how tech is changing the world

Constant stories of shadowy data analytics firms, Russian hacking, and trolling make it difficult to see the wood for the trees. There are a lot of books which cover these issues – and expect more to come – but this year I’ve found it more useful to read technology books that help understand current events in a wider context.

LINK: https://unherd.com/2018/12/why-the-unabombers-manifesto-is-essential-christmas-reading/

Admin’s note: It’s kinda funny to read an article in NY Mag talking to and about friends, projects we’ve contributed to, and former collaborators on this very site. Guess it just goes to show you. Show you what, I dunno, but something.

 

When John Jacobi stepped to the altar of his Pentecostal church and the gift of tongues seized him, his mother heard prophecies — just a child and already blessed, she said. Someday, surely, her angelic blond boy would bring a light to the world, and maybe she wasn’t wrong. His quest began early. When he was 5, the Alabama child-welfare workers decided that his mother’s boyfriend — a drug dealer named Rock who had a red carpet leading to his trailer and plaster lions standing guard at the door — wasn’t providing a suitable environment for John and his sisters and little brother. Before they knew it, they were living with their father, an Army officer stationed in Fayetteville, North Carolina. But two years later, when he was posted to Iraq, the social workers shipped the kids back to Alabama, where they stayed until their mother hanged herself from a tree in the yard. John was 14. In the tumultuous years that followed, he lost his faith, wrote mournful poems, took an interest in news reports about a lively new protest movement called Occupy Wall Street, and ran away from the home of the latest relative who’d taken him in — just for a night, but that was enough. As soon as he graduated from high school, he quit his job at McDonald’s, bought some camping gear, and set out in search of a better world.

LINK: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/the-unabomber-ted-kaczynski-new-generation-of-acolytes.html

Admin’s note: Next time, stay mum until AFTER the deed is done. 😉

A Florida stripper with an affinity for serial killers and mass murderers threatened to commit a violent killing spree in a “very public place,” police said.

Brein Basarich, a 31-year-old dancer at Show Girls in Plant City — about 25 miles east of Tampa — was arrested Wednesday after posting threats of widespread carnage on her Tumblr page under the chilling username “taking-lives,” according to a police affidavit obtained by The Post.

“I had a vision … of a very public place, only one way in and one way out,” one post reads. “Preferably a bar/club on a busy night. 2019 has a lot in store if my plans go accordingly!”

When asked by another user if she had homicidal urges, investigators said, Basarich responded: “I feel at times a lot of us have urges, whether they will admit or not is the question. So yes, I have.”

LINK: https://nypost.com/2019/01/07/serial-killer-loving-stripper-threatened-mass-shooting-cops/