Most of South Jersey is semi-literate - or so it seems on Facebook

SEATTLE, Washington - I now have several people from the Old Country linked up to me in Facebook. I get to see how they write. I also see how the people linked to them write. I also see the writing of people who, like me, have left the area.

This seems to be a fair summary:

• From South Jersey, still living there: semi-literate at best
  
• From South Jersey, moved to Florida: semi-literate at best
  
• From South Jersey, moved to [anywhere but Florida]: often literate
  

I've been bashing anyone younger than John Wooden who moves to Florida for a long time. The people just staying in Jersey.... what can I say. It's probably not fair for me to make these judgments based on brief online writings, but it's just brutal stuff.

There are many possible theories. Could be that the ones who stay where they're born are by definition the dopes. Or maybe there's some environmental factor sapping writing competence out of the people. Or, these people can all form a written sentence perfectly well but choose not to do so on Facebook (but the refugees typically DO write well there).

There could be another angle, the when-I-was-your-age angle. Maybe the schooling just sucks lately. Case in point: my mother, who finished her schooling by graduating high school circa 1960 and has never had a job that involved writing at all.

Six or eight years ago, she briefly got email access at a job she had. So I sent her an email to see her response. I had never seen a written paragraph from her in my life. Many times in the last 15 years, I've seen the emails of people not used to writing, seen the creaky language, brutal capitalization, etc. I was expecting the worst from her.

Well, her email was flawless. Full lush sentences, everything capitalized correctly, none of the common bumblings (its vs. it's, etc.) I could barely believe it. If you had told me it was written by Lionel Trilling, I might have believed you.

I don't have the email any more, it was sent to a work account at an old job. But that writing simply would not fly on today's South Jersey internet.

Simplified cuisine for a change

ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey - After another year of small-plates dining and cutting edge ingredients in Seattle, it's good to get back for a few days of the simple, homespun fare of South Jersey Italian restaurants.

No pomegranate aioli here. The menus feature simply prepared seafood and basic red sauces - the peasant cuisine of southern Italy. Most places have at least one dish that is known as "Joe's Favorite" or similar.

Atlantic City political circus getting national attention

SEATTLE, Washington - The most recent Atlantic City corruption sentences are so noteworthy, they got front-page treatment on the Drudge Report and a mention on KJR's Groz with Gas earlier this week.

A hooker and a Baptist minister having sex in a seedy motel room, where a camera was hidden in a clock radio. A videotape delivered to a radio talk show host by someone wearing oversized glasses, a fake beard and surgical gloves.

Even by the flamboyant corruption standards set by Atlantic City's government over the decades, this was one for the books.

Former City Council President Craig Callaway was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison for his role in setting up council rival Eugene Robinson with a prostitute in a motel room and secretly videotaping the encounter.

Some of the details of Callaway's nefarious plot:

In 2006, [Callaway] rented two rooms at the Bayview Motel, a nondescript lodging outside Atlantic City.

According to an FBI agent's court testimony in June, co-defendant Floyd Tally placed a camera hidden in a clock radio inside one of the rooms. A video recorder was set up in the adjacent room.

The agent said Callaway and his brothers, Ronald and David, paid a prostitute between $150 and $200 to lure Robinson to the motel and perform a sex act on him.

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Prosecutors say Callaway and the others confronted Robinson with the tape and told him it would be released to the media if he didn't resign.

The article mentioned some of the spectacular recent history of Atlantic City politicians:

As recently as 2006, one third of the nine council members were either in prison or on their way. One incumbent councilman is awaiting trial next year for his role in the Callaway sex video case.

In 1989 and 1990, four council members and the mayor were indicted in a bribery case. Only one councilman and the mayor, James Usry, were convicted.

The mayor before Usry, Michael Matthews, was a good childhood friend of my father before growing up, becoming mayor, and being sent to the federal hoosegow for 15 years after pleading guilty to extortion.

Craig Callaway also made headlines in 2002 when, at a city Democratic Committee meeting, his brother Jihad (yes, Jihad Callaway) pulled a knife on a supporter of one of Mr Callaway's opponents.

A rare TV special on Atlantic City

NEW YORK, New York - I've always noted that Atlantic City gets less attention in TV and movies than you would expect. The ledger balances a bit this Thursday on HBO (I check the HBO schedule when I'm at a hotel as I don't have it at home) as they present ATLANTIC CITY HOOKERS: IT AIN'T E-Z BEING A HO', a self-explanatory documentary.

"With some of our personalities out of the game, we decided to head south to the Jersey Shore, where we see the Atlantic City lights, where many lost souls go broke," explains [director Brent] Owens.

Shot on location in the casinos and on the streets of this east-coast gambling mecca, the often explicit, yet frequently poignant, documentary underscores the hopes, fears and humanity of these Boardwalk women-for-hire, telling hard-luck stories of six prostitutes, who open up in a series of informal interviews.

This thing is about 4 years old but it's new to me.

Mary Carter Paint has hidden its tracks

SEATTLE, Washington - I said in a previous post that I wanted to take a look at a 1976 Rolling Stone article that discussed the Mary Carter Paint company, to see if it had any new information or better-documented sources compared to what I have already read on the topic. Not only did the article contain some factual errors that I easily spotted, but the portion of the article that I cared about was retracted by Rolling Stone in 1977.

I was hoping for detailed source documentation, but instead I just got references to "CIA sources" when discussing the evolution of Mary Carter Paint:

Mary Carter Paint, according to CIA sources, was a CIA front group. It had been set up by Thomas Dewey and Allen Dulles. In 1958 Dewey and some friends bought controlling interest in the Crosby Miller Corporation with $2 million in CIA money from Dulles, who was still CIA director. A year later the Crosby Miller Corporation merged with the paint company. During the Bay of Pigs operation in 1960 and 1961, according to CIA sources, Mary Carter laundered CIA payments to the Cuban exile army.

I'm always skeptical when a relatively low-level detail like this (setting up a front company) is credited to the top guys in an organization. It reeks of name-dropping - like Bill Cooper's writings on the alien-government alliance in Behold a Pale Horse.

The article goes on to discuss how the CIA morphed Mary Carter Paint into Resorts International and it became a "conduit for hiding money it sends to counterinsurgency groups in Central in South America."

After suffering through reading this at the library on microfiche (in negative, of course), I find out that Rolling Stone retracted this portion of their story in 1977 after being sued by Resorts International:

Rolling Stone in 1977, after being legally challenged by Resorts, retracted a story that CIA Director Allen Dulles was majorly involved in the buyout. Quoting CIA sources, Kohn wrote that in 1958 Dulles gave Dewey and Thomas $2 million in CIA money to set up a front company. With it they supposedly bought Crosby-Miller Corp, which merged with Mary Carter a year later. In its retraction, Rolling Stone noted that while it respected Kohn as a researcher, Resorts International had shown the magazine persuasive evidence that Kohn had been wrong or been misled by his sources.
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During the early 70s, Resort International/Mary Carter's activities were occasionally cited in the left-wing press as evidence that it had been carrying out CIA business. When similar allegations appeared in a Las Vegas newspaper, Resorts --- as in the case of Rolling Stone --- threatened suit and won a full retraction. (source)

In addition to this retraction, I saw some very simple factual errors regarding Howard Hughes that anyone who has read 9 books about Hughes would spot immediately. The photo-reconnaissance plane Hughes was developing during WWII for the government (and in a prototype of which Hughes had his disastrous 1946 crash) was the XF-11, not the F-11 as the article states. The article calls Hughes's medical charity the "Hughes Medical Foundation"; its correct name is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, that's what it was called when it was formed in 1953 and it still exists and it's still called the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Perhaps Rolling Stone retracted these things too, but I don't want to pore over microfiche to find out.

While I'm on the topic of microfiche - perhaps the library, instead of shelling out for misused flat-screen TVs, should find some technology that lets the user view a negative microfiche in positive form. Viewing a negative is only useful when looking at pictures of the Shroud of Turin.

CRDA head frets about "grind joints" in Atlantic City

SEATTLE, Washington - The Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (or CRDA, pronounced "creedah") is a New Jersey state agency entrusted with skimming some money from Atlantic City casinos (in addition to various other gaming-only taxes and fees) and investing in various infrastructure and development projects in New Jersey. They are currently in a bit of a dust-up with Atlantic City officials over the sale of Bader Field, a former airport (in fact, the first place in the United States to be called an "airport") that is considered a primo casino development location.

Penn National Gaming has offered Atlantic City $800 million (including fat $50 million payments in each of the first two years) so that they could buy the land and divide it so that up to four casinos could open there. Atlantic City is having its first tax reappraisal on residents in 20 years and wants to use some of that money to soften the blow.

CRDA head Thomas Carver blasted this plan with language a bit spicier than you usually hear from a bureaucrat. He said that the Penn National offer was a "scam", that the two large upfront payments were "tantamount to a bribe", and that Atlantic City would end up with shitty casinos instead of the lavish "megacasinos" he envisions:

"It will take the city back years. It will almost preclude us from reaching the next level in terms of our evolution into an international resort destination. You will end up possibly, at best, with four grind joints out there, based on how they want to divide the land up."

Carver believes that it is the job of CRDA, not the city, to oversee a bidding process for the land, and at least partly blames the dispute on "long-held suspicions by city officials that the CRDA is trying to usurp the city's authority." Well, yes, that exactly what the CRDA is doing, usurping the city's authority. People don't trust Atlantic City to handle its own affairs for good reasons, including Michael Matthews, a childhood friend of my father who became mayor in 1982 and within three years was serving a 15 year jail term for extortion.

And for those not versed in gaming lingo, a "grind joint" is a casino that operates by catering to a large volume of small-stakes players, instead of high-rollers. Perhaps Mr Carver hasn't noticed the 800+ junket and charter buses that arrive daily in Atlantic City, ferrying people directly to the casinos from poor neighborhoods in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Sounds like grinding to me.

Homework assignments on Mary Carter Paint

SEATTLE, Washington - In the footnote of one of my posts on the Tropicana gaming license denial in Atlantic City, I noted the rather suspicious fact that Resorts International, the company that opened the first Atlantic City casino in 1978, was the Mary Carter Paint Company only a decade earlier. Paint companies typically don't open casinos. The orthodox explanation is that the company (which was based in Florida in the 1960s) expanded into real estate, which led to acquiring property in the Bahamas, which became casinos, thus they were pros at this thing by the time gambling was legalized in New Jersey.

Various authors that I have read have put a more insidious spin on this. Charles Higham, in Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, says the following:

He [Hughes] made a deal with the CIA, which owned Mary Carter Paints, an improbably named "front" company, to let him buy the operating rights to Mary Carter Paints's Paradise Island Casino, Hotel and Ocean Club. The founders, in 1958, of Mary Carter Paints were Thomas Dewey and Allen Dulles, at a time when Dulles was head of the CIA and shortly before Dulles obtained Maheu's assistance in attempting to kill Fidel Castro, with Hughes's tacit approval... In 1963, the CIA linked up with mob connections through Mary Carter to support fascist governments in South America. By 1964, Robert Kennedy... was aggressively exploring the Hughes-Moe Dalitz-Sam Giancana-CIA-Mary Carter Paints-Nassau connections.

In his source notes Higham says that this came from "files of the Watergate hearings."

Higham may not exactly be a bedrock source of information, as The Secret Life details alleged homosexual activity of Hughes, including longstanding affairs with Tyrone Power and Cary Grant, and essentially alleges that Hughes died of AIDS, even though Hughes died in 1976, he essentially ceased sexual activity in the 1950s, and documented AIDS infections were extremely rare in the US before 1980.

The Money and the Power by Sally Denton and Roger Morris says:

Formerly the Mary Carter Paint Company, which was widely considered to be a CIA front that laundered payments to the Cuban exile army in the early sixties, Resorts International now owned several Bahamian casinos and was thought to be dominated by [Meyer] Lansky.

The source notes for that list Masters of Paradise by Alan Block as the source.

An old conspiracy mailing list post states that the CIA-Dulles-Mary Carter connection was documented in the May 20, 1976 issue of Rolling Stone.

The next time I'm at the library, I'll check out that copy of Rolling Stone (which also has an interview with Marlon Brando!) and look into things further. All of the sources above probably funnel to the research in the Rolling Stone article.

UPDATE I have followed up on this.

Forms to reclaim your Straw Man now available online

SEATTLE, Washington - Backwoods white survivalists and black nationalist schemers have at least one thing in common - a byzantine, conspiratorial plan to escape debts and place themselves above the law known as "Redemption Theory". And while I can visualize the mimeographed newsletters by which this theory was distributed in the past, the paperwork and instructions to help you achieve "Redemption" are now sold on the good old internet, at the Moorish Republic Nation.

I do not wish to contract with you

Redemption Theory was started by a longtime white-extremist figure named Roger Elvick in the 1980s. Without going into too much detail, Redemption holds that the United States government went bankrupt in the 1930s and started taking out international loans against a bureaucratic alter-ego of every citizen. This alter-ego is known as a "straw man" and Elvick and his soulmates claim to have discovered a complex process by which a citizen gains access to his "straw man" and to the money contained therein. In practice, the "process" consists of bad checks and various bureaucratic and commercial filings. Elvick peddled this throughout the 1980s and 1990s before being sentenced to four years in jail for various crimes in April 2005.

The analogous movement among black men is known as the al Moroccan Empire, or Moors, or Moorish Nation, or other things with Moor in the name. The only reason I know about any of this at all is that a few guys in Atlantic City were caught up in this a few years ago. In 2003 three men, including former Atlantic City Housing Authority director W. Oscar Harris, were hauled before a judge [links to Press of AC now pay-only - jeff] for attempting to liberate their "straw man." Per their ideolgy, they responded to questions from the judge with identical, cryptic responses, including "If you think you can make a legal determination for me, you're fired", "I do not wish to contract with you", and my personal favorite, "Is this your chambers, or a courtroom?"

The black wing of all of this has added an interesting twist - they claim that the 1787 treaty between the Morocco and the United States exempts "Moroccans" from U.S. law. Thus, when Moor devotee and former Pleasantville (NJ) police officer Thomas Scott was being tried for fraud, [links to Press of AC now pay-only - jeff]he simply informed the court that his name was now Oman Valord Bey and that the laws of the United States no longer applied to him.

I've read the treaty in question and I don't think I see what they're talking about.

The Tropicana gaming license denial and casino regulation

SEATTLE, Washington - The Courier-Post of Cherry Hill, NJ recently editorialized on the denial of a gaming license to Columbia Sussex, a denial that I have previously discussed. The Courier-Post thinks that the Casino Control Commission went too far in denying the license, and that much of the justification for denying the license (the nebulous "running a first-class property") was for business practices that would have doomed the casino anyway in the competitive Atlantic City market:

We're not denying the Tropicana has slipped or that new ownership would almost certainly do a better job and hire needed staff back... but we think the Casino Control Commission went too far because, in a free-enterprise system, what right does the government have to tell an owner, "You need to do a better job or we'll make you sell." The commission ruled that Columbia Sussex failed to meet state gaming license requirements by lacking business ability and lacking good character, honesty and integrity.

It would be one thing if the casinos owners had allowed cheating to thrive, weren't keeping enough money on hand to pay winning gamblers, or were rigging slot machines to never pay out. This would violate the law or destroy gamblers' trust in a fair game. But that isn't what has happened at the Tropicana.

It's simply been bad ownership trying to maximize profit by sacrificing quality. It's not a pleasant thing for customers, and it hurts, especially for those who've been laid off. But it's something that bad businesses do all the time, and it's their right to do. If they want to run themselves into the ground, they can.
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With this decision, a message has been sent to businesses inside and outside New Jersey that the state has no problem passing judgment on how your business is run.

There is a lesson in all of this about government regulation and oversight more generally. The editorial mentions that the original, overarching mandate of casino regulation in New Jersey was to prevent mob infiltration of the casinos and to ensure honest games. The regulators have been successful at this*, but regulatory bodies seem to be congenitally incapable of keeping a narrow scope to their regulation. Atlantic City casinos have been burdened by a blizzard of regulatory decrees that have nothing to do with the honesty and integrity of the business. Examples:

• Casinos started operating in Atlantic City in 1978, but poker was not offered until 1993. Why? Regulators were reluctant to approve a game where the players touched the cards. Players had been touching the cards in Nevada and Europe for decades, but so what? This was pure fear, ignorance and over-regulation.
  
• All parties in casino poker are interested in a fast game. However, for many years after the introduction of poker in 1993, all players had to buy their chips from the dealer at the table, instead of from a cashier window or a chip runner. Why? Well, casino accounting involves some metrics related to how much money is in the box on each table, and how many chips are in the tray (the "take" and the "drop", among other things) and having players buy chips at a cashier window mussed up the calculations. Again, other jurisdictions offered many ways to buy chips, but New Jersey regulators were resistant to change. It took years and years, but players can finally buy chips at a cashier window in New Jersey.
  
• The ratio of table games to slot machines at a casino is controlled by regulators. Slot machines average more profit per square foot than table games, so regulators put in requirements for a minimum percentage of table games out of a fear that some casinos would turn into pure slot-houses. This has also been relaxed over the years, but the fact that it exists at all is a classic regulatory over-reach of the type mentioned by the Courier-Post.
  
• While I'm mentioning square footage - regulators also mandated a mininum number of restaurants on a property, based on the square footage of the casino. This typically came to more restaurants than the property needed, so some casinos (especially the larger ones) had a restaurant or two sitting around, that was open the bare minimum hours per week necessary to satisfy the regulators, but was otherwise idle and unwanted.
  
• Casino managers holding a Key license (on the casino floor, this translates to Pit Boss and higher level management) are not allowed to gamble anywhere in New Jersey. This regulation seems to be based on the nonsensical belief that high-level personnel will have some special insight on how to cheat a casino. I know some good casino employees that are basically stuck on their career path because they do not want to submit to this silly regulation. This prohibition used to be broader, applying to every employee of a casino, not just the key employees - my father, may he rest in peace, worked at a casino and used to don a wig and a fake cast on his arm to go gambling.
  

This list is not the result of intensive research, it's stuff off the top of my head that anyone that has been around New Jersey casinos knows - I'm sure there's much more stuff that I don't know about.

I think this whole experience planted in me a basic wariness of burdensome regulation. Not an outright opposition to it, but a healthy skepticism - a realization that it will inevitable be over-broad in scope, and provide a lot of counterproductive sand in the gears for each bit of good it does. So when politicians start ringing the bell for more regulation of something (like John Edwards recently calling for sweeping new food regulations - is there some mass poisoning of Americans by evil food companies that I don't know about?) I look at it with all appropriate cynicism.

* I am taking the mainstream view that New Jersey casinos are largely mob-free and have been the whole time. Some authors have a different view - that the company owning the first New Jersey casino, Resorts International, was either a Meyer Lansky mob operation, or a CIA front company, or both. It is suspicious that just ten years before the casino opened, Resorts International was the humble Mary Carter Paint Company.

Kentucky Fried gaming license

SEATTLE, Washington - It's not easy to be denied a gaming license in New Jersey, but Kentucky-based Columbia Sussex Corp. has managed to do it. Columbia Sussex bought the parent company of the Tropicana Atlantic City this past January and has been operating under temporary licensing.

In the months following the acquisition, about 25% of the workforce was laid off (including several friends of mine) and allegations have flown that the deep layoffs left the property in a filthy, poorly operated state. During licensing hearings last month, fired executive Fred Buro (bitter laid-off guy, or conscience of a casino?) discussed the alleged hissy fits of CS head William J. Yung regarding layoffs and regulatory oversight:

The new owner of Tropicana Casino and Resort chafed at regulatory oversight and flew into a rage when told he would not be allowed to make all of the job cuts he wanted, the casino's former president testified Wednesday.

"He said, 'I told you not to tell the regulators. Now you go back and make these cuts, or I'll find someone else who will,'" Fred A. Buro recalled of an angry warning from William J. Yung III, the Kentucky businessman who acquired Tropicana in January.
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Buro said Yung was irate after learning that Buro had discussed proposed job cuts with the New Jersey Casino Control Commission and its sister agency, the Division of Gaming Enforcement. Gaming regulators were concerned about hundreds of layoffs Tropicana had made under Yung's ownership and wanted to be told of others that were being considered.

Yung planned on making $30 million to $40 million in payroll cuts at Tropicana as his company, Columbia Sussex Corp., prepared to take ownership of Tropicana. He began aggressively cutting jobs from the very beginning and complained that New Jersey casino regulators were interfering in his business when they objected to additional layoffs, Buro testified.

"It became a New Jersey thing with him. 'Is this the way you do business in New Jersey?'" Buro said of Yung's reaction to the regulatory system.

Yeah, Mr Yung, that's exactly the way you do business in New Jersey.

Columbia Sussex will appeal the ruling, but unless they win the appeal they're going to have to sell the property.

The old Atlantis casino was the last operating property to be denied a license, in 1989. Hilton was denied a license to operate a new property (that they had just finished building!) in 1985; this property was prompty sold to Donald Trump and is now the Trump Marina casino.

The Internet enters the final frontier - Atlantic City

ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey - I could have avoided many of my recent misadventures at Charbucks if I had known at that time about the free wifi at Formica Bros. Bakery Cafe (no website) in Atlantic City. This is located across the street from the "World Famous" White House Sub Shop (again, no website) and serves fresh breads, biscotti, homemade pizza, and Seattle's Best Coffee (SBC is the best you can hope for here, I guess) and is open 7am - 7pm.

If not for the old dago standing at the counter below, you could just as easily think you're in Seattle.