It’s Facebook’s world now
Up-and-coming Sicilian mobster Domenico Palazzotto, 28, was outed in August by Italy’s L’Espresso magazine as the owner of an ineffectively pseudonymous Facebook page showing off his muscled, bare-chested body and perhaps recruiting members. One fan asked, “Do I need to send a (resume)?” “Yes, brother,” came the reply. “We need to consider your criminal record. We do not take people with clean records.” Palazzotto operates out of Palermo and listed among his “likes” the singer Kenny Loggins.
Can’t possibly be true
A jury’s murder conviction, and the 15-to-life sentence it carried, against Daniel Floyd in Brooklyn, New York, for a 2008 killing went for naught in July when the Brooklyn Supreme Court ordered a retrial (with witnesses forced to testify all over again). The sole reason the court cited was a decision by the trial judge on the first day — to seat the potential jury pool and not Floyd’s mother, who, because she was temporarily left standing that first day, argued successfully that her son’s right to a “public” trial had been violated. …
Two age-30ish men knocked on the door of a Sebastian, Texas, woman at 12:30 a.m. on Aug. 3, asking for water and if they could please come inside to charge their cellphone — and the woman apparently cheerfully invited them in, later offering them use of her backyard shed to grab some sleep. She did not learn until a short time later, when a law enforcement manhunt widened into her neighborhood, that they were wanted for murdering a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Officers arrested the pair inside the shed.
The new normal
The ubiquitous “sexting” phenomenon continues to flourish. A Washington state agency suspended the license of anesthesiologist Arthur Zilberstein in June after finding that he had exchanged sexually explicit text messages — during surgeries. …
One of the emerging occupational skills for Emergency Medical Technicians, according to first responders interviewed in a June Wall Street Journal feature, is merely holding up blankets at accident scenes — to block onlookers from their apparently uncontrollable urge to take gruesome photos to send to their friends.
Anger management needed
Roger Harris, 63, and Bryan Bandes, 42, brawled in August on the 7th tee at the Springdale Golf Course near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, while arguing the rule for playing a ball in a rain puddle. Harris apparently 3-wooded Bandes in the head; Bandes landed punches causing a swollen jaw, a fat lip and a scratched eye.
Wait. What?
In Multnomah County, Oregon, in July, a Romanian princess pleaded guilty to cockfighting. Irina Walker, 61, was born in Switzerland where her father, King Michael I, lived after abdicating the throne. She came to Oregon in 1983, where, in a second marriage in 2007, she fell in with former deputy sheriff John Walker, who had moved on to the gambling and cockfighting business, and, according to a USA Today report, she was assisting him.
Solution to a non-problem
Berlin’s Lutheran Georgen Parochial cemetery inaugurated a 4,300-square-foot area of its grounds as reserved exclusively for lesbians — for women who, said a spokesman, “want to be buried among other lesbians.”
Movies come to life
In July, officials at the Djanogly City Academy in Nottingham, England, broke up an attempt by five students (aged 11 to 14) attending a daytime-locked-down school to escape by tunneling under a security fence. They had discovered the boys’ metal cutlery hidden at the scene. (A World War II tunneling escape from a Nazi prison was partially successful and became the story for the 1963 movie “The Great Escape” starring Steve McQueen.)
Not ready for prime time
A 40-year-old man (not named by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) was arrested in that city on July 31 after a several-hour, epically inept, crime spree. Attempting to rob a restaurant, he was turned down by employees and customers, then turned down by two potential carjack victims (the first of whom added insult by pulling out her cellphone camera and shooting video), before giving up just as police arrived. (His only take was the $15 he had swiped from the restaurant’s tip jar.) …
Joshua Pawlak, 27, entered a total of four businesses in Woodbridge, New Jersey, on July 27 and similarly met resistance and/or indifference to his money demands — and came away from the four with only $2, also from a tip jar. CV
Read more weird news at www.WeirdUniverse.net.
