Brendan I. Koerner's Blog

I spent part of the long holiday weekend catching up with Evan Osnos’s account of Macau’s casino scene, a story gorgeously stuffed with details of nouveau riche excess. The mind reels at the thought that Macau’s high rollers require stools upon which to place their handbags, or that they rock $12,000 mobile phones. But the anecdote I loved most came high up in the piece, as Osnos recalled his first visit to one of the peninsula’s most lavish destination:

A short drive from the ferry, Steve Wynn has a complex with two hotels, where the Louis Vuitton outlet is said to generate more sales per square foot than any other Louis Vuitton outlet worldwide. Walking past a tank of luminescent jellyfish, which require a specially designed curtain to sleep at night, the casino official who was showing me the place told me that Chinese clientele demand a heightened level of luxury, because “everyone is a president or a chairman.” We stopped into the complex’s newest Michelin-starred restaurant, which has an in-house poet who writes a personal verse for every V.I.P.

This was the way things worked in the old days, correct? Before poets were expected to support themselves through book sales and teaching gigs, they relied on powerful patrons who expected adulation in return. I’m sure the poet who holds this post is thankful for the steady paycheck, but I do wonder what he thinks of the multi-millionaire strangers he must shower with praise. He probably didn’t get into the poetry game because he yearned to massage the egos of fat cats.

And the never-ending cosmic ballet twixt art and commerce continues…

As you enjoy the forthcoming three-day weekend, take a moment to think good thoughts for the beleaguered citizens of Papua New Guinea, who are weathering what could be the nation’s nastiest political crisis in years. Matters started to get out of hand three days ago, when Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court ruled that former prime minister Sir Michael Somare (above) should be reinstated to his old job. (The Economist has a good backgrounder on the legal issues here.) Somare tried to bum rush the Government House to get himself swore back into office, but he was turned away by soldiers loyal to current prime minister Peter O’Neill.

Then O’Neill and his surrogates countered in most dramatic fashion:

An extraordinary scene unfolded at the Waigani Supreme Court yesterday when Deputy Prime Minister Belden Namah burst into a Supreme Court session presided over by Chief Justice Sir Salamo Injia and demanded he be arrested for treason and sedition.

Mr Namah was flanked by senior ministers in the O’Neill/Namah cabinet, along with members of the Police and Defence Forces…At approximately 1.45 pm Mr Namah and his entourage walked into courtroom three and shouted at the Chief Justice: “Enough is enough” and “I warned you, you are the most corrupt person in this country.”

The Chief Justice lifted his hands up to calm the situation but upon seeing police advancing towards him quickly made his way out through the judge’s entrance into his chambers. His associate Allan Dian tried to follow him and prevent police from entering but was manhandled.

In a statement Mr Namah said, “The Chief Justice is a threat to National Security. He is not an elected leader. He has on many occasions given permanent stay orders to prevent police exercising their constitutional functions. His decisions encroach into Parliament’s powers – he has usurped the powers of the Legislature, Executive and the Governor-General. His judgments have been vindictive and he has not been behaving like a Chief Justice but rather a tyrant, drunk with power.”

You can probably see where this is heading now: A fracture in PNG’s security services, followed by a state-of-emergency declaration. O’Neill and Somare are such bitter enemies that it’s difficult to see how this impasse will be resolved unless one of them is arrested, harmed, or leaves the country. All that is certain now is that Papua New Guinea will suffer more because of its political leaders’ egotism. Same old, same old.

If the good folks at the National Insurance Crime Bureau are to be believed, the ol’ slip-and-fall con is thriving anew these days. Yet today’s practitioners of this tried-and-true scam are rank amateurs compared to Patricia Latham, who became a wealthy woman by perfecting the art of slip-and-fall. Her dedication to her craft was as deep as it was destructive, as this 1991 Orlando Sentinel article makes clear:

Using heavy rubber bands to bind her wrists and her son as a disguised witness to falls she staged, Patricia Latham was able to defraud insurance companies of thousands of dollars.

Latham, 59, a former Palm Beach and Broward County schoolteacher, her husband, Leroy, 62, and their son, David, 30, pleaded guilty on Thursday in Palm Beach County Circuit Court to swindling insurance companies…

The family’s confessions, which have yet to be made public, outline the drastic steps the family took to conduct the insurance schemes. Those steps included having David Latham physically harm his mother to make it appear she was injured during her staged falls. The couple also used their son as a backup witness in disguise, creating false names and establishing fictitious addresses for him to help support their claims.

The trio maintained during their confessions that a 1986 injury Patricia Latham sustained at a West Palm Beach McDonald`s restaurant was “a real slip and fall, but the injury started to heal too fast.” When Latham noted the quick healing of the hand she used to draw on classroom chalkboards, she did research. Through medical books, she found similar conditions.

When visiting attorneys, doctors or making court appearances, Patricia Latham would use her new medical knowledge to create a swollen hand. She wore sweat bands on her wrist, covering them with very tight rubber bands, for three to four hours before appearing.

After she was awarded $500,000 in the McDonald`s case, the family “intentionally went out” to look for “negligently repaired conditions” at restaurants and businesses. A poorly repaired carpet at Don Carter’s All- Star Lanes Ltd. in Boca Raton gave them their next target.

Once again, the sweat bands and rubber bands were used, but this time on both arms. “They had their son severely manipulate her hand to almost break it,” as they sat in a car in the bowling alley parking lot.

In 1988, Patricia Latham sued the bowling alley, but the lawsuit was dropped after insurance investigators filmed her using her hands during a trip to Walt Disney World.

Before her August arrest, Patricia Latham had fled from a San Diego courtroom. She was in the midst of a trial for a civil suit filed against a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant where she had staged another fall.

Yet Latham’s intelligence seems to have been of a very specific and devious nature, for she was a mess when it came to dealing with more ordinary aspects of life. Despite earning enough illicit money to live comfortably for many years, she wound up broke. I have to assume that Latham was less interested in the money than in the thrill of beating the system. We all have a desire to feel that we are not, in fact, at the mercy of circumstance. For Latham, her way of tasting that bit of human freedom was to pretend that she had broken her hands after slipping in a puddle of KFC barbecue sauce. To each her own.

As a tremendous fan of the French movie A Prophet—I defy you to find a flick with a better razor-attack scene—I was naturally drawn to this recent account of Corsica’s organized-crime problem. The French-run island sounds like it’s run like the Brooklyn docks circa 1952, with men of violence calling the shots at all levels. But that said, I had to pause and scratch my head upon reading this paragraph, which sort of undermines the whole article’s reason for existence:

Bozzi’s murder was the seventh of the 22 that disgraced Corsica in 2011 — a slow year compared to 2010 (40) and 2009 (44). In 2012, violence is already picking up. As of May, there have been nine killings.

First, if there have been nine killings as of May, the homicide pace hasn’t really picked up all that much. If the trend continues, Corsica’s year-end homicide rate will be just shy of 9 per 100,000 residents—high for placid Western Europe, of course, but well below that of most American cities with reputations for poor security. More important, couldn’t that homicide rate also be celebrated as progress? As the article itself notes, the number of annual killings has dropped in recent years. And as you can tell from the data above (taken from this fine tome), Corsica is a far less violent place today than in decades past.

Yes, Corsica has serious problems with organized crime and its attendant violence, many of which can only be addressed to solving the island’s political situation. But wouldn’t it be interesting to know why, exactly, the place has become safer over the years?

Slammed this Monday on business-y stuff—primarily trying to find a new tenant for the old Harlem headquarters. (Anyone in the market for a two-bedroom in a historic neighborhood? Holler.) Back tomorrow with something thoughtful; in the meantime, revel in the fact that some great humor does, in fact, translate across disparate cultures. So heartwarming that the Poles would dig Disorderlies.

I must confess to an undue fascination with bird theft, a crime too-seldom explored in the annals of popular literature. Though there is no shortage of stories about purloined finches, reporters never seem to explain how much the crooks stand to earn—or, more important, the mechanics of fencing illegally obtained birds. I was thus pleased to come across this account of recent swan-egg thefts in Florida, which flicks at the dollar amounts involved:

Forty swan eggs were stolen from nests on the shores of two lakes near downtown Lakeland, city officials said Friday. That’s double the 15 or 20 originally feared stolen since March.

The motive for the theft is believed to be money. Parks and recreation officials say an egg is worth $150 and a cygnet $300, so the thief or thieves could make up to $12,000, tops.

Digging a little deeper, I find that full-grown swans can retail for upwards of $3,500, a figure which would seem to substantiate the Florida officials’ estimates. It should be noted, however, that Cameroonian suppliers stand to roil the market with their cut-rate prices—though, granted, you need to factor in the probability of getting scammed when dealing with Yaoundé-based poultry farms.

Your daily reminder of why Belarus shouldn’t be hosting the 2014 World Hockey Championship:

A Belarusian opposition activist has been sentenced to 15 days in jail for using a sign to mock a plainclothes security officer.

In the April incident, Ivan Amelchanka was photographed standing next to a man who was using a hand-held camera to film an opposition-organized march in Minsk. The activist’s placard contained the word “Musorok”—a Russian slang word that can be translated as “fuzz” or “pig.” It also had an arrow pointing in the direction of the officer.

Amelchanka was technically found guilty of “hooliganism,” which I find both sad and uproarious. Perhaps the Belarusian judiciary should read Among the Thugs to develop a more solid understanding of what “hooligan” actually means.

The last time we checked in with Carol Kidu, Papua New Guinea’s lone female legislator, she was proposing a bil that would set aside a percentage of parliamentary seats for women. Since then, she has become the head of the nation’s forlorn opposition, a role which has brought her into frequent conflict with PNG’s thoroughly corrupt elite. Three days ago, as the above video attests, Kidu’s activism brought her to the streets of a Port Moresby slum, where security services were bulldozing homes to make way for a shiny new development. Kidu asked only that the residents be permitted to gather their possessions before being evicted. But the men who do the government’s bidding wouldn’t hear of it.

Watch the whole video if you can. The situation spirals out of control at the 1:45 mark, which is right around when the bullets start flying. This is life in a country where the rule of law is mostly an illusion.

On the road for much of today, so start your week off right with a little vintage King Kobra, the rare hair-metal band willing to sacrifice its hair for a worthy cause—in this case, the destruction of Commies. Louis Gossett Jr. kills it in this video, too.

I’ve been breaking out all my old kiddie books to read to Microkhan Jr., an experience that has taught me a lot about the formative images that shaped my worldview—sometimes to horrifying effect. One that jumped out at me the other day was from Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World. It purports to depict the demoralizing life of a Tokyo commuter, complete with those infamous subway pushers who cram salarymen onto the rush-hour trains. The Scarry drawing uses pigs instead of people, which makes for a disconcerting finished product—almost as if the passengers are being hauled to the slaughterhouse rather than office buildings.

As a result of that supposedly whimsical image, I developed a longstanding fascination with the travails (both real and imagined) of Japanese mass-transit users. Apparently I’m not the only one.