Category Archives: BAB’s A List

Costco And The Supersized Killer Cops

BAB's A List, Business, Criminal Injustice, Fascism, GUNS, Individual Rights

BY WILLIAM B. SCOTT

On July 10, 2010, Erik B. Scott, a 1994 U.S. Military Academy at West Point graduate with an MBA from Duke University, was shot to death by three Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (“Metro”) officers in front of a Las Vegas, NV, Costco big-box store. While many readers will recall that egregious, senseless murder, few know what followed: A jaw-dropping cover-up more typical of the old Soviet Union than America.

To every man and woman who carries a firearm, the Erik Scott shooting is a chilling reminder that billion-dollar companies, such as Costco, have irrational, secret, anti-gun policies that literally kill their customers.

Erik, a Boston Scientific cardiac pacemaker sales rep, was carrying a legally registered concealed firearm, while he and his girlfriend were shopping at Costco-Summerlin in Las Vegas. He also had a concealed-carry permit in his wallet, issued by the same Metro police force that killed him.

When Erik squatted on the floor to verify that three metal water bottles would fit into a soft-sided, zip-up cooler, a Costco employee spotted Erik’s Kimber Ultra Carry .45-caliber semiautomatic in an inside-the-waistband holster. A civil interchange with a Costco manager ensued, and Erik was told that a Costco policy banned guns inside company stores—although there were no signs to that effect posted outside or inside, and there’s no mention of a gun-ban policy in the membership application. Erik calmly responded that his sidearm was legal and that he had a concealed-carry weapon (CCW) permit on his person. The manager never asked Erik to leave the store, and the two parted on good terms, according to witnesses.

The Costco manager reassured a plainclothes security guard that Erik would be leaving soon. For reasons known only to him, the same young, cocky guard—defying management practices and company policy—placed a 911 call to the local police, falsely claiming Erik “had a gun and was acting erratic.” Thinking an armed madman was barricaded inside, Metro cops descended on the store in overwhelming force—15 police cruisers, a helicopter, an incident-command team and an ambulance.

An inbound Metro lieutenant suggested that Costco managers quietly evacuate the store. Unaware that the evacuation had anything to do with him, Erik and his girlfriend calmly walked out with the crowd, passing three Metro officers waiting at the entrance and exit doors. Costco’s aforementioned security guard identified Erik to an agitated, scared Metro officer, William Mosher, who was clutching a semiautomatic, visibly shaking and sweating profusely. Alarmed, Mosher spun around and immediately yelled something, which even nearby cops failed to comprehend.

Erik turned to find a frightened, supersized cop shouting three conflicting commands. With his left hand, Erik lifted his T-shirt to expose the Kimber, and repeated, “I am armed, I am armed … .” Witnesses said he moved his right elbow enough to expose the Kimber. In his right hand, Erik held a BlackBerry cell phone.

Mosher instantly panicked and fired two shots with a .45-caliber Glock 21. The cop’s first hollow-point slug struck Erik in the heart; the second went through his right thigh, well below his jeans’ front pocket.

Two other officers hesitated not at all, then fired another five rounds, all into Erik’s back. Erik was shot a total of seven times. The five that hit him in the back were fired after he was on the ground, dying.

Based on a recording of the Costco fool’s 911-call, we’ve confirmed that Mosher gave Erik three conflicting commands and fired, all within two seconds. Mosher then knelt on his victim’s back and handcuffed Erik’s hands.

Costco had numerous security cameras inside the store and at least four trained on the entrance, where the lethal shooting took place. Violating department policies, Metro detectives did NOT immediately seize the surveillance system’s two digital video recorders’ hard disks. They left the critical DVR and hard drive in Costco’s control for five days, allowing Costco-Summerlin personnel and the store’s IT contractor to tamper with video data. Five days after the shooting, Metro detectives finally decided to pick up one Costco DVR. After valiant attempts to “recover” critical imagery, the DVR was sent to the U.S. Secret Service’s Los Angeles office, where forensics experts examined it. The experts later testified that 96 percent of the DVR’s data were recovered. The four percent not recoverable just happened to encompass the time Erik was in Costco, as well as the fatal officer-involved shooting. The hard disk’s platter sectors, where that critical four percent of unrecoverable data resided, was physically damaged, as if the disk were running, “then dropped from about chest high,” according to forensic experts’ testimony.

Within hours of the shooting, a Clark County deputy public administrator and a Metro cop illegally entered Erik’s condominium and removed several of his firearms. One pistol, a small Ruger LCP, was later produced as “proof” that Erik was carrying two guns. Why two? Because the AMR ambulance crew had reported finding a gun on Erik’s body. The sole gun Erik really was carrying (the Kimber) had already been removed from his dead body and placed on the ground at Costco, still in the holster, as if Erik had pulled it, thereby “justifying” Erik’s murder. In fact, the only item Erik ever had in-hand was his BlackBerry smartphone. In a state of panic, Mosher couldn’t distinguish a BlackBerry from a semiautomatic pistol. Erik was literally executed.

There is absolutely no doubt that Erik was murdered. However, the integrity-challenged cops of Metro’s “Blue Wall” immediately resorted to post-shooting procedures that are standard practice for hundreds of corrupt Las Vegas police officers: Conceal the facts, destroy and manufacture “evidence,” coerce selected eyewitnesses, and systematically demonize the deceased victim. The cover-up of Erik’s murder-by-cop was aided and abetted by the Clark County district attorney, an unprincipled union—the Las Vegas Police Protective Association—and wealthy power brokers who control The Strip.

My family filed two lawsuits in federal court—one against the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the three shooters and the sheriff, Douglas Gillespie, and a second against Costco. For reasons unbelievable, both suits went nowhere. After the second was dismissed, our lawyer said, “I don’t think it’s possible to get justice in this town.”

The truth about Erik’s murder and its blatant cover-up is so bizarre that non-Las Vegas citizens would never believe it. Consequently, I resorted to asymmetric warfare. I wrote a novel based on the actual events of my son’s senseless execution. Entitled The Permit, the book is “faction”—truth wrapped in a techno-thriller story. The Permit is a fast-moving, riveting tale of intrigue, corruption and accountability, in which murder-by-cop victim “Erik Steele” was actually a covert assassin for Checkmate, an ultra-secret Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism team. Arrogant, low-intelligence Las Vegas Metro cops had brazenly killed a high-value federal agent. As Metro leaders soon realize, their trigger-happy cretins truly did kill the wrong guy.

Only in fiction was justice finally done.

READ: “Stop the Killing on Both Sides of the ‘Thin Blue Line’” By Bill Scott.

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William B. Scott, the late-Erik Scott’s father and author of “The Permit,” is a full-time author and consultant. He retired in 2007 as the Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief for Aviation Week & Space Technology. Over a 22-year career with the international magazine, he wrote more than 2,500 stories, and received 17 editorial awards. He is a coauthor of two other novels, “Space Wars: The First Six Hours of World War III” and “Counterspace: The Next Hours of World War III,” and a nonfiction book, “Inside the Stealth Bomber: The B-2 Story.”

During a nine-year Air Force career, Bill served as aircrew on classified airborne-sampling missions, collecting nuclear debris by flying through radioactive clouds; an electronics engineering officer at the National Security Agency, developing satellite communications security systems; and an instrumentation and flight test engineer on U.S. Air Force fighter and transport aircraft development programs.

Bill is a Flight Test Engineer graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and a licensed commercial pilot with instrument and multi-engine ratings. He has logged approximately 2,000 hours on 80 aircraft types, and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from California State University-Sacramento.

Ebony, Ivory And No Harmony

BAB's A List, Crime, Education, Race

By Myron Pauli

Twenty years ago, I met a Yugoslavian physicist visiting MIT who assured all that Yugoslavia would not collapse into civil war and that only a few “kooks” were stirring up ethnic antagonism. It turned out he knew his quantum chromodynamics better than his kinsmen. Similarly, when I saw übercynic Fred Reed’s portents of civic collapse. It exceeded even my own pessimism. Next week, of course, was Ferguson, and Fred seems once again prophetic. Fred even specifically mentioned that the pervasive racism is in the “real world” and not in physics departments!

The issue of police militarization, of course, is a legitimate concern, even for Finnish libertarians who do not want to see their local trigger-happy cops armed for the Battle of the Bulge with hypermilitarized SWAT teams knocking down doors at 3:00AM. This is not, per se, a racial issue but a civil liberties issue.

However, when the local cops smash down Grandma O’Leary’s door at 3:00 AM to look for some pot and wind up shooting her dog and tasering granny, it is not likely that white people take to the streets and riot. While the all-pervasive black-on-white violence, like the torture/rape/murder spree of Reginald and Jonathan Carr, might have brought out the local Klan in the bad old days, most people let the criminal justice system, however flawed, take its course. One can certainly spot a white person mouthing racist vitriol but neo-fascist pogroms seem to be passé.

Now, let us switch to black victims of crime. Between the killing of Travon Martin and the exoneration of George Zimmerman, roughly 6,000 black Americans were killed by black Americans – not much protest. In that same interval, 400,000 black babies were aborted – presumably not all suffering from Down’s syndrome, Siamese twins, or major medical abnormalities – but not much protest. In Africa, we have the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Diamond Gangs in Sierra Leone, and other examples of mass rape, mass mutilations, and genocide. Remember Rwanda? Does anyone care about 5,400,000 killed in Civil War in the Congo ?

Perhaps the outrage is only due to cop-on-black violence. The bullet blitzkrieg that struck down 3 blacks leaving a strip club in Queens looked like it might go viral. However, the first cop to start the blitzkrieg against Sean Bell and his drunk pals, Gerald Isnora, was himself black – hence, nothing to get upset over! Would anyone have cared if Travon Martin or Michael Bell were killed by a black drug dealer or a rival boyfriend? However, if the shooter is white, then it is time to take to the streets regardless of whether the facts have been established. Time for Al Sharpton to get on his horse like Paul Revere to shout “the whiteys are coming!”. Death is not required – even beating Rodney King or an auto accident that kills Gavin Cato in Crown Heights is enough to get the riots going and the subsequent looting of plasma TV’s from Costco. As Fred puts it, beneath the surface is a cauldron of hatred – as in the Crown Heights riots.

The relatively irrelevant “facts” that Bell and Martin may not have been saints does not imply that trigger-happy cops and cop-wannabees have some inherent authority to blast petty delinquents at will. Nevertheless, the fact that black racists make these unproven charges and that white racists “justify” them only shows the dreadful abyss into whihc this country has been heading.

I don’t recall the America of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era being so polarized. Electing Obama did not improve harmony and might have made things worse. Nor have 50 years of “Civil Rights Laws” helped the underclass – one mile away, Ballou High School in DC is officially “integrated” but it is over 98 percent black with only 20 percent of kids at grade level and zero students who have ever passed an Advanced Placement Course. The Chamber of Commerce prefers importing illegal aliens to hiring blacks. Anger begets paranoia and paranoia begets anger and guilt-tripped whites encourage more anger, while little gets solved waiting for the next incident and riots.

Yugoslavia?!

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

Independence? It’s ‘EZ-Pass Up Our A-S’

America, BAB's A List, Constitution, History, Individual Rights

Some independence: It’s “EZ-Pass up our a-s,” says Myron Robert Pauli, Ph.D.

238 years ago in Philadelphia, a group of Americans adopted the world’s most famous grievance list against the British Empire and declared our independence. As Thomas Jefferson stated, “… unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men … ”

With some guts, guns, and help from Louis XVI, we secured our independence – that was the good news. The bad news was that America was left with the task of self-government. It didn’t start that well with squabbling local governments full of rogue demagogues appealing to indebted yahoos with paper money and contract repudiation. Alarmed men like Washington and Hamilton supported a federal government to keep the yahoos in check. Others like George Mason and Patrick Henry preferred 13 local independent confederacies over one big (potential) tyranny and became the Anti-Federalists.

Jefferson and Madison went along with the Federal idea with a Bill of Rights attached to limit the potential tyranny. And Ben Franklin prophetically said: “I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

Fast forwarding to 2014, and we now celebrate our independence with military displays. We spend more on our Armed Forces than the rest of the world combined. We can kick anyone’s butt, even with such exemplary soldiers as Lynndie England, Chelsea Manning, Nidal Malik Hasan, and Bowe Bergdahl and with one hand tied behind our back! Even our Coast Guard has a larger budget than the British Navy! We can invade anyplace and install “democracy” in primitive cultures in the form of Diem, Thieu, Maliki, Karzai, or HumptyDumpty, until Americans get tired of the expenses and the troops returning in body-bags, without limbs and with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Our President can execute 16 year old Americans on his whim-wham by pushing buttons controlling drones. The local cops now are equipped with lasers, tasers, radars, ladars, mMine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles with turreted 50 cal machine guns, and even drones. Millions of bureaucrats, contractors, etc. can read our e-mail, regulate our soft drinks, fondle our privates, access our bank accounts, deny medical treatments, and track our movements.

It’s EZ-Pass up our a-s – and even small children can come equipped with transponders. Americans can be held incommunicado for years if captured on a “battlefield,” such as Chicago, provided the president labels them “terrorists.” Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, thermal discomfort and painful positioning is how we “secure these rights” in the 21st Century. Unless there’s permanent organ failure, it isn’t torture!

Our educational system spends more money than anyone else to churn out ADHD-drugged up functional illiterates with masters degrees and tons of student debt. The accredited over-tested narcissists having gone through years of New Math, Leave No Child Behind, Ebonics, Political Correctness, Common Core, and dozens of other bureaucratic fads taught by burned-out teachers in a system where administrators outnumber teachers.

Our Federal Reserve can miraculously create trillions of “dollars” at the press of a computer tab and, lo-and-behold, the banksters and hedge funds are bulging with newfound wealth. My 401k can rise $1000 while I’m in the bathroom. General Motors can turn out clunkers indefinitely and the people shout Amen! Employment drops 5 percent and inner cities resemble Hiroshima in 1945 while the Dow hits new highs.

But whatever corrupt rot, bureaucracy, dysfunctional hyperpartisan politics, or authoritarianism has evolved – it was not imposed on us by “terrorists,” Nazis, Commies, Martians, or even Mexicans, but by our own making (as Franklin foresaw). The self-government that was supposed to “secure these rights” now keeps us in a gilded cage with 500 TV channels in the Empire of the Welfare-Warfare State.

In the 1960’s show “The Prisoner,” Patrick Mc Goohan, “Number 6” was held captive in some “utopian ‘Village’” and asked, “Who is Number 1?” That’s easy, baby. It’s US! USA!! U-S-A!!!

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Myron Pauli with his late, lovely wife.

Life On The (PC) Military Lunar Base

BAB's A List, Foreign Policy, Military, War

By Myron Pauli

As I wrote in “Government Begets Government,” insanity breeds more insanity. Take Afghanistan (please!) – where we are closing out our 13th year of “bringing democracy” and propping up Hamid Karzai, “mayor of Kabul” and the Maliki Thieu Diem Distinguished Professor Viceroy of Local Corrupt American Suckupology. Not only that but the US pays protection money to the Taliban to enable us to supply the various “lunar bases” that we maintain remotely to “fight the Taliban.” But as Al Jolson said, “You ain’t heard nuttin’ yet”.

Bowe Bergdahl joined the US Coast Guard, which kicked him out 26 days later because he was a mental case and couldn’t be trusted to rescue swimmers or board a yacht to search for marijuana. Afterwards, he spends 2 years in a Buddhist monastery and after rejection by the French Foreign Legion, he finds the employer of last resort: the US Army! Yes, fat or blind; transgendered or prostitute; quadriplegic or retarde; elderly or toddler; jihadist or just plain NUTS – the US Army wants you to “protect our freedoms.” Today’s loony is tomorrow’s Sergeant York! Eric Shinseki can design a special colored beret for the mentally ill.

Once over in Afghanistan “protecting our freedoms,” Bowe Bergdahl exhibited two contradictory behaviors: (a) becoming disillusioned with the war [a clear sign of sanity!!], and (b) otherwise acting unbalanced. But remember that this is the US Army where Major Nidal Malik Hasan is employed as a psychiatrist (bonus question: Why do the armed forces need psychiatrists as officers in uniform?) and ranting publicly about jihad for a year while no one does anything (presumably it is just normal Army behavior!). So, let’s see, we have a discontented wacko in our lunar base here but let’s not ship him home out of harm’s way but keep him here in Afghanistan.

Bowe walks off the lunar base into Talibanland and gets captured by them. How does the Army handle this? They PROMOTE him from E-3 private to Sergeant E-5. Had they not handed over 5 jihadists to “rescue” Bowe, he could have been promoted to Army Chief of Staff while a prisoner of the Taliban!

Although the Republicans are perfectly fine with Israel releasing 1000 Palestinians who killed 569 Israelis right next door in mortar/infiltration range; they are mortified over 5 jihadists joining up with 1 million others who hate our guts 10,000 miles away. However, they think nothing about the Bush and Obama drone-kills on wedding parties most likely creating 5 new jihadists for each bomb dropped! Insanity breeds more insanity.

Seasoned, decorated warriors like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Steyn, Dianne Feinstein, and Ann Coulter all want Colonel (??!!) Bowe Bergdahl hung out to dry as the new Benedict Arnold. These seasoned superpatriots care less about those who have come home tragically with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder like Staff Sergeant Travis Twiggs. Twiggs watched his men mutilated in front of him by an improvised explosive device and came back home with PTSD, only to get overdoses of drugs but no real help from Bethesda Naval Hospital (Malik Hasan??). He wound up killing himself and his brother after a carjacking in Arizona. Suicides or homicides caused by PTSD struck veterans naturally does not count as “war deaths.”

Like that exemplary soldier Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib fame, Bowe will be scapegoated for “endangering our liberties” while the Rumsfelds, Hagels, Cheneys, and Bidens receive $10,000,000 for documenting their murderous memoirs and receive their “Medals of Freedom.”

Two weeks from now, on the 4th of July, we will all listen to the bloviating pundits praising the troops who are “preserving our liberties” – the old men in wheelchairs who fought for Diem and Thieu 50 years ago and the younger ones who got maimed on behalf of rival Shiite and Sunni religious fanatics in Iraq and Afghanistan. The occasional “nutcase” who says “Blessed are the peacemakers” usually gets ignored or crucified.

To truly understand the nature of war, watch this 5 minute video of the end of Bridge on the River Kwai on Youtube: where warfare is all summarized at the end: “Madness. MADNESS.”