According to the New York Times, the rule change affects multiple areas such as education, housing, and employment, a similar rule change was also proposed last year. The Affordable Care Act in 2010 contained protections for when it comes to discrimination on “race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability” with regards to federal programs that received federal funding. The Trump administration’s recent rule-change affects protections so that the sex-discrimination will no longer cover gender-identity. Under the Obama administration’s interpretation of the law, gender-identity was included, under the new Trump interpretation of the law, it is not.
Advertisements
Roger Severino, the director of the Office of Civil Rights states that the rule-change was simply “house-keeping”, and all that the federal government was doing was changing the rules to reflect the existing legal reality. One court ruling from Fort Worth stated that the ruling did not need to be enforced, while, other court rulings held that it should be enforced. Mr. Severino said that
“It’s not the role of the federal bureaucrat to impose their own meanings on the words that their representatives have enshrined into law,” he said.
Mr. Severino also said that it would be up to individual hospitals and health-care providers to have their own policy. Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, state that it was wrong for this rule to be gutted in the middle of a pandemic, and, that, “This rule opens a door for a medical provider to turn someone away for a Covid-19 test just because they happen to be transgender.”
LGBT organizations are already planning to sue over the rule. Katie M Keith, who teaches health law at Georgetown University states that it’s paving the way for the erasure of the status of transgenders and that sex will be set to the birth default. The rule-change has consequences that reach further than just transgender discrimination. It removes the protection against those that have a history of pregnancy termination, and doesn’t require that providers notify people about the availability of certain important documents’ foreign language translations.
Advertisements
Fox News further confirms the reporting of the New York Times adding that it would target abortion and gender-transitions with “religious liberty”. Democrats were upset over the rule-change as it happened to have been made on an anniversary of the Pulse Night Club shooting, which took place in Orlando. Andrew Cuomo, similarly has expressed concern like Rodrigo has, called the rule-change repugnant, that the Pulse Night Club was a domestic terror incident targeting the LGBT community and that it was “grotesque” to do this during a global pandemic.
Like I always say, If you enjoy thearticles that The Washington Ledger provides you, please consider leaving a small donation. Your support helps keep the lights on and allows usto hire more writers and pay our current writers.
Holding a national general election during a pandemic would be difficult in the best of circumstances.
Advertisements
Add to the mix a President who constantly makes baseless claims about voter fraud and an increasingly well-funded conservative legal apparatus that appears willing to embrace those allegations in court, and you have a recipe for chaos.
The concoction has election law experts and voter advocates thinking through all the different ways the ongoing court battles over voting during the outbreak could play out in November after the election — including the potential for a redux of the Bush v. Gore saga of 2000.
Several election lawyers believed it was still unlikely that the final result would culminate in a Supreme Court intervention, even as President Trump is almost guaranteed to lob claims of voter fraud if he loses.
But in North Carolina, where Republicans attempted to challenge the 2016 election that threw Gov. Pat McCrory (R) out of office, voting rights advocates see signs that the playbook could be run again if the 2020 results are close.
“I definitely am getting the sense that the groundwork is getting laid,” said Allison Riggs, a North Carolina-based attorney who leads the voting rights program at Southern Coalition for Social Justice. Her group’s scenario-planning for a post-election legal mess began prior to the COVID-10 outbreak, she said. But the pandemic — and how some have responded to it — have added to the concerns.
“They’re starting to talk about ‘ineligible voters’ and ‘uncertainty’ and ‘participation’,” she said. “And particularly, participation looks a little different this year than it has in previous years because of COVID-19, that’s totally reasonable and expected. And I can also picture them saying, ‘Well look at these irregularities.’”
Before the coronavirus hit the U.S. in earnest, lawyers with ties to the President were already threatening North Carolina and a handful of other states with lawsuits. They have since rushed to court to oppose efforts to open up vote by mail — a method of casting ballots that will be crucial to a functional election this year — despite traditional GOP support for the practice, as captured by a Washington Post report last week.
Advertisements
Their tactics have often resembled those previously employed by fringier conservative groups, who so far have had little success in convincing courts of their claims. While Republicans and conservatives groups have won out in some of the legal fights over pandemic voting, the more aggressive and outlandish voter fraud claims have so far been rejected in court.
Whether those claims gain traction — in litigation before or after the election — remains to be seen. But even if unsuccessful, they could kick up some serious dirt as results come in.
“The fact that you could have 50-80 million mail ballots cast this election … there’s a lot of controversy that can result when different people are challenging the signatures that appear on mail ballots, for example,” said Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School professor who is co-directing a project to study the lessons for voting in a pandemic that emerge from this year’s primary elections.
Advertisements
“If there is a scorched-earth policy by litigators in the period immediately following Election Day when the votes are counted,” he continued, “there’s a lot of friction they can add to the system, which will make it difficult to count votes in a reasonable period of time.”
‘Testing The Waters’
While the coronavirus outbreak is presenting new challenges to election administrators, the precedent for using fraud claims to wreak havoc after an election stretches back to pre-pandemic times.
In the McCrory episode, Republicans seized on a delay in counting ballots in one Democratic county to allege a “troubling” “mishandling” of the election. They also raised doubts about the way provisional votes were counted, while challenging the ballots of hundreds of voters and demanding a recount. McCrory’s legal team now faces a defamation lawsuit for the allegations it pushed against several voters.
Riggs raised concerns about measures that had been attached to a pandemic voting bill moving through the North Carolina statehouse. Among the provisions is a requirement that certain provisional voting data be reported almost immediately by election officials. Riggs said the type of provisional data being rushed out under the measure is “meaningless,” while speculating that it could be used as part of a larger “strategy to suggest irregularities.”
“What I think they’re doing is sort of testing the waters and trying to perfect some strategy for what are their legal options if they don’t like the outcome,” Riggs said, pointing to the McCrory episode as well as the claims of voter fraud the briefly arose in the 2019 Kentucky gubernatorial election. Upon his defeat in that race, GOP incumbent Gov. Matt Bevins suggested that there were “irregularities” in the election, while he held off conceding and demanded a recanvass.
The claims were roundly rejected as he failed to produce evidence to back them. The refusal by even Republican election officials to go along with Bevins’ unfounded allegations is a positive sign for 2020, according to Justin Levitt, a Loyola-Marymount election law professor who worked in President Obama’s Justice Department.
“It actually showed that when an election is clean, legit clean, there can be bipartisan resistance to unsubstantiated claims of fraud,” Levitt said, comparing the response to the pushback that Trump received for his claims of mass fraud in the 2016 election. “Although there were some notorious officials later given a national commission who validated the President’s claims, the actual people in charge of the elections, Republican and Democrat, said, ‘No, Mr. President. It turns out you won a clean election.’”
Advertisements
‘An Incentive to Create a Fog of Uncertainty’
Even without the interference of bad actors, the pandemic stands to ratchet up the legal fights around voting. The probability of a court fight ultimately determining the result of the election is very low, said Ned Foley, the director of the Election Law program at The Ohio State University. But the risk of post-election litigation “is significantly higher,” he said, a prediction partly driven by larger trends in voting law and partly due to the unique circumstances the pandemic is bringing to voting.
“There is, to my mind, two main capacity questions where the system is being stressed that could potentially give ground for litigation,” Foley said. The first is the drastic reduction in polling places that seems likely due to COVID-19, as election officials struggle to find poll workers (who tend to be older) to staff voting sites or locations to host ballot-casting.
The second pressure point is difficulties election officials have in dealing with a surge in absentee voting, particularly when it appears that absentee voters did not receive their ballots in time to vote. Already there was a big court fight over this issue in Wisconsin, while in Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf (D-PA) tweaked the rules last minute around the deadlines.
Republicans questioned Wolf’s move but ultimately did not challenge it in court — perhaps because there were not any races on last week’s ballots that warranted the legal fight. But had the stakes been higher, or if he had not issued the order to the dismay or Democrats, it could have erupted in a court battle, Foley said.
That chaos will play out while partisans have “an incentive to create a fog of uncertainty, if you’re afraid that the results may not be as attractive,” Foley said, calling the tactic a “pre-2020 phenomena” that at times has been adopted by both parties.
“They’re going to try to spin the reality in order to tread waters as long as they can. And to the extent that filing a lawsuit might help them do that, they certainly might do that.”
We’re getting a mix of information about the state of the COVID epidemic in the United States – much of it contradictory. I wanted to take a few moments to pick apart these seemingly contradictory realities which are happening at the same time.
The first fact is that the initial experiments with easing the strictures on social and economic life have not generated the spikes in new cases that some predicted. Georgia is the clearest case of this. Neighboring Florida is another. We don’t know yet why this is the case. Perhaps we need to wait longer to see the impact. Perhaps continuing mitigation efforts are more effective than anticipated. Perhaps there are cultural, social, epidemiological or even climatic factors that make these states less susceptible to the kinds of outbreaks we saw in New York and other urban centers in the North. But we’ve seen enough data to say with some confidence that the worst predictions are not coming to pass, or at least not quickly.
But there’s another reality that is worth considering. COVID cases across the United States remain notably stable. We may be past the apex but the top looks something like a plateau.
Advertisements
Once New York State is removed from the trend line the rest of the United States looks remarkably stable. Some of this is certainly an illusion created by the steady growth in testing, which has grown dramatically in recent weeks. But even with that, the numbers are coming down quite slowly. Italy had its peak (6,557) of new cases on March 21st and is now at about 1/10th that number (642). Spain had it’s peak (8,271) on March 26th and their drop is even more dramatic (593). That basic pattern is close to the norm in Europe. In other words, other hard hit countries are coming down from their apex of cases much faster than the United States.
Why would this be?
One obvious answer is that the US is doing a worse job and collectively deciding that having COVID running through the population at a high but stable level is okay. But let’s consider some other possibilities. One is simply that the US is a big, big country, not only in population terms but in geographical ones. So more than these other countries we have what are more likely a number of regional epidemics happening in succession. So underneath what appears to be relative stability, with a moderate decline, is actually a series of different regional outbreaks and fall offs unfolding in succession, sort of canceling each other out. This is going to be true in every country where you dig down to the regional or local level. But it can be more true for a country as big as the United States. In epidemiological terms the US is possibly more like Europe as a whole than any individual European country.
Advertisements
So maybe we’ll see this plateau and then a sharper decline coming a bit later.
These numbers are fairly intuitive regarding where the epidemic is expanding or receding. It’s basically receding in the places that have had the worst outbreaks to date. That makes sense. A state that is green can simply have its number of cases falling even if the daily number is higher than a state that is reddish. Make of it what you will.
Another possibility is that our testing is growing faster than it is in other countries, thus propping up the number of positive cases. This is definitely the case if we’re trying to distinguish between ‘actual’ prevalence and positive tests. It’s not clear to me that that is significantly the case relative to other countries.
I think the answer so far is that we don’t know. Or to the extent we can know, it’s beyond my analytic abilities to figure out the answer. But it’s not too soon to consider the possibility that while we are not seeing the rolling series of New York style outbreaks, even as many states start loosening their lockdowns, we are also not making the progress that other countries have. We look to be on a course for a long period of endemic disease and numbers of deaths way higher than most of us could have imagined earlier this year.
If you enjoy what you are reading, please consider making a small donation. Your support helps keeps the lights on and funds our writers.
The federal government is in the midst of rolling out a $2 trillion bailout package to try and mitigate the effects of the national coronavirus shutdown. Much of this money will go to major corporations while working and middle-class Americans may see at most a few thousand dollars. Very little has been done to take care of gig workers, freelancers and consultants who have seen contracts canceled, or drastically reduced, and customers evaporate. Perhaps it could have been better spent bailing out student debtors.
Many of the companies that will be beneficiaries of the bailout seem to be operating with an intent to fleece taxpayers. Hilton Hotel Corporation, for instance, engaged in a $2 billion stock buyback on March 3, at which point it was more than apparent that they would experience a slump in business. The coal industry has sought to use the bailout to wriggle out of a $220 million tax intended to benefit former coal miners with black lung disease. And the airlines have begged poverty despite spending 96% of free cash flow on stock buybacks over the past decade, according to Bloomberg, compared to an average of 50% for the S&P 500. And these same airlines are estimated to have a full six months of liquidity with which they could continue to pay salaries.
And if that’s not frustrating enough, get this: executive pay for bailout beneficiaries is capped at only $3 million plus 50% of whatever they made above $3 million in 2019. This means that theoretically the American Airlines CEO, who earned $12 million 2018 (the 2019 numbers are not available yet), could still earn $7.5 million in 2020 even as his company benefits from taxpayer funds.
Since the cut to corporate tax rates in 2018, big business has benefited to the tune of some $1.5 trillion under the Trump administration. In a nutshell, big business has already been getting a free ride and is not deserving of this bailout. Much of the government spending in the coronavirus bailout seems to be less aligned with helping the American people financially during a trying time or improving coronavirus survival rates, than with underwriting years of irresponsible corporate behavior.
Advertisements
Perhaps there was a better use of $2 trillion than corporate welfare. If the purpose is to inject money into the economy and give Americans a financial cushion to help get them through the coming months, a better move may have been to cancel some or all of the $1.4 trillion in student loan debt that is owned to the federal government. This would still have left $600 billion for other purposes while instantly reducing the expenses of millions of Americans and freeing their money for other uses, such as paying rent and supporting struggling local restaurants and their workers. Even a partial student loan forgiveness could have paid dividends for recipients for years to come.
And it’s not as if we don’t know how to do this, either. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) already has a plan for this, which she campaigned on. The fact that even partial student debt relief was not included in the coronavirus bailout is a travesty. This is money that is owed to the federal government, and it can choose to collect on it or not. Instead of writing paltry checks as part of a bread and circuses policy — $1200 does not go far in New York City, which is the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis — this could have been an opportunity to goose the economy while also creating lasting, high impact improvements in the financial lives of millions of Americans.
While many are simply desperate for any financial relief in this moment, this, in my opinion, was not the way to do it. The fact that this bill passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support speaks not only to the dysfunction in Washington, but to the fundamentally bankrupt values of most members of both parties. The first goal in Congress seems to be lining corporate pockets, not taking care of the citizens who always seem to foot the bill.
If you like what you are reading, consider leaving a small donation.
So many of the most successful and celebrated stories are about singing the praises ofnotorious criminalsfrom real life. Ed Gein has provided morbid fascination in multiple different thinly disguised forms, such as Norman Bates ofPsycho. Ted Bundy has both biopics and a Netflix series. How many dozens of actors have been hired to make Al Capone look affably evil by now?
It’s a shame that the pedestals so many criminals are placed on have a tendency to cast shadows on the members of law enforcement that brought them to justice. This isn’t exclusively about the beat cops and investigators; we’ll also be devoting entries to district attorneys. After all, they are part of a separate but equally important group that represent the people, to paraphrase the classic television programLaw & Order.
10. Frank Hamer
In 1906, Frank Hamer enlisted with the Texas Rangers. He served two years, resigned to work with the regular police, then was back with the Rangers in 1915 where he stayed until he retired in 1932. In 1934, he was brought back out of retirement for his biggest job: Pursuing celebrity bank robbersBonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. He and his posse of six tracked them down over the course of roughly three months after having the breakthrough that they must be hiding in one of the few locations where none of the teams of lawmen had even thought to look: Louisiana. Hamer had a friend of the robber duo pretend he had car trouble on the road to their hideout near Gibsland, and ultimately a jumpy team member opening fire before Bonnie and Clyde could surrender meant neither of the bank robbers got out of the situation alive.
As high profile as the take down of Bonnie and Clyde was, it was Hamer’s work while in the Rangers that was some of the most dramatic of his career. He was a very high profile opponent of theKKKwhen the terrorist group was at its most powerful, and his protracted feud with them would put him face to face with rallies and lynch mobs. In at least one instance in 1930, he faced literally hundreds of people in a mob and was almost incinerated attempting to save a black prisoner when the mob set fire to the jail housing the prisoner. He has been credited with saving more thana dozen peoplefrom lynching.
9. Mabel Walker Willebrandt
For decades, treasury officer Elliot Ness and his Untouchables got the lion’s share of credit for taking down Chicago crime lordAl Capone. More recent historical analyses have spread the praise around. Undoubtedly one of the most significant people involved was apartially deafformer school teacher from Kansas.
Having acquired her law degree in 1916 through night classes, for years Mabel Willebrandt was an advocate for prostitutes in about 2,000 cases. In 1921, she was appointed the Assistant Attorney General by President Warren Harding in time for the Volstead Act (alcohol prohibition) to go into effect, which occupied the bulk of her time and made her practically a household name at the time as “The First Lady of the Law.” Her most significant case was that against oneManly Sullivan, a bootlegging South Carolinian lawyer. Since federal tax laws were in Willebrandt’s purview, she employed the unprecedented tactic of attempting to bust Sullivan for income tax evasion on his alcohol sales. Sullivan argued that he couldn’t disclose his illegal income on his tax forms as that would violate hisfifth amendment rights, and so the case went up to the Supreme Court in 1927 inUnited States V Sullivan,one of 40 cases she argued in front of the highest court in the land. Her victory in court would allow for the successful case against Capone four years later.
8. Frank Worden and Art Schley
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be one of the members of law enforcement who first steps into an eventually world famous crime scene, there are few stories more memorable than those of this deputy and sheriff in Plainfield, Wisconsin. On November 18, 1957, 35-year-old World War II vet Frank Worden was visitinghis mother Bernice’s hardware storeafter a day of deer hunting. She was missing, there was evidence of violence behind the register, and there was a receipt for some antifreeze. Worden happened to have been in the store the day before when a regular customer was in and said he needed antifreeze, but left without buying anything. When two officers located the customer outside of a local store and asked if he would answer some questions, the customer claimed he was being framed. When they asked what he thought he was being framed for, the suspect admitted he knew that Bernice Worden was missing, and the customer was arrested. That evening, Worden and Art Schley arrived at the suspect’s home.
The suspect was Ed Gein. When Worden and Schley could not immediately enter Gein’s home because it was locked, they inspected his shed and Schley literally bumped into the body of the missing Bernice Worden, which he initially thought was adeerbeing butchered. The officers needed the backup of a 10 more men before they felt they could enter the soon to be world famous Gein home. Within days the community was flooded with press.
Schley was a man put in an extremely difficult situation for a small town officer, and he did not cope with it perfectly. During interrogation of Ed Gein, at one point Schley lost his patience and bashed the criminal’s head into the wall, meaning that the evidence of Gein’s confession was thrown out during his trial. Schley passed away from heart failure in 1968, and many were convinced that the deep trauma of Gein’s crimes had made him Gein’s final victim. Worden, by contrast, lived to the age of 78, passing away in2001.
7. Ray Biondi
In January 1978, Lieutenant Ray Biondi of the Sacramento Police Department was investigating a crime scene with a bewildering piece of evidence left behind: A crumpled up yogurt container with blood next to the body of homicide victim Teresa Wallin. He also found little ringlets of blood around the crime scene. Fortunately, Biondi had recently taken a seminar with the FBI and began using the relatively new technique of building apsychological profile. The profile would be used to effectively track down the murderer but unfortunately only after the perpetrator dispatched most of a family four days following the murder of Teresa Wallin. When the Sacramento Police converged on the suspect’s home, he didn’t answer the door. Biondi and his teamloudly pretendedthey were going to leave, hid in some nearby bushes, and waited for the suspect to come out carrying the remains of his victims and his gun. That suspect was Richard Chase, and he would become known as “The Vampire Killer,” with his crime spree inspiring such movies asRampage.
While Richard Chase’s case was a more extreme example than most, it was only one of many for Ray Biondi. By the end of his 17 years working in homicide for Sacramento Police, he had worked roughly500 cases. Even after his 1993 retirement he continued to do psychological profiles for theFederal Bureau of Investigation.
6. Robert Mueller
While lately his work leading the Russia Investigation has overshadowed the rest of his career, Bronze-Star recipient (who was shot in the leg during theVietnam War) Robert Mueller still has one of the most significant convictions of recent decades on his resume. In 1991, John Gotti was one of the nation’s most prominent mobsters. He was estimated to have a net worth of$30 million, making him one of the 10 richest criminals in America at the time. He’d stood trial four times and walked free for three of them, one time receiving a short sentence where he was allowed to continue meeting with mob leaders. It looked in 1991 like Gotti would be able to keep his nickname, “Teflon Don.”
One of the keys to Mueller’s successful conviction was the testimony of one Sammy Gravano. Using his testimony was extremely risky for both parties. Gravano needed to confess to19 murdersfor his testimony to be convincing, while flipping for the FBI meant he would be all the more likely to be killed in prison. Mueller’s methods to keep Gravano convinced and keep him alive was to make a big production of escorting him to the interview, complete with a large number of guards taking part. Another was an elevator trick which separated Gravano from other inmates and his mob attorney, ensuring Gravano could give his testimony to the FBI in secret. Thus was the evidence that put Gotti away for the rest of his life acquired, leaving Mueller with a reputation that would put him at the head of the FBI.
5. David Lee
Both a Pensacola, Florida patrol officer and a captain in the Florida Army National Guard, on February 15, 1978 David Lee was on patrol at 1:00 a.m. when he noticed the driver of a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle seemed to bepeepinginto people’s homes. He called it in, and after a Wants and Warrants check, it turned out the vehicle had been stolen three days prior. Lee successfully got the peeping driver to pull over. That brought him face to face with iconic mass murdererTed Bundy.
David Lee did not have an easy time with Ted Bundy. When he told Bundy he was under arrest, Bundy managed to kick Lee’s legs out from under him and ran away. Lee fired two shots, the first a warning, and then took off after Bundy. He had totacklethe mass murderer, and even after that he needed to struggle with Bundy to avoid losing his gun. After overpowering Bundy, Lee searched the vehicle and found the IDs of three women inside. It took two days in jail for Bundy to give his real name.
You’d think David Lee bringing in one of the most notorious murderers of the 20th Century would mean that at least locally he would be something of a golden boy. In fact, within a year, Lee would besuingthe Pensacola Police Department for being let go over scheduling disputes between his time in the National Guard and the department, a suit which dragged on into 1981. By 1989, when he was present for the execution of Bundy, he had moved on to be a captain in theFlorida Game and Freshwater Commission.
4. Ken Landwehr.
It’s fairly common knowledge among the True Crime crowd that Dennis Rader, the notorious BTK Killer in Wichita, Kansas, was essentially tricked into giving himself up by being told he couldn’t be traced if he sent his messages to the press in the form of floppy disks. Less well known was the fact Rader felt compelled to send antagonizing messages to the press, because in 2004 Lieutenant Kent Landwehr put out a bunch ofpress releasesthat were deliberately coming to the wrong conclusions about the case. Rader’s unusually long reign of death as the BTK Killer, marked by sending messages to law enforcement and the media, had lasted from 1974 to 1991 before he stopped both his killings and communication. Still, Landwehr’s “mistakes” were too much of an attack on Rader’s ego, and in January 2005 he left the disks that would bring him down to be found. He would be identified after minutes of investigation and convicted in months.
Rader’s arrest was the crowning moment of a 20 year career as the head of homicide investigation. He was both extremely detail-oriented in investigating crime scenes and also supposedly able to deduce the chronology of a crime practically at a glance. He claimed one of the events that left him such a dogged investigator was his being taken hostage during a robbery in 1977 at the clothing store where he worked. The experience of being tied up with a gun in his face left him both deeply empathetic of other victims in such situations and irate at the potential incompetence of law enforcement, so he joined the police. He worked on more than600 homicide casesbefore retiring in 2012.
3. Joseph Kozenczak
If you wereLieutenant Joseph Kozenczakof Des Plaines, Illinois, most likely the most vivid mental image of the biggest case in your career would be a crawlspace. For the rest of the country, the strongest impression of that case was a man in clown makeup. That’s because Korean War veteran Kozenczak was one of the officers that caught John Wayne Gacy in 1978.
Gacy while the body of Gacy’s last victim was in the attic. Gacy helped immeasurably to bring about his own downfall by trying to endear himself to Kozenczak and other investigators, inviting them back to his home with a basement full of bodies. When the investigators returned, the basement was flooded, causing the previously concealed bodies to emit a foul odor and alerting Kozenczak to their presence. Within two years of arresting and extracting a confession from Gacy, Kozenczak would reach the rank of captain. In 1985 he became chief of the Des Plaines Police. In all, he would serve27 years with the police. In retirement he continued to work as a private investigator and in such related careers as a regional security director for TNT Express. His 2015 obituary noted that he had a strong interest in the paranormal.
2. Sam Brower
For seven years, private investigator Sam Brower looked into and researched a single group he claimed was a criminal organization before publishing a book on it. That might seem like an enormous amount of commitment for a single investigation, but for Brower it was only the beginning. Four years after the book’s publication he took part in the adaptation of a 2015 documentary based on the book. Even as recently asMay 2019he was continuing his campaign against the organization. Is that perhaps nearly fanatical? Well, considering the crimes of the Jeffs family in the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, Brower’s drive is pretty understandable.
Inspired to get into criminal investigation by the murder of his friend during ahome invasion, Brower would work with both the United States Department of Justice and the Department of Labor. He began his investigation into the Mormon splinter group in 2004 (while being an adherent of the Mormon faith himself) and insisted that the FBI add Warren Jeffs to the most wanted list. Due to his investigations it came out that Jeffs was marrying extremely underage girls to abuse them. Jeffs’ conviction would leave him with alife plus 20 year sentence. Brower, however, was quick to point out that the cult’s abuse of minors did not end with Warren Jeffs’ imprisonment, and it also included putting them into labor at construction sites at dangerously young ages. In addition to his campaigning to end the FLDS’s ability to abuse children, Brower unsuccessfully ran for Iron County Commission in Utah in 2016.
1. Dominick Polifrone
If you knew about the life of Richard “Iceman” Kuklinski, you’d probably be afraid to be around him at all. He would claim that over the course of 30 years he had killed over 100 people using methods that ranged from head shots to beatings to poisoning, and with enough foresight that he would freeze bodies before dumping them to throw off autopsies trying to determine time of death. Still, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent Dominick Polifrone would work undercover with him for a year and a half beginning in 1985, the whole time knowing that Kuklinski was very much the kind of person who killed partners in crime he distrusted with little hesitation. Polifrone’s stories would include hiring Kuklinski for a hit, hiring him for half a million dollars in weapons smuggling, and hiring him for poisoning training. It would be thepoison trainingthat brought Kuklinski down, with the case based primarily onPolifrone’s testimony.
Not that Kuklinski’s case was by any means Polifrone’s only accomplishment. He spent 30 yearsin law enforcement, roughly 15 of those undercover. He would infiltrate five major crime families during his career, and there were contracts taken out on him throughout that time. He has earned enough animosity from his work even in civilian circles that one of the most irritating events of his life was when he was at a wedding, and a young woman attacked him for ruining the life of her friend, Kuklinski’s daughter. Bizarrely, there are communities of people that have labeled Polifrone a traitor for working undercover to take criminals off the streets. Such is the weird life an undercover cop can lead.
The Washington Ledger 