Is Vegas Mayoral Candidate Carolyn Goodman More Than a 'Mouthpiece' for Husband Oscar?

By Cathy Scott

Word on the street is that the campaign headquarters of Carolyn Goodman on Tuesday's election night in Sin City was peppered with mobsters. Old-time mobsters.

"At least 10 were there," the source said.

It's not surprising, considering Carolyn's husband is Oscar Goodman, the self-proclaimed "Mouthpiece for the Mob" who, as a criminal defense attorney, represented the likes of Chicago mobster Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro, once suspected of more than 20 killings, and Philadelphia mob underboss Philip Leonetti. Oscar, currently the mayor of Las Vegas whose three-term sting is expiring, has been vocal about his hopes for his wife succeeding him as mayor.

Back in June of 1999, Oscar Goodman was elected mayor of this gambling mecca.At the time, he said he was proud of his past: "I'm not ashamed of anything." During Goodman's tenure as mayor, he changed his popular "mouthpiece" moniker to "America's Happiest Mayor."

On Tuesday, his wife won 37 percent of the vote, with Chris Giunchigliani coming in second, inching closer to her husband's aspirations for her.

Whisperings, however, at the Goodmans' election-night party, according to the source, were that Carolyn might have been able to pull off an early first in the primary based on name recognition, but when it comes to winning in the run off, it won't be as simple.

That's because Giunchigliani, currently a county commissioner, is known as a politician for the people who runs grassroots campaigns. The personable Carolyn Goodman, on the other hand, is new to politics other than as first lady of Las Vegas for the last 12 years. Mrs. Goodman is more recognized as the founder of a private school, known as a top college prep academy where people with money send their kids

"I am running against a name, let’s put it that way," Chris recently told The Washington Post." But I think the public recognizes that the time for that type of leadership style has passed."

Now it's up to the voters. Chris, 57, and Carolyn, 72, will face each other again on June 7 in a run-off election.

Photos courtesy of the candidates' campaign websites and philly.com.

Sambalatte: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

By Cathy Scott

There's a new place in town, where everybody knows your name. It's called Sambalatte.

Step inside this caffee lounge and espresso bar, and you’re welcomed by your first name. The baristas and owners know everyone, and the guests know just about everybody too. It reminds me of the popular TV show “Cheers” and the fictional neighborhood bar, where everybody knew your name. “Cheers” was a welcoming watering hole, a place for friendship and comaradarie. 

Now, Sambalatte is the new “Cheers” and the place to hang out in Vegas.

Since it opened last fall, it's been embraced by the community, and the media have discovered it as well, including The New York Post, the local NPR affiliate, Fox 5, and a Brazilian TV station. Haute Living ranked Sambalatte No. 1 in its Top 5 coffee shops in Las Vegas. Word is spreading all over Twitter and Facebook too. And Seven magazine wrote, because of the micro-roasted varieties, “this just might be the freshest, most distinctive cup of coffee you’ve ever had in Las Vegas.”


Owners Sheila and Luiz have taken the time to not only focus on the brews, but on customers too by offering quiet attention and friendly smiles, and creating a cheerful atmosphere for people to stop in for their morning organic java and French pastry or sit at a table and sip while reading the paper. They’ve created an upscale boutique coffee lounge with a welcoming atmosphere that’s tough to beat. There’s a European feel about the place, found mostly in coffeehouses in New York and San Francisco.

 

Located on the West Side, in Fashion Village Boca Park, Sambalatte is already filling a niche in the area. The owners have created an environment that welcomes students, entrepreneurs, business people, and friends for a place to meet up by offering comfortable couches, tables and wireless Internet. The mezzanine upstairs is a favorite for some visitors. It’s already being called the best place in town to spot celebrities. But that list also includes local lawyers, cops, journalists, and dancers and performers from the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip.

When the sun is out, people flock to the outdoor umbrella tables and bring their dogs with them (there's an outdoor doggie station too). The shelves are stocked with books, magazines, board and table games, the morning paper, as well as an alt-weekly newspaper, and children are welcome. By nightfall on Friday and Saturday nights, it’s a coffee lounge with live music.

Urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, called such spots “third places,” where they’re not work and they’re not home. Instead, they’re “the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy,” he wrote. In his book, he examines gathering places and reminds us how important they still are.

Sambalatte is just that: a great gathering place, where guests feel connected. Located between the Cheesecake Factory and Kona Grill, some stop by for a short time. Others go in with their Kindles, Nooks, laptops, netbooks and iPads, to work while sipping a white mocha or a chai latte, or lunching on an Italian sandwich or Caprese on a bagette (my favorite), yogurt, or a fruit-and-cheese plate. Fresh-baked goods are made in-house daily, so there's a lot to choose from.

Opening Sambalatte was a good move, choosing a corner of Boca Park Fashion Village that has an almost-village feel to it, with a waterfall, a meandering walkway and greenery. The place caught on quickly.

Like “Cheers” and its characters, who regularly hung out for the camaraderie, Sambalatte has become the place to be, where everybody knows your name. You can smell the fresh-roasted aroma before you walk in, and, somehow, the world seems better for it.

Take a virtual tour, with this video, and see for yourself:

Sambalatte Torrefazione

750 South Rampart Blvd

Las Vegas, Nevada 89145

702.272.2333

What Happens in Sin City Doesn't Stay Here

Here's a twist -- and exactly the type of news the public relations machine behind Vegas doesn't like to see.

Still, it's tough to keep this one off the front pages, after a New York college student, according to a report in the New York Daily News, sued a Las Vegas escort service claiming the prostitute he hired did not stay with him for the agreed-upon amount of time.

Hubert Blackman would like his $275 back, plus an additional $1.8 million for his trouble and damages for what he has called a "tragic event."

Blackman claims in his suit against Las Vegas Exclusive Personals that, during a vacation to Las Vegas last December, he paid $155 for a stripper to visit his room at the Stratosphere Hotel and paid an additional $120 to have her perform a sex act on him, the News reported. She did a strip dance and performed a sex act, but left after 30 minutes.

Upon his arrival home in New York City, he filed his suit in Manhattan Federal Court claiming that “an escort did an illegal sexual act on me during her paid service to me” and “I almost had gotten arrested.”He's also claiming he now needs medical treatment for a mental condition related to the incident.

But Blackman, in his suit, said he paid the woman to stay with him for an hour. The problem arose when she left after just 30 minutes. So he called the escort company and requested his money back. When they refused to give him a refund, he then called Las Vegas Metro Police, only to have officers threaten him with arrest because prostitution is illegal in the city.

It may be illegal in the city, but it's overlooked in hotel rooms, where hotel staff are very much aware of the comings and goings of high-priced escorts and paying visits to guests' hotel rooms. It's a lucrative business, and an old one, in Strip and downtown hotels. The phone books and online directories are full of so-called escort service companies.

Blackman, who said the woman suggested the sex act, claims he was unaware of the law.

One Fatal Night in Las Vegas

Credit: Wikipedia Commons

By Cathy Scott

This week marks the fourteenth anniversary of the day Tupac Shakur was shot.

And with the anniversary comes ESPN’s new documentary: One Night in Vegas: Tyson & Tupac. The rap star, poet and actor was gunned down just hours after watching Mike Tyson knock out Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. “(Tupac) didn't last long, but the time he did last, every minute, every tenth of a moment, was explosive," Tyson told ESPN.

Tupac was also explosive. In the minutes following Tyson’s professional fight, Tupac got into a street-like fight inside the MGM Grand as he was leaving the arena.

At the elevator bank just before the MGM’s main lobby, Tupac and his crew ran into Orlando Anderson, a known Crips street gang member from Compton, California. Tupac’s music producer, Suge Knight, who was with Tupac that night, was a known member of the rival gang Mob Piru.

When he spotted Anderson, Tupac said to him, “You’re from the South,” meaning South Compton. And the fight was on. Tupac, Suge and their entourage stomped and kicked Anderson. A security guard split them up, but Orlando, when Las Vegas police arrived, declined to press charges. The officers did not file a police report and did not even take Orlando’s last name. It would be Compton gang cops, a few days after the shooting, when Las Vegas police realized the scuffle might have significance, later offered up Orlando’s full name. They also offered up Orlando's lengthy rap sheet, gang history, and his street moniker "Baby Lane."

Backpedal a few years to 1992 after Tyson was sent to prison to serve out a sentence for rape. That’s when Tupac reached out to Iron Mike, saying he was going to be in the area and would like to visit him in prison. While they may have been an unlikely pair, both knew how to put up a fight, as evidenced later with the MGM scuffle Tupac started.

From prison, Tyson paid attention to Tupac’s thug-life image. They regularly talked on the phone. That’s when Tyson, who was a few years older than Shakur, handed out brotherly advice. Shakur told friends it meant a lot to him. “Tyson was giving me a lot of advice,” Tupac told a radio station. “I really looked up to him something hard. He’d tell me to calm down.”

But 'Pac did not appear to take it to heart. And he did not calm down. By the time Tyson was released from prison in 1995, Tupac was in jail on Rikers Island in New York, held on suspicion of a similar charge as Tyson’s, this one sexual abuse against a woman Tupac had met at a club and took back to a friend’s hotel room. Tupac was convicted and sent to the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York.

Tupac was released on bond, posted by his record producer Suge Knight, pending an appeal. But before the appeal could be heard, Tupac was dead.

The same night as the Tyson-Seldon fight, Tupac was shot when a gunman in a white Cadillac pulled up to Tupac and Suge’s car and opened fire with a high-caliber Glock handgun, hitting Tupac several times, including in the chest. The Clark County coroner determined the cause of death as multiple gunshot wounds.

The last time Tyson would talk to Tupac would be in Tyson’s dressing room immediately following the fight. “I told him I’d see him that night and we could hang out,” Tyson told ESPN. Six days later, the 25-year-old hip-hop star was dead. Tupac’s unsolved murder has frustrated rap fans ever since, despite Compton Police (a law enforcement department which has since merged with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department) offering up Orlando Anderson as a suspect. For their part, Las Vegas police have said there wasn’t enough evidence against Orlando, and members of Tupac’s entourage were uncooperative. I began covering the case a couple of hours after the shooting, which was the topic of my book, The Killing of Tupac Shakur, and it appeared, after Anderson's name had become known, that there was motive -- the scuffle -- not to mention Compton Police's discovery of a Glock in the home Anderson lived in and Anderson bragging on his home turf that he'd killed Tupac.

But Las Vegas police, who traveled to Compton, did not formally interview Anderson and declined to arrest him. Eighteen months after Tupac was killed, Orlando Anderson was murdered in what police said was an unrelated shooting. We may never know if Orlando was, in fact, the gunman in Tupac's death.

As for Tyson, he told ESPN that Tupac’s memory lives on through his works. "He's going to last until the time this Earth comes to an end. I'm glad to be a part of his life and to have known him. (Tupac) was probably a misguided warrior. He had a heart as big as this planet. He had so much love and compassion, and you couldn't even see it under his rage." 

In the meantime, the murder of Tupac Shakur, unofficially at least, remains unsolved. 

Photo of Tyson and Tupac, courtesy of ESPN. Other photos courtesy of Yahoo! Images.

New Book by O'Brien: My Week at the Blue Angel

By Cathy Scott

Here’s a news release from Huntington Press about my friend Matt's latest book.

For Immediate Release

Huntington Press Announces Release Date for My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas by Matthew O'Brien  

Las Vegas – Acclaimed author Matthew O'Brien (Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas) will release his newest title, My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas, on October 25, 2010.

This creative nonfiction story collection boldly explores the disenfranchised and broken side of Las Vegas while highlighting the unexpected beauty in a neon wasteland, forging a path into a hidden world beneath the city, and lending a voice to the voiceless masses rarely seen.

O'Brien, founder of Shine a Light—an organization that aids the many men and women living in the flood channels of Las Vegas—has already gained recognition for one of the stories in the collection, “Another Day on Paradise,” in the form of a fellowship from the Nevada Arts Council. 

Beneath the Neon, also published by Huntington Press, is an internationally acclaimed nonfiction book that received rave reviews from numerous publications and media outlets, including E!, Publishers Weekly, and Wired magazine.

Smoke and Mirrors: The Truth About Las Vegas

by Cathy Scott

Reprinted from Women in Crime Ink

Watching Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman’s indignation over recent advice by President Barack Obama to a New Hampshire audience to not waste cash in Las Vegas was reminiscent of a similarly indignant Goodman a decade earlier.

Goodman, a former criminal defense attorney and self-described “mouthpiece for the mob,” spent 35 years defending the nation’s most notorious underworld figures. His clients included mobsters Meyer Lansky, Anthony "Tony The Ant" Spilotro and Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, the latter two portrayed in the film Casino by actors Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro. Goodman, also in the film, played himself -- a lawyer for the mob.

So it came as a surprise in 1999 when Goodman tried to deny the mob’s existence in Las Vegas. It was during Goodman’s mayoral run, when he issued a statement in the midst of a colorful Las Vegas trial of two reputed Mafiosi charged in connection with the 1997 execution-style murder of another gangster, Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein. The trial spotlighted the very kind of mob activity that officials, other than Goodman, had insisted, year after year, no longer existed in Las Vegas. 

It started in the early 1990s, when the Nevada Gaming Commission released the first of several statements assuring the public that the FBI had forced the last of the mob out of Las Vegas in the 1980s. That was not true, of course. Goodman himself had represented Spilotro in a mob trial in the mid-1980s, shortly before Spilotro was buried alive and left for dead in an Indiana cornfield. Blitzstein was a co-defendant with Spilotro in that trial. After Spilotro’s murder, Blitzstein pleaded guilty and went to prison. He was released in the early 1990s and returned to Las Vegas, picking up where he had left off.

The 62-year-old Blitzstein ran a downtown auto-repair shop that fronted for his rackets. Authorities said he ran loan-shark and insurance-fraud racketeering operations out of the shop.

In January 1997, Blitzstein was gunned down in his town house. Federal prosecutors later contended that mob families in Los Angeles and Buffalo, N.Y., had ordered Blitzstein’s hit so they could take control of his business.

Then, in May 1999, Goodman, as a mayoral candidate, issued a press release declaring the streets of the city free of traditional organized crime.

"For the last 15 years," Goodman said, "there hasn't been a mob presence here."

Coincidentally or not, Goodman issued that statement from his law office, which was around the corner from the U.S. District courthouse where the Blitzstein murder-related trial was well underway. Testimony in that case, which was heavily covered by the media, related to the life-and-death saga of Herbert Blitzstein–who had been Spilotro's right-hand man–provided new details about Las Vegas street rackets. For example, the 12-count racketeering indictment handed down in the case named 10 defendants charged with offenses ranging from Mafia-related murder-for-hire to racketeering.

The trial surrounding Blitzstein’s murder, which ended with most of the defendants pleading out to lesser crimes, was the last Mafia-related trial in Las Vegas.

Blitzstein’s murder also marked the last mob hit in Sin City. But don't tell Oscar Goodman. We'll just keep it between us.

New Year’s Military-style: A Look Back

by Cathy Scott
Reprinted from Women In Crime Ink

Just before New Year’s Eve 2003, something extraordinary happened in three popular partying spots: The arm of the law came down and ordered that information on everyone visiting those respective cities be handed over to the FBI. It was a true Big Brother moment, all in the name of Homeland Security.

The three cities--Washington, D.C., New York and Las Vegas--were pointed out as possible target cities for terrorist strikes. As history would show, it never happened, but that didn’t stop the frenzy that it might happen. The New York Times' story about the high alert, which was issued December 21, 2004, read: "Military helicopters and sharpshooters joined fireworks and noisemakers on Wednesday in welcoming the New Year in the nation's largest celebrations."

Then-Las Vegas Sheriff Bill Young told PBS’s “FRONTLINE” producers, “We have 300,000 to 400,000 people on the streets on Las Vegas Boulevard [the Las Vegas Strip] in front of all these beautiful hotels, waiting for the clock to strike midnight and all the fireworks to go off. And that was what the intelligence information indicated, that that was, you know, the type of area or venue that they were going to try to target.”

“Here was the real dilemma,” Young continued. “Do we cancel our New Year's Eve celebration in Las Vegas? That was the question being placed on me.”

So the answer was to hand over the names of everybody staying in town. That meant hotel records, airline records, rental car records, gift shop records and casino records.

People swarmed to the Las Vegas Strip anyway to welcome in 2004.
Sheriff Young seemed to justify the heavy scrutiny over his city's guests, telling PBS, “People that come to Vegas, the only time they're not on video is when they're in their room or they're in a public restroom. They don't have them in those. But the hallways, the elevators, the gaming area--we've taken that to a level that has, I think, surpassed any place in the United States.”

But the high alerts weren’t the only time guests of Las Vegas have unknowingly had their personal information handed over to law enforcement. For years, insiders at Vegas hotels have reported that when someone registers at a hotel or even a small motel, and the hotel desk clerk takes the guest's driver’s license, he then walks behind the lobby where you can’t see him. That’s when he makes a Xerox copy that is later handed over, in a stack of driver’s licenses, to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. The police, in turn, run the licenses see if there are any outstanding arrest warrants.

Early on, when I was covering the police beat for the Las Vegas Sun, I wondered how, when someone had just arrived in town and wasn’t pulled over for a traffic violation, the cops knew that particular person had an outstanding warrant. I’d see it several times a week in police reports. Or a news release would state that so-and-so was arrested soon after arriving in Las Vegas because he or she was a fugitive from justice.
Once I learned that hotel personnel regularly Xeroxed driver’s licenses of registered hotel guests and handed them over to the cops, then I knew. The police would run the names, then, voilà, up would pop the miscreants--an easy collar for police.

That’s the dirty secret most people who come to Las Vegas don’t know about. It’s not just that people are being watched via surveillance cameras in cabs, restaurants, hotels and casinos, but their driver’s license info may be passed on to the authorities as well.

As Gary Peck, at the time executive director with the American Civil Liberties Nevada office, told PBS in reference to the December 2003 terrorist scare, '"Trust us. We're the government. And if you're not up to no good, why should you care?' That's not the way our system works. We are a country that is founded on a set of principles relating to individual freedom, including our privacy, our right to be left alone by the government."

Well said, Gary Peck.

Such law enforcement scrutiny for New Year’s Eve hasn’t happened since 2003 turned into 2004--at least not that we know of.

Photos courtesy The New York Times and Las Vegas Sun

Accused Killers Catch a Break

Reprinted from Women In Crime Ink.

by Cathy Scott

Two murder cases with women as the accused killers have taken similar -- and unusual -- turns. Each was instantly labeled the “Black Widow.” And both women stood to gain millions should their husbands die.

In the first case, San Juan and Manhattan socialite Barbara Koganwas indicted late last year for the 1990 murder of her millionaire husband George. She stood accused of convincing her attorney to hire a hitman to kill George. Kogan’s estranged husband, with whom she was in the middle of a nasty divorce, was shot to death in broad daylight while George was walking from a neighborhood market to his live-in girlfriend’s high-rise apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Joel Seidemann, the Manhattan assistant district attorney who has been on the case for nearly two decades, is expected to refile a fresh charge against Kogan by the end of this year. During Kogan's arraignment in November 2008, Seidemann described the suspect as "a very angry woman."

"But when that anger became so overwhelming," he told the judge, "she decided to litigate the divorce through the bullets of a gun."

The second defendant is Margaret Rudin, charged and convicted of killing her husband, wealthy real estate investor Ronald Rudin, then driving the body to a remote area on the shore of Lake Mojave 45 miles outside of Las Vegas, stuffing him inside an antique truck and setting it on fire.

The commonalities with the two women, both of whom are now 65 years old, are many. Rudin, who was convicted of murder, has been granted a new trial. Rudin’s conviction was overturned in December 2008 by Clark County District Court Judge Sally Loehrer, who ruled that Rudin, who has spent the last nine years in a Nevada state prison, had “ineffective counsel” during her first trial.

And Barbara Kogan, accused of second-degree murder in the contract killing of her estranged husband, has had the charge dismissed on a technicality. In July, State Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus ruled that because another grand jury had failed to indict Kogan in the 1990s, prosecutors needed judicial permission to empanel a new grand jury that handed down the indictment against Kogan last year. The prosecution, he said, failed to get that permission.

Both women are expected to be in their respective courtrooms on opposite ends of the country sometime next year. Rudin’s first trial, which was much publicized and lasted 10 weeks, was one of Las Vegas's highest profile murder cases. For Kogan, “48 Hours” and “Dateline” have already made arrangements to be in the courtroom for the trial, which is expected to last eight weeks.

While prosecutors in both crimes claim greed as the motive, in the Kogan case, the only evidence against her is circumstantial at best -- unless, by trial time, the prosecution comes up with more.

As for Rudin, it's mostly circumstantial as well, with hard evidence against her shaky. Her husband was missing in 1994, his car found at a strip club. Later, a boy and his father, out fishing together, discovered the burnt trunk and body near the shore of Lake Mojave on the Nevada side of the water. A gun, said to be the murder weapon, found months later in the lake, was not registered to Rudin or her husband, so that connection was never made, just conjectured.

After Rudin was granted a new trial, her new attorney, Christopher Oram, told reporters, "Obviously, we're very happy with the judge's ruling and look forward to going to trial.”

Kogan’s new counsel, high-profile criminal defense lawyer Barry Levin, said he’s looking forward to going to trial as well. “I intend to represent her zealously. I think she will be acquitted,” Levin said.

It all will unfold in their respective courtrooms. For the prosecution, both cases at this juncture appear to be uphill battles. But you never know what might happen as both sides sides duke it out in court.

Photo of Barbara Kogan in court (top) courtesy of the New York Daily News and photo of Margaret Rudin courtesy of TruTV.


Cathy Scott is writing a true crime book (St. Martin's Press) about the Barbara Kogan case.

New Turn in a Death in the Desert Case

By Cathy Scott An interesting twist in a sensational but aging Las Vegas criminal case has reared its ugly head. And I, for one, am not buying it. Rick Tabish, who was twice tried (convicted, then acquitted) for the 1998 overdose death of casino mogul Ted Binion, is in prison serving time for three related charges in the case. The prosecutors couldn’t nab Tabish for murder. (Binion had died of a self-induced drug overdose after buying 12 pieces of tar heroin and also filling a prescription for Xanax, then drug binging for a couple of days; six months after Binion’s death Tabish and Binion’s live-in girlfriend, Sandy Murphy, were charged with murder.) Tabish, along with co-defendant Murphy, while acquitted of murder in 2004, after the Nevada Supreme Court earlier overturned the conviction, was found guilty in connection with unearthing a fortune of Binion’s silver from a vault in the desert floor in nearby Pahrump, Nev. Murphy was released and given time served. But Tabish was handed down consecutive sentences and is still in a Nevada prison after serving close to nine years. Since the second trial, Tabish has gone before the parole board three times but was denied each time--until last January when, after his fourth appearance, the parole board changed one of Tabish's convictions to a concurrent sentence, meaning he could released as early as mid-2010. It was rumored that because the legal and law enforcement communities in Southern Nevada couldn’t get Tabish on murder charges, they’d keep him in prison as long as they could. So far, it’s been working--until the recent parole board hearing. Now, coincidentally and seemingly out of the blue, a prison inmate--a member, no less, of the Aryan Warrior white supremacist gang--on May 20 testified in exchange for a lighter sentence during a trial (unrelated to Rick Tabish) that Tabish provided him with information about new inmates and with personal information, including home addresses, for law enforcement officers. And Tabish's reward for allegedly providing the information? The gang member claimed that he provided Tabish with protection inside the medium-security prison. Now, call me a skeptic, but I don’t believe in coincidences. And I don’t trust inmates who deliver salacious details for prosecutors in exchange for less prison time. Tabish has access to the Internet for his job inside the walls of the prison 30 miles north of Las Vegas, where he was incarcerated until he recently was relocated to northern Nevada. But it’s near impossible to get home addresses of cops, and certainly not via the Internet, let alone difficult to then hand them over to gang members without prison corrections officers knowing what’s going on. It’s even harder to believe that the computers used by inmates are not monitored to see what sites are being accessed. It’s all an enormous pill to swallow. Still, before you know it, the district attorney’s office might be handing down charges based solely on rewarded testimony of a prison gang member against Tabish, who, according to the prison, has a clean inmate record. To be certain, this latest twist is definitely worthy of following.

Writers' groups

I just discovered a wonderful writers' group in San Diego (to where I'll eventually be moving). It's San Diego Writers, Ink. My lifelong friend Vickie Pynchon, an attorney-mediator, columnist and blogger extraordinaire, is a member of a close-knit writers' group in Los Angeles. Vickie was a part of my first group, Sisters of the Pen, when we were kids. Who knew then how much writing we both would go on to do? (My sister Cordelia, also a former member and now an antiques dealer, is also blogging). I wasn't in another group again until a couple years after I broke into the news business. Fellow journalist and friend Susan Gembrowski, who's now an editor on the metro desk at the San Diego Union-Tribune, once hosted a few writers' meetings in Ocean Beach for local freelancers. The meetings eventually dwindled as we all moved on with our respective journalism careers. The first time I participated (about five years ago) in the Authors of the Flathead conference in Whitefish, Montana, I was envious. The group is chock full of talented, aspiring authors who encourage and constructively critique their respective works. After giving a workshop at their annual conference last month, in early October, I told myself I was going to find a group of my own, even if I had to be the one to organize it. I haven't found a group in Las Vegas, although freelance writer Terrisa Meeks runs one in Vegas where I was once a speaker. When I worked at the Las Vegas Sun in the mid 1990s, a handful of reporters started a writers group there. We'd meet once a month at a local Starbucks and go over each other's lengthier feature pieces we each were working on. With time, those meetings, too, slowly dwindled. Then this week, on the Internet, I stumbled across the San Diego group. Writing is a craft; the more you do it, the better you get. Thus, I'm hoping to not only learn from other writers, but to help others as well. The goal is getting words on the page and getting feedback along the way for works in progress. Fellow writers' feedback is invaluable and a gift when you can get it.