THE GENETIC PREDISPOSITION GAME

Sean Timoney just got off with an 18 months sentence after undercover cops caught him putting down a $200,000 payment on 400 lbs. of marijuana. Presumably he and his partner were not planning on smoking all that reefer themselves, so it is a reasonable assumption that they were planning on generating a little side income.

Eighteen months! Contrast this with the guy in Florida in a wheelchair who hoarded a few grams of painkiller in his house because he couldn’t bear the spinal pain he suffered from a car accident. The law said anything over a minimal amount invokes the presumption of intention to traffic, so he drew a 25-year sentence. Now that he is incarcerated they give him all the morphine he wants.

Right now there are people in New York who are serving open-ended sentences ranging from 14 years to life to 25 years to life for infractions ranging from transporting a few ounces of cocaine to just being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the cops showed up.

I mean, there is no accounting for taste, and while I might prefer a night at the Met seeing Figaro outsmart the Duke, there are people in Washington Heights for whom nothing is sweeter than to drop by the local crack factory and shoot the neighborhood gossip with the people working there. Then, when the cops show up, that woman, whose only crime is at worst cadging a free sample, and the idiots working in the crack den get hit with the wrecking ball of New York criminal justice. People who previously had a clean record end up doing life.

Now, the fastest way to incur the wrath of Americans is to remind them of the relatively more humane social policies of the Europeans. A drug offense that gets you life in this country generally does not carry a punishment of more than eight years in Europe, and that is quite enough, European jails not being such lovely places either! But the Europeans, having lived millennia of barbarity, have quite lost the sense of it.

Citizens of our fair Republic have a variety of stock responses to this, the paramount being, “They don’t have our social problems.” Translated into everyday language, this means, “The Europeans don’t have our colored people with their jungle behaviour (being a Spanish-speaking Francophile Jew, I don’t feel the compulsion to buttress the white race).

When you remind people that the European have more or less the same racial composition that we do, percentage wise, without having reverted to capital punishment or draconian prison sentences, Defenders of American Justice fall back to their firewall position, which is basically that the Europeans are a bunch of cowardly Marxist wimps whose policies of appeasement and capitulation will inevitably lead to the green crescent of Islam being raised over the Eiffel Tower.

Whatever Sean Timoney was smoking, he has nothing on these bowtie-neck newspaper columnist who theorize like they were editing The New York Post out of a rubber room at Bellevue Hospital.

I don’t happen to believe marijuana should be illegal at all, and a lot of states agree with me. Reefer is good for you. And I should know. I’ve certainly smoked enough of it in my life. To paraphrase the great American poet and philosopher Howlin’ Wolf, if I had all the reefer I’ve smoked in my life I’d be a millionaire. Well, maybe not a millionaire, but a fuckin’ happy person!

But as long as the hardass pricks who currently are deciding our lives for us, to our endless detriment and for the benefit of their convenience, are determined to make a federal case out of pot smoking, then the Irish guy who conspires to traffic 400 pounds of it should be held up to the same insane standard as the Dominican nurse’s assistant who is suckered by her boyfriend into transporting five ounces of cocaine up to Albany on a Greyhound bus.

Or vise-versa. She should be able to count on the same indulgence offered to him. Unfortunately, justice as it is practiced in New York, in addition to being blind, has no olfactory sense, otherwise the stench would drive her out of the courtroom. The Roman satirist Petronius wrote many millennia ago:

The court is a market where justice is bought and sold
The judge who presides bangs a gavel of gold

If Petronius was scandalized at the prospect of Roman judges selling justice for gold 2,000 years ago, what would he say about modern New York, where justice is on sale for peanuts, and I’m not kidding. One of my career lows in a career that has been scraping the rind for several years now was a job that required me to manage a retail bagel store on the weekends. Whatever you have to do, stay out of the food business. Anyway, judges used to send their spouses in to the store to cadge free or discount bagels.

“Hi, I’m Judge Schwartz’s husband. Your boss always gives me a dozen bagels when I come in.”

Back in the bad old days, when the police were blatantly on the take, it used to be the cops who behaved like that. Now they have cleaned up the police, and it’s the judges who do it. What kind of justice are you going to get from a judge who is such a slimebag that he doesn’t even want to pay for freakin’ bagels? God Forbid you have to go to court against the baker who’s been feeding him all these years!

Somehow, when I see those British judges with their wigs, I find it impossible to believe that they would chisel for a bagel. Or the judges in France. Those judges are naturally responsive to pressure from above, and they may even be corrupt in their day-to-day lives, but I absolutely refuse to believe that they would scrounge bagels or bend justice for a bagel as I have seen to be the case in New York. Maybe I’m naïve. Maybe there are judges in France who will render a dishonest verdict for a piece of stinky cheese or, more likely, a meal in a good restaurant with a hooker for dessert. But a bagel?!! Get th’ fuck outta’ here!

These judgeships must be worth a considerable amount of money, because politically connected lawyers fight like cats and dogs over them. It can’t be the salary, which is in the low $100,000s, so it stands to reason that the take from grafting and inside deals must be substantial. The Clarence Norman scandal in Brooklyn shed some light on the mechanics of running for judge, and it wasn’t a pretty picture, with payoffs to party bosses and so-called “consultants.”

Frankly, it has to be more fun for me to write about it than it is for these chiseling hack attorneys to have to endure on a daily basis.

Then, on top of everything else, and here we get to the point I’m trying to arrive at, although there was no way to get around the buildup, is the torturous tribalism of electing judges, where each ethnic group gets its own allotment of crooked judges so they can buy their way out of a mess.

At the top of the mess are the black judges, especially the female ones, like the one in Queens who was thrown off the bench for having a black kid escorted out the back of the courthouse to avoid the cops who were waiting to arrest him in front. And the one in the Bronx who drunkenly smashed her car in Loehmann’s parking lot and then accused the black cops who arrested her of racism.

Right behind them are the sleazy, crooked Jewish judges like the one in Brooklyn, who was selling child custody decisions and who was filmed and taped accepting cash bribes and gifts right in his judge’s chambers.

Generally speaking, a lot of these decisions can be bought cheaply enough. A few years ago, when I got into a scrape with a wise guy on the train, whom I punched out for insulting and threatening me, my boss at the time offered to get the case thrown out for $1,000.00. I should have taken him up on it, because my attorney, Ron Kuby, who, after seeing photos of how I had so artfully redecorated the “victim’s” face, determined that he should have charged me a lot more money and did not fight the case hard enough, and I ended up taking a misdemeanor conviction and barely escaping a sixty-day sentence at Riker’s Island. As the old joke goes, I should have “paid the $2.00.”

The defendant in the case involving the 400 pounds of pot, Sean Timoney, is an Irish-American whose father, John Timoney, is Miami Chief of Police. He had his case heard in Albany Federal Court by an Irish judge, John McEvoy, who at the sentence admonished observers against saying that Sean Timoney was receiving prejudicial consideration. Then he handed down a sentence of eighteen months.

The reason I keep going back to the ethnic character of this case is that the defendant’s attorney, Edward Hayes, himself raised it as a mitigating factor. He told the court that as an Irish-American, Timoney had a “genetic predisposition” to substance abuse.

Now this defense, which has about as much scientific basis as the nineteenth century vogue of phrenology, or judging a person’s disposition by the shape of the bumps on his head, which a lot of “scientific” people believed in until it was finally debunked as a bunch of bullshit, opens the floodgates for ethnic-based defenses, presumably aimed at sympathetic judges who share the same ethnic background as the defendant.

This is where I get to explain my new drinking game. Let’s say a Jewish attorney is charged with stealing money that was entrusted to him by a client. He could conceivably raise a genetic disposition defense of being genetically inclined toward greed and thievery and buttress it by quoting Shylock from Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” A compliant Jewish judge hearing the case might be sympathetic to such a defense.

That’s the game – assigning genetic predispositions to match various racial stereotypes. Here are a few examples:
Irish have a genetic predisposition for substance abuse and drunkenness.
Jews have a genetic predisposition for thieving greed and witless moralizing.
Latins have a genetic predisposition for evading child support and operating automobile chop shops.
Asiatics have a genetic predisposition for cooking and eating household pets.
Italians have a genetic predisposition for composing sappy music.
French have a genetic predisposition for avoiding baths.
Mexicans have a genetic predisposition for jumping over fences.

You get the picture. Have fun!

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Posted on 12/23/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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