"Welcome to New York, pal — now go to jail."

"An Italian tourist spent his second night in the city behind bars after staff at an upscale East Side steakhouse called cops when he claimed he left his wallet at a friend’s place."

Graziano Graziussi, a 43-year-old lawyer from Naples, is a regular at Smith & Wollensky....

“I was going to leave my iPhone,” he said. “I suggested they bring a bus boy with me... It would have been an easy trip.”

One police veteran told the Daily News he wasn’t surprised to hear that the restaurant wouldn’t take the phone as collateral.

“How do they know that iPhone was his? It could have come from anywhere,” the cop said.

The restaurant is getting some horrible press, but I'm sure people rip off restaurants all the time with the old forgot-my-wallet routine. If you let the guy leave, 9 times out of 10, you never see him again. I made up that statistic for rhetorical purposes. What do you think the statistic is? How much money do you think restaurants lose every year? They'll have to compensate by charging more to the people who do pay. But now they're stuck with the bad PR, because they called the cops on a photogenic lawyer, which means: 1. Focused outrage, 2. Ability to contact and talk to the press, 3. Big newspaper willing to run the story.

***

Readers of this blog might be thinking: Smith & Wollensky, where were we just talking about Smith & Wollensky? Was it in "The Great Gatsby"? It sounds like the name of the place that's been around long enough to have figured in "Gatsby," which takes place in 1922, but it opened in 1977. It adopted an old-fashioned image way back then. It was founded by Alan Stillman, the man who invented T.G.I. Friday's.

According to Stillman, there was never a Mr. Smith or a Mr. Wollensky involved. He opened the Manhattan phone book twice and randomly pulled out two names, Smith and Wollensky. The announcements for the opening, however, carried the names Charlie Smith and Ralph Wollensky. Stillman later admitted that Charlie and Ralph were the names of his dogs.

What's the deal with Stillman and Friday's? T.G.I. Friday's started back in 1965. Stillman — Wikipedia says — was a "bachelor perfume salesman [who] lived in a neighborhood with many airline stewardesses, fashion models, secretaries, and other single people on the East Side of Manhattan near the Queensboro Bridge, and hoped that opening a bar would help him meet women."

At the time, Stillman's choices for socializing were non-public cocktail parties, or "guys' beer-drinking hangout" bars that women usually did not visit; he recalled that "there was no public place for people between, say, twenty-three to thirty-seven years old, to meet." He sought to recreate the comfortable cocktail-party atmosphere in public despite having no experience in the restaurant business.

So he kind of invented the singles bar?

With $5,000 of his own money and $5,000 borrowed from his mother, Stillman purchased a bar he often visited, The Good Tavern at the corner of 63rd Street and First Avenue, and renamed it T.G.I. Friday's after the expression "Thank God! It's Friday!" from his years at Bucknell University....

Aw. I'm rooting for this guy, who made his mom happy, by facilitating a million fucks, some of which were his. Ah! Here's a whole interview with him, complete with photos:

NCR: Did your strategy work? Did you meet good-looking girls?

Stillman: Have you seen the movie Cocktail? Tom Cruise played me! I was lucky enough to do it for three years — he only did it to make a movie. Even today, the advantage of being the guy behind the bar is huge. Why do girls want to date the bartender? To this day, I’m not sure that I get it.

Ha ha. But, Althouse, get back to where you were going: that time we were talking about Smith & Wollensky on this blog. Yes. It was 9 days ago, and the story was about some job applicant who was presented in the press as a young guy who used what I called "the old honesty-modesty routine." Posting, I accepted the media cue that he was a gutsy, charming underdog, but — using Smith & Wollensky as my clue — I got suspicious in the comments:

A key line in the letter, as reprinted in the Daily Mail is: "I met you the summer before last at Smith & Wollensky's in New York when I was touring the east coast with my uncle, ***** ******"

Why put the name of your uncle in the letter unless it's intended to influence the hiring? Perhaps this person's seemingly refreshing attitude is just the cheeky confidence of a young person from a privileged background.

Would a guy working his way up from a working-class background ever write a letter like this?

Which guy most nearly won your heart?
	Graziano Graziussi
	Alan Stillman
	The guy that wrote the cover letter
pollcode.com free polls

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"An 80-year-old former Australian Catholic priest... bit off a fellow clergyman's ear during a row over a parking spot."

"Thomas Byrne... reportedly told [Fr Thomas Smith, 81] to pick up something he had lost during the brief scuffle. That something turned out to be a part of Smith's ear.... but he did not realise that until he got back to his room and took the object out of his pocket."

At some point, very old people really shouldn't be driving.

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"So far, few traditional farmers lining up to grow marijuana in Washington state, Colorado."

WaPo reports:

Marijuana remains illegal under federal law....

The Justice Department has not said whether it will try to block the two states from implementing their new laws, passed late last year.....

In addition, marijuana is a crop that can’t be insured, and federal drug law bars banks from knowingly serving the industry....

Both states are in the process of developing rules for a legal marijuana industry....

How can state rules possibly make the industry legal? They can only make chaos that might conceivably move Congress to change the federal law. I don't see that coming any time soon. The Justice Department might say something encouraging, but will the next President's Justice Department stick with whatever position Eric Holder embraces?

Even if you felt sure you wouldn't be prosecuted, would you want to sign up on an official list as someone who is conspicuously committing an ongoing felony? Would you switch from a legal crop and expose yourself like that? And even if some farmers would go ahead and violate the criminal law — presumably because the upside profits are high — does the inability to buy crop insurance and use banks wreck the whole idea?

Dozens of marijuana experts, who have been growing plants for medical use or in secret for illegal use, are educating state officials about the potential for the crop. Probably 95 percent of those people choose to grow their plants indoors, despite higher costs, to control light and temperature, improve quality and increase yields....

Indoor crops generally allow for up to three harvests per season, compared to just one harvest for an outdoor crop, and allow for easier security measures. 

So "traditional farmers" have an entirely separate reason for not responding to the new program. You can't be growing marijuana amber-waves-of-grain-on-the-fruited-plain style. This stuff will be grown in big warehouses, pulling in loads of electricity for intense lighting and heavily guarded with guns! guns! guns!

Oh, but here's a little old lady, "Gail Besemer, who grows flowers and vegetables near Deming, Wash., [who] has expressed interest in a producers’ license."

Besemer already has three hoop houses, which are essentially temporary greenhouses, but could see expanding her business slightly to grow marijuana for a local clientele in northwest Washington.

Slightly! Flowers! Grandma!

However, “I’m concerned about druggies invading my property — ne’er-do-wells invading my property to steal, to get free dope,” she said. “Security would be an issue.”

Where do you get off with that contempt for the consumers of the product you want to grow? Seems to me, these are your people. Don't insult them.

“My family is not particularly excited about me being interested in this. But if someone has an integrated farm, growing a number of different crops, I would think it would be a high profit plant,” she said. “Taxation and security might get in the way of profits, and it might end not being so profitable.”

Yeah, you'd better think about it, lady. There's a reason it's a high profit plant. If it weren't for all these problems, any idiot could grow his own in his house. Take away the obstacles, and it's not a business at all. Which removes half of the attraction for the government, since there won't be anything to tax if there isn't a big rules-heavy structure burdening business. This isn't a game for the little old lady with her flowers and hoop houses. But that's the screwy, sentimental anecdote The Washington Post ties to plant in our brain.

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"When I was at M.I.T., if someone went to hack the system, say by downloading databases to play with them, might be called a hero..."

"... get a degree, and start a company. But they called the cops on him. Cops."

From "How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture."

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"Please take away my Second Amendment right."

"Do more to help us protect ourselves because what’s most likely to wake me in the early hours isn’t a man’s body slamming at my door but depression, that raven, tapping, rapping, banging for relief. I have a better chance of surviving if I never have the option of being able to pull the trigger."

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A "pedestrian who did not even own a car could be convicted of vehicular homicide in the death of her 4-year-old son..."

"After a long bus trip with her three young children in April 2010, Raquel Nelson did what other bus passengers did that day, and had done so many days before: She attempted to cross the road from the bus stop, which is directly opposite her apartment complex, rather than walk a third of a mile to a traffic light, cross five lanes and walk a third of a mile back, lugging tired children and groceries."

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Obama resorts to the "if there’s even one life that can be saved" rhetoric.

"If there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, we’ve got an obligation to try."

These are his gun control proposals, including those executive actions that don't require any of that troublesome interaction with Congress.

I loathe the absurd argument that if there is only one life to be saved then we must do something. Obviously, we do not follow that logic generally. For good reason!

IN THE COMMENTS: elkh1 said:

The mother saved three lives, hers and her twin sons' by firing five shots at an intruder.

"if there’s even one life that can be saved, we’ve got an obligation to try." We must require every citizen 18 and up to own a gun for protection. 

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"I think the businesses that bring these men in should also be accountable for not providing opportunities that keep them busy outside of work."

"They should check their employees before hiring (if they don't already) and get rid of those who commit ANY kind of aggression toward women or men. Their social responsibility goes beyond the gate or the door. Maybe the answer is for the towns like Williston to heavily tax the companies so that they can afford to police the men the companies employ. If business doesn't see itself more broadly as a player in the overall health of our society, government needs to step in."

That's a reader comment at the NYT article about all the single men working out in the oil fields of North Dakota, which we've been talking about over in this earlier thread. Please go to that thread to talk about the article more generally. I'm opening up this new thread for discussion of the proposition that business should be responsible for the after-work activities of their employers, that the tendency of men to go out after work looking for female companionship calls for the heavy taxation of business, that individuals looking for sexual relationships in their own free time ought to be conceptualized as an issue of collective "health," that overall societal health requires big "players," and that if businesses don't want to see themselves as the players, they leave a gap that government must fill.

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"Prosecutor as bully."

Lawrence Lessig on the suicide of Aaron Swartz (which we've already been talking about here). Lessig was Swartz's friend and — for a time — his lawyer:

From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good....

Swartz faced a million-dollar trial, and he was out of money, "yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge."

Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.

AND: From the NYT obit:

In 2008, he took on Pacer — or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents. The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free since they are produced at public expense....

Mr. Swartz recalled, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.”...

He was scared, apparently, but he also joked and flaunted about his misdeeds:

 “Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they’ve been personally vetted by The New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they ‘liberated’ millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today’s New York Times.”...

The government chose not to prosecute that time. But Swartz moved on to the JSTOR matter, and United States attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said: “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”

The obit links to Swartz's own blog post describing his depression (and other ills). That post is from 2007, before either the Pacer or the JSTOR incidents.

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D.C. attorney general confirms that law is for the little people.

No charges will be filed against David Gregory "despite the clarity of the violation of this important law, because under all of the circumstances here a prosecution would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia nor serve the best interests of the people of the District to whom this office owes its trust."

The clarity of the violation of this important law....

Why is the law important? If Gregory clearly violated the law, but there is no interest to be served in prosecuting him, doesn't that prove that the law is not important? If the precise thing that he did — which is clearly what is defined as a crime — raises no interest in prosecution, how can we be satisfied by letting this one nice famous man go? Rewrite the law so that it only covers the activity that the government believes deserves prosecution, so there is equal justice under the law.

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