MSNBC: Charles Manson Interview on the Today Show (1987)

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Charles Manson has made a couple of admissions of guilt. I’m not a lawyer but this is what it sounds like when he says perhaps he should’ve killed more people. I’m paraphrasing here, but that is pretty close, and perhaps the closes, he’s come to taking responsibility for the brutal Manson Family murders of 1969 of people the Manson Family didn’t know or had ever heard of. The interviewer asked a basic straightforward question and got a fairly straight answer from Charlie.

I believe a borderline silly question has to be asked of Charlie Manson: Do you feel responsibility or remorse for the murders?  It is a silly question because you know what he’s going to say:  Remorse for what, what murders, what about everything you’ve done to me and so forth.  It has to be asked because he’s the one man who knows exactly how many people he’s responsible for killing and you are looking for new information here and, if nothing else, to get a new reaction out of him.

This is not much of an interview but certainly entertaining. The interviewer is not asking many questions but really just letting Charlie do his shtick, his routine, and letting him go off on the world and what he thinks of things and letting him speak and make up for lost time spending so much of his time not just in State prison but in solitary confinement, during which the world that is still fascinated by the man gets to see how he is doing and what he is thinking.

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Watch Mojo: ‘History of Las Vegas: Casinos and Crime’

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Rik Schneider

History of Las Vegas_ Casinos and Crime (2012) - Google Search (1)

Source:Watch Mojo– welcome to Sin City, Nevada.

Source:The New Democrat

“This city in the middle of the desert was originally named Las Vegas by Spanish explorers, and that name translates to “the meadows.” Soon, a Mormon population relocated there from Utah and eventually became important members of the community. Once a connection to nearby Los Angeles was established, it was only a matter of time before Vegas grew. However, first, the city needed an attraction. Casinos and theaters began popping up and soon Vegas was known for unlawful and sinful behavior. That encouraged organized crime to get into the action. Today, Las Vegas is known as a city of quick marriages, gambling, and glitz. In this video, WatchMojo.com learns more about the history of Las Vegas.”

From Watch Mojo

“History of Las Vegas: Casinos and Crime”

History of Las Vegas_ Casinos and Crime (2012) - Google Search

Source:Watch Mojo– from a History Channel documentary about Las Vegas, Nevada.

From Watch Mojo

“By Ned Day, Robert Stoldal, KLAS-TV, 1987. History of mob involvement in gambling in Las Vegas, 1931-1980s. Includes segments on Moe Dalitz, Allan Dorfman and the Teamsters Union, Tony “Big Tuna” Acordy and the Atlantic City mob, Frank Rosenthal, Tony Spilotro, and the Chicago mob.”

Vintage Las Vegas_ 'Mob on The Run (1987)'

Source:Vintage Las Vegas– The Stardust Casino, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

From Vintage Las Vegas

Take Jimmy Hoffa and Bugsy Siegel, and Howard Hughes as well, away from Las Vegas and that city might still be a desert town, a country town, perhaps a place where people go to get some peace and quiet, but not the the entertainment capital of the United States that it is today. This city was literally built with blood money from the Italian and Jewish mobs, but also from crooks in organized crime such as Jimmy Hoffa, Sr.

Good business people, whether legitimate characters or crooks, are always looking for the next profit and investment where they can make that next fortune. There was no one in Vegas 80 years ago, a city of perhaps 10,000 people, similar to Bethesda, Maryland (if you are familiar with my area) which was, pre-1970 at least, just a stop on the way to somewhere like Washington or Baltimore, but that started to change in the late 1930s and early 1940s as the mobs discovered Vegas.

That is what you see in this video about the men who built Las Vegas and gave the Southwest and the broader West and even the United States (once the word was out that Vegas was a great place) the opportunity to either lose or make money, but Vegas was also a great place to have a good time just a 4-hour drive from Los Angeles. It gave the State of Nevada a serious revenue source to build its infrastructure, schools, and everything that States need to do well.

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TCM: The Last of Sheila (1973)

Posted on February 18, 2014 by kireschneider

The Last of SheilaSource:TCM– the cast from The Last of Sheila.

“An eccentric movie producer-gamester invites six film industry friends to his yacht to play out one of his games, the goal of which is to reveal which of them killed his beloved, Sheila.”

From TCM

“Edgeworth discusses the concept of “playing fair” in mystery stories and illustrates with a forgotten 1973 classic penned by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins.”

IMG_5689

Source:Erin Mills– the cast from The Last of Sheila.

From Erin Mills

First, with this movie, just to get a little personal: what other reason do you need to watch a movie (especially if you are a guy) than to know that both Raquel Welch and Dyan Cannon are featured at the top of their game (well, Raquel Welch has always been at the top of her game) but these two gorgeous, sexy, goddesses in the same damn movie acting together?

Now, in case you are actually interested in this movie: even with Raquel and Dyan in it, it is still not a great movie, but a very entertaining and funny detective movie played by actors who are playing actors and not detectives. A Hollywood director, James Coburn, gives up his yacht to Hollywood friends and associates in Hollywood who play detective and solve the mystery.

The excellent cast numbers 10 or more. Richard Benjamin, a terrific comedian and very good if not great actor, plays Tom, a film writer, who thinks he knows who killed the woman and gets a lot of it right about who could have done it, who had the access, and so-forth.

Phillip, played by the great James Mason (North by Northwest among other great movies) is reserved throughout the movie but at the end figures it out. Raquel and Dyan are basically just along for the ride and clueless, but, as I said earlier, very welcome additions .

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Paul Woods: CFL American Expansion 1995: CFL Commissioner Larry Smith

Posted on February 17, 2014 by kireschneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Canadian Football League expansion, or CFL expansion in America, was a great idea because the CFL, lets face it, was a 9-team league back in the early 1990s, before they expanded inside the United States. From a country (Canada) of roughly 30 million people struggling just to pay their bills, let alone save a few dollars, they needed American fans and American dollars spent on the CFL to pay their bills. At the time, there were plenty of major markets inside the U.S. that could afford and want to support major league gridiron football.

The problem with the CFL expansion was that it was poorly executed and poorly thought out, which is what happens when you get 10-20 thousand fans at CFL games inside 65 thousand-seat stadiums, which is what they had in Memphis and San Antonio, because they didn’t have the right marketing for America or the right management groups for the American teams.  Only Baltimore was profitable in the CFL, while Sacramento, Las Vegas, San Antonio, Shreveport, Memphis, and Birmingham all folded in the CFL.

Thanks to the new United States Football League, the CFL, I believe, will have the opportunity to merge with the USFL, especially if they agree to play in the spring and summer instead of summer and fall. And you could have an American Football Conference and a Canadian Football Conference in this united league in the future. There will be a future blog about that, but bringing in an American conference would more than save the CFL financially and give lots of Canadian and American football fans teams to root for and follow.

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Dame Elizabeth Taylor: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) Starring Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Derik Schneider

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with the great Taylor/Burton combo is supposed to be a drama but  I always laugh throughout this movie, which I’ve seen now four or five times and saw again over the weekend. I’ve been thinking about this movie a lot for some reason but for me this movie turns into a 2-hour comedy that is so great that Turner Classic Movies with Robert Osborne did a special about it about a year and a half ago and brought in actress Ellen Barkin to give an expert analysis of it.

If you are not that familiar with this movie perhaps you are very young, with not much respect for movies that weren’t made in this century, which I’m afraid is very common among the younger generations. Think of Married With Children or The Honeymooners from  the 1950s, which are about married people who seem to love each other but can’t go very long without pissing the other off and spend a lot of the marriage beating the hell out of each other verbally.

Virginia Woolf is one long argument between a couple, George and Martha, who have lost their son (fantasy perhaps?), with the mother especially not ready to accept this reality and not quite there mentally and taking out her anger on her husband, who is the father of their son.  He is having issues with his wife about why their son is no longer there, and they go through these issues as they are entertaining guests.  The man is in direct competition with George to the next professor at their school, yet they do not know each other very well.

I laugh through most of this movie because the shots that they take at each other are dead on because they know each other so well.  The sarcasm is so direct and on target, and even though they are supposed to be entertaining guests, they can’t stay out of each other’s way for most of the movie and even bring their guests into the never-ending argument about what happened to their son and why he is no longer with them.

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Learn How to Box: Video: FOX Sports: Beyond the Glory, Larry Holmes

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Ederik Schneider

Ederik Schneider on Google+

Larry Holmes is the Rodney Dangerfield of heavyweight boxing, but he also deserved a lot of respect, because we are talking about one of the top three to five heavyweights of all time, who beat everyone in his prime except for Michael Spinks, a fighter he should have beaten. But if you look at the list of opponents he beat in his career, it is right up there with the list of Muhammad Ali when you are talking about Ken Norton, Ernie Shavers, Leon Spinks, Gerry Cooney, and many others.

A good way to look at the dominance of Larry Holmes is to look at the fact that he was the boxing heavyweight champion of the world for 7 years, from 1978 to 1985, when he lost to Mike Spinks for the first time. He was one of the most talented and intelligent boxers of all time, a huge man with great power and a devastating jab who pounded his opponent the whole fight until he finally fell.

The reason Larry’s qualities are overlooked is that he was unfortunate enough to pop up in the same generation or era as Muhammad Ali, who is perhaps the most popular heavyweight of all time as well as the best. And another reason has to be the fact that Muhammad and Larry were similar fighters in style–tall, strong guys with agility and great jabs. Unfortunately, he lost to Mike Spinks, a bulked-up heavyweight, and lost that fight plus the rematch to Spinks because he fought with an inadequate strategy and moved far too much when he should have just pounded Spinks the entire time.  Fighters forfeit respect when they lose to people they were expected to dominate.

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Learn How to Box: Video: FOX Sports: Beyond The Glory Documentary Joe Frazier

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Ederik Schneider

Ederik Schneider on Google+

Joe Frazier was called Smokin’ Joe Frazier, but I call him Iron Joe Frazier, even though Mike Tyson now owns that nickname, but that is exactly what Joe was.  He came from a generation before Iron Mike. But Joe Frazier had that iron face, neck, head, and hands.  He descended from sharecroppers in South Carolina and made it up to Philadelphia, where he learned how to box in the 1960s.  He was an Olympic champion at the 1964 Summer Olympics.

Joe Frazier had an iron body and came from a hard-scrabble environment that gave him an iron mentality.  No one was going to stop him. I believe that is what primarily contributed to Joe Frazier’s style as a boxer.  He would close off the ring, especially against tall fighters, and you have to know that Joe Frazier was 5’10,” if that.  Joe did cut off the ring and went right at you and dared you to stop him.

Joe Fraizer had an iron face and neck to go along with iron fists, and when he hit you, he broke bones and dared you to hit him back, and what you had to do was to basically try to kill him before he killed you. Which is what Muhammad Ali did to him in Ali-Frazier III and what George Foreman did to him when he beat him for the World Heavyweight Championship in 1973:  punch Joe as hard as you could over and over to prevent him from hitting you.

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Bill Kurtis: Vegas & The Mob (1996)

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Rik Schneider

Vegas And The Mob - Full Documentary (2017) - Google Search

Source:Gamble TV– former FBI agent Ed Becker.

“Gambling has always been a very important business in the Mafia. From card games to betting on horses and other sports, the Mafia has earned cash from all of them. They operated many illegal and luxurious gambling operations throughout the United States. Police officers and law enforcement agencies were in the payroll of the Mafia Bosses and ignored the gambling operations. However, a major event occurred which forever changed the history of gambling and casinos in the United States. The state of Nevada legalized gambling in 1931.

Even though gambling had been legalized, no one paid much attention except the local cowboys and some men from nearby military bases. Las Vegas was a dirty town in the middle of the desert with a few gas stations, greasy junk food diners and a few slot machine emporiums. Las Vegas in the early 1940s was not an attractive place to do business or live. The Mafia didn’t catch onto the huge moneymaking potential of Las Vegas until after World War II ended. Al Capone had eyed the town with great interest but never got onto completing his plans of turning it into a hotel and casino haven for tourists and travelers.

Las Vegas remained Mafia free until the Mafioso Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel realized the potential for Las Vegas. The timing could not have been better. Before the formation of Las Vegas, American tourists looking for a great time had to go all the way to Cuba. In Cuba gangsters were welcomed by the corrupt Batista regime, casinos were plentiful, and the profits were huge. Around a decade after the opening of the first casino in Las Vegas, Fidel Castro’s Revolution swept Cuba. So, the people were left with no other alternative for legal gambling than going to Las Vegas.”

From Gamble TV

Las Vegas was perfect for the Italian and Jewish-American mobs because it was a physically large but a barely populated city, with great potential to become the entertainment capital of the United States, which was not the case for Cuba, Florida, etc.  The State of Nevada itself was a huge area with a small population that these mobsters could easily control by offering them jobs in their dubious businesses.

Benjamin Bugsy Siegel (the great Jewish mobster) and Howard Hughes saw what Vegas could be before anyone else, which would be a haven for money and for business that they could develop by bringing in people from all over the country, especially the West, and from outside the United States.  They could run legitimate profitable businesses but also cover up criminal activities.

The Italian and Jewish mobs, along with Howard Hughes and a few others, made Las Vegas what it is today, the entertainment capital of the United States, where millions of Americans and foreign tourists go every year to spend their hard-earned money, lose some money, and make some money, but also have a great time and escape their everyday tedium, which is the city you see today.

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Charlie Rose: 1987 Interview of Charlie Manson

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:Fat Hawaiian Man– Serial murderer and cult leader Charles Manson, being interviewed by Charlie Rose, for CBS News in 1986.

Source:The New Democrat

“One of the good interviews of Manson, although shortly before this Manson was apparently in solitary for an extended period and his frustration is easily seen throughout the interview.”

From Fat Hawaiian Man

I can feel a certain sympathy for Charlie Manson because it is easy to see why he is so pissed off at a society that provided only the corrections system as an early home for him. Never knowing his biological father, with a criminal mother who rejected her son, being shipped around from aunt and uncle to aunt and uncle, and then ending up in reform school, he received no encouragement as a child or the emotional and physical skills to tackle life’s demands.

I am not excusing Manson’s crimes, but many career criminals in the United States emerge from similar rough beginnings. Ted Bundy would be an exception to that, as well as Manson’s soldiers, but the life of Charles Manson is a lesson for society that it shouldn’t give up on the younger generation, because it could come back to bite them if young people end up looking for an avenue to express their resentment or hatred for the society that neglected them.

I’m not sure there’s someone more qualified than Charlie Rose to interview Charlie Manson, because of his intelligence, the work he puts into his interviews, and his vast knowledge about so much that is news-related.  His interviewing skills are unmatched.  He knows when someone is being straight with him and knows when they are leaving out important facts.  His bullshit radar is superb, and Charlie Manson found himself up against someone who was more than his match in Charlie Rose in this interview.

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Jack London: ABC News 20/20 Diane Sawyer 1994 Special on The Manson Family

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

The Manson Crime Family, which is what I call it instead of a cult, because of all the crimes they committed and people they either seriously hurt or killed, is one of the worst crime families of all time with regard to their large number of victims.  Charlie Manson, the leader of this family, was a professional criminal and, until he put the Manson Family together, wasn’t a very successful criminal because of all the time he had already spent in prison.

Charlie Manson, even though he was not an educated man (I believe he didn’t even make it to high school) is very intelligent and talented, has a quick mind, and knew how to use his mental skills, charm, and narcotics to make people do exactly what he wanted them to do as in the case of middle class, talented, educated, and intelligent people like Tex Watson and the Manson women.

Charlie Manson felt he had been screwed his entire life and searched for a way to express his anger and get his payback.  He found the perfect cast of characters to do his evil work, a group of people who felt lost, didn’t fit into the establishment, and were looking for a leader.  They found Charles Manson instead and he led them to ruin their lives and those of the victims and their families.

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