Shortly after Bernie Madoff arrived in prison, at the start of a 150-year sentence, the mastermind behind the largest fraud in financial history was slapped across the face. Madoff was closely following the way his case was being reported in the media and had gone to the jail’s TV room to watch “60 Minutes.” When he changed the channel—in defiance of the prison’s unwritten rules, he soon learned—another inmate objected and wanted it changed back. There was a scuffle, and then a smack on the cheek. It was then that Carmine John Persico Jr., the notorious boss of the Colombo crime family, known as “The Snake,” who has been serving his own century-plus sentence at the same prison, intervened. “Carmine sent his boys over, or his ‘friends,’ rather, to ‘have a talk’ with the guy who delivered the slap,” recounted Steve Fishman, a journalist who has covered Madoff for years. Persico’s men “issued what Madoff called ‘an extraordinarily stern warning,’ and talked it all out. After that, Bernie got to watch” whatever he wanted. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between a pair of notorious, geriatric inmates (Madoff is just shy of 80 and Persico is 83) serving what amounts to life in prison.
| *LBN-SITE OF THE DAY: |
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*LBN-SPOTLIGHT:
Broken Windows, Broken Business: How the Smallest –Amazon.com —- —— Once every few years a book comes along with an insight so penetrating, so powerful – and so simply, demonstrably true -that it instantly changes the way we think and behave.
*LBN-R.I.P.: ****Stanley Greene, whose visceral and brutally honest images of conflict and his fearlessness in the most perilous of places made him one of the leading war photographers of his generation, died on Friday in Paris. He was 68. A founding member of the photographer-owned agency Noor Images, Mr. Greene, who lived in Paris, had been treated for liver cancer for several years, associates said.
*LBN-SPOTLIGHT: Do You Want To Be Part of The “Best of Los Angeles” community? It’s simple. Visit this link and simply click “Like” —–
*LBN-COMMENTARY by Bret Stephens: Friends and colleagues who knew Roger Ailes better than I did attest that he was a nicer and more considerate man than most liberal obituarists will ever give him credit for. They add (and the same obituarists concede) that the creator of Fox News understood the art of political messaging better than just about anybody in the last 50 years. And they claim, without contradiction, that nobody did more than Ailes to broaden the reach of conservative ideas among the American public, at least nobody since Ronald Reagan. Except in this respect: If Ailes broadened, he also debased. The man who did so much to engineer the ascendancy of conservative media paved the way to its moral and intellectual decline — much as his own accumulation of vast corporate power created openings for his abuse of it. Many are the milestones along this long and winding road. One that stands out for me came in November 2015, in a revealing exchange between Washington Post columnist George Will, the scholarly senior statesman of conservative punditry, and Bill O’Reilly, Fox News’ lord of hosts.
*LBN-COMMENTARY by Peggy Noonan: Here’s an idea. It would be good if top Hill Republicans went en masse to the president and said: “Stop it. Clean up your act. Shut your mouth. Do your job. Stop tweeting. Stop seething. Stop wasting time. You lost the thread and don’t even know what you were elected to do anymore. Get a grip. Grow up and look at the terrain, see it for what it is. We have limited time. Every day you undercut yourself, you undercut us. More important, you keep from happening the good policy things we could have done together. If you don’t grow up fast, you’ll wind up abandoned and alone. Act like a president or leave the presidency.” Could it help? For a minute. But it would be constructive—not just carping, leaking, posing, cheering and tweeting but actually trying to lead. The president needs to be told: Democracy is not your plaything.
*LBN-SPOTLIGHT: The revealing conversation continues…..”Without Notes” with M. Zuhdi Jasser M.D. – Episode 2: The American Dream —- .
*LBN-OVERHEARD: ***Steve Harvey is being sued by his second ex-wife Mary Shackelford, for upwards of $60 million dollars. According to court documents, the comedian’s ex claims that her life has never been the same following their divorce in 2005. ***Alan Cumming revealed he likes to Google naked pictures of any co-stars he’s scripted to share sex scenes with. The “Good Wife” star, 52, said he liked to see what he was working with if the material was available on the web. ***The Cannes Film Festival started with a bang again this week, after a press screening of Netflix’s “Okja” was interrupted by loud booing. Some attendees were infuriated by Netflix’s refusal to abide by the new festival rule that all movies should be shown in French cinemas. Then the film — which stars Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal — was stopped because of a technical glitch, and restarted again without explanation, which led to further jeers.
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