Watching the bribery of ‘Melania’ in a Las Vegas theater

Posted on by January 31, 2026
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Melania

U.S. Rep. Michael (Ozzie) Myers, second from left, is recorded taking a $50,000 bribe during the FBI’s Abscam sting

Decades before becoming New To Law Vegas, I was a newspaper reporter in the Philadelphia area. In 1980 I helped cover the Abscam bribery scandal. That was an FBI sting in which agents secretly videotaped a plethora of elected officials mainly in New Jersey and Pennsylvania taking bribes to help out a phony Arab sheik. Some of the tapes became public record when they were played in open court during the resulting criminal trials, which sent nearly a dozen political heavies to prison. The scandal, which inspired the 2013 movie, “American Hustle,” is believed to be the first time the FBI used video in a big way to make criminal cases.

The TV-watching public was utterly transfixed watching actual footage of Congressmen, U.S. senators and a mayor accepting major bribes. “Money talks in this business and b—s— walks,” U.S. Rep Michael (Ozzie) Myers of Philadelphia famously declared after pocketing $50,000 of hundred-dollar bills in a New York City hotel room in 1979 (see nearby photo). He then added–somewhat less famously–“And it works the same way in Washington.”

How right he was.

The earthy video-recorded wisdom of Myers, who later went back to prison again for voter fraud but is still around at age 82, barreled back to me as I watched yet another recorded example of actual bribery–but this one this one out in the open and not secret. It was an early first-day showing yesterday of “Melania,” in a Las Vegas theater. The documentary about the First Lady and the 20 days up to Donald J. Trump’’ second inauguration on January 20, 2025, was simply terrible. It was so bad that fact alone amply supported numerous press accounts that Jeff Bezos’s Amazon wildly overpaid—a total of $75 million in rights and marketing–for the sole goal of currying favor for future regulatory actions with her husband, Donald J. Trump, again occupying the pinnacle of power in D.C.

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It Didn’t Stay Here: a civil lawsuit in Delaware for alleged sexual abuse in Las Vegas

Posted on by January 27, 2026
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Delaware’s famous Court of Chancery, now 234 years old, usually hears staid civil business dispute cases turning on dry, complicated, sleep-inducing contract language and mind-numbing lawyering. But every once in a while, a case pops up like Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System, on behalf of eXp World Holdings Inc. v. Glenn Sanford, Randall Miles, Dan Cahir, Jason Gesing, Eugene Frederick and James Bramble. 

The shocking claim: To enhance their personal wealth, leaders of the parent company of eXp Realty, a big publicly traded real estate brokerage incorporated in Delaware, largely turned a blind eye to allegations some of their biggest agents sexually assaulted fellow agents in Las Vegas and other cities. A judge’s recent ruling in Wilmington will allow the case to proceed.

Of course, most everything, especially liability, is being denied. But in a big way the eXp 6, as I might call the half-dozen defendants, still become the newest candidates for my long-running list, It Didn’t Stay Here. The criterion is simple: people in trouble elsewhere for something that happened in Las Vegas. The list is my New to Las Vegas rebuttal to “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” for many years the famous marketing slogan of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. You can see a list of the nominees nearby. A lawsuit like this is definitely trouble. Continue reading →

Far from Las Vegas, founding father Thomas Paine’s legacy in a town where he did nothing 250 years ago

Posted on by January 27, 2026
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Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine

Our nation’s semiquincentennial year has kicked off with the 250th anniversary this week of the publication of “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine (1737-1809). He’s the English philosopher and revolutionary who came to America in late 1774 and published his famous work barely a year later. His best-selling manifesto for freedom was so persuasive and fiery the Second Continental Congress borrowed large chunks of its logic when fashioning the Declaration of Independence just a few months later on July 4, 1776.

I’ll leave it to the historians and the scholars to ponder the continuing significance of Paine and his literary output. Admittedly, there’s no Las Vegas hook for this, but I am sometimes known to ponder matters far and wide. So I’m going to take another look at New Rochelle, N.Y., a leafy New York City suburb where I have relatives and have frequently visited long before becoming New To Las Vegas. They live just a block from one of the strangest and most bogus shrines to political action in America that I know of–strange and bogus mainly because nothing political ever happened there.

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine Cottage Museum, New Rochelle, N.Y.

I am referring to what is now called the Thomas Paine Cottage Museum. The rather nondescript structure is perhaps the last tangible vestige of Paine. Why am I so down on this tribute to a man listed among the country’s Founding Fathers? Here are some reasons. Continue reading →

Fresh questions about Las Vegas’s fallen-cop charity

Posted on by January 11, 2026
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Las Vegas fallen-cop charitySince becoming New to Las Vegas a decade ago, I’ve taken an annual look at the Injured Police Officers Fund. That’s the home-grown 44-year-old Las Vegas fallen-cop tax-exempt nonprofit that raises and provides money to families of Southern Nevada cops injured or killed in the line of the duty. Especially when there is a police fatality, the Las Vegas news media often identifies IPOF as the official conduit for designated donations from public-spirited residents to grieving families.

To me, a national journalist who has written about charities and fundraising for decades, IPOF has stood out in sharp contrast to the morass of national faux charity political action committees sporting law enforcement names with shadowy non-police managers who essentially pocketed all the donations from cold-calling clueless donors. These outfits trolled incessantly for donor cash but spent virtually no money raised on their stated missions. You can read about many of them on this blog by clicking here or typing “faux charity” into the nearby search box. I think IPOF occupies a higher ground in this swamp, and overall does decent work, partly because it is cop-run on a volunteer basis, and not very pushy in its fundraising.

But although a million-dollar annual enterprise operating in the public interest, IPOF simply has not lived up to the promise of its relatively new president, Alexander Cuevas, a North Las Vegas police officer, to continue expanding transparency on how it functions. A recent IPOF move to shield its financial disclosures to the Nevada public, its hard-to-find most recent federal tax return, for 2024, and the organization’s own website raise some uncomfortable questions that the charity so far has declined to address in the seven weeks since I first started propounded them, despite gentle follow-up requests.

So I’ll detail my issues here. Continue reading →