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0 Comments Published by Search on at 9:04 AM.

He left his summer home north of Detroit for the 25-mile trip to the
suburb of Birmingham.

The 62-year-old Hoffa arrived at the Red Fox Restaurant and was observed
parking his green 1974 Pontiac sometime after 1:30 p.m.

When his friends didn't show up, he called Josephine and told her that
Anthony 'Tony Jack' Giacalone had stood him up.

He inquired of Josephine if his friend had called to cancel the
appointment.

Josephine assured him that she had received no such call. Hoffa made
another phone call to a friend. This time he mentioned that Anthony
'Tony Pro' Provenzano had not arrived either.

Jimmy kept dubious company.

Tony Jack, a reported Mafia enforcer, was awaiting trial on income tax
evasion.

Tony Pro had at one time been a Teamsters Union vice-president and had
been a friend of Jimmy's while both were serving time in Lewisburg
Federal Prison.

The boys had a falling out in prison and were no longer on good terms.

Both Giacalone and Provenzano would later deny any involvement in the
greatest disappearance since Ambrose Small walked into a snowstorm in
Toronto and disappeared forever.

Jimmy Hoffa never had lunch that day nor any other day.

He disappeared off the face of the earth.

In a period of 14 years, Hoffa had built the Teamsters Union into the
strongest and wealthiest union in North America.

Defrocked and tossed into prison for jury tampering and mail fraud,
Jimmy had recently been released.

The current president of the union, Frank Fitzsimmons, heard the
rumours. Jimmy Hoffa was making noises.

He wanted the presidency back and meant to do everything in his power to
wrestle control from Fitzsimmons. These boys played hardball.

Fitzsimmons' son Richard had narrowly escaped death a month earlier when
his car had been blown up. President Fitzsimmons claimed he had no idea
who had abducted Jimmy Hoffa.

For several days after the disappearance, police, most notably the FBI,
held out hope that Hoffa had been abducted in some sort of labour power
play and would turn up. As time passed, it became obvious that he had
been murdered.

For some time after his disappearance, it was theorized that Hoffa,
fearing for his life, had fled the country, but few believed that Jimmy,
a devoted family man, would leave his wife, daughter and son. Some think
that Hoffa was planning on testifying against top union officials
suspected of receiving huge kickbacks paid out of the union's pension
fund.

Eliminating a witness ready to spill his guts is a time honoured mob
practice. Most probable of all the theories alludes to Jimmy as a major
threat to once again become president of the Teamsters Union.

It must be remembered that hundreds of thousands of truckers owed their
increased paycheques to Hoffa, who almost singlehandedly had been
instrumental in achieving those increases. Many revered the man.

When Jimmy was paroled from prison, one of the conditions of his parole
forbade him from any participation in union activities. Jimmy was
legally fighting to have this condition set aside.

It was an open secret that he planned to run for the presidency in 1976.
This was considered a direct threat to many people.

The current president, Fitzsimmons, had delegated power to 15
vice-presidents. This was in direct contrast to Hoffa's style.

Jimmy had always insisted on total control. Then there was the Mafia
itself.

They had formulated gentlemen's agreements with the union during Jimmy's
tenure in prison. Would all this change if Jimmy was successful in
regaining the presidency?

Jimmy Hoffa's adopted son, Chuckie O'Brien, came under close
examination.

It has been rumoured that O'Brien had joined the Fitzsimmon camp while
Hoffa was in jail, and stood to lose should Jimmy once again become
Teamster president. O'Brien, who fell out of sight for short while after
his father's disappearance, had an alibi for the afternoon of Jimmy's
abduction.

He claims that he borrowed Tony Jack Giacalone's son Joseph's car to
deliver a salmon to a union official at the time in question. The FBI
have not been able to disprove his alibi.

What happened to Hoffa's body?

The FBI tells me they still receive tips pinpointing Jimmy's last
resting place. Some say he was dumped in a Florida swamp.

Others claim to have watched him being buried beside the end zone in
Giant Stadium after having been transported from Michigan.

Still others believe that Jimmy's body was ground up and incinerated in
a Mafia-owned operation in New Jersey.

The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa leaves many questions unanswered.

Perhaps we will never know the details surrounding his death.

0 Comments Published by Search on at 12:20 PM.

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON, May 19 (Reuters) - A new book on the scandal that brought
down President Richard Nixon accuses then-White House counsel John Dean
of ordering the infamous Watergate break-in in 1972, a charge Dean
strongly rejected.

James Rosen, a Fox News Channel correspondent in Washington, said the
charge was based on interviews and an exhaustive review of documents for
"The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate."

The biography is being released this week about Nixon's attorney
general, a central Watergate figure.

"I hope this book is being sold as fiction, for if it is not, readers
are being defrauded," said Dean, who became a key witness for the
prosecution while pleading guilty to one charge of obstruction of
justice related to the scandal.

The Watergate scandal began with the bungled election-year break-in of
Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in
Washington on June 17, 1972. The aim was to wiretap the telephones.

Initially dismissed by the White House as a "third-rate burglary," the
scandal was slow in evolving and had no impact on the outcome of the
1972 election -- Nixon easily defeated Democratic Sen. George McGovern
to win a second term.

But by 1974 investigators had traced Watergate and various other
political scandals back to the White House and Nixon was forced to
resign on Aug. 9, 1974.

Neil Armstrong Interview " Read More! "......................

http://uk.reuters.com/article/mediaNews/idUKN1955481820080519?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0

0 Comments Published by Search on at 11:43 AM.

May 24, 2008 04:30 AM
Stephen Marche
Special to the Star

If you want to understand how art has changed over the past decades,
don't waste your time looking at its relationship to form or colour;
look at its relationship to The Gap. In 1994, an artists' collective
called Art Club 2000 staged an elaborate "appropriation" of The Gap's
advertising, with parodies of its "Individuals of Style" campaign like
"Hitler wore denim." When they used The Gap logo in one of their pieces,
the collective garnered a cease-and-desist letter from the company's
lawyers.

Fourteen years later, The Gap is now trying to seduce buyers with an
art-inspired campaign of its own. Thirteen artists, including many
famous names such as Chuck Close, Jeff Koons and Cai Guo-Qiang, will be
designing T-shirts for them, under cover of charity (portions of the
proceeds will go to the Whitney Museum). Art used to be a necessary
angel haunting the machinery of capitalistic production, a kind of
consciously futile resistance. Now it's just another shiny spigot.

The Gap's new campaign is only a mainstream version of what Louis
Vuitton has been doing for years, using artists as marketing devices. In
2005, LV hired Vanessa Beecroft to stage a performance art piece at the
opening of a store on the Champs Elysée – she placed nude models on the
shelves. The great Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has designed window
displays for them. The most startling room in the new Takashi Murakami
show in Brooklyn is the Louis Vuitton boutique right in the middle of
the museum. It sells handbags he designed, drawing no distinction
between his artworks and commercial products.

Yet despite such high art co-opts, Louis Vuitton has managed to maintain
a luxury populism. It indulges the highest of high art tastes, and the
most mainstream, too – an LV leather pattern in white and pink is the
perfect interior for your new maroon Escalade. In her new Vegas show,
Bette Midler descends on to the stage on a mountain of its luggage. LV
has somehow managed to straddle high art and low culture while being a
luxury, exclusive product that anybody can own.

None of this should be possible. A luxury brand traditionally derives
its value from being a handcrafted product that only a few can possess –
a relic of the aristocracy. Most luxury brands like Prada or Armani
overcome the problem of selling exclusivity to a broad group of people
by having couture and emporio lines. Not LV. After pirated LV bags
flooded on to the markets of Canal Street, Louis Vuitton originally
protested the integrity of its copyright, arguing for the value of its
brand as an icon of quality. Then it accepted its fate and began to
revel in inauthenticity. At the opening of the Murakami show, hired
actors pretended to sell fake Louis Vuitton bags outside the museum.
Milton Friedman, the seminal economist of the Chicago school, once said
that money is "the fiction that veils its fictionality." Louis Vuitton
is so, so money: It's selling the consciousness of its own fictionality,
the playful unreality of its own branding.

This is all cheeky and wonderful from the point of view of the
corporation, but in what position does it leave the artist? It's not
just that art has become suffused with money – a practice market for
those who love markets so much they want to spend their recreation hours
buying and selling. Art has always had to deal with commerce. The
difference is that artists are now aspiring to be the CEOs of their
work, as conceptualizers, organizers, synthesists, and packagers of
other people's labour. Cai Guo-Qiang, the great Chinese gunpowder artist
specializes in works that are so large they require teams to construct
or perform. Damien Hirst conceived of a skull covered in diamonds, so he
hired Bond St. jewellers to make one. Hirst gave the piece its name, For
the Love of God, he set the price ($100 million) and he sold it on to a
consortium. Conceiving and naming and selling are his jobs, not the
business of fabrication. Beauty, like everything else, has been
outsourced.

In the realms of both luxury goods and art, the whole notion of the
hand-made has become quaint, an old-fashioned notion like dressing for
dinner or saving yourself for marriage. Murakami has argued that the
idea of authenticity in art, and the lines it draws between art and
design, original and fake, are Western constructs, destined to lose
place in an increasingly globalized art world. That may well be true,
but there are Western processes at work, as well, notably the triumph of
consumer capitalism and the reduction of all things to cash value.

There's a nearly perfect analogue to the current condition of art and
commerce in one of the West's oldest myths, the story of Erisichthon
from Ovid's Metamorphoses. As punishment for destroying a sacred grove
of trees, Erisichthon is cursed by the gods with a terrible affliction:
Famine is put in his belly. The more he eats the more he wants to eat.
He begins to sell off all his possessions for food, including his
daughter. Neptune has granted her the ability to change shapes at will.
So Erisichthon sells her as a bull or a beautiful deer and she
transforms back into herself and returns to her father to be sold again.
She finds herself conjured into beauties in order to feed an insatiable
hunger. Just so: The artist in his or her many varied transformations
feeds the endless consumption which no glut can sate. No amount of
diamond skulls or cherry-blossom handbags or Gap T-shirts will fill our
inner, endless hunger for things and more things.

Erisichthon can't save himself from his hunger, no matter how often he
sells his daughter. In the end he eats his own guts. The myth doesn't
say what happens to his daughter.

Stephen Marche is the author, most recently, of Shining at the Bottom of
the Sea.

0 Comments Published by Search on at 11:24 AM.