The investigation that cracked open one of the largest synthetic drug rings in Miami history began with an angry naked porn star jumping on her boyfriend’s white Porsche.
The police call to that lovers spat would eventually lift the lid on a cast of characters straight out of a Hollywood buddy movie. In the leading roles: Matthew Anich and Jorge Ramon Hernandez, two guys who boasted seemingly straight-arrow backgrounds of college degrees and military experience but also shared a taste for Miami’s flashy club culture.
They pumped iron, co-owned a tattoo shop, drove fancy cars and chased an array of party girls — all while, prosecutors say, secretly importing club drugs from shady Chinese labs and enlisting a crew of well-placed associates: Sexual conquests wired money overseas and picked up shipments; strippers and at least one DJ peddled pills that brought in millions of dollars.
Other towns reminisce about former Chief Judges, like Charles Evans Hughes. From the WaPo:
All were in the air last Friday night, when the 17th chief justice of the United States, John G. Roberts Jr., came to the Historical Society of the New York Courts to celebrate the 11th chief justice of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes, about whom it was once said: “He looked like God and talked like God.”When you don't have porn stars and molly, you gotta stick to court-packing plans...
he current self-deprecating chief justice claimed neither distinction in a crisp, 16- minute presentation that evoked frequent laughter. And if you listened closely, it said a few things about Roberts as well: the way he views the responsibilities of the job and his low-key response to the controversies surrounding the court.
If Roberts was nominated as chief justice as an unknown outside legal circles, Hughes arrived as a “brand,” Roberts said. He had a career in law, politics and diplomacy and a white beard that gave the impression he had been sent from central casting.
President Theodore Roosevelt described him as “a bearded iceberg”; Hughes’s political rival William Randolph Hearst labeled him an “animated feather duster.”
He defeated Hearst to become governor of New York, where he developed a reputation as a crusader cleaning up Albany. When President William Howard Taft persuaded him to join the Supreme Court in 1910, he delayed the move to spend a few more months as governor.
He left the court six years later when the Republican Party drafted him at its convention to run against Woodrow Wilson. Hughes lost by 23 electoral votes.
In private practice, he argued cases before the Supreme Court 25 times before President William Harding persuaded him to be secretary of state. And in 1930, President Herbert Hoover nominated him to return to the court as chief justice.
Hughes, who was 86 when he died in 1948, was so iconic, Roberts said, that a letter bearing only a sketch of Hughes and the address “Washington, DC” was delivered, “no questions asked.”
Hughes was the presiding chief justice when the Supreme Court in 1935 moved from its home in the basement of the Capitol to what Roberts called “our current majestic place of work” across the street.
But, more important, Roberts said, Hughes was leading the court during the greatest threat to its independence: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to add enough friendly justices to gain control of the court, which had been striking down Roosevelt’s programs designed to lift the country out of the Great Depression.
“It fell to Hughes to guide a very unpopular Supreme Court through that high-noon showdown against America’s most popular president since George Washington,” Roberts said.
4 comments:
What a sweet deal for the snitch. He's going to do less time than some who uses a phony credit card. That's Miami!
I hope one of the porn stars involved in the case slept with Charlie Sheen.
That's the federal case involving the St. Thomas Law student. I guess the school sure knows how to pick them. What a winner.
This case belongs in state court.
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