Thursday, May 29, 2014

A00036 - Catherine Abate, New York State Senator and Corrections Chief


Catherine M. Abate, 66, a State Senator and Corrections Chief, Dies

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    Catherine M. Abate at Rikers Island in 1992. Chester Higgins, Jr./The New York Times

    Catherine M. Abate, a former New York state senator and commissioner of New York City’s Correction Department whose campaign for attorney general was derailed by questions about her father’s connection to organized crime, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 66.
    The cause was cancer, her family said.
    Ms. Abate (pronounced ah-BOT-eh) was known for her commitment to human rights and gained the notice of the political establishment as a young lawyer at the city’s Legal Aid Society.
    In 1986, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo appointed her executive deputy commissioner of the State Division of Human Rights.
    The move surprised many in Albany who expected Liz J. Abzug to be named to the post. Ms. Abzug was the daughter of Bella S. Abzug, an outsize figure in New York politics who served in Congress.
    Ms. Abate continued her swift rise, and in 1988, she was named to head the state’s Crime Victims Board.
    However, when she was appointed correction commissioner by Mayor David N. Dinkins in 1992, questions were raised about her father’s possible involvement in organized crime. She not only denied that her father was involved with the Mafia but also told supporters that any suggestion otherwise was the result of bias against Italian-Americans.


    Ms. Abate in 1992.James Estrin/The New York Times

    The matter seemed to fade into the background, and after leading the Correction Department for several years, she ran for State Senate in 1994, representing Greenwich Village. She served until 1998, when she ran for attorney general.
    One of her main rivals for the Democratic nomination was Eliot L. Spitzer, who went on to become governor and resigned in disgrace after a scandal involving his association with prostitutes. His aides provided reporters with information about her father, Joseph M. Abate, linking him to the Lucchese crime family.
    Mr. Spitzer, who apologized for his aides’ actions, said they were only responding to requests from reporters.
    But in contrast with her response in 1992, Ms. Abate did not issue a blanket denial. Instead, for the first time, she acknowledged that the allegations might be true, based on recent newspaper articles.
    “I don’t want to believe them, I just don’t want to believe them,” Ms. Abatetold The New York Times. “These are still allegations, I can’t prove or disprove them. I’ll never know the truth. The allegations don’t describe the father I knew.”
    It was a stunning reversal that damaged her candidacy and forced her to confront details about her family’s history that she said she could not bring herself to contemplate. She added that she regretted her denials in 1992.
    Ms. Abate’s father died in 1994, and she said she could never know the details of his life or the truth of the charges leveled against him.
    She had acknowledged that her father was arrested in 1938 for bootlegging. But Ms. Abate said that as a child, growing up in Margate, N.J., where she was born on Dec. 8, 1947, she never knew that he was anything other than what he said he was: the head of a company that manufactured military uniforms for the government.
    In the 1960s, the family fell on hard times, she recalled. Even so many years later, she said, it was hard for her to tell the world that her father had struggled financially.
    Ms. Abate lost her bid for attorney general and went on to work in health care, becoming the president and chief executive of Community Healthcare Network.
    For the last 15 years of her life, she worked to bring programs related to reproductive health to teenagers, to provide services for people with multiple chronic diseases and to help deliver medical care to the uninsured and the poor.
    Ms. Abate is survived by her husband, Ron Kliegerman; a son, Kyle Kliegerman; a stepson, Kip Kliegerman; a brother, Joseph; and three stepgrandchildren.
    Mayor Bill de Blasio, who worked with Ms. Abate during Mr. Dinkins’s 1989 campaign for mayor, issued a statement praising her work on behalf of the city and the state.
    “She never shied from a good cause and a good fight,” he said.
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    A00035 - Sante Kimes, "Dragon Lady" Murderer

    Sante Kimes Dies in Prison at 79; Killed and Swindled With Her Son

    By 




      Sante and Kenneth Kimes Jr. during an interview with “60 Minutes” in 1999. The two were charged with murder in 1998. CBS, via Associated Press

      Sante Kimes, the maternal side of a murderous mother-and-son grifter team, died on Monday in her prison cell in Westchester County, N.Y. She was 79.
      Officials at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility confirmed the death.
      Ms. Kimes had been in prison for a decade, serving a 120-year sentence for her role in a pair of gruesome murders that turned her and her son, Kenneth Kimes Jr., into vivid subjects for television writers and newspaper reporters. With her taste for Victorian evening wear and a long history of larceny, Ms. Kimes, the daughter of an Oklahoma prostitute, rocketed to notoriety in 1998 when she and Mr. Kimes were charged in New York with the murder of Irene Silverman, an 82-year-old widowed socialite, in a scheme to seize her $10 million townhouse on East 65th Street.
      Two years later, at a raucous trial in which Ms. Kimes was scolded by a judge for passing notes to reporters, she was found guilty with her son of killing Ms. Silverman in an elaborate plot that involved cheap disguises, false identities, tapped telephones, forged deeds, a stolen credit card and at least three fake offers of Caribbean vacations.
      The authorities said that Kenneth Kimes had strangled Ms. Silverman, and that the mother and son then disposed of the body in garbage bags. Her body was never found. In a search of their car and luggage, the police found guns, plastic handcuffs, fright masks, tapes of Ms. Silverman’s telephone conversations and a fake deed to the Silverman home.
      Mr. Kimes was sentenced to 126 years in prison. In 2004, Ms. Kimes was convicted of a second killing, this time in an insurance scheme that resulted in the death of a Las Vegas property-holder, David J. Kazdin. Suspected in a host of other crimes — from the arson of homes she owned to the disappearance of a banker in the Bahamas — Ms. Kimes was called by the judge who presided at the Kazdin trial “one of the most evil individuals” she had ever met.
      Born in Oklahoma as Sandra Louise Walker in 1935, Ms. Kimes grew up in Las Vegas and was first arrested — for petty theft — in Sacramento in 1961. She was, according to acquaintances, a talented and obsessive thief. She once stole a car from a dealer’s lot in Honolulu. Later, she was arrested at a Washington hotel with a $6,500 mink coat she had stolen at a piano bar.
      She had been married to Kenneth Kimes Sr., a California real-estate mogul who built and owned motels. Ms. Kimes, who favored wigs and a starlet’s caked makeup, did not lack for money. She simply seemed to enjoy the thievery.
      “To her it was like a game of Monopoly,” a former neighbor in Las Vegas said. “She just liked to do it.”
      While living in Mexico City in 1985, Ms. Kimes and her husband were arrested on slavery charges after several of their maids complained to the Mexican authorities that they had been beaten and imprisoned in the Kimes’s house. Ms. Kimes served five years on the charge (Mr. Kimes served three), and when the couple was reunited with Kenneth Jr., the family embarked on itinerant journeys to Hawaii, Europe and the Bahamas.
      It was not long after the senior Mr. Kimes died — of natural causes — in 1994 that people in the orbit of Ms. Kimes and her son started disappearing. First was Syed Bilal Ahmed, a Bahraini officer at the First Cayman Bank in the Cayman Islands who had met the mother and son in Nassau, in the Bahamas. Next was Mr. Kazdin, whose body was discovered in 1998 in a trash bin near the airport in Los Angeles.
      But it was the Silverman murder that thrust Ms. Kimes and her son into a spotlight bright enough that it led to not just one, but two, television biopics, one of them starring Mary Tyler Moore. As a law enforcement official said at the time of her arrest, Ms. Kimes was “the most ingenious, evil con artist” he had seen “in a long time.”

      *****
      Sante Kimes (born Sandra Louise Walker; July 24, 1934 – May 19, 2014) was an American criminal who was convicted of two murders, as well as robbery, violation of anti-slavery laws, forgery and numerous other crimes. Many of these crimes were committed with the assistance of her son, Kenneth Kimes Jr. They were tried and convicted together for the murder of Irene Silverman, along with 117 other charges. The pair were also suspected but never charged in a third murder in the Bahamas, to which Kenneth has confessed.

      Early life[edit]

      According to court records, Kimes was born Sandra Louise Walker in Oklahoma City to a mother of partial Dutch descent and an East Indian father. Her estranged[1]son, Kent Walker, in his book Son of a Grifter has reported from an old acquaintance of his mother that Sante Kimes was the daughter of a respectable family who was unable to cope with the young girl's aberrant, wild antics; Kimes herself has claimed that her father was a laborer and that her mother was a prostitute who migrated from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl to Los Angeles, where the young Kimes ran wild in the streets. But Sante Kimes has given numerous, conflicting stories about her origins and numerous other accounts are difficult to confirm, and thus Kent Walker says that his ancestry could be anything from Latino to East Indian to Indigenous American to simply white.[2] She spent the better part of her life fleecing people of money, expensive merchandise, and real estate, either through elaborate con games, arson, forgery, or outright theft.[1]
      She attended high school in Carson City, Nevada, and graduated in 1952.[3] She soon married a high school boyfriend, but the marriage only lasted three months. In 1956, she reunited with another sweetheart from high school, Edward Walker. They had one son, Kent. The marriage was troubled. After a shoplifting conviction in 1961, Kimes ended her marriage to Walker.[3]
      In 1971, she met and married Kenneth Kimes, Senior. The marriage produced one son, Kenneth "Kenny" Kimes, Junior who was born in 1975.[3]

      Criminal behavior[edit]

      According to the book Son of a Grifter, she committed insurance fraud on numerous occasions, frequently by committing arson and then collecting for property damage. She delighted in introducing her husband as an ambassador - a ploy that even gained the couple access to a White House reception during the Fordadministration. And she sometimes even impersonated Elizabeth Taylor, whom she resembled slightly. He also alleges that she committed many acts of fraud that were not even financially necessary, such as enslaving maids when she could easily afford to pay them and burning down houses she could have easily sold.[4]
      She frequently offered young, homeless illegal immigrants housing and employment, then kept them virtual prisoners by threatening to report them to the authorities if they didn't follow her orders.[5] As a result, she and her second husband, alcoholic motel tycoon Kenneth Kimes, spent years squandering his fortune on lawyers' fees, defending themselves against charges of slavery. Kimes was eventually arrested in August 1985 and was sentenced by the U.S. District Court to five years in prison for violating federal anti-slavery laws.[6] Her husband took a plea bargain and agreed to complete an alcohol treatment program; Ken, Sr. and their son, Kenny, lived a somewhat normal life until Sante was released from prison in 1989. Ken, Sr. died in 1994.

      Murders[edit]

      David Kazdin[edit]

      David Kazdin had allowed Kimes to use his name on the deed of a home in Las Vegas that was actually occupied by Kenneth Sr. and Sante Kimes in the 1970s. Several years later, Sante Kimes convinced a notary to forge Kazdin's signature on an application for a loan of $280,000, with the house as collateral. When Kazdin discovered the forgery and threatened to expose Kimes she ordered him killed. Kenneth Jr. murdered Kazdin by shooting him in the back of the head. According to another accomplice's later testimony, all three participated in disposing of the evidence. Kazdin's body was found in a dumpster near Los Angeles airport in March 1998. The murder weapon was never recovered, having been disassembled and dropped into a storm sewer.[7]

      Irene Silverman[edit]

      In June 1998, with her son Kenneth, Kimes perpetrated a scheme whereby she would assume the identity of their landlady, 82-year-old socialite Irene Silverman, and then appropriate ownership of her $7.7 million Manhattan mansion.[8] The search for Ms. Silverman went as far as Mount Olive, New Jersey, where a tract of almost seven heavily wooded acres was searched. Ms. Silverman owned the property and the paperwork/tax records for it was found in the Kimes' possession. Without the Kimes' cooperation, there was the assumption that she could be buried there. Despite the fact Silverman's body was never found, both mother and son were convicted of murder in 2000, in no small part because of the discovery of Kimes' notebooks detailing the crime and notes written by Silverman, who was extremely suspicious of the pair. During the trial for the Kadzin murder Kenneth Kimes confessed that after his mother had used a stun gun on Silverman, he strangled her, stuffed her corpse into a bag and deposited it in a dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey.[9]

      Sayed Bilal Ahmed[edit]

      Kenneth also confessed to murdering a third man, banker Sayed Bilal Ahmed, at his mother's behest in The Bahamas in 1996,[10] which had been suspected by Bahamian authorities at the time.[11] Kenneth testified that the two acted together to drug Ahmed, drown him in a bathtub, and dump his body offshore,[12] but no charges were ever filed in that case.
      Sante Kimes denied any involvement or knowledge of the murders, and claimed that Kenneth's confession was solely to avoid the death penalty.[13]

      Trials[edit]

      Although the Kazdin murder happened first, The Kimes' were apprehended in New York City and tried first for the Silverman murder. Evidence recovered from their car helped establish the case for trying them on Kazdin's murder as well.[14]
      The Silverman trial was unusual in many aspects, namely the rare combination of a mother/son team and the fact that no body was recovered. Nonetheless, the jury was unanimous in voting to convict them of not only murder but 117 other charges including robbery, burglary, conspiracy, grand larceny, illegal weapons possession, forgery and eavesdropping on their first poll on the subject.[15] The judge also took the unusual step of ordering Kimes not to speak to the media even after the jury had been sequestered as a result of her passing a note to New York Times reporter David Rhode in court. The judge threatened to have Kimes handcuffed during further court appearances if she persisted and restricted her telephone access to calls to her lawyers. The judge contended that Kimes was attempting to influence the jury as they may have seen or heard any such interviews, and that there would be no cross-examination as there would be in court. Kimes had earlier chosen to not take the stand in her own defense after the judge ruled that prosecutors could question her about the previous conviction on slavery charges.[16]
      During the sentencing portion of the Silverman trial, Sante Kimes made a prolonged statement to the court blaming the authorities, including their own lawyers, for framing them. She went on to compare their trial to the Salem Witch Trials and claim the prosecutors were guilty of "murdering the Constitution" before the judge told her to be quiet. When the statement was concluded the presiding judge responded that Mrs Kimes was a sociopath and a degenerate and her son was a dupe and "remorseless predator" before imposing the maximum sentence on both of them.[17]
      In October 2000, while doing an interview, Kenneth held Court TV reporter Maria Zone hostage by pressing a ballpoint pen into her throat. Zone had interviewed Kimes once before without incident.[18] Kenneth Kimes' demand was that his mother not be extradited to California, where the two faced the death penalty for the murder of David Kazdin. After four hours of negotiation Kimes removed the pen from Zone's throat. Negotiators created a distraction which allowed them to quickly remove Zone and wrestle Kimes to the ground.
      In March 2001, Kenneth Kimes was extradited to Los Angeles to stand trial for the murder of David Kazdin. Sante Kimes was extradited to Los Angeles in June 2001. During that trial in June 2004, while he was facing the death penalty, Kenneth changed his plea from "not guilty" to "guilty" and implicated his mother in the murder in exchange for a plea deal that his mother not receive the death penalty if convicted. Sante Kimes again made a prolonged statement denying the murders and accusing police and prosecutors of various kinds of misconduct, and was again eventually ordered by the presiding judge to be silent.[19] The sentencing judge in the Kazdin case called Mrs. Kimes "one of the most evil individuals" she had met in her time as a judge.[20]

      Imprisonment and death[edit]

      Sante Kimes was serving a life sentence plus 125 years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York. On her prisoner papers, Sante's projected release date was on March 3, 2119. Additionally, Kimes and her son were each sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of David Kazdin in California. Kenneth Kimes is currently incarcerated at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in California.
      Sante Kimes died of natural causes on May 19, 2014 at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.[21]

      In media[edit]

      A 2001 made-for-TV movie, Like Mother, Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes, starred Mary Tyler Moore as Sante Kimes, Gabriel Olds as Kenny, and Jean Stapleton as Silverman. In 2006, another television movie based on a book about the case, A Little Thing Called Murder, starring Judy Davis and Jonathan Jackson, aired on Lifetime.
      She was also featured in a 2008 episode of the television show Dateline.
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      A00034 - Ruth Ziolkowski, Driving Force Behind Crazy Horse Memorial

      Ruth Ziolkowski obituary

      Driving force behind a decades-long project to sculpt a vast memorial to Crazy Horse out of the Black Hills of Dakota
      Crazy Horse memorial, South Dakota.
      Visitors view the progress of the Crazy Horse memorial in the Black Hills of Dakota, a project taken on by Ruth Ziolkowski after the death of her husband, Korczak, a sculptor. Photograph: Sergio Pitamitz/Robert Hardi/Rex
      Ruth Ziolkowski, who has died aged 87, spent much of her life helping her husband, the Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, to achieve his dream of transforming a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota into a colossal sculpture depicting the 19th-century Oglala Lakota war chief Crazy Horse. When Korczak died in 1982, the project could have foundered; it had been in progress for 34 years and still, despite vast quantities of rock having been blasted away, the pink granite crag did not look even remotely like a warrior on horseback.
      But Ruth more than made the project her own and, with help from several of the Ziolkowskis' children and a charitable foundation, progress on the mountain accelerated. The first definable feature, the rider's face, 26.67 metres (87ft 6in) high, was completed in 1998, in time for the 50th anniversary of the very first blast. Work subsequently began on the next phase – the horse's head, 66.75 metres high. Although there is still no estimated completion date, Ruth never lost her faith that her husband's vision would eventually be realised; she said her wish was to "live more years than possible because I would love to see it finished".
      The idea for the project was born in the 1930s, after Korczak helped on the final stages of construction at Mount Rushmore, where the faces of the US presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln are carved into the landscape. He fell out with the project's creator, Gutzon Borglum, and resolved to create a competing monument after he was contacted by the Sioux leader Henry Standing Bear, who said: "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes too."
      Korczak designed the figure of Crazy Horse, who was one of the leading figures in the Native American defeat of General Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, pointing towards his prairie heartland. The sculptor purchased the mountain, which is 17 miles from Rushmore, from the federal government and construction began in 1948.
      Ruth Ziolkowski in 2009.Ruth Ross met her husband, the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, when she was 13. Photograph: Alamy
      Ruth Ross was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, and first met Korczak when she was 13. Later she was among the local students who helped him on a two-year project to produce for the town a 4.11 metre-highstatue of Noah Webster, the creator of Webster's Dictionary and a West Hartford native. It was completed in 1941. Six years later she joined him in the Black Hills as he prepared to start on the Crazy Horse project, which had been delayed by the second world war. The couple married in 1950.
      While Korczak battled on the mountain, Ruth did just about everything else. As well as raising 10 children, she ordered equipment needed to shape the rock, managed the visitor centre, greeted sightseers and fielded growing numbers of media inquiries. She also ran the large dairy farm and timber mill that helped finance the early years; Korczak refused all federal funding, believing it would be an insult to Native Americans.
      Ruth also assisted her husband in drawing up three books of comprehensive plans and measurements for the sculpture. It was vital preparation for the time when she inherited the project. Under her direction, targets were set and achieved – and more than a million people a year came to watch. She took the crucial decision to complete work on the figure's face – Korczak had wanted to complete the horse first – as she believed it would aid fundraising.
      When work on the horse's head started after almost two years of examining the challenge from every angle, she declared: "The first hurdle was one of logistics – we have taken considerable time to measure and calculate the best approach to what will be an extraordinary and lengthy undertaking. We've been mindful of Korczak's good advice to 'Go slowly so you do it right' as well as the old adage about the wisdom of measuring something six times before you cut it once."
      Crazy Horse sculptureA model of the Crazy Horse sculpture with the work in progress in the background. Photograph: Alamy
      As for the cost and timescale, Ruth believed there were too many unknowns to make any realistic projection other than a "conservative" estimate that carving the horse's head could cost more than the total spent on the mountain during the project's first half-century and that, taking into account weather and funding, it could take "perhaps decades".
      She felt that Korczak, who was buried at the foot of the mountain, would be "absolutely thrilled" with the way the work had advanced since the 1980s. Her dedication brought her many honours. After giving Ruth an honorary degree, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology presented the whole family with an outstanding public service award in 1998. Korczak Day is celebrated locally every year on 3 May, the anniversary of Korczak's arrival in the Black Hills in 1947.
      Visitors baffled by the scale of the project often asked Ruth to explain Korczak's motivations. "He decided it would be well worth his life carving a mountain," she said in an interview in 2006. "He felt by having the mountain carving, he could give back some pride. And he was a believer that if your pride is intact you can do anything in the world you want to do."
      She is survived by her children John, Dawn, Adam, Jadwiga, Casimir, Mark, Joel, Monique and Marinka; 23 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. Her daughter Anne died in 2011.
      • Ruth Carolyn Ziolkowski, co-creator of the Crazy Horse monument, born 26 June 1926; died 21 May 2014
      • Brian Unwin died in 2011
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