Bingo
Disagree, but it's a major who cares from me anyway.
Not controversial. 100% true.
Works for me.
Better than Clay. Agreed.
Bingo
Lady boys care. And @Lord Guts
Bingo.
Someone else here gets it!
General chit chat and shit talk.
- Thread starter Kontradiction
- Start date
Bingo
Disagree, but it's a major who cares from me anyway.
Not controversial. 100% true.
Works for me.
Better than Clay. Agreed.
Bingo
Lady boys care. And @Lord Guts
Bingo.
Someone else here gets it!
tabmixer
SKOL!
1a and 1B between Ruth and Gretzky they had / have unbeatable records
2. Michael Jordan biggest shoe brand due to him, undefeated in the Finals, inspired future greats. Ultimate winner
3. Lionel Messi soccer is the most popular sport in the world and grown men literally cried when he won the World Cup.
4. Tom Brady the GOAT of the greatest sport on Earth but doesn't transcend internationally
From those 4 on I dont really have much knowledge on the rest of them including Ali
Mazz22
Tom Brady GOAT
Brady has as many if not more unbeatable records as Ruth/Gretzky. Brady transcended internationally more than Gretsky given his marriage to Gisele.
Mazz22
Tom Brady GOAT
Also, one nit if we are going the tennis route. How is Serena here ahead of Novak Djokivic who has more slams than her and has been ranked numnber one longer??
You know the answer to that question.
Mazz22
Tom Brady GOAT
Yes, sadly I do.
HSanders
EEEGGGGGGGGGGGGGGSSSS!!!!!!
Lord Chevy
I'm home
Lord Chevy
I'm home
Players need to hire both Sports and Travel Agents now.
My friend's in Scotland on vacation and this is the email I got from him:
We were walking through an area called the Grassmarket and came upon Dennis Miller! Got our picture taken with him (attached). Then after exploring Edinburgh Castle and walking down the Royal Mile, we came across a Warner Brothers film crew and watched them shoot a few scenes for a new movie, then saw Glen Powell (we last saw him in Top Gun Maverick). The movie they were filming is called Ghostwriter and it stars Powell, Jenna Ortega and Samuel L. Jackson. Picture of Powell waving to us (and the crowd) attached. Ghostwriter is being directed by JJ Abrams - got a picture of him too.
We were walking through an area called the Grassmarket and came upon Dennis Miller! Got our picture taken with him (attached). Then after exploring Edinburgh Castle and walking down the Royal Mile, we came across a Warner Brothers film crew and watched them shoot a few scenes for a new movie, then saw Glen Powell (we last saw him in Top Gun Maverick). The movie they were filming is called Ghostwriter and it stars Powell, Jenna Ortega and Samuel L. Jackson. Picture of Powell waving to us (and the crowd) attached. Ghostwriter is being directed by JJ Abrams - got a picture of him too.
BURLINGTON — A Bennington County woman convicted in federal court for a $1.6 million bank fraud case had secretly hired about a half-dozen non-English speaking actors to give scripted testimony as witnesses at her criminal trial, newly filed court records show.
Alison Gu, 49, who had Vermont homes in Dorset and Winhall, was sentenced in December 2018 to 3 years in federal prison followed by 3 years of supervised release for bank fraud, aggravated identity theft and making a false statement on a passport application.
Now, Gu of Cheshire, Conn. has filed to have her criminal conviction and prison sentence set aside on grounds of ineffective assistance of legal counsel. She also wants the court to strike a $107,117 restitution order to the Bank of Bennington, one of the five financial institutions she targeted in the case.
But one of Gu's lawyers says the defendant attempted to pull a significant fraud on the court by importing actors and providing scripts for them to serve as fake witnesses at her fraud trial.
Defense lawyer Lisa B. Shelkrot said she determined the bogus witnesses were actors after they arrived in Burlington midway through the trial in November 2017. Shelkrot, in a court affidavit, now says as she prepared three of them to testify at trial, one happened to remark, “It’s for the movie.”
Shelkrot said she asked about what movie. The witness responded, “Are you a real lawyer?”
Shelkrot wrote, “I answered that I was a real lawyer with a real case and a real client, and that we were going to real court on Monday, where the witness would be expected to take a real oath.”
As she asked more questions during the Saturday meeting in her office, Shelkrot said it became clear to her that the witness had been recruited to come to Vermont to play a part in some kind of movie or performance.
The New York actor had no actual knowledge about any facts about the Vermont fraud case and had been coached on what to say, Shelkrot reported.
Shelkrot said the defense team then got everybody into a conference room or on a speaker phone and she recorded the conversation. As she investigated further, Shelkrot said she was then told that the three “witnesses” in her office were actors, and they had responded to an advertisement in a Chinese language newspaper in New York looking for people to perform their roles.
“They were to be paid upon their return, and had not received any compensation yet,” Shelkrot said in her affidavit.
The actors said they had never heard of a "Chinese private investigator Wong," that Gu had maintained she had hired to work on the case in New York, Shelkrot reported.
“They had been given scripts and photographs to prepare them to play their roles,” she wrote.
The photos included Gu’s properties in Vermont and Connecticut, the passport office in St. Albans, a shopping center in St. Albans and a Chinese restaurant. They also were provided pictures of Gu, her family and others in the case, Shelkrot said.
Also shared were photographs of items received during the case, including a driver’s license, a fake social security card, and a TD Bank card in the names of three people, Shelkrot said.
“Each of the three witnesses had photo identification that suggested they were using their own names, but the stories to which they were prepared to testify were entirely fabricated and supplied to them by someone else,” Shelkrot said in her affidavit filed in court recently.
She thanked them for their honesty, assured them they were not in trouble and sent them home to New York.
Shelkrot said she called Gu and told her to meet in the Burlington law office the next morning. She also called one of her partners to go over her ethical duties as a lawyer, including her concern about presenting perjurious testimony from Gu, Shelkrot said.
They determined that Shelkrot had an obligation to present Gu’s testimony if she wished to testify, the affidavit noted.
When Gu arrived at the law firm on Sunday morning, Shelkrot explained she was recording the meeting and told her what she had uncovered the day before and that her client had provided actors, not real witnesses for the fraud trial. Shelkrot also said she had told the four witnesses due in her office on Sunday to go home.
“Alison claimed not to know anything about the plot,” Shelkrot said. Gu questioned whether the four witnesses on Sunday might not have been part of the scheme involving the three on Saturday.
Shelkrot said she believed she could not ethically present any of the witnesses “given the likelihood that they were not authentically who they said they were.”
As Gu’s fabricated defense collapsed, the defendant asked about calling her co-defendant, Matt Abel, formerly of Montpelier, to the witness stand. Shelkrot said she repeated earlier statements that she had no interest in using Abel because as part of his plea agreement he had told the federal prosecutors he acted in concert with Gu to complete the fraud.
Abel had stipulated to facts that established Gu’s guilt in fraudulently obtaining multiple mortgage loans under false aliases, Shelkrot wrote.
Gu then raised the question of switching from a jury trial to a bench trial with Judge Christina Reiss deciding the case, Shelkrot said. The affidavit does not say why, but Gu thought Reiss would find her not guilty. Shelkrot said she thought it was not a good idea.
Shelkrot, reached by phone this week, said she would have no comment beyond what the court had directed her to file in her affidavit.
Attorney-client communication is normally considered confidential, but the court said Gu broke the bond by making public claims in her legal filing. A judge ruled Shelkrot needed to be able to respond in public.
Judge Reiss has scheduled a hearing for later this month.
During the trial then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Doyle, who is now a judge, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher, who is now the acting chief federal prosecutor in Vermont, presented 30 witnesses. The jury deliberated almost two hours after the one-week trial.
"One person, two identities, three crimes," Doyle said in his closing argument.
Drescher and Doyle showed the jurors the elaborate maze that Gu, a mother of three children, attempted to use to hide her identity and to obtain bogus bank loans. They maintained she got tripped up when she failed to keep her stories straight.
Gu, who has at least nine listed aliases, was found guilty of committing bank fraud between 2013 and 2015, falsifying information on a U.S. Passport application in St. Albans in March 2015 and aggravated identity theft also in March 2015.
One of the false identities Gu assumed belonged to a girl killed in a mass shooting outside a Stockton, Calif. School in January 1989. The girl was one of five killed, while 30 other students and teachers were wounded before the gunman turned the weapon on himself, court records show.
The indictment noted that as part of the swindle Gu and her then boyfriend, Matt Abel, bought several properties, including homes on Read Farm Road in Dorset and Old Snow Valley Road in Winhall. Other properties were in Cheshire, Conn., West Yarmouth, Mass. Cocoa Beach, Fla., and Austin Texas, court records show.
She submitted mortgage loan applications with false information to five financial institutions, including the Bank of Bennington.
Gu obtained various fake identity cards, including buying four showing she was at Johnson State College as a professor and a student.
While Shelkrot is considered one of the top defense lawyers in Vermont, Gu tried to attack the former public defender and longtime litigator.
Gu, in her legal filing, said she thought little was done to investigate her case. Shelkrot noted Vermont Private Eye, a private detective service operated by Susan Randall in Vergennes, spent considerable time chasing the evidence and witnesses.
One private investigator focused on the financial investigation, while two other detectives dealt with possible witnesses. Randall went to New York multiple times to meet with witnesses, Shelkrot said.
“Alison was adamant that she was innocent of the charges (and remains so to this day, as I understand it),” Shelkrot wrote. Gu had no interest in a plea deal, Shelkrot said.
“I believe I conducted appropriate and effective cross-examination of both law enforcement and lay witnesses, consistent with our theory of the case,” her affidavit said.
Shelkrot said Gu’s “claim that I ‘failed to connect with the Chinese private investigator Wong and his team’ is farcical.”
She said she and Randall, the Vermont investigator, begged Gu to connect them with Wong in New York throughout the fall of 2017. She refused and “led us to suspect that Wong did not exist.”
Shelkrot said she also did not represent Gu during the repossession of her home in Dorset. She said Gu had a stable of civil and real estate lawyers that had worked with her over the years and was free to consult them with any questions.
Gu also has filed complaints against other lawyers who have represented her during her lengthy legal battle. They include Burlington lawyer Mark Oettinger, who represented Gu between June and August 2022 and was at least her seventh lawyer. Most of Oettinger's time was as stand-by counsel as Gu said she wanted to represent herself.
Oettinger noted the six lawyers before him had also asked for permission to withdraw or had been asked by Gu to leave the case. He noted in his filing he felt uncomfortable breaking the attorney-client privilege, but stated Gu had opened the door with her filing.
Oettinger noted Gu took the witness stand in her own trial and the judge said she believed Gu committed perjury.
“She also called her three children as witnesses in her defense, including an adult son with autism, and was found to have suborned perjury in doing so,” Oettinger said in his affidavit.
He noted after she was convicted, sentenced and imprisoned, Gu was charged in Connecticut state court with writing a bad check, which led to a federal charge of violating her supervised release conditions ion the bank fraud case.
Oettinger said she also had charges pending in New Hampshire for obtaining two separate driver’s licenses by fraudulently using the identity of deceased persons.
“We helped her pursue a definitive psychiatric diagnosis, which I can share in greater detail if the Court deems it necessary,” Oettinger wrote.
Alison Gu, 49, who had Vermont homes in Dorset and Winhall, was sentenced in December 2018 to 3 years in federal prison followed by 3 years of supervised release for bank fraud, aggravated identity theft and making a false statement on a passport application.
Now, Gu of Cheshire, Conn. has filed to have her criminal conviction and prison sentence set aside on grounds of ineffective assistance of legal counsel. She also wants the court to strike a $107,117 restitution order to the Bank of Bennington, one of the five financial institutions she targeted in the case.
But one of Gu's lawyers says the defendant attempted to pull a significant fraud on the court by importing actors and providing scripts for them to serve as fake witnesses at her fraud trial.
Defense lawyer Lisa B. Shelkrot said she determined the bogus witnesses were actors after they arrived in Burlington midway through the trial in November 2017. Shelkrot, in a court affidavit, now says as she prepared three of them to testify at trial, one happened to remark, “It’s for the movie.”
Shelkrot said she asked about what movie. The witness responded, “Are you a real lawyer?”
Shelkrot wrote, “I answered that I was a real lawyer with a real case and a real client, and that we were going to real court on Monday, where the witness would be expected to take a real oath.”
As she asked more questions during the Saturday meeting in her office, Shelkrot said it became clear to her that the witness had been recruited to come to Vermont to play a part in some kind of movie or performance.
The New York actor had no actual knowledge about any facts about the Vermont fraud case and had been coached on what to say, Shelkrot reported.
Shelkrot said the defense team then got everybody into a conference room or on a speaker phone and she recorded the conversation. As she investigated further, Shelkrot said she was then told that the three “witnesses” in her office were actors, and they had responded to an advertisement in a Chinese language newspaper in New York looking for people to perform their roles.
“They were to be paid upon their return, and had not received any compensation yet,” Shelkrot said in her affidavit.
The actors said they had never heard of a "Chinese private investigator Wong," that Gu had maintained she had hired to work on the case in New York, Shelkrot reported.
“They had been given scripts and photographs to prepare them to play their roles,” she wrote.
The photos included Gu’s properties in Vermont and Connecticut, the passport office in St. Albans, a shopping center in St. Albans and a Chinese restaurant. They also were provided pictures of Gu, her family and others in the case, Shelkrot said.
Also shared were photographs of items received during the case, including a driver’s license, a fake social security card, and a TD Bank card in the names of three people, Shelkrot said.
“Each of the three witnesses had photo identification that suggested they were using their own names, but the stories to which they were prepared to testify were entirely fabricated and supplied to them by someone else,” Shelkrot said in her affidavit filed in court recently.
She thanked them for their honesty, assured them they were not in trouble and sent them home to New York.
Shelkrot said she called Gu and told her to meet in the Burlington law office the next morning. She also called one of her partners to go over her ethical duties as a lawyer, including her concern about presenting perjurious testimony from Gu, Shelkrot said.
They determined that Shelkrot had an obligation to present Gu’s testimony if she wished to testify, the affidavit noted.
When Gu arrived at the law firm on Sunday morning, Shelkrot explained she was recording the meeting and told her what she had uncovered the day before and that her client had provided actors, not real witnesses for the fraud trial. Shelkrot also said she had told the four witnesses due in her office on Sunday to go home.
“Alison claimed not to know anything about the plot,” Shelkrot said. Gu questioned whether the four witnesses on Sunday might not have been part of the scheme involving the three on Saturday.
Shelkrot said she believed she could not ethically present any of the witnesses “given the likelihood that they were not authentically who they said they were.”
As Gu’s fabricated defense collapsed, the defendant asked about calling her co-defendant, Matt Abel, formerly of Montpelier, to the witness stand. Shelkrot said she repeated earlier statements that she had no interest in using Abel because as part of his plea agreement he had told the federal prosecutors he acted in concert with Gu to complete the fraud.
Abel had stipulated to facts that established Gu’s guilt in fraudulently obtaining multiple mortgage loans under false aliases, Shelkrot wrote.
Gu then raised the question of switching from a jury trial to a bench trial with Judge Christina Reiss deciding the case, Shelkrot said. The affidavit does not say why, but Gu thought Reiss would find her not guilty. Shelkrot said she thought it was not a good idea.
Shelkrot, reached by phone this week, said she would have no comment beyond what the court had directed her to file in her affidavit.
Attorney-client communication is normally considered confidential, but the court said Gu broke the bond by making public claims in her legal filing. A judge ruled Shelkrot needed to be able to respond in public.
Judge Reiss has scheduled a hearing for later this month.
During the trial then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Doyle, who is now a judge, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher, who is now the acting chief federal prosecutor in Vermont, presented 30 witnesses. The jury deliberated almost two hours after the one-week trial.
"One person, two identities, three crimes," Doyle said in his closing argument.
Drescher and Doyle showed the jurors the elaborate maze that Gu, a mother of three children, attempted to use to hide her identity and to obtain bogus bank loans. They maintained she got tripped up when she failed to keep her stories straight.
Gu, who has at least nine listed aliases, was found guilty of committing bank fraud between 2013 and 2015, falsifying information on a U.S. Passport application in St. Albans in March 2015 and aggravated identity theft also in March 2015.
One of the false identities Gu assumed belonged to a girl killed in a mass shooting outside a Stockton, Calif. School in January 1989. The girl was one of five killed, while 30 other students and teachers were wounded before the gunman turned the weapon on himself, court records show.
The indictment noted that as part of the swindle Gu and her then boyfriend, Matt Abel, bought several properties, including homes on Read Farm Road in Dorset and Old Snow Valley Road in Winhall. Other properties were in Cheshire, Conn., West Yarmouth, Mass. Cocoa Beach, Fla., and Austin Texas, court records show.
She submitted mortgage loan applications with false information to five financial institutions, including the Bank of Bennington.
Gu obtained various fake identity cards, including buying four showing she was at Johnson State College as a professor and a student.
While Shelkrot is considered one of the top defense lawyers in Vermont, Gu tried to attack the former public defender and longtime litigator.
Gu, in her legal filing, said she thought little was done to investigate her case. Shelkrot noted Vermont Private Eye, a private detective service operated by Susan Randall in Vergennes, spent considerable time chasing the evidence and witnesses.
One private investigator focused on the financial investigation, while two other detectives dealt with possible witnesses. Randall went to New York multiple times to meet with witnesses, Shelkrot said.
“Alison was adamant that she was innocent of the charges (and remains so to this day, as I understand it),” Shelkrot wrote. Gu had no interest in a plea deal, Shelkrot said.
“I believe I conducted appropriate and effective cross-examination of both law enforcement and lay witnesses, consistent with our theory of the case,” her affidavit said.
Shelkrot said Gu’s “claim that I ‘failed to connect with the Chinese private investigator Wong and his team’ is farcical.”
She said she and Randall, the Vermont investigator, begged Gu to connect them with Wong in New York throughout the fall of 2017. She refused and “led us to suspect that Wong did not exist.”
Shelkrot said she also did not represent Gu during the repossession of her home in Dorset. She said Gu had a stable of civil and real estate lawyers that had worked with her over the years and was free to consult them with any questions.
Gu also has filed complaints against other lawyers who have represented her during her lengthy legal battle. They include Burlington lawyer Mark Oettinger, who represented Gu between June and August 2022 and was at least her seventh lawyer. Most of Oettinger's time was as stand-by counsel as Gu said she wanted to represent herself.
Oettinger noted the six lawyers before him had also asked for permission to withdraw or had been asked by Gu to leave the case. He noted in his filing he felt uncomfortable breaking the attorney-client privilege, but stated Gu had opened the door with her filing.
Oettinger noted Gu took the witness stand in her own trial and the judge said she believed Gu committed perjury.
“She also called her three children as witnesses in her defense, including an adult son with autism, and was found to have suborned perjury in doing so,” Oettinger said in his affidavit.
He noted after she was convicted, sentenced and imprisoned, Gu was charged in Connecticut state court with writing a bad check, which led to a federal charge of violating her supervised release conditions ion the bank fraud case.
Oettinger said she also had charges pending in New Hampshire for obtaining two separate driver’s licenses by fraudulently using the identity of deceased persons.
“We helped her pursue a definitive psychiatric diagnosis, which I can share in greater detail if the Court deems it necessary,” Oettinger wrote.
Lord Chevy
I'm home
Well, he is creative
www.theblaze.com
Man once tried to outrun police on a mule — now he's in jail for allegedly weaponizing a raccoon | Blaze Media
The Kentucky man also is accused of whipping a mule an 'unnecessary amount' of times.
www.theblaze.com
I'm looking forward to 4 upcoming movies I have tickets to. Within the next month I'm going to F1, Jurassic World, Superman and Fantastic 4. I saw Ballerina a couple of weeks ago and that was a really good movie. Much better than I expected.
