Security guards shot dead a man swinging samurai swords at the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Center in Hollywood. The fortysomething man with tatooed arms had gone back and forth to his car before getting "close enough to hurt" the security guards. Sure, Tom Cruise's cult has a history of turning viciously on its malcontents, but this particular ex-Scientologist was "very clear[ly]" threatening rather than protesting , Los Angeles police — still investigating — tell the LA Times. Which presents a bit of a PR dilemma to Anonymous, the ad-hoc anti-Scientology group that can't decide whether to stay the hell away from this story or flog the angle that the sect's three guards killed an innocent unnecessarily:

For most of the rich, the object of charity is to make one's name known. Alberto Vilar, a founder of a once-high-flying tech-stocks fund who stiffed New York's Metropolitan Opera on a $25 million pledge, has succeeded all too well. But his name is in court documents rather than the opera halls and college buildings he had hoped for. A jury found Vilar and his partner, Gary Tanaka, guilty of stealing $20 million from customers of Amerindo Investment Advisors, in a series of frauds dating back to the dotcom bust. He could face 20 years in prison.Vilar, among other things, was charged with $5 million from heiress Lily Cates, the mother of actress Phoebe Cates, and using some of the proceeds to make a donation to Vilar's alma maters. That was one of the few contributions he actually carried out; he had promised some $200 million to nonprofits over the years, including the Met's $25 million. As he failed to come up with the money, his nameplates came down from the institutions he'd promised to sponsor. Plácido Domingo is among the artists he left shortchanged. (A performing-arts center in the ski-resort town of Beaver Creek, Colo., still carries Vilar's name, though.) What brought Vilar down ultimately, was the dotcom bust. He rode big bets on Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo in the '90s to make billions of dollars, and his net worth peaked at $950 million. After the Nasdaq crashed in 2000, though, investors say Vilar promised to put their money in safe interest-bearing accounts — and instead, kept investing it in hopeless tech stocks. All the while, he kept giving away money to charities that he didn't have. Which makes me wonder: Who is the Alberto Vilar of today, and how long will it take to uncover his misdeeds? The quest may be fruitless, if only because there are too many to count, let alone prosecute. The craze for mortgage-backed securities has made Vilars of almost every fund manager out there. A promise of safety which turned out to be false; that is the theme of the meltdown that has touched every market on the planet. The main difference: Vilar was clever enough, the jury that convicted him must have believed, to know he was fooling his clients. His successors were merely fooling themselves.

Mark "The Maverick, when it comes to blogs and also finance" Cuban is proclaiming his innocence, in detail! Cuban, the mouthy tech billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, was charged with the world's least sophisticated insider trading scheme by the SEC earlier this week. He issued a rote statement the same day denying the charges, and lamented that he wished he could say more. Well now he's saying more! Cuban's basic defense: Yes, I sold a bunch of stock after the CEO of a company I partially owned told me confidential, nonpublic information that I knew would hurt the stock price. But I never agreed to keep the information confidential, so there! Then he says (through his lawyer) that the CEO of said company is full of shit because he can't even remember the conversation. They posted this excerpt of an interview with the CEO:

This would be ironically funny as an Onion article, but in real life it's just awful: Hossein Derakhshan, pictured, is a Toronto-based Iranian blogger who has grown more pro-Iran over the past two years, supporting the country's nuclear program and its three-decade-old Islamic revolution in the press. The dual Iranian-Canadian citizen blogs in both English and Farsi and generally tries to help people understand his home country. PR win for Iran and its blogger-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, right? Actually no, because Derakhshan visited Israel last year for a blogging conference, and bogged there to "show the Iranians a more realistic image of this country," so he's been thrown in jail during a visit home, as a spy, reports The Media Line:

Pirates are now the most important news in the world! Fox Business News is calling pirates "The New Face of Terrorism." The scary new face! But are they really new? The New York Times has written six dozen stories about Somalian pirates in the past ten years, and they're just picking up steam. We know the Somali pirate crew currently menacing African waters has a good PR man. Maybe he's to thank? We took a look back at a decade of pirate coverage and found that the raggedy scalawags have a long media history: [A mere sampling of the highlights]: New York Times: 2/3/99: "Murderous Pirate Attacks Are on the Rise" 9/12/01 (OMINOUS DATE!): "Pirate Militias From Somalia Spill Into the Gulf of Aden" 7/1/05: "Somalia: Pirates Seize Tsunami Aid Ship" 11/6/05: "Pirates Attack Liner Off Coast of Somalia" 12/4/05: "After Attack, Cruise Ships Rethink Security" 7/3/06: "Waters That Prompt Fear From the Toughest of Sailors" (The waters of Somalia, that is) 1/10/08: "Pirate Attacks Increased in 2007, Maritime Group Says" 9/27/08: "Somalia Pirates Capture Tanks And Unwanted Global Notice" That's the one that started this most recent wave of coverage. Everyone has been getting worried about these pirates for years! The Washington Post was late to the game, but they jumped on the story in 2005 when a cruise ship was attacked and have been covering it regularly ever since. Others saw it much earlier: USA TODAY: 2/2/01: "Pirates loot the fruits of 21st century trade 'There is no law' in certain waters of Southeast Asia" The Brits were on the case even earlier! The Guardian UK: 9/18/99: "Bizarre tale of Briton killed by pirates; Family's doubts about attack on yacht in lawless seas off Somalia" And later: 11/7/05: "Seamen call for UN piracy taskforce" HEH. So you see, it's not all fear and terror. Pirates inspire us! Many people would secretly love to be pirates. We only get serious about them if any other response seems inappropriate. The best evidence of that: New York Post: 11/6/05: "YO-HO-WHOA! PIRATES HIT CRUISE SHIP" (Funny) 4/12/08: "FRENCH NAB PIRATES & BOOTY" (Still funny) 10/1/08: "EXTERMINATE THAT PLAGUE OF PIRATES" (Now it's serious!)

Alberto Vilar, the wealthy financier, co-founder of Amerindo Investment Advisors, and mega-donor to the Metropolitan Opera, was convicted of all 12 counts in his securities fraud trial this morning. "Mr. Vilar, 67, blinked when the first guilty verdict was pronounced by the foreman in a United States District courtroom but remain stone-faced." [NYT]

Here is your hilarious coda to the Bush presidency: Vice President Dick Cheney has been indicted by a grand jury, in Texas. He is expected to repair to his moonbase shortly, never to return to Earth. [Chron.com]

Good news for Ted Stevens: the convicted felon and United States Senator from the Great State of Alaska won't face an embarrassing expulsion from the world's greatest deliberative body. GOP Senator Jim DeMint totally promised this morning that he had enough votes to expel Stevens from the Senate, and then, in a close-door conference meeting, everyone decided to just wait until the votes in Stevens' reelection race are all counted. Stevens is currently down a thousand to his Democratic challenger, so hopefully Alaska voters will save Stevens' Senate colleagues the trouble of doing the mind-bogglingly obviously right thing. [Roll Call]

The job of Somali pirate continues to grow ever more alluring! Not only do they run around making millions, doing drugs, and collecting pirate groupies, now they are actually able to change the course of the world oil market. Can't say that about working at Barnes & Noble, suckas!

Billionaire Maverick(s owner) Mark Cuban has issued a statement proclaiming his innocence on the insider trading charges that the SEC filed against him earlier today. He posted the statement on his beloved blog, appropriately. And when he says "I wish I could say more," you can trust that he's telling the truth. We look forward to an ill-advised outburst from him in the coming weeks. For now, the official denial is after the jump:

Ha, well we had a chance to look over the SEC's insider trading complaint against mouthy billionaire Mark Cuban, and it's surprisingly entertaining! Mostly because they allege that Cuban may have tried to pull off the single most idiotic inside trading move in history. To set the scene: The CEO of a company Cuban partially owns calls him up with (confidential) bad news; Cuban gets pissed, knowing the news will sink the stock price; but he just received confidential information, so he can't sell! Here's how they say he handled this financial quandary:

Tech billionaire, anger-driven blogger, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban has just been charged with insider trading by the SEC. The (civil, not criminal) charges center on an incident in 2004 in which Cuban allegedly got early insider information about a company he had an ownership stake in, and used that info to avoid a loss of $750,000. We have no idea whether the charges are true, but if they are, it's a foolish business move by a guy who's already been fined more than twice that much by the NBA just for running his mouth. Though it is possible to formulate a wild conspiracy theory about this! Mark Cuban would be just another rich guy except for his penchant for saying whatever pops into his head. He constantly criticizes the NBA, which is a no-no by owners. The flipside is he gets great PR. Although half of it is bad! Oh well. He also has a blog that is sometimes hilarious and not well thought out a bit. At the moment, Cuban wants to buy the Chicago Cubs from Tribune Co., which needs to sell the storied baseball franchise to raise cash, which it will burn in a vain attempt to save its newspapers. The idea of Cuban—a maverick—owning the Cubs absolutely kills traditionalists, who think he would totally ruin all the great Chicago traditions, such as having ivy on the outfield walls and losing constantly. So is it possible that there was some shady conspiracy that caused this allegation from 2004 to surface just in time to (likely) torpedo any chance Cuban has of buying the Cubs? You would have to be a crazy conspiracy freak to believe this, for which there is no evidence whatsoever, so please don't sue us.

The SEC has filed charges against Dallas Mavericks owner and dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban. The Wall Street Journal, which disgraced Cuban with a stipple portrait this morning, sums up the paperwork thusly:

Today's Chronicle mourns the three victims of an angry coworker at SiPort, the previously obscure vendor of radio chips in Santa Clara. No surprise that CEO Sid Agrawal is remembered as a "Renaissance man," and VP of operations Brian Pugh as a "brilliant engineer." But most touching to me is the story of 67-year-old Marilyn Lewis, the HR manager gunned down by 47-year-old engineer and father of three Jing Hua Wu, because she had handled his firing that morning.Human resources is one of the most disrespected jobs in tech. Yet Lewis's two daughters told the Chron that a few years ago, their mom told them she wanted to take a Hawaiian cruise with them. Taking a week off was so out of character for Lewis that her children feared she'd been diagnosed with a fatal disease. That's how much Marilyn Lewis loved her job. In HR. At a tech company. My kind of lady. Is there anything good we can pull out of this bloody mess? I guess it's: Take the cruise.

Gene Wood, an operations manager at Ask.com, the Barry Diller-owned search engine beloved by Midwestern moms, wrestled a mugger to the ground rather than lose his iPhone, for which he paid $499. While riding on a subway train in San Francisco and watching a movie, Wood felt a hand reach behind him and snatch the phone. Wood, who is 6 feet tall and weighs 240 pounds, jumped from his seat and pursued the thief. Here's his harrowing account of how he got his iPhone back through hand-to-hand combat — and got away with just one small, if nasty, head wound:

Right before he was busted on fraud charges, Rafaello Follieri decided to go house shopping with celebrity girlfriend Anne Hathaway. They wanted four stories: the first two controlled by Follieri, for his con-meetings and fancy con-parties, the top two under the charge of Hathaway, the actress told In Touch. But now Follieri is in jail,on his way to prison, far from his dream-home fantasy. There's poo and rats everywhere, and the Italian high-lifer is complaining, via his lawyer. The Smoking Gun has the documents:

Earlier today we told you how oft-sued American Apparel chief Dov Charney is being sued again—this time by Roberto Hernandez, an ex-AA employee who says he was fired from his IT job in 2006 after he refused Dov Charney's request to cook the books to make the company look more financially attractive. His complaint also includes descriptions of AA as a pervy workplace where Charney held staff meetings in the nude. But there's a new development: a source at AA has just sent us a statement that they say Hernandez himself wrote in August, 2006 defending Dov Charney from an earlier lawsuit, contradicting some of same allegations that Hernandez himself is now making: According to our source, Hernandez wrote this statement in 2006—just three months before he was fired—to counter the allegations of Mary Nelson, who sued Dov claiming sexual harassment. Hernandez defends the work environment at AA:

This is going to come as shocking news, we're sure, but it seems convicted con man Raffaello Follieri is not having a fun time in prison. His lawyer submitted a letter to the sentencing judge this week and he reports that Follieri has been horrified to find that "the food looks spoiled, the showers are filthy with excrement and the place smells really bad." And he doesn't have a window either, which would suck in any case, sure, but probably sucks even more when your last apartment was a $37,500-a-month Trump Tower duplex.

Oh Dov Charney, when will you stop being sued for various sexual and financial shenanigans? The pervy, pacing American Apparel boss has been sued yet again. Just last month he was dealing with a sexual harassment case from an old employee; now, another former employee says that Dov tried to get him to inflate the company's books in order to draw in outside investors. Just your average financial fraud allegation, until Dov trotted out his accuser's old "lover":

When does America care about a Jersey City Councilman? When a Jersey City Councilman urinates on people in Washington, DC. Steven Lipski was arrested in our nation's capital this weekend, because he went to the 9:30 Club to see a Grateful Dead tribute band, got wasted, and peed off the balcony. Idiot drunk middle-aged politicians are DC's cross to bear, of course, and Lipski has given the 9:30 Club staff trouble before: