Though there's a lot more that can sour a startup than employing closet drinkers, gamblers, and perverts, for venture capital firms, ferreting them out prior to offering up their cash is just part of the deal. Which keeps private investigators like Margo Evashevski in business, "armed with a Stanford business degree" and paid for by the fears of skittish VCs. What kind of fears, exactly?
Billionaire sex-perv Jeffrey Epstein enjoys sex with underage girls, that much we know. But before we all knew this, he was a very popular financier with many important and famous friends. He went to a lot of parties! He flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and Chris Tucker to Africa for some reason! We can only imagine what the on-flight entertainment was. Now he's apparently getting ready to plea guilty to all sorts of things involving prostitution, and some ladies are suing him for making them his sex slaves when they were underage, so he doesn't quite go out on the town that much. Except sometimes he does! And, to answer our own question, it's because uber-publicist Peggy Siegal is still happy to stand by her 14-year-old raping friend Jeffrey.
Jake Adelstein is an American reporter who spent the last 15 years covering Japanese organized crime for that nation's largest paper. I have to admit I always thought the Japanese yakuza crime syndicates were some overblown fantasy movie creation, but turns out they're actually very real, 80,000 strong, and they want to kill Jake Adelstein. You learn something new every day! Adelstein got along with the cops and the gangsters fine for a while, until he tried to break a scoop about the "John Gotti of Japan" flying to the US for a liver transplant. "Erase the story or be erased," said the gangsters, dramatically. So Adelstein decided to hold off on the story until things blew over. But that plan didn't quite work out:
The Beatrice Inn should at least pretend a little more convincingly. The signs in the downtown nightspot warning against drugs, sex, smoking, and dancing are routinely ignored, particularly for Josh Hartnett-level celebrities. And according to a tipster, bouncers told all the patrons to extinguish their cigarettes shortly before a raid by the police last night. Two heavyset cops came in around 2 a.m. and made a beeline for the bathrooms—which are, by regulation, drug-free. Still, even the police presence didn't stop two girls from trying to conduct their nefarious business in there:
Internet nerds became terribly excited recently when Twitter sprung a man from jail, but it's worth noting that in most of the world, blogging is much, much more likely to send you to to clink. While there are a number of bloggers whose eternal imprisonment—possibly in the Phantom Zone—we fantasize about daily, we grudgingly admit that throwing bloggers in jail for blogging is probably bad. So as a public service, we're here to tell you where not to blog if you value your freedom. China and Iran probably get the most press for their blogger crack-downs, and Malaysia just arrested a blogger this week, but if there's anything we learned from skimming the site of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, it's this: don't Tumblr in Egypt.
Salvia: the legal drug that really works. Unlike most of the herbal fake-weed concoctions sold in the back pages of High Times, salvia is actually a powerful drug. As anyone who took one too many hits can attest. Now, New York state lawmakers are moving to ban salvia, with penalties of up to three months in jail for possession, and a year for distribution. And crazy kids have no one to blame but themselves; the state senator who proposed the ban "said he was convinced that the drug should be banned after he and his aides watched YouTube videos of people smoking salvia and having psychedelic experiences." Not so funny now, is it? Okay, it's still funny. The videos in question—which we've helpfully posted after the jump—mostly prove that salvia makes people do one thing very well: fall down.
Further details have emerged about that $12,000 fur coat that Lindsay Lohan may have pilfered (pictured). The coat owner is kindly asking Lohan for six figures in pain and suffering. Masha Markova, perhaps a descendant of the noble line of Russian fur traders, claims that the drug-splattered actress stole the blond mink coat while they were both at a party at fancypants clurrb 1Oak. When Markova decided to leave the club, she saw that her coat, which was given to her by her grandmother, had gone missing. A couple of weeks later, she saw a photo in OK! magazine, taken the night of the incident, of Lohan wearing the exact same tan-ish animal pelt. Coincidence? Markova thought not!
Taking a page from Nebraska's Internet cops, U.S. Representative Mark Kirk (R.-Ill.) has created a fake teen of his own in order to protect real ones. While promoting a bill to restrict access to social networking sites in public schools and libraries, Kirk and Illinois law enforcement detailed the solicitations received by the imaginary 15-year-old female they played in Second Life — to enter "rape rooms," among others. Acknowledging that there were no known cases of sexual assault on underage users at Second Life, Rep. Kirk still called the site an "emerging danger." Now with the addition of his fictional sex-seeking teenage avatar, of course. (Photo by Daily Herald)
Weather Channel anchor Bob Stokes is being accused by a former on-air colleague, Hillary Andrews, of being a sexually harassing, stalkerish jerk. For an extended period of time. Andrews says that Stokes harassed her predecessor out of a job, and then began harassing Andrews even harder, constantly hitting on her and asking her inappropriate questions; i.e., "Will you lick my swizzle stick?" Andrews is now suing Stokes, and two highlights from her court documents are below, describing some of Stokes' conduct. Also, a bonus clip: a colleague forgetting Stokes' name, on-air. Maybe she blocked him out of her mind.
The Hollywood Hills home of MySpace quasi-cofounder and acquisitive LiveUniverse CEO Brad Greenspan was broken into over the weekend, and authorities think it could be the work of a cat burglar who has preyed on the wealthy, including the likes of Charlize Theron and Faith Hill, and their hillside hideaways. Looks like everybody's MySpace friend, Tom Anderson, made the right move by choosing Santa Monica.
Mandatory age checks aimed at verifying users may not do much to protect children on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and other social networks. A task force on the behavior of teens on social networks found that the majority of young people who've actually had sex with adults they met online did so without any sort of deception. Does this mean that men in their fifties no longer have to go about pretending they like Hannah Montana if they want the affections of the underaged? No, it just means they're already onto you, dude. (Photo by generated)
Tracey Grinhaff, a 42-year-old mother of two in Sheffield, England, was murdered by her angry husband after she posted a message on her Facebook page saying that she was leaving him. Cops found her body in a shed in the back yard of the couple's house, and her 41-year-old husband Gary's body was found in the woods nearby. She died of head wounds, and so did he, although his were self-inflicted. Apparently the message made him extremely angry:
Two weeks ago, 42-year-old British woman Tracey Grinhaff changed her Facebook status to say she was "currently splitting" with her husband and that they'd "Been married for 16 years but together for 26!!!! God that makes me sound old." Then Grinhaff's husband, 41-year-old Gary Grinhaff bludgeoned her to death and, shortly after, killed himself. Neighbors, according to London's Daily Mail called the Grinhaffs "the perfect little family."
"Burglary Suspect Is Killed With His Own Gun, Police Say": "The man was apparently holding a gun that was encased inside a dark sock, and it discharged as police officers were wrestling with him in a small room on the rooftop of a building." Well, that's good enough for me. On to the next story. [NYS]
There's money to be made in combating the sexual exploitation of children online, if not in the actual exploitation itself. Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning believes internet companies, not taxpayers, ought to be funding the fight. Bruning (pictured here with "Miss Heartland" Rachel Seidel) addressed the Nebraska Crime Commission this week, telling tales of how he created a fake teenage girl to solicit men on webcams to whip it out for an audience they never anticipated — state cops and senators. Says Bruning, "We had state senators about throwing up in their breakfasts, but we wanted to make a point and I think we did." But who will be picking up the check for his educational services? He wants Yahoo, among others, to do so:
Prodigy, the Mobb Deep rapper currently taking advantage of his incarceration to hone his blogging skills, is concerned about quite a few things: ritualistic murders, the 9/11 conspiracy, secret societies, missing children, and "NATURAL ENERGY LINES THAT CRISS-CROSS THE ENTIRE PLANET." How do these things all tie together? Allow Prodigy explain at length [Vibe], like a man with plenty of time to type and type and type and go crazier and crazier and crazier:
Once again, American scandals hang their heads in shame. News comes from jolly old England that a former "Mr. Gay UK" has been arrested for murdering an ad executive from a gay magazine, and then eating some of him [Telegraph via Queerty]. Don't get any untoward ideas, though; they were just "friends." The killer also had some flesh from the man's right leg diced up, cooked, and ready to season when the cops came in. That does seem incriminating. Eat your heart out, Jeffrey Dahmer—you never won any pageants at all. A full beefcake photo (pretty much NSFW) of the award-garnering cannibal, Anthony Morley, from the time of his glorious 1993 title win, is after the jump:
Any smoker who moved to New York from another state has probably reflected on the fact that they could make a lot of easy cash just by filling up a U-Haul truck with cheap cigarettes from back home and driving them into the city. And boy would they be right! Congressman Peter King has helpfully crunched the numbers for an editorial in the Post today, and now we are seriously considering getting into the Newport-smuggling business full time. Upside: you can make $50K in a single trip. Downside: according to Peter King, you will probably use that money to finance "another 9/11-style attack." Also: Peter King loves to use the phrase "butt-smuggler":
Hans Reiser, the software engineer who developed code for the Linux operating system, wasn't just convicted of first degree murder in the disappearance of his ex-wife. He's also become the butt of an incredibly obscure joke. Someone edited a comparison of file systems to add a new feature to ReiserFS and Reiser4 — unlike any other file system available today, the two developed by Hans Reiser will "Murder Your Wife." The change was removed from the Wikipedia page within 90 minutes.
