Wiki Commons

Virtual currency. Real jail time.

At its peak, Bitcoin Savings and Trust -- Trendon Shavers' Bitcoin business that he purported to be an investment operation -- controlled a full 7 percent of all publicly traded Bitcoin.

Operating out of his McKinney home, Shavers, known as "pirateat40" in the Bitcoin community, managed as many as 764,000 Bitcoin at a time, according to federal prosecutors. Promising a return on investment of as much as 1 percent per day, Shavers raised Bitcoin to allegedly fund his day trading habits and pay dividends to his earliest investors. He did not, the feds say, have a special strategy for leveraging Bitcoin markets, he was just running one of the oldest schemes on the books with a new currency.

"As alleged, Trendon Shavers managed to combine financial and cyber fraud into a Bitcoin Ponzi scheme that offered absurdly high interest payments, and ultimately cheated his investors out of their Bitcoin investments. This case, the first of its kind, should serve as a warning to those looking to make a quick buck with unsecured currency," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a press release.

More »

BY SEAN CHAFFIN
One morning in 2011, just after sunrise, a swarm of federal agents rolled quietly down a neatly manicured cul-de-sac in Southlake, the city police's SWAT alongside them. They gathered outside the home of their target, a $750,000 spread with five bedrooms, five bathrooms and a swimming pool, all sitting on a tree-lined half-acre lot in perhaps Dallas' most idyllic suburb. Around 7, they knocked on the door, and waited.

There was no made-for-TV chaos, no upturned tables or scattering underlings. After a brief wait, the man they were there for, 57-year-old Albert Sidney Reed, approached the door, sleep still in his eyes. He was in his underwear.

Reed's teenage son looking on, police calmly handcuffed their target, and black-clad SWAT officers shuffled inside to sweep the 5,250-square foot house. When the all clear was given several minutes later, Reed was un-cuffed and allowed to dress. He sat in a chair inside for four hours as investigators sifted through his belongings, looking for proof of what they already knew.

About an hour into the search, another IRS agent stumbled across a satchel in Reed's SUV and shuffled through its contents: printouts of wagers, collection notes, business expenses, printouts of how much his betting operation profited during football season, even notes from a big meeting upper-level owners in the organization had recently conducted. Later, he made sure to introduce himself to the satchel's owner.

"I'm Special Agent Mark Parsons with the Internal Revenue Service," he said. "We're investigating the Global International Corporation bookmaking operation, and you and I are going to get to know each other pretty well over the next six months. You can make it good on yourself -- or hard on yourself."

---

More »

Cowboys running back Joseph Randle, he of the post-Seattle Seahawks victory underwear theft and subsequent underwear endorsement, had what can best be described as an amusing experience being booked by Frisco police.

See also: Cowboy Joseph Randle Gets an Underwear Endorsement Deal for Stealing Underwear

"This is a cool little publicity stunt though," he says in the first of two videos obtained by KTVT before asking the cop doing his intake if "this was going to be in the papers."

Correctly worried that it would be, Randle tells the officer that he isn't going to look "like a criminal" in his mugshot and asks to see it.

More »

Google

Ronnie Lummus, 71, must not look like the type to carry a gun.

But it's a good thing he was packing last night. He and his wife were shopping at Aldi's on Forest Lane in Northwest Dallas, close to LBJ Freeway. When the couple finished, they walked through the sliding glass doors to the parking lot around 7:20 p.m., and that's when Lummus' wife's gold necklace caught one man's eye.

More »

DFW Airport DPS

Merry Christmas.

Earlier Tuesday, we told you that we didn't yet know the identity of the drunk, gay-slurring man who attempted to assault a man at DFW airport before being tackled by a group of good Samaritans. Now we do. His name is McCleish Christmas Benham and he lives in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

The police report included below outlines what happened before you see Benham get his butt kicked in the now-viral video. Benham began swearing at an airline employee while she attempted to help him with his flight reservations. When she asked him if he had been drinking, he told her that he'd had 100 drinks -- which, having seen the video, seems on the low end. The unidentified man whom Benham would later kick in the junk came to her defense. Benham called him a "San Frisco faggot" and then punched him in the right eye, the man said. It's at this point the recorded portion of the video begins:

More »

The United States' gun-show loophole is as wide open as it's ever been. Any private citizen with a cache of firearms can still sell them to any other private citizen without conducting a background check, as licensed dealers are required to do, because freedom.

There's a catch. The loophole, gaping though it may be, is not quite wide enough to accommodate a couple of sketchy foreign nationals stockpiling weapons for shipment to a former Soviet Republic.

According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, aspiring international arms dealers Fedor Belov and Aleksandr Yezersky of Kazakhstan learned this the hard way over the weekend when they were arrested following a gun-shopping expedition at The Original Fort Worth Gun Show.

More »

Andrew Kennedy via YouTube

Still a good guy, but not Paul Rudd

To the disappointment of the whole of the Internet, the blurry good Samaritan in the now infamous video of an apparent homophobe getting what was coming to him after attacking a man at DFW Airport is not actor Paul Rudd. Despite now retracted reports from Wonkette and D Magazine the man is, in fact, Massachusetts native Ben Kravit, an associate brand manager for Dr Pepper at the Dr Pepper Snapple group who now lives in Dallas.

Kravit, as more than 3,300,000 people have already seen in the YouTube video, was the last guy on the pile after the instigating party kicked his victim in the junk and whiffed on right hook to the head at about the 1:15 mark in the video.

More »

Stephens County

Alan Hruby

Alan Hruby is a 19-year-old shopaholic.

"There is no bigger rush then [sic] getting to the register at a store and swiping your credit card. And in that moment you are waiting for the screen to say, 'Approved' you start to get heart palpitations and you get a rush of adrenaline. By the time she is handing your stuff to you, you are so high on adrenaline, the $15,000 total does not even phase [sic] you until you've gotten home and seen the receipts," Hruby said in a now-deleted February blog post.

Hruby brags about his shoe collection, about the points he earns on his numerous credit cards. He doesn't mention the criminal charge for opening a credit card in his grandmother's name and spending $5,000 on a six-week trip to Europe provided by his parents, nor his assault of his mother two years ago after a fight about money.

More »

Avi S. Adelman/NPPA

A panel on people's rights to film and photograph police officers included two lawyers, two officers and a photojournalist.

Max Geron, the Dallas Police Department's media relations officer, smiled and shook his head in disbelief. In the video, a veteran East Coast police officer approached a photojournalist, who was standing across the street from a traffic stop with multiple squad cars present, and told him to leave. The officer didn't seem to know that, as long as they don't insert themselves into the scene, citizens and journalists have the right to film officers in public. Also, within reason, officers have the right to keep those taking pictures a certain distance away. However, "'Go away and step off the face of the earth' is not reasonable," said the moderator of a panel on the issue Thursday night, which is essentially what the East Coast officer told the photojournalist.

The moderator, a former photographer and a current media-rights lawyer, said that police officers have a sensitivity toward one of their own being filmed, and that's when Geron, who publicly is a progressive on policing, took the mic to defend not the East Coast officer's behavior, but the mentality that may lead to it.

More »

Sky Chadde

The scene of an officer-involved shooting in Dallas. According to a recent analysis, black men are 21 times more likely than white men to be shot by police officers.

In the past few months, Dallas activists have been working to raise awareness about the number of black men police have killed over the years. The Huey P. Newton Gun Club has taken to the streets armed with rifles, and Dallas Communities Organizing for Change has analyzed data on police shootings over a 10-year period. The latter released a report on their findings: Black men, while making up a smaller percentage of the Dallas population than their white counterparts, die at the hands of police officers much more frequently.

Which you already knew. But now there's even more evidence, in the form of a ProPublica analysis of deadly police shootings from around the country that backs up the local group's findings.

More »