Crime

Molly Shattuck pleaded not guilty

A former Baltimore Ravens cheerleader was charged Wednesday with raping a 15-year-old boy.

Molly Shattuck, 47, pleaded not guilty to nine counts including rape, unlawful sexual contact and providing alcohol to minors, WBAL in Baltimore reports. She was released after posting $84,000 bail. She allegedly had sexual relations with the boy over Labor Day weekend in a vacation rental home in Bethany Beach, Del.

Shattuck was 38 when she joined the Baltimore Ravens cheerleading squad in 2005, making her the oldest cheerleader in the NFL.

“This is a difficult situation for everyone involved,” Shattuck’s lawyer said.

[WBAL]

"Turns out it's way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks on the movies"

Washington state police officials said they arrested a man Wednesday night after pictures of his murdered girlfriend’s body were posted online on 4chan, the anonymous messaging board website linked to this summer’s nude celebrity photo leak.

David Michael Kalac, 33, surrendered to Oregon police at 8:50 p.m. local time and was charged with second-degree murder.

The arrest came after an anonymous poster published photos Tuesday appearing to show the corpse of Amber Lynn Coplin, accompanied by the message: “Turns out it’s way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks on the movies… She fought so Damn hard.”

The Washington Post reports that another disturbing message by the poster read:

Check the news for Port Orchard Washington in a few hours. Her son will be home from school soon. He’ll find her, then call the cops. I just wanted to share the pics before they find me. I bought a BB gun that looks realistic enough. When they come, I’ll pull it and it will be suicide by cop. I understand the doubts. Just check the f*** news. I have to lose my phone now.

Coplin’s 13-year-old son found her body shortly after the photos were published online.

NBC reports that an affadavit indicates Kalac, who is suspected of driving away in Coplin’s car following her murder late Monday or early Tuesday, texted friends with messages like, “S*** is all f***** now. You’ll see me in the news.”

Police said that Kalac is cooperating with investigators.

(PHILADELPHIA) — A woman seen on surveillance video being abducted off a street was found safe outside Baltimore on Wednesday, and the man who snatched her was arrested, police said.

Carlesha Freeland-Gaither was spotted in Jessup, Maryland, in a car with the man and was rescued soon after, police said, without going into details. The man was nabbed after he stepped out of the car, they said.

“We got a very dangerous predator off the street,” police Chief Charles Ramsey said.

Freeland-Gaither, who had some minor injuries, was generally doing OK, police said. She and the man didn’t know each other, they said.

The man, Delven Barnes, was being held Wednesday night on an unrelated Virginia warrant alleging attempted capital murder, assault and malicious injury with acid, explosives or fire, police said. Barnes couldn’t be reached for comment while in custody.

Freeland-Gaither’s mother, Keisha Gaither, thanked police and the community for their support and said she had talked to her by phone but hadn’t seen her yet.

“I’m taking my baby home,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Freeland-Gaither had been last seen on surveillance video being grabbed by a man and pulled toward a car Sunday night as she struggled to get away in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood.

Police and federal authorities had released a stream of images over the past two days from surveillance cameras in Maryland and from a Philadelphia supermarket hours before the abduction.

The 22-year-old nursing assistant graduated from high school in Maryland and lived with her grandfather in Philadelphia until a couple of months ago, when she moved in with her boyfriend.

Her grandmother Ana Mulero said she has worked with cancer patients and has been pursuing a career in nursing.

Federal agents aiding in the multi-state search for her had released supermarket security video of a man they said was a person of interest.

The video showed a man in a knit cap and dark coat walking down an aisle of a Philadelphia store and using a self-checkout station. A timestamp indicates the video was recorded eight hours before Freeland-Gaither disappeared.

A witness called 911 at about 9:40 p.m. Sunday and reported seeing a woman identified as Freeland-Gaither screaming for help as she was forced into a dark gray four-door vehicle.

Police said Freeland-Gaither’s glasses and cellphone were dropped on the street, near piles of broken auto glass.

The witness said Freeland-Gaither — described by her parents as easygoing until she’s threatened — broke the car’s rear side windows before the vehicle sped off.

Freeland-Gaither’s parents circulated fliers in Germantown, and Facebook groups sprung up with prayers for her safe return.

The Supreme Court's Wednesday case concerns just one example of, well, fishiness

Fans of The Wire or All the President’s Men will know that the adage “follow the money” is a red-blooded way to make investigating a criminal cash trail sound cool. But why don’t we ever say “follow the fish”?

Fish and crime have long been two arms of an octopus. A recent United Nations report found that child trafficking and drug smuggling are rife in much of the transnational fishing industry, and many fisheries are known to illegally harvest endangered sea creatures. And, of course, if you step on the Mafia’s toes, you can be sure that you’ll “sleep with the fishes.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case about whether fish can count as tangible evidence in a government investigation. The story is this: seven years ago, a commercial fisherman named John Yates in the Gulf of Mexico was found catching undersized red grouper fish. The officer who caught Yates put the red groupers in crates and told him they would be seized when the vessel returned to port. On the way back, Yates decided to throw out the fish. He was charged with destruction of evidence—investigators, after all, could no longer follow the fish to discover the crime.

The link between fish and crime is an old one. From at least the 1930s until the 1990s, the bustling and very stinky Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan—the second largest fish market in the world after Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market—was effectively under Mafia control. The hundreds of fish retailers who bought and sold oysters, eel, squid, pike, crab and abalone at the market on Manhattan’s East River were subject to extortion and systematic racketeering, and cash flowed into Mafia and local union coffers. The scheme was this: the Mafia would either physically intimidate fish retailers, truckers and other third parties who relied on the Fulton Fish Market for business, or threaten to leave their fish on the dock to rot. They would then extort fees for using their facilities.

In 1931, a New York attorney named Samuel Seabury helped lead an investigation into a Manhattan District Attorney (Thomas C. T. Crain) who neglected to prosecute the fish market controllers. TIME wrote about it in its April 20, 1931 issue:

Inquisitor Seabury’s staff introduced scores of witnesses to show that, among many other things, District Attorney Crain had been glaringly lax in prosecuting racketeers at the Fulton Fish Market (where Alfred Emanuel Smith once worked). Facts not brought out in Mr. Grain’s half-hearted grand jury investigation of conditions in the market last year: More than 600 fish retailers were forced to pay $35,000 a Year for “protection,” otherwise they were not permitted to buy fish. Wholesalers were assessed $82 per year per employee by Joseph S. (“Socks”) Lanza, delegate of the fish dealers union, for “insurance” against property damage.

Despite enforcement efforts, corruption at the Fulton Street Fish Market really didn’t end until the mid 1990s. TIME wrote about it then, too, as part of a 2004 profile of Joseph Massino, boss of the Bonanno crime family for nearly 15 years. Massino may not have had direct ties to the fishy business on Fulton street, but Vincent “Chin” Gigante, a competing Genovese mob boss, did:

A former boxer who acted as if he had taken one punch too many, Gigante, dubbed “the Oddfather,” wandered Greenwich Village in an old bathrobe and slippers. After pretending for years that he was not mentally fit to stand trial, Gigante, 75, admitted last year that he was sane and copped a plea, adding three years to a previous labor-racketeering rap. Long considered the wealthiest of the families, the Genoveses, whose ranks currently include 173 made men, controlled New York City’s concrete industry and the Fulton Fish Market–the latter as recently as the mid-’90s.

Today the Fulton Street Fish Market has moved to the Bronx borough of New York City and handles about $1 billion of fish each year, having lost its organized crime connection. That doesn’t mean you won’t find anything if you follow the fish—it’ll just be edible.

The media has been quick to describe as "prostitutes" the two dead women found in the Hong Kong apartment of British banker Rurik Jutting. The truth isn't that simple, and one victim may not have been a sex worker at all

The arrest of young British banker Rurik Jutting, who was charged last weekend with killing two women in Hong Kong, has drawn the world’s attention to the city’s darker side, with current and former financiers coming forward with breathless confessionals of cocaine-fueled nights and easy sex.

But all of that is a world apart from the lives of the two victims — young Indonesian women brutally murdered just days apart in the district of Wan Chai, where posh apartment buildings, like Jutting’s, sit in uneasy proximity to topless bars and sleazy nightclubs.

Both Sumarti Ningsih, 23, and Seneng Mujiasih, 29, first arrived in Hong Kong to work as domestic helpers. They were among hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians in the city — mostly Thai, Filipina and Indonesian women — who work to support their families back home, or to fulfill a modest dream like building a house or saving for a small business.

Sumarti, from Cilacap, a town in southern Java, was a single mother with only a primary school education, but described as “very thoughtful and smart” by her mother Suratmi, 49. Her parents, who are farmers, tell TIME that she worked as a nanny when she was 18, shortly after she left her husband and gave birth to a baby boy in 2009. Life was a struggle.

“She said she didn’t have enough to eat when she lived with her husband,” her mother tells TIME.

Two years later, in 2011, she went to Hong Kong, leaving her son in the care of her parents. She worked as a domestic helper, managing to send around $250 home every month. That’s more than twice what a girl without much education can expect to make in Java working as, say, a shop assistant or in some similar role.

After working as a domestic helper, Sumarti found a job — illegally — in a Hong Kong restaurant as a waitress. Then she returned to Cilacap in 2013.

She wasn’t there for long. Back in Indonesia, she took a DJ course, and then traveled to Hong Kong at least twice more, staying for months at a time. The most recent, and the last, visit began in August, when she arrived on a tourist visa. On each visit, Sumarti returned to the same restaurant to make money for her son’s education and her parents’ daily living expenses.

Other Indonesian women in Hong Kong take on similar work, particularly those who overstay their domestic-helper visas.

One such overstayer was the second victim, Seneng Mujiasih. Her family lives on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and she began working as a domestic helper in Hong Kong some years ago, but her contract was terminated in 2011 by her employer.

Finding a new employer meant paying large sums — the equivalent to many months of wages — to an employment agency. Instead, Seneng, known as Jesse Lorena to her friends, chose to stay on and work illegally in Hong Kong, taking on whatever job she could find.

“She wanted to save money to build a house for her mother,” says Eni Lestari, an adviser with the Association of Indonesian Migrant Workers in Hong Kong, who spoke with Seneng’s friends and relatives. Seneng is said to have lived in a cheap boarding house not far from Jutting’s luxury apartment building, J Residence, where the rent on a 350-sq.-ft. flat costs around $2,800 per month — seven times a domestic helper’s wage.

There are around 6.5 million Indonesians working overseas, sending home $7.4 billion of remittances last year. Many of these migrant workers are women working as domestic helpers in the Middle East and East Asia. Almost half of Hong Kong’s 320,000 domestic workers are from Indonesia.

Although the city offers legal protection to domestic workers, including a mandatory minimum wage and days off, rights activists blame draconian immigration restrictions and Indonesia’s employment regulations for making the women vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

Newcomers incur huge debts to employment agencies. In a case that shocked the world, Erwiana Sulistyaningsih was tortured for months by her employer before she was sent home emaciated and disfigured in January. Despite her plea for help, her agency had refused to intervene because she still owed them money.

Strapped for cash, mired in debt or simply wishing to earn more, some migrant workers, including overstayers like Seneng, take on other kinds of work, from other cleaning jobs to washing dishes or waitressing in restaurants or, in a comparatively few cases, selling sex. Sometimes they do all of the above, moving fluidly between the lives of sex worker, migrant worker and illegal alien.

In interviews with Indonesian-language media, Seneng’s friends said she had been an occasional sex worker. Sumarti’s mother believes that her daughter was not. “I believe she actually worked, and was not doing anything bad,” she tells TIME. “I know my own daughter. She said she worked in a restaurant, and when I called her, she said she worked from early morning to late in the evening.”

Eni slams the media for quickly and pruriently painting the women as mere prostitutes. “We should understand that nobody come here to work illegally or do an immoral job,” she tells TIME. “They are forced by circumstances to do so.”

Unfortunately, those same circumstances persist for millions of Indonesian women. Every day, at Hong Kong’s glittering international airport, more arrive, with the modest aim of earning enough to feed and house their families.

Sumarti was due to pass through the same airport on her way home on Nov. 2. Instead, back in Cilacap, her grieving parents are now waiting for her body.

“Right now I only wait for the return of my daughter’s body as soon as possible,” says her mother. “I am very shocked, and cannot accept it. Whoever did it to my daughter has to get the heaviest punishment.”

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