Will new law slow ‘faux charity’ pitches in Las Vegas and Nevada?

Posted on by October 12, 2021
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faux charity pitches in Las VegasSee update at end of story

A new Nevada law that took effect on October 1 might cut down on or even eliminate the large number of “faux charity” cold-calling money solicitations made in the Silver Silver. I say “might” because Nevada regulators don’t have the greatest track record of protecting the donating public by policing dodgy charitable appeals or, as I will point out again, even enforcing existing law in this area.

Regular visitors to this space are quite aware of what I mean by a faux charity. It is a cause whose pitch on the phone sounds like it is raising money for a meritorious cause like fighting an illness or supporting law enforcement. But in fact it’s a political action committee–often conveniently omitting the letters PAC when making the telephone pitch–run by shadowy folks that take in donations very little of which are then spent for campaign contributions, which isn’t a charitable purpose, either. Almost all the donations go to fundraising and overhead, with the organizers raking off undisclosed sums.

Previous Nevada law required most charitable organizations soliciting federally tax-deductible contributions in Nevada to register with the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office and make some disclosures. But contributions to PACs by law aren’t tax-deductible, so faux charity PACs didn’t fall under the charitable solicitation laws of Nevada–a giant loophole.

Nationally, most PACs are required to make publicly available disclosures to federal agencies, but they can be hard to find and analyze. Nevada has laws requiring state registration of certain PACs doing business in the state. But I have yet to see a Nevada registration of a faux charity PAC calling me, most of which list addresses in Washington, D.C., and other far-away places. Continue reading →

Forbes 400 roster in Las Vegas falls to two

Posted on by October 7, 2021
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Forbes 400 roster in Las Vegas When I became New To Las Vegas five years ago, the annual Forbes 400 list of America’s richest folks contained nine individuals from the Sin City area. As it turned out, that was something of a peak year for the local count, as the basis for much of the vast wealth around Las Vegas–casinos, entertainment, hospitality, that kind of stuff–couldn’t keep up with fortunes being generated by big finance and technology brains elsewhere. Astonishingly, there now are more billionaires in the U.S. not on the Forbes list than on it.

The 40th edition of the Forbes 400 was just published. The Las Vegas Rich List contingent is now down to two. Continue reading →

Las Vegas COVID-19 per-capita death rate still double that of U.S.

Posted on by September 29, 2021
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Las Vegas COVID-19 per-capita death rateWith 0.7% of the national population, Clark County, Nevada (home to Las Vegas and the New to Las Vegas world headquarters) had 1.4% of all the COVID-19 deaths in the country yesterday (29 of 2,026). That’s still double the national per-capita death rate.

In one respect this is good news. During the summer, the per-capita death rate in Clark County/Las Vegas was more than 10 times the national rate. But the local bump in my view is still too high for a place utterly dependent on tourism.

A story right now on the Las Vegas Review-Journal website cites the 29 local deaths, but doesn’t mention how bad that is compared to the entire nation. For some reason, aside from this space, this comparison is rarely mentioned in the Las Vegas media, and, of course, not by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the main local cheerleader for tourism.

Visitors, still be aware.

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Faux cancer charity pitches Las Vegas with variation on a theme

Posted on by September 27, 2021
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Faux cancer charity pitches Las VegasThe cheery female voice–I didn’t get her name–recently cold-calling the New To Las Vegas world headquarters was seeking a donation for Ovarian Cancer Awareness Initiative. This is yet another cancer cause I hadn’t heard of–there are thousands of them out there. Unfortunately, in my long experience the ones calling out of the blue often are up to little good.

I asked where the organization was headquartered. “Washington, D.C.” she quickly replied. Okay, I said, how old is the organization?

There was a pause. A long pause. Then, “I can’t answer that type of question.” She hung up even before I got a chance to ask for her name. Gee, it’s not like I was inquiring how to deal with the Taliban.

Maybe she didn’t want to tell me that the Initiative was likely less than seven months old, judging from the registration date of its website (March 3, 2021) that I quickly looked up. Or maybe it was that she really didn’t exist as a person, but was just a computer-generated voice controlled by a real human somewhere using what is known as soundboard technology. Such callers are known to cut and run at the first suggestion of donor difficulty.

Whatever the reason, after a few more minutes of Internet research I realized a few more things: (1) Despite its call-to-action name, the Initiative wasn’t a charity, but simply a political action committee, or PAC, whose stated mission is to make political contributions; (2) United Women’s Health Alliance PAC, the parent organization controlling the Initiative and which also solicits under other names, during its entire life has spent nearly 80% of all the contributions received in fundraising expense, something would-be donors might be very unhappy to learn, (3) no money–not even one dime–ever has ever spent in political contributions. Talk about cheap!

Plus (4), this was the fourth call I’ve gotten in less than a year from UWHA PAC causes. Two came on the very same day in June on behalf of something called U.S. Breast Cancer and Women’s Health Initiative PAC. You can read about those calls by clicking here and the earlier one by clicking here. So I am adding the Ovarian Cancer Awareness Initiative as a candidate for my list of America’s Stupidest Charities. The criteria is simple: exempt organizations that call me asking for money despite a previous critical post by me about the organization. UWHA PAC and the Breast Cancer and Women’s Health Initiatives PAC already are candidates. You can view the entire list elsewhere on this page.

I call these outfits a faux charity because they sound like charities in making their pitches but really aren’t. Rather, it’s all simply a variation on a theme. The founder/treasurer of UWHA PAC, Audrey Stephanie Mastroianni, has a rather iffy past on the charitable front, as I have detailed before and will briefly summarize again below. Continue reading →

From Las Vegas: World history is fatal flaw in Trump’s voting fraud claim

Posted on by September 21, 2021
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fatal flaw in Trump's voting fraud claim

Donald J. Trump (courtesy donaldjtrump.com)

Every single court that has weighed in–more than 50 at last count, including the Nevada Supreme Court covering where I live and the U.S. Supreme Court covering where we all live–has rejected claims on behalf of Donald J. Trump that he lost his 2020 presidential re-election bid due to massive voter fraud. The main reason for the goose eggs across the board–perhaps the most singularly unsuccessful legal effort in the entirety of U.S. history–is, of course, that no one produced probative evidence supporting his fraud charges. (Having Rudy Giuliani with his hair dye problems as a lead lawyer probably didn’t help, either.)

Yet according to a poll last month by Yahoo News/YouGov, two-thirds of all Republicans continue to believe that “the election was rigged and stolen from Trump.” A CNN poll last week put the number even higher: 78%. The incumbent got 74 million votes, presumably mostly from Republicans. So that is a lot of doubters, even if not very many of them showed up at Saturday’s “Justice for J6” rally in Washington, D.C. From Trump’s perspective the Big Lie clearly has worked.

OK. Sitting in the comfort of the New to Las Vegas world headquarters, I am going to come at this from another angle. The hell with the lack of what lawyers like to call admissible evidence. I’m looking at history. World history. Going back into the 1980s.

Examining nearly 35 disputed-after-the-fact national elections on five continents, I can’t find a single credible example of widespread voter fraud affecting the outcome where the fraud was committed by the party out of power. Trump and his Republicans in 2020, of course, controlled the extensive executive machinery of the U.S. Federal Government. More to the point, I can find only one other good example of an incumbent national leader making a big election fraud allegation. That was Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi after Romano Prodi ousted him in 2006. And Berlusconi, who like Trump carries significant personal baggage, produced no proof of the claimed fraud.

There is a very logical explanation for this pattern. The party in power trying to hang on usually has the money, the courts, the prosecutors, the control of the election machinery, the police, the military, the guns, the teargas, the mace, the jails. The muscle. The party out of power generally has none of this. It’s really just that simple. (I am excluding from my universe any scrutiny of provincial, regional or local elections, where out-of-power parties not facing overwhelming incumbent resources sometimes have swindled their way to victory.)

Now Trump has loooooong experience as a promoter/propagandist–decades of making boastfully false claims about his business career and economic endeavors, which aside from a handful of properties have mainly faltered or even failed. I would submit it is this expertise he has developed peddling flawed products that has enabled him to sell his narrative of a stolen election to so many folks despite a lack of proof and, I would suggest, requiring that logic be suspended.

Trump, who has said he doesn’t read books, is clearly no student of history. He suggested Canada burned the White House in 1814 (it was England), Andrew Jackson was upset about the Civil War (he died 15 years earlier), and Frederick Douglass is still doing good work for blacks despite his death in 1895. On the world front, Trump said North Korea was once part of China (it never was) and that President Clinton negotiated a bad deal with current North Korea leader Kim Jung Un, who didn’t come to power until a decade after Clinton left office.

Much of the public does read books, but folks may not have a full understanding of recent global history. So let’s do some time-traveling around the world. Continue reading →

At the Las Vegas sentencing of the killer whose victim I found

Posted on by September 12, 2021
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killer whose victim I found

Jarrid Johnson in 2018 (courtesy Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept.)

I have been writing in this space about the case of Jarrid Johnson since his arrest for murdering a homeless man whose body I discovered while walking the dog near the New To Las Vegas world headquarters before sunrise on 2018’s shortest day. I’m certainly not condoning murder, and this one was especially senseless and gory. But the more I learn, the more I realize Johnson was in some ways a victim of circumstances not unlike the man he killed, Ralph Franzello. Indeed, the Johnson case has revealed a number of tough truths about Las Vegas.

My latest lessons learned came yesterday, when I attended Johnson’s 13-minute sentencing at the Regional Justice Center in downtown Las Vegas. In an earlier plea-bargain deal, Johnson, now 28, had pleaded guilty but mentally ill–a uniquely Nevada formulation–to second degree murder with a deadly weapon. Appearing on a Zoom-like feed from the county jail projected onto several large screens, some of his hair in what looked like a ponytail, he apologized to the Franzello family. “I wasn’t in my right mind,” Johnson said in a soft Southern accent as his father and a sibling watched stoically sitting in the 14th-floor courtroom near me.

Johnson then learned his fate from District Judge Michelle Leavitt: 10 years to life on the murder charge, and an additional eight-to-20-year “enhancement” for using a deadly weapon–the knife he grabbed from the much-older Franzello, 63, and used to gut his body and drink his blood. I think that basically works out to a minimum 18-year sentence, minus the nearly three years Johnson has been jailed since his arrest. He’ll likely be in his 40s when he gets out. Johnson is supposed to get continued mental health treatment while incarcerated, but good luck on that long term in minimal government Nevada.

In previous posts, I described how Johnson had been arrested a week before the Franzello killing on a separate charge of battery upon a relative–two years ago, I speculated an uncle–with a sword. To me, assaulting a relative with a sword is a clear sign of mental illness warranting further treatment and monitoring and definitely not a quick release. But instead, Johnson was ordered free dby another judge, Karen P. Bennett-Haron, without appearing in court and without bail. Maybe 36 hours later, after meandering around east Las Vegas, he had his fatal encounter in the middle of the night with Franzello. The victim, who became homeless after moving to Las Vegas a quarter-century ago with some disability income, had been living on the streets of Las Vegas for awhile, just trying to get by. Early on the morning of December 21, 2018–the first day of winter–he was simply catching some shut-eye behind a supermarket whose employees knew him as a customer.

The day before the sentencing, Johnson’s lawyer, deputy public defender Anna Clark, publicly filed a sentencing memo with the court laying out her view of the facts and attaching a psychiatrist’s report and letters from friends and family. In open court yesterday, prosecutors said they had no problem with the package, which Clark, who unlike the prosecutors appeared in person, summarized for a few minutes to the judge. So I’m going to take the stated facts and conclusions in the presentation as more or less true.

Boy, did I learn a lot! Continue reading →