The Life & Times (And Trial) of Ed Buck

[Wombaticus Rex]

Ed Buck Guilty ... Guilty, GUILTY!!!

LOS ANGELES - A jury has reached its verdict in the trial of former political donor Ed Buck, who is accused of providing methamphetamine to two men who died in his West Hollywood apartment.

The jury found Buck guilty on all nine felony counts, including two counts of distribution of controlled substances resulting in death, stemming from the deaths of Gemmel Moore in July 2017 and Timothy Dean in January 2019.

Each of the two charges carry 20-year mandatory minimums.

From an anon collaborator:

One of the mundane details that's puzzled me is he lived in a rent stabilized apartment (and was loathed by his neighbors due to the obvious nuisance noise, comings and goings). Was he as wealthy as his donor $$$ implied, or a conduit for others?

Two asides here: first, although I have seen the $500k figure widely disseminated from press orgs with fact checkers on payroll, I have not been able to verify that myself on platforms like Open Secrets or Little Sister. Second, even taking the $500k figure at face value, that is still minor leagues stuff, especially in the era of dark money.

I clearly need to spend some more time digging through the WeHoVille archives...

Ed Buck’s Landlord Tells Neighbors an Eviction Won’t Be Easy

Thursday - January 17, 2019

The owner of the apartment building at 1234 N. Laurel Ave. has responded to a petition from building residents requesting the eviction of their neighbor, Ed Buck...

In a letter to the tenants, Christopher Shane of David Shane Enterprises Inc. said “we are deeply concerned by this most recent incident and how the news coverage, and response both public and private, has effected your occupancy, use and enjoyment of the premises. We understand you fear for your safety and want to assure you that your safety is of utmost concern to us."

However, Shane said, attorneys have told him that “eviction of a tenant, in a ‘rent controlled’ jurisdiction, can be very challenging.”

“Under the law, a suspect/defendant is ‘presumed innocent until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt.’ Attempts to evict a suspect who is presumed innocent, will likely be met with a vigorous defense and retaliatory action. If an action to evict is initiated, we want reasonable assurances that we will prevail.”

“If Ed is arrested, criminally prosecuted and convicted of a crime, the likelihood of an eviction is greatly increased.”

Shane said his company is in close touch with the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station. “We are taking reasonable steps, a permitted by law, to make sure you are safe.”

And an interesting comment on the guilty verdict from the same site:

Michael Grace
West Hollywood Politicians, along with the California Democrat Party, should be part of the guilty verdict.

When Gemmel Moore’s mother spoke to the West Hollywood City Council after her son had died, she said Ed Buck was a very sick man. She indicated he was not alone but just a part of the significant Cyrstal Meth drug problem in West Hollywood.

That didn’t impress the four West Hollywood City Council members who had taken thousands in Ed Buck’s political donations—never mentioning that to Mrs. Moore. They were Heilman, Duran, D’Amico, and Meister. They didn’t return any of Buck’s contributions, but D’Amico, who was put in office by Buck’s donations and actions, “generously,” sent $25 for Gemmel’s funeral.

Ed Buck ran his death house on Laurel Avenue for two more years and operated his Crystal Meth lab to entrap young desperate black men.

West Hollywood politicians looked the other way to the Buck Crystal meth ordeal along with California Democrat politicians that had taken over $500,000 in donations.

Ed Buck had given to Democrat candidates in California brought attention to the politicians. They, of course, distance themselves from the Buck association.

District Attorney Jackie Lacey didn’t prosecute because she was a pawn for the California Democrats who wanted the whole Buck thing swept under the rug.

California Democrat Party chairman Eric C. Bauman worked with West Hollywood and California Democrats to kill the Buck association.
Then Bauman was charged with sexual harassment by young interns and was forced to resign as Chairman of the California Democrats.

It’s excellent that Buck was convicted, but there is guilt by association. Specific political hacks from local to statewide should have been the dock with him.

Pride in WEHO, LOL!

[Wombaticus Rex]

From an anon collaborator:

One of the mundane details that's puzzled me is he lived in a rent stabilized apartment (and was loathed by his neighbors due to the obvious nuisance noise, comings and goings). Was he as wealthy as his donor $$$ implied, or a conduit for others?

Two asides here: first, although I have seen the $500k figure widely disseminated from press orgs with fact checkers on payroll, I have not been able to verify that myself on platforms like Open Secrets or Little Sister. Second, even taking the $500k figure at face value, that is still minor leagues stuff, especially in the era of dark money.

Here's the Open Secrets SERPs organized by date:
https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-looku ... esc&sort=D

1) There are three other Ed Bucks in the mix here - Washington (state), Tennessee, and New Mexico, respectively - but 90046 West Hollywood Ed Buck was no doubt a prodigious donor, racking up 197 of the 209 donations listed there.
2) His spending spree begins in 2006, with a modest outlay of $1925 over six donations, five of which were to Mike Feuer, currently City Attorney for LA.
3) All of his biggest donations occur between 2014 and 2018. Aside from a lavish $31,000 in tribute to Arizona Mafia front/model Krysten Sinema, all of those donations are to California races & orgs, and mostly local LA pols.
4) Although the long read I posted a page back on Stonewall Democratic Club of Los Angeles made Ed Buck out to be a powerful fixture, his publicly verifiable donations to that organization amount to a measly $1100, as well as $1500 for "Stonewall Young Democrats." Influence is a very cheap commodity!
5) I get a grand total of $322,462. LA Times claims "more than $500,00" and NYT claims "$433,500." I'm assuming they're getting direct FEC data and/or I am gently retarded and made basic mistakes calculating.

More from an LA Times piece I overlooked last week:

A Times analysis of campaign finance records shows that, since the mid-2000s, Buck has given more than $500,000 to political candidates and causes, almost all of them linked to the Democratic Party.

...

Questions remain about the source of his wealth. Los Angeles County prosecutors asking a judge to set bond for Buck at $4 million wrote in a bail motion that he was not employed, “has no known source of income,” and might be funding “his lifestyle of preying on vulnerable men” with narcotics trafficking.

In the 1980s, Buck was a well-known figure in Arizona, where he led the effort to recall Arizona Gov. Evan Mecham, who eventually was impeached. Then a Republican, Buck was known for his bombastic actions, like hanging a piñata effigy of the governor and feuding with a black Arizona State Capitol police chief whom he called a "baboon."

By the early 2000s, Buck had relocated to West Hollywood, where he became involved with the Save Tara group.

Allegra Allison, who spearheaded the effort, said he was good at mobilizing volunteers, ran phone banks in his apartment and spent hours walking precincts. Buck told her he had given money to neighbors who were being evicted, she said. He rescued golden retrievers and doted on his dogs. Allison thought that, although prickly, Buck had good intentions.

...

Prang said he knew that Buck was “inclined to be a flamethrower” but maintained a cordial relationship with him. The county assessor, whose office was accused this month of giving special tax treatment as a quid pro quo for campaign contributions, said he did not consider Buck a major donor. (The allegations against the county assessor’s office do not involve Buck.)

“There are friendships, and there are political friendships that really involve civic and political association,” Prang said. “I think Ed fit that category for a lot of people.”

...

In 2013, Buck cut a $250,000 check to Animal PAC. Hale said he essentially gave the PAC a loan to try to influence others to give big donations, “but then, apparently, no one did and he took it back.” State records show Buck received a refund of nearly $225,000.

NYT takes the same stance:

Ed Buck was not a megadonor. Among California Democrats, he was marginal — and that was being generous. Nationally, he was a nobody. The photographs with Clinton and Ted Lieu, which illustrated countless television spots, were the kind that anyone can get by waiting in line at an event — “even a free event,” as the campaign manager for one of the state’s top-ranking members of Congress told me.

Rather than a man of influence, they showed a man who wanted to seem influential. Thousands of Americans whose names you wouldn’t recognize were bigger political donors than Ed Buck — though Buck, from his gray, rent-stabilized apartment on North Laurel Avenue, took pains to make it look otherwise.

...

In the late 1980s, Buck bought a company in Phoenix that sold driver’s-license data to auto insurers, made a few improvements and flipped it. He claimed he made over a million dollars in profit on the deal. Suddenly flush, he bought a hilltop house in an area that was then called Squaw Peak, furnished it with neon lights and almost nothing else and threw parties that choked the cul-de-sac with cars. It wasn’t much to look at, but the house’s view gave it value; when I visited this summer, you could see for miles from the backyard. The current owner, who works in Phoenix real estate, estimated it would have been worth about $250,000 in 1989. He bought it from Buck for $440,000 in 1999.
It was 1991 when he moved to West Hollywood, the twilight of the worst years of H.I.V. Reagan was gone. In the gay bars, the free condoms came in packages labeled with a double entendre: “For the Man in You.” Buck got into bodybuilding and enhanced his muscles with steroids. He told a friend in Phoenix he was paying $250 a month in rent. He said he was “retired” — at age 37.

Whatever profit he had made from the business deal and the house, Buck told friends he invested in the market. If you put $300,000 in an S&P-tracking index fund in 1985, you’d have $3.8 million in 2017 before taxes. Darden told me Buck’s net worth was “Well under $2 million.”

In any event, Buck lived on the cheap. By the time of his arrest, his rent-stabilized apartment on North Laurel Avenue cost just $1,031.17 a month; average rent for a West Hollywood two-bedroom was around $4,000. Donations, not real estate, seem to have been his indulgence, a way of buying himself a sheen. Everything else, he lowballed: Apartment 17 was “the grayest, drabbest place you’d ever seen,” as a friend described it, with a table, couch, tool kit with drugs and sex toys and large mirrors on the wall. He drove a 16-year-old Acura.

...

In 2013, Buck changed. He stopped speaking at City Council meetings. He would call Jane Wishon, a vice president of Stonewall, to ask her when the monthly meeting was, though the meeting was on the same day every month. In the 2013 and 2015 election cycles, he flung $238,000 in total at Democratic candidates — a little each to a lot of people — when before he’d gone only as high as $43,000, and often much lower. His contributions from 2005 to 2017 totaled $433,500. He went out in public with bandages on his arms. He snapped at you for nothing.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Thanks to a twitter pal who I believe is active here at RI -- the Rosetta Stone of Buckery and the source for most of the pieces giving an biographic brief on Buckmelter, an interview with his mother in the Arizona Republic on October 18, 1997.

Anyone reading this who is unfortunate enough to spend time doing original research as some sick, masochistic hobby is strongly encouraged to get a Newspapers Dot Com account, it's the best bang for your archival buck and a triumph of Mormon industry.

Scanned Clip of "Buck's mother recalls path that led him to crusade"

When I am more relaxed and motivated I will come back to transcribe it into .txt here.

[LolaB]

He just got sentenced to 30 years.

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/ed-buck-trial-wealthy-democratic-donor-to-be-sentenced/

"Even after two men were found dead in his California apartment, Ed Buck did not stop injecting gay men with walloping doses of methamphetamine.

A federal judge on Thursday sentenced him to 30 years in prison in the deaths of Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean. Another man, Dane Brown, was repeatedly injected by Buck but survived and his harrowing account of being revived twice finally led to Buck’s arrest in 2019.

Buck, 67, a big dollar donor to Democratic, LGBTQ and animal rights causes, appeared in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles for providing fatal doses of drugs, operating a drug den and enticing men to travel for prostitution. He was convicted last summer.

Judge Christina A. Snyder said the sentencing decision was difficult because she had to balance the good Buck did in his life with the “horrific crimes” that she called “more than just an accident.”

[drstrangelove]

as Constantine mentions Maury Terry somehow stuck Crispo onto his Ultimate Evil wall of post-it notes & string - but I can't remember how - Terry was also probably slightly full of it

states in his book he found crispo's name on roy radin's wedding list.

A week later I was back in Dillon's office. He gave me a puzzled look and handed me a large typewritten piece of paper. It was the guest list from Radin's 1981 wedding. There were numerous names on the alphabetized roster. "I circled one for you," Dillon said. "I don't know how the hell you were so sure." I looked down at the page, and there it was: "Andrew Crispo."

terry also interviewed bernard legeros who confirmed the radin-crispo connection and also mentioned crispo's connection to a texan snuff film dealer. legeros also spilt the beans on this in a 1994 affidavit.

DECLARATION OF BERNARD J. LEGEROS
. . .
9. Mr. Crispo told me that Mr. Mammano was fencing stolen artwork, including sculptures, for him. Mr. Crispo also told me that Mr. Mammano sold cocaine to Mr. Crispo and that Mr. Mammano imported gay and straight "snuff" movies into the United States from Mexico. Stuff movies are obscene movies in which a person is actually murdered on film. I heard that a man from Texas named "John" produced the snuff movies in Mexico and that "John" was subsequently arrested and convicted for committing a crime in Texas.

10. Mr. Crispo also told me about Mr. Hoffey's involvement in a Brooklyn "baby factory" at the same time he was law partners with Mr. Berry and I assume Mr. Berry also knew about this. Mr. Hoffey illegally brokered infants sold by their mothers to persons unable to give birth to children of their own.

11. At the same time Mr. Hoffey was law partners with Mr. Berry, Mr. Hoffey was very close friends with Frank Rossi, an Italian attorney who practiced law in England. On one occasion, Mr. Rossi told me he ran ads for female models in the United States and Asia. When women responded to the ads they would be drugged and sold as "white slaves" to Mr. Rossi's clients in Tunisia and Morocco.

- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Krasel/aff/aff_bl.html

it's the connection maury makes between roy radin and the process church/berkowitz via the photographer ronald sisman which is rather dubious. though to be fair i have been keyword searching his book so may be missing context. his fault for novelisation though.