Archive for May, 2010
America’s Cocaine King Hid From Drug Cartels for 25 Years
To protect members of Max Mermelstein’s family, his alias and certain names have been changed.
DELRAY BEACH, FLORIDA — MOVIE THEATER — NOVEMBER 2006
Former Escorts in Los Angeles actor Brett Tabor tops a medium popcorn with jalapeños, as is his custo…
On the Backs of Children
Two years ago, when Principal Tim Sullivan, who saw educating inner-city children as his life’s work, walked onto the Markham Middle School campus in Watts for the first time, it seemed like a “movie set,” where Denzel Washington, star of Training Day, might suddenly app…
DWP: Reservoir Dogs
It’s called a bucket truck, a large Department of Water and Power vehicle with a cherry-picker mechanical arm, and it’s parked all day on St. George Street in Los Feliz, under a sweet gum.
It’s a beautiful Friday, and it’s hard to figure out why the truck is there. There …
Trash Humpers: Talking Tall
Trash Humpers is not really a movie. Or so its credited writer/director, sometime indie-film enfant terrible Harmony Korine (writer of Kids, director of Gummo, julien donkey-boy and Mister Lonely), has claimed repeatedly since…
Robin Hood: Knock on Sherwood Forest
Is it an accident that Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood plays like a rousing love letter to the tea party movement? It’s certainly something of a surprise. When the movie was announced in 2007 with the title Nottingham, reports suggested that it would sympathize with t…
Movies Gone Bad
Artist/filmmaker Pat O’Neill’s 1989 Sundance Grand Jury Prize–winning experimental feature Water & Power — a sort-of Chinatown-meets–Koyaanisqatsi-on-nootropics dealie — is rightfully recognized as one of the signal artifacts of …
Street Cred, 90210
Eschewing New York, renegade London street-art dealer Steve Lazarides has opened another of his audacious pop-up galleries in an unexpected derelict space — an 8,000-square-foot former Anthropologie store in the middle of Beverly Hills. Last week, Banksy’s former gallerist …
Torture, Lies and Louis XIII Cognac
The police dispatch said a man named Lamond Dean had been hit in the head with a gun. When the officers arrived about 9:30 p.m. at a shabby bungalow set back from Verdugo Road in Glendale, they knew it would be a long night.
A crowd was milling in the driveway. One man ha…
Raven, Death of a Hollywood Beauty
Raven was one of the youngest and toughest Hollywood street runaways, living in alleys and back lots where beatings, drugs and prostitution are still common. Addicted to meth, the stunningly beautiful 15-year-old foster kid and runaway turned tricks to buy drugs.
Her real…
Guessing Game
Escorts in Los Angeles residents can be forgiven if their heads are spinning. Two months ago the City Council spoke of cutting 4,000 jobs to balance the budget. Today, the mayor says the budget can balance with just 761 job cuts, and that the final figure might be lower.
What happen…