When Richard Nixon Was President. The First Term.

People who were alive then are now planning their retirements. They're checking their 401-ks and wondering if Bitcoin and gold will keep them in the sunshine in a few years. Or they are already retired. They pay attention to the markets and wonder if they should call those people who have ads on TV who will guide them in the process of financial planning. They might be called Boomers by their children.

I've always admired the people who write the Jeopardy clues. If these people lived in another era, say like the 1940s, I imagine the OSS would be recruiting them to be spies or intelligence analysts to help defeat the Axis powers. They'd be in the book Book and Dagger.

The crafting of the Final Jeopardy clues is always especially clever. Consider the one from this past Thursday under the category of Super Bowl History.

Realizing that there have now been 58 (LVIII) Super Bowls, that's a lot of history to cover. If a historian were to put pen to paper on that one it would be at least two volumes. If Robert Caro lives long enough he might take the job after he finally finishes telling us what Lyndon Johnson ate in 1967.

If you can spot it, there is always a helpful clue in the Final Jeopardy question that helps anchor the clue to a place, time, or person. Consider:

It's the only team to play in the Super Bowl before Neil Armstrong's moon walk that has not been back to the big game since.

The Neil Armstrong reference anchors the clue to the year 1969, when none of the contestants were even born. I always read the clue in the morning from the NYT and see how I'd do. This one was a slam dunk for me.

One contestant answered the New York Giants; another The Cleveland Browns. The third answered Houston. None of the contestants were from New York, being from Memphis, Illinois and Texas. 

It's a great clue that might have found the right answer if someone was from New York. As for myself, when I read it I immediately knew it was the New York Jets who were in what was an NFL-AFL Championship game in the third year they played in that format in January 1969. Not only was I alive then, I remember watching the game

It's the famous game where the Jets were 17-point underdogs against the Baltimore Colts, only to see the Jets quarterback Joe Namath and his team play the game of their lives, upsetting the Colts 16-7. Joe Namath boldly predicted they'd win. Who believed him?

I'm not a hard-core football fan, professional or college. But I am aware of how the New York teams are doing and do take in some TV viewing.

I've only ever been to one New York Giants game in person at the Meadowlands when Craig Morton was their quarterback. I think they lost to the Cincinnati Bengals.

I've been to a few more Jet games. When the AFL started, the New York franchise was the New York Titans, and they played on Friday nights at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan. My father took me to a game in what I'm guessing was the early 60s. I don't know who they played, or even if they won. The Polo Grounds was at the end of its existence, a dark place full of girders

Shea Stadium was built around the time of the 1964 World's Fair and was close to our home in Flushing. I remember some Friday night games there when the half time show was a contest between three women to see who could empty out a refrigerator into a shopping cart the fastest, racing along rubber mats placed on the field.. I kid you not. Or, half time could be a drum and bugle corps from Brooklyn showing off how they could spin fake rifles.

Anyone who is aware of the Jets knows they are a team steeped in futility. They have had numerous owners, countless coaches and a massive rotation of players. Someone has put a serious hex on that club.

You read that the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians were cursed, but the Jets have set a new standard for ineptness and being haunted. Alert the Vatican. They need a exorcism.

I had the biggest laugh when they got Aaron Rodgers as their quarterback who was going to lead them to the promised land. In 2023 as he ran out on the field for the first, highly anticipated game, carrying Old Glory as if he were Custer and he was going to annihilate some Indians, and then fell in a heap after the first set of plays with an injury that put hm out for the season, I said to myself what more proof do they need that they're never, ever going to win squat?

The beginning of the 2024 season optimism ran high again for the Jets. A health Rodgers was going to do it in 2024 2025 and take them to the Super Bowl. At 4-10 for this season so far the only way they're going to the Super Bowl is if they have tickets. Can they just forfeit the remaining games and show mercy to their fans, a group of masochists if ever there was one. Those people need intensive counseling.

I'd love to see a sports reporter like Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal pick up on the Jeopardy clue of last Thursday and do a column on the history of the Jets. Perhaps his lede could go:

Gas is 34¢ a gallon, Robert Caro is just thinking about writing about Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon is in his first term, and the Jets are in their only Super Bowl. What year is it?

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The Booster Seat

Listen my children
    and take a look,
That once upon a time
   there was a telephone book.
It had tissue thin pages
   and was paper bound,
Names, numbers, addresses
   inside were found.

Since everything reminds me of something else, it is no wonder that when my wife bought our
14-month-old grandson a booster seat that I immediately thought of the Manhattan telephone book. What, you wouldn't?

You have to be of a very certain age to remember telephone books. Every borough in NYC got theirs delivered, by a special delivery guy pulling a customized cart for stacking them, to every phone customer.

Somehow at the family flower shop in Manhattan we managed to get a phone book for every borough. We did this so we could call the intended reciepient of a flower delivery to ask if they were going to be home so we could make a delivery. Manhattan's phone book was by far the thickest; Staten Island's was the thinest.

I think Manhattan's was even thicker than Brooklyn's, despite I think Brooklyn having the larger population. Or, in the 1950s, that might not have been the case. No matter.

We kept the phone books in a bookcase near the telephone in the back of the store. Since this is where I did my homework, I was often staring at these books. I came away with the indelible observation that the word MANHATTAN when capitalized is composed entirely of letters with straight lines.

Also, each book contained the names of only a few, very few people I knew. I sort of marveled at that. I didn't know most of the people in those books. I might have been strange, and certainly have remained so.

Anyway, the booster seat remined me of meals at my grandmother's dining room table, probably birthday parties for my older cousin, when I was propped up with the Manhatttan—White, or Yellow Pages— beneath my butt. These were the thickest of all the city's phone books.

The pictured booster seat seen at the top of this posting is about the thickness of one of those Manhattan directories.

Matthew has outfrown his comfort zone of eating in the family heirloom, vintage wooden high chair; my high chair, and before that my older cousin's high chair from the 1940s, restored—again—for a new generation.

Matthew has gotten so used to eating at the special daycare tables they have where the kids fit into a cutout in a counter, that he's no longer interested in a childish high chair. He wants a seat at the table.

But in the 1950s no one was selling booster seats, Or, if they were, no one in the family bought one. And why would they when a handy phone book did the job?

Show up at a table and you weren't very big yet, someone would take a phone book down from the top of some piece of furniture and plop it under your butt. It's funny, but at home I don't remember sitting on a phone book. Maybe because the Queens directory didn't do the trick.

Phone books were even found in phone booths, another bygone piece of street furniture. You might be able to find someone's number in there, along with their address, if someone hadn't ripped the page out. You could call information, for free, but they wouldn't give you the address, only the phone number, which always struck me as strange but that's the way it was.

The Internet has of course changed everything. Now you can look up a number on your phone, which seems logical, but it is really quite an advancement. But now you'll have to buy a booster seat and you can't rely on the phone company to provide one. Sitting on a cell phone will only hide it and make your butt vibrate if someone calls it, not give you a boost at the table. Not advised.

Now if only the person I'm calling would pick up and not let it go to voicemail.

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Harlem 1958

Every time I see this photo I think it is not iconic, that very much overused word. Like the raising of the flag by the Marines on Mount Suribachi after the battle of Iwo Jima, and the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on V-J Day: It is historic.

And every time I see it I think Louis Armstrong is sitting on the curb in the lower right. No. That's Count Basie, holding his hat. Jonathan Kane, the son of Art Kane who took the photo, explains that one of the little boys seated on the curb kept running off with the Count's hat. Count Basie grew weary of chasing the kid and retrieving his hat, that he grew tired of the chase and needed a rest—now holding his hat more securely—and just sat down on the curb.

The historic photo is the subject of a piece by Hank Shteamer in last Thursday's NYT Arts section. A huge, front page reproduction of the photo graces the headline: 58 Jazz Luminaries Assembled for This Photo. One Remains. The front page jumps to a nicely laid out to a full, two page spread of photos and text.

The one remaining musician from the photo is Sonny Rollins, the saxophone player who is now 91. Anyone who has listened to jazz can easily name some of those who are not in the photo besides Louis Armstrong: Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evens, Duke Ellington. There are many more, but that doesn't diminish the historic quality of the photo.

I don't know how Art Kane got the assembled to show up that hot day in August 1958 at 10 o'clock in the morning. I read that one of the musicians got there and grumbled, "so this is the other 10 o'clock," musicians being more accustomed to late nights and early mornings before sunrise.

The absence of those you might expect to be in the photo could have been due to touring, being out-of-town, or just outright sleepiness. Mr. Shteamer tells us of a commemorative book celebrating the 60th-anniversary of the photo that might have a narrative about the assembly.

For myself, I started to be a fan of jazz in high school in the mid 1960s. I kept the radio on in the back of the family flower shop set to whatever channel that broadcast Del Shields and Billy Taylor.

My growing LP record collection did not include the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. I bought Dave Brubeck, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Oliver Nelson, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans, Blue Mitchell... For singers I was a Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett fan.

When I got to be of drinking age in 1967 I went to The Village Gate and the Top of the Gate to see Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans. For some reason I didn't explore 52nd Street, which at the time still retained some of its music night clubs. For me, recordings is how I absorbed the music.

I waited too long to see Stan Getz at Fat Tuesday's in what had been Joe King's German American Rathskeller in Scheffel Hall at 190 Third Avenue, down the block  from the flower shop at 206 Third Avenue. Stan passed away, and so did Fat Tuesday's. I always regretted that.

I did renew seeing Ahmad Jamal at The Iridium, I think in 2003; and Monty Alexander at Birdland in 2009. I'd like to get out more to Birdland and see some more artists beyond Tierney Sutton and Jane Monheit.

Time is fleeting.

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My Entry for Overlooked No More

Overlooked No More is an occasional NYT obituary page feature that offers lengthy tribute obituaries about historical figures who didn't come close to making the cut for recognition of their life when they passed away. Most of these subjects lived and died quite a while ago.

The subjects are usually women, who historically have been greatly ignored, but there are men who get the treatment of what might be called an obituary of reparations.

Last year the Times produced a collection of these obituaries in a book called...Overlooked No More. I got it for Christmas. The editors at the Times solicit ideas for subjects. So far I've submitted four, I think, all deceptive, felonious people who I love to read about. So far the Times hasn't picked up on one of my nominations. But I'm not discouraged. Here is another one.

I sometimes wonder if there  is a Higher Power that creates what look like coincidences in my life, but are really intendedly steered events. No Matter. We live on a Möbius strip.

Take a recent NYT obituary on Victor Brombert, a scholar who kept his Army past a secret who has just passed away at 101. In the largest photo accompanying the obit we see Mr. Brombert sitting at a desk in his office in Princeton University in 1985, in a setting that is what you'd expect to see a professor of comparative literature sitting in: paper strewn desk, shelves of books, a lamp and a window, while wearing an ascot. If his jacket were on we'd no doubt see elbow patches. No pipe in sight, however.

But that's the 1985 Brombert. During WW II he was one of the "Ritchie Boys" a collection of men— and women—who were selected from academia, science and literature who were trained as soldiers and spies to populate the O.S.S., the forerunner of the C.I.A. to provide needed intelligence on the Axis powers, overseas and abroad.  

William Donovan started the O.S.S. recognizing that the U.S. didn't have a mature intelligence service like the European countries. Donovan recruited people who had language skills and academic rigor to work with Allied resistance cells to provide even the smallest piece of information about the enemy.

Victor, who at 19 came to the United States with his family via Berlin, Russia and France, was a perfect candidate for being a Ritchie Boy, so named after Camp Ritchie, the training came in Ritchie, Maryland. Victor could speak 5 languages, a definite asset for overseas work.

Donovan had people working out of embassies in neutral countries acquiring books, pamphlets,  academic papers, anything that might be used as knowledge. There was a woman, Adele Kibre who was in Stockholm who scoured the libraries and rare book stores, microfilming the papers and sending it back to Washington for analysis.

The activities of this group of people is captured in Elyse Graham's recent book, Book and Dagger. No published piece of paper was too insignificant. Telephone directories, newspapers, and dry as dust books on railroads provided valuable information to the Allies that aided in planning military operations. Books titled, The Universal Directory of Railway Officials and The Railway Year Book 1936 were intelligence gold.

Victor landed on a Normandy beach on D-Day. He made his way into France and even got to see where he once lived. He was a Master Sergeant. He might have been reading and photographing serial numbers from disabled German tanks. This gave the Allies information on where the Germans were in making tanks. Just like the railroad books gave insight to the rail routes and the shortage of locomotives in Germany.

Colorful characters abound in Book and Dagger. There is Sherman Kent, who was already a history professor at Yale who was one of those who reported directly to Donovan and organized the departments that became part of the O.S.S.

Sherman was colorful because his language was colorful, full of swearing and off-color references that kept his colleagues at Yale entertained. In Book and Dagger he is quoted as disdainfully remarking that

a foreign regime's attempt at a cover-up was like "gathering piss with a rake."

Surely a guy like this got an interesting obit. Well, no. Not in 1986 when he passed away. The NYT obit is a small, unbylined piece that is only 9 paragraphs, single column, extending down maybe a third of the page, no photo. In 1986 obituaries didn't expose the everyday sides of a subject. They weren't the art form they today.

Mr. Kent's involvement with the founding of the C.I.A. is well noted. There is one quote that describes his passion about intelligence and keeping secrets that when he returned to Yale after the war he told President Truman that security was so lax in the Government that he intended to turn his Yale students loose and discover 95% of the nation's secrets through periodicals and daily newspapers. After all, that's what he and his colleagues did during the war in Europe.

I haven't yet finished reading Book and Dagger but I've already come across a person who in my opinion is worthy of an Overlooked No More obit, a safecracker G.B. "Sadie" Cohen who was a Lower East Side locksmith who had a store that was just a front for his consulting work on masterminding robberies. If Sherlock Holmes was a Consulting Detective, Sadie was a Consulting Thief.

Sadie was well-known to the NYC police of the time. And when he wasn't doing a stretch in Sing Sing, the state prison in Ossining, New York, he was called upon to do some covert work for the department opening safes when the real owner wasn't there. For this work, some indictments were overlooked.

The O.S.S. needed the contents of a safe in the Spanish Embassy in Washington examined. Spain was a neutral country during the war but like all neutral countries they leaned both ways. Countries like Spain were full of spies and full of German information.

Elyse Graham's book is full of attribution for her sources. The story surround Sadie comes from a memoir by Donald Downes, The Scarlet Thread.     

Downes was a writer recruited for O.S.S. work after a meeting at the Yale Club in NYC. in 1941. Yale seems to run through the O.S.S. and C.I.A. veins.  One of his assignments was to find a way into the safe at the Spanish Embassy in Washington D.C.

Being a writer, Downes knew a guy—who doesn't know a guy?—a major in Army counterintelligence who was once a NYPD detective in the Police Bomb Squad— who knew a guy—a safecracker who ran a locksmith shop on New York's Lower East Side that was actually a front for his more lucrative sideline of providing consulting work on robberies. After all, you can only make so much from making keys for people and opening their doors when they're locked out. G.B. "Sadie" Cohen had an idea, and came highly recommended.

 

The major told Downes there's, "not a safe Sadie can't open." We use him when he's not in Sing Sing, holding back some pending charges." 

Sadie is straight out of the safecracker character Doc played by Sam Jaffe in the 1950 movie Asphalt Jungle. For all I know, Doc might have been based on Sadie.

Like many resident of New York's Lower East Side, Sadie was a Jewish immigrant who spoke heavily accented English. On entering the shop with Downes, described as a "junk heap" by Downes, Sadie asks the major, who he knows quite well from being arrested, "Val lootenant, how's bombs? Vat can I do for you?"

The situation is laid out, and Sadie is quick to absorb the details for the caper. You get someone on the inside, a woman, who hides a gilder's hammer in "her woman's national bank, her bosom." She goes to the safe and breaks the dial. When they call to get the safe fixed, Sadie tells them he goes in the repairman's place and makes the needed key to open the safe. 

At this point in the story, Sadie should be immediately enshrined in the poetic hall of fame for referring to a woman's bosom as her "national bank."  Needless to say, The O.S.S. gets what it wants.

And what does Sadie want? He's insulted at the offer of money. "Paid? You've come into my place and insult me. Don't I have two nephews in the Army? Ain't I an American a much as you? Aren't you ashamed? Pay me? You can't even tank me. Even a ticket to Vashington you can't buy me, or a Coca-Cola."

As Ms. Graham tells us, Sadie was a criminal, but he wasn't a Nazi. And that's how the war was won.

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Where Fugitives Dine

"Take it on the arches" has a whole new meaning. It sounds like dialog from a Humphrey Bogart movie written by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, meaning to scram, flee, run away. And scram is what the suspect in the shooting of United Health Care's CEO Brian Thompson did, hiding behind his surgical mask until a customer in an Altoona McDonald's restaurant recognized his partially hidden face sitting in the back of the restaurant on Monday morning looking at his laptop at 9:44 A.M.

The customer, described as an "elderly fellow", had a McDonald's employee call 911. Altoona police soon descended on the man who got nervous when asked if he had recently been to New York City. And that is the point at which the fugitive from the shooting became embodied as a person of interest whose name was revealed to be Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with an MSE and a BSE in Computer Science.

It's been quite a Monday. The Daniel Penny/Jordan Neely subway choke-hold trial had just been concluded with the defendant Penny found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide. The trail is over and the jury went home. As did Mr. Penny.

Of course a new Manhattan jury will be needed probably in the latter part of 2025, or early 2026 when Mt. Mangione comes to trail on whatever charges the Manhattan DA presents. The wheels of justice just keep spinning.

McDonald's seems to be a place where fugitives are found. They don't hole up in a cabin in snowy Sierra Nevada, smoking, playing solitaire, drinking scotch and waiting for the heat to die down. They settle in with an Egg McMuffin with cars whizzing by.

In one of their many updates the NYT points out that the suspect Frank R. James, who threw smoke bombs into a subway car and shot and wounded 10 people was apprehended fairly quickly at a Manhattan McDonald's.

With Luigi Mangione brought into custody while sitting at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania you might think McDonald's pr people might add something to their slogan: "Billions Served, Several Apprehended."

There was a $10,000 reward offered by NYC police, and $50,000 reward offered by the F.B.I. It is hoped that the man who made the identification and the worker who called it in will actually get the reward and not see it evaporate in some legally worded technicality.

Mr. Mangione's picture was everywhere. Well, only one grainy full facial picture of him checking into a hostel on Manhattan's Upper West side when he pulled his surgical mask down—but still had his hood up— when the cute female clerk asked to see his whole face as he was flirting with her a bit.

Like safe cracker Sam Jaffe's character Doc who gets captured in the 1950 movie 'Asphalt Jungle' because he lingers too long to stare at Marilyn Monroe's character, Mr. Mangione might have just been done in because of a pretty face.

The microscopic examination of Mr. Mangione's life is only just beginning. As Luigi sat there in McDonald's, what plans did he have for the rest of the day that went out the window as the police approached him? Was he thinking of buying Christmas gifts? Supposedly he had $10,000 in cash on him, as well as a manifesto that might explain his thinking.

The thinking of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, is cited in things Mr. Mangione wrote. Ted Kaczynski evaded capture for 17 years as he mailed explosive letters and packages around the United States. Kaczynski lived like a hermit in an isolated Montana cabin. Using the mail to deliver his bombs made it possible to charge him with Federal crimes. Ted passed  away in Federal prison in 2023 at 81 years old after being captured in 1996. Will Mr. Mangione face Federal charges over the gun possession?

As odd and unkempt as Ted Kaczynski was, I always got a kick out of a waitress in the diner near the cabin who told authorities that yes, Ted did come in there, but that they got a lot of people who appeared odder than Ted in there.

In contrast, Mr. Mangione is clean cut, and until only recently, never out of touch with people and employers. He was social. He apparently suffered a fair amount of back pain and had spinal fusion surgery.

The weapon allegedly used was found in Mr. Mangione's possession. It was not a veterinarian handgun, but was a so-called 9 mm "ghost weapon" fashioned from a 3-D printer. A silencer was also found. No less deadly.

At the outset from the raw surveillance footage that showed the shooting outside the New York Hilton on December 4, a professional hit was theorized. All the trappings of a mob rubout were there.

But then shell casings were found to carry a message, "Deny", "Delay", "Defend" words from the title of a 2010 book on abuses of the health care industry. This was not a mob hit. It was something else. 

Mob hits don't produce the perpetrators. I can't remember ever reading about the apprehension of a  trigger man after a crime family head like Paul Castellano is left as a lump on Third Avenue while headed for a meal at Sparks Steak House on 46th Street. Or Joey Gallo is left not breathing after a late night meal on his birthday at Umberto's Little Italy Clam House.

What did Mr. Mangione accomplish other than creating a vacancy at the top of United Health Care? Premiums are not going down, and denials will lot likely abate. Sure, CEO photos are disappearing from websites, but that's cosmetic. Congress is said to want to look at the health insurance industry. Again.

My own life was basically spent working for a major health insurer, that at the time was not a for-profit entity. By financial measures I remember it was reported that around 92% of the premiums collected went back out in claim reimbursements. The percentage now is quite a bit lower, perhaps as low as 82%.

Mr. Mangione is in custody with no bail. And business is left as usual.

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The Most Photographed Unidentified Man

I can offer no clues as to the identity of the gunman who executed United Health Care's CEO Brian Thompson early Wednesday morning. I can only follow the details as they become public. And the release of the details add to the anticipation of capture—or just prolonged frustration at an inability to apprehend. Figures of manhunts can evade identification and capture for an indeterminate amount of time. Although Ted Kaczynski wasn't photographed mailing letter bombs, it took 17 years before he was captured. A lot less for Son of Sam.  

The latest release is of two images of the suspect as he is in a cab, and likely leaving a cab on Wednesday morning after the shooting. Who knew you could get photographed so well from the viewpoint of a cab? It's eerie.

The other detail to emerge is the type of weapon used, as not yet reported recovered. Apparently it is a 9 mm gun used by veterinarians to put down animals. The long barrel makes it look like a silencer, but it is a noise suppressor so not to scare the other animals in the vicinity.

CNN reports that a law enforcement source told them after recovering the Peak Design backpack from Central Park on Friday, police examined it at a forensic lab in Queens. Inside, they found Monopoly money. It was not immediately clear if other items were in the backpack, officials said. Lakes in the park are being searched by police SCUBA teams.

Monopoly money? Is that from a McDonald's Happy Meal? It is certainly going to be interesting to see where all this goes.

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The Morning News

It is said of NYC that it is the city that never sleeps. The city might never sleep, meaning there's always someone up, but people do go to sleep. And upon waking up on Wednesday the morning news wasn't only about the Gowanus Parkway merge into the BQE, or the wait at the George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, but that the CEO of United Health Care, Brian Thompson,  had been gunned down at 6:44 A.M. and killed in front of the New York Hilton on 54th Street and Sixth Avenue while entering the hotel for an investors' meeting

Historically, New York City has seen its share of Mob rub outs in public places, but not for a good while now. The '70s saw so many hits that you had to wonder who was left still breathing in organized crime. There certainly were openings at the top.

You have to go back a long way to remember the rub out of Albert Anastasia in a barber's chair in the Park Sheraton Hotel in 1957, not far from the Midtown Hilton. What a mess.

It's a city that never sleeps, and a city that is always under surveillance. There is grainy camera footage of the gunman pointing his handgun at the back of Mr. Thompson, leaving him crumbled in from of the New York Hilton.

Supposedly the gun jammed, but the gunman unjammed it and kept shooting. Shell casings recovered from the scene had the words, "Delay,  "Deny" and "Defend", the title of a 2010 book by Jay M. Feinman about the practice within the healthcare industry of denying coverage of claims in order to increase corporate profits.

United Healthcare is the largest health insurer in the nation, also one that has run afoul of the law even before Mr. Thompson. One of his predecessors, CEO Dr. William McGuire, a pulmonologist, was brought down by a scandal involving repricing the company's stock options. It was big news then, and there was similar stock manipulation news on Mr. Thompson's horizon.  There seems to be a bit of corporate culture there.

On the heels of this shooting of a healthcare executive, I heard a news story on Friday morning that Anthem BlueCross and BlueShield was abandoning their plans to make patients pay for the anesthesia time that runs past the cook book expected time. The policy was due to go into effect in February 2025, but apparently someone thought twice about it with a crumpled CEO corpse laying in front of a NYC Midtown hotel. 

Anesthesia reimbursement is based on the elapsed time of the procedure, stated in 15 minute units. One hour is 4 units. Added to the units is a Basic Anesthesia Value (BAV). The two numbers are added together and multiplied by a dollar coefficient to determine the reimbursement.

A lot of health care policies hold the patient harmless for any gap in the reimbursement and the total charge. Anthem's plan was to not hold the patient harmless regardless of coverage when the elapsed time went past the anticipated elapsed time.

Thus, if your open heart surgery drifts past the expected elapsed time because of a stubborn blood vessel, then the patient is on the hook for the unreimbursed time. As if you have a chance to pop up and tell the surgeons to stop, or hurry up because this is going to cost them money than they have. Ridiculous. Who thinks of these things? 

At this writing, Wednesday's gunman is still at large, and assumed to have taken a bus back out of the city from the George Washington Bridge bus terminal. The gunman has been traced to getting off a bus originating in Atlanta that made 6-7 stops along the East Coast before getting to New York. The news has been unfolding like a Netflix miniseries release.

The City never sleeps, and it never stops taking images of all that goes on. In the surveillance photo of the shooting, and the gunman's movements before the shooting, he is always wearing a face covering, except the above photo taken when he checked into an Upper West Side hostel days before the shooting.

In that photo it was revealed he pulled the face covering down when the female clerk at the hostel asked to see his face because he was flirting with her. It's going to be interesting if that exposure is going to be key to brining him down.

Anyone who watches enough old movies will remember the Teutonic accented safe cracker, Doc, played by Sam Jaffe who is caught because he stopped too long to star at Marilyn Monroe in the 1950 movie 'Asphalt Jungle.' Undone by pretty face.

The gunman is seen in surveillance footage leaving the scene of the crime on what is reported to be an e-bike, making for Central Park, emerging on the  West Side and taking a cab to the George Washington Bridge bus station and taking a bus out of the city.

I would think at that point this guy has got a round trip ticket to somewhere, unless he risks being seen buying a ticket after the shooting. It is not known if the e-bike was taken from someone. If so, someone didn't get their bagels delivered on time that morning. Another crime.

His handgun was identified, but not recovered. His somewhat designer, upscale backpack was also identified, but eventually found in a wooded area of Central Park. A water bottle he bought at Starbucks was found at the crime scene with unusable, smudged fingerprints. A cell phone was recovered at the scene. Details from that have not yet been revealed.

Perpetrators are identified and caught because of tiny details left behind: DNA, a smile, a missing license plate, a parking ticket, a published treatise. Something will be key to finding the gunman.

In a book review I just read in the WSJ about a book on letter bombers, it is revealed that in 1919 radical Galleanists sent some 30 letter bombs to U.S. politicians. The Galleanists were followers of an Italian anarchist, Luigi Galleani, and one form of perpetuating their terror was to craft letter bombs.

In the book, 'Murder by Mail', by Mitchell P. Roth and Mahmut Cengiz, and reviewed by Bryan Burroughs, a raft of intended letters never got there because they wound up in a pile in the post office marked for Insufficient Postage.

It seems the Galleanists didn't bother to present the mail to a postal clerk who might have weighed the letters and affixed the correct postage, but rather just winged what they thought was enough postage to effect the delivery. I guess not.

There will always be something.

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