Just heard a 55 minute NPR Reveal episode about the case of Philip Nordo, sentenced December 16, 2022 to 24.5 to 49 years in prison for using his power to extort sex from male criminal suspects and to euchre phony homicide convictions.
I know first-hand from my family's own lived experience about the sadistic corrupt cruelty of Philadelpha, Pennsylvania police, including extorting bribes from my parents when they operated a lunch wagon at Franklin Field during football games. It was after WWII. My father was an 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper, a decorated combat veteran. My mom and dad were treated as marks for exploitation by the Philadelphia police. So glad my parents moved from Philadelphia to New Jersey before I was born!
At my late cousin's wedding, his bride told wedding guests that if they ever had any problmes with the Philadelphia police, her "uncle John" would help. It sounded ominous. Philadelphia Police Inspector The uncle was later convicted of federal crimes in extorting bribes.
Such dangerously dysfunctional organiztions require thorough attention from the Bench and Bar, and strong remedies, just like in Lois Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards, 760 F. Supp. 486 (M.D. Fla 1991) where a heroic federal judge from St. Augustine, the late Howell W. Melton, found a culture of sexual harassment of women workers, ordering remedies to transform a dysfuctional organization. We have several dysfunctioal organizations here in Northeast Florida, a place where organized crime must be exposed and extirpated, just like other locales.
Since September 2, 2010, St. Johns County Sheriff's Deputy JEREMY BANKS has not been charged with homicide of his estranged girlfriend, Ms. Michelle O'Connell. disgraced former Sheriff DAVID SHOAR and several State's Attorneys, including RALPH JOSEPH LARIZZA and Special Prosecutors BRAD KING and JEFFREY ASHTON. KING applied for and did not get a Florida Supreme Court appointment in 2016, when the Florida Supreme Court Judicial Nominating Commission refused to recommend him to Governor Richard Lynn Scott after KING gave robotic answers to questions from the Commission about the Michelle O'Connell case. But incredibly, despite his alleged use of government computers to carry on adulterous affairs using the Ashley Madison computer application, the people of Orange County elected ASHTON a judge in 2020.
We know what happened in the Michelle O'Connell case thanks to indefatigable work by The New York Times, PBS Frontline, Walt Bogdanich, et al.
It is up to us.
As Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said, "If we do not, on a national scale, attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own, they will destroy us,."
Hear NPR REVEAL program here, complete with jail telephone call audio:
