Eight years later, his main source in that story was accused of double-dealing with the Gypsy community too. The Dateline story, and all the local cautionary tales like it, are exactly why University of Texas at Austin professor Ian Hancock told me the media are Romani rights activists' worst enemy. He runs the Romani Archives and Documentation Center , and he said he's tired of seeing Romani coverage limited to crime stories.
Hancock's spent years sparring with guys like retired Milwaukee Det. Dennis Marlock, who runs Fraudtech , a site meant to help spread the word about crimes by Gypsy groups. Hancock himself is a Roma, and one of the group's most prominent rights activists. Until his death four years ago, Jimmy Marks in Seattle was another major activist -- he won a hefty settlement from the City of Spokane after suing them for an overzealous police raid.
Marks makes a brief appearance in Peterson's story, incidentally, when he gives a deposition against her in the fight over Clarence Peterson's estate. Closer to home , a rift in the Dallas-Fort Worth Gypsy community got excellent treatment in Skip Hollandsworth's story " The Curse of Romeo and Juliet " subscription-only, but you can cheat and read the whole thing here.
Cops who work swindles and cons around Dallas -- while, like in other cities, they do keep an eye on local Gypsy and Irish Traveler communities -- say roofing and home repair scams tend to be the most common crimes targeting the elderly. Join the Observer community and help support independent local journalism in Dallas. Get the latest updates in news, food, music and culture, and receive special offers direct to your inbox. Support Us Dallas' independent source of local news and culture.
Since we started the Dallas Observer , it has been defined as the free, independent voice of Dallas, and we'd like to keep it that way. Male prostitute. Suspected tax cheat. From New York to Atlanta, Houston to Dallas, the flamboyant Manos changed his name, tweaked his looks and launched celebrity-stoked enterprises that, law officers say, played on the get-rich hopes of victims - now trying to understand how they got duped.
The answer may come from an old truism: The bigger the lie, the more people believe it. For now, Manos, 46, is imprisoned in New York for violating parole in a kidnapping case. Marshals caught him in January in a San Francisco hotel, and he's accused of bilking a Dallas restaurateur and defaulting on a penthouse leased with a sham ID.
Manos - calling himself Mladen "Mordan" Stefanov, the philanthropic scion of a Greek mogul - hung out with actors and Dallas Cowboys, formed a fashion magazine and pitched a reality TV show on "power-filled, sexy lives" last year. But as suspicions grew about Manos and his spending, he fled, until a private detective tracked him down.
In a phone interview from the San Francisco County Jail, before being sent to New York, Manos acknowledged embellishing his life's story to escape his past as a felon. No, I did not come to Dallas to defraud anybody. His far-flung activities are still being unraveled. That includes a stint in Atlanta, when Manos, as "Christian Michael de Medici," befriended Jane Fonda and started a real estate firm that later collapsed amid fraud allegations.
Dallas police Sgt. Kenneth Haben, head of the swindle squad, dismissed Manos' excuses that others caused his problems. The glitz that Manos cultivated is far removed from his working-class roots in Poughkeepsie, N. He suffered from dyslexia, hyperactivity and undiagnosed bipolar disorder. He grew into a troubled runaway, teenage dropout and petty criminal. By his early 20s, he'd been in prison for taking a diamond necklace. He even purported to belong to the famed Vanderbilt family.
In the interview, Manos bragged about his "massive celebrity connections" and dating an A-list Hollywood actor in the '80s. And he boasted of political associations from being a male prostitute in Washington.
A Washington Times story described how a top Labor Department official told authorities he'd befriended Manos after a paid "date. For all his bravado, it was a rather inept, Fargo-like kidnapping in May that put Manos behind bars again.
He said he was fooled by an ex-con, Robert Wooley, who Manos says asked him to deposit checks from another man in his bank account. That's when he learned William Eberle, 25, a chemist living in the same New York boarding house as Wooley, had been abducted. But court records and Wooley's account portray Manos as an active participant.
Wooley said Manos convinced him to kidnap Eberle because the stolen checks were taking too long to clear. Kept in a car trunk, he was released after four days, left in a Red Lobster parking lot and warned not to go to police. Authorities caught Wooley immediately, and Manos months later. Manos' attorney pleaded for leniency, saying he was afraid of Wooley. Johnson is the fourth black police officer fired from the department in about six weeks, which he called the unfortunate aftermath of the Derrick Evans case.
Officer Evans was fired in August after the off-duty shooting of a teenager at a recreation center where his stepdaughter had been involved in a fight. He was terminated after The News discovered that he twice had been the target of emergency protective orders in Alaska and that he had failed a lie-detector test related to an unsolved Dallas slaying while he was a police recruit.
Johnson's personnel file shows that she came highly recommended by former supervisors at the Chicago Housing Authority Police and at three small Illinois police departments. Early problems The new recruit began experiencing problems almost immediately after entering the Dallas police academy in July , failing three consecutive tests, which dropped her average below the mandatory minimum of 70 percent.
As part of a controversial recycling program that offered second and sometimes third chances to recruits experiencing academic and performance problems, Ms. Johnson was moved into a subsequent class to try again. Though she still failed five of 16 exams, according to her records, she was able to keep her average above 70 and graduated 29th in a class of 32 in April. Many veteran Dallas officers criticized the program, saying it put marginal and unqualified officers on the streets. According to field trainers, she repeatedly had trouble handcuffing suspects and frequently left her squad car unlocked with a loaded shotgun inside.
In her last conversations with The News late Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Johnson denied having such problems. She said that she had 14 years of experience handcuffing prisoners and had tried to use the techniques she learned in the Dallas police academy but that some field trainers pressured her to ignore those.
Johnson, Senior Cpl. Robert Sours said the rookie officer hesitated in handcuffing a suspect in a criminal trespass case, which resulted in a struggle and a foot chase before the man was arrested. Sours wrote.
Sours' evaluation said that Ms. Johnson "spent 20 minutes writing a single speeding ticket, which was ultimately incorrectly written. According to records, she was involved in a preventable crash during the first phase of her field training, ran red lights, drove through a flashing railroad crossing with a prisoner in the car, and became so engrossed in operating the on-board computer that she drove her squad car into oncoming lanes of traffic.
Problems at the academy and during training, according to Sgt. Glover, head of the Peace Officers Association, aren't necessarily accurate indicators of future performance. Rivera, the former sergeant who recently resigned to work in real estate, also sees the atmosphere as politically charged, but from a starkly different perspective: "The person or persons who should be making that hard decision, that decision they're getting paid to make, they're just not making it.
These hard decisions get passed on and on. There's pretty much a vacuum of leadership. The police association president said that if Ms. Wink, wink. She probably would get good grades in that situation. Nudge, nudge.
But from the decription of her abilities, I fail to see how this woman could ever become a great officer. But that's not what's important, right? Out of curiosity, what type of police officer would you want to come to your house in a life or death emergency? The job discription says walk down sidewalk, make chalk mark on tire of vehicle parked next to meter that has little red expire thingie.
There is a pictoral included for people who can't read. No tickets are written, that is for Metermaid. Stupid is permanent. Coming to a prison near you.
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