Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • Michael Chesny; racist discharged from USMC

    Michael Chesny; racist discharged from USMC

    Stars & Stripes reports that Michael Chesny, one of the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was discharged from the Marine Corps earlier this month. He published on the internet under the screen name “Tyrone”.

    Under a different command, Chesny appeared to be headed for a promotion to staff sergeant as his misdemeanor trespassing charge was being cleared up in Graham, but he was still a sergeant April 5, when he was separated from the Corps, Fahy said, for “his connection to white nationalist groups.”

    Chesny was an explosive ordnance technician stationed at Cherry Point Air Station. He enlisted in November 2007 and became a sergeant in May 2013.

    Chesny helped raise a banner of the white supremacists on a building during the rally, prompting a trespassing charge, according to Al Jazeera;

    The banner featured a logo for Generation Identitaire, a far-right, nativist and anti-immigrant movement in Europe. The acronym alongside it, “YWNRL”, stands for “You Will Not Replace Us”, a popular chant used by Unite the Right marchers in Charlottesville to signal fears over so-called “white genocide”.

    The Marine Corps also booted Chesny’s accomplice Joseph W. Manning.

    Manning was a staff sergeant stationed at the Marine Corps Combat Engineer School at Camp Lejeune and an instructor in the program until he was “administratively separated” from the Corps over his arrest around late December, said Nat Fahy, representing Marine Corps Installations East.

    Thanks to chooee for the link.

  • Monty Grow sentenced for Tricare fraud

    Monty Grow sentenced for Tricare fraud

    The Gainesville Sun reports that former NFL linebacker, Monty Grow, was sentenced in Miami for defrauding the government’s Tricare program of $20 million.

    Grow, 46, indicted in 2016 in a Miami federal court, faced a maximum 36-year sentence for 52 charges.

    Grow was sentenced to 262 months of imprisonment, or 21 years and eight months, and ordered to pay $18.8 million in restitution.

    According to court documents, Grow solicited and received kickbacks, or negotiated bribes, for Tricare beneficiaries who ordered medications between September 2014 and June 2015.

    Some of the charges Grow faced included five counts of money laundering, eight counts of health care fraud, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and 28 counts of receipts and payments of kickbacks in connection with a federal health care program. He was convicted on 17 counts in February.

    […]

    Also in February, the court ordered Grow to forfeit property that includes his 2014 Porsche, which was seized in 2016; about $1.7 million from his Bank of America account, and nearly $1 million from his company, MGTEN Marketing Group.

    Talk about squandering opportunities, Grow played for the Jacksonville Jaguars and Kansas City Chiefs for two seasons before he decided on a life of crime. I hope it was worth it. Shane Matthews, who played for the NFL for fourteen seasons was sentenced to three months in jail for his role in Grow’s scheme.

    Court documents say through MGTEN Marketing Group, Grow received nearly $20 million in kickbacks from Patient Care America, a Broward County compounding pharmacy, in exchange for recruiting and referring patients to the pharmacy who were covered by the Tricare health care insurance program.

    In all, Tricare paid about $40 million for the medications for its patients to PCA. PCA, which contracted with Grow, paid him half the reimbursements. Grow kept about $10 million for himself and paid his team of sales representatives the remaining amount, according to court documents.

  • Puppet fallout

    Puppet fallout

    The other day, we talked about the Tennessee Air National Guard reenlistment video in which a senior NCO took her oath with a puppet. According to the Air Force Times, punishment has been meted out already;

    The Tennessee Air National Guard colonel who led a re-enlistment ceremony in which a senior noncommissioned officer recited her oath using a dinosaur puppet has been demoted and retired.

    Army Maj. Gen. Terry Haston, the adjutant general for the Tennessee National Guard, also announced in a Facebook post Wednesday that Master Sgt. Robin Brown, the SNCO whose videotaped re-enlistment ceremony created a firestorm online, has been removed from her full-time job with the Tennessee Joint Public Affairs Office and is facing other administrative actions.

    Haston also said that another Tennessee Air National Guardsman — an unidentified SNCO who videotaped the event ? has been removed from his job as unit first sergeant and has been reprimanded. That SNCO will stay in the Guard.

    It was completely avoidable. The video was shot on Friday and it went viral after it was posted on Saturday on the unofficial Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page.

    The lesson is; if you do stupid shit, don’t have a video of it floating around the internet.

  • Thursday morning feel good stories

    Thursday morning feel good stories

    From Glen St. Mary, Florida;

    Three men say they were asleep inside a mobile home in Glen St. Mary about 4 a.m. Sunday when they heard a voice outside yell “Sheriff’s Office!” before the front door burst open.

    In stormed a masked gunman who fired off a single round before two of the men inside, one armed with an AR-15 rifle and the other with a handgun, emerged from two bedrooms and opened fire.

    Gunfire ripped into the masked gunman and two other intruders, who crumpled to the floor with multiple gunshot wounds.

    Those details surfaced Tuesday when the Baker County Sheriff’s Office released an arrest report linked to this weekend’s home invasion turned deadly triple shooting.

    Five people are charged in the case. Investigators suspect the home invasion escalated from an ongoing feud between two groups that was stoked by social media threats.

    The victims told deputies they acted in self-defense when they turned their guns on the intruders, with one of them estimating he fired over 30 rounds from an AR-15 before the threat was over.

    Afterward, the victims retreated to another part of the home before they dialed 911, according to the report. None of them was hurt during the shooting.

    The same cannot be said for the intruders, several of whom were inside a vehicle deputies intercepted as it sped away from the mobile home off County Road 125.

    One of them, Corey Lauramore, died of gunshot wounds to the head. An unidentified 16-year-old remains hospitalized, and a third suspect, William Lauramore, was treated and released to police.

    From Dunstable, Bedfordshire, UK;

    Former Thai boxer Anji Rhys, who kept the weapon on her wall to protect her family, sprung into action when four masked men burst into her home looking for a cannabis factory.
    David Cameron says he doesn’t regret holding Brexit referendum

    They kicked down the door of the home in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, that she shares with her partner Rebecca McCarvel, 42, son Dillon, 22, and her elderly mother.

    But the gang had not only gone to the wrong address – they had picked on the wrong person to rob.

    Anji, 49, said: ‘I had finished work at about nine o’clock and got home. My partner was asleep on the sofa, my 82 year old mum and my son were asleep upstairs.

    The gang had not only gone to the wrong address – they had picked on the wrong person to rob.

    ‘Ironically, I had put 24 hours in police custody on the television and it was 33 minutes in.

    ‘I heard what I thought was a massive explosion and then I realised it was my front door that was being kicked in.

    ‘I ran there and was met with a masked man with a hammer. He was about 6 foot 6 tall with a blue bandana hiding his face.

    ‘I ran and grabbed my crossbow and had a little tussle with a second man who had a machete. He went to grab it, but I managed to spin and shoot him in the belly with it at close range.

    ‘He shouted “You fucking bitch, you shot me”. At that point he fell on me, cutting my hand with the machete.

    From North Charleston, South Carolina;

    Officials with the North Charleston Police Department say shortly after 7 p.m. officers responded to the parking lot of 2170 Ashley Phosphate Rd in reference to a shooting.

    A woman told a responding officer that she shot [Jason] Stinchcomb, who had been trying to get into her car and he was down in the parking lot somewhere, according to the incident report.

    The officer then drove around and found Stinchcomb on the ground with a gunshot wound to the right leg and stated he had an odor of alcohol on his breath, according to the report.

    Stinchcomb and the woman didn’t know each other, the report stated.

    “The female confronted the suspect at which time she says the suspect advanced towards her,” NCPD officials said.

    Stinchcomb was transported to Trident Hospital for treatment and is facing a charge of attempted carjacking.

  • Gen. Kurt W. Stein on administrative leave for remarks

    Gen. Kurt W. Stein on administrative leave for remarks

    The Marine Corps Times reports that Marine Brigadier General Kurt W. Stein has been placed on administrative leave for remarks he made during a town hall discussion on April 6. An anonymous snowflake made a complaint to Naval Criminal Investigative Service;

    USA Today reported that Stein was suspended for publicly ridiculing as ‘fake news’ “allegations of sexual harassment at his command” and also joking “about a chaplain recently fired for having sex in public.“

    From USAToday;

    The Marine Corps on Tuesday suspended a general who publicly ridiculed as “fake news” allegations of sexual harassment at his command and also joked about a chaplain recently fired for having sex in public, USA TODAY has learned.

    Brig. Gen. Kurt Stein, director of Marine and Family Programs, made the remarks April 6 before an audience estimated at hundreds of civilian employees and Marines at their base in Quantico, Va., according to three people who attended the all-hands meeting last week. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they said they feared retaliation.

    The Marine Corps Times, again;

    The allegations that Stein disparaged, first reported by USA TODAY in February, involved two civilian employees who said a Marine officer had made several sexual overtures to them. The allegations initially were deemed unfounded, but the Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. Robert Neller, ordered a new investigation of the claims in March.

  • Tammie Jo Shults, former Navy fighter pilot, lands damaged 737

    Tammie Jo Shults, former Navy fighter pilot, lands damaged 737

    Fox News reports that Tammie Jo Shults, one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots, was forced to land her damaged Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 saving the lives of the 143 passengers and five crew on board.

    Jennifer Riordan, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was identified as the woman who died. Riordan was the mother of two and a Wells Fargo bank executive.

    Witnesses told WCAU that a woman was “partially sucked out” of an airplane window and shrapnel from the exploded engine smashed it, but it remains unclear whether Riordan was that passenger.

    Seven others were injured.

    “We have a part of the aircraft missing, so we’re going to need to slow down a bit,” Shults told air traffic controllers from the cockpit, Reuters reported.

    Shults took the plane into a rapid descent as passengers employed oxygen masks and braced for impact. The veteran pilot managed to safely land the plane at Philadelphia International at 11:30 a.m.

    One passenger cited by The Kansas City Star, lauded Shults’ “nerves of steel.”

  • Maj. Gen. Michael “Iron Mike” D. Healy passes

    Maj. Gen. Michael “Iron Mike” D. Healy passes

    The Fayetteville Observer reports that Major General Michael D. Healy, known as “Iron Mike” passed this last Saturday in his Jacksonville, Florida home;

    When he retired in 1981, Maj. Gen. Healy was the nation’s most senior Special Forces soldier. He was a veteran of wars in Korea and Vietnam, with his service in the latter spanning a decade and ending with him overseeing the withdrawal of troops from the country. And he was the inspiration for John Wayne’s character, “Col. Iron Mike Kirby,” in the 1968 film “The Green Berets.”

    Maj. Gen. Healy is also a former commander of the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg…By the end of his career, Maj. Gen. Healy had earned numerous awards and decorations, including a Distinguished Service Medal, two Silver Star Medals, a Legion of Merit with three oak-leaf clusters, a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Bronze Star Medal with valor device, an Air Medal with Valor device, a Navy Commendation Medal with valor device and two Purple Heart Medals. He is also a member of the Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame.

    According to SWCS, Maj. Gen. Healy was “known by his men for his loyalty, compassion and love, as much for his tenacity in war.”

    Maj. Gen. Healy was a native of Chicago who enlisted in the Army at the age of 19 at the end of World War II.

  • The Gregory Salcido investigation

    The Gregory Salcido investigation

    The Los Angeles Daily News reports on the investigation of Gregory Salcido, the teacher from El Rancho High School in Pico Rivera, California who bullied students contemplating military careers after graduation. The district hired Steve Hummel, owner of the Fremont-based Paradox Technology, which conducts “expert investigation and forensic services for attorneys,” according to the company’s website., to do a deep background investigation of Salcido. According to the Daily News, these were some of the transgressions that Hummel discovered;

    According to the report, Salcido:

    Had nude images of women on his work computer, which had been deleted;
    Had an image of a young boy pulling on a sumo wrestler’s “thong like garment,” which had been deleted;
    Told students it should not be illegal to download “kiddy porn”;
    Told students they had the right to kill themselves;
    Told students he would kill everyone in the classroom if it were required to protect his family;
    Used racial slurs when talking to students;
    Regularly insulted students, including cursing at them;
    Used corporal punishment in the classroom by making students do push-ups or squats;
    Refused to follow the district’s discipline policies;
    Left campus during the school day, against his contractual requirements;
    Completed City Council business on his school district computer;
    Lied repeatedly during his interview with Hummel.

    Hummel’s conclusion;

    Despite Salcido’s denials of many of the allegations in his interview with Hummel, the investigator concluded that Salcido “lied repeatedly during his interview stating he has never raised his voice at a student, never used any curse or swear words in class, never singled out any student with humiliation or racist comments.”

    In Hummel’s opinion, he wrote, “History shows Mr. Salcido will not stop his unacceptable behavior no matter what discipline the district uses on him. Mr. Salcido places his students in physical and emotional danger with his behavior. Removing Mr. Salcido seems to be the only way to protect the students.”