Working On (Murder) Mysteries Without Any Clues

Hi! Enough with the fun and games. Today I’m going to solve a murder. Maybe. Or maybe not. Definitely not.

Connie Dabate of Ellington, CT was killed in her home in December 23^rd of last year. This is intriguing to me because it’s my hometown—their house is about 3 miles away from the house where I grew up. She graduated from Ellington High School in 1995—four years after me. I don’t think I ever met her. Her husband Richard Dabate is from next door Vernon. The case is also intriguing because six months after the fact, there have been no arrests. “There is no update” was the curt reply from the police to the press this week. It’s unsolved as far as we know. Investigations take time but six months is an awfully long time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s before making an arrest. So something weird is going on. Your fearless blog writer would like to go through the facts that have been reported. Let’s see any sense can be made of this at all by Detective Doyle. The Shamrock Sherlock? Let’s go with that.  

Proceeding chronologically, in October police were called after someone tampered with their cars: Connie’s car on October 2^nd, Rick’s car on October 9^th. This is probably irrelevant, but it’s interesting that these incidents happened exactly 7 days apart. The calls came on Fridays and both incidents were reported as happening the night before. So two straight Thursday nights. No detail is too small for the keen detective mind.  

Connie’s car had two yellow rags placed in the exhaust system. She told the cops she “believes she know who did it”. Rick’s car had a damaged windshield on the front passenger side. After the second incident, they both said they suspected the same person they had suspected a week earlier.

She told the cops she did not own any yellow rags matching those found in her exhaust system. I doubt she volunteered this, so the cops must have asked her—a suspicious line of questioning which seems slightly odd thought it might just be standard procedure. The trooper also took great pains to report that all evidence indicated Rick’s windshield was smashed form the inside, not the outside. No other cars parked in the driveway were damaged and there no footprints—which would have been visible due to the morning dew.

Rick said he had purchased a surveillance camera after the first incident a week earlier--but had not set it up yet.

If I’m reading between the lines correctly, it seems clear the cops suspected this was an inside job. While it seems incredibly strange to tamper with your wife’s car and then your own car and call the cops to report so-and-so tampered with the cars yet that’s apparently what they thought happened. Otherwise why ask Connie if she owned matching yellow rags? And why make such a point of noting the windshield was smashed from the inside, not the outside? Isn’t this suggesting that if vandals had shown up at their house they probably would have smashed the windshield from the outside while standing outside the car vs. opening the door, getting in the front passenger seat, and smashing it from the inside? If you’re a criminal, why would you take that extra step when presumably you would want to get away as fast as possible? But if it’s your own car, maybe getting in first and smashing it makes more sense and this was a small detail that, if he did it, Rick didn’t think to account for?

The troopers knocked on the door of the person the Dabates had accused of tampering with their cars. They weren’t home. They didn’t try back. That is also odd to me. No, tampering with cars isn’t the crime of the century, but this is sleepy Ellington. I mean that’s about as much action as those boys are normally going to get. This is the place where a cop once stopped me for rounding a corner too sharply on my ten speed. It’s a place where cows breaking loose from their pen at night is the closest thing to a riot they see, unless you count breaking up bonfires and teenage drinking on Green Road. Why wouldn’t they have followed up? Was it because they were positive Rick did it himself and was trying to play them for fools or was just it simple laziness?

Now let’s skip ahead to December 23^rd. This was a Monday. Two days before Christmas. (Obviously). A burglar alarm sounded at 10:15 AM. The cops found Connie fatally shot in the head and abdomen at their home. Rick had “non life threatening” injuries. They also saw smoke in the house.

Trooper Kelly Grant said, "Are there signs this was a domestic dispute? Sure. But again, I'm not going to make that determination. They don't want to say that and then say someone broke in and then later on that it was a domestic dispute. Right now, it's being investigated as a suspicious homicide until we make a determination."

Here is what the obituary said:

“Connie (Margotta) Dabate, 39, of Ellington, beloved wife and best friend of Richard Dabate, and dedicated and loving mother of Richard "RJ" age 9, and Connor age 6, died tragically at her home on Wednesday, December 23, 2015. Born in Rockville, the daughter of Kenneth and Cindi (Stuart) Margotta, she grew up in Vernon and Ellington. She was a graduate of Ellington High School, Class of 1995. Connie earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Connecticut, Class of 1999. She was a pharmaceutical sales representative for Reckitt Benckiser. Connie was a past vice president, and member for many years, of the Ellington Ambulance Corp. She was a loving, cheerful and kind person. Connie was the sunshine of so many lives including….”.

I have tried in vain to find another article I saw a couple month ago with the remaining piece of publicly revealed info that I know of. I hope I get this right. They had some work done on their house and there was a legal dispute which resulted in the Dabates receiving court ordered payment from the builders. Even an amateur detective like me can see that these were obviously the people they were directing the cops to when their cars were tampered with.

So…..since I’m neither a paid nor a responsible journalist, here is where I engage in rampant speculation. This doesn’t seem like it should be such an amazingly difficult case to solve. It seems like there’s only two possibilities: the contractors did it or the husband did it. If the contractors had lost money and possibly business due to bad publicity, they may have either wanted to get their money back or simply enact revenge. If the husband did it, who knows why? But in those situations you can bet with almost 100 percent certainty that an affair was involved, can’t you? Maybe she was having an affair and he decided to deal with it in the most extreme way possible? Or maybe he was having an affair, wanted out of the marriage, but didn’t want to pay child support?

But if he did it, he obviously went about it in a slightly crazy way by leading the cops directly to him. First with self-tampered cars more than two months in advance of a pre-meditated murder to set up a motive for those he was trying finger for the crime, next with the set up burglar alarm and a 911 call. Even smoke! And injuring himself! Did he take such crazy steps thinking he had the perfect fall guys lined up? Was the prior lawsuit against the contractors the ultimate opportunity to get away with murder?

If the contractors did it, it sure seems an extreme way to deal with a money dispute, but stranger things have happened. Tamper with their cars to scare them and when that doesn't yield the outcome you want, resort to killing the guy's wife? The first scenario is out of a murder mystery thriller, this scenario is out of a gangster movie. I just wish the story of the cracked windshield had answered an obvious question: was the car unlocked? If it was locked, clearly the husband cracked the windshield himself. But if unlocked, maybe vandals thought getting in the car first and smashing it from the inside would reduce noise? And if there were no footprints, maybe they thought to cover their tracks?

But again…..the cops don’t seem to think that. They clearly seem to think it’s the husband—as evidenced by the aforementioned trooper’s statement after the murder, their apparent skepticism over the tampered cars, and their lack of follow up in attempting to talk to the contractors after they supposedly tampered with cars. But why? Why did they seemingly jump to the stranger conclusion vs. the more obvious conclusion? An angry contractor who had lost in court and was out for vigilante justice almost makes sense. A husband hatching a cat and mouse, hiding in plain sight scheme with the police so he can murder his wife seems slightly more out there. Something out of a movie.

So as an irresponsible blog writer with zero journalistic credentials, why don’t I lapse even further into crazy theories? The cops were in on it! In league with the contractors! You heard me. The husband wasn’t setting up the cops, the cops were setting up the husband by feigning ignorance! Okay, again, I’ve seen too many movies and I’m just wildly speculating and I kind of doubt my own theory here, but isn’t this what the Internet is for? If it was true, that would explain their desire to hint that the husband himself tampered with the cars, their non-follow through on talking to the people he had accused, and their dragging their heels for six months without making a single arrest in a case which does seem to have enough facts to work with.

And everyone seems to suspect the husband in town. One article quoted a woman who had moved next door to him saying she carries an “extra large flashlight” when walking her dog in the morning. The most recent article quoted the owner of the Chuck Wagon—the local diner, a fine establishment! —saying he was there with his kids last week and no one came near him. Since one of the cops already more or less stated he suspects him too and the whole town suspects him, why wouldn’t you think you can present a case to a jury to get a conviction? Unless you know the contractors did it, you’re in on it, and fear any action at all will expose that but as long as it’s an “unsolved crime” no one will ever know! Or they are not "in on it" exactly but the contractors have some high up connections making them untouchable? Also the press only reported on the tampered cars through a freedom of information request but the article said the police report was heavily redacted. Why?  

I’ve probably lost it completely. Forget that. 

The cops said from the very beginning that no one was in danger. No manhunt of any kind occurred. So we have to infer that the cops knew beyond a shadow of a doubt who did it. Or least they know it was either Rick or the contractors. With the options so narrowed, again, why is it so hard to get evidence for an arrest!? Whoever is guilty, it would seem relatively easy.

Or maybe there’s no great mystery. Maybe state police in north central Connecticut are simply over their heads trying to conduct a homicide investigation due to limited experience. They know who did it, but they bungled the gathering of evidence at the start and now they have no case. And a murder may go without justice. Hopefully I’m wrong. But I believe the most important time to gather the evidence after any crime is in the immediate hours and days afterward. Otherwise, forensics has a nearly impossible job. Whoever did this, was it a stroke of evil genius to time it two days before Christmas--when you could assume many of them would be taking holiday time off from work?    

Damnit. I solved nothing. I knew it.

Money For Nothing

Hi! In my last blog which held the nation breathless, I discussed an historical event so incredibly weird it would seem unbelievable if not supported by documented fact: The Prohibition. Today I’d like to discuss—to the best of my amateurish knowledge---a contemporary phenomenon no less strange, shocking and in defiance of common sense: our current US economy.

I came across a fact that I found amazing that I wish was as common knowledge as Donald Trump’s shifting funding strategies for his Mexican Wall that wall never be built. According to a recent study, since 2004, Fortune 500 companies have spent 54 percent of their profits on buying back their own stock and an additional 36 percent paying out dividends to shareholders. So companies on average essentially pay 90 percent of their profits back to Wall Street.

They buy back their own stock because it inflates the stock price to the short term benefit of shareholders. Of course, in a world tethered to reality, a company’s stock price would be merely a reflection of its actual performance, but buying back your own stock artificially manipulate its price—making its dollar value higher than its real world value. It’s the performance enhancing drug of corporate America and companies are addicted in record numbers. This is what folks in finance seem to mean by creating a stock bubble: a problem unless you and your shareholders live in that profit making, insulated virtual reality universe where it doesn’t matter so long as the bubble doesn’t burst (or if you fail to get out before it bursts) because it will just mean larger profits for everyone. A bubble bath of bubble boys in a tub of gold. God what a terrifying metaphor.  

Price manipulation through stock buyback was once not only discouraged, it was illegal. But in 1982, the SEC passed Rule 10B-18 which allowed companies to do this—with some limitations. The SEC sheriff at the time was this guy named John Shad. Prior to being charged with policing Wall Street, he had been a Wall Street CEO---totally not a conflict of interest or anything. “John, we’re going to call you a “regulator” but of course your real job is to provide hall passes”. “I see you have an extensive background in burglary, have you considered applying for a security guard job?”, said no one ever, but on Wall Street and in Washington this type of thing seems common: use insiders to blow it up from the inside!

Of course occasionally reality makes a furious comeback (reality loses a lot of battles but it seems to win every war) and a massive mess ensues. This is what nearly crashed the world economy in 2008—bonds linked to mortgages were given to people despite common sense dictating the new homeowners would have to default on them eventually and these bonds artificially soared in value in the short term and everyone got out after the bubble burst---and tax payers cleaned up the mess. The official cost was “only” $700 billion, but factoring in loans and such, another estimate pegs it as $12.8 trillion. Oh well, money can’t buy you love.

A second reason stock buybacks would be outlawed if the inmates weren’t running the asylum: it literally costs jobs. In 2011 Pfizer laid off 1,1000 workers. “Well, it’s sad when people lose their jobs, but when times get tough companies have to tighten their belts”. No. They laid their workers off so they could buy back $4 billion of their own stock. People were expendable, the stock price was invaluable. The following year their reduced staff gave them such massive surpluses they hired back those workers and created new and improved life saving drugs. Just kidding, They bought back an additional $5 billion of their stock. Wall Street was partying, Main Street was crying.

This habit is even more insane when you consider that companies make no money when they do this, but Wall Street has become so powerful and arrogant that they can and will get CEO’s fired if they don’t do their bidding. And 76 percent of CEO compensation now comes in the form of stock options—so they are incentivized to play along with the madness too. This essentially makes CEO’s embedded members of Wall Street themselves. Regulators, CEO’s…….Wall Street has its golden ring wrapped around all of them. “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them”. Too dramatic?  

And when so much of a company’s profits are drained to feed the carnivorous “greed is good” crowd, it’s money not spent on employee salaries, pensions, building new plants/offices, developing new products and services, etc.---in other words, all the things that can benefit the rest of society, not just those impeccably dressed vultures on Wall Street demanding their pound of flesh. The middle class keeps having to sacrifice because we’ve run out of money or because we’ve all become the sacrificial lambs of high finance?

And here’s the punchline: it doesn’t seem to work. Carly Fiorina (remember her? The Republican candidate Trump hated the most because she wasn’t a young, submissive Eastern European supermodel speaking broken English?) ran Hewlett Packard from 1999—2005. She purchased $14 billion in stock buybacks compared with $12 billion in profits over that time. She laid off a bunch of workers. Then she was fired. The company wasn’t growing enough. Giving investors easy money through buybacks is like buying children’s love with too many cupcakes: rather than earning their undying love and loyalty they will just say they want more cupcakes--and a new mommy. HP’s successors followed a similar strategy. But instead of enriching their shareholders, imagine if they had used that money to develop the best mp3 player, smartphone, or tablet. Maybe we would all consider the iPod, iPhone, and iPad pieces of copycat junk compared with the HP Hella Wicked Volcano phone. (I don’t work in marketing). But they opted for fast food takeout instead of a full course home cooked meal. 

But American’s sweethearts Apple are part of this game too. (I’m writing this on a Mac so my hands are also dirty it would seem). Last year  they spent $37 billion on stock buybacks. They have also been accused of being tax dodgers. They, along with other companies, have tax shelters in Ireland. Their CEO Tim Cook has defended this, shifting the blame to a supposedly unfair and outdated tax code in need of reform. In 2014 they paid $14 billion in taxes. A lot of money, second most of any corporation, but still roughly $23 billion less than they paid to Wall Street. They paid less to the people who build roads, bridges, and schools and fight our wars—and grant patents, copyrights, and subsidies that allow American companies like Apple to flourish--compared with the bros who gamble with money and call each other “chief”. Companies claim to be so upset about their taxes, but maybe their enslavement to Wall Street causes them to pay such exorbitant amounts back to them that they can’t stand having to pay government taxes on top it. Is Uncle Sam or Carl Icahn the real villain?

And so they lay off workers, outsource workers, cut products and services…..all to avoid facing the elephant in the room and confronting Wall Street and those activist investors who threaten their heads on a platter or a takeover of their company if they don’t pay their ransom money through huge buybacks and dividends. And this subservience to the stock price and its need to grow every single quarter to please investors (you made $50 billion last quarter but you made $51 billion the quarter before? I can’t wait to get a no-growth loser like you out of my life) seems to breed a kind of madness. The laws of nature dictate creatures stop growing after adolescence, the laws of gravity dictate anything that goes up must come down, but a company slavishly shackled to its stock price has to rise above the laws of nature and never stop growing. So if stock prices have to be manipulated, jobs have to be lost, and profits have to be drained for no societally productive use just to ensure growth (or the appearance of it) it beats getting fired.  

Finance and Wall Street have been around since the system was created by Alexander Hamilton while serving as George Washington’s Treasury Secretary. And right from the beginning, there were “occupy Wall Street” types who decried its perceived exploitation and greed and feared America was being hijacked by the “stock jobbers”. But, like, Kanye West’s ego, finance has only gown over time. Since 1990, the financial sector has represented a higher percentage of our GDP than ever before in US history—and it’s growing all the time. The only other period that came close was the Great Depression. But does this matter? After all a larger financial sector means more jobs….in finance. But many site history and note rich societies of the past underwent similar evolutions: starting out as agriculturally based like us, then shifting to industry/commerce like us, then finance like us, then collapse. Like us? Pass the popcorn.  

How did this growth happen? One prevailing theory is that deregulation--championed by economist Milton Friedman and implemented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and virtually every leader since—has opened the finance floodgates. I noted above how the stock buyback craze is the child of early 80’s deregulation.

Another fascinating—if a little confusing to a layperson like myself—theory says the root lies in our monetary system itself. Prior to 1971, our currency was tied to the gold standard. Our money’s link to gold had already been watered down in 1933 but it was eliminated entirely in ’71. Under the gold standard, your currency had to be linked to your gold reserves. In ’71 a dollar was worth 1/35^th of an ounce of gold. This system had one disadvantage our fearless leaders hated: you couldn’t just make new dollars without new gold to back it up. Nixon complained that our gold reserves had gotten too low (and they were discovering new gold in Russia! Those commies were at it again!) but the other problem was funding that anti-communist police action called The Vietnam War.

With out current “fiat currency” in which currency and gold are divorced from each other, less money creation limitations exist and banks can literally create money out of thin air—order it into existence by “fiat”. God said “let there be light”, AC/DC said “let there be rock”, and banks say “let there be money”. But the value of the dollar has to be measured against something, so instead of being measured against gold, it’s now measured against other currencies. Instead of the dollar’s strength resting on the intrinsic value of a shiny yellow rock, it now rests solely on its relative value to the pound, the euro, the yen, etc. Instead of a fixed currency, we now have a “floating currency”.

Problem: as the names imply, floating is less stable than fixed. Because gold is rare and gold rushes are rarer, currency fluctuations were usually kept in check, but when currency only has relative value to other currencies, it can swing up and down daily, hourly, by the minute. But this see-saw created a new game for Wall Street: the futures market. This is a labyrinthine system (which I barely understand) which allows an investor to hedge against loss due to currency fluctuations and even profit from them. Floating currency may also hurt trade: if your currency is stronger, your exports are more expensive to sell to other countries and imports are cheaper to buy from other countries. After decades of trade surpluses, we’ve had trade deficits every year since 1975—partially thanks to floating currency it seems. And do cheap imported products steer the American consumer to not buy American? And do expensive American exports steer the American employer to not employ American?    

So monetary policy changes may have had deep economic impacts that went way beyond helping fund the Vietnam War and helping Nixon get re-elected: increasing wealth inequality and weakening the overall US economy. Yep, I’ve learned there are some crazy people on the Internet and elsewhere who argue that while tax policy, tax shelters, salaries lagging behind cost of living, the decline in organized labor, and outsourcing may contribute to inequality, they are mere symptoms of the disease of fiat monetary policy.

Others think gold standard vs. fiat currency misses the point. Do you know where money comes from? I mean we all know where babies come from (the stork) but how about money? The government creates money, right? That’s what I always assumed. Not so. The government creates about 2 percent of the money in circulation: mostly coins. The rest is created entirely by private banks when it issues loans. This means our entire economy is fueled by debt. If debt didn’t exist, we would have to create it. The argument that money creation should be the sole role of our democratically elected government, not our unelected bank managers is now considered….well, pretty much a crackpot idea. But it wasn’t always so. In fact, for the first 100+ years of our country’s history it was a popular idea. Andrew Jackson dismantled the central bank and, probably not coincidentally, was also the last President to balance the federal budget. (He also liked to kill Native Americans and place them on reservations so there was that). Lincoln bypassed the banks and poured “greenbacks” directly into the economy to help the people and the struggling Civil War economy. 

But it gets even crazier. Did you know that when a bank issues a loan they are loaning you money they don’t have? They only need to have a fraction of the money they loan in reserves because they know people only take out a certain percentage of their deposited money at any given time. (Unless of course there's a major scare and they need a bailout from the government). It’s called fractional reserve banking. So they create money out of thin air and essentially make multiple loans to multiple people backed by the same reserve of money. What a racket. And each time you pay them back, you pay back with interest. Banks then are the beneficiaries of scarce incomes and big ticket item prices which combine to prevent most people from buying things in one debt free lump sum.

And consider this: to the economy as a whole loans mean inflation because new money is now going into circulation. Under the gold standard we have fluctuating inflation and deflation, but with central bankers’ increased ability to manage money, we’ve had steady inflation since the early 70’s. But—some argue—inflation creates income inequality. Richer people can make more investments in stocks, bonds, real estate: things that will appreciate in value over time if they play their cards right and more than offset inflation. Banks can charge interest and thereby protect themselves from inflation. But middle class and working class people have far less opportunities to shelter themselves from inflation. And when employers don’t adequately adjust salaries to cost of living increases it gets even worse. And when payroll taxes—paid primarily by lower and middle class workers—increase over time while corporate taxes—paid primarily by the rich—go correspondingly down as a percentage of overall tax revenue, the problem gets worse still.

Well I could maybe go on…..but I think all this talk about money is giving me indigestion. So how do we solve this? 1. Make stock buybacks illegal again, 2. tie currency to some natural commodity again, 3. crack down on tax evasion by the very rich, 4. ……..I think I’m out of ideas. No, wait! Ban the charge of interest on loans! This is another crackpot idea that was once mainstream. Interest’s dirty synonym is usury. Both The Bible and The Koran decry usury as a shady tactic which exploits those in need of loans. But what about inflation? Won’t the lenders actually lose money on loans without charging interest? If it’s the case that loans are the very thing that create inflation, maybe the problem would take care of itself. Make banks non-profit organizations who loan without interest!      

I’m sure all those things will happen any day now, no problem.

Well at least they’re about as likely as a classy Trump Wall around Mexico.