Hizzoner and son - Seattle
Two stories for this post. A father and a son. The father is the mayor of Seattle and talks the talk but never quite manages to walk the walk. From the
Seattle Weekly:
After Adding a Hybrid to His Fleet, Mayor Nickels Gulped Even More Gas
The mayor has two cars at his disposal, including a Ford Explorer.
As the municipal version of Al Gore, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels became semifamous in 2004 for challenging the nation's mayors to meet or beat the goals of the Kyoto Protocol and reverse global warming. Just last week, Nickels' office announced in a press release that 514 cities have now signed on to his U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, and that Seattle was continuing to take "bold action under Mayor Nickels" to cut emissions.
As part of his crusade, Nickels announced last summer that he'd "traded in" his elegant city Cadillac limousine for a new, fuel-efficient Toyota Highlander SUV gas-and-electric hybrid. Not exactly: Turns out, the limo just moved to backup status. But environmentally and politically, the mayor left critics in the dust with his professed switch from the 17-miles-per-gallon Caddy to the 31-miles-per-gallon hybrid.
The Cadillac, like two other mayoral limousines that preceded it in recent years, had been an inconvenient truth when contrasted to Nickels' much-ballyhooed greenhouse crusade. Critics such as Sound Politics blogger Stefan Sharkansky thought it was hypocritical of the mayor to use a "chauffeured" limo on his sometimes 100-mile daily rounds of appearances. "[While] he's calling on other people to get out of their cars," wrote Sharkansky, "Nickels' gluttonous dependence on his own official automobile should raise eyebrows."
But while the hybrid switch a month later may have helped clear the air in several ways, the mayor wound up using more money and gas than he did when he cruised around exclusively in the limo, according to city records. But the city says gas records for the Cadillac and hybrid released to Seattle Weekly—detailed fuel-pump statements for a nine-month billing period (March through August and October through December) in 2006 from the city's Fleets and Facilities Department—shouldn't be taken literally.
"Our systems don't track the information in a way to allow one to make [car-to-car] comparisons," says Fleets and Facilities spokesperson Katherine Schubert-Knapp. "When the fuel clerks enter a charge into the system, they pick the [vehicle] number they think applies to the car."
Some charges, Schubert-Knapp adds, could have been attributable to another backup car: a Ford Explorer SUV that gets 11 miles to the gallon and stands at the ready should the hybrid need a tune-up. (The billing documents show no charges for the Explorer, and Schubert-Knapp couldn't explain why that vehicle didn't have its own billing number.)
At any rate, the billings do show this: From October through December of last year, when the gas-saving hybrid was in service, the mayor charged 400 gallons of gas, costing $1,140; compared to 260 gallons at a cost of $870 from March through August, when the Cadillac was in service.
Emphases mine.
And his son is in very deep kimchee. From the
Seattle Times:
Nickels' son indicted with dozens in scheme to cheat casinos
Jacob Dyson Nickels, the son of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, has been indicted as part of an investigation into a multi-state casino-cheating ring that allegedly stole millions of dollars by bribing casino employees to falsely shuffle decks.
Nickels, 25, was a pit boss at the Nooksack Indian Tribe's Nooksack River Casino in Whatcom County in the summer of 2005 when he accepted $5,000 to introduce one of the ring's alleged conspirators to crooked dealers, according to an indictment unsealed today at U.S. District Court in Seattle.
Two of the defendants, George Lee and Tien Duc Vu, won more than $90,000 on mini-baccarat that October with the help of Nickels and two dealers, Levi Seth Mayfield and Kasey James McKillip, the indictment said.
Mayor Nickels said today he and his wife Sharon had only "just learned of the charges involving our son Jacob."
"We will be encouraging him to cooperate fully with the investigation. Until we know more we will have no comment on the substance of these allegations," Nickels said in a prepared statement.
And a bit more about the charges:
Jacob Nickels is charged with one count of conspiracy and four counts of theft of funds from a gaming establishment on Indian lands in the five-count indictment. He attended Western Washington University until last summer. He did not graduate.
And the scam:
The group used "false shuffle" cheating schemes during blackjack and mini baccarat games, the Justice Department said. The schemes involved bribes to casino supervisors and card dealers and use of blocks of unshuffled cards, the indictments said.
Members of the organization allegedly would signal a card dealer to do a false shuffle and then bet on the known order of the cards, winning more than $850,000 on one occasion.
The indictments also alleged that the ring used hidden transmitters and special software to predict the order in which cards would appear.
He is 25 now -- so he drops out of college, works for the Casino and is offered some easy money by some players. He falls for it not realising that the security people at the Casino are a lot smarter than he is and are very familiar with all of the gaming scams out there... They may get "lucky" once or twice but still, evidence is being gathered against them even on the first turn. They are doomed from the start and do not realize it. Stupid boy and unethical dad...
Posted by DaveH at May 25, 2007 9:55 PM