Bruce’s Ship Has Come In Again

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Above are photos of the famous Russian Spy, Svetlana Ogorodnikov with FBI Agent, Miller. Svetlana was also involved with another FBI agent, Chuck Latting.

San Sebastian Avenue

I wonder if Danny Boy Blake thinks I am crazy – and made allot of this shit up. I have long been in the wake of, or, on the path of….

YOU CANT MAKE THIS SHIT UP!

In a thousand nations, Intelligence Officers are trying to figure out what Trump is up to, and what is his next move. Has anyone talked to Michael Cohen. How about….Bruce Perlowin, who is Donald’s John the Baptist. Bruce prepared the way.

I met Bruxes’ son on Broadway. Michael Harkins wea married to his wife. They became friends when they visited Bruce in the Fed Lockup. I met Bruce when he moved into The Pinehaven Asylum. He had to live in a reputable, clean and sober household. Wanda was Mr.’s Cleaver. Bruce put a painting of his turbined guru above my surrogate mothers washer and dryer. Bruce invested ib art,

Mike and I drive to Petaluma to pick up one of his paintings. This is where the Hippie Culture left off. I challenged Bruce to consider a Twelve Step Program, and he stabbed me in the back. He used the idea of sparing the children as a publicity stunt. Here’s the movie trailer he is floating around. He wants it all back….

THE MONEY

THE POWER

THE WOMEN

THE SEX

Has the President of the United States read about Bruce in this blog. How will the Conquest of South America affect American Culture? Is Cuba next?

I am honing in on Cal’s Hole In The Wall as being the Epicenter of the last Bohemian Scene in Oakland. Mike and I used to live on Shafter. Danny-B can now tell Sam flowers what was going on – under his nose! If Cal Iwamoto is alive, and still living there, then he needs to be treated – as a Living Treasure!

http://www.offbeatoregon.com/H1007d_floating-bordello-in-portland.html

John Presco

His operation was so sophisticated it even included his own “counter-intelligence” unit, which monitored the movements of Coast Guard craft and kept track of DEA and FBI agents.

The actual smuggling operation worked like this: Growers in south-central Colombia would fly the marijuana to isolated coastal sections where there were no paved roads and no transportation by train or bus – nothing but big beaches and small villages. The bales of marijuana were kicked out of the planes as they flew low over the beaches. “We would hire whole villages to gather, store and secure the marijuana,” said Perlowin. “Meanwhile, we’d outfit our boats for whatever was in season. We’d rig for tuna during tuna season etc., and send the boats to Costa Rica to refuel get provisions and stand by. As soon as the radio message came that the stuff was on the beach, the boats could get here in a couple of days.”

Bur how did Perlowin’s people manage to offload thousands of pounds of pot in the heart of San Francisco Bay without being spotted?

Simple. He owned the pier.

My Recovery Miracle

In 1992 my best friend, Michael Harkins, took me to a large birthday meeting in Concord California to get my five year sober coin. This is in response to our mutual friend, Bruce Perlowin, misusing recovery miracles to garnish publicity after I challenged him to do a twelfth step to show he has been reformed. I talked an hour with the writer for the Oakland Tribune, who turned out to be a brother in AA. Michael and I were convinced Perlowin was going to get busted for wheeling and dealing that we rented the movie ‘The Producers’ and insisted he watch it. He was living down in Wanda’s basement for four months, it part of his patrol that he be in a halfway house situation. We had Bruce pay attention to the last scene, where more shares in the prison production, is being sold, then allowed. How prophetic. To discover my sister’s biography is full of destructive fraud, put me in therapy. The extent all members of my family – including my newfound daughter – undermined by sobriety, and sober story, is THE sober story of the century. No one has overcome such adversity. I am thirty-four years sober.

I am convinced Ken Kesey wanted what I had when we put together several times by my childhood friend, Nancy Hamren, in 1987, months after I graduated from Serenity Lane. How I view -what could have been – is important. Ken Babbs is giving the impression he is carrying-on a traditional bond – with permission from Dead Kesey. I am THE LIVING EXAMPLE of a evolution, a perfect example of what could be, because I have made astute and elaborate notes on my progress. I should be questioned and interviewed. Indeed, it occurred to me an hour ago, that I can give lectures – and get paid for imparting my valuable history.

Michael Harkins was good friends with Michael McClure and Jim Morrison. I met McCLure on two occasions. Both men had a problem with alcoholism. Add to this the fact Jack London and Jack Kerouac suffered from the same disease that I do, then my writing, my being a sober writer, needs to be studied by professionals.

I have been texting with Peter Shapiro extensively for two weeks about our history.

John

John

Posted by: HempTodayÂź June 3, 2021

Industrial hemp company Hemp Inc. and two of its executives must pay a total of $ 10 million in fines to resolve a 2016 US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fraud allegation, a civil fine of $ 8 million; CEO Bruce Perlowin to Pay $ 1.7 Million; and the company itself pays $ 300,000.

The SEC originally accused the penny stock company Perlowin, Epling, and Bruce Perlowin’s brother, Jed M. Perlowin, of longstanding fraud and running an illegal program to sell unregistered shares in violation of US securities laws. The government did not state that Jed Perlowin had been fined. The case was settled late last year, but no fines were imposed.

Hemp Inc. has since said that Bruce Perlowin is no longer running the day-to-day business of the company, but is now acting as Chief Visionary Consultant.

Questionable offers

The SEC alleged in the original 2016 indictment that Perlowin, as CEO, transferred hundreds of millions of Hemp Inc. shares to companies controlled by his brother Jed and Epling for sale in public markets.

These companies entered into consultancy agreements with Hemp Inc. that the SEC identified as counterfeit. Some shares were given away. In 2012, for example, an Epling affiliate received 100 million shares in Hemp Inc. in recognition of “affection and appreciation for over 20 years of friendship and sincere support,” according to the SEC’s original claims filed in federal court in Nevada.

Not registered

According to the 2016 lawsuit, Epling’s companies sold the Hemp Inc. shares they received and “used a substantial portion of the proceeds for the benefit and at the direction of Bruce Perlowin and Hemp Inc.” Jed Perlowin’s companies also sold millions of Hemp Inc. shares and used a portion of the proceeds to benefit Bruce Perlowin, the commissioned securities agency.

The SEC said the shares were sold to investors as if they were restricted, but that investors buying them through market transactions would have reasonably believed that they were unrestricted shares. The SEC said Hemp Inc. never filed a registration statement with the SEC.

In late May, Hemp, Inc. and its co-principals Bruce Perlowin and Barry Keith Epling agreed to pay $10 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to resolve a suit the SEC filed against them in 2016, according to Law360.

Perlowin will pay $1.7 million, Epling will pay $8 million, and Hemp, Inc. will pay $300,000 to resolve the suit, which alleged they “used a network of shell companies to improperly sell unregistered securities,” according to the news source. However, they didn’t admit or deny the allegations, Law360 stated.

A June 7 press release from Hemp, Inc. stated that “Perlowin has transitioned from CEO to Chief Visionary Consultant (CVC) and while he no longer manages the day-to-day tasks of the company, he remains the true visionary Hemp, Inc. shareholders have come to admire and respect.

“The Company remains committed to its longstanding goals and is aggressively moving forward and continues to add new blood and new ideas to the management of the company. Hemp, Inc. has expanded its knowledge base by bringing in a new CEO and new members of its Board of Directors.”

The Boilermaker Club | Rosamond Press

Martin Eden On LSD | Rosamond Press

Wells Fargo Art & Mural Program | Rosamond Press

Bruce Perlowin and the Gentle Giant

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Royal Rosamond Press

The following is being published by Rosamond Press Co. a newspaper I founded in Lane County Oregon in 1997. Thanks to the Vincent Rice Family Trust, I have been able to upgrade my computer and purchase a scanner which allows me to publish family photographs such as the one above of Wanda Harkins home in the Oakland Hills were Bruce Perlowin lived for five months.

Wanda Harkins was my surrogate mother, and since 1968, she always gave me sanctuary from the storm, if just for one night sleeping on the couch, or staying a month or two down in the basement where the King of Pot had his headquarters. I was a good friend of Wanda’s three sons, James, Michael, and Jeffrey Harkins since 1965. I visited the Harkins home up on Skyline in 1966 with my friend, Nancy Hamren, who became a Merry Prankster. Doctor James Harkins was a well known pediatrician who experimented with LSD with his older son, James Junior. In 1969 Wanda’as home was raided by the Oakland Police, the Oakland Tribune newspaper reporting; “Wild Bongo Party Raided In Oakland Hills”. Wanda’s three sons were put in a paddy wagon and hauled off to jail.

We used to call Wanda Mr’s Cleaver, because she was stuck in 50s. She was the consummate housewife long after she and Jim were divorced. Wanda never failed to invite me to Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, she knowing my natal family were not hospitable. Some stoners of renown walked in her door, such as, Abbie Hoffman, who was in the jewelry business with Bruce Perlowin whose ex-wife was now Michael’s wife, and Bruces’ son, like a grandson to Wanda whose three sons never sired children. Bruce was married to a famous Russian Spy who was still in prison for seducing an FBI agent. Bruce put her picture on the wall. Wanda was a Republican right-winger whose boyfriend attened the hijinks at Bohemian Grove. Wanda would come down into the basement to do a load of laundry, and ask Bruce about the photo;

“That’s my wife. We got married in prison.”

“Oh, how sweet!” Wanda said, she signing parole papers that made her home a halfway house for the drug smuggler who said the rewards arent worth the risk to Junior Highschoo lkids in Oakland’s Ghetto, where Bruce had gone at my suggestion, I trying to do a 12th. Step on him, I having four years of sobriety. I challenged Bruce to give a anti-drug-profit message. Bruce saw a chance to garnish some publicity. I was angry, and called the Tribune reproter who wrote the article. Turns out he had eleven years sobriety, and, he felt guilty for getting Bruce busted because of an article he wrote that he was not aware would crack open the case that put Bruce in the Fed lockup.

“Are you kidding me!”

Bruce is the world expert on getting Sympathy for Devil. There is a third world flavor in feeling sorry for the benevolent dictator, or the Mafia chief who throws huge Columbus Day celebrations in New York. Meanwhile we addicts and drunks in recovery must remain anonymous. To go against my peers after my fall and death at McClure’s Beach, was extremely difficult – to this very day! I just revealed some information I was forbidden to reveal. Why stop now? We are doomed, we getting older and taking drugs for medical problem, and not to trip the lights fantastic, or, exchange Bohemian ideas.

Here is a video of Bruce with Reverend Doug Van Dyke “Doctor of Divinity” I doubt the Doc can quote me one verse from the Bible, but, he is next to Bruce in oder to prove he has a spritual program of some kind – that might heal you! Doug is a secular Jesus pot-head. In many ways he is – me – the me I used to be, that hippie who grew up in Oakland, and who was adopted by the Robert Hamilton, the man behind Owsely, who with his brother Tim Hamilton, sold LSD all over the world.

Below is a vdio of Buzzy Linhart who had a legal marijuana orginization years before Bruce. Buzzy is a friend of Chris Wandel, and went to this show with Joe Marra who owned the Night Owl Cafe in the village. Chris dated Peter Shapiro of the Loading Zone.

Michael became friends with Bruce when he went with his wife and Bruces son to visit The King in prison. Michael was good friends with the beat poet Michael MacClure, and Jim Morrison. He was approached by Stone’s people and asked Michael about his friendship with Jim. They wanted material for the movie The Doors.
Michael told them their movie will suck, and they can go fuck themselves. The movie sucked, as will Bruces movie, as will the movie about my famous sister, will suck, because, Rosamond’s biography sucks, and the people who want to make money – suck the most!

Michael worked as a Private Investigator, and went with me to Carmel to attend the funeral of Christine Rosamond Benton. It was Michael who alerted me to things that were – fishy! If you put Rosamond’s, Bruces’s and Jim’s story-movie together, then you might have an interesting story about folks who like money, sex, drugs, and power!

Above is the price list mu ex-brpther-in-law sent out to steady customers of Rosamond images – a week after she drowned. The probate would ot get under way until a year later due to the huge legal battle over – money – because most folks who surrounded Christine believed the price of dead artist’s work would skyrocket! Instead of the Drunken Rosemary prints being worth $250,000 dollars, they might bring in a cool million. Then there are the book and movie sales. Carrie Fisher did one screenplay.

I am good to go if the outsider get a movie contract, I already acted when it came to one of Bruce’s most famous investors in Rain Crips ceral bars. I’m talking about Victoria from Chicago, the queen of the Blue Meanies, who after a couple of freakouts at the airport and motel, became convinced the Mafia was behind Bruce, and, she would be snuffed out because she got too close to Mr. Big. That’s when I got a urgent call from Michael;

“Get up to Wandas and meet me in the backyard. I’m bringing this woman to meet you. Pretend you are the Godfather. Reasure her I am not a hit man for the Mafia.”

I got in my gold Cadillac and headed for Wanda’s Hideaway. In the backyard I found a coffee cup, and prentended it was full of coffee. There was a newspaper I pretended to read, as she came through the gate. I could hear her gentle whimpering, she believing she had minutes to live. Then she saw me.

Before I could stand up to shake her hand, she has fallen to one knee, and is grasping my hand hard. I spoke gently to her, my blues eyes, bathing her in wisdom and understanding, that, told her things do not have to go badly, and, putting my hand on her shoulder I said;

“You’re under my protection now. (and Wanda’s) You need no longer worry! Michael, make sure no harm comes to Victoria.”

Vicki broke out in tears and cried;

“Oh! You are not what I expected at all. You are a gentle giant!”

Victoria was too hysterical to get on the plane. But, after one session with the Godfather, she was good to go. She reassured Bruce there would be a check in the mail as she waved goodbye. It never arrived. However, I – Mr. Big – received an envelope, which I never told Bruce about. I purtchased a Brother word processor to work on my novel The Gideon Computer which is about the last hippie in the future who gets busted and sent to the first privately owned prison. My friend Nancy suggested I write the history of the hippies, but, how boring!

“Alls well, that ends well!”

Jon Presco

Copyright 2012

These understandings have led him to an entire “GREEN” philosophy that he shares with the world! Nothing held back, Rev. Van Dyke is motivated to bring his unique perspective on cannabis, and how to fully potentiate all aspects of the processes involved, to the world. The ever changing cannabis industry has many, many sides, which will you choose?

At the Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland yesterday, prosecutors spent the day cross-examining defense witnesses and leaders of the First Hemp Bank and its subsidiary, the Buzzy Linhart Medical Foundation.
Both organizations are licensed by the city of Oakland to issue medical marijuana to their members.
Buzzy Linhart, a founding member of the Buzzy Linhart Medical Foundation, said in his testimony that the confiscated marijuana actually belongs to him and not to the defendants.
Linhart said Felini worked for the organization as a “compassionate caregiver” who stored the drug for later distribution among the group’s 48 patients, who are suffering from cancer, AIDS and other illnesses that cause chronic pain

His prowess on the vibraphone found him performing as a session musician on recordings by Buffy Sainte-Marie, Richie Havens, Carly Simon, Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys, and even Jimi Hendrix (on the Cry of Love album).

It was a very unique room, a long and narrow storefront. The stage faced straight at a wall in the center with one church pew at the foot (the “crotch watchers bench”), an aisle, and then another pew against the wall. All the other seating was to the left and right of the stage, giving a side view. The PA was very trebly and faced to the sides. The music crashed into the wall and died, leaving the vocals very bare to the bulk of the crowd to each side. You had better sing on key or else it was a disaster. Good harmony went a long way at the Night Owl! The cast of characters: “Jack the Rat” at the door, a frightening cat with teeth missing and dirty clothes; Joe Marra, the owner; Annie, head waitress (very bossy)
The waitresses all used four letter words that we had never heard from girls before
shocking to four straight, naive, suburban rockers! There was Pepe, the openly gay cook (we had never seen anyone “openly gay”); and of course, all of the great bands! An interesting and happy family indeed
Joe Marra would blink the stage lights on and off, kind of a poor man’s strobe light effect
Waitress Shelly Plimpton appeared in the original cast of “Hair.” [And later had a daughter with Keith Carradine–peerlessly cool actress Martha Plimpton. -Ed.] Every Thanksgiving the Night Owl had a huge feast. Everyone was there past and present–even The Spoonful
and The Mothers of Invention served the food! Yes, we “believed in magic”!

Jerry Rubin used to come to the Harkin’s home to do business with Bruce Perlowin who was living in the basement. Jerry was having a conflict of interest with Abbie Hoffman, a Jew who killed himself. Jerry believed being a Super Businessman was the best way to change the world. China and Russia just accused the U.S. of using Money and Business as a Weapon in the New Cold War.

Bruce and Jerry are Jews. I will link them with Ludwig Wittgenstein because the world’s collective information is conflicting, and often, contradicting. The world may want for a pro-active philosophy that works for everyone. For the last fifty years our Moral Compasses have been in The Hands of Radicals, Hippies, and Born Agains. With Nuclear War back in the lineup, we have to learn how not to play better guessing games. This is why I am authoring a Bond Novel. I am applying the Hippie-Radical Attack, mixed with the Christian End of Days. I have my spies become lovers in order to counter the attack on Gay and Transgender People, which is a USELESS DISTRACTION all the major players – RESORT TO – when they have no answers. I believe in FIGHTING FAIR. Who agrees?

I think my computer is handpicking what news comes up – just for me. The day after I point out the HYPOCRACY of Israel honoring Soviet Veterans who fought for Stalin, there appear an article on his purges. I’m going to try a new way to bring you the news, that replicates how we get it – IN BLOCKS. I will start my morning by posting on news items that interests me, and are revelent to my MAIN ARTICLE. Young folks may never have heard of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. What about Perlowin?

The greatest HYPOCRACY in the world right now, is, the Conservative’s Republican Christians REFUSAL to grant Congress permission to delve deep into the June 6th, Insurrection. Consider the Trial of the Chicago Seven.

John Presco

Chicago Seven – Wikipedia

Pence Taken Out | Rosamond Press

Sometime in the mid-1970s, Rubin reinvented himself as a businessman. Friend and fellow Yippie Stew Albert claimed Rubin’s new ambition was giving capitalists a social consciousness. In 1980 he began a new career on Wall Street as stockbroker with the brokerage firm John Muir & Co. “I know that I can be more effective today wearing a suit and tie and working on Wall Street than I can be dancing outside the walls of power,”[1] he said.

In the 1980s, he became known for his promotion of business networking, having created Business Networking Salons, Inc., a company that organized parties at the Studio 54 and Palladium nightclubs in Manhattan, where thousands of young professionals and entrepreneurs met and shared ideas. Near the end of his life, Rubin became interested in the science of life extension and was heavily involved in multi-level marketing of health foods and nutritional supplements.[42] â€œIn 1991, he and his family moved to Los Angeles,” according to an Observer.com profile of him,[43] â€œwhere he became a successful independent marketer for a Dallas-based firm that sold a nutritional drink called Wow!, made with kelp, ginseng, and bee pollen. Ironically, Bobby Seale became one of his salesmen.”[4

Putin accuses U.S. of using dollar as tool of economic, political war (msn.com)

Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States on Friday of using the dollar as a tool of economic and political war and said Russia may consider settling transactions for oil and gas in other national currencies and the euro.

How Russia confronts Stalin’s purges (msn.com)

 Reuters

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Surveillance Photo of Richard Miller and Svetlana Ogorodnikov

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bruc0002Above are photos of the famous Russian Spy, Svetlana Ogorodnikov with FBI Agent, Miller. Svetlana was also involved with another FBI agent, Chuck Latting. I took the photo of the photo of Bruce’s alleged wife hanging on the wall in Wanda’s basement where Bruce lived for around four months thanks to the generosity of Wanda Harkis who I considered my surrogate mother. For over twenty five years Wanda had me in her home to celebrate Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The last time I had a holiday dinner with a member of my family was 1969.

Last night I had a dream about Wanda. Alas, I got to say goodbye. Due to the legal battle James and Michael Harkins began weeks after their mother’s death – that was wretched and disrespectful to her memory – there was no grieving period. It reminded me of what I first saw when I was in the Harkin’s house on Pinehaven. Wanda brought home bags of groceries her sons did not help her carry into the house, and no sooner did she get them in the kitchen, then down they swoop The Harkins Harpie, they tearing the bags to shreds looking for the choicest items to carry to their rooms that would later be used in the Trade Wars. Wanda’s food would be bartered and bickered over. Wanda retreated to her room.

In this dream I came upon Wanda’s YARD SALE. She was moving and selling everything she owned. To attract buyers to this event, she had baked cookies and cakes that were for free. I wondered why she wasn’t selling them.

Looking around for something I wanted, I opened a cupboard, and there was Jeffery fast asleep. I woke him. He was so glad to see me, and I him. We had forgotten about Jeffery, and I made the mistake of telling him his mother was moving. He went into a panic. Where was he going to live. In whose heart?

I was always welcome in Wanda’s home because I had formed a close bond with all three of her sons, something that is not easy to do. Two years ago Michael Harkins accused me of trying to incorporate his being and history into my blog. He was on death’s door. As his legal battle waged with his brother, Michael sucked my being into the blood-feud. Sensing I had enough, or, was not loyal enough, he promised me he would buy me a used Buick when he got his share. We had been talking about Jeffery’s car. I believe it was a Buick.

When I found Michael alive three days ago he said I never met Bill Linhart and Michael McClure, and did not know Bruce Perlowin like he knew him. Micahel met Bruce through his ex-wife, or ex-girlfriend. Michael said I got it wrong, that Rebecca was not married to Bruce, but, the article above says otherwise. Again, my long time friend accused me of glomming on to the famous folks he knows, he being asked to contribute to Stone’s movie about Jim Morrison. He declined, saying this movie would not do Jim Justice. There is no movie in the works about McClure or Linhart. However, there are to movie scripts about my late sister that are being hawked in Hollywood. A major motion picture is coming out about Bruce. No one wants Michael’s story, as yet. I wonder why? Will a movie be made from my autobiography? I wonder who will play Michael Harkins, who on the way to Rosamond’s funeral, told me to open the brown bag on the seat. Inside was a coloring book, with a box of crayons. As an unlisenced Private investigator, my good buddy told me he was on the case and yo keep me busy and out of his way, I was to color in a page in the book. In other words, I was bid to take a back seat at my families funeral.
My family grief was none of my business. This was a private affair that morons like me had no business attending. Michael once again said I was invading his privacy with my blog, and thus, it would make this fake PI happy if I quit writing altogether, and went back to drinking? What a pal!

Christine’s funeral fell on her first sober birthday. Our sobriety was ripped off by outsiders who published a terrible biography, wherein it is suggested Michael Harkins helped family members loot my dead sister’shome the day of the funeral. Surely this is a invasion of bout our privacy. But, Michales was not mentioned by name, so, no skin off his teath.

When I met Bruce I was authoring ‘Bond’s With Angels’ in hope all my siblings would get sober so we could get back together – and maybe spend a Christmas together. On Wanda’s front porch I talked to Bruce for about a half hour about my Twelve Step program, and if he was really interested in saving the world, then he might consider giving an anti-drug message, employing his fame to do so. In a week Michael and Bruce were in a school in the ghetto. The Messenger had arrived! I tried to object to El Friendo about Bruce being two-faced, but, my opinions were not welcome. Bruce and Michael were going places.

I called up Michael Macor of the Oakland Tribune and told him he had been used. Whe Macor told me he had eleven years sobriety, I was incredulous. Why? Macor told me he owed Bruce one because an article he wrote led to his arrest. HUH???????????? Bruce not only ses a grown man in recovery, this founder of Marijuana Inc. inlists seveth-grade CHILDREN in his promotion scam. Bruce took my words to him, and used my program to get a foot in the door. At the time, no one wanted his story as he shared it with anyone that would listen. Is this a new form of child and drug abuse?

Today, Bruce is the most Pro-Drug dude on the world wide web. Down in Wanda’s basement, on a huge blackboard Bruce drew up his master plan. There were submarines and trams bringing high tech computers into Russia past those who would prevent this plan to take over the world. Svetlana used Miller to get high tech information. Hmmmmm!

I was reading about the Priory de Sion when I met Bruce. I saw him as a player. When I discovered the Roza Mira prophecy, I had to wonder.

Bruce is very topical. I own a newspaper in Lane County Oregon. Michael Harkins has wanted many people to fail in their endeavors – including Bruce! I’m usre Perlowin does not want Macor’s article on any of his webpages that deict him as the Supreme Emperor and Inventorof the Hippie Counter Culture. The truth is, Bruce works both sides of the street, he appolgizing about taking LSD, then in another article he is glomming on the chemmists and dealers I knew.

Here Michael, this birds for you!

I cover the waterfront because some folks got something to hide, while at the same time, promoting their better side.

Jon Presco

Copyright 2012

If I won $100 million, I’d give half of it to my wife to be, and then spend the rest on helping to change the world, feeding starving children or creating an environment to make sure there were no starving children anywhere and other social causes as well as creating communities made up of Kin’s Domains as discussed in the series of books called “The Ringing Cedars of Russia” by Vladimir Megre (which sold over 10 million copies in Russia alone, and has been translated into 20 languages) and is an actual template for that global change we never finished from the 60’s.

However, I embraced the new 60’s generation hippie movement and wore bell bottom jeans, long hair and a scarf around my knee (which meant I was against the war). Jim Daughitt during home room taught me all about Eastern philosophy and concepts like reincarnation, karma, dharma, human auras, prana, vegetarianism, yoga and meditation. We would go on weekends to the Theosophical Society in Miami to read on these subjects, and once in awhile a dozen or more of us would skip school, go to Fairchild’s Gardens and take LSD for the day.

We went to Love-ins at Greynold’s Park and visited The Head Shop, The Micropile, yoga classes given by Yogi Rama in Coconut Grove Park and went to local concerts and festivals. I sold LSD at the pool hall next to the Cloverleaf bowling alley and nickel and dime bags and ounces of marijuana to other Norland Senior High classmates. My car had a big peace symbol painted on the hood and other slogans of the day like “make love not war”. The school didn’t quite know what to make of me – a gymnastic and weightlifting champion – yet a radical hippie embracing the counter culture and enjoying rock and roll music and unusual new ideas.

One childhood memory I’ll never forget was when over a dozen of us from high school skipped school and went to Fairchild’s Gardens and all took LSD (sorry, that was an in thing to do for the hippies of the 60’s). Anyway, at the Gardens I could look around and see individual friends, couples sitting alone, a group of friends sitting together talking and no one but us was in the park. Every one of the people, couples or groups of people were ones I had great fondness for, from liking them a lot to different levels and kinds of love towards them. It was for a moment like living in the Garden of Eden with loved ones and family.

With a major motion picture being done on my life story, I guess when my little brother (when he found out I was going back into the “medical” marijuana industry again – even though this time it’s totally legal) Jed said, “Is this what you want to be remembered for – marijuana”? I answered, “I guess that’s my calling – and it happens to be an industry I love – for way too many reasons to explain very briefly – but mostly because with The Hemp Network – I truly believe we can all collectively change the world for the better – and that is my calling”.
So I invite everyone to join me in spreading the word about industrial hemp by signing up in The Hemp Network today. The hemp movement says that hemp can save the planet, which is a pretty farfetched idea at first glance. However, just a small bit of research (like reading the late Jack Herer’s book “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” available on our website) or watching a few of the short videos on our website will make even the most skeptical person scratch his head and think – gee, this does make sense – maybe hemp really can save the planet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIjSAvn8rfw

Medical Marijuana, Inc., is slated to appear on 60 Minutes’ Rocky Mountain High show today, Sunday, October 21 at 7:30pm EST. The airing will be a huge achievement in the now thriving medical marijuana and industrial hemp industries, as 60 Minutes is the most successful news television broadcast in U.S. history, drawing well over 13 million viewers a week.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/hemp/marijuana/prweb10039492.htm

Surveillance Photo of Richard Miller and Svetlana Ogorodnikov
Original caption:June 4, 1985 – Los Angeles: In this FBI surveillance photo released 6/4/85, former FBI agent Richard Miller (wearing white shirt with dark pants), who is charged with conspiring to sell classified government information, walks with Svetlana Ogorodnikov. She and her husband Nikolai have been accused of conspiring to spy with agent Miller.
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Convicted spy testifies in San Diego murder case
By Ben Fox The Associated Press
Thursday June 27, 2002
SAN DIEGO — In halting and heavily-accented English, a former Soviet spy recounted Wednesday how she became an FBI informant in a murder-for-hire case.
Svetlana Ogorodnikova this week is testifying as a key government witness, seven years after her release from prison. She was convicted of seducing a Los Angeles FBI agent into selling a confidential document to the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
After serving half her 18-year sentence, Ogorodnikova was released and spent several years fighting deportation from the United States — an effort she gave up by moving to Tijuana, Mexico, with a convicted drug trafficker she met and married in prison.
Ogorodnikova returned illegally to Southern California in 1999 and moved with her husband to a ranch in Fallbrook. The ranch was owned by Kimberly Bailey, who is now on trial in federal court on charges of having a San Diego private investigator tortured and murdered in an abandoned house in Tijuana.
Bailey repeatedly asked Ogorodnikova if she could hire a hitman to kill witnesses and others involved in the murder of the private investigator, Richard Post, the Russian woman testified.
“I became very scared,” said the former spy, dressed in a dark blue suit, her hair cut short. “I think maybe she’d forget, maybe she’s not serious.”
Bailey is accused of having Post kidnapped, tortured over five days in Tijuana, and then murdered because she believed he cheated on her with other women and stole money from her.
Bailey has pleaded innocent to conspiracy to murder a person in a foreign country and other charges. Through her lawyer, she has insisted that Post is alive and in hiding.
FBI agents who had the Fallbrook ranch under surveillance approached Ogorodnikova, who agreed to covertly tape conversations over the phone and in person with Bailey.
The Russian woman, according to the tapes, set up a meeting in the Mandalay Bay casino between an FBI agent posing as a hitman and Bailey, who allegedly wanted to have him kill several people involved with Post’s slaying.
In their conversations, Ogorodnikova said she and Bailey developed a code. Examples included “brother” or “lawyer” to mean hitman and “investigation” to refer to murder. “It was like a spy movie, like in James Bond,” she testified.
Bailey’s defense attorney, Philip DeMassa, said he hoped to use Ogorodnikova’s past to convince jurors that she is not a reliable witness.
“She’s an experienced KGB agent and she’s lying about everything,” he said outside the federal courtroom.
Ogorodnikova pleaded guilty to espionage charges in 1985, after she admitted seducing Richard Miller, the first FBI agent charged with espionage.
The former Soviet spy had no trouble slipping back into the United States when a friend drove her across the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego, where inspectors failed to check Ogorodnikova’s background, according to her husband, Bruce Perlowin.
The Bailey trial is expected to last several more weeks. 

Butler, a licensed investigator, started working for the original owner of the firm, former FBI Special Agent Charles Latting, two years after the firm opened in 1996, the website says. At that time, the firm operated under the name Corporate Intelligence Resources and specialized in undercover corporate work and investigative research for corporations and businesses throughout California. 

The commander of a state Justice Department-led county drug task force and the owner of a Concord-based private investigations firm, nationally known for its “Mommy P.I.s,” have been booked into county jail on suspicion of conspiring to sell drugs.
Special agents from the Department of Justice, Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement,  arrested Norman “Norm” Wielsch, a 12-year veteran of the bureau, Wednesday in Benicia. Wielsch was arrested on 22 felony counts. The charges are related to the distribution of methamphetamine, marijuana and steroids, bureau spokeswoman Michelle Gregory said. 

During an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes while he was in prison, colleagues observed that Miller had at one time lost his gun and FBI credentials. Additionally, Svetlana Ogorodnikov alleged that Miller had initiated the affair and had forced himself upon her. When confronted with these accusations by Mike Wallace, Miller demurred, stating that of the two, he was by far “more enthusiastic” in their “lovemaking”.

On October 3, 1984, Miller was arrested with Svetlana and Nikolai Ogorodnikov, Russian immigrants who had moved to Los Angeles in 1973 to seek refuge, but who were actually access agents of the Soviet KGB. Miller was alleged to have provided classified documents, including an FBI Counterintelligence manual, to the Ogorodnikovs after demanding $50,000 in gold and $15,000 cash in return. Miller, who had eight children and was faced with financial difficulties, was having an affair with the married Svetlana Ogorodnikov, and was preparing to travel with her to Vienna at the time of his arrest. It was later alleged that Svetlana Ogorodnikov had been in touch with a KGB case officer working out of the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco and had made arrangements for Miller to meet with the KGB in Vienna.

U.S. law enforcement agencies investigate the case of illegal shipments of U.S. high-tech equipment for the Russian Defense Ministry. New details have emerged about yet another US-Russian spy scandal. Three of the alleged “agents of the Russian government,” are staying in Russia. The Kremlin has not commented on the situation yet, while diplomats do not hurry to confirm the fact that the “spies” hold Russian citizenship.

BRUCE PERLOWIN, DON STEINBERG, AND THE FBI
Dear Roger Wilco,
True, neither the SEC nor FBI has as their high priority busting pump-and-dump schemes on the OTC Pinksheets.
But the FBI has a very keen interest in Bruce Perlowin and Don Steinberg. Trust me on this one thing.
To wit, the U.S. Marshalls Service violated Svetlana Ogorodnikova’s parole last year.
Ms. Ogorodnikova is Perlowin’s wife.
And don’t forget: Ms. Ogorodnikova was responsible for seducing and flipping the first FBI special agent to have ever been convicted of treason (Richard Miller). He was flipped for the promise of a mere $50,000 in gold.
The FBI’s “collective memory” does not quickly forget such things.
Incidentally, Ms. Ogorodnikova got lucky. She did not serve her full term. She was released in a spy-for-spy exchange. Russia released a scientist named Igor Sutyagin, who had been giving documents to the Central Intelligence Agency. The United States of America released Ms. Ogorodnikova.
The intrigue did not stop there, but I can’t discuss it on a public forum.
Be advised that I’ve been tracking Perlowin and Steinberg for most of my career.
As a whistleblower, I initiated the FDA bust against Perlowin’s Energy Wellness scam. Indirectly, I also put his co-conspirator James Folsom behind bars.
Also, I investigated Steinberg’s GlobalCom 2000, One World Communications, Club VivaNet (CVIV.pk) and his other pyramid marketing frauds.
Needless to say, Steinberg learned a lot about pyramid marketing schemes. Currently, he has replicated that business model at the Hemp Network.
Signed,
ConManWatch

Just days after the expo, Cliff Perry, MMI’s former vice-president of business development who’d done a few years in prison decades ago on cocaine charges, was calling Perlowin a “rabid dog” who was bound for failure. Perry was broke and bitter, claiming to have footed the expo’s bills out of his own checking account. Many involved say that Perry was the brains of the operation while Perlowin was the enigmatic visionary. They butted heads throughout the weekend — Perry says Perlowin is flighty and loose with the facts; Perlowin says Perry is a tight-fisted dictator.
Despite this rather public meltdown of support — it was played out in part on the MMI stock bulletin board where Perry and Perlowin exchanged insults — Perlowin considers the expo a wild success. “We now have a runaway company,” he wrote in an e-mail.
If that’s true, his critics say it’s because Perlowin misled his investors. None of them were told that out of the 200-odd attendees at the L.A. event, only about 40 actually paid, a fact that might have dampened some enthusiasm for buying a franchise license. Nick Bird, a Nevada man who paid $100,000 for a license that weekend based in part on his belief that everyone paid to attend, was surprised to learn that ticket revenues were far lower than he thought. “Don’t print that,” he quipped when contacted later. But he added quickly that he still hopes to sell at least 500 tickets to a similar expo planned for June 12-13 at a Las Vegas venue still to be announced.

Like the others, Wickstrom considered Perry to be the yin to Perlowin’s yang. A company without ballast for the King of Pot’s whims, he said, is just too unpredictable to be involved in. He reminds those who are enamored of Perlowin’s outlaw past that the whole billion-dollar operation came crashing down in part because of the boss’s capricious attention span — he left a notebook filled with incriminating information in a booth at a Denny’s.
It was such a boneheaded move that FBI agent Chuck Latting sounded almost embarrassed describing for a CNBC documentary the big break in his till-then fruitless search for all the dope flooding into San Francisco in the early 1980s.
“The book was the key to everything we found,” Latting said on the documentary “Marijuana Inc.” “I couldn’t imagine that anybody who was somewhat competent running an organization would walk away leaving their most prized possession sitting in a booth at Denny’s.”
That discovery led to Perlowin’s eventual incarceration for nine years.
“I don’t want to take anything away from Bruce, but it’s been my experience that nothing really culminates with Bruce at the head of it,” Wickstrom said. “He’s brilliant 
 but none of it ever really comes to fruition. He’s a very likable guy. He’s very genuine. He’s got a big heart. But he’s like a shotgun blast.”

http://www.salon.com/2010/03/09/king_of_pot_campbell/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAbewt6ZGO0
BRUCE PERLOWIN
The King of Pot

Bruce J. Perlowin could give the CIA lessons in how to run an operation – or a country. By J.L. Pimsleur* – “The Berkeley Monthly” – November 1985

The biggest and most sophisticated marijuana smuggling organization in California history had its roots here in Berkeley, Richmond and Orinda. Details of the incredible operation of Bruce J. Perlowin came to light in September after the King of Pot was brought to the Bay Area from Texas as part of the federal government’s ongoing investigation into his 200-man international organization.

Perlowin, a ponytailed, bespectacled, studious and mild-mannered man who looks more like Mr. Peepers than one of the world’s biggest drug dealers, is currently fighting government efforts to have him testify before a federal grand jury in San Francisco. He is being held temporarily in a San Francisco sheriff’s department cell at the Hall of Justice. Assuming a semi-lotus position during a series of jailhouse interviews, he said he turned down offers by federal prosecutors to let him “walk,” and took a 15-year prison term rather than snitch on his former employees.

“There’s nothing I can do about being called before the grand jury,” says Perlowin. “However, I have absolutely no intention of testifying against all the people who worked for me in my organization. If I planned to betray all my friends I would have done it two and-a-half years ago and never spent a day in jail.”**

The staggering scope of his operation began to surface after a federal indictment was brought in September against one of his former associates, Larry C. Donnie, a San Francisco attorney. Prosecutors accused the 44-year-old lawyer of acting as a “money manipulator” for Perlowin’s mammoth drug operation, which smuggled over 250,000 tons of marijuana into the United States between 1979 and 1983-using an entire West Coast fishing fleet to ferry the stuff.

Federal prosecutors allege that Donnie acted as Perlowin’s “front man” because, as a fugitive from a federal arrest warrant in Florida, the boss could not make investments in his own name. Donnie was charged with illegally purchasing and concealing thousands of dollars in assets for Perlowin, including a Cessna airplane and a house in Ukiah.

The house is not exactly your basic rural fixer-upper. A $3 million armored fortress on a 246-acre plot, the house included a $100,000 gymnasium; a complete automobile repair shop; voice-activated, electronically controlled drapes; a steel-lined, bulletproof, computer-controlled central command post; 16 surveillance cameras with night-vision capability; a 14-line telephone and telex system; and a spiral staircase leading to the master bedroom which could be electrified to repel intruders.

To make the place feel homey, however, it also had solid-gold bathroom fixtures and $70,000 worth of carpeting, custom-made by the same firm that does the carpeting for the White House.

A special federal drug task force has been investigating Perlowin’s far-flung operation for nearly five years. According to U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello, 30 of Perlowin’s associates have already been convicted on various drug charges in four states – California, Florida, Georgia and Michigan – including some characters that are almost as intriguing as Perlowin.

Perlowin’s former partners in the Midwest, for example, were the Shure brothers. Well known in academic circles, Fred Shure is a brilliant, Harvard-educated former University of Michigan professor of nuclear engineering. His brother, Ned Shure, was the proprietor of one of the university community’s most profitable textbook stores. Together, the Perlowin-Shure connection is believed to have trucked some 100,000 tons of high-grade marijuana between the West Coast and Ann Arbor.

In a series of interviews in his holding cell at the Hall of Justice, Perlowin declined to discuss the charges against his associates, but admitted that the government’s charges against him were “accurate.”

A small, slightly-built, 34-year-old Floridian, Perlowin said he had been dealing drugs since the age of 17. Since moving his operation from Florida to California in 1975, he said he had imported $150 million worth of marijuana, mostly high-grade “Punta Roja” (red bud) pot from central Colombia and Thailand.

That’s the wholesale value. The FBI and the DEA estimate the street value of Perlowin’s imports at well over a billion dollars.

To run his vast operation, Perlowin operated a flotilla of ships that was larger than the navies of all but a handful of the world’s nations. His fleet consisted of 94 marine vessels – including the Polar Sea, a 120-foot ocean-going tug, a 90-foot North Sea trawler, a converted mine-sweeper, more than a dozen steel albacore fishing boats from 47 to 85 feet long, shrimpers, crab boats, bait boats, motor sailors’, 29 60-foot fiberglass barges, a string of speedboats and a surveillance and communications yacht. He directly employed more than 200 people and hired on others as needed, including captains and crews, boat stagers, fishermen, professional pot salesmen, computer operators, electronic technicians and radiomen.

His operation was so sophisticated it even included his own “counter-intelligence” unit, which monitored the movements of Coast Guard craft and kept track of DEA and FBI agents.

The actual smuggling operation worked like this: Growers in south-central Colombia would fly the marijuana to isolated coastal sections where there were no paved roads and no transportation by train or bus – nothing but big beaches and small villages. The bales of marijuana were kicked out of the planes as they flew low over the beaches. “We would hire whole villages to gather, store and secure the marijuana,” said Perlowin. “Meanwhile, we’d outfit our boats for whatever was in season. We’d rig for tuna during tuna season etc., and send the boats to Costa Rica to refuel get provisions and stand by. As soon as the radio message came that the stuff was on the beach, the boats could get here in a couple of days.”

Bur how did Perlowin’s people manage to offload thousands of pounds of pot in the heart of San Francisco Bay without being spotted?

Simple. He owned the pier.

A meticulous man with a talent for organization and a reverence for detail, before moving his operation from Florida to California Perlowin conducted one of the most remarkable research projects in the history of crime. He hired a Berkeley firm, Information On Demand, to analyze every major marijuana bust on the West Coast during the previous ten years. The idea was “to find out where everyone else had made their mistakes – and then design an operation to avoid them.”

The data disclosed that the weakest link in failed smuggling operations had been the vulnerability of the drop-off points – coves, estuaries, abandoned docks, vacant warehouses and so forth – over which the smugglers had limited and unreliable control. Perlowin eliminated that problem by buying his own dock, a 1,000-foot concrete pier in San Francisco Bay. It was ideally situated, just north of the Red Rock Marina in Richmond.

“Logistically, it was one of the finest offloading spots in the country,” says Perlowin. “It was 40 minutes by boat from the Golden Gate Bridge and right in the radar shadow of the Richmond Bridge.”

Perlowin’s boats would come in to dock and “disappear” – drop off the radar screen. In effect, he said, they would become “invisible.” Perlowin maintained that it was safer to “hide in plain sight” – run his boats in and out of a heavy traffic area – than call attention to himself by trying to sneak around some estuary in Mendocino.

The theory worked to perfection “In Florida,” he says, “you bring in a boatload of fish and everyone thinks its marijuana. In San Francisco, you bring in a boatload of marijuana and everyone thinks its fish.”

Meanwhile, the money-laundering arm of his operation was stretching half way around the world – from a gambling casino in Las Vegas to a pair of trust companies in Luxembourg to banks in the Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles, Panama, Costa Rica and the British West Indies, to a loan brokerage firm in Sarasota, Florida, and back to a string of shell corporations in Nevada.

Headquarters for the Perlowin operation moved around the Bay Area. “The Ukiah house I considered a home and didn’t do business there as a general rule,” he says. Business was conducted out of a house in Berkeley, an apartment in San Francisco and a house in San Rafael. Headquarters for running the dock and houseboat building company he owned (called Shelter Engineering) was an office in San Anselmo.

Marijuana sales headquarters were in various “stash houses” or ranches his operatives bought and rented north of San Francisco. They purchased three such houses outright, with a total value of approximately $1 million, and rented half-a-dozen others.

Perlowin’s VIP headquarters was a house in Orinda lived in by a distinguished-looking 62-year-old gentleman, and impeccable dresser, highly-educated – an individual Perlowin calls “a perfect front man for the organization.” This house, lavishly furnished, was used to entertain the Colombians as well as bankers and businessmen connected primarily with the money-laundering end of the operation.

Surveillance headquarters was a rented house in San Rafael, on a mountain top in direct line of sight of the dock. From here the North Bay was monitored with powerful two-man binoculars and broad-band scanners. A voice-activated tape player recorded all police, Coast Guard, DEA, FBI and other law enforcement radio transmissions. The tapes were reviewed nightly.

The South Bay was monitored from a 37-foot Pacesetter motor home parked on property which Perlowin’s organization rented on Skyline Boulevard. From the outside the motor home looked perfectly normal. Inside, however, it was packed with $1 million worth of sophisticated electronic equipment that not only enabled Perlowin to keep in radio contact with his own boats, but to track every Coast Guard craft from Panama to Alaska and Hawaii. He also tracked all routes flown by the Coast Guard’s surveillance planes.

CB antennas were mounted in the rearview mirrors. Then antenna for Perlowin’s marine single-sideband radio was concealed inside the motor home’s flagpole, with the American flag flying on top. High in several redwood trees on the property were mounted other antennas for marine VHF radios and broad-band scanners. To insure privacy, Perlowin own communications were carried out over his own secret frequencies – accomplished by having his electronics experts shave the standard crystals to specifications that enabled him to transmit and receive in-between regular frequencies.

At one point it struck Perlowin that his communications network was far superior to anything that the local Office of Emergency Services could muster. In a major emergency, he noted, all radio frequencies would be jammed from overuse.

Never one to think small, Perlowin had his own plan. If a major earthquake or other disaster struck the Bay Area, he had contingency plans to mobilize his entire organization to assist in the rescue operations. “With all our boats, trucks, 4-wheel drive vehicles, vans, pick-ups, wagoneers, jeeps, emergency repair trucks and spotter cars, and our ability to communicate with each other by radio – not to mention personnel used to working under dangerous and stressful conditions – we would have made an impressive impact helping the authorities,” Perlowin mused. “When the emergency was over we’d disappear and go back underground.”

But Perlowin’s altruism will never be tested. In March 1983, in Chicago, he was finally arrested. Ironically, what he was doing there had nothing to do with any drug deals. He was on his way to a three-day White Tantric Yoga seminar conducted by his spiritual advisor, Yogi Bhajan.

Despite his painstaking planning, in the end it was not his marijuana operation that tripped him up, but his money-laundering organization. One of his operatives in Sarasota, under pressure from the Feds on a separate drug rap, cut a deal for himself by handing over compromising documents on Perlowin’s money-cleansing methods to the FBI.

When he was busted, Perlowin had marijuana shipments contracted for – or already on the high seas – worth $120 million.

Through it all, Perlowin insists, he is proud of one thing. He stood firm on a basic principle: He never dealt cocaine, which he considers a “vicious and destructive” drug peddled by “violent people.”

Perlowin now spends his days in Federal Prison in Texarkana, and rarely has any man adjusted so well to prison life. Perlowin claims his confinement has improved his self-discipline and helped him to purge himself of “negative habits” (such as drug smuggling almost exclusively – to the exclusion to other meaningful life endeavors). He virtually vibrates with inner peace.

His days now, he says, are the “most calm and relaxed of my life.” A vegetarian, he says he meditates twice daily and reads 15 books a week. He is using his time to study for three degrees and, by the time he gets out of prison, he expects to hold PhD’s in nutrition, psychology and criminology.

Perlowin said he plans to combine the formidable organizational skills he developed as one of the world’s biggest drug dealers with his knowledge of Yoga, meditation and nutrition to forge a revolutionary new holistic approach to prison reform and rehabilitation.

He insists that the current prison system is in a “shambles,” with an 84 percent recidivism rate. “Everyone agrees it isn’t working.”

But he maintains that his method of reducing stress and changing violent behavior through Yogic techniques can turn the system around and produce at least an 80 percent success rate.

With the support of prison authorities, he’s already been allowed to put some of his theories into practice in a small pilot program in Texarkana.

“I’ve been an outlaw half my life,” he notes, “So I certainly comprehend the criminal mind.” On the other hand, he adds, he also understands the humanistic approaches that are necessary to genuinely alter the criminal’s conception of himself and society.

The private prison business is on the verge of becoming a $200 million industry,” Perlowin says with a modest smile, and he’s confident that when he’s released, sometime around 1990, he’ll be in the forefront of that business.

“Who,” he asks, “is better qualified?”

*J.L. Pimsleur is an award-winning reporter who has interviewed everyone from Fidel Castro and Malcolm X to Marilyn Monroe.

**True to his word, Bruce Perlowin never did testify against the far flung members of his organization and did all his time in prison. Because of that at least 100 people form the Perlowin Marijuana Smuggling Organization were never charged with any crimes.

c

How Russia confronts Stalin’s purges

Duration: 02:27 1 hr ago

Mass grave pits have been found near Moscow containing the remains of thousands of people executed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s secret police during his “Great Terror” campaign of purges. Olivia Chan reports.

U.S. Deploys One-Third of Pacific Submarine Fleet for Major Naval Exercise (msn.com)

The U.S. navy is deploying a third of its Pacific submarine force as part of a major exercise to assess its combat readiness.

Exercise Agile Dagger 2021 kicked off on Thursday with deployments from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. Submarines from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; Bremerton, Washington; and San Diego will take part.

The U.S. Pacific Submarine Force comprises submarines that make fast attacks and those that can fire ballistic and guided missiles. The fleet is capable of engaging with other hostile submarines and surface ships, as well as carrying out precision strikes on land targets. It also offers intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance services for the U.S. military worldwide.

Among the vessels deployed is the U.S. Navy Seawolf-class nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine U.S.S. Connecticut, which has eight torpedo tubes and can hold up to 50 weapons in its torpedo room.

Oakland 1968

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Royal Rosamond Press

Above is a photo of the 13th. Street Four crossing a bridge in Venice California. From left to right is: Keith Pruvis, Tim O’Connor, Peter Shapiro, and, Jon Greg Presco. In the foreground in Tim’s girlfriend whose father was a famous Hollywood agent and good friend of Lee Marvin and Marlon Brando who were at her home quite alot. Tim’s father was a famous actor of the same name.

In 1968, The Four lived in a large Victorian house on 13th. street near downtown Oakland. James Taylor, Keith and I, moved into this incredible house two weeks after my fall at McClure’s Beach. James invited the rock band ‘The Loading Zone’ to come live with us. As ‘The Marbles’ they played at the first Trips Festival at Longshoremen’s Hall in 1966.

I was given a bedroom next to the sound room. It had a beautiful carved mantel. I was the artist in residence. When the Zone came home from a gig at the Filmore they would bring home members of famous bands who wanted to see the quintessential hippie scene that had made the San Francisco bay area famous all over the world. I would get a knock on my door and some band member wanted to come in and take a peek. One young man asked if he could watch me paint. There was a fire in the hearth. I worked late at night on large canvases provided by my patron and benefactor, Bob H. who grew up with Tim Scully, and was a good friend of Owsley, he helping him build the sound system for the Grateful Dead. Bob’s brother, Tim H. was a member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and sold LSD in Europe. Bob had worked at the Livermore Lab when he was sixteen. He was a young genius who bid me to paint again after my fall.

One day Larry Sidel came into my room in the attic, and was surprised to find me there. Larry is the father of Shannon Rosamond who inherited her famous mother’s artistic legacy that was destroyed by un-creative members of my family who wanted to go forward without my history that was symbiotic with Christine’s history, that is the subject of a show coming to the Oakland Museum, titled 1968. This show is touring America.

Bill Arnold and I used to got to the original Oakland Art Museum that was located in a small room in the Oakland Auditorium. had a Bohemian scene going on with our thirteen year old peers down by Lake Merrit. Nancy Hamren was Bill’s lover off and on for a couple of years. Nancy was the first girl I every kissed. We ended up living in a famous commune in San Francisco. Christine moved in, and went on a double date with Nick Sands, Nacny, and Owsely. Denny Dent was a part of the Oakland Scene that in many respect was mor dynamic then what was going on in SF. Two of our close friends in Oakland were members of SLA and were questioned by the FBI about the Patty Hurst kidnapping.

In 1968 my father-in-law, Robert Miles, was in Vietnam. Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers helped find Marilyn’slost sister in France. I was general manger of the upstairs Art Association that was located in Victorian offices on Broadway in Old Oakland. The President, Rosalie Ritz, did illustrations for Panther trials. A mutual friend, Bruce Perlowin, is coming out with a movie about his life, he the ‘King of Pot’.

My friend Michael introduce me to his good friend Michael McClure who taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. They were good friend of Jim Morrison. I just found a book of Jim’s poems.

I am still in touch with Tim and Peter, and Chris Wandel, who was a lover to three of the four. She lives in the Grenwhich Village and was close with Buzzy Lindhart who moved to Oakland where my ancestors had a farm in Fruit Vale. Add to all this the East Coast scene of my kindred Mel Lyman and Jessie Benton, then you could say we got it covered.

In the Victorian on 13th. was a room we could not enter that was reserved for the elderly owner who was back east being taken care of by her sister. She lived in the Victorian by herself, in a all black neighborhood. This room was part of the tour, it suspended in time, there little old lady things set out, waiting for her return, that never happened. Great expectations!

The Zone played with The Who at the Filmore. The Who sang’My Generation’ at Woodstock.

Jon Presco

Copyright 2012

They were formed in Oakland, California in 1966 by singer-keyboardist Paul Fauerso, following the dissolution of his jazz group The Tom Paul Trio. The original lineup was Fauerso, bassist Bob Kridle, drummer Ted Kozlowski (replaced by George Newcom), and guitarists Peter Shapiro and Steve Dowler,[2] both formerly of Berkeley psychedelic rock band The Marbles, who had supported Jefferson Airplane at the historic “Tribute to Dr. Strange”, the inaugural Family Dog promotion concert held at San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall in October 1965.
The Loading Zone’s first major concert was the Trips Festival at the Longshoreman’s Hall in January 1966.[3]. Although primarily an R&B band, The Loading Zone added contemporary psychedelic influences and soon became a popular attraction on the burgeoning Bay Area music scene. The Loading Zone was based at the Berkeley venue The New Orleans House, but performed numerous times at major venues including the Fillmore West.
Although The Loading Zone occasionally headlined, the group is better known for supporting some of the biggest acts of the period including Cream, The Who, The Byrds, Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, Country Joe & The Fish, Howlin’ Wolf, Sam & Dave, Chuck Berry and Buddy Miles.[4][5]

The Lords and the New Creatures, Morrison’s first published volume of poetry, is an uninhibited exploration of society’s dark side — drugs, sex, fame, and death — captured in sensual, seething images. Here, Morrison gives a revealing glimpse at an era and at the man whose songs and savage performances have left their indelible impression on our culture.

Scully grew up in Pleasant Hill, which was across the Bay from San Francisco. In eighth grade he won honorable mention in the 1958 Bay Area Science Fair for designing and building a small computer. During high school he spent summers working at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on physics problems. In his junior year of high school, Scully completed a small linear accelerator in the school science lab (he was trying to make gold atoms from mercury) which was pictured in a 1961 edition of the Oakland Tribune. Scully skipped his senior year of high school and went directly to U.C. Berkeley majoring in mathematical physics. After two years at Berkeley, Scully took a leave of absence in 1964 because his services as an electronic design consultant were in high demand. Tim Scully first took LSD on April 15, 1965.
Scully knew the government would move quickly to suppress LSD distribution, and he wanted to obtain as much of the main precursor chemical, lysergic acid, as possible. Scully soon learned that Owsley Stanley possessed a large amount (440 grams) of lysergic acid monohydrate. Owsley and Scully finally met a few weeks before the Trips Festival in the fall of 1965. The 30-year-old Owsley took the 21 year old Scully as his apprentice[3] and they pursued their mutual interest in electronics and psychedelic synthesis.
Owsley took Scully to the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966, and they built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. In July 1966 Owsley rented a house in Point Richmond, California and Owsley and Melissa Cargill (Owsley’s girlfriend who was a skilled chemist) set up a lab in the basement. Tim Scully worked there as Owsley’s apprentice. Owsley had developed a method of LSD synthesis which left the LSD 99.9% free of impurities. The Point Richmond lab turned out over 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed “White Lightning”. LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and Scully wanted to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado.

In 1969, Nick Sand worked with Tim Scully in Windsor, California, producing millions of doses of the Orange Sunshine LSD. Sand was also the first chemist to synthesize DMT and to suggest smoking as a method, which “came about by serendipity, when some crumbs of DMT fell onto a hotplate and vaporized, inspiring Sand to try smoking it.” [*3] This is an impressive accomplishment, because DMT is often considered among the few psychedelics exceeding LSD in the raw intensity of its experience.

Image: Photograph of Nick Sand as a young Anthropology Student,
by Gene Bernofsky, 1967,
From Erowid.org
     Robert Timothy Scully, or more commonly just Tim Scully, was a co-worker with Nick Sand in the Orange Sunshine laboratory. When only 13 years old, Scully designed and built a computer in 1958 that received honorable mention at a San Francisco Bay Area science fair. [*4] A few years later, at another science fair, he attempted “to make gold from mercury by use of thermal neutrons,” whereby he would create “a neutron flux by a deuteron-deuteron interaction.” [*5]

In the 1980â€Čs, Denny Dent invented a new form of performance-based art. No fancy props were needed. Nor was the pretense of knowing anything about art. Just an over-sized canvas, a half-dozen buckets of brightly colored paint, loud music and the rest was pure Denny Dent. The art world took notice. And for over two decades, audiences couldn’t look away.
His portraits of famous people, sports icons and historic figures captured the imagination of the art world. The efficiency with which he could fill a canvas was something no one had ever seen before. And, after Dent’s untimely death in 2004, something they thought they’d never see again.

Courtroom Art
In 1966, at the height of the Haight Ashbury counter-culture era, Ritz moved with her family to the San Francisco Bay Area. Ritz’s sketches of the street scenes were published in the City Magazine and the San Francisco Examiner. Her work in Washington DC brought her to the attention of the local public television station KQED. From there, she began a career covering trials for the local CBS outlet, (KPIX) and for the Associated Press. This included the Patty Hearst trial, the Sirhan Sirhan trial, the Charles Manson trial, the trials of the Black Panthers, including Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and David Hilliard, the trials of Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee, and the trials of the Soledad Brothers, the San Quentin Six, Mass Murderer Juan Corona, John Linley Frazier, the Presidio Mutiny Court-Martial at Fort Ord, the Billy Dean Smith Court-Martial, Inez Garcia (second trial), Bill and Emily Harris (Symbionese Liberation Army), Russell Little and Joseph Remiro (Murder of Marcus Foster/Symbionese Liberation Army), Wendy Yoshimura, Camarillo State Hospital Grand Jury Hearings, the Hell’s Angels, Alioto-Look Magazine Libel Trial, Alioto Conflict of Interest Trial, the Bonanno Brothers, Stephanie Kline, Larry Layton, Dan White, San Francisco Proposition Hearings, Sara Jane Moore, and Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo/Pentagon Papers.
While covering these trials, Ritz worked alongside several renowned journalists, including legendary New York Daily News reporter Theo Wilson, Associated Press senior trial reporter and special correspondent, Linda Deutsch, and Associated Press chief United Nations correspondent, Edie Lederer.
Ritz continued to cover trials through the early 1980s. Then, in the 1990s, the Associated Press brought Ritz out of retirement to cover the O.J. Simpson civil trial.

Gallery of California History
Explore the New Gallery
2
May 1, 2010 – December 2, 2013
The new gallery is based on the theme of Coming to California —an idea that evokes not only the arrivals and departures of people throughout human history and their interactions with the inhabitants already here, but also the notion of coming to terms with the influence of California on our individual and collective identities.
For nearly forty years, the Museum’s Gallery of California History has enabled generations of visitors to explore major events and trends that have shaped California history. It has housed thousands of historical artifacts, works of art, ethnographic materials, and original photographs from OMCA’s permanent collection—the largest, finest, and most comprehensive collection of California cultural material anywhere.
With this overarching concept, visitors explore chronologically arranged sections of the gallery presenting a variety of topics and periods in California history, as well as their continuing legacies today. Containing some 3,000 artifacts and art works, the new Gallery features sections that explore the history of California from the incredible diversity of early Native American culture, to the Gold Rush and growth of San Francisco, through the rise of Los Angeles and Hollywood, to the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970. It concludes with a frequently updated and rotating gallery space that addresses current issues and contemporary perspectives.
Reinforcing the intent of the gallery to reflect multiple perspectives is a highly innovative design and interpretive approach that allows visitors’ learning experiences to be driven by their own curiosities and to engage directly with the stories of Californians—many of them largely untold in traditional histories. Elements of the new Gallery include dramatic exhibit environments and multimedia viewing and listening stations, as well as informal learning spaces that allow for more in-depth exploration and contemplation. The Gallery also features several opportunities for visitors to contribute their own stories and perspectives on the California experience.

http://museumca.org/collections/12

OAKLAND (CBS13) – The exhibit is called “1968″ and it makes an impact as soon as you enter, with a real Huey Medical helicopter in a mock middle-class living room.
“I see things from my past, my home,” said one visitor.
The Huey chopper was built this week by actual Vietnam vets, bringing back memories of their days at war.
“I was frightened the whole time, but I learned something about myself and my brothers, and that’s something you don’t learn anywhere else,” said Wayne Terry, Vietnam Vet.
And for those who didn’t go to war, different memories.
“The protests and burning my draft card, and going through all this stuff was happening,” said Victor Quintero.

There were protests against the war, shows of black power from the Black Panthers, and feminist demonstrations with a “freedom trash can” full of bras and curlers.
Then, there were the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy.
Photographs hung that were taken from a train as Kennedy’s body travelled cross country after his death.
But 1968 wasn’t all doom and gloom.
Laugh-in was the number one show on TV, and Johnny Cash gave a performace at Folsom Prison.
There are some interactive aspects to this exhibit. You can even vote for your favorite presidential candidate, and since this exhibit has moved from Minnesota to Oakland, Robert F. Kennedy has been in the lead.
“I think 1968 impacts every living human being. Not to mention all of those who gave their lives in 1968, so, that, we could have the life we do now in 2012,” said Cynthia Taylor, Oakland Museum of California.

Big Bones” of Scowtown

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Yesterday I talked to Dick Moyer, a curator of the Crockett Museum. I had talked with his late father back in the 70s about my grandfather, Hugo Presco. He said he was a great man, known as a gambler. I asked Dick about the gambling in Crockett, but he knew very little. There were some raids during Prohibition, but Moyer had not read the article that I found in 1994 that said there were about sixty bordello and gambling houses in Crockett. My father had said the same thing. Rosemary said there were about five thousand people at Hugo’s funeral, including the Mayor of San Francisco. Was the funeral held in Crockett? According to my mother, Vic took the money collected for burial, and went and got drunk. Where Hugo is buried, is unknown.

Vic took us to see his father but one time. Hugo was living on a houseboat in Scowtown located in the shadow of the Carquinis Bridge. We had to walk along a maze of floating dock. A malato answered the door, then went and got The Gambler. In reading about gambling in Portland’s Scowtown, Hugo’s houseboat could have been the sight of a infamous poker game that was impossible to raid. You could see, and feel the cops coming as they rocked the dock.

Mr. Moyer told me he had a drawing of Scowtown on the wall in his office done by a Portuguese resident. I asked him if he would get it scanned and put on the museum webpage. I told him I was writing about my famous artistic sister. Dick didn’t get it. Royal Rosamond’s novel ‘Bound In the Clay’ was compared to ‘Tobacco Road’. consider John Steinbeck’s novel ‘Canary Row’.

Victor William Presco wanted to be a bigger man then his father. Above we see the captain with on e of his Chriscraft boats he had docked in Martinez, located about five miles from Crockett. In 1969 I took my father and his best friend and business partner, Ernie quinones, down to the estuary and showed them any empty plot of land. I told Vic he should get together some investors and build a commercial community here. Jack London Village was built several years later, and is now about to be torn down. How time flies. Mr. Moyer is kin to Jim Strehlow who owned Neptune Beach in Alameda. Bobby Jensen, the brother of the Yankee ball player, Jackie Jensen, did watercolors of the boats in Jack London Square, and was my teacher at McCheznie High.

I was living on my sailboat about a mile from the square when I had my brain-storm. In 1962 I did a watercolor of Oakland’s produce market where Vic operated Acer Produce in an old Victorian Warehouse located on 4th. Street and Webster. This painting was chosen to tour the world in a Red Cross show.

Ernie’s brother were the Mexican Mafia in San Quintin. Vic drank with Art who made Vic one with them. Above we see Ernie and Vic in Mexico investing in time-shares. Vic married a Mexican woman whom he smuggled across the border in a marijuana shipment. I took my friend Michael Harkins on a tour of the waterfront that took us deep into West Oakland. Mr. O’Harkins forbid me to blog about him. He likes to stay under the radar because he is a Private Investigator who is like Dashel Hammet’s ‘Continental Op’

Michael Harkins, and his family, have been close friends of mine, and other mutual friends, since 1965. Michael went to the California College of Arts and Crafts, and was good friends with the Stackpole family. Michael married the ex-wife of Bruce Perlowin who married a famous and dangerous Russian Spy while in the fed lock-up. A movie is being made about Bruce, the founder of Marijuana Inc, who lived in the Harkin’s basement for several month, and did business with Abbey Hoffman, there. Michael worked for Bruce who also founded a company called One World. Arround 1990 Michael and I went to lunch with William Linhart, the Private Investigator who Cayrl Chessman hired to keep him from going to the electric chair. We accompanied Bill to KTVU in Jack London Square where he was going to be interviewed.

Above is a painting of the duck hunting shacks located at the entrance of the Bay Bridge that Peter Stackpole photographed. Nick and Nora drive past these huts. The Thin Man movies are ‘Film Noir’. Nick had oddball friends. One of them was named ‘Meatball Murphy’. Sounds like Elmer ‘Big Bones’ Remmer the mafioso my mother worked for.

“Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood’s classical film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the last depression.

While fishing near the San Rafael Bridge, I an my friends were approached by three men who were unloading a freighter. They asked us what we are doing here. My Japanese drug dealer gave them a dirty look, and said;

“What does it look like we are doing?”

“Fishing?”

There was a Mexican Standoff. One of my friends is packing a piece. They thought we were cops posing as fishermen. We had stumbled on Perlowin’s smuggling operation we stumbled upon. Bruce had purchased equipment to spy on the Coast Guard. It was discovered that large vessels
went off radar when they went under the San Rafael Bridge. One could say we owned the waterfront as did the author Jack London. Royal Rosamond was a friend of Hammett, and taught Erl Stanley Gardener who to write.

After getting out of the Fed lock-up, Bruce was looking for a staight job. Vic interviewd ‘The King of Pot’ out at his Lafayette home where he ran a Loan business. In 1994, Captian Vic was convicted of loan sharking. The DA of Conra Costa wanted the names of his money men. The Cap told him to go fuck hiself.

Jon Presco

Copyright 2012

I Cover the Waterfront is a 1933 film, based on the book of the same name by Max Miller. The film was directed by James Cruze and stars Ben Lyon, Claudette Colbert, Ernest Torrance, and Hobart Cavanaugh.
A reporter investigates a dockland smuggling operation, and, in the process, becomes romantically involved with the daughter of the man he is investigating.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/70551203/The-Golden-Gate-Smuggling-Company

CORRECTION: Michael Harkins just corrected me: Bruce was not married to Michael’s wife: I got Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin mixed up – as do many people when you recall them. Jerry Rubin used to visit Bruce Perlowin when he lived in the basement of my freind, Wanda Harkins, the mother of Jeff, James, and Michael.

In the 1980s, he embarked on a debating tour with Abbie Hoffman titled “Yippie versus Yuppie.” Rubin’s argument in the debates was that activism was hard work and that the abuse of drugs, sex, and private property had made the counterculture “a scary society in itself.” He maintained that “wealth creation is the real American revolution. What we need is an infusion of capital into the depressed areas of our country.” A later political cartoon portrayed Rubin as half-guerrilla and half-businessman.[8]

McClure would later court controversy as a playwright with his play The Beard. The play tells of a fictional encounter in the blue velvet of eternity between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow and is a theatrical exploration of his “Meat Politics” theory, in which all human beings are “bags of meat.”

After the Vietnam War ended, Rubin became an entrepreneur and businessman. He was an early investor in Apple Computer.[7] During much of the 1970s and 1980s, he lived in Echo Park, California and ran a legal and civil rights office on the southwest corner of Echo Park Avenue and Sunset Blvd.
In the 1980s, he embarked on a debating tour with Abbie Hoffman titled “Yippie versus Yuppie.” Rubin’s argument in the debates was that activism was hard work and that the abuse of drugs, sex, and private property had made the counterculture “a scary society in itself.” He maintained that “wealth creation is the real American revolution. What we need is an infusion of capital into the depressed areas of our country.” A later political cartoon portrayed Rubin as half-guerrilla and half-businessman.[8]
Rubin’s differences with Hoffman were on principle rather than personal. When Hoffman died in 1989, Rubin attended his funeral.[9]

On November 14, 1994, Rubin jaywalked on Wilshire Boulevard, in front of his penthouse apartment [11] in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, California. It was a Monday evening and weekday traffic was heavy, with three lanes moving in each direction. A car swerved to miss Rubin but a second car, immediately behind the first, was unable to avoid him. He was taken to the UCLA Medical Center, where he died two weeks later. He is interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.City Streets is too early a movie to be labeled “film noir,” but with its focus on characters overwhelmed by fate and circumstance, and its strong mood of corruption and menace, it does emanate something of a noir attitude and can be seen as an important precursor to the style, along with such other films of its era as Underworld (1927), The Racket (1928), and Thunderbolt (1929).

The Continental Op is a fictional character created by Dashiell Hammett. A private investigator employed as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office, his name is never mentioned in any story.

Decades of witnessing human cruelty, misery, and ruin, as well as being instrumental in sending hundreds of people to jail, or to the gallows, have greatly weakened the Op’s natural sympathy with his fellow men. He fears becoming like his boss, “The Old Man”, whom he describes as “a shell, without any human feelings whatsoever”.

The home of the Bertram family in Scowtown on the Willamette river.  Illustration from the Sunday Oregonian, circa 1892
 
Scowtown

Life on the river, in the luxury of a modern houseboat, is the dream of many.  But in nineteenth century Portland, houseboat living was exclusively for the poorest of the poor.
    Imagine water lapping on the shore, ship’s bells ringing, an occasional seagull with the sound of footsteps crunching in the sand and gravel. 
     Now imagine that it’s eighteen ninety three Portland, and we’re walking the Western shore of the Willamette just North of today’s downtown, across the river from where the Memorial Coliseum now stands.  Seen over the bank to the west is the skeleton of Union Station, scheduled to be finished in eighteen ninety five.  To the South along the river where today a seawall stands are docks, piers and warehouses lining Southwest Front all the way to Jefferson Street.  In the mid-1890’s, many of these are abandoned, rat-filled ruins, un-approachable from the river due to a build up of silt and a lack of dredging.  North of us is the ballast pier, across from Swan Island. 
     Here, where we’re walking, are about twenty humble homes built on scows, or large, flat bottomed boats used in shallow water, or built on a raft of logs salvaged from the river. 
     Some are neatly painted and clean, others look like they would collapse in a light wind.  The whole settlement is dotted with the refuse of a nomadic existence. 
     On one particularly clean and orderly raft stands the neat, painted home of the Bertram family.  While some Scowtown residents resort to begging and petty crime for an income, here several Bertram men cut and split logs salvaged from the river which they sell to the wealthy homeowners along Northwest Seventeenth at two dollars, twenty five cents the cord for firewood, firewood that lines the streets and avenues of Portland in tall stacks on the parking strip. 
     Aboard the raft is Grandma Bertram, matriarch of the Bertram family, and several of girls of the family who tend their drying wash ashore or sweep the deck of their raft. 
     Next door is a particularly shabby residence inhabited by several Chinese Men.   Dressed in tradition silk knee length shirts, braided hair hanging in long queus, they labor with long oar-like sticks over a tub of steaming soapy water filled with the clothing of wealthier Portlanders.  Behind them along the shore are lines heavy with drying laundry, set up on driftwood poles. 
     A little girl of six or so, barefoot in a gingham dress lugs an oaken bucket heavy with drinking water from a well dug in the riverbank.  She struggles up a flimsy gangplank that threatens to break and toss her into the river at every step. 
     Scowtown settlements exist all up and down the Willamette, providing inexpensive housing with no rent for Portlanders of modest means.  And when one spot on the river becomes too crowded, noisy or polluted, it’s a simple matter to cast off from shore and to pole your raft to a new, fresh location, to start over.

For owners of brothels, gambling houses and other “colorful” businesses, it’s a well-known trick: When the police and city government start trying to run you out of town, you go — into a “whisky scow” anchored in the harbor.

In the rough and gamey frontier towns of 1870s Portland and East Portland, it was this last item that bothered the City Halls — not morals, but money. Both towns, at the time, were fairly friendly to prostitution; land-based brothels were operating highly successfully on both sides of the river. In fact, the city’s first police chief was part owner of a saloon that, some historians believe, dabbled discreetly in the trade as well. But these brothels paid liquor taxes. Nancy’s did not.
Several times throughout the 1870s, police from one side of the river or another tried to raid her boat. Nancy, tipped off by one satisfied customer or another, would simply hoist anchor and tow her bordello close to the shore of the city that was not conducting the raid. The towns were bitter rivals, and their police forces did not cooperate with each other, so this strategy was effective for many years. It’s also pretty likely that the cops on both sides of the river were sympathetic to her cause.

http://www.offbeatoregon.com/H1007d_floating-bordello-in-portland.html

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