Under watch: Melissa Huckabee and investment adviser Albert Vilar. Our codependent is the British medical journal “The Lancet”.
Under watch:
In an early 2009 piece on white collar crime, The Economist magazine suggests there may be some truth in something those who have read my books would predict: “Many [Club Fed and other white collar] prisoners suddenly discover, post-conviction, that they had a drinking problem….” I would add that those who don’t figure this out might benefit from greater introspection. In the spirit of The Economist’s discovery, recent stories follow for which the evidence of alcoholism is in the behavior itself.
Melissa Huckaby, 29, pleading guilty to the 2009 slaying of her daughter’s 8-year-old playmate Sandra Cantu in Tracy, California, in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table and dropping charges of rape. She had previously been charged with drugging a 7-year-old girl, along with a 37-year-old man whom police believe she had been dating. She had gone through a divorce and, just four years out of high school, bankruptcy. Despite the fact that she had accused her ex-husband John Huckaby of child abduction, domestic violence and alcohol abuse, he was stunned and told the press that while she battled “depression,” she “was not a violent person.” In addition to murder, she was arrested twice for petty theft and was suspected of two arson fires set eight days apart at the house where she lived in 2007. While she could simply be nuts, the fact that she drugged two people suggests she knows drugs as an addict would know them and, well, she committed murder and possibly other crimes—which puts the odds of addiction at well over 80%.
Alberto Vilar, 69, former patron of the arts and investment adviser, co-founder of Amerindo Investment Advisors Inc., sentenced to nine years in prison for bilking investors out of millions of dollars. The wheels of justice grind slowly: in the July 2005 TAR (“under watch”), I wrote: “Vilar, who spent big, lived high, made grandiose promises of bestowing charitable gifts and whose firm once managed $7 billion, reportedly now has no money and owes the Internal Revenue Service $24 million. The week he was arrested, he had boasted he was planning to take a close friend to Paris for his birthday and dine in London on the way back with Prince Charles. While blaming a series of back surgeries that left him bedridden for missing charitable pledges to hospitals, universities and opera houses, he admitted to taking 16 different medications for dislocations in his back.” His recent comment? “I deeply regret any inconvenience our 14,000 clients may have suffered. Fortunately, there are only five victims. I’m 95% confident they will be paid and not suffer a loss.” He still exhibits confabulated thinking and shows no remorse. The problem with pharmaceutical drug addicts is they can stay on their drugs legally, even while in prison.
Co-dependents of the month:
The British medical journal The Lancet, which fully retracted a study it published in 1998 by Dr. Andrew Wakefield linking measles-mumps-rubella vaccines to autism. The Lancet stuck to its story through 2004, when it found that Wakefield had been paid to conduct his study on children who were clients of a lawyer representing them in a lawsuit against the vaccine manufacturer, at which point it offered a partial retraction. The Lancet decision to fully retract came after British medical regulatory authorities confirmed years of allegations that Wakefield had lied about his patients and funding and had shown a “callous disregard” for the children by subjecting them to invasive and unnecessary procedures. I have long suspected that junk science is generally rooted in alcoholism, but as is all-too-common among professionals, including scientists, this cannot yet be proven: journalists don’t “out” them as they do celebrities and professional athletes. Yet, the mindset of a person making false claims in science is probably similar to one making false accusations, which due to its ego-inflating potential has often proved to be rooted in alcoholism. (Those interested in an alternative idea about the causes of autism may wish to check out Vitamin D Council.)