My Third Open Letter to Mike Lawlor: The Depraved Indifference of the "Prison Commissar" & The Subversive Uses of the "Wretched of the Earth."

Lumpenproletariat, noun: In Marxist terminology, the unorganized and unpolitical lower orders of society who are not interested in revolutionary advancement, to include the criminal class and beggars.

To constitute depraved indifference, the defendant's conduct must be 'so wanton, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the life or lives of others, and so blameworthy as to warrant the same criminal liability as that which the law imposes upon a person who intentionally causes a crime. Depraved indifference focuses on the risk created by the defendant’s conduct, not the injuries actually resulting. -- U.S.Legal.com.

Mike.Lawlor@ct.gov

7 February 2014

Mike Lawlor

Under Secretary, State of Connecticut

Office of Policy and Management, Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division

450 Capitol Avenue

Hartford, CT 06106

Dear Mike,

In my first letter to you we established the undoubted existence of your KGB file. In my second, we established that:

a. With words out of your own mouth, you were willing to commit treason to your country if the price was high enough;

b. From reports of my sources that you also were the subject of files on your conduct at the CIA and FBI as well as the KGB;

c. That, in a rather startling career move, you eschewed the life of a Soviet Studies academic at which you had made a brilliant start, went to law school, and (having attempted to join the CIA and been rejected) chose to become a zealous public prosecutor with a view to chasing the brass ring of power in Connecticut politics;

d. And finally, that these facts, statements and actions merely raised more questions and reinforced my earlier ones about who it is you are and where your real loyalties lie -- back during the Cold War as well as now.

But the fact of the matter is that, absent the publication of those files, all we have are questions, albeit good ones, and no factual answers -- as yet. But with this letter we move from mere questions to evidence that you yourself have provided in your public career, actions that some find inexplicable but which I, as an ex-collectivist myself, find perfectly sensible if you understand the subversive collectivist point of view, the depraved indifference of the True Believer and his embrace of the utility of the lie in furtherance of his objective.

Case in point, from less than a year ago, is Don Pesci's critique of your actions as Governor Malloy's "prison commissar" (his words) in an article entitled Lawlor’s Penology And The Corpse At The Hearing.

During a public hearing on the state’s new Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program, the informational portion of which was devoted to testimony given by politicians rather than the public, there was a dead body in the room, that of Ibrahim Ghazal, murdered by Frankie “The Razor” Resto shortly after Mr. Resto, a violent criminal, had “earned” early release credits from a program that was the brain child of Mike Lawlor, tapped early in his administration by Governor Dannel Malloy to serve as Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning.

Some of the public figures, notably among them Mr. Lawlor, danced nimbly around the corpse.

Mr. Lawlor, who has been tinkering with penological reform since his days as co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, was able to put some of his ideas into practice after his installation as Connecticut’s prison commissar.

Mr. Lawlor’s career in this regard has been marked by several successes. An early opponent of capital punishment, Mr. Lawlor was doubtless pleased when Connecticut gave up the barbaric practice of putting to death such multiple murderers as Michael Ross. Mr. Ross’ specialty was raping and strangling young women.

Mr. Lawlor, sitting as co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, argued strenuously during an earlier attempt to abolish the death penalty that capital punishment, encumbered as it was by endless appeals, was rarely applied and urged then Governor Jodi Rell “to reach out to our state's prosecutors and judges before taking action. Ask these front-line professionals their off-the-record opinions on whether anyone will ever be executed in Connecticut. I believe that she will be told what many of us have been told - the Connecticut death penalty is a false promise.”

. . . In 2003, Mr. Lawlor told the New York Times he favored "alternative ways of combating overcrowding, like making it harder to put people back in prison for technical violations of their parole,” which could result in re-incarceration, “and argued that transfers should be a last resort.” In response to prison overcrowding in 2004, Mr. Lawlor argued strenuously against the expansion of prisons. So persuasive was Mr. Lawlor that the bill, co-sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats, passed unanimously in the Senate and received only token opposition in the House. “The key,” Mr. Lawlor said at the time, “is to resist doing the simple thing - dumping a bunch of money into a new prison."

Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men are often torn asunder. Following the horrific home invasion and multiple murder in Cheshire -- in the course of which two paroled inmates raped two family members and murdered three people, a mother and two young daughters, by setting a house on fire -- Mr. Lawlor never-the-less continued to stump for early release: “Some people say let's put them all in jail. OK, fine, but that means dramatically increasing taxes or shutting down a bunch of colleges."

During a special session called to enact stiffer penalties for home invasion in 2008 following the murder by arson in Cheshire, a new law was passed making home invasion a class A felony, and the parole board under whose supervision the two convicted Cheshire murderers were released was reformed: In fact, the parole board was decimated; heads rolled. Mr. Lawlor at the time opposed efforts to pass a three strikes law, which was defeated. Had a three strikes and you’re out law been in place before the Cheshire murders, Connecticut would have been spared the necessity of housing on death row two murderers, both of whom had lengthy prison records.

Mr. Lawlor’s Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program is the crown jewel of his career in penological reform. In effect, the program repeals Mr. Lawlor’s earlier momentary setbacks.

The putative therapeutic benefits of the hastily launched, poorly conceived program had little effect on Frankie “The Razor” Resto. “The Razor,” so called because he had for some years been in the business of shaking down drug dealers with a razor, was given early release credits under Mr. Lawlor’s program -- even though, according to testimony given to the Judiciary Committee by newly elected State Senator Dante Bartolomeo, Mr. Resto fought while in prison with other inmates, dealt drugs, burnt his mattress, was in other ways an incorrigable prisoner, and unfortunately was never subject to the non-existent “Three-Strikes” law so ardently opposed by Mr. Lawlor.

The law establishing early release credits was passed October 1, 2011 and made retroactive to April 1 (no joke) 2006. Since the provisions of the bill were applied retroactively to 7,589 prisoners, many critics of the program contended that the applied credits were both UNDESERVED and unjust.

Having cashed in his credits, Mr. Resto acquired a gun, likely NOT from a gun show or an authorized dealer, and murdered Mr. Ghazal, whose son Fapyo, present at the hearing and also severely beaten in an earlier robbery at a different store, must in the future refer to his father forevermore in the past tense.

Speaking for every victim of Mr. Lawlor’s program, past, present and future, Mr. Ghazal’s son said at the hearing press conference, “This guy, he destroyed our life. He destroyed my mom’s life. He destroyed my life.” But by the time the real public spoke, Mr. Lawlor and his retinue of subalterns had left the hearing room relatively certain that Mr. Lawlor's utopian prison reforms would not be torn asunder by an obliging judiciary committee over which he once presided as co-chairmen.

You know, it takes more than a modicum of depraved indifference to hold to a policy that so obviously opens up your fellow citizens to the depredations of hardened criminals. But not even the evidence of the murder of Mr. Ghazal could deter the True Believer Mike Lawlor. And in the absolute pinnacle of irony, you managed to shove your deadly policy through in a bill which not only empowered the violent cons you sought to liberate and scatter among the populace so they could ply their deadly trade, but unconstitutionally disarmed their victims as well. From Don Pesci again, this time on 4 April of last year: Lawlor’s Stow-Away Bill

If Frankie “the Razor” Resto were an AR15 semi-automatic rifle and present laws banning him had been in effect on June 27, he would not have been permitted within spitting distance of Meridan when, newly released from prison, he entered an EZMart store and fatally shot its co-owner, Ibraham Ghazal, according to arrest records. But Mr. Resto was at that point only an ex-con who had been given get-out-of-jail-early credits under a problem plagued program that was the brainchild of Governor Dannel Malloy’s prison commisar, Mike Lawlor.

Mr. Resto's criminal resume was such that he should never have been given early release credits under any circumstances; he should never have been paroled, and he should have served his entire sentence behind bars. Following his release, Mr. Resto should have been monitored carefully by Mr. Lawlor’s somnolent watchdogs and rearrested if he so much as jaywalked.

But Mr. Resto never served his full sentence – because Mr. Lawlor is a penological utopianist whose views on prison reform bear the same relation to reality as does a fish to a bicycle. So far, Mr. Lawlor has been able to honey-tongue his way past two murders and more than 700 rearrests of prisoners given early release credits under his program.

But then, who’s counting? The answer to that question is: no one.

Michelle Cruz, Connecticut’s Victims Advocate, started to tote up the numbers, but her agitations on behalf of Mr. Ghazal’s still living family members so disturbed Mr. Lawlor and Mr. Malloy, who brooks no criticism that cannot be answered in one line quips on “Morning Joe,” that Ms. Cruz’s license to defend victims preyed upon by such as Mr. Resto was revoked. Her job was put on the block and, before you could say Cook County, Illinois is the most politically corrupt acreage in the nation, Ms. Cruz was replaced by a Chicago political operative who is certain to get along famously with Mr. Lawlor, Mr. Malloy and their prison reform measures.

Mr. Lawlor specializes in smuggling his problematic bills past the noses of his comrades on the judicial committee and foxing the foxes. He would make a super incorrigible prisoner, but perhaps not as accomplished as Mr. Resto . . . Mr. Lawlor, in a transparent attempt to smuggle his program past the noses of his more vigilant comrades in the legislature, initially packed his Risk Reduction Earned Credits bill in an implementer suitcase; the implementer bill is last minute measure usually designed to implement budget provisions, and it has always been easy to hide a rat in such omnibus bills.

This time around, Mr. Lawlor has attached his so called “reform” legislation putatively correcting problems in his program to a larger bill banning so called “assault” weapons; this after ranking member of the judiciary committee Senator John Kissel, during a special hearing on the defects of Mr. Lawlor’s problem infested program, put Mr. Lawlor on notice that members of the committee wanted to address the defects of his program in a stand-alone bill so that legislators might cast an honest up or down vote on his readjusted bill.

Mr. Lawlor’s proposed “reform” considerably worsens his present blood stained program because it codifies its most glaring defect and invites the imprimatur of a distracted General Assembly . The problem with Lawlor’s law is that it bestows upon violent criminals the same get-out-of-jail-early credits properly given to inmates who have not been convicted and sentenced for such crimes as rape, kidnapping, arson, first-degree manslaughter, assault of a pregnant woman, first degree assault, second degree strangulation, first degree threatening, having sex with someone under the age of 13, assault of a blind or disabled person and animal cruelty. . .

Mr. Suzio recently characterized Mr. Lawlor’s measure, stowed in the gun control bill affirmed by the Senate on April 4 and codifying the present arrangement suitable to Mr. Lawlor, as a “dangerous joke” and fraud upon the public. It is also a fraud upon Mr. Lawlor’s former colleagues who serve on the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee. It’s only a matter of time before yet another early-released criminal, his pockets bulging with good-time credits given to him by Mr. Lawlor, is prematurely set free to murder or rape some other Connecticut citizen who quite possibly had voted for Mr. Lawlor prior to his political assent as Mr. Malloy’s commissar of prisons.

In a column this past Sunday, Mr. Pesci points out that your jihad in favor of what Marx called the "lumpenproletariat" will have political consequences in the upcoming election. It is obvious from reading Mr. Pesci and other commentators that they find your depraved indifference to the effects of your program to be inexplicable, even mystifying as well as politically stupid and bumbling. Ah, but then we both know that they are NOT thinking as a collectivist subversive thinks, now don't we? To us, both having been inculcated in the collectivist dynamic of the lie, it is perfectly understandable, even predictable.

"Subversion — Actions designed to undermine the military, economic, psychological, or political strength or morale of a governing authority." -- Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Department of Defense; Joint Education and Doctrine Division (November 2010)

As we are of the same generation, both former college students, I am certain that you were assigned Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth as required reading by some long-forgotten leftist professor who thought he (or she) was being au courant. I'm sure you remember it as well as I do.

 

Unlike Marx, Fanon was enamored of the lumpenproletariat as a change agent for "liberation." As an accomplished student of the Soviet Union as well as a possible KGB mole, I will not insult your intelligence by lecturing you on the uses to which the KGB put Fanon's work in their subversion campaigns, within this country and around the world. Since this is an open letter, however, I will direct other readers to Yuri Bezmenov's lecture on Psychological Warfare Subversion & Control of Western Society from 1983.

The socialist Peter Worsley, in his essay on Fanon and the Lumpenproletariat, called them "the non-working classes," but what we're really talking about here, as you know, are criminals. Taking their clue from Fanon (they read Wretched as as if it were a religious text) the New Left and the Black Panthers celebrated the criminal class as the spearhead of Marxist revolution. They were the fighters, bred from childhood to "confront the Man." And, as Bezmenov points out, they were perfectly positioned to create the crises that every successful subversion campaign needs to succeed. Of course as the former KGB agent of subversion points out, such people would ultimately be summarily shot by the new regime, having served their purpose.

So, if embracing the interests of the criminal classes is demonstrating depraved indifference that is politically inexplicable, why do you do it? Why would you be motivated to go easy on the cons yet so draconian in your attitude to hitherto law-abiding firearm owners? Why the insistence on disarming the populace in the face of a predatory criminal class? The explanation could simply be that as a government functionary in a state that is widely seen as arbitrary and criminally corrupt, firearms in hands of people with whom you disagree politically make you nervous. Tyrannical governments are every bit as opportunistic as common criminals and in agreement that unarmed victims are the best victims. It could be that simple I suppose. But the intensity of your True Belief, the absolute sociopathic unconcern demonstrated by your depraved indifference may be no more complicated than your own personal failure -- that big hole in the middle that Doc Holliday ascribed to Johnny Ringo in Tombstone that I quoted in the last letter.

In Anton Myrer's great American novel Once An Eagle, the protagonist Sam Damon is confronted at critical moments in his life by another Army officer, Courtney Massengale, a man that Damon explains to his wife has a "funny little lack," tapping his heart in explanation. Massengale, Damon explains, just doesn't care about people. Later in the book, when Massengale is his commanding officer on an operation of great peril to Damon's division, Damon writes in his diary:

I have such a black feeling about this op. Can't shake it. He's trying just too damn much . . . He hates my guts. There it is. He hates my very guts and I despise him and fear him. Not HIM actually -- more what he will do, what he is capable of: like those visitations of the gods in Homer. There is something terrible inside him, in his soul. He talks about the big picture and command problems and knowledge of terrain but all that has nothing to do with it -- it's this other thing that slips along just under the surface . . . He doesn't feel. He doesn't LOVE MAN. Yes, old Homo mensura, with his prehensile claws and splayed feet, with his nobility and greed and hope and vanity and wonder, his immense possibilities. People. The guy bent over at the sink trying to work the sludge out of his knuckles with solvent, and his wife at the stove with her hair in curlers, shushing the kids over the booming racket of the radio. Her face catches the light in a certain way, or that tender, dreamy look comes over it as she watches the baby, and the guy at the sink straightens and moves up behind her and steals a kiss, and she laughs, fussing a little because he's still wet and soapy -- and then turns and hugs him in the middle of the kitchen floor, with the kids squabbling over the toys and the radio yammering away . . . All the men and girls with their dreams and derelictions, their quarrels and reconciliations, wrenched away from those intimate things now, those naked things, snatched up and flung harshly into jungles, mountains, burning desert sands for the preservation of this way of life we believe in so passionately -- and which has so many glorious things about it that the simple contemplation of it, late on a hot, still night like this one, between the jungle and the sea, 10,000 miles from home, can move you almost to tears . . . But Massengale doesn't see any of this. He can't love that guy at the sink, trying to work the grease out of his knuckles. And because he can't love him, he himself is only half a man.

So which is it? What motivates a man like you? -- to be so indifferent, so stony-hearted, to the agonies of Fapyo Ghazal, who cried out “This guy, he destroyed our life. He destroyed my mom’s life. He destroyed my life.” The murdered man's son may have been talking about Frankie “The Razor” Resto, but we both know he was talking about you too, for it was your policy that put Resto on the street. It is your policies which seek to disarm your fellow citizens in the face of savages like Resto.

So which is it? Are you a KGB mole who never got the word, like one of those bitter-ender Japanese holdouts staggering around the Philippine jungles into the 1990s? Are you the life-long collectivist acting out as best you can Fanon's appreciation of the lumpenproletariat as a change agent for some remnant of True Belief? Or are you simply a selfish sociopath, trading on the agonies of the innocent to make you feel important? Are you, quite simply, merely "half a man"?

Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.” So help us understand, Mike. Explain why you do what you do. What is the reason for your embrace of leniency for butchering murderers and your simultaneous rejection of, and unconcern about, that innocent man at the sink? Explain your tyrannical compulsion to disarm him in the face of those murderers, will you? What makes you think you have the right to interfere with his liberty, his property and his life, and that of his family? From whence does such sociopathic arrogance come?

In my next letter, we will begin to delve into the ramifications of the Law of Unintended Consequences in your peculiar case and introduce you to the existence of some men and women who call themselves the "One Hundred Heads Life and Casualty Company."

Have a nice day.

Sincerely,

Mike Vanderboegh

P.O. Box 926

Pinson, AL 35126