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Also last week, a few hundred miles southwest of Wolds, in Cardiff, Wales, the foreman of a jury faced Alan Rashid, accused of making a threat to kill, and read the verdict: "not guilty." Unfortunately for Rashid, another juror coughed while the verdict was being delivered -- just as the foreman said "not." The judge -- influenced, perhaps, by the Trial of Alice -- then sentenced the perplexed Rashid to two years in prison and off he went. It was only when a brave juror wondered aloud why an innocent man was going to jail that the judge realized his error. In a laudable show of fair play, he immediately freed Rashid, who was "very relieved."

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As for luckless blokes, after being arrested last week, New York Yankees outfielder Darryl Strawberry, who can definitely think on his feet, explained that the cocaine found wrapped in a $20 bill in his wallet didn't belong to him. OK, we'll accept that. And it belongs to ...? His wife's uncle, who must have left it in Strawberry's car's glove box the night before, said the ballplayer (amazingly enough, his wife's uncle denies it). The next day, Strawberry removed the folded 20 from the glove box and, without unfolding it, tucked it in his wallet. Right, if you say so. And now would all earthlings who would first unfold the 20 please raise their hands. That's not to suggest that events unfolded differently than the way Strawberry tells it, but you've got to admit that when it comes to tortured logic, he out-torques Torquemada.

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Strawberry, however, has time to put his problems behind him, unlike Brose Gearhart. "I got nothing to say, I guess," was the best Gearhart could do last week before being sentenced to up to four years for selling crack cocaine out of his Saugerties, N.Y., home. Gearhart was first busted for crack possession in 1997, and was popped again in March 1998 for felony possession with intent to sell -- the rap that's just put him in storage. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, 43-year-old Debra Bailey, also snagged for coke vending, is now counting down four and a half to nine years in state prison. Saugerties police say that Gearhart was selling $1,000 worth of crack a week and often traded the stuff for sex with prostitutes. Maybe a stretch in the joint will give him some time to mature. The bummer is that last Friday was the ex-dealer's birthday -- his 90th.

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I don't know about you, but I can't get enough of Chuck and Marla. If the days of our lives flow like sand through the hourglass, then we've got the entire Gobi coming our way at the New York trial of Chuck Jones, the man who loved Marla Maples' shoes just a little too much. For the past week, Jones, Maples' former publicist, has been acting as his own lawyer in a retrial that could net him four years in stir if convicted. At his 1994 trial (conviction overturned on a technicality), he acknowledged that his profound feelings for Maples' footwear compelled him to bonk her Birkenstocks, which is better than to never have loved at all. But then the heel didn't have the decency to walk them home (we're talking 70 pairs!), and that's a felony.

According to a report in the New York Post, last Friday, Maples' mother, Ann, broke down under Jones' cross-examination. Described sympathetically in the Post as a "50-something Sophia Loren lookalike," testifying "tearily in her Georgia drawl," Ann Maples denied that she took home the papaya-sized engagement ring that Donald Trump gave her daughter in order to show it off to friends. "I didn't show it!" she said. "And didn't your husband ... check its authenticity by scraping it across a mirror?" asked the cheeky Jones. But Ann Maples didn't get a chance to respond before the prosecutor objected, the judge sustained and decency was restored. The miniseries, I mean trial, could go on for weeks.

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Even though he once ran with crime's Alpha males, the tawdriness of the Jones case would probably have amused Los Angeles Times reporter Nieson Himmel, but we'll never get a chance to ask him. Himmel was on a first-name basis with everyone from Raymond Chandler and Mickey Cohen to Bugsy Siegel (who you can be sure he didn't call "Bugsy"). And he'd covered every L.A. crime story of any significance since World War II, including the "Black Dahlia," but on March 13, the last of the old-school crime reporters caught a cab for the next world. In the Times obituary, staff writer Miles Corwin described Himmel, 77, as " a Buddha-like figure who stood 5 feet 7 and weighed nearly 300 pounds ... During the late 1940s, [he] cruised the city, from dusk to dawn, with a 500-pound photographer everyone called 'Tiny,' listening to the police dispatchers on his dashboard scanner and often arriving at crime scenes before detectives."

Better known around the Times for his eccentricities than his writing, Himmel never owned a car: He was a serial renter. He'd pay the daily car rental rate and proceed to fill the vehicle with what Corwin described as "an odorous melange of partly eaten hamburgers, chicken bones, fast-food wrappers, French fries and stacks of newspapers." When he could no longer see out the rear window, he'd turn in the car and rent another.

Among a vast array of unusual acquaintances, Himmel had counted Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, with whom he shared a Pasadena mansion in the late 1940s. "He was a guy on the make," Himmel once said. "I couldn't stand him." Another reporter, Dick Turpin, worked with Himmel decades ago at the Times. In an interview last week with the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, Turpin, who now heads up a club of retired L.A. journalists called the Old Farts Society, told how the Great Buddha of crime reporting was honored by his friends. "We had a silent moment for Nieson," Turpin recalled, "and because he's so big we had two empty chairs at the bar for him."

Grab your camera, Tiny, you and Himmel are going cruising again.
salon.com | April 22, 1999

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