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BADFELLAS

Craig M. Kitts, 44, was indicted earlier this year by a Portage County grand jury on one count of carrying a concealed weapon, a fourth-degree felony,

Sunday 1 August 2010

Craig M. Kitts, 44, was indicted earlier this year by a Portage County grand jury on one count of carrying a concealed weapon, a fourth-degree felony, and one count of possession of heroin, a fifth-degree felony.

Ravenna police spokesman Lt. David Rarrick said officers came into contact with Kitts on Sept. 4, 2009, while responding to a report of a suspicious person in the 400 block of South Walnut Street.

Officers checking the area located Kitts and questioned him, Rarrick said. While questioning Kitts and patting him down to make sure he was not armed, officers found a spring-loaded knife and heroin, he said.

Rarrick said Ravenna police have had numerous contacts with Kitts in the past. He said the seizure of the knife was a positive outcome as “someone with a concealed weapon is a concern to us.”

Kitts, who is currently incarcerated in a community-based corrections facility in Summit County, was granted a personal recognizance bond June 30 by Judge John Enlow during his arraignment on the charges in Portage County Common Pleas Court.

A trial date is set for Nov. 30, according to court records. The weapons charge is punishable by up to 18 months in prison, and the drug charge up to a year in prison.

The concealed weapons charge is a felony because of Kitts’ prior conviction on involuntary manslaughter and felony domestic violence charges in the November 2000 death of his wife, Lori Kitts.

According to prior accounts of the case in the Record-Courier, Craig and Lori Kitts got into an argument on Nov. 4, 2000, in their home at 121 Brady St. in Kent. A police investigation later revealed that Craig Kitts smashed his wife’s head between the front door and a wall of the house.

Lori Kitts, 27, was found unconscious 60 feet from the couple’s home in front of another house on Brady Street. She died the next day at Akron City Hospital. The couple were parents of an 18-month-old child.

An autopsy found that Lori Kitts had suffered numerous blunt force injuries to her head. Kent police arrested Craig Kitts on Nov. 17 and he was indicted a week later on murder and felony domestic violence charges.

A jury convicted Craig Kitts in February 2001 of involuntary manslaughter, a third-degree felony, and domestic violence, a fifth-degree felony, and he was sentenced in March 2001 by Portage County Common Pleas Judge Joseph Kainrad to six-years in prison, the maximum allowable by law on the two charges.

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Ali Osman Gok,The man, who was a senior member of an international drugs gang, arranged to smuggle £30 million of heroin into Britain

Ali Osman Gok,The man, who was a senior member of an international drugs gang, arranged to smuggle £30 million of heroin into Britain hidden inside the fuel tank of an articulated lorry.
The Home Office spent two years trying to deport Ali Osman Gok after he was freed from prison in 2008.But his lawyers successfully overturned their efforts by mounting a lengthy series of appeals, focusing on a little-known, 30-year-old treaty between the EU and Turkey which mainly deals with import duty on fruit and vegetables.
Gok, 40, who lives in north London with his wife and two daughters, is now free to remain in Britain indefinitely.
Immigration campaigners have described the decision is "ridiculous" and criticised lawyers for using "obscure" rules to prevent deportation of serious criminals.
The treaty which enabled Gok win his case governs tariffs on goods between Turkey and Europe, and includes a detailed list of aubergines, watermelons, marrows and other foodstuffs covered by the agreement.
Known as "Decision 1/80 of the Association Council of September 19, 1980", it also includes a number of "social provisions" which were the key element of the case put forward by Gok's solicitor.
It meas that Turkish nationals can only be denied the right to live and work in European Community states if they pose a "specific risk of new and serious prejudice to the requirements of public policy".
The Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT) made its decision despite hearing that Gok had been a key member of one of the biggest heroin smuggling plots the UK has ever seen.
The plot saw 345lbs (157 kilograms) of heroin smuggled through a British port hidden in a secret compartment in a Slovenian-registered truck.
Police used a helicopter and plain clothes officers to observe the lorry's progress through Folkestone and around the M25 to the Rookery Cafe on the Great North Road at Welham Green, Hertfordshire, where the driver transferred the drugs from the customised fuel tank to the cab.
Shortly afterwards police intercepted the lorry, and arrested the driver as well as Gok and his co-defendant Mahir Kaynar.
Gok's crime was described as "despicable" by the trial judge who sentenced him to 30 years' imprisonment, later reduced to 20 years by the Court of Appeal. He served a total of nine years and three months before being released in February 2008.
The AIT Judge, Peter Moulden, said: "It is clear that his offence, involving the importation of a very large quantity of heroin worth at street value in the region of £30 million, was an offence with the potential to do enormous damage to many people.
"There was no doubt that when he was convicted the appellant posed a serious and current threat to public policy and security and there was likely to be a propensity to re-offend.
"However, that was in 1997 and I must consider the position now."
He added: "Looking at all the evidence in the round I find that the appellant does not pose a genuine or sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society."
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch, said: "This is getting increasingly ridiculous. If a major drugs smuggler can't be thrown out then who can be?
"Lawyers are finding one obscure means after another to prevent the deportation of serious criminals who we would be much better off without."
The drug smuggler launched his appeal against deportation based on Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a family life.
Gok argued that he had a 13-year-old daughter and an infant daughter born after his release from prison who would suffer if he was deported.
He also argued that he would be at risk of retribution from Turkish criminals who helped organise the plot.
Because the court accepted his argument on Decision 1/80, the AIT made no further ruling on the human rights arguments.
A Home Office spokesman said: "We were very disappointed with the court's ruling in this case and it was in the public's interest that we tried to remove this individual from the UK.
"Any foreign criminal serving more than 12 months in prison is automatically considered for deportation."
Earlier this year The Sunday Telegraph disclosed that an Iraqi immigrant who stabbed two doctors to death had been awarded the right to stay in Britain by the AIT because he would pose a danger to the public in his homeland.

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Scott tried to sell the First Folio in order to wipe out his debts and also allow him to marry his Cuban girlfriend

What lifts the case out of the ordinary is not just the property – one of the rarest books in the world – but Scott himself, a man who has committed a crime so iconic that even a classic Ealing comedy couldn’t do justice to its daring, its eccentricity and its downright silliness.

The champagne-drinking, cigar-smoking, Ferrari-driving 53 year old was found guilty at Newcastle Crown Court on July 9 of handling stolen goods and smuggling a stolen copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, reportedly worth £3 million, to the US.

He was warned by Judge Richard Lowden that he faces an “inevitable substantial custodial sentence”, having already been branded by the chief prosecutor as a “dishonest conman and serial thief”.

The colourful case has drawn in the FBI, rare book experts in America, the world-renowned Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, the British Embassy in the city ... oh, and a humble Pot Noodle.

This is a man who thinks he’s James Bond.
Durham detective
It began when Scott, a man who favours Tiffany sunglasses even indoors, walked into the Folger unannounced one morning in June 2008 and told chief librarian Richard Kuhta that he would like them to examine an “old Shakespeare book”.

He had come to the right place. The Folger has no fewer than 79 copies of the First Folio, which dates from 1623 and includes the Bard’s complete works. Of the 700-plus copies originally printed, only 231 are known to exist. Of these 231, nine are unaccounted for.

“I met Mr Scott at the security desk,” Kuhta says. “I was greeted by a gentleman in very tropical gear.He had an oversized T-shirt on with large fish on the chest, lightweight summer pants, loafers with no socks, and sunglasses which he never removed the entire time we were together that morning.”

Scott produced a First Folio which he said he had acquired in Cuba and which he wanted the Folger to authenticate. Kuhta, aware that First Folios, the most documented book in the world, were not in the habit of walking in off the street, looked at it and quickly deduced that it had been mutilated.

He told Scott that he would like to retain the book for 48 hours to examine it. What he did not know at the time was that the First Folio had been stolen from Bishop Cosin’s Library, part of Durham University Library, 10 years earlier in an incident that had shocked scholars all over the world.

Scott was happy to oblige, and returned to his room at DC’s plush, five-star Mayflower Hotel. He then took it upon himself to inform the Washington Post that he had found an “unrecorded”First Folio.

But alarm bells had already begun to ring in Kuhla’s mind. Was this book really one of the missing nine folios?

He contacted Daniel De Simone, from the Library of Congress, who saw that the book had been stripped of some of its leaves. He knew it had been cleaned and prepared, rather than having lain in a dusty attic.

“From my perspective there was a problem with the situation,” he said.

The Folger then consulted rare book expert Stephen Massey who, using data published by Anthony James West, a world expert on First Folios, realised that the book had come from Durham. But Scott had already left DC. Kuhta alerted the FBI, and Durham police in turn were alerted by the British Embassy in Washington.

The force was given details of the story that Scott had spun in Washington: that he was a millionaire who was selling the family heavy plant machinery business in Scotland. His mother lived in Monte Carlo, and he also had connections with Lichtenstein. The truth, as police found when they traced Scott in Wingate, County Durham, was more prosaic: he was unemployed, and lived in a three-bed semi with his mum, who was in her 80s.

“He’s an eccentric character,” says one Durham detective. “This is a man who thinks he’s James Bond.”

Scott has maintained all along that when he was in Cuba he had met, and fallen for, a 21-year-old dancer. He said he acquired the Folio from a Cuban man who, he claimed, used to be a personal bodyguard to Fidel Castro. The book, he explained, was simply this man’s family heirloom.

But police discovered that he was in the UK, indulging himself in a spending spree, in the dates he claimed he was in Cuba. When questioned by police about the discrepancy, he had no answer. He also maintained he had flown from Cuba to Washington DC via the Bahamas, but police found he had actually flown to DC from Heathrow. The net was closing in.

On one occasion Scott arrived at the police station to answer police bail in a Hummer, clutching champagne, a cigar and, for reasons best known by himself, an opened Pot Noodle.

He was subsequently charged with theft and handling stolen goods. The trial heard he had never worked and had piled up £90,000 in maxed-out credit-card debts.

In court he exercised his right not to give evidence, but he had earlier told police that the academics had conspired against him. He was acquitted of theft but convicted of handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from the UK.

Police have speculated that Scott tried to sell the First Folio in order to wipe out his debts and also allow him to marry his Cuban girlfriend, to whom he sent £10,000 in one five-month spell.

The First Folio itself, now back at Durham University library, will be the centrepiece of an exhibition of University treasures starting in January.

In this respect at least, it’s true that all’s well that ends well.

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