Here is the excerpt from the entry from Wikipedia under “the murder of Julissa Brisman.”
The armed robbery, kidnapping, and murder of Julissa Brisman (April 24, 1983 – April 14, 2009) in Boston, Massachusetts occurred on April 14, 2009.
On April 20, 2009, citing security camera footage and Internet-based evidence, police arrested Philip Markoff, a 23-year-old, living in the High Point apartments in Quincy, Massachusetts, and charged him with the murder of Brisman on April 14 among other crimes. The arrest took place on Interstate 95 in Walpole, Massachusetts, while Markoff and his fiancée were en route to Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut. He had over $1,000 cash on him at the time of his arrest.,, Boston investigators suspect that Markoff may have preyed on erotic services providers because of a gambling problem.
According to other published reports, Markoff’s gambling addiction began when he was a college student. He came to Boston as a medical student at Boston University and continued to visit Foxwoods with increasing frequency. The case against him alleges that he began to target masseuses and other sex workers because they kept supplies of cash and were unlikely to report crimes against them.
If the allegations about Markoff’s gambling habits turn out to be true – the circumstantial evidence is strong – we can only wonder what the long-term effect of placing thousands of slot machines and casinos all over the state – some of which will be easily available to the the hundreds of thousands of students on public transportation – will have.
Future generations will look back on this decision and wonder how gambling fever caused some of Massachusetts most principled progressive leaders to abandon the commitments to which they had devoted their political careers. But at this point the legislature has lost the capacity for rational thought.
It’s bad enough that the assertion that the legislation will create thousands of jobs at no cost to the Commonwealth is demonstrably false. What is worse is that it will create future Philip Markoffs . And future Julissa Brismans will suffer the consequences.
a very chilling reminder, indeed.
I don’t want slots – for a number of reasons.
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p>But I find this argument more than tenuous. Allowing slots in Massachusetts will spawn Phillip Markoffs and more Julissa Brismans will be killed? Come on. It wasn’t a slot machine that created the sociopathic Markoff.
His means was Craigslist. His motive was to raise money to pay off thousands in gambling debt.
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p>Patrick, a blogger for Smooth Talk Sports, and a family friend of both the Markoffs and the McAllisters (Markoff’s fiancee) put it this way, as reported here
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p>Philip Markoff was not robbing women for ice cream money. Would you be prepared to argue that one can have an unlimited increase in gambling addiction with no ill effects?
One of his many reasons for opposing slots may well be concerns about addiction. Gambling debt appears to be this person’s motive, but banning it on the basis of this case makes as much sense as making Craigslist the scapegoat and shutting down that site.
Alcoholics sometimes get violent and also desperate to feed their addiction, but we don’t ban it; we do our best to regulate it.
The state does not PROMOTE the drinking of alcohol as a means of creating jobs and raising money for its coffers. Between the lottery, slots, and casinos we are talking about the state encouraging the use of a dangerous product by one portion of the population in order to raise revenues for another.
Indeed: the state chose to make it legal, when it was previously banned outright. Not only that, the sale of alcohol is regulated by the state, subject to special licensing and regulation, and is specially taxed. They allow it to be advertised!
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p>We are raising money on the backs of alcoholics!
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p>We must ban this pernicious practice, along with the sale of tobacco products and fatty foods, upon which the state rakes in meals taxes.
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p>The primary reason I remain skeptical of the anti-casino crusade is because it is, at its heart, puritanical. You sound like Carrie Nation. X is a sin, we don’t want people doing X, and therefore we should ban X.
Alcohol is not illegal in this state — and neither is gambling. But the worst and most dangerous forms of each, up until this point, is illegal (and, indeed, there are different forms of alcohol that are banned in this state and across the country). We just decriminalized pot in this state, because the overwhelming evidence is it’s not physically addictive — if the evidence pointed in a different way, there would have been a different result. But you don’t see a big movement to decriminalize heroine, because that’d be stupid. It’d be almost as stupid to decriminalize slot machines, which double the rate of addictions and suck regional economies dry, exporting the cash to companies either in Las Vegas or across the Globe.
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p>Or, if we want to be equally blunt, we could say the primary reason reason opponents “remain skeptical of the pro-casino crusade is because it is, at its heart, about the special interests and people too stupid to even want to do a cost-benefit analysis.”
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p>While I think its horrendous to discount the human toll slot machines can take on families with an addict — which would be 5% of this state within two or three years of slots (or about 1 in 4 families with an addict) — the primary reason why I oppose them is because, on the merits, they’re a bad idea. They will cost this state and its people way more than it brings in. If the calculus was there was enough of a net-gain to mitigate the human toll, and then some, I’d give it my blessing, but neither house of the state legislature is particularly interested in having that kind of a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis, which makes me surmise both branches are almost certainly afraid of the results.
Alcohol was banned in Massachusetts for the entire second half of the 19th century and for much of the first half of the 20th century. Until recently, it was illegal in Mass for more time than it has been legal. The entire justification for prohibition was that those stupid immigrants just cant control themselves and will do terrible things to their finances and families just for the demon rum. To a large extent, this was and is true. People are addicted to alcohol, and this addiction does an awful lot of damage to an awful lot of people.
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p>It was, nevertheless, an extraordinarily intrusive and oppressive method of saving the stupid immigrants and poor people from themselves. But the repeal of prohibition was widely supported by– liquor distillers, who yearned to make profits off of those poor drunks’ misery. Duh. The liquor companies were right.
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p>The argument on gambling is exactly the same. The anti-gambling folks know where and how people should spend their time and money, and are going to try to force it, for our own good. The only arguments advanced by anti-casino people here have been variations on (i) puritanical prohibitionism, and (ii) pointing out that casinos are run for profit, and that businesses that run casinos would like to run casinos.
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I think I’ll wear pink today.
Real wealth will go over seas and to the same sociopathic neobarons who crashed capitalism on the rocks of greed.
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p>The kind of wealth that creates the Yeoman Class (remember when there was a middle class in American) stems from manufacturing, farming, innovation and actual service – not the sucking pits that masquerade as entertainment and are given the name “Casino”.