The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
Download The King of Con Audio Book
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Upper Saddle River NJ, from time to time the Ridgewood blog does book reviews and we just finished the “King of Con ” by Thomas Giacomaro and Natasha Stoynoff published in 2018 . We received a copy from the author Tom Giacomaro , the “King of Con: himself through a mutual friend in early February and finally got to reading it this past weekend .
Continue reading The King of Con by Thomas Giacomaro and Natasha Stoynoff
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Saddle River NJ, Well, it was twenty years ago today…when a bunch of FBI guys got hit in the head with a million bucks, falling from the New Jersey sky.
Until that moment, April 2002 had been going okay for NJ con master, Thomas Giacomaro, author of the 2018 memoir The King of Con: How a Smooth-Talking Jersey Boy Made and Lost Billions, Baffled the FBI, Eluded the Mob, and Lived to Tell the Crooked Tale.
True, he was doing 18 months for embezzlement at Fort Dix prison, just south of Trenton. But it was easy time in a low-security prison. And he was such a clean, neat inmate…he was a shoo-in to get out by Christmas.
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Saddle River NJ, Childhood memories of spring are usually happy and bright: Icicles dripping, chocolate Easter bunnies, putting your sneakers on after a long, Jersey winter.
For local anti-hero, Thomas Giacomaro, spring reminds him of the day he saw his father almost kill two men.
Dear A.G.,
It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.
I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.
Continue reading Bari Weiss Quits in a Huff From New York Times Opinion Post
“The thing that scares me more than the high number of imbeciles in this country who wake up one morning and feel like they don’t like a statue or a word or parts of history and decide to start a war through social media or in the street is the lack of law and order. Police can barely defend a statue or a public institution being attacked by a bunch of kids, most of the time the small crowds have no problem toppling anything they want, nobody gets punished in the name of law after causing damage to public property, politicians inciting hate against institutions, police being seen as the enemy, schools changing long held names, corporations changing product names overnight, the opposition by either politicians or population against the extreme ideas and actions is very weak or non existent, people are scared to voice opposition because the slightest disapproval in social media will surely get them fired from work and ruin their lives. The level of madness is incredible and most of it is triggered by the extreme hate toward their own president. I immigrated here more than 25 yrs ago from Europe to the land of the free. I wish I never did. There is no difference between the persecution during communism in eastern Europe and what’s happening here. In fact here it is much worse because your life can instantly get ruined by the wrong post on social media. Your colleagues and “friends” can instantly hate you with no mercy you for the “wrong” opinion or expression. Terrible and tragic.”
“This country was successful and the envy of the world because of the rule of law. Now that the hordes have taken control and they can literally destroy a life in minutes through social media attacks, law only applies to certain groups of peaceful people we are headed for turmoil. The transformation of this country into some unrecognizable mix of socialism, humiliating and destroy white people, creating artificial divide between Americans of different colors and backgrounds and inciting them against each other is an experiment that will really destroy the world as we know it. Conflict after conflict, division after division is the path to self destruction. We are under the siege of extreme ideologies that nobody seems to be able to stand against.
I feel so bad for the children and I sympathize with the new couples who would rather raise dogs than kids.”
