“Punchy Pirone”…
Great post about cop mobster Tony (AKA “Punchy”) Pirone. Kudos, Packratt. Also what a great moniker. That’s what I’m going to call him from now on.
SF Examiner published some interesting observations:
BART’s initial probe into the fatal shooting New Year’s Day of an unarmed passenger by a transit agency police officer is under fire after recently released footage of the incident shows another officer punching the Hayward father in the head prior to the shooting. That’s after BART announced it had completed its internal investigation into the death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant III and police Chief Gary Gee said only the shooter, former Officer Johannes Mehserle, was being investigated and that the other officers involved had followed proper police procedure.
Well now. Isn’t that interesting.
And, Gary Gee gets named their “Dim Bulb of the Week”:
What: Chief Gee was already under fire for the botched BART Police investigation of former officer Johannes Mehserle’s fatal shooting of an unarmed 22-year-old passenger, which sparked destructive riots across Oakland. Now Gee has cluelessly sent a memo on his own letterhead instructing rank-and-file officers how to send money, food, books and letters to Mehserle at Santa Rita Jail where he is being held on murder charges.
Why: This latest tin-eared episode surfaced at the same time as a previously unseen cell-phone video showing a second BART officer apparently hitting an unresisting Oscar Grant III just before the shooting — contradicting the BART internal report that all other officers at the scene behaved professionally.
Fallout: Attorney John Burris, representing the dead man’s family in a $25 million claim against BART, said Grant’s mother was “appalled” by the memo. She has every right to be.
Meanwhile, Punchy Pirone’s lawyer Bill Rapoport is so desperate that he’s actually going to argue that Punchy was provoked. And that Punchy was trying to protect his partner, a female officer.
It is contrary to our own eyes. Several men, including Oscar Grant, were seated with their backs against the wall, surrounded by cops. Out of the blue, and for no apparent reason, Punchy Pirone can be seen marching into the frame from the lefthand side. He’s pointing at a seated Oscar Grant. You can clearly see Punchy directing speech, seemingly toward Oscar Grant, along with the pointing.
You can clearly see Oscar responding to what might have been an order. After all, if you were seated on your ass, with your back to the wall, surrounded by cops… and a big, burly cop comes aggressively toward you, pointing at you and directing his speech at you… you’d probably stand up as well. Maybe you were told to stand up. Or maybe you were standing up to try to be polite, a trained social reflex: officer addresses you, you sit up straight and comply with orders.
See, once Punchy Pirone arrives in the immediate area (which had been controlled before his immediate presence), he physically assaults Oscar Grant and is screaming at him.
Watch the video again. Closely.
How any sane person can say that it was necessary for anyone’s safety, that Punchy Pirone walk up onto a controlled scene, and assault someone? Turning it, ultimately, into a murder scene?
As Oscar was seated, surrounded by officers, he could not have been assaulting Punchy’s female partner. It is scientifically impossible. How can you do both at the same time? Unless we’re talking about theoretical quantum physics or something, where… in this universe Punchy Pirone will be rolling up on and then punching and screaming at an unarmed man sitting on the floor, but in another universe Punchy Pirone will be walking up to Oscar to give him a bouquet of roses and ask for his hand in marriage—and yet in another universe Punchy Pirone will be wearing a tutu and spinning ’round and ’round in a lovely pirouette. And so on.
It’s not possible. We’ve seen the videos. We know. We cannot unknow, after having seen it with our own eyes.
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