Real Think Tank: 01.03.10

Police: Bizarre jewel heist was inside job

New York (CNN) -- Two men have been arrested in a bold and bizarre jewelry store robbery involving crooks who disguised themselves in Hasidic Jewish attire, complete with hats and false beards, police announced Tuesday.

But all was not as it seemed, according to police. The heist was actually an elaborate inside job set up by the store's owners, who were $1 million in debt and six months behind on their rent, police said.

The New York Police Department announced Tuesday that Atul Shah, 43, and Mahaveer Kankariya, 43, both of New Jersey, have been arrested on charges of grand larceny, insurance fraud and falsifying business records.

The two men, co-owners of the Dialite Imports jewelry store in Manhattan's diamond district, are in custody, authorities said.

The costumed robbers connected to the crime remain at large.

According to NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, two armed men casually walked into the commercial office building where Dialite Imports was located on the afternoon of December 31, 2008. They were dressed in traditional looking Orthodox-style clothing and quickly gained access to the store's safe, spray-painting two security cameras in the process.

The two thieves appeared to make off with about $4 million in diamonds and other jewels.

Immediately after the robbery, Shah told the New York Post that his insurance company had instructed him to refrain from commenting about the heist. "They told me I cannot say anything right now," he said at the time.

But police said Tuesday that investigators became suspicious of the incident when it was discovered that Shah and Kankariya got a new insurance policy just before the apparent robbery.

The owners of the jewelry company hired the two men "to play the armed robbers and dressed them up as Hasidic Jews to avoid causing suspicion," Browne said.

The robbery and security camera footage of the two supposed orthodox outlaws gained particular attention because of the similarities between the staged robbery and the 2000 movie "Snatch," in which diamond thieves donned similar outfits for their burglary.

Nude Photos of Trina Leak To the Web

Nude photos of rapper Trina leaked to the Internet over the weekend, showing the female MC in several personal poses.

The pics -- which were posted atWorldStarHipHop.com -- appear to be taken via cellphone.

In the photos, the Miami rapper is seen exposing her breasts with a clear shot of her face in one, while another shows a close up of what is assumed to be her crotch. There are also numerous, clothed, photos of Trina and her NBA boyfriend Kenyon Martin, as well as close-up pics of some sort of skin reaction.

While details regarding the leakage were unknown at press time, coincidentally, Trina spoke about the possibility of embarrassing photos being leaked during an interview released a week prior, where she revealed that she had lost her cellphone.

In an interview with Str8NYC.com, the rapper was asked how she felt about the leakage of sex tapes and nude photos for publicity. In response, Trina said she felt it was an invasion of privacy, and would be devastated if personal photos of herself were made public.

"I personally would not want a picture of me exposed leaked," Trina told the website. "I lost my phone, and I had some pictures of me that I don't want the world to see. I'm thinking that if it ever came out, I'm devastated. It's not sex tape pictures, but it's still ... I don't want you to see it. Losing a phone, it happens.

"I was so devastated about this phone. I was calling up my mom crying like 'Mom...' I just feel like what's personal is personal," she continued. "I don't feel like, as an artist, that I need to do anything to expose myself. I don't need to put out a nude photo for press. I don't need to do that. I don't want a sex tape of me and my significant other to be worldwide for the world to see. That's a personal endeavor."

Despite the photos being lost along with her phone, Trina made it clear that the public would never see a sex tape ... because she's never made one and never will.

"For me, I don't have no sex tape, you ain't gonna see no sex tape, and I didn't make none. If I made one, I'm keeping it. You ain't gonna have it," she said.

Quadriplegic man loses sight after bizarre AC/DC wheelchair accident

A QUADRIPLEGIC man injured at the Queensland AC/DC concert has lost sight in his right eye after being catapulted off a podium when his mate accidentally hit the joystick of his motorised wheelchair.

The Courier-Mail reports Terry Watson, 31, of Morningside stabbed himself in the face with a metal manipulator prong as his wheelchair crashed more than a metre into the mosh pit at the Queensland Sport and Athletic Centre on Saturday night.

Wayne Watson, his father, said "all was going well'', at the hospital and his son had forgiven his mate's carelessness.

But the father was upset QSAC did not place a proper barrier in front of the concert wheelchair section.

"If there had been a rail there, he wouldn't have gone over the side,'' he said.

Photos obtained by The Courier-Mail show that the podium had side and rear barriers but the only front barrier was a strip of floor timber and plastic caution tape.

Workplace Health and Safety officials were investigating yesterday.

Mr Watson said his son, a former truck driver paralysed four years ago in a vehicle accident, did not turn off his wheelchair motor because he needed to continually shift his chair because of his disability.

An automatic brake was not set when the motor was being used, he said.

The band was nearing the end of their concert when the freak accident happened.

"He was loving it,'' his father said.

WWII Vintage War Posters…last of Nazi stuff for tonight.

WWII Vintage War Posters

4 charged with hacking into concert ticket sites

By DAVID PORTER (AP) – 3 hours ago

NEWARK, N.J. — Four California men were charged on Monday with using sophisticated computer programs to fraudulently obtain more than a million tickets to concerts and sporting events and reselling them for a profit estimated at $29 million.

Although the tickets they bought and resold were authentic, prosecutors say the group used the programs to bypass safeguards meant to restrict the number of tickets that each customer can buy. According to a 43-count indictment, the four men and their company, Wiseguy Tickets Inc., devised software that impersonated individual ticket buyers to bombard online ticket services such as Ticketmaster and Major League Baseball.

"This drove more tickets into the hands of ticket brokers instead of individuals," U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said.

The group focused on highly coveted premium tickets to big-ticket events such as concerts by Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Dave Matthews and Hannah Montana as well as sporting events such as the Major League Baseball playoffs, the 2009 Sugar Bowl and the 2007 BCS college football championship game, Fishman said.

Many of the events were held at New Jersey's Giants Stadium, Izod Center and Prudential Center, but others were spread across the country, including New York City, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Tampa, Fla., according to the indictment.

Kenneth Lowson, 40, Kristofer Kirsch, 37, Faisal Nahdi, 36, all of Los Angeles, and Joel Stevenson, 37, of Anaheim, Calif., face charges that include conspiracy, wire fraud and unauthorized computer access. The wire fraud counts are the most serious and carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years per count.

Mark Rush, a Pittsburgh attorney representing Lowson, called the indictment "disheartening" and characterized what his client allegedly did as a more sophisticated version of getting a bunch of friends together and sleeping out to try to get tickets first when ticketing offices open in the morning.

"All these guys really did was invent a better mousetrap to buy tickets," Rush said. "That's all."

Attorneys for the three other men did not immediately return phone messages Monday. Lowson, Kirsch and Stevenson surrendered in Newark on Monday; Nahdi is out of the country and is expected to surrender within the next few weeks, according to prosecutors.

According to the indictment, the defendants worked with computer programmers in Bulgaria to create a computer network that was able to fool mechanisms that ticket sites have in place to make would-be buyers prove they are humans.

Such mechanisms, known as CAPTCHA, involve making the buyers type random words or characters shown on their screen before proceeding to purchase tickets. That's difficult for a computer to do, but according to the indictment, the defendants bypassed the system by, among other things, having employees and agents create databases of answers ahead of time by manually going through tens of thousands of CAPTCHA challenges.

The company was able to snap up the best seats as soon as they were made available online because the programs were able to complete transactions more quickly than real humans vying for tickets manually. For example, Fishman said, Wiseguy bought nearly half the 440 available floor tickets for a Bruce Springsteen concert at Giants Stadium in 2008. In most cases, individual buyers are restricted to a maximum of four tickets.

"They undermined the primary market for premium tickets at a slew of events," Fishman said.

The defendants are accused of using hundreds of credit card numbers from ticket brokers and friends, along with thousands of fake Internet domain names and e-mail addresses, to disguise who actually was purchasing the tickets.

Wiseguy then would sell the tickets to brokers for an average markup of $30 apiece, Fishman said, though in some cases the markup reached as high as $1,000 per ticket. The company made an estimated profit of $29 million from 2005 through 2008, according to the indictment.