Periodical Note:
There Will Always Be a Brooklyn
18 April 2018

¶ When Ian Frazier’s writing first appeared in The New Yorker, a very long time ago, I thought that he was going to be one of the magazine’s funnymen. He has proven far more versatile than that, but there is usually a wrinkle or two in his pieces through which one glimpses, or at least senses, an alternative universe that, for everybody’s sake, Frazier has decided it best not to acknowledge, springing off instead on a light bounce of absurdity. There are several such wrinkles in his latest offering, which is ostensibly about the maraschino-cherry factory in Red Hook. The wrinkliest, of course, concerns the marijuana plantation in the factory’s basement. Yes, there was one. But its place in the nexus of criminal commerce appears to be unknown, except maybe to a few detectives. (Frazier isn’t asking.) But the Richard Luthmann tangent has really stuck in my mind. Luthmann, an attorney, represented a dead man’s daughters in a wrongful-death suit against the City. He discussed the case (which was thrown out by the judge) with Frazier. Then there’s this:

Though I never met Luthmann in person, I found him helpful on the phone. A follow-up story of December 16, 2017, made me wonder if I had been talking to the same guy. It said that Richard Luthmann—identified as a Staten Island attorney; yes, it was the same guy—and two other men had been arrested for wire fraud, kidnapping, extortion, brandishing a weapon, identity theft, and money laundering. There were eleven charges in all. The alleged scheme involved a scrap-metal-dealer co-conspirator; the sale to foreign customers of shipments of scrap metal that turned out to contain mostly concrete blocks; a blind client of Luthmann’s whose identity the conspirators used in order to set up bank accounts and launder almost half a million dollars obtained by this fraud; and the later kidnapping of the scrap-metal dealer for the purposes of extorting an extra ten thousand dollars from him at gunpoint.

Frazier notes that while Luthmann was tied up with this problem (as it were), the deadline for appealing the judge’s decision “lapsed.”

The most amusing tangent, though, was remembering the incident with which Frazier starts his story, the time when beekeepers in the Red Hook vicinity were disturbed by their harvests of red honey. And how they found out that it was maraschino-cherry juice. Did that really happen in 2010? Like so many things, it seems both closer and more distant in time.  K

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More anon.

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