First off, the wrong way to wear a pocket square is to not wear a pocket square, like these two bozos below. Politicians are historically speaking, horrible dressers.
Here is one of the exceptions to the “politicians” dressing horribly rule. Willie Brown always dresses smooth. Whenever I am in San Francisco, I always stop by his base of operations for menswear, Wilkes Bashford.
Cary Grant always dresses smooth. Check out To Catch a Thief. Cary Grant and I share some of the same Style lineage. I may elaborate more in the future.
Not sure I dig the way Tony Montana rocks the pocket square. I actually used to rock it this way but haven’t for years.
Muhammad Ali, cold chilling. Smooth Square. Relaxation.
Bruce Lee rocks the pocket square perfect. Straight across. Matching with the tie can pretty dope, as witnessed here, but far from necessary.
Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra always rock the pocket squares on point. Smoking is a nice Style touch as well.
Las Vegas visionary and all around super G, Bugsy Siegel knows how to rock the square. I have mentioned before that I have the same “large houndstooth check” jacket. I had to have it Custom Made, of course.
James Bond always rocks the square right. Real subtle and dope.
Chain smoker, International Playboy and Boxing Champ Mickey Walker wears the square with ease. So does Doc Kerns.
Sean Connery shows you how to relax: pocket square, feet up and with a smoke.
Serge Gainsbourg can rock the square.
Hollywood Playboy Warren Beaty rocks the square while playing Bugsy Siegel. Good casting job.
Super G Robert Shaw rocks the power square. Presence. And I don’t mean that Led Zeppelin album either. Or maybe I do.
Hollywood tough guy Humphrey Bogart busts a decent square.
Marcello Mastroianni rocks the gun, the flower and the square. Watch La Dolce Vita.
Roberts returned from Vietnam to New York with screws and a metal plate in his head — the aftermath of an explosion. By the time he was 20, he was one of New York’s biggest nightclub impresarios, rubbing shoulders with everyone from Jimi Hendrix to John Lennon.
But after a business partner turned up dead and an informant told the police Roberts was involved, he hightailed it to sunny Miami. The year was 1975.
“When I first came to Miami, I wasn’t smuggling: I was like all the other dealers on the street just trying to make a living, and it got to a point where I had so much business that these people just couldn’t supply me,” he says.
That’s when Roberts shifted from being a drug dealer to a drug importer for the Colombian Medellin cartel.
Importing paid well: By the end of 1976, Roberts says he was moving 50 kilos of cocaine worth $500,000 or more a month. Roberts was living it up: He had half a dozen servants, a Porsche, multiple houses, dozens of race horses and friends in high places, including the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
The U.S. government labeled Roberts the “American Representative” of the Medellin cartel; he became known as “the bearded gringo” on Miami’s streets.
Roberts and a few American partners created a highly advanced drug-smuggling system that included secret airfields, listening posts to eavesdrop on Coast Guard communications, and homing beacons for tracking cocaine shipped by sea.
“We ended up getting, up by Tampa, a 450-acre farm and it was all surrounded by trees and we put two runways in there and we put hangars in for the planes to go in,” Roberts says.
Their drug-smuggling schemes stymied the U.S. government for nearly a decade.
Death came for Jon Roberts, the infamous cocaine cowboy, on Dec. 28 at age 63, after a long battle with cancer. But his public career as a charming monster is just beginning
A true-crime memoir, “American Desperado” (Crown; $28), written with journalist Evan Wright, has just been published. In Hollywood, director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg are developing a movie based on his exploits.
Dying at his ease in Fort Lauderdale in the company of a devoted younger spouse and his 11-year-old son Julian, product of an earlier marriage, was an improbable end for a man who never repudiated his lifelong philosophy that “evil is stronger than good.”
“How many times have I encountered a crooked politician who wants to establish he’s a nice guy, or a killer who wants you to think he’s a good guy at heart,” says Wright. “I was fascinated because here is a guy who has done monstrous things and he’s not trying to portray himself as a nice guy or a victim.”
As Roberts tells Wright in “American Desperado,” “I might be a sociopath. Most of the time I’ve been on this earth I’ve had no regard for human life. That’s been the key to my success.”
If “American Desperado” is to be believed, Jon Roberts beat people to death in New York, skinned enemy POWs alive in Vietnam, and helped a future CIA agent murder famed mobster Meyer Lansky’s stepson in Miami – with Lansky’s approval.
Roberts first came to national attention as one of the stars of “Cocaine Cowboys,” a Miami-produced documentary that was a surprise hit in 2006. The film details the early 1980s, when Miami became a nearly lawless place awash in cocaine, violence and corruption.
As an American representative of the Medellin Cartel, Roberts helped import some $2 billion worth of cocaine into South Florida, working with infamous figures like Albert San Pedro, Pablo Escobar, Bobby Seal, Max Mermelstein and Bobby Erra.
“He’s a killer,” says Wright, author of the acclaimed Iraq War book, “Generation Kill.” “The notion that Jon is a monster because he kills people doesn’t disqualify a person in my code of life. He’s a killer — let’s move on from there. Let’s find out more.”
Last night, I spoke to Roberts’ smuggling partner and costar in Cocaine Cowboys, the laid-back and quirky Mickey Munday, with whom he had epic disagreements. The last time Munday saw Roberts, he recalls, was at a Miami restaurant with Peter Berg — where the cancer-stricken old criminal vowed to kill Munday before he kicked the bucket: “Before I go, I’m going to get you.”
“I told him: ‘If I had a bucket list, I might put that blonde over there on it,'” Munday says. “‘But not whacking somebody who’s known me for 25 years.'”
“I always thought that he would beat this, I really did,” Munday told me. “If anybody could, it was him, because he’s the meanest son of a bitch I knew. If cancer could get to him it could get to anybody.”
Munday later texted me, referring to Roberts’ nemesis Mermelstein, who also died of cancer: “I hope Jon is kicking Max from one end of Hell to the other.”
Here is a little breakdown for 2012 by the cat who basically predicted the Occupy Wall Street Movement:
One megatrend looms on the near horizon. And we forecast that when it strikes, it will be a shock felt around the world. Hyperbole it’s not! Our research has revealed that at the very highest levels of government this megatrend has been seriously discussed. Read on:
1. Economic Martial Law: Given the current economic and geopolitical conditions, the central banks and world governments already have plans in place to declare economic martial law … with the possibility of military martial law to follow.
2. Battlefield America: With a stroke of the Presidential pen, language was removed from an earlier version of the National Defense Authorization Act, granting the President authority to act as judge, jury and executioner. Citizens, welcome to “Battlefield America.”
3. Invasion of the Occtupy: 15 years ago, Gerald Celente predicted in his book Trends 2000 that prolonged protests would hit Wall Street in the early years of the new millennium and would spread nationwide. The “Occtupy” is now upon us, and it is like nothing history has ever witnessed.
4. Climax Time: The financial house of cards is collapsing, and in 2012 many of the long-simmering socioeconomic and geopolitical trends that Celente has accurately forecast will come to a climax. Some will arrive with a big bang and others less dramatically … but no less consequentially. Are you prepared? And what’s next for the world?
5. Technocrat Takeover: “Democracy is Dead; Long Live the Technocrat!” A pair of lightning-quick financial coup d’états in Greece and Italy have installed two unelected figures as head of state. No one yet in the mainstream media is calling this merger of state and corporate powers by its proper name: Fascism, nor are they calling these “technocrats” by their proper name: Bankers! Can a rudderless ship be saved because technocrat is at the helm?
6. Repatriate! Repatriate!: It took a small, but financially and politically powerful group to sell the world on globalization, and it will take a large, committed and coordinated citizens’ movement to “un-sell” it. “Repatriate! Repatriate!” will pit the creative instincts of a multitude of individuals against the repressive monopoly of the multinationals.
7. Secession Obsession: Winds of political change are blowing from Tunisia to Russia and everywhere in between, opening a window of opportunity through which previously unimaginable political options may now be considered: radical decentralization, Internet-based direct democracy, secession, and even the peaceful dissolution of nations, offering the possibility for a new world “disorder.”
8. Safe Havens: As the signs of imminent economic and social collapse become more pronounced, legions of New Millennium survivalists are, or will be, thinking about looking for methods and ways to escape the resulting turmoil. Those “on-trend” have already taken measure to implement Gerald Celente’s 3 G’s: Gold, Guns and a Getaway plan. Where to go? What to do? Top Trends 2012 will guide the way.
9. Big Brother Internet: The coming year will be the beginning of the end of Internet Freedom: A battle between the governments and the people. Governments will propose legislation for a new “authentication technology,” requiring Internet users to present the equivalent of a driver’s license and/or bill of health to navigate cyberspace. For the general population it will represent yet another curtailing of freedom and level of governmental control.
10. Direct vs. Faux Democracy: In every corner of the world, a restive populace has made it clear that it’s disgusted with “politics as usual” and is looking for change. Government, in all its forms – democracy, autocracy, monarchy, socialism, communism – just isn’’t working. The only viable solution is to take the vote out of the hands of party politicians and institute Direct Democracy. If the Swiss can do it, why can’t anyone else?
11. Alternative Energy 2012: Even under the cloud of Fukushima, the harnessing of nuclear power is being reinvigorated by a fuel that is significantly safer than uranium and by the introduction of small, modular, portable reactors that reduce costs and construction time. In addition, there are dozens of projects underway that explore the possibility of creating cleaner, competitively priced liquid fuels distilled from natural sources. Plan to start saying goodbye to conventional liquid fuels!
12. Going Out in Style: In the bleak terrain of 2012 and beyond, “Affordable sophistication” will direct and inspire products, fashion, music, the fine arts and entertainment at all levels. US businesses would be wise to wake up and tap into the dormant desire for old time quality and the America that was.
Irish Gangster Whitey Bulger Captured in Santa Monica
Authorities at a multiagency news conference in Boston praised their own persistence and tenacity in the capture of legendary crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger, and credited public service announcements for leading them to the fugitive in Santa Monica.
The announcements were launched Monday and Tuesday in 14 markets across the country where Bulger and his companion, Catherine Elizabeth Greig, 60, had been spotted or had past ties.
Bulger, 81, who has been on the run for more than 15 years, fled Boston in late 1994 as federal agents were about to arrest him in connection with at least 19 killings, racketeering and other crimes that spanned the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. He headed an organized crime group that allegedly controlled extortion, drug deals and other illegal activities in the Boston area.
Bernard Hopkins defeats Jean Pascal in Rematch to Become Oldest Champion
Hopkins, who turned 46 in January, eclipsed the record set in 1994 by George Foreman, who knocked out Michael Moorer in the 10th round to win the heavyweight title at the age of 45 and 10 months.
The fighters started out slow, but their dislike for each other showed through as the fight wore on. Hopkins taunted Pascal repeatedly, sticking his tongue out at champion several times. He even came out before the seventh round and did about four or five pushups to prove he was not as tired as a 46-year-old man should be.
The tongue-wagging by Hopkins seemed to touch a nerve in Pascal, 28, who responded by charging like a bull at Hopkins, who was able to avoid most of the punches and appeared to enjoy doing it, as if he was teaching the kid a few lessons leanred in his 23-year career.
Judge Guido Cavaleri scored the fight 115-113, Danseco Reynante 116-112 and Anek Hongstongkam 115-114, all for Hopkins, who used his guile and years of experience to avoid some of Pascal’s wild swings, and to tie up Pascal whenever he needed a breather.
It was textbook Hopkins, and the stats proved it. Hopkins landed 131-of-409 punches (32%), while Pascal connected on just 70-of-377 (19%).
“First I want to thank God for the victory,” said Hopkins. “It all started with Smoky Wilson (his mentor in prison). I didn’t feel like I was 46 tonight. I felt more like 36.”
Another masterful performance by G Manifesto Hall of Fame Member, Bernard Hopkins.
I still remember when I used to roll in Hopkins’ entourage back in the day. (Watch the old tapes, I was the young, Custom Suited Down cat rolling. Or just look for the only, non-African-American cat in the entourage).
It will be interesting to see if he can dismantle Lucien Bute.
