VinitaPark.org

Mayor James McGee.

Over the course of several months in 2011, eight police officers for the city of Vinita Park were fired, resigned or took jobs with other departments. This was an unprecedented amount of turnover in the small north-county town. More than half the department, including the chief, was suddenly gone.

According to a lawsuit filed by five of those officers, Vinita Park city officials terminated or forced the officers out because they are white. African American officers kept their jobs, and the majority of the replacement hires were black also.

The allegation might sound far-fetched, but attorneys for the officers believe they have a smoking gun -- a secretly recorded conversation of Vinita Park mayor James McGee, the subject of this week's cover story. On the tape, McGee speaks in blunt terms about racial tension in the city and his role in the termination of the white police officers.

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Courtesy ACLU

Frederick Walker

When saxophonist Frederick Walker retired from his band "Mystic Voyage" after 21 years, he decided he didn't want to hang it up completely. He took his talents to the streets, specifically the 9th Street side of the Soulard Market, to try his hand at buskering.

"I'm 70 years old and I thought it was time to give up jumping up and down on tables and chairs," he says. "I decided to slow down."

Walker says before long a city official approached him and told him he needed a permit. There was also a required audition (though Walker never actually had to complete one since, he figures, the city official saw him playing on the street).

"He saw me. He knows I can play," says Walker.

The fee, however, was another matter.

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Sandra Lupo says she was effectively let go for having a shaved head after surgery.

Sandra Lupo knew something was seriously wrong when she suddenly felt a numb, tingling sensation running along the left side of her body down to her toes. After she was admitted to the emergency room, a series of tests revealed a mass in the right side of her brain that had burst and was bleeding inside her skull. Doctors told her that without immediate surgery to remove the clot, there was a chance she could die.

Lupo, who had been a waitress at the St. Peters location of Hooters since 2005, says she called and told her bosses that she was going into brain surgery. The procedure, which required drilling holes into and opening up the skull, meant Lupo's long, dark hair would have be shaved off.

"They said, 'Don't worry about it, no big deal,'" recalls Lupo.

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MalawiUNChannel

Arthur Peter Mutharika

Update: Washington University has released a very brief statement on Peter Mutharika.

A former Washington University law professor was jailed earlier this month in Malawi after he and ten others were charged with trying to overthrow the current presidential administration.

A. Peter Mutharika was a law professor for 39 years in St. Louis before he returned to his native Malawi in 2011 to help his older brother, President Bingu wa Mutharika, in his final presidential term. The younger Mutharika was favored to succeed his brother in the 2014 elections.

Those plans were thrown into turmoil in April of 2012, when President Mutharika suddenly died of a heart attack and his vice president took his place.

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City Museum: As profitable as it is whimsical.

City Museum clears millions of dollars in profits each year, according to financials made public this month in a protracted legal battle that has pitted City Museum founder Bob Cassilly's widow, Giovanna, against her husband's former business partner, David Jump.

In the lawsuit's latest skirmish this month, a St. Louis judge blocked Jump's attempt to seize control of the downtown attraction and the old shoe factory that houses it, International Building Co., from Giovanna and other members of Cassilly's estate.

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via YouTube

Susan Gibson says she was denied treatment at Castlewood Treatment Center.

The Department of Justice agreed last week that a St. Louis eating disorder clinic discriminated against an HIV-positive woman by intentionally delaying her admittance and denying her treatment. Castlewood Treatment Center for Eating Disorders has been ordered to pay a $140,000 settlement, the second largest in the history of HIV-related discrimination cases.

The patient, Susan Gibson, a retired nurse living in mid-Missouri, spoke to Daily RFT about her health during the seven months of waiting to hear from the facility and her fear that other patients may have been discriminated against.

"It angers me they would treat people like that and for such a stupid reason," she says.

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Don't throw a hotdog down a hallway, chuck it at an eye socket!

Good people of St. Louis, Daily RFT would like to submit for your pleasure the single greatest legal opinion ever written, in the case of John Coomer v. Kansas City Royals Baseball Corporation.

While the case does involve a very serious injury to poor Mr. Coomer, the rest of the details are a scream. It involves a mascot, a hot dog, and one burning philosophical question:

When a man enters a baseball stadium, is he not in essence resigning himself to the possibility of grievous bodily harm by hot dog?

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Image via

No newspapers for you, sorry fellas

If you're an inmate in St. Genevieve County jail, and you want to keep your newspaper subscription, you'd better not write a letter to the editor that mentions the sheriff or calls out local Christians. 

Stanley Schell wrote such a letter, and immediately thereafter, the sheriff -- citing security concerns -- cut off all newspapers to inmates, according to a lawsuit that the ACLU filed on behalf of Schell yesterday in federal court.

Schell is in his mid-sixties, online court records show. He's already served time for sex offenses to which he pleaded guilty in the early nineties, but is still incarcerated because the state is trying to civilly commit him as a sexual predator.

While he waits, he likes to read the Ste. Genevieve Herald.

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Don't drink the wine if you can't do the time.

Five inmates at a prison in Idaho have sued Anheuser-Busch, along with several other alcoholic beverage producers, claiming that had they only known that alcohol is addictive, they wouldn't have touched the stuff.

Instead, delicious Budweiser and Michelob ruined their lives and made them do a string of awful things for which they were caught and are currently serving time for.

They would like $1 billion, please and thank you.

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Aubrey Ireland

Letting go of kids is tough for lots of parents. But one couple from the Kansas City suburb of Leawood seem to have take things way too far.

So far, in fact, that a judge has agreed with their daughter that their overanxious parenting sounds like "stalking." They've been ordered to stay away from her.

A very merry Christmas indeed.

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