|
Clint Ritchie http://www.clintritchie.com/clints-biography/
Cli
He plays “Machine Gun Jack McGurn” in Corman's St. Valentines Day Massacre with Jason Robards as Al Capone, Harold J. Stone as Frank Nitti and Ralph Meeker as George “Bugs” Moran. Moran's top killer is Peter (George Segal -- Pete Rose) Gusenberg. Jack Nicholson has a small uncredited role as a hit man recruited by Jack McGurn, the mastermind of the slaughter commissioned by Al Capone.
McGurn sets up the hit by hooking Moran on a phony deal to buy bootlegged Canadian whisky, then sending in hit men disguised as cops followed up by hit men in plane clothes to kill everyone at the Clark Street Garage meeting place. Moran escapes by pure luck. All of the killers are later murdered. Capone personally bashes the brains out of two of them at a banquet with a baseball bat.
Background Note: The slang term “mickey” is a shortened form of Mickey Finn, a drug administered surreptitiously to render the victim unconscious. It was named after a turn of the 20th century Chicago bar manager named Michael Finn. He and people working for him at his Lone Star Saloon slipped knockout drops into the drinks of selected customers, robbed them in a back room and dumped their unconscious bodies in the alley. He was tried and convicted in 1903, partly on the testimony of a prostitute he employed name “Gold-tooth Mary.” This story didn’t become nationally know until 1940 with the publication of Herbert Asbury’s book Gem of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld
The name Michael McClinton can be traced back as far as 1986 in connection with scores of robberies across the continental United States. The M/O in these cases was the same from the first recorded bust in Santa Ana in Orange County on an LAPD warrant in May of 1986 to June of 1987 in Miami Beach, Florida. Typically, an attractive woman posing as a lonely, out of town, businesswoman would befriend a man wearing a Rolex watch and a wedding band in a bar, lure him to a motel, slip him a Mickey and rob him of cash, credit cards and other valuables. The Rolex watch magnet for the robberies led to the ring being dubbed “the Rolex Gang.”
The number of these robberies and where they occurred were underreported because married victims rarely reported them.
According to a Miami Herald report on June 11, 1987, the 29-year-old man arrested as the leader of Rolex Gang went by the name “Michael or Melvin McFare.” However, the police report that defense attorney Yale Galanter read in the 2008 Las Vegas trial of O.J. Simpson and Clarence Stewart on the robbery charges noted the first name as Melvin and the spelling of the last name as M-c-P-h-a-i-r.
Although the Los Angeles Times broke the story first on May 29, 1986 with the name Michal McClinton associated in a way that the paper noted was “unclear,” the paper did not connect it to a story it ran on August 6, 1986 about the victim of a similar robbery. The August story was about a Newport Beach, CA businessman who was robbed by a woman who slipped him a Mickey.
From the June 11, 1987 Miami Herald story: “The break in the case came Sunday, when a 24-year-old woman named Jane Henderson told police that McFare had kidnapped her from her Dallas home, brought her to Fort Lauderdale, then beat her when she failed to steal from her first potential victim, police said.
Henderson agreed to press kidnapping charges against McFare and one of the women in the ring, identified by police as Leigh Miller, 19, of Tulsa. Miller was arrested Tuesday after Henderson duped her into meeting with Fort Lauderdale police. The charges: kidnapping Henderson and robbing Moran.
Detectives are seeking another woman -- known as Kim or Jessica Jenkins -- on robbery charges. They want McFare for kidnapping, robbery, and fleeing to avoid prosecution. The latter is a federal offense, allowing the FBI to assist in the search, police said.”
Las Vegas Metro Police never said anything like that about McClinton by any of his names. O.J.’s Las Vegas prosecutors sat on his criminal record and actively blocked all defense attempts to introduce it. They did not argue the facts of his criminal record. Instead, they argued successfully that too much time had passed for it to be relevant.
That’s not the point. The point is, McClinton’s role in the Rolex Gang makes him a setup artist – a master of manipulating his victims into doing what the victimization plan calls for while thinking that it’s their idea to do it – and a great idea, at that.
The last thing most people would think of as a key component of an operation like this is the manipulation of time. It’s an example of how planning can be a form of time travel when the active ingredients of a contrived future event can be determined in advance.
The Rolex Gang victims were presented with a rare opportunity to get something they wanted. What made the opportunity rare was not the attractive woman in the bar but the limited time that the men being set up believed that she would be available. The essential difference between what happened to them and what happed to O.J. at the Palace Station is illusory. There is no essential difference. It’s the same formula.
O.J. was enticed by the belief that he could recover unique personal items that were stolen from him and offered for sale to collectors by someone he knew. He had a list of those items and a history with police that foreclosed the option police intervention. He thought he had the opportunity of recovering his property when he went to Las Vegas for his friend’s wedding because he was told that the people who had them would also be in Las Vegas at that time.
Look at a Scrabble game* with the name of the actor who played Machine Gun Jack McGurn in Roger Corman’s 1967 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (in Chicago) and his soap opera character Clinton Buchanan.
CLINT RITCHIE MACHINE GUN JACK MCGURN CLINTON BUCHANAN
MICHAEL MCCLINTON CINCINNATI TRUNK BEAR GUN HG AC NJ CHU
Some Jumble puzzle solutions can be found by rearranging the letters in BEAR GUN HG AC NJ CHU
HEAR GUN CUB (baseball reference to Chicago -- the Cubs) HG AC NJ
BEAR GUN HG AC NJ CHU can also give you HEAR GUN CH (Pete Rose nickname Charlie Hustle) BUG AC NJ
Factor in OLTL for Ritchie’s role as Clit Buchanan in One Life To Live and you get this:
CLINT RITCHIE MACHINE GUN JACK MCGURN CLINTON BUCHANAN OLTL
MICHAEL MCCLINTON CINCINNATI CH TRUNK BUG HEAR GUN AC NJ
MICHAEL MCCLINTON CINCI CH TRUNK GUN AC NJ NHL BARETTA GUN OIL
NHL = National Hockey League BARETTA = The TV series Baretta with Robert Blake as Tony Baretta and Michael Roberts as the pimp informer Rooster. The sound of Baretta also equals the GUN manufacturer Beretta, the 9mm pistol that Fuhrman wore on the Bundy murder scene and the .22 that McClinton gave to Walter Alexander to take to the Palace Station. OIL = The foundation of the Buchanan family wealth in One Life To Live.
Remember that Bruce Fromong had autographed baseballs of Cincinnati Reds All Star Pete Rose in the trunk of his car (Thomas Riccio’s Busted, page 176) and brought them to the room where McClinton displayed his gun ("bear" gun). After the confrontation, Fromong said on Riccio’s recording that he was going to get his gun from his car trunk to go after O.J. However, Riccio, who had inspected the contents of Fromong’s trunk before the confrontation, gave no indication that he saw a gun there.
Forget the Chicago Bears connection to O.J. on the football field and in The Naked Gun 2 ½. Forget the trunk connection to the murder of Robert C. Hurd. These are red herrings. This Jumble puzzle is about setting up O.J. in the Palace Station Hotel.
HG = H.G. Wells. In the 1979 movie Time After Time Herbert George Wells is called H. G. by his friends. Wells authored The Invisible Man and The Time Machine. HG is also the name of an airport in Cincinnati. When you factor in celebrity birthdays on St. Valentine's day you get Florence Henderson (The Naked Gun 33 1/3). Florence is a city about 21 miles north of the HG Airport.
AC NJ = Atlantic City, New Jersey. The Muhammad Ali boxing glove that the police found in the room is an allusion to the Atlantic City, NJ boxing match that corresponded to when and where McClinton and Walter “Goldie” Alexander said they met. Boxing, in turn, draws in O.J. Simpson in Goldie and The Boxer, in his attendance at World Heavyweight Boxing matches in Atlantic City and Las Vegas and his former agent Michael Gilbert who stole the items that O.J. went to the Palace Station to recover.
* This Scrabble game solution assumes that the puzzle maker spelled all of the names correctly with CHU left over. However, in my first attempt at setting up the puzzle I spelled McGurn incorrectly. I spelled it "McGirn" and got a Jumble puzzle solution with CHI. The puzzle makers could have made the same mistake or used the I instead of the U intentionally, although I seriously doubt it. "CHI" (Chicago) is redundant in this context because it's inherent in the construction of the puzzle. –Jasper |
nton Charles
Augustus Ritchie, popularly known as Clint Ritchie,
owned a ranch in California. He had a horse name Hammer and
he taught Tom Selleck (same January 29 birthday as Michael
McClinton) how to ride. He was a cavalry officer in Alvarez Kelly
('66). In Roger Corman's 1967 St. Valentines Day
Massacre, he makes a