Bob Houbregs, a Hall of Fame basketball player who led theUniversity of Washington to its only Final Four appearance, in 1953, and played five seasons in the National Basketball Association, died on Wednesday. He was 82.
The university confirmed his death but did not provide further information.
Houbregs, a 6-foot-7 Canadian, was the national player of the year and an all-American in 1953 and an all-Pacific Coast Conference selection from 1951 to 1953.
Known for his right-hand hook shot, he averaged 25.6 points in his senior year and still holds Washington’s record for single-game scoring, with 49 points against Idaho in 1953.
Until 1988, Houbregs was Washington’s leading career scorer, with 1,774 points. He is now fifth on the list. His No. 25 is one of two men’s basketball numbers retired by the university.
Houbregs was the No. 2 overall pick in the 1953 N.B.A. draft, selected by the Milwaukee Hawks. He also played for the Baltimore Bullets, the Boston Celtics and the Fort Wayne Pistons. He went on to be the general manager of the Seattle SuperSonics in their early years. (The franchise went on to become the Oklahoma City Thunder.)
He was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 1987.
Robert John Houbregs was born on March 12, 1932, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Information on survivors was not available.
Hamawi, Yaqut ibn 'Abdullah al-Rumi al- Yaqut ibn 'Abdullah al-Rumi al-Hamawi (1179–1229) (Arabic: ياقوت الحموي الرومي) was an Islamic biographer and geographer renowned for his encyclopedic writings on the Muslim world. "al-Rumi" ("from Rum") refers to his Greek (Byzantine) descent; "al-Hamawi" is taken after Hama, Syria, and ibn-Abdullah is a reference to his father's name, Abdullah. The word yāqūt means ruby or hyacinth.
Yaqut was working as a slave to a trader, Askar ibn Abi Nasr al-Hamawi, who lived in Baghdad, Iraq. His master taught him accounting and trading and sent him to trade on his behalf. He later freed him of his obligations and that enabled Yaqut to dedicate himself to his scholarly tasks. He was one of the last scholars who had access to the libraries east of the Caspian Sea before the Mongol invasion of Central Asia. Yaqut travelled to the peaceful scholarly city of ancient Merv in present-day Turkmenistan. There Yaqut spent two years in libraries, learning much of the knowledge he would later use in his works. Yaqut spent the last few years of his life in Aleppo and died there. The works of al-Hamawi include the following:
Kitab mu'jam al-buldan (معجم البلدان "Dictionary of Countries")
Mu'jam al-udabā', (معجم الأدباء "Dictionary of Writers") written in 1226.
Hamdun ibn al-Hajj or in full Abu al-Fayd Hamdun ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Hamdun ibn Abd al-Rahman Mohammed ibn al-Hajj al-Fasi al-Sulami al-Mirdasi (1760–1817) was one of the most outstanding scholars of the reign of Mulay Suleiman of Morocco. He was a committed Tijani Sufi but also an outspoken critic of some of the practices of Sufism in that time. Hamdun ibn al-Hajj was also one of the best known poets of the period and the author of a diwan (Silsilat Dhakhair al-turath al-adabi bi-al-Maghrib). He also wrote a commentary on Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani's Muqaddimah, a gloss on Taftazani's treatise on the Mukhtasar and a series of Diwans including a controversial poem dedicated to Amir Sau'ud ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz.
Catherine M. Abate, a former New York state senator and commissioner of New York City’s Correction Department whose campaign for attorney general was derailed by questions about her father’s connection to organized crime, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 66.
The cause was cancer, her family said.
Ms. Abate (pronounced ah-BOT-eh) was known for her commitment to human rights and gained the notice of the political establishment as a young lawyer at the city’s Legal Aid Society.
In 1986, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo appointed her executive deputy commissioner of the State Division of Human Rights.
The move surprised many in Albany who expected Liz J. Abzug to be named to the post. Ms. Abzug was the daughter of Bella S. Abzug, an outsize figure in New York politics who served in Congress.
Ms. Abate continued her swift rise, and in 1988, she was named to head the state’s Crime Victims Board.
However, when she was appointed correction commissioner by Mayor David N. Dinkins in 1992, questions were raised about her father’s possible involvement in organized crime. She not only denied that her father was involved with the Mafia but also told supporters that any suggestion otherwise was the result of bias against Italian-Americans.
Photo
Ms. Abate in 1992.CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times
The matter seemed to fade into the background, and after leading the Correction Department for several years, she ran for State Senate in 1994, representing Greenwich Village. She served until 1998, when she ran for attorney general.
One of her main rivals for the Democratic nomination was Eliot L. Spitzer, who went on to become governor and resigned in disgrace after a scandal involving his association with prostitutes. His aides provided reporters with information about her father, Joseph M. Abate, linking him to the Lucchese crime family.
Mr. Spitzer, who apologized for his aides’ actions, said they were only responding to requests from reporters.
But in contrast with her response in 1992, Ms. Abate did not issue a blanket denial. Instead, for the first time, she acknowledged that the allegations might be true, based on recent newspaper articles.
“I don’t want to believe them, I just don’t want to believe them,” Ms. Abatetold The New York Times. “These are still allegations, I can’t prove or disprove them. I’ll never know the truth. The allegations don’t describe the father I knew.”
It was a stunning reversal that damaged her candidacy and forced her to confront details about her family’s history that she said she could not bring herself to contemplate. She added that she regretted her denials in 1992.
Ms. Abate’s father died in 1994, and she said she could never know the details of his life or the truth of the charges leveled against him.
She had acknowledged that her father was arrested in 1938 for bootlegging. But Ms. Abate said that as a child, growing up in Margate, N.J., where she was born on Dec. 8, 1947, she never knew that he was anything other than what he said he was: the head of a company that manufactured military uniforms for the government.
In the 1960s, the family fell on hard times, she recalled. Even so many years later, she said, it was hard for her to tell the world that her father had struggled financially.
Ms. Abate lost her bid for attorney general and went on to work in health care, becoming the president and chief executive of Community Healthcare Network.
For the last 15 years of her life, she worked to bring programs related to reproductive health to teenagers, to provide services for people with multiple chronic diseases and to help deliver medical care to the uninsured and the poor.
Ms. Abate is survived by her husband, Ron Kliegerman; a son, Kyle Kliegerman; a stepson, Kip Kliegerman; a brother, Joseph; and three stepgrandchildren.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who worked with Ms. Abate during Mr. Dinkins’s 1989 campaign for mayor, issued a statement praising her work on behalf of the city and the state.
“She never shied from a good cause and a good fight,” he said.
Sante Kimes, the maternal side of a murderous mother-and-son grifter team, died on Monday in her prison cell in Westchester County, N.Y. She was 79.
Officials at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility confirmed the death.
Ms. Kimes had been in prison for a decade, serving a 120-year sentence for her role in a pair of gruesome murders that turned her and her son, Kenneth Kimes Jr., into vivid subjects for television writers and newspaper reporters. With her taste for Victorian evening wear and a long history of larceny, Ms. Kimes, the daughter of an Oklahoma prostitute, rocketed to notoriety in 1998 when she and Mr. Kimes were charged in New York with the murder of Irene Silverman, an 82-year-old widowed socialite, in a scheme to seize her $10 million townhouse on East 65th Street.
Two years later, at a raucous trial in which Ms. Kimes was scolded by a judge for passing notes to reporters, she was found guilty with her son of killing Ms. Silverman in an elaborate plot that involved cheap disguises, false identities, tapped telephones, forged deeds, a stolen credit card and at least three fake offers of Caribbean vacations.
The authorities said that Kenneth Kimes had strangled Ms. Silverman, and that the mother and son then disposed of the body in garbage bags. Her body was never found. In a search of their car and luggage, the police found guns, plastic handcuffs, fright masks, tapes of Ms. Silverman’s telephone conversations and a fake deed to the Silverman home.
Mr. Kimes was sentenced to 126 years in prison. In 2004, Ms. Kimes was convicted of a second killing, this time in an insurance scheme that resulted in the death of a Las Vegas property-holder, David J. Kazdin. Suspected in a host of other crimes — from the arson of homes she owned to the disappearance of a banker in the Bahamas — Ms. Kimes was called by the judge who presided at the Kazdin trial “one of the most evil individuals” she had ever met.
Born in Oklahoma as Sandra Louise Walker in 1935, Ms. Kimes grew up in Las Vegas and was first arrested — for petty theft — in Sacramento in 1961. She was, according to acquaintances, a talented and obsessive thief. She once stole a car from a dealer’s lot in Honolulu. Later, she was arrested at a Washington hotel with a $6,500 mink coat she had stolen at a piano bar.
She had been married to Kenneth Kimes Sr., a California real-estate mogul who built and owned motels. Ms. Kimes, who favored wigs and a starlet’s caked makeup, did not lack for money. She simply seemed to enjoy the thievery.
“To her it was like a game of Monopoly,” a former neighbor in Las Vegas said. “She just liked to do it.”
While living in Mexico City in 1985, Ms. Kimes and her husband were arrested on slavery charges after several of their maids complained to the Mexican authorities that they had been beaten and imprisoned in the Kimes’s house. Ms. Kimes served five years on the charge (Mr. Kimes served three), and when the couple was reunited with Kenneth Jr., the family embarked on itinerant journeys to Hawaii, Europe and the Bahamas.
It was not long after the senior Mr. Kimes died — of natural causes — in 1994 that people in the orbit of Ms. Kimes and her son started disappearing. First was Syed Bilal Ahmed, a Bahraini officer at the First Cayman Bank in the Cayman Islands who had met the mother and son in Nassau, in the Bahamas. Next was Mr. Kazdin, whose body was discovered in 1998 in a trash bin near the airport in Los Angeles.
But it was the Silverman murder that thrust Ms. Kimes and her son into a spotlight bright enough that it led to not just one, but two, television biopics, one of them starring Mary Tyler Moore. As a law enforcement official said at the time of her arrest, Ms. Kimes was “the most ingenious, evil con artist” he had seen “in a long time.”
*****
Sante Kimes (born Sandra Louise Walker; July 24, 1934 – May 19, 2014) was an Americancriminal who was convicted of two murders, as well as robbery, violation of anti-slavery laws, forgery and numerous other crimes. Many of these crimes were committed with the assistance of her son, Kenneth Kimes Jr. They were tried and convicted together for the murder of Irene Silverman, along with 117 other charges. The pair were also suspected but never charged in a third murder in the Bahamas, to which Kenneth has confessed.
According to court records, Kimes was born Sandra Louise Walker in Oklahoma City to a mother of partial Dutch descent and an East Indian father. Her estranged[1]son, Kent Walker, in his book Son of a Grifter has reported from an old acquaintance of his mother that Sante Kimes was the daughter of a respectable family who was unable to cope with the young girl's aberrant, wild antics; Kimes herself has claimed that her father was a laborer and that her mother was a prostitute who migrated from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl to Los Angeles, where the young Kimes ran wild in the streets. But Sante Kimes has given numerous, conflicting stories about her origins and numerous other accounts are difficult to confirm, and thus Kent Walker says that his ancestry could be anything from Latino to East Indian to Indigenous American to simply white.[2] She spent the better part of her life fleecing people of money, expensive merchandise, and real estate, either through elaborate con games, arson, forgery, or outright theft.[1]
She attended high school in Carson City, Nevada, and graduated in 1952.[3] She soon married a high school boyfriend, but the marriage only lasted three months. In 1956, she reunited with another sweetheart from high school, Edward Walker. They had one son, Kent. The marriage was troubled. After a shoplifting conviction in 1961, Kimes ended her marriage to Walker.[3]
In 1971, she met and married Kenneth Kimes, Senior. The marriage produced one son, Kenneth "Kenny" Kimes, Junior who was born in 1975.[3]
According to the book Son of a Grifter, she committed insurance fraud on numerous occasions, frequently by committing arson and then collecting for property damage. She delighted in introducing her husband as an ambassador - a ploy that even gained the couple access to a White House reception during the Fordadministration. And she sometimes even impersonated Elizabeth Taylor, whom she resembled slightly. He also alleges that she committed many acts of fraud that were not even financially necessary, such as enslaving maids when she could easily afford to pay them and burning down houses she could have easily sold.[4]
She frequently offered young, homelessillegal immigrants housing and employment, then kept them virtual prisoners by threatening to report them to the authorities if they didn't follow her orders.[5] As a result, she and her second husband, alcoholic motel tycoon Kenneth Kimes, spent years squandering his fortune on lawyers' fees, defending themselves against charges of slavery. Kimes was eventually arrested in August 1985 and was sentenced by the U.S. District Court to five years in prison for violating federal anti-slavery laws.[6] Her husband took a plea bargain and agreed to complete an alcohol treatment program; Ken, Sr. and their son, Kenny, lived a somewhat normal life until Sante was released from prison in 1989. Ken, Sr. died in 1994.
David Kazdin had allowed Kimes to use his name on the deed of a home in Las Vegas that was actually occupied by Kenneth Sr. and Sante Kimes in the 1970s. Several years later, Sante Kimes convinced a notary to forge Kazdin's signature on an application for a loan of $280,000, with the house as collateral. When Kazdin discovered the forgery and threatened to expose Kimes she ordered him killed. Kenneth Jr. murdered Kazdin by shooting him in the back of the head. According to another accomplice's later testimony, all three participated in disposing of the evidence. Kazdin's body was found in a dumpster near Los Angeles airport in March 1998. The murder weapon was never recovered, having been disassembled and dropped into a storm sewer.[7]
In June 1998, with her son Kenneth, Kimes perpetrated a scheme whereby she would assume the identity of their landlady, 82-year-old socialite Irene Silverman, and then appropriate ownership of her $7.7 million Manhattanmansion.[8] The search for Ms. Silverman went as far as Mount Olive, New Jersey, where a tract of almost seven heavily wooded acres was searched. Ms. Silverman owned the property and the paperwork/tax records for it was found in the Kimes' possession. Without the Kimes' cooperation, there was the assumption that she could be buried there. Despite the fact Silverman's body was never found, both mother and son were convicted of murder in 2000, in no small part because of the discovery of Kimes' notebooks detailing the crime and notes written by Silverman, who was extremely suspicious of the pair. During the trial for the Kadzin murder Kenneth Kimes confessed that after his mother had used a stun gun on Silverman, he strangled her, stuffed her corpse into a bag and deposited it in a dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey.[9]
Kenneth also confessed to murdering a third man, banker Sayed Bilal Ahmed, at his mother's behest in The Bahamas in 1996,[10] which had been suspected by Bahamian authorities at the time.[11] Kenneth testified that the two acted together to drug Ahmed, drown him in a bathtub, and dump his body offshore,[12] but no charges were ever filed in that case.
Sante Kimes denied any involvement or knowledge of the murders, and claimed that Kenneth's confession was solely to avoid the death penalty.[13]
Although the Kazdin murder happened first, The Kimes' were apprehended in New York City and tried first for the Silverman murder. Evidence recovered from their car helped establish the case for trying them on Kazdin's murder as well.[14]
The Silverman trial was unusual in many aspects, namely the rare combination of a mother/son team and the fact that no body was recovered. Nonetheless, the jury was unanimous in voting to convict them of not only murder but 117 other charges including robbery, burglary, conspiracy, grand larceny, illegal weapons possession, forgery and eavesdropping on their first poll on the subject.[15] The judge also took the unusual step of ordering Kimes not to speak to the media even after the jury had been sequestered as a result of her passing a note to New York Times reporter David Rhode in court. The judge threatened to have Kimes handcuffed during further court appearances if she persisted and restricted her telephone access to calls to her lawyers. The judge contended that Kimes was attempting to influence the jury as they may have seen or heard any such interviews, and that there would be no cross-examination as there would be in court. Kimes had earlier chosen to not take the stand in her own defense after the judge ruled that prosecutors could question her about the previous conviction on slavery charges.[16]
During the sentencing portion of the Silverman trial, Sante Kimes made a prolonged statement to the court blaming the authorities, including their own lawyers, for framing them. She went on to compare their trial to the Salem Witch Trials and claim the prosecutors were guilty of "murdering the Constitution" before the judge told her to be quiet. When the statement was concluded the presiding judge responded that Mrs Kimes was a sociopath and a degenerate and her son was a dupe and "remorseless predator" before imposing the maximum sentence on both of them.[17]
In October 2000, while doing an interview, Kenneth held Court TV reporter Maria Zone hostage by pressing a ballpoint pen into her throat. Zone had interviewed Kimes once before without incident.[18] Kenneth Kimes' demand was that his mother not be extradited to California, where the two faced the death penalty for the murder of David Kazdin. After four hours of negotiation Kimes removed the pen from Zone's throat. Negotiators created a distraction which allowed them to quickly remove Zone and wrestle Kimes to the ground.
In March 2001, Kenneth Kimes was extradited to Los Angeles to stand trial for the murder of David Kazdin. Sante Kimes was extradited to Los Angeles in June 2001. During that trial in June 2004, while he was facing the death penalty, Kenneth changed his plea from "not guilty" to "guilty" and implicated his mother in the murder in exchange for a plea deal that his mother not receive the death penalty if convicted. Sante Kimes again made a prolonged statement denying the murders and accusing police and prosecutors of various kinds of misconduct, and was again eventually ordered by the presiding judge to be silent.[19] The sentencing judge in the Kazdin case called Mrs. Kimes "one of the most evil individuals" she had met in her time as a judge.[20]
Sante Kimes was serving a life sentence plus 125 years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York. On her prisoner papers, Sante's projected release date was on March 3, 2119. Additionally, Kimes and her son were each sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of David Kazdin in California. Kenneth Kimes is currently incarcerated at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in California.
Sante Kimes died of natural causes on May 19, 2014 at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.[21]
