MARQUETTE, Mich. – Federal jurors are preparing to consider whether a small-town Michigan couple tried to swindle actor John Stamos out of $680,000 by falsely claiming to have photos showing the “Full House” and “ER” star using illegal drugs while surrounded by strippers and underage girls.
Attorneys were expected to make closing arguments Thursday in the federal trial of Allison Coss and Scott Sippola, both charged with conspiracy and two counts of extortion for allegedly threatening Stamos through e-mail that they would peddle 6-year-old compromising photos of him to magazines if he didn’t pay them. Jury deliberations would begin afterward.
Defense attorneys argue that it wasn’t a crime to make a business deal. But prosecutors say it was a ruse, and a major issue at trial has been whether the pair ever had an incriminating photo of Stamos.
Prosecutors say they didn’t, and two FBI agents testified they never found any while searching the defendants’ home and vehicles after their December arrests. The defense insists the couple did, and an ex-boyfriend of Coss’ testified he had seen several photos showing Stamos and what appeared to be cocaine.
Coss testified Wednesday that while she and Sippola lied repeatedly to Stamos in e-mails threatening to sell images to celebrity tabloids, she did have a photo of him using drugs. Coss, 24, said she last saw the photo about a week before she and Sippola were arrested.
Stamos testified Tuesday and insisted knowing all along that no photos of him using illegal drugs existed.
Sippola has not testified.
If convicted, the Marquette couple could get up to five years in prison on the conspiracy charge and two years on each extortion count.
Stamos and Coss met in 2004 in Orlando, Fla. Stamos said he was there unwinding with friends after a painful separation from his wife, actress and supermodel Rebecca Romijn, whom he later divorced. Coss was a 17-year-old high school student, but Stamos said she told him she was a college student on spring break and he met her at a club where patrons had to be at least 18.
Coss said the two ended up at Stamos’ hotel suite. She said one of several photos she and a friend took that night showed him “doing a line” of cocaine.
She also repeated the allegation made by her attorney in opening statements that Stamos stripped and sat in a hot tub with the scantily clad Coss — something Stamos denied Tuesday. She also said Stamos made sexual advances as they kissed on a bed in his room.
“After that night, I didn’t have a great impression of him,” Coss said.
Both Stamos and Coss said they maintained an e-mail relationship, and Coss said her opinion of him changed over the next few years.
She said she started dating Sippola in 2008 and he was the one who proposed selling pictures of Stamos to tabloids. She said she initially was reluctant but eventually went along.
Coss said they investigated the potential value of embarrassing photos, sounding out several publications. Coss, who has a degree in criminal justice, said they even researched the legal definition of extortion and concluded they weren’t breaking the law.
Coss said she began sending Stamos e-mails falsely saying a man was claiming to have incriminating photos of her and Stamos. She and Sippola eventually posed as “Brian L,” who said in e-mails he’d been offered $780,000 in a tabloid bidding war but would let Stamos have the pictures for $680,000. In fact, the publications had made no such offers, Coss said.
She became emotional during the cross-examination, as Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Lochner challenged her contention that she had preferred selling the images to Stamos instead of tabloids partly because she considered him a friend.
“You wanted not to hurt him, yet you were willing to take $680,000 of his money?” Lochner asked. “What kind of a friend does something like that?”

After pausing to compose herself, Coss replied softly, “Not a very good one.”

Stamos contacted the FBI in late November.

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DENVER (Billboard) –
During a recent taping of the Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report,” host Stephen Colbert took Pandora founder Tim Westergren to task for the name of his Internet radio service.

“Why Pandora?” Colbert asked, reminding him that Pandora’s box from Greek mythology released evil into the world. “Is that what the Internet is? You click open the box and evil comes out your speakers?”

“Surprises come out,” Westergren responded, “and at the bottom of that box was hope.”

To be sure, Pandora is full of surprises and hope. For almost 10 years, Pandora operated on the verge of collapse. In the early years, while it labored to build the Music Genome Project that powers its music recommendation engine, Pandora struggled to find both a business model and funding, to the point where it had to ask employees to work without pay for almost two years.

Then came the infamous March 2007 Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision that raised the performance royalty rates for Internet radio to a degree that Westergren said would put Pandora out of business. It led to a two-year fight to reduce those rates, culminating in a compromise reached last July.

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BOGOTA (AFP) –
Former Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt has urged the leftist FARC guerrillas Friday to free their prisoners as she celebrated the second anniversary of her own release.

“I have faith and hope that those who are kidnapped will be released soon and I call on the FARC to change course and become a peace alternative,” Betancourt said Friday at a ceremony celebrating the Colombian military’s successful “Operation Jaque” of July 2, 2008.

The US-backed operation freed 15 hostages of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) — Betancourt, three US military contractors and 11 Colombian soldiers and policemen.

It was Betancourt’s first visit to her native country since a stopover of only a few hours in November 2008.

The former Colombian presidential candidate was held for more than six years by the FARC, and ultimately became a global symbol of the guerillas’ hostages.

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NEW YORK – Indra Tamang was a teenage farmer in a Nepalese village without running water or electricity. He barely learned how to write and lived in a straw, mud and stone house with his parents before landing a hotel job in the capital of Katmandu.
But after befriending a well-to-do hotel patron, the young man started traveling the world, meeting the likes of Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Patti Smith, and living in New York, Paris and the Greek island of Crete.
Almost four decades later, luck struck again: A Manhattan woman bequeathed Tamang her entire estate — including two apartments in the famed Dakota building off Central Park and her Russian surrealist art collection.
After all, for 36 years, Ruth Ford and her brother relied on “Indra darling” — as she often called the now 57-year-old — to tend to their activities on three continents. He was ever present in the apartments he inherited, available around the clock as Ford’s health deteriorated.
She died in August at 98, leaving nothing to her estranged daughter and two grandchildren.
So how does a dirt-poor teenager who speaks only Nepalese turn into a globe-trotting sophisticate — and now, a multimillionaire?
He started as a personable waiter whose fine table skills were noticed by a hotel guest — a Mississippi-born writer, photographer and gay cultural activist in his 60s named Charles Henri Ford. He hired Tamang in 1973, first to get groceries and the mail by bicycle to his Katmandu house, then to cook too. Eventually, the bohemian artist taught Tamang how to use a camera and made him his photo assistant.
He became a sort of surrogate son — a factotum who lived the adventures of Ford and his entourage. At one point, Ford, Tamang and a friend rode a Volkswagen minibus from Istanbul to Katmandu via Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
In Paris, home was a studio on Ile Saint-Louis, and Tamang took French lessons. And there was a house on Crete, where the American’s young sidekick learned some Greek from local fishermen.
In New York, they lived in a small apartment at the Dakota four floors above Ford’s sister, Ruth Ford, a former actress, model, muse to artists and writers like William Faulkner, and widow of Hollywood actor Zachary Scott.
The Nepalese emigre went along to celebrity-studded parties the siblings hosted or attended, taking pictures of famous figures that were later published in Charles Ford’s books and exhibited in Manhattan galleries. Tamang also set up cameras for Ford for profiles of well-known faces.
As the years passed, his attention shifted from the brother to his ailing sister, who was losing her sight and hearing; ironically, the brother died first, in 2002.
In recent years, Tamang was on call even at home in Queens with his wife and children. He skipped family vacations to take care of bills and appointments, organize papers and supervise Ruth Ford’s home, though she had a maid.
After her mother’s death, Shelley Scott received “a modest settlement” negotiated with the attorney for the estate, said Arnie Herz, Scott’s lawyer. Tamang agreed to the resolution, whose details remain confidential, Herz said.
Scott is “very happy” for Tamang, Herz said, and she “personally did not make a penny out of the modest settlement, because she gave it all away.”
Her mother had sent her to boarding school as a young child, and the estrangement began, Herz said.
“The mother was a socialite, hanging out with the rich and the famous, and I have the impression that the daughter did not receive the level of parenting she needed,” Herz said.
Now, he said, Scott lives a “simple, meaningful life, and she’s not interested in bashing her mother.”

Neither is Tamang.

“Between Charles and Ruth and me, it was a friendship,” he said. “I wasn’t just a butler; our bonds were more than that.”

When they died, seven years apart, he organized a Buddhist rite for each one in Queens — first for Charles, who followed the Buddhist philosophy, then for Ruth, after her Episcopal funeral.

He says he never looked for another job, though his salary was so modest he could not support his family without his wife also working. The Fords’ assets were mostly in property and art, and they were not cash-rich, Tamang said.

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