This is part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the cult known as The Hooded Hawk. If you any information regarding this investigation, please contact your local authorities immediately.

Ken Stone, investigative reporter, stationed live here in the NY tristate area. In 2007, I won the “Top Crime Reporter in the NY Tristate Area” award granted annually by the Metropolitan Freelance Writers’ Guild. I’m the guy that Rudy Giuliani wakes up thinking about with a cold sweat in the middle of the night. When a stray cat gets mauled by a truck under the BQE, I’m the first guy to hear about it. Some know me as the man who was handing out pennies to the neighborhood children who had gathered around when a lowlife soldier from the Genovese family took some potshots at me with the accuracy of a little boy. I am also the man who broke the infamous Derek Jeter autograph scam scandal at an auction in Wyandach out in Suffolk County. Street villains such as G-Man, Worm, Big Jim, and a no-show town employee named Tony Tickets were all locked up as a result of my reporting. My informants are carefully and deceptively placed all over the five boroughs and surrounding suburbs. They meet who they need to meet in the aisles of Home Depots and flush incriminating notes down the toilet. That crossing guard who serves as a surrogate mother for your children thirty seconds every day? She has a Smith & Wesson .38 I’ve procured from an Albanian mobster in the Bronx. I have blacked out with Jesuits, rappers, real estate moguls; I have gambled away my daughter’s first communion money down in AC. I’m a man about town. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The metropolitan area winds down for the holiday; drunken revelers make grave mistakes on the night before Thanksgiving, in some cases drunk driving and destroying entire families forever; a large inflatable Garfield balloon is blown up in the darkness of Central Park; the ghost of Regis Philbin sips his eggnog in heaven and looks down on the festivities with that avuncular smile we had all grown to love and cherish.

The celestial sounds of Regis’ smooth crooning continue to echo out across not only the tristate area, but throughout the vast infinity of the cosmos itself, in frequencies only an elite few can hear:

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas/with every Christmas card I write

Back in 2021, I broke that story as well. Reports from Jersey that a woman in a nursing home who had been in a state of catatonia for a decade suddenly one evening began to waltz around and merrily sing in her room. The nurses were astounded. When asked if any changes had happened inside of her, she avowed that Regis had come to her in a vision and told her to let go of all the misery in her heart that told her that she would never experience love again.

In short, the holiday season has commenced. For this reporter, the excitement shifts in a different direction. There will be no lavish holiday meal. Instead of a Turkey filled with rosemary and apples, cranberry sauce, and delectable cocktails, family members and in-laws exchanging amusing anecdotes, laughter, smiles, joy, it will be just yours truly, award-winning investigative reporter Kenneth Stone, with a bottle of bourbon, some cold bottles of Bud in the fridge for a chaser, and an unlicensed handgun in a briefcase under the bed whose demon cries remind me each night of all the uncertainty in this universe, the foremost being whether I have the will to make it through another holiday season.

But I keep going.

This case is too big.

There are too many leads.

Too many caverns.

Winding country roads that seem to lead nowhere until all of a sudden in the moonlight there is an old barn and you park your car and go inside and find among the grunting, swollen farm animals the remains of a human being.

The latest in this grisly saga involves a boutique vintage shop in Cold Spring, New York, ostensibly owned and operated by a Ms. Tabatha Tribeca-Coldbrew. To the passerbyer on the street, eating ice cream with their family on a crisp fall day, the thought that this small business was a front for a criminal organization would not likely occur. Neither would the fact that the proprietor, the aforementioned Ms. Tabatha Tribeca-Coldbrew, had come under the tutelage of a nefarious healer and controversial writer Jason Shint. Author of numerous bestsellers—The Manageable Good Vibes Highway to Divine Love, Wealth Mindset Growth Health Living In An Age Of Tepid Democracy, The Tip of the Iceberg: How the Irish Sunk the Titanic and Other Postpartum Strategies For Daddies Whose Partner Has Just Birthed, Learning to Love Again, What if Saturn Never Returned? & the pretentious, overwrought travel guide Maui Momma Come Back To Me—Shint is, nonetheless, an undeniable powerhouse among healers nationwide.

Ms. Tribeca-Coldbrew’s primary partner Donathan, with who she is in a polyamorous relationship with, had this to say: “I adore my partner, Tabatha. When we matched on the Swiper app in Chiang Mai all those years ago, I knew I had found My Woman.” [He insisted that this reporter capitalize the phrase My Woman, for it was a crucial piece of the lore between him and Ms. Tribeca-Coldbrew]. Flash forward many years to the present day, and the digital detox Donathan had meticulously planned to simultaneously relaunch his career as an entrepreneur, life coach, & DJ, was hijacked like Flight 93.

Tabatha opened a “dope” vintage antique shop in the town of Cold Spring, New York, called Woke Momma. According to evidence presented by the prosecution in the ongoing trial, Woke Momma was not a legitimate business but a front for a criminal organization known as The Hooded Hawk. Donathan told this reporter that he learned of this unfortunate news when on day 3 of his digital detox, his assistant Shmiel stormed into his bath-time-low-frequency session to announce that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had arrived to his penthouse suite.

I’ll let Donathan’s words highlight his descent into hell: “You want to know what the worst part of my day was? I was riding the excellent high of my digital detox. Aglow with the knowledge that the meditative reps I was doing in the present would reap financial abundance in the future. Thinking of the highs of my divine love with my partner, my person, the woman who defied the patriarchy by taking half my name, the hot-ass babette, who should be a Rockette at Radio City as far as I’m concerned, by the name of Tabatha Tribceca-Coldbrew. The point is, I was doing well. I was chillin’. Arguably, I hadn’t felt that good since I was at the zenith of my DJ career.”

And what was the news that shocked Donathan’s world?

This is part of an ongoing series by award-winning journalist Kenneth Stone, who has covered The Hooded Hawk story for several publications for over two years now.

Hello to all my wonderful subscribers on this beautiful cloudy Monday in New York!

I just put a book of short fiction out called Successfreak. It features some great illustrations by my friend Silas Borsos. You can order it here:

https://tinycutlery.com/shop/p/successfreak

Cheers,

Jack

Things are heating up in the race for mayor in the Big Apple. One candidate, the candidate who I know deserves to win and who we need more than ever back in a big way in this state, reminds me a lot of a very special man from my past: my CYO soccer coach, Vinny O’Brien. They are different in certain respects but what I see in both of them are brilliant, tough men who are determined to win.

Who was Vin? Vin was a no-bullshit workhorse. A man’s man. The kind of guy that woke up with a beer and went to bed with bourbon, that provided for his family. The world tried to tell Vin how he was supposed to live his life, who he was supposed to be. And you know what he did? He told everybody to go fuck themselves and did it his way. All the way until the end. It was the 3rd grade boys’ soccer team and Vin was determined to win. The second all the minivans drove off, and the dainty ears of the parish mothers were enjoying the easy-listening ballads of Shania Twain and Celine Dion away in their vehicles and were away from the soccer field —the Coliseum, the battle ground, where us young boys were being shaped into warrior-men, those storied grass fields where Vin would launch geese shit if we didn’t run our punishment laps fast enough, sometimes adding in that the shit was “pure Canadian” for good measure, where Vin screamed, needled, shoved and shouted us towards what he hoped was victory—Vin did not hold back. He used cuss words liberally. Whatever it took to win, Vin was willing to do. He was, in many respects, a champion. There is one vicious rant, in particular, that Vin went on where he praised the courage of the geese and their long migrations, comparing it to our sloth, that to this day never fails to give me chills when I reflect on it. Would he take us, a bunch of kids who spent too much time indoors playing N64 games like Pokemon Snap and Goldeneye, to the championship that year? Or would his out of control drinking and rageaholic tendencies zap the team’s ambition? Would we, a group of young boys with our whole lives ahead of us, sink into the maelstrom of Vin’s wild psyche and come out the other end stronger—as true warriors—or would we merely lose every game in the season, becoming true losers, and thus just more names on the allegedly long lost of people whose lives had been rocked by Vin’s boozing?

With a big wad of chewing tobacco edged in the corner of his mouth, he fired off commands to every kid on the team as we did our drills or paced around manically in our scrimmage matches, life and death—heaven and hell—at stake. The war against Catholicism that had begun centuries before when that pussy ass bitch Martin Luther nailed his whiny “Theses” to the wall; was this the type of stuff that went on in Vin’s mind beneath that permanent mean mug? Inconclusive. Did Vin have a tumultuous marriage? Many claimed so. Did Vin spend countless hours each week at McGroarty’s Tavern by the Metro North station to avoid seeing his wife and kids, soaking in the solace of the devil’s homemade gin and the other regulars’ inane din—obsessive, repetitive analyses, parroted from radio talking heads, of the latest in NY sports— instead? It is difficult to deny the affirmative in that as well. Then again, the devil’s advocate asks, would we have won the championship that year had Vin been a spineless appeaser like Neville Chamberlain rather than the stalwart, diehard Napoleon that he was? Was he really just wasting time at the Tavern, escaping his responsibility as a family man every time he lifted the glass from the dark bar of the Tavern, or was he internally drafting the playbook that won us the championship that year and that, mastermind that he was, he knew he could not put down on paper at the Tavern because the head coach of our #1 rival, Patrick McGinty from Our Lady of Lourdes, was known to pop in to the Tavern once in awhile and was the type of red-faced Mick fuck who’d snatch up any piece of paper or book anyone had out, like a lizard sucking down flies in a glass box in one of those rooms that smell like the death of the jungle in the Bronx Zoo, and hold it up to his face and put on a mocking nerd voice and say, watcha readin’ there Vinny? Harry Potter and the Buybacks?

He had no mercy, that McGinty. Vin? Sure, he was just as tough, but he had a human side, too. Beneath his stern exterior he loved us kids. He was the way he was because he believed in us. He wanted us to win. McGinty was an absolute monster. And you have to understand, this was before cell phones, when it was more normal for people to do other things at the bar than look at their phones when they were alone. Guys used to scan the obituaries to pay their respects to old-timers they might’ve known that kicked the bucket, checked out the ads in between the editorials to see if any of the lawyer chicks in the photos were smokeshows.

Ultimately, it is my conviction that, despite what all the gossips in town say, Vin was not an alcoholic who was running away from his family. He was a mastermind who used alcohol as fuel to draft the perfect playbook that won us the championship that year. And if we hadn’t won that year when I was in the 3rd grade, would my current wife Courtney, who I started dating the year after we won the championship, when I was in 4th grade, have fallen for me? Would my wonderful son, Champion, never have been before? If you could see how far the home runs Champion hits during the beach wiffleball games against his cousins, you might know the answer to that question. It’s funny, no one ever wants to ask the hard questions…

It’s Easter Sunday night here. All day I tried to be grateful for the sacrifices Jesus made, but I can’t focus. I take my boat out on the Hudson River and light up a cigar. Sometimes a soulful moonlit evening alone births the greatest ideas for business. The cigar hits nice, and I add a little bourbon to compliment it. My incredible wife Courtney has limited me to one bourbon a night now. So I’ve been drinking about one bourbon a night for the past 3 or so years. The Cuban is an Easter special. Usually I don’t even smoke. More importantly, my hulk is riding smoothly on the Hudson, and in the distance the wonderful lights of the bridge, that wonderful new bridge where the Tapan Zee Bridge once stood, emerge. That’s when it truly hits me: a certain man must take the reigns of the mayoralty of New York City, he must win, that is what the world needs now more than ever, the prophecy must be fulfilled, everything depends on this outcome…

It’s rare that I see that type of attitude anymore. A guy who is willing to go the distance. A no bullshit man from a good Catholic family who will fight the good fight. Just as Thomas More did, when he saw Henry VII’s flagrant improprieties and put everything in his life on the line to call out it out. When we lose, we experience injustice in our lives firsthand. In the 3rd grade, when we blew Our Lady of Lourdes out of the fucking water on that fateful cloudy day, winning the game in a 4-nil blowout, Vinny O’Brien showed me what it feels like to be a winner. It is a lesson I am proud to say I have never forgotten.

The domain for this blog has been purchased by the producer Jackie Michaels. Renowned for his exceptional and legendary skills to produce every type of media content for his respective clients, Jackie is the leading luminary of the cultural scene of the 2020s. Until further notice all posts on this blog will be entirely and exclusively about the one and only Jackie Michaels. Jackie has hired a team of the best young writers to chronicle his dope daily escapades as a producer and tastemaker, right here on this blog.

But ultimately, Jackie remains uncertain about whether or not Chat GPT and AI could deliver a better product. He wants the best product to tell the story of his life. Not to mention that those exciting new technologies would cost him a lot less. So, this is sort of like the reality TV show Survivor, and he wants to test the writers to see what they can deliver. Just as the pharoah told Moses he was lazy for wanting to go to the desert to worship God, Jackie is not sold on whether any of the writers-contestants have enough work ethic.

This week’s contestant: an Iowa MFA student named Thurber Lard. Will Jackie approve of his writing, and bring him to the upper echelons of dope life success with him? Or will he toil away in obscurity grading undergraduate papers about gender equality for less than minimum wage for the rest of his life? Stay tuned. Enjoy this week’s episode. Peace and prosperity to all. And that’s the exclusive Jackie Michaels guarantee you can bet your ass on. -JM

It is with great dismay that life’s sorrows may not be immediately followed by life’s most pleasurable moments. Indeed, the intense sadness and disappointment that may enter one’s life may in fact be prolonged for such a period that the individual engulfed in its depth may soon forget the glorious tastes of the many fruits of life; that same succulence that perhaps Adam tasted when he erroneously listened to the serpent, and cast man out of paradise for eternity. The sweetness of the fruit may no longer be tested, not even in that unreliable mistress called memory, when the vicissitudes of hellfire have bathed the soul with its lacerating waters.

Fortunately, such tribulations do not apply in the life of the iconic producer Jackie Michaels. Jackie’s life has been one success moment after another. The most recent episode in his beautiful life, which I will fill you in on, dear reader, shortly, fits into that pattern like a bird in a flock that has just set off towards the sunset. Birds traverse continents together in that epic journey scientists call migration. Jackie Michaels traverses the art and entertainment world. The result? He produces gold. The difference? The birds leave their feces behind whereas Jackie produces stunningly successful product for all of his clients and their adoring fans.

Jackie’s latest client, Surf Dad, is one of his most exciting yet. Fresh out of songwriting camp, Surf Dad is about to alter the musical landscape indelibly. An indie rocker who has an incredible ability to make the most feel-good sonic landscapes imaginable, Surf Dad is not a songwriter to miss, particularly as summer 2025 approaches. God only knows what the future holds for such a talented young man.

Surf Dad’s music, if listened to enough, will help jumpstart that self-care routine you’ve been wanting to fire up like a spliff. It will calm you down. Focus your mind so that you can be your best self. Over email, Ken Kentson, the legendary downtown photographer, told me that, after listening to Surf Dad’s album West Coast, he went into a deep meditative trance that lasted for 3 hours, and the only way he got out of it was by running over to The Cold Brew Emporium in the West Village (we do not have such an equivalent out here in the cornfields of Iowa) and bribing the barista there to make a very specific matcha ginger broth that he then soaked his foot in for the entire evening before he felt like himself again. Kentson said that the week that followed was one of the dopest in his life. He made tons of connections in the industry that week and has another gallery launch coming later this year as a result.

What has Jackie done for Surf Dad? Plays, likes, skips, and saves are monitored and tracked and sent to the Surf Dad team so that they know what’s good and can work their magic in the studio to make those necessary artistic changes. In collaboration with one of Spotify’s leading in-house producers, Jackie has placed Surf Dad’s hottest new single, “Hell(o) Angel” on not just one, but several of Spotify’s in-house editorial playlists. The result? Millions of streams. Tens of thousands of new fans for Surf Dad all across the globe, from Hoboken to Hong Kong. Surf Dad’s set last week at The Risers: Spotify’s Emerging Young Voices Festival For Incredible Exceptional Young Voices at Club Follow For Follow in North Bushwick last Thursday night only sold about seven tickets, but that’s just because Surf Dad is so underground at this point that his millions of streams have not yet caught up to reality. It is only a matter of time until Surf Dad’s vibe transforms the world, and none of it could have happened without Jackie’s magic touch as a producer.

You can stream “Hell(o) Angel” on the following Spotify playlists:

“Indie Chillout”

“Chilling With Your Friends”

“Another Stress Free Day In The Books”

“Turned The Page To The Next Chapter In Your Life Only To Discover It Was Amazing”

“Audio Wake and Bake For Sober Neurodivergents”

“Drowning Out The Screams of Despair and Return-of-the-Repressed-Type Thoughts That Emerge When You Are With Absolute Silence and Not Consuming Media”

“I Think I Found My Person?”

“Getting Ready For Bed But Immaculate Energy Only You’re Not Stressed At All”

“Dope Songs To Rock Out To With That Special Person”

“Press This Button To Hear 3 Hours Of Fire Ass Indie Songs That Will Make You Feel Amazing”

“Hellfire Cometh”

“Smoke and Toke Yoga Chill Session For Love and Prosperity Feelings”

“I Hope Your Day Is So Dope”

“Coffee. Breakfast. Workout. Check Your Email. Check your Text messages.”

“Holistic Midday Mood Booster (While the Irishman Reaches For The Bottle Instead)”

“Van Life Campfire Chill Sesh”

“Litigious Landlords”

“I Just Found My Person And I’m Very Excited About It”

“Yes, This Day Will Very Most Likely Rock, But You Have To Jumpstart It The F*** Up And This Collection of MP3s Will Do That For You”

“Wellness? Check!”

“Van Life Campfire Blaze Sesh”

“Chill Road Trip Vibes”

“Chill Commute”

“Low-Key Ridin’ The Surf Dad Train :)”

Everything he had ever known was a lie. St. Patrick had never thrown the snakes out of Ireland; they were their the whole time. The end of Long Island, Montauk, was not the end of the world. He had thought he was going to have a nice weekend over in the city, to get a load on, sure, but also to just enjoy the holiday festivities—what was wrong with that?—who didn’t enjoy the yearly tradition of Manhattan on fire with the Christmas spirit, a midnight’s kiss in Central Park before a young lover who owed a bookie connected to the Five Families was gunned down with a machine gun in front of his crying wife to be and she was pregnant too, sure, yes, there was violence in the city, but there was the eternal holiday joy too, so much of it, that’s why he had booked the room the night before Thanksgiving, because that was when the holiday season really went into high gear, when everyone went out drinking big time the night before Thanksgiving, nothing wrong with getting a load on like that—so what? when you work your ass off nonstop all year—and that’s what he had been doing in his pleasant but affordable hotel room at the Holiday Inn Express in Midtown when his drinking had gone a little bit too far and he started to think about 9/11 again and felt the world slip away and now somehow he had ended up in some dump upstate, Jesus Christ on the cross. The hicks up here did not like the Irish and they especially did not like the Catholics, they reviled the Holy See and anything that stunk of Popery and what they saw as the cult of the Virgin Mary. All it would take was one wrong look at one of those overall-wearing freaks and they would have you in the back of their truck, chopped up on ice next to the venison.

He got to the first floor of the hotel and walked into a large ballroom. There was an upside down piano and pieces of paper and smashed instruments here and there, playing cards thrown about and glitter all over the floor. There must have been a party at some point and now it was over. Was this the party that he had heard up in his room? Had it happened while he slept? It could not have been that recent. He wasn’t a scientist, a detective. He didn’t know when the hell the party was. He had missed the party, that was the main point. There must have been a lot of characters and beautiful women there, the booze aplenty, an open bar in fact, but at this early hour it was all over now, done forever, and all he had to show for it was one measly Irish coffee poured half-assedly by an insouciant bellboy with a laziness that could only be backed by a union. The effects of the Irish coffee were about to wear off. He needed more of the hard stuff more than anything. All that mattered was that the party was over, he had missed it, and the hangover that he had delayed for two days with further drink was about to catch up to him in a horrible way.

In the corner of the ballroom the bellboy was there with his eyesight right on the trembling guest from Room 403. Mickie was sure that he had not been there just a moment before, that he had appeared out of nowhere in a moment, but also the effects of the Irish coffee had just started to wear off and he no longer had any alcohol in his system and he was beginning to hear voices in his head and felt unsteady as if at any moment he would finally fall over and it would all be over for good. Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.

“There you are, thank God!” Mickie’s voice was failing. “This has been a ridiculous Thanksgiving weekend. I don’t know how the hell I even ended up here. Where the hell are we, upstate? Did I get on the bus to Saratoga to bet on the ponies? I was checked into the Holiday Inn Express in Midtown.”

“Thanksgiving weekend? What do you mean, sir? We’re now just days away from New Years Eve. Christmas was two days ago.”

Mickie stood their shaking not believing a word the insouciant bellboy spoke. He only talked to him because he had the booze on him anyway, and he did not care a lick for the man’s pedantry when it came to such matters as the Gregorian calendar.

He changed the subject fast before he heard any other such egregious distortions. “Say kid, you got that whiskey on ya still? It really put a pep in my step but now I’m, uh, falterin’ a little bit here kid.”

The bellboy smiled with a deviousness that had grown even more diabolical.

“Oh yea, Mickie, I got it. Why don’t you come this way, let’s hang out a bit.”

He pointed to an out of place red door on one of the walls in the ballroom near where he stood. Mickie walked over to him unsteadily. The bellboy led him into the room.

There was a fireplace going strong and the room smell of freshly burned wood. There was a large black leather couch filled with blankets and pillows. There were no windows in the room and the lights were dim. It smelled like a movie theater.

“Please Mickie, make yourself at home, I’ll make you a nice strong one. How about a Manhattan?”

“Terrific, just terrific kid. I knew you’d come through.”

“You can smoke in here too Mickie, if you want. Light one up, baby.”

He tossed Mickie a pack of smokes and an electrical lighter. Mickie’s hand shook as he struggled to light a cigarette. The sounds of ice and glass moved in the room as the bellboy prepared the drinks.

“Oh yea, Mickie, and how could I forget?” The bellboy snapped his right middle finger and right thumb together.

A classic rock song started to play, the intro to a very classic one with a slide guitar. It had been voted the #1 Greatest Classic Rock Song of All Time by iHeart radio listeners.

The bellboy walked over to the couch. “Isn’t this great, Mickie? This is the man cave right here! We got everything we need!”

He handed Mickie his drink. The bellboy watched as Mickie drank a big sip of the Manhattan. His face became animated again.

“We got ourselves a friggin’ mixologist ova here! Holy crap!”

“You’re dead, Mickie.”

“What’d you poison me you little shitbag?”

The bellboy continued to smile.

“Why would I do that, Mickie?”

“I don’t know, kid. Cause you hate the Pope?”

“It’s not about that Mickie, I’m just a messenger.”

“You’re a bartender kid, and a great one at that. And you will keep these coming all afternoon.”

The bellboy became serious in front of Mickie for the first time that day.

“Where the hell are we anyway? Saratoga? Can I bet on the ponies up here?”

“I wasn’t kidding Mickie.”

“I ain’t kiddin’ either junior, I’m back on the saddle and now I’m ready to play with the numbers. What are we working with here?”

“Mickie. You’re dead.”