musiclover

Convicted of engineering a $100 million mortgage-fraud scheme, Aaron Hand was yearning for vengeance and stuck in prison, prosecutors said.

So from behind bars, he plotted to have a key witness against him killed. He hired an undercover investigator posing as a hit man, issued instructions to make the murder look like a gang attack and said he wished he could be there to see the witness suffer, prosecutors said.

When word leaked out last year that New York police were showing an inflammatory movie about Muslims to trainees, news reporters flipped open their notebooks, picked up their phones and hit the speed dial for a man named Paul Browne.

As the spokesman for America’s largest police force, Deputy Police Commissioner Browne is one of the most important — yet largely unknown — newsmakers around. From Occupy Wall Street to the arrest of the International Monetary Fund chief, he’s at the center of some of the globe’s biggest stories.

A judge overstepped his authority when he tried to ban enforcement around the world of an $18 billion judgment against Chevron Inc. for environmental damage in Ecuador, a federal appeals court said Thursday.

The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals explained why it lifted the ban last year and blocked a judge from staging a trial to decide if the judgment was obtained fairly.

A judge gave federal prosecutors until a week from Wednesday to give up the name of a witness they say was recruited for a chilling, al-Qaida-sanctioned plot for suicide bombers to attack the New York City subways with explosives made from beauty supplies.

Lawyers for alleged plotter Adis Madunjanin had demanded to know the identity of the man, referred to only as John Doe in court papers, before Madunjanin goes to trial later this year.

A 17th century portrait that once hung over the fireplace of Elizabeth Taylor’s Bel Air home — and only recently reattributed to the Dutch master Frans Hals — is expected to fetch up to $1 million at auction. “Portrait of a Man,” painted in the early 1630s, is being offered at Christie’s sale of Old Masters on Wednesday.

A Hals scholar, Seymour Slive, had listed the painting as a “doubtful” Hals in a 1974 catalog, based on a black and white photo of the work. After Taylor hung it in her home in the 1950s, “It academically fell off the radar,” said Nicholas Hall, head of Christie’s Old Master paintings.