Aurelia Butler

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    Woman Will Plead Guilty in Scheme to Defraud Presleys and Sell Graceland

    Prosecutors had accused the woman of creating fraudulent loan documents and forging Lisa Marie Presley’s signature.A Missouri woman agreed to plead guilty to mail fraud on Tuesday for her role in orchestrating what the authorities described as a scheme to defraud Elvis Presley’s heirs by claiming ownership of Graceland, his Memphis home, and threatening to sell it in a foreclosure auction.The woman, Lisa Jeanine Findley, of Kimberling City, Mo., will have a count of aggravated identity theft dismissed as part of the plea agreement, which was filed in United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee.The mail fraud count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, but prosecutors said they would recommend a sentence of less than five years. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A public defender listed in court documents for Ms. Findley also did not respond.The case involving Ms. Findley burst into the public eye in May, when lawyers for the actress Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Mr. Presley, went to court to stop what they said was a monthslong, fraudulent scheme to sell Graceland, which is now a lucrative tourist attraction that draws 600,000 visitors a year.Court papers revealed that the attempt had been made by a company known as Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC, but exactly who was behind that company remained a mystery for many months. Naussany Investments had claimed in court papers that Mr. Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, who died in 2023, had borrowed $3.8 million from the company and put Graceland up as collateral.The company subsequently scheduled a sale of Graceland. But a Tennessee judge blocked the sale and the state’s attorney general said his office would look into the situation after no one showed up in court to represent the company.Eventually, federal officials came forward and claimed that the whole situation had been part of an elaborate fraud.In an affidavit filed in August in support of an arrest warrant, Christopher Townsend, an F.B.I. agent, wrote that Findley used “a series of aliases, email addresses and fake documents” to engage “in a scheme to defraud Elvis Presley’s family for millions of dollars by threatening to foreclose on the ‘Graceland’ estate.”Mr. Townsend said in the 30-page affidavit that Ms. Findley had created fraudulent loan documents and unlawfully used Ms. Presley’s name and signature as part of her scheme.The affidavit also said that Ms. Findley published a fraudulent “Notice of Foreclosure Sale” in The Commercial Appeal, a Memphis newspaper, executed false affidavits that were sent to the Shelby County Register’s Office, and communicated with the news media through fake identities. More

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    Want to Talk About Loss? For This Label Head’s Album, Many Stars Did.

    At the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the English music producer Richard Russell realized how many conversations he was having about mortality and loss.Russell owns the label XL Recordings, whose roster has included Radiohead and Adele. He also makes his own studio albums, with widely assorted collaborators, under the rubric Everything Is Recorded. With permission, he started recording the death-haunted discussions.Those voices would find their way into the opening track and shape the overarching theme of the third Everything Is Recorded album, “Temporary,” due Friday. The songs materialize in a soundscape that mingles past and present, new performances and vintage samples. The lyrics reflect on grief, separation, regrets and memories, but also on survivorship — on what comes afterward.“I didn’t want to make a miserable record,” Russell, 53, said via video from the Copper House, his studio in London, where many of the conversations and most of the album were recorded. “It’s not meant to be that. It’s meant to be joyous, and it was quite joyous to make it.“In a way it’s about loss,” he continued. “But it’s about how to be all right with loss, how to accept it, how to embrace it, to not resist it. Obviously, music can be a huge part of that. Music is one of the things that can provide genuine solace.”Wearing an olive-drab T-shirt, Russell gave a virtual tour of the main studio, a brick-walled space with synthesizers, mixers, an upright piano and an old-fashioned recording console. A wooden wall sculpture from India hung overhead, adding color as well as sound diffusion for live recording. It’s a carving of birds; the album begins and ends with bird songs. “There’s a nice Gil Scott-Heron lyric in the song ‘I Think I’ll Call It Morning,’” he noted, referring to an older track, “where he says, ‘Birds got something to teach us all about being free.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Movies

    ‘Exterior Night’ Review: Life in Perilous Times

    The Italian master Marco Bellocchio turns to TV, revisiting the mysteries of the Aldo Moro affair.When the great Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio made “Good Morning, Night” in 2003, about the 1978 kidnapping and killing of the politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, he provided a fanciful, heartbreaking coda: an image of Moro walking away from captivity, looking not much worse for wear after 55 days in a small cell.Bellocchio revisits the Moro affair in his first television series, “Exterior Night,” and once again he frees Moro (Fabrizio Gifuni) for just a bit. This time the scholarly, prickly statesman gets to stare down his colleagues in Italy’s Christian Democratic Party and tell them exactly how and why they have allowed him to die.(Released in 2022, the series is now available in the United States on MHz Choice, where the third and fourth of six episodes will stream beginning Tuesday.)Moro’s abduction and death was a watershed moment in the “years of lead,” when politically motivated bombings, shootings, kidnappings and assassinations convulsed Italy and other European countries. But it is a story that can speak to anyone who has a sense of living in perilous times. As a character in “Exterior Night” says, a society can tolerate a certain amount of crazy behavior, but “when the crazy party has the majority, we’ll see what happens.”What makes Moro’s fate such prime material for dramatization, though, are its elements of mystery and imponderability and its hints of conspiracy, as murky today as they were four decades ago. Why did Moro’s own government — of which he would have become president later that year — refuse to negotiate for his release? Why did the Red Brigades finally kill him, knowing it probably would be disastrous for their cause?“Good Morning, Night,” told from the point of view of a female captor who begins to sympathize with Moro, was a splendid film, both passionate and razor sharp. Working across five and a half hours in “Exterior Night,” Bellocchio spreads out, adding historical detail and giving space to players he had little or no room for in the film.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Conductor Antonio Pappano, on Top and Learning on the Job

    Antonio Pappano, who leads the London Symphony Orchestra, feels like he is always “playing catch-up” because he skipped music school.It was just a few hours before a concert, and the London Symphony Orchestra was only now rehearsing with its star soloist.Janine Jansen, the violinist featured in Bernstein’s “Serenade (After Plato’s Symposium),” was supposed to have performed the piece with the orchestra on its home turf in early February. But illness forced her to cancel, so she didn’t get together with the orchestra until the sound check for its first stop on its North American tour, at the Granada Theater in Santa Barbara, Calif., last week.The conductor Antonio Pappano walked onto the stage with Jansen, then cued her to begin. To an average listener, what followed would have sounded like a pretty good performance. But to Pappano, there was work to be done.“We can do better,” he told the musicians. “I’m sure.”Concise in his directions and quick to compliment a success, he refined dynamics, asking the violins for a velvety glow, and demanded precision, telling the players: “You’ve got to be exactly with me or exactly with her. There’s no other choice.”Eventually, Pappano was satisfied. He might not have had the luxury of an earlier performance, but “Serenade” was now ready for the London Symphony’s tour, which concludes at Carnegie Hall on March 5 and 6.The Carnegie concerts will be Pappano’s first appearance with the London Symphony in New York since becoming the orchestra’s chief conductor last year. And they will be something of a homecoming for Pappano, who cut his teeth in Manhattan as a humble rehearsal pianist before rising to the top of his field, conducting at the coronation of King Charles III and receiving knighthoods in England and Italy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Drake and PartyNextDoor’s ‘Some Sexy Songs 4 U’ Is No. 1

    Their collaborative album “Some Sexy Songs 4 U” opens atop the Billboard 200, unseating his foe Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX,” which surged after the Super Bowl halftime show.News flash: Drake’s music is not dead.Although the Canadian rapper, the longtime prince of streaming, was badly pummeled in a diss-track war with Kendrick Lamar last year, and two weeks ago Lamar performed Exhibit A of that fight — the vicious “Not Like Us” — at the Super Bowl halftime show, Drake’s latest album has sailed to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.“Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” a collaborative album with the singer and producer PartyNextDoor — with scant reference to Drake’s feud with Lamar — was released on Valentine’s Day and opens at the top of the latest chart. It had the equivalent of 246,000 sales in the United States, including 287 million streams and 25,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.It is Drake’s 14th title to go to No. 1, counting collaborative releases, which ties him with Jay-Z and Taylor Swift for the most albums by a solo act to reach the top of Billboard’s chart. (The Beatles have more No. 1 albums than anybody, solo or group, with 19.)The release of “Some Sexy Songs” also came after Drake sued Universal Music Group, the giant label behind him and Lamar, for defamation in “Not Like Us” (which was lightly censored at the Super Bowl). His joint album was released by Republic, a Universal label, along with OVO Sound, a Drake imprint, which is distributed through Sony Music, a Universal competitor.The numbers for “Some Sexy Songs” are modest for Drake, whose knack for taking over streaming services has made him one of the top-selling artists of the last decade-plus. Its 246,000 “album equivalents” last week — a composite figure that combines popularity on streaming with old-fashioned unit sales — is considerably lower than the opening-week totals for Drake’s last two releases, “For All the Dogs” (402,000 in 2023) and “Her Loss,” a joint album with 21 Savage (404,000 in 2022). But it is better than the 204,000 he had for “Honestly, Nevermind” in 2022 — still his lowest opening-week number for a studio LP — and the 109,000 for “Care Package,” a 2019 collection of non-album tracks.Also this week, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” rises five spots to No. 2 after the release of an expanded version, and Lamar’s “GNX” falls two to No. 3, after it returned to the top slot in the week following his triumphant Super Bowl appearance. SZA’s “SOS” is No. 4 and Bad Bunny’s “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” is in fifth place. More

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    Jane Fonda’s SAG Awards Speech: ‘Empathy Is Not Weak or Woke’

    While some stars have been less politically outspoken this awards season, she issued a call to action as she accepted a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild.Jane Fonda, who has been politically outspoken since the Vietnam War era, urged people “to resist successfully what is coming at us” as she accepted a lifetime achievement award Sunday night during the Screen Actors Guild Awards.“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke,” said Fonda, 87. “And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”She never explicitly mentioned President Trump or his administration, but she seemed to allude to them as she warned of bad things to come.“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way,” Fonda said. “Even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent. Because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what is coming at us.”Fonda, a two-time Academy Award winner, has long been known for political activism, particularly her support for the civil rights movement and Indigenous rights and for her opposition to the Vietnam War. A 1972 visit to North Vietnam led some critics to call her “Hanoi Jane”; she has since apologized to soldiers and veterans for being photographed there on an antiaircraft gun. In more recent years, she has fought to draw attention to the climate crisis.In her acceptance speech, she expressed her strong support for unions and noted that when she was starting out in the late 1950s, some leading Hollywood figures had been prominently resisting McCarthyism. She also said that she believes Americans are currently facing the same kinds of challenges that have been captured in historical documentaries about social movements, including apartheid, the civil rights movement and the Stonewall Rebellion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More