Echo Park Candidate "Haunted By Her Past"

As reported here last week, tomorrow is the big day for Yolande Beckles, when the electors pass judgment on her suitability as a candidate for the Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council of Los Angeles. The local blogzine The Eastsider LA yesterday published an article about Yolande, showing all the hallmarks of a media outlet with a large team of conservative lawyers and a strong desire not to suffer the penalties associated with breach of local election law. The article refers to "surprise", "misfortune" and "involvement at local schools" and goes on to give Miss Beckles a time-honoured and thoroughly decent right of reply in which she defends her record of selfless volunteering, philanthropy and mistakes, mostly in the public domain.

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Well, Beckles Watch does not propose to deal in euphemisms or censored verbiage. Yolande Beckles' mistakes are in the public domain because we - working together with some incredibly courageous victims and a few decent and honest journalists - put her there. Yolande Beckles has a past riddled with accusations of misrepresentation, fraud, embezzlement, theft, assault and even attempted murder. She has been taken to court for attempting to poison a partner and got off only by hiring expensive barristers whom she never paid. She has taken money from desperately poor, largely ethnic minority, families for overseas trips that never took place. And everywhere she has been she has left victims facing massive debts with no hope of recovering their money. But, of course, all this is behind her. Having moved to America, Yolande Beckles is now living the life of a saint, with "nothing for me to hide".

According to denial extracts published in The Eastsider, Yolande "...continues to work to repay some debts. Meanwhile, she volunteers at local schools and raises funds for programs to help disadvantaged students and support arts education." What a load of bulls**t! The only debts Yolande Beckles is struggling to repay are the personal ones that she can't get away with by declaring her businesses insolvent. And as for her transformation on arriving in America, don't believe a word of it. Take this email that I received from a Los Angeles auto dealer last October: "This woman should be on the FBI's most wanted list! She tried to buy a car from our dealership and her paperwork was completely false... it wasn't even her information it belonged to someone else." And, far worse, the testimony of the woman who took Yolande into her house when she first arrived - only to be left with her house and car repossessed, hugely in debt due to fraudulent use of her credit cards, with her necklace stolen and strong evidence to suggest that Yolande had attempted to kill her daughter by poisoning. Vote for whom you like tomorrow. If you want to be represented by a murderer, swindler, thief and all-round bad guy... vote for Al Capone. Or if he's not available, the next best choice.