xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In 1999, recently widowed Mary Corcoran, who was already set to receive a $1.4 million settlement from Union Pacific Railroad in the death of her husband, met Chicago lawyer Joseph P. Dowd in a bar, and Dowd convinced her that she needed better legal representation. Dowd called a hotshot Chicago law firm, which examined the case, concluded that Corcoran could not expect more than $1.4 million, and thus bowed out without charging Corcoran. Dowd, however, continues to bill Corcoran for the customary “finder’s fee” (10 percent, or $140,000) stemming from the single phone call he made to the Chicago law firm. According to an August report in The New York Times, Dowd is back in court, demanding not only the $140,000 but five years’ interest.
The Catholic Diocese of Orange County, Calif., which should be alarmed about facing millions of dollars in abusive-priest lawsuits, has quietly since 1998 bought up at least 10 luxury townhouses (some in beach communities, one $2 million house for the monsignor) for its priests, despite plenty of room for them in 56 church rectories, where priests have traditionally lived. According to an investigation by the OC Weekly of Santa Ana, just the 10 identified properties have a total value of about $8.8 million.
In a weird-behavior genre that has been out of the news for several years now, the Taipei Times reported that a man went to the emergency room of the National Taiwan University Hospital on Sept. 6 with an empty Taiwan-brand beer bottle lodged in his rectum, it having been inserted “wide-end first.” Doctors took two hours to remove the bottle and said that the man had a history of such inappropriate insertions.
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd
NEWS OF THE WEIRD