Guilty Pleasures
By NewsPress Now
Celebrity handbag designer sentenced to 18 months in prison
MIAMI | A leading fashion designer whose accessories were used by celebrities from Britney Spears to the cast of the “Sex and the City” TV series was sentenced Monday to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty in Miami federal court on charges of smuggling crocodile handbags from her native Colombia.
Nancy Gonzalez was arrested in 2022 in Cali, Colombia, and later extradited to the U.S. for running a sprawling multiyear conspiracy that involved recruiting couriers to transport her handbags on commercial flights to high-end showrooms and New York fashion events — all in violation of U.S. wildlife laws.
“It’s all driven by the money,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Watts-Fitzgerald, who compared Gonzalez’s behavior to that of drug traffickers. “If you want to deter the conduct, you want the cocaine kingpin, not the person in the field.”
Lawyers for Gonzalez sought leniency for the celebrity designer, describing her journey as a divorced single mother of two children who designed belts on a home sewing machine in Cali for friends into a fashion icon who outcompeted the likes of Dior, Prada and Gucci.
“She was determined to show her children and the world that women, including minority women like herself, can pursue their dreams successfully, and become financially independent,” they wrote in a memo prior to Monday’s hearing. “Against all odds, this tiny but mighty woman was able to create the very first luxury, high-end fashion company from a third world country.”
The attorneys said the 71-year-old designer has already paid dearly for her crimes. The Colombian company she built, which once employed 300 mostly female employees, declared bankruptcy and stopped operating after her arrest.
They also argued that only 1% of the merchandise she imported into the U.S. lacked proper authorization and were samples for New York Fashion week and other events.
Gonzalez, addressing the court before sentencing, said she deeply regretted not meticulously complying with U.S. laws and that her only wish is to hug once more her 103-year-old mother.
“From the bottom of my heart, I apologize to the United States of America. I never intended to offend a country to which I owe immense gratitude,” she said holding back tears. “Under pressure, I made poor decisions.”
Prosecutors countered that Gonzalez had acquired great wealth and an opulent lifestyle, which contrasted with the couriers she recruited to smuggle her merchandise into the United States. The couriers were instructed to say that the items were gifts for their relatives if they were asked any questions by customs agents.
“Her mission turned into producing felons,” said Watts-Fitzgerald. “She tried to rewrite the law for herself, to do it her way.”
According to the testimony of her co-defendants and former employees, ahead of important fashion events, Gonzalez, described as a micro-manager, would recruit as many as 40 passengers to carry four designer handbags each on commercial flights. In this way, prosecutors estimate that she smuggled goods that fetched as much as $2 million in the U.S. Gonzalez’s attorneys disputed the claim and said each skin cost only around $140.
All of the hides were from caiman and pythons bred in captivity. Nonetheless, on some occasions she failed to obtain the proper import authorizations from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, required under a widely ratified international treaty governing the trade in endangered and threatened wildlife species.
In 2016 and 2017, she was warned by U.S. officials against sidestepping such rules, making her conduct particularly “egregious,” Judge Robert Scola said in handing down his sentence.
Prosecutors had been seeking a stiffer sentence of 30 to 37 months. But Scola said he was taking into account the nearly 14 months she spent in harsher conditions in a Colombian prison awaiting extradition. Gonzalez, who has been free on a bond under confinement at her daughter’s home in Miami, must surrender June 6 to begin her sentence.
Although trade in the skins used by Gonzalez was not prohibited, they came from protected wildlife that requires close monitoring under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known by its initials as CITES.
Salma Hayek, Britney Spears and Victoria Beckham are among celebrities who bought Gonzalez’s carefully crafted handbags. Her work also was included in a 2008 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Gonzalez’s attorneys showed in court a video, from 2019, of top buyers from Bergdorf Goodman, Saks and others praising the designer’s creativity, productivity and humanity — comments prosecutor Watts-Fitzgerald said the retailers likely regret today.
“They must be regretting they were ever put up to that and if they heard it was presented in court they would cringe,” said Watts-Fitzgerald. “They have their own brand to protect.”
PEN America calls
off awards ceremony
NEW YORK | Facing widespread unhappiness over its response to the Israel-Hamas war, the writers’ group PEN America has called off its annual awards ceremony. Dozens of nominees had dropped out of the event, which was to have taken place next week.
PEN, a literary and free expression organization, hands out hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes each year, including $75,000 for the PEN/Jean Stein Award for best book. But with nine of the 10 Jean Stein finalists withdrawing, along with nominees in categories ranging from translation to poetry, continuing with the ceremony at The Town Hall in Manhattan proved unworkable.
Among those dropping out was debut novel finalist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, wife of former PEN president Salman Rushdie.
“This is a beloved event and an enormous amount of work goes into it, so we all regret this outcome but ultimately concluded it was not possible to carry out a celebration in the way we had hoped and planned,” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said in a statement Monday.
The cancellation comes as tensions over the war have spread throughout the country, from college campuses to political events to roadways, which at times have been blocked by protesters everywhere from Illinois to California.
Since the war began last October, authors affiliated with PEN have repeatedly denounced the organization for allegedly favoring Israel and downplaying atrocities against Palestinian writers and journalists. In an open letter published last month, and endorsed by Naomi Klein and Lorrie Moore among others, the signers criticized PEN for not mobilizing “any substantial coordinated support” for Palestinians and for not upholding its mission to “dispel all hatreds and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace and equality in one world.”
PEN has responded by citing that it has condemned the loss of life in Gaza, called for a ceasefire and helped set up a $100,000 emergency fund for Palestinian writers. Last week, PEN America President Jennifer Finney Boylan announced that a committee was being formed to review the organization’s work, “not just over the last six months, but indeed, going back a decade, to ensure we are aligned with our mission and make recommendations about how we respond to future conflicts.”
Critics have said that the relief fund is too small and noted that PEN waited until March to endorse a ceasefire, five months after the war began.
Stein finalists had included Justin Torres’ “Blackouts,” winner last fall of the National Book Award for fiction, and Catherine Lacey’s “Biography of X.” At the request of the estate for Jean Stein, an author and oral historian who died in 2017, the prize money will be donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
“Jean Stein was a passionate advocate for Palestinian rights who published, supported, and celebrated Palestinian writers and visual artists,” reads a statement from Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Wendy Vanden Heuvel and Bill Clegg, on behalf of the Stein estate. “While she established the PEN America award in her name to bring attention to and provide meaningful support to writers of the highest literary achievement, we know she would have respected the stance and sacrifice of the writers who have withdrawn from contention this year.”
Camille T. Dungy’s “Soil” had been the only remaining Stein award contender.
PEN announced Monday that judges had selected a handful of winners, among them Javier Fuentes’ “Countries of Origin” for debut novel, the PEN/Hemingway award. Playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner will still receive the PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award. Other honorary awards include the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, given to the late Maryse Condé.
Some authors have called for the resignation of Nossel and other top officials. Lacey, in an Instagram post last week, wrote that PEN needed to “make big changes in the leadership and move into a new era.” More than a dozen awards finalists endorsed a recent letter that demanded Nossel, Boylan and others step down and alleged that PEN had “shown blatant disregard of our collective values.”
A PEN spokesperson said it had no plans to respond to calls for Nossel and others to resign.
PEN’s other high-profile spring events — the “World Voices” festivals in New York and Los Angeles, and the gala at the American Museum of Natural History — will go ahead as scheduled. Klein and Moore are among the writers who have said they will not attend the World Voices festival, which Rushdie helped establish 20 years ago. Rushdie and other former PEN presidents, including Jennifer Egan and Andrew Solomon, had recently published a letter urging the literary community to participate in the festival.
“The festival was conceived amid conflict to draw together diverse authors and thinkers at a time of deepening and deadly geopolitical tension after 9/11,” the letter reads in part.
“We believe in PEN America and the festival and urge that, even at a time of discord, readers and writers will once again find a way to come together to jointly quest for insight and inspiration.”
Yoko Ono to
receive Edward MacDowell Medal
NEW YORK | One of the country’s leading artist residency programs, MacDowell, has awarded a lifetime achievement prize to Yoko Ono. The groundbreaking artist, filmmaker and musician is this year’s recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal, an honor previously given to Stephen Sondheim and Toni Morrison among others.
“There has never been anyone like her; there has never been work like hers,” MacDowell board chair Nell Painter said in a statement Sunday. “Over some seven decades, she has rewarded eyes, provoked thought, inspired feminists, and defended migrants through works of a wide-ranging imagination. Enduringly fresh and pertinent, her uniquely powerful oeuvre speaks to our own times, so sorely needful of her leitmotif: Peace.”
Ono’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, said in a statement that the medal was “an incredible honor.”
“The history and list of past recipients is truly remarkable. It makes me very proud to see her art appreciated and celebrated in this way,” he said.
Ono, 91, has made few public appearances in recent years and is not expected to attend the July awards ceremony, at the MacDowell campus in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Ono’s music manager, David Newgarden, will accept the award on her behalf.
Ono first became known as part of the avant-garde Fluxus movement of the 1960s, then reached international fame after meeting John Lennon, to whom she was married from 1969 until his death, in 1980. Their many collaborations included the songs “Give Peace a Chance,” “Imagine” and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” the basis for “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko,” this year’s winner of the Oscar for best animated short film.
Over the past 40 years, Ono has had a busy career as a visual and recording artist, her albums including “Season of Glass,” “Starpeace” and “Take Me to the Land of Hell.” She was recently the subject of a career retrospective at London’s Tate Modern.
—From AP reports
Longtime Hawkeyes football broadcaster steps down from his radio analyst role
IOWA CITY, Iowa | Longtime Iowa football broadcaster Ed Podolak announced Monday he will move out of the radio booth this season and limit his appearances to pregame shows and podcasts.
Podolak played quarterback and running back for the Hawkeyes before he became a fixture at running back for the Kansas City Chiefs from 1969-77. He was a color commentator for NBC and ESPN before he joined the Iowa radio team in 1982. He worked nearly 500 games alongside play-by-play men Jim Zabel and Gary Dolphin.
“I have said it often across 27 years that Ed Podolak is the best I’ve ever worked with in the broadcast booth,” Dolphin said. “One of the game’s great competitors, Ed’s ability to explain plays was unparalleled. Football mentalities of all ages understood and enjoyed the humor each Saturday. I look forward to Eddie’s continued involvement on game day.”
Podolak, 76, said in a statement he decided the time was right to step back from some of his broadcasting duties.
“I believe there is no greater honor than to be part of the Iowa Hawkeye Football team,” he said. “I have loved watching these young men and coaches compete for the past 42 years. Sharing my perspective for the incredible Hawkeye fans from coast to coast has been a thrill.”
Podolak was named first-team All-Big Ten and team MVP in 1968, when he set a then-conference record with 286 yards on 17 rushing attempts against Northwestern. He had nearly 4,500 yards rushing and 2,500 yards receiving and a combined 40 touchdowns in 104 games for the Chiefs. He is a member of the Chiefs Hall of Honor.
