If you're looking for a good drug-fueled orgy in southern Michigan, your best bet is reportedly the Masonic Temple in Battle Creek.

At 2 a.m. last Sunday morning, police were called to the Battle Creek Masonic Temple about a possible fight. But when police arrived, they didn't find a brawl; instead, officers allegedly walked in on a “drug-fueled sex party."

The first officer in the door found reportedly one couple in the midst of “lewd sex act” as other several other nude partiers stood nearby, filming the couple and using unspecified drugs. Multiple arrests were made.

“Charlie,” the Freemason in charge of bookings at the Temple, told Newschannel 3 that a group had paid $900 to rent out the Temple that Saturday for a dance party. “Charlie” also said all future private events at the Temple had been suspended, adding that drug-fueled sex parties are not something that the Freemasons support.

According to the Battle Creek police department, there's been at least one other sex party broken up at the temple, though "Charlie" denied their claim during an off-camera with Newschannel 3.

[via The Atlantic Wire]

To contact the author of this post, email taylor@gawker.com

Just seven days after an Oklahoma man was sentenced to one year in jail for spying on women from a public park's septic tank, another man was sentenced to three years in prison for watching women from inside the tank of a portable toilet at a Colorado yoga festival.

In June 2011, police arrested Luke Chrisco at a yoga festival in Boulder, Colorado after a woman reported seeing something moving in her portable toilet's tank; that “something” turned out to be Chrisco, who emerged from the tank covered in feces and promptly ran away.

Last month, Chrisco, who prefers the name Skye Oryan, pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and two burglary counts, and on Friday a judge in Boulder sentenced him to three years in jail and 10 years of probation.

The three-year sentence is two years more than Kenneth Enlow received last week for spying on a woman from a public restroom's septic tank, though Enlow wasn't a serial peeping Tom as Chrisco claims to be in the interview posted below.

To contact the author of this post, email taylor@gawker.com

Since at least 2007, DEA agents and local police detectives have had regular access to a gigantic database that contains detailed records of every American phone call that's passed through an AT&T switch in the past 26 years. The program, named the Hemisphere Project, also pays AT&T employees to work alongside drug-enforcement officers stationed in three states.

According to a report in the New York Times, the Hemisphere Project began in 2007 and has been carried out in secret since. The database goes back to 1987 and includes information about every call that's gone through an AT&T switch. That information consists of user's phone numbers, the time and duration of their calls, and their location. About 4 billion new calls are added to the database each day. For comparison, the Patriot Act allows the NSA to store just five years worth of caller information, which can only include phone numbers and the time and duration of calls.

The Times learned about the project from a training PowerPoint presentation, which they were given by a peace activist named Drew Hendricks. The presentation is labeled “Law enforcement sensitive,” but not classified.

“I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts,” Jameel Jaffer, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Times.

The Justice Department released a statement defending the program, emphasizing the fact that the phone data is stored by AT&T, not the government, and is only accessible though "administrative subpoenas, those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A."

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”

Mr. Fallon said that “the records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government,” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”

Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia, seemed to agree with the Justice Department's statement.

“Is this a massive change in the way the government operates? No,” Richman told the Times. “Actually you could say that it’s a desperate effort by the government to catch up.”

Representatives from other major phone companies, including Sprint and T-Mobile refused to answer the Times' questions about whether they were involved with similar programs.

[Image via AP]

To contact the author of this post, email taylor@gawker.com

64-year-old Diana Nyad is less than five miles from completing a record-breaking 112 mile swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida. She would be the first person to complete the swim without a shark cage. UPDATE: She did it.

After a summer-long investigation by its Hamptons beat-reporter Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times has discovered that the Hamptons are no longer the sole domain of the gilded elite (and the various news reporters who are supposed to be covering them), but are now becoming pretty trashy. Like Jersey levels of sleaze.

While this summer has had its share of salacious major crimes, it's the gradual worsening of quality of life that has Hamptonites worried. There is now a "struggle to strike a balance between its increased popularity — which has brought a rowdy young crowd ever-ready to release the stresses of city living — and the high quality of life that made it such a draw in the first place."

It seems like the Hamptons, which has long been the home of financial elites who have already made heinous amounts of money, is now drawing younger financial bros, who have yet to bring in their first million, and are content to pass out in the street after a long night of partying, as opposed to politely smashing up their BMW's (like a civilized drunk).

Rutenberg writes,

But it is the smaller, rowdier, “quality of life” offenses that some longtime residents and lawmakers say has made the area seem slightly out of control at times, exacerbated this year by illegal share-houses and an expanding array of night spots catering to what appears to be a growing number of visitors.

“This is a place where people want to come enjoy our natural resources; they don’t want to see drunken people falling across the road,” Councilwoman Sylvia Overby told Rutenberg. “That’s where the politics comes in: Which definition of East Hampton do you want?”

Do you want the Hamptons of yore, where older people routinely got wasted and spent obscene amounts of money on monuments to their own wealth, or the new Hamptons, where young people reveal the resort for what it really is: rich people acting badly?

It's not like new ordinances or a checkpoint verifying executive-status on the Long Island Expressway would discourage the riffraff, anyway. The Long Island Rail Road is reporting record numbers of commuters to the Hamptons this year.

Some highlights of bad behavior include:

A 31-year-old New York City woman was drunk and disorderly near the Memory Motel on Aug. 25 and hit an officer with a bag containing a glass beer jug; a 39-year-old financial adviser climbed drunk into his Mercedes at around 1:30 a.m. in mid-July and crashed into the Gazebo in the middle of the grassy Montauk plaza; a 33-year-old woman drunkenly tailgated a police car in Napeague at 6 a.m. in mid-July, with no pants on, as the police discovered when they eventually pulled her over.

You were already trashy. Embrace it, Hamptons.

[Photo]

Great week for Lance Bass! After spending a decade trying to escape Earth's orbit, the former 'NSYNC member reunited with his old group at the VMA's and then got engaged to boyfriend Michael Turchin.

A one-year-old was shot in the head and killed Sunday night after a gunman allegedly attempted to shoot the toddler's father.

Antiq Hennis was in a stroller being pushed across the street by his parents in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, when a single bullet struck his head just a block from the family's home. The child's father began looking for help after the shots rang out.

“He was screaming ‘My baby got shot.’ He was going crazy,” Gina Gamboa, 22, told the Daily News. “The baby was breathing, but his eyes were closed. It’s crazy. They just will start shooting."

Four shots were fired at around 7:30 P.M. Only Antiq was hit. He was pronounced dead at Brookdale University Hospital shortly before 9 P.M.

Antiq's father, the intended target, has a record of more than 20 arrests. “They shot at him and ended up shooting the baby,” the child's great-uncle, Chris Dobson said.

This follows another incident last week where a toddler was also shot in the head in Brooklyn. Luckily, that child survived.

I have no idea the provenance for this video, but it appears it took place a few decades ago, somewhere in Australia. Either way, it is by far the classiest arrest one will ever see.

Nefertitties with the transcription:

What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal? Oh, that's a nice headlock sir! Oh! Ah, yes—I see that you know your judo well...All right. And you sir, are you waiting to receive my limp penis?

Also, GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY PENIS.

[h/t Ben Yakas]

Casting roundup: Charlie Hunnam (Pacific Rim, Sons of Anarchy) will star opposite Dakota Johnson (21 Jump Street) in the film adaptation of "Fifty Shades of Grey." Also, Benedict Cumberbatch will most likely have a role in the new Star Wars.

Nicknamed the Walkie-Talkie, 20 Fenchurch Street in London's busy financial district turns out to be a giant magnifying glass parabolic reflector as well as a 37-story skyscraper, melting cars and forcing pedestrians to shield their eyes on the street. The most recent casualty is this Jaguar XJ.

It only took an hour of parking on the street for businessman Martin Lindsay to end up with a Jaguar that had most if its plastics melted beyond repair. He is not the only one. Another unlucky driver came back to his van only to find a melted dashboard and a twisted bottle of Lucozade in the cabin.

A London skyscraper is blamed for reflecting light which melted parts of a nearby car: http://t.co/EbJUqc4wUg pic.twitter.com/sPijHkIoEw

— BBC London Newsroom (@BBCLondonNews) September 2, 2013

The building's developers so far have only managed to close three parking bays with the help of the City of London.

Naturally, Londoners have already given a new nickname to this very bright building, which shall be known from now on as the Walkie Scorchie.

Image credit: Getty Images/BBC Source: City A.M.

Labor Day, an opportunity for the working class to momentarily kick off those economic shackles and spend the day with their family, barbecuing and enjoying the privileges normally reserved for the leisure class. Or, at least, it used to be.

Now that most job growth takes place in the part-time economy, where workers work odd hours just to make ends meet, and no one is salaried, a hefty portion of the workforce will celebrate Labor Day by laboring all day. Or they will honor Labor Day by working just enough to remain out of poverty. But it need not be this way forever.

Perhaps there should be an international minimum wage that will create a stable working class. Or a unionized fast food movement that can turn precarious labor into a real career. Or the largest retailer in the U.S. could start investing in its workers, so it can make even more money.

Whatever happens, the current state of the American low-wage worker is deplorable. While Labor Day might be a scam to keep you miserable and poor, perhaps it isn't as dark as some writers might think. There's some positive signs out there, folks (fast food strikers, successes like Costco). And despair isn't going to help anyone, especially the people stuck behind a counter today.

Sons of Anarchy's Charlie Hunnam and Ben and Kate's Dakota Johnson have just been confirmed as the leads of 50 Shades of Grey, according to an exclusive from Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr posted at 8:11 AM Pacific time.

Except, oh wait, he didn't actually have the exclusive. Unless you count an "exclusive" being something tweeted to 50 Shades author E.L. James' 358,030 Twitter followers 11 minutes in advance.

I am delighted to let you know that the lovely Dakota Johnson has agreed to be our Anastasia in the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey.

— E L James (@E_L_James) September 2, 2013

Fellow professional gossip mongers were not pleased. (I would be equally displeased but it's a holiday and I slept in till 11:00, so I'm pretty sure my high horse already departed without me.)

The gall of Deadline never ceases to amaze me: An author announces casting on Twitter, and it posts the news as "exclusive."

— Joe Adalian (@TVMoJoe) September 2, 2013

Now, wait. How is this exclusive when EL James tweeted the news 11 min earlier? http://t.co/dIO0I1NEk2

— AJ Marechal (@Variety_AJM) September 2, 2013

Deadline has long been known for breaking news first that the rest of the industry clamors for (creator Nikki Finke's "TOLDJA!" missives are infamous), but their exclusives are usually, well, exclusive. Whoops.

The final day of the Electric Zoo was canceled yesterday after two deaths and multiple hospitalizations from bad Molly. But all Molly is bad Molly if you take six hits of it.

Gothamist reports that University of New Hampshire junior Olivia Rotondo, 20, told EMS workers that she took six hits of the party drug before collapsing, having a seizure, and then dying. “I just took six hits of Molly,’’ she reportedly told the EMS worker.

Rotondo had tweeted hours before, "The amount of traveling I’ve done today is unreal. Just get me to the damn zoo.”

"She was the nicest girl I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing,” Noah Burkholz, a friend who traveled to the concert with her told the Times.

Over the weekend, four people were hospitalized for overdoses, and one woman was sexually assaulted. Another overdose death, Jeffry Russ, 20, had no contact with Rotondo during the festival and investigators believe they took a different set of drugs. Concertgoers had complained of harmful pills circulating during the festival, which will refund concertgoers for the canceled day.

Pictures from our terrifying, barren future Burning Man.

This is love. An Ohio man remembered he might have a copy of the first Spider-Man comic ever in a box in his attic, found it, and sold it to help pay for his daughter's wedding.

“I gave my daughter a promissory note for the money with a picture of the Spider-Man comic, which we can use to pay for a big part of the catering for her reception,” Richard Schaen, 69, told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

Schaen had bought the comic in 1963 at a Columbus drugstore for 12 cents. He had continued collecting comics up until adulthood when the birth of his daughter Jane (who is getting married) forced him to stop his comic book hobby.

“Comics had gone up to 75 cents by then and I was spending $40 a month,” he told the Plain-Dealer. “Also, it took two evenings a week to read the new comics and with a new baby in the house, I found myself stretched.”

Schaen however, kept his comics in the home. “I put them away for a rainy day,” he said. The Spider-Man comic was not in perfect condition, but was in good enough shape to contribute $7,000 towards the cost of the wedding.

Schaen, who found other valuable comics, including Daredevil #1 has begun selling off his entire collection to pay for improvements around the home he shares with his wife.

The Worm has returned: Just a few months after his infamous trip to the starving authoritarian hellhole, former basketball superstar Dennis Rodman flew back to North Korea from Beijing on Tuesday, ready to "have a good time," and "sit with [North Korean dictator Kim John Un] and his family."

Rodman insists that the trip will involve no diplomacy, but is rather intended to "show people around the world that we as Americans can actually get along with North Korea... I just want to meet my friend Kim, the marshal, and start a basketball league over there or something like that."

In May, Rodman, after reading a Seattle Times op-ed, tweeted a call for Kim to release Kenneth Bae, an American citizen and missionary accused of plotting to overthrow the DPRK government—but says he has not been "promised" anything, and is not going in order to seek Bae's release.

I'm calling on the Supreme Leader of North Korea or as I call him "Kim", to do me a solid and cut Kenneth Bae loose.

— Dennis Rodman (@dennisrodman) May 7, 2013

Rodman's original visit, in conjunction with an "epic" Vice magazine trip, was roundly criticized (not by the DPRK, obviously), but Rodman promised he'd be back.

Intrepid Mississippians tracked down the state's largest alligator, and killed it.

The world's most famous feline mayor remains in critical condition today after being mauled by a dog while strolling through his hometown of Talkeetna, Alaska.

Stubbs rose to public prominence last year when a local media outlet revealed that the 16-year-old Manx mix has been the town's honorary mayor since practically birth.

Last Saturday, while greeting constituents and surveying the streets near his homebase at Nagley's General Store, Stubbs was reportedly attacked by a "mean dog" and left for dead.

His owner, Laurie Stec, was informed of the incident and immediately put together a search party to find her wounded pet.

Stubbs was discovered hours later hiding in an abandoned structure near the general store.

He had sustained a deep gash, a punctured lung, and a crushed sternum, and was rushed to a vet in Wasilla, some 70 miles away.

There, staffers dressed his wounds, hooked him up to life support, and fitted with a compression jacket.

Stec's medical expenses have surpassed $2,000, but she says Stubbs is more than worth it.

"[H]e’s just a really cool cat," she told the Alaska Dispatch.

An attempt to locate the dog or its owner were unsuccessful, but Stec says she plans to file a report with animal control in an effort to have the animal removed from Talkeetna.

[photo via Facebook]

A new Quinnipiac poll of the New York City mayoral race has Bill de Blasio leading at 43 percent—more than double the support of Bill Thompson, at 20 percent. (Quinn trails with 18 percent.) If de Blasio can garner more than 40 percent of the vote in the primary, he can avoid a runoff.

The DeLorean DMC-12, despite its "Back To The Future" buzz and scintillating stainless steel skin, never became the success some thought it destined for and the last to save it was mysteriously interrupted. Did the Reagan White House guide the British government to let the company die so it could entrap its creator in an FBI-run drug smuggling bust?

Nick Sutton was a senior Manager of DeLorean Motor Cars, a junior member of the UK Consortium and later became a Director of Lotus Cars two years after Colin Chapman’s death. This is a chapter from his book: The DeLorean Story, the Car, the People the Scandal, published by Haynes, about the company's rise and fall. — Ed.

Margaret Thatcher vetoed a plan by a UK Consortium to save the DeLorean car company in Northern Ireland, then in receivership, which would have saved 1500 jobs and secured at least part of the UK government’s $160 million investment in the project. Weeks earlier she had been told that $17.65 million had been taken from the company’s coffers and that the likely culprit was John DeLorean and associates.

“I can build you a factory, design and produce a car, employ two thousand people all in eighteen months” DeLorean declared to the British government in June 1978. The catch was that he needed $100 million. His offer was accepted, but in return he was told that the car had to be built in West Belfast, Northern Ireland. Despite setbacks caused by styling changes to the car’s original design and sectarian conflict, that brought Northern Ireland close to civil war, the project took twenty six months to the first car and $160 million of tax payer’s money. The company was continuously dogged by cash shortages and poor quality. It went bust in February 1982 due to over production.

Just three months after signing the master agreement with the British government, in July 1978, well before the foundations of the factory were laid, DeLorean decided that he should benefit personally from the cash windfall, courtesy of the investors. A contract with Colin Chapman chairman of Lotus through an intermediary GPD, a Panamanian company with offices in Geneva, would be the conduit to move the cash out of the company. In all $17.65 million of payments went walkabouts to GPD and onwards. The money was split between Colin Chapman chairman of Lotus and John DeLorean with the loose change going to Fred Bushell the finance director of Group Lotus. The fraud would have gone unnoticed if not were not for receivership. It wasn’t too long before the receiver’s staff noticed a hole in DeLorean Motor Cars Ltd’s accounts and reported this to the government.

So what made The Iron Lady reject the sound business proposal made by a UK Consortium, a plan approved by the Receiver, Sir Kenneth Cork and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, James Prior? The UK Consortium’s proposal also limited DeLorean’s involvement in the project and added a second vehicle to the line-up at the plant in Belfast; it was a perfect plan, except the initial £80,000 to allow due diligence was to be funded by the Northern Ireland Office, which they had already agreed, but final approval from the Prime minister was necessary. Much to everyone’s consternation she rejected the plan outright.

It was now DeLorean’s turn to make proposals to fund the revival of his fledgling car company. In desperation he took the bait from the FBI posing as cocaine drug dealers during a phone call they made to DeLorean on 30^th June 1982 (Three weeks earlier Margaret Thatcher met Ronald Reagan in London). Time after time the British government gave DeLorean more breathing space, a commodity they didn’t offer the UK Consortium, deadlines came and went; each week brought a fresh announcement of a new backer by John DeLorean non believed by the receiver to be real. During this period the home and business ‘phones of key employees were wired by authorities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Finally the last deadline was given as 19^th October, if by then John DeLorean had come up with the money the company in Belfast would definitely close. DeLorean chose the easy route for funding and met the FBI that day posing as drug dealers. They met in a Los Angeles airport hotel room.

During DeLorean’s later drugs trial Gerald Scotti a former DEA agent involved in the entrapment of DeLorean said, ‘I knew from a long way back the (US) government would go to any lengths to prosecute Mr. DeLorean ’. Scotti also gave evidence that he overheard a heated argument the night before DeLorean’s arrest between the two law-enforcement agents, he said the name of ''Mr Meese'' was mentioned. Edwin Meese was then counselor to the President.

Was Margaret Thatcher aware of the impending drugs bust drama being played out in the US when she rejected the UK Consortium’s plan so DeLorean could be lured into the FBI trap? Catching DeLorean dealing with drugs would be a huge bonus for Ronald Reagan as he was about to launch an issue close to his heart: The War On Drugs. His announcement of the programme was made during his weekly radio broadcast on 2 October 1982. DeLorean’s arrest and associated scalp would hit the headlines a few weeks later providing a kick start Ronald Reagan’s initiative.

The rest is history except for a little known fact that occurred during the Receiver’s discussions with Colin Chapman; Chairman of Group Lotus. The receiver asked Chapman about the GPD contract to which the Lotus chairman initially denied any knowledge. Before a second interview could take place Chapman flew to Paris to meet Jerry Juhan who together with his wife Marie Denise Juhan- Perrin had brokered the GPD deal. Colin Chapman left Paris that evening and landed at the Lotus factory airstrip in the late evening of 15 December. Hours later he was dead.

DeLorean’s share of the GPD deal was found and returned to the Receiver, Colin Chapman’s cut was never located but his estate agreed to a settlement with the UK government of £4.67 million.

Fred Bushell Group Lotus finance director pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to three years in jail and fined £4.5 million.

This story originally appeared in The DeLorean Story: The Car, The People, The Scandal by author Nick Sutton and published by Haynes. It was republished with the permission of the author.

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