Here is the transcript of the segment on Irish Travelers from the "Dateline NBC" television program to which Larry refers: http://www.msnbc.com/news/820204.asp

While it is true that, in this segment, Dateline "did not use a single expert to speak on behalf of Travellers" as Larry says, many of the statements Larry has made in his last two posts are disputable and some are downright incorrect.

If by "the Wanda story" Larry means her attempted scam at Walt Disney World, that scam was perpetrated on October 31, 1992 so that story is not two decades old... only one! According to Dateline, Wanda also admits to having had "28 aliases, running repair scams, [and] shoplifting" so she did, in fact, have a crime "spree"; the attempted scam of Disney was simply the most famous (or, more accurately, infamous) of her crimes.

Larry says that Wanda's story details "the only really bad events" investigated and reported by Dateline, yet Dateline reports this of Madelyne Toogood's family: "Her husband's grandfather killed another Traveler. One brother-in-law was convicted of swindling more than $100,000, and another skipped out on an assault charge." Since when are murder and assault not "really bad events"??

Larry says that "[John Toogood] has a single felony conviction of overcharging on a job. He plead[ed] guilty and paid restitution to an old woman he charged $7,000 dollars for home repair work." There's no indication from the Dateline report that that repair work was ever done; was it? If so, was it done properly? The conviction was for theft (theft by deception? theft of services?), and the report states that Toogood "paid back the stolen money". Without knowing more about the charges brought against Toogood and the reasons for those charges, I don't think we can assume this to be a case that should have been settled in small claims court rather than with a guilty plea to a criminal felony charge.

Was this the charge made in Pennsylvania, or the one in Ohio (and were there felony charges and convictions in both cases?)? I ask because, in PA, small claims court handles civil disputes involving no more than $8,000 (and if prosecution was seeking pain-and-suffering payment or other fees, the dispute could have topped $8,000 – and if there were criminal charges, then they could not have been heard in a small claims court). In Ohio, only civil actions for the recovery of money in the amount of $3,000 or less can be considered in small claims court. This information was obtained from these two sites: http://www.pennsylvanialawonline.com/smallclaims/smallpa.htm and http://www.ag.state.oh.us/agpubs/smclaims.htm

As much as Larry would like to downplay Toogood's actions by sarcastically calling them "wretched 'crimes' " and putting "crimes of fraud" in quotation marks as if they weren't really crimes, they were. It doesn't matter whether or not Toogood's crimes rise to the level of Al Capone's; theft by deception is still theft. Where's the supposed prejudice in seeing theft as theft without regard to ethnic origin?

I do see prejudice, however, in Larry's statement to me that, because I'm white, he assumes I've never been in a "dark and hopeless place" where I've experienced discrimination of any kind. I guess he's never heard of discrimination based on gender, or socioeconomic position, or age, or body weight, or medical condition. With regard to ethnic origin, though, I'm told I'm English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, French and German, and I don't even know the ethnic origin of my father's father since he was a bigamist and no one in the family talks about him; so perhaps "Anglo-Saxon" doesn't accurately describe me. I do know that my mother looked dark enough that city bus drivers used to give her dirty looks because she didn't sit in the back of the bus and they weren't sure enough of her ethnic origin to order her there. And my father, born in 1913, certainly experienced discrimination as an "illegitimate child". What else do I need to say about my family before Larry's convinced that I wasn't raised in an ivory tower? Maybe I should show him a picture of my Italian-American cousin's Italian-African-Haitian-American child.