Another high-profile celebrity athlete is facing foreclosure.
This time it's Plaxico Burress, the former New York Giants wide receiver best known for making the game-winning catch in the final minute of Super Bowl XLII – a spectacular feat that helped the Giants topple the New England Patriots.
Unfortunately for Burress, the past two years have been spectacularly bad. He's now being
sued by Deutsche Bank National Trust Co. for $3.3 million for allegedly failing to pay the note on a palatial, waterfront home Burress bought in Lighthouse Point, Fla. for $4 million back in 2005.
It's perhaps little wonder that Burress is behind on his mortgage, considering he's actually in prison stemming from a self-inflicted shooting about a year and a half ago.
In November 2008, Burress was in a Manhattan nightclub with a gun hidden in his pants. That gun went off and shot him in the thigh, and the Giants later released Burress.
After being charged with criminal possession of a weapon, Burress struck a plea deal to get a lesser charge and was sentenced to two years in prison.
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10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
10. Don't Commit Crimes
Seems pretty obvious, but those who are locked up (and are actually guilty) didn't seem to get the memo that crime does not pay.
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AP
BlackVoices.com
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
10. Don't Commit Crimes
Seems pretty obvious, but those who are locked up (and are actually guilty) didn't seem to get the memo that crime does not pay.
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
9. Get a Good Lawyer
Far too many people, particularly minorities, wind up in the clink because they didn't have adequate defense. The court system's public defenders are underfunded, understaffed and overburdened. Get a lawyer. He or she will might be able to get you off the hook. That's all some people need to get on the straight and narrow.
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
8. Support Businesses That Build Rural Economies
With much of America's farmland disappearing, rural areas are becoming desperate for places to employ their idle populations. Politicians from those areas lobby for funding to build state prisons, so that their people are employed. In many states, although inmates cannot vote, they are counted as part of the population, thereby justifying more funds for those areas. When farms, mills and plants in small rural communities subsist, there is no need to build prisons to replace them.
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
7. Support Drug Rehab Centers
Drug addiction is not a crime, it's an illness that is treatable, thank God. For the amount of money spent on trying, housing, feeding and providing health care for people locked up due to drugs, a small fraction of that money could be spent rehabilitating drug addicts so that they could permanently get the monkey off their backs, thereby destroying the market for dope.
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
6. Don't Elect 'Tough on Crime' Politicians
Instead, vote for candidates who campaign on crime prevention, community counseling and youth intervention. Most important, support politicians who advocate increased funding for public education. Preventive measures can reduce both.
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
5. Discipline Your Kids
Child abuse is very bad. Don't hurt 'em. But applaud mothers who knock the hell out of their kid in public for smarting off at the supermarket. Courthouses have lines around the block of young people whose parents thought it was cute for them to act like little ghetto birds when they were 4. But now at age 18, when you are taking out a second mortgage on your home to pay legal bills, that cute crap doesn't work. Big secret: Judges hate cute.
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
4. Get Out, Stay Out
One of the main points a Pew Research Center report on this issues brings up is the number of recidivists -- or people who keep going back. They make up a large number of people who are incarcerated in this country. In fact, if it weren't for them, the 1 in 100 stat wouldn't be nearly as high.
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
3. Crackdown on Rogue Gun Dealers
Remember the D.C. sniper? Well, between 1997 and 2001, guns sold by the clown who supplied him were involved in 52 crimes, including homicides, kidnappings and assaults. Still open to this day, the dealer also can't account for 238 guns or say whether they were stolen, lost or sold, or if their buyers had to undergo felony background checks. These chumps keep in close contact with the supportive gun lobby to make sure gun laws remain weak.
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
2. Threaten Your Children
This relates to #5, and is very important. You know about the ratio of high school dropouts in jail to educated people who are not in jail. Okay, just to drive the point home, the National Educational Association says 75 percent of all people in America who are state prison inmates are high school dropouts. This means if your child quits before he or she graduates high school, there's a one-in-three chance you'll get a 3 a.m. call saying: "Mama, I'm in jail, I need you to come get me." What you do from there is up to you, but I'd leave their little butts locked up.
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
1. Quit Getting High
More than half of the people imprisoned in this country are doing time because of drug offenses. Ronald Reagan's "War on Drugs" was moronic rhetoric at best, designed to galvanize conservative white politicians who hate black people and their religious right constituents. And we can certainly see the merits of legalization as alternative. But piggybacking off #7, the fact of the matter is dope creates an illicit economy of marketers, investors, speculators and has a very large consumer group. That consumer group drives the whole thing.
10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration
What strikes me about the situation with Burress is that he was like many athletes and celebrities, making tens of millions of dollars, who apparently have no real financial plan for their lives. Yet, it was a little less than five years ago – March 17, 2005, to be exact – that Burress signed a $25 million contract with the Giants. In late 2008, he inked another deal with the Giants: a five-year, $35 million contract extension.
Burress no doubt didn't get to collect all that money – not only because he only lasted with the Giants until the spring of 2009, but also because he presumably had to pay his football agent, the tax man, and any other managers, handlers and others working for him. Still, it never ceases to amaze me how quickly people can burn through cash at this level.
It's obvious that many well-paid public figures wrongly assume that the money will simply keep flowing.
Sadly, for Burress, that doesn't seem to be the case. But here's wishing him and his family well when Burress is released from prison. He's eligible to come out in early 2011.
Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, an award-winning financial news journalist and former Wall Street Journal reporter for CNBC, has also been featured in top newspapers including the Washington Post, USA Today, and the New York Times, as well as magazines ranging from Essence and Redbook to Black Enterprise and Smart Money. Check out her New York Times bestseller,
'Zero Debt: The Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom.'
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Comments: (60)
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By: rosematt on 2/23/2010 3:21PM
Perhaps it is because the slide show is geared towards black people from a black author. Did you read the rants about "law and order politicians" or "the moronic Reagan drug war"? Of course not. You, like the author of the article, only see things in the context of race. Interestingly, the slide show is an appeal to blacks to follow the same rules that everyone else does, and if they do, they will stay out of jail. What a novel concept. The blaming of whites and conservatives is not novel, though. It is the same stupidity that is tried time and time again by the race pimps to explain away the destructive behavior that blacks inflict upon their own community. Just once I would love to see the anger and motivation that many blacks have towards whites mobilized towards the true predators on their families and communities-the repeat BLACK offenders. But that will never happen. It would force the author and his ilk to admit that the vast majority of the problems in the black community are not a result of "the man" or "whitey", but a failing of their own culture.
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By: The One on 2/23/2010 1:25PM
Most of these comments have nothing to do with the story. Get head out of @sses!!! Plax should have paid the bills instead of buying guns, ammo and blowing money at the clubs! What a moron.
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By: Dean on 2/23/2010 1:45PM
Easy come easy go?
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By: gerald on 2/23/2010 1:46PM
Clearly Bush was not a good Pres. The same for Obama, who may even be worse. It is not the business of govt. to help businesses or people. The job of govt. is to protect people from foreign countries, from criminals, etc. If the govt would just butt out, the country and the people would be a lot better off.
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By: sonnieC on 2/23/2010 2:05PM
My comment has two words Anus Hole
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By: max on 2/23/2010 2:15PM
mark you need to learn to spell use the the word whole correctly the word your looking for is hole , but i digress. the bottom line is most athletes are stupid and black one are the stupidest because of the rolls royces and the diamond rolexes lets face it coloreds like shiny things .... peasant lol
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By: will on 2/23/2010 2:27PM
ITS' REALLY FUNNY THAT YOU SHOOT SOMEONE YOU GET 18 MONTHS, AND IF YOU SHOOT YOURSELF YOU GET 18 MONTHS. ONLY IN AMERICA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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By: beau on 2/23/2010 3:32PM
new money ..dont have a plan..why not pay cash for their house.
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By: Jeannette on 2/23/2010 11:03PM
I feel sorry for Plaxico. It was not his intension to harm any one. He shot his self, and now he is in prison. He is a young guy that made a mistake. A large majority of you are condeming this young man for this mistake. If he took all of his money and burned it, it was his money to burn. And just because you have a family, does not mean that you can never go out, who made that rule? Their are a few female child molestors that have been in the news that has gotten away with just a slap on the wrist, and no jail time. I know of at least one that is still allowed to teach. I think that he should not have been sent to prison, maybe some other type of punishment. So he has money, or had money, what ever the case, you can not tell him how to spend it. It may not be how I would spend it, but again, it's not mine to spend. My point is, why special consideration for some child molestors, and prison for him? And you guys need to get over Mike Vick, he's payed his debt to society, and does not owe anyone anything.
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By: YatesCeleste on 7/16/2010 5:41AM
When you are in uncomfortable position and have no cash to go out from that point, you would require to take the mortgage loans. Just because that will help you for sure. I get commercial loan every year and feel good because of this.
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