rebootied

For three years, Bertone, who once worked for the city Housing Authority and ran for the Board of Supervisors in 2000, has wreaked all sorts of havoc in an otherwise quiet community in the southeastern part of the city known as Little Hollywood, officials and his neighbors said Wednesday.

Bertone, 54, doesn't just play loud music, authorities say. At all hours of the day and night, he has blasted police radio broadcasts, shrill oscillating tones, Spanish dance tunes and other noise from speakers he installed on the outside of his home at 336 Lathrop Ave. Police said they could hear the racket from 100 yards away.

Bertone isn't just a nosy neighbor, they add.

Police said he hooked up floodlights and six cameras that swept the block. Inside his home, he could monitor his neighbors' movements on four video screens.

The home of a San Francisco man who once tormented his neighbors by tracking them with surveillance cameras and blaring music from the roof went up in flames Wednesday, in what firefighters called an accidental blaze.

The two-alarm fire broke out just after noon near the water heater in Don Bertone's home at 336 Lathrop Ave., in a southeastern neighborhood known as Little Hollywood. Firefighters believe heat from the appliance ignited fumes from a nearby can of gasoline.

By Kevin Poulsen Email Author |  August 14, 2009 | 2:51 pm |

It’s official. There’s nobody in the chat rooms but pedophiles and undercover police.

On Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of an Indiana man whose online efforts to proposition underage girls led him to not one, not two, but three undercover cops, none of whom apparently knew about the others.

The case began in August 2006, when aspiring sexual predator James Daniel started an online conversation with Amanda_13, a fake 13-year-old girl voiced by Sergeant Richard Howard of the Porter County Sheriff’s Department.

After several highly explicit chats, Daniel asked Amanda_13 to meet him at a park in Valparaiso, Indiana, to have sex. When he showed up, he was arrested for inducing an individual under 18 to engage in criminal sexual activity.

When Secret Service agents searched Daniel’s computer, they found logs of chats with two other apparent minors, who described themselves as 13 and 15 years old, respectively. Federal prosecutors introduced the chats at Daniel’s trial as evidence of his perverted motives.

Supposedly, it was only after Daniel was convicted that the feds realized that one of those girls, daisy13_Indiana, was also a cop working the very same Secret Service operation. They informed Daniel’s attorney, who appealed on the grounds that the government improperly withheld information that would have proven entrapment.

The case became even more bizarre when the three-judge appellate panel reviewing the conviction saw the screen name of the third supposed teenager, blonddt, and recognized it from an earlier case.

“To our surprise, the government was unaware until this panel told it at oral argument that the other screen name, blonddt, was also an officer from the Indiana operation,” wrote Judge Diane Wood (.pdf) on Thursday.

Despite the prosecutorial missteps, the panel upheld Daniel’s conviction, ruling that the additional chat logs still showed his intent to commit a crime. Daniel is serving a sentence of 17-and-a-half years in prison, followed by supervised release for life.

There’s no evidence in the record that he ever succeeded in talking with a real underage girl.