John Lennon & the FBI

[spanone]

John Lennon has been dead for 30 years, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still on the case.

On Wednesday morning a small pop-culture memorabilia shop in Midtown opened an 836-lot auction timed to what would have been Lennon’s 70th birthday, which is Saturday. The prized item was a set of Lennon’s fingerprints made in 1976 as part of his application for citizenship. Minimum bid: $100,000.

But after an hourlong standoff involving cellphone calls, faxes and meetings with an agent in a parked car outside the East 57th Street storefront, the F.B.I. served the shop — called Gotta Have It! — with a subpoena and seized the fingerprint card, which was made at a New York police station on May 8, 1976, and bears a signature and the name John Winston Ono Lennon.

Given Lennon’s history with the F.B.I. — he was under surveillance in the early 1970s for his antiwar activism — the events were strange enough to make Peter Siegel, an owner of the store, wonder what the fuss was about. Since last Thursday, he said, the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and the United States attorney in Manhattan had asked about the card.

“I’ve been doing this 20 years and have never had this much government interest in something,” Mr. Siegel said. “Here he is, one of our greatest musicians ever, and they just don’t stop investigating this guy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/arts/music/07lennon.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

[H2O Man]

1. Thanks for this.

There are parts of the "US v Lennon" contest that have not been made public, due to the government's failure to release documents that pose absolutely no threat to anyone, anywhere. A friend who sometimes played in the Plastic Ono Band -- which I thought was second only to the Beatles -- told me some stories about the government's focus on the song "Luck of the Irish." Interesting story behind it.

[spanone]

2. what can they possibly still be concerned about....30 years after his death

what is it about calling for Peace that scares our government?

[RufusTFirefly]

3. Yeah. What is it about peace?

June 10, 1963
At American University's Spring Commencement, President Kennedy called on the Soviet Union to work with the United States to achieve a nuclear test ban treaty and help reduce the considerable international tensions and the specter of nuclear war at that time.



Calling for peace would seem to be a death sentence

"...I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

[ClassWarrior]

4. Do tell!

Who did you know in the POB? And what's the story behind "Luck of the Irish?"

NGU.