Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves

The trouble began when Edward Merino and his wife Sonia opened Angelic Sanctuary fortune telling in Newport Beach, Calif. They allege the rival Stevens clan then broke in and attacked them.
From our friends at the AP, a story of fortunes & fortune-telling, as a sub-culture is dragged into the light of the court system.

"The older Gypsies are pulling out their hair, not wanting the courts in our business because they'll find out too much about us," said Tom Merino, who is distantly related to one of the clans but has spurned his heritage. "Ignorance is the Gypsies' weapon against the outside world."

[...]

That the dispute wound up in court reflects an erosion of tradition among the Gypsies, said Ian Hancock, an expert on Gypsy language and culture at the University of Texas.

"It used to be that the Romany world was absolutely insulated from the outside world," said Hancock, a Gypsy himself. "But it's very hard to resist the pressures of MTV, and people are beginning to see alternatives."

Specifically MTV, or merely MTV as a metaphor of the modern world?

Things were calm for months until the Stevens patriarch died of a heart attack at age 53 last May. Edward "Davie" Merino showed up at the funeral, pulling up at the cemetery in a limo with what was described as a menacingly burly chauffeur.

Merino says members of the Stevens clan attacked him and screamed, "We will make your life a living hell!" But the Stevenses claim that Merino flashed a gun and threatened to "come back and kill all of you." Both sides agree that before speeding off, Merino shouted that he wanted to make sure "the mother-(expletive) was dead."

Your editor, in a previous incarnation as a copy shop wage-slave, has had several encounters w/ these folk, as they came in to make fliers for their fortune-telling/psychic scams, or to fax their other scams. We assume they're into home (not) schooling, as they seemed actually illiterate; "Could you fill out the cover sheet for me? I can't write very good." One guy was sending about five different slip & fall claims to various stores. Very industrious, in their own way.

Another generation of MTV & "modernity" & this culture will be subsumed into the great American proletariat w/ the rest of us.