My latest published by Civil Beat: “Back Behind Bars: Miske Co-Defendant Faces New Allegation Of Witness Tampering/Preston Kimoto had been on pretrial release but was arrtested by federal agents on Tuesday.”

Here’s the back story.

We were nearing the end of our week vacation in Portland, Oregon, when I saw into posted on the court docket for the Miske Enterprise case on Tuesday afternoon. It noted a petition had been filed to revoke defendant Preston Kimoto’s release on bond because he had been arrested, and an appearance before Magistrate Judge Kenneth Mansfield was scheduled for late Wednesday.

Kimoto hasn’t seemed to be one of the heavyweights in the Miske organization, although he charged with being part of three criminal conspiracies–the overarching racketeering conspiracy, a drug trafficking conspiracy, and a conspiracy to kidnap a victim. But he was very visible in Miske’s termite empire, and also accompanied Miske on shopping trips to a Honolulu used car auction, so he shouldn’t be underestimated.

So I checked back on Wednesday afternoon, looked at documents available online, and saw his arrest had been for witness tampering! This charge carries a sentence of up to 20 years in federal prison if convicted, on top of whatever penalties go with underlying crime. I had some down time Wednesday afternoon, and started to write a blog post about Kimoto’s situation. As I started writing, I realized there was enough to write this for Civil Beat rather than just as a blog post.

But there was a big IF. The problem was that Thursday was our travel day. We were booked to fly from Portland to Honolulu, with a connecting stop to change planes in San Francisco. And I wasn’t totally sure I would be able to get this story done on the way. A further complication was that I was traveling with my iPad Pro, and not my laptop. Serious writing is a bit harder on the iPad, but possible. After spending another hour early Thursday playing with a rough draft, I decided to go for it, and sent an email off to CB editor, Patti Epler, with my story idea.

She got back to me later with a link Peter Boylan’s very thorough story in the Star-Advertiser describing the witness tampering case, based on court documents.

I was lucky to have seen that story early in the day, as it meant that I could go lightly over the basics of the witness tampering, and instead concentrate on case he was trying to disrupt by threatening this witness, the underlying kidnapping case. The kidnapping itself has been described in several earlier court documents, some filed in cases prosecuted separately from the case of Miske and his co-defendants. Luckily, I was able to get online and find, then access, most but not all of the documents saved in my own files in the cloud. And I also knew there was a kicker–relatively recent information laying out the context and move for the kidnapping, which would give my story something new to present.

Anyway, by the time we arrived in San Francisco, I was able to submit a draft. And in another stroke of luck, WIFI was available on the flight to Honolulu, so I was able to make some edits and revisions, and email those as updates to the original draft.

Whew. It turned out to be an interesting and productive way to while away the travel day.

I should say something about the in-flight WIFI. T-Mobile offers free in-flight WIFI with certain plans, and our “Over 55” plan just sneaks in. It isn’t available on every flight, and can be slow, with many dropped connections. But being able to do a substantial rewrite and send it to Civil Beat from my seat on the United flight is it’s own kind of magic! The internet connection can also be purchased separately for $10, or $8 for Mileage Plus members.

And while I’m at it, I should say that my online filing system is far from efficient, as it has developed over time. I save files in Dropbox, Evernote, and Apple Notes, which can all be accessed from anywhere, as long as internet access is available. The problem is that some files that I download get missed, and do not get saved over to one of these cloud-based systems. It the file I’m thinking of is in that category, then I’m out of luck, and just have to recreate it from memory. But, all in all, a vast improvement over the tall stacks of paper that used to be a ubiquitous feature of the old Star-Bulletin newsroom when I was with the newspaper back when dinosaurs roamed the streets.

Bottom line–Do check out today’s Civil Beat story.