Gary Dean Zimmermann is an American politician and member of the Green Party of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was an elected member of the Minneapolis City Council from 2001 to 2005. Before that, Zimmermann initially served on the Minneapolis Park Board as a member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
Dean Zimmermann has been an outspoken proponent of personal rapid transit (PRT). [1] He developed a proposal to build a PRT system in Minneapolis consisting of 31 miles of track and 68 stations. [2] Zimmermann "teamed up" with Minnesota State Representative Mark Douglas Olson, a Republican from Big Lake, Minnesota, to promote PRT in the media. [3]
Dean Zimmermann was convicted August 10, 2006 in federal court of accepting bribes in connection with his official duties. He was found guilty on three counts of accepting cash from a local real estate developer who had business before the City Council of Minneapolis. [4]
In December 2006, Zimmermann was sentenced to 30 months in prison for his felony convictions and served his sentence in the minimum security wing of the Federal Correctional Institution Englewood in Littleton, Colorado. [5] [6] Zimmermann was released from prison in July 2008 and returned to Minneapolis. [7]
Personal rapid transit (PRT), also referred to as podcars or guided/railed taxis, is a public transport mode featuring a network of specially built guideways on which ride small automated vehicles that carry few passengers per vehicle. PRT is a type of automated guideway transit (AGT), a class of system which also includes larger vehicles all the way to small subway systems. In terms of routing, it tends towards personal public transport systems.
Abscam, sometimes written ABSCAM, was a Federal Bureau of Investigation sting operation in the late 1970s and early 1980s that led to the convictions of seven members from both chambers of the United States Congress and others for bribery and corruption. The two-year investigation initially targeted trafficking in stolen property and corruption of prominent business people, but later evolved into a corruption investigation. The FBI was aided by the United States Department of Justice and convict Mel Weinberg in videotaping politicians accepting bribes from a fictitious Arabian company in return for various political favors.
The Metro Green Line is an 11-mile (18 km) light rail line that connects the central business districts of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota as well as the University of Minnesota. An extension is under construction that will extend the line to the southwest connecting St. Louis Park, Hopkins, Minnetonka and Eden Prairie. The line follows the path of former Metro Transit bus route 16 along University Avenue and Washington Avenue. It is the second light-rail line in the region, after the Blue Line, which opened in 2004 and connects Minneapolis with the southern suburb of Bloomington.
Isadore Blumenfeld, commonly known as Kid Cann, was a Romanian-born Jewish-American organized crime enforcer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for over four decades. He remains the most notorious mobster in the history of Minnesota. He was associated with several high-profile crimes in the city's history. He was tried and acquitted for the 1924 murder of cab driver Charles Goldberg. Blumenfeld was also present at the scene of the attempted murder by Verne Miller of Minneapolis Police Department officer James H. Trepanier. Blumenfeld was also tried and acquitted for personally firing the murder weapon, a Thompson submachine gun, in the globally infamous December 1935 contract killing of Twin Cities investigative journalist Walter Liggett. He was also unsuccessfully prosecuted in Federal Court for both conspiracy and racketeering in the mobbed up hostile takeover and dismantling of the Twin City Rapid Transit streetcar system during the early 1950s.
The Minneapolis City Council is the legislative branch of the city of Minneapolis in Minnesota, United States. Comprising 13 members, the council holds the authority to create and modify laws, policies, and ordinances that govern the city. Each member represents one of the 13 wards in Minneapolis, elected for a four-year term. The current council structure has been in place since the 1950s.
Michael Joseph "Ozzie" Myers is an American politician and convicted felon who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1976 to 1980. A member of the Democratic Party, Myers became involved in the Abscam scandal during his tenure in Congress and was expelled from the House after being caught taking bribes in a sting operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He spent three years in federal prison. In 2020, he was accused of stuffing ballot boxes in Philadelphia elections during the 2010s, and charged with election fraud. He pleaded guilty in 2022 and was sentenced to 2.5 years in federal prison.
The 2005 Minneapolis municipal elections in the U.S. state of Minnesota held a scheduled primary election on 13 September and a general election on 8 November. Voters in the city elected:
Angelo Joseph Errichetti was an American Democratic Party politician who served as Mayor of Camden, New Jersey, and in the New Jersey Senate before being indicted during Abscam.
Mark Douglas Olson was an American politician who served as a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives from district 16B, first elected in 1992. After his re-election in 2006, Olson was arrested and subsequently convicted of domestic assault. Olson left the legislature 2009 after failing to win a special election for a vacant seat in the Minnesota Senate.
John Edward Anderson is an American engineer and proponent of personal rapid transit.
Cheryl Diane Glenn is an American politician. She was a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, representing Maryland's 45th legislative district which is situated in northeast Baltimore. She resigned in December 2019 in advance of a federal indictment for wire fraud and bribery to which she pleaded guilty in January 2020. In July 2020, she was sentenced to two years in prison.
The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) is the primary law enforcement agency in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. It is also the largest police department in Minnesota. Formed in 1867, it is the second-oldest police department in Minnesota, after the Saint Paul Police Department that formed in 1854. A short-lived Board of Police Commissioners existed from 1887 to 1890.
Rufus Seth Williams is a former district attorney of the city of Philadelphia. He began his term January 4, 2010. He formerly served as an assistant district attorney. Williams was the first African-American district attorney in Philadelphia and in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. On March 21, 2017, Williams was indicted on 23 counts of bribery, extortion, and fraud. His trial began June 19, 2017. He resigned and pleaded guilty to one charge on June 29, 2017.
Corruption in Illinois has been a problem from the earliest history of the state. Electoral fraud in Illinois pre-dates the territory's admission to the Union in 1818. Illinois had the third most federal criminal convictions for public corruption between 1976 and 2012, behind New York and California. A study published by the University of Illinois Chicago in 2022 ranked Illinois as the second most corrupt state in the nation, with 4 out of the last 11 governors serving time in prison.
The 2016 Minneapolis shooting took place on June 29, 2016, in Minneapolis, Minnesota when a man named Anthony Sawina shot at five Somali-Americans, wounding two of them. Witnesses later recounted that Sawina shouted anti-Muslim expletives and claimed he was "going to kill [them] all." The attack was condemned by civil rights groups as part of a larger rise of Islamophobia in the United States leading up the 2016 presidential election.
Derek Michael Chauvin is an American former police officer who murdered George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. On May 25, 2020, Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for about nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down on the street, calling out "I can't breathe," during an arrest made with three other officers. Chauvin was dismissed by the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) on May 26 and arrested on May 29. The murder set off a series of protests in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, across the United States and around the world.
The following is a timeline of race relations and policing in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, providing details with a history of policing in the Twin Cities in the U.S. state of Minnesota from the nineteenth century to the present day. The Hennepin County Sheriff's Office, with its headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, is one of the "largest law enforcement agencies in Minnesota" with division and unit facilities throughout Hennepin County. Twin cities, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, have their own police departments, the Minneapolis Police Department, which was established in 1867 and the Saint Paul Police Department. A union for rank and file officers in Minneapolis—the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis —was established in 1917.
False rumors of a police shooting resulted in rioting, arson, and looting in the U.S. city of Minneapolis from August 26–28, 2020. The events began as a reaction to the suicide of Eddie Sole Jr., a 38-year old black man who was being pursued by Minneapolis police officers for his alleged involvement in a homicide. At approximately 2 p.m. on August 26, Sole died after he shot himself in the head as officers approached to arrest him. False rumors quickly spread on social media that Minneapolis police officers had fatally shot Sole. To quell unrest, Minneapolis police released closed-circuit television surveillance footage that captured Sole's suicide, which was later confirmed by a Hennepin County Medical Examiner's autopsy report.