newsmakers

newsmakers

Woman jailed, stole $1M from Twain House

BRIDGEPORT, Conn.

A federal judge has sentenced a woman to 31/2 years in prison for stealing more than $1 million from the Mark Twain House & Museum in Connecticut.

Donna Gregor of East Hartford also was sentenced Monday to three years of supervised release. The 58-year-old faced up to 23 years in prison after pleading guilty in August to wire fraud and filing a false tax return.

Prosecutors say Gregor was a long-term employee of the museum in Hartford. She submitted false information online to the museum’s payroll-management vendor to get more pay than she deserved and also used the museum’s check-writing system to write checks payable to herself.

Gregor used the money to pay for home improvements, theater tickets, dining out, mortgage payments, credit-card payments and car payments.

Jagger, Richards talk about ‘Some Girls’

NEW YORK

Keith Richards equates the rush to release the Rolling Stones’ seminal album “Some Girls” as “the same as cutting off your baby’s head.”

“We couldn’t release a double album, and we were on deadline,” the guitarist said of the 1978 recording. “Sometimes you’re really getting into tracks you want to finish, but they don’t make [it] because time was up.”

Many of those songs were included when the album was re-released Tuesday as a double disc with previously unreleased material. A box-set from the album also is being released.

Mick Jagger said “Some Girls” was a pivotal album for the band.

At the time, punk rock and disco were threatening the old “dinosaur rockers,” as Richards said, so the band had to get back to its basic stripped-down sound.

One of the album’s biggest hits, and also the most criticized at the time, was the dance track “Miss You.”

“It’s not like we wanted to make a career out of disco; it just happened to be that beat, and Mick came up with this beautiful idea. If you’re ever gonna do disco, you got to do it now. It was like a one-off,” Richards said.

Next year, the band will celebrate its 50th anniversary, and there’s a great deal of speculation as to whether the band will tour for their milestone.

Associated Press