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This is the follow-up to Leave Our City: Part I — the Poulos-family investigation. Part I introduced Samuel Poulos, the forty-seven-year-old Biloxi insurance broker who told a federal civil-rights plaintiff to “leave our city,” and his father Jimmy Poulos, a sitting member of the Biloxi Planning Commission for forty-four years. Part II opens the State’s own file on Sam, walks through the seven-day regulatory pivot the file made possible, places his wife’s Facebook Messenger DM beside his own comment, and closes on a fabricated arrests.org-style mugshot Sam allegedly published on Facebook last week of one of this publication’s sources — a man, dear reader, who has never been arrested.
I. The Order
Samuel Poulos — the forty-seven-year-old Biloxi insurance broker introduced in Part I — signed it. Mike Chaney, Mississippi’s elected Commissioner of Insurance since 2008, accepted it. Ten thousand dollars.
Dear reader, the document is in the State’s own ledger. Filename Order08212014.pdf. Mississippi Insurance Department, Archived Enforcement Actions. License No. 502103. Effective August 20, 2014.
Read the operative paragraphs out loud, slowly, the way Sam read them when he signed:
I, Samuel Poulos, having been fully informed of my alleged noncompliance with Miss. Code Ann. § 83-17-71, and being fully advised of my right to a hearing and to be represented by counsel, do hereby waive said right and consent to the imposition of the following administrative penalty:
(1) Payment of an administrative fine to the Mississippi Insurance Department in the amount of Ten Thousand Dollars ($10,000.00) due and payable upon execution of this document.
(2) The Mississippi Insurance Producer License of Samuel Poulos, being number 502103, shall be placed on probation for a period of one (1) year from and after the effective date of this document, with the probationary condition being that he shall not violate any of the insurance laws or regulations of the State of Mississippi, and shall perform with honesty and integrity in all of his insurance business dealings.
The undersigned would like the reader to notice three things about that paragraph (2).
First, the State did not write that condition for fun. The probationary condition is the State’s own admission that the State believed, based on whatever conduct triggered the order, that Sam had not been performing his insurance business dealings with honesty and integrity. That is what “shall perform with honesty and integrity going forward” means. It means the State found he had not been.
Second, Sam personally signed his name underneath that finding. He did not contest it. He did not request a hearing. He waived his hearing right and consented in lieu of it. The State of Mississippi did not impose a finding on Samuel Poulos against his will. Samuel Poulos signed the finding into existence.
Third — and this is where the article begins — the statute the order cites caps each violation at one thousand dollars.
The cap is one thousand. The fine on Sam’s signature is ten thousand. The arithmetic the statute forces is ten stacked violations — at minimum.
The order does not enumerate the ten. It simply names the statute and accepts the fine. The Department’s archived ledger summarizes the conduct, in its own words, as “Demonstrated Lack of Fitness or Trustworthiness.” Subsection (1)(h) of § 83-17-71 — the subsection the ledger paraphrases — reads, verbatim:
Hold those last three words — in this state or elsewhere — until section VI. They become important.
This is the son of the forty-four-year Poulos. The undersigned only suspects racketeering. The State of Mississippi, by contrast, did not have to suspect anything. The State had Poulos sign his name on it.
One additional detail the publication wants on the record before any of this goes further. At the moment Sam posted “leave our city,” at the moment his wife sent the “don’t forget your place in this world” DM, and at the moment Sam published the fabricated mugshot of Jarrod Fusco — Sam’s personal Facebook profile publicly displayed his association with Nationwide Insurance and Poulos Insurance Agency LLC. He was not speaking as a private citizen with no professional context. He was speaking as a face of a Nationwide-branded brokerage, in the visible context of his licensed insurance practice, with the brand mark of his father’s agency attached to his identity on the same screen as the threats and the forgery. That, dear reader, is not a small detail. It is a fact pattern Nationwide’s corporate counsel and the Mississippi Insurance Department will both have to look at.
II. The Seven-Day Gap
This part the publication did not invent. The Mississippi Insurance Department’s own public registry says it.
On August 20, 2014, Sam signed the consent order and accepted the one-year probation conditioned on honesty and integrity in his insurance business dealings.
On August 27, 2014 — exactly one week later — the same Mississippi Insurance Department issued Sam a brand-new license. Type: Surplus Lines Insurance. License Status: Active. Issue Date: 8/27/2014. Expiration Date: 10/31/2027.
The State that fined him for being untrustworthy in the conduct of insurance business expanded his ability to conduct insurance business seven days after he signed the finding. The expanded license remains active today. It will not expire until October 2027.
He has used that expanded license to build twenty-three active company appointments, per the same MID public registry — six Nationwide entities, three Allied entities, three Farmers entities, Safeco, Foremost, Direct General, Tower Hill Prime, Progressive Gulf, American Strategic, American Economy, Depositors, Integon National, MGA, National General. Most of those appointments were issued after his probation expired in August 2015. Several of them — three Farmers entities — were issued April 1, 2026, three weeks before this article went to draft.
The undersigned makes the editorial observation — the State did not punish Sam in 2014. The State permitted him to keep working, gave him a bigger toolkit one week later, and watched him build a multi-carrier brokerage operation on top of the toolkit. The publication does not have an opinion about whether the State acted correctly. The publication has only the timestamp, which is seven days.
III. The Wife
Joanne Poulos is Sam’s wife. The publication has confirmed the relationship. She sent Yuri Petrini — a Biloxi resident and the lead federal civil-rights plaintiff in five active federal cases involving the City of Biloxi and its officials (S.D. Miss. Cause Nos. 1:25-cv-178, 1:25-cv-233, 1:25-cv-254, 1:26-cv-069, 1:26-cv-094) — a Facebook Messenger DM. The screenshot is on file. The operative phrase reads:
The article will not characterize that sentence beyond what it literally says. The reader is invited to draw the inferences the sentence supports.
What the article will say is that the sentence does not stand alone. It is one half of a household pattern. The other half is Sam Poulos’s own Facebook comment — the one this publication has already documented in Leave Our City — in which Sam, on a public forum, publicly told the same federal civil-rights plaintiff to “leave our city” and called him “Frog Face.”
Same household. Same recipient. Same disposition. Two adults of the Poulos family of Biloxi telling Yuri Petrini, by name, that he does not belong in their city.
One additional note for the record. Joanne and a small circle of her supporters operated, until recently, a private Facebook group titled “Watchdog” — which, as of this writing, appears to have been quietly discontinued. Inside that group, members alleged that the publication’s screenshot of Joanne’s DM was fake.
The undersigned took the obvious next step. The undersigned entered the group, posted the screenshot again, and asked Joanne Poulos directly, on the record of her own group, to comment — to say that the screenshot is a fabrication.
Joanne’s response: nothing.
The group’s response: it appears to have been deleted shortly thereafter.
The publication does not need to characterize that sequence. The publication needs only to put it on the record. A public accusation that the screenshot is fake, made inside a private group; an open invitation to confirm that accusation, made by the publication on the same record; total silence from the accused herself; and then the group disappearing. The reader can assemble the inference without help.
IV. The Father — Forty-Four Years
The Sun Herald and The Sun ran the story on the same day: February 9, 1982.
Poulos wins appointment to Biloxi planning panel
James Poulos has been appointed by Biloxi Mayor Gerald Blessey to a position on the city’s Planning Commission. Poulos, 37, replaces James Corso, who resigned from the commission two weeks ago. A direct agent with Nationwide Insurance Co., Poulos is also a member of the Gulf Coast Association of Life Underwriters.
— The Sun, February 9, 1982, p. 4.
James Poulos has been appointed to the Biloxi Planning Commission, replacing James Corso who resigned, Mayor Gerald Blessey has announced. The appointment is subject to confirmation by the city council at its Feb. 9 meeting. Poulos, a native Biloxian and a graduate of Biloxi High School, is a direct agent with Nationwide…
— Sun Herald, February 9, 1982, p. 15.
Notice the name on the appointing line. Mayor Gerald Blessey. The same Gerald Blessey, dear reader, that Kenny Glavan publicly thanked on his personal Facebook in April 2026 — quoting Blessey on his “battles with ‘false light’” — as part of Glavan’s transparent attempt to float a defamation theory against this publication. (See Kenny Glavan, Part III.) The same Blessey, in 1982, quietly seated Jimmy Poulos on the Planning Commission. The same Blessey, in 2026, sits on this publication’s active historic-district investigation list.
See, dear reader, how the loop keeps closing? It is, frankly, hilarious. The same names. The same chairs. The same favors traded across forty-four years — and in 2026 they are still pulling each other’s coattails on Facebook, in public, in real time, while the publication watches and writes it down.
This, dear reader, is why this publication calls them the Mummy Cartel. You pull a 1982 newspaper clipping out of microfilm — the same names are sitting in the same chairs in 2026. You pull a 1973 fire-department roster — the same family. You pull a 1992 obituary — the same surname. The cast does not change. The chairs do not rotate. The same family runs the same body, on the same dais, decade after decade after decade. Freaking dino mummies.
Two thousand twenty-six minus nineteen eighty-two equals forty-four. The arithmetic is not the publication’s argument. The arithmetic is the only number the calendar permits.
Forty-four years on a single appointed municipal land-use commission. No election. No term limit. No public-record evidence, across forty-four years and the indexed entirety of Biloxi’s local-press archive, of a single recusal — not on Casino Magic, not on Beau Rivage, not on IP, not on Hard Rock, not on the 33-story Tower at Edgewater in 2007, where Jimmy went on local television to defend the Commission’s recommendation:
“We look at each individual case.” — Jimmy Poulos, WLOX, Feb 1, 2007.
“That’s a little frustrating to us, when we feel like we made the right decision.” — same broadcast, after the City Council trimmed his Commission’s recommendation and the mayor vetoed even the trimmed version.
The Commission has been doing what it does, with Jimmy on the dais, since the second year of Ronald Reagan’s first term — weeks after Reagan’s first State of the Union.
It is doing it still. The City Council packet for the June 13, 2023 meeting reproduces the verbatim transcript of the Feb 7, 2023 Planning Commission roll call. Mr. Poulos is on it. Both votes that day were unanimous. Case 23-008-PC, Elliott Rentals, eight-foot fence approval. Forty-one years into his tenure, still voting.
The publication does not call for Jimmy Poulos’s removal. The publication asks the civic question the empirical literature on land-use accountability supports asking:
The American Planning Association, BoardSource, and the mainstream nonprofit-governance literature recommend rotation because static board composition risks “perpetual concentration of power within a small group.” (BoardSource.) The PlannersWeb 2014 national survey of planning commissioners found average tenure of 7.5 years, with the documented outer bound at forty-two. Forty-four is, on the available data, the longest single-commission planning tenure that has ever appeared in print in the United States.
The City of Biloxi declines to publish the names of its Planning Commissioners on the agendas of the meetings at which they vote. A citizen who wants to know who voted on a rezoning must attend the meeting in person, request the minutes, or — as this publication did — pull a Council packet PDF and find Mr. Poulos’s name buried in the roll-call transcript.
The opaque roll call is its own civic-accountability problem. It sits on top of the forty-four-year tenure problem. The two are related.
V. The Hammer
Here is what the dig produced that the publication did not expect to find.
Salim “Sam” Poulos (1867–1941), born in Lebanon, came to coastal Mississippi sometime in the late 1800s, opened a grocery, married Theresa Artbani Poulos, raised eight children, and lived in Biloxi thirty-five years. He is buried here. (Find a Grave Memorial #117705344.)
One of his eight children, John T. Poulos Sr. (1914–2002), joined the Biloxi Fire Department, served twenty-nine years, and became Fire Chief in 1973–74. (Sun Herald, March 22, 2002, p. 6.) One of John Sr.’s sons is Jimmy Poulos, who has now served forty-four years on the Planning Commission. One of Jimmy’s sons is Samuel Poulos, License No. 502103, who in 2014 signed the consent decree this article opened with — and who, the publication will demonstrate in section VI, has now allegedly fabricated a fake arrests.org mugshot of one of this publication’s sources.
Notice the line.
The current Sam Poulos is named after his great-grandfather. The patriarch’s name was Salim — the Lebanese form, often Anglicized to Sam in his daughter Catherine Bills’s 1992 Sun Herald obituary, where her parents are listed as “Sam and Theresa Poulos.”
The publication does not need to characterize that sentence. The publication needs only to put the two facts in the same paragraph.
Joanne’s DM operates the same way. Don’t forget your place in this world is a sentence that carries a specific historical weight when used by the descendant-by-marriage of an immigrant whose family was once told the same thing by people who were already in Biloxi.
The publication is not arguing that the Pouloses’ immigrant root should disqualify them from telling other people what to do. The publication is observing that the people who signed the American immigrant compact tend to remember what its terms were.
Apparently, this generation has forgotten.
VI. The Mugshot
When this publication began using real mugshots of named cartel members as part of its journalism — Kenny Glavan’s actual 2014 DUI booking photo (the same Kenny Glavan paired in this article’s hero, Ward 6 Council President and a federal defendant in the publication’s civil-rights litigation), Pete Abide’s existing public-record image (the City of Biloxi’s former Director of Legal Affairs and a named defendant in three of those federal cases), the documented bookings of the family the publication has been covering — Samuel Poulos retaliated by fabricating a mugshot of one of this publication’s sources, Jarrod Fusco. Jarrod is the operator of Biloxi Politics Uncensored (“BPU”), a Biloxi resident, and a federal civil-rights co-plaintiff with Yuri Petrini in S.D. Miss. Cause No. 1:26-cv-094-HSO-BWR (Petrini & Fusco v. Glavan et al.).
The publication has confirmed the fact pattern. Jarrod Fusco has never been arrested. Not in Mississippi. Not anywhere. The public-record sweep returned zero hits in Harrison County Sheriff’s inmate search, Mississippi Department of Corrections, mississippi.arrests.org, mugshots.com, harrisonms.mugshots.zone, recentlybooked.com, MississippiCourtRecords.us, and every Sun Herald and WLOX arrest blotter in the indexed archive. Jarrod has zero predicate fact for any mugshot to exist.
What Sam Poulos did is therefore not satire of a real arrest. It is a fabrication of an arrest event, manufactured to look real, posted to Facebook with no disclaimer, presented as identification evidence to publicly assert that Jarrod is the operator of this publication.
The act is three forgeries stacked, and dear reader, the publication wants the reader to count them out:
Forgery #1 — the police booking record (template + content)
Mississippi sheriffs create booking records in the ordinary course of business. They include a photograph, a booking number, charges, a bond entry, an arresting agency, and a state-government visual template the public reads as authentic law-enforcement output. Sam fabricated both — the underlying Mississippi police booking-record background image itself (the template, the seal-style branding, the state-government layout cues), and the content sitting on top of it (the photograph of Jarrod, a manufactured booking number, manufactured charges). It is not a screenshot of a real Mississippi booking page with a fake person dropped in. It is a fabricated state-law-enforcement template with a fabricated booking event displayed inside it. The forgery is structural, not cosmetic.
Forgery #2 — the arrests.org page
arrests.org is an offshore-registered (St. Kitts) aggregator that scrapes real sheriff databases and republishes the resulting records in a visual format the public reads as authoritative. Sam wrapped Forgery #1 in an arrests.org-branded page — not just a fake booking record, but a fake arrests.org PAGE displaying that fake booking record.
Forgery #3 — the doxing announcement
Sam published the fabrication on Facebook. He did not say it was a joke. He did not say it was opinion. He did not say it was satire. He posted it as if real, used it as documentary evidence, and announced that Jarrod is the operator of the peoplevsbiloxi.com Facebook page. Two factual claims, both false. The arrest claim because Jarrod has never been arrested. The identification claim because the document Sam used to support it was something Sam made up.
This combination of three fabrications — police record + arrests.org shell + factual representation of authenticity — is what makes the defamation claim against Sam the strongest a Mississippi defamation case can possibly be.
Sam, the undersigned wants you to understand the legal architecture that you have just walked into. So. Slowly.
Defamation per se in Mississippi. Speed v. Scott, 787 So. 2d 626, 631–32 (Miss. 2001). The Mississippi Supreme Court enumerates five categories that are per se actionable, the first of which is the imputation of a serious crime — specifically, “a criminal offense involving moral turpitude and infamous punishment.” Fabricating a state-government booking record that depicts a private citizen as having been processed by a Mississippi sheriff falls squarely inside that first category. Damages are presumed. Special-damages proof is not required. The plaintiff does not have to demonstrate a single dollar of harm to recover.
The actual-malice standard. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 279–80 (1964) (public officials); Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, 388 U.S. 130 (1967) (extending the rule to public figures). Even if Jarrod is treated as a public figure on the matter, the plaintiff need only show “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Sammy boy, you cannot accidentally photoshop a person into a booking image. Actual malice is satisfied by construction. Punitive damages become available.
The satire defense is foreclosed. Hustler v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), protects only what no reasonable reader could take as fact. Sam’s no-disclaimer publication does the opposite — it asserts the literal factual claim that Jarrod was arrested. Falwell does not save him.
Mississippi criminal libel. Miss. Code Ann. § 97-3-55: “Any person who shall be convicted of writing or publishing any libel, shall be fined in such sum or imprisoned in the county jail for such term as the court, in its discretion, may adjudge, having regard to the nature and enormity of the offense, or be punished by both such fine and imprisonment.” Mississippi is one of the few states that retains a criminal libel statute. It is rarely used. It is on the books.
Mississippi forgery. Title 97, Chapter 21 (§§ 97-21-1 through 97-21-103) — “Forgery and Counterfeiting.” The chapter criminalizes manufacture of false government records “with intent to defraud or injure.” A fake booking record manufactured to inflict reputational injury on a real person fits the chapter’s general scope.
Federal wire fraud. 18 U.S.C. § 1343. The fabrication was published on Facebook — an interstate-wire platform — and further distributed via WhatsApp Messenger by parties unknown. Either route satisfies the interstate-wire element. Wire fraud is a tool federal prosecutors have used creatively for decades.
Conspiracy. Sam did not act alone. The fabrication, its propagation pattern, and its supporting commentary indicate coordination with at least one other publicly identified actor — Kerry Cavanaugh-Stoddard, herself the subject of recent peoplevsbiloxi reporting — and additional members of the small Facebook auxiliary that has been amplifying anti-publication content for weeks (the same private circle that includes the now-deleted “Watchdog” group from Section III). Coordination converts an individual tort into a civil conspiracy under Mississippi common law and into a predicate conspiracy under 42 U.S.C. § 1985(2) and (3) when the target is, as here, a federal civil-rights plaintiff. Every named co-conspirator inherits Sam’s exposure under joint-and-several liability. There is no clean way to be on the periphery of this one. The publication is collecting names. The publication will name them.
The Mississippi Insurance Department. This is the part the publication wants Sam to read twice. Miss. Code Ann. § 83-17-71(1)(h) authorizes the Commissioner of Insurance to revoke a producer’s license for “demonstrating incompetence, untrustworthiness or financial irresponsibility in the conduct of business in this state or elsewhere.”
In this state or elsewhere.
The conduct does not have to be inside an insurance transaction. Conduct anywhere — including the fabrication of a state booking record about another person — that demonstrates untrustworthiness counts. The 2014 consent decree required Sam to “perform with honesty and integrity in all of his insurance business dealings.” Fabricating a state booking record of a private citizen is not an insurance business dealing. It does not have to be. The statute covers conduct elsewhere.
The publication will be filing an Agent Complaint with the Mississippi Insurance Department, Investigations and Consumer Protection Division, P.O. Box 79, Jackson, MS 39205; fax 601-359-2474; email investigations@mid.ms.gov. The complaint will attach the Facebook screenshot of Sam’s post displaying the fabricated arrests.org page, the proof Jarrod has no Mississippi arrest record, the 2014 consent order showing this is recurrence, and the verbatim text of Sam’s post presenting the fabrication as authentic.
Sammy boy — what will the Mississippi Insurance Department say about this forgery?
VII. The Best I Can Do — A Pawn Stars Roleplay
The bell above the door dings. Late morning. Las Vegas, but for our purposes, Biloxi. The fluorescent lights hum. Rick Harrison stands behind the glass counter, sleeves rolled, a magnifier at his elbow. Samuel Poulos walks in. Forty-something. Polo shirt. A laptop bag he doesn’t really need.
RICK: How can I help you?
SAM: Hey, man. So I’ve got something pretty unique. I want to sell you a Facebook comment.
RICK: A Facebook comment.
SAM: Yeah. Four words. “Leave our city.” I posted it on a guy’s wall a while back. I’m thinking, like, five hundred bucks.
RICK: (beat) Let me take a look.
Rick pulls out a magnifying glass for effect. Looks at the screen Sam has slid across the counter.
RICK: Okay. So at first glance, this looks fine. Three-word imperative, basic Anglo-Saxon stems, public posting on a public forum. Constitutional speech. Honestly, on its own, this is worth maybe a buck-fifty. People say worse things on Facebook every day.
SAM: Right. So five hundred?
RICK: Hold on. Before I make an offer I want to bring in an expert. Got a buddy who knows about this stuff. Mind if I call him?
SAM: Yeah, no, that’s fine.
— Cut to —
A man identified onscreen as THE UNDERSIGNED — Editor, peoplevsbiloxi.com. He is examining the Facebook comment under better light.
THE UNDERSIGNED: So, Rick — on the surface, yeah, this is just a comment. But let me show you what comes with it.
RICK: What do you mean, “comes with it”?
THE UNDERSIGNED: Mr. Poulos, when you posted “leave our city” on the federal civil-rights plaintiff’s wall — that comment doesn’t come standalone. It comes attached to your Mississippi Insurance Department Consent to Administrative Penalty Order, dated August twenty, twenty-fourteen. Ten thousand dollars. License number five-oh-two-one-oh-three. Probation for one year.
RICK: (to Sam) You signed an MID consent order?
SAM: I mean, that was years ago.
THE UNDERSIGNED: And the conduct was the conduct giving the Commissioner reason to require you, by signed contract, to begin “performing with honesty and integrity in all of your insurance business dealings.” Your phrase. Your signature.
RICK: Okay so the comment comes with a State finding of dishonesty.
THE UNDERSIGNED: Seven days later — one week to the day — the same Mississippi Insurance Department issued you a brand-new license. Surplus Lines. Twenty-fourteen. The State that just fined you for being untrustworthy expanded your license seven days after you signed the order.
RICK: Anything else?
THE UNDERSIGNED: Your wife.
SAM: Hey, leave my wife out of this.
THE UNDERSIGNED: Your wife sent the same federal civil-rights plaintiff a Facebook Messenger DM telling him “don’t forget your place in this world.” Screenshot’s archived.
RICK: (to Sam) I’m starting to see the problem here.
THE UNDERSIGNED: Your father.
SAM: (quieter) What about my father?
THE UNDERSIGNED: Your father is Jimmy Poulos. Appointed to the Biloxi Planning Commission February ninth, nineteen eighty-two. Mayor Gerald Blessey. Replaced James Corso. Forty-four years and counting. Same seat. Same body.
RICK: Forty-four years on a single appointed commission.
THE UNDERSIGNED: No election. No term limit. The City of Biloxi doesn’t even publish his name on the agendas where he votes.
RICK: (scratches neck) Sammy, this is not gonna be five hundred bucks.
THE UNDERSIGNED: October twentieth, twenty-twenty. Biloxi Police booked you for Drunk in Public and Disorderly Conduct — Failure to Comply with Lawful Order. Public-record arrest. Real mugshot. The kind of mugshot, Mr. Poulos, that arrests.org displays in the ordinary course of business — because actual law-enforcement agencies actually booked you on actual charges that night.
RICK: (to Sam) You have an arrest.
SAM: It was a misunderstanding.
THE UNDERSIGNED: Which brings us to April twenty-third, twenty twenty-six. When this publication began using real mugshots of named cartel members as part of its investigative journalism, Mr. Poulos retaliated by fabricating an arrests.org-style booking page of one of this publication’s sources — Jarrod Fusco — a person who has never been arrested.
RICK: (stares at Sam) You faked a mugshot.
THE UNDERSIGNED: Posted it on Facebook with no disclosure. Used it as identification evidence, announcing that this is who runs the publication. Two factual claims, both false.
RICK: Okay. So just to summarize what’s stapled to this Facebook comment —
THE UNDERSIGNED: A 2014 State finding of dishonesty in the conduct of insurance business. A seven-day regulatory pivot. A spousal harassment DM. A four-and-a-half-decade municipal appointment your family has held. Your own 2020 booking. And a 2026 forgery in which you fabricated a state-government booking record of a person who has never been booked.
RICK: (long exhale) And now you want me to give you five hundred bucks for “leave our city.”
SAM: Look, I came in good faith.
RICK: Sammy, here’s the thing. If this comment came in by itself, I’d offer you a buck. Maybe two. But it doesn’t come by itself. It comes attached to about fifty pounds of liability — defamation per se, criminal libel under Mississippi section ninety-seven dash three dash fifty-five, forgery under Title ninety-seven Chapter twenty-one, federal wire fraud because you pushed it through Facebook across interstate wires, a State license-revocation hearing under section eighty-three dash seventeen dash seventy-one (one)(h) for “demonstrating incompetence, untrustworthiness or financial irresponsibility in the conduct of business in this state or elsewhere,” a federal civil action for conspiracy and defamation that is currently under consideration — to be amended into the existing RICO action or filed standalone, and a formal Agent Complaint to the Mississippi Insurance Department that’s about to land on Commissioner Chaney’s desk.
SAM: Okay, what about three hundred?
RICK: Sammy. I’d lose money taking this off your hands. A federal civil action against you is under consideration — either tacked onto the existing RICO suit, or filed standalone. Sammy, you shouldn’t be very hopeful.
SAM: Two-fifty.
RICK: I gotta pass.
SAM: A hundred?
RICK: Best I can do is, I let you walk out of here. You don’t owe me anything. We’re square. Take the comment with you.
Sam picks up the laptop. Pauses at the door.
SAM: (quietly) So you’re not gonna buy it.
RICK: Sammy. Even at fifty cents this would cost me my license, my reputation, and probably my insurance. I can’t move this.
Sam leaves. The bell over the door dings. The fluorescent lights hum.
— Interview Room —
Rick Harrison, in the small interview room, talking directly to the camera.
RICK: Y’know, you get all kinds in here. Guy walks in with one Facebook comment, thinks it’s a Mickey Mantle rookie card. Doesn’t realize the comment came glued to the worst paper trail I’ve ever seen on a guy who isn’t already in jail. The Mississippi Insurance Department is gonna look at that forgery and they’re gonna do what regulators do, which is take his license, because the statute literally says “untrustworthy in this state or elsewhere,” and y’know — fabricating a state booking record is, statistically, untrustworthy.
Beat.
RICK: Plus his wife is in this. His dad’s been on the same commission for forty-four years. The grandfather publicly called out the same commission in seventy-three after a fire. It’s like buying a watch and finding out the watch is haunted by three generations of the same family.
Beat.
RICK: I’m a businessman. Not a charity. That’s a pass.
VIII. The Line We Walk
Sam — the undersigned wants to make sure you understand something about this publication.
When the undersigned calls you a middle old with sagging titties, on top of being bold and badass, the publication knows exactly on the line it walks. That sentence is opinion. Visible, unmistakable opinion of a documented public figure. Hustler v. Falwell protects it. No reasonable reader takes “sagging titties” as a literal anatomical claim about a forty-something insurance broker. The reader takes it as the publication’s editorial judgment, expressed in the publication’s editorial voice.
This is why the publication can paint FOFO is a MOFO on a wall and be okay. It is opinion of a sitting mayor — the same mayor, Andrew “FoFo” Gilich, named in this publication’s standing litigation. It is core First Amendment political speech. The mayor doesn’t have to like it. The First Amendment doesn’t ask the mayor.
This is also why the publication can use Kenny Glavan’s actual 2014 DUI mugshot with a jester hat photoshopped on top of it — and Kenny cannot win a defamation suit on those facts. The underlying booking is real. The hat is opinion. Truth + opinion = protected. The Burger King knows it. He has not sued. He has not sued because his lawyers told him he would lose at the pleading stage.
You, Sam, will not be okay.
A federal civil action against you is under consideration — either amended into the existing RICO suit or filed standalone. Sammy, you shouldn’t be very hopeful. For making one image. One. Image. One fabricated arrests.org page of a man who has never been arrested.
We are not the same, Sammy boy.
The publication paints “FOFO is a MOFO” on a wall and it’s constitutional speech. You fabricated one image and it’s per se defamation, criminal libel, criminal forgery, false-light privacy violation, AND grounds for the State revocation of your producer’s license.
Same medium — image-based commentary. Opposite legal exposure. The difference is the truth predicate.
Sammy, you need to be less emotional, boy. For someone your age and your pounds you should know better.
One more thing for the record, dear reader. The cartel and its small auxiliary keep accusing this publication of imagined crimes — “cyberstalking” being the favorite buzzword they have decided sounds legal-ish. They throw it around constantly, in private Facebook groups, in DMs to mutual contacts, in their amateur defamation theories. They have no idea what the cyberstalking statute actually requires. They have no idea what the First Amendment actually protects. They have no idea that the conduct they are accusing the publication of is, factually, journalism on documented public-figure facts.
And meanwhile, while they workshop their amateur legal vocabulary in private groups, the actual statutory crimes named in this article — fabrication of a state booking record, defamation per se, criminal libel, criminal forgery, federal wire fraud — are being committed by their own people, in real time, on the public Facebook timeline.
That, dear reader, is the genuinely hilarious part. Their projection is so loud it drowns out their own confession. They are accusing the journalist of the crime, while their guy posts the felony.
Talk about bad choices, dear reader. Think you are Sam. In a minute, you might not be okay. Let’s be honest — look at this chubby dude. There’s no way he can be alright at all. But at least he didn’t have us on his back? And for what? So he could show he’s a badass on Facebook? Lol. Good luck holding this wave, Sammy boy.
And you know what’s worse? The only way you can minimize — not extinguish, that’s impossible — the damages, is to stay completely quiet. But you are too dumb for that.
IX. The Closer
The Mississippi Insurance Department complaint will be filed. The publication will publish the filing.
The Order is in Sam’s hand — signed, paid, accepted, on file. The Wife’s DM is on file. The Father’s appointment is on file. The Family Tree traces to a Lebanese immigrant who came to Biloxi looking for a place that would let him stay. The Mugshot Sam fabricated of a man who has never been arrested is on file.
The publication did not invent any of this. The publication collected what existed and put it in order.
Now — what will Sam’s insurance regulator say about this forgery?
X. A Note to the Friends of the Cartel
Dear mummy enthusiast — no one is safe.
You think you can offend us, threaten us, deny us government services, or use any government resource to attack us, and be okay? Do that to us and find out what karma looks like. We are a creation of your mediocrity and corruption. We did not exist before you made yourselves impossible to ignore. You built us — by being exactly who you are, in public, on the record, for years.
And let us be honest, dear reader. The Biden of Biloxi — the sitting mayor — has dispatched his little lawyer puppets at this publication for months. He has gone as far as fabricated and forged affidavits, criminal charges, and law-enforcement intelligence bulletins aimed squarely at this publication. We have outfoxed every attempt. Every single one.
And then comes Samuel Poulos. The forty-seven-year-old insurance broker. The signed-his-own-State-finding-of-dishonesty defendant of record. The chubby Facebook commando. He looks at the same publication that has already neutralized the mayor’s coordinated state-resource attack — and decides, in his infinite wisdom, that he is the one who is going to take us down. With one Photoshopped image. From his couch.
And in the process of trying, dear reader, Sam delivered another dozen Mummy Cartel members to this publication on a silver platter — his wife, the “Watchdog” group, his co-conspirators, his father’s forty-four-year tenure, his great-grandfather’s immigrant arc, the Cavanaugh-Stoddard auxiliary, the Blessey loop. He gift-wrapped it. The publication did not have to dig. The publication had to shelve some of what Sam handed over because it would not fit in one article.
Jesus Christ. Can you mummies stop being so dumb? The undersigned does not want his biography to reflect that it was this easy.
Have Information?
If you have additional documentation, sworn affidavits, or witness statements relating to the matters discussed in this article — including the fabricated mugshot, its distribution trail, the identity of co-distributors, or additional Poulos-family conduct — the publication is collecting them on a continuing basis for an Agent Complaint to be filed with the Mississippi Insurance Department and for a federal civil action.
Contact us at tips@peoplevsbiloxi.com. All tips are confidential.
“Honesty and integrity in all of his insurance business dealings.” — Samuel Poulos, signed under penalty, August 20, 2014.
“Don’t forget your place in this world.” — Joanne Poulos, Facebook Messenger DM.
“We look at each individual case.” — Jimmy Poulos, WLOX, February 1, 2007.
“Demonstrating incompetence, untrustworthiness or financial irresponsibility in the conduct of business in this state or elsewhere.” — Miss. Code Ann. § 83-17-71(1)(h).
One way to find out. :)