{"id":1452,"date":"2006-08-23T07:19:57","date_gmt":"2006-08-23T15:19:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2006\/08\/hipsters_are_part_of_a_cult.html"},"modified":"2006-08-23T07:19:57","modified_gmt":"2006-08-23T15:19:57","slug":"hipsters_are_pa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/08\/hipsters_are_pa.html","title":{"rendered":"Hipsters Are Part Of A Cult"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Post adds some details<\/a> to the “hipster bank robbers” from yesterday<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Joe Kirby, 23, and his sister, Shemini, 20, told friends that they spent their formative years being psychologically abused in a “cult” in the Catskills community of Monticello, where their mother and another brother live.<\/p>\n

“I don’t know him to be a bad person. I don’t know him to be a thief or anything like that. I just know he has a serious drug problem,” said a pal.<\/p>\n

The friend of Joe Kirby said the alleged bank robber referred to the strange “hyper-religious” group he grew up in only as “the community” — and said it kept him in line by doling out punishments like being locked in a closet or forced to stand naked in front of a group of adults.<\/p>\n

“It was a very Jim Jones, hyper-religious kind of thing,” the friend said. “Joey used to call it a cult. He was raised in it; he was abused in it. Just extreme situations . . . nothing sexual, just humiliation.”<\/p>\n

Joe and Shemini Kirby escaped when they were adolescents and were put into foster care, the pal said.<\/p>\n

He said when they were teenagers, Joe started coming to New York City to go clubbing and got involved in the underground drug scene.<\/p>\n

Then, when he had to pay for his expensive habit, Kirby hit rock bottom.<\/p>\n

“For the last 18 months to two years, he has been working as a male prostitute, selling himself, sometimes for a very low amount of cash, to support his drug addiction,” the friend lamented.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

Prosecutors said the sister served as a lookout during one of the heists and pretended she had a gun in another.<\/p>\n

She also “had knowledge of her brother’s [computer] research to rob the bank,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Jordan Arnold said in court last night.<\/p>\n

“She Googled bank robbery.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Post adds some details to the “hipster bank robbers” from yesterday: Joe Kirby, 23, and his sister, Shemini, 20, told friends that they spent their formative years being psychologically abused in a “cult” in the Catskills community of Monticello, where their mother and another brother live. “I don’t know him to be a bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law_order"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}