I do it every day while reading it:
"Police-psychic controversy brewing in Salem" by Billy Baker | Globe Staff, October 31, 2013
SALEM — The controversy does not stop there, for a police detective has dared to utter what is a loaded word in the local occult economy: fraud.
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The controversy centers on Fatima’s, a psychic studio that has been in Salem for two decades, practicing a Romani form of fortune-telling that embraces the existence of curses, unlike most of the local Wiccan community.
And for a long time, there have been unofficial reports that Fatima’s was charging big bucks for curse removal. Internet review sites are loaded with such stories.
The city finally went after the studio this month, after two people made formal fraud complaints to police, including Ryan Reid of West Henrietta, N.Y., who said he went to Fatima’s in August and was convinced by an employee named “Debbie” that he needed a curse shield placed over him. Over the course of several weeks, Reid paid Fatima’s $16,800 for that shield.
In the course of the investigation, police determined that Fatima’s fortune-teller license had expired more than a year earlier and forced the studio to close.
But on Monday night, when Fatima’s owner Harry Mitchell went before the city’s licensing board to ask for reinstatement, the lapse worked in Fatima’s favor. Detective Sergeant James A. Page, who has been leading the investigation, said that without a valid license, the shop was not technically operating under the fortuneteller’s ordinance at the time of the cash-for-curse incidents and therefore could not be charged with violating it.
Instead, he issued two $100 fines for operating without a license. The board granted a probationary license for Fatima’s to resume operation until the end of the year, provided they promise not to meddle in curses again and work with the New York man to come up with some kind of reimbursement.
They got a cur$e put on them!
In an interview after the hearing, Page made clear that he thought Fatima’s was defrauding people much like Internet scammers who prey on the elderly and weak. But while he said the department will continue to investigate Fatima’s, prosecuting them on criminal charges is extremely difficult because “people are embarrassed and they’re not going to come forward.”
Many in the Salem fortune-telling community have long been suspicious of the practices at Fatima’s and applaud the city’s crackdown.
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Barbara Szafranski, who spoke harshly about Fatima’s practices at the licensing board hearing, said she once had a woman come into her shop, Angelica of the Angels, hysterically crying because someone at Fatima’s had told her she had “a hole in her aura.” Szafranski said she put the woman in front of a $25,000 camera that can take a picture of your aura with biofeedback, “and her aura was beautiful, blue with violet around it, which is very spiritual.”
How much did that cost?
But Lorelei Stathopoulos, “Salem’s love clairvoyant” and the owner of Crow Haven Corner, Salem’s oldest witch shop, says that witches run a real danger in criticizing the beliefs of the tellers at Fatima’s.
They might get burned at the stake.
“How can I put down what they believe in?” she said. “And they’re charging a service for others who believe in it. You’d be surprised at how many people call me every single day and say they have a curse and they want me to remove it.”
She tells them all the same thing: “If you believe in it, you’re cursed.”
My curse is reading the Boston Globe every day, but I don't believe in it.
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A fool and his money....
UPDATE: Salem: Curse victims, meet Adam Smith
I broke the cur$e.
