The listing for Lori Drew's marketing business on Yelp has been ravaged by negative reviews posted by Yelpers, including yours truly. The number of reviews numbered six or seven dozen. Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, I received the following email from Yelp HQ:

Hi,

I'm writing to let you know about our decision to remove your review of Drew Advantage in O'Fallon, MO. Your review was flagged by the Yelp community, and our Customer Service team has determined that it falls outside our review guidelines: http://www.yelp.com/faq#great_review.

We review every situation with detail and care and take the removal of reviews very seriously. If you have additional questions about this policy, please contact us at http://www.yelp.com/contact.

Regards,
Kris
Yelp User Support

I checked -- not only did Yelp delete my review, they deleted every single one. I just checked again -- two fresh negative reviews have been posted since the deletions.

I can't blame Yelp for asserting themselves as alpha dog on their boards, but the truly fair solution is to remove the listing for Drew Advantage altogether because is it really a business anymore? With the notoriety of the Drew family in their community and the negative goodwill from being associated with them, what business in their right mind would today or ever? Can Yelp name a standing client of Drew Advantage?

Just in case it is not clear, Drew Advantage is a marketing company for small local businesses. They most likely send out those advertiser packs you get in the mail with coupons for pizza, dry cleaning, car washing, etc. What does this business have to do with the Yelp demographic anyway? My coupons were late in the mail? They don't come anymore? By implicitly coming down on the side of a now defunct B2B business, Yelp is risking a PR blunder for naught.

Meanwhile, I am the boss of me and I'm abstaining from posting reviews of DC area businesses on Yelp for six months.

Reader "Haywood" dug up these pictures of Lori Drew. Curt's was easier to find. Lori's just took longer. The most popular person in the blogosphere couldn't hide her image forever. The picture portfolio of the June 15th, 2006 meeting of St Peters Chamber of Commerce is the source 1, 2.

[thanks to "Haywood" we now also have pictures of Lori Drew.  and Yelp has been pulling reviews of Drew Advantage.]

Someone in a Facebook Group dedicated to the memory of Megan Meier found this picture of Curt Drew on his Coldwell Banker real estate agent profile:

Also, Yelpers have dug up information on Curt Drew's local business, Drew Advantage, including a list of businesses that advertise through it.

[update: next hearing on the case is scheduled for 2008/01/17. looks like yet another pre-trial hearing before the big show. justice moves slowly in this case.]

Brandon Antron Rolle, the man accused of killing Ronald Gentile in Miami last year finally goes to trial today.  The killing was the subject of a crime investigation show "48 Hours" that I saw on cable (probably in reruns) a few weeks ago.  Ronald Gentile was in Miami to see his son and was returning to his hotel after dropping the son off at work when he made a wrong turn in his rental car.  His stop to ask for directions turned into a mugging that became a murder.  The fingerprint lifted off the car belonged to Brandon Antron Rolle, a felon who had been released from jail only months prior.  Rolle was also identified as the man who tried to sell Gentile's driver's license.

The murder made national news and reports about it could be found on a handful of websites but nothing about the disposition of the accused could be found.  What happened to the accused?  Looking into the Miami court system, I found that Rolle's case had been slowly making its way to trial, with much pre-trial work being done first.  Today is the hearing date.

Brandon Antron Rolle is a guy who received one chance too many.  The sad reality of criminality shown by "48 Hours" is that same people commit crime after crime until they get caught for doing something serious enough to put them away for good.  Perhaps this senselessness of the innocent suffering until the inevitable was the motivation for Philip K. Dick's Minority Report.