Sam Sloan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Samuel Howard Sloan (b. September 7, 1944), also known as M. Ismail Sloan, is an American author and former securities trader. He is also involved in chess, as a publisher of chess books and former member of the Executive Board of the United States Chess Federation (USCF). While having no formal legal training, he once orally argued and won a case in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. In July 2006, he was elected to the Executive Board of the USCF.

He has been married thrice and has eight children by five women. He once drove a taxicab in New York City. He is now a publisher of books and DVDs about chess, go and other subjects.

Contents 1 Biographical highlights 2 Chess 2.1 USCF Special Election 2006, and Election 2007 3 Other recent activities 4 Books 5 References

[edit] Biographical highlights

Sloan attended the University of California, Berkeley majoring in mathematics. At the time U.C. Berkeley was a center for student protest during the social unrest of the 1960s. Sloan became the president of the Sexual Freedom League. His book Sex Marchers, co-authored with SFL founder Jefferson Poland, called for sexual emancipation.

After dropping out of UC Berkeley, Sloan worked for two years for the Wall Street Investment Banking firm of Hayden, Stone & Co. in the over-the-counter trading department. In 1970, he established Samuel H. Sloan & Co., a registered broker-dealer primarily trading over-the-counter stocks and bonds. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought civil actions against Sloan & Co. in 1971-1975 alleging he had failed to maintain adequate books and records. In 1975, the SEC revoked Sloan's broker-dealer registration. After years of litigation, Sloan in 1978 prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court. Sloan argued the case pro se even though he was not an attorney. The opposing attorney was Harvey Pitt, who was later Chairman of the SEC from 2001 to 2003. Sloan won before the U.S. Supreme Court 9-0. Sloan is the last non-lawyer to argue before the court.^[1][2][3] Justice Rehnquist's majority opinion stated that "During this series of suspensions respondent Sloan, who owned 13 shares of CJL stock and had engaged in substantial purchases and short sales of shares of that stock, filed a petition in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit challenging the orders on a variety of grounds. On October 15, 1975, the court dismissed as frivolous all respondent's claims, except his allegation that the "tacking" of 10-day summary suspension orders for an indefinite period was an abuse of the agency's authority and a deprivation of due process." The Supreme Court agreed.

Sloan has written an extensive and definitive lexicon of Khowar, a language spoken in Chitral, Pakistan. His first wife was a native of that region and they had had a daughter. Sloan was later locked into a prolonged and complex custody struggle for his eldest child.^[4][5]

Sloan had a minor role in a commercially-produced film, that later became a video game, Mahjong Hōrōki Classic.^[6]

[edit] Chess

Sam Sloan is a chess journalist^{[citation needed]}, and ex-member of the Executive Board of the USCF. He has claimed that when he was playing for U.C. Berkeley in the late 1960s, he was for a time, playing at master strength, but he was never officially rated as such in the United States. He has claimed to have traveled to nearly 80 countries, primarily attending chess tournaments. He has claimed to have "won the World Championship of Chinese Chess in Beijing, China, in 1988."^[7] He is rated an FM (equivalent to FIDE Master) by the World Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) Association.^[8] Sloan has competed in tournaments in Thai (Makrook) and Japanese (Shogi) chess. Sloan is a longtime and frequent cross-poster to Usenet groups.^[9][10]

[edit] USCF Special Election 2006, and Election 2007

In July 2006, Sloan was elected to the Executive Board of the USCF.^[11]. He advocated a major expansion of scholastic chess, stating that the USCF should establish a program to certify school chess teachers. He criticized the USCF's recent move from New Windsor, New York to Crossville, Tennessee. As second-place finisher (out of five) in the special election, Sloan was elected to a one-year term on the board (the first-place finisher received a three-year term). Sloan's term of service began in August 2006.^[12][13]

In 2007, Sloan ran for reelection to the USCF Executive Board, but was unsuccessful, finishing ninth out of ten candidates.^[14]

[edit] Other recent activities

In an April 30, 2006, email to Michael Badnarik's 2004 Presidential campaign mailing list, an individual claiming to be Sloan announced his intention to seek the Libertarian Party nomination for Governor of New York State.^[15]

From 2002 to 2006, Sloan was active in the Libertarian Party of New York attempting to influence its policy agenda and candidate nominations. In 2006 Sloan was elected as an officer to the Manhattan Libertarian Party County Committee as Director of Media Relations. He was not re-elected to that position in 2007.^[16]

On October 2, 2007, Sloan filed suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York seeking to overturn the results of the 2007 USCF election, despite finishing a distant ninth out of ten candidates, alleging that there were more than 2,000 obscene "Fake Sam Sloan" newsgroup postings by Susan Polgar and Paul Truong impersonating Sloan, as a result of which Polgar and Truong were elected.^[17][18][19]

On 03 April 2008, posts appeared on USENET, apparently placed by Mr. Sloan, claiming that some of his websites had been censored. "Today, April 3, 2008, the Sheriff of Amherst County Virginia finally succeeded in shutting down Sam Sloan's websites. The following websites were closed down on orders of Deputy C. R. Smith of the Amherst County Sheriff's Department: http://www.samsloan.com http://www.shamema.com..." (He added a third site, but it is blacklisted).

Attempts to view the sites came back with error messages, and their DNS entries seem to have disappeared as well. Older versions of their material are available through the Internet Archive.

[edit] Books

• Sex Marchers (with Jefferson Poland, eds., Elysium, Inc. 1968) ISBN 0-923891-13-7
• Khowar English Dictionary (as Mohammad Ismail Sloan, 1981) (published in Pakistan) ISBN 0-923891-15-3
• Chinese Chess for Beginners (1989) ISBN 0-923891-11-0
• How to Take over an American Public Company (1992) ISBN 1-881373-01-0
• The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson (1992) ISBN 1-881373-02-9
• The Farm Book by Thomas Jefferson with light notes and annotations by Sam Sloan ISBN 0-923891-80-3
• Mafia Moll: The Judith Exner Story, The Life of the Mistress of John F. Kennedy (2008) ISBN 0923891900

[edit] References