Apologies for the sporadic posting these last couple of weeks. I’m neck deep in a million things as the book nears publication, including those all-important updates on Skyjacker of the Day. Fear not, though, this enterprise still lives, and posts shall be issuing at more traditional rate starting early next week. For the moment, though, […]
Tags:crime·murder·philosophy·religion·Utica
As a tremendous fan of the French movie A Prophet—I defy you to find a flick with a better razor-attack scene—I was naturally drawn to this recent account of Corsica’s organized-crime problem. The French-run island sounds like it’s run like the Brooklyn docks circa 1952, with men of violence calling the shots at all levels. […]
Tags:Corsica·crime·murder·statistics
While snooping about some old Google-able papers the other day, I stumbled across this true-crime tidbit about a 1940 murder case involving a pair of Hollywood extras. The killing took place in Gower Gulch, a street corner where former cowboys would gather in hopes of being picked to appear in B-grade Westerns—much like day laborers […]
There is great wisdom to be gleaned from studying anomalies, which is why the El Paso Police Department’s homicide unit deserves our attention. It is the rare squad that appears to be solving an ever-greater percentage of its cases, thereby defying the nationwide trend illustrated in the graph above: Since 2004, unit detectives have investigated […]
Tags:crime·El Paso·murder·statistics
Buried in this account of a Rwandan-born, Kansas-based octogenarian who may be a genocidaire is an interesting tidbit regarding Finnish jurisprudence: Mr. Kobagaya did not come to the United States government’s attention until December 2007, when he agreed to testify as a defense witness on behalf of a former neighbor, Francois Bazaramba, in a trial […]
Whenever my work involves looking at rolls of decades-old microfilm, I inevitably stumble across a handful of tremendous yarns that have been lost to time. Such was the case this past Saturday, as I whiled away the hours scrolling through old copies of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Lazily panning across the pages in search of […]
Tags:crime·Florida·Jacksoville·Lonnie Cross·murder·prisons·religion
I’ve recently been reading up on the history of the Blackstone Rangers, the gang whose criminal entanglements contributed greatly to the post-1965 increase in Chicago’s homicide rate. In the course of my research, I started wondering about how the Rangers’ impact on the Second City compared to that of Al Capone’s organization. I had long […]
Tags:Chicago·crime·dueling·Florida·Jacksonville·murder·Prohibition
