18th January 2012
Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief
““Cunning, clever, conniving, and creative,” as one prosecutor would call him, Blanchard eluded the police for years. But eventually he made a mistake. And that mistake would take two officers from the modest police force of Winnipeg, Canada, on a wild ride of high tech capers across Africa, Canada, and Europe. Says Mitch McCormick, one of those Winnipeg investigators, “We had never seen anything like it.”
11th January 2012
The Whole True Story of the Dougherty Crime Gang
“They shot at cops! The sister’s a stripper! It’s like Bonnie and Clyde! These were the irresistible beats of the media’s giddy coverage of one of the most bizarre crime sprees in recent memory. Kathy Dobie retraces the eight-day, fifteen-state, AK-47-inclusive journey of Ryan, Dylan, and Lee-Grace Dougherty—and discovers that the siblings’ saga is even weirder than you thought
6th January 2012
Inside the World of the 'Ndrangheta
“The shadowy Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, has become one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the Western world through its dominance of the European cocaine trade. For the first time, local syndicate bosses described their business model to SPIEGEL. It’s a mixture of entrepreneurial talent, skillful management and deadly ruthlessness.
3rd January 2012
Presumed Guilty
“Tim Masters, who seems closer to 30 years old than his chronological age of 40, is wearing faded jeans, a blue T-shirt, and well-worn, white running shoes. He has a reddish-brown mustache and a carefully groomed beard. His blue eyes convey an intense attention to detail as he talks about the treachery and turning points that have shaped his life since that morning nearly 25 years ago when he stumbled upon a corpse and became a suspect. The stigma hovered over him during high school and through an eight-year stint in the Navy. It peaked with his arrest in 1998 and his conviction for first-degree murder. It took everything he had to keep his spirit from folding into itself during the decade-long legal battle that ultimately won his release from prison. The events surrounding the case tore apart a town and challenged people’s perceptions of right and wrong, truth and justice, and who, really, were the good guys and the bad guys.
21st December 2011
Hannah and Andrew
“In October 2006 a four-year-old from Corpus Christi named Andrew Burd died mysteriously of salt poisoning. His foster mother, Hannah Overton, was charged with capital murder, vilified from all quarters, and sent to prison for life. But was this churchgoing young woman a vicious child killer? Or had the tragedy claimed its second victim?
19th December 2011
Who Runs Russia?
“Russians have an oddly reverential attitude about their gangsters. For a small fee, tour guides will lead you through Moscow’s Vagankovskoye cemetery, where mafiosi of means are buried – some under life-sized statues or headstones etched with a likeness of the deceased standing next to his BMW. You can tune into Radio Shanson, named after a style of folk music devoted to ballads about prison life, which is currently Moscow’s second most popular station. Or notice the traditional thief’s gesture known as the raspaltsovka, extending the index and little finger, now as ubiquitous as gold chains and Rolexes in Moscow’s nightclubs. But nothing demonstrates the veneration of all things gangster, like the untimely demise of a vor v zakone, or Russian mafia boss.
The Demands of Cold Blood
“When a crime reporter is told an outlandish account, his first obligation is to establish the facts. But when the story turns out to be far more shocking—a conspiracy, in fact, of appalling darkness—it can knock his sense of duty until it cracks.
15th December 2011
A Massacre in Jamaica
“The trouble that led to the Tivoli Gardens deaths began in August, 2009, when the United States government requested the extradition of Christopher (Dudus) Coke. In the U.S., Coke stood charged in federal court of trafficking in narcotics and firearms; in Jamaica, he was known as the country’s most powerful “don,” a community leader who also runs a criminal enterprise. He lived in Tivoli, where everyone called him “president,” and, since 2001, Jamaican police had not been able to enter the neighborhood without his permission. Coke was so powerful that Prime Minister Bruce Golding spent months resisting the extradition order. But in early May, 2010, under heavy international political pressure, Golding authorized Coke’s arrest. In response, Coke converted Tivoli and nearby Denham Town into a personal fortress. Barricades of rubble and barbed wire sprang up across major intersections. Armed sentries took up posts around Tivoli’s perimeter. It looked as though Coke were preparing for war with the Jamaican state.
13th December 2011
No Country for Innocent Men
“Texas has exonerated no fewer than 56 people. All had served years, sometimes decades, in prison; five were on death row. As Perry sees it, these exonerations don’t suggest a problem with the system—they demonstrate that it’s working. “We have a very lengthy and methodical process of appeals,” he said in March 2010. “And that is a great and good mark for Texas.”
Perry made those remarks during an extraordinary ceremony in which he handed down the first posthumous pardon in Texas history. Timothy Cole, imprisoned while a 26-year-old student at Texas Tech University, had been failed by the justice system at every turn. But what makes his story particularly gut-wrenching is that he perished in prison even as the real rapist, Jerry Johnson, tried repeatedly to confess to the crime. By the time Johnson’s story was heard, Cole had been dead nearly a decade.
8th December 2011
Three at Last!
“They are notorious for, and can never escape, a crime they didn’t commit. Eighteen years ago, three teenagers in Arkansas were falsely accused of the murders of three young boys. It was an astounding abuse of justice, and it was all caught on film, in a series of HBO documentaries that gained a cult following and led celebrities like Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder to take up the cause. Suddenly released this summer, the West Memphis Three are now free to pick up their lives—if they can even find them.
