Jan. 23, 2012

Jack Henry Abbott

Jack Abbott sold himself to Norman Mailer as the “Super Convict.” Mailer turned the letters Abbott sent him into the best-selling book, In the Belly of the Beast, and assisted Abbott in gaining parole in 1981. Six months later Abbott stabbed a waiter to death in a New York restaurant.

 by J.J. Maloney

Jack Henry Abbott started as a boy in a training school, worked his way up through the system-—getting in trouble here, being transferred there, getting into more trouble until, ultimately, he spent virtually all of his life in some form of reform school or prison.

When it became known in 1977 that Norman Mailer was to write The Executioner's Song, about Gary Gilmore, Abbott, who was incarcerated in the same Utah penitentiary, wrote to Mailer, suggesting that Mailer could make use of the observations of someone like Abbott, someone who had lived in the world Gary Gilmore inhabited.

Mailer began to correspond with Abbott, and apparently began to care about him. Abbott wrote long, grandiloquent letters, in which he discussed his fantasized perception of himself as a Super Convict. He claimed to have been subjected to more brutality than other convicts, to have risen higher above the situation than other convicts, to have been more philosophically correct than other convicts.

Mailer bought it; for his own reasons, he wanted to believe what Abbott was saying. And, of course, there was some truth in many of the things Abbott said about prisons. 

Jan. 16, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine:

  This is an excerpt from the new book, Queenpins: Notorious Women Gangsters from the Modern Era, by Ron Chepesiuk. The book is published by Strategic Media Books (www.strategicmediabooks.com) and is available from the web site, Amazon.com and other publishing outlets.       

by Ron Chepesiuk              

In 1912, Pearl Adler, a 12-year old girl from the small village of Yanow, Russia, embarked on a long, perilous oceanic journey. For support, the young girl, whom her family called “Polly,” had nothing more with her than the high expectations of her large family and a potato sack that contained her belongings, some garlic, apples, four loaves of black bread and four hunks of salami that her mother Gertrude had packed for her. Joining Polly on board the good ship Naftar was a diverse mix of Poles, Italians, Danes and Swedes, all determined to make a prosperous new life for themselves in the Promised Land of America. It was a rough voyage and nearly all the passengers got sick, but not Polly. No sickness was going to impede her determination to reach America.

Unlike many of her fellow passengers, Polly did not leave a life of abject poverty. She was the eldest child in a family that included two daughters and seven sons. But her father, Morris Adler, was a tailor, a respectable occupation, and the family was well-off by Yanow standards. Still, the family’s ethnic roots were Jewish and it was a time of virulent anti Semitism in Russia. The Adler family could be a victim of a pogrom, or violent attack, at any time. It had happened frequently between 1903 and 1905. In the course of one week alone, there had been 50 anti-Jewish pogroms. In the village of Binlystok, for instance, 19 Jews were murdered and 24 injured. The Kishinew pogram left 120 dead and 500 injured, while the Odessa pogrom had 299 victims.

Until the pogroms, Morris Adler’s plan for Polly was to have her attend school in a nearby village and then complete her education under the village Rabbi’s guidance. Given the insecurities of life in Russia, the father decided that she would be the first link in a line of emigration that would bring his family to America.

Jan. 9, 2012

(Photo used by permission of BlueStar Forensic)

Extra-marital affairs are accepted in France. Wives and husband who indulge in them are even admired. It means that a woman, though married and probably a mother, is still attractive and desirable to the male of the species, and that despite marriage and fatherhood a man remains virile. Yet, occasionally, a spouse will cry “Stop!” and when the philandering continues, the result can be foul murder.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

On Wednesday, February 25, 2004, early in the morning, Florence Bourgade dialed the telephone number of her sister.

Yves and Florence

The sun was shining but it was bitterly cold – just 42° F – in Moigny-sur-École in the Department of Essonne, 36 miles south of Paris, and the 42-year-old’s news was as chilling. Her husband, Yves, 44, had only got back home in the early hours of that morning after a night of drinking and he’s being very abusive verbally and she did not want their children to witness such behavior. Could she therefore send them over for a couple of days? The next-door neighbor would be dropping them off on her way to work. It was the February school vacation.

That call was not the first that Florence made that morning.

Her first call had been at 6:45 a.m. She had called her husband’s employee to say that he would not be in that day.  Her husband was a self-employed mason.  “Yves has blown a fuse. He has left,” she told the man. What she had said in French was Yves a pétée les plombs for which “blowing a fuse” is a polite translation.

At 7 a.m. she had made a second call. She had called her neighbor to ask if she could bring over the children for her to look after for that day. “She wanted me to take the children, but I had to go to work which I told her,” the neighbor would later testify to the police.

Fifteen minutes later Florence had made yet again another call. She had again called her neighbor to ask if she could, on her way to work, drop the children off at her sister’s house. The neighbor had replied that she could do that, yes.

Florence’s sister lived 10 miles away in the town of Barbizon, so, as the neighbor had to go in that direction, dropping the children off would not make her late for work, but, all the same, within 15 minutes she was at the Bourgade house.  The three children, two boys and a girl, aged respectively 12, 10 and 5, were still in bed and were told to get dressed immediately and quickly.

“I understood that Yves was not well,” the neighbor would also later say in her testimony. “I thought of the alcohol.”

She knew that Yves Bourgade drank.  In 2004 there were only about 500 houses in Moigny-sur-École and not even 1,500 people lived there, so it was not easy to hide that a spouse habitually returned home in the early hours of the morning and in an inebriated state.

Florence’s family and friends, although they did not live in the village, were also aware of the drinking. They also knew that Yves was a womanizer. And it had not been necessary to stick their noses into the couple’s life to have known about the women because Yves bragged about his exploits. He even made it his dinner conversation. He did not appear to care that his wife was at the table tending to their guests for whom she had prepared a splendid meal.

The two had been married since 1997 but they had been partners for more than 14 years and Yves had not ever been faithful.

Dec. 28, 2011

Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, the leaders of the Omaha chapter of the Black Panther Party in the early 1970s, were framed for the murder of Omaha Police Officer Larry Minard as part of J. Edgar Hoover’s clandestine, illegal counterintelligence operation known as COINTELPRO that targeted Black Panther Party leaders all over the United States. Although neither man had any connection to the murder of the young officer, both remain imprisoned for life. 

by Michael Richardson

The murder of Omaha, Nebraska policeman Larry Minard over 40 years ago and the COINTELPRO-inspired investigation that followed landed two Black Panther leaders – Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa – in prison for life.  The scapegoats came to be known as the “Omaha Two.”  In order to pin the police officer’s murder on the two leaders of Omaha’s Black Panther Party, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover gave a secret order to withhold a crime laboratory report on the identity of the anonymous caller that lured the 29-year-old policeman to his death.

Hoover directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to his death in 1972.  He also directed a secret, illegal, counterintelligence operation within the FBI from 1956 to 1971, codenamed COINTELPRO that targeted radical groups such as the Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and the American Indian Movement. COINTELPRO’s stated aim was to destabilize these groups by either murdering their leaders or getting them convicted of felonies. (COINTELPRO is an acronym for Counterintelligence Program.)

Dec. 19, 2011

Bridego Bridge just after the robbery

In August of 1963, 15 men pulled off “The Great Train Robbery,” at Sears Crossing in Buckinghamshire in southeast England, netting the equivalent of $68.5 million in today’s dollars.  Of the £2,631,684 stolen, less than £400,000 was ever recovered.

The mastermind, known as “the Ulsterman,” would never be identified.  One of the robbers, Ronnie Biggs, became an international celebrity after escaping from prison.   

by Mark Pulham

The train didn’t seem to be anything special. It had a single diesel locomotive at the front, pulling a number of coaches, 12 in all, through the night, heading for its final destination, Euston Station in London. The only difference was that the coaches didn’t have windows. This was the overnight mail train from Scotland to London.

The train, known as the “Up Special” made the same journey every night, and had been doing so for 125 years. There had never been any major incidents.

But all that was about to change.

In 1963, there were many events which would be considered significant or noteworthy. In the United States, the year began with George Wallace taking over as the governor of Alabama after a landslide victory the previous November. In his inaugural speech he spoke the line for which he will always be remembered, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Later on in the year, he would stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama to stop the enrollment of black students, only stepping aside when confronted by federal marshals, the deputy attorney general, and the Alabama National Guard.

The end of the year came with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

In between those two events, Alcatraz closed as a penitentiary, the first James Bond film, Dr. No, had its North American premiere, and Martin Luther King gave his 17-minute “I Have A Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

In Great Britain, it was the swinging sixties. Heavy snow dominated the beginning of the year, with snow remaining on the ground in many places right into April. It was the worst winter in 16 years. The end of the year would see the police in Ashton-under-Lyne begin a fruitless search for a missing 12-year-old boy named John Kilbride.

Kim Philby, a high ranking member of British Intelligence, would turn out to be a double agent spying for the Russians. He would disappear and resurface later in Moscow. It was an embarrassment for the Conservative Government. One of Philby’s fellow double agents, Guy Burgess would die later in the year.

In Gorton, Manchester, 16-year-old Pauline Reade went missing, the first victim of the Moors Murderers, Brady and Hindley.

Harold Wilson became the leader of the Labour Party after the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskill; The Beatles released their first album “Please, Please Me” which went to number one and sparked Beatlemania. The album would remain at the top for 30 weeks until finally being toppled by their second album.

Following the Philby spy humiliation, the Conservative Government was hit by a second scandal, when 48-year-old John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, resigned after admitting that he had been having a “secret” affair with a 21-year-old woman named Christine Keeler, a call girl. The problem was that Profumo wasn’t the only one having an affair with Keeler. Also sharing her bed was Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attaché, and spy, at the Soviet Embassy in London. When Keeler was interviewed, she used the term “nuclear payload,” a term not used by the general public at the time. It was clear that John Profumo liked to talk in bed. The Profumo Affair would eventually bring down the Government.

In other news, Pope John XXIII died, and in the Soviet Union Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

And in the middle of it all, in August, 15 men, plus a few accomplices, would commit a crime so audacious that it would go down in history as one of the greatest robberies of all time, one that all others would be compared to: The Great Train Robbery.

Nov. 7, 2011

Casey Anthony 

Not since O.J. Simpson’s murder trial in 1995 has national media attention focused so intently on one case, and not since Simpson’s acquittal has the public been more shocked by the verdict that exonerated Casey Anthony of any responsibility in the death of her toddler daughter, Caylee Marie Anthony.   

by Denise Noe

The case of Casey Anthony, a young mother accused of murdering her small child, triggered a ravenous media feeding frenzy not seen since the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial in 1995. The parallel was magnified when public outcry at the Casey Anthony verdict echoed the outrage over the Simpson verdict.

A Time magazine article proclaimed the case “the first murder trial of the social-media age.” It noted that hundreds of people began showing up each day as early as 2 a.m. to land one of the 50 courtroom seats reserved for the public at the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando. 

Millions of people followed the trial every day on live-stream video feeds provided by TruTv and HLN. Both CNN and NBC built two-story structures in a lot across from the courthouse to catch every possible detail of the trial and transmit it to eager viewers. Hundreds of media vehicles often surrounded the Orlando courthouse.  Prominent TV personalities such as Geraldo Rivera and Greta Van Susteren covered the trial but no one was more incessant in publicizing this case than Nancy Grace. A former prosecutor and author of three best-selling books, she is known as an outspoken advocate for victims’ rights. Her Headline News’ (HLN) program, called Nancy Grace, garners high ratings. The program focused incessantly on the Casey Anthony trial with its hostess making no secret of her belief that the accused was guilty.