Jim Morrison
On March 5, 1969, the Dade County Sheriff's Office issues an arrest warrant for Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors. He is charged with a single felony count and three misdemeanors for his stage antics at a Miami concert a few days earlier.
Murder resulting from police misconduct and brutality amounts to only a misdemeanor, the shocked residents of Milwaukee, Wisconsin have recently discovered.
That apparently also extends to killer cops who conspire to hide their crime, obstruct investigations, and commit perjury once dragged kicking and screaming into a courtroom.
Sadder still is that even this tiny measure of justice could only be afforded through a last-minute offer of immunity to two other MPD officers who’d either joined in the illegal police action in 2011 or witnessed it, but never before admitted being present at the scene.
The shifty pair provided testimony against a trio of MPD’s uniformed thugs who, even under oath, continue to insist they “didn’t notice” 22-year-old Derek Williams struggling to breathe after they roughed him up during a false arrest. Nor did they hear any of his urgent pleas for medical attention.
Those would be officers Hear No, See No and Speak No, of course. (No relation to each other.)
March 4, 2013 Good Morning America
A rattled Casey Anthony tried to hide her face today as she waded through a mob of photographers and reporters when she arrived at federal court in Tampa for a meeting in her bankruptcy case, her first public appearance since she was acquitted of killing her daughter Caylee in 2011.
Anthony clung to the man who exited the car with her as someone shouted repeatedly, "Did you get away with murder?"
She clutched a black floppy hat and a pair of sunglasses near her face and looked shaken up as she was surrounded. Her brown hair was loose, just below her shoulders and she wore a long black sweater, black pants and a printed blouse.
Today marks Anthony's first public appearance after more than two years in hiding.
Anthony, 26, has been unemployed for the past four years and filed for bankruptcy in January. She's almost $800,000 in debt and has less than $1,100 worth of assets, according to her bankruptcy filing.
She is scheduled to appear in federal court in Tampa, Fla., this afternoon. Anthony has not made any public appearances since her 2011 acquittal in the alleged murder of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee.
Louis "Lepke" Buchalter
On March 4, 1944, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, the head of Murder, Inc., is executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Lepke was the leader of the country's largest crime syndicate throughout the 1930s and was making nearly $50 million a year from his various enterprises.
March 3, 2013 Daily Mail UK
An enormous prison brawl involving 400 inmates broke out today at the Whetstone Unit of Arizona State Prison Complex in Tucson.
The riot involved 300 white and Mexican inmates fighting against 100 Africa-American prisoners and started around 9.45 a.m. in the unit which houses 1,250.
At least 17 inmates were injured during the free-for-all and two prison staffers suffered minor injuries - The extent of the inmates' injuries wasn't immediately available.
March 3, 2013 NY Times
Bruce Reynolds, the chief architect of one of 20th-century Britain’s most notorious crimes, the caper known as the Great Train Robbery, died on Thursday in England. He was 81.
His son, Nick, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Sky News in Britain reported that Mr. Reynolds had died at his home in South London, a few months short of the robbery’s 50th anniversary.
In the early morning of Aug. 8, 1963, a gang of 15 men stopped a Glasgow-to-London mail train about 45 miles short of its destination by tampering with a signal. The train, which usually carried large quantities of money in the second car behind the locomotive, was loaded even more heavily than normal because of a just-completed bank holiday in Scotland, and the thieves escaped with about 120 bags of cash, mostly in small bills, totaling about £2.6 million, or about $7 million at the time — the equivalent of about $60.5 million today.
Mr. Reynolds, who was 31 at the time and known to the police as a burglar well-connected in the London underworld, had used insider information from the postal service to plan the heist, which he thought of as a painter would a masterpiece. Indeed, he referred to it in a 1996 interview as “my Sistine Chapel.”
Charles Ponzi
On March 3, 1882, Charles Ponzi, was born in Lugo, Italy. He became known in the early 1920s as one of the most infamous swindler’s in American history.
On the night of November 29, 1988, near the impoverished Marlborough neighborhood in south Kansas City, an explosion at a construction site killed six of the city’s firefighters. It was a clear case of arson, and five people from Marlborough were duly convicted of the crime. But for veteran crime writer and crusading editor J. Patrick O’Connor, the facts—or a lack of them—didn’t add up. Justice on Fire is OConnor’s detailed account of the terrible explosion that led to the firefighters’ deaths and the terrible injustice that followed. Also available from Amazon
