Corruption

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.)

Oct. 10, 2011 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from Scott Bartz’s recently published book, The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder, and Johnson & Johnson, available at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com.

Introduction

On September 29, 1982, seven people in Chicago died after taking Extra Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. Authorities immediately blamed the poisonings on an anonymous madman who had supposedly put the poisoned capsules into Tylenol bottles in several local retail stores. The evidence, however, refutes this madman-in-the-retail-stores hypothesis, and points instead to a culprit who planted the lethal capsules at a warehouse in the Tylenol distribution system - a system the police did not understand and the media did not investigate.

Sept. 12, 2011

A Predatory Priest by David Margolick is available as a Kindle Single on Amazon.com

by David Margolick

Hard by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks on the outskirts of Belen, New Mexico, on a rutted gravel driveway flanked by scrubby brush and lonely cottonwoods, Tommy Deary’s three youngest brothers walked side by side. They’d traveled a long way from Putnam, Connecticut, the small New England mill town where they’d grown up, the last three sons in a succession of 13 children, but no farther than the man they’d come to see, the man they believed to be in the house barely visible in the distance. That man had grown up only a few miles from them, but had spent the last 30 years in a strange ecclesiastical exile. Thirty years earlier, in fact, at St. Mary’s Church in Putnam, to which the Dearys, like so many Catholic families in town had flocked every Sunday, he’d briefly been one of the priests. Very briefly, it turned out, though for longer than long enough.

April 11, 2011

Frank Sturgis

Three years after he was arrested as a Watergate burglar, Frank Sturgis told Senate investigators he was a CIA agent who would do anything for the agency—even kill. To flaunt his expertise, Sturgis volunteered a grisly “How to Get Away with Murder” tutorial for the committee. He bragged that his reputation as a hit man led the FBI to grill him as a prime suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.   

 by Don Fulsom

Best-known as one of President Richard Nixon’s five inept Watergate burglars, Frank Sturgis would undoubtedly prefer to be recalled as a swashbuckling CIA assassination specialist who would gladly bump off anyone for the agency.  In fact, in secret 1975 testimony before a Senate committee, Sturgis proudly described himself a “whore” who “would do anything” for the CIA.

Sturgis’s boast lies buried in his lengthy, closed-door testimony to a post-Watergate Senate investigation of alleged CIA and FBI crimes and abuses.  A bi-partisan committee chaired by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, conducted the investigation.  Sturgis’s testimony was declassified—but mostly ignored—in the 1990s.

June, 15, 2010 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from Ron Chepesiuk’s new book, Sergeant Smack, The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson., Kingpin, and his Band of Brothers. (www.ikeatkinsonkingpin.com)

by Ron Chepesiuk