Crime Magazine is about true crime: organized crime, celebrity crime, serial killers, corruption, sex crimes, capital punishment, prisons, assassinations, justice issues, crime books, crime films and crime studies.
Don Fulsom
Don Fulsom covered the Nixon White House for United Press International. He has written about Nixon for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Esquire, Los Angeles, and Regardie's. His e-mail address is donfulsom2002@yahoo.com.
“Le Perv” Beats the Rap
May 30, 2011 Updated Oct.22, 2011
Dominique Strauss-Kahn
A questionable history of sexual indiscretions caught up with the man considered to be the next president of France, but not enough to bring him down.
(Editor’s Note: On August 23, 2011 all criminal charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn were dismissed by the New York Supreme Court at the request of the Manhattan Attorney General’s Office.)
by Don Fulsom
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Blackmail at Black Rock: The David Letterman Case
Oct. 11, 2009 Updated Sept. 4, 2010
David Letterman
Letterman survives his unmasking as a “creepy” sexual predator
by Don Fulsom
On September 9, 2009, David Letterman ambled out of his multi-million dollar lower Manhattan hideaway and plopped his lanky frame into a waiting limo for the short ride to the Ed Sullivan Theater. To Dave’s surprise, his chauffer handed the CBS TV star an envelope.
The driver had lowered his window to accept the envelope at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m. He apparently thought little about the propriety of the transaction—because the envelope came from esteemed CBS veteran “48 Hours Mystery” producer Joe Halderman.
Yet the envelope was not an innocent handoff of company memos from one Black Rock (CBS Headquarters in Manhattan) biggie to another. Authorities say its contents amounted to an extortion attempt by Halderman. And six months later, Halderman himself concurred—pleading guilty to second-degree larceny.
In his failed blackmail attempt, the producer was threatening to expose the 62-year-old Letterman’s sexcapades, over several decades, with a significant number (eight or nine are the most prevalent rumored numbers) of far-younger Letterman staffers. In fact, Halderman’s former live-in girlfriend, 34-year old Stephanie Birkitt, was reputedly among Letterman’s cavalcade of underling bedmates.
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Did Jack Ruby Know Lee Harvey Oswald?
Feb 1, 2009 (rev. March 27, 2009)
Lee Harvey Oswald (center) Jack Ruby (right)
There's no hard evidence that he did, but numerous people say they saw Oswald at Ruby's club, The Carousel, weeks before the JFK assassination.
by Don Fulsom
Jack Ruby (born Jacob Rubenstein) was a vulgar, violent, lowlife. But a proud one. He had risen from the Mob-dominated slums of Chicago—where, growing up, he'd run errands for Al Capone. Now, in 1963, Ruby ran his own striptease club in Dallas—seedy to some, but to Jack "a f----ing classy joint."
The Carousel was a run-down walkup on Commerce Street where Jack (or "Sparky," as the easily ignitable owner was known) oversaw a master of ceremonies, four strippers and a five-piece bump-and-grind band. On Commerce, flashing neon signs and scores of eight-by-ten glossy stock photos of near-nude gals beckoned horny guys to ascend the stairs and enjoy "Dallas's only nonstop burlesque."
Soon after Ruby murdered JFK assassination suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, Carousel emcee Bill Demar (Bill Crowe in real life) publicly identified Oswald as a recent patron. The magician-ventriloquist said he distinctly recalled Oswald because, as an audience member, Oswald had actually taken part in Demar's "memory act."
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Nixon, Sinatra and the Mafia
July 11, 2009 Updated Feb. 23, 2010
Frank Sinatra
Both Nixon and Sinatra had deep ties to the Mafia. It was only natural that after President John Kennedy dumped Sinatra that Ole Blue Eyes hooked up with the biggest politician in the Mob’s pocket. Sinatra hung around with Nixon and Vice President Agnew so much he even acquired a Secret Service code name, “Napoleon.”
by Don Fulsom
John Kennedy banished Frank Sinatra from Camelot when the singer’s Mafia ties clashed with the President’s crackdown on organized crime. But those well-documented ties didn’t keep President Richard Nixon—a big recipient of Mob payoffs—from wooing the popular crooner away from the Democratic Party.
The courtship actually started with Nixon’s unsavory vice president, Spiro Agnew—who first got together with Sinatra during the Thanksgiving holiday in 1970. They enjoyed each other’s company so much that Agnew became a regular houseguest at Frank’s (Palm Springs) place, and made 18 visits in the months that followed.
The two men played golf together, dined out, talked through the night in Frank’s den, and on one occasion watched the porn movie Deep Throat together. Frank’s guest quarters, once remodeled for John F. Kennedy, were eventually renamed “Agnew House,” according to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan in Sinatra: The Life.
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The Capture of Whitey Bulger
Aug. 15, 2011
James “Whitey” Bulger
Accused in the mid-1990s of nearly a score of gangland murders, James “Whitey” Bulger, the reputed boss of Boston’s Irish Mafia, fled town and evaded the FBI for an astonishing 16 years.
by Don Fulsom
Nick-named for the color of his hair, Bulger had gained a reputation as a guy who would kill anyone he thought might betray him. Indeed, he was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s murder-happy mobster in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 big screen crime thriller The Departed.
One of the grisliest murders attributed to Bulger was the strangling of his top lieutenant’s girlfriend, apparently to keep her from snitching about the gang’s operations. Bulger is accused of chopping off all of the dead woman’s fingers and pulling out all of her teeth so she couldn’t be identified.
Were it not for his own girlfriend, it turns out, Whitey might still be a Top Ten fugitive with a $2 million bounty (the most ever for a domestic fugitive) on his head.
When arrested in June 2011, the 81-year-old Bulger and his 60-year-old companion, Catherine Greig, were living in Santa Monica, Calif. They had been hiding in plain sight—about four miles from an FBI office—for fifteen years.
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Frank Sturgis: “I was a CIA Assassin”
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.
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Nixon’s Secret Bombing of Cambodia
March 6, 2011
Between March of 1969 and August of 1973, President Nixon illegally bombed Cambodia, causing over three-million tons of bombs to rain downs on the neutral country and the deaths of an estimated half-million Cambodian citizens.
by Don Fulsom
In mid-March 1969, President Richard Nixon launched “Operation Breakfast,” the first assault in the first stage of the Henry Kissinger-inspired covert carpet-bombing of defenseless and neutral Cambodia.
From the start of this surreptitious warfare, records were falsified to hide the attacks. They were reported as strikes against Communist forces within Vietnam.
In the first attack, scores of Guam-based B-52 Stratofortresses—operating in waves—struck enemy ammunition dumps, fuel depots and troop concentrations three miles inside the Cambodian border. Initial reports indicated that North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces there had been disabled.
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Nixon’s Plots Against Daniel Ellsberg
Jan. 10 ,2011
Daniel Ellsberg (left)
The WikiLeaks disclosures of top-secret government documents recall the time in 1971 when the intrepid Daniel Ellsberg released the “Pentagon Papers” to The New York Times to hasten the end of the Vietnam War.
by Don Fulsom
In the summer of 1971, The New York Times published the "Pentagon Papers,” a top-secret Defense Department study critical of U.S. war efforts in Vietnam. The huge report had been methodically stolen and duplicated by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon analyst who had turned against the war. He leaked copies to Times reporter Neil Sheehan.
Newly declassified tapes show President Richard Nixon first realized the seriousness of the leak during a June 13th noontime telephone call from National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s top deputy, Alexander Haig:
Haig: This goddamn New York Times expose [is] of the most highly classified documents in the war.
Nixon: Oh, that! I see! I didn’t read the story. You mean that was leaked out of the Pentagon?
Haig: This is a devastating security breach of the greatest magnitude of anything I’ve ever seen.
By the time Nixon talked to Kissinger himself a short time later, the President was climbing the walls over the leak:
Nixon: That Henry, that to me is just unconscionable, this is treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out.
Kissinger: Exactly, Mr. President.
Nixon: Doesn’t it involve secure information, a lot of other things? What kind of—what kind of people would do such things?
Kissinger: It has the most—it has the highest classification, Mr. President.
Nixon: Yeah. Yeah.
Kissinger: It’s treasonable! There’s no question it’s actionable. I’m absolutely certain that this violates all sorts of security laws.
Next on the tape, the President gives his chief foreign policy advisor permission to call Attorney General John Mitchell to determine the options for prosecuting the newspaper.
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