J. Patrick O'Connor

Feb. 27, 2013 Updated May 8, 2013

Helvetic Airways aircraft at the Brussels international airport (Photo: Associated Press)

In a daring, commado-style operation, eight masked, heavily armed gunmen pulled off a lightening quick heist of more than $50 million worth of diamonds.     

Update: May 8, 2013 Nearly three months after the spectacularly daring diamond heist at Brussels Airport, authorities announced on May 8, 2013 that at least 31 people – spread out over France, Switzerland and Belgium – have been detained in connection with the estimated $50 million theft.

The Associated Press reported that a Frenchman, who is believed to have been one of the airport robbers, was arrested in France, while eight people, including a lawyer, were detained in Geneva, and 24 in and around Brussels.

“In Switzerland, we have found diamonds that we can say are coming from the heist, and in Belgium large amounts of money have been found. And the investigation is ongoing,” said Jean-Marc Meilleur, spokesperson for the Brussels prosecutor’s office.  In Geneva, a police statement said “a very important quantity of diamonds was seized” during the roundup of suspects. 

A Swiss investigator told reporters that almost a third of the stolen diamonds were seized in the Geneva raids and that about $110,000 in cash and a number of luxury cars were also confiscated. The unnamed investigator said all eight of those detained in Geneva were middlemen and intermediaries involved in the cutting and selling of the stolen diamonds.

by J. Patrick O’Connor

For centuries, Antwerp has been the world’s center of diamond trading and remains so today.  According to a spokesperson for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre about $200 million in diamonds enter and leave Antwerp daily, with about 99 percent of that moving through the Brussels Airport in several shipments each week. The spokesperson said that diamonds traded in Antwerp last year had a total value of $51.9 billion, accounting for 80 percent of the world’s rough diamond trade and 50 percent of trade in polished stones. The only other major diamond center is Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

Diamond brokers from around the world store their diamonds and gems – sometimes for as little as a day – in one or more of the 160 safety-deposit boxes located in an underground vault at the Antwerp Diamond Centre. Once a deal is brokered for the sale of the diamonds, shipment is arranged through the Zaventem International Airport in Brussels. The diamonds are placed in small packets and driven by armored Brinks vans to the airport.  On the 25-mile trip to the airport, the Brinks vans are accompanied by armed escorts that peel away once the Brinks vans arrive at the airport’s locked gate.

On the evening of February 18, 2013, eight heavily armed masked men were outfitted in airport security uniforms and drove two black vehicles that had police-style lights on top.  They arrived at Zaventem International Airport in Brussels in darkness intent on pulling off the most audacious heist in airport history. They knew, due to construction near the main security gate, that gate would be unlocked. Using wire cutters, they opened a section of the other 10-foot-high security fence on the perimeter of the airport and then waited eight minutes for the Brinks van to unload some 125 packets of diamonds in the cargo hold of Flight LX789, a Helvetic Airways jet waiting to depart in the next 18 minutes for Zurich, Switzerland.

Jan. 21, 2013 Revised April 8, 2013

Newtown students

A month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, President Obama called for sweeping legislation to stem “the epidemic of violence” confronting the United States. The next day, the National Rifle Association called the President’s proposal to rein in gun violence “the fight of the century.”

by J. Patrick O’Connor

In 2012, the Newtown, Connecticut massacre capped the worst year in U.S. history for mass murderers using high-capacity ammunition clips in assault weapons. Fifty innocent people were gunned down in public places.  In April, seven people at Oikos University in Oakland, California were shot to death; in July, 12 people, including a 6-year-old girl, were murdered at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado where another 58 people sustained gunshot wounds; in August, five men and one woman were shot to death at a Sikh Temple outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Three others, including a police officer, suffered gunshot wounds.

All the children murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, were first graders. Seventeen of them were 6 years old and three had recently turned 7. If police and other first responders had not arrived as swiftly as they had, dozens if not scores more of children would have been shot to death.  The shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, had several hundred unspent bullets in additional ammunition clips.  Instead of committing the second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history – second only to the 32 people shot to death at Virginia Tech in 2007 – he would have committed the worst.  The Hartford Courant reported that Lanza had several news articles in his bedroom about Andres Behring Breivik murdering 77 people, most of whom were teenagers, in Norway in 2011. It is likely his intent was to top that body count.

Nov. 28, 2012

This essay is adapted from a presentation J. Patrick O’Connor gave at the Collier County, Florida, Main Library on October 16, 2012.

by J. Patrick O’Connor

The United States operates the largest criminal justice system in the world, incarcerating 2.3 million people in over 5,000 jails and prisons. Another five million Americans are on parole or some sort of conditional release program.  Since the so-called “War on Drugs” was launched during the Reagan administration in the early 1980s along with mandatory sentencing guidelines for drug possession and sales, our prison population has nearly tripled.  Over 50 percent of the people now incarcerated are in on drug offenses, thousands of them for marijuana possession.

Although the U.S. makes up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we now incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Russia is a distant second. The U.S. justice system now imprisons its citizens at a rate roughly five to 10 times higher than the countries of Western Europe. It isn’t because U.S. citizens are five to 10 times more inclined to commit crimes than Europeans, it’s because our state legislatures have enacted a host of mandatory minimum sentences enhancements that took sentencing discretion out of the hands of judges and juries and placed it in the hands of “get tough on crime” prosecutors.  Over the last 15 years, these “enhancements” have doubled the average prison sentence for a wide variety of offenses. In terms of incarcerating youth, the disparity is far more pronounced. The United States incarcerates 336 per 100,000 youths. Austria incarcerates 25, Germany 23, Italy 11 and Japan 0.1. The second highest incarceration for youth in the world is 69 out of 100,000 in South Africa.

Jan. 30, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from the recently released book Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper by J. Patrick O’Connor, editor of Crime Magazine.  Published in January of 2012 by Strategic Media Books, Scapegoat is available at www.strategicmediabooks.com, Amazon.com, barnesandoble.com and other book sellers throughout the United States. Scapegoat won Silver in the 2013 Independent Publishers Book Awards for True Crime.

 by J. Patrick O’Connor

Foreword

During the fall of 2008, I was in the San Francisco Bay area on a book tour for The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal.  The tour was arranged by Jeff Mackler, the executive director of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, and it involved about fifteen speaking engagements at different venues.   Jeff told me that supporters of death-row inmate Kevin Cooper – whom I had not heard of -- would be attending a number of these presentations, and that they would be asking me to write a book about Kevin’s case.  Indeed, two of Cooper’s most dedicated supporters, Carole Seligman and Rebecca Doran, did just that. 

Cooper had been convicted in 1985 of the brutal murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their ten-year-old daughter, Jessica, and eleven-year-old houseguest Christopher Hughes, and the attempted murder of the Ryens’ eight-year-old son Joshua. 

Jeff had gotten to know Cooper over the years, and had visited him about twenty times. Kevin’s case was quite different from Mumia’s, he said, in the sense that Mumia is essentially a political prisoner and Kevin was anything but. 

When I decided to begin researching the Kevin Cooper case in early 2009, I had no pre-conceived notions about his guilt or innocence.  Each case is different, radically so.  My first step was to read and notate the trial transcripts, documents of over eight-thousand pages.  I then read all the police reports, witness interviews and various newspaper accounts.  Finally, I read all of the appeals and the judicial rulings.  By this time I was ready to begin interviewing various people involved in Cooper’s trial and his subsequent appeals. 

One problem in researching a crime nearly twenty-five years after it occurred is that a number of key people involved in the investigation and trial have passed away or have retired or have simply forgotten important factual details.  Another obstacle is that, because Cooper technically still has appeals open to him, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office refused to discuss the case.

During the summer of 2009, I made arrangements to interview Kevin Cooper in a visitor’s cell on death row at San Quentin.  On several issues, particularly those regarding his criminal record previous to the Chino Hills trial, I found him protective and less than forthcoming.  That was all behind him, he seemed to suggest.

On the other hand, I was taken by his equanimity and his resolve to prove he was wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Chino Hills murders.  I could see that the many years he had spent on death row, instead of diminishing him, had turned him into a person worthy of the high regard that his supporters – and his attorneys at the Orrick law firm – felt for him.  On death row, Kevin Cooper had finally grown up. 

Contrary to popular belief, most of the nation’s more than three-thousand-five-hundred death row inmates do not profess innocence.  In fact, unlike Kevin Cooper, very few do.  For those who do, the road to exoneration is a long, slow trek that usually fails.  But it does succeed occasionally.  Since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions, one-hundred-thirty-six death-row inmates have been exonerated.  In the majority of those cases, the proof of the inmate’s innocence was so convincing that the prosecutor dropped the charges rather than retry the case.  In forty-five cases where there was a retrial, the inmate was acquitted. 

There are two things that do link the Mumia Abu-Jamal and Kevin Cooper cases: Each was prosecuted by a district attorney’s office hell bent on winning a death-penalty conviction; and neither defendant received a proper defense.  What separates the two cases is that, while Mumia’s trial was a mockery of the justice system’s standards for a fair trial, Cooper’s trial had the trappings of fairness – but was lost long before the trial opened.  Two pre-trial developments caused this outcome: The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department destroyed evidence that could have exonerated Cooper; and his public defender insisted on going it alone.  Not many Davids actually slay Goliaths. 

This then is a book about a gruesome murder case, painfully recounted; all quotes are from either documents or interviews I conducted doing my research.  It is also a book about how justice can go astray.  It is the true story of the Chino Hills murders, and the prosecution of Kevin Cooper, a prisoner who escaped once too often and found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Since 1985, he has been on death row at San Quentin asserting his innocence in failed-after-failed appeal while awaiting his execution.