FOREWORD
The pleasures to be had in reading this book are legion.
There’s the consistent quality of the reportage, the rich yet precise presentations of backstory and the overall handsomeness of the prose. There’s the revisiting of historical events unfolding in real time, the ramifications of a singular act often unknown (except to the reader, who feels like a reverse-oracle predicting the past) for weeks, months and even years to come. The early days’ speculations on looming verdicts, the progress of manhunts, the (sometimes empty) vows of law enforcement to bring the perps to heel, the prosecutorial and defense team strategies that will succeed or fail. The unfolding of criminal deeds—the Enron and Madoff trials; the assassinations of Lincoln, of JFK, of Malcolm X; the massacres at Columbine, at Sandy Hook and in Charleston—that still sear the national psyche. The scramble to make immediate sense of fresh events, (“Heir to Austria’s Throne Is Slain … by Bosnian Youth”) that will end up reshaping the world map.
I’ve always assumed that the best crime reporting—sports reporting, too—was to be found in the tabloids, but after inhaling the contents of this anthology, which cover more than a century and a half of criminal mayhem as filed with The New York Times, the shingles have fallen from my eyes. Lurid writing can overwhelm lurid deeds. Excitable adjectives, judgmental prose and the egging on of public outrage can often obscure rather than illuminate the facts at the core.
In most of the articles contained herein, the thoroughness of the research combined with the implacableness of the tone, especially when flying in the face of a popular taboo or sentiment of the times, often reads like a fortress of probity.
A 1926 article debunks the era’s hysteria over marijuana by carefully extrapolating the results of an investigation into the physiological and psychological impact of smoking marijuana on a number of subjects, “soberly” concluding: “The influence of the drug when used for smoking is uncertain and appears to be have been greatly exaggerated…. There is no evidence that [marijuana] is a habit-forming drug in the sense of the term as applied to alcohol, opium, cocaine … or that it has any appreciable deleterious effect on the individuals using it.” I repeat: 1926.
An even earlier investigative piece written in 1852 regards the systematic use of capital punishment as meted out by the guards at Sing Sing prison. The report gathers physicians and physiologists to refute the prison staff’s claims that the punishments (including an hours’-long form of water torture) were carefully monitored, when in fact, due to either unchecked sadism or sheer ignorance regarding the limits of human endurance, they often ended in either death or madness.
Occasionally, the stoniness of the prose can feel chillingly blunt given the subject at hand. The unnamed writer covering the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, reports: “The pistol ball entered the back of the president’s head and penetrated nearly through the head. The wound is mortal. The president has been insensible ever since it was inflicted, and is now dying.”
At other times, the measured tone and objective formalism of the writing, when set against the grain of an outrage, can powerfully serve to isolate and heighten the darkness of the deed. At first glance, John N. Popham’s atmospheric description of the Sumner, Mississippi, courtroom during jury selection for the trial of Emmett Till’s murderers in 1955 reads like a rough draft of To Kill a Mockingbird; the judge in shirtsleeves, the defendants and rubberneckers free to smoke up a storm, bailiffs passing out cups of ice water to their friends in the sweltering pews, the jarring intimacy between the state-appointed prosecutor and the prospective jurors during voir dire: “He seemed to be familiar with everyone’s personal habits and family background, even to the nicknames they had for friends who might be interested in the outcome of the trial.” And last, but not least, the defendants’ children “played around the knees of their fathers and occasionally ran up and down the corridors” of the courtroom.
This effortless sketch of southern comfort has become a trope of countless Hollywood legal dramas, from Inherit the Wind to My Cousin Vinny, yet in this soon-to-be-infamous courtroom, the barely mentioned true crime that has brought this assembly together—the torturing and murder of a 14-year-old African American boy for allegedly whistling at a white woman—infuses every folksy detail with an aftertaste of revulsion. On the other hand, Popham’s description of the courthouse hangers-on as “several hundred white persons who strongly support a strict pattern of racial segregation” seems, pardon the oxymoron, a feat of excessive understatement.
At the other end of tone spectrum, and maybe the biggest revelation of all, is the discovery that certain crimes—especially those found in the heists and capers chapter—demand a punchier, almost sporty, narrative. Who didn’t root for Willie Sutton? How could you not like a jewel thief named Murph the Surf? The articles can read like a cross between a tense noir thriller and a riff on Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
In the report on the 1965 recovery (from a bus terminal locker in Miami) of the Star of India diamond (563.35 carats) and eight other eye-popping jewels stolen by the aforementioned Murph and two other part-time beach bums, the Florida paparazzi chasing three NYPD detectives, Assistant District Attorney Maurice Nadjari and a handcuffed perp, Allan Kuhn, seem more villainous than the bad guys, some of them “hiding in bushes … carrying walkie-talkies and … pulling ignition wires on cars the authorities had rented so they would not start.”
At one point in this Marxian (Groucho, not Karl) game of hide-and-seek, Nadjari, the cops and the arrestee, after having already switched hotels and motels ten or twelve times, “jumped 20 feet from a motel window to shake off” the press—a caper within a caper—after which the collared Kuhn said to his captors, “I’m glad you fellows aren’t burglars. You’d put me out of business.”
In a similar vein, Dan Bilefsky’s 2015 piece, “Graying Thieves and a Record Heist Undone in London,” which could have just as easily been entitled “One Last Score,” offers up a blow-by-blow recreation of another doomed heist, this one led by a 76-year-old lifetime criminal. As much a character study as a detailed accounting of star-crossed events, it begs to be rewritten as a vehicle for an ensemble of aging hard-guy actors.
But sometimes the melodrama can run as thick as in any news rag, including the account of the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre that consolidated Al Capone’s gang rule in Chicago: after two of the killers entered the murder garage dressed as policemen, “their stars gleaming against the blue of the cloth.” The seven victims were lined up against a wall. The likely order to “give it to them” was followed by “the roar of the shotguns mingled with the rat-a-tat of the machine gun, a clatter like that of a gigantic type-writer.” (Love the hyphenated “type-writer.”)
However, the same reporter redeems himself when he describes one of the victims in a sleek three-sentence word burst worthy of James M. Cain: “The body of Mays, the overall-clad mechanic, had only a few dollars in the pockets. He was the father of seven children. A machine gun bullet had penetrated two medals of St. Christopher.”
In another gem of succinctness written 78 years later, Shaila Dewan describes the sound of another deadly barrage, this one slow and steady, resulting in the deaths of 33 Virginia Tech students (including the shooter, who killed himself) and the wounding of 17 more: “[the gunshots] went on and on, for what seemed like 10 or 15 or 20 minutes, an eternity with punctuation.”
Jumping back from 2007 to the Jean Harris murder trial in 1981, that same tight prose is on display in James Feron’s deft description of the defense table’s reaction to the guilty verdict: “Two lawyers at the … table burst into tears, but Mrs. Harris showed no emotion, watching as each juror was polled. ‘I can’t sit in jail,’ she said to one of her attorneys. She then walked forcefully from the courtroom, shrugging off a police matron.” Afterward, “She sat in the back of a sheriff’s car, appearing stunned and staring straight ahead. Photographers’ flashbulbs glinted on her headband.”
But my favorite example of how novelistically hardcore the writing in The Times can be is in one the most recent filings to be included, Azam Ahmed’s 2016 account of El Chapo’s escape and recapture in Mexico. Here’s the lede ’graph: “Stripped to his undershirt and covered in filth, the world’s most notorious drug lord dragged himself out of the sewers and into the middle of traffic. Disoriented from his long trudge underground, with gun-toting marines on his heels, he found himself standing across the street from a Walmart. Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the kingpin known … as El Chapo, would have to improvise. His cavalry was not coming.”
Over three centuries, the Gray Lady of journalism has time and again earned her moniker, but as often on display in this volume, when it comes to her crime reporting, she can just as easily come off as a bottle blonde.
Enjoy.