crime

The bizarre tale of "Clark Rockefeller," a con artist wanted for abducting his child, continues, as police link him to the 1985 disappearance of a couple in California.

If you’re a pathological liar, you likely have 26 percent more white brain matter, and 14 percent less gray matter, than average folk. That means you are a natural, as elegant with lies as Tiger Woods with his swing. Less gray matter, some doctors believe, helps lower your moral inhibitions; more white matter suggests you’re hyper-wired to manipulate one of those suckers born every minute. I bring this up because every year or so, like clockwork, a breathtakingly fantastic impostor makes the news.

The Dark Knight earned a record-setting $158.4 million in its opening weekend.

In a memorable scene towards the end of The Dark Knight, the Joker turns to a mobster and diabolically sneers, "This town needs a better class of criminal, and I'm gonna give it to 'em." And this promise he fulfills. The film's anarchistic uber-criminal goes on a wanton, murderous rampage, terrorizing Gotham City by creatively slaughtering its denizens.

Fear of the sort of brazen, epic violence depicted in The Dark Knight is what keeps real-life police chiefs up at night, and not without reason. As we witnessed on September 11, America's cities are not immune to popcorn-flick scale devastation at the hands of ruthless madmen. And so big-city police departments turn to Batman-style tactics to fight crime.

Called in to evolving crises of public safety when the bat-signal beckons, Batman is Gotham City's ultimate crime-fighter. In the real world, a city's SWAT team plays the role of Batman. Both are bedecked with body armor, brandish top of the line firepower, conceal their faces behind masks and favor the element of surprise. And like Batman, the SWAT team was originally conceived as an elite force designed to respond to such rare crisis situations as hostage standoffs.

Ninety-six people were arrested in a San Diego State University drug bust.

Where's Captain Renault when you need him? I'm shocked, shocked, to learn that drug dealing is rampant at fraternities at San Diego State (one of Playboy's top 10 party schools). Actually, what shocks me is the price the student dealers were charging for cocaine: $35 a gram. In my college days almost 30 years ago, at a small, northeastern liberal-arts school with a less illustrious party heritage, a gram cost $100. So in constant dollars, the price of cocaine has fallen by 85 percent, to about $16 a gram -- imagine how many more coke-fueled novels Jay McInerney could have written at that price!

The Supreme Court heard arguments today in a case that will determine whether child rapists are eligible for the death penalty. No one has been executed in the US, except for the crime of murder, since 1964.

Before this morning's arguments on whether Louisiana can execute Patrick Kennedy' the Chief Justice read an opinion that must have made the condemned man's lawyers' hearts sink. In what might give a signal, however faint, of the Court's disposition toward capital punishment, John Roberts delivered a judgment that roundly rejected the claim by two Kentucky death-row inmates that lethal injection would be a cruel way to kill them, and therefore prohibited under the Eighth amendment to the Constitution. A healthy majority of 7-2 sided against the inmates. And on a Court that thinks pumping a man full of toxic chemicals is not likely to cause a "'substantial' or 'objectively intolerable' risk of serious harm," Kennedy could not expect a great deal of compassion.

The killing of a black high school student by a Hispanic illegal immigrant has revived Southern California's racially fraught debate about how police should treat illegal immigrants.

Outsiders can be forgiven for imagining that LA's touchiest racial controversies follow the black versus white narrative of the Watts riots, the Rodney King beating or the O.J. Simpson trial. But locals know better -- ask the Korean grocers whose stores were torched in 1992 (a year after Ice Cube’s racist harangues against them), or the South Central blacks who federal prosecutors say were targeted by a Latino street gang bent on “cleansing” the neighborhood.

An Oregon man lost a considerable amount of property after a prank Craigslist ad invited all comers to strip his house clean.

Imagine Robert Salisbury's shock and horror as he saw thirty strangers cheerfully carting away his prized possessions -- and, one assumes, some of his not-so-prized possessions as well. It's easy to imagine bargain-hunters helping themselves to, for example, stray soup-cans, or an aging toaster oven. To be sure, Salisbury wasn't stabbed, shot, or, as in the case of another spectacular Craigslist crime, "tased" as a result of this prank. But our stuff is much more than just stuff. MORE

The Supreme Court heard arguments in Indiana v. Edwards, a case that could limit the right of mentally-ill criminal defendants to represent themselves at trial.

A madman had his day in court yesterday. Ahmad Edwards, a schizophrenic who tried to kill a security guard in 1999, appealed his conviction on grounds that the judge hadn't let him act as his own lawyer. The Indiana court that eventually convicted him appointed a public defender after Edwards filed nonsense motions and wrote a letter addressing the judge as "old man." (Edwards has counsel representing him on appeal.) Is it possible, the Supreme Court asked yesterday, to be too crazy to represent yourself in your own trial, but sane enough to stand trial to begin with? MORE

Two public defenders announced that their client, now deceased, killed a man nearly thirty years ago, but that attorney-client privilege kept them from telling the world -- and allowing the wrongfully convicted suspect, Alton Logan, to go free.

It's tempting to say that the public defenders should have come forward, accepted disbarment, and spared Alton Logan twenty-six years of wrongful imprisonment. Perhaps they could have sprung Logan without appreciably weakening clients' trust in their attorneys. Disbarment is a severe sanction, and after all, this case is an extreme one. Besides, what comes first -- lawyerly obligations, or human ones? MORE

This weekend, HBO will air the last episode of the final season of The Wire.

The Wire is the best program in television history by such a wide margin that even though its final season has been a huge disappointment, compromised by creator David Simon's grudges, it still stands up well against virtually every non-Wire season of television out there. As it draws to a close, fans are of course eager to see the last installment, but it's a mark of the series's unique approach that few of us are on the edge of our seats, eager to see "what happens."

Acting on a US warrant, Bangkok police arrested Viktor Bout, the world's most notorious arms dealer.

The big lie about Viktor Bout is that he escaped capture because he was hard to find. In recent years he did hide -- the New York Times reports that during his two months in Bangkok he switched hotels often to avoid detection, landing finally at the swish Sofitel Silom -- but during his previous two decades of international mischief he conducted himself with surprising openness. He didn't get caught, because either through negligence or complicity, figures at the governmental level let him go, and let his business flourish. MORE

Japanese prosecutors have dropped charges against a U.S. Marine accused of rape in Okinawa.

John McCain and others often cite U.S. bases in Korea and Japan as a model for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq. This rape case, which the Japanese authorities dropped because the family of the 14-year-old junior high student didn't want to pursue charges, is a reminder of one of the less savory dividends of U.S. bases in your backyard. U.S. military personnel have been raping Okinawans for the last 60-plus years. (For an early account, see this 1949 report by Time's Japan correspondent; Chalmers Johnson gives a detailed, and depressing, update in the Okinawa chapter of Blowback.) MORE

Thieves stole a Cezanne, a Degas, a van Gogh, and a Monet from a private museum in Zurich Monday. Together they are worth $163 million.

The universal first reaction is to puzzle over why anyone would want to own a painting so obviously hot that it could never sell.  Personally, I easily see why.  For a thief, driving a van with $100-million of French impressionism in the back would be far more thrilling and professionally satisfying than driving a similarly valuable load of, say, stolen bearer-bonds or gold ingots.  Money is money, everywhere.  But every Econoline van full of Cezannes is unique.

Suppose, though, that the thieves do not share my love of post-Impressionism and the Ford E-Series.  Why want the paintings?  Here's one intriguing possibility.  Criminals have, in past, tried to exchange stolen works of art for lenience in sentencing for other crimes.  "I'll help you find the Rubens, if you put me in jail for five years instead of ten for robbing that bank."  This perverse incentive probably isn't at work here, but it does show how a canvas with only sentimental value to the honest might have considerable value for those who live outside the law.

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement and spiritual icon of the last several decades, has died in the Netherlands.

Was he a cult leader?  The Maharishi's army of consciousness-expanders regards him with the slavish devotion, and they impute powers to his teaching that bear no relation to reality.  "Yogic flying," one of several cases in which TM supposedly lets practitioners suspend physical laws, closely resembles hopping around on a mat, not "flying" in any common use of the word.  The much vaunted claim that TM caused violent crime to drop in the District of Columbia by 18% is total hooey.

Meditation does seem to yield real and impressive effects for many who practice it, but the Maharishi demanded dangerous levels credulity -- specifically, faith in his own status as the exclusive fount of spiritual knowledge.  Nor was he entirely forthright with his followers (some of whom quit their jobs and moved to Iowa) about his intention of using TM to introduce them to an intense variety of Hinduism.  He was, in short, a domineering religious megalomaniac who tricked good people into dropping everything and following him.  If he wasn't a cult leader, he was certainly getting there.