EWK

A Conversation On: Crime Scene Forensics

If only the real world worked like it does on CSI.

THE LAZARUS FILE
by Matthew McGough | The Atlantic | June 2011

In 1986, a young nurse named Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in Los Angeles. Police pinned down no suspects, and the case gradually went cold. It took 23 years—and revolutionary breakthroughs in forensic science­—before LAPD detectives could finally assemble the pieces of the puzzle. When they did, they found themselves facing one of the unlikeliest murder suspects in the city’s history.

BEYOND C.S.I.: THE RISE OF COMPUTATIONAL FORENSICS
by Sargur Srihari | IEEE Spectrum | December 2010

On 6 May 2004, a Portland, Oregon, lawyer named Brandon Mayfield was arrested for his alleged involvement in the terrorist bombings of four commuter trains in Madrid. The attacks killed 191 people and injured 2000 others. But Mayfield had never been to Spain, and his passport at the time was expired. The sole evidence against him was a partial fingerprint found on a plastic bag in a van used by the bombers. The FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System had identified Mayfield as a possible match, and three FBI fingerprint experts as well as an outside analyst confirmed the identification.

A Conversation On: Anthrax After 9/11

Two profiles, one each on the suspects the FBI thought was the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks post-9/11. I did a lot of head shaking at the ineptitude on display. You will, too.

THE WRONG MAN
by David Freed | The Atlantic | May 2010

In the fall of 2001, a nation reeling from the horror of 9/11 was rocked by a series of deadly anthrax attacks. As the pressure to find a culprit mounted, the FBI, abetted by the media, found one. The wrong one. This is the story of how federal authorities blew the biggest anti-terror investigation of the past decade—and nearly destroyed an innocent man. Here, for the first time, the falsely accused, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, speaks out about his ordeal.

ANTHRAX REDUX: DID THE FEDS NAB THE WRONG GUY?
by Noah Shachtman | Wired | March 2011

But things are not always as clear-cut as they may seem in an FBI presentation. Two years later, sitting in her office overlooking West Baltimore, Fraser-Liggett concedes she has reservations. 

A Conversation On: The Kill Team

Two takes on the same story. Not surprising is how each outlet approached this topic.

THE KILL TEAM
by Mark Boal | Rolling Stone | March 2011

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

A BEAST IN THE HEART OF EVERY FIGHTING MAN
by Luke Mogelson | New York Times | April 2011

“Ask them, ‘Do they understand why we shot this dude?’ ” the lieutenant told his interpreter. During their last patrol to Qualaday, soldiers in the platoon had attacked Mullah Allah Dad with rifles and a fragmentation grenade that blew off the lower halves of his legs and badly disfigured his face. The soldiers claimed that Allah Dad was trying to throw a grenade at them. Two days after the killing, however, a company commander attended a council during which the district leader announced that people believed the incident had been staged and that the Americans had planted the grenade in order to justify a murder.

A Conversation On: NYC’s Micro-Economies

On the fringe, skirting the law or ignoring it completely - five looks into NYC’s micro-economies.

THE ONE MAN DRUG COMPANY
by David Amsden | New York Magazine | April 2006

After prep school, he built a thriving business. Now he’s got to find a way to get out of it.

THE COLUMBIA KID
by Robert Kolker | New York Magazine | December 2010

How do you get through college these days? You and four friends, police say, deal pot, coke, Adderall, ecstasy, and LSD. Until you make a few boneheaded mistakes.

A CIGARETTE FOR 75 CENTS, 2 FOR $1: THE BRISK, SHADY SALE OF ‘LOOSIES’
by Joseph Goldstein | New York Times | April 2011

Rarely does a minute go by without a customer stopping just long enough to pass a dollar bill to Lonnie Loosie, known to the police by his given name, Lonnie Warner, 50. They clench the two “loosies” — as single cigarettes are called — that he thrusts back in return.

HEROIN.COM: SELLING JUNK ONLINE
by David Shapiro | Village Voice | April 2011

“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel,” she told the Daily News. That year, a Citigroup vice president, Mark Rayner, was caught moving ecstasy and cocaine from his Midtown offices using Craigslist. “We see lots of professionals, people with good jobs, doing it,” Brennan said.

Three years later, drug dealing on the classified-ads website is still blatant and ubiquitous.

ADVENTURES IN A BOOK TRADE
by Mitchell Duneier | New York Times | 1999

To some New Yorkers, the men who hawk secondhand books and scavenged magazines on city sidewalks are no better than beggars and squeegee men; they form a parasitic and intimidating gantlet that mars the urban streetscape and consumes precious areas of public space. Protected by local law, vendors of written material have largely weathered Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s quality-of-life jihad, which has swept away peddlers, panhandlers and other unsavory elements in the name of a safer, saner city.

The entire book is available via google books, here.

Update: Shadowcrew

An update to the Shadowcrew conversation.

IN SURPRISE APPEAL, TJX HACKER CLAIMS U.S. AUTHORIZED HIS CRIMES
by Kim Zetter | Wired | April 2011

Albert Gonzalez, the hacker who masterminded the largest credit card heists in U.S. history, is asking a federal judge to throw out his earlier guilty pleas and lift his record-breaking 20-year prison sentence, on allegations that the government authorized his years-long crime spree.

A Conversation On: Lost Boys

The bodies being discovered on Long Island bring to mind other tragedies, maybe overlooked tragedies, similar in nature. Thankfully, because of technology and the 24-hour news cycle, hopefully this one won’t be so easily swept aside.

DISCOVERY OF THREE MORE SETS OF REMAINS ADDS TO L.I. MYSTERY
by Joseph Goldstein and Tim Stelloh | New York Times | April 2011

Investigators on Long Island discovered the remains of three more people on a barrier beach on Monday, bringing the number of remains found nearby to eight since the police began searching for a missing prostitute late last year.

SEE NO EVIL
by Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | May 1933

How does a perfect gentleman become a vicious murderer? For Charles Albright, it all began with an obsession with eyes.

THE LOST BOYS
by Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | April 2011

In December 1970 two teenagers disappeared from the Heights neighborhood, in Houston. Then another and another and another. As the number of missing kids grew, no one realized that the most prolific serial killer the country had ever seen—along with his teenage accomplices—was living comfortably among them. Or that the mystery of what happened to so many of his victims would haunt the city to this day.

Browsing Omni Mag Online makes me question the ending of ‘The Lost Boys’… Would love the author to weigh in.

While reading through these, two books came to mind.

THE CONCRETE BLONDE
by Michael Connelly | 1994

In his latest adventure, LAPD detective Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch–whose first excursion, The Black Echo (1992), won an Edgar–moves into Scott Turow territory. Bosch is Exhibit A in a civil suit against the city filed by the family of a man Bosch killed: a man he and the police believe was the serial murderer of prostitutes and porn stars whom the media dubbed the Dollmaker. As Bosch’s trial opens, however, a Dollmaker-style note directs the police to a woman’s body buried in concrete, a “concrete blonde” who turns out to have been murdered with all the Dollmaker’s trademarks after Bosch killed the suspect. Did Bosch kill the wrong man? Strongly plotted and deftly orchestrated, the novel shifts back and forth between the courtroom and the streets, between Bosch’s often troubled relationships with his professional colleagues and his deepening love affair with the schoolteacher widow of a brother officer, and between Bosch’s unaccustomed self-doubts and his suspicions of others. A fast-paced, classy mystery.

LOST BOYS
by Orson Scott Card | 1992

A withdrawn eight-year-old in a troubled family invents imaginary friends who bear the names of missing children in this absorbing thriller.

A Conversation On: Shadowcrew

Cybercrime, credit cards and drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.

THE GREAT CYBERHEIST
by James Verini | New York Times | November 2010

One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes N.Y.P.D. detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash. Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another, and another. The guy wasn’t stealing cars, but the detective figured he was stealing something.

Rolling Stone’s more colorful take on the same.

SEX, DRUGS AND THE BIGGEST CYBERCRIME OF ALL TIME
by Sabrina Erdely | Rolling Stone | November 2010

They’d been high all weekend long — on Ecstasy, coke, mushrooms and acid — so there seemed little harm in doing one last bump of Special K while they packed up to leave their $5,000-a-night duplex in South Beach. For the past three days, the three friends had barely bothered leaving their hotel, as a dozen club kids in town for Winter Music Conference, the annual festival that draws DJs and ravers from all over the world, flocked to their luxury suite to partake of the drug smorgasbord laid out on the coffee table. But even stoned on industrial-grade horse tranquilizers, Albert Gonzalez remained focused on business — checking his laptop constantly, keeping tabs on the rogue operators he employed in Turkey and Latvia and China, pushing, haranguing, issuing orders into his cellphone in a steady voice. “Let’s see if this Russian asshole has what I need,” he’d say calmly. Then he would help himself to glass plates of powder, each thoughtfully cut into letters for easy identification: “E” for Ecstasy, “C” for coke.

And one more on stolen credit cards that overlaps with the above two.

ONE HACKER’S AUDACIOUS PLAN TO RULE THE BLACK MARKET IN CREDIT CARDS
by Kevin Poulson | Wired | December 2008

The heat in Max Butler’s safe house was nearly unbearable. It was the equipment’s fault. Butler had crammed several servers and laptops into the studio apartment high above San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, and the mass of processors and displays produced a swelter that pulsed through the room. Butler brought in some fans, but they didn’t provide much relief. The electric bill was so high that the apartment manager suspected Butler of operating a hydroponic dope farm.

…And one more. Kevin Poulson’s book about Max Butler.

KINGPIN: HOW ONE HACKER TOOK OVER THE BILLION-DOLLAR CRIME UNDERGROUND
by Kevin Poulson | February 2011

In a previous life, Poulsen served five years in prison for hacking. So the Wired senior editor and “Threat Level” blogger knows intimately the terrain he explores in this page-turning tale of the criminal exploits of a hacker of breathtaking ambition, Max Butler, who stole access to 1.8 million credit card accounts. Poulsen understands both the hows of hacking, which he explains clearly, as well as the whys, which include, but also can transcend, mere profit. Accordingly, his understanding of the hacking culture, and his extensive interviews with Butler, translates into a fascinating depiction of a cybercriminal underworld frightening in its complexity and its potential for harm, and a society shockingly vulnerable to cybercrime. The personalities, feuds, double dealing, and scams of the hackers are just one half of this lively story. The other half, told with equal verve, is law enforcement’s efforts to find and convict Butler and his accomplices. (Butler is now serving a 13-year sentence and owes .5 million in restitution.) Poulsen renders the hacker world with such virtual reality that readers will have difficulty logging off until the very end.

4/18/11 – Update:

IN SURPRISE APPEAL, TJX HACKER CLAIMS U.S. AUTHORIZED HIS CRIMES
by Kim Zetter | Wired | April 2011

Albert Gonzalez, the hacker who masterminded the largest credit card heists in U.S. history, is asking a federal judge to throw out his earlier guilty pleas and lift his record-breaking 20-year prison sentence, on allegations that the government authorized his years-long crime spree.