Crime Books and Films

May 14, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine

This is an excerpt from The Kalinka Affair by Joshua Hammer. The full ebook single is available for sale from The Atavist, through Kindle Singles, iBooks, The Atavist app,and other outlets via The Atavist website. When André Bamberski’s daughter died 30 years ago, he was helpless to save her. Suspicions of murder began to surround her stepfather, a German doctor named Dieter Krombach, but Bamberski could only hope the truth would prevail. But when the authorities gave up their pursuit, he knew he had to act. So against the odds, Bamberski embarked on an obsessive quest to capture and punish his daughter’s killer.

by Joshua Hammer

The abduction of Dr. Dieter Krombach began in the village of Scheidegg, in southern Germany. His three kidnappers punched him in the face, tied him up, gagged him, and threw him in the back of their car. They drove 150 miles, crossing the border into the Alsace region of France, with Krombach stretched out on the floor between the seats. The car stopped in the town of Mulhouse. An accomplice called the local police and stayed on the line just long enough to deliver a bizarre instruction: “Go to the rue de Tilleul, across from the customs office,” the anonymous caller said. “You’ll find a man tied up.” 

A few minutes later, two police cars arrived at the scene, their red and blue patrol lights illuminating the street. Behind an iron gate, in a dingy courtyard between two four-story buildings, Krombach lay on the ground. His hands and feet were bound and his mouth was gagged. He was roughed up but very much alive. When the police removed the covering from his mouth, the first thing he said was “Bamberski is behind it.”

May 7, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine

“Shadow People” — the term refers to hallucinogenic figures glimpsed by methamphetamine addicts after days without sleep. But, in reality, it’s the addicts themselves who are living in a shadow, growing in numbers, becoming an alarming subculture on the periphery of rural America, engaging in crimes that are having devastating impacts on places where traditional life is valued most. Between May 2010 and October 2011, award-winning journalist Scott Thomas Anderson worked as an embedded reporter with law enforcement agencies, partnering with officers on night patrols, accompanying detectives on warrant searches and probation sweeps, observing SWAT operations and spending hundreds of hours with attorneys and victims’ advocates in small-town courtrooms. The result is Anderson’s new book, Shadow People: how meth-driven crime is eating at the heart of rural America. The following excerpt from Chapter 5 of Shadow People follows several cops and prosecutors in Amador County, California, during a hot week in July, 2010. Available on Amazon.com

by Scott Thomas Anderson

Chapter 5

Jackson, California: June 13, 2010

Mike Collins pounds the accelerator. The voice calling for backup over his radio belongs to a police officer in Sutter Creek, Jackson’s sister city to the north. To Collins, it sounds like a fellow cop is approaching two burglary suspects caught in the act; and he’s confronting them utterly alone. Mosquitoes are swarming as the Jackson cruiser drives under the bloodshot silhouette of a mine frame, ridges and rooftops below swept by a champagne curtain of light. The car moves through an intersection, past a white, plaster slum structure with rusty air units and bed sheets hung for drapes: Carrion eaves, cracked Spanish arches, its condemned walls flash by the veteran’s eye in an instant. Radio traffic advises Collins that the policeman has his suspects cornered in a cemetery. By now, the cruiser has pushed through two staggered intersections to an upper gateway to Sutter Creek. For an instant Collins can see down the rolling vista to a basin of houses and yards a magazine once deemed “the city without crime.” 

It’s all in the eyelids — the burglar’s are low, ruby flaps of half-hung skin. Below them, two pupils shutter into postmortem windows, wobbling and wandering on the salmon-white glaze of his corneas. The eyes are vacant, deeply chiseled into a gaunt, shaven skull. The burglar’s agitated. Trembling. He can barely speak. Moments before, he had no problems pattering to the Sutter Creek officer in front of him, even joking that the reason he and the emaciated woman at his side were spotted creeping out of garages was because they’d been taken by the carnal urge. Laughing, he’d quickly dropped the line that they were just looking for an impromptu place to satisfy it. But two black bags lay near a headstone, and Collins is watching as his fellow officer searches through them, discovering twenty-one stolen items hidden under knotted clothes and a bottle of Hennessy. The last thing the officer pulls out is a roll of toilet paper. Securing his gloves, he moves his fingers up inside its cylinder to discover a crystal pipe loaded with methamphetamine.   

“That’s insulin,” the burglar assures everyone.

Handcuffs slide out of a leather sheath. The Sutter Creek officer moves in, but his suspect suddenly wants out of the graveyard at all costs. The wiry man locks his fists as a frail snare line rattles through his elbows. The much larger officer wrenches the burglar’s forearms. The meth is good for one more push, a trapped tugging and some wordless defiance. Collins is ready to step in and help when the Sutter Creek officer, in one motion, forces his suspect down on the hood of the patrol car.

April 24, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine 

An excerpt from Rogue Mobster: The Untold Story of Mark Silverman and the New England Mafia by Mark Silverman and Scott Deitche. (Published March 17, 2012 by Strategic Media Books, paperback, 298 pages, $24.95.)

Introduction

The New England underworld had a rough year in 2011.  On January 20, 2011 the FBI coordinated the largest ever sweep of Mafia suspects in the country.  Over 120 alleged mobsters and associates were taken in, encompassing a dozen different cases involving Mafia families in the Northeast.   One of the coups was the arrest of the now-retired boss of the New England Mafia, Louis “Baby Shacks” Manocchio.  Shacks led the New England Mafia from his headquarters in Providence, since the Boston faction of the family had faced numerous takedowns from state and federal police.  Manocchio’s retirement brought the power base back to Boston, but the North End mob was still battling ghosts from a decade before.

Just under a month after the historic sweep, federal authorities closed in on a Boston mobster that had been on the run from the law since 1994, Enrico Ponzo.  Back then, Ponzo was facing a drug indictment.  He skipped town and headed west.  He changed his name to Jeffrey John Shaw and was living on a small ranch in Marsing, Idaho, worlds away from the streets of Boston.  On February 7, 2011, federal agents, acting on a tip, arrested Ponzo as he drove up to his home.   

But the biggest catch for law enforcement came on June 22, 2011, when federal authorities, acting on a tip, finally nabbed James “Whitey” Bulger, in Santa Monica, California.  Bulger had been there for over a decade with his girlfriend, Catherine Greig. He was No. 1 on the FBI’s Top Ten Wanted list.  Sightings of the elusive Irish mob boss had taken agents around the world.  Some speculated that he was dead. Others thought that because Bulger had knowledge of the pervasive corruption in the FBI's Boston office that the feds simply didn’t want to find him.  And when they did arrest him and Greig they found an arsenal of guns, and $800,000 in cash.  Bulger may have been long removed from the criminal underworld in New England but he obviously had the street smarts and connections to live a comfortable life on the run.

The Bulger and Ponzo arrests were parts of the final chapter of an underworld saga that had played out on the streets of Boston and Rhode Island since the late 1980s.  Those events also helped Louis Manocchio ascend to the top spot in Rhode Island.  The saga was a war for control of the New England Mafia, with the backdrop of Whitey Bulger and his Winter Hill Gang, a corrupt FBI department, and the shifting allegiances of mobsters looking to stay ahead of the law.

Mark Silverman was coming up in the New England underworld during these days.   Mark got to see the Boston mob wars of the '90s from both sides.  He was with a renegade faction that was challenging the traditional Mafia, which he terms LCN (La Cosa Nostra) and he was with the renegade faction.  His ties to the Winter Hill gang, starting from childhood, also brought an element to the story that’s so typical of the New England underworld. 

April 16, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine

One Voice Raised, A Triumph Over Rape , an excerpt from the non-fiction story about Jennifer Wheatley-Wolf’s empowering experience of testifying against the man who raped her 20 years after the crime was committed.  In addition to Jennifer's story of hope is a detailed account of how the cold-case was solved by Chief Investigator David H. Cordle  Sr.

Chapter 4

Intuition

1. Direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension.

2. A fact, truth, etc., perceived in this way.

3. A keen and quick insight.

4.The quality or ability of having such direct perception or quick insight.

I have always been intuitive. I suppose we are all intuitive to some degree. But maybe my feeling of “something isn’t right here” was a bit keener than even I believed. I have been asked, if I’d felt something was wrong, “Why didn’t you do something?”

Indeed, why didn’t I? Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. However, even if I had followed my instincts, to what outcome? Who knows? In truth, the answer to “why not?” isn’t, “I was tired and overreacting,” or even “I had spooked myself by reading Stephen King at 3 a.m.” It is much simpler: I’m home, getting ready for bed; I’m in my pajamas.

I am home. Isn’t this the place where we feel the most invincible, the safest? Don’t we all feel like the weight of the day begins to fall off once we come into our homes and kick off our shoes? We turn on the TV or stereo, grab a beer or glass of wine, get ourselves something to eat, and begin to relax. We naturally put our guard down. Getting ready for bed, dressed in my pajamas, and unwinding after a busy night at work is so far opposite from running out of the house screaming for help like a maniac. I didn’t believe I was in danger because I was home. I didn’t listen to my intuition. All the warnings were there and I got them all loud and clear.

I did not react to any of the intuitive signals I was picking up on because I wanted to continue to believe my home was a safe haven.

I am home. I’m safe.

March 5, 2012

Book Review by Mark Pulham

For many of us, the death of one of our children is inconceivable. Most of us would agree that there is nothing worse. It is an unimaginable tragedy, something that we cannot picture getting over. But, as anyone who has lost a loved one knows, a healing process begins. A funeral is held, a time for grieving passes, and if time does not exactly heal old wounds, it does dull their pain.

But, as John Leake’s new book Cold a Long Time: An Alpine Mystery shows, there is something worse for a parent. What if your child was missing? The grieving process cannot begin and the passing of time does not lessen the pain. Instead, there is uncertainty, the parent remains in limbo, and they cannot move past.

Cold a Long Time presents the story of Duncan MacPherson, a professional ice hockey player from Saskatoon, who had played for the Saskatoon Blades and the Springfield Indians. He dreamed of joining the NHL, but it was not to be. At 23 years old, he had numerous injuries, and he was not quite as fast as some of the others, and when his contract expired, he was released. But showing grace and maturity during an interview, he didn’t express anger or bitterness, just acknowledged that it wasn’t meant to be.

Duncan MacPherson

Duncan was offered a job as coach for the Dundee Tigers Hockey team in Dundee, Scotland. Although the owner of the team was a little shady, Duncan accepted. Before he joined the team, Duncan decided to take some time for himself and visit some friends in Europe.

On August 7, 1989, Duncan was in Nuremburg where he borrowed a friend’s car, intending to be back by August 11 to catch his flight to Scotland. He told his parents, Lynda and Bob, that he would call them from Scotland on August 14.

That call never came. Days passed with no word from Duncan, and when the phone did finally ring, it wasn’t their son, but one of his friends telling them that he never made it to Scotland. The last anyone saw of him was on August 9, when he went snowboarding at a popular ski resort on the Stubai Glacier near Innsbruck, Austria.

And so the nightmare began for Lynda and Bob MacPherson, a nightmare that would span 20 years. What had happened to their son? The question itself is a simple one, but as with many simple questions, the answer was complex. Was he dead? Did he have amnesia? If he was dead, then how did he die? And where was the body? Was there another explanation?