Longreads Best of 2015: Crime Reporting

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in crime reporting.
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Chris Vogel
Articles Editor at Boston magazine.
The Great Cocaine Treasure Hunt (Daniel Riley, GQ)
This is easily one of my favorite stories of the year, regardless of genre. Sure it has buried treasure, 70 pounds of cocaine, and a questionable undercover sting in the Caribbean, but it’s also a tale about the power of story and good story telling. I’m pretty sure I emailed Riley’s opener to more people this year than any other, which starts like the seductive thrum of a GTO:
Good Goddamn, the way Julian told that story. It was the sort of story that imbued the mind with possibility. That lingered like campfire smoke in a sweater.
But it wasn’t just the particulars of the story—Julian burying the million-dollar stash of coral-white cocaine he’d found washed up on the beach in Culebra—that captured Rodney Hyden’s imagination. It was the sounds of the story—the slithering South Carolina accent, the whistly snicker at parts that weren’t funny to anyone but Julian. And the picture of the storyteller, too. The silver hair down around Julian’s shoulders, the big Gandalf beard distracting from his slight frame, the bare feet, and always that Mason jar of wine that kept bottoming out and filling right back up again.
I mean, c’mon. Read more…
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