Inside Monopoly’s Secret War Against the Third Reich

How a popular board game helped flood escape tools into POW camps around Europe during World War II:

“The Deluxe set looks very much like the set you would have found in stores maybe ten years ago,” Orbanes tells me. “The box would have been the same size as the game board. The board fit into the box, and the box was maybe an inch in depth. It was black in colour and it had a two-colour label that adhered to the middle of the top surface. That’s what would have been shipped into the German POW camps.”

And what would have been inside it? “There’s an organisation here in the US called the Army Air Force Historical Association,” Orbanes says. “They made contact with me about three years ago after looking at my book on Monopoly, and one of their members, a graphic artist, took it upon himself not only to do a lot of research through whatever his channels would be, but also to recreate one of these sets, which he’s done for display at their headquarters.

“What he found out along the way is that the tools that most likely would have been used in this set would have been a very small compass, maybe an inch in diameter, and they also would have had files – two different types to get you through fencing material, and probably a folding pair of shears, a very small set of shears that would collapse on a pivot, and then of course a silk escape map that would have been appropriate for whatever camp the delivery was for.”

Source: Eurogamer
Published: Jan 12, 2014
Length: 35 minutes (8,900 words)

A Dangerous Mind

Examining the case and trial of Gilberto Valle, AKA the “cannibal cop,” a New York police officer who fantasized about kidnapping, killing, and eating women he knew with strangers, but who never acted on any of his plans:

On August 24, they discussed ways that Valle might kidnap another woman, Kristen Ponticelli, a recent graduate of Valle’s old high school whom he never met personally (Valle’s lawyers assume he just noticed her photo on Facebook). The next day, they moved on to Andria Noble. “If Andria lived near me, she would be gone by now,” Valle wrote. “Even if I get caught, she would be worth it.”

But there was no physical evidence from Valle’s home suggesting he was getting ready to kidnap or cook anyone—no oven large enough for a human, no cleaver, no homemade chloroform. Prosecutors had no proof he had a place in the mountains. They had no proof that Valle knew the identities of the three people he was chatting with. Valle never divulged the last names of any of the people whose photos he passed along (not even his wife’s) and never gave out any of their addresses, even after Moody Blues ­specifically requested one, and he haphazardly switched up details about their life stories and college educations.

Published: Jan 12, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,858 words)

Inside the Incredible Booming Subterranean Marijuana Railroad

Drug cartels are digging tunnels into the U.S. to transport massive amounts of marijuana and other narcotics from the border onto American soil. The Feds have managed to shut down many of these tunnels and capture a key cartel manager, but this is just the beginning:

The land east of Otay Mesa, around the agricultural towns of Calexico and Mexicali, is a terrible place to build a sophisticated drug tunnel. The soil is unstable, and the All-American Canal, an eighty-mile-long aqueduct that surrounds Calexico, presents a formidable obstacle. Still, the cartels have found a way.

In October 2008, Mexican authorities, responding to reports of a cave-in and flooding near the canal, discovered a tunnel unlike anything they’d ever seen. Only ten inches wide, it was essentially a pipe. The Mexican cops traced it back to a house about 600 feet from the border, where they found a tractor-like vehicle with a long barrel on its side—a horizontal directional drill, or HDD. Used by oil, gas, and utility industries to quickly bore conduit holes over significant depths and distances, this drill was believed to belong to the AFO. It was the cartel’s first known attempt to use cutting-edge industrial equipment to build—in the most literal sense of the word—a drug pipeline.

Source: GQ
Published: Jan 12, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,125 words)

Bigfoot, Nessie, and the Study of Hidden Animals

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from The Morning News, VQR, All About Birds, and Open Spaces Magazine.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 12, 2014

Blood in the Sand: Killing a Turtle Advocate

A conservationist and advocate for endangered turtles is murdered on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast:

For decades, Playa Moín has been a destination for hueveros—literally, “egg men”—small-time poachers who plunder sea turtle nests and sell the eggs for a dollar each as an aphrodisiac. But as crime along the Caribbean coast has risen, so has organized egg poaching, which has helped decimate the leatherback population. By most estimates, fewer than 34,000 nesting females remain worldwide.

Since 2010, Mora had been living at the sanctuary and patrolling the beach for a nonprofit organization called the Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network, or Widecast. His strategy was to beat the hueveros to the punch by gathering eggs from freshly laid nests and spiriting them to a hatchery on the sanctuary grounds. This was dangerous work. Every poacher on Moín knew Mora, and confrontations were frequent—he once jumped out of a moving truck to tackle a huevero.

Source: Outside
Published: Jan 2, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,002 words)

Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500

The author, on buying an abandoned house in Detroit and fixing it up, in a city that has seen more busts than booms:

I wanted something nobody wanted, something that was impossible. The city is filled with these structures, houses whose yellowy eyes seem to follow you. It would be only one house out of thousands, but I wanted to prove it could be done, prove that this American vision of torment could be built back into a home. I also decided I would do it the old-fashioned way, without grants or loans or the foundation money pouring into the city. I would work for everything that went into the house, because not everyone has access to those resources. I also wanted to prove to myself and my family I was a man. While they were building things, I had been writing poems.

Author: Drew Philp
Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Jan 9, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,333 words)

The Murderer and the Manuscript

Alaric hunt is writing detective novels, while serving a life sentence for murder, arson, robbery and other charges:

Alaric Hunt turned 44 in September. He last saw the outside world at 19. He works every day at the prison library in a maximum-security facility in Bishopville, S.C., passing out the same five magazines and newspapers to the same inmates who chose the library over some other activity. He discovered his favorite writer, Hemingway, at a library like this one, in a different prison. He found the Greek and the Roman philosophers there too. He rediscovered the science-fiction masters who wowed him as a boy and spurred him to write his own stories. And, one Friday three years ago, he found the listing for the contest that would change his life.

Published: Jan 10, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,823 words)

‘I’m One of the Others Now’: What Life Was Like for a Family in East Germany

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share the first chapters from the forthcoming book Red Love: The Story of an East German Family by Maxim Leo. Growing up with bohemian parents in the GDR, Leo recreates their lives as rebellious artists in an increasingly restrictive world. Our thanks to Pushkin Press for sharing the book with the Longreads community.

Author: Maxim Leo
Source: Pushkin Press
Published: Jan 10, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,200 words)

Standard of Care

What happens when a former prison inmate sues for medical malpractice:

Tonight in a nursing home in the North End neighborhood of Boston, not far from where his family owns a restaurant, there is a man with the brain of a boy. He is blind. He is 375 pounds because he doesn’t know when he is full. He can’t walk. His wheelchair is padded with a cushion from a beach chair that his mother folded in half. He has to be taken to the bathroom every thirty to sixty minutes. He can remember what his life was like before. He cries when he is asked about it.

Source: The Rumpus
Published: Jan 10, 2014
Length: 23 minutes (5,939 words)

‘I Was Trapped in My Own Body’

Henry Evans, a quadriplegic who is unable to speak, is exploring how robotics can greatly enhance the lives of the disabled:

When Henry lost the ability to move most of his body and to speak, the disabled world gained a strong advocate, and those who study robotics got a tireless and passionate thinker. A few years into his new life, Henry recognized the potential of robots to level the playing field for severely disabled individuals. Like Henry, many people are dependent on caregivers for their “activities of daily living,” as they are called: eating, showering, moving around, shaving, even scratching an itch. But robotics has the potential to help by serving as extensions or surrogates for body parts. Living with quadriplegia had given Henry a grasp of what ideas would actually be helpful in practice. So he began reaching out to others. He has become an idea generator and a test pilot, using robots to open drawers and even to shave. He has helped create and test user interfaces and programs, providing feedback for his collaborators at more than half a dozen universities and labs across the country.

Author: Brian Eule
Published: Jan 9, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,299 words)