The Tragedy of Louis Scarcella
How the face of NYC’s tough-on-crime era went from Supercop to scapegoat after a series of questionable from convictions.
The White Album: How Bob Marley Posthumously Became a Household Name
Before he died Bob Marley’s best-selling album moved just 650,000 units in the U.S. After some careful remarketing, his label moved millions posthumously.
The Prisoner’s Daughter
What if your dad had been doing time for murder for as long as you’d known him?
She was a leader like her father, Amanda’s relatives told her. She’d inherited his forceful personality and his stubborn streak. She took gymnastics classes and sang in the school chorus — a natural performer, just like her father.
She took pride in the comments, but they wore on her, comparisons to a man she had never really met. As her 13th birthday approached, she resolved to see her father again. She told her mother, making it clear she didn’t believe the stories about him serving overseas.
Conceded Minerva: “Your father is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”
“Why is he there if he didn’t do it?”
Who Were Those Masked Men, Anyway?
How a trio of bank robbers—inspired by The Town—disguised themselves as white cops and almost got away with a 200k heist:
When Visconti watched the security footage, he saw a team of professionals. The masks were Hollywood-quality, realistic enough to fool people standing inches away. In an era when images spread around the world with the click of a finger, these robbers had managed to throw their pursuers far off the scent. They had turned the law’s most powerful tool to their advantage. Then there was the speed: in and out in three minutes. And the spoils: They had scored more than $200,000 cash. These guys were pros.
Over The Volcano
An experienced hiker returns to the biggest volcano on Earth, and finds himself stranded and hallucinating in a Hawaiian snowstorm:
Broward arrived at the Visitor Emergency Operations Center, a long brown building near Mauna Loa’s southern base, at about 8 a.m. He strolled down a hallway, past his office and up into the dispatch center, perched above the first-floor roof like an air-traffic-control room. He picked up a fax with a 3:17 a.m. timestamp.
It was an advisory from the National Weather Service. A storm was on the way that would hit the summit with a foot of snow, temperatures in the 20s, and wind gusts up to 50 miles per hour. Broward had worked at the park for 13 years and he saw two or three of these storms every winter. He plugged the forecast data into a threat-level chart, which confirmed what he already knew: Conditions were in the Red Zone. The park would be closed for the day. He told the dispatcher to spread the word, then checked the backcountry permit records. There was someone on the mountain: Alex Sverdlov, age 36, had left on Sunday and was scheduled to return on Wednesday. Broward knew the hiker would be at or near the summit when the storm hit.
‘The saddest fact I’ve learned is nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody.’
Jessica Hopper interviews former Chicago Sun-Times music journalist Jim DeRogatis, who first broke the story of dozens of alleged rapes committed by R. Kelly, on why more people have not paid attention to what really happened:
I was one of those people who challenged DeRogatis and was even flip about his judgment – something I quickly came to regret. DeRogatis and I have tangled – even feuded on air – over the years; yet, amid the Twitter barbs, he approached me offline and told me about how one of Kelly’s victims called him in the middle of the night after his Pitchfork review came out, to thank him for caring when no one else did. He told me of mothers crying on his shoulder, seeing the scars of a suicide attempt on a girl’s wrists, the fear in their eyes. He detailed an aftermath that the public has never had to bear witness to.
DeRogatis offered to give me access to every file and transcript he has collected in reporting this story – as he has to other reporters and journalists, none of whom has ever looked into the matter, thus relegating it to one man’s personal crusade.
I thought that last fact merited a public conversation about why.
Maybe I Do And Maybe I Don’t
Steven Thrasher has been named the 2012 National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association journalist of the year. After gay marriage was legalized in New York last year, he followed two same-sex couples who finally earned the right to consider whether or not they wanted to get married:
“‘We never did this saying, “We’re going to go out and marry right away,” ‘ Howard says. ‘We won the right. Now, we have the choice.’
“Besides: ‘I was waiting for Kevin to bring it up.’
“Kevin hears this and replies, ‘Really? That’s interesting,’ without adding more.
“It turns out that although same-sex couples now have 1,324 new legal benefits in New York State, there are actually some big economic incentives for Kevin and Howard not to wed. Kevin receives state insurance for his disabilities, and marrying Howard would end that. While it would allow Kevin to go onto Howard’s insurance plan, the co-payments for the drugs and procedures he needs could be prohibitive.
“This is exactly the kind of conundrum cohabitating straight couples of certain means have had to face from time to time.”
‘Gary Jones’ Wants Your Nudes
Who is “Gary Jones”? An investigation into how a hacker may have stolen nude photos for a “revenge porn” site:
“Is it really so easy to hack a Gmail account? See for yourself: Go to the Gmail login screen and click on the frequently ignored link underneath the sign-in menu, ‘Can’t access your account?’ Three options appear; choose ‘I forgot my password.’ Type in a Gmail address—any active Gmail address—and if there’s a phone number associated with the account, you’re given three more options, one of which is ‘Get a verification code on my phone.’ You don’t even need to know the phone number. Just hit ‘continue’ and an unrelated six-digit code will appear in a text to the account owner’s phone. Type in that verification code—a number easily obtained by a masquerading e-impostor—and you’re in. The first thing you’re prompted to do is immediately change your password, thereby blocking out the original owner.
“In other words, if a hacker knows only your Gmail address and can figure out how to access your phone, he’s already most of the way into your shit.”
The NYPD Tapes Confirmed
How officers in the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn were “juking the stats” to improve crime statistics in their area. The NYPD called it an isolated incident, but critics point to a culture of data-obsession that leads police to ignore, discard or downgrade complaints from victims:
“These weren’t minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment.
“‘When viewed in their totality, a disturbing pattern is prevalent and gives credence to the allegation that crimes are being improperly reported in order to avoid index-crime classifications,’ investigators concluded. ‘This trend is indicative of a concerted effort to deliberately underreport crime in the 81st Precinct.’
Wheelchair Sports Camp’s Crip Life
Kalyn Heffernan is 24 years old, weighs 53 pounds, and measures three feet, six inches tall. She’s light enough to carry, compact enough to hide under a winter coat, and is sometimes mistaken for a child. But Kalyn, who has the brittle-bone disability osteogenesis imperfecta, is hardly innocent, precious, or inconspicuous: The Colorado native dabbles in graffiti, cusses gloriously, and has a septum piercing. She raps, scribbles rhymes, and has been known to cover the viral YouTube video “My Vagina Ain’t Handicapped.” If you ask—and even if you don’t—she’ll eagerly lift her shirt to show off the words “CRIP LIFE” inked on her stomach, an homage to Tupac Shakur’s THUG LIFE tattoo.
Kalyn is the founding member of Wheelchair Sports Camp, a fledgling jazz-hop trio cheekily named after a week-long youth-disability program she attended growing up and, by her own admission, “corrupted.”