Search Results for: crime

Women Are Writing the Best Crime Novels

Longreads Pick

From Tana French and Natsuo Kirino to Gillian Flynn, women are writing crime novels that turn the old genre formula on its head, dispensing with heroes and more accurately reflecting our social media era, one where a murderer’s motives are no longer as clear as they were in Raymond Chandler’s day, and where emotional violence tastes precedence over gunplay.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 4, 2016
Length: 15 minutes (3,937 words)

A Crime Is Nothing If You Can’t Get Away

Longreads Pick
Source: White Noise
Published: May 6, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,426 words)

The NYPD Is Kicking People Out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven’t Committed a Crime

Longreads Pick

An investigation into the aggressive use of nuisance abatement actions by the NYPD in New York City.

Source: ProPublica
Published: Feb 4, 2016
Length: 27 minutes (6,956 words)

High Crime in California Dairy Country

In the California Sunday Magazine, Tessa Stuart writes the gripping story of a criminal who worked the people who work the fields in California’s rural interior, and the detective agency who raced to catch him. The story has all the markings of a Netflix original series, except in place of drugs or gold, the loot is cattle and farmers’ money.

The last deal they did together was far and away the biggest — to the tune of about $450,000. Arno bought 185 head of cattle and wrote Jamie a check for the total. But instead of taking them to his cattlemen clients, Arno drove down to the Tulare County Stockyards and put the cows up at the public auction, where they fetched a price that was $300 less per head than the check he’d written Jamie. It bounced.

Jamie, Rocky eventually learned, wasn’t the first or last dairyman Arno scammed. Arno was buying cows from different cattlemen, taking the money he made at the auction and using it to buy more, or accepting payment for a certain number of cows from a farmer and delivering only a fraction of those promised. “It was a giant Ponzi scheme,” Rocky says. “These guys would start calling him, ‘Hey, dude, where’s the rest of my cows?’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, they’re coming. The truck broke down in Texas or New Mexico or … ’ He’d come up with some cock-and-bull story.”

Rocky found that even as Arno was failing to deliver the dairymen’s cows, he was flying the same dairymen around in private planes on trips up to Oregon or over to Las Vegas on a lark, with fuel and piloting services he also hadn’t paid for. At the time, the dairymen weren’t talking about Arno among themselves; the fear was that if they exposed Arno’s fraud to one dairyman, Arno wouldn’t be able to extract money from that person to pay back the others.

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Longreads Best of 2015: Crime Reporting

Longreads Pick

The best in crime reporting, with picks from Susan Dominus, Steve Kandell, Erika Hayasaki, Chris Vogel, and Brendan O’Connor.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 16, 2015

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.

* * *

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…

The Crimes of Children

Longreads Pick

Children who commit crimes and enter the U.S. juvenile justice system often find themselves dealing with collateral consequences that affect them for the rest of their lives.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 10, 2015
Length: 26 minutes (6,549 words)

Vanity Fair’s Early Look into the Alleged Crimes of Robert Durst

Photo by HBO

The Jinx—a six-part documentary miniseries about alleged murderer and real estate scion Robert Durst—aired its final episode this past Sunday, a day after Durst’s real life arrest for the murder of his close friend Susan Berman. Berman was killed in 2000. In 2002, Ned Zeman profiled Durst (and his alleged crimes) for Vanity Fair. The excerpt below offers a window into Durst’s early friendship with Berman:

The second influence was Susan Berman. Acerbic and lively, talking a mile a minute, controlling the room, Berman was, by almost any standard, an exotic. She had shiny, black Louise Brooks-style hair, and she had stories. She’d spent her childhood in Las Vegas and Hollywood, where her classmates included Liza Minnelli and Jann Wenner. Her late father, Dave Berman, had run the biggest hotels on the Las Vegas Strip—the Riviera, the El Dorado, and, most notably, the Flamingo, where his only daughter’s portrait hung over the reservation desk. That Dave Berman had been a confederate of Mob bosses Meyer Lansky’s and Bugsy Siegel’s—that, in fact, he was a notorious gangster whom one detective called “the toughest Jew I ever met”—was Susan’s obsession. Bobby was fascinated. They’d both lost their mothers. They both had paternal issues. They became fast friends. He doted on Susie, as he called her.

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Defending Those Accused of Unthinkable Crimes

Longreads Pick

Defense lawyer Judy Clarke has taken on reviled clients like Jared Loughner and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. “It’s a hell of a fight as a defense lawyer.”

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Jan 21, 2015
Length: 17 minutes (4,291 words)

Longreads Best of 2014: Crime Reporting

Longreads Pick

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.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 17, 2014