Ever since the 70s Crime Film Festival I’ve been a bit on a crime film kick, having watched Get Carter, Mean Streets, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Casino and Scarface. Along the way I’ve found a few Best Crime Films lists that may be worthy of your attention:
Posts Tagged ‘crime’
Lists of Top Crime Films
Monday, June 27th, 2011Starr Faithfull, Andrew J. Peters, and the Scandals of Yesterday
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011Today we come up on the 80th anniversary of an unsolved death that marked a major scandal for a prominent political figure. The badly bruised body of beautiful 25-year old girl washed up on the beach at Long Island, her liver showing traces of Veronal (the first commercially available barbiturate). The body turned out to be one Starr Faithfull, a “good time girl” well known on the Boston social scene.
That would be interesting enough. But it turned out that Starr Faithfull kept a diary, in which she described having an affair with a prominent political figure. The figure turned out to be Boston Mayor Andrew James Peters, who denied the affair, but who ended up paying $20,000 worth of hush money to Starr Faithfull’s father.
John O’Hara would later use elements of the story in his novel BUtterfield 8, though set in New York rather than Boston, which lead to Elizabeth Taylor’s Academy Award winning performance in the movie of the same name.
But the movie (I haven’t read the book) changes one very big detail: the first time she had sex with Peters, Starr Faithfull was eleven years old.
As to whether she was murdered or not, that remains unresolved to this very day…
Liberty County Mass Grave: “Never Mind”
Tuesday, June 7th, 2011You know that 0-30 range for that mass grave? It turned out to be on the low end of that range. Namely zero.
Can I say I’m psychic for thinking this was bunk?
Police Find Mass Grave of 0-30 Bodies in Liberty County, Texas
Tuesday, June 7th, 2011Which is to say that so far they’ve found none. Which hasn’t kept other people from jumping the gun. You might want to wait on reporting that until you find, you know, actual bodies. Especially since the tip was reported to come from a “psychic.” This would keep distant outlets like The Sydney Morning Herald from reporting it as fact.
Is “police investigating report of mass grave” just not sexy enough for the news cycle these days?
Baby Showers Are Usually Pretty Dull
Sunday, April 24th, 2011Sherry Black Murder Tidbits Trickle Out
Sunday, January 2nd, 2011There’s been a tiny bit of news in the case of murdered bookstore owner Sherry Black: police have released pictures of a belt that may belong to her murderer. So if you live in Salt Lake City and know someone with criminal tendencies who has worn a belt with the initials “AX” on the buckle (which evidently stands for “Armani Exchange”; fashion is not my beat), police would like a word with you.
A commenter here has suggested that transient Paul David Vara, who has been arrested on aggravated murder and multiple rape charges in the same area, may be involved. There’s certainly no question that (assuming police statements are true) Vara is (to use a legal term) a violent scumbag:
When police found Gabel’s body, they noted that her breasts had been mutilated, according to court documents. An autopsy by the Utah State Medical Examiner’s Office found most of Gabel’s internal organs had been torn out.
The 6-foot-1 and 260-pound Vara told police that he “pulled her internal organs out of her body,” court documents state.
The cause of death was determined to be “multiple factors, including strangulation and extensive loss of blood,” according to court documents.
Vara told police that he “used green string to strangle the female because she was struggling with him.”
Vara hails from San Antonio, and seems to have quite a record of violent offenses:
His adult charges in Texas date from 2007 back to 1998, when he would have been 18. His charges in Texas include aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in 2004, assault in 2001, two separate incidents of assault causing bodily injury in 2000 and another one in 1999. He had several charges of burglary and vehicle burglary in 1998.
And pace our commentator, his record of gang activity (such as it is) seems to be non-Insane Clown Posse related:
Medina said Vara told him that he had come to Utah to escape the Latin Kings gang in San Antonio. Medina, 40, said he left MS-13, a gang he had joined at age 11 and the two men bonded over their mutual hope to leave gangs behind.
(A little background on the Latin Kings can be found here. )
While Vara certainly seems violent and scummy enough to have killed Black, I’m just not seeing any real link to her (or, that matter, ICP). And sadly, the world suffers from no shortage of violent scumbags…
Sherry Black, Pickers, and the Salt Lake City Meth Underworld
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010As far as I can tell, there are no new leads in the murder of bookseller Sherry Black. Or at least none that the police are sharing with the media.
However, that blog update did link to this fascinating piece from 2008 talking about a ring of meth addicts stealing Mormon collectables and selling them to antique dealers, and the (mostly unsuccessful) quest of Randy Holladay to get back his possessions. I am very far indeed from the Salk Lake City antique business, but the story paints them (and the “pickers” that sell to them) in a most unflattering light:
Holladay made one fatal mistake, he says, in his homespun investigation. He gave out his list of stolen property to antique dealers in the first week of March. That’s something the Utah Antique Dealers Association advocates, according to its vice president, Nate Bischoff. One day to the next, though, Holladay says, the trail went cold. He suspects the list was circulated to dealers across the Salt Lake Valley, who then hid from view whatever they had bought of his possessions.
The story it paints of the Salt Lake City police is also less-than-flattering, noting that “In 2007, nine burglary detectives handled 1,300 cases each.” The story also notes:
A month ago, Holladay learned that 10 pages of e-mails he had sent to law enforcement at the beginning of the investigation were being circulated among neighbors and what he calls “various shady people” throughout the city. In those e-mails, Holladay poured out his anger, his fear, his suspicions—accurate or not—of neighbors and others. The district attorney’s office shared the e-mails with defense attorneys in the discovery process. Lloyd says his house was broken into several weeks ago. The only thing taken was the discovery file containing Holladay’s e-mails relating to this case.
Then again, hosility to police is pretty much a given for an “alternative weekly,” so their reporting in that arena may need to be taken with a grain of salt…
Sherry Black Murder Follow-Up #2
Friday, December 10th, 2010This story by Paul Koepp of the Deseret News, unlike the one I linked to yesterday, seems competently written, and sheds light on a few items that were previously unclear, namely:
- Suspect Lorin Nielsen pleaded guilty in April 2009 to theft, a third-degree felony, and theft by deception, a second-degree felony.
- He was sentenced to 90 days in jail, which means he would have been out on of jail at the time of Black’s murder.
- “Nielsen was booked into Salt Lake County Jail on Monday for a violation of his probation in the theft case. Detectives, however, would not say whether he is being investigated in connection with the homicide.”
- He was a member of “the Kearns Town ICP gang.”
Amazing how competent writing makes things so much clearer, isn’t it?
I’m not going to pretend to be an Internet Columbo, able to ascertain Nielsen’s guilt or innocence from a handful of news articles. But if he did kill Sherry Black, he’s too stupid (not to mention too evil) to live. Gee, you don’t think police might be able to connect the murder of a central figure (albeit an inadvertent one) in your last crime? Not only did it not take Sherlock Holmes to crack that case, it didn’t even take his dim half-brother Hiram, who works the fryolater at the Hildale Dairy Queen…
Follow-Up on the Murder of Bookstore Owner Sherry Black: Books and Mormons and Juggalos, Oh My
Thursday, December 9th, 2010You may remember the post on the murder of bookseller Sherry Black I did last week. You may also remember the piece I did on Insane Clown Posse and their Juggalo followers a month or so ago. I never imagined the stories would intertwine, but police speculate that her murder may have something to do with the fact that Black unwittingly bought stolen books from 20-year-old Lorin Nielsen. Guess what band Nielsen was a fan of?
The relevant section:
In February of 2009, 20-year-old Lorin Nielsen was arrested and charged with stealing books from his father, a polygamous church president.
He sold them to Sherry Black for $20,000.
The books included a first-edition French Book of Mormon signed by John Taylor with a message to Parley P. Pratt.
For those without any particular knowledge of the history of Mormonism, both of those were big wheels in the early LDS. Pratt was a member of the first “Quorum of the Twelve Apostles” and Taylor was with founder Joseph Smith the night he was killed by a mob in a jail in Carthage, Illinois on June 27, 1844.
In total, the books were worth an estimated $45,000.
When the father confronted Nielsen about the theft, the report states Nielsen warned him that “if he got police involved he will set off a chain of events he’s not going to like because he is a member of a gang.”
Police reports state Nielsen was affiliated with an Insane Clown Posse, or Juggalos gang and had access to guns.
I’m inferring from the above that Lorin Nielson’s father is Wendell Nielsen, president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Nielsen took over from convicted felon Warren Jeffs. (Recently Jeffs’ rape conviction was overturned, but he’s now facing sexual assault charges in Texas. It was big news in when Jeffs’ bigamist compound in Texas was raided by police. I must admit that my tolerance for polygamy as an “alternate life style” pretty much evaporates when you start marrying 12-year-olds. )
Never mind the fact that Juggalos are a “gang” in about the same sense that Deadheads or Parrotheads are a gang. Or that my (admittedly facile) understanding of Utah law is that it is not much more difficult to obtain “access to guns” if you’re not a felon than Texas. However, if this is the same Lorin Nielson, he probably is a felon (it says he was found guilty of theft and theft by deception, the date is about right, and the amount involved would certainly be enough to earn a felony conviction (assuming it wasn’t pleaded down), but because Utah is a closed records state, you can’t be sure that’s the case).
I mentioned before that bookstores are rarely robbed, because there are usually much richer targets available. Plus books are next to impossible to fence, because collectors are too small a community, word of stolen goods gets out really fast, and it’s almost impossible to find a place to sell anything worth stealing. But some of that early Mormon stuff goes for insane amounts of money. This case reminded me that fake documents were at the heart of the “White Salamander Murders” case. (Short version: A guy named Mark Hoffman was selling fake Joseph Smith documents that undermined official Mormon dogma to church leaders desperate to keep them off the market, then he went all mad bomber in an attempt to cover his tracks.)
So police believe, what? An insane Juggalo killed Black because they were pissed off because she cooperated with the police? Honestly I think there’s more wackiness in the FLDS side of story than the Juggalo side…
Movie Review: Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Kelly Masterson
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Michael Shannon
This is a “heist gone wrong” film that had gotten lots of great reviews, including from some of my friends. And having seen it, I can see why; it’s extremely well-done. (You would hope the guy who directed Network would remember a thing or two about making movies.) But I’m not quite as enthusiastic about this film as others, mainly because it’s sort of like Fargo, but without the laughs or Marge Gunderson. It’s like being in a car at the top of steep, icy hill that almost immediately starts sliding. And pretty much the entire movie is the characters sliding down that hill, with the only question being exactly how bad the crash will be. And the answer, after nearly two hours of watching them squirm, screw up and go blood simple, is very bad indeed.
The action unfolds in non-linear fashion, following first one character and then another. We see the heist go wrong in the first 10 minutes of the film, but its only later that we understand just how wrong it went, and how the consequences from it just keep getting worse.
The performances are uniformly excellent, while the script is interesting without being engaging; Hoffman’s character is so unlikable, and Hawke’s character such a weak-willed pushover, that we regard them less with sympathy than critical detachment. The direction is solid, but many scenes could have been edited; Lumet likes to watch his characters flail and squirm a bit too much, and this film could have easily been 10-15 minutes shorter and have more impact.
Whether you’ll enjoy watching it depends on how much you like watching that long, agonizing slide down the icy hill. And Marisa Tomei is still quite lovely (and, here, frequently undressed). But many viewers will find it an uncomfortable ride.