Crime

The New F***ing Tone Is Here.

Hope and change: The deficit last month was bigger than the deficit for all of 2007.

More hope and change: Obama restarts Guantanamo trials.

Illinois Democratic Senate candidate Alexi "Ali G" Giannoulias was senior loan officer at his family bank, Broadway Bank, which authorized loans to convicted organized crime leaders like Michael “Jaws” Giorango (a pimp and bookmaker), Demitri Stavropoulos (an illegal gambling operator), and for convicted felon Tony Rezko, as chronicled here.

Broadway Bank, owned and operated by the Giannoulias family, was closed by the feds just two weeks ago, which led the spokesman of his political opponent Mark Kirk to give this statement to the New York Times: “While years of risky lending schemes, hot money investments and loans to organized crime led to today’s failure, it’s a sad day for Broadway Bank employees who may lose their jobs due to Mr. Giannoulias’s reckless business practices.”

I

ONE FRIDAY THIS PAST NOVEMBER, without much to-do, the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia dismissed the case of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. The court's reasoning, what I could make of it, seemed highly technical. "Appellant's insurmountable problem is that his claim is not arguably within the zone of interests to be protected or regulated by the statute in question," the judges wrote. The ruling was rendered unanimously, and bloodlessly--though bloodlessness, in my opinion, is an odd tone to adopt in a case so heartfelt and long-lived as Dr. Mudd's.

A Crossworder's Holiday
by Nero Blanc
Prime Crime, 224 pp., $22.95

A Puzzle in a Pear Tree
by Parnell Hall
Bantam, 308 pp., $23.95

The Christmas Garden Affair
by Ann Ripley
Kensington, 293 pp., $22

THE TRADITION of telling ghost stories at Christmas has a venerable lineage, reaching back well into the Middle Ages. Christmas detective stories have a shorter history.

"Chasing the Dime"
by Michael Connelly
Little, Brown, 400 pp., $25.95

WILLIAM J. BRATTON, having won his crime-fighting laurels in the first Giuliani administration, was recently inducted as the new chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. There was something discordant about the erstwhile top cop of New York City taking over in Los Angeles. The two cities are just so different.

It's not a question of statistics, though in L.A. violent crime is rising at an alarming rate, murders having vaulted upward by 27 percent since 2000.

LONDON
THINKING OF VISITING London? Great idea. Airfares are low, the weather is fine, the chance of contracting mad cow disease has fallen from infinitesimal to zero, and the talented British actors tread the boards of the West End and National theaters with their usual skill and verve.

But leave your Rolex at home. At least once each day someone here is mugged for his or her Rolex, and typically badly mauled in the process. And if you hire a car and driver to show you around, make sure the driver is reasonably expert in evasive tactics.

I'VE BEEN AMUSING myself recently with the following experiment: I call up the most strident anti-police activists of recent years, people like Georgetown law professor David Cole, who argues that every aspect of the criminal justice system is racist. I ask these police critics the following question: Suppose that in the wake of September 11, the FBI decides to check out recent graduates of American flight schools to see who else may be plotting to use airplanes as weapons. Which students, I ask, should the FBI investigate--all of the would-be pilots, or a subset of them?

POOR BILL AYERS. His timing could not have been worse. Just when his widely publicized memoir of his days as a terrorist was coming out, our nation suffered its worst terrorist assault ever.

Indeed, the very morning of the attack, the New York Times printed a fawning profile of Ayers and his comrade in terror, Bernardine Dohrn.

GENERALS AREN’T THE ONLY ONES at risk of fighting the last war. Indeed, military leaders today may be less prone to this failing than are members of some other professions, since military leaders are aware of experiences like World War I and Vietnam that remind them in a most painful way of the hazards of driving with both eyes on the rear-view mirror.

Over the last three weeks, we have heard many pronouncements from government officials, right up to the president, about the importance of attacking Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization through their money trail.

BETWEEN COLUMBINE, EMINEM, AND MTV, today’s teenagers often come across to their elders as indecent, self-destructive, and dangerous. But Baby Boomers shouldn’t be too quick to judge. In one respect, modern adolescents behave far more responsibly than their parents did at the same age. High school students today are far less likely to drink or to drink and drive.

This is partly because changing attitudes among kids. But they’ve also gotten some crucial help from adults—particularly a 1984 law effectively forcing every state to bar alcohol sales to anyone under the age of 21.

EUROPEANS LOVE THE DEATH PENALTY

WITH GEORGE W. BUSH visiting Europe last week as Timothy McVeigh was being put to death, it was perhaps only natural that newspaper readers would be treated to a sample of European opinion on capital punishment.

"Almost as One, Europe Condemns Execution," clucked a typical headline in the June 12 New York Times. Well, at least they said "almost."

In the body of the article, we discover that the headline refers, first off, to other headlines.