Uncle John’s True Crime (28 page)

The pressure was on: citizens were growing more panicked with each new bomb, and more impatient with the cops’ inability to catch the Mad Bomber. After poring through letters, phone call transcripts and police reports, and studying the unexploded bombs, Dr. Brussel presented this profile to Inspector Finney:

On the show
CSI
, all of the equipment in the lab is fully functional
.

GOING PUBLIC

Finney was impressed...but skeptical. His team had drawn some of the same conclusions, but even so, there had to be thousands of middle-aged men who fit that profile. What good would it do?

“I think you ought to publicize the description I’ve given you,” suggested Dr. Brussel. “Publicize the whole Bomber investigation, in fact. Spread it in the newspapers, on radio and television.” Finney disagreed. It was standard procedure to keep details of investigations away from the press. But Brussel maintained that if they handled the case correctly, the Mad Bomber would do most of the work for them. He said that, unconsciously, “he wants to be found out.” Finney finally agreed. And as he left the office, Brussel added one more thing: “When you catch him, he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit, and it will be buttoned.”

So the papers published the profile and the chase went into high gear. As Finney predicted, “a million crackpots” came out of the woodwork, all claiming to be the Mad Bomber, but none of them had the Mad Bomber’s skill or his distinctively neat handwriting. A slew of legitimate leads came from concerned citizens about their odd neighbors, yet nothing solid surfaced. Still, Brussel was confident that the real Bomber’s arrogance would be his undoing.

Did Brussel’s strategy work? Turn to
Part II on
page 250
to find out
.

Flamethrowers are legal in 40 US states
.

Here’s a news item from the future: “June 29, 2159: 231-year-old former stockbroker Bernard Madoff was released today after his 150-year prison sentence ended. His first words to reporters: ‘I want my stuff back.’”

E
VERYTHING MUST GO

Over a career of more than two decades, stockbroker—and scam artist—Bernie Madoff bilked thousands of investors out of nearly $20 billion in what is considered the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. He was arrested in December 2008, and pleaded guilty to securities fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, perjury, theft, and six other charges four months later. In November 2009, while Madoff was beginning a 150-year prison term, the U.S. Marshals Service attempted to return some of that money to his victims by holding a series of auctions. The first one was held at the Sheraton Hotel in New York City. Purses, ashtrays, dishes, jewelry, golf clubs, stationery, duck decoys, and a Wayne Gretzky action figure were among the 200 items stacked on folding tables or leaned against walls, ready to go to the highest bidder. What did these things all have in common? They belonged to Madoff and his family, and were seized from their Manhattan penthouse and Montauk, Long Island, vacation home.

As collectors from around the world queued up to bid on the items from the New York sale, the auctioneers estimated they’d fetch about $500,000. Turns out they grossly underestimated just how crazy some people will go for anything (no matter how seemingly insignificant) that has “celebrity” status.

HEY BIDDER, BIDDER...SWWWING, BIDDER!

Auction item:
A blue satin New York Mets baseball team jacket with “Madoff” stitched on the back in orange. (Ironically, team owner Fred Wilpon was one of Madoff’s victims.)

Estimated value:
$720

Sold for:
$14,500

Longest sentence: An Alabama judge gave Dudley Kyzer 10,000 years for killing his wife
.

Auction items:
A Lady Hermes brown suede handbag that belonged to Madoff’s wife, Ruth, plus two other purses.

Estimated value:
$210

Sold for:
$1,900

Auction items:
Three boogie boards, one with “Madoff” written on it with a black marker.

Estimated value:
$80

Sold for:
$1,000

Auction item:
A set of Madoff’s personalized golf clubs (irons only).

Estimated value:
$350

Sold for:
$3,600

Auction item:
A pair of Ruth Madoff’s diamond Victorian dangle earrings.

Estimated value:
$20,000

Sold for:
$70,000

Auction item:
A 1960 Hofstra University ring engraved with “BM.”

Estimated value:
$360

Sold for:
$6,000

Auction item:
A black leather Mont Blanc wallet embossed with “BM.”

Estimated value:
$100

Sold for:
$2,200

EVERYTHING ELSE MUST GO

At later auctions, Madoff’s 61-foot yacht,
Bull
, fetched nearly $1 million; his 38-foot-long boat,
Sitting Bull
, sold for $320,000; and his 21-foot-long
Little Bull
brought in $21,000. Some other Madoff items that collectors made off with: hockey trading cards, a “Bernard Madoff Investment Securities” pen, a Tiffany silver key ring monogrammed “BLM,” and the Mad-offs’ Christofle flatware engraved “RMB.” And then there was Madoff’s 18-carat-gold Rolex “Prisoner Watch,” inspired by the steel watches given to Allied prisoners of war in Germany during World War II. The Prisoner
Watch sold for $65,000 (or about the cost of two years’ worth of room-and-board to imprison Madoff).

Q: Why is London’s Metro police station known as “Scotland Yard”?
A: The entrance was once located on Great Scotland Yard Street
.

In the end, the auctions earned about $3 million for the victims—a tiny fraction of what Madoff had stolen from them.

SWINDLER’S TWIST

Following on the heels of the official Bernie Madoff auctions, several
unofficial
“Bernie Madoff Auctions” took place around the country...in much less posh hotels and community centers. Each of these auctions promised bidders a piece of the Madoff pie. The only problem: None of them offered any items that had actually belonged to Madoff. Atlanta-based Southern Star Auctioneers—which held a sale in Syracuse, New York—said they never claimed to be selling Madoff’s personal items, just stuff that belonged to his
victims
. But an investigation by the U.S. Marshals discovered that the items didn’t even belong to the victims. In some of the other bogus auctions, organizers forged the stockbroker’s name on the items: They sold $20 fountain pens for hundreds, even thousands of dollars...proving that even though he’s behind bars, Bernie Madoff is still able to part people from their money.

*
*
*

Cardiff, Wales: “When a juror coughed, defendant Alan Rashid had a right to feel sick. The cough came at the precise moment that the jury foreman announced a verdict of ‘not guilty’ in Rashid’s trial on a charge of threatening homicide. The cough coincided with the word ‘not,’ and Judge Michael Gibbon only heard ‘guilty.’ He sentenced Rashid to two years in prison. As the jury left the court, one inquisitive member of the panel asked an usher why Rashid was going to jail after being found not guilty. So the jurors were herded back into their box, Rashid was brought back to court, and the jury members confirmed their ‘not guilty’ verdict. Judge Gibbon told the defendant he was free to go. ‘I am very relieved, as you would imagine,’ Rashid said.”

—
Associated Press

Of all the crimes in this book, those committed by Morganna Roberts may be the lightest. But she
did
break the law—and in doing so, she stole the hearts of sports fans all over the United States
.

O
N A BET

One summer afternoon in 1971, a 17-year-old woman named Morganna Roberts went to Riverfront Stadium to see a Cincinnati Reds game with a friend. The game was pretty uneventful until Roberts’s friend “dirty double-dared” her to run out onto the field and give Pete Rose a kiss. Why not? Roberts climbed over the railing, ran across the field, and gave the startled but welcoming Rose a big smooch as fans roared their approval.

Roberts must have enjoyed the experience, because a few games later she ran out onto the field to kiss another player...and then another...and another. Blonde, with a top-heavy Dolly Parton build (she claimed measurements of 60-24-39), Roberts got
a lot
of attention. Her profile rose with each pucker and she soon found her way into the newspapers, where a Cincinnati sportswriter dubbed her “The Kissing Bandit.”

SOMETHING TO SEE

If you ever got a chance to see the Kissing Bandit at work, you probably never forgot it. Fans aren’t allowed on the field for security reasons, no matter how famous they are, so Morganna typically had to sneak into the baseball park incognito, her ample attributes concealed beneath a bulky jacket or some other loose-fitting garment. Then, at the opportune moment, she’d throw off her disguise and jump down to the playing field wearing a tight T-shirt and short shorts and bound across the field to the object of that day’s affection.

Roberts parlayed her fame into a career as an exotic dancer, and, thanks to bookings in nightclubs and strip joints all over the country, she was able to visit nearly every ballpark in Major League Baseball. Over the years she kissed everyone from Johnny Bench and Don Mattingly to
Nolan Ryan and Cal Ripken Jr. Why stop at baseball? Morganna also snuck into pro basketball games to kiss Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Charles Barkley, and other greats.

Even the quickest DNA testing method takes 48 hours to produce a result
.

Stadium officials weren’t crazy about her breaking the rules, but the players liked her, and many grew to see her as a good luck charm. After she kissed George Brett of the Kansas City Royals in the mid-1980s, his team went on to win the next 22 of 23 games. In 1988 she tried to kiss Ryne Sandberg of the Chicago Cubs but failed when she was blocked by an umpire. Sandberg hit the next pitch out of the park. (Maybe the umpire shouldn’t have gotten involved—the Cubs still lost the game.)

BUST-ED

Roberts’s antics got her arrested more than once over the years. In 1985 she was charged with criminal trespassing after she ran onto the field during the Houston Astros season opener to kiss pitcher Nolan Ryan. Her attorney claimed that she was a victim of physics—when she leaned over the railing “the laws of gravity took over,” he explained. “She ran out onto the field and saw police chasing her, so where would she run but to the safety of the pitcher?” Roberts managed to beat that rap, but when she was arrested in 1988 during the Baltimore Orioles “Fantastic Fan Night,” she spent a night in jail before the prosecutor set aside the charges as long as she stayed off the field at Memorial Stadium.

GAME OVER

Roberts was a part of baseball for nearly 30 years, from her late teens into her late forties. But in 1999, she decided to hang it up. She never formally announced her retirement, she just dropped out of sight and stopped giving interviews. When the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
ran a profile on her in 2001, she again refused to participate, but after the story ran she called the newspaper at 4 a.m. and left a message explaining that she had retired to a “dream life” with her husband and three dogs, in a house alongside a creek and a running trail in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. “I just got sick of talking about myself and always being the center of attention,” she said in her message. “I had a great time. All the fans were wonderful. All the players were wonderful. But I just had enough.”

The average American company loses about 6% of its revenue to fraud each year
.

Here are a few of the more interesting comments that author Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes make
.

“Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.”

“I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty.”

“You can never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.”

“As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is, the less mysterious it proves to be.”

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

“You know my method. It is founded on the observance of trifles.”

“It is always dangerous to reason from insufficient data.”

“Crime is common. Logic is rare.”

“Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.”

“I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues.”

“It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.”

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.”

“I can discover facts, Watson, but I cannot change them.”

“A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman’s love, however badly he may have treated her.”