The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

Introduction

IF ALL THESE CRIMES are so terrible, why do I feel so good?

It’s not all murder in these pages-there is a little fraud, robbery, and even (honest!) shoplifting-but most of the stories feature untimely demise, delivered by force. Some of the bodies are floating (an advertising executive in a river in Poland and a hedge fund manager in a pool near Palm Beach); some of them are mutilated (the victims of Mexican drug gangs and the corpses at a Philadelphia funeral home, sold to the transplant industry for parts); most are obscure (the victims of a Somali gang war in, of all places, Minnesota, and a loudmouthed punk on Long Island). One is very, very famous (JFK).

Still, these stories are the unlikely vectors of good cheer because, simply, they are so fascinating and so well told. These are good days for crime (most days are), but they are also rough days for journalism, especially for publications that tell stories at some length. Newspapers and magazines are going bust or shrinking, and so, it is said, are attention spans. But these stories show that narrative journalism-a fancy term for story telling, nonfiction division-is alive and well.

Notice that verb: show. As in the most venerable, and still the most useful, advice given to writers: show, don’t tell. There is a wonderful moment in Hanna Rosin’s “American Murder Mystery” that brings home the meaning of that well-worn phrase. To be honest, the subject matter of Rosin’s story could sound a little dry. She is exploring whether the decision to close down high-rise housing projects for the poor and move their residents to suburban neighborhoods-a practice that was broadly supported across the political spectrum-was in fact good public policy. Rosin tells the story through a pair of husband-and-wife researchers in Memphis; by coincidence, he studies crime and she studies housing. One day, he decided to plot his violent crime statistics (in blue) over her poor people (in red). “All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire,” Rosin writes. “The rest of the city has almost no dots.” Aha, says the reader, sharing the moment of recognition.

It’s great reporting, which is the constant throughout these varied stories. In “The Zankou Chicken Murders,” Mark Arax recounts how Mardiros Iskenderian built a small empire of fast-food chicken restaurants in and around Los Angeles. There is family strife, and ultimately murder, but the key to the story for me was how delicious the food sounded. “How did they make the chicken so tender and juicy?” Arax asks. “The answer was a simple rub of salt and not trusting the rotisserie to do all the work but raising and lowering the heat and shifting each bird as it cooked. What made the garlic paste so fluffy and white and piercing? That was a secret the family intended to keep.” You could tell this story without dwelling on the food; a narrow-minded writer (or editor) could see it as extraneous to the crime story. But it’s not too much of a jump to see how the family’s passion in the kitchen turned into rage of another kind-at each other. Here, the mystery of the garlic paste mattered far more than the model of the handgun. (And the story made me want to kick myself, because I spent all those years in L.A. covering O.J. and I never tried this chicken! What was I thinking?)

One of the shames of contemporary journalism is that an opinion is sometimes more valued than an eye. In “The Color of Blood,” Calvin Trillin takes on a case that was a brief tabloid phenomenon in New York, and shows the complexities and heartbreak that lay beneath the sensational facts. In short, Daniel Cicciaro Jr., who was white, threw Aaron White, a black acquaintance, out of a party near their homes on Long Island. Cicciaro and his buddies pursued White to his house, where his father, John White, shot Cicciaro dead in the driveway. Was this self-defense by a black family that was about to get lynched? Or a cold-blooded murder by a trigger-happy homeowner? Neither, it seems, at least according to Trillin, who covered John White’s trial. The richly detailed portraits of the White and Cicciaro families show how stereotypes about race and class yield to the messy complexity of real life.

The simplest story in the collection is “The Day Kennedy Died” by Michael J. Mooney, an account of a speech by an elderly doctor to a group of medical students in Dallas. Dr. Robert Nelson McClelland was a young doctor at Parkland Hospital on November 22, 1963, and around lunchtime that day he was showing a film of an operation for a hiatal hernia to some medical students when he was called away for an emergency. Behind a curtain in Trauma Room One lay the young president of the United States-with parts of his brain falling out on to the gurney. More than four decades later, McClelland tells the rapt students, and us, how he tried to save him. I’m a JFK-and JFK-buff of sorts, and I can still never get enough about the details of that day. The wound, the Zapruder film, the injury to the cerebrum-or was it the cerebellum? And two days later, incredibly enough, Dr. McClelland was called in to Parkland to try to save Lee Harvey Oswald’s life, too.

If that begins to sound too somber, there are a couple of stories here that fit squarely in the most lighthearted genre of crime reporting: the caper. “The Fabulous Fraudulent Life of Jocelyn and Ed,” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, is the story of a couple of knuckleheaded college students in Philadelphia who decided to live beyond their means. (Way beyond. Thanks to identity theft.) Perhaps it speaks ill of me, but I came to have a soft spot for Jocelyn, the star of the tale, who told friends “she was fluent in Russian, which she’d learned while growing up in Lithuania; later, she’d tell classmates she spoke eleven languages, including Turkish, Czech, and Afrikaans. She also mentioned she was an athlete who had qualified for the 2004 U.S. Olympic team. In pole-vaulting.” (She had me at Afrikaans.) In a similar vein, there is the tale of “Lightning” Lee Murray, who turned from a brief career in the field known as Ultimate Fighting Championship, a kind of mixed martial arts, in Las Vegas, to engineering the biggest bank heist in the history of Great Britain. In “Breaking the Bank,” L. Jon Wertheim seems to have almost as much fun as the perps did when they got their hands on fifty-three million pounds, or about a hundred million dollars, in cash. I, for one, was relieved to hear that Murray bought himself a villa and “commissioned a giant mural above the hot tub, depicting his victory in his one and only UFC fight.” (He also wasted some of the money.) Alas, Murray is now in prison in-don’t ask-Morocco.

For all the mayhem in this collection, there’s one story that’s actually about how not to kill people-“Non-Lethal Force,” by Alec Wilkinson. It turns out that the authorities have been trying for literally hundreds of years to figure out ways to stop people from making trouble, but in a way that will not kill or permanently incapacitate them. It’s harder than I thought. Through an entertaining portrait of Charles Heal, a man known as “Mr. Non-Lethal Weapons”-a title I did not know existed-Wilkinson offers a wry introduction to this curious field. (Who knew, for example, that the word Taser comes from the phrase, “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle”?) As always, the resilience of criminals is remarkable; Heal notes that in the old days, “The non-lethal options were a baton, which all it did was get the guy mad, or tear gas, which they didn’t feel and tended to work better on us.” It reminded me of the line from Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. “If you shoot him, you’ll just make him mad.”

Ultimately, though, the highest form of crime reporting, I think, is in the creation of portraits of the criminals themselves. On hearing of a particularly awful or shocking crime, who among us hasn’t asked the question, “Who could do a thing like that?” Several stories in this collection try to answer that fundamental question-again, not with stereotypes or surmise, but with painstaking reporting.

I had to remind myself of the subject of Mark Boal’s “Everyone Will Remember Me as Some Sort of Monster.” It was a spree killing by a kid with a gun; sadly, they all seemed to come in a jumble between Columbine and Virginia Tech. This one was in Omaha, where a skinny nineteen-year-old-“Harry Potter with an AK-47”-mowed down eight people in a shopping mall just before Christmas. As Boal writes, “It was a big story. For about a week.”

But Boal does what a real journalist should-which is unpack a simple story in all its awful complexity. He writes, in essence, a mini-biography of Robert Hawkins, who had bounced from foster home to no home in his sad, short stay on the planet. As with any memorable work of journalism, it’s the details that stay with you. “On Mother’s Day, when patients were told to draw cards for their loved ones,” Boal writes, “Robbie drew a picture of a noose for his stepmother.” Robbie was such a screwup that he tried to roll joints with Post-it notes. But what turned Robbie from a sad sack into a mass murderer? That’s not clear; nor could it be.

The story that best sums up the paradoxes of crime reporting is David Grann’s “True Crime,” which begins in 2000 with the discovery of a bound-and-gagged body in a river in Poland. For years, there are no arrests or suspects. Then, in 2003, the police are alerted to the publication of a novel by Krystian Bala, an obscure Polish writer. The book, called Amok, includes scenes of a homicide that bear a great deal of similarity to the unsolved crime in 2000. An intrepid police detective makes copies of the novel and hands them out to his colleagues. “Everyone was assigned a chapter to ‘interpret’: to try to find any clues, any coded messages, any parallels with reality.”

In the confrontation between detective and author-suspect, Bala denies responsibility for the murder but admits that he drew some of the novel from real life. “Sure, I’m guilty of that. Show me an author who doesn’t do that.” The question at the heart of Grann’s piece is the difference between life and art-and whether any story, of fiction or nonfiction, can ever accurately portray reality.

Grann’s story culminates in a trial-and all of Poland was watching. Bala denied all. The government said his novel proved his guilt. Grann writes, “A trial is predicated on the idea that truth is obtainable.” So is journalism. This collection represents the best of that compelling and imperfect profession.

– Jeffrey Toobin