Best American Crime Writing
Guest editor Nicholas Pileggi

The crimes:

“The Cheerleaders” by E. Jean Carroll: the tragic lives of cheerleaders at a high school in Upstate New York.

“Our Man in Mexico” by Charles Bowden: a DEA agent working on the Mexican border gets dirty. It comes with the job.

“Should Johnny Paul Penry Die?” by Alex Prud’homme:  a brutal rapist and murderer with a mental disability sits on death row.

“The Outcast” by Pat Jordan: hanging out with O. J. Simpson in Florida.

“Fatal Bondage” by David McClintick: J. R. Robinson escalates from a life of fraud to kinky sex and serial killing.

“Flesh and Blood” by Peter Richmond: ex-NFL player Rae Carruth puts a hit out on his pregnant girlfriend.

“A Prayer for Tina Marie” by Robert Draper: a young woman with lots of personal issues kills her two small children by throwing them off a cliff.

“Bad Cops” by Peter J. Boyer: the L.A.P.D.’s Rampart scandal (bad cops involved with drugs and murder).

“The Chicken Warriors” by Mark Singer: a look into Oklahoma’s cockfighting subculture.

“The Crash of Egyptair 990” by William Langewiesche: a depressed pilot crashes the plane he’s flying, killing everyone on board. Under political pressure, Egyptian authorities don’t accept that narrative.

“Judgment Day” by Doug Most: a man who killed a convenience store clerk twenty-five years earlier faces his parole board.

“The Killing of Alydar” by Skip Hollandsworth: a famed racehorse breaks its leg in what was probably not an accident and then has to be put down.

“The Chicago Crime Commission” by Robert Kurson: an ex-cop now working for the Chicago Crime Commission is still committed to taking down the Outfit, which in the twenty-first century is seen by many as a quixotic quest.

“Under Suspicion” by Atul Gawande: thoughts on delivering better justice through science.

“X Files” by Julian Rubinstein: an Israeli-American TV salesman becomes a high-profile ecstasy dealer but his gangsta life implodes.

“The Day of the Attack” by Nancy Gibbs: an on-the-ground account of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“Anatomy of a Jury” by D. Graham Burnett: a university prof serves on the jury of a murder trial in New York City.

The book:

I was sorry to see this series canceled. This was the first volume (2002), and it was still called Best American Crime Writing. In 2007 it would change its title to Best American Crime Reporting. I’m not sure, but I think 2010 was their last year. When I went to look it up, I couldn’t find any mention of it on the Best American Series Wikipedia page, even under titles “formerly included in the series.” It’s like they hadn’t just canceled the series but tossed it down a memory hole.

That’s too bad, as it was an excellent annual anthology. There was always a good mix of stuff from top-shelf publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and GQ as well as less well-known regional outlets. The different sorts of crime, and perspectives on them, were also enjoyable, even if some stories seemed to go outside the series’ remit. In this book, for example, there’s a story on cockfighting but cockfighting, however disreputable, isn’t a crime, or at least wasn’t in Oklahoma at the time.

Because these are examples of crime reporting they are very much of the moment, which led me to go to the Internet to find out how some of them turned out. For example, in 2008 Penry reached an agreement where he is now serving three consecutive life sentences and is off death row. Subsequent U. S. Supreme Court jurisprudence has held that executing individuals with intellectual disabilities is unconstitutional, but the question of defining intellectual disability and whether a person is eligible for the death penalty remains the tricky part.

Some of the stories I didn’t care for. The 9/11 piece by Nancy Gibbs felt slapdash and overly dramatic, but apparently it was written in a day or two on a tight deadline after the attack. Something about Burnett’s account of jury duty sounded familiar and when I checked (I had to check) I found I’d reviewed his book-length treatment of the same material over twenty years ago. I called it “pretentious, self-dramatized nonsense” then, and reading over my review I’m inclined to agree with my younger self. With the benefit of hindsight, it also stands as an early example of the genre of true-crime memoir that I’ve since come to despise so I’d probably be even harsher on it today. But that’s a judgement I won’t be putting to the test as reading the story sure didn’t want me to go back and take another look.

For a collection like this it’s hard to point to much in the way of connecting threads. At least among the early stories though I did find the recurring theme of bad fathers to be interesting. In the O. J. Simpson story the refrain that he’s a family man becomes a sort of punchline delivered by his lawyer at regular intervals. When J. R.  Robinson was released on parole in 1991 (he’d been convicted of a series of frauds) his supervising psychiatrist described him as “a devoted family man who has taught his children a strong value system.” That wasn’t meant as a joke, but it registers as bitter irony. Tina Marie may have been sexually abused by her stepfather, and is, at least on some level, described as searching for a father for her young children before giving up on the quest, and them. And Rae Carruth is the ultimate bad dad, thinking nothing of having his latest baby mommy murdered. I’m sure being a father isn’t always easy, but these are all examples of epic fails. And bad parenting is really what gets a lot of things rolling downhill.

It’s a first-rate collection, and as I said at the top I’m sad the series didn’t stick. With most news media, “if it bleeds, it leads” is still a good rule of thumb that especially holds true in cases of crime writing/reporting. Maybe what this series needed was more violence. Honestly, I don’t understand why it wasn’t more successful. Perhaps the writing, which only on a couple of occasions strays into “literary” territory, was a little too polished and highbrow. When targeting a genre audience it’s important to know your market.

Noted in passing:

In 1993 Robinson moved into a mobile home development in Missouri named Southfork after the family ranch on the TV show Dallas, which had ended its run a couple of years earlier. The streets were all named after characters on the show: Sue Ellen Avenue, Cliff Barnes Lane, etc. I thought this was so bizarre I went online to see if it still existed. I’m not sure if it does, but there are apparently other such communities in other states even today. I just can’t imagine.

Everyone, or nearly everyone, who has had the misfortune of actually having to deal with an insurance company (aside from just giving them money) knows how difficult and unpleasant a process it can be. No, they don’t just show up on your doorstep with a cheque to compensate you for your loss. They’d like to, but there’s some fine print that says they can’t. And then there’s the deductible and other issues like if you’re going to replace whatever it is you’ve lost and with what. So whatever money you do get turns out to be a joke.

That is, unless the payout is really, really big. Then they don’t care at all. They’ll just give you a boatload of money, no questions asked. This is the standard operating procedure that at least one insurer pushed back against in Dead in the Water, while others just figured it was easier to give the scuttled ship’s owner whatever he wanted, despite the fishy circumstances. It was also the case in the story here about the racehorse Alydar. Again there was plenty of reason to be suspicious, but the insurer made no attempt to investigate or challenge the initial findings with regard to Alydar’s death and simply paid off the claim.

“It was as if those who made a living off the big horse farms – like the insurance adjusters and the veterinarians – realized it was not in their best interests to rock the boat,” Tomala [the FBI agent who pursued the case] says now. “Why risk losing any future business by asking too many questions?”

This is exactly the line taken by the ship insurance companies. Basically they’re fine with eating huge losses from rich clients but will rarely miss the chance to nail the little guy to the floor. That’s the way the system works. It’s the way it’s designed to work.

Takeaways:

You should probably be suspicious of anyone who presents himself as a devoted family man. Devoted family men are not that common, and they certainly don’t brag about it.

True Crime Files