The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [2]
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