The saddest book

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, feathers, fly tying, salmon flies, natural history museums, crime, theft

First, some background. Points to remember:

• Salmon very seldom eat during their spawning run upriver. Those that do eat a little have been found to contain only salmon eggs in their stomachs, eggs from salmon that spawned already. This is for reasons to be mentioned below.
• Salmon are protective of their spawning areas. They will snap at something that they think is a threat, particularly if it looks like a large, swimming insect.
  
• They may also bite out of sheer annoyance.
• Salmon can see colors, but mainly in the red-orange-yellow part of the spectrum. Salmon eggs are orange, which is why they might eat a few; they can see them well. A gray "lure" would work no better nor wore than a brightly colored one.
• The so-called "salmon fly" isn't something they eat; it just happens to emerge around the time salmon are running the rivers. See the image:

The upper image is a salmon fly, of the variety found in Idaho and Montana. You can see it's rather big, about two inches; they get up to three inches. It is also drab in color, though the abdomen is kind of orange. These big insects are eaten by large trout, not by salmon.

The lower image is also called a salmon fly, one of the classic designs developed by Victorian fly-tiers. For someone who knows the natural history of salmon, one wonders, "What were they thinking?" These are for people, not for fish!

Trout are finicky eaters. The kind of insect a trout will "hit" varies almost by the week, as various species of May fly, stone fly, caddis fly, and so forth emerge, one after another. A wise fly fisherman will have tied (or purchased) dry flies that mimic the look of each insect that trout are looking for, and use the lure that fits the season. Color is no big deal to a trout; shape is.

Although a big trout looks a lot like a salmon, salmon are not trout. They don't live in the river year-round. They live at sea and eat at sea. Atlantic salmon go upriver to spawn, and they typically survive the experience. On the way back to sea they may eat, but they didn't eat on their way upriver. Pacific salmon die after spawning, and by the time of spawning their bodies have already begun to decay. As mentioned, if they eat at all on their way upriver, they eat the eggs of salmon who stopped earlier to spawn, eggs that didn't stay buried in the riverbed sediment. So they aren't looking for prey at all.

Victorian salmon flies were just artwork. Some self-promoters claimed to have caught salmon with their flies, but it is only because they succeeded in getting a salmon annoyed enough to defend itself. The truly unique attribute of the craft of tying classic salmon flies is the use of colorful feathers. The most colorful feathers come from tropical birds. Beautiful birds such as bird-of-paradise and trogon and blue chatterer.

The Victorian fly above, a replica of a classic, century-old design, was produced either from bits chicken and turkey feathers that were dyed appropriately, or from feathers of rare, endangered, or perhaps extinct birds. Most of the feathers needed for a classic "recipe" are illegal to possess in most Western countries. But guess what? That doesn't stop dedicated artists (some of whom actually fish, but not with their artworks!) from spending tons of money on feathers or even entire bird skins obtained by various means; sometimes legally for a few species, but more often with varying degrees of shadiness in a "don't-ask-don't-tell" industry.

Naturally, with big money changing hands, thievery isn't just likely, it is guaranteed from time to time. Where can feathers from rare or extinct species be found? All the attics that might have contained articles of clothing from the "feather boom" in the Victorian Era have been scoured. The usual target is a natural history museum. People have occasionally been caught leaving the research area of a natural history museum with a few bird skins in pockets or stuffed into their trousers. But there is one big heist, the one that (temporarily) rocked the fly-tying community. The Tring Museum Heist.

Kirk Wallace Johnson, an activist for refugees until about 2016, is an avid fisherman, finding solace in faraway places where he can stand hip-deep in a river fly fishing, for trout. When a guide showed him a couple of salmon flies (tied mainly to learn how), and then told of the Tring Heist, Johnson was intrigued. Intrigue soon became an obsession, which resulted in several years of travel, interviews, and tracking down a few secretive characters, culminating in the book The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century.

The central character is Edwin Rist, who apparently carried off the theft of 299 skins of 17 species of very sought-for birds, filling a large suitcase that he took into the Tring Museum in England through a window he broke. Had it not been for a thrilling soccer match going on at the time, the night guard might have seen the alarm light (no sound alarm was used), and caught Rist in the act. As it was, it took a month for the museum to realize it had been robbed, when a researcher wanted to study some specimens of birds collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Theory of Natural Selection. He found only an empty drawer.

I found the book very painful to read. By the end, it was clear that most "feather hobbyists" are contemptuous of the scientific mission of natural history museums. Many of them wonder why the museums don't support their hobby by "plucking off a feather here and there" and selling them. It doesn't matter to them that in the case of one species (read the book to find out which), the skins Rist stole represented more than half of all specimens ever collected, of a species now extinct.

Two-thirds of the skins that Rist stole were recovered, some when his apartment was raided, and others that were returned by his "customers" (he sold some on eBay, and others through a friend in Norway, whose reputation suffered greatly as a result). But for nearly all of them, the collecting tag or label had been removed and discarded. Without the information about where and when a specimen was collected, it is scientifically useless.

I'll give you an example. I work at a natural history museum part time, as a data manager (I have a minor in biology, which helps a great deal). One day, gathering information about certain freshwater mussels, I came across the drawers of Zebra Mussel (Dreissena polymorpha), the critter that invaded the Great Lakes in the late 1980's, carried in the ballast water of cargo ships. Its home range is Croatia, Ukraine, and southern Russia. The specimens collected before 1988 are all from Croatia and Ukraine. Later ones are all from Lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron, except for one from Russia. Besides the definite "invasion started on X date" that flags the invasion, studies of comparative morphology and perhaps DNA can be done to see how the animal may have changed in American waters, and perhaps whether their ancestors mostly came from the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea. If all the specimen labels were discarded, it would just be a bunch of boxes of small, striped shellfish, with little more one could glean from them.

Author Johnson ended his research, knowing that perhaps as many as 65 bird skins were still not accounted for, but stonewalled at every turn. He wrote what he could, and that is a fascinating, if saddening, story.

Johnson wonders if he was played by Rist and others. Edwin Rist didn't serve any prison time. His defense lawyer used an "Asperger's defense" to convince the judge that he wasn't "judicially responsible", whatever that may mean. Having confessed to his crime, he didn't have to go through a discovery trial, just a sentencing hearing. He is certainly bright enough to fool the psychologist who pronounced him a case of Asperger's Syndrome. Hmph! If he is, so am I. If the psychoanalyst who counseled me when I was 12 had known about Asperger's, she might have pigeonholed me there; as it was, I was pronounced "socially withdrawn" and encouraged to learn to understand people better. From what I read about Rist, he was, if anything, either never "on the spectrum", or got off it more rapidly than I did (and I did!).

Various figures, in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars (or pounds) are found throughout the book. One cannot properly appraise such losses. One cannot go back to 1860 and re-collect a certain bowerbird or trogon. To collect in the same location today, if the species still exists, is to collect specimens of populations that have continued to evolve for 160 years, which is more significant than most folks would imagine.

If you love natural history, plus detective stories, this is a great read for both. Maybe you won't find it as saddening as I do, and that's OK; most people aren't in a day-to-day environment where the rubber hits the road for researchers.

Political Math - Not so Clear-Cut

kw: politics, crime, population, economy, trends, charts

I have heard it claimed for years, by various "conservative" commentators, that the most crime-ridden American cities are led by Democratic administrations. I finally decided to gather some data and find out for myself.

The four pairs of charts presented below summarize data gathered from sources as reliable as I could manage to find. All were online. The basis was a table of crime statistics for 80 cities with population greater than 250,000. Based on data compiled by the FBI, it is found at this Wikipedia page. The population estimates are for 2009, and the crime statistics are mostly from 2014 (a few from 2013). Not perfect, but a usable start. U.S. population rose 4% from 2009 to 2014. Thus the numbers used are likely in error by no more then a few percent.

I also gathered the basic economic factor, GDP per capita, from the OpenData Network, where you can ask a question like "What is the GDP per capita for New York metro area?". The result is a map showing US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) with the area highlighted that you asked for. But then you can move the map around and click on each area of interest to see a summary for it. These data are also for 2014 (mostly). The highest GDP/person is for Oakland, California, just over $100,000/yr.

I used information found in Wikipedia and various city and county web sites to determine the political environment for each of the 80 cities. This was the most time consuming. On occasion, it is pretty easy to get the party affiliation for the Mayor and the City Council, or its equivalent, but usually only the Mayor's affiliation can easily be found. So I relied instead on the voting records that are conveniently compiled in the Wikipedia page for every county, to determine the county's political leaning, and the combination of the Governor, Lt. Governor (if there is one), and the congressional delegations, to determine the state's political leaning. I used 0, ½, or 1 for Republican, Moderate/Independent/Mixed, or Democratic, for each case. Then I combined these numbers into a single factor in which the Mayor had the most weight and the county had a little more weight than the state. I bucketed these into these categories that are shown in each chart's legend:

• Strong R (Red) – City, state, and county are represented by all or nearly all Republicans
• Mod. R (Magenta) – Significantly more R than D, but R not totally dominant
• Mixed (Purple) – Somewhere between 60/40 and 40/60
• Mod. D (Light Blue) – Significantly more D than R, but D not totally dominant
• Strong D (Dark Blue) – All three represented by all or nearly all Democrats

Now to the charts. First, Violent Crime in aggregate, normalized at incidents per 100,000 persons for the whole year:

You can click on this image to see it at full size (1672x519). Right away this seems to confirm the claims of the commentators I had heard. There is hardly anything but blue to be found above 1,000 violent crimes per 100,000 persons. However, the situation with the "Mixed" group is interesting. Crime is not in the lowest range, but the average range for these is the lowest of the five groups. And the situation for Democratically-controlled and -influenced cities is more nuanced. Many of the cities with the lowest crime also lean Democratic. For this category of crime, the safest city is Virginia Beach (Strong R), with 146, and the most dangerous is Detroit (Strong D), with 1,989.

The style of the Democratic politics clearly varies a lot, and this is worth looking into. Not that I am likely to do so any time soon. One thing I do happen to know: Two cities in Minnesota are right in the middle, Minneapolis with 1,012 and St. Paul with 663. A number of Strong R and Mod. R cities are also in this range. Democrats in Minnesota belong to a party called "Democrat-Farm-Labor", jokingly called "Democrat For Life". They are more conservative than "RINO" Republicans and even most of the so-called "Republican Establishment", while Minnesota Republicans are typically staunch conservatives, well to the right of the GOP Establishment.

I had thought that crime statistics might show some trend with city size, or with economy, but I see no clear trend here. Nonetheless, both parameters serve as a way of spreading out the data so that's how they'll be shown here and below.

Such nuances demand a deeper look than just one crime statistic. Knowing that homicide trends with violent crime in general, and is the crime that gets the most news play, I charted homicides:

Other than Chandler, Arizona (0.4 homicides per 100,000), the Strong R and Mod. R points all plot in the lower 2/3 of a bubble outlines by the other three categories, particularly Strong D. The upper part of the chart is dominated by blue markers. The "killingest" city in 2014 was Saint Louis (50 per 100K), not Chicago. I don't have current statistics to determine if this was still so in 2016, the year everyone is talking about. Thus, although details vary, this chart tells the same story as the prior one, that the Reds are a bit safer than the Blues, but the Purples are, by a small margin, the safest overall.

Let's look at crimes that are less violent. First, burglaries:

This is very interesting. Here, nobody "wins", at least no political party "wins". A handful of cities come off as very safe, led by, of all places, New York City, with 186 burglaries per 100,000. The place in which your home is most likely to be burgled is, by a small margin, Cleveland, with 1,788 burglaries per 100,000. But Toledo and Cincinnati are right up there with it (maybe there is something about Ohio…), and also Memphis. If there is any trend at all, it is that the Mixed category is still the safest in general, but only slightly.

Finally, let's look at auto theft. This is usually nonviolent, but I suspect carjacking was included in the statistic:

This resembles the first two charts a little bit more, in that Strong R and Mod. R cluster below Strong D and Mod. D. But, again, Mixed clusters below the average of all the others, though two such places crept above 500 thefts per 100,000: Bakersfield (621) and Dallas (524). The safest place to park your car is Virginia Beach (80) and the least safe is Oakland (1590).

These charts broadly support the contention that the most crime-ridden cities do tend to be led by Democrats, and in the few cases I looked into, the Democratic party has been entrenched there for decades. However, clearly not all Democrats are created equal! Several of the cities with overwhelming Democratic environments are among the safest cities in America.

I just had to devise one more chart. I normalized and combined the four statistics used above into one number. A dangerous generalization, to be sure, but here it is:

I know, I ought to have swapped the horizontal axis to put the R's on the right, but perhaps it is healthier for our mind to reverse such a convention once in a while. First, the five cities with the lowest Index scores:

• Virginia Beach, Virginia (0.331): P.E. = 0.25, Mod. R
• Plano, Texas (0.343): P.E. = 0.5, Mixed
• Chandler, Arizona (0.369): P.E. = 0, Strong R
• El Paso, Texas (0.465): P.E. = 0.55, Mixed
• Chula Vista, California (0.503): P.E. = 1, Strong D

And the five cities that "top the chart" with the highest Index scores:

• Detroit, Michigan (3.55): P.E. = 0.8, Strong D
• St. Louis, Missouri (3.22): P.E. = 0.8, Strong D
• Oakland, California (2.78): P.E. = 1, Strong D
• Cleveland, Ohio (2.62): P.E. = 0.8, Strong D
• Memphis, Tennessee (2.57): P.E. = 0.65, Mod. D

Is there any point in drawing further conclusions?

Why the war on terror is an illusion

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, terrorism, crime

Cast a net wide enough, and everyone will be in it. This is the single flaw in Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat by Jeffrey D. Simon. I'll get to that anon; otherwise, this excellent book is a comprehensive survey and diagnosis of a phenomenon that has always been with us, but could become much greater in the future.

We all know what is the greatest terrorism incident in U.S. history: the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by al Qaeda members in NYC and Washington, DC (the Shanksville, PA crash was probably intended to terminate in DC also). What was the second? The April 19, 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh and abetted by Terry Nichols.

It is hard to imagine a blast that large. I was in Stillwater, OK that day, and I heard the sound. Hearing what it had been on the radio later that evening, my wife and I went the next day to see it. The sight was amazing. So is the thought of a sound heard more than fifty miles away!

Simon introduces three themes:

• The lone wolf is changing the dynamics of terrorism.
• Technology plays a key role in terrorism, and this will increase.
• A lone wolf can me more creative and innovative than a group.

He traces the history of terrorists who worked alone, or with only minimal help, such as the help Terry Nichols gave to Timothy McVeigh in helping him construct the fertilizer bomb. The early examples are primarily assassins, such as John Wilkes Booth. But he includes John Gilbert Graham, the first person to bomb a commercial aircraft in 1955, whose motive was entirely pecuniary; he'd heavily insured his mother who unknowingly carried the bomb onto the plane. This is because he has produced five categories of terrorism:

• Religious – those such as radical Islamists or certain white supremacists who claim a religious motive for their racism.
• Secular (i.e. political) – those such as the assassins of presidents or other public officials, including Timothy McVeigh, and Joseph Stack, who flew a small airplane into an IRS building in 2010.
• Single-Issue – such as those who bomb abortion centers or sabotage logging equipment in old-growth forests.
• Criminal – those who perform terroristic acts for financial gain.
• Idiosyncratic – insane persons, such as schizophrenics or those with "antisocial personality disorder", driven by their delusions to kill or destroy. The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, is included here.

J.G. Graham was a criminal terrorist by this scheme. For that matter, so is the Mafia when its depredations erupt into the public sphere, though they are usually more circumspect in their tactics of intimidation. I find myself troubled by this classification.

I understand his reasoning, to a point. He includes as "terrorists" all who commit acts that cause public terror. If, for some reason, a group of organized criminals had committed the 9/11 attacks, then issued a demand for, say a few billion dollars ransom in return for not doing it any more, is that a terrorist incident? I think not. It is a kind of extortion. There is an entire category of actions for which people who intimidate others too severely are charged with "terroristic threatening", but they are not considered terrorists; they are considered extortionists or other kinds of criminal. So I would deny the category of "criminal terrorist". Otherwise, it will develop into a wide net that includes everyone who goes on a destructive spree, like the guy who blew a gasket and used a tractor to tear down a neighbor's house.

Setting that matter aside, I was (properly) unsettled by his analysis of lone wolf creativity. A loner is not bound to the decisions of a leader or a committee. Thus it was a lone wolf, Bruce Ivins, who first committed bio-terror in the modern era, by sending anthrax spores through the mail in 2001. It is not certain, though, whether his intent was criminal (seeking publicity leading to quicker acceptance of an anthrax vaccine he'd developed) or political (anger at those blocking his research). I wonder if the distribution of "smallpox blankets" among Indian tribes in the 18th Century qualifies as bio-terror, or was it "just" attempted genocide? Simon predicts it will be a lone wolf who first creates havoc with Cyberterror (haven't hordes of virus coders already done that? Most of them work alone).

In the late chapters, Simon turns his attention to ways to prevent lone wolf terrorism—indeed, of terrorism in general—and, failing that, ways to ameliorate the conditions that lead to terrorism. This I find most useful. Terrorism, particularly by small cells and lone wolves, is an arms race between law enforcement agents and the terrorists. For example, it took a generation, but you can now take training courses in defeating a Polygraph. And terrorists are always coming up with new ways to smuggle bombs or bomb-making materials into airplanes and other public venues; the police and TSA and Homeland Security are engaged in a "catch up" race.

I liked the discussion of biometric identification by video, coupled to a hot computer. The way people walk is characteristic, for example. But then I remembered things like putting a tight piece of duct tape between someone's shoulder blades, or taping two of their toes together, to change their posture and gait. These methods are pretty old hat, but could easily defeat a biometric ID scheme.

Simon considers the ways our government and society have aroused ire in others. It is pretty well known, for example, that a lot of Osama bin Laden's hatred for America arose from our cavalier treatment of Muslims and rather open denigration of Islam. But the fire in his belly was because of what he saw as a promiscuous, excessively sinful society. So we may be able to reduce some of the resentment by treating the Muslim countries more respectfully. But what do we do about those who plan to impose Sharia law on the entire world?

By the way, my Islamic friends: this sort of thing was tried by the Christians, several times, most recently by John Calvin in Geneva in the 1600s. It has never worked. The Catholic Church imposed Canon Law for a few hundred years on much of Europe, but it fell apart as people learned more and more about science and psychology. Ironically, much of the impetus for the overthrow of Canon Law during the Enlightenment came from rediscovery of Greek scientific texts that had been preserved by Islamic scholars. The current generation of Sharia promoters are trying to bury the effects their remote ancestors brought about!

I have wondered for a long time, if a society could be developed in which the greatest number of people could develop their genuine abilities and use them to the fullest. Even those we consider unsavory. During the long ages in which European laws required death for a wide range of infractions, kings and governments employed great numbers of executioners. The squeamish need not apply; there were plenty of psychopathic killers whose urges could be in some measure satisfied by such work. I don't know what we would do with people who like to pull wings off butterflies, but such activities are sublimating something else and better understanding of psychology just might ferret out the real motive, and help such a person find a calling that makes him happy without harming others. We Americans claim to believe that the basic rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. While it is foolish to believe we can help absolutely everybody actually to achieve happiness, it is worthwhile striving to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

Yet a very good society, were it achieved, would not eliminate terrorism, either by groups or by individuals. "There is no pleasing some people." So the continuing "war on terror" is actually a branch of criminal jurisprudence, where the action is domestic, or of international diplomacy. Overcoming criminality, including terrorism, is a permanent game of Tetris. The blocks keep falling, and you never quite get them all. And I remember a saying from the Vietnam War: "It is costing us a quarter million dollars for each Viet Cong we kill. We could pay them off for less than that." Is it too crazy a notion to think we can just bribe most of the potential terrorists? I mean, we could have BOUGHT Viet Nam for what the war cost us.

Yeah, I know, the ideologues and single-issue (e.g. anti-abortion) folks will never be satisfied. But a happier society would go a long way toward removing two or three of the five categories above. Worth thinking about.

A bibliophilic thriller

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, crime, books, libraries

The urge to collect is oddly human. Few other animals collect objects, and those that do, such as nesting birds, do not maintain permanent collections, nor become hoarders. What is the difference between a hoard and a collection? The index. Thus, libraries and museums result from turning hoards and accumulations into collections.

Huge industries subsist and even prosper from the urge to collect. Interestingly, the priciest objects, in monetary terms, are those that have no other value except as something collected. Fine art is at the top of the scale. A somewhat distant second is rare books and manuscripts. I wonder if the reason that a unique book sells for less than a unique painting or sculpture is that it has a use: you can read it, and the books that command the highest prices are those nobody would read. I just checked "first edition" on eBay and sorted by price. There are 7 items, out of about a million, with an asking price of $950,000 or greater. All for books you wouldn't be obtaining for reading purposes.

Even in bad times, collectors spend a lot, and in the worst of times, the wealthiest collectors continue to spend, unfazed by the poor economy. Some spend more, hoping for bargains as people who are running out of money auction off their treasures. Thus, the most lucrative period for book thieves was the Great Depression of the 1930s. A particular theft, of a nearly unread book, in 1931 led to a sea change in the attitude of librarians and law enforcement about book theft. Unraveling the case cracked open a ring of book thieves and crooked dealers, the most notorious up to that time, as chronicled in Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped it, by Travis McDade.


Edgar Allen Poe lived only 40 years, and was an active author for about 22 years: his first publications were poems, from 1827, and his first prose story was published in 1832. His second published poetry collection, a tiny volume really, was Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, in 1829. The edition of 400 was poorly received, and most were discarded unsold. Fewer than twenty copies survive, but the most celebrated has come to be a copy that made its way to the New York Public Library, via the Lenox Library, upon its opening in 1911. Ignored for 20 years, and protected by security practices that were exceptional for the times, it was nonetheless stolen in January 1931, whence began a hunt that crossed several state lines, though the book itself did not.

The book itself is inconsequential. Thieves and crooked book dealers (in the 1920s and 1930s, that term was a redundancy) know that it isn't worthwhile stealing the rarest, most valuable books, because every copy is well known, so to whom can you sell it without being arrested? A book having between 10 and 100 or so known exemplars is a safer target, and worth the trouble of bleaching or otherwise erasing the library marks (there are always library marks, even in this era of electronic 'tattle tape' protection systems).

And why steal from libraries? It is a great deal safer than stealing from a personal library, because libraries are public! Turn-of-the-Century America was in the midst of a shift in rare book possession. Prior to about 1900, a bibliophile could amass a costly book collection, and might sometimes sell some, but more usually, his (very rarely, her) heirs would auction the estate through an established book house. The book dealers were used to selling and re-selling the same book as it passed from private collection to private collection. The notion of establishing a legacy, and of endowment, began taking hold in late Victorian times, however, and the book collectors' heirs were more likely to donate the books to a major library. Perhaps the collector, upon finding no heir who loved books as he did, would will them to a library. Once there, they were typically there forever.

Of course, libraries weed out their stacks periodically, but do not discard their rarities. Those are intended to remain for eternity, for the benefit of scholars. So by about 1920, book dealers were faced with a thinning supply of rare, and thus pricy, books. A few began to commission thefts. Other thieves took note, and got into the book "business". Before long, any dealer who remained in business had learned not to inquire too closely into the source of a box or bag of books at very attractive prices.

Library "security" practices, being nearly nonexistent, allowed a brisk trade in these moderately rare books. Only a few libraries made much attempt to stem the tide. NYPL was one, with an effective system. But the system did have a few tiny holes, and a certain book thief and two accomplices must have thought the stars had all lined up perfectly when they were able to obtain the library's copy of Al Aaraaf and two other books of similar value, and get them out the door (down 3 stories and across a large, crowded, echoing hallway). The 3 books were soon in a safe owned by Harry Gold, where at least the Poe book sat until its retrieval many months later.

I found it hard to figure out who was "the man who stopped it." I find it a tossup between G. William Bergquist and Felix Ranlett. Seems it took them both. Ranlett was in Boston, at the outskirts of the book ring's activity. In the juiciest sentence in the book, McDade writes, regarding a related theft in Boston, "In the grand tradition of library theft, a person with little prior experience in the subject was assigned to handle the matter for the [Boston Public Library]."

Once the action returns to New York, Bergquist is at its center, so I suppose he is the one. Certainly, he engineered the turning of a certain Babyface Mahoney into a cooperating stooge, and the arrest of a certain Harold Clarke and eventually Harry Gold, who were behind the Poe theft, though the thief was Sam Dupree, in their pay.

It has been written, most famously by Doc Smith who wrote the Lensman books, that what technology can create, technology can duplicate or defeat. Tattle tapes and other electronic measures are the current weapons of choice in the arms race to reduce library book theft. A recent estimate is that major libraries lose about 5% of their rare book collections annually. That is about half what the figure was a century ago. There is a trade-off between the cost of better security systems, and the cost of just buying replacement copies. Most first editions sell in the range of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Hiring armed security costs $100,000 yearly, or more, and you can replace a lot of lost books for that. The system most small libraries use costs $20,000 to install and set up, and a few thousand yearly to maintain.

Thieves is a joy to read. McDade has the rare talent to pack a book with facts and keep the writing enjoyable. The book doesn't look large, but it is densely set in 9pt type, so there is a lot there, backed up by about 400 notes and references. Well worth the reading.

To some, it is just a million-dollar bill

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, art, crime, organized crime

There is an awful lot of art out there. Some we handle frequently: stamps and coins and currency. In the developed world at least, stamp and coin collecting are the two top hobbies. The things we are more likely to call "art"—paintings, sculptures, various tchotchkes, and better grades of furniture or clocks—are nearly universal. Every home I have been in has at least a picture or two on the wall that are something besides family photos, or maybe a small sculpture. Families have "grandpa's dining set" or "great-grandma's quilt". And it is fascinating to watch NPR's Antiques Roadshow, to see what people have inherited, or bought at a garage sale, or picked up on a trip abroad "because it was pretty", that is found to have collectible value.

On Antiques Roadshow, I have noticed that at least half the time the owner of a valuable piece is told its "insurance value". This is a hint: Now that it is known you have something worth $10,000 or $40,000, you'd better have it insured, because you are now a target for thieves. A note to any thieves who might think they know who I am: The only piece in my house worth more than a few bucks is a 100-year-old piano. It might be worth $2,000 because it is a major brand that holds up well (most pianos are no good after 50 years). But be cautious, it weighs twice as much as the usual parlor piano. That is why it still holds its tuning. For $2,000, you can fence a stolen Thomas Kincaid landscape that weighs only a pound or so, even less if removed from its frame.

We have seven levels of currency, $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills. In the art world, the Kincaid is a $2 bill. It isn't on the lowest rung, and its popularity is in a similar mental space to a $2 bill, a quirky taste. The $1 bills in art are seen on the walls of small galleries, local artists hoping to make a buck here or there, with their paintings priced in the $200 range, or their ceramics priced less than $100. Local art fairs are composed of booths that are full of this kind of art. And much of it is surprisingly good.

But a few contemporary artists "make it". I live in Wyeth country. Paintings by any of the three living Wyeths command prices in the $10,000-plus range (sometimes, a lot plus!). These are the $10 and $20 bills of the art world. And just like the real $20 that is the most frequently counterfeited, artworks in this price range are a popular currency of crime worldwide. And the hugely-priced "old Masters" and other works, with inflated "values" equal to the GDP of Mali? These $100 bills are called, by the real pros of art theft, "Headache Art". They get national or international attention if they are stolen, and then where can you sell them?

This concept of art as currency is the core around which Joshua Knelman built his book Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through the Secret World of Stolen Art. He didn't start out with this concept. He almost stumbled on his subject, being asked to report on an art theft in Toronto for a local news outlet. If I count right, there are no more than twenty people employed most- or full-time investigating art theft for the FBI, Interpol, and a very few national or city police departments. That is good news for thieves. Another thing thieves like is the handshake-trust nature or art transactions. Who would buy a $5 million Lear Jet without paperwork?

I don't have a count for the number of artworks out there, of course, or even for those whose whereabouts are unknown to their original owners, one database lists more than 200,000. Just in the Headache Art category, there are hundreds of missing Picassos, Van Goghs, Monets and Rembrandts. The bulk of the listings are the "small bills", and it may be that most of these are used as vehicles to launder money from other black market operations such as drugs or prostitution or illegal gambling. That makes art theft and "re-marketing" the fourth largest black market on the planet.

The book skips around, just as its author did, gathering a list of people he could interview and learn from. One key resource was Bonnie Czegledi, now with Interpol, but at the time an investigator whose phone list cracked open the field of art theft investigation, and helped him achieve access few have been granted. Another was the mysterious "Turbo Paul", a former middleman, one who commissioned thefts to order and passed them along into the gray margin of small "don't ask don't tell" galleries and auction houses.

My advice to someone who likes to own art. Buy from the artist. If you want older art, and you have to go to an auction or gallery, it is strictly buyer beware. You'd better know how to authenticate the piece, because oftentimes the gallery owner or auctioneer won't know for sure...and all too frequently, won't care. It's all about the money. The insane inflation in art prices has been good for everyone except the collector.

A second piece of advice is, if someone comes to your door asking to buy your "old junk", don't let the person in. They just want to case the place while paying half what the family silver is worth. The visit will almost certainly be followed up by a break-in. It is the way Turbo Paul started in the business, and it is still going on, in neighborhoods just enough upscale that $5,000 pieces are to be found, but don't think suburbia is exempt.

With very rare exceptions, the police are not on your side if your artworks are burgled. They don't care, even though in Los Angeles, from 1993 to 2008, two art theft detectives recovered $77 million in stolen art, while the rest of the force of 90 detectives recovered $64 million of other kinds of stolen property. It takes a certain kind of detective to work the art field, and they are so rare you can count them all if you take off your shoes.

Resources:

• IFAR - International Foundation for Art Research
• The Art Loss Register
• The Art Hostage blog

Kill a cop, get famous

kw: national events, observances, crime

Twenty-nine years ago today, Wesley Cook killed Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner. He bragged about it at the hospital. He was convicted of first-degree murder by a jury of ten whites and two blacks, and sentenced to die. He hasn't.

What has dies is the American justice system. Wesley Cook, who has taken the name Mumia Abu-Jamal, has become the symbol of getting ahead by doing evil. He is more famous than Al Capone, has had a street in France named for him, is staunchly defended by thousands of ignorant, misguided public figures, and has been invited to speak at college and high school commencement exercises, as he continues to thumb his nose at the right of a civilized society to make totally certain he will not commit murder again, by killing him. If ever someone "needed killing", it is him.

You can get more information from the official Daniel Faulkner web site. Be patient, the site is getting huge numbers of visitors, plus a huger number of "denial of service" accesses by immoral opponents.

Genius versus Brilliant

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, crime

In 1698, Isaac Newton, after two years as Warden of the Royal Mint, found his work called into question because of allegations made by…a counterfeiter. Though not quite called up before the dock, he had to defend himself because at least some in Parliament had been swayed by the claims of malfeasance in the Mint made by one William Chaloner. Chaloner had some fame as a betrayer of a Jacobite plot, which gave him a measure of unwarranted credit. It was unknown at the time that he had set up the plot with the intent to betray it and thus gain that very credit. His aim, however, was to obtain an official post in the Mint, the more easily to corrupt the currency. This, on the heels of an effort, led by Newton, that de-corrupted a famously vulnerable monetary system.

Fortunately, Newton was able to fend of this attack and brush off others. He finally had Chaloner brought to justice a year later. But how did Isaac Newton, mathematician extraordinaire, the most famous scientist in England, become first Warden then, after 1700, Master of the Mint? What turned this academic don into a hard-boiled detective, who hired little crooks to catch bigger ones, and did not hesitate to send "clippers and coyners" to their doom on the gallows? A large biography of Isaac Newton that I read years ago hardly provides five paragraphs on this portion of his life.

Thomas Levenson begins Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist with two mini-biographies, one of the young Newton, the other of the young Wm. Chaloner. Each rose to the pinnacle of his chosen profession, the one to riches and honor, the other to temporary riches and then the end of a short rope. We see how the laboratory habits of mind that served Newton so well were equally useful in criminal investigation. Indeed, he seems to have invented the kind of network of informants that is so routinely used by modern police detectives. And we see how another brilliant mind was always and ever turned to criminal pursuits, to playing a deep game that kept him far from the bleeding edge of blame, at the center of his own network of minions.

Criminal detection thrives on information. Even today, many investigations are hampered by the tendency of some enforcement agencies to keep their information close. Sharing is rare. Nobody can "connect the dots". The problem was much keener in the 1680s. Newton, who spent a year and more on the effort to reform British coinage and eliminate clippable coins, had no way at first to know his post was being stalked by a criminal bold enough to attempt to take over the Mint, a criminal who produced gilded pewter/lead slugs that looked better than the real thing. Newton knew none of this for many months. It was only once he had built up his own information network that he could learn who the players were in the great counterfeiting enterprises, and focus upon the most dangerous of them all, William Chaloner.

Chaloner epitomizes the theme of an old popular song: "I fought the law and the law won." By betraying the Jacobite plot he had set up, he won a monetary reward from Parliament. By dint of clever accusations, he persuaded that august body to reward him further for demonstrations of superior coining techniques (in spite of the fact that any Member with the brain of a turtle might have realized he was eminently skilled in counterfeiting). But his attempts to attain access to the Mint failed, because the Warden, Newton, would have none of it, and once he realized that his accuser was his prime target, he relentlessly pursued the evidence he would need to hang him.

It is likely that the criminal didn't realize, until perhaps a day or two before his demise, the quality of mind he'd set himself up against. The very lack of information flow that hampered Newton also hampered Chaloner, so that he thought slow action bespoke a slow mind. He learned instead, one must beware a patient man. Newton, patient? With his scientific peers he could be short, even abrupt, but he had the patience to spend decades upon the equations of gravity. He was equally patient and persistent, treating Chaloner's case as an equation to be solved, and solve it he did.

A fascinating account, which rounds out Newton's character compared to the more standard biographies I have read.

They're following Winnie's advice

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, crime, police work, homicide

Winston Churchill is noted for saying (I must paraphrase), "Never give up. Never, never, give up." For New York Police Department's Cold Case Squad, just ten years old, this could be the motto. Stacy Horn, in The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City's Cold Case Squad, has opened at least a keyhole into the (mostly) men whose job it is to crack the hardest cases.

Test pilots are famous for the saying, that their job is long periods of boredom spiced with brief moments of sheer terror. I suppose you could say this about detective work too, except that the terror is (fortunately) even more rare...but the boredom is, if anything, more mind-numbing.

In a typical TV show or film about police work, the ratio of "routine" detection—tracking down leads, talking to people who don't want to talk to you and mostly don't care if you drop dead, making endless phone calls, choking back your bile while negotiating with yet another even-more-bored bureaucrat—takes up no more than 40% of the screen time. The action has to be at least 60% or nobody will watch it, or recommend it to a friend.

Popular cop shows are full of lab "AHA" moments, DNA testing, forensic tricks, thrilling chases, and sensational arrests. Most of the fancy stuff isn't worth the time, most of the time. Today's sexy topic, DNA fingerprinting, is mostly too expensive.

In reality, action worth telling your grandkids is at most a percent, maybe 0.1%, of time spent. It takes a special kind of mind to survive a job like that. Stacy Horn introduces us to a big handful of such men—and no women, for good reason—and profiles four or five in some detail, while weaving into the narrative glimpses of the mini-worlds surrounding the Squad's realm: the case files and their endless stacks of DD5 forms; the evidence warehouses, where some small fraction of the evidence related to tens of thousands of murders (and maybe a couple million other crimes) is kept...and often lost; the labs they do use when they have evidence worth a professional look; and particularly, the neighborhoods they canvass over and over again, gleaning the tiniest of clues and fast-fading memories.

Why no women? Women and men think differently. I've had a couple of friends over the years who were policewomen; one was a detective. They bring different skills, and valuable ways of looking at evidence and personalities to police work. Both freely admitted they couldn't do the "street work" of homicide investigation. There are likely other reasons. If there are any women working Cold Case homicides, Horn doesn't mention any.

I got into a rant a few postings back, about crudity in public culture. While I have a few quibbles with the author's language when he is speaking for himself, I have none when he is quoting his subjects. Nor when he describes the crime scenes and mostly seedy settings where the great majority of murders take place. The subject doesn't lend itself to reading while eating, and I think the author uses no more ugliness than is warranted by the material.

For me, reading about some of the things done by the murderers mentioned in the book confirmed my support for capital 'punishment.' I use quotes, because putting a murderer to death is not really punishment. It is our only way to be totally sure he or she will not murder again.

There is little comfort in Cold Case work. It is an ugly necessity, if only to mitigate, at least a little, the proportion of evil persons. Horn makes it clear that few of these detectives are 'nice guys.' They are hard, tough, and aggressive. They have to be. If some of them are jerks, it's the price to be paid for bringing, if not quite justice, at least finality, to old crimes.