TODAY IN CRIME: November 2

619 Emperor Gaozu, founder of the Tang dynasty of China, allowed an envoy of the Eastern Turk Khaganate to assassinate a qaghan (emperor) of the Western Turkic Khaganate after a banquet in Gaozu's palace. When everyone was replete with food and drink, Gaozu lured the emperor to an empty office where he was set upon by assassins. The powerful Eastern Turks made better friends than enemies, and this way Gaozu could repay them for their help during his march on Chang'an.

1859 A Charles Town, Virginia, jury sentenced abolitionist John Brown to death by hanging. On October 31 the jury had found him guilty of murder, conspiring slaves to revolt, and treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia for his raid at Harper's Ferry October 16-18.

1959 Twenty-One game show contestant Charles Van Doren admitted to the U.S. Congress that he had been given questions and answers in advance.

1960 In London, a jury of nine men and three women found Penguin Books not guilty of obscenity by publishing the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.

1963 Army of the Republic of Vietnam Majors Nguyễn Văn Nhung and Dương Hiếu Nghĩa assassinated South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother, political advisor Ngô Đình Nhu, on the orders of RVN General Dương Văn Minh in a coup d'état. With the brothers tied up in the back of an armored personnel carrier, Nhung lunged at Nhu with a bayonet and stabbed him 15-20 times, shot Diem in the head with a semi-automatic, then turned and shot Nhu. No one was ever charged in the killings but Nhung was later executed. His cohort Nghĩa survived the Fall of Saigon. Junta leader Minh was himself deposed in a bloodless coup three months later.

1964 Saudi Arabia formally deposed King Saud and replaced him with his half-brother Faisal.

1965 Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker, doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire outside the Pentagon office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war.

1966 The Cuban Adjustment Act took effect, allowing Cuban refugees the opportunity to apply for permanent residence in the U.S.

1979 Black militant Assata Olugbala Shakur escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey, where she'd been serving a life sentence for the 1973 murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. She fled to Pittsburgh; eventually Cuba granted her political asylum. In 2013 she became the first woman added to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list; there is a two-million-dollar reward for her return.

1984 Convicted murderer Velma Margie Barfield became the first woman to be executed since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. No woman had been executed in the U.S. since 1962. Barfield confessed to killing at least five people, although she was tried and executed for only one homicide—poisoning boyfriend Rowland Stuart Taylor with arsenic.

1985 The South African government imposed strict rules of censorship on all media coverage of unrest by both local and foreign journalists. The press of South Africa is still considered only partly free.

1986 Shiite Muslims released American kidnap victim David Jacobsen after holding him in Lebanon for 17 months.

1988 Cornell graduate student Robert Morris launched the Morris worm, the first highly publicized Internet-distributed computer worm, from the computer systems at MIT. In 1990, Morris was the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for penetrating and crippling 6,000 "federal interest" computers nationwide. The U.S. District Court of NDNY sentenced him to three years' probation, 400 hours of community service, a $10,050 fine, and costs of his supervision.

1993 The U.S. Senate voted 94-6 to demand full disclosure of Senator Bob Packwood's diaries in a sexual harassment probe. Packwood resigned from the Senate the previous month under threat of expulsion after 19 women came forward alleging sexual harassment, abuse, and assaults. His diaries confirmed the allegations.

1995 Eleven former senior military officers, including former South African defense minister General Magnus Malan, were arrested and charged with the murders of 13 people in the KwaMakhutha apartheid massacre in 1987. All were eventually acquitted.

1995 The U.S. banned Daiwa Bank Ltd. from operating in the United States for allegedly covering up $1.1 billion in trading losses incurred by New York bond trader Toshihide Iguchi over a 12-year period. Daiwa paid a record $340-million fine to settle the fraud case and Iguchi spent four years in prison.

1999 In the worst mass murder in the history of Hawaii, Xerox service technician Byran Koju Uyesugi shot eight people with a Glock 17 handgun at the Xerox building in Honolulu, killing his supervisor and six coworkers. Uyesugi was facing dismissal for refusing to take training on new machines and "decided to give them a reason to fire me."

2010 California voters rejected a statewide ballot measure that would have made the Golden State the first to legalize marijuana for recreational use. The Adult Use of Marijuana Act did succeed in 2016.

TODAY IN CRIME: October 12

 

1692 Massachusetts Bay Governor William Phips halted the Salem witch trials. His letter to the Privy Council of King William and Queen Mary cited “what danger some of their innocent subjects might be exposed to…if the evidence of the afflicted persons only did prevaile." Phips disallowed such "spectral evidence"—descriptions of abuses committed by the accused's spirit in witnesses' visions and dreams—in the new court he established.

1871 The British in India enacted the Criminal Tribes Act, naming many local communities "Criminal Tribes." The legislation was ostensibly enacted to combat thugees but declared everyone belonging to certain castes to be born with criminal tendencies and required adult males of the named tribes to report weekly to local police.

1915 In WWI, a German firing squad executed British nurse Edith Cavell for helping 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium.

1933 The Pierpont Bunch broke John Dillinger out of the Lima, Ohio, city jail to pay him back for his help in planning their jailbreak a few weeks before. Disguised as Indiana State Police officers, the three men claimed they had come to extradite Dillinger to Indiana. When Sheriff Jesse Sarber requested their credentials, Pierpont shot him dead, then released Dillinger from his cell.

1960 Seventeen-year-old Japanese ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi stabbed to death Japan Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma during a televised political debate. Photographer Yasushi Nagao won a Pulitzer Prize for his picture of the assassin attempting to thrust the sword a second time. Police captured Yamaguchi at the scene and he hanged himself in his cell at a juvenile detention center less than three weeks later.

1963 The Soviet Union released Jesuit priest Reverend Walter Ciszek after imprisoning him for nearly 23 years. Ciszek had conducted clandestine missionary work in the Soviet Union for more than twenty years before he was arrested by the Soviet secret police.

1972 During the Vietnam War, a brawl between Black and white sailors broke out aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk off the coast of North Vietnam. Nearly 50 sailors were injured. The Navy charged 26 Black sailors with assault and rioting and ordered a court-martial in San Diego, where four were convicted of rioting, fourteen of assault, and four found not guilty of all charges; the rest had the charges dropped. Most were demoted in rank. In the aftermath, the Navy instituted reforms to address racial inequality in the ranks.

1978 Police arrested rocker Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, the same day Spungen bled to death on the bathroom floor of their room in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. The twenty-year-old died from a single fatal stab wound to the abdomen. Vicious died of a heroin overdose before his murder trial began.

1983 Japanese former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka was found guilty of taking a $2 million bribe from the Lockheed Corporation, sentenced to four years in jail, and fined 400m yen. His sentence remained under appellate review until he died ten years later.

1984 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet escaped an assassination attempt by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. A bomb planted by the group at a hotel in Brighton, England, exploded, killing five people and wounding 31.

1988 Members of the Melbourne underworld gunned down two officers of the Victoria Police execution-style in Melbourne, Australia. The perpetrators were responding to local police fatally shooting an armed robbery suspect the day before.

1995 New York state released rapper Tupac Shakur from prison on $1.4 million bail pending an appeal of his conviction for sexual assault. Suge Knight of Death Row Records posted the bail in exchange for Shakur releasing three albums under the Death Row label.

1998 Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, died five days after he was beaten, robbed, and left tied to a wooden fence post outside of Laramie. His two attackers were found guilty of murder.

1999 General Pervez Musharraf overthrew the democratically elected government of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup.

2000 Two al-Qaeda suicide bombers exploded a small craft next to the US Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors and wounding at least 39.

2002 A bomb exploded in the Sari Club, a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people and wounding more than 300. Authorities blamed Islamic militants linked to al-Qaida.

2011 Nigerian al-Qaida operative Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty to trying to bring down a jetliner with a bomb in his underwear minutes before the plane landed in Detroit, Michigan, on Christmas Day, 2009. Charges against him included the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and the attempted murder of the 289 people on the plane. A federal court judge sentenced him to four consecutive life sentences plus 50 years.

2019 The partially constructed Hard Rock Hotel, a luxury complex on Canal Street in New Orleans, collapsed, killing three and injuring 20. Local news media uncovered evidence of improper structural work and negligent city inspectors as factors leading to the tragedy; OSHA is still investigating the incident.

TODAY IN CRIME: September 7

 

Tower Hill, London

1303 Backed by 1600 men, royalist Guillaume de Nogaret took Pope Boniface VIII prisoner at his Palace in Anagni, Italy, on behalf of King Philip IV of France. Philip’s plan was for Nogaret to take Boniface to France to face charges of heresy, corruption, and committing various mortal and venal sins before a general council. Before that could happen, though, the Pope excommunicated both conspirators, and Nogaret’s forces, facing too much local opposition, fled back to France and the Pope was free.

1571 Authorities returned Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, to Tower Hill and held him on charges of treason for his role in the Ridolfi plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I of England and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.

1695 In one of the most profitable pirate raids in history, British pirate Henry Every captured the trading ship Ganj-i-Sawai of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb on its way from Yemen to India. In response, Aurangzeb closed all ports in India to English ships until Every was caught and executed, igniting a global manhunt. The East India company compensated the Great Mughal for his losses—£325,000 to £600,000. Every and most of his crew were never caught.

1857 In southern Utah, Mormon John Doyle Lee led 50 to 60 Mormon militiamen disguised as Native Americans, along with Paiute allies, in an attack on a wagon train of Arkansas emigrants traveling to California. The Mormons feared outsiders (and the U.S. Army) were plotting an invasion of Utah and suspected some of the Arkansans in the death of Mormon Apostle Parley Pratt. The fighting continued for five days and left 120 migrants dead. After two trials, Lee was convicted of first-degree murder and shot at the site of the massacre on March 23, 1877.

1876 In Northfield, Minnesota, Jesse James and the James–Younger Gang attempted to rob the town's bank but were driven off by a mob of armed and angry citizens. Town residents killed two robbers that day; a posse killed or captured four more gang members after a 14-day manhunt while Jesse and Frank James escaped.

1911 French police arrested poet Guillaume Apollinaire on suspicion of aiding and abetting the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre museum. Even Picasso was brought in for questioning. Both men were exonerated. The real thief, Italian house painter Vincenzo Peruggia, was caught two years later when he tried to sell the painting in Florence.

1923 In Vienna, 22 delegates formed the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC), the direct forerunner of INTERPOL. Today, INTERPOL has 194 member countries, making it the world's largest police organization.

1978 Bulgarian secret police agent Francesco Gullino fired a ricin pellet from a specially-engineered umbrella into the leg of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov as he walked across Waterloo Bridge in London. Markov died four days later. According to some reports, the Bulgarian police had arrested Gullino on smuggling charges and gave him the choice of going to prison or becoming a secret agent.

1986 Members of Marxist guerilla group the Patriotic Front of Manuel Rodríguez ambushed Chilean President Augusto Pinochet's motorcade on its way back to Santiago. Firing on the convoy with machine guns, rifles, bazookas, and hand grenades, the guerillas killed five bodyguards and wounded eleven but inflicted only a hand wound on the president. Pinochet's grandson, protected by his grandfather, survived unharmed. Pinochet said he did not fear his opponents. "Try to kill me," he said. "I'm a soldier, I'm ready."

1996 An unknown assailant fired shots into the car of hip hop artist Tupac Shakur after he attended a Mike Tyson boxing match in Las Vegas, Nevada. Shakur suffered four .40 caliber rounds from a Glock 22—two in in the chest, one in the arm, and one in the thigh—and died six days later. He was 25. Bullet fragments hit passenger Suge Knight, causing slight injuries. Shakur's entourage was headed for an anti-violence fund-raiser at Knight's Club 662. Suspect Orlando Anderson was himself murdered before he could be charged.

2000 Police arrested rocker Timothy Commerford of Rage Against the Machine for resisting arrest and disorderly conduct during the MTV Music Awards. The bassist shimmied up a 15-foot-high scaffold and rocked it back and forth, disrupting Limp Bizkit's acceptance speech for Best Rock Video and delaying the show 20 minutes, before stagehands and security talked him down.

2006 Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage confirmed he was the source of a leak that disclosed the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame to journalist Robert Novak. Armitage claimed he didn't realize Plame's job was covert.

2008 The U.S. Treasury Department placed troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in government conservatorship.

2017 American credit bureau Equifax announced a data breach potentially impacting 140 million consumers in the U.S. Exposing millions of names and dates of birth, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, and other personal information, the breach was one of the largest cybercrimes related to identity theft. Equifax agreed to pay $575 million in a global settlement with the FTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and all 50 U.S. states and territories.

2019 Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and 69 others were released in a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia. Sentsov, an outspoken opponent of Ukraine’s former pro-Russian government and of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and 24 Ukrainian sailors captured by Moscow when warships seized three naval vessels in the Kerch Strait in 2018 were among those released, while Russian prisoners released to Moscow included Volodymyr Tsemakh, a suspect in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that killed 298 people.