TODAY IN CRIME: December 7

 

Fulvia With the Head of Cicero by Pavel Svedomsky

43 BC Two soldiers acting for the Second Triumvirate assassinated Roman orator and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero, the last defender of the Roman Republic, before he could flee to Macedonia. Mark Antony ordered his enemy’s severed head and hands nailed on the Rostra in the Forum Romanum—but first Antony’s wife Fulvia spat on Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and stabbed it with her golden hairpins as a final act of revenge against the power of his oratory.

1941 353 Japanese warplanes attacked the home base of the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing more than 2,300 Americans. Because the attack happened without a declaration of war and without explicit warning, judges at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials ruled the strike illegal—a war crime under the 1907 Hague Convention.

1972 Geodetic engineer Carlito Dimahilig attempted to assassinate Imelda Marcos, wife of Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos, on live television. Wielding a bolo—a long, heavy, single-edged knife—Dimahilig repeatedly stabbed Marcos, inflicting wounds that required 75 stitches, before the First Lady’s bodyguards shot and killed him. The attacker’s motive is unknown.

1974 President Makarios returned to Cyprus after five months in exile. He fled to London after a coup d’etat.

1982 At Ellis Unit near Huntsville, Texas, convicted murderer Charlie Brooks Jr. became the first prisoner in the U.S. to be executed by lethal injection.

1984 Michael Jackson testified in Chicago, IL, that he wrote the song "The Girl is Mine," not Illinois songwriter Fred Sanford. Sanford alleged the King of Pop copied his song "Please Love Me Now" and sued CBS Records for $5 million for copyright infringement. Jackson described his song-writing process to the jury and CBS won the case.

1987 Ticket agent David Burke, a disgruntled former employee of USAir, followed his ex-boss onto a Pacific Southwest Airlines British Aerospace 146-200A flying from Los Angeles to San Francisco and hijacked the plane. Burke, who had recently been terminated, used his credentials to bypass security and boarded with a .44-caliber Magnum pistol. He shot his ex-boss, the two pilots, and two others before the plane crashed, killing the remaining 38 people on board.

1992 The U. S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to a Mississippi law that required women to receive counseling and wait 24 hours before having an abortion.

1993 U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders suggested that the U.S. government study the impact of drug legalization as a possible antidote to urban violence. About a week later, Arkansas police arrested her son Kevin for selling cocaine.

1993 Gunman Colin Ferguson opened fire with a Ruger P-89 9mm on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train, killing six people and wounding 19 before three passengers tackled him to the floor. After a bizarre trial where Ferguson insisted on representing himself and questioned his own victims on the stand, the killer was convicted of six counts of murder and 22 counts of attempted murder and sentenced to 315 years in prison.

1996 A thief stole Jerry Lewis's white and red pinstriped devil suit from his dressing room at Shea's Performing Arts Center in Buffalo, New York. Lewis needed the $9,000 costume to play the role of Satan in the musical Damn Yankees.

1998 The Immigration and Naturalization Service granted jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval U.S. citizenship after a two-year legal battle. Sandoval, who defected from Cuba in 1990, had been denied citizenship because he once belonged to Cuba's Communist Party.

1998 U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno reported she would not seek an independent counsel investigation of President Clinton over 1996 campaign financing.

1999 A U.S. federal grand jury indicted former convict David Roland Waters in the 1995 disappearance of atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair. Waters, an employee of American Atheists, along with two accomplices, killed and dismembered O-Hair, her son, and granddaughter, then disposed of their mutilated corpses.

2002 In Amsterdam, Netherlands, two men stole two van Gogh paintings—“ View of the Sea at Scheveningen" and "Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen"—valued at 100 million dollars from the Van Gogh Museum. Professional art thief Octave Durham and accomplice Henk B used a ladder and broke in through a second story window, setting off the alarm system, but disappeared before police arrived. Forensic analysis lead police to the pair and they subsequently served time but the paintings were not recovered until 2016.

2011 U.S. District Judge James Zagel fined ousted Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich $20,000 and sentenced him to 14 years in prison for public corruption— he attempted to trade President Obama's vacated U.S. Senate seat in exchange for money or favors. The second former Illinois governor in a row to be sent to prison, Blagojevich served almost 8 years before President Trump commuted his sentence in 2020.

TODAY IN CRIME: September 21

 

1776 During the American Revolutionary War, British forces arrested American spy Nathan Hale as he attempted to cross back into American-controlled territory. He was caught with the intelligence he’d been gathering for several weeks behind British lines and was hanged the next day.

1780 American Revolutionary War General Benedict Arnold met with British Major John Andre and made plans for British forces to seize West Point, the fortress on the Hudson River under Arnold’s command, in exchange for 10,000 pounds and a British military commission. The conspiracy was uncovered, Major Andre captured and executed, and Arnold fled to England.

1792 The French National Convention formally abolished the monarchy.

1898 Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi seized power and imprisoned the Guangxu Emperor, her nephew and adopted son, ending the Hundred Days' Reform, a movement to modernize and reform China's imperial system that was vigorously opposed by the conservative elite.

1939 The Iron Guard, a fascist movement in Romania, assassinated Romanian Prime Minister Armand Călinescu with the approval and assistance of Germany.

1942 Horrors in the Ukraine: On Yom Kippur, the most revered holiday in Judaism, Nazis murdered 2,588 Jews in Dunaivtsi and sent more than 1,000 Jews of Pidhaitsi to Bełżec extermination camp.

1953 North Korean pilot Lieutenant No Kum-sok defected to South Korea with his Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 jet fighter. No received a $100,000 reward for being the first pilot to defect with an operational aircraft as well as asylum in the U.S. Five of his North Korean Air Force comrades and commanders, including his best friend, were executed by firing squad as punishment for his defection. 

1972 Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos began authoritarian rule by declaring martial law.

1976 Agents of Chile's secret police, under orders from dictator Augusto Pinochet, assassinated Chilean exile Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. with a car bomb. Letelier had been a member of the Chilean Marxist government of Salvador Allende, overthrown by Augusto Pinochet in 1973.

1981 The U.S. Senate unanimously approved Sandra Day O'Connor as the first female Supreme Court justice.

1985 American CIA case officer Edward Lee Howard fled to Russia after being identified as a KGB agent. He left a dummy made from stuffed clothes and an old wig stand in his car to fool the FBI agents following him. His book Safe House: The Compelling Memoirs of the Only CIA Spy to Seek Asylum in Russia explains his side of the story.

1993 Russian President Boris Yeltsin suspended parliament and scrapped the constitution, triggering a constitutional crisis.

1996 The U.S. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act. The federal law defined marriage as the union between one man and one woman and allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages sanctioned by other states. Subsequent Supreme Court decisions (United States v. Windsor [2013], Obergefell v. Hodges [2015]) have ruled it unconstitutional or rendered it unenforceable.

1998 American television networks publicly broadcast President Bill Clinton's August 17^th grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (This is the hearing where Clinton redefined “sexual relations” and argued the meaning of the word “is.”) The interview was taped at the insistence of the investigating team for the benefit of a jury member who could not attend the hearing. Members of the House of Representatives insisted on the release of the tape—along with 2,800 pages of supporting documentation—saying the public had the right to see all the evidence of the Starr Report.

2001 A gang of ten British Pakistani youths murdered Ross Parker, a white 17-year-old, in Peterborough, England, in a racially-motivated crime. Ross bled to death after being stabbed, beaten with a hammer, and repeatedly kicked. The Muslim community aided police in the capture of the perpetrators. Three defendants received life sentences and a fourth defendant was cleared of murder and manslaughter.

2019 The skies over Jambi province, Indonesia, turned red as the worst illegal forest fires since 2015 burned more than 800,000 acres and created respiratory problems for a million people. Fire is a cheaper and faster way to clear land than using heavy construction equipment, it provides a cheaper treatment than chemicals and fertilizers to create arable soil, and burned land can be sold illegally at a higher price. Environmental protection lawsuits against firms believed responsible for the fires have produced little change.