TODAY IN CRIME: October 19

1765 Nine American colonies united to draw up a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances” opposing the Stamp Act, which ordered colonists to pay yet more taxes—without representation. Eventually all thirteen colonies adopted the Declaration.

1864 21 Confederate soldiers based in Canada robbed three banks in St. Albans, Vermont, killed a local man, then escaped back across the border. Their goal, in addition to raising funds, was to convince Union generals the northern border posed a significant threat and troops were needed there. A U.S. posse captured several raiders but Canadian authorities ordered their release.

1921 Radical members of the Portuguese Army, Navy, and National Republican Guard set up artillery in Lisbon and forced the government of Portuguese Prime Minister António Granjo to step down. When President António José de Almeida refused to allow the rebels to take over, Corporal Abel Olímpio drove a "ghost van" through the streets of Lisbon looking for National Republican Party politicians on a hit list and led the radicals in the assassination of P.M. Granjo and several cabinet members. The perpetrators were judged and condemned in court.

1943 Allied aircraft bombed and sank the cargo vessel Sinfra at Crete, drowing 2,098 Italian prisoners of war crammed in the cargo hold.

1944 The "October Revolution" of Guatemala started when a small group of army officers launched a coup against the military junta of Juan Federico Ponce Vaides that was set up by U.S.-backed dictator Jorge Ubico after he was forced to resign. Oppressed citizens across the country joined the pro-democracy movement and replaced the junta with one that promised free and open elections.

1960 Police arrested Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and 51 others after they refused to leave their seats at a segregated lunch counter in an Atlanta department store. Judges dismissed charges against 16 of the protesters at their first court appearance but Dr. King was held on a charge of violating his probation and sentenced to six months’ hard labor. Presidential candidate JFK helped secure Dr. King's release.

1970 "Killer Prophet" John Frazier, convinced he was obeying the word of God, invaded the home of California ophthalmologist Victor Ohta and bound Ohta, his wife, two sons and a secretary, shot them all dead, threw their corpses in the swimming pool, then wrote a note on Ohta's typewriter declaring the start of WWIII and left it on Ohta's Rolls Royce. Deputies staked out Frazier's shack and arrested him October 23. Tried and sentenced to death, he received a commutation to life imprisonment; he hanged himself in his cell in 2009.

1973 U.S. President Nixon rejected an Appeals Court decision that he turn over the Watergate tapes.

1976 U.S. President Gerald Ford signed the Copyright Act of 1976, the first major revision of American copyright law since 1909. It extended federal copyright protection to all works, both published and unpublished, once they are fixed in a tangible form.

1977 French authorities found the body of kidnap victim Hanns-Martin Schleyer in the trunk of an Audi 100 on the rue Charles Péguy in Mulhouse. The Red Army Faction, a West German far-left militant organization, kidnapped the industrialist and former SS officer in September and demanded the release of four RAF members being held at Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart. The German government refused to negotiate and even prevented Schleyer's family from offering 15 million Deutschmarks as a ransom. After three of the RAF fanatics were found dead in their cells October 18, the kidnappers shot and killed Schleyer.

1982 Police arrested automaker John DeLorean on charges of conspiracy to obtain and distribute 55 pounds of cocaine worth $24 million. He was acquitted two years later.

1984 Three agents of the Polish Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs kidnapped Roman Catholic priest Jerzy Popiełuszko, chaplain of the Polish “Solidarity” trade union, on his way home from a prayer service. His captors tortured and hog-tied him, then bound him up, attached rocks to his body, and threw him over a dam to drown. The intelligence agents were tried and convicted of the murder.

1986 Mozambique President Samora Machel, leader of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) who led the Mozambican people in their fight for independence from Portugal, along with 33 others, died when their aircraft crashed into the Lebombo Mountains in South Africa. Some observers believe the apartheid regime of South Africa set up a false beacon to lure the plane off-course.

1988 The British government imposed a broadcasting ban on television and radio interviews with members of Sinn Féin and eleven Irish republican and Ulster loyalist paramilitary groups.

1989 The Court of Appeal of England and Wales quashed the convictions of the Guildford Four after they had spent 15 years in prison for the pub bombings in 1974 Surrey that killed four soldiers and one civilian and wounded 65 others. The Met forced false confessions out of Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong, and Carole Richardson and they were wrongly convicted; the Balcombe Street Gang of the Provisional Irish Republican Army later claimed responsibility.

1989 The U.S. Senate rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have banned the desecration of the American flag, with 51 Senators voting in favor of the amendment and 48 voting in opposition. Congress passed the Flag Protection Act nine days later, but in June 1990 the Supreme Court ruled (United States v. Eichman) the Act violated the right of free speech under the First Amendment.

1998 Rock music fan Mark Nieto filed a lawsuit against the rock group Aerosmith for alleged hearing loss after he attended a “Nine Lives” concert at the Concord Pavilion amphitheater in Concord, California, the year before. Nieto claimed he was not made aware of possible hearing loss before the show.

1998 Members of the Earth Liberation Front set fire to several lifts and buildings at Vail Ski Resort in Colorado, claiming expansion of the resort was causing irreparable harm to area wildlife. The eco-terrorists caused $12 million in damages. Two members pleaded guilty, one suspect was finally captured 20 years later, and another remains at large.

2004 Thai officials announced the State Peace and Development Council ousted Myanmar prime minister Khin Nyunt and placed him under house arrest on charges of corruption. He was released in 2012.

2005 A defiant Saddam Hussein pleaded innocent to charges of pre-meditated murder and torture and argued with the Iraqi Special Tribunal on the opening day of his trial in Baghdad. He was sentenced to death by hanging a year later.

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: October 5

 

610 Heraclius arrived at Constantinople, killed Byzantine Emperor Phocas—beheading him on the spot—and declared himself emperor.

1607 Venetian statesman and scientist Paolo Sarpi survived an attack by stiletto-wielding assassins sent by Pope Paul V. Sarpi retired to his cloister and the would-be assassins received pensions from the viceroy of Naples.

1838 A band of Cherokee Native Americans killed or kidnapped 18 Texan settlers in East Texas in response to a broken treaty.

1877 Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians surrendered to the U.S. Army in Montana after trekking 1,000 miles attempting to reach political asylum in Canada.

1892 The Dalton gang tried to rob two banks simultaneously in Coffeyville, Kansas. The townspeople recognized them, however, and ran to nearby hardware stores for weapons. When the gang left the banks, the people were ready. In the ensuing gun battle, two Dalton brothers and two other gang members were killed; four citizens defending their town were killed and three more wounded. A third Dalton was captured and sentenced to life in prison.

1910 The Portuguese Republican Party overthrew King Manuel II in a revolution and Portugal became a republic. The exiled king fled to England.

1985 Egyptian soldier Suleiman Khater machine-gunned seven Israeli tourists—three adults and four children—for trespassing on a prohibited area at a Sinai beach. He also shot an Egyptian police officer who attempted to arrest him and wounded four Israeli civilians. Two weeks into a life sentence, Khater died of an apparent suicide.

1989 A jury in Charlotte, N.C., convicted former PTL evangelist Jim Bakker of using his TV show to defraud followers. Bakker served nearly five years in prison.

1990 A Cincinnati jury acquitted Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center and its director Dennis Barrie of obscenity charges for exhibiting Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial photographs.

2000 Huge mobs rampaged through Belgrade and ousted Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic. He had been defeated in a presidential election but refused to step down. He finally resigned on October 7.

2005 Defying the White House, the U.S. Senate voted 90-9 to approve the Detainee Treatment Act that would prohibit the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against any prisoner of the U.S. Government, including those in custody at Guantanamo Bay.

2010 A New York federal judge sentenced Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani immigrant who'd tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, to life in prison.

2011 Eight members of a Myanmar drug-trafficking ring hijacked two Chinese cargo ships on the Mekong River and shot or stabbed thirteen crew members before throwing them in the river. River police recovered 900,000 amphetamine pills on the ships. Drug lord Naw Kham and three accomplices were executed in China while members of an elite Thai anti-drug task force suspected of being involved in the massacre "disappeared from the justice system."

TODAY IN CRIME: September 28

48 BCE Officers under orders from King Ptolemy of Egypt fell upon Roman general Pompey as soon as he stepped foot in Egypt after his defeat by Caesar. The assassins stabbed him to death, cut off his head, and threw his naked body into the sea. Ptolemy hope to gain favor with Caesar for the assassination but the dictator was appalled because he’d planned to pardon Pompey, his most ardent rival.

235 Roman emperor Maximinus Thrax, an opponent of Christianity, exiled both Pope Pontian and anti-Pope Hippolytus, church leader of Rome, to the mines of Sardinia, a certain death sentence.

365 Roman usurper Procopius bribed two legions passing by Constantinople and proclaimed himself emperor. Two of his generals betrayed him to the rightful emperor, though, and he was beheaded a few months later.

935 Nobleman Boleslav I the Cruel and three allies stabbed to death Boleslav's older brother, Duke of Bohemia Wenceslas I, on his way to mass. Boleslav became the Duke and “Good King” Wenceslas became the patron saint of the Czech state. Every year on this day, the Archbishop of Prague parades the skull of St. Wenceslas through the town of his murder, Stará Boleslav.

Sixty years later to the day, Boleslav’s son, Boleslav II the Pious, murdered most members of the rival Slavník dynasty—Spytimír, Pobraslav, Pořej and Čáslav—and added their land to his dukedom.

1787 The U.S. Congress sent the new Constitution to the states for their approval.

1850 The U.S. Navy abolished flogging as a form of punishment.

1871 The Brazilian Parliament passed a law granting freedom to all government-owned slaves and all new children born to slaves.

1904 NYPD arrested a woman for smoking a cigarette in a car on 5th Avenue.

1919 In Omaha, Nebraska, a mob of between 5-15,000 whites assaulted police officers guarding the courthouse where Will Brown, a Black man, was being held on suspicion of raping a white woman. The mob set the courthouse on fire, cut all fire hoses, looted downtown stores, beat up black citizens at random, and almost succeeded in lynching Mayor Edward Smith. Deputies and prisoners, trapped in the burning courthouse, threw Brown to the crowd. He was hanged from a telephone pole and riddled with bullets before being cut down and dragged behind a car for blocks, burned, and paraded through the streets. 1600 Army soldiers finally restored order.

1920 A Chicago grand jury indicted eight Chicago White Sox players for fixing the 1919 World Series in the Black Sox Scandal. All eight were acquitted at trial but banned from professional baseball and consideration for the Hall of Fame.

1928 The U.K. Parliament passed the Dangerous Drugs Act outlawing cannabis, although doctors could continue to prescribe it. On this day in 1971, Parliament banned the medicinal use of cannabis.

1931 200,000 demonstrators in Peking demanded a declaration of war on Japan after Japanese forces invaded Manchuria.

1958 France ratified the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.

1961 In Damascus, Syria, Syrian Army officers unhappy with Egypt’s dominance in the United Arab Republic staged a coup, effectively ending the union between Egypt and Syria. An independent Syrian Republic was restored—for a while.

1973 The Weather Underground bombed the ITT Building on Madison Avenue in New York City for ITT's alleged involvement in the September 11 military coup d'état in Chile. The company reportedly helped finance Pinochet.

1975 Three robbers took the staff of the Spaghetti House restaurant in Knightsbridge, London, hostage and barricaded themselves in the basement for six days.

1995 French mercenary Bob Denard and 33 freelance soldiers took the islands of the Comoros in a coup. It was his third coup there, but this time France sent paratroopers to stop him and Denard was forced to surrender.

1995 In Boston, gunman John Tibbs opened fire on the luxury Bentley of pop singer Bobby Brown, killing passenger Steve Sealy, Brown’s childhood friend, bodyguard, and would-be brother-in-law. Brown ducked under the steering wheel and escaped injury during the ensuing gun battle. Prosecutors believe either robbery, a turf war, or jealousy motivated the shooting: local gang members begrudged Sealy’s closeness to Brown, who grew up in Roxbury. Tibbs received 27 years in prison.

2009 The Presidential Guard of Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, leader of the junta government in Guinea, sprayed tear gas and opened fire on an estimated 50,000 pro-democracy protesters at a rally at a football stadium in Conakry, Guinea. At least 157 demonstrators were shot or bayoneted and 1,250 injured. A U.N. panel reported more than 100 women and girls were raped or sexually mutilated during the chaos following the shooting. A handful of protest leaders were arrested.

2012 Saudi Arabian authorities deported more than 170 women who arrived from Nigeria without a male escort. The women were on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Officials detained about 1,000 Nigerian women during the week before. 

2018 Facebook reported an unknown hacker, using a code weakness, had breached the accounts of as many as 50 million users.

2018 A Las Vegas woman accused football star Cristiano Ronaldo of rape in a lawsuit filed in Nevada. Kathryn Mayorga claimed Ronaldo assaulted her in a Las Vegas penthouse suite in 2009. In 2010 Mayargo signed a non-disclosure agreement in exchange for $375,000; no criminal charges were ever filed. The new suit included charges of battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, coercion, fraud, abuse of a vulnerable person, racketeering, defamation, abuse of process, negligence, and breach of contract.

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.

TODAY IN CRIME: September 14

1846 Jung Bahadur Kunwar and his brothers massacred about 40 members of the Nepalese palace court, including the prime minister and other senior ministers, military officers, and palace guards at the royal palace armory in Kathmandu. The massacre enabled Jung Bahadur to establish the powerful Rana dynasty of hereditary prime ministers, an office that remained in his family until 1951.

1901 U.S. President William B. McKinley died of gunshot wounds inflicted by anarchist Leon Czolgosz eight days earlier. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him, becoming the youngest president in U.S. history.

1911 In Kiev, leftist revolutionary Dmitry Bogrov shot Russian Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, whose regime had been characterized by harsh measures against dissidents. Stolypin died three days later and Bogrov was hanged ten days after the assassination.

1940 The Hungarian Army, supported by local Hungarians, killed 158 Romanian civilians in Ip, Sălaj, a village in Northern Transylvania. The soldiers and vigilantes were acting on the rumor that Romanians were responsible for the deaths of two Hungarian soldiers who died in an accidental explosion, and a report that armed Romanians were looting. The massacre is regarded as an act of ethnic cleansing.

1960 With CIA help, Mobutu Sese Seko seized power in a military coup in the Congo, suspending parliament and the constitution.

1979 Communist politician Hafizullah Amin ordered the arrest of Afghan president Nur Muhammad Taraki and took over the government.

1982 Syrian Social Nationalist Party member Habib Shartouni assassinated president-elect of Lebanon Bachir Gemayel, along with 26 others gathered at the Lebanese Phalanges Party offices in Beirut. Lebanese forces arrested Shartouni two days later.

1982 Princess Grace of Monaco died from injuries sustained in a car crash the previous day. Although official records show the monarch was driving, witnesses put 17-year-old Princess Stephanie—underage and unlicensed—behind the wheel.

1989 Pressman Joseph T. Wesbecker shot and killed eight people and wounded twelve others at the Standard Gravure printing plant in Louisville, KY. Wesbecker, 47, was on disability for mental illness. He took his own life after the incident.

2010 Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court in London sentenced George Michael to eight weeks in prison, a £1,250 fine, and a five-year ban from driving for crashing his Range Rover into a Snappy Snaps store while under the influence of cannabis the previous July. He was released from Highpoint Prison after four weeks.

2015 In MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing a home-made clock to school because a teacher assumed it was a bomb.

2018 Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort plead guilty to conspiracy charges and agreed to co-operate with the U.S. Justice Department.

2019 Members of the Houthi movement in Yemen launched a drone attack on the state-owned Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in eastern Saudi Arabia. The attack destroyed half of the country's oil production and 5% of the world's.

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.