By Gregory Stejskal There is an apocryphal story – Ernest Hemingway was having lunch with some writer friends when he proposed a wager. He bet $10 that he could write a story in six words. With no doubt some curiosity, everyone at the table put $10 in the pot. Hemingway wrote on a napkin, “For…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com Jack Clingingsmith had what any car guy would consider a dream job. He was the executive in charge of testing for Buick at the General Motors proving grounds. GM’s Milford, Michigan proving ground, when it opened in 1924, was the auto industry’s first dedicated testing facility. Today the sprawling 400 acre…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com I was assigned to the FBI’s Ann Arbor, Michigan office for most of my career (referred to as a resident agency or RA in the Bureau) We were primarily responsible for investigating violations of federal law in five counties which had a total population of about a million people. Ann Arbor…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com It took about 5,000 years from the discovery of glass until a process was developed to economically mass produce flat glass, and only a few years before the technology was stolen. Glass is one of the great fundamental inventions – not at the level of the wheel or fire, but up…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com Webster Bivens may have been a drug dealer, but his place in law enforcement history is not proportional to his status as an alleged dealer. In the fall of 1965, Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents raided Bivens’ Brooklyn apartment. The FBN agents had neither an arrest warrant nor a search warrant….
Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End baseball’s Steroid Era , By Tim Elfrink and Gus Garcia-Roberts By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com__ This is not a traditional book review as those are usually done about the time a book is published and first available for sale. Also in the interest of full disclosure, another…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com The 60s were a tumultuous decade, and 1964 was emblematic of that decade. Arthur Ashe won the US Open, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace. The Beatles came to America and established a beachhead for the “British invasion.” Lyndon Johnson, a Southern Democrat,…
This column was originally posted on April 14, 2010. Because I thought it continued to be relevant, it was re-posted last year (2013) on April 2. (I had no idea how relevant it would become.) The subject of the column, “April 19th,” first became significant when some New England citizens confronted a unit of the…
