By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com I was seated, facing Michael Lee Sprague as I interviewed him. We were on the same side of the table. As an FBI agent on the fugitive squad in the Detroit Division, I never liked having anything between me and the person I was interviewing. It was easier to observe body…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com In the summer of 2004, a Senate sub-committee, chaired by Senators Charles Grassley and Joseph Biden held a hearing regarding the prevalence of steroids in sports. I had helped arrange for two of the witnesses who testified at this hearing. One was Curtis Wenzlaff, a convicted steroid dealer, who had supplied…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com This is a Christmas story, but it really began just before Thanksgiving in 1987, at the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta. The Cuban inmates had rioted and had taken control of a sizeable portion of the penitentiary. The catalyst for the riots happened years before that in 1980. The Mariel boatlift,…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com In the summer of 1988, Vincent Loonsfoot, an American Indian, drove to the Hannahville Potawatomi Reservation near Escanaba, Mich. There he ambushed and shot to death four members of his wife’s family and kidnapped his estranged wife. Loonsfoot then set off into the woods – beginning a highly publicized manhunt through…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com In 1982 legendary Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler called the FBI office in Ann Arbor. Bo wanted the FBI to talk to his team primarily about the perils of illegal sports gambling. The Senior Resident Agent, Tom Love, agreed to make the presentation. Tom knew I had played (read mostly practiced)…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com Last November I wrote a column about how I thought legendary Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler would have handled the Penn State scandal. Since then Joe Paterno was fired and subsequently died from cancer. Jerry Sandusky was convicted of 46 of 48 counts of sexual child abuse involving 10 boys. Now…
By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com There’s a memorable scene near the end of the classic John Ford movie and parable about the triumph of the rule of law in the old west, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” The editor of the local newspaper has just heard the true story from Jimmy Stewart’s character, Ranse Stoddard,…
This column also appeared in the New York Daily News. By Greg Stejskal ticklethewire.com What if several executives of a multimilliondollar national corporation hatched a plan to pay bounties to its employees to deliberately injure key employees of competing corporations? Then put the plan in action, actually disabling key employees, thereby affecting those corporations’…
