By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com As he left for work on a January day this year, Police Officer Carlos Perez said goodbye to his wife and young children at their home in Limon, Costa Rica. As law enforcement officers and their families across the globe, they faced the unspoken reality that it could be the last…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — I spent last week in Honduras with a couple dozen friends under the watchful and protective eye of a Honduran woman who has dedicated her life’s work to bettering the lives of the indigenous peasants of her country. Despite State Department warnings we felt safe and…
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…
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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 Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Perhaps you, like me, have blithely assumed declining crime rates are due to some wonderfully fortunate combination of social factors. Not so, says Kevin Drum in a fascinating, recent article in Mother Jones. Citing dozens of crime causality studies, he makes a provocative and convincing case that a generation of children’s…
Second of a two part series. By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Stan Garnett, the District Attorney in Boulder, recently told the people of Colorado that, although he was not morally or philosophically opposed to the death penalty, he had simply concluded that it was too expensive, time consuming, and subject to random application. As…
This is the first of two parts. By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Stephen Simmons slowly walked up the steps to the scaffold in Library Park in Detroit. It was September 24, 1830, his last day on Earth, and he looked out at the festive crowd of 2,000 celebrating spectators. Men had brought their wives…
