By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com I remember years ago sitting at a banquet table at a retirement party for a U.S. Marshal in Detroit when the head of U.S. Customs in Detroit started talking about his school-aged son. With some amusement, and a perhaps a drop of disappointment, he recounted how his son told people his…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Partisan politics inside the Beltway has been around forever. That’s a given. Unfortunately, these days it has reached such ridiculous heights. That being said, if the Republicans had been serious at all about pressuring Atty. Gen. Eric Holder Jr. to resign, they would have been a little smarter and tried to…
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, a…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Ok, so I wouldn’t have given ex-Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich 14 years in prison for his infinite arrogance and his corrupt ways. Ten or 12 would have sufficed. That being said, I can’t say he didn’t deserve getting the toughest sentence of any crooked Illinois governor. He never stopped yapping and…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Dear Son, As your enthusiasm builds for leaving home and going off to college in a few months, I want to talk with you about having to make on-the-spot moral, legal, and social decisions when you are on your own. As you know, the news has been filled with reports and…
As head of the FBI’s Ann Arbor office, Greg Stejskal got to know well the legendary University of Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler. Stejskal, who has retired from the FBI, gives his insights into the Penn State scandal and discusses how he thought Schembechler, who died in 2006, might have handled it. By Greg Stejskal…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Atty. Gen. Eric Holder Jr. is an honorable man. So I believe him when he tells Congress he didn’t know about ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious until the controversy exploded in 2011. The problem is that he needs to take responsibility for it. Period. He’s the top dog. People…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com The U.S. Justice Department can feel proud that an appeals court Thursday essentially upheld its right to screw the families whose relatives were allegedly murdered by Boston gangster James J. “Whitey’’ Bulger. Bulger was working as an FBI informant and running wild, and a Boston federal judge back in…
