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…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Thirty years ago this week, a young Chinese-American man, Vincent Chin, was bludgeoned to death by a man wielding a baseball bat, only a few steps away from a strip club where he and his friends had been celebrating his bachelor’s party. The crime and its state and federal prosecutions raise…
FBI agent Theresa Foley was the first full-time female FBI agent to be stationed at Guantanamo. She has filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, saying she was made to bunk with vermin that gave her a tropical disease. Theresa Foley has undergone multiple surgeries since contracting the disease and has been disabled and is…
Michael Mason, a former assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, retired as the executive assistant director at FBI headquarters in 2007. His column is in response to a column ex-fed prosecutor Ross Parker wrote in the form of a letter to his son about the Penn State Scandal in which he quoted…
Ross Parker was chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit for 8 years and worked as an AUSA for 28 in that office. 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…
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…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com How many books have you read recently that actually changed your thinking on opinions you have held near and dear for decades? Not many, I wager. In my case, damn few. Like most people I read for entertainment, education, reinforcement, seldom to challenge firmly held views. As a three-decade drug prosecutor,…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com The case for and against marijuana legalization continues to be a hotly debated issue. Weighing in, even in a subjective and limited way, is tempting after working on a history project about smugglers in the 1970s and the agents who pursued them. Here’s the pros and cons as I see it….
