Uncle John’s True Crime (21 page)

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot and killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The assassinations caused a chain reaction of events which, within less than five weeks, led to the start of World War I. The gun was a Browning semiautomatic pistol, model M1910, serial #19074.

Princip, just 19, was a member of the Serbian nationalist group called the Black Hand. He fired seven shots into the royal couple’s car from five feet away, then attempted to shoot himself, but was stopped by passersby and quickly arrested. Princip died in prison of tuberculosis in 1918 (the disease was one reason he took the mission). After his trial, the pistol was presented to Father Anton Puntigam, the Jesuit priest who had given the archduke and duchess their last rites. He hoped to place it in a museum, but when he died in 1926 the gun was lost...for almost 80 years.

In 2004 a Jesuit community house in Austria made a startling announcement: they had found the gun (verified by its serial number). They donated it to the Vienna Museum of Military History in time for the 90th anniversary of the assassination that started a war that would eventually kill 8.5 million people. Also in the museum are the car in which the couple were riding, the bloodied pillow cover on which the archduke rested his head while dying, and petals from a rose that was attached to Sophie’s belt.

JOHN WILKES BOOTH’S GUN

The gun that Booth used to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln now resides in the basement museum of Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, D.C. The gun is a single-shot flintlock, made by Philadelphia gunsmith Henry Derringer. It’s tiny—just six inches total in length with a 21/2" barrel—but it’s powerful, firing a .44- caliber bullet. The gun was found on the floor of the theater box where Lincoln sat. Also in the museum is the
knife with which Booth stabbed one of Lincoln’s companions, Major Henry Rathbone, in the arm before Booth jumped from the box to escape.

“Machine Gun” Kelly’s 1933 trial was the only federal criminal trial that allowed cameras
.

What about the bullet that killed one of the most revered figures in American history? You can see that, too. It was removed during a postmortem autopsy and was kept by the U.S. War Department until 1940, when it went to the Department of the Interior. It can be viewed today at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.

THE MUSSOLINI MACHINE GUN

On April 28, 1945, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured while trying to flee into Switzerland. They were executed by an Italian communist named Valter Audisio, who shot the pair with a French-made MAS (Manufacture d’Armes de St. Etienne) 7.65mm submachine gun.

The gun disappeared until 1973, when Audisio died. He’d kept it in Italy until 1957, when, during a resurgence of Mussolini’s popularity, he secretly gave it to the communist Albanian government for safekeeping. With Audisio’s death, the Albanians proudly displayed the gun “on behalf of the Italian people.” Its home is now Albania’s National Historical Museum. Audisio once wrote that the only reason he used the machine gun was that the two pistols he tried to use had jammed. He also said that he had no orders to shoot Petacci—but she wouldn’t let go of Il Duce.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD’S GUNS

The gun that Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly used to assassinate President John F. Kennedy is a Mannlicher-Carcano .38 bolt-action rifle, 40 inches long, and weighs eight pounds. He bought it through a mail-order company for $12.78. Something with as much historical significance as Oswald’s rifle would become the property of the people of the United States, right? Wrong. Murder weapons are normally returned to the families of their owners, and Oswald’s gun was no exception—it was returned to Oswald’s widow. The National Archives purchased the rifle from Marina Oswald. The Archives also has the .38 Special Smith & Wesson Victory revolver that Oswald had with him that day and used (allegedly) to kill Officer J.D. Tippett before being arrested. Two days later, Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby.

First child to be recovered via an AMBER Alert: 8-week-old Rae Leigh Bradbury (1998)
.

JACK RUBY’S GUN

Ruby was a Dallas strip-club owner and small-time mobster who killed the alleged killer of the president. Just why he did it remains a mystery. But on November 24, 1963, in the basement of the Dallas jail—which at the time was crowded with police officers, reporters, and cameramen—Ruby walked right up to Oswald and shot him once in the side. The gun he used was a .38-caliber Colt Cobra revolver that he bought at Ray’s Hardware and Sporting Goods (on the advice of Dallas police detective Joe Cody).

The gun was returned to Ruby’s family, where it promptly became tangled in a legal battle over Ruby’s estate between the lawyer who was appointed executor and Ruby’s brother, Earl. It wouldn’t be resolved until 1991, when a judge found for Earl Ruby, who immediately put the gun up for auction and it sold to a collector named A. V. Pugliese. Price: $220,000. In 1992 a friend of Pugliese’s brought it to Washington, D.C., and offered to show it to Speaker of the House Thomas Foley. The gun was seized by police and almost destroyed, per D.C.’s strict gun-control laws, but lawyers were able to get it back. On November 24, 1993, the 30th anniversary of the shooting, Pugliese had Earl Ruby fire 100 shots with the gun and offered the spent shells for sale. Price: $2,500 each. (They only sold a few.)

SADAAM HUSSEIN’S PISTOL

When former Iraqi president Sadaam Hussein was captured in a “spider hole” in Iraq in December 2003, he had several weapons with him. One was a pistol. Major General Raymond Odierno reported that Hussein was holding the loaded pistol in his lap when he was captured, but didn’t make a move to use it. The Army had the pistol mounted and, in a private meeting, the Special Forces soldiers who took part in the capture presented it to President George W. Bush.

When news of the war souvenir broke in May 2004, reporters asked President Bush if he planned to give the pistol to the next Iraqi president. No, he said, it “is now the property of the American government.” The gun is kept in a small study off the Oval Office, and, according to one White House visitor who later spoke to
Time
magazine, the president “really liked showing it off. He was really proud of it.”

Is this some kind of joke? In Quitman, Georgia, it is illegal for a chicken to cross the road
.

COPS
has been a Saturday night TV staple for so long—24 seasons as of September 2011—that it’s easy to forget what a groundbreaking show it was when it debuted in 1989
.

F
IRST-PERSON PERSPECTIVE

In the early 1980s, an aspiring filmmaker named John Langley began work on
Cocaine Blues
, a documentary about the crack cocaine epidemic sweeping the country. As part of the project, he filmed law-enforcement operations, including drug busts and police raids.

At first Langley obtained the footage as an objective bystander, but that ended when an officer invited him to suit up in tactical gear and follow the police as they moved in. For the first time, Langley understood the stress and danger (and the adrenaline rush) that police experience daily. And the footage he shot during the raid was some of the most compelling he’d ever seen. He thought it might be possible to build an entire show around it.

KEEPING IT REAL

As Langley developed the idea for a show he called
Street Beat
, he decided it should be presented in a minimalist,
cinema verité
style—the edited footage would be presented as-is, without a narrator, script, music, staged reenactments, much editing, or any other standard TV storytelling conventions to distract the viewing audience. He didn’t want a host or anyone else telling people what to think about what they were seeing.

Langley believed that such a show would be successful, but ABC, CBS, and NBC weren’t convinced and passed on the idea. Even Langley’s business partner, Malcolm Barbour, was skeptical. The concept was
so
unusual, and even if it was a good idea, it wasn’t clear that a beginner like Langley would be able to pull it off.

With no takers for
Street Beat
, Langley and Barbour’s production company spent the next few years producing a series of crime-themed syndicated TV specials (which included footage of police ride-alongs) hosted by Geraldo Rivera. The specials were very successful and helped to raise Langley’s profile in the TV business. But if he thought that would make it
easier for him to find a buyer for the show he now called
COPS
, he was wrong: ABC, CBS, and NBC still said no.

Duane Chapman (
Dog the Bounty Hunter
) cannot own a gun. Reason: felony conviction
.

THE ROOKIE

By 1987, however, there was a new player in network television: Fox. The upstart network had been on the air since October 1986, but few of its shows were successful. Fox was struggling not just to stay afloat but also to forge an identity distinct from the Big 3 networks—its survival strategy was to put unusual new shows on the air. And thanks to a looming TV writers’ strike that looked like it might drag on for months, Fox was particularly interested in shows that didn’t require writers or scripts.

Langley and Barbour put together a reel of the best police-raid footage from the Geraldo crime specials and made a sales pitch to three Fox executives: CEO Barry Diller; programming head Steve Chao; and a third, unidentified man who sat in the corner taking notes—Langley assumed he was an accountant. After they made their presentation, the man taking notes, who turned out to be Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch, told Diller, “Order four of ’em.” Langley and Barbour had a deal.

COP-SPAN

To film the pilot, Langley went to the same person he’d gone to when he needed police footage for his Geraldo specials: Sheriff Nick Navarro of Broward County, Florida. Navarro was bothered by the fact that the public’s understanding of law enforcement was informed by fictional and wildly inaccurate movies and TV shows such as
Dirty Harry
and
Miami Vice
. He saw
COPS
as an almost C-SPAN-like chance to depict law enforcement as accurately and honestly as possible, and he believed that such transparency was essential in a free society. He happily allowed Langley to film his officers at work.

If you watch the hour-long
COPS
pilot, you may be surprised at how different it is from the modern version of the show. The most glaring difference is the inclusion of scenes of the officers in their own homes—cooking dinner with their families, watching TV, and playing with their children. One officer and his wife even argue about their relationship in front of the
COPS
camera crew. Langley says Fox forced him to insert the cops-at-home footage into the pilot against his better judgement, theorizing that if the
cinema verité
footage didn’t hook the
audience, the real-life soap opera storylines would. The
COPS
pilot aired on Saturday, March 11, 1989. Ever since then, the show has aired on Saturday night.

Average length of a criminal sentence in Colombia: 137 years
.

ONE, TWO, THREE

Fox didn’t promote
COPS
very heavily, but the show still managed to find an audience, which grew quickly thanks to positive word of mouth. As it did, Langley set to work stripping out all the features the network had forced on him—background music, the “soap opera” subplots, and the scenes shot at police headquarters, which he believed were unnecessary and much less interesting than scenes of police in the field. In the process, he also developed the three-stories-per-episode format that continues to this day:

• The first segment is a dramatic “action” sequence of some kind, often involving a police chase of a vehicle, or of a suspect on foot.

• The second segment is slower and often contains emotional or humorous content (such as the scene where a suspect repeatedly denies that he uses drugs, not realizing that he has a marijuana cigarette tucked behind his ear until the officer plucks it out).

• The third segment aims to give the audience something to think about, such as the methods used to take an uncooperative suspect into custody, or the social costs associated with treating drug addiction as a criminal problem instead of a public health issue.

BAD BOYS, BAD BOYS

Twenty-three years and more than 800 episodes later,
COPS
remains the most successful reality series on network television. Its role in shaping the public’s perception of law enforcement has been profound, and it has produced an entire generation of officers who first developed an interest in police work while watching
COPS
when they were kids.

Perhaps the show’s most unusual claim to fame is how it turned its “Bad Boys” theme song into the most quotable, if not the most famous, reggae song in history. From the beginning, Langley wanted
COPS
to be the first-ever network show with a reggae theme song, and while filming the pilot in Florida he had his field producers scour local record stores in search of just the right song. Someone found “Bad Boys,” sung by the Jamaican band Inner Circle. “I said, ‘That’s it, that’s the song,’” Langley
remembers. “I mean, it was just too good. You know, ‘...bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do, what you gonna do when they come for you?’ It was just too perfect.” The song was released as a single in 1993 and hit the Top 10.

J. Edgar Hoover once gave his mother a canary bred by the “Birdman of Alcatraz.”

MAKING THE SHOW

• In a typical week of production, as many as a dozen two-person
COPS
film crews are riding along with police officers all over the U.S. Most production takes place during warmer months, when crooks are more likely to be out and about. That explains why you hardly ever see a police chase in the snow...but you see plenty of suspects who are sweaty and shirtless.