Uncle John’s True Crime (9 page)

Luminol, the chemical that makes blood glow, can destroy other crime scene evidence
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Gang:
Mad Cowz

Base:
Winnipeg, Manitoba

History:
This gang formed in the early 2000s around crack dealing in Winnipeg’s crime-ridden west end. Members are African Canadians, most of them refugees from nations ruined by decades of civil war, such as Somalia and Sudan. New members are recruited from recently arrived immigrants, mostly teenagers already accustomed to violence. The gang quickly became a successful, wealthy, and dangerous force in the city. In late 2005, their success led to a split, and a new rival gang, the African Mafia, was born. That same year, the son of a prominent Manitoba surgeon was shot and killed in the streets by battling Mad Cowz and African Mafia members. His death dominated local news for weeks, and a resulting police crackdown put most of the Mad Cowz’ leadership behind bars. Still, they continue to operate in the city and in prisons.

Gang:
Ace Crew

Base:
Ottawa, Ontario

History:
Formed sometime in the early 1990s, the Ace Crew was involved in activities common to most gangs, including drug dealing and extortion, but they became infamous all over Canada in August 1995 when they abducted four teenagers in retaliation for a perceived slight to the gang by one of the teens. They tortured all four and murdered 17-year-old Sylvain Leduc. Ace Crew member John Wartley Richardson was sentenced to life in prison for the murder, with an additional 73 years added for other crimes. The gang faded, but some members are still active in Ottawa.

Gang:
The Independent Soldiers, or IS

Base:
Vancouver, British Columbia

History:
IS became an organized gang in the early 2000s and is now one of Canada’s most well-known gangs. The membership is multiracial, but the leaders are Indo-Canadians; the gang grew up out of Vancouver’s large
Punjabi Sikh community. Dealing in drugs, prostitution, gun-running, and money laundering, the gang has spread across British Columbia and into several towns in neighboring Alberta. IS has been linked to hundreds of shootings and dozens of murders, mostly in Vancouver, since 2005. In January 2009, a crackdown on Mexican drug cartels led to a brutal war between the IS and other Vancouver gangs over dwindling drug supplies, with more than 100 shootings and stabbings and more than a dozen murders in just two months.

Say hello to his little friend! Al Pacino was once arrested for carrying a concealed weapon
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EXTRAS

• A 2008 report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said that gang members involved in international drug smuggling had infiltrated airports in major cities around the country. Most were working as baggage handlers.

• More than 130 gangs are based in Vancouver alone, vying for a drug business estimated to be worth more than $6 billion per year.

• In the late 1990s, Toronto police arrested four members of the Spadina Girls, a short-lived, all-female gang led by a 16-year-old girl. The gang consisted entirely of high schoolers, who, among other things, charged other students for protection. The arrests came after gang members brutally assaulted a fellow student at a billiard hall.

• A much more dangerous all-female gang has formed in recent years: the Indian Posse Girls, an offshoot of Indian Posse. They’re believed to be in control of the sex trade in Winnipeg and Edmonton.

• Canada’s Criminal Intelligence Service estimates that more than 11,000 Canadians are members of street gangs.

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“In a Miami courtroom, while the lawyer for defendant Raymond Jessi Snyder was vociferously protesting a prosecutor’s demand that Snyder be locked up pending trial because he was a ‘flight risk,’ the sly defendant slowly eased from his seat and bolted out the door. (He didn’t get far.)”

—
Miami Herald

NYPD lingo: A “cheese eater” is a cop who rats on other cops
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It took us a while, but using time-tested sleuthing techniques, we finally solved...the mystery of the fictional detective names
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P
ERRY MASON
(1933)

As a youngster, author Erle Stanley Gardner subscribed to a boy’s fiction magazine,
The Youth’s Companion
, and learned a lot about writing from the stories he read.
The Youth’s Companion
was published by Perry Mason and Company.

SPENSER: FOR HIRE
(1973)

Robert B. Parker first introduced his streetwise, Chaucer-quoting, beer-drinking, gourmet-cooking, Bostonian, ex-boxer private investigator in
The Godwulf Manuscript
. Parker saw Spenser as a tough guy but also as a knight in shining armor and named him after the English poet (and Shakespeare contemporary) Edmund Spenser.

MIKE HAMMER
(1947)

Writer Mickey Spillane had been in and out of the comic book business for years when he tried to sell a new detective strip to some New York publishers in 1946. The character’s name was Mike Danger. When no one would buy, he decided to turn it into a novel and changed the name to Mike Hammer, after one of his favorite haunts, Hammer’s Bar and Grill.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DR. JOHN WATSON
(1887)

Dr. Watson is believed to have been inspired by author Arthur Conan Doyle’s friend Dr. James Watson. It’s less clear how he named the famous sleuth whom he originally named
Sherringford
Holmes. Most experts say Doyle took “Holmes” from American Supreme Court justice, physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, well-known for his probing intellect and attention to detail. Sherringford was changed to Sherlock, Doyle enthusiasts say, for a famous violinist of the time, Alfred Sherlock. Fittingly, Doyle made his detective an amateur violinist.

There were 46 U.S. executions in 2010: 1 by firing squad, 44 by lethal injection, 1 by electric chair
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INSPECTOR MORSE
(1975)

Morse’s creator, Colin Dexter, was once a Morse Code operator in the English army—but that’s not where he got the name for his character. Sir Jeremy Morse, the chairman of Lloyd’s Bank, was a champion crossword-solver in England. Dexter, once a national crossword champion himself, named his melancholy inspector after Sir Jeremy.

HERCULE POIROT
(1920)

Some say the meticulous Belgian detective was named after a vegetable—
poireau
means “leek” in French. But it’s more likely that Poirot’s creator, Agatha Christie, took the name from the stories of another female author of the time, Marie Belloc Lowndes. Her character: a French detective named Hercules Popeau.

TRAVIS MCGEE
(1964)

John D. MacDonald began working on his Florida boat-bum character in 1962, calling him Dallas McGee. The next year, President John Kennedy was shot—in Dallas—and MacDonald changed the name to Travis.

KINSEY MILLHONE
(1982)

Sue Grafton spent 15 years as a Hollywood scriptwriter before the birth of her first Kinsey Millhone novel,
A Is for Alibi
. Where’d she get the name? From the birth announcements page of her local newspaper.

JOHN SHAFT
(1970)

Ernest Tidyman was trying to sell the idea of a bad-ass black detective to his publisher, but was stymied when the publisher asked the character’s name—he didn’t have one ready. Tidyman absent-mindedly looked out the window and saw a sign that said “Fire shaft.” He looked back at the publisher and said, “Shaft. John Shaft.”

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“Police arrested two kids yesterday—one was drinking battery acid, the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other off.”

—
Tommy Cooper

Russian astronauts are allowed to carry guns
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The facts about one of the most famous feuds in U.S. history
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T
he Contestants:
Neighboring clans living on opposite sides of a stream that marked the border between West Virginia and Kentucky. The Hatfields, headed by Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield, lived on the West Virginia side. The McCoys, whose patriarch was Randolph “Ole Ran’l” McCoy, lived on the Kentucky side.

How the Feud Started:
There was already animosity between the two clans by 1878. For one thing, during the Civil War, the Hatfields sided with the Confederacy, and the McCoys sided with the Union. But in 1878 Ole Ran’l sued Floyd Hatfield for stealing a hog—a serious offense in a farm-based economy—and McCoy lost. In 1880 relations worsened when McCoy’s daughter Rose Anne became pregnant by Devil Anse’s son Johnse and went across the river to live—unmarried—with the Hatfields.

Then on August 7, 1882, Randolph’s son Tolbert stabbed Devil Anse’s brother Ellison multiple times in a brawl that started during an election day picnic; when Ellison died a few days later, the Hatfields retaliated by tying three of the McCoy brothers to some bushes and executing them.

The feud continued for six more years. It ended after a nighttime raid on the McCoys on January 1, 1888. That night, a group of Hatfields surrounded Ole Ran’l McCoy’s house (he was away) and ordered the occupants to come out and surrender. When no one did they set the house on fire. Ole Ran’l’s daughter Allifair finally ran out and was gunned down; so was her brother Calvin. The house burned to the ground.

And the Winner Is:
No one. This last attack was so brutal that officials in both Kentucky and West Virginia finally felt compelled to intervene. One Hatfield who participated in the raid was convicted and hanged for the crime. Several others were sentenced to long prison terms. With most violent offenders behind bars and the rest of the clan members weary of years of killing, the feud petered out.

About 1 out of every 30 Americans is either in jail, on probation, or on parole
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Johnny Cash was one of country music’s first “outlaws,” but the music industry was still surprised in 1957 when he played a concert at Huntsville State Prison in Texas. Over the next decade, Cash performed 30 prison shows and recorded albums during at least three of them. (The shows at California’s Folsom Prison and San Quentin became the most famous.) Here are 10 little-known facts about the Man in Black’s prison concerts
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1. Columbia Records repeatedly rejected Cash’s request to record a prison concert
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Cash started playing at prisons in response to fan mail from inmates who identified with his songs (especially “Folsom Prison Blues”). Soon he discovered that “prisoners are the greatest audience that an entertainer can perform for. We bring them a ray of sunshine into their dungeon, and they’re not ashamed to respond and show their appreciation.” He suspected that their excitement and gratitude combined with the thrill of performing in a dangerous venue would create the perfect setting for an album. His record company disagreed—they thought the concerts would kill Cash’s career and hurt the label’s image. But when Columbia brought on producer Bob Johnston—known for being a bit wild himself and for bucking authority (as well as for producing Bob Dylan)—that stance changed. Johnston readily approved the country star’s idea. Columbia remained tight-lipped about the performance and the release of
Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison
in 1968, still believing the album would never sell. But it did...an incredible 500,000 copies in one year. Sales were boosted by Cash’s tough-guy image (he wore solid black clothing, used profane language, had a gravelly voice, and fought an on-again, off-again addiction to drugs). To help the cause along, Columbia released exaggerated ads claiming Cash was no stranger to prison. Which brings us to...

2. Cash never served time at Folsom, or any other prison
.

He did seven short stints in jail, though, for drug- and alcohol-related charges. His song “Folsom Prison Blues” was instead inspired by the 1951
movie
Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison
. According to biographer Michael Streissguth, another influence was Gordon Jenkins’s song “Crescent City Blues,” from which Cash “borrowed” so heavily that when his version was recorded on the
Folsom
album, the original artist demanded—and received—royalties.

First nationally televised court trial: Ted Bundy’s, in 1979
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3. Cash inspired future country star Merle Haggard
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Haggard was serving three years at San Quentin Prison for armed robbery and escaping from jail when Johnny Cash took the stage there in 1958. When Haggard later told Cash that he’d been at the concert, Cash said he didn’t remember Haggard performing that day; Haggard replied, “I was in the audience, Johnny.” In fact, he was sitting in the front row and was mesmerized by Cash. He and his fellow inmates identified with Cash’s lyrics about loss and imprisonment. Haggard reminisced: “This was somebody singing a song about your personal life. Even the people who weren’t fans of Johnny Cash—it was a mixture of people, all races were fans by the end of the show.” Haggard also soon realized that he shared Cash’s talent for making music and for speaking to the struggles of the working class. He joined the prison’s country band shortly after Cash’s concert and penned songs about being locked up. After his release in 1960, Haggard sang at clubs until he eventually became a country superstar himself.

4. The live “Folsom Prison Blues” was too grisly for radio play
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Cash’s declaration “I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die,” followed by an inmate’s shriek of joy, was edited by radio stations. But the hollering wasn’t real. It had been dubbed in by Columbia Records since the prisoners had been too enthralled by Cash’s performance to whoop it up during songs.

5. Cash’s band smuggled a gun into Folsom
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Johnny Cash and his bassist, Marshall Grant, often performed a comedy skit with an antique cap-and-ball gun that made smoke. It was a prop—but it was a real gun. Grant accidentally brought the weapon inside his bass guitar case to the 1968 show. A prison guard spotted it and politely