The Bad and the Ugly: Understanding Crime and
Criminals
A history of Crime : From Pirates to Phiserman
PIRATES
1) Piracy Refers to an act of Criminal Violence in the sea. (thus,
Piracy in the World of Internet means that we are stealing something in the sea
which they refer as the INTERNET)
2)The English Channel and State of Malacca were the one’s that were
often met with Piracy
3) In the modern World They come under Customary International Law which
means they are different for Different Regions based on their Customs.(As Per
accepted by the International Court of Justice: UN)
4) The Oldest Pirates were Greek and Roman Who Heavily traded Slaves
5) The Vikings were Pirates during the Middle Ages
6) In Africa it is believed(Pirate Utopia) that there was a Captain
Mission present there Who had the Colony of Libertatia in the 17th Century
7) In the 18th Century, Persian Gulf was known as the
Pirate Coast for the heavy loots there…These Loots were performed into the
British Ships which transported goods from and to India
8) The Caribbean Lands were there which were told to be the Homes of
more than 50 Privateers thus it has also got a Movie (The Pirates of Caribbean
) named after it.
6* A Pirate Utopia is a concept proposed by Anarchist Peter Wilson, The
Concept Suggests a place where autonomous
proto-anarchist societies in that
they operated beyond the reach of governments and embraced unrestricted freedom.
FAMOUS PIRATES (FROM THE Caribbean and Beyond)::
1) William
Kidd: Was a Scottish, He was also Involved in the Building of the Trinity
Church , He began his career being Commissioned to get the sea rid of
Pirates but later turned to be a pirate Himself. His greatest misfortune was
raiding the East India Company Ship, When he knew he was being looked upon for
this sin, He Buried some of his Treasure into Gardiner’s Island , some of which
was Discovered last year near Madagascar. He went to England Jurisdiction and
was sentenced o death , hung by Chains along the Thames River.
2) Edward
Teach*BLACKBEARD*: He was the best-known and Widely-feared Pirate of his time.
He Commanded four Ships and had a crew of more than 300 at the height of his
career, He would’ve clutched two Swords with Knives and Pistols ready as
well.He has a warship known as HMS”Scarborough”. He captured 40 merchant ships
in the Caribbean. He was officially married to a 16-Year Girl, He was beheaded
by the Royal British Navy.
3) Henry
Every: He started his naval Career by serving the British Royal Navy. He served
on various ships which included the Venture known as Spanish Expedition
Shipping in 1693. In his time He became the Most Successful and Feared Pirate
across the Red Sea. He Captured some of the finest shipping in the Indian Ocean
(including a Ship which Carrried bulges of Gold and Jewels from India). He
retired but was yet feared and the time and Reason of his Death remains Unknown
till date.
4) Anne
Bonny: She was a Woman who travelled into the New World with Her Family, Fell I
love with a poor Guy named James Bonny, While Growing up and Getting Sick of
Her husband’s Lack of Valour , She tried out new men in Nassau, and Like this
She met the Captain of a Pirate Ship named Calico Jack Rackham, She Joined His
Crew acting like a man(Dressing Like a man, Drinking, fighting etc.). She met
another Girl named Mary Read on the Crew and they both then fought together.
Later She went to Prison with Rackham and Mary where She and Mary both went
pregnant. Her Death Sentence wasn’t Carried out and she Even Returned home to
her Husband/or her Father.
5) Cheung
Po Tsai: (1800s)He was a Chinese Fisherman’s Son, who along with his Mother
were Captured by a Pirate Ship. Later, He abandoned his Mother and Went on to
become a Pirate. At the Height of his Career, He had a Crew of more than 50,000
men and Several Hundred Ships , Which is way too more than any Caribbean.He
Treasured GuangDong amassing Great Treasure. He was later Caught by the Chinese
Government and Was Appointed the Captain in the Qing Imperial Navy. He was
Appointed to the Rank of Colonel and spent the Rest of his life aiding the
Chinese Government.
PHISERMAN
1) They might steal credit reports
2) The Psychology of Phiserman
3)To Stop Phising many people have suggested to censor emails Before
they hit anyone’s Inbox
4) Spear Phiserman: They are the one’s who sent emails to thousands of
People at one time
5) They can have Boundless Internal Revenue
6) There are more than a Few Obvious ways to protect yourself from
Phising.
7)Losses by Phising were estimated to be $200 Million in 2006, in the US
Almone
8) Phisherman Prefer targets who are unaware of the Danger
Many of the
remarkable similarities identified result from common legal traditions,
especially Roman civil law, English common law and Islamic or sharia law,
blended with customary practices. Crimes evolved or were abandoned as societies
changed. As the nation state emerged, rebellion and treason attracted ever more
severe penalties, while penal servitude grew in importance: someone had to row
the galleys and provide the labour that sustained growing empires. In an
unintended consequence of state centralisation, regional gangs used expanding road
networks to rob and pillage. The aims and motives of criminals have not
changed, only the opportunities open to them. Today globalisation defines the
criminal frontier, but prohibition laws and financial cunning continue to spawn
new forms of crime.
Exceptionally, one chapter is devoted to a single offence, serial
murder. Some well-known stories (Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth Báthory) are
recounted, together with a reflection on the usefulness of werewolf and vampire
tales as a means to investigate its past incidence. The author is on firmer
ground in the final two chapters, which bring the study up to the present day.
The impact of colonialism, modern execution protocols, burgeoning prison
populations, women's rights and the re-emergence of crimes and punishments once
thought consigned to history (witchcraft, shaming) are among the topics handled
with sensitivity. Swaziland's 1998 search for a new 'hangperson' elicits a
flash of (gallows) humour, but generally this is sobering stuff.
The Criminal Mind: Insights from Psychology
ACCORDING TO STUDIES MOST OF THE CRIMINALS HAVE ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY
DISORDER AND in their Brain takes place the Deformation of the Amygdale
(Deformation of Emotions).
They have Anti-Social Personality Disorder means that they are characterized by a pervasive pattern of disregard for,
or violation of, the rights of others. It is the Same thing Which is referred
to as Psychopathy or Sociopathy according to DSM (Diagnostic and Statistics
Manual) and ICD(International Statistical Classification of Disease and Related
Health Problems).It is led by Trauma. Traumatic events lead to the Disruption
of Standard Development of Central Nervous System. The testosterone Hormone
Heavily contributes to Aggressiveness in the Brain. It was also Found in
Surveys that we find low levels of the Serotonin (Neurotransmitter) in the
Brains of the People with ASPD[Low Levels--- Levels below 5HIAA.
Home Environment Heavily Contributes to Someone to
get ASPD.
Robert D Hare is a major Figure in Studying ASPD.
Some Experiments Regarding the Psychology of
Criminals Include The Stanford Prison Experiment that was performed by Philip
Zimbardo in 1971 and has been par of the WSC Curriculum in the Past 3 Years.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is a diverse one. It
led to a variety of Conclusions which were largely about , how people react to
Authoritarian Rules
The Criminal In Society: Insights from
Sociology and Anthropology
A normative definition views crime
as deviant behaviour that violates
prevailing norms – cultural standards prescribing how
humans ought to behave normally. This approach considers the complex realities
surrounding the concept of crime and seeks to understand how
changing social, political, psychological, and economic conditions
may affect changing definitions of crime and the form of the
legal, law-enforcement, and penal responses made by society.
These structural realities remain fluid
and often contentious. For example: as cultures change and the political
environment shifts, societies may criminalise or decriminalise
certain behaviours, which directly affects the statistical crime
rates, influence the allocation of resources for the enforcement of laws,
and (re-)influence the general public opinion.
Similarly, changes in the collection and/or calculation
of data on crime may affect the public perceptions of the extent of any given
"crime problem". All such adjustments to crime statistics,
allied with the experience of people in their everyday lives, shape attitudes
on the extent to which the State should use law or social
engineering to enforce or encourage any particular social norm.
Behaviour can be controlled and influenced by a society in many ways without
having to resort to the criminal justice system.
Indeed, in those cases where no clear consensus exists
on a given norm, the drafting of criminal law by the group
in power to prohibit the behaviour of another group may seem to some
observers an improper limitation of the second group's freedom, and the
ordinary members of society have less respect for the law or laws in general —
whether the authorities actually enforce the disputed law or not.
A Guy to investigate while reading about
Criminology and Anthropology is Cesare Lombroso.
Cesare Lombroso’s theory of anthropological
criminology essentially stated that criminality was inherited, and
that someone "born criminal" could be identified by physical
(congenital) defects, which confirmed a criminal
as savage or atavistic.
Another Guy
named Alexandre Lacassagne who formed the Lacassagne School of Criminology had
contradictory views, He said that:
"The
social environment is the breeding ground of criminality; the germ is the
criminal, an element which has no importance until the day where it finds the
broth which makes it ferment."
"To
the fatalism which ineluctably follows from anthropological theory, we
oppose social initiative."
"Justice
shrivels up, prison corrupts and society has the criminals it
deserves.
(Lacassagne
was influenced by Augustus Comte who was part of Last Year’s Syllabus.)
[Lombroso is
like Thomas Carlyle(Great Man Theory) and Lacassagne is like Herbert
Spencer(Zeitgeist Theory){Both were part of Last Year’s Curriculum}]
Crime as
Spectacle: Postmodern Perspectives of Criminology
Considering Criminology in a Postmodernist School, Criminality is
understood as a product of the use of power to limit the behaviour of those
excluded from Power (in the cases of Prisons, CRIMINALS) to limit the Behaviour
of these individuals excluded from Power and those who try to overcome
social-inequality and in Ways which the power structure prohibits. the
discourse of criminal law is dominant, exclusive and rejecting, less diverse,
and culturally not pluralistic, exaggerating narrowly defined rules for the
exclusion of others.
It also says that there is nothing Inherently Criminal in any given act.
It Suggests Crime to be an ontological(Regarding any question, with
one’s very existence) phenomena as a mental Construct.
Criminality is almost completely constructed by the controlling
institutions which establish norms and attribute determinate meanings to
certain acts; criminality is thus a social and linguistic construct.
To Conclude , Always remember One thing….Anything is Criminal Just
because we name it so…Eg. Shouting and hoofing aren’t a crime but If you go to
a School and during a class it might be Considered as a Crime.
Codes of Misconduct: Prosecution and Punishment
Hammurabi, Draco and Other Early Approaches
Hammurabi: it Dates back to 1754 BC in Mesopotamia, Its one of
the oldest Deciphered test and is a Code of Law. It was enacted by the 6th Babylonian
King who was also known as Hammurabi. It was written on a Man-Sized Stone
stele. The Code Consists of 282 Laws with Scaled Punishments. Adjusting , “An
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. It had Punishments based on people’s
Social Status. There were Different types of Punishments for a Slave and for a
Merchant for the same offence. . A third of
the code addresses issues concerning household and family relationships such as
inheritance, divorce, paternity, and sexual
behavior. Only one provision appears to impose obligations on an official; this
provision establishes that a judge who reaches an incorrect decision is to be
fined and removed from the bench permanently. A few provisions address issues related to military
service. The Code was found in 1901 by Archaelogists, it was inscribed in the
Akkadian Language, using Cuneiform Script, It was than Translated and Published
in 1902 and is currently displayed in Louvre, with replicas all around the
World.It has one of the oldest ideas of the Presumption of Innocence. Some of
the laws presented in Hammurabi are regarding Slander(Punishment : Cutting the
Skin /Hair), Trade (Punishment: The thief will have to pay 10 times of what
he/she has stolen),Slavery(Punishment: Death), Theft(Punishment: Death),
Food(Law: It states for any trade regarding food the Buyer should obtain a
Receipt), Liability (If anyone’s too lazy to take care of Property, The
property along with the Person will be sold off at an auction.), Divorce(After
Divorce the Women should take her money and go back to her Father’s House.)If
any Son strikes his father, his hands should be hewn off.
One of the Best known laws in Hammurabi’s Code is :
"If a man destroy the eye of another man, they
shall destroy his eye. If one break a man's bone, they shall break his bone. If
one destroy the eye of a freeman or break the bone of a freeman he shall pay
one gold mina. If one destroy the eye of a man's slave or break a bone of a
man's slave he shall pay one-half his price."
Assyrian Law: It was very similar to Sumerian and Babylonian Law, although the
Penalties were more Brutal and Barbaric. The First copy of the code dated to
the Reign of Tiglath Pileser I, was Discovered during an Excavation by the
German Oriental Society. Three Assyrian law collections have been found to date. Punishments
such as the cropping of ears and noses were common, as it was in the Code of Hammurabi, which was composed several
centuries earlier. Murder was
punished by the family being allowed to decide the death penalty for the
murderer.
Draco: He was a legislator, the first of
Athens in Ancient Greece. His Constitution replaced the prevailing system of
oral law and Blood feud by a written code (thus, Suggesting
Uniform[ity]).Draco’s Representation can be found in the Library of the Supreme
Court of the United States . It generates the Adjecive Draconian which means
‘unforgiving rules or laws’.
The Laws in the Draconian Constitution(first
Constitution of Athens)[Written in 7th Century BC.] were posted
on Wooden Tablets, Where they were preserved for almost three Centuries on
steles of the shape of three-sided pyramid. The Laws Distinguished Murder and
involuntary Homicide. The laws, however, were particularly harsh. For
example, any debtor whose status was lower than that of
his creditor was forced into slavery. The punishment was more
lenient for those owing a debt to a member of a lower class. The death
penalty was the punishment for even minor offences, such as 'stealing
a cabbage'. Concerning the liberal use of the death penalty in the Draconic
code, Plutarch states: 'It is said that Drakon himself, when asked
why he had fixed the punishment of death for most offences, answered that he
considered these lesser crimes to deserve it, and he had no greater punishment for
more important ones'.
All his laws were repealed by Solon in
the early 6th century BC with the exception of the homicide law.
According to the preserved part of the
inscription, unintentional homicides received a sentence of exile. 'Even if a
man not intentionally kills another, he is exiled'.
Greek Law: No systematic collection of Greek
laws has come down to us. Our knowledge of some of the earliest notions of the
subject is derived from the Homeric poems.
Code of the Nesilim: It is an
ancient Hittite legal code dating from 1650-1500 BC. It was got Laws Regarding
Arguments between Men and Women, Soldiers, Slays and Free Men.
Traditional Chinese Law: It was
established in 11th Century BC and Lasted upto 1911 when the
last imperial Dynasty fell. This legal tradition is distinct from
the common law and civil law traditions of
the West – as well as Islamic law and classical Hindu
law – and to a great extent, is contrary to the concepts of contemporary
Chinese law. It incorporates elements of both Legalist and Confucian traditions
of social order and governance. To Westerners, perhaps the most striking
feature of the traditional Chinese criminal procedure is that it was
an inquisitorial system where the judge conducts a public
investigation of a crime, rather than an adversarial system where the
judge decides between attorneys representing the prosecution and defence.
"The Chinese traditionally despised the role of advocate and saw such
people as parasites who attempted to profit from the difficulties of others.
The magistrate saw himself as someone seeking the truth, not a partisan for
either side."
Code of Ur-Nammu: It is the
oldest known law code written to have survived till date. Its preface directly
credits the laws to King Ur-Nammu who was also the actual author of the code
and had the laws written down into Cuneiform tablets. It was written in
Sumerian Language in 2100-2050 BC. More than half-of-it has been destroyed. For
the oldest extant law-code known to history, it is considered remarkably
advanced, because it institutes fines of monetary compensation for
bodily damage, as opposed to the later lex talionis (‘eye for
an eye’) principle of Babylonian law;
however, murder, robbery, adultery and rape were
capital offenses. Beneath the lugal ("great
man" or king), all members of society belonged to one of two basic strata:
The "lu" or free person, or the slave (male, arad;
female geme). The son of a lu was called adumu-nita until
he married, becoming a "young man" (gurus). A woman (munus)
went from being a daughter (dumu-mi), to a wife (dam), then if
she outlived her husband, a widow (nu-ma-su), who could remarry.
Modern Legal Systems
Common Law (Legal System): A "common
law system" is a legal system that gives great precedential weight to common law, so that consistent principles applied to similar facts
yield similar outcomes. The body of
past common law binds judges that make future decisions, just as any other law
does, to ensure consistent treatment. In cases where the parties disagree on
what the law is, a common law court looks to past precedential decisions
of relevant courts. If a similar dispute has been resolved in the past, the
court is usually bound to follow the reasoning used in the prior decision
(this principle is known as stare
decisis). If, however, the court
finds that the current dispute is fundamentally distinct from all previous
cases (called a "matter of first impression"), judges have the
authority and duty to make law by creating precedent. Thereafter, the
new decision becomes precedent, and will bind future courts. Stare decisis,
the principle that cases should be decided according to consistent principled
rules so that similar facts will yield similar results, lies at the heart of
all common law systems.
One third of the world's population (approximately
2.3 billion people) live in common law jurisdictions or in systems mixed with civil law. Common law originated during the Middle
Ages in England, and from there was propagated to the colonies of the British Empire, including India, the
United States (both the federal
system and 49 of its 50 states),Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Canada (and
all its provinces except Quebec), Malaysia, Ghana, Australia, Sri Lanka, Hong
Kong, Singapore, Burma, Ireland, New
Zealand, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Cyprus, Barbados, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Namibia, Liberia, Sierra
Leone, Botswana, Guyana, and Fiji.
Civil Law (Legal System): Historically,
a civil law is the group of legal ideas and systems ultimately derived from
the Code of Justinian, but heavily overlaid by Napoleonic,
Germanic, canonical, feudal, and local practices, as well as
doctrinal strains such as natural law, codification, and legal
positivism.
Conceptually, civil law proceeds from abstractions,
formulates general principles, and distinguishes substantive rules from
procedural rules. It holds case law to be secondary and
subordinate to statutory law. When discussing civil law, one should keep
in mind the conceptual difference between a statute and a codal article. The
marked feature of civilian systems is that they use codes with brief text that
tend to avoid factually specific scenarios. Code articles deal in generalities
and thus stand at odds with statutory schemes which are often very long and
very detailed.
It Sources law from Legislation, Here Judges
dominate the Trials(Career Judges), Judicial Independence is High and Spereate
from the Executive and Legislative branches of Government, The Juries may
adjudicate in conjunction with judges in serious criminal matters, Courts have
equal and separate power for Policy Making and All European Union states (except UK and Ireland), All of continental
Latin America (except Guyana and Belize),Quebec, All of East Asia (except Hong
Kong), Congo, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, Iraq, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Madagascar,
Lebanon, Switzerland, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand follow Civil Law System.
Religious Law (Legal System): Its
Formulation refers to ethical and moral
codes taught by religious traditions. Examples
include Christian canon law, Islamic sharia, Jewishhalakha,
and Hindu law.
The two most prominent systems, canon law and
sharia, differ from other religious laws in that canon law is
the codification of Catholic,
Anglican and Orthodox law as in civil law, while sharia
derives many of its laws from juristic precedent and reasoning
by analogy (as in a common tradition).
Canon Law is adopted by many for the government of
the Christian Organisation. The Catholic Church (Present in Vatican City) is
runned by Government adopted by the Apostles at the Council of Jerusalem in the
1st Century, It follows norms of the New Testament along with
some elements of Old Testament, Roman, Saxon and other Legal Tradition. In
the Roman Church, positive ecclesiastical laws, based upon either immutable
divine and natural law, or changeable circumstantial and
merely positive, derive formal authority and promulgation from the pope,
who as Supreme possesses the totality of legislative, executive, and
judicial power in his person. The actual subject material of the canons is not
just doctrinal or moral in nature, but indeed all-encompassing of the human
condition.
Sharia Law system is followed in Islamist
Governments such as Saudi Arabia, Israel and by minorities in India. It deals
topics that are addressed by Secular Law, including Crime, Politics and
Economics as well as personal Matters such as Sexual Intercourse, hygiene,
diet, fasting, prayer and Fasting. Where it has official status, sharia is
applied by Islamic judges, or qadis. The imam has varying
responsibilities depending on the interpretation of sharia; while the term is
commonly used to refer to the leader of communal prayers, the imam may also be
a scholar, religious leader, or political leader.
Statutory law: It(or statute law) is written law set down by a body of legislature or by a singular legislator (in
the case of an absolute monarchy).
This is as opposed to oral or customary
law; or regulatory law promulgated by the executive or common
law of the judiciary. Statutes may originate with national, state legislatures or
local municipalities. Statutory laws
are subordinate to the higher constitutional
laws of the land and other sources of law.
Classifications of Crime
Personal Crimes – “Offenses against the Person”: These are
crimes that result in physical or mental harm to another person. Personal
crimes include: Assault, Battery(the unlawful or unauthorized application of
force to another person, resulting in contact that is either harmful or
offensive to the victim), False Imprisonment, Kidnapping, Homicide(crimes such
as first and Second dgree,murder and Involutary manslaughter, and vehicular
Homicide), Rape and Sexual Assuault.
Property Crimes – “Offenses against Property”: These are
crimes that do not necessarily involve harm to another person. Instead, they
involve an interference with another person’s right to use or enjoy their
property. Property crimes include: Larceny (The attempt to take someone’s
property and later holding that THAT property never belonged to the real
owner), Burglary (Breaking into someone’s house with intentions of Kidnapping,
murdering or performing any other Felony crime), Arson (wilful and malicious
burning of Property), Embezzlement (Fraudulent conversion of property from the
rightful owner’s name to another person by someone who had a right to possess
the property, such as a trustee or a bank.), Forgery (the creation, altering,
forging, or imitating of any document with the intent to defraud another
person), False Pretenses (Acquiring legitimate title to property through false
representations with the intent to defraud), Receipt of Stolen Goods(purchase
or accept property that you know or believe was obtained through theft).
Inchoate Crimes – “Inchoate” translates into “incomplete”,
meaning crimes that were begun, but not completed. This requires that a person
take a substantial step to complete a crime, as opposed to just “intend” to
commit a crime. Inchoate crimes include:Attempt (Any crime like “attempted
robbery”), Solicitation (someone asks, requests, hires, commands, or encourages
someone else to commit a crime) and Conspiracy.
Statutory Crimes – A violation of a specific state or federal
statute and can involve either property offenses or personal offense. Statutory
crimes include: Alcohol related Crimes such as Drunk Driving and Selling
Alcohol to a minor.
Crime Investigation and Criminal
Apprehension
Crime Investigation: It is an applied science that involves the study of facts, used to identify, locate and prove the guilt of an
accused criminal. A complete criminal investigation can include searching, interviews, interrogations, evidence collection and
preservation and various methods of investigation. Modern-day criminal investigations commonly employ
many modern scientific techniques known collectively as forensic science.
It is an Ancient Science that has got its roots as far back as in 1700BC
in the Writings of the Code of Hammurabi. The Code said that both the accuser
and the accused have the right to present evidence they have collected. In
modern era, investigations are performed by Police forces and sometimes by
Private Investigators who are hired for this purpose.
We also have proof from around 1250 AD, of English Constables who’s
responsibilities were to “record…..matter of fact, not matters of judgement and
law.”
Crime Apprehension: The seizure
and arrest of a person who is suspected of having committed a crime.
A reasonable belief of the possibility of imminent
injury or death at the hands of another that justifies a person acting
in Self-Defense against the potential attack.
An apprehension of attack is an element of the
defence of self-defence that can be used in a criminal prosecution for assault and battery, manslaughter, or
murder. An individual who acts under apprehension of attack does not have to
fear injury. It is sufficient that there is a likeli-hood of actual injury to
justify the person's taking steps to protect him or herself.
In the United States, There’s a special program
which works as a part of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation
responsible for the analysis of Serial violent and Sexual Crimes,
organizationally situated within the Critical Incident Response Group’s (CIRG)
National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), IT is named Violent
Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), it was established in 1985 by the FBI,
out of Quantico, Virginia.
The Judicial
Process Around the World
Japan's process for selecting judges is longer and
more stringent than the process in the United States and
in Mexico. Assistant judges are appointed from those who have
completed their training at the Legal Training and Research Institute located
in Wako. Once appointed, assistant judges still may not qualify to sit
alone until they have served for five years, and have been appointed by
the Supreme Court of Japan. Judges require ten years of experience in
practical affairs, as a public prosecutor or practicing attorney. In the Japanese
judicial branch there is the Supreme Court, eight high courts, fifty
district courts, fifty family courts, and 438 summary courts.
Mexican Supreme Court justices are appointed
by the President of Mexico, and then are approved by the Mexican
Senate to serve for a life term. Other justices are appointed by the
Supreme Court and serve for six years. Federal courts consist of the 21
magistrates of the Supreme Court, 32 circuit tribunals and 98 district courts.
The Supreme Court of Mexico is located in Mexico City. Supreme Court
Judges must be of ages 35 to 65 and hold a law degree during the five years
preceding their nomination.
United States Supreme Court justices are
appointed by the President of the United States and approved by
the United States Senate. As in Mexico, justices serve for a
life term or until retirement. The Supreme Court of the United States is
located in Washington D.C. The United States federal court
system consists of 94 federal judicial districts. The 94 districts
are then divided into twelve regional circuits. The United States has five
different types of courts that are considered subordinate to the Supreme
Court: United States bankruptcy courts, United States Court of
Appeals for the Federal Circuit, United States Court of International
Trade, United States Courts of Appeals, and United States District
Courts.
Types of Punishment
Retributive Punishment: In this theory of justice that
considers punishment, if proportionate, to be the best response to crime. When an offender breaks the law, justice
requires that they forfeit something in return. In contrast to revenge, this type of retribution is only directed at
wrongs, has inherent limits, is not personal, involves no pleasure at the suffering of others, and employs
procedural standards.
It is based upon the principle “Let the Punishment
fit the Crime” which means the severity of Penalty for any misdeed should be
reasonable and proportionate to the severity of the infraction. This Concept
was common in many ancient cultures including the ancient Jewish Culture (as it
is in the laws of Moses), Exodus [(part of the Old Testament) which includes
the punishments “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,
foot for foot”. It also resembles the older Code of Hammurabi.
Traditionally, philosophers of punishment have
contrasted retributivism with utilitarianism.
For utilitarians, punishment is forward-looking, justified by a purported
ability to achieve future social benefits, such as crime reduction. For
retributionists, punishment is backward-looking, justified by the crime that
has been committed and carried out to atone for the damage already done.
This type of Punishment was also Supported by the
18th Century
Philosopher Immanuel Kant [(Past of Last Year’s WSC Curriculum)Part of the Age
of Enlightenment].
Deterrence: It is the use of punishment as a threat to deter people from offending. Deterrence
is often contrasted with retributivism, which holds that punishment is a
necessary consequence of a crime and should be calculated based on the gravity
of the wrong done.
The concept of deterrence has two
key assumptions: the first is that specific punishments imposed on offenders
will "deter" or prevent them from committing further crimes; the
second is that fear of punishment will prevent others from committing similar
crimes.
Rehabilitation: It is the
re-integration into society of convicted and the main objective of modern penal, to counter habitual, also known
as criminal recidivism.
Alternatives to imprisonment also
exist, such as community
service, probation orders, and others entailing guidance and aftercare
towards the offender.
This is followed in the United
States of America, Germany and Italy.
Incapacitation: It is that type of a sentence in positively preventing
(rather than merely deterring)
future offending.
Imprisonment incapacitates the
prisoner by physically removing them from the society against which they are
deemed to have offended. Long term imprisonment with the intention to
incapacitate is often used by systems
against criminals who recidivate. Incapacitation also focuses on removing
the ability of the offenders to commit future crimes.
In his 2004 article, Levitt
attributes part of the decline in the crime rate seen beginning in the mid
1990s to the inability of inmates to recidivate as sentences for crimes,
especially for repeat offenders, had been greatly increased. Examples of these
laws include back-to-back life sentences(Common
Punishment for double murder in the United States. In this two or more
Consecutive Life Sentences are given to a person who has committed more than
one serious crime. ), three-strikes
sentencing (This is a type of Sentencing which suggests more harsh punishment
to someone who has been convicted of two prior serious offenses.), and other
habitual offender laws. In the United States, 18 U.S.C. § 3553 states that one of the purposes of criminal sentencing
is to "protect the public from further crimes of the defendant."
Quite simply, those incarcerated can not commit further crimes against society.
Crime in a Globalized World: The International Criminal
Court
The International Criminal Court (ICC or Act) is an intergovernmental organization and international
tribunal that sits in The Hague in the Netherlands.
The ICC has the jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide,
crimes against humanity, and war
crimes. The ICC is intended to complement existing national judicial systems
and it may therefore only exercise its jurisdiction when certain conditions are
met, such as when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute
criminals or when the United Nations
Security Council or individual
states refer investigations to the Court. The ICC began functioning on 1 July
2002, the date that the Rome Statute entered into force. The Rome Statute is a multilateral treaty which serves as the ICC's foundational and governing
document. States which become party to the Rome Statute, for example by
ratifying it, become member states of the ICC. Currently, there are 123 states which
are party to the Rome Statute and therefore members of the ICC.
The ICC has four principal organs:
the Presidency, the Judicial Divisions, the Office of the Prosecutor, and the
Registry. The President is the most senior judge chosen by his or her peers in
the Judicial Division, which hears cases before the Court. The Office of the
Prosecutor is headed by the Prosecutor who investigates crimes and initiates
proceedings before the Judicial Division. The Registry is headed by the
Registrar and is charged with managing all the administrative functions of the
ICC, including the headquarters, detention unit, and public defense office.
The Office of the Prosecutor has
opened nine official investigations and is also conducting an additional nine preliminary
examinations. Thus far, 39
individuals have been indicted in
the ICC, including Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi, and Ivorian president Laurent
Gbagbo.
Throughout the history and evolution of an
international criminal court from World War II on, the need has never been a
debatable topic. The need, due to the inevitability of humans acting inhumane
towards their fellow man, especially in conflict areas, will always be
present. Overall, the ICC needs to be examined in the perspective of its
context. It is an adolescent institution that must function in an international
system without full global support and especially lacking in support from major
global powers. This can be a very precarious situation to bridge and maintain.
However, success will be the foundation of its power. The more successful and
justifiable cases that are brought and handled before the ICC, the more that
its niche in the international stage will be carved. When this occurs, major
powers such as the U.S. and China can ill afford to ignore the criminal court.
In order to do this, the ICC will need to be willing to be flexible, but
simultaneously relevant, as well as find a charismatic champion to become the
face of the court, and revert back to some of the fantastic foundations from
which the Rome Statute was derived. If all of these things can be accomplished,
and the ICC can successfully complete cases and see things through to the end,
then the importance of the court will only grow exponentially in the global
forum.
CSI: The Science of.....
Fingerprints: A fingerprint in its narrow sense is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The
recovery of fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of forensic science. Fingerprints are easily deposited on
suitable surfaces (such as glass or metal or polished stone) by the natural
secretions of sweat from the eccrine
glands that are present in epidermal
ridges. These are sometimes referred to as "Chanced Impressions".
In a wider use of the term,
fingerprints are the traces of an impression from the friction ridges of any
part of a human or other primate hand. A print from the sole of the foot can
also leave an impression of friction ridges.
Deliberate impressions of
fingerprints may be formed by ink or other substances transferred from the
peaks of friction ridges on the skin to a relatively smooth surface such as a
fingerprint card. Fingerprint
records normally contain impressions from the pad on the last joint of fingers
and thumbs, although fingerprint cards also typically record portions of lower
joint areas of the fingers.
Human fingerprints are detailed,
presumed to be nearly unique, difficult to alter, and durable over the life of
an individual, making them suitable as long-term markers of human identity.
They may be employed by police or other authorities to identify individuals who
wish to conceal their identity, or to identify people who are incapacitated or deceased
and thus unable to identify themselves, as in the aftermath of a natural
disaster. Fingerprint analysis, in use since the early 20th century, has led to
many crimes being solved. This means
that many criminals consider gloves essential. In
2015, the identification of gender by use of a fingerprint test has been reported.
Fingerprint identification, known
as dactyloscopy, or hand print identification, is the process of comparing
two instances of friction ridge skin impressions (see Minutiae), from human
fingers or toes, or even the palm of the hand or sole of the foot, to determine
whether these impressions could have come from the same individual. The
flexibility of friction ridge skin means that no two finger or palm prints are
ever exactly alike in every detail; even two impressions recorded immediately
after each other from the same hand may be slightly different. Fingerprint
identification, also referred to as individualization, involves an expert, or
an expert computer system operating under threshold
scoring rules, determining whether two friction ridge impressions are
likely to have originated from the same finger or palm (or toe or sole).
An intentional recording of
friction ridges is usually made with black printer's ink rolled
across a contrasting white background, typically a white card. Friction ridges
can also be recorded digitally, usually on a glass plate, using a technique
called Live Scan. A "latent print" is the chance recording of
friction ridges deposited on the surface of an object or a wall. Latent prints
are invisible to the naked eye, whereas "patent prints" or
"plastic prints" are viewable with the unaided eye. Latent prints are
often fragmentary and require the use of chemical methods, powder, or alternative
light sources in order to be made clear. Sometimes an ordinary bright
flashlight will make a latent print visible.
When friction ridges come into
contact with a surface that will take a print, material that is on the friction
ridges such as perspiration, oil, grease, ink or blood, will be
transferred to the surface. Factors which affect the quality of friction ridge
impressions are numerous. Pliability of the skin, deposition pressure,
slippage, the material from which the surface is made, the roughness of the
surface and the substance deposited are just some of the various factors which
can cause a latent print to appear differently from any known recording of the
same friction ridges. Indeed, the conditions surrounding every instance of
friction ridge deposition are unique and never duplicated. For these reasons,
fingerprint examiners are required to undergo extensive training. The
scientific study of fingerprints is called dermatoglyphics.
Genetic Testing: It is the identification of any
person by testing their blood. The Testing is by identifying a person’s DNA (or
Deoxyribonucleic Acid). Any Set of our body (which is made up of cells) does
contains DNA. 99.9% of the DNA from two people will be identical. The 0.1% of
DNA code sequences that vary from person to person are what make us unique.
These sequences are called genetic markers, and are the part of the code that
forensic scientists use when doing a DNA test. Identical twins are the only
people who have identical genetic markers. However, the more closely related
two people are, the more likely it is that some of their genetic markers will
be similar. The key to DNA testing is knowing where to look in the billions of
letters of genetic code to find the genetic markers that will identify the
important similarities or differences between people. Parental, forensic and
genetic testing look for similarities in the genetic markers between two
biological samples. Because all cells in the body contain exactly the same DNA,
samples can be taken from almost anywhere in the body, including skin, hair
follicles, blood and other bodily fluids. A forensic scientist might be asked
to compare DNA from skin cells found underneath the fingernails of an attack
victim, with the DNA from a blood sample taken from a potential suspect. First
of all, the DNA is isolated from the cells and millions of copies are made,
using a method called 'polymerase chain reaction', or PCR.PCR uses a naturally
occurring enzyme to copy a specific stretch of DNA over and over again. Having
lots of DNA makes the genetic code easier to analyse. The DNA molecules are
then split at particular locations to separate them into known 'chunks' and the
code at those specific points is analysed to create a DNA fingerprint. The
fingerprints from the two different samples are then compared to see if they
match. The accuracy of DNA tests has big implications. DNA tests are sometimes
the only evidence to prove that a suspect was involved in a crime, or free
someone who has been wrongly convicted. It is easy to tell if DNA from two biological
samples does not match. But a match doesn't make you totally certain that the
two samples come from the same person. There is always a small chance that two
different people's genetic markers could be the same, especially if they are
related. To reduce the chance of error, scientists test more than one genetic
marker. The more identical markers there are in two samples, the more accurate
the test. However, testing more markers takes more time and is more expensive.
Forensic DNA tests usually examine six to ten markers. The chances that two
unrelated people have identical profiles is less than one in one billion.
Blood Splatter: Blood Splatter Analysis inolves the study and analysis of bloodstains at
a known or suspected violent crime scene with the goal of to helping
investigators draw conclusions about the nature, timing and other details of
the crime.
The use of bloodstains as evidence is not new; however, the application of modern science
has brought it to a higher level since the 1970s and '80s. New technologies,
especially advances in DNA analysis,
are available for detectives and criminologists to use in solving crimes and apprehending offenders.
Calculating the speed at which drops of blood leave
the body during an attack is an important measurement for blood pattern
analysis. The physics behind the velocity and size of a blood drop gives
investigators an idea of what kind of wound was inflicted.
A drop of blood falling from a cut finger, for
instance, is a battle primarily between the force of surface tension, which
keeps it stuck to the body, and gravity, which pulls it downwards. Solve the
equations, and you'll find that a typical drop released this way has a volume
of less than one percent of a teaspoon. Blood released
from a wound by a violent impact -- such as a bullet -- tends fly in even
smaller drops. That's because the force of a bullet is much stronger than
gravity and easily overcomes the surface
tension, flinging tiny drops away at high speeds.
Blood contains three components or blood cells that
are suspended within plasma. The
three components are erythrocytes, leukocytes, and platelets, Because plasma is
less dense than the blood cells, it can be easily separated. Plasma does not
separate from blood cells whilst circulating in the bloodstream because it is
in a constant state of agitation. Upon exiting the body, bloodstains transit
from bright red to dark brown, which is attributed to oxidation of oxy-hemoglobin (HbO2) to methemoglobin (met-Hb) and hemichrome(HC).
The fractions of HbO2, met-Hb and HC in a bloodstain can be used for
age determination of bloodstains and can be measured by Reflectance
Spectroscopy.
Autopsy: In Ancient Egypt (3000 BC), Mummification was an example of Autopsy. In
modern Times Autopsy is done in a quite different way, The procedure of Autopsy
we use today was Standarised by Rudolph Virchow in the 20th Century. We have got two types of Autopsies: 1)
Forensic- Which is medical-legal and spends almost as much time on the Internal
Part of the body as on the External , ‘cause that’s where evidence is’.
Forensic Autopsies try to find out answers for the cause of death as a part of
overall police investigation.2) Clinical – In this the cause of death is found
out for Research and Study Purposes. if the autopsy reveals a natural disease process such as leukemia or cancer, then the death would be considered natural. But when that evidence is added to the police report
that states the body was found next to an ice-covered, fallen ladder, the
manner of death is an accident.
It would be easy to assume a gunshot wound is the result of a homicide. an autopsy could reveal that the wound patterns,
angle of bullet entry and gun powder residue indicate that the gun was fired
while being held by the victim. The wounds are self-inflicted, so that would be
ruled a suicide.
Its Process is as follows:
The First step is External Examination, In this we
first Handle, Clean and Move the body which is termed as diener. After that
Ultraviolet rays might be used to search bod surfaces for any evidences.
Samples such as Nails, Hairs etc. might be radio graphically imaged. After that
the Wounds are Examined. Than the Body is weighed on a scale which is designed
to accommodate the Container of the Body as well.
The Second step is Internal Examination, In this
first of all a plastic/rubber brick called a body block is placed under the
back of the body. The Internal Examination consists of inspecting the internal
organs of the body for evidence of Trauma or other indications for the cause of
Death.Patholgists have a variety of ways of Examining the rest of the body to
collect evidences etc.If they want to preserve something, In many cases the
Brain , they do so in Formalin [15% Formaldehyde(also part of last year’s
curriculum) gas in buffered water].
Scene Recognition and Examination: I read more than a few Articles about this and All I was able to take out is : Investigators conduct informal crime scene reconstruction while processing, documenting, and collecting evidence. This process is often subconscious. The formal, second phase of crime scene reconstruction is a conscious process. It takes place after the processing of the scene, analysis of the evidence, and completion of all investigative processes. The methodology for crime scene reconstruction needs standardization for it to mature. The scientific method is a proven systemic process of problem-solving that follows six steps. These steps are to state the problem, develop a hypothesis regarding the explanation or solution of the problem, test the hypothesis by experimentation, form a theory, use theories to predict events, and consider as a scientific law a theory that holds up under testing as an accurate predictor. The hypothesis in crime scene reconstruction needs to be narrow in scope and precise. The investigator must give equal emphasis to all feasible and reasonable possibilities when considering answers to questions. Opinions must rest on an analysis of the physical evidence and known facts. Results must be reviewable, testable, and repeatable. In addition, opinions are always open to new knowledge. The use of the scientific method can overcome obstacles to the admission of testimony. The analysis concludes that a decision template is an appropriate format for applying the scientific method to reconstruction in that it guides the process and documents the analysis.
Sketches: A Sketch Accurately portrays the physical
facts and Relates the sequence of events at the scene. It also establishes the
precise location and relationship of objects and evidence at the scene. It
creates a mental picture of the scene for those not present. It is a permanent
record of the scene.
The Process of Sketching includes: 1) Interviewing
and Investigating the Person 2) Preparing investigative report 3) Presenting
the Case in Court.
The Sketch Supplements Photographs, notes, plaster
casts and other investigative techniques. There are two types of Sketches: A
rough Sketch and a Finished Scale Sketch. The rough sketch is the first
pencil-drawn outline of the scene and the location of objects and evidence
within this outline.(It is usually not drawn to scale). It is made after
Photographs are taken and before anything is moved.
After that When the Investigators move to their
base they make up a finished sketch which consists of a legend, is properly
outlined etc.
Evidence Collection: A wide variety of physical evidence can be collected at a scene that is
deemed valuable (“probative”) for collection and investigation:
biological evidence (e.g., blood, body fluids, hair
and other tissues)
latent print evidence (e.g., fingerprints, palm
prints, foot prints)
footwear and tire track evidence
trace evidence (e.g., fibers, soil, vegetation, glass
fragments)
digital evidence (e.g., cell phone records, Internet
logs, email messages)
tool and tool mark evidence
drug evidence
firearm evidence
The type of evidence collected will vary with the type of crime. In the
case of a burglary, for example, it would be common to perform tasks in the
order listed below. This will help ensure that evidence isn’t inadvertently
damaged or destroyed:
1. Photograph and document the scene
2. Collect trace materials (especially from probable points of entry)
3. Collect low-level DNA evidence by swabbing areas of likely contact
4. Collect other items that may contain biological evidence
5. Locate and collect latent fingerprints
Forensic Entomology: It is the application and study of insect and
other arthropod biology to criminal matters. It also involves the application
of the study of arthropods, including insects, arachnids, centipedes,
millipedes, and crustaceans to criminal or legal cases. It is primarily
associated with death investigations; however, it may also be used to detect
drugs and poisons, determine the location of an incident, and find the presence
and time of the infliction of wounds. Forensic entomology can
be divided into three subfields: urban, stored-product and medico-legal/medico-criminal entomology. It has been written about even in Sun Tzu’s
Works (Part of 2014 WSC Curriculum). The SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) method is effective provided
there is ample time and the proper equipment and the particular fly eggs are
plentiful. The ability to use these morphological differences gives forensic
entomologists a powerful tool that can help with estimating a post mortem
interval, along with other relevant information, such as whether the body has
been disturbed post mortem. In 2001, a method was devised by Jeffrey Wells and
Felix Sperling to use mitochondrial
DNA to differentiate between
different species of the subfamily Chrysomyinae. This is particularly useful
when working to determine the identity of specimens that do not have
distinctive morphological characteristics at certain life stages. A valuable
tool that is becoming very common in the training of forensic entomologists is
the use of mock crime scenes using pig carcasses. The pig carcass represents a
human body and can be used to illustrate various environmental effects on both
arthropod succession and the estimate of the post mortem interval.
Trace evidence: It is created when objects contact. Material is often transferred by heat or induced by contact friction.
The importance of trace evidence
in criminal investigations was shown by Dr. Edmond Locard in the early
20th Century. Since then, forensic scientists use trace evidence to reconstruct
crimes, and to describe the people, places and things involved in them. Studies
of homicides published in the forensic science literature show how trace
evidence is used to solve crimes. Trace evidence is important in accident
investigation, where movement of one part against another will often leave a
tell-tale mark. Such analysis is of great use in forensic engineering.
Examples of typical trace evidence
in criminal cases include glove prints,
hairs, cosmetics, Lipsticks, plant
fibers, mineral fibers, synthetic fibers, glass, paint chips, soils,
footprints, botanical materials, gunshot
residue, explosives residue, and volatile hydrocarbons (arson evidence). For such evidence to be useful, it must be
compared to similar items from suspects, but particular care is necessary to
ensure a thorough analysis. Analysis
of trace materials most often begins with a visual examination of the evidence
usually involving macrophotography. This is then usually followed by microscopic analysis, of which a number of different
types are available depending on the type of material to be analysed, such as a stereomicroscope, scanning electron microscope (SEM) or comparison
microscope. SEM is especially useful because X-ray analysis can be conducted on
selected areas of the sample, so is a form of microanalysis. It is useful where chemical residues
can show unusual elements present which may indicate chemical attack of the
product. A car accident caused by a diesel fuel leak, for example, showed
traces of sulphur on the cracked tube indicative of attack by sulfuric acid from the battery.
Gunshot residue may be identified
by elemental analysis using atomic absorption or with a scanning electron microscope equipped with an energy dispersive spectroscope. Small
amounts of explosives, volatile hydrocarbons, and other chemicals are
identified with the use of analytical instruments, such as gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, and infrared spectroscopy, all of which separate out the
components of the chemicals.
Similar comments apply to damaged
items from an accident scene, but care is needed in ensuring that the sample is
not damaged by the testing, or sampling for testing. Such nondestructive testing must always be used first before considering
destructive methods which involve taking small samples from the item for more
detailed tests, such as spectroscopic
analysis. Use of all such methods must be done in consultation with other
experts and the relevant authorities, such as lawyers on both sides of a case.
Serology: It is the study and examination
of bodily fluids that is used in forensic science as a means of segregating
fluids excreted by assailants or attackers in varying criminal acts. These acts
can range from physical assault to sexual assault, right through to the act of
murder and all of them will have an element of fluid secretion attached to
them. Serology allows the forensic
scientists to segregate these bodily fluids when found at the scene of the
crime and then perform a variety of tests on them in order to identify where
these fluids originated from - or most importantly - who they came from.
One important aspect of Serology is determining
whether or not stains resembling blood found at a crime scene are actually
blood or some other stain that bears a similar resemblance.
Serology is split into two categories of
investigation:
- Presumptive Testing: These
tests provide two separate means of producing a result. One is to use
compounds that can have an effect on blood when introduced to it. These
results are a simple and quick way of proving that samples are actually
blood especially if time is of the essence.
- Confirmatory Tests: This is a
more involved set of tests that are carried out using samples of what is
believed to be blood and mixing them with a chemical compound that reacts
adversely with haemoglobin, the resultant factor being the production of
crystals under the microscope that can be identified as blood.
It is important that these tests -
either one of them - are carried out to prove that these stains are in actual
fact blood; and, more importantly, human blood. This is particularly important
if the deceased's body has been found outside where it may be possible that
animal blood has been spilled on the ground at some point.
Serology, in addition to examining and identifying
blood, is used to identify and categorise semen, saliva, sweat and even human
faeces. This can be achieved in the instance of faeces as it is covered in a
mucus membrane to enable expulsion from the body.
Serology also has a use in proving if unlawful
sexual intercourse has taken place; this has become a necessary element of
forensic science given the rise in sexual assaults and cases of rape. The
processes used by a Serologist can help time intercourse and also help prove
that unlawful intercourse actually took place.
It is important to note that although a large
percentage of the population are classed as 'secretors' there are a smaller
percentage of people who are non-secretors. Secretors exhibit elements of their
blood's protein when they secrete other bodily fluids whilst non-secretors will
not have levels of protein from their blood in their bodily fluids.
Testing the bodily fluids of secretors will reveal
a result but non-secretors make it difficult for Serologists to gain any
results so blood from these individuals must be tested in order to provide any
level of positive result.
Again it is important to note that these procedures
are used when other means of identification yield no results and although these
tests may prove accurate other means of identification should be used, leaving
this kind of scientific evidence to provide additional weight to any legal
proceedings.
Simulations: is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over
time. The act of simulating something
first requires that a model be developed; this model represents the key
characteristics or behaviors/functions of the selected physical or abstract system or process. The model
represents the system itself, whereas the simulation represents the operation
of the system over time.
Simulation is used in many
contexts, such as simulation of technology for performance optimization, safety engineering, testing, training, education, and video games.
Often, computer experiments are used to study simulation models. Simulation is
also used with scientific of natural
systems or human systems to gain insight into their functioning. Simulation can be used to show the eventual real
effects of alternative conditions and courses of action. Simulation is also
used when the real system cannot be engaged, because it may not be accessible,
or it may be dangerous or unacceptable to engage, or it is being designed but
not yet built, or it may simply not exist.
Key issues in simulation include
acquisition of valid source information about the relevant selection of key
characteristics and behaviours, the use of simplifying approximations and
assumptions within the simulation, and fidelity and validity of the simulation
outcomes.
DNA profiling: It is also called DNA fingerprinting, DNA testing, or DNA typing. It is a forensic technique
used to identify individuals by characteristics of their DNA. A DNA
profile is a small set of DNA
variations that is very likely to be different in all unrelated individuals,
thereby being as unique to individuals as are fingerprints (hence
the alternate name for the technique). DNA profiling should not be confused
with full genome sequencing. First developed and used in 1985, DNA profiling is used in, for example, parentage testing and criminal investigation,
to identify a person or to place a person at a crime scene, techniques which
are now employed globally in forensic
science to facilitate police
detective work and help clarify paternity and immigration disputes.
Although 99.9% of human DNA
sequences are the same in every person, enough of the DNA is different that it
is possible to distinguish one individual from another, unless they are monozygotic ("identical") twins. DNA profiling uses repetitive ("repeat")
sequences that are highly variable, called variable number tandem repeats (VNTRs), in particular short tandem repeats (STRs).
VNTR loci are very similar between closely related humans, but
are so variable that unrelated individuals are extremely unlikely to have the
same VNTRs.
The modern process of DNA
profiling was developed in 1988.
Offender Profiling: is an investigative tool used by law enforcement agencies to identify
likely suspects (descriptive offender profiling) and analyze patterns that may
predict future offenses and/or victims (predictive offender profiling). Offender profiling dates back to 1888 and the spree of Jack the Ripper, and the profiling theory describes
how profiling will ideally work.[2] Current applications include predictive profiling,
sexual assault offender profiling, and case linkage (using profiling to
identify common factors in offenses and to help with suspect identification).
Goals of criminal profiling
include providing law enforcement with a social and psychological assessment of
the offender; providing a "psychological evaluation of belongings found in
the possession of the offender" (p. 10); and offering suggestions and
strategies for the interviewing process. Ainsworth
(2001) identified four main approaches to offender profiling: geographical,
investigative psychology, typological, and clinical profiling.
Five steps in profiling include
analyzing the criminal act and comparing it to similar crimes in the past, an
in-depth analysis of the actual crime scene, considering the victim’s
background and activities for possible motives and connections, considering
other possible motives, and developing a description of the possible offender
that can be compared with previous cases. Notable
profilers in history include Walter C. Langer, James Brussel, Howard Teten,
Robert Keppel and Richard Walter, John Douglas and Robert Ressler, and David
Canter.
Entertainment media has depicted
the practical use of offender profiling through television shows such as Law
& Order: Criminal Intent, Profiler, Criminal Minds, Criminal Minds: Suspect
Behavior, and the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. Unlike these and other
popular media portrayals, offender profiling is just one of the tools,
investigative methods, and techniques available to law enforcement personnel. Offender profiling is still controversial and subject
to debate and varied opinions about the accuracy of, effectiveness of,
evidentiary support for, and scientific validity and reliability of this
investigative tool.
Forensic science: It is the application of science to criminal and civil laws. Forensic scientists are tasked with the
collection, preservation, and analysis of scientific evidence during
the course of an investigation. While some forensic scientists travel to the
scene to collect the evidence themselves, others occupy a purely laboratory
role, performing analysis on objects brought to them by other individuals. In addition to their laboratory role, forensic
scientists testify as expert
witnesses in both criminal and civil
cases and can work for either the prosecution or the defense. While any field could technically be forensic,
certain sections have developed over time to encompass the majority of
forensically related cases. Due to
the nature of their position, forensic scientists are expected to uphold a high
level of integrity and maintain strict ethical guidelines regarding their work.
All the Cases above can be said to
be nothing but different Branches of Forensic Science.
Types of Crime to Research
Felony vs. Misdemeanour: A felony is a more serious crime than a misdemeanour and carries much higher penalties, such as long-term jail sentencing.
For example, murder or armed robbery is termed as felonies, while shoplifting —
typically a nonviolent crime — is a misdemeanour. In several states, possession
of small amounts of marijuana has been downgraded to a misdemeanour. The
penalty for misdemeanours often involves only a fine and no jail sentence.
If jail time has been ordered, it is for no more than 1 year.The Three-Strikes
law that has been enacted in Texas, California, Washington and numerous other
states of the United States (and abroad.), is something wherein those convicted
of a felony who have been previously convicted of two or more violent crimes
(or serious felonies) usually receive a more severe punishment in most of the
cases Life Sentence.
White Collar vs. Blue Collar: White-collar crime refers to financially motivated nonviolent crime committed by business and government professionals. Within criminology,
it was first defined by sociologist Edwin in 1939 as "a crime committed by a person of
respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation".
Typical white-collar crimes include fraud, bribery, Ponzi
schemes, trading, embezzlement, cybercrime, copyright
infringement, laundering, identity,
and forgery. Whereas, blue-collar crime is any crime committed by an individual from a lower social class as opposed to white-collar crime which is associated with crime committed by someone of a higher-level
social class.
Theft: It is the
taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with
the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. The word is also used as an informal shorthand term
for some crimes against property, such as burglary, embezzlement, larceny, looting, robbery, shoplifting, library theft, and fraud (i.e., obtaining
money under false pretences). In
some jurisdictions, theft is considered to be synonymous with larceny; in
others, theft has replaced larceny. Someone who carries out an act of or makes
a career of theft is known as a thief.
The act of theft is known by terms such as stealing, thieving, and filching.
Theft is the name of a statutory offence
in California, Canada, England
and Wales, Hong Kong, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Victoria.
Robbery: It is the crime of
taking or attempting to take anything of value by force or threat of force or
by putting the victim in fear.
At common law, robbery is defined
as taking the property of another, with the intent to permanently deprive the
person of that property, by means of force or fear. Precise definitions of the
offence may vary between jurisdictions. Robbery is differentiated from other
forms of theft (such as burglary, shoplifting or car theft) by its inherently violent nature (a violent crime); whereas many lesser forms of theft are
punished as misdemeanors, robbery is
always a felony in jurisdictions that distinguish between the two.
Under English law, most forms of theft are triable either way, whereas robbery is triable only on indictment. The word "rob"
came viaFrench from Late Latin words
(e.g. deraubare) of Germanic origin, from Common
Germanic raub -- "theft".
Among the types of robbery are armed robbery involving use of a weapon and aggravated
robbery involving use of a deadly
weapon or something that appears to be a deadly weapon. Highway robbery or "mugging" takes place outside or in a public place such as a sidewalk, street, or parking
lot. Carjacking is the act of stealing a car from a victim by force. Extortion is
the threat to do something illegal, or the offer to not do something illegal,
in the event that goods are not given, primarily using words instead of
actions.
Criminal slang for robbery
includes "blagging" (armed robbery, usually of a bank) or
"stick-up" (derived from the verbal command to robbery targets to
raise their hands in the air), and "steaming" (organized robbery on
underground train systems).
Burglary: It is typically defined as the
unlawful entry into almost any structure (not just a home or business) with the
intent to commit any crime inside (not just theft/larceny). No physical
breaking and entering is required; the offender may simply trespass through an
open door. Unlike robbery, which involves use of force or fear to obtain
another person's property, there is usually no victim present during a
burglary.
For example, Dan enters Victor's boathouse through an open window,
intending to steal Victor's boat. Finding the boat is gone, Dan returns home.
Though he took nothing, Dan has committed burglary.
The crime of burglary has been around for a long time. It originally
developed under the common law, but states have incorporated the basic idea of
burglary into their penal codes, albeit with some slight modifications. For
instance, under the common law definition of burglary, the crime had to take
place in the dwelling house of another at night. Most states have subsequently
broadened the definition of burglary to include businesses and illegal entries
during the day.
Burglary developed to protect a person's interest in their home and to
prevent violence, not to protect against theft. Other laws criminalize the
taking of property; instead, burglary is meant to safeguard the sanctity of a
person's home and to protect against the possible violence that could arise if
someone discovers a burglar in their house.
The definition of burglary arises out of state law, and thus, the
components of the crime may differ slightly depending on the state. Federal
criminal law incorporates the meaning of burglary used by the state that the
crime occurred in.
Most states and the Model Penal Code use the same basic definition of burglary,
however. In those states, burglary is:
1. The unauthorized breaking and entry;
2. into a building or occupied structure;
3. with the intent to commit a crime inside.
Each of those elements must be present in order to convict a defendant
accused of burglary, so its important to examine each of them a little more
closely.
Breaking and Entry
The first element of burglary involves the burglar breaking into and
entering a structure. The breaking-in can occur in two ways: actual and constructive.
Actual breaking involves physical force: picking a lock or kicking a
door in, for example. It could even be a very slight use of force, such as
pushing open a door thats been left ajar.
Constructive breaking, on the other hand, entails means of gaining entry
that dont use physical force: threats, blackmail or fraud, for example.
However a burglar breaks in to the structure, they must also enter the
structure in order to satisfy this element. The entry can be minimal; the
burglar doesnt have to actually walk into a building in order to commit a
burglary. Sticking a hand through a window counts as an entry sufficient to
support a charge of burglary.
It is also important to note that the entry has to occur without the
consent of the person occupying the property.
Building or Occupied Structure
As mentioned above, under the common law crime of burglary, the accused
burglar had to break into someone else's home. Under the modern definition, a
person commits burglary if they break into almost any type of building or
structure, so long as the structure meets certain requirements.
Usually, states require that the structure be capable of either housing
people or animals, or sheltering property. Houses certainly qualify under this
definition, as do their outlying structures, such as garages and sheds. Stores
and office buildings also qualify.
Breaking into a fenced-off area may not qualify as burglary, however,
since such areas generally do not act as a shelter for people, animals, or
property. For example, breaking into an amusement park after hours probably
wouldn’t meet the requirements for a charge of burglary, but breaking into a
building on the amusement park property probably would.
The structure must also be closed to the public at the time of the burglary.
If a person enters a store during its normal retail hours and steals an item,
the person has committed a shoplifting crime, and not a burglary. If, on the
other hand, the person waits until after the store has closed, picks the lock
on the front door and steals the same item, then a burglary has occurred.
Abandoned buildings generally do not qualify as buildings or structures
for the purposes of burglary charges. Breaking and entering into an abandoned
building may result in other criminal charges, but most likely not a burglary
charge.
Intent
In order for a break-in to constitute a burglary, the person breaking in
must have the intent to commit a crime inside the building. Usually, this crime
is theft, but other crimes can render a break-in a burglary as well.
The crime has to exist separately from the break-in itself. For example,
if an individual uses fraud - which is a crime - to gain after-hours entrance
to a building to view a piece of art, no burglary has taken place since the
only crime that occurred was the fraud used to gain entrance to the building.
Of course, taking the art would elevate the crime to one of burglary.
The timing of the intent also becomes important when determining the
degree of a burglary charge. For instance, if a person intended to commit the
crime in question before they broke in to the building, then most states will
consider this to be a burglary of the first degree (more serious). If the
person broke into a building and only subsequently formed the intent to commit
a crime, most states will classify the burglary as second degree.
Many other factors may affect the degree or
seriousness of the burglary, so it is important to check the specific laws
of the state you are in.
Vandalism: It gets its
name from the Vandals who were a colony of people (The Vandals, an ancient Germanic people, are associated with senseless destruction as a
result of their sack of Rome under
King Genseric in 455.) It
is an offense that occurs when a person destroys or defaces someone else's
property without permission. Effects of vandalism may include broken windows,
graffiti, damage to vehicles, and even damage or destruction of a person's
website. The results of vandalism may be found on billboards, street signs, and
building structures, as well as near bus stops, tunnels, cemeteries, and many
other public spaces.
While vandalism may be considered "art" by some, it is
nonetheless a crime against property that is punishable by jail time, monetary
fines, or both.
What Constitutes Vandalism?
Vandalism is a broad category crime that is used to describe a variety
of behaviors. Generally, vandalism includes any willful behavior aimed at
destroying, altering, or defacing property belonging to another.
Common behaviors that may lead to a vandalism charge include:
Spray painting another's property with the purpose of
defacing;
"Egging" someone's car or window;
Keying (or scratching) paint off of someone's car;
Breaking someone's windows;
Defacing public property with graffiti and other forms
of "art";
Slashing someone's tires;
Defacing park benches; and
Altering or knocking down street signs;
Kicking and damaging someone's property with your
hands or feet; and several other behaviors.
In addition, a person who possesses the means to commit vandalism, including possession of
a drill bit, glass cutter, or other substance, may also face vandalism charges
under certain circumstances (for example, a person under eighteen who carries a
can of spray paint at a park or on school grounds).
Vandalism Laws
Vandalism is covered by state statutes, and varies by state. Some states
refer to vandalism as "criminal damage", "malicious
trespass", "malicious mischief", or other terms. In an effort to
control the impact of vandalism, many states have specific laws that may
decrease certain forms of vandalism. For example, some states have local
"aerosol container laws" that limit the purchase of spray paint
containers or other "vandalism tools" which could be used for
graffiti or vandalism purposes.
In addition, some states have laws that prohibit vandalism to certain
types of property, such as autos, churches, school property, and government
facilities.
Moreover, some states have laws that prohibit specific acts of
vandalism, such as breaking windows, graffiti, and using man-made substances to
destroy property.
Purpose of the Law
Vandalism laws exist to prevent the destruction of property and public
spaces, and may also exist to protect against hate crimes and other behavior
that is directed at religious or minority groups, such as ransacking a church
or synagogue, writing racist or sexist graffiti on school property, or etching
a swastika in a car.
Penalties and Punishment
Depending on the specific state and value of the
property damage, vandalism is either
a misdemeanor or felony offense. Penalties typically
include fines, imprisonment in county jail, or both. In addition, a person
convicted of vandalism is frequently ordered to wash, repair or replace the
damaged property (known as "restitution"), and/or participate in
programs to clean up graffiti and other forms of vandalism. Moreover, a parent
of a minor child may be ordered to pay fines resulting from their child's
vandal behavior under a "parental liability" theory.
Related Offenses
Vandalism, on its own, is often considered a
non-violent crime that generally affects ones "quality of life", but
may escalate to more serious crimes typically
involving juveniles including theft/larceny, burglary, drug
possession, disturbing the peace, and other random acts of violence.
Defenses to Vandalism
Defenses to vandalism typically include circumstances that might
"mitigate" or lesson the penalties, such as indifference, accident,
mischief, or creative expression. Even though vandalism is a crime that
generally requires completion of the act, it does not require you to get
"caught in the act". You may be charged with vandalism after the fact
if there are witnesses, surveillance, or other evidence that might implicate
you with the crime.
Conclusion
Vandalism has the potential to cost states millions of dollars each year
in clean-up efforts and other program costs, and may cause psychological or
emotional damage to property owners as well. When a person defaces, alters, or
otherwise destroys someone's property, he or she may be required to clean- up,
repair, or replace the damaged property or, more substantially, face criminal
penalties in the form of jail time, fines, or both.
Assault: It is harmful or Offensive contact with any person (according to Common
Law.). An assault is carried out by a threat of bodily harm coupled with an
apparent, present ability to cause the harm. It is both a crime and a tort and,
therefore, may result in either criminal and/or civil liability. Generally, the
common law definition is the same in criminal and tort law. There is, however,
an additional criminal law category of assault consisting of an attempted but
unsuccessful battery. The term is often confused with battery, which involves physical contact. The specific
meaning of assault varies between countries, but can refer to an act that
causes another to apprehend immediate and personal violence, or in the more
limited sense of a threat of violence caused by an immediate show of force. Assault in many US jurisdictions and Scotland is defined more broadly still as any intentional physical
contact with another person without their consent; but in England and Wales and in most other common law jurisdictions
in the world, this is defined instead as battery. Some jurisdictions have incorporated the definition of civil
assault into the definition of the crime making it a criminal assault
intentionally to cause another person to apprehend a harmful or offensive
contact.
Laundering: It is the process of transforming the
proceeds of crime into ostensibly legitimate money or other assets. However, in a number of legal and regulatory systems,
the term money laundering has become conflated with other forms of financial crime, and sometimes used more generally to
include misuse of the financial system (involving things such as securities, digital currencies, credit cards, and traditional
currency), including terrorism
financing and evasion of international sanctions. Most anti-money laundering
laws openly conflate money laundering (which is concerned with source of
funds) with terrorism financing (which is concerned with destination of funds) when regulating the financial system.
According to the United States Treasury Department:
Money laundering is the process of
making illegally-gained proceeds (i.e. "dirty money") appear legal
(i.e. "clean"). Typically, it involves three steps: placement,
layering and integration. First, the illegitimate funds are furtively
introduced into the legitimate financial system. Then, the money is moved
around to create confusion, sometimes by wiring or transferring through
numerous accounts. Finally, it is integrated into the financial system through
additional transactions until the "dirty money" appears
"clean."
Money obtained from certain
crimes, such as extortion, insider trading, drug trafficking and illegal gambling
is "dirty". It needs to be cleaned to appear to have been derived
from legal activities so that banks and other financial institutions will deal
with it without suspicion. Money can be laundered by many methods, which vary
in complexity and sophistication.
Different countries may or may not
treat payments in breach of international
sanctions as money laundering. Some
jurisdictions differentiate these for definition purposes, and others do not.
Some jurisdictions define money laundering as obfuscating sources of money,
either intentionally or by merely using financial systems or services that do
not identify or track sources or destinations.
Other jurisdictions define money
laundering to include money from activity that would have been a crime
in that jurisdiction, even if it were legal where the actual conduct occurred.
This broad brush of applying the term "money laundering" to merely
incidental, extraterritorial, or simply privacy-seeking behaviours has led some
to label it "financial thought crime".
Many regulatory and governmental
authorities issue estimates each year for the amount of money laundered, either
worldwide or within their national economy. In 1996, the International estimated that two to five percent of the worldwide
global economy involved laundered money. The Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF), an intergovernmental body set up to combat
money laundering, stated, "Overall, it is absolutely impossible to produce
a reliable estimate of the amount of money laundered and therefore the FATF
does not publish any figures in this regard. Academic commentators have
likewise been unable to estimate the volume of money with any degree of
assurance. Various estimates
of the scale of global money laundering are sometimes repeated often enough to
make some people regard them as factual—but no researcher has overcome the
inherent difficulty of measuring an actively concealed practice.
Regardless of the difficulty in
measurement, the amount of money laundered each year is in the billions (US
dollars) and poses a significant policy concern for governments. As a result, governments and international bodies have
undertaken efforts to deter, prevent, and apprehend money launderers. Financial
institutions have likewise undertaken efforts to prevent and detect
transactions involving dirty money, both as a result of government requirements
and to avoid the reputational risk involved. Issues relating to money
laundering have existed as long as there have been large scale criminal enterprises. Modern anti-money
laundering laws have developed along with the modern War on Drugs. In more recent times anti-money
laundering legislation is seen as adjunct to the financial crime of terrorist financing in that both crimes usually involve the transmission
of funds through the financial system (although money laundering relates to
where the money has come from, and terrorist financing relating to where the money
is going to).
Extortion: is a criminal
offense of obtaining money,
property, or services from a person, entity, individual or institution, through coercion( Compelling or manipulating a person to act
in one’s own Desired way.). It is sometimes euphemistically referred to
as a "protection racket" since the racketeers often phrase their
demands as payment for "protection" from (real or hypothetical)
threats from unspecified other parties. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to
commit the offense. Making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or
property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit the offense. Exaction
refers not only to extortion or the demanding and obtaining of something
through force, but additionally, in
its formal definition, means the infliction of something such as pain and suffering or making somebody endure something unpleasant.
Extortion is distinguished from robbery. In robbery, whether armed or not, the
offender takes property from the victim by the immediate use of force or fear
that force will be immediately used (as in the classic line, "Your money
or your life.") Extortion, which is not limited to the taking of property,
involves the verbal or written instillation of fear that something will happen to the victim if
they do not comply with the extortionist's will. Another key distinction is
that extortion always involves a verbal or written threat, whereas robbery does
not. In United States federal law, extortion can be committed with or
without the use of force and with or without the use of a weapon.
In blackmail, which always involves extortion, the extortionist threatens
to reveal information about a victim or their family members that is
potentially embarrassing, socially damaging, or incriminating unless a demand
for money, property, or services is met.
The term extortion is often used metaphorically to refer to usury or to price-gouging, though neither is legally considered
extortion. It is also often used loosely to refer to everyday situations where one
person feels indebted against their will, to another, in order to receive an
essential service or avoid legal consequences.
Neither extortion nor blackmail
requires a threat of a criminal act, such as violence, merely a threat used to
elicit actions, money, or property from the object of the extortion. Such
threats include the filing of reports (true or not) of criminal behaviour to
the police, revelation of damaging facts (such as pictures of the object of the
extortion in a compromising position), etc.
Blackmail: It is an act, often a crime, involving
unjustified threats to make a gain (commonly money or property) or cause loss
to another unless a demand is met. Essentially, it is coercion involving
threats to reveal substantially true or false information about a person to the public, a
family member, or associates, or threats of physical harm or criminal
prosecution. It is the name of a
statutory offence in the United States of America, England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Victoria,
Australia, and has been used as a convenient way of referring to other
offences, but was not a term of art in English law before 1968. It originally meant payments rendered by settlers in
the Counties of England bordering Scotland to chieftains and the like in the Scottish Lowlands, in exchange for protection from
Scottish thieves and marauders into England.
Blackmail may also be considered a
form of extortion. Although the two are generally synonymous, extortion
is the taking of personal property by threat of future harm. Blackmail is the use of threats to prevent another
from engaging in a lawful occupation and writing libellous letters or letters
that provoke a breach of the peace, as well as use of intimidation for purposes
of collecting an unpaid debt. Some
US states distinguish the offenses by requiring that blackmail be in writing.
In some jurisdictions, the offence of blackmail is often carried out during the
act of robbery. This occurs when an
offender makes a threat of immediate violence towards someone in order to make
a gain as part of a theft. For example, the threat of "Your money or your
life!" is an unlawful threat of violence in order to gain property.”
Embezzlement: It is an act of dishonestly withholding assets for the
purpose of conversion (theft) of such assets, by one or more persons to whom
the assets were entrusted, either to be held or to be used for specific
purposes. Embezzlement is a type of
financial fraud, e.g. a lawyer might
embezzle funds from the trust accounts of his or her clients; a financial advisor might embezzle the funds of investors; and a husband or a wife might
embezzle funds from a bank account jointly held with the spouse.
Embezzlement usually is a
premeditated crime performed methodically, with the embezzler taking
precautions to conceal his or her activities of the criminal conversion of the
property of another person, because the embezzlement is occurring without the
knowledge or the consent of the affected person. Often it involves the trusted
individual embezzling only a small proportion or fraction of the total of the
funds or resources he/she receives or controls; in an attempt to minimize the
risk of the detection of the misallocation of the funds or resources. When
successful, embezzlements continue for years (or even decades) without
detection. It is often only when a relatively large proportion of the funds are
needed at one time; or they are called upon for another use; or, when a major
institutional reorganization (the closing or moving of a plant or business
office, or a merger/acquisition of a firm) requires the complete and
independent accounting of all real and liquid assets; prior to, or concurrent with, the
reorganization, that the victims realize the funds, savings, assets or
other resources, are missing and that they have been duped by the embezzler.
In the U.S., embezzlement is a statutory offense, thus the definition of the crime of
embezzlement varies according to the given statute. Typically, the criminal
elements of embezzlement are: (i) the fraudulent (ii) conversion (iii)
of the property (iv) of another person (v) by the person who has
lawful possession of the property.
(i) Fraudulence: The requirement that the conversion be fraudulent requires
that the embezzler wilfully, and without claim of right or mistake, converted
the entrusted property to his or her own use.
(ii) Criminal conversion: Embezzlement is a crime against ownership; i.e.
voiding the right of the owner to control the disposition and use of the
property entrusted to the embezzler. The
element of criminal conversion requires substantial interference with the
property rights of the owner. (This is unlike larceny, wherein the slightest movement of the
property, when accompanied by the intent to permanently deprive the owner of
possession of the property is sufficient cause.)
(iii) Property: Embezzlement statutes do not limit the scope
of the crime to conversions of personal property. Statutes generally include
conversion of tangible personal property, intangible personal property and choose in
action. Real property is not typically included.
(iv) of another: A person cannot embezzle his or her own property.
(v) Lawful possession: The critical element is that the embezzler must have
been in lawful possession of the property at the time of the fraudulent
conversion, and not merely have custody of the property. If the thief had
lawful possession of the property, the crime is embezzlement. If the thief
merely had custody, the crime is larceny.
Caper: It is a subgenre of crime fiction. The typical caper story involves one or
more crimes (especially thefts, swindles, or occasionally kidnappings)
perpetrated by the main characters in full view of the reader. The actions of
police or detectives attempting to prevent or solve the crimes may also be chronicled,
but are not the main focus of the story.
The caper story is distinguished
from the straight crime story by elements of humor, adventure, or unusual
cleverness or audacity. For instance, the Dortmunder stories of Donald
E. Westlake are highly comic tales
involving unusual thefts by a gang of offbeat characters — in different stories
Dortmunder's gang steals the same gem several times, steals an entire branch
bank, and kidnaps someone from an asylum by driving a stolen train onto the
property. By contrast, the same author's Parker stories (published
under the name Richard Stark) are grimly straightforward accounts of mundane
crime — the criminal equivalent of the police procedural. Others, such as Lawrence Block's Bernie
Rhodenbarr novels, feature a role reversal, an honest criminal and crooked cop,
and the use of burglar Rhodenbarr criminal talents to solve murders.
A caper may appear as a subplot in
a larger work. For example, Tom Sawyer's
plot to steal Jim out of slavery in the last part of Huckleberry Finn is a classic caper.
Heist: It basically refers to any type of robbery (big robbery) from any Bank,
Museum etc. Some of the major heists are part of the Material Below.
Conspiracy: It is an agreement between two or more
persons to commit a crime at some time in the future. Criminal law in some
countries or for some conspiracies may require that at least one overt act must
also have been undertaken in furtherance of that agreement, to constitute an offense. There is no limit on the number participating
in the conspiracy and, in most countries, no requirement that any steps have
been taken to put the plan into effect (compare attempts which
require proximity to the full offence). For the purposes of concurrence, the actus reus is a continuing one and parties may join the plot later and incur joint
liability and conspiracy can be charged where the co-conspirators have been
acquitted or cannot be traced. Finally, repentance by one or more parties does not affect liability – unless, in
some cases, it occurs before the parties have committed overt acts – but may reduce
their sentence. There are many
Conspiracy theories as well such as the Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory.
Fraud: It is a deliberate deception to
secure unfair or unlawful gain. Fraud is both a civil wrong (i.e.,
a fraud victim may sue the fraud perpetrator to avoid the fraud and/or recover
monetary compensation) and a criminal
wrong (i.e., a fraud perpetrator may
be prosecuted and imprisoned by governmental authorities). The purpose of fraud
may be monetary gain or other benefits, such as obtaining a driver's license by
way of false statements.
Larceny: It is a crime involving the unlawful
taking of the personal property of another person. It was an offence under the law of England and became an offence in jurisdictions
which incorporated the common law of England into their own law.
Larceny has been abolished in England and Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland due to breaking up the generalized crime of larceny
into the specific crimes of burglary, robbery, fraud, theft, and related crimes. However, larceny remains an
offense in parts of the United
States and in New South Wales, Australia, involving the taking (caption) and carrying away (piration)
of personal property.
Hate Crime: It is a prejudice-motivated crime, often violent, which occurs
when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her membership (or
perceived membership) in a certain social
group. Examples of such groups can include but are not limited to: ethnicity, gender
identity, disability, language, nationality, physical appearance, religion, or sexual orientation. Non-criminal actions that are motivated by these
reasons are often called "bias incidents".
"Hate crime" generally
refers to criminal acts that are seen to have been motivated by bias against
one or more of the types above, or of their derivatives. Incidents may involve
physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal
abuse or insults, mate crime or offensive graffiti or letters (hate mail).
Hate Crimes have a huge variety of
Psychological effects.. A 1999 U.S. study of lesbian and gay victims of violent
hate crimes documented that they experienced higher levels of psychological
distress, including symptoms of depression and anxiety, than lesbian and gay
victims of comparable crimes not motivated by antigay bias. It can have
psychological and affective disturbance on the victim, can generate terror
on/from (which would originate from) the targeted group and overall it can have
division and factionalism arising in the Society.
In the UK we might dial 999 or 112
when we witness or are victim of or are about to be the victim of Hate Crime.
Trafficking: It is the trade of humans, most commonly for the purpose of sexual slavery, forced labour, or commercial
sexual exploitation for the
trafficker or others. This may
encompass providing a spouse in the context of forced marriage, or the
extraction of organs or tissues, including
for surrogacy and ova
removal. Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans-nationally.
Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the
victim's rights of movement through coercion and because of their commercial exploitation. Human trafficking is the trade in
people, and does not necessarily involve the movement of the person from one
place to another.
In 2013 the Total revenue
generated from Trafficking Human beings was calculated to be $32 Billion.
Kidnapping: It is the unlawful taking away or transportation of a person against that person's will, usually to hold the person
unlawfully. This may be done for ransom or in furtherance of another crime, or in connection
with a child custody dispute.
In some countries such as the
United States a large number of child abductions arise after separation or divorce when one parent
wishes to keep a child against the will of the other or against a court order.
In these cases, some jurisdictions do not consider it kidnapping if the child, being
competent, agrees.
There are some named forms of
Kidnapping as well some of which are: Bride Kidnapping (Where the Bride is
kidnapped after abductions related to her parents getting her to marriage
against her will, Its resurging in Kyrgyzstan.), Express Kidnapping (In this
someone is abducted and kidnapped for a Ransom, this form is very common in
Latin America), Tiger Kidnapping (In this case, Someone is taken hostage just
to abduct someone else to do something for the kidnapper.).
According to 2014 Statistics,
Mexico was the World’s top hotspot for Kidnapping , since 2006. It is followed
by India and Pakistan.
Classic Piracy: It is an act of robbery or criminal violence at sea. Those who engage in acts of piracy are called pirates.
Narrow channels which funnel
shipping into predictable routes can develop opportunities for piracy, as well
as for privateering and commerce raiding. (For a land-based parallel, compare
the association of bandits and brigands with mountain passes.) Historic examples
include the waters of Gibraltar, the Strait
of Malacca, Madagascar, the Gulf of
Aden, and the English Channel, whose geographic strictures facilitated pirate
attacks.
The term can include acts
committed in the air, on land, or in other major bodies of water or on a shore. It does not normally include crimes committed
against people traveling on the same vessel as the perpetrator (e.g. one
passenger stealing from others on the same vessel). The term has been used
throughout history to refer to raids across land borders by non-state agents.
Piracy or pirating is the name of a specific crime under customary international law and also the name of a number of crimes under the
municipal law of a number of states. It is distinguished from privateering, which is authorized by national
authorities and therefore a legitimate form of war-like activity by non-state actors. In the 21st century, the international community is facing many problems in bringing pirates to justice.
The Word Pirate has been derived
from the Latin Term ‘pirata’ which means to attempt.
Aircraft Hijacking etc are nothing
but different terms of Piracy. There are different types of Pirate Code which
different pirates such as John Phillips have developed for maintaining
Discipline and Division of Stolen Goods. To find out more about Classic Pirates
go to the Material Above.
Digital Piracy: The illegal trade in software, videos, digital video devices (DVDs), and
music. Piracy occurs when someone other than the copyright holder copies the
product and resells it for a fraction of the cost that the legitimate producer
charges. It is a serious problem in many countries outside the United States,
particularly China. It is also closely related with Copyright infringement.It
is the infringement of the Works protected by Copyright laws. Like this
companies and people are losing millions of Dollars. According to a 2007 BSA and International Data Corporation (IDC) study, the five countries with the highest rates
of software piracy were: 1. Armenia (93%); 2. Bangladesh (92%); 3. Azerbaijan (92%); 4.Moldova (92%); and 5. Zimbabwe (91%). According to the study's results, the five
countries with the lowest piracy rates were: 1. U.S. (20%); 2. Luxembourg (21%);
3. New Zealand (22%); 4. Japan (23%); and 5. Austria (25%).In
2007, the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) reported that music piracy took
$12.5 billion from the U.S. economy. In
2008, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) reported that its six
major member companies lost US$6.1 billion to piracy.
419(or Advance Fee Scam): It is used to refer to one of the most common types of Confidence Trick
(fraud). The scam typically involves promising the victim a significant share of a large sum of money, which the fraudster requires a small up-front payment to obtain. If a victim makes the payment, the fraudster either invents a series of further fees for the victim, or simply disappears. 419 is said to be a modern derivative of traditional centuries old West African scams and pranks such as the "Red Mercury" scam (a "magical substance" advance fee fraud scam very similar to Black Currency 419, which is described below. Although 419 has often been erroneously described as an evolution of an old European advance fee fraud called the "Spanish Prisoner" scam, after a journalist doing an early article on noted the similarities between it and certain forms of 419, in actuality 419 is more of a "home grown" enterprise as it were.419 is the No. of the Section of Nigerian Criminal Code which deals with A kind of Advance Fee Scam.
(fraud). The scam typically involves promising the victim a significant share of a large sum of money, which the fraudster requires a small up-front payment to obtain. If a victim makes the payment, the fraudster either invents a series of further fees for the victim, or simply disappears. 419 is said to be a modern derivative of traditional centuries old West African scams and pranks such as the "Red Mercury" scam (a "magical substance" advance fee fraud scam very similar to Black Currency 419, which is described below. Although 419 has often been erroneously described as an evolution of an old European advance fee fraud called the "Spanish Prisoner" scam, after a journalist doing an early article on noted the similarities between it and certain forms of 419, in actuality 419 is more of a "home grown" enterprise as it were.419 is the No. of the Section of Nigerian Criminal Code which deals with A kind of Advance Fee Scam.
Notorious Crimes and Capers
The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist: On the morning of July 30, 2012, an accountant named Michel
Gauvreau arrived at the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, housed in a huge
red brick warehouse on the side of the Trans-Canadian Highway in
Saint-Louis-de-Blandford, about two hours northeast of Montreal. Inside,
baby-blue barrels of maple syrup were stacked six high in rows hundreds deep.
Full, each barrel weighs about 620 pounds. With grade A syrup trading at about
$32 per gallon, that adds up to $1,800 a barrel, approximately 13 times the
price of crude oil.
The fiscal year was coming to a close, and the Federation
of Québec Maple Syrup Producers had hired Gauvreau’s company, Veragrimar, to
audit its inventory. Québec dominates the maple syrup market, and since 2002
the Federation has operated as a legal cartel, setting production quotas and
prices, authorizing buyers, and stockpiling syrup. There were around 16,000
barrels here, about one-tenth of Québec’s annual production. The gap between
the rows was barely wide enough to walk through, and the rubber soles of
Gauvreau’s steel-tip boots stuck to the sugar-coated concrete floor.
He scaled a row of barrels and was nearing the top
of the stack when one of them rocked with his weight. He nearly fell. Regaining
his balance, he rattled the barrel: It was light because it was empty. He soon
found others that were empty. After notifying the Federation’s leaders and
returning with them to examine the stockpile, they unscrewed the cap on a full
barrel. The liquid inside was not goopy, brown, or redolent with the wintry
scent of vanilla, caramel, and childhood; it was thin, clear, and odorless. It
was water.
The Federation would need two months to tally the
losses to the stockpile. Sixty percent, or 6 million pounds of syrup, had
vanished, worth about $18 million wholesale. The bold and baffling heist
counts as one of the largest agricultural thefts ever, dwarfing the 860 head of
cattle snatched in Queensland, Australia, last spring and the potato patches
the size of a football field that were dug up in British Columbia in August.
Siphoning off and transporting so much syrup was no mean feat. It would have
taken more than 100 tractor-trailers. “To steal that amount of maple syrup
means you have to know the market,” says Simon Trépanier, acting director of
the Federation. “We are talking about big players.”
The theft was also an existential threat to the
Federation, which had viewed its growing strategic reserves as the final step
in stabilizing prices, locking in buyers, and ensuring loyalty from its
producers. For the past decade it had struggled to overcome opposition to its
reign in a series of legal battles the local media had christened “The Maple
Wars.” Some observers have suggested that their attempts to control the syrup
supply had, in fact, catalyzed an underground economy.
“With the benefit of hindsight, this is something
you would have expected,” says Marc Van Audenrode, an economist with the
Analysis Group in Montreal, who has studied the industry. Indeed, the syrup
trail soon led to free-market renegades inside and outside the province who
opposed what was, in their view, a Communist program. It wasn’t just about
syrup, or money. It was a miniature Canadian Cold War.
Maple syrup may not rank among Canada’s most
financially important agricultural exports, but nothing says “Eh!” quite like a
liter of boiled-down tree sap. Ten species of maple, including the sugar maple,
are native to Canada. By the early 19th century the multipointed leaf had
become a popular icon for French-Canadians living in the Saint-Lawrence Valley;
it wasn’t long before the leaf became a national symbol featured on coins,
military uniforms, and eventually the country’s flag.
When Prime Minister Stephen Harper travels abroad,
his gift bag for foreign leaders includes a selection of the country’s finest
maple syrup. It remains both a national point of pride and a durable punch
line. At Canadian markets, you can find maple sugar, maple butter, maple pork
rub, maple vinaigrette, maple coffee, maple tea, and, as of last year, maple
perfume.
Syrup production occurs between February and April,
on the 20 to 25 days when the temperature rises above freezing, creating
pressure that forces the energy-rich sap—which is about 3 percent
sugar—out of a tap hole in the trunks of maple trees. On a recent morning,
Philippe Turcotte, 39, an affable man with a speckling of gray in his goatee
and mustache, took an ATV tour of his family’s 12,000-tree sugarbush in
Drummondville, Québec. A tangle of plastic tubes stretches from tree to tree,
converging on a vacuum pump in a wooden shack at the back of their property. From
that shack, the thin sap gets pumped about half a mile over the hill to a barn,
where reverse-osmosis raises sugar concentration to 14 percent. Then
Turcotte fires up his $25,000 stainless steel Dallaire evaporator—model name:
L’Enfer (“Hell”)—and boils the syrup until it reaches a sugar concentration of
exactly 66 percent.
For 2012, Québec estimated maple
syrup production of 96.1 million pounds, which has a wholesale value of
about $270 million. Approximately two-thirds of bulk exports head to the
U.S., with the rest going to Japan, Germany, France, the U.K., and other
countries. For most producers, maple syrup is either a hobby, a second career,
or a source of retirement income, but their investment and revenue are not
trivial. Turcotte’s sugarbush can produce 35,000 pounds of syrup each year,
worth about $100,000, but it’s going to be many years before he pays off his
equipment improvements. Turcotte, who also works for the telecommunications
company Bell Canada (BCE), says he
would not be where he is today were it not for the Federation. “They took this
industry out of the backwoods,” he says. “For myself, business has never
flourished so much.”
Early on, maple syrup producers banded together in
this region to form trade groups and develop joint marketing plans. In 1989 the
Agriculture and Food Marketing Board in Québec, which sets regulations and
arbitrates legal disputes, oversaw a vote that empowered the Federation alone
to set the rules for the production and marketing of maple syrup throughout the
province. Over the next 10 years, the number of tapped trees increased from
20 million to 35 million. The short production season often resulted
in price fluctuations, and by 2000 supply had also outpaced demand: Syrup
prices fell to C$1.56 ($1.57) per pound from C$2.20 in 1998. Producers were
unable to get bank loans or invest in new equipment.
In 2002 and 2003 the Federation created a central
sales agency and a quota system for bulk sales. Producers obtained their quota
based on their two best production years. The rules have nudged the wholesale
price up from an average of C$2.06 per pound in 2002 to C$2.82 today, but the
province’s 7,300 producers also have to pay their dues: C12¢ per pound sold.
For the 20th anniversary of the cartel, in 2010, the Federation’s enthusiastic
young inspector, Mathieu Audy, penned an ode: “With the principles of unity,
solidarity, and social justice, producers have pursued their common interest
and traveled the countryside in search of consensus!” It sounds better in
French.
Solidarity to some, however, is devilish
centralized planning to others. If you live in Québec and want to tap a maple
tree to sell syrup wholesale, you either have to buy land from someone who has
been granted an allocation or apply for a new allocation from the Federation,
an uncertain process that could take years. Twelve hundred producers are on the
waiting list. Producers are free to exceed their quota, but they’d only get
paid once the Federation’s entire inventory was exhausted. They’re also on the hook
for storage fees. The quota also calls for intrusive oversight at times. For
instance, if a producer fails to sell to the Federation one year, Audy or his
peers could ask him to provide electricity bills to prove he wasn’t boiling
syrup. Buyers and producers caught circumventing the system are hit with hefty
fines. “We have a rotten system in Québec,” gripes Roland Champagne, a producer
in Inverness. In the woods, a rebellion started.
Nevertheless, by the summer of 2012, the Federation
had largely prevailed over its malcontents and was nearing a milestone that
would cement its dominance. To fully stabilize prices, actuaries calculated
that the Federation needed to maintain reserves of 40 million pounds of
syrup, and the Federation was building a facility to accommodate that.
Meantime, it had begun stashing its surplus syrup at a rented warehouse in
Saint-Louis-de-Blandford. The only security was a guard who was supposed to
stop by each day.
Etienne St. Pierre, a 69-year-old widower, has lived his entire life in Kedgwick, New Brunswick, a working-class logging town 100 miles from Maine surrounded by mixed evergreen forest in the northernmost remnants of the Appalachian Mountains. His great-grandfather settled here in 1905 as part of a land grant program; today, his four brothers and two sisters all have houses along one short stretch of Route 17. After retiring as a mechanic in the early 1990s, St. Pierre started a sugar farm producing about 65,000 pounds of syrup each year and selling it to Québec. But for three straight years, from 1993 to 1995, he lost about half of his sales as one buyer after another declared bankruptcy.
Etienne St. Pierre, a 69-year-old widower, has lived his entire life in Kedgwick, New Brunswick, a working-class logging town 100 miles from Maine surrounded by mixed evergreen forest in the northernmost remnants of the Appalachian Mountains. His great-grandfather settled here in 1905 as part of a land grant program; today, his four brothers and two sisters all have houses along one short stretch of Route 17. After retiring as a mechanic in the early 1990s, St. Pierre started a sugar farm producing about 65,000 pounds of syrup each year and selling it to Québec. But for three straight years, from 1993 to 1995, he lost about half of his sales as one buyer after another declared bankruptcy.
He decided that if anything went
wrong, he’d rather be the one declaring bankruptcy. He sold his sugarbush to
his only son and set up shop in an office attached to his home, launching SK
Export in 2002 to package and ship syrup. His business plan was simple: Avoid
the Federation and sell directly to distributors in the U.S. In the first year
he exported thousands of barrels of New Brunswick syrup to Maple Grove Farms of
Vermont, whose syrups, candies, and baking mixes sell at Wal-Mart
Stores (WMT),Safeway (SWY), and other chains. In 2006 he sent advertisements to
producers in Québec, promising 25 percent to 50 percent cash. “Our
system is very confidential,” one flyer noted. “St. Pierre is a very honest
person and very well known in the region,” said another. St. Pierre’s opinion
is that Québec’s provincial rules don’t apply to him. “As soon as you cross
into New Brunswick, the Federation can do nothing. There’s no border. No duty,”
he says.
The Federation begged to differ.
On April 17 an undercover investigator working for the Federation—and
operating under the dashing alias Jacques Leblond—phoned St. Pierre, asking if
he’d buy four barrels of Québec syrup. Mais oui,
said St. Pierre. The next day, Leblond’s partner drove four barrels from the
stockpile to New Brunswick. St. Pierre graded his syrup and assigned Leblond a
confidential number, 95, by which he would be identified. One month later,
Leblond received a check for C$3,550.65 made out to Buyer 95. That was less
than the Federation would have paid, but the payment came promptly.
The Federation expanded the investigation the
following year, discovering more about St. Pierre’s trade network. Québec
producers were shipping thousands of barrels of syrup to St. Pierre via a
remote farm, where the owner earned a dime for every pound it stored. One
couple, Jean-Pierre and Lise Caron, ignored the quota system and sold St.
Pierre their entire annual production in 2005 and 2006. The Federation demanded
that St. Pierre pay C$264,166 in damages and submit all his bank statements
from 2004 to 2008.
St. Pierre, a mellow man who dons a navy shirt and
slacks to work each day, ignored this and other demands, believing the
Federation is not entitled to any money. His second-in-command, Julienne Bossé,
took a stronger tack: She scribbled her response on a subpoena and faxed it
back to the Federation. “F--- you gang of A-holes,” she wrote. “Ha! Ha! Ha! … We will keep
buying maple syrup forever.” In another letter, she taunted the Federation for
continuing to get the address of SK Export wrong and helpfully provided a
creatively spelled alternative: “7348 Rue Funck You.” When Bossé wasn’t penning
screeds to the Federation, she helped make syrup-filled chocolate maple leaves
and melt-in-your-mouth maple meringues for sale in the gift shop.
After the Federation reported the theft from the Strategic Reserve to the Québec provincial police, known as the Sûreté du Québec, the agency began a vast investigation that would involve interviews with nearly 300 people in the industry, reviews of export statistics, and forensic analyses of syrup kettles, forklifts, and scales, tracing two-thirds of the stolen syrup to companies in New Brunswick, Québec, Ontario, and the U.S.
After the Federation reported the theft from the Strategic Reserve to the Québec provincial police, known as the Sûreté du Québec, the agency began a vast investigation that would involve interviews with nearly 300 people in the industry, reviews of export statistics, and forensic analyses of syrup kettles, forklifts, and scales, tracing two-thirds of the stolen syrup to companies in New Brunswick, Québec, Ontario, and the U.S.
At 10 a.m. on Sept. 25, Etienne St.
Pierre was in his usual navy-blue outfit, working in the office after a recent
scouting trip to China, when two police officers from the Sûreté du Québec
arrived with a search warrant. Bossé knew their Québec warrant was no good in
New Brunswick; at one point she says she pretended to wipe her derrière with
it, gave the police the bird, and locked the side door. When the officers went
to another door and asked for the keys to the warehouse, she snatched them from
St. Pierre and tucked them into her ample bosom.
The police relented, returning that evening at 11
with a stamp of approval from a New Brunswick judge, but they still had to pry
open the warehouse door with a crowbar. Inside, St. Pierre had more than a
million dollars’ worth of syrup. The next day he told the authorities that
about 700 to 800 barrels came from Richard Vallières, one of Québec’s most
notorious “barrel-rollers,” an unauthorized middleman who had run afoul of the
Federation in the past and paid thousands of dollars in fines. The police
seized St. Pierre’s forklift, his confidential list of suppliers, and all his
syrup for forensic analysis. The next month they took between 75 and 100
barrels from an unmarked warehouse near Québec City that Vallières had rented
to stash and cook fermented syrup. Neighbors said they frequently smelled the
maple wafting across the parking lot, and Vallières made no attempt to hide his
operation.
In early November, I met Vallières in Kedgwick,
where he was keeping a low profile, regularly lunching with St. Pierre and
establishing his own sugarbush. A chubby, nervous guy in his 30s with a six
o’clock shadow and a baseball cap, he was willing to speak only for a few
minutes through the open window of his idling pickup truck. He owed back rent
on the warehouse and hadn’t returned to it since the raid. He said he typically
bought from producers who had exceeded their quota but couldn’t guarantee that
purloined syrup didn’t pass through his hands, and he had no idea who could
have carried out the theft.
Five weeks later, on Dec. 18, as snow
blanketed the Saint-Lawrence Valley, the Sûreté du Québec arrested Vallières at
his home near Québec City, charging him with conspiring with five others to
commit the theft at the warehouse and sell the stolen maple syrup. TV cameras
filmed him being hauled into the courthouse in handcuffs. One member of the
gang had rented space in the same warehouse, merely moving the syrup from one
section of the warehouse to another and out the other loading dock. In total,
prosecutors have charged 22 suspects, including St. Pierre, who is accused
of knowingly possessing and trafficking the stolen syrup. St. Pierre is out on
bail and says he had nothing to do with the theft.
The stolen syrup still worries law-abiding producers within the Federation. “My biggest fear is that this syrup is going to hit the market, and big buyers are not going to buy our syrup,” says Turcotte. The Québec television station TVA Nouvelles reported that at least 70 truckloads of stolen syrup have already made it to three distributors in the U.S., including Bascom Maple Farms in New Hampshire, one of St. Pierre’s clients and the largest maple supplier in the U.S. Bruce Bascom says he fully cooperated with the Sûreté du Québec and they have ended their inquiries, but he declined to answer whether the company purchased any stolen syrup. Two Vermont companies that reportedly purchased the syrup, Maple Grove Farms and Highland Sugarworks, did not respond to requests for interviews.
The stolen syrup still worries law-abiding producers within the Federation. “My biggest fear is that this syrup is going to hit the market, and big buyers are not going to buy our syrup,” says Turcotte. The Québec television station TVA Nouvelles reported that at least 70 truckloads of stolen syrup have already made it to three distributors in the U.S., including Bascom Maple Farms in New Hampshire, one of St. Pierre’s clients and the largest maple supplier in the U.S. Bruce Bascom says he fully cooperated with the Sûreté du Québec and they have ended their inquiries, but he declined to answer whether the company purchased any stolen syrup. Two Vermont companies that reportedly purchased the syrup, Maple Grove Farms and Highland Sugarworks, did not respond to requests for interviews.
There is no guarantee that the Federation will get
its syrup back across international boundaries. “This is what bothers us,” says
Trépanier, a slim technocrat who is passionate about the Federation. “Everybody
knows it is stolen, but nobody can do anything about it. It’s incredible.” At
least until the full story comes out, he says the Federation is obligated to
sell to Bascom and other companies that reportedly received stolen product.
Large questions loom about whether Québec’s tightly
controlled system will survive in the long term. In 2002, the first year the
new rules went into effect, Québec claimed 80 percent of world maple syrup
production. The Federation has raised its quota from 68 million pounds to
115 million pounds today, but its market share is slipping. In 2011, its
share dropped to 71 percent of the market as U.S. states and Canadian
provinces without quotas have risen to supply cheaper syrup, according to
buyers. Last June, Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) inserted the Maple TAP Act
into the draft of the Farm Bill to provide grants to farmers to tap trees on
private lands and to promote the industry. New York has 280 million tappable
maple trees—three times more than Québec—but very few are tapped. The bill
stalled in the House in September and may not pass until well into 2013.
Trépanier is watching all these developments closely. “We are not idiots,” he
says, adding that in his mind climate change ultimately will tip the syrup
scales in favor of his countrymen.
On a recent afternoon, the side door to the
warehouse where the theft took place was open, and a clanging sound echoed off
the walls. It had a funk of spilled beer, and the floor glistened with patches
of dried syrup. Two men with grimy work gloves climbed up stacks of battered
barrels in the dark, knocked them down with a boom, and rolled them into the
back of a trailer. “They’re empty,” said one of the men as he banged on the
barrel. “Scrap!”
Twenty-five miles away in the town of
Laurrierville, the Federation was preparing its new warehouse. When the Sûreté
du Québec called to say they had no place to store the syrup they seized from
St. Pierre, Trépanier offered to help. “We have a new building,” he said,
“and there’s some space in there.”
Agricultural Bank of China Robbery: This was the embezzlement of
nearly 51 million yuan (c.US$6.7 million) from the Handanbranch of the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) in Hebei province between March 16 and April 14, 2007.
Perpetrated by two vaultmanagers
employed at the branch, it is the largest bank robbery in China's history. The idea for the heist had begun when one of the managers, Ren Xiaofeng,
stole 200,000 yuan (c.US$26,000) in October 2006 with the complicity of two
security guards, Zhao Xuenan and Zhang Qiang. Ren then purchased tickets for
the Chinese lottery, with the intention of winning a sufficiently large prize
that he could return the missing funds before their absence was noted, and
still have money left over for himself. Despite the unfavourable odds Ren was successful, and he was able to
return the 200,000 to the vault.
Emboldened by his initial success, Ren joined forces with another
manager, Ma Xiangjing, to perpetrate the same crime on a far larger scale.
During March and April 2007, the two stole 32.96 million yuan (c.US$4.3
million), and spent almost the entire amount—31.25 million—on lottery tickets.
This time good fortune was not on their side. In desperation, they stole
six cash boxes containing a further 18 million yuan (c.US$2.3 million) on April
14, spending 14 million in a single day in an effort to recover their losses.
Despite Handan reporting record lottery ticket sales, the two recouped only
98,000 yuan (c.US$12,700).
On April 16, ABC branch managers discovered the missing money and
notified the police. With insufficient funds to cover the losses, Ren and Ma
bought fake IDs and cars with their meagre winnings, and fled. But it did not
take long for them to be captured.
Both Ren and Ma were executed in Hebei province on
April 1, 2008.
Fortaleza Banco Central Burglary: It was the theft of about R$ 160
million from the vault of the Banco
Central branch located in Fortaleza, in the state of Ceará, Brazil.
It is one of the world's largest
heists. In the aftermath of the burglary, of the 25 persons thought to be
involved, just eight had been arrested, and R$20 million recovered, up to the
end of 2005. In addition, several of the gang are thought to have been victims
of kidnapping, and one, Luis Fernando Ribeiro, thought to have been the
mastermind of the operation, was killed by kidnappers after a ransom was paid.
Arrests and recovery of the money, as well as kidnapping and murder of the
perpetrators, have been ongoing, though most are still unaccounted for.
The Burglary began On the weekend of August 6, 2005, a gang of burglars
tunnelled into the bank and removed five containers of 50-real notes, with an estimated value of R$164,755,150 (about
71.6 million USD at 2005 exchange rate) and weighing about 3.5 tons.
The money was uninsured, a bank spokesperson stating that the risks were too
small to justify the insurance premiums. The burglars managed to evade or
disable the bank's internal alarms and sensors, and the burglary remained
undiscovered until the bank opened for business the following Monday.
Banco Central is the Brazilian central bank, charged with control of the money supply. The money in the vault was to be
examined to decide whether it should be recirculated or destroyed. The bills
were not numbered sequentially, making them almost impossible to trace.
They tunnelled their Ways 3 Months in Advance.
"They worked for several
months", police said. "The gardening company was working since March.
They had sophisticated equipment, including GPS, and experts in mathematics, engineering and excavation."
Police located a pick-up truck
branded with a Grama
Sintética (Synthetic Turf) logo
found at the rented property. Bolt
cutters, a blow torch, an electric saw and other
tools used to penetrate the concrete barrier were found both inside the vault
and within the empty property. The property was covered in burnt lime to
avoid fingerprints.
KLM Diamond Heist: Calculated to be the biggest diamond heist ever, It took place on 25
February, 2005 at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. The Total haul of the Diamonds
is supposed to be $118 million, The Thieves WHO GOT AWAY WITH THE DIAMONDS are
yet unknown.
More of a
truck hijacking than a stylish heist, this theft involved two men wearing KLM airline uniforms who drove a stolen KLM cargo truck
onto the tarmac at Amsterdam's Schiphol
Airport. Brandishing pistols, they
hijacked another truck that was carrying an estimated $118 million in uncut
diamonds to a waiting flight bound for Antwerp. After forcing the drivers out
of the truck and making them lie on the ground, the robbers climbed in and
drove away. The truck was later found abandoned, but the men and diamonds
remain missing. If the estimated value of the diamonds is correct—being uncut,
their precise value is hard to gauge—the theft would be the biggest diamond
heist in history.
Lufthansa Heist: was a robbery at John F.
Kennedy International Airport on December 11, 1978. An estimated $5
million in cash ($18.1 million today) and $875,000 in jewelry ($3.2 million
today) were stolen, making it the largest cash robbery committed on American
soil at the time. The robbery was the subject of two television films, The
10 Million Dollar Getaway and The Big Heist, and is a key plot
element in the 1990 film Goodfellas. In July 2015, Rowman and
Littlefield published a book titled The Lufthansa Heistwhich tells
the story of the crime. It is written by Daniel Simone and
co-authored by Henry Hill. The heist's magnitude made it one of the
longest-investigated crimes in the United States: for over 35 years after it
happened, the latest arrest associated with it was made in 2014.
The heist was planned by Jimmy Burke, an
associate of the Lucchese crime family, and carried out by several associates.
The plot began when bookmaker Martin Krugman told Henry Hill (an
associate of Jimmy Burke's) about millions of dollars in untraceable money:
American currency flown in once a month from monetary exchanges for military
servicemen and tourists in West Germany. The currency would arrive
via Lufthansa and was then stored in a vault at Kennedy Airport. The
information had come from Louis Werner, a worker at the airport who owed
Krugman $20,000 for gambling debts ($78,000 adjusted for inflation) and from his
co-worker Peter Gruenwald. Werner and Gruenwald had previously been successful
in stealing $22,000 in foreign currency ($91,000 adjusted for inflation) from
their employer Lufthansa in 1976.
Salish Sea Foot Mystery: Since August 20, 2007, several detached human feet have been
discovered on the coasts of the Salish Sea in British Columbia,
Canada. and Washington, United States. The feet belonged to five men, one
woman and three other people of unknown sex. Of the ten or 11 feet found, only
two have been left feet. Both of those were matched with right feet. As of
February 2012, only five feet of four people have been identified; it is not
known to whom the rest of the feet belong. In addition, several hoax feet have
been planted in the area. The series of discoveries has been called
"astounding" and "almost beyond explanation", as no other
body parts have turned up. The discoveries have caused speculation that the
feet may be those of people who died in a boating accident or a plane crash in
the ocean. One explanation is that some of the feet are those of four men
who died in a plane crash near Quadra Island in 2005 and whose bodies
have not been recovered, though one of the feet has been determined to be from
a female. Foul play has also been suggested, although none of the
first four feet showed tool marks. This does not rule out foul play, however;
it is possible that the bodies could have been weighted down and disposed of,
and the feet were separated due to natural decay.
Determining the origin of the feet is complicated
because ocean currents may carry floating items long distances, and
because currents in the Strait of Georgia are unpredictable. A
foot may float as far as 1,000 miles (1,600 km).Also, human feet have a tendency
to produce adipocere (a soap-like substance formed from body
fat), which makes it hard for forensic scientists to find clues. Under
optimal conditions, a human body may remain intact in water for as long as
three decades, meaning that the feet may have been floating around for years.
Another theory is that the feet belonged to people
who died in the Asian Tsunami on December 26, 2004. Richmond-based
writer Shane Lambert has advocated this position, pointing to the fact that
many of the shoes found were manufactured and sold in 2004 or earlier. Lambert
acknowledges that there could be other sources for the shoes or multiple
sources. However, besides the dates when the shoes were manufactured, Lambert
cites ocean currents and their ultimate northward tendencies up the Pacific
Ocean from part of the region that was hit by the 2004 Tsunami.
Great Train Robbery: It was the robbery of
substantial sums of money from a Royal
Mail train heading between Glasgow and London in the early hours of Thursday 8 August 1963 at
Bridego Railway Bridge, Ledburn near Mentmore in Buckinghamshire, England.
After tampering with line signals,
a 15-strong gang of robbers led by Bruce Reynolds attacked the train. Other gang members included Gordan
Goody, Buster Edwards, Charlie Wilson, Roy James, John Daly, Jimmy White, Ronnie Biggs, Tommy Wisbey, Jim Hussey, Bob Welch and
Roger Cordrey as well as three men known only as numbers '1', '2' and '3'. A
16th man, an unnamed retired train driver, was also present at the time of
robbery.
With careful planning based on inside
information from an individual known as 'The Ulsterman' (named as Patrick
McKenna in 2014), the robbers got away with over £2.6 million (the equivalent
of £50 million today). The bulk of the stolen money was never recovered. Though
the gang did not use any firearms, Jack Mills,
the train driver, was beaten over the head with a metal bar. Mills' injuries
were severe enough to end his career.
After the robbery the gang hid at
Leatherslade Farm. It was after the police found this hideout that incriminating
evidence would lead to the eventual arrest and conviction of most of the gang.
The ringleaders were sentenced to 30 years in jail.
It had a mind-blowing aftermath.
The Bridge which was part of the scene of the Crime has been renamed the “Train
Robber’s Bridge”.
Out of £ 2.6 million only £
400,000 has been recovered till now the rest is believed to be laundered and
distributed equally(or maybe unequally) among the Gangsters.
Notable Criminals To Research
Billy the Kid: William H. Bonney alias Billy the Kid is probably the most misunderstood
historical figure of the Old West. He was not a cold-blooded killer, nor was he
a robber of trains or banks. Instead he was a gunfighter in a feud between two
factions in which both sides stole from each other and killed. The Lincoln
County War would have turned out exactly the way it did if Billy the Kid never
took part in it. His role in the LCW was minor -he wasn’t the leader but a
follower. Although Billy the Kid was one of many who fought and killed
during the LCW, he was the only one that faced conviction and was sentence to
death. So Billy the Kid used his wit and courage to escape his date with
the hangman which boosts his notoriety even more. If his spectacular escape
wasn't enough, his controversial death was the final dramatic ending to his
story. But it wasn't the end, Billy the Kid lives on in history and legend.
Billy the Kid’s real name was William Henry
McCarty, when and where he was born, or who or what happened to his father is
not known. It’s estimated that he was born around 1860-61 possibly in New York.
History first traces the Kid as a youngster in Indiana in the late 1860s and
then in Wichita, Kansas in 1870. His mother Catherine McCarty was a widow and
single mother and he had a younger brother named Joseph (born 1863). By 1871,
Catherine was diagnosed with Tuberculosis and was told to move to a climate
that was warmer and drier.
On March 1, 1873 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Catherine
McCarty married a man named William Antrim. Since there were now two Billies in
the household, the Kid’s mother referred to him by his middle name, he was now
Henry McCarty-Antrim .
The family moved to Silver City in Grant County,
located in southern New Mexico. Catherine was suffering from consumption and
her health began to deteriorate rapidly. Then on September 16, 1874, the Kid’s
mother died.
Antrim didn’t want to be burden with two small boys, so he separated them and placed them in foster homes and left Silver City for Arizona. The Kid now had to earn his own keep, so he was put to work washing dishes and waiting on tables at a restaurant. After a year of no parental guidance and looking out for himself, the Kid quickly fell in with the wrong crowd. One of his troublemaking buddies, Sombrero Jack, stole some laundry from a Chinese laundry cleaner and told the Kid to hide the bundle. The Kid got caught with it and was arrested. The county sheriff decided to keep him locked up for a couple of days just to scare him, but the Kid escaped and ran away.
Antrim didn’t want to be burden with two small boys, so he separated them and placed them in foster homes and left Silver City for Arizona. The Kid now had to earn his own keep, so he was put to work washing dishes and waiting on tables at a restaurant. After a year of no parental guidance and looking out for himself, the Kid quickly fell in with the wrong crowd. One of his troublemaking buddies, Sombrero Jack, stole some laundry from a Chinese laundry cleaner and told the Kid to hide the bundle. The Kid got caught with it and was arrested. The county sheriff decided to keep him locked up for a couple of days just to scare him, but the Kid escaped and ran away.
The Kid fled to one of his foster families and they put him on a stagecoach to Clifton, Arizona where his stepfather was living, but when he found his stepfather he didn’t want him and told the Kid to leave. All alone in a strange desert, the Kid wandered from one ranch to another to find work. For the next 2 years the Kid tramped around as a ranch hand and gambler. He then met up with a horse thief name John Mackie who taught him the tricks of the trade and the two became partners. But after some close calls, arrest, and escaping from custody, the Kid decided it was wiser to give up his new occupation. He returned some stolen horses to the army to clear himself and got work as a ranch hand.
One day while at a saloon in Camp Grant, Arizona, the Kid who was about sixteen at the time, got into serious trouble. He got into an argument with a bully named Frank “Windy” Cahill, who had picked on him numerous times before. After some name-calling, Cahill rushed the Kid and slammed him down on the ground, then jumped on top of him and proceeded to slap him in the face. The Kid worked his hand free to his revolver and fired it into Cahill’s gut. When Cahill fell over the Kid squirmed free, ran off, and mounted the nearest horse and fled Camp Grant.
The Kid didn’t stick around to face murder charges and left Arizona and returned to New Mexico. Now an outlaw and unable to find honest work, the Kid met up with another outlaw named Jesse Evans, who was the leader of a gang of rustlers called “The Boys.” The Kid didn't have anywhere else to go and since it was suicide to be alone in the hostile and lawless territory, the Kid reluctantly joined the gang.
The gang made their way to Lincoln County where the Boys joined forces with James Dolan, who was currently in a feud against an Englishman entrepreneur named John Tunstall and his attorney and partner Alex McSween. The feud would be famously known as the Lincoln County War .
The Boys started to steal Tunstall’s livestock, so
arrests were made and the Kid eventually was caught and placed in jail.
Tunstall noticed something different about this rustler, he wasn’t rough like
the other men, but just a boy who got a bad start in life and was looking for
place to belong. So Tunstall gave him an ultimatum: if he testified against the
other rustlers, Tunstall would hire him as an employee. The Kid took Tunstall’s
offer.
Now fighting for the Tunstall side and in the hopes of a better future, the Kid changed his name to William H. Bonney, but his friends called him “Kid.” Tensions were high and the feud between Dolan and Tunstall escalated in to bloody violence. John Tunstall was brutally murder by members of Sheriff Brady’s posse and the Boys. Tunstall’s ranch hands then formed a vigilante group called “the Regulators.” Now the war was on.
At first the deputized Regulators tried to do things legally by serving warrants, but with the prejudice Sheriff Brady and the bias court system, they couldn’t count on justice being served. So they took the law in their own hands. They retaliated by killing Bill Morton, Frank Baker and William McCloskey. Then they ambushed Sheriff Brady and his deputy George Hindman in Lincoln. Lastly, they had a dramatic gunfight with Dolan gunman Buckshot Roberts, but during that shootout their leader Dick Brewer was killed.
The Regulators revenge only made things worse. They were now viewed as the bad guys and warrants were put out for their arrest.
Now the Dolan side struck back. Dolan's gunmen and newly appointed sheriff, George Peppin and his men, had the McSween house surrounded with Alex McSween and many of the Regulators trapped in side. Dolan sent for Colonel Dudley at Fort Stanton for assistance. The colonel came with troops along with a Howitzer and Gatling gun. On the fifth day of the siege the Dolan side was getting impatient, so they set the house on fire. By nightfall, the house was completely ablaze and heat from the flames were overwhelming. The Regulators began to panic, so the cool-headed Billy the Kid, only about seventeen years old, took over leadership of the men. The Kid divided the men into two groups, he lead his party out the door first and ran in one direction so as to draw the line of fire towards them so McSween’s party could make a run in another direction and get away. When the men began to run out of the burning house the Dolan side opened fire and all hell broke loose. McSween and three men were killed, but Billy the Kid and the others escaped into the darkness.
The war was over; the Regulators disbanded and the Kid was now a fugitive.
Billy the Kid was unable to settle down, so he made his living by gambling and rustling cattle. The Kid heard about Governor Axtell being replaced by Lew Wallace, who was now trying to bring law and order to Lincoln. The Kid wrote to the governor that he was tired of running and would surrender to authorities and testify against the Dolan side to have his murder charges dropped. The governor agreed and promised the Kid a full pardon.
The Kid surrendered and testified in court, but the Santa Fe Ring had influence over the court system, so members of the Dolan side, including James Dolan, were acquitted. The Kid was in unfriendly territory and one of his threats was prosecutor attorney William Rynerson, who was part of the “Ring” and wanted to put the Kid on trial for the murder of Sheriff Brady. The Kid felt betrayed when he learned that Governor Wallace didn’t have the power to pardon him without Rynerson’s cooperation, nor was the governor pressuring the attorney to collaborate. Wallace simply lost interest and left the Kid to his fate. Billy the Kid knew he didn’t stand a chance in court and he had lost faith in the governor, so he escaped.
On the run again and an outlaw, the Kid went back to making a living the only way he knew how –rustling. There were other outlaws and rustlers in New Mexico, much worse than Billy the Kid, but the Kid had gain fame and was singled out by the newspapers who had built him up into something he wasn’t. It was the newspapers who had given him a name that he would forever be known as “Billy the Kid.”
Since the end of the Lincoln County War, the Kid spent the next two years eluding the law and living in and around Fort Sumner (a former military fort transformed into a tiny Mexican village). While in Fort Sumner, he would kill a drunk at a saloon, but the killing was shrugged off and got almost no attention, but unfortunately, the Kid got into more serious trouble that did get plenty of attention. It happened when a posse from White Oaks surrounded the Kid and his gang at a station house, during the standoff the posse accidentally killed their own deputy, James Carlyle. Of course the death was credited to the Kid and destroyed any ounce of sympathy the public had for him, not to mention, any chance for him to get things squared up with the governor to get his pardon.
Now fighting for the Tunstall side and in the hopes of a better future, the Kid changed his name to William H. Bonney, but his friends called him “Kid.” Tensions were high and the feud between Dolan and Tunstall escalated in to bloody violence. John Tunstall was brutally murder by members of Sheriff Brady’s posse and the Boys. Tunstall’s ranch hands then formed a vigilante group called “the Regulators.” Now the war was on.
At first the deputized Regulators tried to do things legally by serving warrants, but with the prejudice Sheriff Brady and the bias court system, they couldn’t count on justice being served. So they took the law in their own hands. They retaliated by killing Bill Morton, Frank Baker and William McCloskey. Then they ambushed Sheriff Brady and his deputy George Hindman in Lincoln. Lastly, they had a dramatic gunfight with Dolan gunman Buckshot Roberts, but during that shootout their leader Dick Brewer was killed.
The Regulators revenge only made things worse. They were now viewed as the bad guys and warrants were put out for their arrest.
Now the Dolan side struck back. Dolan's gunmen and newly appointed sheriff, George Peppin and his men, had the McSween house surrounded with Alex McSween and many of the Regulators trapped in side. Dolan sent for Colonel Dudley at Fort Stanton for assistance. The colonel came with troops along with a Howitzer and Gatling gun. On the fifth day of the siege the Dolan side was getting impatient, so they set the house on fire. By nightfall, the house was completely ablaze and heat from the flames were overwhelming. The Regulators began to panic, so the cool-headed Billy the Kid, only about seventeen years old, took over leadership of the men. The Kid divided the men into two groups, he lead his party out the door first and ran in one direction so as to draw the line of fire towards them so McSween’s party could make a run in another direction and get away. When the men began to run out of the burning house the Dolan side opened fire and all hell broke loose. McSween and three men were killed, but Billy the Kid and the others escaped into the darkness.
The war was over; the Regulators disbanded and the Kid was now a fugitive.
Billy the Kid was unable to settle down, so he made his living by gambling and rustling cattle. The Kid heard about Governor Axtell being replaced by Lew Wallace, who was now trying to bring law and order to Lincoln. The Kid wrote to the governor that he was tired of running and would surrender to authorities and testify against the Dolan side to have his murder charges dropped. The governor agreed and promised the Kid a full pardon.
The Kid surrendered and testified in court, but the Santa Fe Ring had influence over the court system, so members of the Dolan side, including James Dolan, were acquitted. The Kid was in unfriendly territory and one of his threats was prosecutor attorney William Rynerson, who was part of the “Ring” and wanted to put the Kid on trial for the murder of Sheriff Brady. The Kid felt betrayed when he learned that Governor Wallace didn’t have the power to pardon him without Rynerson’s cooperation, nor was the governor pressuring the attorney to collaborate. Wallace simply lost interest and left the Kid to his fate. Billy the Kid knew he didn’t stand a chance in court and he had lost faith in the governor, so he escaped.
On the run again and an outlaw, the Kid went back to making a living the only way he knew how –rustling. There were other outlaws and rustlers in New Mexico, much worse than Billy the Kid, but the Kid had gain fame and was singled out by the newspapers who had built him up into something he wasn’t. It was the newspapers who had given him a name that he would forever be known as “Billy the Kid.”
Since the end of the Lincoln County War, the Kid spent the next two years eluding the law and living in and around Fort Sumner (a former military fort transformed into a tiny Mexican village). While in Fort Sumner, he would kill a drunk at a saloon, but the killing was shrugged off and got almost no attention, but unfortunately, the Kid got into more serious trouble that did get plenty of attention. It happened when a posse from White Oaks surrounded the Kid and his gang at a station house, during the standoff the posse accidentally killed their own deputy, James Carlyle. Of course the death was credited to the Kid and destroyed any ounce of sympathy the public had for him, not to mention, any chance for him to get things squared up with the governor to get his pardon.
As the Kid dodged the law, Pat Garrett was elected
sheriff and made US Marshal to hunt for Billy the Kid. He was familiar with the
Kid’s habits and hideouts, which may show that Garrett may have been a rustler
himself or at one time may have ridden with the Kid. During the pursuit
for Billy the Kid, Garrett ended up killing two of the Kid’s closest comrades,
Tom O’Folliard and Charlie Bowdre. Finally on December 23, 1880 Garrett trapped
the Kid and three other gang members at a cabin in Stinking Springs. After a
short standoff, Billy the Kid came out and surrendered.
Billy the Kid was quickly put on trial in Mesilla and was sentence to hang for the murder of Sheriff Brady. After his sentence was passed, the Kid was taken to Lincoln to await his hanging. The Kid was shackled and imprisoned in a room in the Lincoln courthouse as two deputies took turns guarding over him. On April 28, 1881 the Kid made his most daring escape (which would also be his last). The Kid was successful in getting a drop on the lone guard, Deputy James Bell, by slipping his hand out of the handcuffs and using the heavy restraints to hit the deputy over the head. The Kid then jerked Bell's pistol and told him to throw up his hands, but instead the deputy ran and the Kid had no choice but to shoot him. The other guard Bob Olinger was across the street having dinner when he heard the gunshots. He ran toward the building and as the Kid saw him approaching he shot Olinger down with a shotgun .The Kid rode out of Lincoln a free man and headed to the only place he could call home: Fort Sumner.
Billy the Kid was quickly put on trial in Mesilla and was sentence to hang for the murder of Sheriff Brady. After his sentence was passed, the Kid was taken to Lincoln to await his hanging. The Kid was shackled and imprisoned in a room in the Lincoln courthouse as two deputies took turns guarding over him. On April 28, 1881 the Kid made his most daring escape (which would also be his last). The Kid was successful in getting a drop on the lone guard, Deputy James Bell, by slipping his hand out of the handcuffs and using the heavy restraints to hit the deputy over the head. The Kid then jerked Bell's pistol and told him to throw up his hands, but instead the deputy ran and the Kid had no choice but to shoot him. The other guard Bob Olinger was across the street having dinner when he heard the gunshots. He ran toward the building and as the Kid saw him approaching he shot Olinger down with a shotgun .The Kid rode out of Lincoln a free man and headed to the only place he could call home: Fort Sumner.
The Kid decided to laid low long enough until the
law would give up hunting him and he could “rustle” up some money and leave the
territory. By July of 1881, Garrett heard rumors that Billy the Kid was in the
Fort Sumner area, so with two deputies he rode into Fort Sumner.
On July 14, 1881 just before midnight, Pat Garrett waited till the town was quiet before he slipped into Pete Maxwell’s room to ask him about Billy the Kid. Garrett was a former employee of Pete Maxwell's and it's possible that Maxwell tipped Garrett off that the Kid was in the area. At that exact moment, the Kid with a knife in hand went to Maxwell’s house to get some fresh beef for a late steak dinner. As he approached, he saw Garrett’s two deputies on the porch and since he didn't recognizing the strangers, he backed cautiously into Maxwell’s room and asked “Pete, who are those fellows outside?” He got no answer and as he walked towards the bed, he saw Garrett’s silhouette and started to back away and asked in Spanish, “Whose there?” Garrett recognized the Kid’s voice and fired his gun. The bullet pierced the Kid's heart and he fell to the floor. Garrett and Maxwell ran out of the room and huddled outside with the two deputies and waited. They could hear as the Kid gasped for breath and then all was quiet -Billy the Kid was dead .
On July 14, 1881 just before midnight, Pat Garrett waited till the town was quiet before he slipped into Pete Maxwell’s room to ask him about Billy the Kid. Garrett was a former employee of Pete Maxwell's and it's possible that Maxwell tipped Garrett off that the Kid was in the area. At that exact moment, the Kid with a knife in hand went to Maxwell’s house to get some fresh beef for a late steak dinner. As he approached, he saw Garrett’s two deputies on the porch and since he didn't recognizing the strangers, he backed cautiously into Maxwell’s room and asked “Pete, who are those fellows outside?” He got no answer and as he walked towards the bed, he saw Garrett’s silhouette and started to back away and asked in Spanish, “Whose there?” Garrett recognized the Kid’s voice and fired his gun. The bullet pierced the Kid's heart and he fell to the floor. Garrett and Maxwell ran out of the room and huddled outside with the two deputies and waited. They could hear as the Kid gasped for breath and then all was quiet -Billy the Kid was dead .
The next day Billy the Kid was buried at the Fort Sumner cemetery near his two fallen companions, Tom O’Folliard and Charlie Bowdre. He was killed not for who he “really” was, but for what people “thought” he was. He was a pawn in losing game and he was made a scapegoat for other outlaws’ crimes. Although he did participate in killings, the men he fought against were much worse than he ever was. This nineteen or twenty year old lived a short life but made a lasting impression. If it weren’t for our attraction to Billy the Kid, the history of the Lincoln County War and its participants would've been long forgotten. Thanks to Billy the Kid, New Mexico has a thriving business in tourism as a steady flow of tourists each year come to visit the Billy the Kid sites. Even in death Billy the Kid is likeable and he has a large following with people all over the word. A matter of fact, Billy the Kid is known as the Old West's most favorite outlaw.
Robin Hood: The subject of ballads, books and
films, Robin Hood has proven to be one of popular culture’s most enduring folk
heroes. Over the course of 700 years, the outlaw from Nottinghamshire who robs
from the rich to give to the poor has emerged as one of the most enduring folk
heroes in popular culture–and one of the most versatile. Beginning in the 15th century and perhaps even
earlier, Christian revelers in certain parts of England celebrated May Day with
plays and games involving a Robin Hood figure with near-religious significance.
In the 19th century, writer-illustrators like Howard Pyle adapted the
traditional tales for children, popularizing them in the United States and
around the world. More recently, bringing Robin to the silver screen has become
a rite of passage for directors ranging from Michael Curtiz and Ridley Scott to
Terry Gilliam and Mel Brooks.
Throughout Robin’s existence, writers, performers and filmmakers have
probed their imaginations for new incarnations that resonate with their
respective audiences. In 14th-century England, where agrarian discontent had
begun to chip away at the feudal system, he appears as an anti-establishment
rebel who murders government agents and wealthy landowners. Later variations
from times of less social upheaval dispense with the gore and cast Robin as a
dispossessed aristocrat with a heart of gold and a love interest, Maid Marian.
Academics, meanwhile, have combed the historical record for evidence of
a real Robin Hood. English legal records suggest that, as early as the 13th
century, “Robehod,” “Rabunhod” and other variations had become common epithets
for criminals. But what had inspired these nicknames: a fictional tale, an infamous
bandit or an amalgam of both? The first literary references to Robin Hood
appear in a series of 14th- and 15th-century ballads about a violent yeoman who
lived in Sherwood Forest with his men and frequently clashed with the Sheriff
of Nottingham. Rather than a peasant, knight or fallen noble, as in later
versions, the protagonist of these medieval stories is a commoner. Little John
and Will Scarlet are part of this Robin’s “merry” crew—meaning, at the time, an
outlaw’s gang—but Maid Marian, Friar Tuck and Alan-a-Dale would not enter the
legend until later, possibly as part of the May Day rituals.
While most contemporary scholars have failed to turn up solid clues,
medieval chroniclers took for granted that a historical Robin Hood lived and
breathed during the 12th or 13th century. The details of their accounts vary
widely, however, placing him in conflicting regions and eras. Not until John
Major’s “History of Greater Britain” (1521), for example, is he depicted as a
follower of King Richard, one of his defining characteristics in modern times.
We may never know for sure whether Robin Hood ever existed outside the
verses of ballads and pages of books. And even if we did, fans young and old
would still surely flock to England’s Nottinghamshire region for a tour of the
legend’s alleged former hangouts, from centuries-old pubs to the Major Oak in
Sherwood Forest. What we do know is that the notion of a brave rebel who lives
on the outskirts of society, fighting injustice and oppression with his band of
companions, has universal appeal—whether he’s played by Erroll Flynn, Russell
Crowe or even, as on a 1979 episode of “The Muppet Show,” Kermit the Frog.
Bonnie and Clyde: Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut/Champion Barrow were criminals who travelled the central United States with their gang
during the Great Depression, robbing and
killing people. At times, the gang included Buck Barrow, Blanche Barrow, Raymond Hamilton, W. D. Jones, Joe Palmer, Ralph Fults, and Henry Methvin. Their exploits captured the attention
of the American public during the "Public Enemy Era", between 1931
and 1935. Though known today for his dozen-or-so bank robberies, Barrow
preferred to rob small stores or rural gas stations. The gang is believed to have
killed at least nine police officers and several other civilians. The couple
were eventually ambushed and killed near the town of Sailes, Louisiana, in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, by law officers. Their
reputation was revived and cemented in American pop folklore by Arthur Penn's 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, which starred Faye Dunaway and Warren
Beatty as the pair.
Even during their lifetimes, the
couple's depiction in the press was at considerable odds with the hardscrabble
reality of their life on the road—particularly in the case of Parker. Though
she was present at a hundred or more felonies during her two years as Barrow's
companion, she was not the machine
gun-wielding killer portrayed in the newspapers, newsreels, and pulp detective magazines of the day. Gang member W. D. Jones later testified
that he was unsure whether he had ever seen her fire at officers. Parker's reputation as a cigar-smoking gun moll grew
out of a playful snapshot found by police at an abandoned hideout, released to
the press, and published nationwide. While she did chain smoke Camel cigarettes, she was not a cigar smoker.
Historian Jeff Guinn has said that
the hideout photos led to the glamorization and creation of legend about the
outlaws:
John Dillinger had matinee-idol good looks and Pretty Boy Floyd had the best
possible nickname, but the Joplin photos introduced new criminal superstars
with the most titillating trademark of all—illicit sex. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie
Parker were wild and young, and undoubtedly slept together.
When they met,(in 1930) both were
smitten immediately; most historians believe Parker joined Barrow because she
was in love. She remained a loyal companion to him as they carried out their
crime spree and awaited the violent deaths they viewed as inevitable.
From 1932, onwards they committed Murders from 1933
They joined a gang and had a hideout. In 1934. They were arrested and as per
Historians killed by the Police.
Al Capone: He was an American gangster who
attained fame during the Prohibition
era(the time between 1920 and 1933 when the US Government banned Alcoholic
Beverages across the Country) as the
co-founder and boss of the Chicago
Outfit. His seven-year reign as crime boss ended when he was 33 years old.
Capone was born in the borough of Brooklyn in New York
City to Italian immigrants. He was considered a Five Points Gang member who became a bouncer in organized crime premises such as
brothels. In his early twenties, he moved to Chicago and
became bodyguard and trusted factotum for Johnny Torrio, head of a criminal syndicate that illegally supplied
alcohol – the forerunner of the Outfit – and that was politically protected
through the Unione Siciliana. A
conflict with the North Side Gang was instrumental in Capone's rise and fall. Torrio
went into retirement after North Side gunmen almost killed him, handing control
to Capone. Capone expanded the bootlegging business through increasingly
violent means, but his mutually profitable relationships with mayor William Hale Thompson and the city's police meant that Capone seemed safe
from law enforcement.
Capone apparently reveled in
attention, such as the cheers from spectators when he appeared at ball games.
He made donations to various charities and was viewed by many to be a
"modern-day Robin
Hood". However, the Saint
Valentine's Day Massacre of gang
rivals, resulting in the killing of seven men in broad daylight, damaged
Chicago's image - as well as Capone's - leading influential citizens to demand
governmental action and newspapers to dub him "Public Enemy No. 1".
The federal authorities became
intent on jailing Capone, and they prosecuted him for tax evasion in 1931, a
federal crime and a novel strategy during the era. During the highly publicized
case, the judge admitted as evidence Capone's admissions of his income and
unpaid taxes during prior (and ultimately abortive) negotiations to pay the
government any back taxes he owed. Capone was convicted and sentenced to 11
years in federal prison. After conviction,
he replaced his old defense team with experts in tax law, and his grounds for
appeal were strengthened by a Supreme Court ruling, but his appeal ultimately
failed.
He was already showing signs of
syphilitic dementia early in his sentence, and he became increasingly
debilitated before being released after eight years. On January 25, 1947,
Capone died of cardiac arrest after suffering a stroke.
D B Cooper: One afternoon a day before Thanksgiving (i.e. 24th November) in 1971, a guy calling himself Dan Cooper (the media
mistakenly called him D.B. Cooper) boarded Northwest Airlines flight #305 in Portland bound for Seattle. He was wearing a
dark suit and a black tie and was described as a business-executive type. While
in the air, he opened his brief case showing a bomb to the flight attendant and
hijacked the plane. The plane landed in Seattle where he demanded 200K in cash, four parachutes and food for the crew before
releasing all the passengers. With only three pilots and one flight attendant
left on board, they took off from Seattle with the marked bills heading south
while it was dark and lightly raining. In the 45 minutes after takeoff, Cooper
sent the flight attendant to the cockpit while donning the parachute, tied the
bank bag full of twenty dollar bills to himself, lowered the rear stairs and
somewhere north of Portland jumped into the night. When the plane landed with
the stairs down, they found the two remaining parachutes and on the seat Cooper was sitting in, a
black tie.
Jets, a helicopter and a C-130 aircraft had been
scrambled from the closest air force base to follow Cooper's plane. The
military was called in days after the hijacking and approximately 1,000 troops
searched the suspected jump zone on foot and in helicopters. The Boeing 727
used in the hijacking was flown out over the ocean and the stairs lowered and
weights dropped in an attempt to determine when Cooper jumped. The SR-71
super-secret spy plane was sent in to photograph the entire flight path but no
sign of D.B. Cooper was ever discovered.
Nine years later in 1980 just north of Portland on the Columbia River, a young boy named
Brian Ingram was digging a fire pit in the sand at a place called Tena Bar. He
uncovered three bundles of cash a
couple inches below the surface, with rubber bands still intact. There was a
total of $5800, the Cooper serial numbers matched, and the first evidence since
1971 came to light. The FBI searched and analyzed the beach, the river was
dredged by Cooper Hunters and the theories on how the money got there
supercharged the Legend of D.B. Cooper.
Decades passed, D.B. Cooper became famous in book,
movie and song. In 2007, Special Agent Larry Carr took on his favorite case
with the restriction not to waste government time or money pursuing it. Agent
Carr brilliantly decided the way around the problem was to treat the
hijacking like one of his bank robbery cases - to get as much information out
to the public as possible. He released previously unknown facts about the case
and the D.B. Cooper frenzy started anew. In 2008 the Cooper Research Team came
together to take up the challenge and was given special access to investigate
the case.
Till now it is a running
Controversy/Debate that whether Cooper got out of the Plane alive or dead.
Though Evidence has been found that he got front and Back Parachutes before the
Robbery.
Charles Manson: He is an American criminal who led
what became known as the Manson Family,
a quasi-commune that arose in the
California desert in the late 1960s. Manson and his followers committed a
series of nine murders at four locations over a period of five weeks in the
summer of 1969. In 1971 he was found guilty of conspiracy to
commit the murders of seven people: actress Sharon Tate(a famous American Actress and model who also won the Golden
Globe award.) and four other people
at Tate's home; and the next day, a married couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca;
all carried out by members of the group at his instruction. He was convicted of
the murders through the joint-responsibility
rule, which makes each member of a conspiracy guilty of crimes committed by
fellow conspirators in furtherance of the conspiracy's objective. His followers also murdered several other people at
other times and locations, and Manson was also convicted for two of these other
murders (of Gary Hinman and Donald
"Shorty" Shea).
Manson believed in what he called
"Helter Skelter", a term he took from the song of the same name by the
Beatles. Manson believed Helter Skelter to be an impending apocalyptic race
war, which he described in his own version of the lyrics to the Beatles' song.
He believed the murders would help precipitate that war. From the beginning of
his notoriety, a pop culture arose around him in which he ultimately became an
emblem of insanity, violence and the macabre.
The term "helter skelter" was later used by Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi as the title of a book that he wrote about the Manson murders.
At the time the Family began to
form, Manson was an unemployed former convict, who
had spent half of his life in correctional institutions for a variety of
offenses. Before the murders, he was a singer-songwriter on the fringe of the
Los Angeles music industry, chiefly through a chance association with Dennis Wilson, drummer and co-founder of the Beach Boys. After Manson was charged with the
crimes of which he was later convicted, recordings of songs written and
performed by him were released commercially. Various musicians, including Guns N' Roses, White Zombie, Devendra
Banhart and Marilyn Manson, have covered some
of his songs.
Majority of the members of the Manson Family are
currently in Life Sentence.
Charles Ponzi: He was an Italian businessman and con artist in the U.S. and Canada. His aliases include Charles Ponci, Carlo and Charles P. Bianchi. Born in Italy, he became
known in the early 1920s as a swindler in North America for his money-making
scheme. He promised clients a 50% profit within 45 days, or 100% profit within
90 days, by buying discounted postal
reply coupons in other countries and
redeeming them at face value in the United States as a form of arbitrage. In reality, Ponzi was paying early
investors using the investments of later investors, a practice known as
"robbing Peter to pay Paul." While this swindle predated Ponzi by
several years, it became so identified with him that it now bears his namesake. His scheme ran for over a year
before it collapsed, costing his "investors" $20 million.
Ponzi was probably inspired by the
scheme of William F. Miller, a Brooklyn bookkeeper who in 1899 used the same
scheme to take in $1 million.
He also Introduced/ proposed
something known as the Ponzi Scheme, which was fraudulent investment operation where the operator, an individual or
organization, pays returns to its investors from new capital paid to the
operators by new investors, rather than from profit earned by the operator.
Operators of Ponzi schemes usually entice new investors by offering higher
returns than other investments, in the form of short-term returns that are
either abnormally high or unusually consistent.
The Ponzi Scheme Then Collapsed.
His Investors lost about $20 Million, Charles annihilated them.
Ponzi spent the last years of his
life in poverty, working occasionally as a translator. His health suffered. A
heart attack in 1941 left him considerably weakened. His eyesight began
failing, and by 1948, he was almost completely blind. A brain haemorrhage
paralyzed his right leg and arm. He died in a charity hospital in Rio de
Janeiro, the Hospital São Francisco de Assis of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro on January 15, 1949.
Frank Abagnale: is an American security consultant known for his history as a former
confidence trickster, check forger,
and impostor between the ages of 15 and 21. He became one of the
most famous impostors ever, claiming to have assumed no fewer than eight
identities, including an airline pilot, a physician, a U.S. Bureau of Prisons agent, and a lawyer. He escaped
from police custody twice (once from a taxiing airliner and once from a U.S. federal penitentiary), before he was 21 years
old. He served less than five years
in prison before starting to work for the federal government. He is currently a
consultant and lecturer for the FBI academy and field offices. He also runs Abagnale &
Associates, a financial fraud consultancy company.
Abagnale's life story provided the
inspiration for the feature film Catch Me If
You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale, aBroadway musical
of the same name which opened in April 2011, and a ghostwritten autobiography
also of the same name.
His first victim was his father,
who gave Abagnale a gasoline credit card and a truck to assist him in commuting
to his part-time job. In order to get date money, Abagnale devised a scheme in
which he used the gasoline card to "buy" tires, batteries, and other car-related
items at gas stations and then asked the attendants to give him cash in return
for the products. Ultimately, his father was liable for a bill worth $3,400.
Abagnale was only 15 at the time. Abagnale's early confidence tricks included writing personal
checks on his own overdrawn account.
This, however, would only work for a limited time before the bank demanded
payment, so he moved on to opening other accounts at different banks,
eventually creating new identities to sustain this charade. Over time through
experimentation, he developed different ways of defrauding banks, such as
printing out his own almost-perfect copies of checks such as payroll checks,
depositing them, and encouraging banks to advance him cash on the basis of his
account balances. Another trick he used was to print his account number on
blank deposit slips and add them to the stack of real blank slips in the bank.
This meant that the deposits written on those slips by bank customers entered
his account rather than the accounts of the legitimate customers.
He also impersonated in to a Pilot
(because he wanted to travel the entire world or free, he did by Acquiring a
uniform of Pan American World Airlines), Teaching Assistant (at Bringham Young
University under the name Frank Adams), Physician (in a Georgia Hospital,
Attorney (by forging a law Transcript from Harvard University.)
Abagnale was eventually arrested
in Montpellier, France, in 1969 when an Air France attendant
he previously dated recognized him and informed police. When the French police
arrested him, 12 countries in which he had committed fraud sought his
extradition. After a two-day trial, he first served time in Perpignan's prison—a one-year sentence that the
presiding judge at his trial reduced to six months. At Perpignan he was held
nude in a tiny, filthy, lightless cell that he was never allowed to leave. The
cell lacked toilet facilities, a mattress, or a blanket, and food and water
were strictly limited.
While being deported to the U.S.,
Abagnale escaped from a British VC-10 airliner as it was turning onto a taxiway at New
York's JFK International Airport.
Under cover of night, he scaled a nearby fence and hailed a cab to Grand Central Terminal. After stopping in The Bronx to
change clothes and pick up a set of keys to a Montreal bank safe deposit box
containing $20,000, Abagnale caught a train to Montreal's Dorval airport to purchase a ticket to São Paulo, Brazil. After a close call at a Mac's Milk, he was apprehended by a constable of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police while standing in line at the ticket counter. Abagnale
was subsequently handed over to the U.S.
Border Patrol.
In 1977, He appeared in a TV Quiz
show named “Time to tell the truth” and told his entire story.
James Hogue: He is a US impostor who most famously entered Princeton University by posing as aself-taught orphan.
He was raised in a Working Class
Family in Kansas City, Kansas. He Graduated from Washington High School in
1977.
In 1986, He enrolled himself into
Palo Alto, California High School as Jay Mitchell Huntsman, a 16-year old
orphan from Nevada but a local reporter James Cole Exposed him.
In 1988, When he enrolled into
Princeton University by using the alias Alexi
Indris-Santana, a self-taught orphan from Utah; Hogue claimed in his application materials that he had slept
outside in the Grand Canyon, raising
sheep and reading philosophers. He deferred admission for one year, not telling
Princeton that it was because he was incarcerated after a conviction on the theft of
bicycle frames in Utah, though he later violated his parole to
enter class. For the next two years he lived as Santana, was a member of the
track team and was admitted into the Ivy
Club. His real Identity was exposed when One of Palo Alto’s former Student
found him and reported about him to reporter James Cole. For Defrauding the
University of $30,000 as financial Aid, He was sent to jail for 5 consecutive
years.
He again tried to enter Harvard
University as a security guard in 1993 by again lying about his identity but a
few months later he was caught replacing several gemstones on exhibit with Fake
Ones and he was arrested by the Somerville, Massachusetts Police and was
charged with a Grand Larceny in the amount of $50,000.
Hogue violated the conditions of
his parole by returning to Princeton and hanging around the campus using the
name Jim MacAuthor; he had not
officially enrolled, but had attended social functions and eaten in the
cafeteria. When a graduate student recognized him, he was arrested on February
19, 1996 and taken into custody by the Princeton Borough Police –
who later released him on his own recognizance. He was later incarcerated in
the Mercer County Correctional
Center on a conviction for defiant trespass.
Hogue was released from prison in
1997 and vanished from the public eye. In 1999, Jesse Moss, a director making a
documentary film about Hogue, tracked him down in Aspen, Colorado and secured
his cooperation in making the film. The completed documentary, entitled Con Man, was released
in 2003.
Barefoot Bandit(or Colton Harris
Moore): He is an American criminal and former fugitive from Camano Island, Washington. He was charged with the
thefts or destruction of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and property,
including several small aircraft, a boat, and two cars; and the burglaries of
at least 100 private residences in various locations around the Pacific Northwest of the United States and adjacent areas of Canada, all committed while
still a teenager.
He fled to the Bahamas on
July 4, 2010, allegedly in a plane stolen from Bloomington, Indiana. He was indicted on July 6, 2010, by a U.S. Federal Court in Seattle, Washington, on
charges of transporting another stolen aircraft in that state. Harris Moore,
still only 19, was arrested in Harbour
Island, Bahamas, on July 11, 2010, after police shot out the engine of the boat
in which he was attempting to flee. Two
days later, he was extradited from Nassau,
Bahamas, to Miami, Florida, and
transferred on July 21 to the Federal Detention Center, SeaTac in Washington. On December 16, 2011, Harris Moore was sentenced to more than seven
years in prison for dozens of consolidated charges brought against him from
three different counties. On January 27, 2012, he was sentenced to six and a
half years for related federal crimes.
He became known as the
"Barefoot Bandit" by reportedly committing some of his crimes barefoot, once leaving behind 39 chalk footprints and
the word "c'ya!". Despite the widely reported nickname, officials
said that he more often wore shoes.
The Criminal Charges on him are : Interstate transportation of a stolen aircraft,
interstate and foreign transport of a stolen gun and interstate transport of a
stolen boat, bank burglary, flying a plane without a pilot's license,
attempting to elude, being a fugitive in possession of a gun, burglary, identity
theft, illegal entry, illegally landing a plane, malicious mischief, motor vehicle theft, possession of stolen property, theft by unlawful
taking or disposition.
Los Zetas: It is a Mexican criminal syndicate,
considered by the US government to be "the most technologically advanced,
sophisticated, and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico." The origins of Los Zetas date back to the late 1990s
when commandos of the Mexican Army deserted their ranks and began working as the
enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel. In February 2010, Los Zetas broke away from their
former employer and formed their own criminal organization.
Unlike other traditional criminal
organizations in Mexico, drug trafficking makes up only around 50% of the
revenue of Los Zetas, while a large portion of their income comes from other
activities directed against rival drug cartels and civilians. Their brutal
tactics, which include beheadings to terrorize their rivals and intimidate them,
torture, and indiscriminate slaughter, show that they often prefer brutality
over bribery. Los Zetas are Mexico's
largest drug cartel in terms of geographical presence, overtaking their rivals,
the Sinaloa Cartel. Los Zetas also operate through protection rackets, assassinations, extortion, kidnappings and other activities. The organization is based in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, directly across the border
from Laredo, Texas.
The group's name Los Zetas is given after its first commander, Arturo Guzmán Decena, whose Federal
Judicial Police radio code was "Z1",a code given to high-ranking officers.The radio code
for Commanding Federal Judicial Police Officers in México was "Y" and
are nicknamed Yankees, for Federal Judicial Police in charge of a city the
radio code was "Z", and thus they were nicknamed as the letter in
Spanish, "Zetas".
After Osiel Cárdenas Guillén took full control of the Gulf Cartel in 1999, he found
himself in a violent turf war. In order to keep his organization and
leadership, Cárdenas sought out Ruben Salinas alias el Chato, a retired Army
lieutenant who lured more than 30 army deserters of the Mexican Army's elite Grupo Aeromóvil de
Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE) to become
his personal bodyguards, and later, as his mercenary wing. These Army
deserters were enticed with salaries much higher than those of the Mexican
Army.Cárdenas' goal was to protect himself from rival drug cartels and from the
Mexican military. Some of the
original members, who had come from the GAFE unit, had during the 1990s
reportedly received training in commando and urban warfare from Israeli Special Forces Units and American
Special Forces units, which included
training in rapid deployment, marksmanship, ambushes, counter-surveillance and
intimidation.
It is unclear which of the two –
the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas – started the conflict that led to their break
up. It is clear, however, that after the capture and extradition of Cárdenas, Los
Zetas had become so powerful that they outnumbered and outclassed the Gulf
Cartel in revenue, membership, and influence. Some sources reveal that as a result of the supremacy of Los Zetas, the
cartel felt threatened by its own enforcers and decided to curtail their
influence, but ended up instigating a civil war.
Los Zetas have also carried out
multiple massacres and attacks on civilians and rival cartels, such as:
the 2008
Morelia grenade attacks (15
September), where 8 were killed and over 100 were injured;
the 2010
San Fernando massacre (24 August),
where 72 migrants were found dead;
the 2011
San Fernando massacre (6 April – 7
June), where 193 people were killed;
the massacre of 27 farmers in Guatemala (discovered
on 15 May 2011);
the 2011
Monterrey casino attack (25 August),
where 52 people were killed;
the Altamira
prison brawl (4 January 2012), where
31 Gulf cartel inmates were killed;
the Apodaca
prison riot (19 February 2012), where
44 Gulf cartel inmates were killed and 37 Zetas escaped from prison;
In addition, sources reveal that
Los Zetas may also be responsible for:
the 2010
Puebla oil pipeline explosion, which killed 28 people, injured 52, and damaged
over 115 homes.
the 2011 massacre at Allende, Coahuila where an estimated 300-500 civilians were killed after the Zetas accused
two local men of betraying the organization.
By 2011 only 10 of the
original 34 zetas remained fugitives. And to this
day most of them have either been killed or captured by the Mexican law
enforcement and military forces.
As of 2012, Los Zetas had control
over 11 states in Mexico, making
it the drug cartel with the largest territory in the country. Their rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel, have lost some territories to Los Zetas, and went down
from 23 states in dominion to 16.
By the beginning of 2012, Mexico's
government escalated its offensive against the Zetas with the announcement that
five new military bases will be installed in the group's primary areas of
operation.
Zodiac Killer: It is the nickname given to an unidentified serial killer who operated in northern
California in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. The Zodiac murdered victims in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa, and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. Four men and three women between
the ages of 16 and 29 were targeted. The killer originated the name
"Zodiac" in an August 7, 1969 letter to the local Bay Area press,
which was just one in a series of taunting letters. These letters included four
cryptograms (or ciphers). Of the four cryptograms sent, only one has
been definitively solved.
Suspects have been named by law
enforcement and amateur investigators, but no conclusive evidence has surfaced.
In April 2004, the San Francisco
Police Department (SFPD) marked the
case "inactive", yet re-opened the case at some point prior to March
2007. The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo, as well as in Napa County and Solano County. The California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969.
Although the Zodiac claimed 37
murders in letters to the newspapers, investigators agree on only seven
confirmed victims, two of whom survived.
The First murders committed by the Zodiac Killer
were those commited at Lake Herman Road, It was the shooting of two High School
Students.
There are a no. of suspects who are said to be the
Zodiac Killer. These are been identified with the Typewriters with which
written the letters have been received and the DNA footprints.
Postcard Bandit (or Brenden Abbot): is a convicted Australian bank robber. He is
reported to have stolen and hidden millions of dollars, and was dubbed "the postcard
bandit" by police seeking media coverage. Abbott has been imprisoned in Woodford Correctional Centre and Arthur
Gorrie Correctional Centre, and held in both mainstream and Supermax conditions.
He was moved to Brisbane Correctional Centre in August 2011, and is detained
under severe Supermax-style conditions. Though scheduled for release in 2020, he faces further charges in two
other states.
He has tried many times to escape
prison. He had been part of armed robberies as well.
Griselda Blanco: was a drug lord of the Medellín
Cartel and a pioneer in the Miami-based cocaine drug trade andunderworld during the 1970s and early 1980s. She was an important
member of the Medellin Cartel but developed a bad rapport with the Cartel when
she had the niece of the Ochoa family of the Medellin Cartel, Marta Saldarriaga
Ochoa, murdered in order to not pay for a shipment of cocaine delivered by
Marta. Her plan was to say she never received the shipment and that the young
lady disappeared with it. After the young woman's body was found on a rural
south Florida road, it became open season on Griselda and she was subsequently
"on the run". She is also known as La Madrina, The Black Widow, The
Cocaine Godmother and the queen of narco-trafficking.
In her Early Life, Blanco's former
lover, Charles Cosby, recounted how Blanco, at age 11, allegedly kidnapped,
tried to ransom, and eventually shot a child from an upscale flatland
neighborhood near her own slum neighborhood.
By her preteens, she had become a
pickpocket, and at the age of 14 she ran away from her allegedly physically
abusive mother. Blanco resorted to prostitution for a few years in Medellín,
until age 20. She married her first husband, Carlos Trujillo, and gave birth to
three sons: Dixon, Uber, and Osvaldo.
She was openly Bisexual as well.
Blanco played a major role in the
history of the drug trade in Miami and other cities across the United States.
The return of Griselda Blanco to
the US from Colombia is what led the start of the mass murders, which later
turned out to be the Miami drug war. Her Distribution network got a turnover of
$80 million at that time.
On February 20, 1985, she was
arrested by DEA agents in her home. Held without bail, Blanco was
sentenced to more than a decade in jail. She continued to run her cocaine business while in jail. By pressuring
one of Blanco's lieutenants, the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office obtained
sufficient evidence to indict her for three murders. However, the case
collapsed, largely due to technicalities, and Blanco was released from prison
and deported to Colombia in 2004. Before
her death in 2012, she was last seen in Bogota Airport in May 2007.
Jacques Masrine: He was a French criminal.
He was responsible for numerous murders, bank robberies, burglaries,
and kidnappings in France and Canada. Mesrine repeatedly escaped from prison and made international
headlines during a final period as a fugitive when his exploits included trying
to kidnap the judge who had previously sentenced him. An aptitude for disguise
earned him the moniker "The Man of a Thousand Faces" and enabled him
to remain at large while receiving massive publicity as a wanted man. Mesrine
was widely seen as an anti-establishment 'Robin Hood' figure. In keeping with
his charismatic image, he was rarely without a glamorous female companion. A pair of films which came out in2008 were
based on Mesrine's life.
Drafted into the French Army, he volunteered for special duty in the Algerian War as
a parachutist/commando. While participating in ruthless counter-insurgency
operations, Mesrine's duties are said to have included the killing of
prisoners. Although he disliked military discipline, Mesrine enjoyed action and
was decorated with the Cross of Military Valour by General Charles de Gaulle before leaving the army in 1959. His father was later to claim that the
time in Algeria had brought about a noticeable deterioration in Mesrine's
behavior. In 1961 Mesrine became involved with the Organisation de l'armée secrète(a far- rightist
organisation formed during the Algerian War) . He married Maria De La Soledad; they had three
children but later separated in 1965. In 1962 Mesrine was sentenced to 18
months in prison for robbery (his first prison sentence although he had been a
professional criminal for a number of years). After being released Mesrine made
an effort to reform: he worked at an architectural design company where he
constructed models, showing considerable ability. However a downsizing in 1964
resulted in him being fired. His family bought him the tenancy of a country
restaurant, a role in which he was quite successful, but this arrangement ended
after the owner paid a visit one evening to find Mesrine carousing with
acquaintances from his past. The lure of easy money and women proved impossible
for him to resist and he returned to crime. Overcoming some suspicion about his
relatively middle-class background, Mesrine began to establish a reputation in
the underworld as a man who was crossed at one's peril.
El Chapo (or Joaquin Guzman): is a Mexican drug lord who
heads the Sinaloa Cartel, a criminal
organization named after the Mexican Pacific coast state of Sinaloa where
it was formed. Known as "El Chapo Guzmán" for his 1.68 m (5 ft 6 in) stature, he
became Mexico's top drug kingpin in 2003 after the arrest of his rival Osiel Cárdenas of the Gulf Cartel, and is
considered the "most powerful drug trafficker in the world" by the United States Department of the Treasury.
Each year from 2009 to 2011 Forbes magazine
ranked Guzmán as one of the most powerful people in the world, ranking 41st,
60th and 55th respectively. He was thus the second most powerful man in Mexico,
after Carlos Slim. He was named as the 10th richest man in Mexico
(1,140th in the world) in 2011, with a net worth of roughly US$1 billion. The magazine also calls him the "biggest drug lord of all
time", and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimates he has surpassed the influence and
reach of Pablo Escobar, and now
considers him "the godfather of the drug world". In 2013, the Chicago
Crime Commission named Guzmán "Public Enemy Number One" for the
influence of his criminal network in Chicago, though there is no evidence that
Guzmán has ever been in that city. The
last person to receive such notoriety was Al Capone in 1930.
Guzmán's Sinaloa Cartel transports
multi-ton cocaine shipments from Colombia through Mexico to
the United States, the world's top consumer, and has distribution cells
throughout the U.S. The organization has also been involved in the production,
smuggling and distribution of Mexican methamphetamine, marijuana, ecstasy (MDMA) and heroin across both North America and Europe. At the time of his 2014 arrest, Guzmán imported more
drugs into the United States than anyone else.
Guzmán was captured in 1993 in
Guatemala, extradited and sentenced to 20 years in prison in Mexico for murder
and drug trafficking. After bribing
prison guards, he was able to escape from a federal maximum-security prison in
2001. He was wanted by the governments of Mexico and the United States, and by INTERPOL. The
U.S. offered a US$5 million reward for information leading to his capture, and
the Mexican government offered a reward of 60 million pesos (approximately
US$3.8 million) for information on Guzmán.
Guzmán was arrested by Mexican
authorities in Mexico on 22 February 2014. He was found inside his fourth-floor
apartment at 608 Avenida del Mar in the beachfront Miramar condominium in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, and was captured without a gunshot being fired. Guzmán
escaped from prison again on 11 July 2015.
Vassilis Palaiokostas: He is a Greek fugitive(who
was born in 1966 in the Trikala Region of greece ) who escaped
by helicopter twice from the Greek
high-security Korydallos prison while serving a 25-year sentence for kidnapping and robbery. He is believed to have been the mastermind of
the kidnapping of Giorgos Mylonas, a Greek industrialist, as the ransom paid
was traced back to him. In 2000 he was convicted for the 1995 kidnapping of
Alexander Haitoglou, the CEO of Haitoglou
Bros, a food company in Northern Greece and sentenced to 25 years in prison. His brother, Nikos Palaiokostas, is in prison for 16
bank robberies.
The government of Greece faced
intense criticism after his second escape from the same facility, and the
government responded by firing three justice ministry officials and arresting
three prison guards.
What makes him famous in his
hometown is the fact that it is said that he has given most of the stolen money
to poor families, making him a local "Robin of the Poor", reminiscent
of the famous tale of Robin Hood. His actions have also garnered him the title
"uncatchable".
In his 2006 Escape from Prison, Two accomplices hired a trip on a sight-seeing
helicopter from Agios Kosmas, a
coastal suburb of Athens. They
hijacked the helicopter using a pistol and hand grenade, and forced the pilot
to fly to the prison. When the
helicopter arrived, guards believed the helicopter was a visit from prison
inspectors. The helicopter flew the prisoners to a cemetery nearby, where they
transferred to motorcycles and fled from there.
He was then recaptured in August,
2008.
But then again in 2009, On the afternoon of Sunday 22 February, Palaiokostas
again escaped from Athens' Korydallos
Prison by helicopter. He and his
accomplice Alket Rizai, 34, climbed a rope ladder thrown to them by a female
passenger in the helicopter as it flew over the prison courtyard.
Guards on the ground opened fire
and the woman fired back with an automatic rifle. No injuries were reported due
to the short gun fight, although one prison guard injured himself while trying
to pull out his gun.
Jonathan Tokeley- Parry: He is a British restorer and who is notable for smuggling more than 3000 pieces
of Egyptian antiquities out of Egypt by disguising them as reproductions.
It has been reported that
Tokeley-Parry changed his name from Jonathan Foreman.
Philippe Jamin: He was a guy who while in a prison in France with two other guys planned
to steal paintings from the Musée
Marmottan Monet in 1985.
Patty Hearst: She is the granddaughter of American
publishing magnate William Randolph
Hearst; she became nationally known for events following her kidnapping. In
1974, while she was a 19-year-old student living in Berkeley, California, Hearst was abducted by a
left-wing terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army. After being isolated and threatened with
death, she became supportive of their cause, making propaganda announcements
for them and taking part in illegal activities.
Hearst was found 19 months after
her kidnapping and she suddenly developed "Stockholm Syndrome".And by
which time she was a fugitive wanted for serious crimes. She was held in
custody, despite speculation that her family's resources would prevent her
spending time in jail. At her trial, the prosecution made Hearst's character
and sexual morality an issue, suggesting that she had not been raped while
being held prisoner by the SLA. She was found guilty of bank robbery. Her
conviction and long prison sentence were widely seen as unjust, but the
procedural correctness of her trial was upheld by the courts. Hearst's sentence
was commuted by President Jimmy Carter,
and she was pardoned by President Bill
Clinton.
Unabomber(Real/Full name: Theodore
John ‘Ted’ Kaczynski): Heis an
American anarchist andserial murderer. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski engaged
in a nationwide bombing campaign against people involved with modern
technology, planting or mailing numerous homemade
bombs, ultimately killing a total of three people and injuring 23 others. He is
also known for his wide-ranging social critiques, which opposed
industrialization and modern technology while advancing a nature-centered form
of anarchism.
Kaczynski was born and raised in Evergreen Park, Illinois. While growing up in
Evergreen Park he was a child
prodigy, excelling academically from an early age. Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree. He
subsequently earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University
of California, Berkeley in 1967 at
age 25. He resigned two years later.
As a Harvard undergraduate,
Kaczynski was among twenty-two students who were research subjects in
ethically questionable experiments (possibly part of Project MKUltra) conducted by psychology professor Henry Murray from
late 1959 to early 1962.
In 1971, he moved to a remote
cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while
learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. 17 years after beginning his mail bomb campaign, Kaczynski sent a letter
to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised "to desist from
terrorism" if the Times or the Post
published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), in
which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract
attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring
large-scale organization.
The Unabomber was the target of
one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's
costliest investigations. Before Kaczynski's identity was known, the FBI used
the title "UNABOM" (UNiversity & Airline BOMber) to refer to his
case, which resulted in the media calling him the Unabomber. The FBI (as well
as Attorney General Janet Reno) pushed for the publication of Kaczynski's
"Manifesto", which led to his sister-in-law, and then his brother,
recognizing Kaczynski's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto, and
tipping off the FBI. Kaczynski tried
unsuccessfully to dismiss his court appointed lawyers because they wanted to plead insanity in order to avoid the death penalty, as Kaczynski did not believe he was
insane. When it became clear that
his pending trial would entail national television exposure for Kaczynski, the
court entered a plea agreement,
under which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He has
been designated a "domestic terrorist" by the FBI. Some anarcho-primitivist authors, such as John Zerzan and John Moore, have come to his defense, while also
holding some reservations about his actions and ideas.
Moriarty: is a fictional character in some of the Sherlock Holmes stories
written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Moriarty is a criminal mastermind whom Holmes describes as the "Napoleon of crime". Doyle lifted the phrase from a
Scotland Yard inspector who was referring to Adam Worth, a real-life criminal mastermind and one of
the individuals upon whom the character of Moriarty was based. The character was
introduced primarily as a narrative device to enable Conan Doyle to kill off
Sherlock Holmes, and only featured directly in two of the Sherlock Holmes
stories. However, in more recent derivative work he has been given a greater
prominence and treated as Holmes's archenemy.
His personality was heavily based
on Admas Worth who was worth becoming
a bounty jumper; enlisting into
various regiments with assumed names, receiving his pay, and then deserting. When the Pinkerton Detective Agency began to track him, like many others using similar
methods, he fled to New York City and went to Portsmouth.
After the war, Worth became a pickpocket in
New York. In time, he founded his own gang of pickpockets, and then began to
organise robberies and heists. When he was caught stealing the cash box of an Adams Express wagon, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment in Sing Sing; he soon escaped and resumed his criminal
career.
Worth began to work for the
prominent fence and criminal organiser Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum. With her help
he expanded into bank and store robberies around 1866 and eventually began to
plan his own heists. In 1869 he helped Mandelbaum to break out safecracker Charley Bullard from the White Plains Jail through a tunnel.
With Bullard, Worth robbed the
vault of the Boylston National Bank in Boston on 20 November 1869, again
through a tunnel, this time from a neighbouring shop. The bank alerted the
Pinkertons who tracked the shipment of trunks worth and Bullard had used to
ship the loot to New York. Worth decided to move to Europe with Bullard.
Hannibal Lecter: He was a character in a series of Fictional novels written by Thomas
Harris. He was introduced in the 1981 thriller novel Red Dragon as a forensic psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer. The novel and its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs, feature Lecter as one of the primary antagonists after
the two serial killers in both novels. In the third novel, Hannibal,
Lecter becomes a protagonist. His
role as the antihero occurs in the fourth novel, Hannibal Rising, which explores his childhood and development into a serial killer.
Red Dragon firmly states that Lecter does not fit any known psychological profile. In The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter's keeper, Dr. Frederick Chilton, claims that Lecter is a "pure sociopath" ("pure psychopath" in the film adaptation). In the novelRed
Dragon, protagonist Will Graham says that Lecter has no conscience and tortured animals as a child, but does not exhibit any other of the criteria traditionally
associated with psychopathy. Graham explains that psychiatrists refer to Lecter
as a sociopath because "they don't know what else to call him". In
the film adaptation of The
Silence of the Lambs,
protagonistClarice Starling says of
Lecter, "There's no word for what he is."
Lecter's pathology is explored in
greater detail in Hannibal and Hannibal
Rising, which explain that he was traumatized as
a child in Lithuania in 1944 when he witnessed the murder and cannibalism
of his beloved sister, Mischa, by a group of deserting Lithuanian Hilfswillige,
one of whom claimed that Lecter unwittingly ate his sister as well.
All media in which Lecter appears
portray him as intellectually brilliant, cultured and sophisticated, with
refined tastes in art, music and cuisine. He is frequently depicted preparing
gourmet meals from his victims' flesh, the most famous example being his
admission that he once ate a census takers liver "with some fava beans and
a nice Chianti" (a
"bigAmarone" in the novel). He is well-educated and speaks several
languages, including Italian, German, Russian, Polish, French, Spanish, and, to some extent, Japanese. He is deeply offended by rudeness, and
frequently kills people who have bad manners. Prior to his capture and imprisonment,
he was a member of Baltimore,
Maryland's social elite, and a sitting member of the Baltimore Philharmonic
Orchestra's board of directors.
In The Silence of the Lambs,
Lecter is described through Starling's eyes: "small, sleek, and in his
hands and arms she saw wiry strength like her own". The novel also reveals
that Lecter's left hand has a condition called mid ray duplication polydactyl, i.e. a duplicated middle finger. In Hannibal, he
performs plastic surgery on his own face on several occasions, and removes his
extra digit. Lecter's eyes are a shade of maroon, and reflect the light in
"pinpoints of red". He has
small white teeth and dark,
slicked-back hair with a widow's
peak. He also has a keen sense of smell; in The Silence of the Lambs, he is able to identify through a plate glass window
the brand of perfume that Starling wore the day before. He has an eidetic memory and a fondness for the method
of loci: he has constructed in his mind an elaborate "memory palace"
with which he relives memories and sensations in rich detail.
Walter White: He is the main protagonist in Breaking Bad TV Episode. Walter
White was born on September 7, 1959, as seen on some of his personal papers.
Walt studied chemistry at the California
Institute of Technology, where he conducted research on proton radiography that helped a team win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985. After
graduate school, Walt founded the firm Gray Matter Technologies with Elliott Schwartz (Adam Godley), his former classmate and close friend. Around this time, Walt dated his lab assistant, Gretchen (Jessica
Hecht). However, he abruptly left both Gretchen and Gray Matter Technologies,
selling his financial interest in the company for $5,000. Gretchen and Elliott
later married and made a fortune, much of it from Walt's research. Though they
remain friendly, Walt secretly resents both Gretchen and Elliott for profiting
from his work.
At the age of 50, Walt works as a
high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, providing instruction to uninterested and disrespectful students. The job pays so poorly that Walt is forced to take up
another job at a local car wash to supplement his income, which proves to be
particularly humiliating when he has to clean the cars of his own students. Walt and his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) have a
teenage son named Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte), who has cerebral palsy. Skyler is also pregnant with their
second child, Holly, who is born at the end of season two. Walt's other family
includes Skyler's sister, Marie
Schrader (Betsy Brandt); her
husband, Hank (Dean Norris), who is a DEA agent;
and his mother, who is never seen.
Dexter: Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a blood for
the fictional Miami Metro Police Department who also leads a secret life as a
vigilante serial killer, hunting
down murderers who have slipped through the cracks of the justice system. The
show's first season was derived from the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004), the first of the Dexter series novels by Jeff Lindsay. It
was adapted for television by screenwriter James Manos, Jr., who wrote the first episode. Subsequent seasons
evolved independently of Lindsay's works. Orphaned at age three when his mother
is brutally murdered in a shipping container, and harboring a traumatic secret,
Dexter (Michael C. Hall) was adopted by Miami policeman Harry Morgan (James
Remar) who recognized his homicidal tendencies and taught him to channel his
gruesome passion for killing in a "constructive" way—by killing only
heinous criminals (such as child molesters, mob assassins, rapists, serial
killers of the innocent etc.) who have slipped through the justice system. To
satisfy his interest in blood and to facilitate his own crimes, Dexter works as
a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department (based on the
real-life Miami-Dade Police
Department). Although his drive to kill is unflinching, he is able to affect
normal emotions and keep up his appearance as a socially-responsible human
being. He is extremely cautious in his kills – using plastic-wrapped clean
rooms and carefully cleaning up afterward – to reduce the chances of detection.
The Joker: He is a super villain and the
archenemy of Batman. He was first introduced
in Batman #1 (Spring 1940) and has remained consistently
popular. The Joker is a master criminal with a clown-like appearance. Initially
portrayed as a violent sociopath who murders people for his own amusement, the
Joker later in the 1940s began to be written as a goofy trickster-thief. That
characterization continued through the late-1950s and 1960s before the
character became again depicted as a vicious, calculating, psychopathic killer.
The Joker has been responsible for numerous tragedies in Batman's life,
including the paralysis of Barbara Gordon(Batgirl/Oracle) and the murders
of Jason Todd (the second Robin) and Jim
Gordon's second wife Sarah Essen.
Interpretations of the Joker's appearance in other
media include Cesar Romero's in the 1960s Batman television
series, Jack Nicholson's in Tim Burton's Batman, and Mark
Hamill's in Batman: The Animated Series, other DC Animated Universe shows
and the Batman: Arkham games. Wizard magazine listed him the #1 villain of all
time in 2006. As played by Nicholson, The Joker ranks #45 in the American Film
Institute's list of the top 50 film villains of all time.Heath
Ledger signed to play the Joker in July 2006, for director Christopher
Nolan's Batman Begins sequel, The Dark Knight and won a
posthumous Oscar for his performance. He was also ranked 8th on the Greatest
Comic Book Character of All Time list, which was released
by Empire (notably being the highest ranked villain character on the
list), as well as being the fifth Greatest Comic Book Character Ever in Wizard
Magazine's 200 Greatest Comic Book Characters of all Time list, once again
being the highest ranked villain on the list.
Additional Terms to Learn
Cartels: It is an
agreement between competing firms to control prices or exclude entry of a new
competitor in a market. It is a formal organization of sellers or buyers that
agree to fix selling prices, purchase prices, or reduce production using a
variety of tactics. Cartels usually
arise in an oligopolistic industry,
where the number of sellers is small or sales are highly concentrated and the
products being traded are usually commodities.
Cartel members may agree on such matters as setting minimum or target prices
(price fixing), reducing total industry output, fixing market shares, allocating customers, allocating
territories, bid rigging,
establishment of common sales agencies, altering the conditions of sale, or
combination of these. The aim of such collusion (also called the cartel agreement) is to increase individual members' profits by
reducing competition. If the cartelists do not agree on market shares, they
must have a plan to share the extra monopoly profits generated by the cartel. One can distinguish private cartels from public cartels. In the
public cartel a government is involved to enforce the cartel agreement, and the
government's sovereignty shields such cartels from legal actions. Inversely,
private cartels are subject to legal liability under the antitrust laws
now found in nearly every nation of the world. Furthermore, the purpose of
private cartels is to benefit only those individuals who constitute it, public
cartels, in theory, work to pass on benefits to the populace as a whole.
Competition laws often forbid private cartels. Identifying and breaking
up cartels is an important part of the competition policy in most
countries, although proving the existence of a cartel is rarely easy, as firms
are usually not so careless as to put collusion agreements on paper.
Several economic studies and legal
decisions of antitrust authorities have found that the median price increase
achieved by cartels in the last 200 years is around 25%. Private international
cartels (those with participants from two or more nations) had an average price
increase of 28%, whereas domestic cartels averaged 18%. Fewer than 10% of all
cartels in the sample failed to raise market prices.
Mafia: It is a type of organized crime syndicate whose primary activities are protection racketeering, the arbitration of disputes
between criminals, and the organizing and oversight of illegal agreements and
transactions. Secondary activities
may be practiced such as gambling, loan sharking, drug-trafficking, and fraud.
The term was originally applied to
the Sicilian Mafia, but has since
expanded to encompass other organizations of similar methods and purpose, e.g.,
"the Russian Mafia" or "the Japanese Mafia". The term is
applied informally by the press and public; the criminal organizations
themselves have their own terms (e.g., the original Sicilian and
Italian-American Mafia call themselves Cosa Nostra, the Mexican Mafia
calls itself La Eme, the Japanese Mafia Yakuza, the
Chinese Mafia Triad and the Russian Mafia Bratva).
When used alone and without any
qualifier, "Mafia" or "the Mafia" typically refers to
either the Sicilian Mafia or the Italian-American
Mafia, and sometimes Italian
organized crime in general.
Syndicate: It is something which is there to
promote, and engage in, organized
crime, that is, organizations which run common illegal businesses on a large,
national, or international scale. The subunit of the syndicate is a crime family or
clan, organized by blood relationships, as seen in the Italian Mafia and the Italian American
Mafia crime families (the Five Families dominating New York City crime, namely, the Gambino crime family, Genovese crime family, Lucchese crime family, Bonanno crime family, and the Colombo crime family).
Extradition: is the official process whereby one country transfers
a suspected or convicted criminal to another country. Between countries,
extradition is normally regulated by treaties. Where extradition is compelled
by laws, such as among sub-national jurisdictions, the concept may be known
more generally as rendition. It is
an ancient mechanism, dating back to at least the 13th century BC, when an
Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramesses II, negotiated an extradition treaty with a Hittite King, Hattusili III.
Through the extradition process, a
sovereign (the requesting state) typically makes a formal request to another
sovereign (the requested state). If the fugitive is found within the territory
of the requested state, then the requested state may arrest the fugitive and
subject him or her to its extradition process. The extradition procedures to
which the fugitive will be subjected are dependent on the law and practice of
the requested state.
Jury: It is a sworn body of people convened to render an impartial verdict (a finding
of fact on a question) officially
submitted to them by acourt, or to set a penalty or judgment. Modern juries tend to be found in courts to
ascertain the guilt, or lack thereof, in a crime. In Anglophone jurisdictions,
the verdict may be guilty or not
guilty (not proven; a
verdict of acquittal, based on the state's failure to prove guilt rather than
any proof of innocence, is also available in Scotland). The old institution of grand juries still
exists in some places, particularly the United States, to investigate whether enough evidence of a crime exists
to bring someone to trial.
The jury system dates back to
5th-century BCE Ancient Greece, where members of the boule, or council (and other institutions, such as
judicial courts), were selected from the male citizenry by lot. This process
had two distinct advantages: Firstly, all citizens were considered for
socio-political purposes to be fundamentally equal, and, secondly, the process
prevents corruption. The boule (and hence the jury) were at the core of the
original Athenian democracy. The modern criminal court jury arrangement has
evolved out of the medieval juries in England. Members were supposed to inform
themselves of crimes and then of the details of the crimes. Their function was
therefore closer to that of a grand jury than that of a jury in a trial.
Reasonable Doubt: It is a term used in jurisdiction of anglo-saxon countries. Evidence that is beyond
reasonable doubt is the standard of
evidence required to validate a
criminal conviction in most adversarial
legal systems.
Generally, the prosecutor bears
the burden of proof and is required to prove their version of events to
this standard. This means that the proposition being presented by the
prosecution must be proven to the extent that there could be no
"reasonable doubt" in the mind of a "reasonable person"
that the defendant is guilty. There can still be a doubt, but only to the
extent that it would not affect a reasonable person's belief regarding whether
or not the defendant is guilty. Beyond "the shadow of a doubt" is
sometimes used interchangeably with beyond reasonable doubt, but this extends
beyond the latter, to the extent that it may be considered an impossible
standard. The term "reasonable doubt" is therefore used.
If doubt does affect
a "reasonable person's" belief that the defendant is guilty, the jury
is not satisfied beyond "reasonable doubt". The precise meaning of
words such as "reasonable" and "doubt" are usually defined
within jurisprudence of the applicable country. A related idea is Blackstone's formulation "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than
that one innocent suffer".
“Reasonable Doubt” is also the
title of a movie which was released in 2014. Its suggested to watch this movie
for better preparation.
Attorneys: It is the official name for a lawyer in
certain jurisdictions, including Japan, South Africa (for
certain lawyers), Sri Lanka, and the United States. In Canada, it is used only in Quebec. The term has its roots in the verb to attorn,
meaning to transfer one's rights and obligations to another.
Bail: It is some form of property deposited
or pledged to a court to persuade it to release a suspect from jail, on the understanding that the suspect will
return for trial or forfeit the bail
(and possibly be brought up on charges of the crime of failure to appear). In some cases, bail money may be
returned at the end of the trial, if all court appearances are made, regardless
of whether the person is found guilty or not guilty of the crime accused. If a bondsman is
used and a surety bond has been obtained, the fee for that bond is the fee
for the insurance policy purchased and is not refundable.
In some countries, granting bail
is common. Even in such countries, however, bail may not be offered by some
courts under some circumstances; for instance, if the accused is considered
likely not to appear for trial regardless of bail. Legislatures may
also set out certain crimes to be not bail able, such as those that carry the
penalty of capital punishment. Even
for lesser crimes, bail will not be granted if it is deemed likely that the
accused will flee, tamper with evidence, or commit the same offense before
trial.
Witnesses: It is someone who has, who claims to
have, or is thought, by someone with authority to compel testimony, to have
knowledge relevant to an event or other matter of interest. In law a witness is
someone who, either voluntarily or under compulsion, provides testimonial evidence,
either oral or written, of what he or she knows or claims to know about the
matter before some official authorized to take such testimony.
A percipient witness or eyewitness is one who testifies what they perceived through his or her senses (e.g.
seeing, hearing, smelling, touching). That perception might be either with the
unaided human sense or with the aid of an instrument, e.g., microscope or
stethoscope, or by other scientific means, e.g.,a chemical reagent which
changes color in the presence of a particular substance.
A hearsay witness is one
who testifies what someone else said or wrote. In most court proceedings there
are many limitations on when hearsay evidence is admissible. Such limitations
do not apply to grand jury investigations, many administrative proceedings, and
may not apply to declarations used in support of an arrest or search warrant.
Also some types of statements are not deemed to be hearsay and are not subject
to such limitations.
An expert witness is one who
allegedly has specialized knowledge relevant to the matter of interest, which
knowledge purportedly helps to either make sense of other evidence, including
other testimony, documentary evidence or physical evidence (e.g., a
fingerprint). An expert witness may or may not also be a percipient witness, as
in a doctor or may or may not have treated the victim of an accident or crime.
A reputation witness is one
who testifies about the reputation of a person or business entity, when
reputation is material to the dispute at issue.
In law a witness might be
compelled to provide testimony in court, before a grand jury, before an
administrative tribunal, before a deposition officer, or in a variety of other
proceedings (e.g., judgment debtor examination). Sometimes the testimony is provided
in public or in a confidential setting (e.g., grand jury or closed court
proceeding).
Although informally a witness
includes whoever perceived the event, in law, a witness is different from an
informant. A confidential informant is someone who claimed to have witnessed an event or
have hearsay information, but whose identity is being withheld from at least
one party (typically the criminal defendant). The information from the
confidential informant may have been used by a police officer or other official
acting as a hearsay witness to obtain a search warrant.
A subpoena commands a
person to appear. It is used to compel the testimony of a witness in a trial. Usually, it can be issued by a judge or by the lawyer representing the plaintiff or the defendant in
a civil trial or by the prosecutor or the defense
attorney in a criminal proceeding.
In many jurisdictions, it is
compulsory to comply, to take an oath,
and to tell the truth, under penalty of perjury.
Type of Pleas: A plea is a defendant's answer to a factual matter. In criminal
law, a plea is a defendant's formal response of guilty, not guilty or nolo
contendere to a criminal charge.
The tpes of Pleas include:
1) Guilty - A plea by a defendant admitting
that he committed the offense or crime charged. A guilty plea is a
complete admission of guilt to the charge and a waiver of all rights. A
guilty plea must be made with the consent of the court.
2) Not Guilty - A plea where the defendant
denies the charges against him. The burden remains on the city, state, or
federal government to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
3) Nolo Contendere (no contest) - A plea
entered by a defendant that does not admit guilt, but that subjects the
defendant to punishment, while allowing the defendant to deny the alleged facts
in other proceedings. For purposes of sentencing a defendant, a plea of no
contest is equivalent to a plea of guilty. However, a no contest plea
differs from a guilty plea because it cannot be used against the defendant in
other proceedings. For example, a plea of no contest by a defendant to a
criminal assault charge will result in the defendant being convicted and
sentenced for the criminal assault. But the no contest plea cannot be used in a
civil suit against the defendant. A no contest plea must be made with the
consent of the court.
4) Failure to enter a plea - If the defendant
refuses to enter a plea or does not appear, the court must enter a plea of not
guilty.
Eyewitnesses: a person who has seen something happen and can give a first-hand
description of it.
Arraignment: It is a formal reading of a criminal charging
document in the presence of the defendant to inform the defendant of the charges against them.
In response to arraignment, the accused is expected to enter a plea. Acceptable pleas vary among jurisdictions, but
they generally include "guilty", "not guilty", and the peremptory pleas (or pleas in bar) setting out reasons why a trial cannot proceed. Pleas
of "nolo contendere" (no contest) and the "Alford plea" are allowed in some circumstances.
Sentencing: It is a decree of punishment. In law, a sentence forms the final explicit act of a judge-ruled process, and also the symbolic principal
act connected to his function. The sentence can generally involve a decree of imprisonment, a fine and/or other punishments against a defendant convicted of
a crime. Those imprisoned for
multiple crimes will serve a consecutive
sentence (in which the period of
imprisonment equals the sum of all the sentences), a concurrent sentence (in which the period of imprisonment equals the length
of the longest sentence), or somewhere in between, sometimes subject to a cap.
Additional sentences include: Intermediate or those served on the weekend (usually Fri-Sun), Determinate or a specific set amount of time (90 days) or Indeterminate which are those that have a minimum and maximum time (90 to 120 days).
If a sentence gets reduced to a less harsh punishment, then the sentence is
said to have been "mitigated" or "commuted". Rarely
(depending on circumstances) murder
charges are "mitigated" and reduced to manslaughter charges.
However, in certain legal systems, a defendant may be punished beyond the terms
of the sentence, e.g. social stigma,
loss of governmental benefits, or, collectively, the collateral consequences of criminal charges.
Statutes often specify the range
of penalties that may be imposed for various offenses, and sentencing guidelines sometimes regulate what punishment within those ranges
can be imposed given a certain set of offense and offender characteristics.
However, in some jurisdictions, prosecutors have great influence over the
punishments actually handed down, by virtue of their discretion to decide what
offenses to charge the offender with and what facts they will seek to prove or
to ask the defendant to stipulate to in aplea agreement. It has been argued
that legislators have an incentive to enact tougher sentences than even they
would like to see applied to the typical defendant, since they recognize that
the blame for an inadequate sentencing range to handle a particular egregious
crime would fall upon legislators, but the blame for excessive punishments
would fall upon prosecutors.
Sentencing law sometimes includes
"cliffs" that result in much stiffer penalties when certain facts
apply. For instance, an armed career
criminal or habitual offender law may subject a defendant to a significant increase in his sentence if
he commits a third offense of a certain kind. This makes it difficult for fine
gradations in punishments to be achieved.
Alibi: It is a form of defense used in criminal procedure wherein the accused attempts to prove that he or she was in some other
place at the time the alleged offense was committed. The Criminal Law Deskbook of Criminal Procedure states: "Alibi is different from all of the other
defenses; it is based upon the premise that the defendant is truly
innocent." In the Latin language alibī means "somewhere else."
Corrections: They are umbrella terms describing a variety of functions typically carried out by government agencies, and involving the punishment, treatment,
and supervision of persons who have been convicted of crimes. These functions commonly include imprisonment, parole and probation. A
typical correctional institution is a prison.
A correctional system, also known as a penal system,
thus refers to a network of agencies that administer jurisdiction’s prisons and community-based programs like parole and
probation boards; this system
is part of the larger criminal
justice system, which additionally includes police, prosecution and courts. Jurisdictions throughout Canada and
the US have ministries or departments, respectively, of
corrections, correctional services, or similarly named agencies.
Corporal Punishment: It is the punishment intended to cause physical pain, including physical chastisement such as spanking, paddling,
or caning of minors by parents, guardians, or school or other officials.
Capital Punishment: is government sanctioned punishment
by death. The sentence is referred to as a death sentence. Crimes that can
result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences, such as first degree murder, terrorism, and espionage. The term capital originates from the Latin capitalis, literally "regarding the head" (referring
to execution by beheading). There are many execution methods; one widely practiced form historically that is the
most common modern method used in jurisdictions with capital punishment is hanging.
Capital punishment has, in the
past, been practiced by most societies, as a punishment for criminals, and
political or religious dissidents. Historically, the carrying out of the death
sentence was often accompanied by torture, and executions were most often public.
Thirty-six countries actively
practice capital punishment, 103 countries have completely abolished it de jure for
all crimes, 6 have abolished it for ordinary crimes only (while maintaining it
for special circumstances such as war crimes), and 50 have abolished it de facto (have
not used it for at least ten years and/or are under moratorium). No Western country still uses
the death penalty except the United
States.
Nearly all countries in the world
prohibit the execution of individuals who were under the age of 18 at the time
of their crimes; since 2009, only Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Pakistan have carried out such executions. Executions of this kind are prohibited under international law.
Capital punishment is a matter of
active controversy in various countries and states, and positions can vary
within a single political
ideology or cultural region. In the European Union member states, Article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits the use of capital punishment. The Council
of Europe, which has 47 member states, also prohibits the use of the death
penalty by its members.
The United Nations General Assembly has adopted, in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014 non-binding resolutions calling for a global moratorium on executions, with a view to
eventual abolition. Although many nations have abolished capital punishment,
over 60% of the world's population live in countries where executions take
place, such as China, India, the United States and Indonesia.
Parole: It is the provisional release of a prisoner who
agrees to certain conditions prior to the completion of the maximum sentence
period. Originating from the French parole ("voice",
"spoken words"), the term became associated during the Middle Ages with
the release of prisoners who gave their word. This differs greatly from amnesty or commutation of sentence in that parolees are still considered to be serving
their sentences, and may be returned to prison if they violate the conditions
of their parole. A specific type of parole is medical parole or compassionate release which is the release of prisoners on medical or
humanitarian grounds. Conditions of parole often include things such as obeying
the law, refraining from drug and alcohol use, avoiding contact with the
parolee's victims, obtaining employment, and maintaining required contacts with
a parole officer. Some justice
systems, such as the United States federal system, place defendants on supervised release after serving their entire prison sentence; this is not the same as
parole. In Colorado, parole is an additional punishment after the entire prison
sentence is served—it is called "mandatory parole".
Rehabilitation: It is the re-integration into society
of a convicted person and the main objective of modern penal policy, to counter habitual, also known as criminal recidivism.
Alternatives to imprisonment also
exist, such as community
service, probation orders, and others entailing guidance and aftercare
towards the offender.
Probation: It is
a period of supervision over an offender,
ordered by a court instead of serving time in prison.
In some jurisdictions, the term probation only applies to community
sentences (alternatives to
incarceration), such as suspended
sentences. In others, probation also
includes supervision of those conditionally released from prison on parole.
An offender on probation is
ordered to follow certain conditions set forth by the court, often under the
supervision of a probation
officer. During this testing period, an offender faces the threat of being sent
back to prison, if found breaking the rules.
Appeals: It is the process in which cases are
reviewed, where parties request a formal change to an official decision.
Appeals function both as a process for error correction as well as a process of
clarifying and interpreting law. Although
appellate courts have existed for thousands of years, law countries did not incorporate an affirmative right to appeal into their
jurisprudence until the nineteenth century.
Double Jeopardy: It is a procedural defence that forbids a defendant from being tried again
on the same (or similar) charges in the same case following a legitimate
acquittal or conviction. In common
law countries, a defendant may enter
a peremptory plea of autrefois
acquit or autrefois convict (autrefois means "in the past" in French), meaning the defendant has been
acquitted or convicted of the same offence and hence that they cannot be
retried under the principle of double jeopardy.
If this issue is raised, evidence
will be placed before the court, which will normally rule as a preliminary
matter whether the plea is substantiated; if it is, the projected trial will be
prevented from proceeding. In some countries, including Canada, Mexico and the
United States, the guarantee against being "twice put in jeopardy" is
a constitutional right. In other countries, the protection is afforded by statute.
As for the Questions to Consider It is Suggested to go through
Each and Ever one of them individually reading it all up
and memorizing the Important Stuff....YOU MIGHT FIND THE LINKS TO ALL
THE QUESTIONS THAT WERE TO BE CONSIDERED ON THE HOME PAGE.
THANK YOU!