8 new true-crime longreads to help you escape the news
Even if the election turned out *exactly* as you hoped, these stories will be a welcome break
the true crime that's worth your time
After I finish writing this I’m going to go vote. It’s Tuesday afternoon in California as I type the intro to the next days issue, and the only thing keeping me going is the advice from today’s escapism thread. (Oh, and the editorial package I’m running at my day job.) And tonight, I’m going to shut off all my devices and read a book, because I’ve realized over the last few years that endlessly consuming the news does not allow me to control it, it just makes me feel like shit. Wow, I should be a life coach!
Assuming for the moment that you and I share some of these anxieties, I thought it would be helpful if I assembled a slew of really engrossing true-crime longreads you might use to distract you on Wednesday, as the results of the election come more fully into focus.
After all, even if you and I get every single thing we want when the ballots are counted, there’s still going to be a tidal wave of just gross and yucky commentary, predictions, yakking…and we haven’t even talked about Twitter. (Put that bird in a cage for a bit, baby! We don’t need to be there.)
Now, all these stories also have upsetting elements, sure, but they’re different upsetting elements from the ones on the front page Wednesday. These days, that’s enough. So, instead of hitting refresh on google news or scrolling through social media, why not open up one of these stories and fall into that narrative hole? I also present my “dream” adaptation for each story, and I hope you’ll hop into the comments to argue with my assessment. — EB
The DWI Lawyer Who Represented Cocaine Traffickers—and Paid the Price [Texas Monthly]
San Antonio attorney Jamie Balagia was a TV commercial lawyer known as the “DWI Dude,” a one-time Texas attorney general candidate who ended up in a video in which a Columbian drug lord discussed the bribes he’d handed off to U.S. officials. Snip:
By 2010, the DWI Dude firm had become a recognized force. “I was getting not guilty verdicts in cases where everybody said, ‘There’s no way you can win this case,’ ” Balagia said. He says he took forty to sixty new cases each month, mostly misdemeanor cases with a $6,000 retainer. Some years, he says, the firm brought in close to $3 million—$200,000 of which belonged to Balagia. In Manor, just east of Austin, he’d built a four-thousand-square-foot, two-story residence with columns, a terra-cotta roof, and a pool; in North San Antonio, he owned a three-thousand-square-foot home.
Still, he had his worries. His legal strategy often depended on clients who had refused to take Breathalyzer or blood tests, just as he had advised in his ads. But states had begun passing “no refusal” laws that required those stopped for DWI to submit themselves to such tests. Such a law would mean fewer easy wins for Balagia. Although Texas hadn’t yet passed such legislation, “we had all been concerned,” he told me. “We were looking at the end of our golden goose.” While Balagia realized he needed to diversify, he still didn’t want to take on cases involving violent crimes. He didn’t want to downsize, either; he loved his employees too much. He needed a plan B.
One day, Pytel told Balagia that a friend of his might be able to help him out. But it would require going big.
Dream adaptation: A Vince Gilligan series for AMC, because this story is basically Better Call Saul…but better. — EB
The Hunt for the Dark Web’s Biggest Kingpin [Wired]
This is a six-part series, with the second and third articles online and three more to go. It’s about Alpha02 who — spoiler — is actually named Alexandre Cazes, the creator of AlphaBay. That’s a website that, per the DoJ was “designed to enable users to buy and sell illegal goods, including controlled substances, stolen and fraudulent identification documents and access devices, counterfeit goods, malware and other computer hacking tools, firearms, and toxic chemicals.” This Wired series covers how he got started and how he got caught, and its a snappy, smart, and engrossing tale. Snip:
For Grant Rabenn, the Fresno-based prosecutor, it was clear that Alpha02 was now the most wanted man on the dark web; Rabenn compared his notoriety among digital crime investigators to that of Osama bin Laden. AlphaBay and Alpha02 were invoked at every law enforcement conference on cybercrime, every interagency meeting, every training event, Rabenn says. And as the target on Alpha02's back loomed larger, so too did the unspoken fear that this mastermind might stay a step ahead of them indefinitely.
“Is this person just a pure genius who's figured out all of the possible mistakes?” Rabenn remembers asking himself. “Has this individual found the perfect country with the right IT infrastructure to run a marketplace, and he's able to bribe the officials there so we'll never touch him?
“As every day passed there was, more and more, a sense that this might be the special one,” Rabenn says. “You begin to wonder: Is this the Michael Jordan of the dark web?”
But Rabenn followed these discussions of Alpha02 from a distance. The idea that his Fresno team might actually take on the Michael Jordan of the dark web had never occurred to him. “It's not expected for people like us,” he says simply, “to go after a site like that.”
Dream adaptation: A feature-length doc from Laura Poitras, who with Citizenfour made online surveillance accessible. — EB
A child star at 7, in prison at 22. Then she vanished. What happened to Lora Lee Michel? [LA Times]
This piece is from May, but has been circulating lately, so I’m gonna count it: Lora Lee Michel was billed as the next Shirley Temple, but a lawsuit over her custody derailed her career and life. Snip:
In 1946, the year after she was adopted, Lora Lee and Lorraine arrived in Hollywood. They moved to Crescent Heights Boulevard into a striking French Normandy-style apartment building that later housed Marilyn Monroe and Rock Hudson.
Otto remained back home to pay the “mounting bills,” according to a local news report.
Lorraine encouraged Lora Lee’s talents, enrolling her in dance classes and hiring a drama coach, fellow Texan Ona Wargin, who specialized in children.
Before long, Lora Lee began acting in TV and radio dramatizations and plays. Within a couple of years, she appeared in “I Remember Mama” at the El Capitan Theatre and in Clare Boothe Luce’s “The Women” at the Key Theater.
Invited to sing and dance at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in front of 500 studio officials, Lora Lee ended the routine by sitting “on every lap in the place,” her mother boasted to their hometown paper in 1948.
Dream adaptation: I will complain about it when it happens, but if Ryan Murphy hasn’t already snapped up the rights to this story, I will eat my hat. — EB
The Internet Is Full of Predators. Omegle Lets You Meet Them. [Mother Jones]
Omegle is a Chatroulette precursor that’s somehow hung on past its more famous rival, though most of us olds hadn’t heard about it until the NYT covered it as a pandemic diversion. A recent lawsuit claims its primary use “is for live sexual activity, such as online masturbation,” and some claim its users target kids for exploitation. Snip:
I first heard of Omegle one day last March, when I learned that the child of a close friend had gone on the site the previous summer, seeking respite from social isolation. That child, too, had met a man, “middle-aged at least,” who told them they were beautiful and sexy; then he asked them to do things for him—“sexual things.” They obliged, because if they didn’t, they said, they felt like they’d have been “stringing him along, abusing his kindness.” By December the child had attempted suicide, and in February they were placed in a psychiatric institution. Like Alauna, they were 12 years old.
They wanted to know if what happened to them counted as grooming and sexual abuse, and whether they should report it. They were still recovering emotionally from the ordeal, and said they were “doing bad, like really bad.” Their father and I affirmed that there was no question it was abuse, but we still didn’t fully grasp what Omegle was.
After speaking with the two of them, I went online to learn what I could about the site. I started by masking the camera on my laptop and going on the “moderated” version of Omegle, where I was immediately paired with a man masturbating beneath a blanket. I switched to the unmoderated version, where I clicked through five different chats and saw five erect penises. Because I could not see the users’ faces, it was impossible to know how old they were, but according to investigations of Omegle by the UN and the BBC, apparently prepubescent boys have been seen masturbating on the site.
Dream adaptation: There’s no way anything with visuals won’t end up hitting, just, wrong, so I think this has to be a podcast. But I’m struggling with who should host — it seems like it has to be someone dry and incapable of disingenuity. Starlee Kine? I’m open to suggestions. — EB
Bad Professor: The Rise and Fall of John Donovan [Town and Country]
Yes, that Town and Country, I’m surprised as you are. This is a fucking banger though, so my inverse snobbery is pointless. Look at this lede:
John Donovan gazed down at his belly: a bullet hole, blood. It was December 16, 2005, and John had a lot on his mind. It seemed that his entire life had been leading up to this moment: a Bay State legacy bolstered by a professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a prodigious streak of entrepreneurship, and, more recently, the slow crumbling of his family’s dynastic ascent through Yankee upper-crust society.
As he sat in the front seat of his minivan—the vehicle hit by gunfire, blood pouring out of his abdomen—Donovan was in the midst of a vicious legal battle with his five grown children over the family estate, which included tens of millions of dollars’ worth of property in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Bermuda; even more millions of dollars in offshore accounts; and the blood-born trust between a father and his children that was supposed to hold the family name together. It was here, on this fateful night, in a dark parking garage outside Donovan’s Cambridge office, that the Donovan name would morph from a revered cornerstone of the Massachusetts aristocracy into an infamous badge, a tangle of letters best forgotten.
This is a seriously cinematic way to begin an article, right? What follows is a wild story that reminds us all that money doesn’t buy happiness when you do a shitty job of instilling values in your kids.
Dream adaptation: I’d love to see what a writer/director like Tyler Perry could do with this — if he strikes the right soap-to-darkness sensibility ratio, this is an HBO limited series that gets all the awards. (And if he fucks it up, it’s Lifetime.) — EB
The Portland Van Abductions [The Verge]
During the social justice protests of 2020, slews of cops and federal agents descended on Portland, Oregon, scooping up protesters in a surreal and seemingly unconstitutional way. What gives? Snip:
There were four men in camouflage inside the van. As they drove around, they asked her questions — about her hair color, about a laser pointer that she didn’t own. They repeatedly misgendered her. (“Even though I was wearing a pin that said ‘she / her’ and a trans [flag] pin,” Evelyn says.)
In the moment, Evelyn had not seen the relatively small patches that read “POLICE” on the fronts of their camouflage. They looked like they were dressed to invade Iraq rather than a sidewalk crossing in front of Starbucks. Thoughts of her son were first and foremost in her mind. She didn’t know if she’d see him again.
After five or 10 minutes of turning and turning around — downtown Portland is lousy with one-way streets — they parked the car and had Evelyn put her hands on the roof of the van. One agent frisked her; one removed her black construction helmet.
“That’s not him,” an officer said. They showed Evelyn a grainy cellphone photo of someone they were apparently pursuing for committing “a federal offense,” based on their questioning, possibly for shining a laser pointer at a fed. Even with the bad resolution, Evelyn — who is a brunette — could see that the person in the photo was blond and wearing a gray skater helmet.
Dream adaptation: The Good Fight ends its final season on 11/10, and though I hate to suggest the Kings do anything that will take them away from my beloved Evil, a mini-series take on this case from them (I’m thinking three episodes, maybe 75-80 min each) would be pretty terrific. Just none of that “Schoolhouse Rock” nonsense. — EB
The $30 million lottery scam [The Atlantic]
Michigan real-estate broker Viktor Gjonaj won about $30 million in the Michigan Lottery over the course of nine months. It will not surprise you to learn that (spoiler) shenanigans ensued! Snip:
On February 7, Benjamin Vogel, who worked in the Michigan Lottery’s security division, emailed James Grady, a Michigan State Police detective, asking about Gjonaj. The situation quickly reached the desk of Aric Nesbitt, then the state’s lottery commissioner. Nesbitt and his people saw only that Gjonaj was raking in jackpots; it was hard to track how much money he was spending on wheeled tickets. “The guy was winning big; I had my people do an investigation,” Nesbitt later told Kirk Pinho, a reporter for Crain’s Detroit Business. “As I recall, I believe we took actions at the lottery to try to slow him down.” But those efforts failed.
On February 28, Gjonaj won approximately $9.5 million: $6 million in tickets from Picolo’s and another $3.5 million from the Van Dyke Avenue Smoker’s Express, a different party store just a few miles away. Vitto orchestrated the play, making sure that each store printed numbers at full tilt, spending $6,300 on tickets. This was a boon for Vitto, who didn’t spend his own money on tickets, but shared in the winnings. I asked him what it felt like to win three lottery jackpots in 47 days. “I’m Dorothy. It’s the fucking Wizard of Oz, bro,” he laughed. “I’m fucking Muhammad Ali. I’m a space traveler. It was crazy, dude. Crazy.”
Dream adaptation: It’s too on the nose to propose James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte — the folks behind McMillions — tackle this one, and yet that’s all I want. — EB
The Most Lawless County in Texas [D]
Ok, maybe it’s a bad idea to include a longread with claims of election theft in it, but this piece on maliciously prosecuted Texas judge Suzanne Wooten is much more than that: it’s a yard of malicious prosecution, a messed-up frame job, and inspiring human persistence in the face of shitty people! So I feel OK about leaving this in. Snip:
While a fourth grand jury was investigating Wooten, Schulte, her lawyer, was finally able to arrange a meeting with Milner to try to find out what was going on. Milner told Schulte that Wooten had one week to resign. If she didn’t, he threatened, she was going to face indictment and would lose her house, law license, family, and reputation, and he would put her in prison for a long time. Wooten, having done nothing wrong, refused to leave the bench.
After the fourth grand jury declined to indict and a fifth was convened, Wooten and Schulte took matters into their own hands and went to the FBI. They filed a report stating that the Collin County DA’s office was misusing the grand jury to undertake politically motivated investigations. In April 2010, the FBI opened an investigation into potential corruption in the DA’s office. But before the agency could conclude its investigation, Milner got what he had been after. On October 14, 2010, nearly two years after she had taken the bench, Wooten was indicted by the sixth grand jury to hear her case.
“I was at a judicial conference in San Francisco when they indicted me,” Wooten says. “And I was told that their plan was to have me arrested at the airport with the media present. So I took a flight a day early and came back, because I have children and a family. And that’s when I was told the allegation was bribery.”
Dream adaptation: Ron Howard directs, Julia Roberts as Suzanne Wooten. As the story says, her judge opponent “Charles Sandoval resembled John Lithgow playing Winston Churchill in The Crown, only with more hair,” so Lithgow as him, duh. Oscars for everyone! — EB
Thursday on Best Evidence: Probably something on-the-nose about cults? We’ll see whether SDB has the stomach for it…
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