Clarence Thomas · Mark Geragos · Big Mack
Plus: a new San Quentin doc hits the festival circuit
the true crime that's worth your time
I haven’t been this grateful for a Friday in a while. My week began at 3 AM Monday, when my car’s windows were bashed in by a group of vandals. (20-part Netflix docuseries on the case tk.) I’ve been off a step since, as the late hour at which this issue arrived in your inbox likely confirms. I’m glad to have a couple days off, and am even gladder that one of those days is a candy-related holiday.
In terms of what to watch, I haven’t made any decisions. My top pick, most likely, is Big Mack: Gangsters and Gold, a German docuseries about wrongly convicted (or was he?) man Donald Stellwag that dropped on Netflix last weekend, but escaped my attention until today.
Netflix originally promised a January release for this series, declaring it the tale of the “most intriguing character in German legal history.” Instead, it was quietly released just a few days ago, which is certainly a red flag! The reviews that followed also suggest why it got dumped: Decider says to skip it, and it hasn’t even garnered enough coverage to merit a Rotten Tomatoes score.
This is the part where I was planning on linking to coverage of Stellwag and his strange case, but there’s not much in English to share. So, irritatingly, I’ll have to put the Netflix recap of the story here instead:
Donald Stellwag is an outsider; bullied. Eventually, he leaves his small hometown in Bavaria to move to Frankfurt, where he becomes addicted to drugs. In the early 90s, just as he’s getting his life on track, his name is mentioned in connection with a bank robbery on the German TV show Aktenzeichen XY. He’s described as very tall and clearly obese. A dubious expert convinces the judge of Stellwag’s guilt due to an allegedly characteristic earlobe. He is sentenced and, despite having an alibi, spends nine years in prison. Not two weeks after his release, he finds out that the true perpetrator has been captured. Stellwag is exonerated and becomes a media sensation. But when a gold transporter is hijacked near the A81 motorway and €1.8 million in gold is stolen, everything changes. The ringleader, infamous gangster rapper Xatar, is candid in court. The robbers and victims all have one thing in common: they all know Donald Stellwag. Has he now committed the crime he just finished serving time for? Did he do it to avenge his own ill fate?
Because there isn’t much out there for non-German speakers like me, and because I enjoy watching things in German with my husband (a native German speaker who likes to pick apart the subtitles), I might ignore all those flags and dive in anyway. Unless your comments on what you are watching this weekend give me a better idea! — EB
I wish I could watch What These Walls Won’t Hold, a new documentary about San Quentin during the pandemic that’s generating a decent amount of buzz. Director Adamu Chan was incarcerated at the notorious prison when the COVID-19 crisis began, giving him connections to sources that one rarely sees in a prison-related documentary — but also, I should note, he’s positioned in a place of advocacy, so it’s impossible that this is an agenda-less doc. (There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s important to differentiate productions like Chan’s from “down the middle,” journalistic ones.)
Chan is out on parole now, and tells KQED that he was just denied a request to travel to New York to promote the film. Instead, he’ll be in San Francisco for its world premiere at the city’s International Film Festival next weekend.
Chan’s also the guest on today’s episode of the SF Chronicle’s Fifth and Mission podcast (the name refers to the intersection at the Chron’s main building) to discuss the doc, as well as some nascent plans to revamp Quentin, helping build the chatter around his doc just a bit more.
But before I close this item, it’s worth talking a bit more about Chan, and how he ended up at the prison, as the coverage I could find of his work didn’t mention it. (Examples include the KQED and Chron links above, local outlet 48 Hills, Stanford University — I haven’t had time to listen to the podcast, so I can’t speak to that.) According to coverage at the time of Chan’s initial arrest, he was accused of sexually assaulting a Japanese exchange student at UC Berkeley, with the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office saying then that they believed he was responsible for additional attacks.
He was eventually convicted of, per court records, “one count of sexual penetration by a foreign object, one count of forcible oral copulation, three counts of forcible rape and one count of false imprisonment by violence.” He appealed his conviction, saying that “the state court improperly determined that he did not present substantial evidence of his good faith and reasonable, albeit mistaken, belief in the victim's consent and, consequently, refused his request to instruct the jury on a reasonable-belief-in-consent defense,” but the appeal was denied. He remains a registered sex offender.
I’m curious about why you think the other outlets that wrote about Chan’s film didn’t mention what he was convicted of, or why, in all these interviews, that aspect of his experience as an incarcerated person didn’t come up. The International Documentary Association doesn’t mention it in its bio of Chan, nor does the film fest, but the details on his conviction aren’t hard to find — it took me a second of googling to get a lot of it.
To be clear: I’m certainly not suggesting that one’s personal or professional life should end at conviction, nor do I believe that every conviction in a case means the accused is fully guilty. But I do think that covering Chan’s film, which relies on his experience as an incarcerated person, without noting how he ended up in that place does a huge number of parties on all sides a disservice. I’d love to hear your thoughts about it even more. — EB
A message from a Best Evidence sponsor
Want to join Thursday Evening Money as a Best Evidence sponsor? Drop us a line at editorial@bestevidence.fyi.
There’s some bad news coming for fans of Los Angeles magazine’s excellent true crime reporting. As we noted a bit ago, well-known criminal defense lawyer, restaurateur, and aspiring media mogul Mark Geragos purchased Los Angeles late last year, saying then that the plan was to expand its award-winning reporting. But now it looks like that plan has changed, with a reported pivot to “celebrity-friendly covers and lifestyle coverage,” per The Hollywood Reporter.
A look at LA Mag’s crime archives will reveal a lot of throwaway reblog on cases from across the state (and beyond), the sort of stuff you do to stay in business but that is on the floor of the next day’s virtual birdcage. But the publication is also home to longreads like Michelle McNamara’s game-changing, now-famous “In The Footsteps of a Killer,” prison life romance (?) “The Conjugal Visit,” and this 2009 oral history of the Manson murders that’s a master class on that type of story construction.
Speaking with The Wrap, editor-in-chief Maer Roshan said that the pub’s new owners had him escorted out of the building, following the firing of reporter and news editor Ian Spiegelman, who doesn’t do much in the way of true crime but whose dismissal is too fascinating not to note: “[T]wo insiders confirmed to TheWrap … he erroneously sent an email to the new owners referring to them as ‘slimy shady figures’ and that LA Magazine should do an expose on them.” Whooooops.
Roshan told THR that he was particularly proud of stories like this month’s true crime piece “The Short, Unhappy Life Of Anthony Avalos,” a story about the slaying of a 10-year-old boy in the Antelope Valley. “These are the stories that Los Angeles magazine should be covering,” he said, “especially when you consider that five years ago we were known for our Best Parks issue.” — EB
Finally, before the sun sets, a longread to send you off on the weekend. This painstaking ProPublica report on the alleged ethical breaches and potentially lawbreaking behavior of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas might have gotten a little less attention than it should have, given the media circus around Donald Trump’s indictment and court appearance this week.
This bothers me, because in another news cycle this would have been the stuff of Daily Show monologues, A Closer Look on Seth Meyers, and all the other now-political talk show segments that end up on TikTok and shared through out other social media platforms. It’s not too late, politics-news remasticators! You can still get this one out there!
But even if an Ivy League-ish white guy isn’t telling jokes about it, it’s still worth reading; here’s a snip to get you going:
For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.
These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.
The whole report, headlined “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” is unpaywalled and free to read for all. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: Shotspotter, JFK, and CNN.
What is this thing? This should help. Follow Best Evidence @bestevidencefyi on Instagram, email us at editorial at bestevidence dot fyi, or call or text us any time at 919-75-CRIME.