Crime & Punishment

Each time I learn of another terrorist who spent time in prison, I'm taken back to my own prison time. In 1994, I was caught smuggling hashish into South Korea and spent three and a half years imprisoned there. Since then I've struggled to understand the nature of confinement and its effects on the individual.

Argentina is only one site where murderous attacks inspired or directed by Iran have gone unpunished. It's time to pull out all the old files.
History repeats itself, whether we've forgotten it or not, and sometimes what used to be considered cold cases come back to haunt those governments that hoped they'd just crumble away like old newspaper clippings in rusting file cabinets.

Sonora Review, Issue 66, Fall 2014
He's looking at newspaper articles about CIA agent Raymond Davis, arrested for murder, then released, in the shattered zone of Lahore—the story a mystery.
Davis shot two Pakastanis on a motorcycle who'd supposedly ridden up to his car as it was stopped in traffic, or he was chasing them, maybe on a back street, by a crumbling wall, in broad daylight...

Just before eight in the morning on September 6, I caught the Amtrak Adirondack Line at Penn Station, a ten-hour train journey up the Hudson River and the eastern edge of New York State, past Lake Champlain, snaking along a path carved into bluffs so that at times the rest of the train was visible through the windows ahead and behind me on the tracks above the water and the pines.
Destination Canada, Montreal, where I'd never been. I had no other purpose for the trip but to get out of the every day, stir my imagination, do some writing in a new city and country.

My mom recently read about Anne Perry in The Writer's Almanac and sent me the link, still feeding me what's good to eat: Perry, an international bestselling crime novelist who at fifteen had helped murder a friend's mother. The Almanac was featuring her on her birthday, October 28. A Scorpio, like me...

In 1980, then 15-year-old Peter Haberl sat with his parents at home in the small town of Lustenau, Austria, and joyfully watched as the U.S. men's Olympic hockey team beat the Soviet Union, shocking the world.
"This was really inspiring for us Europeans," Haberl recalled for Newsmax. "We were bordering the iron curtain and the looming threat of the Soviet Union, and having played hockey myself, knowing how powerful the Soviet team was, it was amazing to see the youthful spirit of those young American college kids, that belief in what is possible. It impacted the world."

In the basement waiting area of New York City's Port Authority Station I watch the buses dock and depart from tight channels and chutes like sea creatures, floating in and disgorging, engorging and floating out.
Cullen Thomas from atop Mt. Katahdin
Seated on my right, two old Amish women in black headscarves bent forward at the waist, heads in exhausted hands, like matching birds on a branch. Within reach is a moon-faced Hispanic fellow talking at cross purposes with a West Indian woman about nothing that, as far as my dim reach can manage, makes much of any sense at all; it seems they've just met: the apocalypse; a young kid who speaks Russian and should be in school, who they aren't sure they can trust; some powerful or dangerous country she is trying to think of and he can't name."

In banning innocuous tourism websites, "seditious" anti-capitalist books, and information about Pyongyang, South Korea's intelligence service is acting a lot like its brother to the north.

On a recent hot afternoon, Tony Perrottet, veteran travel writer, journalist, historian, raconteur, man of ribald curiosity, invited me up to the poolside bar on the rooftop of the Soho House to discuss his latest book, The Sinner's Grand Tour: A Journey through the Historical Underbelly of Europe.
For the book Perrottet sought out arcane places, characters, and objects of decadence and sex, from London to Capri: the Marquis de Sade's castle in Provence; the pornographic bathroom, painted by Raphael, in the Pope's Vatican apartments; the notorious "sex chair" of King Edward VII.
As we talked, bodies in bikinis and shorts drank cocktails, jumped in and out of the pool, and surrendered to the sun, the Hudson River, Chelsea, and the West Village stretching languidly below us.

Last Thursday morning, Bernard Kerik's lawyer, Andrew Schapiro, called Kerik's wife, Hala, to give her the bad news before it became public. Kerik's federal appeal of the four-year sentence he was given last February, for tax fraud and lying to the White House, had been denied.
The decision came swiftly and took Kerik, his family and his legal team by surprise. Federal appeals decisions often drag on for four to eight months. It had been just a week and a half, however, since oral arguments in the appeal of the United States of America v. Bernard Kerik were presented at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse near City Hall.
A thin crowd of around 20 people were scattered around the dark wood gallery that morning. Ms. Kerik; Kerik's son from a previous marriage, Joe; and John Picciano, Kerik's longtime friend and corrections, police and security consulting colleague, sat in the back row.

Of course, people in Kabul asked my friend Barry Misenheimer what he was doing in Afghanistan. Not a spook, not military, not a contractor, not a consultant or NGO worker, he was rarer, more absurd than all those.
"I'm a tourist," he answered people, recalling his trip recently from his apartment on the Lower East Side. The other foreigners laughingly called him "the tourist."
And so he was without an agenda, had no objective in Afghanistan other than his own on-the-fly itinerary: to see and experience the country independent of General McChrystal and President Obama, the front pages of the Wall Street Journal.

On March 17, 2009, North Korean border guards detained two American journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who were working for the U.S. independent cable television network Current TV (defunct since August 2013), after they crossed into North Korea from the People's Republic of China without a visa. They were found guilty of illegal entry and sentenced to twelve years hard labor in June 2009.[1][2] North Korean leader Kim Jong-il pardoned the two on August 5, 2009, the day after former U.S. President Bill Clinton arrived in the country on a publicly unannounced visit.
CNN.com's Blogger Bunch comment on the release of the two U.S. journalists in North Korea.