Rise and Fall of Frank Ma, Last Asian Godfather - NYTimes.com

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By ALAN FEUER

IT was 1994 — the Year of the Dog — and Frank Ma was in a quandary.

Mr. Ma, a 40-year-old crime boss, had just arranged the murder of his longtime heroin supplier, who, on his orders, had been gunned down in a Los Angeles parking lot. He had recently found a new supplier: Golo Keung, a member of the Big Circle Boys, one of Hong Kong’s largest criminal triads.

The quandary was this, according to court records: Mr. Keung, in classic gangster fashion, had been asking for a favor. He believed his partner in Toronto had been cheating him. He wanted the partner dead.

Mr. Ma, who had arrived in the United States a decade before from China, had pondered this request for several days, and in early May, witnesses said later, he summoned his lieutenants to his doorman building in Rego Park, Queens. Before talking shop, the half-dozen men played cards: Pick Two, one of the boss’s favorite games. Mr. Ma loved gambling, federal agents say: mah-jongg, casinos, almost any sports event. Wiretaps would later catch him wagering thousands on a basketball game he did not even seem to understand: he picked teams not by standings or statistics, but according to the color of their uniforms.

As the cards were dealt that day, Mr. Ma made an announcement. He was going to take the job for Mr. Keung. There was no way of knowing that the decision would result in two botched murders, an international investigation spanning 16 years, and his own arrest and prosecution. Its effects would ripple from central Queens to Canada to Northern California and back to Manhattan, where, only two months ago, Mr. Ma was sentenced to life in prison in what the authorities describe as the downfall of the last of New York’s Chinese gangsters.

That day around the card table in Rego Park, though, all of this was safely in the future. Mr. Ma asked an underling to secure two weapons for the job. For the hit itself, he planned to use a man from California.

That man, Ah Wah, was good. In fact, as one of Mr. Ma’s associates would later testify, he was Frank Ma’s “most helpful killer.”

Mr. Wah had once killed two men in a graveyard, federal agents say, forcing them to kneel in front of a headstone before putting bullets in their brains. His partner was a man named Luyen Nguyen; people called Mr. Nguyen “Psycho.”

Mr. Wah was from Vietnam and had pledged allegiance in the early 1990s to Mr. Ma, whom he referred to as his “dai lo,” or elder brother, according to the authorities. Mr. Wah’s associates included Paul Cai, another Vietnamese man, and William Nagatsuka, a felon from Japan. Together, they made quite a crew. According to courtroom testimony, the four immigrants killed, robbed brothels, broke into computer stores, stole cars, defrauded banks, illegally cloned cellphones and took people’s welfare checks.

Not long after Mr. Ma’s card game, court papers say, Mr. Wah invited Mr. Cai and Mr. Nagatsuka to his home in Monterey, Calif. Mr. Nagatsuka later testified that Mr. Wah said that Mr. Ma was looking for some “fresh faces” for a hit. Mr. Wah had already gone to Toronto to scout the location: the Seafood Alliance Corporation, a wholesale fish seller. He asked Mr. Nagatsuka to prepare supplies: ski masks, gloves, walkie-talkies. Mr. Nagatsuka’s roommate, referred to in the court file only as Simone, bought the walkie-talkies at a Costco in Alhambra, Calif. The four of them would split $30,000 for the job.

Days later, Mr. Wah, Mr. Nguyen, Mr. Cai and Mr. Nagatsuka flew to New York. Mr. Ma’s top lieutenant, Bing Yi Chen, met them at Kennedy Airport, court papers say, and, after they had eaten at a Chinese restaurant, took them to the boss’s home. There, they met two women, referred to in court papers as Christina and Salina, who, as Mr. Nagatsuka later said, would serve as their “tourist cover in Canada.” Expense money — $2,000 in a paper clip — was handed out.

They left Queens that night in a minivan and, hours later, checked into a small motel near Niagara Falls. The following day, July 19, they surveilled Seafood Alliance, a large, nondescript storefront in an industrial park, checking for cameras and security guards. They sent Christina and Salina shopping and promptly stole a Honda as a getaway car. They met two of Mr. Ma’s Canadian associates at a Baskin-Robbins to pick up two pistols. Back at the motel, court papers say, they cleaned the guns with WD-40 and discussed the next day’s plan: fake a robbery, tie up the victims, shoot them.

•

The men who became America’s first Chinese gangsters arrived here in the mid-1800s, mostly settling in San Francisco, where many worked for prospectors during the Gold Rush, or as laborers on the rapidly expanding transcontinental railroad. Faced with harsh conditions and anti-immigrant riots, they quickly formed social groups, called tongs, that offered protection from a hostile culture alongside basic services like credit unions.

For decades, the tongs, which also dabbled in gambling and prostitution, were mainly Cantonese, but in 1965, with the passage of a new federal immigration act, the scope and nature of Chinese immigration changed. One result was the arrival of a large number of alienated youths from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Some of them were put to work by the tongs as muscle at clubhouses, gambling dens and brothels in California and New York.

It is impossible to know precisely how many men were involved in Chinese organized crime over the decades, experts say. But in just two years, 1990 and 1991, at the height of the gangsters’ power, federal agents in New York alone made 130 arrests, confiscated 200 pounds of heroin and seized $25 million in assets, including $15 million in cash, as well as homes, boats, apartment buildings, jewelry stores, even the Golden Palace restaurant, one of Chinatown’s biggest, which was used to launder money.

This was the world that Frank Ma eventually inherited after slipping into the country illegally in the 1980s, court papers say. Born in China as Sui Min Ma, he started his career in the Boston rackets, moved to San Francisco and, by the early 1990s, federal agents say, settled in New York. By that point, Manhattan’s Chinatown was owned by two main tongs, each one connected with a youth gang. The On Leong tong dominated Mott Street and was allied with the violent Ghost Shadows. The Hip Sing tong controlled Pell Street and ran the Flying Dragons, whose boss, Johnny Eng, had moved into the heroin trade when the Italian Mafia’s role decreased.

(Mr. Ma, now in a federal prison in Brooklyn, declined through his lawyer, Don Buchwald, to be interviewed.)

The government does not believe that Mr. Ma was ever formally associated with a tong, but he would have known the major players — like Clifford Wong, leader of the Tung On tong, or Paul Lai, president of the Tsung Tsin Association, who once served on an advisory panel for Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and even attended the wedding of the governor’s daughter. (Both men were eventually convicted on racketeering charges.)

Mr. Ma was instead a member of the 14K triad, federal agents say, a Hong Kong group founded more than 60 years ago by 14 leaders of the Kuomintang nationalist party. Based in Queens, he oversaw gambling parlors, a luxury car-theft ring, extortion rackets and an immigrant smuggling operation. By his own admission, though, his most profitable business was always heroin — and that, of course, was why he had sent his killers to Toronto.

•

In the morning, their getaway car was gone.

Perhaps someone had stolen it. The men, at any rate, had a backup plan. They had stolen license plates from another car, according to court papers, and they put these on the minivan they had driven from New York. They dropped the women at a park and drove past Seafood Alliance. In the afternoon, when the coast was clear, Mr. Wah pulled the van into a parking spot. Mr. Cai and Mr. Nguyen walked toward the door. It was locked, so Mr. Nguyen fired a few shots, shattering the glass. He stepped inside. Mr. Cai followed.

Waiting in the van, Mr. Nagatsuka heard more shots. Many, many more. Years later, at the murder trial of Bing Yi Chen, he testified as to what happened next:

Mr. Wah “started putting the minivan into reverse, started pulling away from the parking lot. Once we were driving away, we see Paul Cai and Luyen coming out, running fast. Along the way, Paul Cai disassembled his handgun, threw the handgun parts to an empty lot on the right side. We were following at a slow pace along with Luyen and Paul Cai. There was a Home Depot nearby. We went to the back of it. That’s where the plan was to meet, in the back of the Home Depot. Once we turned the corner to the Home Depot, we start hearing the siren.”

They found Christina and Salina and hurried the 80 miles back to Niagara Falls. The next day, they saw news coverage of the murders on TV: two bodies being carted off by the police. They returned to New York City and to Mr. Ma’s apartment. There, court papers say, they apologized to Mr. Chen.

They had escaped unscathed. But, on reading the morning papers, they realized they had killed the wrong two men.

•

Within hours, the case was assigned to Detective Sgt. Douglas Grady of the Toronto homicide squad.

It was a Wednesday, Detective Grady’s day off, and he was at home watching the Blue Jays on television. After six years on the job, he was accustomed to the untoward hours of police work and immediately left for the scene. He found Seafood Alliance’s glass door shot out and bullet casings strewn across the ground. “In my entire career,” he recalled in a recent interview, “I’d never seen so many shots fired at a scene.”

The victims were identified as Samson Yip, 32, a computer technician, whose body was found slumped against the wall, and Stephen Kwan, 36, an accountant, who was lying in a pool of his own blood. Detective Grady saw that both men had suffered “torture shots” to the leg and had been finished off with “coup-de-grâce shots” to the head. Mr. Kwan’s lunch — a hamburger and orange juice — still rested on his desk.

By the next morning, Detective Grady was working several leads. In a nearby parking lot, the police found a knapsack containing ski masks, walkie-talkies, a canister of WD-40, a Niagara Falls baseball cap and pieces from a 9-millimeter pistol. And in a neighborhood park, they recovered two guns and another ski mask and baseball cap.

Witnesses reported seeing a van leave the scene, but no one could identify the license plate. The guns turned out to be untraceable; the masks and clothes were tracked to the United States. Even the victims, Detective Grady said, were puzzling: college graduates with no criminal records. “There seemed to be no reason at all,” he said, “for these guys getting killed.”

One potential investigative path was the walkie-talkies. Detective Grady’s team quickly determined they had come from the Costco in Alhambra, Calif. But the list of people who had bought such radios ran into the dozens, if not the hundreds, he said. He could not — or would not — ask officials in Alhambra to track down every person on the list. Nor could he do it himself. “What? I’m going to ask my bosses to let me go to California? From Ontario? They’d think it was a scam,” he said.

The only other avenue was Seafood Alliance’s owner, David Seto, who, Detective Grady determined, had a reputation for sharp elbows and late payments. So his team investigated Mr. Seto’s finances and discovered that he lived a much more opulent life than importing shrimp or cod should probably allow. They interviewed his workers, competitors and suppliers, but it was not until they examined his investors that they found a startling clue: Mr. Seto had been in contact with a man named Golo Keung.

“Every time we interviewed him, he was nervous,” Detective Grady recalled of Mr. Seto. “He wasn’t forthright — he was dodging and weaving, as they say. He thought that somebody had tried to kill him, but he couldn’t say why or who. It just became clearer that he was the intended victim, that he was the reason these two men were dead.”

When Mr. Seto left the country in 1995, the case went cold. Months, then years, went by without another lead.

“We’d gone to Crime Stoppers,” Detective Grady said. “We’d gone to our informants in the Asian community. We dealt with the constabulary in Hong Kong. But we weren’t getting anywhere.

“There was nothing left as to who did this,” he said. “Or why.”

•

Eight years later, in 2002, Special Agent Bill McMurray of the New York office of the F.B.I. busted a drug ring connected to a Chinese triad called the Wo Lee Kwans. Cooperating witnesses in that case led to the arrest of a killer known as Psycho: Luyen Nguyen.

One day, as often happens in police work, Agent McMurray mentioned his triumph to a friend, Officer John Glenn of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Officer Glenn, it turned out, had once been assigned to Detective Grady’s homicide squad and had never forgotten the seafood murders. On a professional whim, Officer Glenn sent Agent McMurray the one outstanding, albeit long-shot, lead in the case: the list of people who bought those Costco walkie-talkies all those years ago.

The whim paid off. Agent McMurray recognized the name Simone, Mr. Nagatsuka’s former roommate. Psycho had mentioned him while being questioned.

Within a year, the case had broken open. Mr. Nagatsuka, already in custody on other charges, began to cooperate. Bing Yi Chen, Mr. Ma’s right hand, was arrested in Arizona in 2003 and eventually went to trial, where he was convicted of committing murder while engaged in a narcotics conspiracy. The authorities found Paul Cai in Los Angeles, and he pleaded guilty to similar charges. Ah Wah, who had fled to China, was returned by extradition in 2007 and pleaded guilty to racketeering and murder charges. He now awaits sentencing.

Frank Ma, who had also fled to China in 1996, was arrested in Boston after he slipped back into the country in mid-2003. His case took nearly as long to wind through the courts as it had to investigate. He pleaded guilty to murder and narcotics charges. Finally, in February, Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan handed down the life sentence.

“He’d killed the wrong guys, and it caused a conflict with his supplier back in Hong Kong,” Agent McMurray said in an interview. “Before he left, Frank Ma was this mysterious godlike creature, but in China, on the run, he didn’t have the support to live the lifestyle he was used to. People owed him money in America. That’s why he came back.”

His downfall marked the passage of an era.

“Could there be another Ma-type guy still out there?” Agent McMurray asked. “The fact is our source base is so good that we’d probably be aware of his existence, even if we couldn’t make a case.

“Frank Ma was probably the last of the Asian godfathers.”

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• New Yorker who hired hit men in Toronto gets life sentence (nationalpost.com)

Murder in America - The New Yorker

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by Jill Lepore

Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, who met three years ago in a Hartford drug-treatment center and shared a room in a halfway house in between stints in prison, were both seasoned burglars, though Hayes, a forty-four-year-old crack addict, was quite a bit older than Komisarjevsky, who was twenty-six, and the great-grandson of a Russian princess. In the spring of 2007, both men were paroled. Hayes, whose arrest record stretches back to 1980, had served about three years of a five-year sentence for third-degree burglary, and Komisarjevsky had finished half of a nine-year sentence for burglary in the second degree. Hayes moved in with his mother, in Winsted, in Litchfield County; Komisarjevsky went back to his home town, Cheshire, a suburb about fifteen miles north of New Haven. They kept in touch. On July 23, 2007, authorities say, Hayes and Komisarjevsky broke into the Cheshire home of William Petit, Jr., an endocrinologist, and tortured the family through the night, raping Petit’s wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and at least one of the couple’s two daughters. In the morning, Hayes and Komisarjevsky are said to have forced Hawke-Petit, a school nurse who suffered from multiple sclerosis, into the family car and taken her to a local bank, where she withdrew fifteen thousand dollars, after which a suspicious teller alerted the police. The two men allegedly then took Hawke-Petit back to the house, killed her, set the house on fire, and fled in the Petits’ S.U.V., though not far: they crashed into a police barricade, just past the driveway.

Inside the house, a four-bedroom Colonial, police found three bodies. Hawke-Petit, forty-eight, had been strangled. Seventeen-year-old Hayley Petit, who, that September, was to start college at Dartmouth, died of smoke inhalation. Her eleven-year-old sister, Michaela, was found tied to a bed, her body badly burned after having been doused with gasoline. Only William Petit, who had been bound with rope, beaten in the head with a baseball bat, and left for dead in the cellar, survived.

Hayes and Komisarjevsky have been charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, arson, and murder. Jury selection for Hayes’s trial is scheduled to begin in January, in New Haven. William Petit, who is expected to testify about what happened that night, had asked not to be put through that ordeal twice, but his request for a single trial was denied. A trial date for Komisarjevsky has not yet been set. The state is seeking the death penalty.

Every murder raises terrible questions that no trial, no law, no punishment can answer. What forces make it possible for one human being to take the life of another? Murders can be solved and even explained—at least, that’s the operating assumption of criminal investigation and the narrative logic behind every whodunit—but to think about a specific murder with any clarity, or for very long, can be difficult, and viscerally painful. Maybe the brisk trade in lurid violence as spectacle has something to do with it: one either watches or averts one’s eyes; dispassionate reflection rarely enters into it. Scholars ranging from theologians and psychologists to evolutionary biologists have offered theories about murder—theories of evil, theories of disease, theories of disposition—but the analytical burden placed on any general discussion of murder, freighted, as it is, with atrocity, is nearly unbearable. Nothing suffices, or can.

Between the convulsive emotional response to a single murder and an elusive general theory of murder lies another kind of contemplation: the study of the murderousness of nations. The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany. Why? Historians haven’t often asked this question. Even historians who like to try to solve cold cases usually cede to sociologists and other social scientists the study of what makes murder rates rise and fall, or what might account for why one country is more murderous than another. Only in the nineteen-seventies did historians begin studying homicide in any systematic way. In the United States, that effort was led by Eric Monkkonen, who died in 2005, his promising work unfinished. Monkkonen’s research has been taken up by Randolph Roth, whose book “American Homicide” (Harvard; $45) offers a vast investigation of murder, in the aggregate, and over time. Roth’s argument is profoundly unsettling. There is and always has been, he claims, an American way of murder. It is the price of our politics.

In the archives, murders are easier to count than other crimes. Rapes go unreported, thefts can be hidden, adultery isn’t necessarily actionable, but murder will nearly always out. Murders enter the historical record through coroners’ inquests, court transcripts, parish ledgers, and even tombstones. “Fell by the hands of William Beadle / an infatuated Man who closed the / horrid sacrifice of his Wife / & Children with his own destruction,” reads the headstone of Lydia Beadle, of Wethersfield, Connecticut, who was murdered, along with her two children, in 1782. The number of uncounted murders, known as the “dark figure,” is thought to be quite small. Given enough archival research, historians can conceivably count, with fair accuracy, the frequency with which people of earlier eras killed one another, with this caveat: the farther back you go in time—and the documentary trail doesn’t go back much farther than 1300—the more fragmentary the record and the bigger the dark figure.

Pieter Spierenburg, a professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, sifts through the evidence in “A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present” (Polity; $24.95). In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century.

In the United States, the picture could hardly be more different. The American homicide rate has been higher than Europe’s from the start, and higher at just about every stage since. It has also fluctuated, sometimes wildly. During the Colonial period, the homicide rate fell, but in the nineteenth century, while Europe’s kept sinking, the U.S. rate went up and up. In the twentieth century, the rate in the United States dropped to about five during the years following the Second World War, but then rose, reaching about eleven in 1991. It has since fallen once again, to just above five, a rate that is, nevertheless, twice that of any other affluent democracy.

What accounts for this remarkable difference? Guns leap to mind: in 2008, firearms were involved in two-thirds of all murders in the United States. Yet Roth, who supports gun control, insists that the prevalence of guns in America, and our lax gun laws, can’t account for the whole spread, and a few scholars have argued that laws allowing concealed weapons actually lower the murder rate, by deterring assaults. Some Europeans suspect that Americans haven’t undergone the same “civilizing process,” as if, unmoored from Europe, Colonial Americans went murderously adrift. Spierenburg speculates that democracy came too soon to the United States. By the time European states became democracies, the populace had accepted the authority of the state. But the American Revolution happened before Americans had got used to the idea of a state monopoly on force. Americans therefore preserved for themselves not only the right to bear arms—rather than yielding that right to a strong central government—but also medieval manners: impulsiveness, crudeness, and fidelity to a culture of honor. We’re backward, in other words, because we became free before we learned how to control ourselves.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone buys these arguments, and Monkkonen himself took a different, though equally conjectural, approach. At the time of his death, he had been working on an article called “Homicide: Explaining America’s Exceptionalism,” which hypothesized that four factors accounted for the centuries-long differences between American and European homicide rates: mobility, federalism, slavery, and tolerance. Mobility breaks social ties; federalism is a weak form of government; slavery not only rationalized a culture of violence among white Southerners (where the murder rate has been disproportionately high, as it has, and remains, in many of the so-called law-and-order states) but also infected American culture; and American judges and juries have historically proved less willing than their European counterparts to convict murderers, tolerating, among other crimes, racial murders and killings by jealous spouses.

Roth, who teaches at Ohio State, wants to bring into this debate hard facts and rigorous methods. He rejects arguments about the “civilizing process” by pointing out that people didn’t necessarily intend to murder one another more often in the premodern world; they merely succeeded more often. Given modern medicine—emergency response, trauma surgery, antibiotics, and wound care—three out of every four people murdered before 1850 would probably survive today. Roth heads a collaborative project, dedicated to Monkkonen, called the Historical Violence Database, which has assembled reports of murders in several of the original thirteen colonies; nineteenth-century records from five states, seven cities, and thirty-four counties; and a wealth of twentieth-century statistics, chiefly from the Uniform Crime Reports kept by the F.B.I. beginning in 1930. As a discussion of the available data, “American Homicide” is rich, fascinating, and unrivalled. As an explanation, though, it gets dubious. Roth’s work involves three steps: first, he uses his database to count murders (he’s primarily interested in homicides among unrelated adults); then, using surviving censuses to count people, he calculates the homicide rate; finally, he attempts to explain what factors correlate with that rate, across four centuries. It’s the last step that’s the most wobbly.

Historians haven’t studied murder much, but criminologists have. Although most criminologists trace the homicide rate back only a few decades, Roth takes his lead from their work. The fluctuations in the homicide rate since the nineteen-forties have at least something to do with demography. A vastly disproportionate number of murderers and murder victims are young adult men. When baby boomers reached that age bracket, the homicide rate soared. Now that they’ve aged out of their most lethal years, the rate has fallen. To Roth, the demographic explanation of the postwar crime boom and bust falls short, but, where other social scientists have investigated economic conditions like joblessness or government policies like gun control to fill the explanatory gap, Roth favors the argument made by a criminologist named Gary LaFree, in a book called “Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America” (1998). LaFree observed that the crime rate correlates, inversely, with public faith in government and trust in elected officials. So, for instance, the Vietnam era, marked by declining confidence in elected officials, experienced a rising crime rate. He measured that faith and trust by consulting national opinion surveys taken beginning in 1958, which asked questions like “How much of the time can you trust the government to do what is right?”

Roth attempts to graft LaFree’s argument onto all of American history. He has determined that four factors correlate with the homicide rate: faith that government is stable and capable of enforcing just laws; trust in the integrity of legitimately elected officials; solidarity among social groups based on race, religion, or political affiliation; and confidence that the social hierarchy allows for respect to be earned without recourse to violence. When and where people hold these sentiments, the homicide rate is low; when and where they don’t, it’s high.

Whatever you think about the value of public-opinion polls, LaFree at least had them. Roth doesn’t. How do you measure the belief that government is stable in 1695 or 1786 or 1814 or 1902? You can’t. You can only look at what was happening in those years and tell a story about what you think people believed about their government, and, if you know what the homicide rate is, it’s easy to find a story that fits your data. The homicide rate in New England fell from a high, in 1637, of a hundred and twenty to under one, in 1800, chiefly by dropping, rather dramatically, after the Pequot War and King Philip’s War. Roth argues that the rate fell, over all, as judicial institutions were established and people developed faith in them, and that the rate fell, sharply, after these wars because conflicts with hostile neighbors brought the colonists together. But it seems equally plausible to argue that the homicide rate in Colonial New England tracks the European decline quite nicely, over all, and drops, in a stepwise fashion, after wars because they diminish the population of young men, leaving fewer potential murderers and murder victims around. Both interpretations make sense; neither has been demonstrated.

The implications of Roth’s argument are, as he realizes, distressing. Democracy requires dissent. If a high American murder rate is a function of not placing our trust in government, are we doomed to endure a high murder rate? Roth takes his case all the way to the White House: “The statistics make it clear that in the twentieth century, homicide rates have fallen during the terms of presidents who have inspired the poor or have governed from the center with a popular mandate, and they have risen during the terms of presidents who presided over political and economic crises, abused their power, or engaged in unpopular wars.” The homicide rate appears to correlate with Presidential approval ratings. If Roth is right, electing a bad President is dangerous and inciting people to hate any President, good or bad, could be deadly. But which is the cart, and which the horse? The Presidential approval rate might be a proxy for all sorts of measures of a well or poorly adjusted society. Or maybe there’s another horse, somewhere, some third factor, that determines both the Presidential approval rate and the homicide rate. It’s hard to say, partly because, in using quantitative methods to make an argument about the human condition, Roth has wandered into a no man’s land between the social sciences and the humanities. After a while, arguments made in that no man’s land tend to devolve into meaninglessness: good government is good, bad government is bad, and everything’s better when everything’s better. Correlating murder with a lack of faith and trust may contain its horror, but only because, in a bar graph, atrocity yields to banality.

Every September, the F.B.I. issues a report on crime, a compilation of statistics for the previous year. It does not offer an interpretation of this immense quantity of data. “We leave that up to the academics and the criminologists and the sociologists,” an F.B.I. spokesman said, upon the release of this year’s report. For all the number crunching, it’s clear that there is no such thing as an average murder. Even if there were, what happened at the Petits’ house in Cheshire, Connecticut, on July 23, 2007, wouldn’t be it, and not just because of that crime’s particular depravity. Much about the case is out of the ordinary. The victims were white and wealthy; murder victims are disproportionately black and poor. Exceptional, high-profile crimes often lead to legislative action driven by citizen initiative. California’s controversial three-strikes law, a ballot measure, was proposed by a Fresno photographer whose daughter was murdered. Last year, after the Petit murders, the Connecticut legislature doubled and tripled mandatory penalties for second- and third-time offenders. “Big cases make bad laws” is a criminological axiom, and one with which Mark A. R. Kleiman agrees, in “When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment” (Current Affairs; $29.95). Kleiman blames big cases and bad laws for another distinctive feature of American life: 2.3 million people are currently behind bars in the United States. That works out to nearly one in every hundred adults, the highest rate anywhere in the world, and four times the world average. Prison crowding may have been one reason that Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky were paroled. Although the crime rate today is fifteen per cent lower than it was twenty-five years ago, the incarceration rate is four times as high. At what point, Kleiman wonders, will incarceration be a greater social ill than crime? He proposes, for lesser offenders, punishments that are swift and certain but not necessarily severe: a night in jail, instead of a warning, for missing a meeting with a parole officer, say, and ten nights the next time. Whether or not Kleiman’s recommendations are practical, Connecticut, reeling from the Petit murders, is heading in the opposite direction.

The F.B.I. may leave the analysis of crime to academics, but, in the past few decades, the government has, increasingly, left the punishment of criminals up to public opinion. William Petit and his sister-in-law Johanna Petit-Chapman serve as the honorary co-chairs of Three Strikes Now, a grass-roots organization lobbying the state legislature to adopt California-style mandatory sentencing of life without the possibility of parole for third-time violent offenders. The Cheshire case has also dominated the state’s death-penalty debate, a debate that, nationwide, has long centered on race. In Connecticut, whose population is eighty-four per cent white, six of the ten men on death row are black. (Both Hayes and Komisarjevsky are white.) Earlier this year, the Connecticut legislature voted to abolish the death penalty. William Petit publicly denounced the bill, and Jodi Rell, the state’s governor, a Republican, vetoed it.

Capital punishment has been on the books in Connecticut since 1642. Three strikes has been tried before, too. In Colonial America, many crimes, including murder, were punishable by death and, for lesser crimes, Connecticut, like many colonies, mandated the death penalty for third-time offenders. That began to change on September 7, 1768, when a burglar named Isaac Frasier was hanged in Fairfield. Frasier had shown early evidence of a “thievish Disposition.” “Men go from one degree of wickedness to another,” the town’s minister said in a sermon at the gallows titled “Excessive Wickedness, the Way to an untimely Death.” Convicted of burglary in New Haven, Frasier was whipped and branded and had his ears cropped. Caught again in Fairfield in 1766, he received the same punishment “and was solemnly warned . . . that death would be his punishment on a third Conviction.” When Frasier robbed another house, he was sentenced to death. “The Government of Connecticut have always been remarkably tender of putting persons to Death,” one observer noted. But when Frasier applied to the legislature for clemency, he was denied. Said the pastor at the gallows, “Justice requires that you should suffer.”

An outcry followed. Two weeks after Frasier’s death, a Hartford newspaper published an essay called “An Answer to a very important Question, viz. Whether any community has a right to punish any species of theft with death?” The writer’s answer—an emphatic no—borrowed extensively from Cesare Beccaria’s treatise “On Crimes and Punishments,” published in 1764. Beccaria, an Italian nobleman, argued against capital punishment—which was, at the time, widespread in Europe, too—on two grounds: first, in a republic men do not forfeit their lives to the government; and, second, capital punishment does not deter crime. Beccaria argued (and Kleiman has merely revisited that argument) that punishments, to be effective, must be swift and certain but not necessarily severe. Punishments, he insisted, should be proportionate to crimes, whose dangerousness could be measured, in “degrees,” by their injury to society. For the crime of murder, Beccaria considered life in prison to be both more just and a more effective deterrent than execution.

The first American edition of Beccaria’s treatise was published in 1777, and it reached a wide audience in Connecticut beginning in 1786, when it was serialized in a New Haven newspaper. “If we glance at the pages of history, we will find that laws, which surely are, or ought to be, compacts of free men, have been, for the most part, a mere tool for the passions of some,” Beccaria wrote. This argument held particular appeal for a people who had just finished waging a war against the passions of King George; adopting Beccaria’s recommendations came to seem, in a fundamental sense, American, as if the United States had a special role to play, as a republic, in the abolition of capital punishment. In 1784, the Yale senior class debated whether the death penalty was “too severe & rigorous in the United States for the present Stage of Society.”

In the seventeen-nineties, five states abolished the death penalty for all crimes except murder. By the eighteen-twenties, all Northern states reserved capital punishment for first-degree murder. When incarceration replaced all corporal and most capital punishment, Americans built prisons, and sentenced criminals to jail time. In 1846, Michigan became the first state to abolish the death penalty. Twice, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the governor of Connecticut asked the state’s legislature to do the same, to no avail.

In the course of the twentieth century, capital punishment was abolished in much of the world, including all of Western Europe, but not in the United States. Germany, Austria, and Italy stopped executing criminals after the Second World War. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, other European countries began limiting capital punishment. Denmark abolished it entirely in 1978; the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand in the nineteen-eighties; Britain, Canada, and Belgium in the nineteen-nineties. In many parts of the United States, the death penalty was, if not outlawed, abandoned. Except for a serial murderer named Michael Ross, who was killed by lethal injection in 2005, after he waived his right to appeal because he wanted to die, no one has been executed in Connecticut, or anywhere else in New England, since 1960.

Not so elsewhere. Since 1976, more than a thousand people have been executed in the United States, a third of them in Texas. If Hayes and Komisarjevsky are found guilty and sentenced to death instead of life in prison without the possibility of parole, they will be killed by lethal injection. China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia execute more criminals, but, among affluent democracies, the death penalty, like the U.S. homicide and incarceration rates, marks an American exception, or, looked at another way, an anachronism.

Long ago, Beccaria pointed out the meaningfulness of the correspondence, over time, between crime and punishment, between one kind of violence and another. If the history of murder contains a lesson, Beccaria believed, it was this: “The countries and times most notorious for severity of punishment have always been those in which the bloodiest and most inhumane of deeds were committed.”

Murder has a history, but it isn’t always edifying, and sometimes the history of crime and punishment has a chilling sameness. The prospect of death didn’t deter Barnett Davenport, a Connecticut murderer who was hanged in 1780, at the age of nineteen. “No man becomes a devil in a minute,” Davenport said, in a confession made a week before he mounted the gallows. His life of crime began when, at the age of twelve, he stole some watermelons from a neighbor’s garden. More than once, he was caught. But by the time he was eighteen he had advanced from pilfering eggs and potatoes to stealing horses. He fought in the Revolution and then deserted. He went to live in the house of a man named Caleb Mallery, near Litchfield. On February 3, 1780, “a night big with uncommon horror” (and a year with an elevated homicide rate), Davenport killed Mallery, Mallery’s wife, and their seven-year-old granddaughter, beating their heads in with a pestle and a rifle. Next, he pried open the family’s money chest and took from it a pile of bills and a handful of coins. Then he set the house on fire, leaving inside two more children, ages six and four. He was captured, and swiftly hanged. In his confession, he recalled that Caleb Mallery had cried out, in between blows, “Tell me what you do it for!” History does not record the murderer’s reply.

Billion-Dollar Mystery in Iraq

posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 08/04/2009

A multi-billion dollar mystery is unfolding in Iraq, and it may reach to the highest levels of the Iraqi government.

It involves what the New York Times calls an "extremist Shiite group" that has now reconciled with Prime Minister Maliki and his regime. The group is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five British contractors who, according to the Guardian, were installing a sophisticated financial tracking system in Iraq's ministry of finance in 2007.

The story so far:

Today, the Times reports:

"An extremist Shiite group that has boasted of killing five American soldiers and of kidnapping five British contractors has agreed to renounce violence against fellow Iraqis, after meeting with Iraq's prime minister.

"The prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, met with members of the group, Asa'ib al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, over the weekend, said Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the prime minister, confirming reports. 'They decided they are no longer using violence, and we welcome them,' he said in a telephone interview.

"Mr. Dabbagh first revealed the negotiations in remarks on Monday to Al Iraqiya, the state television network. 'We have reached an agreement to resolve all problems, especially regarding detainees who do not have Iraqi blood on their hands,' he said. He did not say anything about British victims of the group."

In other words, Maliki met with a bunch of Shiite terrorists, welcomed them with open arms. Why would he do that?

In addition, the Times reports, the terrorists have a "liaison to the government." By coincidence, his name is also Maliki, and he wants to get into the government's favor and take part in the "political process":

"Salam al-Maliki, the insurgent group's liaison to the government, said in a telephone interview that the group had not renounced fighting the Americans. 'Of course we want to get into the political process, because circumstances have improved, and the United States is out right now,' said Mr. Maliki, who is not related to the prime minister. 'We told the government anyone who has Iraqi blood on their hands, you should keep him in jail. We are only fighting the United States.'"

The Guardian, in a related story, suggests that the kidnapping of the five Britons was carried out with government collusion by a team of 80 to 100 men, dressed as Interior Ministry police officials and driving a convoy of 19 white SUVs. Here's the Guardian story:

"An investigation into the kidnapping of five British men in Iraq has uncovered evidence of possible collusion by Iraqi government officials in their abduction, and a possible motive – to keep secret the whereabouts of billions of dollars in embezzled funds.

"A former high-level Iraqi intelligence operative and a current senior government minister, who has been negotiating directly with the hostage takers, have told the Guardian that the kidnapping of IT specialist Peter Moore and his four bodyguards in 2007 was not a simple snatch by a band of militants but a sophisticated operation, almost certainly with inside help. Only Moore is thought still to be alive.

"Witnesses to the extraordinary operation which led to the abductions have also told us that they have been warned by superiors to keep quiet."

And this crucial piece:

"Moore was employed to install a new computer tracking system which would have followed billions of dollars of oil and foreign aid money through the ministry of finance. The 'Iraq Financial Management Information System' was nearly complete and about to go online at the time of the kidnap.

"The senior intelligence source said: 'Many people don't want a high level of corruption to be revealed. Remember this is the information technology centre [at the ministry of finance], this is the place where all the money to do with Iraq and all Iraq's financial matters are housed.'"

The Times story, which notes that the terrorist group also killed five US soldiers, says that the five British contractors were seized in retaliation for the detention of some of the group's leaders, after the killing of the Americans. But that makes no sense. Why would they organize and carry out a 19-SUV, 80-person raid on the finance ministry just as retaliation? And could this group have done so? As the Guardian points out, only a government agency could have pulled off the attack.

You can watch a 12-minute video on the case at the Guardian site.

Curiously, the Times report adds: "American military officials say the group is supported by Iran."

I tried getting some background on the League of the Righteous, and I found a posting on the Long War Journal about them, including alleged ties to Iran's Qods Force, the arm of the Revolutionary Guards.

There's more background here, too, at the Long War Journal.