A small proportion of human beings – perhaps 1 percent of any given population- is different from the rest of us in ways that wreak havoc on the rest of us.
The cardinal traits of this bunch include superficiality;
impulsiveness; self-aggrandizement to the point delusion; callousness; and,
when it suits, outright cruelty. Truth and principle don’t intrude upon the
world of disrupters. When they don’t lapse into tell-tale glibness, the more
socially adroit among them come across as charming, sometimes overwhelmingly
charismatic.
They project a preternatural calm that isn’t an act. Their resting pulse rate
tends to be low, they don’t sweat readily – literally and figuratively – nor do
they react strongly to pain and fear.
Because of their eerily quiet nervous system, they don’t learn readily from experience.
If anybody can fool the polygraph, they can.
Intellectually, they understand the necessity for
rules and regulations, but only for others. They
are exempt from all that nonsense because they
are special.
The smarter ones among them eschew
violence. Not because they abhor bloodletting, but because they realize
violence is usually a counterproductive strategy. Some of the cleverest among
them run successful Ponzi schemes or
engage in hugely profitable insider securities trading. Others rise to the
boards of corporations where they coordinate felonies of a subtler nature.
The most ambitious and, arguably, the most dangerous among them fix their eyes
on the Oscar of amorality known as political power. Chameleons adroit at
tailoring their behavior to the needs of others, they often win elections.
Sometimes they simply take by force. In either event, when one of them runs a
country, things get really ugly.
The stupid ones, on the other hand, opt for offenses that range from petty to
horrific and rarely pan out. They’re more likely to end up behind bars.
The disrupters don’t comprise the majority of incarcerated criminals. That distinction
belongs mostly to people who make poor choices due to bad habits.
When the nasty 1 percent do commit crimes, the offenses are frequently
stunningly audacious, cold-blooded, vicious, and terrifying to the rest of us.
Because their actions are beyond our ken, we are sometimes seduced into
believing the circular logic of their defense attorneys:
Anyone who could chop up six women has to
be insane.
Anyone who could poison her own children for insurance money must be crazy.
Wrong.
Insanity – a legal, not a medical concept- simply refers to the inability to
understand the essential wrongness of one’s acts. The disrupters understand
damn well.
They just don’t care.
People who get paid to produce jargon have termed the disruptors psychopaths,
sociopaths, possessors of antisocial personalities. For the most part, the
labels are interchangeable and emanate from political points of view.
Psychopath implies an internal mental state. Jargonmeisters who favor an
emphasis on individual responsibility go for that one.
Antisocial personality is a stab at sounding medically diagnostic without giving away one’s bias.
“Bad Guy’ would be just a good a label.
Foolish bad guys commit the crimes that bore us.
High-level bad guys – who view crime as a job- begin their iniquitous careers with misdemeanors, but they learn quickly, zipping up the criminal ladder, because they’re smart but lack an effective stoop mechanism.
The most evil among us commit outrages that enthrall, capturing our attention precisely because the internal world that motivates them is so chillingly barren that they might as well have been reared on Pluto.
The most evil among us do the stuff covered by the media genre known as ‘true crime.’
Back in the good old days, ‘true crime’ meant delightfully lurid and judgmental pulp magazines, frequently marketed with covers depicting scantily-clad women in the grips of slavering brutes. Think Thrilling Detective. A secondary outlet was true-crime’ books, generally paperback originals, with authorial and editorial emphasis on the bloody and ghastly.
The occasional masterpiece of reporting that ventured beyond the ghoulish explication of body fluids and viscera to skillfully explore the events, persona, and sometimes the sick-joke happenstance leading to ‘senseless’ crime did occasionally elbow its way above the slush pile. (Think of the books of the late Jack Olsen.) But that was the exception; this was low-rent territory.
That hasn’t changed, but the vehicle of delivery has. Nowadays, ‘true crime’ most frequently refers to that ironically cruel Grand Guignol mislabeled ‘reality TV.’ And since television is a cheap, quick high for those simply interested in a violence fix, it has achieve rapid dominance. (A fact that might also be explained by the prevalence of amoral, even psychopathic, individuals in what’s known in my hometown, L. A., as ‘The Industry.’ What better way to capture psychopaths than to have their portraits painted by other psychopaths?)
The pulps and softcover originals may not have been refined, but they did possess a certain shameless charm. Sadly, they’ve been wounded grievously, perhaps incurably, by trash TV. But an occasional full-lengthy true-crime masterpiece continues to surface and thrive for the same reason that high quality crime novels seem impervious to the video onslaught and remain staples of any best seller list: a great book is able to plumb the depths of human motivation in the way that TV and movies- essentially impressionistic vehicles- cannot.
For the most part, though, the best true-crime writing today appears on the pages of magazines.
This book showcases the best of the best.
While the ultimate goal of crime-beat reporting – understanding what drives people toward evil – is eons away from being achieved and may in fact never be achieved, the stories in this book will satisfy you intellectually and emotionally because you will be moved to think, feel, puzzle, and sometimes to self-examine.
Everyone of these gems is penned by an individual with a strong distinctive voice, leading to a varied and fascinating lot, stylistically and contextually. And the topics are a deliciously eclectic mix. Sure, there are a few serial lust killer tales. How could there not be? But each has something especially provocative to say about that most terrible of patterns.
At times, the accounts in this book explore crime in the highest places, reminding us that a geopolitical focus should not obscure the fact that evil deeds emanate from evil people. Particularly fascinating is an account of the strategic planning leading to the capture of the Islamo-fascist kingpin Abu Musab al Zarqawi – a tale that is unquestionably one of the finest police procedurals ever written.
The always provocative essayist Malcolm Gladwell has produced a compelling examination of a topic near and dear to my heart: exposure of the confidence game that is criminal profiling. But even if I didn’t agree with him completely, I’d love the piece because it’s witty, incisive and beautifully written.
The eminent humorist Calvin Trillin abandons any pretense of levity in his fascinating look at the genesis of violence on an isolated Canadian island – one of those obscure locales, struggling for its very existence in the face of a rapidly changing world, that few of us are likely to visit. And even if we did ferry over, we couldn’t capture the place, or the people, the way Trillin does.
Two of the stories deal with life in prison. One illuminates the perspective of a complex man who’s spent a good part of his life on death row – as a custodian of the condemned. The other allows us to peek into the mind of one of the most dangerously violent offenders in the United States and offers a hint of what it might be like to occupy his private hell.
There’s a great unsolved mystery – an eerily suggestive psychological autopsy exploring the death of an emotionally tortured, one-shot-wonder master novelist, that manages to leave the reader grandly satisfied. To unforgettable portrayals of habitual liars, one of whom just might be telling the truth when the truth is most devastating, will leave you thinking about them long after you’ve read their final paragraphs.
The morally complex account of the painful intersection between public outrage and the attempt, by an undeniably evil man, to do something good leaves us with more questions than answers, but they are questions that need to be faced.
All in all, a page-turning look at the myriad faces of evil.
This is the new face of quality true crime literature.
Bad guys at their worst, writers a their best.
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