The Typical FBI Field Office

     There is no set design for FBI officers. Many buildings are new, but some are quite old. Generally, each agent has a desk or cubicle, and squad supervisors have private offices. Squads are grouped together in areas informally referred to as "bull pens." The Special Agent in Charge (SAC) and Assistant Agent in Charge (ASAC) have much larger offices, with doors, sofas, and overstuffed chairs.

     Support personnel are interspersed in the squad areas. These support personnel may include file clerks, word processing personnel, computer technicians, financial analysts, or translators. Increasingly in the FBI, because of the terrorism threat, there are also a significant number of intelligence analysts.

     There will be a gun vault for the storage of ammunition and shoulder weapons, and also an evidence vault for the maintenance of items of physical evidence. Files are in abundance, as are computers, phones, secure file cabinets, and fax machines. Squads working national security matters and terrorism also have encrypted telephones that permit secure transmissions of sensitive information. Identification cards are worn at all times, and holstered firearms and dangling handcuffs are a common sight.

Joseph W. Koletar, The FBI Career Guide, 2006 

Searching for Jimmy Hoffa: Who Cares Where He Is?

     In 1967, in a Chattanooga, Tennessee courtroom, a federal jury found Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa guilty of pension fraud and jury tampering. Four years later, another crook, Richard Nixon, pardoned him. While serving his time in prison, Hoffa lost control of the mobbed-up union and all of the Teamster union's pension money.

     On July 30, 1975, the 62-year-old ex-union boss disappeared. Hoffa was last seen outside a Detroit area restaurant getting into a car occupied by several men. At the time, the FBI presumed that Hoffa had been the victim of a contract murder orchestrated by a crime boss who didn't want to relinquish control of the Teamsters union, and all of that easy money.

     Earlier this year, a reputed mobster in his 80s, Tony Zerilli, told a New York City TV reporter that Detroit based organized crime figures wanted the ex-Teamsters boss dead. Mafia hit men had lured Hoffa to a meeting at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant, abducted him, and drove him to a farm owned by a mob underboss. According to Zerilli, the killers dragged the bound and gagged Hoffa out of the car, hit him with a shovel, then buried him alive under a cement slab in the barn.

     In June 2013, FBI agents, convinced that Tony Zerilli's information was "highly credible," were once again looking for Hoffa's remains. Agents, a cadaver-sniffing dog, and two forensic anthropologists from Michigan State University, were at the possible burial site located in Oakland Township twenty miles north of where Hoffa was last seen.

     For decades, people have joked about Hoffa resting in peace beneath a Meadowlands stadium end-zone in New Jersey just outside of New York. The basis of this speculation incorporates the common wisdom that New Jersey crime boss Anthony Provensano of the Genovese family had arranged the hit.

     Last October, FBI agents took soil samples from the yard of a home in suburban Detroit. The search was launched by a tipster who claimed he had seen a body buried in that yard one day after Hoffa's disappearance. Nothing came from that search.

     On Wednesday, June 19, 2013, following three days of digging, FBI agents, the cadaver dog, and the scientists left the Oakland Township site without finding Jimmy Hoffa's remains.,

     All of the mobsters who have been linked to Hoffa's abduction, murder, and burial are dead. This makes, in my view, the search for his remains 38 years after his death a waste of the FBI's time. These government resources should be applied to missing person and homicide cases that are still fresh, criminal investigations that could produce meaningful results.

     Jimmy Hoffa was a mobster murdered by mobsters in a bygone era. At this late date, what difference does it make where his bones are buried? I miss not thinking of Jimmy Hoffa every time someone scored a touchdown at the Giant's stadium in New Jersey.  

The Need for Commas

There are two types of writers who underuse commas: the first is the unsophisticated writer who has not developed an ear for sentence rhythm. He is unable to hear fine distinctions, and thinks writing is solely about conveying information. He will need to spend time reading classic writers and train himself to hear the music of language. The second is the sophisticated writer who has an aversion to commas and underuses them on purpose. There are numerous writers who rebel against the overuse of punctuation, and more often than not they find a target in the poor comma. The danger for these writers is the rare problem of overestimating the reader. Unless a reader is accustomed to reading twelfth-century clerical texts, he will want at least some commas, some pauses laid out for him. There is a need for marks--especially commas--to indicate ebbs and flows, pauses and pitch, division of clauses and meaning. The writer who ignores this is the writer who writes for himself, not with the reader in mind. He will not be a commercial writer, or plot oriented, but prose oriented, interested in nuances of style--but to a fault.

Noah Lukeman, A Dash of Style, 2006

Lawyers as Sharks

A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt each other, and to devour each other if possible.

Joyce Carol Oates

Charles Bukowski on Trial Lawyers

The language of the lawyer is the language of the trickster. It's an inhuman language, a sub-language. And justice is hardly ever served. Justice is just forgotten. Our court system are just swamps of dark and devious jargon. It's just a wash of dull, crippled, masked wordage put before a jury of twelve imbeciles or a bored judge.

Charles Bukowski

Physical Evidence Doesn't Lie

You can lead jurors to the truth but you can't make them believe it. Physical evidence cannot be intimidated. It does not forget. It doesn't get excited at the moment something is happening--like people do. It sits there and waits to be detected, preserved, evaluated, and explained. That is what physical evidence is all about. In the course of a trial, defense and prosecuting attorneys may lie, witnesses my lie, the defendant certainly may lie. Even the judge may lie. Only the evidence never lies.

Herbert Leon MacDonnell, The Evidence Never Lies, 1984

Thornton P. Knowles On True Detective Magazines

In 1946, as a 15-year-old, I discovered true detective magazines. I was hooked. This was the beginning of the end of the golden era for fact crime mags. Television came along and wiped out all but a few of these colorful periodicals with the pulp art covers. I particularly liked the stories written by Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, and Alan Hynd. Dashiell Hammett went on to become a famous crime novelist. (I didn't.) My favorite magazines were Master Detective, Official Detective, and True Detective Mysteries. I didn't realize it at the time that these "true" crime stories were more fiction than fact. But many of them were well-written, and they got me interested in criminality, criminals, and criminal investigation. Most of the featured crimes involved gruesome murders and brilliant police work. Depression era bank robbers such as John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Machine Gun Kelly also made appearances between the covers of these splashy, photograph rich publications. I purchased most of mine off the rack down at the local drug store. My mother worried that these mags had a bad influence on me. They did, I became a crime novelist.

Thornton P. Knowles

Card Players Are Now Athletes

If you had any doubt the world is going crazy, consider this: They now drug-test professional card players. Geir Helgemos (I'm sure you've heard of him), the world bridge champion, has been banned from the game a year after he tested positive for testosterone. The game of bridge--are you ready for this?--is now considered a sport! (My mother, who couldn't drive a golf bar farther than 40 yards, was an avid bridge player. All those years I had no idea she was an athlete.) How in the hell, you might ask, does testosterone make one a better bridge player? Does this mean that men are better at the sport than women? Good heavens.

Thornton P. Knowles On Psychic Detectives

I don't believe in ghosts, Big-Foot, UFOs, alien abductions, Elvis sightings, spontaneous human combustion, or the Loch Ness Monster. I also don't believe in fortune tellers, soothsayers, and so-called psychic detectives who inject themselves into high profile missing person and murder cases. The words "psychic" and "detective" do not belong next to each other. Psychic detectives claim credit for locating missing persons by embellishing and changing, after the fact, their initial predictions and visions. It's all a load of crap. If psychic detectives could do what they claim, there would be no such thing as a missing child. There wouldn't be unsolved murders. Moreover, we would have been spared the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. But in an era of magical thinking and stupid beliefs, millions of people buy into this paranormal nonsense. Today, it's all about what a person believes, not what he or she knows. Police detectives who allow psychic detectives to waste their time, should find another line of work.

Thornton P. Knowles 

Political Correctness in the War on Crime

     If you need proof that some politicians are idiots, look no further than the state of New York. In the Empire State, a few legislators, as far back as 2013, were talking about a new law that would prohibit law enforcement officials from incorporating race into the descriptions of criminal suspects. In the looney world of extreme political correctness, police officers in search of terrorists, rapists, robbers, and murderers wouldn't be on the lookout for Black, Asian, Hispanic, or Native American males. They'd just be looking for males.

     If describing criminal suspects by race is inappropriate, what about using gender in describing perpetrators of crime? Isn't that sexist? If politicians devoid of common sense get their way, police dispatchers will be advising all units to be on the lookout for two human beings who just robbed the First National Bank.