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The Unintended Consequences of a Silly Person With Money. (Random gun and gun book crankery.)

Thursday, May 22nd, 2025

34. If you’re leaving scorch-marks, you need a bigger gun.

–“The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries“, Schlock Mercenary

Sometimes you buy the book, then you buy the gun.

Sometimes you buy the gun, then you buy the book.

Some days you get the bear, other days the bear gets you.

===

When the Smith and Wesson .500 Magnum came out, I didn’t care much for it. I still don’t like pretty much all of the production guns.

What’s not to like about one of the most powerful handguns in existence?

Well, for one thing, the factory guns are shiny. Awful shiny to me.

Secondly, I don’t care much for the barrel options. FotB Andrew is interested in the .500 Magnum, so I’ve taken a look at a few. There’s one with a 10 1/2″ barrel that we got a chance to handle at Collector’s Firearms in Austin. I’m sure that’s great for some people. For me, if i wanted a crew-served weapon, I’d buy a vintage French 75.

There’s an 8 3/8″ version that still seems awkward to me (and we haven’t found one anywhere recently). There’s a 7 1/2″ Performance Center version that seems perhaps less awkward than the 10 1/2″. (Since this is a Performance Center gun, we’d probably have to special order it: I don’t think anybody is going to have one in stock.) There’s a 4″ version that seems too short to me. And there’s a 3 1/2″ version that’s probably great for self-defense: if you don’t hit the bad guy, the muzzle blast will deafen him, and the fireball will set him on fire.

(Smith and Wesson at one point made an “Emergency Revolver Survival Kit” and a bear emergency kit, both containing a .500 Magnum with a 2 3/4″ barrel. I sort of vaguely wanted one of those, just because it seemed so ridiculous. Also, I like the fact that the bear one includes a book on “bear attacks”.)

(And, on a side note, why aren’t there more .500 Magnum lever guns? The few I have seen are from high-end custom or semi-custom gun makers. I haven’t seen any that I’d consider “mass produced”. I have heard rumors that S&W is looking at a .500 Magnum chambering for their 1854 lever gun, sometime in the not too distant future (but not next Sunday, A.D.).)

There is, however, one Smith and Wesson .500 Magnum that I do like. But I didn’t know about it until I read Timothy J. Mullin’s Serious Smith & Wessons The N- and X-Frame Revolvers: The S&W Phenomenon.

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Smith and Wesson | 1 Comment »

I’ll take “Als” for $400, Alex.

Monday, May 12th, 2025

President Trump talking about re-opening Alcatraz prompted two stories in the NYPost that are moderately worth linking:

1) An interview with Charlie Hopkins, who is 93, and is allegedly the last surviving Alcatraz inmate.

2) A second interview, this time with Jolene Babyak. Ms. Babyak’s father worked in the federal prison system. Her family lived on Alcatraz twice, and she’s written several histories over the years.

Posted in Books, History, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 30, 2025.

Wednesday, April 30th, 2025

David Horowitz, noted conservative commentator. Twitter X. NYT. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Priscilla Pointer, actress. Other credits include “Blue Velvet”, “C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “McCloud”, and “Mrs. Columbo”.

Andrew Gross, thriller writer. He may have been best known for the books he wrote with James Patterson.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 29, 2025.

Tuesday, April 29th, 2025

The paper of record ran a nice obit for Peter Lovesey. (Previously.)

Except for the grumpy part, Mr. Lovesey’s son said, Superintendent Diamond was a stand-in for his creator, who was bitterly opposed to technology. Mr. Lovesey wrote in longhand for decades before briefly and reluctantly switching to an electric “golf ball” Olivetti typewriter and then, finally, a word processor, which threw him entirely. During the pandemic, his son said, he mistakenly downloaded Zoom 25 times.

Cora Sue Collins, actress. She was 98.

Collins was born on April 19, 1927, in Beckley, West Virginia. Her mom brought her and her older sister to Los Angeles just before Collins turned 4.
“On the third day we were here, I went with my mother to enroll my older sister in school,” she told Danny Miller in a wonderful 2015 interview. “We were walking up to the entrance of the school, my sister and I each holding one of my mother’s hands, when this huge car came screeching up.
“A woman jumped out of the car and said, ‘Excuse me, would you like to put your little girl in pictures?’ Of course my mother said, ‘Yes!’ The woman said, ‘Get in the car with me, there’s a big casting going on right now at Universal.’”
They made it on their own to the studio, where Collins was quickly tapped to play Pudge in the 1932 comedy The Unexpected Father, starring ZaSu Pitts and Slim Summerville. “Wait till you see Cora Sue,” wrote one reviewer of her performance. “Just four, she walks away with everything.”

…

…Collins portrayed Sylvia Sidney’s daughter in Jennie Gerhardt and was the main attraction at the premiere of Queen Christina at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where she was accompanied by MGM chief Louis B. Mayer after arriving in a miniature coach pulled by Shetland ponies. (Garbo refused to do any publicity for her films.)
Collins signed a contract with MGM in 1934 for $250 a week — about $5,900 in today’s dollars — and appeared in 10 features that year, including Black Moon with Fay Wray, The Scarlet Letter with Colleen Moore, The World Accuses with Dickie Moore and Treasure Island with Jackie Cooper.

…

She played the juvenile delinquent daughter of a court judge in Youth on Trial (1945) and appeared in Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), then retired from acting at age 18. “I wanted to enjoy the luxury of anonymity,” she said.

IMDB.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 18, 2025.

Friday, April 18th, 2025

Joe Nickell, paranormal investigator, passed away on March 4th. I wasn’t aware of this until the NYT ran a very respectful and lengthy obit today.

Working for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a program run by the nonprofit group Center for Inquiry, and as a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer, the organization’s magazine, Mr. Nickell investigated ghosts, poltergeist activity, apparitions, the Loch Ness monster, crop circles and multiple reappearances of Jesus, including one on a tortilla.
“Some of it is like satire,” Mr. Nickell told The New York Times in 1997, “almost like it’s reached a comic level.”

Back in the day when I read SI, Mr. Nickell’s articles were always a high point. He was one of the greats, right up there with Martin Gardner and James Randi, and his passing leaves a hole in the world.

(The only reason I stopped reading SI was that I just didn’t have time to read it. Nothing else, I just couldn’t keep up with that and everything else, too.)

The paper of record also ran a long, respectful, and very well illustrated obit for Robert E. McGinnis. (Previously.)

Posted in Art, Books, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 16, 2025.

Wednesday, April 16th, 2025

Wink Martindale. NYT (archived).

Martindale said he became interested in hosting a TV game show in 1965 when he learned that Password‘s Allen Ludden would “go in two days a week and tape five shows one day and five shows the next and the other five days play golf. I went to my agent and said, ‘How about sending me on a game-show hosting interview?’”
He eventually landed at NBC’s What’s That Song? (billed as Win Martindale) and worked for a year on that, the first of the 20 game shows that he hosted (only Bill Cullen did more). He was on Tic-Tac-Dough for a decade, did two shows for producer Chuck Barris (How’s Your Mother-in-Law? and Dream Girl of ’67) and produced game shows as well.

Another one that would have got past me if it wasn’t for “The Rap Sheet” (and I haven’t seen an obit anywhere else): Peter Lovesey, one of the great British crime writers.

Wikipedia:

He was also one of the world’s leading track and field statisticians.

Interesting, as his first novel (which was re-issued in a 50th anniversary edition late last year), Wobble To Death, is a Victorian era murder mystery…set against a speed walking marathon.

In addition to the scope of his unparalleled crime fiction career, Peter Lovesey will be remembered by his many grieving friends as the paragon of decency, compassion, loyalty, self-discipline, and pride in good work—in short, a human example of what it means to live a good life.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 14, 2025.

Monday, April 14th, 2025

Mario Vargas Llosa.

Mr. Vargas Llosa was never fully enamored, however, by his contemporaries’ magical realism. And he was disillusioned with Fidel Castro’s persecution of dissidents in Cuba, breaking from the leftist ideology that held sway for decades over many writers in Latin America.
He charted his own path as a conservative, often divisive political thinker and as a novelist who transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.
His dabbling in politics ultimately led to a run for the presidency in 1990. That race allowed him to champion the free-market causes he espoused, including the privatization of state enterprises and reducing inflation through government spending cuts and layoffs of the bloated civil service.
He led polls for much of the race, but was roundly defeated by Alberto Fujimori, then a little-known agronomist of Japanese descent who later adopted many of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s policies.

Jean Marsh, actress. NYT. Other credits include the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “The Eagle Has Landed”, and “See China and Die”.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 11, 2025.

Friday, April 11th, 2025

I missed this, and it hasn’t been reported in the usual places I check. I only know about it thanks to a story in the Rap Sheet.

Ken Bruen, the great Irish mystery writer, passed away on March 29th.

My late lamented friend Willie Siros (of the late lamented Adventures in Crime and Space) gave me an advance reading copy of The Guards because he thought I might like it. I loved it. It was something new and stunning and frankly brutal, especially the ending. I haven’t gone back to the Jack Taylor books since, though, and I don’t know why, other than not having enough time to read everything. But with a hard stop in place, now I can catch up.

I’ve read A Fifth of Bruen (and I have the promotional Zippo that was issued with it). You can see the Jack Taylor in these early stories, but you can also see more depth to Bruen. For example, one of the stories is a very gentle mainstream story about a couple dealing with the birth of a child with Down syndrome.

Bruen was, to my mind, a good and underappreciated writer, whose death leaves a hole.

Also by way of the Rap Sheet, also among the dead, and also no obit in the usual places: Robert McGinnis, artist. Quoting from his obit:

Bob was one of the most prolific illustrators of the 20th century. It’s likely you have seen one or more of his artwork images somewhere. They appeared in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest and Guideposts; on very many book covers (especially paperback books, spanning many genres, from Detective to Mystery to Gothic to Historical Fiction to Romance to Fantasy); in the form of personal-project paintings that included many Old West scenes; and also on movie posters for culturally significant movies (and also on soundtrack album covers). In our biased opinion, Bob was the very best of the James Bond/007 artists, having created exciting images for the posters for movies such as Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale (parody movie), and Live and Let Die.

Not exactly an obit, but this is a swell…tribute? to John Taffin from the Revolver Guy blog.

Posted in Books, Guns, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 27, 2025.

Thursday, March 27th, 2025

Carole Keeton.

She was the first woman to serve as mayor of Austin, served as state comptroller, and served on the Texas Railroad Commission. The obits right now seem kind of short, but I remember she was a big deal in Austin and Texas politics when I first moved to Austin.

Clive Revill. Other credits include “Babylon 5”, “Pinky and the Brain”, “Let Him Have It” (which I highly recommend), and a spinoff of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s.

Oleg Gordievsky. He was a Commie spy.

Except he actually wasn’t. He was a double agent for British Intelligence.

In 1985 he was recalled to Moscow, given drugs and interrogated. Someone, it seemed, had tipped off the K.G.B. to the presence of a high-ranking mole in London.
Lacking solid evidence, the Soviets placed him on leave. A few days later he appeared at 7 p.m. on a Moscow street corner, holding a shopping bag. A man soon passed, eating a candy bar. They locked eyes.
That was the signal to activate Operation Pimlico, an emergency extraction. Mr. Gordievsky shook his K.G.B. tail and then hurried to the Finnish border. Two British agents, a man and a woman, along with their baby, awaited him there in their Ford Sierra.
They placed him in the trunk, wrapped in a foil sheet to confuse heat detectors. When dogs at the border grew suspicious, the agents began to change the child’s diaper, filling the car with odors that threw the canines off Mr. Gordievsky’s scent.
When they were finally across, they played Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia” symphony on the car’s sound system, a signal to Mr. Gordievsky that he was safe.
Back in Moscow, he was sentenced to death in absentia. That sentence has never been rescinded.

L.J. Smith, author. I probably would not have noted this, but she had an interesting career.

She published her first book (The Night of the Solstice, for young readers) in 1987. It wasn’t a bestseller, but it did attract the attention of Alloy Entertainment, “a book packaging and production company that has since been acquired by Warner Brothers”. They hired her to write “The Vampire Diaries” series, and she wrote four of those books between 1991 and 1992.

But Ms. Smith — whose first agent was her typist, who had never represented a client — told The Wall Street Journal that she had written the trilogy for an advance of only a few thousand dollars without realizing that it was work for hire, meaning she did not own the copyright or the characters.

She also wrote other YA series books. In the late 1990s, though, she stopped writing for a time due to family health issues.

During her fallow period, though, vampire books soared in popularity, lifted on the success of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series. By 2007, sales of “The Vampire Diaries” had increased, and Ms. Smith was contracted to continue the series by writing a new trilogy for Alloy Entertainment, for which she was entitled to half the royalties.

Yes, this is “The Vampire Diaries” that became the CW series. Which may have been part of the problem: Ms. Smith was fired as the writer in 2011. She stated that she thought the publisher wanted “wanted shorter books more closely associated with the TV series”.

But wait, there’s more! She started writing “The Vampire Diaries” fan fiction!

In 2013, Amazon created Kindle Worlds, an online service that gave writers of fan fiction permission to write about certain licensed properties, including Alloy’s “Vampire Diaries” series, and to earn money for their ventures.
In 2014, Ms. Smith became the rare celebrated author to produce fan fiction as a way to recoup characters and story arcs she had lost, publishing a novel and novella in an informal continuation of the “Vampire Diaries.” (Kindle Worlds was discontinued in 2018).

I had actually never heard of “Kindle Worlds”. But I don’t follow fan fiction.

In addition to “The Vampire Diaries,” Ms. Smith wrote three other popular series for young adults: “Night World,” “Dark Visions” and “The Secret Circle,” which also became a series on the CW, lasting one season.

Posted in Austin, Books, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

And speaking of Rugers…

Saturday, March 22nd, 2025

…some quick random book geekery. “Quick” because I bought two copies of the same book, for reasons.

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 17, 2025.

Monday, March 17th, 2025

Guns magazine and American Handgunner are reporting the passing of John Taffin last week. Podcast.

I was fortunate enough to meet him in 2012, shake his hand, and say “thank you”. And I’ve written about some of his books, too.

I’m hoping at some point this week (or by next Sunday) I can get a special gun crankery post up in memory of the late Mr. Taffin. He struck me as a swell guy, and he knew his Smith and Wessons.

Gene Winfield, custom car builder. He did a considerable amount of work in Hollywood.

The Reactor was then used on three more series: “Star Trek,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Batman,” on which Catwoman (Eartha Kitt) used it as the Catmobile.

(Also “Bewitched”.)

He also designed cars for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”, “Get Smart”, “Sleeper”, and “Blade Runner”. And he designed the famous shuttle craft from a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Posted in Books, Cars, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Obits, Smith and Wesson, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 15, 2025.

Saturday, March 15th, 2025

I lost pretty much the entire day yesterday to various things. I didn’t even get any pie.

One of the things that went by the wayside was obits, so here’s a quick and lazy roundup from the past few days. I have to rush off in a little bit to a wedding shower, and I’m not sure when I’m going to be back.

John Feinstein, sports writer and author. The only one of his books I’ve read is The Punch, which I wrote about a while back and thought was pretty good.

Chris Moore, artist. He illustrated quite a few SF books, and also did album covers for Fleetwood Mac and Rod Stewart.

Carl Lundstrom, who was one of the people behind the Pirate Bay website, died in a plane crash on Monday.

Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford’s press secretary, and one of the 892 Saturday Night Live hosts who have not committed murder. (I think that count is right, but it may be a little out of date.)

Larry Buendorf, retired Secret Service agent. He’s the guy who wrestled the gun away from Squeaky Fromme.

“Squeaky was back in the crowd, maybe one person back, and she had an ankle holster on with a .45,” he said, referring to a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol. “That’s a big gun to have on your ankle. So, when it came up, it came up low, and I happened to be looking in that direction, I see it coming, and I step in front of him, not sure what it was other than that it was coming up pretty fast, and yelled out ‘Gun!’ When I yelled out ‘Gun!’ I popped that .45 out of her hand.”
He added: “I got a hold of her fingers, and she’s screaming — the crowd is screaming — and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t have a vest on, I don’t know where the next shot is coming from,’ and that I don’t think she’s alone. All of this is going on while I’m trying to control her.”
“She turns around, and I pulled her arm back and dropped her to the ground, and agents and police come from the back of the crowd” as Ms. Fromme shrieked in disbelief, he said.
“She’s screaming, ‘It didn’t go off!’” he continued. “I had it in my hand. I knew what she was doing, she was pulling back on the slide, and I hit the slide before she could chamber a round. If she’d had a round chambered, I couldn’t have been there in time. It would’ve gone through me and the president.”

If the Times account is to be trusted, she had four rounds in the magazine and the hammer cocked, but she hadn’t chambered a round.

Kevin Drum, leftist political blogger.

He also invented Friday cat blogging.

Alan K. Simpson, former Republican senator from Wyoming.

He had been struggling to recover from a broken hip that he sustained in December, according to a statement from his family and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a group of museums of which he was a board member for 56 years. The statement said his recovery had been hindered by complications of frostbite to his left foot about five years ago that required the amputation of his left leg below the knee.

Raul M. Grijalva, current Democratic House rep from Arizona.

Mr. Grijalva (pronounced gree-HAHL-vah) disclosed last year that he had lung cancer and would not run for a 13th term in 2026. He died of complications of his treatment, his office said. He was absent from Washington for nearly a year, missing hundreds of votes in the narrowly divided House.

Posted in 1911, Art, Books, Guns, Heroism, Obits, Politics, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 10, 2025.

Monday, March 10th, 2025

It has been a rough few days for baseball.

Frank Saucier, outfielder for the St. Louis Browns. He had a limited career due to injuries and the Korean War. Baseball Reference.

He is perhaps most famous as a historical footnote.

He was the only major league player removed from a game by his manager in favor of a 3-foot-7 circus performer.

Yes, he was the player who got benched in favor of Eddie Gaedel.

Art Schallock, pitcher for the Yankees and Orioles. He was, at the time of his death, the oldest living major league player. Baseball Reference.

Athol Fugard, South African playwright. He’s another one of those folks I’ve heard a lot about, but have no personal experience with his work.

It also hasn’t been a good time for music. D’Wayne Wiggins, of Tony! Toni! Tone!.

Joey Molland, the last surviving member of Badfinger. I feel like this is one of those areas where pigpen51 is better equipped to comment than I am.

Geoff Nicholson, author. I’ve never read any of his books, but the NYT obit makes him sound interesting.

His death, in a hospital, was from chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, his partner, Caroline Gannon, said. It is a rare bone marrow cancer, though, as Mr. Nicholson mordantly observed, “not rare enough, obviously.”

…

Mr. Nicholson was married for a time to Dian Hanson, a former model who edited a fetishist magazine, Leg Show. After living together in New York, the couple moved to Los Angeles when Ms. Hanson became the editor of sex-themed books for the luxury art publisher Taschen. Mr. Nicholson reveled in the 1960s kitsch of his home in a geodesic dome in the Hollywood Hills.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Sports, Theatre | 1 Comment »

All gun books, all the time!

Friday, March 7th, 2025

This time on “What’s Been Added to my Library of Gun Books” recently, a special all gun books edition! No diversions into subjects such as absinthe or old bibles. Just some new and new old gun books. But I am going to include a gun crankery photo.

Since this is going to be gun book heavy, I’m following my usual policy of inserting a jump so the non-book, non-gun, and non-book non-gun people can skip easily to the next post…

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Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Sarcasm, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 5, 2025.

Wednesday, March 5th, 2025

Congressman Sylvester Turner (Dem. – Houston).

Turner took over the seat of the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in January after serving two terms as mayor of Houston from 2016 to 2024. He was born and raised in Acres Homes, Houston, and attended the University of Houston and Harvard Law School.

…

Turner will be remembered for his decades-long service to Houston and its residents. He has represented his community at Houston City Hall and the Texas House of Representatives, notably fighting for the people of Houston’s historically black neighborhoods. Turner represents Texas’ 18th Congressional District, a historically significant seat once held by civil rights icons such as Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland, Craig Washington and Sheila Jackson Lee.

…

In 2015, Turner was elected the 62nd Mayor of Houston and was re-elected in 2019. Turner forged a path forward for Houston during some of the city’s most turbulent times, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey.

Lawrence.

Edited to add: The NYT did not have a story up when I posted, but they do now. I don’t see any coverage in the WP.

Edited to add 2: WP coverage, but it really doesn’t add anything.

James Harrison, big damn hero.

…Mr. Harrison was one of the most prolific donors in history, extending his arm 1,173 times. He may have also been one of the most important: Scientists used a rare antibody in his plasma to make a medication that helped protect an estimated 2.4 million babies in Australia from possible disease or death, medical experts say.

…

Mr. Harrison’s plasma contained the rare antibody anti-D. Scientists used it to make a medication for pregnant mothers whose immune systems could attack their fetuses’ red blood cells, according to Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
Anti-D helps protect against problems that can occur when babies and mothers have different blood types, most often if the fetus is “positive” and the mother is “negative,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. (The positive and negative signs are called the Rhesus factor, or Rh factor.)
In such cases, a mother’s immune system might react to the fetus as if it were a foreign threat. That can lead babies to develop a dangerous and potentially fatal condition, hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, which can cause anemia and jaundice.

…

In Australia, scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne are working to create a synthetic version of the drug using what some have called “James in a Jar,” an antibody that can be made in a lab.
But for now, human donors are essential: The anti-D shots are made with donated plasma, and Mr. Harrison was one of about 200 donors among the 27 million people in Australia, Lifeblood said.
“It wasn’t one big heroic act,” Jemma Falkenmire, a spokeswoman for Lifeblood, said in an interview as she reflected on Mr. Harrison’s 64 years of donations, from 1954 to 2018. “It was just a lifetime of being there and doing these small acts of good bit by bit.”

FiveThirtyEight.

According to the Journal, the entire site is being axed and all 15 of its employees will be handed pink slips.

Selwyn Raab, journalist and author. He did a lot of reporting on the Mafia, and on people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes.

One was George Whitmore Jr., who had been imprisoned for the 1963 murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, roommates in an Upper East Side apartment — “career girls,” as the tabloids called them.
Mr. Raab, working first for the merged newspaper The New York World-Telegram and The Sun and then for NBC News and the New York public television station WNET-TV, uncovered evidence showing that Mr. Whitmore was elsewhere on the day of those murders and had no part in an unrelated attempted rape with which he was also charged.
Mr. Whitmore said that the police had beaten him, and that he had no lawyer during the interrogation. In 1996, his case was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark ruling that upheld a suspect’s right to counsel.
Mr. Raab wrote a book about the case, “Justice in the Back Room,” which became the basis for “Kojak,” the CBS series about a police detective, played by Telly Savalas, which ran for five years in the 1970s. “I’m not a detective,” Mr. Raab said. “I just look for the most reasonable approach to a story.”
He joined The Times in 1974 and worked there for 26 years. Reporting for the paper, he uncovered evidence that helped free Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the middleweight boxer who was imprisoned for 19 years in the 1966 shooting deaths of three people in a bar in Paterson, N.J.
The Carter case was another instance of police coercion and prosecutorial overreach, one that also led to the conviction of another man, John Artis. Mr. Carter, who died in 2014, became something of a folk hero, his cause championed in a 1976 Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane,” and in a 1999 film, “The Hurricane,” in which Mr. Carter was played by Denzel Washington.

Posted in Books, Heroism, Law, Obits, Politics, Texas, TV | Comments Closed

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