‘Wild Justice’
By Phillip Margolin
HarperCollins,$26
When Portland Detective Bobby Vasquez receives an anonymous tip that notorious drug dealer Martin Breach is about to make a large cocaine sale to prominent surgeon Vincent Cardoni in a remote mountain cabin, he’s faced with a choice. He can try to corroborate the tip, obtain a lawful warrant, and search the cabin. Or he can just search the cabin without a warrant and hope his fabricated excuse for doing so holds up in court. Intent on nailing Breach, Vasquez opts to ignore the legal niceties.
The cabin, as it turns out, holds no cocaine but does feature two severed heads carefully stored in the fridge. A nearby makeshift burial ground contains the mutilated remains of nine bodies. The bloodstained operating table in the basement makes it clear that this was the work of an insane serial killer. And all but conclusive evidence points to Cardoni, a notoriously violent surgeon.
All this by Page 59, and the pace only begins to accelerate in Portland writer Phillip Margolin’s new thriller, “Wild Justice.” Margolin, who specializes in the serial-murderer-gone-amok genre, is a splendid writer. Several of his prior books have been New York Times best sellers since his 1994 best known novel, “Gone, But Not Forgotten.”
Cardoni, a spectacularly unappealing man dubbed “Dr. Death” by the tabloids, is arrested, but he protests his innocence and fingers his estranged wife, Dr. Justine Castle, as framing him. Cardoni hires top-gun criminal defense lawyer Frank Jaffe and his daughter, Amanda, who has just graduated from law school. In a showstopping hearing, Jaffe exposes Vasquez’s perfidity and wins Cardoni his freedom, much to Jaffe’s, and his daughter’s, discomfort. Cardoni swiftly disappears, leaving behind a handful of evidence indicating that he is apparently dead.
But four years later another series of disturbingly sadistic and grisly murders are discovered in a remote farm house, complete with torture notes and body parts. (Really, it’s hard to find this many severed heads and body parts for just $26.) Justine Castle is arrested at the scene and the evidence tips rather dramatically against her. She insists on her innocence and claims she’s being framed by her ex-husband. But she has a more complicated history than we’ve been let on and her defense – led by Amanda Jaffe, now a seasoned lawyer in her own right – is no cake walk. Amanda struggles to reconcile who she thinks is really guilty with her duty to defend her client.
“Wild Justice” has the gritty feel of reality, with careful and accurate descriptions of Portland-area locations, and character development that lets you feel for Amanda’s struggle to emerge from her father’s shadow, as well as her internal conflict over her duty to defend even a client who she believes is guilty. Make no mistake: this is no Grisham cutout. Margolin’s compelling writing, thoughtful plot and colorful narrative all put the best seller of the courtroom genre to shame.
Margolin is a former criminal defense attorney from Portland, and his experience shows. Virtually all of the courtroom maneuvers are accurate, which is no small trick to accomplish while at the same time maintaining an accelerating narrative velocity. But the attorney-client privilege sure takes a beating here: Amanda blabs her clients’ confidences left and right (which a lawyer is forbidden from doing). Perhaps we are to discern the errors of a new lawyer, or maybe it’s just literary license. Either way, it’s not much comfort to her clients, though, who are facing the death penalty or worse.
The book’s title is taken from a quote from Francis Bacon, quoted at the outset: “Revenge is a kind of wild justice.” And there’s certainly plenty to spread around. Justine Castle wants revenge for her brutal mistreatment by her husband during their marriage; Vincent Cardoni wants revenge against his wife for setting him up; the drug dealer Martin Breach wants revenge for a body-part sale gone awry for which he blames Cardoni; Vasquez wants revenge for a ruined career. Amid the flying accusations and counteraccusations, its hard to find a character who does not cross your mind as a suspect before you finally snap your fingers and figure it all out.
Year: 2000
-
The City of Roses is smelling like murder
-
Casting light on a dark subject
‘Unspeakable Acts; Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture’
by John Conroy
Knopf, $26
‘The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, A Life Against Cruelty’
by Neil Belton
Pantheon, $27
Torture is something that happens in other countries, at other times, to other – different – people. Or so most of us want to believe. Unfortunately, it isn’t so.
In “Unspeakable Acts; Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture,” John Conroy, a Chicago journalist and author of “Belfast Diary: War as a Way of Life,” explores torture in settings close to home for many Americans: the torture of suspected IRA activists in Northern Ireland by the British, the beatings of Arabs in Israel and the use of electric shock on prisoners by Chicago police. He selected these examples, not because they were the most egregious incidents of torture, but rather because they are not: State-sponsored torture is a depressingly common experience.
Conroy first details the detention of 14 Northern Irish men by the British government in 1971. All of the men were subjected to the same treatment: Their captors placed hoods over their heads, blasted noise at them and forced them to stand leaning against a wall for days at a time. Severe beatings followed any movement. Most were denied access to toilets or food. When the men were eventually released, and the episode revealed, the government denied any “torture” and publicly labeled the victims as “thugs and murderers.”
Conroy next describes the calculated beatings of Arabs in an Israeli village during the Intifada uprising. The Israeli army seized the men from their homes at night, drove them to isolated locations, and systematically beat them and broke their legs. Even the Israeli soldiers left the scene shaken, with several crying. Although the operation was eventually exposed and the responsible officer court martialed, the punishment was relatively light.
Conroy finally focuses on the torture of arrestees by Chicago police through the use of an electrical generator. Although the police denied the practice for years, one of the victims sued and won, revealing the electrical torture and subsequent cover-up.
All of these are offered not as examples of extreme violence, but to show how routine and commonplace – even in our modern world – torture is. Conroy brings us along as he sits down with many of the torturers for coffee, and quietly talks about what they did and why they did it.
Not surprisingly, they see nothing wrong with the behavior, and offer up a variety of excuses for why the torture was necessary to protect the public. It is a time-honored response. Torture, from St. Augustine (who defended the practice), to Aristotle, to the Spanish Inquisition, is often defended on strikingly similar grounds: because the victim is evil and not really “human”; because the victim himself is a criminal and has or will cause even greater pain to innocent people; because others engage in even worse forms of torture; or simply because it is perceived as an effective shortcut to obtaining crucial information.
Conroy surveys societies that condone torture, and notes that the process often begins with the marginalization of a disfavored minority (the Left, the Right, the Arab, the Jew) that is ridiculed, humiliated and ultimately dehumanized to the point that it “finds itself beyond the compassion of the public at large.”
Conroy’s approach, though, emphasizes the banality of torture at the cost of minimizing its frequency and historic and geographic reach. Although he devotes a portion of the book to the history of torture, it is a sidelong glance at best, and does not even attempt to survey the virtual catalog of state-sponsored torture present in history, much less in the modern world.
By contrast, Neil Belton’s recent biography of Helen Bamber, “The Good Listener,” takes the opposite tack by focusing on the victim, not the torturer. Bamber, a 74-year-old activist, has devoted her life to working with torture victims.
Bamber volunteered as a young woman to work with a Jewish Relief Unit in occupied Germany just after World War II. She arrived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp soon after the British forces liberated it, and was stunned by the thousands of decomposing bodies, human waste and barely alive survivors scattered like refuse around the camp.
Belton’s fluid and descriptive writing captures this horrific scene and the chaotic years that followed. At least some of the children rescued from the camps were brought to England where Bamber worked with them, attempting to bring them back from the unspeakable horror they had survived.
Bamber thus launched a career of working with torture victims, and fighting torture, around the world. Quiet listening and talking of her own experiences are the tools Bamber employs to salve the wounds of these broken men and women.
As Belton writes, “Fifty years after governments representing most of humanity declared that they rejected `cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment,’ an elderly, formally unqualified woman and her colleagues, working from a row of terraced houses under a railway bridge in North London, hold up a flimsy, necessary barrier against torture.”
Belton’s book is better written than Conroy’s: The writing is more fluid and descriptive, the narrative is fascinating and the attention to detail is captivating. If there is a fault in Belton’s writing, it is the odd and muddled opening chapter of the book, which describes the cold reception British veterans of the surrender of Singapore received on returning home. A far more briskly paced and engaging core lies beyond this opening stumbling block.
Both of these books shed a light on a terrible and unfortunately common aspect of human frailty. Maybe someday we can accurately describe torture as something awful that happened at other times, in other places. But until that day, these narratives shed a necessary, if not welcome, light on this perverse corner of human behavior. -
In harm’s way
Montana’s Glacier Park contains within it some of the most awe-inspiring mountains in America. But one of the park’s most prominent peaks also was the scene of a terrible disaster in the late 1960s, relatively unknown outside of Montana until this month’s publication of McKay Jenkins’ new book.
‘The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone’
by McKay Jenkins
Random House, $23.95
Just after Christmas 1969, five young men, ages 18 to 22, set out to climb the sheer ice wall of the north face of Mount Cleveland in the park. The ascent of the north face, one of the highest vertical walls in America, would have been a first, under the worst possible conditions in the dead of winter.
Days later, their failure to return set off an enormous and perilous search, involving both U.S. and Canadian authorities. Their tracks were eventually found at the edge of a massive avalanche. The search-and-rescue effort was abandoned when deteriorating weather made it all but impossible to continue, and the chances of the young men surviving became minimal.
Their bodies were eventually recovered during the spring thaw, buried deep within the cold grip of the avalanche, some upside down and hanging suspended in an ice cave formed by the spring runoff, more than 30 feet from the surface of the snow.
In his captivating new book, Jenkins unfolds the tragedy as a framework for a history of avalanches. The first detailed published account of the tragedy, the book has sparked an outpouring of interest nationally, including a cover story in Outside magazine and an upcoming excerpt in Reader’s Digest.
In the style of Norman MacLean’s best-selling exploration of a notorious Montana forest fire in “Young Men and Fire,” Jenkins combines the best of a study of the history and causes for avalanche disasters with a gripping story of young men pitting their strength and mountaineering skills against a formidable foe under unforgiving conditions.
Jenkins, a professor at the University of Delaware and a prolific writer for numerous publications, explained in a recent interview how, during a ski vacation in Glacier Park, he attended a slide show by park Ranger Bob Frauson. Frauson had cautioned the young men on the danger of their proposed trip, and helped to lead the search-and-rescue efforts.
Frauson’s story of the tragedy – almost completely unreported in the national press at the time – captured Jenkins’ imagination.
“Frauson essentially wrote the book in that presentation,” Jenkins explained. In the following two years, Jenkins pored through the general literature on avalanches and interviewed family, rescue officials and others about the Montana tragedy. Slipping in the science of avalanches “sideways” around the narrative results in a remarkably interesting study of the history, causes and sometimes disastrous Sudden, horrifically swift and massive, avalanches are difficult to predict, much less to survive. Avalanches are usually caused by instability between different layers of snow, and particularly dangerous slab avalanches are often launched when “depth hoar” – small glittering sugar granules of snow – forms between layers of snow.
When the unsuspecting climber or skier steps onto such a field of snow, the top level of snow can suddenly collapse with a “whoompf,” and trigger a fracture across the snowfield that moves in excess of 300 mph. This is followed by a sudden massive release of the top snow layers. Fueled by its sheer weight and greased by the underlying depth hoar, the avalanche roars down the mountain, with more than 2,800 times the power generated by an Amtrak locomotive, exploding everything before it and easily overtaking anyone in its path.
Although Jenkins avoids any suggestion that the Montana climbers should not have attempted the ascent, he notes the alarming increase in avalanche death: From 1950 to 1975, roughly half a dozen people died in avalanches in the United States each year. But in the past five years, it has leaped to an average of 28 per year and last year reached 32 fatalities – the worst in 75 years. European avalanches last year were even deadlier: 160 people died in the record snowfalls.
Avalanches, like hurricane-force winds, earthquakes or other natural forces, occur every day, and are not generally dangerous in and of themselves. “Only when human life is present – when the avalanche serves as the backdrop to human drama – are these natural forces `dangerous,’ ” Jenkins says.
Avalanche death has increased in recent years, not because avalanches are getting worse, but because humans are putting themselves at risk more often. Jenkins attributes this, in large part, to the elimination of most risk from the average American’s life.
The “alpha male” lawyer from Chicago carries an attitude into the mountains, where his status means nothing and his attitude is a downright liability. Bolstered with the latest expensive gear, many try to squeeze maximum risk into minimum time, untempered by experience, humility or real knowledge of hidden risks. The result, Jenkins believes, is often disastrous.
In this case, these young men were among the best-trained and most-experienced climbers of their generation. But, even armed with that skill and experience, because of the unique geologic structure of the mountain upon which they found themselves, they could not see the amount of snow above them, lying in wait for an errant footstep to release its awful power.
Humility is the lesson of the disaster, Jenkins says – that, and the knowledge that even the best-trained and best-prepared cannot anticipate the natural forces that sometimes lurk beyond our power to recognize or control.
Although more deadly avalanches have occurred, the Mount Cleveland disaster remains one of the nation’s worst, and a warning that mountains are dangerous places. Even strong young men with mountaineering expertise are no match against the danger that often lies beneath that soft white blanket of snow. “White Death” is an eloquent and spectacular tribute to five young men who died 31 years ago.