Giving Up on the 2020 Criminal Mind Theme

Poor choice this year ... I quickly discovered that I really didn't care why criminals commit crimes.  So when I went to Texas early in January, I went to the half off price book store and picked up two "history" books.

From reading the 2019 spy books based in the Middle East, I came to acknowledge my lack of knowledge about that part of the world; so, I picked up After Tamerlane by John Darwin.  Too bad I did not "accentuate the first two "syllables."  This was a 506 page volume about all empires POST Tamerlane.  In the first "orientation" chapter of the book, Darwin says Tamerlane's was the "last real attempt to challenge the partition of Eurasia between the states of the Far West, Islamic Eurasia and Confuscian East Asia ... and revealed that power had begun to shift back from the nomad empires to the settled states."

He goes on further to cite Max Weber's explanation of "modern capitalism" that requires "an activist, rationalizing mentality, Chinese Confucianism (rational but inactive), Islam (active but irrational), and Hinduism (inactive and irrational) ..."   And so his  book goes on to integrate colonial history, underlined by  basic assumptions, such as:

Rejecting the idea of a linear change in the course of modern world history, in which Europe progressively rise to pre-eminence, then fell and rose again.  Instead to think in terms of conjunctures, periods of time when general conditions in other parts of the world coincided to encourage or check the enlargement of trade, the expansion of empires, the exchange of ideas or the movement of people,

Seeing Europe's age of expansion firmly in its Eurasian context, for example contrasting naval power with the invention and expansion of railroads.

He concludes that given the propensity of humans to accumulate power on an extensive scale is countered by the ethnic basis and gravitational pull of culture, making this tension the default mode of political organization throughout most of history.

I continue to emphasize Darwin's underlining perspectives; he sees modernity as a very slippery idea:  its convention meaning is based on a scale of achievement; in political terms its key attributes are an organized nation state, with definite boundaries, an orderly government with a loyal bureaucracy ti carry out its commands; an effective means to represent public opinion; a code of rights to protect ordinary citizens and encourage the growth of civil society.  Economically, it means the attainment of rapid, accumulation economic growth through industrial capitalism; the entrenchment of individual property rights, and the systemic exploitation of science-based knowledge.  Culturally, the separation of religion and the supernatural from the mainstream of thought (by secularization and disenchantment of knowledge and social behavior; the diffusion of literacy and a sense of common origins and identity.

Most of the above have been typed from Darwin's opening pages (so don't think either that I write like this or came up with these clear ideas on my own).  After reading the rise and fall of several "nations" and their attempts at empire building, and then overlaying the concept of economic globalization, I have to pull back and ponder on what is different of special about America and where other human aggregates are on the scale of becoming a "nation."  So much for the arrogance of "nation building" by force, occupation or holding up one model as one size fits all.

Like the book 1492, the best parts of this book align different parts of the world at several points of time to assess what was simultaneously happening within an area to impact the rest.  This is not a reprise of what was taught as "world history" in schools decades ago.

Maybe I Should Just Watch Goodfellas

The Big Heist:  The Real Story of the Lufthansa Heist, the Mafia, and Murder by Anthony M. Destefano … I probably should have taken Prevagen to make any sense of the chronology, the criminals, and who got the money.

Maybe if there were illustration and schemas to show the pecking order and the relationships I could have felt that I could follow the story better.  I'm left confused about how really was the top dog, if anyone really got most of the money.  It seems everyone was either killed by other mafioso or acquitted.  Really not a book I'd recommend.

American Kingpin by Nick Bilton

I know this is only the second book I've finished this year but this one is spectacular.  It is the backstory of the creation of the Silk Road by Russ Ulbricht, known on the dark web as Dread Pirate Roberts.

Unlike the author who intruded herself onto every page in the rare book thief, Bilton himself seems "dark" with the ability to move the story along quickly yet with much detail, with confidence and without question.  DPR's motives started out from a strong libertarian base wherein he opposed the government's intrusion into what a person could ingest.  He grew some "magic" mushrooms, posted them for sale and the site itself mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar e-store where not only were all kinds of illegal drugs sold, but guns and eventually body parts.  Worse yet, DPR himself began acting like a Mafia boss, killing or at least contracting to kill, anyone who threatened the operation.

While Bilton acknowledges that eventually there were conflicts among the several federal agencies that composed the task force to track down and arrest DPR, we lauds the individual talents of a low level postal inspector and other men who thought outside of standard operating procedures to identify Russ.

Several "it's bound to happen" things occur in the story:  investigators tap into the Bitcoin site to steal; others leak the status of the hunt to DPR; girlfriends and family are completely blind and stunned by Russ' corruption.

The Silk Road site is gone.  Computer crime investigation has grown up.  Yet one cannot help but wonder what new sites have replaced it.

The Man Whoe Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Subtitled The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession.

First of all, let me say that the author of this book included herself almost in every paragraph; it was her soul-searching of why anyone would steal books rather than an in-depth analysis of why John Gilkey stole rare books.

As superficial as her writing was, the reader is left concluding that Gilkey was a delusional con man whose underlying motivation was a character flaw whereby he believed he could be admired as a rich, erudite man if he had a collection of rare books  His thefts were not petit crimes, his victims honest book sellers.  Granted she discovered that his mother had many collections of objets d'art in her house, but unlike Gilkey, hers could be displayed because they were not stolen.

Stealing for "appearances' sake" seems to fall flat as many of the stolen items remained undiscovered by the police.  The author also seems to downplay Gilkey's planning:  like working for Saks where he could steal credit card numbers and having books delivered so acquired to hotels rather than to where he lived.

This was a short easy read to start the new year, but I hope I find meatier books that better divulge the psychology of criminals.

2019 Lessons Learned

I am not going to reprise all the spies that I've read in 2019; first of all because I cannot remember everyone's name, and secondly, I was not reading them as biographies.  My motive for selecting espionage as a theme was only to see if there was a common trait or motivation urging them to spy.

The motive seems to be a variable of a couple of factors:  (1) the times and (2) patriotic idealism.

Spies come in several "flavors."  Those that I consider to be the most noble are those who put country over self, especially in those times of war.  By country, I mean those lands where freedoms come first, because spies will work for allies of their homeland.  Next comes those who choose espionage as a career, joining an organization to gather information either involved in encryption/decryption or in capturing information from their country's enemies.  (I prefer people with these responsibilities over those that strew disinformation, although I found the antics of Garbo in World War II to be almost as theatrical as a movie epic.)  Military personnel spies are also less attractive to me, but I find them more honorable if they are "on the winning side" and actually engage in acts of sabotage/destruction.

Maybe because she was one of the first I read about in 2019 was Virginia Hall.  Her drive to help the Allies during WWII was over-arching:  when the US would not advance her from her clerical duties both because she was a female "clerk" and crippled, she just offered her services to Britain.  She did everything:  running a large network of agents, getting pilots and radio operators into France, coordinating sabotage.  She eventually won the highest honors from France, Britain and finally the USA.  Because of the time/need, she did not undergo "spy academy" training a rigor that would have surely disqualified me.

See, when I was in high school and had to take a career aptitude test, the result was I should be a spy.  I guess I hit some of the qualifications:  I was good with languages, wrote creatively, and liked to perform on stage.  Obviously, the written test profile could not pick up my glaring disqualifications:  I would have royally failed any PE demands and I don't think I could shoot straight.   Maybe that's why I think I read these biographies looking for people who were intellectual giants, clever, creative and honorable.

Of course over the past twelve months I read about those "spies" who were double agents and conducting espionage for the enemies of my country.  What I was less conscious of before starting this theme was how much of it would be international history.  I read about how much George Washington relied on his spy network and how ruthless he was dealing with British spies.  I read about Britain's counsel in South Carolina during the Civil War.  Of course I read dozens of books about World War II spies, American, German, French and British  I read about the CIA infiltrating Russia and the KGB doing the same here.

But the ones I read about spying in the Middle and Far East affected me the most; mainly because of all the intrigue and interventions the US and its allies conducted in these regions.  I concluded people who live in these areas will never forgive or forget.  It explains a lot of the continuing hostility.  Spies cross the line when they advocate or provoke regime changes; that is insidious and ignores the will of the people who live there … they have to overthrow their own tyrants on their own terms.  (This tome quotes Dick Heuer's book, The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis:  "The U.S. perspective on what is another country's national interest is usually irrelevant in intelligence analysis.)

This morning (a day into the new year) I finally finished my "last" spy book, The History of Spying, all 760 pages of it (after renewing it two times and still incurring $1.00 of library fines).    The title of this book emphasizes my final perspective of this theme:  my reading about spying was once again an effort of better understanding history.  This scholarly author was motivated to write this comprehensive timeline of espionage (starting with Old Testament characters to Wiki leaks and cyber space spying) basically to combat what he calls "historical attention span deficit disorder," to me a real wide-spread epidemic that extends into a generational lack of American history across all disciplines.  The books includes a great quote from Churchill, "The further backward you look, the further forward you can see."

So yesterday when I stopped at the library to pick up some of the books I reserved for my 2020 theme, The Criminal Mind, I picked up only a few of those that were ready, first because I will be out of town for several days and don't feel like lugging books along with me, and second brought home only the shorter ones, one of which I finished this morning, reading it while the New Year's Eve fireworks where exploding and a neighbor was playing Auld Lang Syne outdoors on his coronet.  First post of the new theme to shortly follow.  Good bye 2019.

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South by Christopher Dickey