Some people are addicted to the con. It’s playing the game itself that provides the thrills; the payoff is walking away unscathed. The question is, how long can it keep coming up heads? The answer is until it comes up tails. James William Lewis, the original suspect in the Tylenol case is what you might call an interesting character. He admitted to sending the extortion letters to Johnson and Johnson over the poisoned capsules, but was never convicted to placing the poison himself. He subsequently did a stretch in jail but resumed his life, first as a tax preparer and most recently as a web designer and programmer upon release. Somewhere along the way he was suspected of dismembering a man and raping a woman. However, neither charge stuck.
Now the FBI, some say prompted by publicity attending the anniversary of the crime, others by attentions brought by enterprising minor journalists, is reopening the case. Maybe they have a new tip; maybe modern forensics has provided them with news sources of evidence. Boston.com explains:
Yesterday, an FBI spokesman in Chicago said that advances in forensic technology, including DNA evidence, had rekindled the investigation. Investigators searching his Cambridge condominium Wednesday were seen carrying out five boxes and a late-model MacIntosh computer.
“As you can imagine if you were at the search scene, there’s a lot of evidence that has to be gone through, a lot of tests that have to take place, and we don’t know if it’s going to be positive,” said the spokesman, Ross Rice.
Investigators had also obtained a warrant to search an unidentified storage facility nearby that Lewis, 62, had rented, according to Rice. A police officer from Arlington Heights, Ill., where three of the slayings occurred, was dispatched to Boston, the Associated Press reported yesterday.
Rice said that police from the Chicago area who investigated the murders still have capsules recovered as evidence. It might be possible to find traces of DNA on them, he said.
Lewis is without a doubt an interesting man; perhaps his problem was that he needed to prove it to the world. In this interview, Roger Nicholson, a Cambridge area journalist who put the spotlight on Lewis again, believed that the so-called Tylenol Man was driven by a need to get back at the world for unspecified offense. He had to keep thumbing his nose in society’s face. Maybe it was all he lived for.
This brings to mind some of the issues arising from the debate between Dick Cheney and former CIA analyst Glen Carle about the danger that Islamic terrorists might sucessfully attack an American city. The relationship is this: it illustrates the power a small probability event that with repetition becomes cumulatively large. If Lewis is found guilty, it will be because he went to the well too often. You might poison 7 people and get away with it. You might even poison 7 people, dismember a man and rape a woman and get away with it. But if you keep at it long enough at some point, some little thing — a fingerprint, some DNA sample, some memory — will bring you down. Even a master criminal has a small probability of getting caught. If he continues long enough, the thousand to one chance may happen.
Small probability threats exist too. And they’re not too bad provided they don’t keep happening. In the Cheney-Carle debate alluded to above, we are told by Carle that al-Qaeda’s chances of launching a catastrophic WMD attack on US soil are small. That may be true, but imagine a criminal organization that survives over decades and keeps buying a large quantity of criminal lottery tickets. What are the odds they eventually makes payday? We won’t remember the hundreds of failures, but we’ll remember the day they get lucky. If Lewis is the the Tylenol killer, he can’t take comfort in all the times he fooled the cops. He’ll remember the one slipup he made. If you model the problem like that, then it becomes clear that a number of otherwise irrelevant factors become important when trying to prevent a terrorist from eventually hitting the jackpot. The first is to make lottery tickets more expensive, so that the terrorist can’t try too many. The second is to prevent him from learning where he went wrong, so that each attempt has a probability independent of the other. If terrorist — or the real Tylenol Man — can learn where he went wrong, then the probabilities of his individual attempts at success improve over time until finally they become very good indeed.
Has the Tylenol Man taken one thrill pill too many? Time will tell. As for al-Qaeda, when will they stop?
Wretchard’s comments about the Tylenol Man remind me of Anthony Blunt, the art critic who was the so-called Fourth Man in the group of Cambridge spies that included Guy Burgess and Kim Philby. Blunt seemed unable to explain even to himself in his later years why he had spied for the Soviet Union, although his biographer thinks it had to do with “anger against the English bourgeois world.” But she also quotes a friend of Blunt’s who saw his primary motivation for espionage as a need to show off his intellectual superiority: “He enjoyed the exercise of his skills in every area. He enjoyed knowing he could do something terribly well. . . . There was a delight in the game, in being able to do it so completely, and to live completely differently in the two worlds must have been quite exhilarating. My hunch would be that that was what really kept it going: the intoxication of playing this wonderfully complex game. . . ”
And of course, as with the Tylenol Man, it was a series of small missteps that led to Blunt’s eventual exposure. Meanwhile, he was able to do something terrible– terribly well.
I think,
yes,
I think I see a Black Swan up there…
Yup.
Just. To. The. Right.
Up. There ->
At what odds does Russian roulette become attractive? 5 shot revolver? 6 shot? 100 shot?
For most people, the potential reward isn’t worth the risk, even with the reward being substantial. On the other hand,I can almost understand spying, with the odds of being caught worse than Russian roulette, as an appealing game of wits. It might result in the deaths of some players, but not necessarily, and getting away with it would be an intellectual victory. However, putting cyanide in Tylenol almost assuredly will kill someone who is not even playing the game, and that makes it a particularly repugnant crime.
I’d like to see that criminal get his trial and reward in anonymity, so he would not have the perverse satisfaction of publicity. Shoving him off a cargo ramp 1,500 miles off the east coast would be fine by me.
Wretchard:
The relationship is this: it illustrates the power a small probability event that with repetition becomes cumulatively large. … if you keep at it long enough at some point, some little thing … will bring you down. … the thousand to one chance may happen. In the Cheney-Carle debate … we are told by Carle that al-Qaeda’s chances of launching a catastrophic WMD attack on US soil are small.
In the cases of James William Lews and of a fanatic Moslem, the bad guy is not a random person who is perceived randomly and who attempts crimes that succeed randomly.
Rather, the bad guy is subjected to persistent and agressive observation, and the bad guy’s explanations are reflexively challenged and rejected. Therefore, the bad guy’s efforts to commit his crimes and to escape detection and prosecution become more and more difficult.
Eventually basic functions become more and more difficult — recruiting associates, accumulating money for expenses, obtaining identification documents, crossing international borders, etc.
The need to be careful and circumspect about every action and in every situation consumes time, effort and resources. Paranoia causes confusion and mistakes.
At some point, therefore, the bad guy will decide to give up his efforts in a particular place and against a particular target. There’s just too much heat there, and so the bad guy will redirect his efforts to a different place and a different target.
We might suppose that Al Qaeda still strives energetically to launch a massive attack against the USA and that eventually one of these energetic efforts will succeed.
Or we might suppose that Al Qaeda has decided that those efforts have become too futile and dangerous and therefore has abandoned its efforts against the USA homeland in the present circumstances.
Either explanation might be correct. Both explanations deserve objective, serious consideration. We might be compelled to decide that one of the explanations is more probably correct.
We should remain objective and calm and avoid obsession, panic and hysteria. We must be willing to re-prioritize our concerns, re-weigh our risks and re-emphasize our precautions as our circumstances evolve. We cannot insure ourselves maximally against absolutely every possibility at all times.
Sylvester, that’s an appalling suggestion.
The real threat of a nuke obliterating a US city is not a rare Tylenol man poisoning, but a high-probability attack by a bunch of people who all know that doing so brings wealth, power, prestige, and an exile army.
A more appropriate model would be an elderly lady in an expensive car in a poor neighborhood. How soon before she is attacked, her car stolen, her purse stolen, and perhaps herself held for ransom or her ATM account drained?
Reality, Pakistan alone makes it quite easy for AQ and groups associated with them to acquire a nuke. Or three. Iran’s nuclear status then allows another source and more uncertainty for any US response. Then there is the high degree of certainty that no real retaliation for killing millions of Americans by nuking, say NYC will happen.
Obama will forbid it, as will Democrats. At any rate, the World’s Muslims believe this as do most Americans, and Obama’s hold of the Cole and other terrorists prosecution in preparation to releasing them (which is what civilian prosecution will entail, since none of them were given Miranda Warnings by CIA officers and soldiers who captured them) make any “retaliation” by the US merely a strongly worded letter of regret.
The situation is desperate, serious, and Democrats and Obama bear all the blame for the millions of Americans who will be guaranteed to be killed, soon, because they lacked the will to take certain measures:
1. Detail, explicitly, the US strategic response to a nuking of an American City by a non-state actor, by listing the nations and peoples who will be wiped out to the last man, woman, and child, including Pakistan and Iran. Make this automatic policy, and publicize it to every corner of Iran and Pakistan.
2. Vigorous questioning by drug/chemical means with total immunity for US officers/CIA officials of any suspected terrorist.
3. Rapid military court / commissions with rapid execution of the terrorists to show will and the validity of above threat.
Instead, Obama issued a giant apology for America to the World’s Muslims, basically stated “Trust me I’m really Muslim” to the World’s Muslims (it’s certain that’s how they all took it) and has acted in a weak manner: proposing to dismantle 80% of the nuclear arsenal, missile defense, and another round of apologies to Iran (on top of Clinton’s) to basically grovel at their feet.
Disaster can be averted, but it requires a serious approach.
Obama and his people are not stupid, they want America nuked, so Obama can push a general surrender to Islam agenda, ala Britain which responded to terrorism by adopting Sharia and general submission to Islam, and Spain, which has done the same.
Whiskey — I appreciate your posts, but sometimes you can be a downer, man!
The current situation is going to end in tears. That, we know for sure. Whose tears? When? That, we have to wait & see.
Just remember that the wheel never stops turning. It is easy to imagine a series of situations which end up with the US military (supported by 80% of the population) eliminating Congress (supported by 20% of the population).
If we are lucky, the US military would then organize a new constitutional convention, which would permanently destroy the power base of the political class. (E.g., no taxation without representation, and no representation without paying taxes).
The world will continue — long after the present bunch of losers have well & truly lost.
I’m sure there are some in the current brain trust who have given that some thought, kinuachdrach. the thought may rein in the more orthodox marxists among ‘em. Always have to worry about them trying to drive a wedge between the Oath and the generals, tho. They’re already fooling around with time-tested structures in an area where they can’t possibly have any experience, and must thus be working from some objection to the status quo, in favor of some other plan or vision, something “improved”, which we are not given to know. Hope it’s not some 1955 cyrillic alphabet pamphlet. One reads the article, and partway through the feeling of looking through glass darkly, of apprehension, becomes so palpable that one notes with a shock how little one trusts these people. I had much higher hopes, for some old fashined Steinbeckian, dos Passos, Lincoln Brigade lefties, principled lefties, if we were to have to have lefties. what I’ve seen so far is like a movie –and an implausable one at that. The oft made promise (20 times? 100 times?) to”never sign legislation until it has been on the website five full days for the American people to read and comment” –shit, two acts so far, ledbetter a day or two (and you had to discover it) and s-chip all of two hours. That ain’t a straw in the wind –that’s a log in the gale. and the expressions and gestures acted out in Williamsburg the other night (he took the 747 for the 100 mile trip, say green) during the two or three seperate turns on the “cable tv chatter” (‘hurting the people’s freedom to agree with him on the stim bill’ was the message) were nothing if not zombie signals that Leader Is Bothered, and that we zombs are to have no more regard nor respect for those cable tv people than we would a moth or mosquito or fly buzzing around our head. Not a good thing to see, watching it on the tube –way too much load in it.
I have to agree with Whiskey that the probability of a nuclear weapon being detonated in a U.S. city by Islamic terrorists within ten years seems pretty high.
Run your own calculations: List the events you feel must happen to enable that outcome to happen, and estimate the probability (zero to one) of each over the next decade. Multiply these together and there’s your answer.
An Islamic nation gets the Bomb: already happened, with more coming.
One or more bombs finds its way into terrorist hands: 0.99. This is most likely to happen with the bomb being stolen from a facility staffed by Islamic extremists (thus an inside job rather than brute force), but could also happen by purchase from corrupt weapons custodians or via an Islamic-supremacist state (Iran) simply giving one to terrorists.
Probability that terrorists would try to detonate a nuke in an American city if they had one: 0.9999. Most likely method is probably via shipping container into a port, though delivery by commercial airliner is also possible.
Probability of the bomb giving a full-on nuclear event when triggered: I’d guess around 70 percent.
So far it’s looking pretty grim. Now let’s look at the probability of the U.S. government (or other friendly gov’t) foiling the plot:
Probability of U.S. intelligence agencies learning that a bomb had found its way into terrorist hands: say 0.5.
Probability that we could locate the bomb before it arrives here: This is by far the hardest event to predict. It’s been alleged that the U.S. had information that Islamic terrorists had *something* planned in the last half of 2001, but I’ve not seen anyone who credibly claimed we had any specific information on the exact nature of the threat.
Absent specifics, it’s hard to stop a plot by overt action (as opposed to blind luck).
Before the New York Times publicized the operation, the U.S. had been able to wiretap known terrorist telephone calls. But now that capability is effectively nullified: once the capability was publicized, only an incompetent terrorist would keep using the phone system without using code words that would appear innocuous.
So I put our intercept ability at barely over five percent–essentially the ‘blind luck’ value. That equates to a 95 percent probability of getting through.
SO…essentially, given the policies adopted by the U.S. government, we can’t stop it. But surprisingly, that doesn’t mean complete disaster.
Yes, Americans will die, but almost certainly not millions. For those of you who aren’t familiar with ‘em, nuclear weapons come in two flavors, “A” and “H”. The first is what the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW2. They were the equivalent of roughly 18,000 tons of TNT.
A weapon of that size, exploded on a ship in New York harbor, would probably not be uniformly fatal more than a mile away.
Disaster? Sure. But not on the scale to *require* that we surrender.
So if I were a planner, over the next 4 years I’d constantly be in the face of Dems and the media, warning that Obama’s policies–with the full support of Democrats in congress, were setting the stage for the detonation. I’d be harping on this at every opportunity, along with presenting some ideas that might prevent it, so that when the thing happened, the American public would know which party to blame.
The problem here (other than the obvious one, which we can’t stop without changing presidents and policies) is that the Dem/Left, with the help of their c*ck-sucking friends in the MSM, will quickly re-write history to try to put all blame on the GOP–exactly as they did with the WMD issue in Iraq.
While Clinton was prez, virtually every top Dem leader joined in sending letters warning that Saddam was developing WMDs, had already used gas on Iraqi Kurds, and was thus likely to use them again. Of course Clinton’s only interest was Monica so he did nothing. But when Bush took firm, effective action to actually remove Saddam, the MSM published thousands of articles claiming that no one other than fanatic right-wingers believed Saddam was working on WMDs.
The Dems who’d written letters urging Clinton to act smiled as they savaged Bush’s invasion, knowing they’d never be called on their hypocrisy by their friends in the MSM.
The big lie worked perfectly then, so we can expect it to be tried again.
Maybe we can’t prevent a terrorist group from detonating a nuke here, but we sure as hell should try to ensure that the blame is laid squarely where it belongs: at the feet of the Dem/Left and their Messiah.
Whiskey (@5)
Reality, Pakistan alone makes it quite easy for AQ and groups associated with them to acquire a nuke.
How many nuclear bombs does Pakistan have? How much is each one worth?
For the sake of argument, I’ll pick some numbers out of thin air. Let’s suppose that Pakistan has 100 nuclear bombs and that each one is worth $10 million.
Despite Pakistan’s many incompetencies, I think that Pakistan’s military can manage to guard 100 items of such high value and strategic importance. They are being guarded by a huge organization of professional military officers. The Pakistani military has been trained and equipped largely by the USA through the past half century.
In fact, therefore, it would not be “quite easy” for Al Qaeda to acquire a nuclear bomb.
The relevant circumstances are that the Pakistan military has been fighting a hot war against Al Qaeda during the past couple of years. Al Qaeda members and associates have been killing Pakistani soldiers and officials (e.g. the former Prime Minister, who was the wife of the current Prime Minister), and Pakistani soldier have been killing Al Qaeda members and associates.
Whiskey:
Obama and his people … want America nuked, so Obama can push a general surrender to Islam agenda … by adopting Sharia and general submission to Islam
Do you recognize that most people think this ranting is hysterical? You should re-think your ideas that are way off in extreme regions of public perceptions.
The last paragraph in my above comment should not be italicized.
One of the arguments against SDI in the Reagan era was that the consequences of even one nuclear weapon getting through were horrible, and since you can’t stop all of them even in the best of circumstances, SDI was worthless.
These were people who were terrorized by the very idea of nuclear weapons – and that is what is really terrifying. With that kind of fear, any threat becomes paralyzing, and deterrence is lost. It is replaced by the kind of calm rational thinking displayed a victim on her knees before a mugger, crying and saying “Pleeze, pleeze, pleeze…” And that, in turn, makes the dreaded event that much more likely.
If we were to create a true “Binomial Distribution” then there would have to be one curve for taking action to prevent, preempt, and protect against the event and one curve for “I don’t even wanna think about it.”
A nuclear attack is certainly possible, but what about chemical or biological weapons? A strain of super flu would be more deadly than a bomb, especially if the terrorists were willing to sacrifice themselves for Allah.
Pakistan is a state coming apart due to tribal conflicts and a failed socialist economic system. The Pak army may be well trained but their enemy is India. The nukes are for India. Yet the political and social chaos may result in the Islamacists selling a nuke to the Hez or even Hamas. It is a low probability event but it could happen.
SF@8:
Waht you run your probability against is the potential cost of the event. Detonation of anything even semi-nuclear would be astronomical. Bush et al recognized that.
You also said:”So if I were a planner, over the next 4 years I’d constantly be in the face of Dems and the media, warning that Obama’s policies–with the full support of Democrats in congress, were setting the stage for the detonation. ”
Two issues with that: inside the Gov’t you’d be outside the Gov’t very quickly as a disgruntled employee (likely crazy)
Outside the Gov’t you’d be ill-informed and crazy.
How does the distribution change when those in power act to increase the likelihood of further criminal/terrorist activities? From the article Wretchard linked to:
“In the summer of 1978, Lewis was accused of murdering and dismembering West, whose decomposed body was found in the attic of his home. Lewis became a suspect after he tried to cash a $5,000 check he claimed West had given him. Police searched his home and car and found rope they said matched rope found at the scene. They thought Lewis used the rope and a pulley to hoist West’s body into the attic, according to the prosecutor and defense lawyer on the case.
“I’m flat-out convinced that he murdered Raymond West,” James Bell, the prosecutor then but now a lawyer in private practice, said in an interview. “We had a winnable case.”
But Bell was forced to dismiss the charges against Lewis after a judge threw out most of the evidence, as well as statements Lewis made to police. The judge found that officers did not have probable cause to take Lewis into custody or to search his home and his car.”
If that was indeed they Tylenol killer, then the deaths of the tylenol victims rest on the conscience of that judge.
How much more likely is a new terrorist act when we have an Obama administration that has shown through its actions that it prefers process over results? Aren’t we doing the same thing when we release terrorists because a particular process was not followed to the letter?
Mike S. “Despite Pakistan’s many incompetencies, I think that Pakistan’s military can manage to guard 100 items of such high value and strategic importance. They are being guarded by a huge organization of [B]ISLAMIC[/B] professional military officers.”
That is one of the most incredibly naive statements I have ever read on BC. These people are Muslim FIRST and semi-professional second or third. They do not care that we get nuked, hell they pray for it. At the bottom line we know that money is all that it will take for some General to make the relativistic morality judgment and BOOOOOOM.
It is a 1% problem with a 100% outcome. You can’t just put your fingers in your ears and start singing Lalalalalala hoping to change their hearts and minds. YOU want to sacrifice your life and those of your families? Go right ahead, but don’t be confused into thinking that the rest of us will commit suicide with you. They only have to be successful ONE TIME!
Jim
MUSLIM I think it was supposed to look this way.
Jim
Regarding the probability of a nuclear device being imported into and being detonated in a major metropolitan area, it should be pointed out that any group intent on doing something like this does not need access to an off-the-shelf working device. All they need to be able to do is smuggle undetected a sufficient quantity of fissionable material into the country and then build the bomb on-site. And for that on-site construction, the only things required would be a few-story tall building to build the device in, and some pipe, concrete and a vacuum pump. Granted, this type of construction would only yield a very inefficient ground-level-detonation explosive device, but if terror is all you want to create, then it would serve that purpose admirably.
Living, as I do on the Left Coast, next to the ocean and not far from a commercial fishing port, I am used to seeing news reports of drug busts of boats bringing drugs into this country. Given the ability of certain drug cartels to the south, to smuggle illegal drugs into the USA, literally by the ton, it would be a safe bet that if any terrorist group did acquire a sufficient quantity of fissionable material to make a bomb, then getting it into the country would not be a problem.
As always with groups like AQ, their deeds are only limited by opportunity, not by intent. To put it another way, AQ’s past performance, limited as it has been by opportunity, should never be used as an indicator for their possible future performance, which, as history has shown, is not limited by any rational calculations.
RE: #6
new constitutional convention = unnecessary
The old constitution works fine… its just got some questionable actors and bloated executive bureaucracies, and it has a few crappy amendments (16,17 in particular).
The OS is fundamentally stable, but a reboot would be nice (since we clearly have a growing memory leak). I’d prefer ballots over bullets … but sometimes we don’t get our d’ruthers.