The 2009 Lakewood Shooting on this Day in History

 

This Day in History: Four police officers of Lakewood, Washington were fatally shot at the Forza Coffee shop in the Parkland unincorporated area of Pierce County, Washington, near Tacoma. A gunman, later identified as Maurice Clemmons, entered the shop, shot the officers while they worked on laptops, and fled the scene with a single gunshot wound in his torso. After a massive two-day manhunt that spanned several nearby cities, an officer recognized Clemmons near a stalled car in south Seattle. When he refused orders to stop, he was shot and killed by a Seattle Police Department officer.

Prior to his involvement in the shooting, Clemmons had five felony convictions in Arkansas and eight felony charges in Washington. His first incarceration began in 1989, at age 17. Although his sentences totaled 108 years in prison, those for burglary were reduced in 2000 by Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee to 47 years, which made him immediately eligible for parole. The Arkansas Parole Board unanimously moved to release him in 2000. Clemmons was subsequently arrested on other charges and was jailed several times. In the months prior to the Parkland shooting, he was in jail on charges of assaulting a police officer and raping a child. One week prior to the Parkland shooting, he was released from jail after posting a $150,000 bail bond.

Mike Huckabee was widely criticized for having commuted Clemmons' sentence and allowed his release from prison in 2000. In his book about the shooting, The Other Side of Mercy, Jonathan Martin of The Seattle Times wrote that Huckabee apparently failed to review Clemmons' prison file, which was "thick with acts of violence and absent indications of rehabilitation." Martin also suggested that Huckabee failed to ensure Clemmons' post-release plan was "solid, or even factual." In an article for the Times, Martin wrote that if Huckabee was serious about running for president in 2016, "he'll have to answer his Maurice Clemmons problem."

At a previous arrest, Clemmons made religiously-themed comments and referred to himself as The Beast. He also told a police officer that Obama and LeBron James were his brothers, and Oprah Winfrey was his sister.

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Bank Robber Baby Face Nelson on This Day in History

 

This day in history: Bank robber Baby Face Nelson was killed on this day in 1934. Nelson got his start in the criminal gangs when he was employed to bootleg alcohol throughout the Chicago suburbs. Alcohol was illegal thanks to Prohibition.

At the beginning of Prohibition, the Reverend Billy Sunday stirred audiences with this optimistic prediction:

"The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."

That was far from the truth. The golden age of bank robbers like Baby Face Nelson in the 1930's can be linked to Woodrow Wilson, the man who gave us both the Federal Reserve (which led to the great depression) and Prohibition. Organized crime got its first foothold in American life thanks to the lucrative black market in liquor. Overall crime increased by 24 percent during the first two years of Prohibition. "In fact, a study of South Carolina counties that enforced Prohibition versus those who didn’t found a whopping 30 to 60 percent increase in homicides in the counties that enforced the law." ~Brian Miller

"Prohibition did not achieve its goals. Instead, it added to the problems it was intended to solve and supplanted other ways of addressing problems. The only beneficiaries of Prohibition were bootleggers, crime bosses, and the forces of big government. Carroll Wooddy concluded that the 'Eighteenth Amendment . . . contributed substantially to the growth of government and of government costs in this period [1915-32].'" Source

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Master Criminal, Adam Worth, on This Day in History

 

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This Day in History: The Napoleon of Crime, Adam Worth, died on this day [January 8] in 1902. Adam Worth was a German-born American criminal and crime boss who is widely considered the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional criminal mastermind James Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes series, whom Conan Doyle calls "The Napoleon of Crime".

Worth enlisted in the Union Army during the civil war at age 17. When he was wounded in battle he found out that he was listed as "killed in action" and so he left. After the war, Worth became a pickpocket, and over time he started his own gang of pickpockets, and then began to organize robberies and heists.

"His name was Adam Worth; a dapper, cerebral and ambitious little man, he had come from nowhere--specifically, the mean backstreets of Cambridge, Massachusetts--to become the most successful safecracker and bank robber in the city of New York, which in 1865 boasted 53,000 crimes of violence. Dissatisfied with a mere local notoriety, and seeking to escape the notice of Pinkerton detectives, in 1869 he borrowed or stole the name of Henry J. Raymond, late founder editor of the New York Times, and sailed to England where he transformed himself into an elegant English gentleman, with a flat on Piccadilly, a steam yacht, racehorses and an international syndicate of robbers and forgers. For years he drove the world's police forces to distraction with well planned, bloodlessly executed crimes all the way to Port Elizabeth in South Africa, without ever leaving a bit of incriminating evidence."

Richard Wolkomir

"Adam Worth, the greatest thief of the 19th century, could have furnished the basis of a great novel. No need though: In 'The Napoleon of Crime--The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief,' British journalist Ben Macintyre has given him a biography that reads like one. Worth, a German-born American Jew who affected the manners and lifestyle of a Victorian English gentleman, became, in the words of his great adversaries, the Pinkerton detectives, 'The most remarkable, most successful and most dangerous professional criminal known to modern times.'" Source

See also 19th Century Crime Boss Adam Worth and the Pinkertons 1905