Word: agent
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After receiving a tip from a usually reliable informant, an FBI agent tails a suspected gambler and bookmaker for five days. On four of those days, the suspect parks his car near the same apartment house in St. Louis. He is observed, on one occasion, entering a flat that has two phones listed in another person's name. The phone numbers correspond with those that the informant claims are used for taking bets. Is there enough evidence for a magistrate to issue a search warrant...
...some support for the FBI claim that the informant's word could be trusted. The informant's "meager report," said Justice John Harlan for the majority, "could easily have been obtained from an offhand remark heard at a neighborhood bar." Nor, said the court, does the FBI agent's report make up for the shortcomings in the informant's story...
Justices Hugo Black and Abe Fortas, who are both regarded as among the court's libertarians, strongly opposed the decision. Fortas argued that the FBI agent's affidavit and the informant's word together were sufficient to establish "probable cause." From the bench, Black angrily attacked his colleagues for trying to supervise local magistrates "from a thousand miles away." Justice Byron White said that he was voting with the majority to avoid a deadlocked court (Justice Thurgood Marshall had abstained). Declaring himself confused by the majority opinion, White called for "fullscale reconsideration" of the precedents...
...What kind of tale can possibly evolve from such a gallimaufry of trivia? A dreamer on a park bench, a dim-witted bird fancier, a dead cat, an eight-year-old boy, a picture dealer, a handful of pigeons and an insurance agent-hardly the cast of War and Peace, I must agree." So speaks the witty but slightly (?) deranged narrator, park-bench dreamer, master painter and hero (?) of this fantastical and compelling first novel. The unlikely tale that does evolve draws the unwitting narrator into a plot to palm off one of his works as a Leonardo da Vinci...
...series of short phrases, each accompanied by a cartoon, each representing some part of the business of being alive, and each ending with the word "stoned." Drugs play no part in Crumb's version of stoned, though; the variety of events and emotions found in life is the stoning agent here...