Word: amsterdams
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Fittingly enough, Bessie Gilmore's attorney was Professor Anthony G. Amsterdam of Stanford, the man who had helped persuade the Supreme Court to answer that question in the negative. Or so the answer seemed to be in 1972. when the Justices ruled that the "arbitrary" and "freakish" way death sentences were imposed made them unacceptable. But when several states began writing more limited and more specific new death-penalty statutes (35 have now done so), the court started refining the rules. Having rejected capricious death sentences on the one hand, it also rejected mandatory ones, like an automatic death...
Though Gilmore has persistently disavowed all lawyers who tried to win him a reprieve, the decisive intervention came when Stanford Law Professor Anthony G. Amsterdam moved in the following day, on behalf of Gilmore's mother. Amsterdam, a leader in the fight against capital punishment for a decade, filed a petition with Supreme Court Justice Byron White, who is responsible for emergency appeals in the Utah area. "The need for a stay of execution is obvious," said Amsterdam. "Such stays are commonly granted in death cases. Indeed, the only factor that makes this application unusual is [Gilmore...
...Amsterdam was the natural rendezvous. The city's large Chinese community (1,500 legal residents and more than 7,000 free-floating illegals) had a long-established internal drug trade; easy Common Market border rules made Amsterdam the perfect hub for Europe-wide smuggling. In 1971 gangsters from triads (secret societies) in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore began infiltrating Amsterdam's Chinatown, forcing merchants and community leaders to help shield their operations. Ironically, many of the operators were corrupt drug cops purged from the Hong Kong police force...
...Dodging Amsterdam's closely watched Schiphol Airport, couriers detour to Zurich, Frankfurt, Rome and other cities and then carry the dope to Holland overland. Penny-wise smugglers have even used Aeroflot's discount flights across Asia, though Soviet police crackdowns in Moscow are making that route more dangerous. Tactics change daily. "You know if we see a Chinese get off a flight from Bangkok, we're going to nail him," says one Paris-based U.S. narc. To avoid that, the triads are recruiting middle-class Caucasians as "mules" for $1,000 a trip plus plane fare...
European narcs are finding it hard to crack the Chinese Connection because they never made contact with their Chinese communities. Amsterdam police, for example, have only one Cantonese-speaking agent; hired translators face jarring death threats. Among street-level dealers and users, the triads enforce a ruthless code of silence that shields the trade's heroin "Godfathers." Time-tested techniques-infiltration, bribes, informers-have proved almost useless. "They're very closed," says a top French investigator, "and won't deal with anyone with round eyes...