Word: arsons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...public insurance adjusters, one police officer and a retired fire chief. By week's end a total of 26 men had been arraigned in Suffolk County superior court on charges as varied as fraud, bribery and murder. But all of them were alleged to have committed one crime: arson. They were accused of contracting with landlords, financially troubled shopkeepers, warehouse owners and others to burn down their buildings for the insurance, with the arsonists taking a percentage of the claim...
...suspicious fires that occurred between 1973 and 1976, including one that led last year to a Pulitzer-prizewinning photograph of a woman and little girl plummeting from a collapsed fire escape (the woman died, but the child survived). Last week the police came up with enough evidence to bring arson indictments on 35 of the fires that destroyed property worth $6 million and killed three people. Massachusetts Attorney General Francis X. Bellotti denounced the torch ring as "a conspiracy to burn down Suffolk County for profit." Added Stephen Delinsky, head of the state criminal bureau: "This is just...
Whether for profit or for revenge, arson has become one of the most deadly, costly, and, for law enforcement officials, maddening crimes in the country. Deliberatley started fires now exceed 100,000 a year, up 400% since 1967. Last year there were 6,776 reported arsons in New York City alone. In Chicago, arson has tripled in less than three years, and in crime-plagued Detroit it is up 12% over last year alone. But the most shocking statistics come from San Francisco, which has experienced a 700% increase in arson in five years. Says Lieut. James Mahoney, chief investigator...
Cheap to commit, perhaps, but staggeringly expensive for society to endure. Officials blame arson for more than 1,000 deaths and 10,000 injuries a year. Insurance companies estimate that in 1976 arson cost $2 billion in claims. As a result, fire insurance premiums have risen sharply in the past five years. Adding other, related costs such as business failures, loss of jobs and tenant relocation, Walter D. Swift, vice president of the American Insurance Association estimates last year's total arson price tag in the U.S. to be between $10 billion and $15 billion...
...that therapeutic methods using cannabis could be successfully applied to patients suffering from this modern neurosis. He draws a parallel between the symptoms of a heroin addict going through severe withdrawal and an individual suffering from an "acute anxiety neurosis episode." Humes attributes the rise in the incidence of arson, rape, and other types of crime to this widespread upswing in anxiety neurosis, saying that the acceptance of his therapeutic method would go a long way toward alleviating this nationwide problem...