Word: kurtz
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...next day, however, FBI agents showed up at the house, and Kurtz allowed them to search him, his home and his car. When he told them he had to go to the funeral home to make arrangements, the agents drove him there. When he arrived, an apologetic funeral home director told him that the body was gone. The FBI had redirected it back to the morgue for further analysis...
...began one of the more surreal errors in post-9/11 America. Agents from a rainbow spectrum of agencies occupied Kurtz's home for several days, blocking off his street and setting up a biohazard shower to hose down investigators leaving the residence. (click here for a video about the raid created by Kurtz's art ensemble.) Agents would not let Kurtz retrieve his cat, Bean. Having lost his wife, his home and his pet in the span of 48 hours, Kurtz decided to get a lawyer. He told a friend at one point, "I just need to pretend Hope...
...confirms much of Kurtz's account, but stresses that the situation was far from clear-cut when agents arrived on the scene. "He had a working microbiology lab in his home. He did not have an art exhibit in his home. We also had a dead body," says Maureen Dempsey, spokesperson for the Buffalo field office of the FBI. "We didn't know what was in there. That's why we had to cordon off the house." The bacteria that Kurtz had in his house had been used in the past to simulate dangerous bacteria for research purposes - which...
...Kurtz and a colleague were eventually charged with mail and wire fraud connected to the way they had purchased bacteria for one of Kurtz's projects. The indictment made no mention of terrorism. This spring, after the case made headlines, and artists and activists raised $300,000 for his defense, a U.S. District Court judge threw out the indictment, calling it "insufficient". The U.S. Attorney's office in Buffalo announced in June that it would not appeal...
...lessons of the ordeal, says Kurtz, is that "if you have hundreds of thousands of dollars, good lawyers, four years and total innocence, you might get some justice from the system...