Word: lawman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Midnights: A Year with the Wellfleet Police (1982), heard about Bunting and thought there might be a story in the lawman's exploits. Their first meeting got off to an edgy beginning. Because Wilkinson was from New York City, Bunting suspected him of being a Mafia hit man. But the Yankee journalist hung around long enough to win Bunting's confidence and come up with Moonshine, an intoxicating report on free and illicit spirits...
...Wiley was not a run-of-the-beat lawman. He aspired to be a poet (writing lines like "my love is a silver shadow") and had long worked on a mystery novel called Harvest Madness. Bigam knew that the chief had been moody lately, and a bit bored with the department he joined in 1978 and had run since 1982. Still, Bigam did not suspect suicide. Wiley's normally disheveled uniforms had been left at the dry cleaner. His apartment was spotless, and his manuscript for Harvest Madness was missing...
Like all romantic leads, the subway avenger looked better on paper. Until the real one stood up at a New Hampshire police station and confessed, we could imagine him a star. Charles Bronson. Gary Cooper as Wyatt Earp. Better still, Cooper in High Noon, citizen-lawman, doing his duty, Grace Kelly at his side...
Despite these expensive and humiliating defeats, there is little likelihood that the Government will change its investigative ways. Without what one lawman calls "creeps as witnesses," it would be impossible to solve most drug, organized-crime and official-corruption cases. Dan Webb, U.S. attorney in Chicago, for instance, seldom tries a major criminal case in which some witnesses do not "carry baggage"-have criminal records. Webb's prosecutors may have set a record for the use of bad-guy witnesses, when in 1982 they paraded some 50 criminals into court to testify against ten police officers charged with taking...
...bitterly logical lot is to help people accomplish efficiently the evil to which they aspire. In the course of this process, many will manage to do themselves in; the rest will find themselves in such a weakened condition that they will be easy prey for even the laziest lawman. In Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate), Director Bertrand Tavernier has had the good sense to cast Philippe Noiret, the underplayer's underplayer, as his seemingly indolent and ineffectual gendarme. Not so much as a knowing smirk crosses his angelic avenger's face as he sets most of his relatives...