Word: stormed
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...famous, although nobody had any idea at the time. One is a tiny baby sitting in his mother's lap. The other is a smiling, tough-looking, pompadoured fellow standing behind her. The baby would grow up to be Sebastian Junger, the mega-selling author of The Perfect Storm, the true story of a fishing boat lost at sea. The smiling guy was a handyman named Albert DeSalvo. History would come to know him as the Boston Strangler...
...route to his home in New York City. Junger is by trade a prowler of battlefields and wildernesses, and his placid, well-heeled hometown was not the most obvious starting point. "I liked the idea partly because it was the exact opposite kind of story from The Perfect Storm," he says. "It's not an adventure story. There are no 100-ft. waves. And I just frankly wanted to know what happened...
DeSalvo, on the other hand, was a nightmare straight out of Thomas Harris. Born into a violent home in a rough neighborhood, he was a perfect storm of another kind--handsome enough to talk his way into women's homes, sick enough to rape and kill, smart enough to cover his tracks afterward. "All I know is that something would happen and I would have my arms around their necks," he told an investigator. (Junger makes extensive and creepily effective use of police transcripts.) DeSalvo sometimes posed his victims after the crime for shock value and left the victim...
...also proof of how messy democracy can be. In Belarus, just several days before President Alexander Lukashenko ordered his storm troopers to meet the flowers and colored balloons of a peaceful people's march with clubs, tear gas and stun grenades, I happened to overhear a Western observer. The gentleman, apparently Italian, was admiring the impeccable organization of Lukashenko's election: all so orderly, just like in Switzerland, he enthused. Well, yes, order is admirable - didn't the trains run on time under Mussolini, which doesn't always happen in Italy under democracy? That's the eternal problem: democracy...
...floor, until Larry's 40-km-wide eye suddenly arrived over Innisfail. It was about 7 a.m. Karl screamed frantically for his wife and was amazed when she screamed back. They ran to a neighbor's low-slung brick house to wait out the rest of the storm...