from 1994:
https://thestacks.deadspin.com/the-suff ... 1796892112Quote:
Michael’s wrath at the media for reporting his gambling problems waxed red after James Jordan’s death.
“Throughout this painful ordeal,” Michael said in a statement issued on August 19, “I never wavered from my conviction that Dad’s death was a random act of violence. Thus, I was deeply disturbed by the early reports speculating that there was a sinister connection [between Michael’s gambling activities and] Dad’s death. I was outraged when this speculation continued even after the arrest of the alleged murderers. These totally unsubstantiated reports reflect a complete lack of sensitivity to basic human decency.”
Right. No connection whatsoever. James Jordan, a fast-living man with a 1985 felony conviction for taking a kick-back, business debts and gambling problems of his own, father of the most celebrated man on the planet, disappears for three weeks, during which time his birthday falls, and nobody—not his wife and not the world-famous son who considered him a best friend—files a missing-person report. He winds up shot dead in the dark of hell’s backyard, dumped into a swamp in another state and burned as an anonymous pauper. His car is found 60 miles away, where the police take nearly a week to identify it. His widow says he called three days after he supposedly died. Within 48 hours of his identification, a backwoods sheriff produces two of an endless supply of blank, born-violent minority youths and puts them on trial for their lives after another open-and-shut investigation of another random killing in Robeson County.
. . .
Even if he turns state’s evidence, Demery may well get life. Either way, Daniel Green probably is headed to death row, where he’ll wait with 117 others, nearly half of them African-American. Someone killed James Jordan, and Sheriff Stone has all the proof Robeson County has ever required: two poor boys, one Indian, one black. The absence of physical evidence or witnesses, the conflicting dates and possible sightings, the botched Lexus investigation, the uncertainty as to the time and place of death—such things don’t fit and therefore don’t matter.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.