November
7 , 2003
Front-Page
News
Lawless
Enforcer Mount
Holyoke criminologist Richard Moran reviewed the memoirs of
Edward J. MacKenzie Jr., a brutal Boston gangster, in the October
26 Chicago Tribune and found it both gripping and horrifying: “In
my 25 years of studying crime and criminals, I have never come
across a book quite like Street Soldier:
My Life As an Enforcer for Whitey Bulger and the Boston Irish
Mob. One-third of the
way through, I had to put it down, because I was so shaken
by the depraved life and gruesome events that it openly describes,” Moran
wrote.
“Even today, at 45 and more than 10 years into retirement
as an enforcer for James ‘Whitey’ Bulger—the
Irish gangster from South Boston who is second only to Osama
bin Laden in terms of how much reward money the FBI is offering
for his capture — MacKenzie still projects the image of
a dangerous man. A self-described violent predator, he is quick
to remark that he feels no remorse for the damage he has inflicted
on others.”
In fact, Moran has more than read the book. He knows MacKenzie and has had him
share his experiences with a class at the College.
“‘I have never lost a night’s sleep,’ [MacKenzie] said
at one of my classes’ seminars at Mt. Holyoke College,’” according
to Moran’s review. “‘I did what I had to do to survive. Like
a lion, I was a predator, and the streets of Southie was my Serengeti. Does a
lion feel remorse when he returns to the pride after a kill?’ He answered
his own question. ‘Of course not. He feels good. His belly is full, and
his predatory instinct has been satisfied.’”
On another subject, Moran was quoted in an October 27 piece, also in the Chicago
Tribune, regarding findings that police and prosecutors are, for a variety of
reasons, often unable to identify new suspects for serious crimes after a suspect
had been tried and found not guilty or set free as a result of appeal.
“Prosecutors and police can become so wedded to initial theories of how
a crime occurred that it can be difficult, they acknowledge, to start anew when
an inmate is set free,” the Tribune noted. “‘For prosecutors
and police, these cases are more to them than just having made a mistake or a
mistake was made,’ said Richard Moran, a professor of sociology
and criminology at Mount Holyoke College. “‘They have gone to court
and argued these people are guilty. They need a full emotional commitment to
that position, otherwise how can they prosecute them and send them to prison?
That is difficult to change.’”
The Big Picture Anthony Lee, associate professor of art, discussed
the work of Diane Arbus on Forum, a program of National Public
Radio member station WQED in San Francisco. Lee, cocurator of
Diane Arbus: Family Albums, now on display at the Art Museum,
was joined by Sandra Phillips, senior curator of photography
at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Vicki Goldberg,
a photography writer whose article on Diane Arbus appears in
this month’s Vanity Fair. The one-hour radio program, which
aired on October 24, was timed to coincide with the opening of
the Diane Arbus Revelations exhibition at SFMOMA. CNN.com also
reported on the San Francisco and Mount Holyoke Arbus exhibitions
in an October 28 article titled “Diane Arbus’ Strange
Faces and Places.”
Taking Her Lead MHC’s third annual Take the Lead conference
attracted 38 high school juniors from across the United States
this fall. Among them was Kara Schnabel of Barrington, Rhode
Island, who was profiled in the October 28 edition of the Providence
Journal. In “What This Girl Wants Is a Way to Make a Difference,” reporter
Jessica Ullian wrote about Schnabel’s experience during
Take the Lead, and how the skills she learned will help her work
toward her goal of creating an “armchair travel” club
for elderly residents of her town. “The conference, now
in its fourth year, is a four-day workshop in which teenage girls
are asked to come in with an idea about how to change their worlds,
and leave with a plan to do so,” the story read. Patricia
VandenBerg, MHC’s executive director of communications
and strategic initiatives and the founder of Take the Lead, told
Ullian, “It’s a very exciting program. We get these
high-achieving young women who really have a desire to make a
difference in the world, and we are able to help them do that.”
Ballot Measures When offered up to six choices
from a field of 14 candidates, how can a voter best maximize
her vote? Douglas Amy, professor of politics and an authority
on voting systems, helped the Daily Camera of Boulder, Colorado,
answer that question for its readers in light of an impending
City Council election. In “Vote Once—or Six Times,” Amy
explained that the more candidates a voter picks, the less weighty
the voter’s support for any one of them becomes. “If
a voter agrees with the viewpoint of Boulder’s political
majority—socially progressive, slow-growth and environmentally
concerned—voting for six like-minded candidates would make
sense,” wrote staff writer Greg Avery, quoting Amy. “But,
for someone who dislikes the status quo, Amy recommends voting
for only one or two candidates who promise to change things.
Forgoing four or five votes may not feel empowering to a voter,
Amy said, but it will make it more likely that at least one member
of the council is someone that voter supports.”
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