Silent Terror

So Ross Anderson, aka “Wisconsin Whipsaw” and “Four-State Hooker Hacker,” languishes in a special protective custody facility, lifting weights, reading science-fiction novels and building expensive balsa-wood airplanes. The prisoner in the cell next to his is Salvatore DiStefano, the Cleveland Mafia underboss serving fifteen years on Racketeering charges. He and Anderson talk baseball through the bars for hours each day.

Martin Plunkett resides at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. He talks to no one, but is rumored to be considering writing his memoirs. He corresponds with various New York literary agents, all of whom are eager to peddle any book he writes. Offers from Hollywood — rumor has it that some studios have offered him as much as fifty thousand dollars for a twenty-page outline of his life — abound. Fifty thousand dollars divided by fifty victims comes down to a thousand dollars per head.

That’s obscene.

Plunkett wouldn’t be able to keep the money; New York State law prohibits convicted criminals from reaping the financial rewards of published or filmed accounts of their crimes, and Plunkett probably wouldn’t care — since his arrest he has brilliantly manipulated the legal and media establishments into waiting for him to tell his story his way. It is all he seems to want, and both well-intentioned legal people and literary voyeurs are drooling with anticipation.

It’s all obscene, and inimical to the American concepts of blind justice and punishment to fit the crime. It’s all obscene and points out the perfidies of free speech carried to the extreme of license. It’s all obscene and points to the need for a National Death Penalty Statute.