Category Archives: Crime

KILL THE RICH CHAPTER 2 By Peter Nolan Smith

Two NYPD homicide detectives stood in front of the Vent du Sol. Uniformed officers kept the curious behind the yellow tape. Dead men attract spectators. The rubberneckers weren’t looking for the victim to come back to life, but waited to see if anything else out of the ordinary happened on this quiet Upper East Side […]

THE ROAD TO KABUL by Peter Nolan Smith

Afghanistan was a two-day drive from Italy in the summer of 1972. At the end of the school year my future friend Gianni bought a school bus in Milano and told his parents that he was going on vacation. Kabul was his destination. His parents offered to pay the gas, viewing the venture as a […]

Osama Down

The USA has been fighting a decades-old war against Al-Quada. At one time its founder, Osama Bin Ladin had been our ally in the insurgency against the Soviets in Afghanistan. His family had ties to power brokers in Washington. Bin Laden’s schism with the West began in 1990 with the stationing of foreign troops on […]

On The Saudi Cross

In 2013 Saudi Arabia hit the headlines after a young Saudi prisoner announced that he had been sentenced to crucifixion for three days. The condemned man had been convicted of theft in 2009 and Sharia law in the southern province demanded capital punishment, even though main defendant, Sarhan al-Mashayeh, was 15 at the time of […]

Silence On Cellblock # 9

When I left the USA for Africa in February 2020 over 80,000 prisoners were incarcerated in solitary confinement in US prisons, which equals the entire penal population of the UK. The practice was first introduced in the Eastern State Penitentiary in 1830. The punitive toll on inmates had been touted by prison officials as the […]