Tag Archives: crime

“Look at me, top of the leader board!”

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Reading Paul Mullen’s Running Amok for the Telegraph, 27 September 2025

Paul Mullen has spent years trying to understand the internal world of the lone mass killer: the sort of person who draws their weapon in a school, on a factory floor, or at a supermarket. In this pursuit, says Mullen – a forensic psychiatrist – we should remember, and admit, that everyone has the odd unpleasant impulse from time to time: it’s part of being human. So, he writes, when discussing the most sickening criminals, we mustn’t “endow perfectly normal mental mechanisms with a pathological, sinister significance”.

For example, many of us feel undervalued. Many of us feel in possession of skills and attributes that, in a better world, would surely bring us recognition. Who among us has not looked in the mirror and met a creature consumed by resentment or depression? Life can be crushing, and as Mullen says, “disappointed, egotistical, isolated and rigid men are ten-a-penny.” Pushed to the edge, they’re much more likely to put an end to themselves than go out in a blaze of vicious “glory”. (The male suicide rate in the UK last year was 17.4 deaths per 100,000 people, vastly larger than the rate of male deaths by homicide.)

Mullen is best known for his research into the link between common-or-garden jealousy and the obsessional, sometimes homicidal, behaviour of stalkers. He takes a similar tack in Running Amok, a devastating compendium of mass killings, arranged by locale and severity. Many lone mass killers, we learn, are persistent whiners – “querulants” is Mullen’s term-of-art – which led me to wonder what our burgeoning culture of complaint is doing to stoke their fires. From those who self-righteously pursue their grievances to others who seem to live fantasies of battling persecution, you wonder how thin the cognitive dividing-line can safely grow. And yet: whether or not the world is filling up with narcissistic whiners, most of them don’t turn to slaughter. So what leads a handful to make that change? Or, to put it another way, what actuates them even more than what, in truth, are the perfectly common means (guns, vehicles, knives), and motive (the desire for “a semblance of power and significance”)?

Mullen, who has met a wide range of criminals across his professional career, and was the first non-military defence expert to gain access to the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, points the finger at the availability of an incident the would-be killer can emulate: what Mullen calls a “social script”. In his experience, mass killers are invariably fixated on reports of previous massacres; also on their fictional depiction. Rambo is a fine movie, intelligently written, but there’s a reason the DVD keeps turning up on the shelves of such people.

As societies change, so do the scripts they make available to the despondent, the despairing, the rejected and the humiliated. In the 1970s and early 1980s, homicidal losers used to fixate on a belief; now they’re more likely to kill in the name of a group. The 2016 Orlando killer Omar Mateen claimed allegiance to both Isis and Hizbullah: a neat trick, given how violently these groups are opposed to each other. In this shift from ideology to tribe, Mullen detects the influence of the internet, with its pseudo-communities of extremists desperate to represent some persecuted minority.

The other essential characteristic of these scripts is that they are self-perpetuating. Killers inspire killers. It’s why Mullen won’t mention the killers he’s writing about by name, a tactic that gives the reader the initial impression – quickly dispelled – that the author is only marginally acquainted with his subject matter. On the contrary, Mullen anatomises, with skill and a certain amount of garrulousness, what seems a desperately intractable problem, noting in particular the inflammatory influence of a predominantly on-line incel culture, the depredations of the attention economy, and the addictiveness of certain videogames. The violence or otherwise of these games is not at issue: much more important is their ability to offer the pathologically lonely a semblance of social validation: “Look at me, top of the leader board!” Internet tribalisms of all sorts service the lone killer’s need to belong — and not just to belong, but to crawl to the top of some specious hierarchy. “I’ve got the record, haven’t I?” was practically the first question Martin Bryant asked after shooting and killing 35 people and injuring 23 others in the Tasmanian tourist town of Port Arthur in 1996.

So much for sociology. Mullen would sooner engage with the extreme inner worlds of lone mass killers than explain them away with platitudes. Whatever maddened these people in the first place (and let’s face it, some people are just born miserable), by the time mass homicide seems like a solution to their problems, they are, by any common definition of the term, mad, and should be treated as such.

This is where Mullen turns to discuss, of all people, Queen Victoria. Across her long reign, she was the victim of eight assassination attempts. By the time she died, entirely peacefully, the Metropolitan Police had learned that the most effective strategy for avoiding or mitigating attacks on a permanently public target was, as far as possible, to dampen down publicity. Ever since, would-be regicides have been arrested without fanfare, and often ushered into psychiatric treatment. Thus, within the bounds of law, a security issue has been turned into a public-health one.

Mullen would like to see potential lone mass killers spotted and treated in much the same way. He proposes a Threat Assessment and Response Centre (targeted on random killings) modelled on the Met’s Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, which handles the security of known targets. Faced with a credible threat, the Centre should be given access to the suspect’s police and medical records and their internet history. Why? Because identification is ninety per cent of the battle. Treatment, by comparison, is startingly simple: obsessives on the path to atrocity are, in Mullen’s experience, remarkably cooperative and frank with those who’ve managed to stop them.

At the time of writing, there have been just over 300 mass shootings in America so far, and while gun-control laws may have preserved Britain and other Western countries from that specific plague, a spate of vehicle ramming attacks in Nice, Berlin, London, Barcelona, Stockholm and other European cities have left us, and our security services, in a state of hypervigilance.

So can we do anything? Mullen wants us to overcome our reticence and take seriously the threats made by miserable obsessives. False alarms will be raised, but psychologists aren’t witch-finders, Mullen assures us — in fact much of his time is spent avoiding the false attribution of madness in the people he meets.

I fear public awareness won’t do much good, however. Now that civic society has declared war on nuance and arrests people (or, Graham Linehan, anyway) for jokes, how can any of us be expected to hear the signal over the noise?

An all-out cyberwar is coming

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Watching Billion Dollar Heist by Daniel Gordon for New Scientist, 6 September 2023

On Thursday, 4 February 2016, after a year of meticulous malware-enabled close observation of its computer systems, an international criminal group called Lazarus tried to steal a billion dollars from Bangladesh Bank. The country’s central bank was a soft target, with no firewall, and simple $10 electronic switches connecting it to the SWIFT global payment system — used by over 11,000 financial institutions around the world.

The Federal Reserve in New York, meanwhile, is the largest bank in the world, housed in one of its most secure buildings, with its own power plant, water supply and communications system. One problem: back in 2016, it hadn’t thought to put in an emergency hotline for its customers. This, in an institution responsible for providing financial services to foreign central banks and international organisations as well as to the US government, has since proved to be, shall we say, a source of embarrassment.

An interview with British investigative journalist Misha Glenny provides the narrative for Billion Dollar Heist, a documentary that makes up, with its talking heads and comic-book graphics, what it lacks in expensive location shots. Reuters journalist Krishna Das guides us through the heist itself. Of the 35 financial transactions Lazarus attempted, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York cleared five, sending 101 million dollars in two directions: $20 million to Sri Lanka (where a spelling error raised a red flag and stopped the transaction) and $81 million to the Philippines, where Under Philippine banking laws, the stolen funds could not be frozen until a criminal case was lodged. Most of the $81 million disappeared into the country’s casino industry, which is exempted from anti-money laundering laws, and was lost, presumably forever.

Requests for payment continued to pour in, totalling around a billion dollars. By then, though, and frankly more by luck than good management, the fraud had been detected. (The fraud: not the hack. That took months to unpick.)

Finnish computer security expert Mikko Hyppönen and Eric Chien, technical director of Symantec’s Security Technology and Response division, lead the film’s discussion of the implications.

The Lazarus Group, bankrolled by the North Korean government, was responsible for the heist. In 2017, a year after the events recounted here, it attacked five Asian crypto exchanges and made off with $571 million.

If they worked purely to line their own pockets, this would be bad enough, but such organisations — and there are about a dozen of them, including APT 10 (backed by China) and Sandworm (backed by Russia) — are very much thieves for hire, riding the boom in state-sponsored cybercrime that’s been triggered, we’re told here, by the growing effectiveness of the global sanctions regime.

If the daylight world of international diplomacy stops your bank accounts, you know who to call.

Billion Dollar Heist is directed by Daniel Gordon, a sports documentary maker whose 2002 film, about the 1966 North Korea national football team drew him into more politically charged territory. True to his pedigree, he spins a logistically complex story in terms that are easy to follow. No ponderous political generalisations cloud his narrative. This is a caper movie, albeit one with a vicious sting in the tale, as Misha Glenny spends the last few minutes of screentime preparing us for the world this heist and others are ushering in. The world hasn’t had an all-out cyberwar yet, but it’s coming, care of Lazarus and other groups the US State Department has designated “Advanced Persistent Threats”.

Health services, transport networks, communications, finance and the apparatus of government: all are a single human error away from compromise, and then annihilation.

Remember that, next time you forget your keys.

You wouldn’t stop here for gas

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Reading Lyndsie Bourgon’s Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in the Woods for the Telegraph, 12 July 2022

Worldwide, the illegal timber trade is worth around 157 billion dollars a year. According to oral historian Lyndsie Bourgon, thirty per cent of the world’s wood trade is illegal, and around 80 per cent of all Amazonian wood harvested today is “poached” (a strange term to apply to timber, which would struggle to fit into the largest poche or pocket — but evocative nonetheless). $1 billion worth of wood is poached yearly in North America.

Bourgon focuses her account on thefts from public lands and forest parks of the Pacific North-West. There are giants here, and Methuselahs. “Old-growth” trees, more than two hundred years old, are intagliated with each others’ root systems, with fungal hyphae and with other soil systems we’ve barely begun to understand. Entire ecosystems may stand or fall on the survival of a single 800-year-old red cedar — an organism so huge it may take weeks or months to saw up and remove from the forest, leaving a trail of sawdust, felling wedges and abandoned equipment.

That the trade in such timber was not sustainable has never been a secret, and to save some of the world’s oldest and biggest trees, the Redwood National Park was established in 1968.

But while the corporations received compensation for their lost profits, the promised direct government relief for workers never materialised. “Do you know what it’s like to work 20 years, then sleep in a pick-up truck?” asked Seattle’s archbishop Thomas Murphy, at a 1994 summit attended by the new president, Bill Clinton; “A way of life is dying.”

North America’s oldest timber companies were founded near the town of Orick, on the banks of the Redwood Creek in Humboldt County, California. Orick’s first commercial sawmill opened in 1908. Orick is now home to just under 400 people. You wouldn’t stop here for gas on your way to a luxury cabin on US Forest Service land, or a heated yurt by Park Canada.

To live in Orick is to feel the walls closing in: one woodsman turned poacher, Danny Garcia, likens the sensation “to having your car break down in the middle of nowhere — you’ve no cash to fix it and no way out.”

This, says Garcia, is where his “tree troubles” started, but he wasn’t the first to go sawing chunks out of giants. His partner in crime Chris Guffie says: “I’ve been at it for so doggone long. It’s like Yogi Bear and the park ranger.”

“To begin to understand the sadness and violence of poaching,” says Bourgon, “we need to consider how a tree became something that could be stolen in the first place.” Like it or not, conservation has patrician roots: in the 1890s, organisations like the New York Sportsmen’s Club lobbied to ensure access to game and fish for its members. Dedicated hunting and fishing seasons suited their sporting clientele, but as a letter to a Wyoming paper put it: “When you say to a ranchman, ‘You can’t eat game, except in season,’ you make him a poacher, because he is neither going hungry himself nor have his family do so…”

Remove land from a community, Bourgon argues, and you make poaching “a deed of necessity”. So why not buy the land and give it back to its people, along with the tools to protect and manage it. Going by the experiences of the 59 community forests that now dot the province of British Columbia, community forests create twice as many jobs as those run by independent industry.

Of necessity, however, Bourgon spends more pages explaining the workings of a solution more palatable to central authority: an ever-more interconnected system of police surveillance, involving cameras, magnetic plates, LIDAR and, most recently, genetic testing. Even as Bourgon wrote this book, a genetic map was being assembled to make wood products, at least in the Pacific North-West, traceable to their original growing locations. The brilliance of this effort, spearheaded by Rich Cronn at the Oregon State University at Corvallis, cannot hide the fact that it is facilitating an age-old mistake: substituting enforcement for engagement.

Bourgon gives a voice both to the rangers risking their lives to save some of the planet’s oldest trees, and to poachers like Danny Garcia whose original sin was his unwillingness to leave the home of his ancestors. Full of the most varied testimonies, and by no mean fudging the issue that timber poaching is a crime and an environmental violation, Tree Thieves nonetheless testifies to the love of the woodsman for the wood. Drive through Orick sometime, and you will discover that communities are an ecology, too, and one worthy of care.

Hurtling towards zero

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Watching Richard Ladkani’s Sea of Shadows for New Scientist, 2 October 2019

This is the story of the world’s smallest whale, the vaquita, reduced in number to fewer than 30 individuals, and hiding out in the extreme south-western corner of its territory in the Sea of Cortez. It is not a story that will end well, though Richard Ladkani (whose 2016 Netflix documentary The Ivory Game was shortlisted for the Oscars in 2017) has made something here which is very hard to look away from.

This is not an environmental story. This is a true crime. No-one’s interested in hunting the vaquita. The similarly sized Totoaba fish, which shares the vaquita’s waters, is another matter. It’s called the cocaine of the sea — a nickname that makes no sense whatsoever until you learn that the Mexican drug cartels have moved into the totoaba business to satisfy demand from the Chinese luxury market. (It’s the usual film-flam: the fish’s swim bladders are supposed to possess rare medical properties. )

Illegal gill nets that catch the totoaba — itself a rapidly declining population — also catch and kill vaquitas. The government talks a good environmental game but has let the problem get out of hand. Law-abiding fishing communities are ruined by blanket fishing bans while the illegals operate with near-impunity. Late on in the film, there’s some CCTV footage of a couple of soldiers having some car trouble. They ask for help from a passing motorist. Who shoots one of the soldiers dead. Bam. Just like that. And drives away. Meet Oscar Parra, the tortoaba padron of Santa Clara. (I said you couldn’t look away; I didn’t say you wouldn’t want to.)

Things are so bad, a scheme is dreamt up to remove the remaining vaquitas from the ocean and keep them in captivity. It’s an absurdly desperate move, because virtually nothing is known about the vaquita’s disposition and habits. (Some locals believe the creature is a myth dreamt up by a hostile government to bankrupt the poor: how’s that for fake news?) Project leader Cynthia Smith explains the dilemma facing the vaquita: “possible death in our care or certain death in the ocean”. She knows what she’s doing — she a senior veterinarian for the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program — but no one has ever tried to capture, let alone keep, a vaquita before. This could go very wrong indeed. (And still, you cannot look away…)

Sea of Shadows won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in February this year; National Geographic snapped it up for $3million. It’s built around a collaborative investigation between Andrea Crosta, executive director and co-founder of Earth League International (the hero-detectives of The Ivory Game) and Carlos Loret de Mola, a popular correspondent and news anchor in Mexico, whose topical show Despierta reaches an international audience of 35 million people a day. Crosta and de Mola and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, their maritime partners in crime-prevention, are all of them expert in handling and appealing to the media. Everything about this film that might rankle the viewer is entirely deliberate — the film’s “whodunnit” structure, the way all content is crammed into a pre-storyboarded narrative, then squeezed to release a steady drip-drip-drip of pre-digested information. Sea of Shadows is pure NatGeo fodder, and if you don’t like that channel much, you won’t like this at all.

Just bear in mind, the rest of us will be perching on the edge of our sofas, in thrall to drone-heavy cinematography that owes not a little to Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 thriller Sicario, rocked by a thumping score full of dread and menace, and appalled by a story headed pell-mell for the dark.

Rare resources are doomed to extinction eventually because the rarer a resource is, the more expensive it is, and the more incentive there is to trade in it. This is why, past a certain point, rare stocks hurtle towards zero.

Can the vaquita be saved? Sea of Shadows was made in 2018 and says there are fewer than 30 vaquitas in the ocean.

Today there are fewer than 10.