Subject: Federal Bureau of Investigation

• Daily Briefs: Repent, scientists

  By CHRIS PACKHAM Gotta keep the devil way down in the hole: If you're like me, you spend a lot of time sitting in your darkened kitchen drinking Taster's Choice and listening to the police scanner, and you smell so strongly of Aqua Velva that you can see wavy blue-colored odor-lines wafting from your torso. And, thanks to the police scanner, you know that life in parts of Kansas City is terrifying and dangerous. Unfortunately for people who like numbers, such as Nate Silver and Jimmy the Greek,

  November 24, 2008

• Stealing Time: Christmas comes early this year?

  I didn't know Christmas was on Monday, December 22. You know who did? KCTV-5. Nick Sloan has screen shot proof thanks to our live, late breaking, investigative friends. So take Monday off. Tell your boss Katie Horner said it's Christmas (Chris Packham can't use that excuse, so look for Daily Briefs Monday).Meesha V. is cranky but his media tips are great. I especially like "kill yourself."Mark "Deep Throat" Felt, the ultimate anonymous source, is dead. This makes me a little sad. You know, in 19

  December 19, 2008

• Shon Pernice's lawyer vindicates Ethiopian cab driver accused of rape

  Attorney Kevin Baldwin (pictured) may act like an asshat -- as David Martin wrote earlier this week in his look at how Baldwin has handled the press while representing Shone Pernice, husband of missing white woman Renee Pernice -- but he's also a winner. Baldwin didn't have time to talk to Martin about the Pernice case. Guess he was busy defending an Ethiopian cab driver accused of raping a woman. Baldwin's office sent out a press release yesterday celebrating the not-guilty verdict that his cli

  January 16, 2009

• Kansas City Strip

  November 1, 2001

• Welcome Home

  November 29, 2001

• Johnny Come Lately

  August 19, 2004

• Best Case of Terror Alert Hysteria to Hit the Heartland

  October 7, 2004

• Copfest 2009! National Fusion Center Conference mobs downtown Marriott

  Did you know that there's an office at 635 Woodland that collects reports from local police departments about suspicious activities in the metro area and analyzes them for terrorist threats? And that "suspicious activities" can include taking pictures of questionable aesthetic value, lurking around potential terrorist targets like power plants and oil refineries, or looking up subversive stuff on the 'net? Amateur photographers who like staging photo shoots in the West Bottoms, you might wan

  March 11, 2009

• Pole Position

  August 3, 2006

• Daily Briefs: Power-bombing journalism through a folding table since 2008

  South by Southwest: Apparently, Johnson County is weathering the economic collapse a little better than Kansas City, Missouri. I'm moving to Overland Park, you guys. I've had it with Hobotown, its frustratingly spotty bus service, budget cuts, shiny prefabricated entertainment district, and punk-ass Child Protective Services department. If that bitch Doreen from CPS don't stop stickin' her nose into my business, one of these days, I'm gonna pop her one right in her smug fat face. She's all, "

  April 6, 2009

• Set to make millions with their YouTube-beating technology, the upstarts in Lifted Logic found a better market for their talents

  January 29, 2009

• Traitor

  August 28, 2008

• Shauntay Speaks

  Awaiting trial in March, Shauntay Henderson remembers her community-activist grandmother and dreams of making babies.

  January 24, 2008

• To Save Souls

  December 6, 2007

• Kansas City Strip

  Gambling companies bet on sneaky tactics while Leonard Peltier bets on Bill Clinton's clemency pen.

  December 28, 2000

• Moved Again

  Crossroads Infoshop Re-Settles

  September 13, 2007

• Katie Talks

  The weatherwoman much maligned for her storm reports gets a cop-style grilling from us.

  August 16, 2007

• Shauntay's Elite Club

  April 12, 2007

• Spy vs. Spy

  February 15, 2007

• Dear Katheryn

  January 11, 2007

• Prison Break Blues

  November 9, 2006

• All the President's Men Deep Thoughts by Redford

  February 23, 2006

• Parental Advisory

  November 17, 2005

• Backwash

  September 1, 2005

• The Beauty of Fake

  Attention shoppers: If you have the connections, you, too, can get the goods!

  June 2, 2005

• Go Ask aAlice

  This Chameleon's bound to have good karma.

  May 5, 2005

• Night & Day Events

  Week of March 17, 2004

  March 17, 2005

• Redemption Thong

  Salma's shorts get top billing in an otherwise unwatchable caper.

  November 11, 2004

• Garden of Evil

  A Kansas school board member lurks in the slime.

  October 21, 2004

• Screenplay Zero

  Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley struggle through floundering frights.

  August 26, 2004

• The Anarchists' Datebook

  The FBI's anti-terrorism task force goes Info-shopping.

  August 5, 2004

• What a Drag

  January 1, 2004

• Flesh for Fantasy

  Brett Ratner tarts up Red Dragon.

  October 3, 2002

• Murder By Numbers

  The strange case of cross-dresser Jovan Ross lives on.

  September 19, 2002

• Hearse Nurse

  Nurse Richard Williams has never been charged, but he's suspected in 42 murders.

  November 1, 2001

• Best Place to Relive Childhood

  Reading Reptile

  October 18, 2001

• Night & Day Events

  Week of October 11, 2001

  October 11, 2001

• Hit Happens

  Sometimes, even a drug dealer can have a really bad day.

  September 6, 2001

• Ryders of the Storm

  McVeigh is dead, but John Does 2, 3, 4 and 5 live on.

  June 14, 2001

• Trouble in Mind

  The Cell dives into a killer's brain, but it's a shallow pool

  August 17, 2000

• Love on the run

  Prison-break sweethearts Lynette Barnett and Terry Banks were on the run for seven weeks untill they got nabbed by America's Most Wanted

  March 16, 2000

• Journalists school themselves

  Local journos -- including all you citizen journalists out there in the blogosphere -- are invited to a Saturday morning session in which a panel of "newsmakers" and reporters will talk about some hypothetical yet ethically dicey news events and how they might be covered. On the newsmakin' side are former FBI agent Jeff Lanza, attorney Eric Vernon and retired Marine Col. Bob Lewis. Representing journalists are Micheal Mahoney of KMBC, Dave Helling from the Star and Chris Hernandez from NBC Actio

  May 8, 2009

• Author Joel Goldman

  May 14, 2009

• Reporter's Notebook: Skillicorn and the Mexico murder

  Dennis Skillicorn, courtesy of Paula SkillicornWhen Dennis Skillicorn was picked up by California Highway Patrol and turned over to the FBI, he was pretty fried. On the run, he'd spent weeks with little food, even less sleep, and God knows how much meth. Meth, he explained to me during our prison interview at Potosi, can turn reality into a paranoid, shape-shifting nightmare. "It will literally have you shooting the neighbor's cat because you think he might have a radio transmitter in his collar

  May 14, 2009

• Two Kansas City neighborhoods ranked among the 10 most violent in America

  Hooray for Kansas City! Two KCMO neighborhoods ranked in the top 10 most violent neighborhoods in America. A site called Wallet Pop ranked "the 25 neighborhoods with the highest predicted rates of violent crime in America" by using FBI data and data from the site NeighborhoodScout.com.Those neighborhoods are 30th Street and Bales Avenue, which ranked as the sixth most violent neighborhood, ... View Larger Map And 41st Street and Forest Avenue, which ranked eighth, ... View Larger Map The si

  June 23, 2009

• Kansas City is responsible for new Johnny Depp gangster movie

  This weekend the highly anticipated film Public Enemies opens. It's the story of outlaw John Dillinger and stars Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, so you know it'll probably make a shit-ton of cash. Plus, it was directed by Michael Mann, and that guy knows his way around cops and robbers and bullets (ahem, Heat, everyone?).But without Kansas City, there'd be no badass shootouts to film. I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you that John Dillinger was shot to death by federal a

  June 30, 2009

• Concert Review: T-Model Ford at Davey's

  Some folks have mantras. And others have mantras. Baby, look what you get if you don't clown. But if you clownin', you don't get a doggone thing. This, evidently, is the mantra -- emphasis on the first syllable -- of 89-year-old bluesman T-Model Ford. He uttered some variation of this maxim at the finish of the songs he played during his two-hour set last night at Davey's Uptown Ramblers Club. Those words represented a good portion of the lyrical/spoken side of T-Model's performance. Grinn

  July 16, 2009

• The Informant

  September 17, 2009

• A Q&A with local FBI agent portrayed in The Informant!

  Matt Damon in The Informant!​In Steven Soderbergh's new movie The Informant!, Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a bio-chemist at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) who sets off an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into allegations of price-fixing at the agricultural industry giant. Whitacre suffers from delusions of grandeur (among other things) and is all too eager to make the feds' case by recording insider conversations. He imagines that when it's all over, his grateful bosses wi

  September 17, 2009

• Olathe Subway closed after FBI gunfight last night

  ​The lunch bunch in Olathe will need to find a new place to get a $5 footlong. FBI agents engaged in a gunfight with a man in the parking lot outside of a Subway at 151st and Ridgeview last night. The man -- wanted for aggravated assault -- was shot and taken to a hospital in critical condition, Fox 4 reports. Check Fox 4's video (and the screenshot at the right). Note the truck and Corvette riddled with bullets. Ouch.

  November 2, 2009