Tag: Crime

Formula One champ kidnapped


Year
1958
Month Day
February 23

On February 23, 1958, five-time Formula One champion Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina is kidnapped in Cuba by a group of Fidel Castro’s rebels.

Fangio was taken from his Havana hotel the day before the Cuba Grand Prix, an event intended to showcase the island nation. He was released unharmed several hours after the race. The kidnapping was intended to bring international embarrassment to Cuban President Fulgencio Batista, whose government Castro would overthrow on January 1, 1959.

In addition to Fangio’s kidnapping, the Cuba Grand Prix was marred by tragedy when a Cuban driver named Armando Garcia Cifuentes lost control of his car on an oil-slicked part of the street course and plowed into a crowd on onlookers. Seven people were killed and dozens more injured. The crash led to immediate speculation that Castro’s followers had sabotaged the course by coating it with oil; however, it was later believed that a broken oil line in a car driven by Argentina’s Roberto Mieres was the cause of the slick spot.

The kidnapping incident occurred at the end of Juan Manuel Fangio’s storied career. Fangio, who was born on June 24, 1911, in Balcarce, Argentina, quit school at the age of 11 to work as a mechanic’s assistant and as a young man raced “souped-up passenger cars on the unpaved roads of South America,” according to his 1995 obituary in The New York Times. After modern Formula One racing began in 1950, Fangio collected his first world championship in 1951. He repeated this feat in 1954, 1955, 1956 and 1957. Fangio left racing in 1958, stating that the cars had become too fast and dangerous. According to the Times: “That he survived to enjoy his wealth despite racing in an era without seat belts and fire-retardant uniforms was a credit to his skills, the cars he drove and no small measure of luck.”

Fangio died in Buenos Aires at the age of 84 on July 17, 1995. His record of five Formula One world titles stood until 2003, when Germany’s Michael Schumacher won his sixth world championship (Schumacher retired in 2006 with a total of seven world titles).

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Bill Cosby’s son murdered along CA interstate


Year
1997
Month Day
January 16

On January 16, 1997, disgraced comedian and TV star Bill Cosby’s 27-year-old son Ennis Cosby is murdered after he stops to fix a flat tire along California’s Interstate 405 in Los Angeles. The 405, which runs some 70 miles from Irvine to San Fernando, is known as one of the planet’s busiest and most congested roadways. Construction began on Interstate 405 in the late 1950s, with the first section opening in the early 1960s.

At approximately 1 a.m. on January 16, 1997, Ennis Cosby, a graduate student in special education at Columbia University Teachers College who was on vacation in Los Angeles, was driving a Mercedes-Benz convertible on Interstate 405 when he pulled off to Skirball Center Drive to change a flat tire. A Ukrainian-born teenager, Mikhail Markhasev, and two friends were at a nearby park-and-ride lot using the phone. Markhasev, reportedly high on drugs, approached Cosby to rob him but when Cosby took too long to hand over money he was shot and killed. Ennis Cosby was the third of Bill Cosby’s five children and said to be the inspiration for the character of Theo Huxtable on the hit TV sitcom “The Cosby Show,” which originally aired from 1984 to 1992.

In August 1998, Markhasev, then 19, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for Cosby’s murder. During his trial, Markhasev reportedly showed no remorse for his crime; however, in 2001, he confessed his guilt, stopped his appeals process and apologized to the Cosby family.

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Charles F. Kettering, inventor of electric self-starter, is born

Year
1876
Month Day
August 29

Charles Franklin Kettering, the American engineer and longtime director of research for General Motors Corp. (GM), is born on August 29, 1876, in Loudonville, Ohio. Of the 140 patents Kettering obtained over the course of his lifetime, perhaps the most notable was his electric self-starter for the automobile, patented in 1915.

Early in his career, Kettering worked at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio, where he helped develop the first cash register to be equipped with an electric motor that opened the register drawer. With Edward A. Deeds, he formed Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO), a business dedicated to designing equipment for automobiles. Kettering’s key-operated electric self-starting ignition system, introduced on Cadillac vehicles in 1912 and patented three years later, made automobiles far easier and safer to operate than they had been previously, when the ignition process had been powered by iron hand cranks. By the 1920s, electric self-starters would come standard on nearly every new automobile.

United Motors Corporation (which later became General Motors) purchased DELCO in 1916, installing Kettering as vice president and director of research at GM from 1920 to 1947. During his tenure at GM, Kettering was instrumental in the development of improved engines, quick-drying automobile paints and finishes, “anti-knock” fuels (designed to reduce the damaging process of engine knocking, which occurs when gasoline ignites too early in an internal combustion engine) and variable-speed transmissions, among other innovations.

Kettering’s passion for invention spread far beyond the automotive industry: He helped develop the refrigerant Freon, used in refrigerators and air conditioners, and took an active role in the medical industry, inventing a treatment for venereal disease, an incubator for premature infants and artificial fever therapy. Highly devoted to education, he helped found the Flint Institute of Technology in 1919 and the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) in 1926. In 1945, he and longtime General Motors head Alfred P. Sloan established the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York City.

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Doctor is killed by anti-abortion radical

Year
1998
Month Day
October 23

Doctor Barnett Slepian is shot to death inside his home in Amherst, New York by an anti-abortion radical. His killing marks the fifth straight year that an abortion-providing doctor in upstate New York and Canada became the victim of a sniper attack. 

Slepian and his family had just returned from religious services at their synagogue when a bullet shattered the kitchen window and struck him in the back. Each of the five attacks, the first four of which did not result in fatal wounds, occurred in late October or early November. 

Investigators in both Canada and the United States believed that James Charles Kopp, known among abortion opponents as “Atomic Dog,” was responsible for Slepian’s murder. Although he had been seen in the vicinity of Slepian’s home in the weeks before the killing, Kopp, a member of the terrorist group Army of God, was nowhere to be found after the incident.

In the aftermath of Slepian’s murder, at least four doctors in upstate New York quit practicing, and countless other clinic staff members left their jobs. Following Slepian’s murder, a serious crackdown on anti-abortion terror cut down the number of violent incidents. 

In 1999, for the first time in six years, there were no sniper attacks against any doctors during the course of the year. As the 20th century came to an end, Kopp remained at large, despite a $500,000 reward for information leading to his capture from the Justice Department and his place on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. 

In March 2001, the authorities caught up with Kopp in Europe, and he was extradited from France on the condition he would not receive the death penalty. Kopp, whose defense argued he only intended to wound Slepian, was convicted of second-degree murder. On May 9, 2003, Kopp was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

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