Moving Down The List

Yesterday morning the world was buzzing with the news that the FBI had finally captured fugitive mob boss Whitey Bulger, after he had been on the run for 30 years. Turns out he was living in Southern California and they caught him because of the woman he been living with. (Apparently, Whitey never saw "Heat".) Coming just a month and a half after the government found and killed Osama bin Laden, you could say that the Intelligence Agencies are on quite the roll right now. (And wow, did people ever say that. Honestly, I was sick of the 'next they're going to find Waldo' jokes by noon.)

However, people are only interested in stories about capturing people for so long. Unlike with a scandal that can continue for weeks as new information comes along, stories like this have a pretty short shelf-life, unless you are in Boston, where this is pretty much the only news of the week. Not that I blame the news media around here because they've spent 30 years preparing Whitey Bulger stories. Much like having the obituary of a famous person ready to go with only the exact date of their death needing to be filled in, you can tell the newspapers had been sitting on all these "Bulger gets caught" headlines, wondering if they would ever get printed and are now being rolled out in force.

Still, if the Intelligence Agencies want to keep the good vibes and government funding rolling in, they are going to need to keep breaking big news stories by solving crimes we all thought would never be solved. To help them out, I came up with a few people they could look into finding.

-D.B. Cooper. Cooper skyjacked an airplane in 1971 and made off with $200,000, allegedly by parachuting out of that plane and into the woods. No one knows if he ever actually jumped, if he survived the landing or what became of the money. In this economy, finding that cash would be big news.

-Jimmy Hoffa. The former union boss went missing in 1975 and the big myth was that he was killed and buried under one of the endzones of Giants Stadium. People checked it out when they tore the stadium down and it wasn't true. I know that finding one man who's probably buried under the ground is going to be like trying to find a needle in haystack, but you mean to tell me with all the new housing developments that happen in the country no one has stumbled upon him yet? He's out there somewhere.

-Amelia Earhart. The first woman to try and fly around the world, she came up a bit short. But, wouldn't we all like to know just how short? Again, finding one plane that is probably at the bottom of the ocean somewhere won't be easy, but with how far technology and sonar have come, it can't be impossible, can it?

-Oscar Zeta Acosta. You probably haven't heard of this guy, but he was the inspiration for Hunter S. Thompson's character of Dr. Gonzo in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and he disappeared in Mexico in 1974. Either he died, or he's been on one hell of a trip for the last 37 years. If it's the latter that would make for one great story.

-Judge Joseph Crater. When the judge went missing in 1930, it became one of the first big missing person stories to grip America. Now, he's obviously dead, but I mostly want them to find him because when my mother used to complain about my room being dirty she would tell me they would find Judge Crater under a pile of my clothes. Even though that hasn't happened in 20 years, I would simply appreciate the reference being taken out of play.