Longreads Best of 2014: Crime Reporting

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories.

我们要求一些作家和编辑在特定类别中选择一些他们今年最喜欢的故事。

Here, the best in crime reporting.

这里有最好的犯罪报道。

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Ashley Powers

阿什利·鲍尔斯

Freelance journalist in Miami and a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.

迈阿密自由记者，《洛杉矶时报》前全国记者。

## By Noon They’d Both Be In Heaven (Hanna Rosin, New York Magazine)

## 到中午他们都会在天堂（Hanna Rosin，纽约杂志）

Kelli Stapleton is a Michigan mom who admitted to a particularly heinous crime: trying to kill her 14-year-old autistic daughter, Issy, via carbon monoxide poisoning.

凯莉·斯泰普尔顿 (Kelli Stapleton) 是一位密歇根州的母亲，她承认犯下了一件特别令人发指的罪行：试图通过一氧化碳中毒杀死她 14 岁的自闭症女儿伊西 (Issy)。

In a lesser journalist’s hands, she could have ended up a caricature, but Rosin tells her story solely in shades of gray.

在一个小记者的手中，她可能会成为一幅漫画，但罗辛只用灰色阴影讲述她的故事。

One minute your heart breaks for Kelli, and the next you fume at her apparent selfishness.

前一分钟你还为凯莉心碎，下一分钟你就对她明显的自私感到愤怒。

Kelli spent years on an exhausting form of therapy for her daughter in hopes of coaxing out “the Isabelle that was in there.” Instead, Issy grew into a sometimes-violent teenager who repeatedly knocked Kelli unconscious.

凯莉花了数年时间对女儿进行令人筋疲力尽的治疗，希望能哄出“里面的伊莎贝尔”。相反，伊西成长为一个有时有暴力倾向的青少年，多次将凯莉打昏。

Kelli blogged about her struggles, ostensibly to raise awareness, but her look-at-me tone convinced her husband’s family she was more interested in fame than mothering.

凯莉在博客上讲述了她的挣扎，表面上是为了提高人们的认识，但她那种看着我的语气让她丈夫的家人相信，她对名誉比养育孩子更感兴趣。

I’ve read the story several times, and I still don’t know what to make of Kelli.

这个故事我已经读了好几遍了，但我仍然不知道凯利是怎样的。

But I can’t stop thinking about her.

但我无法停止想她。

## The Dead Zoo Gang (Charles Homans, The Atavist)

## 动物园死亡帮（查尔斯·霍曼斯、返祖者）

This tale opens with a heist at a university in Portugal; the thieves ignore the stuffed peacock and lion and manatees in a natural-history collection and run off with two rhinoceros horns.

这个故事以葡萄牙一所大学的抢劫案开始；盗贼们无视了自然历史收藏中的孔雀、狮子和海牛标本，并带着两个犀牛角逃跑了。

Frankly, the phrase “rhinoceros horns” was all I needed to keep reading, but Homans’ deep dive into international horn trafficking grows more twisty and bizarre by the chapter.

坦率地说，“犀牛角”这个词是我继续读下去所需要的，但霍曼斯对国际犀牛角贩运的深入研究在这一章中变得更加曲折和奇怪。

Authorities blame a handful of itinerant, wealthy Irish families known as the Rathkeale Rovers.

当局将责任归咎于少数被称为“拉特基尔流浪者”(Rathkeale Rovers) 的爱尔兰流动富裕家庭。

(After rhino heads belonging to Ireland’s National Museum are stolen, the bandits earn a second nickname: the Dead Zoo Gang.) In the course of the story, we careen through Vietnam, Colorado, the Hague and several European countries, and learn about poaching, tarmacking (it’s a thing) and class warfare in rural Ireland.

（爱尔兰国家博物馆的犀牛头被盗后，强盗们获得了第二个绰号：死亡动物园帮。）在故事的过程中，我们穿越了越南、科罗拉多州、海牙和几个欧洲国家，了解了爱尔兰农村地区的偷猎、柏油碎石（这是一件事）和阶级斗争。

It’s one hell of a romp, the literary equivalent of racing through a fun house.

这是一场欢闹的地狱，文学上相当于在一个游乐场里赛跑。

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Amy Wallace

艾米·华莱士

Editor-at-large for Los Angeles magazine and correspondent for GQ.

洛杉矶杂志特约编辑和 GQ 记者。

## Gone Girls (Mike Kessler, Los Angeles magazine)

## Gone Girls（迈克·凯斯勒，洛杉矶杂志）

Disturbingly (and rivetingly) well-told from six points of view, this piece pulls back the curtain on something most of us don’t want to believe happens here in the First World: the pimping out of children, most of them black or brown, all of them marginalized.

这部作品从六个角度讲述了令人不安（又引人入胜）的故事，揭开了我们大多数人都不愿相信的事情发生在第一世界的真相：儿童拉皮条，其中大多数是黑人或棕色人种，他们都被边缘化。

“The younger the child, the higher the cost,” explains the story, which is devastating in its portrayal of how poor children are especially vulnerable to being exploited.

这个故事解释说：“孩子越小，成本就越高。”这个故事对贫困儿童如何特别容易受到剥削的描述是毁灭性的。

## The Craigslist Killers (Devin Friedman, GQ)

## Craigslist 杀手（德文·弗里德曼，GQ）

I’ll read anything Devin Friedman writes.

我会读德文·弗里德曼写的任何东西。

He’s the master of so many kinds of long form, from genre-defying celebrity profiles (read him on Jeff Bridges) to sociological analyses that will make you squirm (he once spent 24 hours in a Las Vegas “superclub,” with hilarious and revolting results).

他是多种长文形式的大师，从反流派的名人简介（读杰夫·布里奇斯的作品）到让你局促不安的社会学分析（他曾经在拉斯维加斯的一家“超级俱乐部”度过了 24 小时，结果令人捧腹且令人反感）。

This piece, though, about two guys who used a Craigslist ad to lure a certain kind of downtrodden American man into their web of horror, is anything but funny.

不过，这篇文章讲述了两个人利用 Craigslist 的广告来引诱某种受压迫的美国男人进入他们的恐怖网络的故事，但它一点也不有趣。

More than a murder story, it’s an examination of human nature.

这不仅仅是一个谋杀故事，更是对人性的审视。

As Devin writes: “One thing about humans is that they will put up with all but the most absurd and alarming events once they’ve signed on to a situation.

正如德文所写：“人类的一个特点是，一旦他们接受了某种情况，他们就会忍受除了最荒谬和最令人震惊的事件之外的所有事情。

There is in fact a moment when the teenage girl could jump out at the stoplight once she starts to get the smell of bad magic on the guy who said he’d give her a lift home, when the homeowner could close the door on the man at the front steps whose face isn’t composed right at all.

事实上，有那么一刻，一旦十几岁的女孩开始闻到那个说要送她回家的家伙身上有邪恶魔法的味道，她就可以在红绿灯处跳下车，而房主可以把门关上，关上门前台阶上那个脸色根本不平静的男人。

But if you don’t bail right away, chances are you will be along for the entire ride, however windy and gruesome and never-ending it turns out to be.”

但如果你不立即离开，你很可能会全程陪伴，无论风多么大、多么可怕、多么永无止境。”

Let that be a lesson to us all.

让这成为我们所有人的一个教训。

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Sarah Stillman

萨拉·斯蒂尔曼

Staff writer at The New Yorker.

《纽约客》特约撰稿人。

## Blood in the Sand (Matthew Power, Outside)

## 沙中之血（马修·鲍尔，《外面》）

“Blood in the Sand,” a murder-tale-plus-foreign-dispatch by Matt Power, which ran this past January in Outside magazine, reads like a challenge to true-crime writers tempted by the genre’s easy conventions: Don’t be lazy.

马特·鲍尔（Matt Power）今年一月在《Outside》杂志上刊登了一部谋杀故事加外国快讯的《沙中血》，读起来就像是对受该类型简单惯例诱惑的真实犯罪作家的挑战：不要偷懒。

The story investigates the murder of Jairo Mora Sandoval, a 26-year-old Costa Rican sea turtle conservationist who was beaten and asphyxiated last year, apparently at the hands of roving turtle-egg poachers.

该故事调查了 26 岁的哥斯达黎加海龟保护主义者贾罗·莫拉·桑多瓦尔 (Jairo Mora Sandoval) 的谋杀案，他去年遭到殴打和窒息，显然是被流动的海龟蛋偷猎者所为。

But Power doesn’t stop at the obvious tick-tock reconstruction of the crime.

但鲍尔并没有止步于对犯罪行为的明显的滴答作响的重建。

As a result, the story offers a useful model for how to treat a brutal murder not just as an object of meticulous, obsessive inquiry—the way many argue, say, the Serial podcast does—but also as an entry point into tangled social issues we’d otherwise ignore: the effects of profiteering on an endangered species, most notably, and the high-stakes persecution of those who defend said species from extinction.

因此，这个故事提供了一个有用的模型，告诉我们如何对待残酷的谋杀，不仅将其视为细致、痴迷的调查对象——就像许多人争论的那样，比如系列播客的做法——而且也将其作为一个切入点，探讨我们否则会忽视的错综复杂的社会问题：牟取暴利对濒危物种的影响，最值得注意的是，以及对那些捍卫该物种免遭灭绝的人的高风险迫害。

(This persecution occurs not just at the hands of organized crime, but also at the hands of government and business interests worried about scaring off tourism dollars.

（这种迫害不仅发生在有组织犯罪手中，还发生在担心吓跑旅游业收入的政府和商业利益集团手中。

Power pursues both fearlessly).

权力无所畏惧地追求两者）。

A while back, in an interview on craft, Power told fellow travel writer Rolf Potts: “I always fantasized about being the great sort of archive-diving investigative reporter who finds a trail of clues in some trove of documents and reconstructs a riveting narrative…but I’ve found I’m not really temperamentally suited to that.” Then he added, “I’m trying to learn.” In “Blood in the Sand,” Power shows he was either bluffing, or an absurdly quick student.

不久前，在接受 Craft 采访时，鲍尔告诉同行旅行作家罗尔夫·波茨：“我一直幻想成为一名伟大的档案调查记者，在一些文件宝库中找到线索，并重建引人入胜的叙述……但我发现我在性格上并不适合这样做。”然后他补充道：“我正在努力学习。”在《沙中血》中，鲍尔表明他要么是在虚张声势，要么是一个速度快得离谱的学生。

He draws on mountains of documentary material to reconstruct Mora’s final days and hours—court files, emails, cell-phone texts, and more.

他利用大量的文献材料来重建莫拉最后的日子和时间——法庭文件、电子邮件、手机短信等等。

But it’s Power’s first-person maneuverings in Costa Rica that make the story memorable to me.

但正是鲍尔在哥斯达黎加的第一人称行动让这个故事让我难忘。

His fearlessness isn’t flaunted, so much as lightly tucked into the story’s smooth transitions: One moment, he’s describing Mora’s final hours on the beach, collecting sea turtle eggs in a plastic bag for transport to a sanctuary; the next, Power is flying towards that very same beach, then “walking for three hours alongside an escort of five officers from Limón’s Fuerza Pública, kitted out with bulletproof vests, sidearms, and M4 carbines.” He chases the story in every direction, but never gets scattered.

他的无所畏惧并没有被炫耀，只是轻轻地融入到故事的平稳过渡中：一会儿，他描述了莫拉在海滩上的最后几个小时，用塑料袋收集海龟蛋，准备运送到避难所；一会儿，他正在描述莫拉在海滩上的最后几个小时，用塑料袋收集海龟蛋，准备运送到避难所；一会儿，他正在描述莫拉在海滩上的最后几个小时，用塑料袋收集海龟蛋，准备运送到避难所；一会儿，他正在描述莫拉在海滩上的最后几个小时，用塑料袋收集海龟蛋，准备运送到避难所；一会儿，他正在描述莫拉在海滩上的最后几个小时，用塑料袋收集海龟蛋，准备运送到避难所；一会儿，他正在描述莫拉在海滩上的最后几个小时。接下来，鲍尔飞向同一个海滩，然后“在利蒙公共力量的五名警官护送下步行了三个小时，他们配备了防弹背心、随身武器和 M4 卡宾枪。”他从各个方向追逐故事，但从未分散。

Instead, he leads us like a seasoned guide from the darkness of the beach, with anti-poaching volunteers in headlamps; to official police headquarters, with cops under troubling siege; to Twitter, where the President of Costa Rica promised “no impunity” in Mora’s murder, but hadn’t yet delivered.

相反，他像一位经验丰富的导游一样从海滩的黑暗中带领着我们，头灯里还有反偷猎志愿者。前往官方警察总部，警察受到令人不安的围困；推特上，哥斯达黎加总统承诺莫拉谋杀案“不会有罪不罚”，但尚未兑现。

The toughest thing about re-reading “Blood in the Sand” is that the controlled passion of its implicit argument and the just-show-up authority of its narrator remind me of how much we lost, as a community of writers and readers, with Power’s death.

重读《沙中血》最难的事情是，它隐含的论点所控制的激情和叙述者刚刚出现的权威让我想起，作为一个作家和读者的群体，我们因鲍尔的去世而损失了多少。

Returning to the story now, I lingered on the tenderly-constructed scene in which one of Jairo Mora’s colleagues, Vanessa Lizano, saw Mora’s mother at the young man’s funeral, and asked for her forgiveness.

现在回到这个故事，我在这个温柔构建的场景中徘徊，在这个场景中，贾罗·莫拉的一位同事瓦妮莎·利扎诺在年轻人的葬礼上看到了莫拉的母亲，并请求她的原谅。

Lizano had been carrying with her a deep guilt at her perceived roll in enabling Mora’s dangerous work.

利萨诺一直对自己在促成莫拉的危险工作中所扮演的角色感到深深的内疚。

“Sweetie,” Mora’s mother replied, in words that now seem hard to shake, “Jairo wanted to be there.

“亲爱的，”莫拉的母亲回答道，现在看来很难动摇，“贾罗想去那里。

It was his thing.”

这是他的事。”

[Editor’s Note: Consider donating to NYU’s Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, which was created to remember Power and support promising new writers to bring forward an unreported story of significance.]

[编者注：考虑向纽约大学马修·鲍尔文学报道奖捐款，该奖项的设立是为了纪念鲍尔并支持有前途的新作家提出一个未被报道的重要故事。]

## The Hunt for El Chapo (Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker)

## 追捕矮子（Patrick Radden Keefe，《纽约客》）

I thought that writing on Mexico’s drug war couldn’t get much more engaging than Patrick Radden Keefe’s treatment of the Sinaloa cartel in The New York Times magazine several years ago.

我认为写关于墨西哥毒品战争的文章不会比帕特里克·拉登·基夫（Patrick Radden Keefe）几年前在《纽约时报》杂志上对锡那罗亚贩毒集团的处理更有吸引力。

In that piece, “Cocaine Incorporated,” Keefe examined the outsized business success of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, whose leaders—despite the “vaudevillian goofiness” of their nicknames, a la “Fatty” and “Shorty”—constitute some of the world’s richest, savviest corporate figures.

在《可卡因公司》这篇文章中，基夫审视了墨西哥锡那罗亚贩毒集团在商业上取得的巨大成功，尽管他们的绰号“胖子”和“矮子”等“歌舞杂耍般的愚蠢”，但其领导人却是世界上最富有、最精明的企业人物之一。

Keefe’s secret, simple as it sounds, was taking narco-moguls seriously as intellects, inventers, and transnational entrepreneurs.

基夫的秘密，听起来很简单，就是认真对待毒枭，将其视为知识分子、发明家和跨国企业家。

Then, this spring, Keefe went ahead and proved me wrong, with his piece on the February capture of Joaquin Guzman Loera (aka “El Chapo”), the Sinaloa’s mythic honcho and one of the world’s most wanted drug lords.

然后，今年春天，基夫继续证明我错了，他发表了关于华金·古兹曼·洛埃拉（又名“矮子”）二月被捕的文章，他是锡那罗亚州的神话头目，也是世界上最受通缉的毒枭之一。

At a point in time when most U.S. readers had effectively tuned out the scale of drug-war violence in Mexico, Keefe made the topic gripping again, through the suspense of his piece on Guzman’s final moments as a free man this past February.

当大多数美国读者实际上已经忽视了墨西哥反毒战争暴力的规模时，基夫在今年二月发表的关于古兹曼作为自由人的最后时刻的悬疑文章再次让这个话题扣人心弦。

The story wasn’t just compelling for its surreal color—the fact, for instance, that Keefe got officials to describe El Chapo’s “prodigious” consumption of Viagra thus: “He ate it like candy.” What makes the story list-worthy is that it lures the reader in with the suspense of pursuit, but keeps us there with deeper questions that have only grown more timely—for instance, what does it means that torture was a likely part of the operation, and that the Mexican security forces with which U.S. officials sometimes cooperate on these sorts of raids have a reputation for what Human Rights Watch describes as “beatings, asphyxiation with plastic bags, waterboarding, electric shocks, sexual torture, and death threats”?

这个故事不仅因其超现实的色彩而引人注目，例如，基夫让官员这样描述“矮子”对伟哥的“惊人”消费：“他像吃糖果一样吃它。”这个故事之所以值得列入名单，是因为它以追捕的悬念吸引读者，但又让我们留下更深层次的问题，这些问题只会变得越来越及时——例如，这意味着酷刑可能是行动的一部分，这意味着什么？美国官员有时与墨西哥安全部队合作进行此类袭击，他们以人权观察所描述的“殴打、塑料袋窒息、水刑、电击、性酷刑和死亡威胁”而闻名？

Reading “The Hunt for El Chapo” in the wake of the 43 disappeared students in Iguala, and the broader news of brutality unleashed not just by cartels but by certain Mexican authorities, is a useful reminder of just how much the country demands our more committed curiosity, and our will to care.

在伊瓜拉 43 名学生失踪后，阅读《追捕矮子》一书，以及有关卡特尔和某些墨西哥当局所实施的更广泛暴行的新闻，可以有效提醒我们，这个国家多么需要我们更加坚定的好奇心和关心的意愿。

There are many stories left to tell there—and also, it’s worth noting, many Mexican journalists across the country, like Marcela Turati and Anabel Hernandez, who’ve been risking their lives daily to uncover them.

那里还有很多故事要讲——而且值得注意的是，全国各地的许多墨西哥记者，比如马塞拉·图拉蒂和安娜贝尔·埃尔南德斯，每天都冒着生命危险去揭露这些故事。

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Longreads Editor’s Pick (Julia Wick)

长读编辑精选（朱莉娅·威克）

## Finding Marlowe (Daniel Miller, Los Angeles Times)

## 寻找马洛（丹尼尔·米勒，洛杉矶时报）

Did Samuel B.

塞缪尔·B.

Marlowe—Los Angeles’ first licensed black private detective—provide the inspiration for Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, two of noir’s most iconic characters?

马洛 - 洛杉矶第一位获得执照的黑人私家侦探 - 为菲利普·马洛和萨姆·斯佩德这两个黑色电影中最具标志性的角色提供了灵感？

Louise Ransil, a former Hollywood executive who has spent years researching Marlowe certainly thinks so.

多年来研究马洛的好莱坞前高管路易丝·兰西尔（Louise Ransil）当然这么认为。

But because this is Hollywood she also has a vested interest in being right—she’s peddling a script based on his life.

但因为这是好莱坞，她也有自己的既得利益——她正在兜售根据他的生活改编的剧本。

Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Daniel Miller digs deep into Marlowe’s life to try and verify her claims.

丹尼尔·米勒为《洛杉矶时报》撰稿，深入研究马洛的生活，试图证实她的说法。

What makes “Finding Marlowe” especially wonderful is Miller’s creative form-follows-function take on the subject matter: the piece itself is a mini-noir, relayed in rich, distinctly Chandleresque prose.

《寻找马洛》之所以特别精彩，是因为米勒对主题的创造性形式追随功能：这部作品本身就是一部迷你黑色电影，以丰富的、明显钱德勒风格的散文来表达。