What began with a thunderclap ended with barely a whisper.   On  August 6, 2015, a statement released by the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz announced the release for public viewing a Gardner Museum surveillance video from just 24 hours before the Gardner Heist.  Beginning in 2013 there was “an exhaustive re-examination of the original evidence, law enforcement officials were “seeking the public’s assistance in identifying an unauthorized visitor to the museum from the night before the theft.”  News of the release quickly became national and international news. "it sparked an Internet frenzy," the Boston Globe reported in a follow up story two weeks later.    Now it was over, the crowd which had been sourced, as it were, in the crowd-soucing effort to identify this individual in the video had been pink-slipped. It had been nearly two years, May 23, 2017, just a few months after U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz left o...

This article by Kevin Lange ran in Salon.com from July 11, 2011 until April 1, 2015.  No longer active cached link from 4/5/2015 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GdKCgc38BlwJ:open.salon.com/blog/ellipses/2011/07/16/nobody_waits_tables_better_the_spy_who_served_me+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us Nobody Waits Tables Better (The Spy Who Served Me) - Salon Every so often I like to check on old friends and acquaintances... and people who, for whatever reason, good or bad, make an impression on our lives. Facebook is often a good first step, if not a search engine.  Once these are exhausted, I like to visit more exotic places... like http://florida.arrests.org.  Their basic search algorithm is a little weak, requiring you type the name just right… but occasionally, with patience, you find someone you know. A number of weeks ago, I found one such individual. While I was wrapping up my undergraduate education, he was still a relative ...