How U.S. Marshals used Redskins tickets to bust fugitives in 1985 sting

washingtonpost.com

9 pointspercept2 comments

> "Leschorn eventually mailed more than 3,000 invitations to the last known addresses of fugitives with 5,117 outstanding warrants among them. About half of the invitations were returned because the suspects had moved."

> "The letter that was included with the invitation was signed by I. Michael Detnaw. (Spell the last name backwards and say the first and middle initials.)"

Why would anybody in their right mind do this? I guess, there were quite a few of the non-attending ~1400 recipients of this letter who recognized this semordnilap and stayed away from the sting.

Criminals, for the most part, are dumb. The Marshalls still got a 50%-ish response rate, and cut their capture-cost down to 10%. Not bad for a first-time novel approach.

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