JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
©
2007
The
Full 200: Sympathy Beatings in Fact and Fiction
Surely
there is no brand of crime more obscure, or more poignant, than this: paying someone
to beat you up so you may garner sympathy for ends pathetic, nefarious or
mysterious. (Perhaps obscurity and poignancy of crime are directly
proportional.)
I first learned of the remarkable
under-underworld of sympathy beatings not from some news story or personal
fight club plunge, but rather the way most people garner their
pseudo-criminology: from the movies.
For me, it was the classic,
oft-quoted yet under-seen Clint Eastwood thriller “Dirty Harry” (1971), wherein
the villain—in what even a disgusted Pauline Kael grudgingly heralded as a
“virtuoso plot development”—pays someone to beat him up so he can pretend to be
a victim of police brutality.1 (Somewhat superfluously, since he
actually is a victim of police brutality throughout the film.)
“Dirty Harry” is about how the
titular cop hunts down and kills a hippie-but-racist
sniper/rapist/kidnapper/etc./etc./etc. despite the hassle of all sorts of
bleeding-heart laws construed as everything up to and including the Fourth,
Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and 14th Amendments.2 It
may sound ridiculous to call such a tautological propaganda movie a fount of
insights, and if I’d first seen it as an adult, I wouldn’t.
But I saw “Dirty Harry” when I was
young—too young—as well as naïve, philosophical and theological. I’d never seen
anything like it, and felt an immediate attraction-repulsion dynamic that keeps
me coming back to it even now. The idea that law and justice were not
necessarily synonyms was striking, new and unsettling. So was a hero I found
almost as scary as the villain. And also, there was a certain sadness,
depression and regret that I sensed, perceptively I think, lurking under the
movie’s bravado.
More simply, it’s an exciting movie
that offered me all sorts of alleged crime information, famously typified in
Dirty Harry’s wielding of “the most powerful handgun in the world.”
More generally, it depicts a
nightmarish, topsy-turvy world where the obvious criminal can’t be charged with
a crime and the cop breaks all kinds of laws. (A score featuring horror-movie
“wahhh-wahhh-wahhh-wahhhhhhh”s underlines the mood.) The villain is given to
spectacularly innovative perversities, such as approaching a store owner famous
for shooting robbers and then robbing him of his gun itself. And, of course, he
claims to be a police beating victim after having himself beaten—thus become a
criminal who accuses a cop of crime.
The beating scene is deliberately
weird and disorienting, presented without explanation or foreshadowing. We
merely see the villain hobbling (due a previous injury actually inflicted by
Dirty Harry, I might add) toward a creepy decaying/abandoned building, where
awaits a mysterious, neatly dressed man.
The villain enters and hands over a
wad of cash.
“You really want 200 dollars worth?”
the mystery man asks.
“Every penny of it,” comes the
reply.
The man seats the villain on an old
chair. “Might as well get comfortable. Go on, sit.”
The man becomes creepily,
unnecessarily friendly—a professional at work, but what type of work remains
spookily unclear. He loosens the villain’s scarf like a doctor or masseuse.
“Relax, take it easy.” Then menacing black gloves are pulled on. “It’s gonna be
alright.”
Then the man proceeds to punch the
crap out of him, knocking him to the ground.
“You sure you want the rest of it?”
he asks.
“Every penny’s worth, you black son
of a bitch,” confirms the villain, his malignancy extending even to a partner
in crime.
The “rest of it” is merely a kick.
Whether that was really it, or the man is just disgusted now, is unclear. He
adds one more kick: “This one’s on the house.” He tosses the bleeding, groaning
villain outside.
Cut to a hospital, where the villain
is heavily bandaged on a hospital gurney, giving his story to reporters and
claiming Dirty Harry dished out the beating. “I swear, God as my judge,” he
pleads. The cops are trying to frame him, he insists: “And now look at me, just
look at me.”
At City Hall, Dirty Harry and the
police chief watch it all on TV. Harry brushes it all aside. “And anybody can
tell I didn’t do that to him,” Harry says. The police chief, understanding his
role as the straight man, takes the bait and asks how. “’Cause he looks too
damn good, that’s how,” Harry snarls.
My young mind was blown by this
sequence, and not only for the obvious enthralling weirdness of cynical
self-martyrdom. I was particularly fascinated by the man who did the beating.
Were we to understand that performing sympathy beatings is his main criminal
offering? Or is he just some kind of enforcer, in this odd case paid to
victimize his own employer?
With such unresolvable mysteries
adding to the appeal, it became my personal archetype of the over-the-top movie
beating, given the signal honor of receiving one of my many arcane shibboleths:
in a paraphrase of the “200 dollars worth,” I dubbed it the “Full 200.” It
remains in my vocabulary today, sometimes broadening into a “whole nine
yards”-type meaning. I use “Full 200” fairly frequently with the friend who is
unfortunate enough to know almost all of my codewords; I think mostly recently
I deployed it in a discussion of the memorable ball-busting scene in “Casino
Royale.”3
Such genericism is useful as well as
a matter of necessity—actual sympathy beatings, as opposed to merely
over-the-top or ultra-weird beatings, are not that common in fiction. Still,
true Full 200s are still out there. It’s driving me crazy because I can’t
remember which show, but on some TV show I saw in February an ex-con had a
prison buddy beat him up to frame a cop for assault and battery.4
Far more important is that also in
February, I first heard of a real
Full 200.
Last year in
Suddenly opening before me was a
world where you really could find guys pulling on black leather gloves in the basements
of decaying buildings—or at least friends willing to clock you. I began to dig.
As is obvious here, I dig pretty
well, but I unearthed only two other unequivocal Full 200s from the newspaper
morgues.
In
Then there is the Fullest 200 of
them all: the 1997 and 1998 claims by a
In 1998, the woman’s family found
her “beaten and tied spread-eagle to the rear deck of her home,” where she had
reportedly spent two hours in the sun.8
Also in 1998, an acquaintance of the
woman came forward and admitted that she hired him to do the 1997 beating,
paying him $50 out of a promised $300. (That is to say, she asked for a Full
300 but only got an Incomplete 50.) He told police he had gone with her to a
Wal-Mart and “purchased a leather work belt then whipped her with it while she
lay on her bed.”9
The woman reportedly had been
repeatedly harassed for her sexual orientation.
There is poignancy, even tragedy, in
all of these reports. They tend to wind up as false police report charges, but
that never really clarifies their nature. There’s some social truth lurking in
them that the adversarial system never really gets to, just brushes aside as
irrelevant.
This is particularly true of what I
might call the Half 200—cases where it seems someone gave themselves the
sympathy beating instead of having someone else do it. I found about four dozen
Half 200 candidates since circa 1992. Very often, however, the reports don’t
clarify the nature of the injuries, or even confirm that the injuries were
real, let alone who actually created them. “False police report” only tells us
about the lie; it omits a lot of truths.
The unambiguous Half 200s I found:
(The still-mysterious, and still
highly suspicious, 1987 case of Tawana Brawley may fit in here as well.21)
From this mash of Full and Half
200s, it’s easy to distill the theme of attention-seeking, and to refine it
further into obvious categories: political causes; revenge; loneliness;
covering up a crime or mistake.
It’s so easy that the Full 200
phenomenon sinks into the tar pit of blithe pop criminology about false
reporting: “Oh, it’s about attention-seeking. Bye.” It’s like being forced to
discuss the rainbow when you’re only talking about red (or perhaps ultraviolet,
as the Full 200 often is an unseen subject). It’s just another way of lumping
all forms of false reporting together and then dismissing the entire subject as
lies. In newspaper stories, you can find criminologists making such generic
comments/dismissals, though as far as I can tell, no one even tracks false
police reports comprehensively.22 Occasionally, the sociopolitical
subgenres of false rape reports and false hate crime reports get more
particular attention, but I couldn’t find a single study or even comment
regarding the import of the modus
operandi—the key to the strangeness of the Full 200.
In the three Full 200 reports I
found, all of the attention went to the fake victim. And yet, to me, the person
who agreed to beat them up is at least as psychologically and criminologically
interesting, just like that mysterious figure in “Dirty Harry.”
Never is there an explanation of how
the idea was brought up, and rarely any hint of how it was executed. The mental
intensity and horrific intimacy of such an act must be overwhelming. Somehow,
this rouses no curiosity in the system or in the news.
Of course, I wouldn’t deny that the
Full 200 relates to, and sometimes involves, broader forms of criminal
falsehood. Clearly, it’s rooted in the general phenomenon of making up a story
and/or falsifying evidence (such as fake “hate” graffiti). We’re all liars and
can empathize mostly easily with this facet; it’s obviously where most of the
general pseudo-criminology statements come from.
Undoubtedly like many of you, I can
recall calling in fake fire alarms when I was very young and feeling excited and
guilty. One time cops approached me and other kids at elementary school recess
and asked about some crime report in the area; we obliged by providing an
exciting tale of a guy in a ski mask in the nearby woods. Heck, I even neared
Half 200 territory by once pretending to fight myself in class in an
attention-getting, and now cringe-worthy, move. I was probably particularly
weird, but I think we can relate to at least the simplest forms of
attention-getting lies, if only from childhood. (A related and more obscure
genre may be false tales of heroism, such as phony war veterans and the like.)
But, of course, the Full 200 goes
well beyond this. It literally does make the person a victim, if only of
themselves and/or their cohort. And while false police reports appear to be
fairly common, elaborate ones like the Full 200 are not.23 Here we
move from the realm of lie into that of hoax—a distinction lost on the law of
false report charges.
On the other hand, there are
self-inflicted, hoax shootings/severe stabbings that are more overtly violent
than sympathy beatings. I think of
But there’s an emotional difference
as well. While such shootings and stabbings appear more violent than beatings,
they are often far more precise and tidy—colder and more calculating. They have
an air of sociopathic, iron-willed scheming. Sympathy beatings are wilder, more
chaotic, perhaps more emotional and frantic. They are less tidy in both
appearance and in apparent motivations.
At the most extreme, all of these
crimes trend toward true martyrdom—righteous suicide. You could say
Christianity is founded on a Full 200—or Full 30 (shekels): God torturing and
killing himself to gain global sympathy as a victim of the Romans and/or Jews.
But obviously, we are interested in these lesser forms, where the phony victim
wishes to stick around and savor the sympathy.
Sympathy is the mysterious quality
at the heart of the Full 200. If you know someone well enough to ask them to
beat you up, presumably you already have a significant measure of sympathy in
your life. And yet some dilemma causes the hoaxer to employ that sympathy in a
way that results in more pain. Maybe some sympathy is never enough.25
If the beating is performed merely
for money (in “Dirty Harry” fashion), it must really highlight feelings of alienation
and self-objectification that seem to underlie a lot of these reports. It’s
barely different from an S&M scene acting out self-hatred or hopelessness.
It may well involve wish fulfillment—an enjoyment of the abuse, or a taking of
emotional pain and both incarnating and controlling/possessing it.
I see this even in the baldly
criminal form of covering up one’s own robbery. It would be simpler to just
tell a lie about being robbed at gunpoint—indeed, there would be less evidence
and detail for the police to question. Why have someone beat you up? It
suggests an inner test, a demonstration of will, machismo gone masochistic.
The Full 200 is never totally false.
After all, something really did happen. The story is literally false, but the
act is literally true in some way. In a sense, the Full 200 is art as much as
artifice. Sympathy beatings are shadow plays based on society’s light source;
they may tell us about the solidities behind them. As a rape crisis center
director said in one article on hoax tales, “When somebody files a false
report, something else is wrong. It’s never just a blind cry.”26
Full 200s often appear to act out
verbal/atmospheric/emotional violence—a way to make oft-dismissed threats and
pain real and turn them into something people will pity you for. Some cases suggest an inversion of Martin Luther
King Jr.’s philosophy of non-violent protest: Instead of letting yourself be
beaten to prove the oppressor’s violence and cause shame to surface, you do the
beating yourself.
Of course, the “oppressor” can be
perceived rather than real. There seems to be some links here to conspiracy
theories and ploys—like the way the Nazis covered their invasion of
As “Dirty Harry” demonstrates, the
Full 200 is certainly a conservative paranoid fantasy come true—victims
victimizing themselves. Conservative groups have particularly seized on faked
anti-gay crimes in an attempt to discredit gay rights initiatives, often while
implying some sort of secret cabal behind it all.27 Conservatives
also immediately spread Full 200 accusations about the 2005 beating of Paul
Mirecki, a University of Kansas professor and staunch opponent of “Intelligent
Design” being taught in public schools, which, incredibly, is actually a viable
debate in that medieval state.28 Mirecki reported that two men beat
him with crowbars while referring to the Intelligent Design dispute—a
controversy, I might add, that is clearly settled by the fact that humans are
stupidly not armored and thus susceptible to simple beating. The case remains
unsolved.
What the conservatives conveniently
overlook is that the Full 200 only works because there is so much real victimization—as
Dirty Harry himself acknowledges with the “he looks too damn good” punchline.
Real police brutality is what allowed the villain to fake it. Only a fool would
suggest that false insurance claims mean accidental fires never happen; only a
disingenuous thug would claim that false rape reports mean rape is nonexistent.
Crimes are defined by laws that are based on experience; a false report, by
definition and logic, is based on a true criminal category. It can’t innovate a
brand of crime; a functional false hate crime report can never come out of a
place that doesn’t have a measure of bigotry. (However, it is a valid concern
that false reports of “hate” crimes and/or rapes often lead to a call for the
bolstering of existing laws, which would make them predicated on a false sense
of insecurity.) Likewise, only certain scenarios would work as Full 200s in
principle: they must involve the weak or minority perceived as victimized by
the strong or majority, not the other way around. A real crime may involve surprising
nuances, but false reports never will. (We must, of course, allow for supposed
reverse-discrimination reports and the like, though I found no such scenarios
among the Full/Half 200 reports.) They rely on the solid, the unquestionable,
the pity-evoking.
The particular subgenre of
hate-crime Full 200s is the only one that has received consideration about what
it is trying to incarnate. Conservatives see it as an incarnation of liberal
victimhood, which is conceived (partly correctly and mostly vapidly) as an
abstract, false cultural principle. On the other hand, especially on college
campuses, Full 200s sometimes find apologists who see the faked crime as an
incarnation/extension/expansion of what the majority already does to people, or
how it makes them feel. This is essentially my view as well, though I read it
less as a valid excuse and more as an identification of a significant
mechanism. (I also see interplay between the views; an anti-gay Full 200 can
work only when there is still bigotry, but enough growing tolerance for
sympathy to be evoked—that is to say, in an era of civil rights controversy. If
cases could be tracked, I think we would see a rise in anti-gay Full 200s over
the past 20 years and a fall in African-American racist ones.)
But in the end, all that really
tells us is that the culture wars will suck up anything, including Full 200
reports. It tells us little or nothing about apolitical Full 200s—about a
cabbie who just wants to see his ex.
Overlooked by all commentators and
reports is the danger underlying all interpretation of lies and hoaxes: we can
only discuss those that have been exposed, and thus are flawed. Certainly
others have passed successfully—and thus would have even more truth to tell
about us. We’ll never know how much of reality is composed of undetected lies.
Perhaps that speaks to the conservative paranoia that minority protections are
based on fictions. To me, it merely describes how really good lies reflect our
truths. Full 200s are designed to get attention, but in a conventional way—they
don’t really stand out; they fit in.
The Full 200 fits in to the
aggression, desperation and isolation that undergird a lot of our society.
Perhaps the most piteous tragedy of known Full 200s is that, despite all the
attention they garner, their core pain is never really addressed, merely
dismissed as a lie. The response is eventually a reinforcement of the
self-denial these people were obviously already experiencing in a more general
form. The system has sent them back to obscurity, but they still have my
sympathy—more than ever.
The Full 200 is symptomatic of a
cold, lonely society wherein beating somebody up is a perceived solution and
getting beaten up is the only thing considered undeniable, sympathy-stirring
violence. The vast majority of people lack the will and imagination to really
sympathize sans violence, because it would mean recognizing that their own
little world isn’t absolutely right and perfect; at best, they issue the
occasional spurt of politics/religion-filtered condescension and
sentimentality. The Full 200 is theater for their clouded eyes.
I suppose all the lingering mystery
still comes down to something pretty simple: Sympathy is hard to beat. But a
person isn’t.
1
Kael’s quote is from “For Keeps.”
2 “Dirty Harry” was released by Warner Bros.
It is interesting to note that 20 years later, Warner Bros. distributed the
Body Count album containing the infamous song “Cop Killer.” While that song
drew massive protests against Warner Bros. from cops, who eventually succeeded
in getting the song censored, there were no such protests for the release of
“Dirty Harry,” which might as well be titled “Civilian Killer,” and the company
continues to profit from it to this day. We would do well to recall the double
standards of anti-violence righteousness. Meanwhile, Body Count frontman Ice-T
now pulls down a fat check playing a cop on a popular TV show beloved by moms
and dads everywhere, in a fine example of poetic justice, if not of fine
acting.
3 Another shibboleth that has probably caused
some consternation among fellow moviegoers is, “I’m Hitler,” used as a quick
condemnation of anything annoyingly over-explanatory. It goes back to an old
“Twilight Zone” episode in which a guy was screwing around with a genie and
made the wish that he become a world leader with absolute power who could not
be voted out of office. A puff of smoke, and he awakens in a bunker with a
funny little moustache, a swastika armband and a lieutenant coming in and
leaving a Luger on his desk. It’s a hilarious and decent little twist—but then
the guy launches into a screaming frenzy: “I’m Hitler! I’m in the bunker! It’s
the end of World War II! I’ve lost! I’m going to kill myself! I can’t be voted
out of office! I’m Hitler! I’m Hitler!” The idea that anyone dressed as Adolf
Hitler has to explain, “I’m Hitler!” was funny enough to put me on the floor
gasping for air, and has become one the most useful, if unsettling,
catchphrases of my moviegoing life.
It’s worth noting that the Full 200 scene in “Dirty
Harry” remains an obscure cultural touchstone for other viewers as well. I
recently found it used as a simile for the practice of paying people to bang up
a new guitar to look old, and referenced by a blog commenter criticizing
another poster who suggested the beating of an Iraqi civilian by U.S. troops
was similarly faked. (At www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=113147 and
www.brianarner.com/weblog/archives/000856.html, respectively.)
4 Possibly “The Shield,” “Las Vegas” or an old
“Forever Knight,” judging from my peripatetic viewing habits at the time. I
welcome any clarifications.
The motif remains relatively unusual in fiction. Recent
versions (neither quite meeting the Full 200 standard) include Dusty Donovan’s
possibly faked extortion-related beating in 2003 on “As the World Turns,” and
two men claiming to have been attacked and robbed to cover up the fact they
were short on money to pay off a debt on the “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”
episode “Fannysmackin’.” (At http://tvmegasite.net/day/atwt/updates/older/2003/atwt-05-19-03.htm
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannysmackin'_(CSI_episode), respectively.)
Since the publication of this column, a friend reminded
me of a “Half 200” (see below) in the movie “Class of 1984” (1982), in which
the New Wave villain bounces his face off a bathroom mirror, towel dispenser
and sink to fake a beating from his teacher nemesis; and I also saw an old
episode of “Law & Order” in which a journalist formerly “embedded” with
troops in Iraq has someone else shoot him to frame a soldier and get
headlines—in an interesting twist, the soldier gives a false semi-confession as
an act of attention-seeking bravado. Notably, “Class of 1984” is also a
paranoid conservative fantasy about unruly youths, and happens to have a score
by Lalo Schifrin, who also wrote the music for “Dirty Harry.” (Perhaps he
should have written a “Theme for a Sympathy Beating.”)
Yet another cinematic Half 200 appears in the 1996
thriller “Fear”; read all about it elsewhere on this
site.
Most ironically, I alluded to the book/movie “Fight Club”
in the column without noting it is the most thorough fictional Half 200 of all
time. In general, it is about a guy beating himself up. Specifically, a friend
reminded me that a scene in the movie version features Edward Norton’s
character beating himself up to blackmail his boss.
A friend pointed me to a direct allusion to the original
“Dirty Harry” Full 200 in the cult TV show “Freaks and Geeks” (1999-2000). In
the episode “Beers and Weirs,” young Sam is worried about his sister’s plan to
hold a beer bash while their parents are out of town; he consults with friends
Bill and Neal for solutions. Bill suggests that Sam call his parents and say he
suffered a head injury, so they must come home, thus ruining the party. Sam
objects that they would be upset at finding he actually had no head injury.
“Well, we’d have to hit you over the head and give you a bump,” Bill replies,
thus suggesting a Full 200. Neal elaborates: “Ooh, like in that Dirty Harry
movie, where the bad guy yells at this black guy so he’ll beat him up, then he
blames it on Clint. [Melodramatically:] ‘It was Callahan!’” Sam decides not to
go along with any Full 200 scenario. Interestingly, Neal later helps the sister
end the disastrous party by making a false complaint to police.
“Dear Boy,” a 2000 episode of the TV series “Angel,”
contained a twist on the Full 200. Darla, the nemesis of heroic vampire Angel,
poses as part of a normal married couple (whom she has already murdered), then
kills her fake “husband” and has herself beaten up to frame Angel for murder.
The twist is that Darla tricks Angel into fighting her so that he does the
beating himself. The scenario is also unusual in that Darla gains sympathy in
part by pretending to be someone else; the entire set-up, not just the beating,
is a hoax.
5 “Brutal attack called a fake; ‘Victim’ a
thief, police charge” by George Barnes, Worcester (Massachusetts) Telegram
& Gazette, Feb. 28, 2007, at
www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070228/NEWS/702280769/1116.
6 “Time,” March 17, 1952, at
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,816083,00.html?promoid=googlep.
7 Quotes and information from “Plea ends false
hate-crime case” by Nichole Monroe, Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer, Jan.
30, 2002, via LexisNexis.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 “Lying to the law; Crime: Prosecutions
rarely follow those who file false police reports,” by Anne C. Mulkern,
11 “Attack faked, police say,” Fort Lauderdale
Sun-Sentinel,
12 “As hate-crime concerns rise, so does the
threat of hoaxes; Campuses often provide conditions that can cultivate false
reports of racist or anti-gay acts, police say,” by Nora Zamichow and Stuart
Silverstein, Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2004, via LexisNexis.
13 “City code inspector indicted,” Houston
Chronicle, Jan. 31, 1999, via LexisNexis and “Woman admits fabricating rape” by
Associated Press, Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News, May 23, 1999 at
www.amarillo.com.
14
www.leg.state.nv.us/70th/Minutes/SM-JUD-990422-Assembly%20Bills.html.
15 Zamichow and Silverstein, op. cit.
16 “Crying wolf in B.C.,” editorial, The Globe
and Mail (Toronto, Canada), Sept. 18, 2006, via LexisNexis.
17 “Police: Gay bashing report turns out to be
false,” KTVB-TV,
18 “Woman faked beating to get sympathy,”
KSL-TV,
19 “Family Court judge acquitted of domestic
battery charge” by Carri Geer Thevenot, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Sept. 15,
2006, at www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Sep-15-Fri-2006/news/9671261.html.
20 The Official Update Footnote. (A remarkably
necessary device, considering how few Full 200s I could find in my initial
research. It appears it is not so much that the phenomenon is ultra-rare as it
is hard to categorize, and therefore to tease out of databases.)
November 2007: As I explain
later, self-shootings/stabbings do not strike me with the same emotional tenor
as Full/Half 200s. But I didn’t think about how to categorize nail guns. I think
this simply must qualify as one of the greatest Half 200s: a man in Gloucester,
England, in August 2007 shot himself seven times in the chest and arm with a
nail gun, causing critical wounds and making himself eligible for hefty
payments from a government compensation fund for violent crime victims. (He
claimed three street punks shot him.) Furthermore, it was the second time he has nailed himself for Half 200
purposes. The dude is tougher than Jesus and earned his cash, in my opinion.
His fake attack included planting a two-inch nail into his ribcage an inch from
his heart. This is a case that covers all the intriguing bases, starting with
the outstanding BBC News headline, “Man jailed over nail gun fantasy.” (Nov.
14, 2007, via http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/gloucestershire/7094258.stm.)
The money motive is particularly bald for a Half 200, but the pathology (which,
as usual, received scant press attention) is what’s really fascinating.
Obviously, there are far easier ways to raise cash—like, well, mugging someone
else with a nail gun instead. In the
August incident, the man’s mugging lie raised the specter of minority gangs
attacking the white family; he said two of the attackers were black and the
third—the nail gun-wielder—was “mixed-race,” then mused to the press from his
hospital bed, “These people must be caught and punished. It could have been my
wife with our baby or anyone else innocently minding their own business.” In a
fascinating Freudianism, he also termed the attack a “sick joke.” The lie is
structured around a majority-ethnicity victim being preyed upon by ethnic
minorities, a common backstory to self-shootings/stabbings, whereas sympathy
beatings tend to have the reverse, majority perp/minority victim structure. The
monetary fraud is another fascinating social context, illustrating how a
victims’ compensation fund can turn into a generator of Full or Half 200
violence. The ability to become an official paid victim must be alluring in
this mental context. Obviously, the extremity of the self-mutilation is also
noteworthy: inflicting multiple horrible wounds, on two separate occasions,
indicates more going on than the mere “convincing fantasist” angle of press
coverage. The case is unusual for the severity of the judicial punishment as
well—a two-and-a-half-year sentence for “perverting the course of justice.” As
usual, some of the most significant questions went unasked: Why a nail gun? Did
he need the money? Did he lie to his wife about it? He’s gone to prison for
lying, but we don’t even care about most of the truth.
February 2008: I’ve discovered a seemingly authentic Full
200 documented on YouTube—one apparently filmed in my own Boston-neighborhood
back yard. The footage consists primarily of a young man being punched in the
face by a woman in some apartment living room. The video’s description,
verbatim: “This is my friend Adam Littleboy. [An apparent pseudonym.] A couple
fourth of Julys ago he did a no call/ no show at his restraunt and told his
boss he got mugged so Christen had to punch him in his face about 8 million
times [to simulate mugging damage] and he still got fired.” No surprise it
didn’t work, because the beating was not severe, resulting in no injuries
visible at YouTube resolution, though one observer in the video assures him
cheek became “poofy.” It’s the only documentation of anything like a Full 200
that I’m aware of. However, it may also be an exception that proves the Full
200 rule. The thing smacks more of a half-assed “Jackass”-style stunt than a
seriously attempted hoax. (In a non sequitur sequence in the same vid,
Littleboy licks an alley cat.) Littleboy took some real punches that sent him
sprawling; but the decision to have a woman do the beating, the obvious lack of
commitment to serious injury, Littleboy’s giggling between punches, and a
laughing audience with a video camera suggest something other than the
psychodrama of a full Full 200. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem like a total joke, either. The sympathy-beating motivation is there. And if the beating
wasn’t good enough to support a bad lie, it still seemed to work out the
tension of screwing up a job and indeed drew a lot of attention from friends.
It’s an interesting softcore version of the Full 200—probably a relatively
widespread subgenre, and worthy of notice. (Source:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=tVQUCFJ3w5s.)
February 2008: A remarkable sympathy shooting that
occurred Dec. 3, 2007 in the small town of Hartford, Alabama has turned into a
court case, thanks to outraged citizens, and thus become a detail-laden
treasure trove of Full 200 information. The incident began with Charles Gregory
Hatcher, 41, found shot twice in the back and leg (a third shot missed) in a
cotton field. Some type of note on his car suggested he had been lured to the
scene. Cops were irritated that Hatcher—who was hospitalized for several
days—refused to cooperate with the investigation, insisting he would not press
charges and so forth. However, it took them a week—during which they conducted
a manhunt for a phantom criminal—to figure out that the victim had orchestrated
his own shooting. According to statements from Hartford Police Chief Nick Finer
reported in the Dothan (Alabama) Eagle, Hatcher eventually confessed that he
“had an associate stage the shooting to basically gain sympathy from family
members. I think it was just a ‘do me a favor’ type thing.” It was reported
that Hatcher was having some type of family problems at the time. However, more
recently the county DA has stated that the shooter was an employee of the victim
and had been threatened with firing if he didn’t, well, fire. A fascinating
aspect of this case is that the victim succeeded in gaining sympathy from
police and prosecutors as well. The DA’s Office initially claimed there was no
crime because the shooter had the victim’s permission to do the shooting—a sort
of “consenting adults”-type argument that is unusual in American/Southern
jurisprudence, to say the least. Meanwhile, Chief Finer reportedly sympathized:
“There’s a lot of sensitive family feelings involved in this case. If the
victim doesn’t want to do anything, and wanted it to happen, then you really
don’t have much of a crime.” The public was to prove less forgiving, as
telegraphed by a comment on the Eagle’s Web site that noted the shooter surely
would have been prosecuted if he had accidentally killed Hatcher: “Who is [Hatcher]
going to have shot next? This is wrong and I think they should both be charged.
Only in Alabama!!” A month later, a grand jury indicted Hatcher on charges of
obstruction of justice and giving false information; he later pleaded guilty,
receiving a six-month suspended sentence and an order to repay $750,000 in
investigation costs. Another Eagle Web site comment indicates public
dissatisfaction with the lack of attention on the shooter—who, as we know is
usual for this strange category of crime, is being given virtually no official
attention. Some observations: I have probably underestimated the significance
of gunshot-oriented Full 200s in my main essay; this apparently was a sympathy
crime in the purest sense. Also remarkable was the victim’s, and the crime’s,
ability to gain sympathy from the officials closest to the case—even though
they are presumably pretty tough, strict folks who had to deal with the
embarrassment of being fooled. There is an air of small-town community-mindedness
and male weird-favor-doing kinship in the response. I sympathize with their
sympathy; I also understand why the more distant public wasn’t so sympathetic.
(This is one of the few modern cases that have suggested to me a continued need
for the archaic grand jury system.) You might say that the official response
was something like they might accord to an attempted suicide, except in that
sort of case, the authorities presumably insist on mental health monitoring.
The general public more clearly saw the aggression and rage lurking in the Full
200. We can’t say anything definitive about Hatcher’s motivations at this point—as
usual, the press quickly lost interest, and the guilty plea was reported with
no new information. But if the story about a coerced employee proves true, that
indicates something very unsympathetic to me—something involving a terrifyingly
desperate rage and sociopathic willingness to traumatize someone like that. (It
would also be perhaps the only example of someone facing firing for not attacking their boss.) Like the newspaper Web site poster, I wonder
where further charges are: either equivalent charges for the shooter, or some
of type of additional coercion charges for the “victim.” But then, this is a
strange crime indeed that occupies a very gray area. How does one prove
coercion when the coerced is the one with the gun? (Sources: “Man Pleads Guilty
to Making False Report,” WTVY-TV [Dothan, Alabama], Feb. 14, 2008, at www.wtvynews4.com/news/headlines/15648492.html;
and “Police investigate Hartford shooting” by Matt Elofson, Dec. 4, 2007;
“Hartford shooting victim doesn’t want case pursued” by Ebony Horton, Dec. 5,
2007; “Hartford man stable as shooting investigation continues” by Ebony
Horton, Dec. 6, 2007; “Hartford man staged his own shooting” by Matt Elofson,
Dec. 12, 2007; and “Man who staged own shooting indicted” by Matt Elofson, Feb.
12, 2008; Dothan [Alabama] Eagle, all [along with aforementioned public
comments] via www.dothaneagle.com. I first heard about the case from an
Associated Press article via www.boston.com, where this fascinating and
significant tale was, naturally, relegated to the “Odds & Ends” funny-news
section.)
March 2008: The Full 200 shootings just keeping coming;
obviously, I underestimated this subgenre completely. On Feb. 28, 2008,
21-year-old Daniel Kuch reportedly had himself shot in the shoulder with a
.22-caliber revolver by a friend on a remote stretch of highway outside of
small-town Pasco, Washington. At the hospital, he claimed to have been the
victim of a drive-by shooting while jogging, but the point-blank nature of the
wound was obvious. There are a couple of interesting features of this case. For
one thing, it involved several people. Kuch reportedly was shot by one friend
(Kurtis Johnson, 24, of Burbank, Washington) after both were driven to the site
by another friend (Oleg Barbarosh). After the shooting, Johnson reportedly left
the scene in another car with still more friends while Barbarosh drove Kuch to
a hospital. It seems like a complex group dynamic or plan; the details are
unclear. Another unusual feature is that both “victim” and shooter are facing
charges: Kuch for false reporting and Johnson for reckless endangerment. But
once again, motivations remain unclear. The primary story is that Kuch wanted
to avoid an upcoming drug test at work—a standard utilitarian angle that might
put this somewhat outside the realms of Full 200s (as well as being a great
commentary on what jobs and drug-anoia have done to our psyches). But in a
local newspaper story, the sheriff’s office said Barbarosh offered a different
explanation (which the story itself didn’t seem to notice): “Kuch wanted to
know what it was like to get shot.” Presuming all of this is true—which courts
have yet to determine—it sounds as if it may be a case of attention-seeking in
a strange group dynamic, with the work-avoidance issue as a type of excuse. It
reminds me of the YouTube incident described above. I’d say let’s wait and see;
but these stories have a way of disappearing once they’re branded as lies.
(Source: “Pasco man gets charges instead of drug test” by Kristin M. Kraemer,
Tri-City (Kennwick/Richland/Pasco, Washington) Herald, March 5, 2008. This is
another one I discovered dumped into “Odds & Ends” on www.boston.com in the
form of an Associated Press story.)
April 2008: New York City police accused a Massachusetts
man of having his girlfriend murdered and staging a Full 200 shooting of
himself to cover it up. This is the more classic crime-cover-up subgenre. Police
say the man drove with his girlfriend and their child to a remote area of the
Bronx, where a cousin of the man shot the girlfriend to death in a faked
robbery. The cousin initially forgot to do the Full 200 part of the shooting,
causing the man to run after saying something like, “Hey, you forgot to shoot
me!”; the cousin finally obliged by shooting the man in the leg, police allege.
It is interesting to note that that in this case (presuming any of the
authorities’ claims are true), the horrid murder-for-hire so consumed the
shooter that he forgot to do the secondary, Full 200 part. When the Full 200
bit is a mechanical afterthought, I don’t find it as psychologically or
culturally interesting. (Source: “Boyfriend of Victim Arrested in Bronx Murder”
by Al Baker, New York Times, April 15, 2008, via www.nytimes.com. Incidentally,
tsk-tsk on the Times for calling the incident a “murder” prior to a court’s
verdict. “Murder” is a particular legal definition of homicide involving a
finding of wrongful death and a judgment on the killer’s mindset, neither of
which can or should be determined prior to trial.)
21 See http://en.wikipedia.org/Tawana_Brawley.
Ambiguous reports that may reflect Full or Half 200s include (not counting
those in articles referenced elsewhere in this column): “Woman charged with
faking assault,” The Herald (Rock Hill, South Carolina), Oct. 31, 2001; “Woman
admits to making up gang-rape by skateboarders; She breaks down after Davis
police ask her” by Martin Halstuk, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 20, 1991;
“Benton County woman, 18, is arrested after filing false police report; Student
claims she was pulled over, beaten” by Michelle Bradford, Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette, March 18, 2005; “Guard charged in false report” by Rusty
Marks, Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette, May 3, 1997; “Maid of casino foe
made false report, Sarasota police say,” St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, Sept.
23, 1994; “Washington County Police Reports,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, May
21, 2006 (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4196/is_20060521/ai_n16413042);
“Man charged with filing fake police report,” by Bill Bird, Naperville
(Illinois) Sun., May 8, 2007
(www.suburbanchicagonews.com/napervillesun/news/375054,6_1_NA08_FALSE_S1.article).
All via LexisNexis unless otherwise noted.
22 As an example of how these comments are
always generic and unilluminating: Northeastern University criminal justice
professor James Alan Fox, a frequent media commentator, informs us that false
reporting is “a self-serving act” (“Hoaxes a fact of life for police” by Linda
Goldston, San Jose [California] Mercury News, Sept. 13, 2005, via LexisNexis).
But what crime isn’t?! He followed with equally generic and obvious comments
about attention-seeking. Regarding false-report reporting, there is no official
tracking of false hate crimes in particular (Zamichow and Silverstein, op.
cit.).
23 For example, from 2000 to 2003, Richmond,
Virginia police charged 220 people with filing false police reports, a number
that dwarfs the amount of Full and Half 200s I could find (“Truth or
consequences; False reports waste police time, can lead to charges against the
individual” by Mark Bowes, Richmond [Virginia] Times Dispatch, Feb. 18, 2004,
via LexisNexis).
24 There was recently a notable exception to this—a
self-shooting designed, like some Full/Half 200s, to frame someone. On
As I explain later, sympathy beatings still strike me as
something of a different animal from shootings. But in all other respects, this
incident fits at least the Half 200, and even highlights the unusual revenge
subgenre of this weird crime—ones that target a particular villain (via
frame-job) rather than a generic group. Even though that’s the motif in “Dirty
Harry,” I didn’t pay enough attention to that subtle distinction. It may be
even more psychologically curious. Apparently, it not only seeks sympathy by
incarnating the pain the victim/perpetrator feels emotionally in his/her
situation; it also is itself an angry attack on the perceived enemy. The
thinking appears to be: “You go around unpunished for the emotional pain you
cause me, so now I really will hurt myself and see you really punished.”
(Incidentally, I was aware during the writing of this column that Donovan’s
case was pending in court, but for that very reason chose not to include it
initially. Sources: “Former MIT professor found guilty of staging shooting” by
John R. Ellement, Boston Globe, Aug. 17, 2007, and “Former MIT professor headed
to trial in allegedly staged shooting” by Associated Press [via Boston.com],
Aug. 2, 2007.)
25 A friend of mine has since noted another
extremely relevant comparison: Munchausen syndrome. I wish it had occurred to
me to elaborate on it here. It may be quite valid to say that the Full 200 is
Munchausen’s incarnate. There may be relevancy to hypochondria in general here.
Another friend also pointed out to me the phenomenon of
soldiers shooting themselves to avoid duty. As the friend informed me, there
was recently a report of a
Yet another comparable syndrome/crime has occurred to me:
faked kidnappings/disappearances that involve self-inflicted injuries, particularly
if they involve a desire to gain attention or sympathy (as opposed to a desire
to truly run away). Indeed, they should be considered basically a subgenre of
the Half 200. I was reminded of this better-known subgenre by the recent
conviction of New Hampshire’s Gary Dodds, who reportedly crashed his car and
inflicted injuries to make it appear as if he spent a night in winter woods,
all to draw attention to his failing candidacy for a seat in Congress. (Dodds
reportedly continues to deny faking any of it.) He was convicted on charges of
falsifying evidence, leaving the scene of an accident and the legal version of
crying wolf. In some ways, this sort of crime takes us a bit far afield from
the subject at hand. But increasingly I envision a chart where sympathy
beatings, faked accidents and suicide attempts occupy circles with mutually
overlapping edges. (Source: “Ex-candidate convicted of faking post-crash
disappearance” by Holly Ramer, Associated Press, Feb. 20, 2008, via
www.boston.com.)
26 Sandy Davis of the YWCA of Santa Clara
Valley, California, in Goldston, op. cit.
27 See “For Real: Many Well-Publicized ‘Hate
Crimes’ Were Staged” at www.cwfa.org/articles/8776/CFI/family/index.htm#ref. In
an amusing coincidence, the fool who wrote the piece is named “Douthit.”
28 See http://en.wikipedia.org/Paul_Mirecki.
As a side note to Intelligent Design proponents, feel free to contact me with
an explanation of: the shin; the testicles; the birth canal; the appendix; the
fragility of the eye and eyelid; the airway/gullet connection that allows us to
easily choke on food; the upright gait that leads to damaging falls; and/or our
lack of fur or armor. Persuade me though you might, you will never get me to
accept more than Unintelligent Design.
Posted June 16,
2007. Updated June 29; July 4 and 15; Aug. 22; and Nov. 4 and 15, 2007; and
Feb. 6, 19 and 21; March 6 and 27; and April 2 and 21, 2008. Hyperlinks have
been removed due to severe code-corruption problems with two of them. Thanks
again, MS Word!