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Mike Pingree

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September 24, 2000

LONG TIME NO SEE: After leaving the courthouse in North Adams, Mass., where they had faced assault charges, two young men decided to relieve the stress by smoking a little marijuana in an unlocked car they found parked under a bridge. They didn't know that the vehicle belonged to the Berkshire County Drug Task Force. 
Police spotted the dope-smoking duo and arrested them, marking the second time they were in police custody in the same day.

HEY, I'M TALKING TO YOU HERE: Alpna and Viresh Patel's marriage was arranged in their native India, but, it turns out, they were not all that compatible, and their relationship began to falter in less than a year after they came to the United States. One night, Alpna began reading to her husband a list she had written of 39 ways to salvage their union when he made the mistake of falling asleep. She responded by stabbing him to death with a steak knife. 
She was convicted of voluntary manslaughter.

THE NO-SEX BROTHEL: Gao Mingliang, a corrupt police official, opened up a phony brothel in the back of a restaurant in Jiangsi, China, in which women would entice customers into the back room where cops would then arrest them and impose a fine. It was turning a handsome little profit until Gao's frontman, the guy officially listed as owning the place, was arrested for running the brothel by honest cops in another district and sent to jail for a year. 
When he got out, he blew the whistle on the whole operation.

REMEMBER ME? TURN IN YOUR BADGE! Alarmed by rampant police corruption in Kazakhstan, Interior Minister Kairbek Suleymenov took an incognito trip across the country with a truck driver to find how exactly how bad it was. Suleymenov, in a vehicle transporting nine tons of melons, said the driver had to bribe 36 different officials and traffic policemen along the way. Each took only a few dollars, but the bribes totaled $225, big money in Kazakhstan. 
When Suleymenov got back, he fired all 36 men. 

SHE GOT WHAT SHE ASKED FOR: Janice Petrowsky was apparently a very difficult woman who ferociously guarded her privacy by leaving angry messages on neighbors' answering machines and firing a BB gun at children if they came too close to her Washington Township, N.J., home. She once slashed the tires of social workers who tried to help her. The 56-year-old woman, nicknamed "The Witch," so intimidated those around her that they kept their distance, until, finally, after not seeing her for a long time, a neighbor ventured in and found her skeletal remains. 
She had been dead for at least a year. 

Mike Pingree writes another Looking Glass column in the Boston Sunday Herald. You can read it by clicking here:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists.html

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