Bombed by the USA?
“I feel that a sector of the U.S. government, this one wild sector, almost killed me and did kill some of my friends,” he said. “And I think it is perfectly capable of doing it again if we don’t stop them.”
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We asked Avirgan what he thinks about being turned into a comic book. (A better term would be “graphic docudrama,” which is what the book calls itself It’s square-bound and 80 pages long. And it costs $8.95.)
“Of course, when I was a kid. we had Superman and Batman comics,” Avirgan said. “But I have been out of the United States in third world countries the last 17 years, so I’d completely missed the phenomenon of comics making a transition to an intellectual stage, an adult stage.
The racketeering charge was a stroke of genius. Christic, which describes itself as “a nonprofit interfaith center for law and national policy in the public interest,” decided that 30 years of gunrunning, dope smuggling, and bushwhacking fit the usual definitions of organized crime. So Christic sued under the authority of RICO, the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Statute passed by Congress in 1970 to help the feds bust mobsters.
“That’s four times greater than the largest award ever under the laws that he used,” said Avirgan. “He’s a Judge so he can do it.”
“Better late than never,” says Tony Avirgan, who needed some good news.
