Crime – Jeff Wise

The Debate Over the Air India Crash: Was It Suicide?

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on July 15, 2025.

The release over the weekend of the preliminary report on last month’s deadly crash of an Air India flight has stirred controversy in the aviation community with some asserting that the crash could have been caused only by pilot suicide.

Prior to the report’s release, speculation had swirled for weeks about the cause of the June 12 crash with commentators struggling to interpret grainy video and incomplete tracking data to explain why the plane rose only a few hundred feet after takeoff, then sank back toward the ground before striking the campus of a medical college, killing 19 on the ground and all but one of the 242 people aboard the plane. Some wondered if contaminated fuel might have caused an engine failure or if the flight crew had incorrectly configured the flaps or landing gear.

The 15-page report, which includes information gleaned from the black boxes, puts much of that speculation to rest.

According to the report, the Boeing 787 began its takeoff roll at Ahmedabad’s international airport at 1:37 p.m. The first officer, 32-year-old Cliver Kunder, was at the flight controls in the cockpit’s right seat with the captain, 56-year-old Sumeet Sabharwal, sitting to his left. Assuming that they were following normal procedure, Sabharwal would have been keeping his right hand on the throttle levers, ready to pull the engines to idle if he felt he needed to abort the takeoff.

How Luigi Mangione Probably Gave Himself Away

This article originally ran on Tuesday, December 10, 2024 in New York magazine.

Former FBI agent Jerry Clark served six years on the Cincinnati division’s violent-crime fugitive task force and was later the lead investigator on the notorious “Pizza Bomber” murder case. Today, he’s a professor of criminology at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the co-author of four books, including On the Lam: A History of Hunting Fugitives in America. We talked to him about the manhunt for Luigi Mangione, who allegedly fled from Manhattan after gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4.

How does law enforcement go about apprehending a fugitive?
You start out with, “What do we know happened?” Then you start to piece together how he got to the scene and where he went after he left, and you start searching for imagery. We call it canvassing. In the digital age, every business has a camera, every person has a camera in their pocket. So you’ll canvass and follow the trail of where the last known sighting was.

It takes hours and hours of painstaking police work to get those videos. They don’t just appear. You’ve got to go find them. I used to even look at people riding on the bus. If there’s a bus route near where the suspect was last seen, you find the bus driver who was working that shift and ask if they have any regular customers, then put out a note asking anybody that was riding this bus at this time to give you a call. It’s all just hard gruntwork.

And then you go through hours of footage. Once you have a clear image, you put it out over the media as quickly as possible to get the help of the public. You’re creating digital billboards so that everybody gets to see this face. Now you’ve got millions of investigators.

How Trump Will Change America This Time

This article originally ran in New York magazine on December 6, 2024.

Those expecting a continuation of Donald Trump’s first term are in for a shock. Back then, he came to office with no experience governing and no understanding of the machinery through which he could implement his will. Over time, he learned and then spent the next four years stewing in resentment and plotting revenge. “In the first term, things were chaotic. Trump did not achieve most of his policy goals, and mostly the institutions survived. They took some damage, but mostly they held up reasonably well,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University. “I think that is not going to be true for the second term.”

When he comes to power in January, he will have the benefit of a judiciary stocked with his own appointees, not least in the Supreme Court, which this summer decided a president has immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he does in an official capacity. What’s more, Trump will be abetted by a unified Congress held by a party that is more compliant than before. “The checks will not be there,” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of political science at Harvard and co-author of How Democracies Die. “This is going to be a much more authoritarian government.”

One of his first moves will be to carry out a massive purge of the officials who might stand in his way. Trump plans to reclassify some 50,000 civil servants so that he can fire them at will. He has already signaled that he intends to axe the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, whom Trump himself appointed in 2017 and who has a ten-year term set by Congress in order to insulate the bureau from partisan politics.

Trump’s power, though, will not be limitless.

The CEO Shooting Has Corporate America Panicking

This article originally ran in New York magazine on December 6, 2024.

As soon as the manhunt for the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson got underway, the security and risk-consultancy firm Kroll started getting calls from its clients. As the the head of enterprise security risk management, Matthew Dumpert’s job is to protect executives and wealthy individuals from a wide variety of threats, including violence. I spoke to him the day after the attack about the public reaction to the vigilante-style killing and whether the shooting is a wake-up call for corporate America.

What have the calls been like since the shooting? What are your clients saying?
There’s been a real steady flow of phone calls, emails, and text messages from our clients wondering, “What does this mean? Is this a new evolution, or is this just an expansion of the existing threat environment? What do we need to do?” People are recognizing that in corporate America, life is very different than it was two days ago.

Why is it different?
A lot of executives’ eyes have been opened to the notion that even if you think you’re flying under the radar, there could be individuals or groups out there conspiring against you. To see this attack unfold in such a cold and clinical manner, it rocks the soul. It really captured how vulnerable we are as individuals.

How Trump Goes to Prison

This article originally ran in New York magazine on October 29, 2024

Donald Trump is facing an extreme sliding-doors scenario on Election Day. If he wins, he would have the power to single-handedly scuttle the federal criminal cases against him, be immune from prosecution while in office, and, thanks to the Supreme Court, have broad immunity from prosecution once — if — he leaves. If he loses, though, he will face criminal penalties that could leave him in command of a 70-square-foot prison cell for most of the rest of his life.

“He will be facing serious legal jeopardy if he loses. He knows that,” says Bennett Gershman, a professor of constitutional law at Pace Law School who served for a decade as a New York prosecutor. “It’s probably on his mind every day. He faces four very, very serious cases, in one of which he has already been convicted as a felon. The others are easily convictable.”

The minute it becomes clear that Trump has lost the election, his legal team will be preparing for the fight of a lifetime to keep him out of prison. “This defendant will use every means at his disposal to delay the outcome and complicate the adjudication,” says Martin Horn, a professor of corrections at John Jay College and the executive director of the New York State Sentencing Commission. “Who knows what legal maneuvers are available to him?”

Here is a look at where the four cases against Trump stand and how they might play out.

New York: In Russia, No One Is Safe in the Air

The apparent downing of the business jet carrying Wagner chief Evgeniy Prigozhin delivered a suitably brutal end to one of Putin’s most ruthless and effective deputies. It also underlined the extent to which Russia has been willing to set aside the niceties of aviation safety in the raw exercise of power.

Throughout the rest of the world, civil aviation is sacrosanct, a highly protected and regulated industry bound by international treaties enforced by powerful agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency in the EU. Passenger safety is paramount. As a result, fatal accidents are exceedingly rare: The United State hasn’t had a fatal crash since 2009.

In 1978, the Soviet Union shot down an off-course Korean Air Lines 707, forcing it to crash-land on a frozen lake with the loss of two of the passengers and crew. Five years later, it shot down another off-course Korean Air Lines airliner over the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 aboard. In both cases, Soviet officials claimed that they were acting in self-defense, yet in both fighter jets had approached close enough to their targets to see that they were civilian airliners.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, its successor state, the Russian Federation, modernized its civilian aircraft fleet, and for a time safety improved. But after former KGB agent Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, the Kremlin gradually returned to its old ways. In 2014, as a Russia-backed insurgency raged in the eastern part of Ukraine, a regular Russian army anti-aircraft unit shot down a Malaysian Airlines 777 en route from the Netherlands to Malaysia as it neared the border between Ukraine and Russia. All 298 passengers and crew were killed. To this day, it remains unclear why the plane was shot down, but in the aftermath Ukraine halted its air-force attacks on Russian ground units and its counteroffensive against the invaders stalled.

New York: Could Trump Get Tossed Off 2024’s Ballots?

Donald Trump’s indictment on charges relating to his attempt to overturn the election, which led to the January 6 insurrection, represents not just a major legal hazard for the former president but also a potential political risk. The Constitution states officeholders who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States are unable to hold office. Already, anti-Trump advocates plan to use the charges tying Trump to the coup attempt to get him removed from the 2024 ballot.

The two main groups behind the effort to bar Trump’s candidacy are Free Speech for the People, a nonprofit aimed at fighting corruption and political inequality, and the watchdog organization Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Both are likely to start filing multiple challenges in dozens of states this November after states have set their primary rules. “We are focused on bringing the strongest case possible against Donald Trump,” says Donald Sherman, CREW’s senior vice-president and chief counsel. “This is not a messaging exercise. We are bringing a case to win.”

Video: MH370 Viewer Questions with Sarah Wynter

A lot of people who watched the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” have written me with questions. I asked my friend Sarah Wynter, star of the hit show “24,” to discuss some of the ones that have gotten asked the most. This is a new format for me; in the past I’ve mostly explained my ideas through writing, but I thought that people who came to my work via video might prefer that medium. I’m grateful to Sarah for helping me out with her considerably more advanced televisual chops.

New York: MH370 Is a Cold Case. But It Can Still Be Solved.

Nine years ago, MH370 took off into a clear, moonlit night and flew into the unknown. Somewhere over the South China Sea, 40 minutes into the red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, it disappeared from radar screens. None of the 239 passengers and crew were ever seen again. The conventional thinking is that the pilot had decided to commit mass murder-suicide by crashing into a remote corner of the southern Indian Ocean. But significant aspects of the case remained unexplained, including the plane’s ultimate resting place, and search officials have long since given up trying to determine what happened. Officially, MH370 is a cold case.

The urgency of solving the mystery remains, though. It’s disturbing enough that a state-of-the-art airliner can disappear so completely off the face of the earth; it’s even more troubling that the authorities, armed with hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct a search and self-proclaimed near certainty about where it must have gone, could fail to locate the 200-foot-long aircraft.

I’ve been following the case obsessively from the beginning, appearing on CNN to talk about it and writing about it in this magazine. I dove deep into the evidence for a 2019 book, and then spent several years working with the producers of a three-part Netflix documentary series, which debuts this week. My hope is that, while the passage of time has lessened the public’s interest in the case, it has also dispelled the fog of wild claims, giving us space to consider the evidence with greater clarity. Far from being a dead end, MH370 still offers multiple leads worth investigating. It’s important that we follow them. Continue reading New York: MH370 Is a Cold Case. But It Can Still Be Solved.

Netflix releases trailer for “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared”

On February 15, 2023 Netflix released the trailer for its three-part documentary series about the as-yet unsolved disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which will debut on March 8, 2023. I participated quite extensively in the years-long development project, and I think it’s the most detailed and thoughtful documentary on the topic to date.

You can read more about the production at Tudum, Netflix’s companion website.