Rob Gentz

“So I had to go to the Marriott,” I finished. “You what?” He jumped to his feet as though he’d been hit with a cattle prod. “How could you do this, after everything that happened?”
― Michael Levine, Deep Cover: The Inside Story of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of the Drug War

“As it turned out, warning Christians that burying their heads in the sand would only marginalize them further was completely intolerable to those Christians with their heads buried the deepest.”
― David Fitzgerald, Jesus: Mything in Action, Vol. I

“Those who are attracted to Dole’s vision of life in Russell, Kansas, need to spend a little time here. It turns out there’s a reason ambitious people like Dole have been fleeing the place in droves: while its mythical counterpart grows in stature, the actual Russell has been slowly withering. A bleak local economic history could be written from inside any store on Main Street. For example, the biggest and oldest store—a department store called Bankers, for which Dole modeled clothes—opened in 1881, ten years after Russell was founded, beside the new tracks laid by the Union Pacific Railroad. It prospered through the oil boom of the 1920s and the farming boom of the 1940s, reaching its apogee in the 1950s, when it stocked three full floors of dry goods. Since then the store’s business has gradually waned so that it now occupies barely one floor, some of which is given over to the sale of Bob Dole paraphernalia. Where once there were gardening tools there are now rows of Dole buttons, stickers, T-shirts, and caps. The oldest family-owned business in Kansas will probably soon close for lack of business and of a family member willing to live in Russell. “I’d manage the place,” says one of the heirs, who lives in Kansas City, “but only if you put it on a truck and moved it to another town.”
― Michael Lewis, Losers

“On December 3 the New York Times announced the death of Pablo Escobar on the front page. “Pablo Escobar, who rose from the slums of Colombia to become one of the world’s most murderous and successful cocaine traffickers, was killed in a hail of gunfire… . “The death is not expected to seriously affect cocaine traffic.”
― Roberto Escobar, Escobar: The Inside Story of Pablo Escobar, the World's Most Powerful Criminal