You Can Run

https://magazine.atavist.com/2026/mccann-cocaine-fugitives

by bryanrasmussen • 2 months ago

142 78 2 months ago

magazine.atavist.com

delichon• 2 months ago

  The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself. -- Ezekiel 18:20

That was aspirational around 590 BC when written, and still is. To isolate children from the iniquity of the parent would require the dissolution of the family.

boothby• 2 months ago

My favorite (dys|u)topian setting; universal child removal to robo-nurseries, gets closer to implementable every day.

Etheryte• 2 months ago

They more or less did that during the bombing of London, children were evacuated to foster families in the countryside en masse. Luckily they came to terms with the fact that this was an insanely traumatic experience pretty quickly and reverted. It's literally less traumatic for a child to be in an active war zone than to be separated from their parents.

marginalia_nu• 2 months ago

Amusing how many read excerpts of The Republic and come away thinking it's a utopian project, and not a thought experiment to investigate the nature of justice.

lazyasciiart• 2 months ago

And as many adoptive parents know, that doesn’t go so easily.

password43217• 2 months ago

You can't quote that without also quoting:

   Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. -- Exodus 34:7

incr_me• 2 months ago

Why not?

Exoristos2• 2 months ago

Except that the writer in Ezekiel is proposing a new deal (in the voice of God) for his intended audience: basically, if at this point in the negotiations you forsake behavior A, various criminality and oppression; I will promise B, not to hold your relatives responsible, and C, to rescue those you've oppressed. (Also possibly D and E -- it's a long passage.)

Kaliboy5• 2 months ago

This is literally true now that we understand epigenetics a bit more.

jibal8• 2 months ago

Of course one can quote the statement that one agrees with and not the statement one doesn't agree with, unless the intent is to review the work that contains them, which it wasn't.

bee_rider3• 2 months ago

Wow, that was quite a lot of cryptic build-up. It’s basically a story about conman/drug guy interwoven with biographical information and anecdotes about how this impacted his family.

“You can run,” I guess maybe in the context of “You can run but you can’t hide” is not really touched upon too much. I mean it doesn’t have a particular connection to this story, any more than any other story about a fugitive.

kayo_20211030• 2 months ago

Yup. A big yawn. It seems like it ought to deep and insightful, but is, as you say, "basically a story about conman/drug guy interwoven with biographical information and anecdotes about how this impacted his family". There's no connection between the two parts that goes deeper that "they knew each other once, but did they really know each other?". It'd be Hallmark, but the parents aren't sympathetic enough.

muglug• 2 months ago

Yeah — but includes a fun cameo from a famous 90s TV dad.

linohh• 2 months ago

When I read your comment, I instantly knew which one.

jmye• 2 months ago

Have you ever like, read books? Why on earth would you think the title of a piece needs to call to anything but a general emotion from the story?

Wow, that was quite a lot of cryptic build-up.

Yes, they were building suspense and telling an interesting story. It's a long form article, not a 30-word tweet. Jesus.

JRandomHacker42• 2 months ago

I've seen this attitude on HN all the time - the concept of "a narrative hook" is apparently a foreign concept here

bee_rider3• 2 months ago

It might be a nice truecrime story (I’m not sure actually, they aren’t my cup of tea). I read along figuring it’d have some HN-related twist eventually, but it didn’t. So I thought I’d provide a heads up.

spaqin• 2 months ago

Usually a book title is a little more descriptive. And there's a synopsis or some other blurb on the back of the cover, to try to make you care a bit more than three words on a link on the front page of Hacker News.

chongli• 2 months ago

Damn, I thought this was going to be a guide to getting into running for exercise. Yes, I know there are lots of those around, but if this one made the front page of HN then maybe it had something interesting about it, or it was particularly well written or something.

bee_rider3• 2 months ago

Or something about politics. Or schedulers.

davidw• 2 months ago

On the subject of crime and that web site, I thought this story was quite fascinating:

https://magazine.atavist.com/2019/outlaw-country-klamath-cou...

There are a lot of those bits of land throughout the west that have been, for whatever reason, subdivided enough to make them very cheap plots of land in remote areas. They tend to attract a lot of very random people.

There's an area like that near where I live in Bend, Oregon where some guy called in to the Sheriff's department worried about his brother. The deputies decided to visit the next day because it was winter and already dark. Reading that, I had a record scratch moment where I was going "wait, the sheriff's deputy wouldn't visit the area after dark - holy crap".

RickJWagner• 2 months ago

Car racing and drug running must have been closely linked in the 80s. For another great read about them, check out Randy Lanier’s story. ( He had racing boats, too. )

Maybe Miami Vice was closer to truth than we knew.

wwarner• 2 months ago

Honestly i come to hn to escape true crime.

tobyhinloopen• 2 months ago

I expected a “running for beginners” app hah, like for training / endurance

twobitshifter• 2 months ago

I read it all. There are no shockers in the boxes. It's all explained ahead of time and by the time the contents of the boxes are revealed, you'll wish you didn't read all of that.

fisian• 2 months ago

I interpreted it another way: the boxes are what connects the past to this written story. Without the boxes most details would be forgotten and this article wouldn't exist. The documents in the boxes were only thoroughly read by one daughter starting in 2024.

ahwvd37js• 2 months ago

In the long tradition of commenting on HN without reading the source, I was about to write up everything I've learned about running over the years...shoes, routes, stretches, rest days, IT band therapy, ...

declan_roberts• 2 months ago

Their dad smuggled cocaine. That was the secret that took about 4,000 words to reach. Entertaining article, but boy what a trudge.

kraussvonespy• 2 months ago

Sometimes the journey is the reward.

MarsIronPI• 2 months ago

Meh, I felt that the article was over-dramatic and verbose at times.

dyauspitr2• 2 months ago

John was strict and controlling. He wanted his daughters to dress in identical clothing embroidered with their initials, and told them to wear their hair long, that it looked more ladylike than a popular bob cut. He wrote down chores for everyone in the family on sheets of yellow legal paper. Erin and Meredith got lists of books to read and words to memorize. The house had about a dozen phones, and John instructed Erin to answer formally: “McCann residence, Erin speaking. How may I help you?” John told his daughters that there was only one right way to install a new roll of toilet paper—feeding forward from the top, not hanging down in back—and insisted that they get straight A’s while lying about his academic achievements.

So completely normal things painted as some insidious nonsense.

djeastm• 2 months ago

I wouldn't call that completely normal. It's certainly strict and controlling.

dyauspitr2• 2 months ago

Ah to live in the 70s and 80s where nothing was verifiable. I probably would still have been a model employee but the possibilities were endless.

thomassmith65• 2 months ago

The 90s weren't so different, nor earlier decades, centuries. In fact, the positioning here irritates me:

  The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives.

It makes it sound as though the anomaly were not the past two decades, but all of recorded history which preceded them.

decimalenough• 2 months ago

No, it really was a golden age. Before the 747 kicked off the age of cheap air travel in the 1970s, it was impractical to hop around the world like the family here did. Even domestic travel in the US was slow, difficult and expensive until the train and automobiles came along.

And if you wind the clock even further back, you could hardly go further than a few villages away on foot or horseback before people would get very suspicious about an outsider venturing to their domain.

bflesch• 2 months ago

Is this a story from the Epstein universe? Because the town of York during that time had some interesting characters like Donald and Kashoggi. Also "Lago Mar" in Florida sounds familiar.

Edit: At the end the main protagonist even mentions having Iran Contra evidence and speaks to the commission, but two senators present evidence that devalues his testimony. Interesting.

photochemsyn• 2 months ago

The moral of the story is that they should have followed in the footsteps of the Sackler Family and Purdue Pharma, who found a legal way to push opiates on people using shopping mall pain clinics and shady doctors as the sales and marketing team.

Just as sociopathic, but they got to keep their billions, serve no prison time, all while doing far more social harm than a pair of low-life cocaine importers could have dreamed of.

user_of_the_wek• 2 months ago

Reminds me of Brecht

Was ist ein Einbruch in eine Bank gegen die Gründung einer Bank?

woogiegie• 2 months ago

I actually enjoyed this one the build up worked for me, even if the two threads don't fully tie together.

You Can Run

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