tv Meet the Author BBC News April 16, 2017 10:45pm-11:01pm BST
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rule until 2029. it now and he can rule until 2029.m isa now and he can rule until 2029.m is a turning point. it could be. turkey has long wanted to join the eu. but something he has said this evening that he wants to do is to eventually introduce the death penalty. europe has been clear and said if turkey does that, it does not get into the eu. it looks like turkey is choosing to face eastwards. he has got the result that some commentators are saying in the worst possible way. it is too small a margin to say he has a clear mandate to introduce the powers? asked him was saying, he was expected to get 55% and did not. it was like the 52—48 that we had, it is not a ringing endorsement. it creates more uncertainty. he was looking for a rubber—stamp. he didn't get it. now you have the opposition saying 60% of the vote is being contested. it creates more
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uncertainty. that region is and uncertainty. that region is and uncertain region. they are a buffer state between syria and europe. he has used the cover of the coup last year to call this. i think he has put something like 50,000 people, jailed or removed from theirjobs in the judiciary, journalists... jailed or removed from theirjobs in the judiciary, journalists. .. he says that is to bring about stability and security? he has to deal with syria, the kurdish problem, islamists from his own country. this is going to solidify divisions and show us the size of dissent. three of the biggest cities in turkey voted against it. the i, is it time to strip president assad's wife of uk citizenship? she was born in london and holds a british passport. there is a move in
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parliament to do exactly that. conservative mps and liberal democrat mps are calling for her to have her citizenship revoked. the right to do that, i think it is under the british nationality act, it lies with the home secretary. does being the wife of a dictator give you the license to say you are not entitled to british citizenship any more? one important point, she has been disseminating pro—syrian, pro—assad messages on social media accounts. we are not at war with syria. i'm uncomfortable about stripping citizenship. it is usually invoked to protect the country against someone you don't want coming in. i think everyone against someone you don't want coming in. ithink everyone has human rights, civil rights, she remainsa human rights, civil rights, she remains a citizen until she shows good cause for having it taken away. don't forget all the front pages are online on the bbc news website where you can read a detailed review of the papers. it's all there for you — seven days a week at bbc.co.uk/papers —
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and you can see us there too — with each night's edition of the papers being posted on the page shortly after we've finished. don't go yet, john and tim will be back at 11:30pm for another look at the front pages. now it's time for meet the author. oklahoma in the 1920s and the true story of a murder conspiracy that absorbed and shocked america, and epitomised the darker side of the wild west and all its lingering lawlessness. native americans being herded into reservations and dismissed as inferior red indians. then the oil gushes sprouting out of the prairies and changing everything. and eventually a conspiracy fuelled by greed and jealousy that became one of the obsessions of the young j edgar hoover and his new fbi. david grann's book killers of the flower moon is a trip into the story of the osage people, a journey into a part of american's past that's closer than we sometimes think. welcome.
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david, this is a fabulous melodrama, but it's also a human story that is full of tragedy. when you lifted the lid on this series of murders in oklahoma in the early 20s, apart from knowing you had stumbled across a wonderful story, how did it affect you? i've written so many stories, this was the one that was probably the most emotionally draining. i worked on it for nearly half a decade and i began to collect victors, photographs, of the victims. and i would keep those photographs by my desk as i worked on the project. the real tragedy was, as i began the project,
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i thought there were, you know, so many victims, a dozen, and then a dozen grew to two dozen and by the end of the project i was looking at scores of victims who were caught up in this incredibly sinister conspiracy. and of course, they were native americans. red indians, as we grew up to call them in an earlier age. and they faced the most terrible problems in their lives. the land was removed, the discrimination was at a level that we can barely imagine. and then they discovered that black oil was coming up through their land and they became rich. the way the story begins is extraordinary, it takes you to another planet. yes. i mean, it's amazing. so, the osage suffered the same fate as so many native american communities and tribes and nations in the united states, which is that they were driven off their land. they once controlled most of the midwest. thomasjefferson referred to them of that great nation. and then within a few years,
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they had to cede millions and millions of acres. and eventually they were driven to this little corner of north—east oklahoma. they went there because they thought the land was rocky and fertile and they said the white men will finally leave us alone. so they go there, and lo and behold they are sitting on some of the largest deposits of oil in the world. and overnight they became millionaires. they became the richest people per capita, not only in the united states, but in the world. and they lived in mansions. it was said at the time that each american might own one car, each osage owned 11 cars! the car had come, it was in the 20th century, this story, but it is the wild west! it is the last remnants of the wild west. it's lawless, it's outlaws... power hungry... pistol shooters... and because of the oil, this area drew, it was like a magnet for every kind of outlaw. getty arrived on the train. all the great oil men made their fortune in the osage. getty, sinclair...
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all the great names we associate with oil barons, they all made their fortune in the osage. and in the midst of it, you tell the story of a real set of murders, a conspiracy, what we would now call a cover—up, and a target for the nascent fbi, hoover the new director sitting in washington, sending his men in undercover to try to sort this out. yes. and it's a story that is, it's better than fiction. yeah, it is crazier than fiction. it was hard to believe. what's amazing about this story is it has been almost excised from history, partly because of racial prejudice. i had known nothing about this story when i started writing it. and yet it was huge. across america. it was big in its day, yeah. it was big in its day. it became the nascent fbi's first major homicide case. it becamej edgar hoover at age 29 doing hisjob, believe it or not, insecure about his security and holding onto hisjob. it became his first big case.
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and after they badly bungled the case and, just to give one example of that, they recruited an outlaw, appropriately named blackey, to go in undercover to use as an informant. instead, he slips away, robs a bank and killed a police officer. j edgar hoover is sitting in washington petrified that he might actually lose hisjob, that his streams of a bureaucratic empire might end. he turns the case over to an old frontier lawman, an agent named tom white. tom white puts together an undercover team and it is like something out of oceans ii. texas rangers come in. yeah, texas rangers. they have one guy pose as an insurance salesman. he used to sell insurance. he actually opens an insurance store in town. he's selling real policies. the most amazing thing is, too, that the undercover team included an american indian agent, and this was remarkable because there was so much prejudice at the time, he was probably the only american indian or native american in the bureau at the time. and in the midst of this, you uncoverfor us a conspiracy, the nature of which we won't reveal
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because it would spoil it for readers, and subsequently a sensational trial. that i think goes deep into the american story and the sense that you can see through this prison, with all its melodrama and bloodstained detail, the emergence of a real system of laws and order. in the 19205, it took that long. yes, this was really the emergence of what i would call professionals, an effort to professionalise law enforcement. one of the things that shocked me was just how lawless the country was, how untrained the sheriffs office was, how widespread corruption was. so this was an attempt to professionalise the art of detection. the amazing thing about tom white is, he began his career riding on a horse when justice was meted out by the end of a barrel of a gun and by the 1920s he was working this case, he's wearing a suit and a fedora, trying to work out how
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to study fingerprints, handwriting analysis, and he has to file paperwork, which he can't stand. this is a magical story. but as you said when we began, it's also a very painful story. what did you learn about your country in the 1920s that you hadn't really thought of? you know, i was shocked, even though you grow up hearing about racial prejudice, the degree of racial prejudice that allowed these crimes to go on. these were crimes of greed and avarice but they were carried out without consciousness because the targets and the victims were native americans, and in their minds and many of the killers, these were seen as sub humans. and because of that, these crimes are covered up. i guess the thing that shocked me most is we tend to think about murder stories with a singular evilforce, right? you have one really bad
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man and the whole kind of concept of a mystery, both in fiction and in nonfiction, is you capture that bad man, you'd expunge it and you feel better about society. what happens when you have a crime story where the whole of white society, the whole town, is possibly complicit in it? finally, how have the osage people you have been in touch with reacted to the telling of the story and the fact that it will now be read by millions of people? yeah, i mean, i didn't know when i began the project how people would receive me and the desire to tell the story, and i was struck that the osage were remarkably generous, because they carried the story inside them for so many years. and so for them i think the chance to share the story, that it might receive its place in history in a wider audience, at least so far my experience has been extremely positive.
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david grann, author of killers of the flower moon, thank you very much. thank you so much. hello. a sunny day tomorrow with just a few showers around. out there at the moment, we still have some rain across parts of central and eastern england. patchy and sporadic. some will stay dry and avoided altogether. elsewhere, dry for a time before showers start developing parts of scotland. clear skies, particularly for the north of the country. a touch of frost for one two could take us to the start of easter monday. a lot of cloud around, some showers brightening up. showers pushed across scotland. after a sunny start in northern england, clouding over with showers later. northern ireland avoiding most of the showers throughout the day. quite a bit of sunshine around, some avoiding them altogether. chilly in the breeze, particularly
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for eastern scotland and north east england. a cold start with a wider frost in the countryside. a pleasant day with some sunshine around. through the week ahead, not much rain in the forecast away from parts of western scotland. turning warmer by day. the night is still chilly with a risk of frost. goodbye for now. this is bbc news. the headlines at 11:00pm: turkey's president erdogan declares victory in the referendum to increase his powers, but opponents question whether the vote was fair. translation: this success, this victory for turkish people, turkish economy and for turkey as a whole. the us and china are working on a range of options to deal with north korea, america's top security adviser says. 68 children are among the dead in syria, after yesterday's bomb attack on buses carrying evacuees from besieged towns. also in the next hour: theresa may
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