Event Preview: Friends of Mystery's Bloody Thursday featuring John Kroger

This preview is provided by contributor, Teresa Bergen.  Ms. Bergen is the author of the novel Killing The President, and in addition to writing, transcribes and edits oral histories, paints animal portraits, makes costume devil horns, teaches yoga, and plays bass in an indie rock band.

Thursday night we can bask in the glory of an incredibly accomplished man. Oregon’s attorney general John Kroger will speak at the meeting of Friends of Mystery.

Kroger has an amazing and varied background. He joined the Marines at the age of seventeen, undergoing jungle warfare training in Panama. Then he studied philosophy at Yale. He spent time in Washington, DC, as a legislative assistant, as deputy policy director of Clinton’s presidential campaign, and as a senior policy analyst at the US Treasury Department. Then he decided to go back to school. He studied law at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1996.

After law school, he served as federal prosecutor. He won a conviction in a Mafia multiple homicide trial against gangster Gergory Scarpa, Jr. Among many other cases.

He took a vacation and rode his bicycle all the way across the country. He started to think about the quieter life of teaching law. When a position in criminal law came open at Lewis and Clark, he took it.

But his halcyon days were brief, because he was called back to join the Justice Department’s Enron Task Force. After securing fraud convictions against Enron’s chair and the CEO, Kroger returned to Lewis and Clark.

But then in 2007, he became Oregon’s attorney general. And sometime during what sounds like quite a busy life, he managed to write Convictions: A Prosecutor’s Battles against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux published it in 2008.  The book has drawn rave reviews, and won the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction.

He has a bunch of other accomplishments, too, which would probably max out Reading Local’s web space.

Did I mention people with accomplishments like these should not have been born only one year before me? I’d prefer them to be at least thirty years older.

Anyway, I am sure he is a dynamite speaker. And Friends of Mystery is a fun group of mystery enthusiasts who host Bloody Thursday events every few months. This Thursday, a reception will start at 7:00, followed by the program at 7:30. The event is free and open to the public. Park free at Terwilliger Plaza in either of their permit only parking lots near the intersection of SW 6^th and Sheridan. The #8 bus also serves Terwilliger Plaza. Enter the building through the lower entrance, across Sixth Avenue, directly in back of the bus shelter.

Image credits Lewis & Clark College and IndieBound.