Michael Blanding

Michael Blanding was a staff writer at Boston Magazine when he first received a letter from Gardner heist suspect, David Turner, who had been ensnared in the February 1999 sting on TRC Auto Electric. Writing from prison, Turner expressed his belief that the FBI had set him up for one crime — the planned Loomis Fargo heist — in order to squeeze him on another: the Gardner. Over the course of a correspondence that spanned several years, Turner proposed that Blanding write a book about his life. Turner dangled tantalizing hints about the Gardner heist and other unsolved crimes, but eventually stopped communicating with Blanding. But not before he shared a few poems about him written by a fellow inmate. Hear Michael Blanding read from one of them, “The Sting,” here:

-- Reported by Kelly Horan