On Nov. 18, 1983, police were dispatched to what started out as a robbery but soon escalated to a homicide.

That afternoon, a man entered Pace Dry Goods, 603 S. Chadbourne St., and took a pair of jeans into the dressing room, according to police reports.

He took the item to the register, and while the cashier was ringing it up, the man pulled out a small-caliber handgun, police said.

Thomas Henry Marsden, who managed the store, spoke briefly to the gunman and started to follow the man to the front of the store.

“I know it was in the afternoon,” said Fred Dietz Sr., who investigated the killing. “The guy went in there and pulled a gun and demanded money.”

According to reports, the suspect fired a single shot to the center of Marsden’s chest. Marsden took a couple of steps back and fell to the floor as the shooter ran outside and then toward the back of the store.

“That’s the last they saw of him,” Dietz said. “He did get some money I believe, but I don’t know how much.”

Dietz, a Criminal Investigations Division sergeant in 1983, said a door handle in the store was dusted for fingerprints. He also recalls that a composite was shown to witnesses.

Assistant Chief Robert Martinez, who was a patrol officer in 1983, was one of the first officers on scene.

Martinez didn’t see surveillance cameras around the store, but it didn’t surprise him.

“Back in 1983 I don’t think that was a high priority,” Martinez said. “What I remember growing up was you’d walk into a Town & Country or convenience store and there were mock cameras.”

Witnesses told Martinez they saw a man leave the store and gave him a description of a possible getaway car, he said.

“Someone actually gave chase to an individual,” Martinez said, “but they couldn’t identify anybody.”

When he walked in, he saw Marsden laying on the ground unconscious with a wound to the chest. At that point, an all-points bulletin was dispatched over the radio.

Attempts to revive Marsden were unsuccessful. He died at the scene and his body was taken to the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office in San Antonio.

An autopsy determined Marsden died from a close range single gunshot to the chest from a small caliber handgun. The bullet entered the center of the chest and was deflected through the heart.

Several witnesses inside the store gave police a description of the shooter and a potential getaway car, but the description was too general to make “an immediate or positive identification” of the man.

“The suspect was described as a Hispanic male in his early to mid 20s, approximately 5-feet, 8-inches to 5-feet, 9-inches tall and weighing 150 to 160 pounds,” according to police reports.

Witnesses told police the suspect may have stepped into a small brown four-door car — possibly a 1980 to 1983 Chevrolet Citation or Pontiac Phoenix. No one was able to remember a license plate or other unique characteristics about the vehicle.

San Angelo resident Richard Porter remembered buying clothes from Marsden, although he never knew him personally.

“He was an elderly fellow,” Porter said about Marsden. “It seemed like a senseless shooting at the time.”

Porter, who was 33 at the time, said he remembers the store shutting down shortly after the shooting.

Years after the shooting, detectives pursued leads in the case and were reluctant to give it up, Assistant Chief Jeff Fant said.

“After 26 years, we still don’t want to give up,” Fant said. “We can solve this crime and put a murderer behind bars who has been walking around our community, carrying the emotional baggage that he killed an innocent man in cold blood — over a pair of bluejeans.”

Anyone who has information on an unsolved crime is asked to call police at 657-4352. To leave information anonymously, call Crime Stoppers at 658-4357.

U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen, in an opinion released today, rejected John Satawa’s request to allow his family to erect the display pending a federal court case with the Macomb County Road Commission.

Rosen said Mound Road doesn’t represent a traditional public forum.

Satawa sued the Road Commission in October after it denied a permit for the large manger scene, saying structure created public safety hazards.

Satawa claimed the Road Commission violated his constitutional rights.

David Kravets

The operator of a popular BitTorrent search site said Monday he will likely challenge last week’s landmark decision by a U.S. judge declaring such sites unlawful and no different from conventional peer-to-peer piracy services.

“We do think from our preliminary review there are a number of issues for appeal,” said Ira Rothken, attorney for popular torrent search engine ISO Hunt, the defendant in the case.

The long-awaited decision, while not unexpected, was the first in the United States in which a federal judge found that BitTorrent search engines are an unlawful avenue (.pdf) to free movies, music, videogames and software. A contrary ruling likely would have sparked a gold rush of BitTorrent prospectors in the United States.

Targeted in the case was Gary Fung, a Canadian who operates ISO Hunt and other torrent search engines. Among other things, he argued that U.S. laws did not attach to him, and if they did, that his websites were protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In a lawsuit brought by the Motion Picture Association of America, U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles ruled: “Defendants’ technology is nothing more than old wine in a new bottle.”

Fung’s “intent to induce infringement is overwhelming and beyond reasonable dispute.”

In terms of infringement, the judge said ISO Hunt was no different than Napster and Grokster. But he said the BitTorrent technology was far superior and “obviously increases the potential for copyright infringement.”

The judge wrote that, instead of having to log into a proprietary network to download copyright files from each others’ computers, “users access defendants’ generally accessible website in order to download those files. And instead of downloading content files directly through defendants’ website, defendants’ users download dot-torrent files that automatically trigger the downloading of content files. These technological details are, at their core, indistinguishable from the previous technologies.”

The MPAA has sued dozens of similar sites in the United States, resulting in settlements or default judgments. the industry group won an $111 million default judgment against TorrentSpy last year after a federal judge concluded the now-shuttered tracker hid evidence.

That case is on appeal, but Judge Wilson’s ruling marks the first time that the legal merits of torrenting have been squarely addressed in the United States.

“The court’s decision establishes a powerful precedent that makes clear, once again, that website operators must respect the rights of content owners and control infringement on their websites, or face liability for their actions,” MPAA vice president Daniel Mandil said in a statement.

Fung, in an e-mail, said his sites should be protected by safe-harbor provisions of the copyright law, which immunize search engines from infringement liability if they promptly remove works when a rights-holder notifies them to take down infringing content.

“We are considering all options,” Fung said.

Among other things, the judge said Fung has not “acted expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the infringing material.”

The judge said Fung’s sites — including ISO Hunt, Torrentbox and Podtropolis — garner about 10 million hits monthly. Wilson noted that metadata for the sites included “warez” to alert search engines of the site’s nature ,and that Fung was “fostering a community that encouraged — indeed, celebrated — copyright infringement.”

But both Fung and Rothken said the judge got it wrong, that the site has removed thousands of infringing files upon proper request. “This alone, among other reasons, contradicts allegations that we willfully induce infringements,” Fung said.

The decision came eight months after a Stockholm court ruled similarly in the movie studios and Swedish government’s case against The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent site. That case, a blend of a civil and a criminal trial, is on appeal.

That April decision calls for the jailing of the Swedish site’s four co-founders. Despite a Stockholm court’s orders, the site remains functional.

Fung does not face any prison time. The judge did not order Fung to shutter his sites or pay monetary damages. A hearing on those matters is scheduled Jan. 11 in Los Angeles.

U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan said the hearings operate with many of the same legal rules as a court proceeding and are entitled to the same First Amendment protection. Although his written decision was signed Wednesday, it was released publicly on Monday.

The decision came in a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union against the New York City Transit Authority, which operates the city’s 27 subway lines and 243 bus routes, providing more than 2.3 billion rides in 2008. Also last year, the agency staged more than 20,000 hearings to process alleged violations of rules in the transit system.

Sullivan rejected arguments by lawyers for the transit authority who said the agency wanted to protect the privacy of people who challenge alleged rule violations and ensure they would not fail to attend a hearing out of fear that their case might be made public.

The Transit Authority said its policy was that members of the press or the wider public could only attend a hearing if the person who was challenging a rule violation gave permission.

Sullivan said defendants at civil and criminal court proceedings would likely prefer the same ability to control whether their hearings were public.

“Such a desire, however, does not suffice to defeat the First Amendment right of access,” the judge wrote.

Sullivan noted that many of the same legal rules were followed at the hearings as occur in court proceedings. For instance, those challenging a citation have the right to an attorney, the right to cross-examine the police officer and the right to produce documents and witnesses.

Police officers issue the citations and it is up to their discretion whether to require that they be processed in criminal court, where penalties can include a jail sentence, or before the Transit Authority Bureau, where no jail time is possible.

The city’s transit authority did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said the ruling confirms that there is “no room for a secret court in New York City.”

The NYCLU said the police department in recent years has issued up to 171,000 citations annually for violations such as fare evasion, public intoxication, unreasonable noise and obstructing pedestrian traffic.

The citations from 2005 to 2008 have resulted in more than 22,000 hearings annually at offices in Brooklyn, with guilty judgments issued in more than 83 percent of the contested cases, the civil liberties group said.

The civil rights group’s associate legal director, Christopher Dunn, said the NYCLU plans to monitor the hearings in the future to ensure they are conducted fairly and to track police enforcement activity in the transit system.

In its lawsuit, the agency said the number of subway riders stopped and questioned by police officers grew dramatically from 2,474 in 2003 to 38,552 in 2007, with studies showing that 88 percent of those subjected to police stops in the subway system were black or Latino.

The so-called Spartacus trial involved 36 defendants, all linked to the Casalesi clan from the southern Casal di Principe area near Caserta. The defendants were appealing prison sentences handed down in late 2005.

On top of the life sentences, 14 of the others received sentences of between two and 30 years behind bars.

The verdict was received with “great satisfaction” by Interior Minister Roberto Maroni and across the political spectrum.

The court followed the recommendations of the prosecution in pronouncing its verdict for the accused, who include the alleged head of the clan, Francesco “Sandokan” Schiavone.

Among the many accusations was murder - namely by mafia bosses Francesco Bidognetti, Michele Zagaria, and Antonio Iovine, as well as Schiavone, who has been in a high security prison since 1998.

Zagaria and Iovine are still on the run.

Extreme security measures were taken for the trial, with the court housed in a top security prison in the Poggioreale district of Naples. Only two of the defendants - locked in “cages” - were in the heavily guarded courtroom to hear the verdict. Others followed it via videolink from their prison cells.

Some 500 witnesses testified in the Spartacus trial, which opened in 1998 in Santa Maria Capua Vetere north of Naples, including about 20 mafia turncoats who gave key evidence against their former partners in crime.

A dramatic trial saw five people involved in the case - including an interpreter - assassinated, as well as a judge and two journalists threatened during hearings.

These episodes are part of the clan’s “strategy of terror” that could continue after the trial is finished, a parliamentary mafia commissioner, former senator Lorenzo Diana, told AFP.

“The clan is scared,” mafia author Roberto Saviano wrote in the daily La Repubblica on Wednesday. Saviano wrote the book “Gomorra”, which revealed the incredible reach of the Camorra clans.

The writer has had to live with a police escort since 2006. He attended the court verdict to show he was “not afraid”, he said.

While Saviano said the verdict was a “victory of justice”, he warned the state not to “let down its guard” against the Camorra.

By means of a territorial war that has cost some 1000 lives in 30 years, the Casalesi criminal cartel has progressively spread its reach.

Saviano described the Casalesi as “a confederation grouping all the Camorra families from the province of Caserta”, comprised of “violent heads of business, murderous managers … all with their own army and all linked by economic interests in most sectors”.

According to the investigation, the power and activities of the clan span beyond Italy’s borders and extend to eastern Europe and include the trafficking of drugs, arms and toxic waste, as well as prostitution.

Several cases that fall under Spartacus are still under investigation, delving into the clan’s political and legal links.

Judicial sources in Spain said Wednesday that a Spanish investigating judge had sent recordings purporting to reveal a match-fixing plot to German authorities.

Russian Premier League champion Zenit crushed Bayern 4-0 at home in its return match to win 5-1 on aggregate before going on to beat the Glasgow Rangers in the final of the competition.

“There is nothing to comment on because even if there is an investigation, Zenit has nothing to do with this,” said Alexei Petrov, a spokesman for Zenit.

In a statement issued on the club’s web site Wednesday, Zenit said its performance in the matches against Bayern and Glasgow “is the best proof the victories were achieved in honest, uncompromising contests.”

Sports, Tourism and Youth Politics Minister Vitaly Mutko, who also serves as president of the Russian Football Union, said the allegations of match fixing were another attempt to discredit football in the country.

UEFA, European football’s governing body, said Wednesday it was aware of the reports about a match-fixing investigation. Bayern said Wednesday it had no information about the reports.

Even then, they were only slightly optimistic that they would find the suspect, a drifter who has spent part of the last four decades living in Florida, Arizona, Nevada and California.

Investigators finally caught up with Robert Bowman on Thursday in southern California when he was spotted riding a bicycle