The Boy Who Loved Transit

How the system failed an obsession: "An uncommonly seamless blend of fluid writing and fastidious reporting, "The Boy Who Loved Transit" tells the story of Darius McCollum, a thirty-seven-year-old New Yorker who has spent much of his life in jail for impersonating a transit officer. Writer Jeff Tietz outlines the numerous ways in which the court system has failed McCollum, the the piece is much more than a sermon against injustice; it's a complex portrait of an inscrutable character who, in Tietz's hands, comes alive."

Finalist, profile writing, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing 2003. (Jeff Tietz, Harper's, May 2002.)

Also: a Wikipedia entry on McCollum; "The Ballad of Darius McCollum" by a band called the Dare Dukes.