This book explores the conundrum that political fortune is dependent both on social order and big, constitutive crime. An act of outrageous harm depends on rules and protocols of crime scene discovery and forensic recovery, but political authorities review events for a social agenda, so that crime is designated according to the relative absence or presence of politics. In investigating this problem, the book introduces the concepts ¿intelligence crime¿ and ¿critical forensics.¿ It also reviews as an exemplar of this phenomenon ¿apex crime,¿ a watershed event involving government in the support of a contested political and social order and its primary opponent as the obvious offender,