Books
The Last Western
The Unjustified Killing of Michael Rosa by Ed Cantrell
ROCK SPRINGS, WYOMING, 1978. A Puerto Rican undercover cop out of West Harlem. An Indiana preacher's son turned frontier lawman. A midnight shooting death outside a boomtown saloon. A mountain town murder trial turned Wild West show.
In his powerful and compelling reconstruction of an infamous 1978 killing in boomtown Rock Springs, Wyoming, journalist Rone Tempest tracks the parallel lives of Ed Cantrell, an Indiana schoolboy who styled himself a 19th-century gunfighter lawman, and Michael Rosa, a decorated U.S. Marine who worked under Cantrell as an undercover narc until Cantrell drew his gun an shot him dead in the back seat of an unmarked police car.
The Two Elk Saga
Originally published in seven installments between May 20 and June 10, 2014 on the nonprofit news site WyoFile.com.
"The Two Elk saga is made up of intertwined stories: one man’s outsized dream; Wyoming’s desire to believe in energy castles in the air, kept aloft by taxpayer dollars; and the federal government’s failure to bring anyone down to earth, until millions of dollars in public money had been squandered. It is, in short, a case study of territorial ambition, personal greed, political nepotism, government malfeasance, and a highly creative interpretation of federal tax laws."