Attention quickly focussed on the alleged triggerman: a decorated thirty-three-year-old Chechen officer named Zaur Dadaev, a former deputy commander of Sever.
A young dot-com entrepreneur named James Healy, a regular customer whom Koenig referred to as a "triggerman," took a liking to the other.
"Around 1970, an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration got blown away, and the D.E.A. heard that Scarpa was the triggerman.
In the novel, Selassie is smothered by a military officer, not shot by an impoverished triggerman.
In a gallery labeled "To Meyer Lansky," there are his home movies, outfits and favorite poems; in another is living room furniture of Sam Giancana, Capone's "efficient and ruthless triggerman".
He often teamed up with his friend and brother-in-law, Dulmatin, whom police officials accused of wiring up the detonators and then serving as the triggerman in the Bali attack.
From there it was on to the perpetually dysfunctional Knicks, who spent the better part of D'Antoni's first two seasons more focused on clearing cap room than on getting him the right offensive triggerman.
Crump, the family's lawyer, told me, "You know, if Trayvon would have been the triggerman, it's nothing Trayvon Martin could have said to keep police from arresting him Day 1, Hour 1".
The triggerman in Mr. Boulis's killing is thought to have been another Queens mobster, John Gurino, who was himself gunned down in Boca Raton, Fla., in 2003.
O'Connor describes one incident in which an Afghan suspected of being a triggerman was shot while running from the scene of an I.E.D. explosion.
"They have a better chance of proving the involvement of all the individuals they want because the triggerman is the key to proving a crime," said the deputy editor, Sergei M. Sokolov, whose journalists had undertaken an independent investigation of Ms. Politkovskaya's death.
