Laurels & lances: Cancer & crime

Laurel: To cancer research. Luca Bertucci, 17, of Murrysville understands what it’s like to have cancer. As a sophomore, he received inpatient chemotherapy for Burkitt’s lymphoma, a rare, aggressive lymphatic cancer.

After seven months of treatment, today he is in remission. When his girlfriend, a member of a Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Student Visionaries program team, asked him to join, he couldn’t say no to raising money through events and solicitation of donations because he understood what it meant.

Bertucci was able to channel that understanding and motivation into a remarkable haul for the nonprofit. He raised more money than any other student in the Pittsburgh/Cleveland region. He was personally responsible for $40,200 in fundraising, making up more than half his entire team’s total.

The money goes toward research. That’s critically important in rare cancers like Bertucci’s.

“There are only 1,500 cases each year of my type of lymphoma. So without research, they wouldn’t have been able to develop such a great treatment plan,” he said.

That total is impressive, but so is the amount of work that went into hoagie sales, bake sales, donations and more. Great job by everyone who worked, to everyone who gave and to everyone fighting cancer in hospitals and through research.

Lance: To life imitating fiction. We’ve all seen the TV shows and movies about people in perfectly respectable professions being sucked into a life of drugs and crime.

That makes it no less shocking and disappointing to see it happen in real life. James France, 62, of Scott has the kind of education and resume that should have made him a paragon of the legal profession. Instead, he became a large-scale methamphetamine dealer smuggling drugs across the country hidden in candles and stuffed animals.

France was found guilty in March 2022 after multiple arrests from 2015 to 2017. On Tuesday, a judge sentenced him to 12½ years in federal prison.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Brendan Conway asked for more than the 10-year mandatory minimum with good cause.

“He has no excuse for turning to a life of crime, which makes him more deserving — not less deserving — of the lengthy prison term sought by the government,” Conway wrote.

Many defendants get caught up in systems they do not understand. A corporate lawyer should know better than to smuggle drugs in children’s toys.