By James Eli Shiffer

Minneapolis Star Tribune

For the past 16 months, when a notable person dies, Parker Higgins sends a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Each letter is the same, except for the name, and makes the same request: Hand over the FBI file for the deceased.

Higgins then posts the file online, in its entirety, with a link to the obit. He calls it “FOIA the Dead: a morbid transparency project.” Its icon is a little pixilated skull.

FOIA stands for the Freedom of Information Act, and under that law, FBI files become public after someone dies.

Since Higgins started his project in 2015, he has posted 29 files for people whose common traits are 1) they merited a New York Times obituary; 2) the FBI had a file on them and was willing to turn it over.

Through FOIA the Dead, Higgins discovered a fundamentalist Christian cartoonist’s failed effort to entice J. Edgar Hoover to enlist his drawings in the fight against the coming revolution. (Jack T. Chick, died Oct. 23, 2016).

Higgins also acquired a six-page dossier from the FBI’s Minneapolis office about John Trudell, a longtime American Indian activist, poet and songwriter who died in December 2015.

The document, dated March 18, 1975, said that Trudell’s activities with the American Indian Movement could put him in violation of federal laws against insurrection.

It noted that Trudell lived at 996 North Grotto in St. Paul with two women also associated with the AIM. “Source advised that he has good rhetorical delivery and is considered to be an agitator.”

Much of Trudell’s agitation, in fact, was speaking out against harassment of Indians by the FBI.

FOIA the Dead also features the files of such disparate figures as Fred Thompson, the GOP presidential candidate; impresario Robert Stigwood; U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali; and Luther “Ticky” Burden, an NBA player turned bank robber.