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It started, as so many things now do, with a tweet.

I was in the Times newsroom mindlessly scrolling through Twitter when I spotted a headline, one of those News of the Weird police blotter items. I clicked.

“An 89-year-old Indiana man who grows lilies pleaded guilty Tuesday in Detroit to serving as a drug mule to distribute more than 1,400 pounds of cocaine.”

Ding ding ding! I sat upright in my chair. Now that’s a sentence.

I felt like a 19th-century miner emerging from a cave with a fleck of gold in my dirt-caked hand. I emailed my brother, who is also a writer and thus spends a good chunk of his day scrolling through Twitter. “I would read a magazine story about this guy,” I wrote.