Instapaper Stories

The Geek Kings of Smut

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:07:00 -0500

After once being the best thing that ever happened to porn, the Internet is now wreaking havoc: destroying some fortunes, making bigger ones, and serving as a stimulus plan, in more ways than one.

By Benjamin Wallace

For one brief moment here at the 2011 Adult Video Awards in Las Vegas, America’s porn performers can forget about the Golden Decade of the Teen Wanker and remember when they were stars. Tonight, all of them, the whole porn carnival, are vamping down the red carpet at the Palms Casino. There are actual midgets. There is self-styled fakir Murrugun the Mystic, who has been nominated for Most Outrageous Sex Scene: swallowing a sword “while she swallows my sword,” as he puts it. There are the Oscar-ishly glammed-up ladies with titanic breasts and twitchy Restylane smiles. There is—yes, here he comes—Ron “The Hedgehog” Jeremy: The starriest living male porn star ambles along the carpet in a sad, grubby collar and with an air of existential depletion. And now, the announcer is introducing Joslyn James as “Tiger Woods’s ex-girlfriend,” fresh from her appearance in the scandal-milking The Eleventh Hole.

Maybe you’ve seen it. Did you pay for it? This evening, if only for a few hours, the industry is doing its best to ignore the explosion of free porn online that has made the early-21st century such a bonanza for masturbators. It’s difficult. The Adult Entertainment Expo taking place simultaneously at the Sands has scaled back dramatically; Vivid and Adam & Eve, two of the best-known companies in the business, didn’t even have booths on the main floor this year. There are no Jenna Jamesons on this red carpet, and even the idea of a porn A-list seems dated. Performers are making less money, working harder for it, getting fewer jobs. “It doesn’t affect me that much—well, I guess less work—but my friends with companies are being put out of business,” Ron Jeremy says, pausing before the media gauntlet. He mentions one who has been forced to diversify into “cookies, penis pills, and a blender.”

For a decade or so, to the porn industry, the Internet looked like the best thing ever invented—a distribution chute liberating it from the trench-coat ghetto of brown paper wrappers and seedy adult bookstores, an E-Z Pass to a vast untapped bedroom audience. If it was equally apparent that the web would prove as destabilizing as it has for other media, the money was so good that the industry could ignore the warning signs. Now the reckoning has arrived.

The chief culprits in the eyes of the porn Establishment are the “tube sites,” YouTube-like repositories of content that is often free, and often pirated. “Tubes are going to destroy our industry,” says Sunny Leone, 29, an Indian-American knockout who is celebrating eight nominations this evening. “Fans don’t understand that if they don’t pay for porn, we can’t make a living. They’ll have to watch crazy European porn.”

Farther along the red carpet, as the porn parade navigates the throng of gawkers to enter the Pearl Theater, actor James Bartholet shouts to the onlookers, “Buy your porn, don’t download it illegally!” During the impressively slick ceremony, piracy is an anxious leitmotif. “Thank you for paying for porn,” says Joanna Angel, accepting the award for Best Porn Star Website. Then, with a less-carrot-more-stick approach, an anti-piracy PSA plays on the big screen, ending with the admonition: “Buy the fucking movies.”

The audience erupts in cheers.

There you are, Porn Surfer, Googling your way to a little adult material—you know, a little plain-vanilla, middle-of-the-road grown-up content—when, wham, you’ve dropped acid and been astrally projected into a triple-X pachinko parlor. One minute you’re trawling for a simple NSFW divertissement, and the next you’re in free fall through this insane, cross-linking wilderness-of-mirrors chaos of pop-ups and pop-unders and portals and paysites. And, wait, why is someone named Jasmin talking to you in that browser window that just opened, as if you’d accidentally paid for a live cam show? Even after you figure out that she’s a canned come-on for a streaming site, you’re still befuddled. You click on an image, only to find yourself being shuttled from one site to another, unsure of what’s free and what’s not, what’s a destination and what’s merely a billboard for one, who’s an amateur and who’s a pro, who owns what and how it’s all connected. You start to nurse a deep suspicion that there’s more going on here than you can see—that there is some intricate, invisible web of revenue-sharing and traffic-trading and content-licensing at work. Which, of course, there is.

Until the invention of the tubes, online porn was relatively simple to watch and lucrative to sell. With very little money and a For Dummies–level understanding of HTML code, anyone could put up a web page featuring a list of text links to other porn websites. If a surfer clicked on one of the links, he would be directed to a paysite; the paysite would pay the referring site a tiny amount for the traffic, and kick back a more substantial amount if the surfer ended up subscribing to the site. Over time, link collections evolved to the more visual formats of “thumbnail-gallery pages” and “movie-gallery pages,” where instead of a list of text links, you’d see a mosaic of snapshot links or, say, eight-second movie-clip links. TGPs, as they were called, drew more traffic than link collections and “converted” better—that is, a higher percentage of surfers signed up for billed memberships. MGPs were more effective still. The paysites would supply these “affiliates” with the snapshots and clips for free, and the online porn universe came to consist of a relatively small number of paysites surrounded by many thousands of affiliates.

Evolution of an Empire

It was inevitable, once YouTube launched in 2005, that someone would start a porn equivalent. Sure enough, over two months in the summer of 2006, three different sites launched that would become major adult-only tubes: PornoTube, RedTube, and YouPorn. Like YouTube, the porn tubes were flooded with free content—some of it licensed for pennies from older companies that didn’t understand the web, much of it pirated from paid sites. The tubes had a new business model: They made most of their money by keeping surfers on their sites and selling banner ads, though they also put some content behind a paywall. Porn surfers migrated en masse from the old TGPs and eight-second MGPs to free movies on tube sites that could run upwards of 30 minutes. Traffic to the affiliates and conversions to paysites both plummeted. The proliferation of cam sites (where you can video-chat with a live model), together with the waning popularity of DVDs, compounded the industry’s problems. Steven Hirsch, president of Vivid Entertainment—who five years ago was called “The Porn King” by Forbes—says his company’s online revenue projections are off 50 percent. Other companies report declines closer to 80 percent.

When the old porn companies complained that the tube sites were stealing their content, the tubes claimed, as YouTube did, that the “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act absolved them of responsibility for “user-uploaded” content. Never mind that industry consensus was that the sites were doing the uploading themselves. (How else to explain tube sites full of content from day one?) The sites could simply deny it—or point to YouTube, which had launched using a similarly shady business model and was now owned by Google.

Content thieves “will not steal it and get away with it,” Brazzer declared. “Their days are counted!”

The furor over the tubes began to dominate discussions on GoFuckYourself.com (GFY), the main online industry forum, and finally someone took action. In December 2007, nine months after Viacom sued YouTube for copyright infringement, Vivid sued PornoTube. Around the same time, an anti-tubes diatribe was posted on GFY by Ouissam Youssef, a co-founder of Brazzers, one of the most successful new companies producing and branding online content. In a thread on piracy earlier that year, “Brazzer,” as Youssef called himself on GFY, declared that content thieves “will not steal it and get away with it, their days are counted!”

In fact, Youssef had already helped launch a tube site of his own. In January 2007, Matt Keezer, another of Brazzers’ creators, had bought the domain name pornhub.com for $2,750 from a speculator Keezer had met the previous year at the Playboy Mansion. PornHub went online as a tube site in early 2007. It was owned by a separate company called Interhub, but the Brazzers group were silent partners. Brazzers and the tube sites were owned by the same people and run out of the same office.

The Brazzers founders had gotten their start in the industry four years earlier, as 22-year-old Montreal techies bonding over a bar game. Youssef and Stephane Manos, friends at Concordia University, had met Keezer on, of all places, the competitive-Foosball circuit. Keezer was the best player and biggest enthusiast—he had helped stream live Foosball-training sessions online, and drawn praise for his wicked push shot—but all three liked to play, and Keezer and Youssef traveled across the States to compete. In 2003, while still students, Keezer, Manos, and Youssef, along with Youssef’s brother and another friend from Concordia, started some TGP and MGP sites including Jugg World, Ass Listing, KeezMovies, and XXX Rated Chicks. At first, they focused on busty women, “because the big-tits niche was so cheap,” explains Feras Antoon, the company’s current CEO. Then “they saw, wow, that tit niche is huge. Then they realized that the MILF niche—the older-woman niche—is even bigger. And they became the masters of the big-tit–MILF niche.”

They were making good, easy money, and they rapidly expanded, creating their own affiliate network (Jugg Cash) and their own paysite, Brazzers. Several of the founders were of Middle Eastern extraction, and the name was their private joke, a throaty immigrant-Arabonics version of “brothers.” They contracted with producers in Los Angeles, and later Las Vegas and Miami, to create content (which they charged for), and Brazzers drew notice for its high-quality productions. “They changed the face of porn,” says Lux Alptraum, editor of Fleshbot, who ascribes the resurgence of breast implants in the industry to the Brazzers signature look.

“They never imagined they would grow that big,” Antoon says. “Who would have?” Soon Brazzers was rolling out more sites: JugFuckers, DoctorAdventures, RacksAndBlacks … Eventually, in addition to the Brazzers paysites, the company would build a second network, Mofos, featuring lesser-known girls doing more-extreme things. They slept in the office, worked weekends, bought houses near each other in the Montreal suburb of Laval. As their need for manpower exploded, they hired friends, neighbors, classmates—loyalists who could learn on the fly and pitch in as needed (Antoon, for instance, is Manos’s brother-in-law). Every year, the company nearly doubled in size. They had 80 employees in 2007, 150 in 2008, 250 in 2009. Youssef was the business visionary, Manos the salesman and motivator, Keezer the savant of search-engine optimization. “He’s a master,” Antoon says. “By far the best in the world, in my opinion. Who can get ‘porn’ and ‘sex’ to be No. 1? We’re the No. 1 result [for each]. You know how hard that is?” (In a recent search, Pornhub.com came up as the No. 2 Google result for “sex” and No. 3 for “porn.”)

AlphaHarlot (real name: Liz) on xTube.

In December 2007, the same month that Vivid sued PornoTube, rumors began to circulate in the industry that Brazzers also owned the increasingly successful and much-loathed PornHub. When GFY’s amateur sleuths turned up connections between domain names and corporate registrations that suggested common ownership, “Brazzer” (a.k.a. Youssef) responded vaguely that he had been “approached” about starting a tube site but had “refused” because “it would be 100 percent against the core interests of our business.” This answer did nothing to dispel suspicions, and Brazzers quickly came to be viewed by its many industry critics as an almost The Firm–like criminal corporation. On GFY, the founders were scorned as “thieves,” “a cancer,” and “foosball faggots.” At trade shows they kept a low profile. “They’d probably get their asses beat,” says Jason Quinlan, from LordsOfPorn.com, who says traffic to his company’s paysites has declined 40 percent in the last four years.

But the Brazzers crew, who were adding other tube sites to their portfolio (Tube8, ExtremeTube), took it all in stride. And plenty of companies did do business with PornHub, unable to resist the lure of its traffic. “We call them keyboard warriors,” Antoon says of the GFY trash talkers. “When we see them, they buy us drinks.”

The woman on my MacBook screen, whose username is xTattooSurprisex, has punky two-tone hair and wears a scoop-neck top that reveals her ample chest and a clavicle tattoo reading BEAUTIFUL DISASTER. I chose xTattooSurprisex for my “private chat” because she looked American. (Most of the girls on LiveJasmin.com, the biggest cam site, seem to be from Russia.) When I tell her I’m a journalist and just want to talk, Roxy, as she introduces herself, immediately types that she is camming “not by choice.”

Roxy moved to New Mexico from Washington State to get away from her alcoholic mother, who, she says, was stalking her and caused her to lose her job at the Cheesecake Factory. She’s 20, and has been doing this since July. She says that she was going to lose her house if she didn’t get a job, and the money’s not bad. I’m paying LiveJasmin $1.99 per minute, of which Roxy receives about 70 cents. She tells me she might make $1,200 a month. She doesn’t want to do this forever, but at times it can be fun, most of the guys are nice, and she just ignores the mean ones. Some of her orgasms are fake, she says, and some are real.

Unlike recorded porn, live cams are immune to piracy, which has made them especially successful as a business proposition. In this sense, the cams function as anti-tubes, but the two technologies have together opened up an entirely new frottage industry, so to speak: a grassroots, DIY porn democracy where anyone with a bedroom, a cam, and a web connection can set up as a one-woman or -man operation. LiveJasmin has some 40,000 registered cammers. “Today,” porn distributor Farrell Timlake says, “cams are the closest thing to amateur.”

“Amateur” is a semantically slippery term, as Timlake will tell you. A graduate of the Kent School in Connecticut, he spent a good deal of the early nineties submitting his own home sex tapes to Homegrown Video, which functioned as a kind of VHS video exchange for swingers. In 1992, he and his brother Moffitt (Exeter and Stanford), bankrolled by their mother, bought out the company, which they run together and which has, so they plausibly claim, the largest library of amateur videos in the world. Since then, Farrell and Moffitt have watched “amateur” move from almost a fringe fetish to one of pornography’s most popular aesthetics—and, as such, one co-opted by the pros.

Pretty much all the porn labeled “gonzo” and “reality” these days is a put-on, Timlake insists. In the Dancing Bear series, a male stripper wearing an enormous bear head performs for a bachelorette party until several fairly respectable-looking women suddenly lose control and start fellating him. “That stuff looks pretty real,” he says. “It takes a minute, but where are there roomfuls of women willing to have sex with a guy?” Watch a few of them, and you’ll notice the same women reappearing. Another series, Dare Dorm, claims to pay real college kids for tapes of campus orgies, but Timlake isn’t buying it. “I can always tell, because most college kids can’t afford as many tattoos as those people have.” Occasionally, as in Fuck Team Five and Fuck a Fan, a series will be a pro-am hybrid, in which porn stars have sex with civilians (though even they are likely cast). A recent vogue for “ex-girlfriend porn”—purportedly uploaded by vengeful former boyfriends—democratizes the celebrity sex tape but is also phony (actual unauthorized home videos would pose legal risks to the hosting websites).

If you expand the idea of amateur, though, to encompass a whole new set of outsiders for whom cam sites and tubes have provided a cheap, almost barrierless way to make, distribute, and sell videos of themselves having sex, well, then, we’re living in a grand age of micro-smut, a burgeoning empire of lemonade-stand porn. xTube, for instance, offers a mix of straight and gay movies, some of which are free, others pay-per-view. The majority of xTube’s content was made by a professional studio, but the site’s “amateur” section allows any of its visitors to upload content. A frequent uploader with the username Tnhotbtm has been on the site for six months. “I enjoyed the videos I was viewing personally, so I decided to add my own,” says Tnhotbtm, whose real name is Rob. “I never really liked mainstream porn. I always like guys that look like you could walk up and talk to them in a club, not the perfect shaved guys that never give you the time of day.” Rob had dabbled in shooting his own, self-starring movies, and for the last ten years he had sold them as DVDs through his website atticmen.com or streamed through video-on-demand companies. Then he lost his job as a corporate auditor and started trying to use the tubes to do this full-time. Rob lives in a “small, small town” in the Bible Belt, and when people ask him what he does, he says he shoots wedding and special-event videos. (“If they only knew how special …”)

On xTube, he puts up free previews meant to lure viewers to his pay-per-view content, which he sells for 50 cents a minute. Rob says the average viewer watches ten minutes; of that $5, he gets to keep 50 percent, minus a small processing charge. A video he uploaded the week before we speak has been viewed 2,470 times, but a lot of the viewers watched only the free preview, so he has made just $125 from it. But he says he’s earning around $1,500 every two weeks from xTube, more than he was making in his corporate gig. “The key is keeping new stuff up and answering your friend requests and private messages,” he says. “It’s good to know just how much they like my stuff, and what they would like to see in the future.”

If Rob is just getting started on xTube, a Boston male couple who go by the names Cole Maverick and Hunter are its Tila Tequilas. Cole, a former welder who got his masters in psychology, met Hunter, who had grown up in a devout Mormon family, when he was a college freshman. They’ve been together for ten years. Cole had always been a compulsive picture-taker, and four years ago, on a whim, he uploaded a few snapshots to xTube, followed by some movie clips and, later, movies featuring them with other men, often fans. They weren’t prepared for the enormous popularity that has ensued. Their videos have been viewed more than 90 million times on xTube, where they are currently the “most favorited” submitter. “I remember the first time we posted one and got our first check. I said, ‘Why doesn’t everyone do this?’ ” Cole says. They now film full-time and clear “a nice six-figure income,” according to Hunter.

“Our main goal,” Cole says, “was to take gay sex out of the dark, leathery guilt-ridden realm, into fun sex, in the sun, in an honest, open relationship. We get so many inspiring messages from guys and girls who love what we’re doing.”

Paradoxically, as Cole and Hunter have thrived on the tubes, they have experienced the underbelly as well, increasingly finding their films pirated on tube sites, including xTube and PornHub. “They’re big thieves,” Cole says of the tubes.

In October 2009, the U.S. Secret Service’s Organized Fraud Task Force in Atlanta seized about $6.4 million in funds from two Fidelity bank accounts controlled by Mansef, the Brazzers holding company. By this point, the company was already experiencing internal troubles. Matt Keezer had left earlier that year; his brother Phil then joined as CEO, only to leave within a few months. At least some of the founders had grown concerned for their safety and hired security guards, who for several months patrolled their neighborhood 24 hours a day in SUVs with tinted windows.

In response to the asset seizure, Mansef claimed that it had opened the Fidelity accounts simply to ease payment processing in the U.S., but the Feds accused the company of money-laundering: More than $9 million had been wired into the two accounts over a three-month period from banks in Israel and other countries on financial-fraud watch lists. The founders decided it was time to sell the company and get out of the industry altogether, and within a few months, the auteurs behind TeensLikeItBig and InGangWeBang had receded into a search-engine-optimized fog of web spam and redundant social-media profiles. One of Ouissam Youssef’s LinkedIn appearances states that he obtained his M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Business and is a special consultant at Accenture Plus Limited in Monaco. (Wharton has no record of his attendance, Accenture Plus Limited doesn’t exist, and plain old Accenture says he has never worked for the firm.) Only near the bottom of page three of Stephane Manos’s well-scrubbed Google results does one glimpse his connection to Brazzers. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t believe how philanthropic these guys are. Youssef hopes to build “a foundation that will help impoverished children play organized sports,” his website announces. Manos, per his blog, is a “charity contributor.” As for Matt Keezer, he “strongly believes in our children of the world and supports UNICEF’s Canadian programs.”

Mansef’s and Interhub’s assets were sold to a German named Fabian Thylmann. One of the less heralded aspects of the migration of the world’s skin flicks online has been a sociological shift among those who make and distribute them. Unlike the gold-chain-wearers of yesteryear—the Boogie Nights–style performers turned directors and photographers turned producers—the new pornographers are as likely to be software engineers: masters of affiliate marketing, search-engine optimization, and traffic-conversion ratios. The Brazzers founders were hardly lady-killers. (According to Antoon, not one ever set foot on a porn set.) And Thylmann is blunt when talking about how he got into the business: “I was a geek,” he says, from his home in Aachen, Germany.

Thylmann has been programming since he was 17. He began writing software to collect Internet-traffic statistics, and because porn was generating most of the web’s traffic, he ended up getting work writing code for adult websites. In the early aughts, he wrote an affiliate-tracking software package called NATS that came to dominate the industry. By late 2006, he had cashed out of the company he had co-founded and started looking around for other companies to buy.

His first purchase was PrivatAmateure, a micro-smut site that “was doing tube-ish logic, it just wasn’t free.” He found that by making some simple tweaks he was able to double profits within three months. “That’s basically where I figured out that it seems to be an awfully good thing to buy adult websites in the current climate, because you can get things cheap, and there are obvious ways to improve what they’re doing.” In the last few years, Thylmann has been on an acquisitions tear. He bought another European amateur site (MyDirtyHobby), a cam site (Webcams.com), and xTube. By March 2010, he owned both Mansef’s and Interhub’s assets, too, including the Brazzers and Mofos paysite networks and four tube sites. GFYers gossiped that he spent $140 million on the purchase, which Thylmann confirms is “close enough.”

“I get excited making videos. xTube gave me another outlet for my sexual energy, so I stopped slutting around in real life.”

Since then, the company has been making a strong bid for respectability. Right away, Thylmann changed the corporate name to Manwin and sponsored a safe-sex campaign, “Get Rubber,” featuring porn-star PSAs and a billboard in Times Square. He spent $1 million to license nonexclusive content, buying 22,000 DVDs containing 100,000 scenes, and adopted anti-piracy digital-fingerprinting software.

Between December 2009 and December 2010, Manwin says, its pretax earnings increased more than 40 percent. The tube sites are responsible for half of that growth—and now for half of the company’s bottom line. But Manwin is also diversifying, from a Fleshbot-style industry blog called ZZ Insider to more mainstream fare. In June, Manwin launched Videobash.com, a Funny or Die knockoff, and in November it rolled out TMZ-like Celebs.com. The company is also one of the two leaders in mobile-phone porn in North America, handling 4.5 million visitors a day. And Thylmann has continued to make acquisitions, both within the Manwin corporate umbrella (a tube site named Spankwire) and without (a company called Eurorevenue, with a network of European paysites). Thylmann now has 500 employees, including 324 in the Manwin office in Montreal. He owns four of the ten most trafficked tube sites. His Brazzers and Mofos brands shoot around 120 scenes a month. At 32, he is likely the biggest porn tycoon on the planet.

“It’s a huge misconception that the industry is doing badly,” Feras Antoon tells me over rib eye and lobster tail at Delmonico, the Emeril Lagasse steakhouse at the Venetian in Las Vegas. “It’s moved on. It’s as simple as that.” And he insists that the tubes haven’t cannibalized paid content: People who consume only free porn, he argues, are people who, in the past, would not have consumed any. The people who paid for porn then will still pay for it now. Plus the tube sites have so vastly enlarged the total universe of porn consumers that the number of those who pay has ballooned along with it. Ten years ago, total daily adult-site traffic averaged less than 1 million unique visitors—on the entire Internet; today Manwin’s tube sites alone get 42 million daily uniques. “I personally have one or two memberships,” Antoon says jovially, “and I still go to the tubes. I get my appetizer on the tubes, my main course on one of the sites.”

This line of reasoning makes sense to Farrell Timlake, who uploads sponsored clips to PornHub and credits the brand exposure with a 50 percent increase in “organic” traffic—the desirable, high-converting surfers who start by typing a paysite’s name into a Google search box—and a 100 percent increase in video submittals to Homegrown. “One thing is for sure,” he says. “ ‘Free porn’ has not killed the industry. It has killed those unwilling to realize that it was just as easy to jerk off for free to the TGP-MGP stuff.”

But this is hardly the consensus opinion. Allie Chase, operator of solo-site NaughtyAllie.com, takes issue even with the five-minute trailers that plenty of producers deliberately upload to tube sites in the hope of whetting appetites. “Do you honestly think that your average guy watching a five-minute porn, or several of them, won’t be able to get off? Of course he will. And once he’s shot his load all over his keyboard after watching my free five-minute video, he certainly isn’t going to be pulling out a credit card to join my site.” Manwin, in fact, has studied the question of optimal clip length. “We tested one minute, three minutes, five minutes,” Antoon says. “The best converting for the content owner is three minutes. The best for the tube sites—for the surfer to come back and back—is five minutes. So we always ask for three to five. We don’t mind if they send us seven to nine.”

It’s also unclear whether piracy can ever be contained. Besides tube sites, the industry must contend with torrent sites and cyberlockers. And for every tube that goes legit, a hundred new rogue ones pop up. Vivid’s Steven Hirsch sees it as a cat-and-mouse game. Under the DMCA, the onus is on piracy victims to monitor tube sites and send takedown notices. Hirsch has nothing bad to say about Manwin (“My dealings with them have been very fair, and our stuff isn’t up on PornHub, so I take them at their word,” he says), but even if the sites are good about complying, the content can be reuploaded minutes later. Hirsch holds out hope for legislation, passed by a Senate panel in November, that would allow victims to get pirate sites shut down entirely.

Marc Randazza, a San Diego–based First Amendment lawyer who represents porn companies and sued Manwin in November, citing pirated content on Spankwire, remains unconvinced by Manwin’s conversion to solid corporate citizen. “I guess they’re trying to come to the surface,” he says, “but I still think they have a toxic business model.” We are sitting at a cluster of slot machines in the Venetian and discussing the woes of Porn Valley, as the traditional bricks-and-mortar, L.A.-based industry is known. For all the work-from-home opportunities afforded by the new universe of micro-smut, professional porn continues to hold an allure. A few minutes into our conversation, a middle-aged guy in a plaid shirt walks hesitantly toward us, leering at our trade-show lanyards printed with the logo bang bros. Almost shyly, he asks, “How would I get into that?”

“You mean become a performer?” Randazza asks.

The man nods.

Randazza looks at him wearily, like he gets this all the time. “Honestly,” Randazza says, “the gay side’s where all the money is. There might be 30 straight guys who can make a living at it, but if you’re willing to get fucked in the ass, I can get you five grand right now.”

The man’s smile quavers, and he backs away.

However the industry ultimately reshapes itself to accommodate the twin threats of free and stolen content, the broader legacy of the tubes may have little to do with the high-gloss, professionally made porn that they have imperiled. More than anything, the tubes have the potential to change the viewer’s relationship to erotica itself. On some tubes, gigabytes of home movies are being uploaded and streamed without any money changing hands. There, consumers can also be producers. Posting can be as arousing as watching. We are all porn stars, if we want to be. Maybe porn isn’t even really the right word for it anymore, as it evolves from something made to be watched to something made to be shared.

On xTube, of the videos submitted to the amateur portion of the site, only 20 percent are pay-per-view; the other 80 percent are evidently uploaded for kicks. Consider AlphaHarlot, a regular contributor to the site. Her real name is Liz. She’s 30 and lives in Clifton, New Jersey, where by day she works as an accountant. Two years ago, she started uploading videos to xTube, which her boyfriend at the time had done. “When I joined I was in kind of a weird place,” she says, “dating that guy plus a bunch of others that were more like one-night stands than relationships. And xTube gave me another outlet for that sexual energy, so I stopped slutting around in real life. xTube made me feel better about myself.”

She eased into it, starting with photos. After loving the response she got, she moved to faceless videos, and ultimately to showing her face. She now has over 4,000 “friends” following her on xTube. She has been recognized twice in public, once in the Bath & Body Works at the Garden State Plaza. Some of the nearly 150 videos she has posted show her with a woman or with a man—she lives “a polyamorous lifestyle”—but most show her alone, masturbating or performing a fetish at the request of one of her fans.

Liz has never sought to make money from her videos. “I get excited making them, posting them, and seeing how people react,” she says. She fears it would be less fun—more like a job—if she charged. “xTube is my family. It has completely altered how I see people. It’s made me realize there are people out there who understand there’s more to the world than black-and-white sexuality, that everyone fits in somewhere.”

Still, even Liz, who lets people watch her videos for free, doesn’t like to see her content show up on other websites. A few times a month, one of her vigilant xTube fans will alert her to an instance of piracy. Usually, after she contacts a site, they’ll remove the video; sometimes they argue. “You want control of where your stuff appears,” she says. “Stolen porn irks the hell out of me.” She tries, at least once a month, to buy a DVD from an adult video store, “so I feel like I’m giving back a little.”

Note: This article has been updated with the following correction. Vivid Entertainment’s online revenue projections are off 50 percent, not its online revenues.

Travis the Menace [New York, Jan. '11]

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:21:44 -0500

Travis the Menace

He was the most famous ape in America. But to really understand a chimp, you have to know his mother.

By Dan P. Lee
Published Jan 23, 2011

Travis holding Sandy’s grandson, Andrew. (Photo: Courtesy of Di Mare Pastry Shop)

Throughout her life, Sandy Herold had long, straight hair so black it almost looked wet. She wore it down below her shoulders, her bangs cut straight across. She applied bright-pink lipstick and copious amounts of bronzer. She wore skintight size-7 jeans. She spoke with a strange accent, a New York–New England hybrid, and spent her entire life in Stamford, Connecticut.

She was born in 1938 to a Jewish mother and Italian father who operated a popular bakery downtown and eventually built an unassuming shingled house on a windy road called Rock Rimmon, to the north of the city. As an only child, Sandy spent much of her time playing with her German shepherd Gretchen and tending to the horses on the property. At birthdays, her parents outfitted her in silk dresses and cardigans and had her pose for photographs, smiling, near multitiered cakes, Gretchen standing at her side.

She married shortly after high school, then again in 1960. Her second marriage was romantic, intense, and desperate—she adored her new husband, with whom she had a daughter named Suzan, in 1961, but they fought violently over his frequent affairs and divorced after four years. At 30, Sandy married her third husband, Jerry Herold, who was kind, intelligent, and devoted. Her life stabilized; she, Jerry, and Sue, whom Jerry raised as his own, ultimately settled in the house on Rock Rimmon Road with Sandy’s parents. Sandy and Jerry opened several businesses in Stamford, including a tow operation and an auto-body shop, that would soon make them unlikely millionaires.

For a time in the seventies, Sandy, Sue, and Jerry towed their horses from state to state so that Sandy (and later Sue) could barrel-race semi-professionally in rodeos. It was during a stint with the country singer Loretta Lynn’s traveling rodeo that Sandy struck up a lifelong friendship with an 18-year-old runaway named Charla Nash, who was rodeoing her way around the country. One day, Sandy and Charla spotted a chimpanzee dressed in Westernwear who rode a horse around the ring. Sandy sought him out backstage. She was carrying gummy bears. He took them from her with his fingers. Later, back atop his horse and wearing a cowboy hat, the chimp spotted Sandy in the audience. He jumped down, ran on two legs, and leaped into her arms.

Between the expanding businesses, the horses in the yard, and their many dogs, the Herolds lived a happily frenetic life. Sue grew into a platinum-blonde version of her mother. The two raced side by side, country-line-danced, worked together at the businesses. Mother and daughter were engaged in one endless conversation. And so when Sue married an employee from her parents’ shop and moved away, Sandy was bitter and heartbroken. Then each of her parents became sick and died. Her world narrowed further. Seemingly all of a sudden, she saw herself and Jerry drifting beyond the outer periphery of middle age.

Jerry was home tending to the businesses as Sandy landed at the Lambert–St. Louis International Airport one day in 1995. A few days earlier, she had received a call from Connie Casey, a breeder in Festus, Missouri, a rural town 35 miles south of St. Louis. “Sandy,” she said, “your baby has arrived. It’s a boy.”

Sandy stood in the Caseys’ living room. In her arms, swaddled and in a diaper, lay tiny Travis—named after her favorite singer, Travis Tritt. Travis was the son of Coco, who’d been snatched from the jungles of equatorial Africa in the early seventies and purchased for $12,000, and an 11-year-old retired zoo chimp named Suzy. A day earlier, the Caseys had shot a tranquilizer in Suzy and removed Travis from her cage. Travis peered up at Sandy. Black hair covered all but the interior of his face, which was pink, and the two tiny Dumbo ears that jutted from the top of his head. Sandy cried as his hands and feet grasped at her. She paid the Caseys $50,000 in cash, and a few days later, with Travis wrapped in baby blankets, the two of them boarded a flight home.

Back in Stamford, Sandy and Jerry played with Travis, who absorbed their smells and cues and began learning their language. Sandy bottle-fed him formula, burped him, put him down for naps in a crib in their bedroom. At 3 months, he turned over. Soon he was scooting, then walking on his arms and legs, his knuckles absorbing much of his weight. They taught him to use the toilet. They joined him in the bathtub. They brushed his teeth, and later taught him to brush his own teeth. Sandy bought him an extensive wardrobe and dressed him every morning.

The Herolds retrofitted their house to accommodate Travis. They caged in a large room in the rear, which had a set of sliders that led to an outdoor enclosure. They installed a heavy, lockable metal door on their bedroom, creating a suite of rooms, including the caged room, where Travis could roam freely when he was left alone. When Sandy and Jerry were home, Travis had the entire house at his disposal, knuckle-running from the couch in the living room to the kitchen, swinging from the tires and ropes in his room, jumping on his bed. The Herolds also laid a mattress on the floor of their bedroom, though most nights Travis slept in bed with them.

Sandy and Jerry took Travis to work with them every day. They installed tire swings, ropes, and trampolines in a giant room above the tow shop. He was inquisitive and friendly. Even the tow drivers and mechanics melted when they saw him.

These were some of the happiest days of Sandy’s life. By then, Sue had divorced her first husband, and she and her young son had returned to Stamford, moving into a spacious loft-style apartment her parents constructed next to the auto-body shop. Sandy and Sue worked together every day, in the room above the tow shop, with Travis. They joked, gossiped, talked about men. Sue’s son, Tyler, and Travis were close in age, and they played well together; as Travis matured more rapidly than Tyler, his fondness for the boy grew, so that he often held him in his lap, kissing him.

Travis grew quickly. Jerry played catch with him and taught him to ride a tricycle (which was awkward at first, what with his long arms), then a bike, then a ride-on lawn mower. Sandy put on a blue bikini and big gold-hoop earrings and took him to the beach, carrying him into the water with her.

Sandy and Jerry invited Travis to join them at the table for meals. He ate oatmeal with a spoon every morning. At their favorite Italian restaurant, Pellicci’s, she read him the menu, offering him choices. His favorite food was filet mignon. He also enjoyed lobster tail. He preferred Lindt’s chocolates. He liked Nerds candy and taffy, and he loved ice cream, hooting and pulling at Sandy when the ice-cream man came down the street. When he was thirsty, he swung his body up onto the counter and took out a glass, opened the refrigerator, and poured himself juice or soda.

Travis had a distinct sense of humor. He’d become particularly impish when Sandy was on the phone talking. He’d change the channels of the remote furiously. He’d blast the volume on the TV. “Cut it out, you little son of a bitch!” Sandy would yell, and then laugh. “I’m gonna kill you, you little bastard!”

“I’ll tell you,” she’d say into the phone, “you should see how smart Travis is. Just today he …” Sandy was ceaselessly dumbfounded by Travis’s humanness. Though she did not know their name, she seemed to intuit the so-called spindle cells in his brain, cells shared by humans and chimps that are believed to help us to process complex thoughts and empathize.

Sandy’s old friend Charla Nash came to visit, bringing with her her young daughter, Briana. They sat outside, Charla playing with Travis, the chimp climbing all over her, messing with her long blonde hair, the two of them posing for pictures. He climbed the tall oak trees around their property, racing up them, jumping from one to the next.

Travis quickly became Stamford’s most famous resident. The Herolds plastered his image on the side of their tow trucks and flatbeds. He sat shotgun on tow calls, waving as the truck pulled up. He came to love police officers especially, and virtually everyone on the force had his photo taken with him. Strangers approached in stores, on the street. Sometimes they handed him their babies to hold.

One fall day, a neighbor was out raking leaves. Across the street, he noticed a Corvette coming down the Herolds’ driveway. It was Travis’s favorite car—he perceived it as his own, Sandy said—and in fact there were rumors that Travis had once taken the keys and gotten behind the wheel, turned the ignition, and, half-standing in the driver’s seat, his opposable-thumbed feet grabbing the pedals, steered the car down the driveway and out onto Rock Rimmon Road. The man raking leaves watched as the car drew closer. Dressed in animal prints and decked to the nines, Sandy was driving, with Travis, in a ball cap and T-shirt, sitting beside her; the windows were down, and each had an arm hanging out. Reflexively, the man raised his hand. Sandy and Travis both waved back.

Jerry and Travis at home.

When Travis was around 5 years old, Sue fell in love and married again. She had two more children. She and her husband eventually decided to relocate near the Outer Banks, where he was opening a mechanic’s shop. Sandy did not take kindly to the news. Again, she felt abandoned; again she disapproved of Sue’s husband. Within a few months, however, Sandy was calling to tell Sue she couldn’t stand not talking every day. She sent money and gifts down to North Carolina. Every note Sue mailed to her mother, no matter how banal, Sandy read repeatedly, showed repeatedly to Jerry, and bound in plastic for safe keeping.

Sue was making repeated trips to Connecticut to retrieve their remaining belongings. On her way home one night in September 2000, Sue, who’d complained of back pain and taken a Percocet, was driving on a mostly empty highway. Somewhere in Virginia, her car left the roadway and collided with a tree. Her infant daughter, strapped in her car seat, was unscathed. Sue was ejected from the car. The phone rang inside Rock Rimmon Road, waking Sandy, Jerry, and Travis, all asleep in bed.

At an open-casket viewing in Stamford, Sue’s body lay in a floral-print dress her mother had bought her. Beside her stood an enlarged photo of her in the same dress, holding her newborn daughter. Sandy was anything but stoic in her mourning. She stalked the room, gasping, and blocked certain visitors from coming inside. “That’s that bastard!” she shouted at Sue’s husband. “If it wasn’t for him my daughter would be alive!”

In the years after Sue’s death, Sandy vacillated between combustible anger and unrelenting depression. She struggled to maintain relationships with Sue’s children. She distanced herself from her friends and at one point considered suicide. Her life was now built almost entirely around Jerry and Travis, and when she finally began venturing out of the house again, it was with the two of them. One bright winter day, they all drove down to the sea. They walked out onto the beach holding hands, in a line straight across; it was Travis who held their dog Apollo’s leash. Sandy now considered Travis her only child.

Travis quickly moved beyond the gangly phases of early adolescence, through puberty, and into early adulthood. One night after work, Jerry was sipping a glass of wine when Travis climbed up into the seat next to him. Travis was interested in what he was drinking. Jerry offered him a sip. Thus began their nightly ritual: a glass of wine, one for Travis, one for Jerry, served in stemware, which they clinked together as Jerry said cheers.

“Sandy,” the breeder said, “your baby has arrived. it’s a boy.”

Travis was also growing more willful. Three years had passed since the death of Sue. It was a warm night in October 2003. Jerry, Sandy, and Travis had eaten a dinner of sausage and peppers and were sitting on the couch watching the World Series. Travis was an avid TV watcher, and he particularly liked sports. All three were cheering for the Yankees. Sandy and Jerry decided they needed to make a trip to the tow shop. They asked Travis whether he had any interest in a ride. It was a rhetorical question.

They were in the 4Runner, stopped downtown at the intersection of Tresser and Washington Boulevards, when someone, for reasons unknown, threw an empty soda bottle into Travis’s partially open window. Travis looked, grunted, unbuckled his seat belt, unlocked and opened the door, and began knuckle-running across the road.

He stood, surveying the area in his extra-large adult diaper (though he was potty-trained, he often wore diapers when he was out). At one point, he lunged at a passerby. And then, all of a sudden, he lay down in the street and began rolling on his back. People in their cars honked and pointed. Traffic at the intersection came to a standstill. Neighbors came out to watch.

Travis was clearly enjoying himself, climbing over cars, hooting, smiling. He chased the dozen police officers who responded to the call for a “loose chimpanzee downtown.” The spectators cheered for him as he evaded capture, smacking several officers on their behinds. Cookies and ice cream could not coax him back. Each time they lured him into the 4Runner, Travis opened the door and got out again before they could lock it. This continued for two hours.

Finally, when he began to tire, Travis climbed into the SUV and buckled his seat belt. No charges were pressed; several of the police officers who knew Travis personally wrote in their reports that his attitude was only playful. They escorted the Herolds home. Travis spent the next day in his room, grounded.

Travis starting the lawn mower.

Virtually everyone made light of the escapade downtown. The state Department of Environmental Protection was aware of what happened, and also that the Herolds were in violation of a new statute that required a permit to keep a primate over 50 pounds. But they determined that pressing any action would amount to a most likely unwinnable battle to “take custody of a local celebrity” and opted not to pursue the matter.

Stamford’s animal-control officer was more concerned. After contacting primatologists, she spoke with Sandy, arguing that Travis was by now a fully sexualized adult (chimpanzees in the wild have sex, nonmonogamously, as often as 50 times a day); that he had the strength of at least five men; that adult chimpanzees are known to be unpredictable and potentially violent (which is why all chimp actors are prepubescent); and that maintaining Travis for the duration of his five- or six-decade lifetime was not viable. Sandy seemed to pay an open mind to the officer’s warning but ultimately concluded that Travis had never exhibited even the slightest capacity for violence.

There was one piece of information, however, that Sandy chose not to share with the officer. Two years earlier, the Herolds had received a phone call from Connie Casey, the breeder in Festus. She explained how Travis’s parents, Suzy and Coco, had escaped their cages and, with a third chimp, run across the ranch to a nearby housing development, where a 17-year-old named Jason Coats and some friends were pulling into Coats’s driveway on their way home from the Dairy Queen. Coats claimed the chimps approached his Chevy Cavalier and trapped the teenagers inside, baring their teeth and rocking the car. Coats eventually got out, ran into his house, and grabbed a shotgun. Casey had by then arrived at the driveway and tranquilized Suzy, who was now, according to Casey and several eyewitnesses, sitting at the edge of the road, stoned, fingering the grass and flowers. Casey begged Coats not to shoot. He fired three rounds at Suzy; she died two hours later.

Following several neighbors’ testimony that the chimps were behaving playfully and had posed no threat, a jury found Coats guilty of property damage and animal abuse, and he served a month in jail. Coats nevertheless remained steadfast in his belief that the chimps were dangerous.

The Herolds stopped taking Travis out in public after the incident in downtown Stamford, and they spent most of their time away from work at home with him. One night, over takeout spaghetti dinners at the kitchen table, Travis was sulking. He was sitting next to Jerry, facing away from him. Jerry was eating heartily, after some dental work he’d had earlier in the day. Jerry and Sandy were trying to engage Travis.

“Daddy got his tooth fixed today,” Jerry said. “Look.”

Travis wouldn’t.

“Come on, Trav,” Sandy said. “Look at Daddy’s new tooth.”

Travis turned, glanced begrudgingly.

“Come on, Trav,” Jerry said. “Which tooth had a boo-boo? Which one?”

Travis looked finally. Jerry opened his mouth.

“Which one?”

Travis looked for a second before extending his long index finger. He placed the tip of it directly on Jerry’s left molar. Sandy and Jerry cheered: “That’s the one, Travis! That’s the one!” Travis’s lips curled open around his gleaming white teeth. He bounced in his chair and buried his face in Jerry’s chest.

“Show Daddy your teeth now,” Sandy told him. Travis looked at her, looked at Jerry, puckered his lips again, exposed his teeth, and tilted his head up toward Jerry. Jerry cheered.

“Show Daddy your big tongue now!” Sandy said. Travis opened his mouth and unfurled his giant pink tongue. Once again, they cheered. By now Travis could not contain himself: He smiled broadly and grunted, his shoulders shaking in silent laughter. He patted Jerry on the back. Finally he wrapped his long arm around him.

Occasionally, Jerry complained that he wasn’t feeling well. After playing with Travis one morning in March 2005, he went off to work, where his discomfort sharpened. He asked one of his employees to take him to the hospital.

Over the course of Jerry’s weeks-long stay, during which his doctors tried to arrest his rapidly spreading stomach cancer, Sandy spent virtually every minute at the hospital. One night he said he wanted to talk to her about Travis. He asked her what she would do if he were to die—if it were to become just her, alone with Travis. As much as he said it pained him, he urged her to send Travis to a sanctuary. He told her Travis was too much for her to manage alone. He said it was best for both of them.

Charla and Travis in the Herolds’ backyard.

When Sandy arrived home from the hospital, Travis smelled her clothing frantically, inhaling Jerry’s scent. He was at first disoriented by Jerry’s sudden absence, then despondent. Several times Sandy put Travis on the phone to talk to Jerry; each time Travis became so upset that she had to take the phone away. Travis sat rocking back and forth for hours. He lifted pictures of Jerry off the wall, put his lips to the glass, held them to his chest. Sandy took them all down and put them in a box. On April 12, Jerry died.

After Jerry’s death, Sandy ignored condolences and stopped speaking to many of her friends. Travis continued his rocking. When she sat on the sofa crying, Travis gently brushed her hair. He bit her nails and used an emery board to file them.

When almost a year had passed, Sandy sat down to write a letter. She drafted it in longhand, and addressed it to a woman in Florida who runs a respected chimpanzee sanctuary. These were the last two paragraphs.

“Needless to say, after 45 years with the most wonderful man in the world we are both lost without him and miss him dearly. Travis still waits for him especially at supper time, because at that time they both had a glass of wine with their supper and if my husband ever cooked anything you can bet it has garlic in it. Try having two guys breathing on your sleep time with (garlic breath). Travis would go to the bedroom window many nights sit on the bench seat look out, get very vocal and happy then come back to sleep, this was always very late at night. Finally I went to psychic and she told me Jerry would visit at night and talk to Travis and my husband would always kiss me good night. P.S. (him and Travis kiss alike) that’s good too.

“I have no family, my only child, Suzan had gotten killed in an auto accident 4 years before Jerry died and who Travis also loved. My grand kids live in North Carolina and I don’t see them very often. I live alone with Travis, we eat and sleep together but I am worried that if something happens to me as suddenly as my husband what would happen to Travis, therefore I have to try to do something before that happens. I set up a trust fund for him but that’s not enough, he needs someone to play with of his own kind and have the best most possible life if I’m not here to care for him. I would love to see and talk to you if that’s possible. I am flying down to see your member event enclosed is our donation. I am looking forward to meeting you.”

She signed the letter, “Sandy (Jerry) and Travis,” and enclosed photos of Travis and the family. She wrote out a check for $250, signing it from both her and Travis. She put everything in a stamped envelope. She never mailed the letter and never made the trip.

Charla Nash and Sandy reunited around the time of Jerry’s death. Charla and her then-12-year-old daughter had lived itinerantly, at one point staying for more than a year in a homeless shelter. Charla had taken odd jobs, picked up occasional yard work, cleaned horse stalls. The reunion was mutually beneficial: Sandy invited Charla and her daughter to move rent-free into the loft apartment that had once been Sue’s. She gave Charla a job, handling towing dispatch and bookkeeping. Over time the terms of Charla’s employment blurred. Charla tended to Sandy’s lawn and would look in on Travis if Sandy was away.

She rarely was. For four years, Travis never left home, and Sandy only sporadically did, aside from compulsive shopping trips: She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at stores like T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, stuffing bags of clothes in dozens of plastic bins that filled almost every room of the house. She and Travis relegated themselves to the kitchen and the suite in the rear of the house. In early 2008, construction was under way on a gigantic new addition that Jerry had designed for Travis years earlier. Travis, by this point, no longer bore much physical resemblance to his former self. He was 14 years old, five feet tall, 240 pounds, and morbidly obese. His hairline had receded dramatically, and his center torso had gone gray. His face was black and wrinkled. His chest sagged. He spent the majority of his days snacking, watching TV, playing on the computer, and roaming the house.

It was February 16, and Sandy and Charla had just returned from a weekend at the Mohegan Sun casino; before leaving, Sandy had taken Charla to get her hair colored and curled, in case, Sandy had joked, two eligible bachelors crossed their paths. Sandy had offered Charla some gambling money. At dinner one night, Sandy had opened her purse and showed the waiter several pictures of Travis. “Do you think he looks more like his mom,” she had asked, “or his aunt?”

Travis with a Stamford police officer.

Now it was after 3 p.m., and Sandy was in a bit of a panic. She was meeting a friend, and as she’d been cleaning Travis’s room, he’d walked into the kitchen, picked up the keys from the counter, unlocked the door, and ventured out into the yard. He’d seemed agitated for a good part of the day; after eating a lunch of fish and chips and Carvel ice-cream cake, he’d not been particularly interested in watching any of the three TVs that were playing in the house. He did not want to draw or color. He did not want to pet his cat, Misty. Even the smorgasbord of food—the Popsicles in the freezer she’d labeled for him with R for red andF for Fudgsicle, the steam-in-a-bag vegetables he liked to toss in the microwave himself—was unappealing. Sandy, slightly concerned, had dropped a Xanax in his mug of afternoon tea.

She was on the phone with Charla. She told her about Travis. He was outside, she said, running from car to car, apparently wanting to go for a ride; he’d ignored her entreaties to come back inside. Later, Sandy would say that Charla volunteered to come over and help; Charla would maintain she was asked. In any case, Charla arrived at about 3:40, opened the iron gate at the end of the driveway, and drove to the front of the house. She stepped out onto the frozen dirt and grass and held over her face a red Elmo doll she’d thought to bring with her. Travis was in the front yard, about 35 feet away. He knuckle-ran toward her, then came up on his two legs.

“Travis!” Sandy shouted. “Travis! What are you doing? Travis! Stop! Travis! It’s Charla, Travis!”

Travis knocked her into the side of her car. Then to the ground. Almost immediately, Charla turned red with blood. Sandy screamed and grabbed a nearby snow shovel. She ran to Travis and began beating him over the head. He was screaming, too, a terrible high-pitched screech. He continued at Charla, unyielding.

Hysterical, Sandy ran back to the house. She grabbed a butcher knife. She ran back, screaming all the while. As Travis stood over Charla, chewing, ripping, pulling, Sandy plunged the knife into his back. He did not stop. She pulled the knife out and stabbed him twice more, to little effect. Travis stood up finally, turned to look Sandy in the face—directly in the face—then continued.

Sandy ran to her Volkswagen Passat, parked about fifteen feet away. She got in and locked the door. She dialed 911, still holding the butcher knife.

“I live alone with Travis. We eat and sleep together, but I am worried if something happens to me, what would happen to Travis,” Sandy wrote.

“Stamford 911, where’s your emergency?”

“Two-forty-one Rock Rimmon Road, send the police!”

“What’s the problem?”

“Send the police!”

“What’s the problem there?”

“The—that—the chimp killed my—my friend!”

“What’s wrong with your friend?”

Sandy gasped, pressed her feet into the floor of the car to turn around and look, her face pushing the buttons of her cell phone. She sobbed.

“Oh, please! Send the police with a gun—with a gun—hurry up!”

“Who has the gun?”

“Please, hurry up! Please hurry up! He’s killin’ my girlfriend!”

“I need you to talk to me, I need you to calm down. Why do you need somebody there?”

“What? Please, God!”

“What is the problem?”

“He’s killing my friend!”

“Who’s killing your friend?”

“Chimp—my chimpanzee!”

“Oh, your chimpanzee is killing your friend?”

“Yes! He ripped her apart! Hurry up! Hurry up! Please!”

“What is going on? What is the monkey doing? Tell me what the monkey is doing.”

“He—he ripped her face off!”

“He ripped her face off?”

“Gun! They got to shoot him! Please! Please! Hurry! Hurry! Please!”

“Ma’am, ma’am, I need you to calm down. They’re already on their way.”

“I can’t. I can’t … He’s eating her! He’s eating her!”

“He’s eating her?”

“Please! God! Please! Where are they? Where are they?”

It went on for twelve minutes.

When the authorities finally arrived, they saw a body lying mostly naked on the ground, lifeless and covered in nearly half its blood supply. Travis was roaming the property. He made his way to the police car. He swatted off its driver’s-side mirror. He went to the passenger’s side and tried to open the locked door. He walked back around to the driver’s side. He tried the door. It opened.

The officer lurched. He struggled to remove his gun from its holster. His body became wedged against the center-console computer. Travis stared into the car, baring his blood-streaked teeth. In one swift motion the officer at last released his gun and fired four rounds. Travis staggered backward, screeched, defecated, and ran off.

The officer got out of his car. Huge chunks of scalp and fingers lay scattered around the yard. He walked slowly to the body. With the stump of what remained of her arm, Charla Nash reached for his leg.

Travis with a Stamford police officer. (Photo: Courtesy of Kerri DeBlasi)

As another group of officers set out into the woods to look for him, Travis scampered unnoticed into the house. Leaving a trail of blood, he knuckle-walked through the kitchen, the bedroom, and into his room. Then he grasped his bedpost, heaved forward, and died.

Charla Nash’s injuries were overwhelming. Travis had bitten or torn away her eyelids, nose, jaw, lips, and most of her scalp. He’d broken nearly all the bones of her facial structure. He’d fully removed one of her hands and virtually all of the other. He’d rendered her blind.

And yet she did not die. Three days after the attack, in critical condition, Charla was flown by specialized jet from Stamford to the Cleveland Clinic. Fifteen months of intervention followed.

One month after the attack, her family filed a $50 million lawsuit against Sandy.

Sandy was alone.

After weeks of blistering coverage, journalists from around the world—who, hoping to coax Sandy out of the house, had left her flowers, coffee, and sympathy notes—had finally moved on. The reporting had included many inaccuracies, such as the unsubstantiated assertion (which Sandy never disputed) that Travis was the same chimpanzee who had appeared in the iconic Old Navy ads of the nineties and on The Maury Povich Show. The New York Post had accused Sandy of “weird jungle love” and all but said that she and Travis had sexual relations. Even after the press mob had lost interest in her chimp, the allegation that hurt her most was that she’d cared more about Travis than Charla. “I stabbed my own son,” she cried to friends on the phone. For a long time, inside her house, she refused to clean up his blood. She sat a gigantic stuffed chimpanzee in the leather chair in his room.

“I just—you just—you can’t imagine,” she sobbed into the phone late at night. “They cut off his head!” She was referring to the last time she’d seen Travis, when she’d gone to the crematorium to drop off his favorite tie-dyed T-shirt and discovered he’d been decapitated for rabies testing.

She tried to reconstitute her life. She visited occasionally with friends, and made trips to the casino. She continued shopping—much of it for clothes for her three grandchildren that she would end up never sending—until her house became impassable. She sat at her kitchen table and leafed through stacks of mail, old letters, old pictures, doodling Sue’s name on the back of envelopes. She tuned in nightly to Bill O’Reilly. She talked—and cried—on the phone incessantly; the subject was almost exclusively Travis. One of her daughter’s friends helped her set up a profile on Match.com; she went on a date with an elderly Stamford man who appalled her by requesting oral sex as they were having dinner.

In the end, all that was really left for Sandy were animals. She put bowls outside for the raccoons. She fed deer in the yard from her hands. And she found another chimpanzee. His name was Chance. She knew she could never bring him back to Connecticut, so she contributed money to a friend out of state, and the two women were to assume a kind of joint custody. One spring day, she sat on a couch in the woman’s mobile home. Chance, about a year old, stretched his young, long body out across her lap. Sandy tickled his belly. He climbed all over her. The two of them snuggled and played. They opened their mouths wide and put them up against each other’s. Sandy’s makeup ran with her tears.

Back in Connecticut one day last summer, shortly before sunset, Sandy was alone, outside, feeding the animals. She looked up. A cloud formation resembling a fish’s backbone was unspooling against the sky. She found her camera, held it up, and clicked.

Sometime later, her chest began hurting. The pain came on quickly and intensified. Frightened, she called a friend, who drove over to her house to sit with her. A hot bath provided no relief. The friend called 911. She put Sandy in her car, in her pink bathrobe and slippers, and drove her down Rock Rimmon Road, to meet the ambulance on its way.

At the ER, tests determined Sandy’s aorta was bulging. She was prepared for emergency surgery. In the operating room, two hours in, Sandy’s lungs filled with blood.

And then they were all gone. All the Herolds were dead.

Last May, Charla Nash was transferred to a long-term assisted-living facility outside Boston. The innumerable cosmetic surgeries she has undergone have accomplished little cosmetically. On her 56th birthday, nine months after the attack, in what will undoubtedly go down as one of the most extraordinary moments in television history, she revealed her face—a bulbous surface of transmogrified skin—to Oprah Winfrey; she told Winfrey she remembers nothing from the attack and is disinclined to worry about how others see her. “I just look different,” she said. “Things happen in life that you can’t change. It’s a tragedy.” She is financially insolvent; her brothers and a team of representatives are apparently shopping two book ideas and weighing several movie deals on her behalf. Her daughter is in her freshman year of college. Through Brigham and Women’s Hospital, she is hoping to become the world’s first face- and double-hand-transplant recipient.

Travis with a Stamford police officer. (Photo: Courtesy of Kerri DeBlasi)

When her brother informed her of Sandy’s death, Charla was shocked.

She said: “Sandra was a troubled woman, and maybe she has some peace now.”

Two-forty-one Rock Rimmon Road remains almost exactly as it was the day Sandy left, held in limbo by order of the court. Rumors abounded after Sandy’s death that along with jewelry, antiques, and other valuables, somewhere in the ramshackle house she had secreted $80,000 in cash, and burglars broke in five times in the first two months. The gigantic addition is frozen in mid-construction, exactly as it had been that February day, its windows still glassless, so that leaves and small drifts of snow blot its unfinished floor. The life-size stuffed chimpanzee still sits in the oversize chair in Travis’s room, gazing out the window to the backyard and the woods beyond it.

A few miles away is a cemetery that has no tombstones. A plot there belongs to the Herolds. Beside Jerry, inside a sealed vault inside a sealed coffin, Sandy Herold wears an animal-print shirt and tight jeans distressed from ankle to hip. Her fingernails are painted pink, and her hands rest atop her abdomen. Against her one side stands an urn containing the ashen remains of her daughter Suzan. On the other, in the same urn she’d slept with every night since that day in February, are Travis’s.

Interview: George Lois [Vice Magazine, Jan '11]

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:14:00 -0500

INTERVIEW BY ROCCO CASTORO
PORTRAITS BY TIMUR CIVAN

George Lois was one of the primary architects of the Creative Revolution in American advertising in the 1960s—yeah, yeah, like on Mad Me. He was a leading figure at the world’s first creative agency and cofounded its second. This was a time when “creative” was a way to describe someone who had original ideas and not, as theOxford American Thesaurus puts it, an “advertising buzzword… that simply means new or different.”

Lois wholly or partially created some of the most exceptional and memorable ads in history. For better or worse, behemoths of consumerism such as Tommy Hilfiger, Jiffy Lube, ESPN, MTV, and many others have ingrained themselves in American culture because of his indelible campaigns. The qualities that set Lois’s work apart from that of today’s advertising industry are a) his stuff was unapologetic and transparent about the fact that it was selling a product, and b) he used ideas to hawk products rather than the other way around.

Considering the breadth and quality of his advertisements, it’s all the more impressive that Lois is best known for his work at Esquire, where he created a staggering 92 of the most iconic magazine covers ever published in a mass-market magazine. They were visual battering rams, catalysts for dialogue about topics people found uncomfortable. With full backing from editor in chief Harold Hayes, Lois was given complete creative control. Sometimes Hayes didn’t even know what he was getting until the finished cover arrived. It was the type of arrangement that would be impossible in today’s sycophantic and flaccid media industry. Some have criticized Lois for exaggerating the scope of his influence and claiming other people’s ideas as his own. Regardless of the particulars, his work has undeniably had a lasting influence on the media world and will continue to until we’re all dead.

Most journalists and television producers want to speak with Lois about his creative process or how he came up with so many unforgettable concepts. But I had a different agenda. I visited him at his stately full-floor apartment on West 12th Street in Manhattan to ask about his take on why the advertising industry—and, really, the media machine as a whole—has been cascading down a bottomless pit of mediocrity for at least the past two decades.

Vice: Do you get pissed off that your advertising work is glossed over by people who only know you for your Esquire covers?
George Lois: I really am a magazine lover. Magazines are great. I love the idea of picking them up, flipping through them, and looking at the ads. Sometimes you get knocked over, and other times you just say, “Piece of shit,” and drop it. When you get a good one and you’ve got it resting on your lap it’s like a lap dance. I’ve played with the iPad and it’s like the difference between looking at porn and having sex. But yeah, sometimes writers or filmmakers or whoever just forget about my main line of work. They never mention the advertising and keep calling me “the art director of Esquire during the 60s.” Other people just get it wrong… have you seen that film Art & Copy?

Yeah, it’s that PBS documentary about creative agencies.
I didn’t think it was particularly terrific. It was all over the place. I mean it was OK, but it was done by someone who doesn’t understand. Nice guy. Good documentary filmmaker, but he didn’t understand the Creative Revolution in advertising—what was going on in the 60s and how it all started. When they first edited it, the guy said, “We have 40 minutes of just you. We can’t do that. We’ve got to cut it down.” The whole thing felt conflicted, but it airs all the time. Every goddamn day I get phone calls from people who saw the movie. I’ve received hundreds of emails from young people who didn’t know me as an advertising guy. They knew me as the guy who did the Esquire covers. I wasn’t ever at Esquire! I was an advertising guy who happened to do some good covers for them. I swear, it never stops.

Are these folks disappointed when they find out the majority of your work was for the big bad advertising industry?
Four or five years ago there was a memorial service for a great graphic designer by the name of Saul Bass. It was at Cooper Union in the Great Hall, where Lincoln spoke. Saul did amazing title sequences for films like Psycho and The Man With the Golden Arm. Anyway, I gave a speech about him, and then Martin Scorsese did a half-hour lecture about the importance of Saul’s movie titles. Afterward somebody was like, “Georgie, you ever meet Marty?” and I said, “No, I’ve never met Marty.” So the guy takes me to the other side of the room and there are like 200 advertising guys around Scorsese. We broke through the crowd and he introduces me. Scorsese went apeshit, like, “My God! I didn’t know you existed.” He started going on about the Esquire covers and how much he liked them. After about ten minutes of this he said, “Well, what happened to you? Why didn’t you keep doing it?” And I said, “What do you mean? I stopped doing that because it pays less than… You don’t understand. I’ve always been an advertising guy. I did those covers on the weekends to help out Harold Hayes.” Scorsese just said, “Oh.” It was like the air came out of the balloon—psshhooo—like I was a fucking sellout or something. It’s weird how people perceive me.

Did you have any insight as to what the cover-selection process was like at Esquire before you stepped in? Was it a by-committee situation?
I call it group grope.

That’s a good name for it. How were you able to overcome their bad-idea orgies?
Hayes called me up one day—he must have read about me in a newspaper or something because my agency was getting all sorts of press around then. He gave me a ring and introduced himself as the editor of Esquire and I said, “What the fuck do you want from me?” It couldn’t have been advertising, because editors don’t go begging for advertising. They do the work. A few days later I was having lunch with him at the Four Seasons—I was doing all of their design work at the time. He described how they selected a cover: “Well, I get my design staff and other editors…” He named like 12 people. “Once a month we all get together and discuss the new issue for an hour or so—what it should be about, the topic, etc. Then two days later everybody comes back in with ideas for the cover. We discuss them and argue and usually choose four of five to be mocked up.” I said, “Holy shit. Group fucking grope! Obviously you don’t have somebody there who can do it, because if you did one of your people would come in and say, ‘That’s the cover, motherfucker!’ And you’d all go, ‘Wow.’ You have to find someone from the outside.”

See all articles by this contributor ^[1]

Published January, 2011

(Page 2 of 4)

What did he say?

He was confused. “How can anybody outside do the covers for my issues, what we created?” he asked. I said, “Easy! I’m in advertising. I do advertising for products. I don’t do the product. They come to me, and I give them something that shows them I know more about their product than they do because I know how to sell.” I started to say, “Well, maybe this guy could do it.” Then he interrupted me and said, “Wait a minute, pal. You’ve got to do me a favor. You’ve got to give me just one cover.”

That cover turned out to be the one where you called the championship fight between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, right? You picked Liston, who was the underdog by a long shot.
The fight was coming up, and I knew the sports writers were full of shit. I knew that Vegas was full of shit. They had Patterson favored 10 to 1, but I knew Liston would just go into him and beat the living shit out of him. I just absolutely knew it. When I was younger I was the only white kid allowed to play ball in Bed-Stuy. I used to go see Floyd train a couple of blocks away. I knew he was going to get killed. What’s better than predicting a fight that everyone had wrong, for a men’s magazine?

What I really want to know about is Hayes’s liability in all of this. There isn’t an editor working today who has balls that heavy. I’m not even sure it would get to that point, because of the whole group-grope thing you were talking about earlier. Most publishers are so nosy and paranoid that it wouldn’t get past the boardroom.
When I showed it to Hayes he told me he really liked it but he was nervous. “You’re calling the fight against Patterson,” he said. “You’re crazy.” I said, “No, no. I’m not crazy. You’re crazy because you’re going to run it. Look at it this way: There’s a 50-50 chance I’m right. If I’m right, you’re a genius. Everyone’s going to look at you and say, ‘Wow. What an editor.’” Years later I found out that everyone—including the publishers—told him he was nuts and that there was no way he could run it. But he told them he’d quit if they didn’t run it. Hayes didn’t let me know what was happening over there. He was fighting the world, especially the ad people. Sometimes I did a cover and they lost ten advertisers in two days, but the circulation was going up, up, up. Hayes would say, “Yeah, fuck it, don’t worry about it,” and next month they’d pick up 10 or 20 advertisers. He was incredible.

Did you have absolute free rein? There must have been some kind of process during which you discussed cover ideas.
In the beginning Hayes would describe what was going to be in the issue over lunch. Sometimes he wouldn’t have half the articles, but he knew enough. I didn’t even take notes. Usually he’d say something about a story and I’d say, “That’s the cover. That’s what I want to do.” Other times he’d say, “There’s a lot of stuff in there about movies. It’s the kids’ new religion. You’ve got to do a cover on that.” Sometimes I had to do this or that; it was obvious that I had to do something on a certain topic. But usually he didn’t know what I was going to pick.

What are the tenets of a good magazine cover?
Did you read that Annie Leibovitz book that came out a while back? Leibovitz at Work or something like that? It’s not a great book, but it’s interesting. There’s one very short chapter about “idea covers.” She said something like “George Lois is the master of idea covers. He did this and this and this. I did some too.” Then she said, “I really couldn’t keep doing them because Jann Wenner [cofounder and publisher of Rolling Stone] wanted covers that all looked alike and had a similar style.” It was this whole idea of You shouldn’t look at a cover and think too much. I don’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. Everybody’s crazy. What’s a magazine about? At some point in the 70s everybody decided that magazine covers had to feature the face of the month, some fucking would-be star. Put 20 blurbs on it and the logo on top. You go to the newsstand and there are 30 or 40 magazines that all look the same. And there are people who defend it. Tina Brown [former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker] once said to me, “You know, George, you can’t do those covers today. There are so many magazines out there.” And I replied, “What’s that mean? Tina, if you took any one of my covers today and went to the newsstand it would knock your eyeballs out! Everything looks the same!”

So you’ve got the ears of some of the most powerful editors in the world and they won’t even take your advice, which is proven. That’s really comforting.
The American Society of Magazine Editors has this yearly conference where they all get together and jerk off and talk about where they are and where the culture is. So they invited me down a few years ago and asked me to talk about the Esquire covers and tell everybody to stop doing terrible covers, or something like that. I was like, “So you want me to come down and bust balls? OK.” Just about every editor and publisher in America was there, and I just ripped their eyeballs out. Every magazine except maybe Vanity Fair and the New Yorker was complicit in the Iraq war. I gave them the whole thing about weapons of mass destruction and said, “Every one of you sons of bitches is complicit in what’s going on over there.” They were all, “Oooohhhh.” Ten minutes later I did a little bit more of it [mimes clapping his hands together to demonstrate their applause], and then half an hour later I really ripped into them about the war and I got a standing ovation. All the while I’m talking about why they can’t do good covers, and I’m showing mine at the same time.

And in the end?
Afterward there was a line—about 200 of them—waiting to talk to me. I’m signing stuff, and it’s all bullshit! They all keep doing the same crap. They’re not even trying. It’s so ignorant. Why would you want your magazine to look like the other guys’ magazines? It doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t you want to run a cover image that rips your lungs out?

It’s both sad and absurd that at most publications so much goes into ruining a cover image. Tons of money is devoted to the marketability of these blurbs, when it could go toward funding good stories or something remotely useful.
They’re very carefully researched. They test them: “Do you like this line better than this one?” If you have to depend on blurbs to have people buy your magazine then you’ve got a piece of shit! You don’t have a brand! You don’t design a magazine for your audience; you create a great magazine for yourself. I’ve had this discussion with editors like Graydon Carter. He could do great Vanity Fair covers. Graydon said, “We have very intelligent readers.” And I said, “Of course you have very intelligent readers, and you insult them with every cover!” This month it’s Lady Gaga on the cover! Everybody has a chance to use their covers to say, “Whoa, what a magazine!” and they don’t even try.

Do you think part of the problem is that magazines are afraid of losing advertisers and readers if they don’t choose covers that appeal to the lowest common denominator?
I don’t think they sit there and say, “Gee, if we did a great idea cover we’d lose advertisers.” I don’t think they even think that way. Why would they lose advertisers by doing a good cover?

See all articles by this contributor ^[2]

Published January, 2011

(Page 3 of 4)

Have you seen a single cover from the past few years that you liked?

Once in a while, and it really thrills me.

The New Yorker

did two or three terrific covers over the last couple of years that really nailed what was going on. That terrific drawing of Obama and Hilary Clinton in bed together, answering the phone, was fucking good. David Remnick is a fan of mine. We had lunch once and he said, “Do you think I should do some photographic covers?” I said, “What? Are you fucking nuts? You’re the only mag that stands out or has a chance of standing out! You don’t fill it with blurbs; you have drawings, which in many cases are whimsical and sweet. That’s terrific, but you should do a cover about something that happened last Thursday. Have somebody come up with a great idea on Friday, and then it comes out the next Monday. You’ll nail what happened!” Then he did three or four of them, and I said, “Jesus Christ, somebody’s listening to me!” But that’s about it.

In a way, I feel like it’s exactly the same with modern ads. I have a theory that creative agencies—and there are exceptions, especially outside the States—lack conviction and are lazy. They play it safe and maximize profit margins by purposefully fucking things up or doing a mediocre job because some marketing goon on the other end has to spend his budget by the end of the year. No one has the guts to say anything provocative. What was different in the 60s?
I started the second creative agency in America. The first was Doyle Dane Bernbach, and that’s where I came from. Bill Bernbach invented the idea of getting a terrific graphics guy to work with a writer and merging the energy between them to make great ads. That was his epiphany. Before DDB and my agency, art directors usually sat around in a room with their thumbs up their asses and waited for a copywriter to come around and give them some lines. So I went to DDB and kicked a lot of ass and did a lot of great stuff. When I left to start my own agency with a few other people—Papert, Koenig, Lois—everybody thought I was insane. And it was extremely insane because I left the best job in the world at the only agency anybody would want to work at to be a competitor. We started the new agency in January 1960, and we were successful every week. Every time we did a campaign there were big stories in the newspapers about it.

OK, but were people less pussylike and not afraid to try something new? Or maybe all the good ideas are used up by now and we’ve entered an era of ubiquitous mediocrity?
The 60s were a heroic period. And I really mean that. They were courageous. When I started the second creative agency everybody said, “Holy shit! There can be more than one creative agency.” Out of my agency came three other agencies in the next three years, and then there were five agencies, and that was enough to spur a revolution. Creativity was flourishing, and then I don’t know what happened. We hit some wall of bureaucrats—of guys selling out their agencies. Now there are basically three giant agencies in the world, and everybody belongs to one of them. I remember reading an article about the ad industry in a magazine a couple months ago about some agency run by this French guy who owns half the world. I can’t even remember his name. It was 12 pages without one mention of the word creativity and never talked about the actual products they were creating campaigns for.

So no one’s doing it right today?
No. Now it’s all about eight people sitting in a room, picking things together. What the fuck? Are you crazy? People think the way to be a successful executive is to get the right people around them and listen to their thinking and pick the best of their thinking. I don’t get it. I know it goes against the grain, but that’s certainly not the kind of creativity I’m involved in. I know it sounds terrible, but everything that’s great in this world gets done by one or two people together. My advice is to avoid group-analysis paralysis. Reject con and create icon.

But some advertising relies on the collaborative process, doesn’t it? It takes more than one or two people to shoot a television commercial.
You need a team for production, but a team for creating ideas? Get the fuck outta here! That’s impossible. It really is. People say, “Well, if you get together, if there are 20 people…” I say the more talented the 20 people, the more trouble you’re in. If there’s one talent in the 20 and the guy has conviction, he can beat the shit out of the other guys. But if the entire group is talented then you’re in trouble. It’s impossible!

Creative agencies today seem to put their perceived creativity above the relative merits of the product they’re selling. This results in either two-bit comedy skits or branded content that tries to masquerade as something else. What happened to ads that explained how a certain brand of deodorant is going to make my armpits stink less or why a particular type of vehicle is better built than the rest? The worst part is the amount of money spent on making this schlock.
Back in the 60s everybody looked toward the commercials DDB and I did. A campaign for the entire year was $200,000, and the entire country would be talking about it. There are 50 companies in America today that spend at least $150 million a year on advertising, and you could look at their commercials and have no idea what product they’re advertising. I’ll be watching one today and say, “What the fuck was that?” You don’t know what they’re talking about. For some reason young people—or maybe everyone in the business—is afraid of looking like they’re selling something. They try to make pieces of entertainment. They don’t get to the point.

Who’s to blame for this?
I was teaching a class at the School of Visual Arts and half of the students are Korean and Chinese—they don’t even understand the culture, and I want to say to them, “What the fuck are you doing here? It’ll take you 30 years to understand what the hell goes on here.” Just because you learn the language doesn’t mean you understand the culture. I couldn’t be an art director in England. This kid gets up and describes a commercial that came out four or five years ago. There’s a young man with a woman in a bar and they’re drinking beer. Another woman starts walking over to them. She looks mad, he sees her coming, and then he switches beers with the woman he’s sitting with. The woman who walked over grabs his beer, pours it over his head, and walks away. Everyone said, “Oh yeah, that’s a great one!” I said, “What beer were they advertising?” They had a five-minute argument over the brand name. They didn’t know which beer it was.

So what’s the secret to making a good ad?
Make it simple. A great ad campaign has two mnemonics: There should be a visual one—somebody doing something—and something verbal. The big idea has got to have this synergy of memorability.

See all articles by this contributor ^[3]

Published January, 2011

(Page 4 of 4)

The epitome of these types of mnemonics—to me at least—is the “I Want My MTV” campaign you did. It is a prime example of how advertising can change the course of popular culture. MTV was on very thin ice at the time. They had no viewership, the record companies thought videos would kill their business, and people who played and listened to rock thought it was a joke. Then those commercials came out and turned it all around. I always wondered how the rock stars were initially convinced to appear in the commercials? Did you just throw a bunch of money at them?

When I first started working with MTV everyone there was 25 or 26 years old. They were all young punks. I told them that I wanted to do a commercial with footage they had left over—they had a lot of things that never ran, that nobody ever saw—and then toward the end a slightly manic voice would come on and say something like “If you want to get MTV where you live, pick up the phone, call your cable operator, and say—and this is where we cut to someone like Mick Jagger saying, ‘I want my MTV.’” They said, “Yeah? And then what?” I told them millions of young fans would dial the number of their cable providers and keep calling until they could watch MTV. They told me that I could never, ever get a rock star because everyone hated them. I said, “No, I’ll get one.” I only had a week to do it.

How did you do it?
The next thing I did was call up Bill Graham, one of the most iconic concert promoters of all time. “I need a rock guy,” I told him. He said, “But George, MTV? You won’t be able to convince anybody to do MTV. They are going to destroy music.” I told him that was ridiculous and that I wanted Mick Jagger. He said, “Well, I have his home phone number in London. I’ll give it to you, but you can’t tell him I told you to call.” So I called Mick and told him the deal. He said, “Well, I’ll be in New York on Monday. I’m flying in on Sunday night. What time of the day do you want to shoot it?” I said, “How about nine o’clock in the morning? What hotel you staying at? I’ll make sure the car picks you up.” He said, “No, I’ll be there.”

You sold him!
Then I called Bob Pittman, who was the founder of MTV and the guy who hired me. I said, “I got Mick Jagger, I think!” He said, “What do you mean you think?” I said, “He told me he’d come to the studio Monday. I gave him the address and hopefully he’ll be there.” He said, “Hopefully? I’m not going to pay for hopefully.” I told him, “Then I’ll pay for it!” On Monday the crew showed up. Then nine o’clock hit, then 9:15, 9:30. At about five minutes to ten Jagger walked in and says, “Oh, listen George, I brought a couple of friends: Peter Townshend and Pat Benatar. Maybe you’d like to shoot them too?” I said, “Yeah, I think I can make room for them.”

Were you ever a regular MTV viewer?
I thought MTV was great. I wasn’t a rock fan, but I became a rock fan just by watching it. If you had blood in your veins, you had to check it out every day. There were a lot of really good music videos. It was a very exciting period of pop culture. Then they started all the reality shit, the scumbag stuff of the world. It really dumbed down America. I’ve learned to totally ignore the Gagas and the reality shows and Jersey Shore. People say, “Well, you’re missing out on what’s going on with popular culture.” But I’m not. Popular culture doesn’t have to be the kind of culture I find revolting. That stuff is invisible to me.

When I was conducting research for this interview I discovered that you won an MTV Best Music Video of the Year award in 1983 for Bob Dylan’s “Jokerman.” It’s the only video you’ve ever directed. How did that happen? Did Dylan seek you out?
Bill Graham called me up in ’82. I had just done “I Want My MTV,” and I had just saved USA Today’s ass and was about to make Tommy Hilfiger famous with one ad. Graham said, “I’m trying to get Bob Dylan to do a goddamn video, but you know Bob, he won’t do any videos. So I said to him, ‘If I get George Lois to do it will you do a video?’ He hesitated before saying, ‘Probably.’”

So you were in.
The reason Graham suggested that I direct the video is because in ’76 I went to one of Dylan’s concerts and kind of made a date to see him through a writer by the name of Larry Sloman. Larry said, “Look, if you come to the concert I can probably get you in to talk to him about Hurricane Carter,” which was a cause I was championing at the time. I told him I’d take a shot at it. I spoke with Dylan and tried to get him interested in Hurricane’s case. A week later I took him to the prison, he meets Carter, and I convince Dylan he’s innocent. I said, “Would you write a song?” Dylan said, “Sure!” and wrote “Hurricane.” After that I said, “How about a concert?” and he did a benefit at Madison Square Garden.

So I had that connection with him. When I first heard “Jokerman” I thought, “Jesus Christ, every line is biblical!” Every line made me think of a visual from the history of art. I put together a storyboard over the course of a couple days. I had the boards hanging up all around a darkroom and Bobby came in one day. I explained that the video would depict 5,000 years of art history. I read each line and explained each piece of art that would go with it. I went through about 20 of them when Bob said, “I had almost all of these things you have up there in mind when I wrote the lines.” Graham was in the back of the room. You could hardly see him, but all of a sudden he appeared out of the shadows like Orson Welles and was doing this [mimes masturbating with his hand]. Then he stepped back into the dark. What an image!

Speaking of stuff on TV, which shows do you like? I bet you’re a huge fan of Mad Men.
[gives an exasperated look] Did you read the thing I wrote for Playboy?

Yeah, you took a giant shit on the show. I’m just messing with you.
What’s funny is that the cover says something like “George Lois on Mad Men,” and underneath that is “An Eight-Page Homage to Naked Secretaries and Cold Martinis, blah blah blah.” There are a lot of people who know me from back then who, because of the way they laid out the cover, thought, “Oh my God. George Lois is giving an homage to Mad Men!” They all fucking hate Mad Men because they lived through what I did! It infuriates me. All that’s on the minds of the characters on the show is getting laid, screwing their secretaries, and drinking all day. They don’t talk about anyone having any type of talent. I told somebody that maybe I criticize it in a way that Mafia guys probably criticize The Sopranos. The mobsters probably sit there and laugh their asses off and say, “That’s not the way we did it.” I’m sitting here saying, “That’s bullshit,” but I know I’m right. [laughs]

The Last Resort [Guardian, 2003]

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 11:16:00 -0500

Decca Aitkenhead
The Observer, Sunday 29 June 2003

When you have a teenager on the rampage, who are you going to turn to? In America, parents send their troubled offspring to Jamaica’s Tranquility Bay - a ‘behaviour-modification centre’ which charges $40,000 a year to ‘cure’ them. Decca Aitkenhead, the first journalist to gain access to the centre in five years, wonders if there isn’t too high a price to pay

Were you to glance up from the deserted beach below, you might mistake Tranquility Bay for a rather exclusive hotel. The statuesque white property stands all alone on a sandy curve of southern Jamaica, feathered by palm trees, gazing out across the Caribbean Sea. You would have to look closer to see the guards at the wall. Inside, 250 foreign children are locked up. Almost all are American, but though kept prisoner, they were not sent here by a court of law. Their parents paid to have them kidnapped and flown here against their will, to be incarcerated for up to three years, sometimes even longer. They will not be released until they are judged to be respectful, polite and obedient enough to rejoin their families.

Parents sign a legal contract with Tranquility Bay granting 49 per cent custody rights. It permits the Jamaican staff, whose qualifications are not required to exceed a high-school education, to use whatever physical force they feel necessary to control their child. The contract also waives Tranquility’s liability for harm that should befall a child in its care. The cost of sending a child here ranges from $25,000 to $40,000 a year.

Opened in 1997, Tranquility Bay is not a boot camp or a boarding school but a ‘behaviour modification centre’ for 11- to 18-year-olds. An American Time magazine journalist visited in 1998, and since then no media have been allowed inside. With all access denied, there has been little coverage beyond sketchy reports based on hearsay - even the local community knows almost nothing of what goes on. My discovery of Tranquility Bay came only by accident in 2000, while living nearby, and all my approaches since then were, like every other media request, firmly rejected.

The owner is an American called Jay Kay. He doesn’t trust the media, because ‘they go for sensationalist stuff. Nothing has really presented things in a way that is factual.’ On the other hand, he believes anyone who saw inside Tranquility would support and admire it, and blames criticism on ignorance. So Kay has been in a dilemma. His business is expanding, and he is turning his attention to the UK, for he believes there is a large untapped market of British parents who would ship their children straight off to Jamaica if only they knew about Tranquility. The British government, too, he hopes, might send him children in its care. ‘If social services was interested, at $2,400 a month I bet they can’t offer our services for that.’

This spring he decided to grant me and a photographer unprecedented, exclusive access. If he didn’t like the result, ‘Hell will freeze over before anyone gets in here again.’

The first impression once inside Tranquility Bay’s perimeter walls is of disconcerting quiet. Students are moved around the property in silence by guards in single file, 3ft apart - a complicated operation, because girls and boys must be kept segregated at all times, forbidden to look at one another.

Tranquility has a language of its own. The vocabulary is recognisable, but its use has been delicately customised, so that boys are ‘males’, girls ‘females’, and they are all divided into single-sex ‘families’ of about 20. The families have names such as Dignity, Triumph and Wisdom, and are led by a staff member known as the ‘family mother’ or ‘father’, addressed by the children as Mum or Dad. The 200 staff are all Jamaican.

Along with multiple guards known as ‘chaperones’, the family mothers and fathers control and scrutinise their children 24 hours a day. The only moment a student is alone is in a toilet cubicle; but a chaperone is standing right outside the door, and knows what he or she went in to do, because when students raise their hand for permission to go, they must hold up one finger for ‘a number one’, and two for ‘a number two’.

Corporal punishment is not practised, but staff administer ‘restraint’. Officially it is deployed as the name suggests, to subdue a student who is out of control. However, former students say it is issued more often as a punishment. One explains: ‘It’s a completely degrading, painful experience. You could get it for raising your voice or pointing your finger. You know you’re going to get it when three Jamaicans walk in and say, “Take off your watch.” They pin you down in a five-point formation and that’s when they start twisting and pulling your limbs, grinding your ankles.’

Before sending their teen to Tranquility, parents are advised that it might be prudent to keep their plan a secret, and employ an approved escort service to break the news. The first most teenagers hear of Tranquility is therefore when they are woken from their beds at home at 4am by guards, who place them in a van, handcuffed if necessary, drive them to an airport and fly them to Jamaica. The child will not be allowed to speak to his or her parents for up to six months, or see them for up to a year.

Let us say you are a new female assigned to Challenger family. You sleep with your family in one bare room, on beds which are pieces of wood on hinges hung on the walls. The day begins with a chaperone shouting at you to get up. You put on your uniform and flip-flops (harder to run away in) in silence and fold your bed against the wall. The room is now completely bare. After performing chores, the family is ordered to line up, for your family mother to do a head count.

You are walked to a classroom to watch an ‘EG’ - a 30-minute video intended to promote ‘emotional growth’ - on a theme such as why you shouldn’t smoke. Then the family is lined up, counted and walked to the canteen to eat a plate of boiled cabbage and fish in silence while listening to an ‘inspirational tape’ broadcast loudly through the room, urging you to, for example, eat healthily.

‘If 70-80 per cent of the food you eat is not water rich, what you are doing is clogging your body. Eat 80 per cent water-rich food. Try it for the next 10 days. Watch what happens to your body. It will blow your mind.’ Students have no choice in what they eat - there is a seven-day plan of basic Jamaican meals which never changes, and eating less than 50 per cent of any dish is forbidden.

Morning routines vary between families. Some shower (three minutes, cold water), others wash clothes (outside, in buckets, cold water), or exercise (walk round the yard). At 9.30am, each family is moved into a classroom for two hours. You continue the US high-school curriculum where you left off at home, but there is no teaching.

Watched by chaperones, you read prescribed course books, take notes, then sit a test after each chapter. Two or three Jamaican teachers sit at the back of the room in case you get stuck, and they may be able to help. But to mark the tests, they have to use an answer key sent down from the States.

After lunch and another inspirational tape come three further hours of school, a second EG, plus an educational video about a historical figure of note. There is a sports period, a family meeting, a final meal with tape, followed by a period called Reflections, when you must write down what you have memorised from the tapes and EGs. You may also write home to your parents, and though staff can read your mail, you may write what you like. But Tranquility’s handbook for parents warns them not to believe anything that sounds like a ‘manipulation’, the programme’s word for a complaint.

There is no free time, and you are never alone. At 10pm everyone is in bed for Shut Down; the lights go off, and Tranquility is silent, save for waves crashing on to the beach below. Chaperones watch you through the night. And the next day is exactly the same. As is the next, and the next.

‘Yep, identical,’ says Kay. ‘Exactly identical. Now you see,’ he adds, with a grim nod of satisfaction, ‘why kids are not happy here.’

Tranquility Bay is one of 11 facilities affiliated to an organisation in Utah called the World Wide Association of Speciality Programs. The facilities are located in the States and Caribbean region, and although independently owned, all run the same programme, devised by Wwasp.

Jay Kay is 33 years old, and the son of Wwasp’s chief director. He opened the facility at the age of 27, after four years as administrator of a Wwasp-run juvenile psychiatric hospital in Utah. Previously he had been a night guard there, and before that a petrol-pump attendant, having dropped out of college. He has no qualifications in child development, but considers this unimportant.

‘Experience in this job is better than any degree. Am I an educational expert? No. But I know how to hire people to get the job done.’ There is more than a touch of the Jerry Springer guest about his looks - heavy, shaven-headed, colourless, and a similarly deadening certainty of mind. ‘I’ve got the best job in the world,’ he claims, but he carries himself like a man who has learnt to expect the worst, and is seldom disappointed.

Tranquility is basically a private detention camp. But it differs in one important respect. When courts jail a juvenile, he has a fixed sentence and may think what he likes while serving it, whereas no child arrives at Tranquility with a release date. Students are judged ready to leave only when they have demonstrated a sincere belief that they deserved to be sent here, and that the programme has, in fact, saved their life. They must renounce their old self, espouse the programme’s belief system, display gratitude for their salvation, and police fellow students who resist.

A finely engineered reward-and-punishment system has been designed to effect this change. In order to graduate, students must advance from level 1 to 6, which they do by earning points. Every aspect of their conduct is graded daily and as their score accumulates, they climb through the levels and acquire privileges.

On level 1, students are forbidden to speak, stand up, sit down or move without permission. When they have earnt enough points to reach level 2, they may speak without permission; on level 3, they are granted a (staff-monitored) phone call home. Levels 4, 5 and 6 enjoy significantly higher status. In addition to enjoying privileges, such as (strictly limited and approved) clothing, jewellery, music and snacks, they are employed for three days a week as a member of staff, and must discipline other students by issuing ‘consequences’.

Every time a member of staff or upper-level student feels a student has broken a rule, they ‘consequence’ them by deducting points. Rule-breaking is classified into categories of offence. A ‘Cat 1’ offence, ie rolling your eyes, is consequenced by a modest loss of points. A ‘Cat 3’ offence, eg swearing, costs a significant number, and may drop the student’s score beneath their current level’s threshold, thus demoting them and removing privileges.

‘You know,’ offers Kay, ‘if people want to talk about the length of the programme, it’s up to the child. If a parent wonders why their kid is here so long, well gee, we are doing our part, maybe you need to ask your little Joey why he is not moving forward. Everyone knows how to earn the points.’

The strategy of coercing children to rewire themselves is the concept Kay is most proud of, for he believes it places troubled teenagers’ redemption in their own hands. The choice is theirs.

‘For years, we just believed if you make the kids do what you want them to do, then they will make the change. But what we figured out was, why not get them to come to the conclusion that they need to make the change themselves? That’s what makes this programme special. It’s up to them.’

Students who fail to grasp this formula are forcefully encouraged to get the message. One girl currently has to wear a sign around her neck at all times, which reads: ‘I’ve been in this programme for three years, and I am still pulling crap.’

When most children first arrive they find it difficult to believe that they have no alternative but to submit. In shock, frightened and angry, many simply refuse to obey. This is when they discover the alternative. Guards take them (if necessary by force) to a small bare room and make them (again by force if necessary) lie flat on their face, arms by their sides, on the tiled floor. Watched by a guard, they must remain lying face down, forbidden to speak or move a muscle except for 10 minutes every hour, when they may sit up and stretch before resuming the position. Modest meals are brought to them, and at night they sleep on the floor of the corridor outside under electric light and the gaze of a guard. At dawn they resume the position.

This is known officially as being ‘in OP’ - Observation Placement - and more casually as ‘lying on your face’. Any level student can be sent to OP, and it automatically demotes them to level 1 and zero points. Every 24 hours, students in OP are reviewed by staff, and only sincere and unconditional contrition will earn their release. If they are unrepentant? ‘Well, they get another 24 hours.’

One boy told me he’d spent six months in OP.

I didn’t think this could be true, but it transpired this was not even exceptional. ‘Oh no,’ says Kay. ‘The record is actually held by a female.’ On and off, she spent 18 months lying on her face.

‘The purpose of observation,’ Kay offers, ‘is to give the kids a chance to think. Hopefully, it’s giving the kids a chance to reflect on the choices they’ve made.’ And indeed it is often in OP that a student decides to stop fighting. In this respect, OP works. In fact, the success rate of OP can be understood as a perfect distillation of Tranquility Bay’s ideology. If your son is willfully disrespectful, the most loving gift a parent can give him is incarceration in an environment so intolerable that he will do anything to get out - where ‘anything’ means surrendering his mind to authority.

‘I say to the parents,’ says Kay, leaning back in his office seat. ‘The bottom line is, what’s the end result you want? Getting there may be ugly, but at least with us you’re going to get there.’

Jim Mozingo got the result he wanted. Twenty months after sending his son Josh away, he arrived from North Carolina to collect him. Mozingo has four sons, an insurance company, and is a good example of a typical Tranquility parent. Divorced from Josh’s mother, busy, wealthy, he found Tranquility by typing ‘defiant teen’ into the internet.

‘I tell you, I was at my wits’ end with my son. We’d tried military school, but he got kicked out. He never got into trouble with the police. He was one step from that. What it was is, he was going through this identity crisis. Peer pressure. Pot got involved.’

Drugs feature high among reasons for choosing Tranquility, although addicts who need detox are not accepted. Running away from home, sleeping around, or being expelled from school are also typical. Some kids have been in trouble with the police. Others had been in court, where their parents persuaded the judge to let them send their child to Tranquility, rather than issue his own punishment. Other students were sent here for wearing inappropriate clothes, using bad language, or hanging around with the wrong sort of friends.

‘He was real disrespectful to his mom,’ Mozingo sighs. ‘Not to me. Never to Daddy. He lived with his mom until a year-and-a-half before he came here, and I knew the day would come when she would call me and say, “I can’t handle it.”’

But Mozingo had baby twin sons with his new wife, and Josh was a disruptive addition to the household. ‘I knew I had to do something. I didn’t want to lose him. I would do anything for him, that’s why I sent him here. We tried therapy at home, but you know.’ He laughs conspiratorially. ‘God love ‘em, we’ve got to have therapists, I guess. But I come from a class where if you’ve got a problem, well hell, you just work it out. Josh just needed to get his head on straight. And he has.

‘Sure, he complained like hell at first,’ he recalls fondly. ‘Typical case of manipulation, just like they said in the handbook. He said the staff were mean and violent, they beat you, the food is terrible.’ He chuckles, pleased by the neat symmetry of the handbook and letters. While he is talking, Josh hovers nearby, with bright eyes that dance longingly on his father’s face. It took Josh a whole year to reach level 2, some of it spent in OP, but his father feels only awestruck gratitude for the treatment his son has received.

‘Every time I come here I’m just so struck by the love of these people. You can’t fake this kind of love. And this place is just full of love. I challenge anyone to come down and take a look.’

These are classic Tranquility-parent feelings. For example, Mozingo believes his son had a serious drug problem before coming to Jamaica and Josh agrees. What was he taking? ‘I was doing marijuana. I was doing cigarettes. Alcohol.’ He looks disgusted with himself. ‘Mostly, though, I stole prescription pills from my grandmother.’

Also striking is the assumption parents make of entitlement to their child’s affection, as though this is a legal right. ‘She’s a neat kid, she really is,’ a former student’s mother says. ‘She just didn’t like us.’ But now, ‘I don’t believe she’s lying to me any more, and that’s a neat feeling.’

Messy divorce and remarriage are the norm among these parents. Their expectations of loyalty from their children, though, suggest a gilt-edged ideal of American family life so brittle any rebellion or defiance is literally terrifying. This culture then creates its own logic - for once adolescence is criminalised, Tranquility becomes the obvious solution.

A clearer picture of this family culture emerges from conversation with a group of levels 5 and 6.

‘Oh, my relationship with my family was pretty bad. I just went to my room and avoided my parents. There was always arguments and stuff,’ offers Pete. ‘I was very angry with my parents, their divorce had a big influence on me. I’m not angry with them now, though. Not at all. I mean, I look at this as a punishment, obviously, but I deserved it. How I acted towards my parents.’

Susie is 16, from New York, and here ‘because of having sex. Not going to school. It was my attitude. It wasn’t, like, drugs. The problem was, me and my mom, we just didn’t have a relationship. We could say how was your day, that was about it.’ The possibility that this was a normal phase is adamantly rejected by Susie.

‘No, that wasn’t normal. I would be doing the same thing all my life. I would never have got out of it.’ Her friend Michelle believes, ‘I’d be living on the streets now. And I think one of the biggest things I’ve learnt here is that everything happens for a reason. I came here for a reason. You see, I just wasn’t meant to be living the life I was living. I wasn’t meant to be homeless.’

So who is meant to be homeless? ‘What?’ She looks thrown, before putting the question aside. ‘If my mom hadn’t sent me here I would have died.’

That without Tranquility they would be dead is an article of faith among all the students.

I ask one how they would have died. ‘What?’

It soon becomes apparent that despite all having been programmed with the script of their near death, no one has paused to wonder how it would have happened. But if they hadn’t been dead, they would have been poor, a destiny they have been taught to consider more or less the same thing. ‘Tranquility showed me that I’d have been a minimum wager,’ Nick says. ‘This place saved my life.’

‘I’d probably be living with a drug dealer or something awful like that,’ speculates a girl. ‘And going nowhere. Not being successful.’

A number of these students are 18 years old and therefore legally free to walk out, but until they graduate the programme their parents are refusing to have them home. Lindsay Cohen is nearly 19. A straight-A high-school graduate, she was heading for Harvard until an unsuitable choice of boyfriend had her sent here at the age of 17. The day she turned 18, Tranquility would be obliged to hand over $50 and the return half of her air ticket if she wanted to leave.

She picks the words of her explanation carefully. ‘OK. I’m used to a high-profile lifestyle. I really don’t own anything too inexpensive. What I’m accustomed to isn’t anything of the sort you can buy for $50. And my parents promised to support me through law school if I stayed. So really, walking isn’t worth it. Sometimes,’ she murmurs, ‘I still think I didn’t need to come here…’ but stops herself and offers, vaguely, ‘But I guess in life things happen.’

The students all describe their pre-programme selves using the same subjective descriptions, such as ‘ignorant’ or ‘disrespectful’, as if these were neutral adjectives, like ‘brown’. Their delivery, too, is disturbingly similar, for the words come out like empty envelopes, emotionally vacant.

‘When I was sent here I was very upset,’ Kate tells me. Her voice is careful but dull. ‘My parents didn’t tell me I was coming here. They tricked me.’ She smiles a faraway, inscrutable smile. ‘I had to have the police escort me on to the plane.’

How do you feel about it now? ‘I think it’s great. The fact that I changed my life is great.’ And what’s your relationship like with them now? ‘It’s great.’ What spark Kate and others have is lit only by Kay and the chaperones, towards whom a faintly flirtatious electricity seems to flicker. These children do not just obey rules. They seem to have been psychologically rewired.

‘You have to understand,’ a former student, who turned 18 and walked out, tries to explain. ‘The staff are constantly trying to work out what you are thinking about and constantly telling you what to think about, and then constantly checking to see if you are thinking about it. And if you’re not, and they know you’re not, you might as well be dead.’

Every day, each family has a meeting, taken by its ‘family representative’, the staff member who reports to their parents in a weekly phone call.

Challenger family’s meeting is the first I attend, and has the appearance of group therapy. The girls sit in a circle on the floor, with an hour to stand up and ‘share’, or offer ‘feedback’.

The first to her feet is frightened that her old problem of anorexia is returning. ‘I feel really disgusting the whole time. I hate it so much because I feel so imperfect. I just feel so insecure, I didn’t think this was going to come back, I don’t know what to do.’ She casts about, anguish bubbling out incoherently. ‘Like, if I was to date a guy, and I was always hating myself, well that would push him away. Being alone really scares me a lot, but I know that’s how I’m going to end up.’ Now she is crying hard, gulping air, talking randomly. ‘Like, if I get a Cat 2, I feel like I’m letting everyone down.’

After 10 minutes she sits down. But there is something odd about the atmosphere - hot grief has met ice-cool air. Hands go up for feedback.

‘No one else is thinking about you, why do you think anyone notices you?’

‘Don’t you get it? The purpose of being here, and getting consequences, is to teach you how to pick yourself up. If you don’t mess up, you go home.’

I am completely taken aback. As they rattle out their spiteful attacks some sound bored, like waitresses running through a menu, but others are imaginatively vicious. After the next has shared, a girl stands up and points at her victim’s acne.

‘Why is it that you feel so comfortable wallowing in your own crap? That’s why you have that stuff on your face. It’s because you’re hurting yourself on the inside.’ The family rep looks on with approval.

The rep for Renaissance takes a more pro-active role in her meeting. Her senior boys need no help on the feedback front - ‘You’ve got a really bad attitude. I’ve talked to you about that before. You’re lazy. That’s all you are, man’ - and so on, but she pulls a coup de grâce towards the end.

A boy stands and clearly thinks just once he is going to come off best. There had been a dispute over his ‘exit plan’, the arrangement for his imminent return home. He had said he was not going to live with his mother and staff thought he was. His mother had now written to confirm that he was absolutely correct.

‘So I just wanted to make sure,’ he says, with biting diplomacy, ‘that there were no other “misunderstandings” that need to be cleared up.’

His family rep stares hard at him hard, smarting. Defeat seems inescapable. The silence lengthens, and her eyes narrow.

‘You know what? I’m going to review your exit plan. It will have to go on hold.’

‘Miss! Miss, no!’ He is aghast, panic-stricken. ‘You can’t mean that? Why are you punishing me?’

She studies him. ‘I am not punishing you. You just gave me the idea. You have punished yourself.’

Why would students want to stand up and share, or give this kind of feedback? Scott Burkett, a student who left two years ago, explains: ‘You can only move forward in the programme if you share intimate details of your life. If you don’t share, you’re not “working the programme”, and they’ll take away your points. In a meeting, your rep will suddenly pick on you and say, “Right, I want to hear something private, right now. Come on. Or do you want to go to OP?” And I’m going through this inventory in my head real fast, thinking what will hurt least to say? Because you tell her secrets and then she uses them against you later. Like, say a guy mentions problems with his girlfriend, a month later she’ll have him up, and she’s saying, “You don’t think she’s waiting, do you?” She’s laughing at you behind your back. “How many of your friends do you think she’s sleeping with right now?” So I start telling her something, and she just says, “I’m not listening to that, that’s not deep,” and she calls for the guard to take me to OP. And I’ve got until he gets in the room to give her something better, or he’s taking me.’

Points and privileges are awarded to students who tell on each other. If you don’t tell on someone for breaking a rule and get found out, you lose points. ‘There is zero trust,’ Scott explains. ‘You can’t trust anyone. It’s not us against them. It’s everyone against you.’ Scott remembers a new boy being caught with incriminating used tissues; masturbation is strictly forbidden. ‘And they got him up in front of everyone right after dinner, and the upper-level kids just ripped into him, this little 13-year-old kid. It was kind of the entertainment for the night. That’s what I mean about breaking kids.’

Students also take part in seminars - phenomenally confrontational three-day sessions which are calculated to induce what approaches mass hysteria. Participants must swear a vow of silence, shrouding what takes place in secrecy. Many credit these emotionally intense encounters with transforming their lives, whereas others describe them as brutal manipulation.

Parents cannot visit their child at Tranquility until they, too, have attended a seminar in the States. They attend further seminars together with their child and many consider this to be the programme’s most valuable attribute. ‘Awesome,’ marvels Jim Mozingo, ‘mind-blowing.’ But this dual approach ensures that the only people outside Tranquility with whom students are allowed contact become insiders, too, co-opted into Tranquility’s special language and belief system. And parents have a financial incentive to believe and proselytise. For every new customer they can recruit, a month’s fees for their own child are waived.

What Wwasp has created is a perfectly watertight world in which all criticism is, by definition, discredited. From former students, it merely proves they are still dealing in ‘manipulations’. If parents are unhappy, the ‘poor results’ they got only indicate that they failed to support the programme. Staff are bound by a confidentiality clause, and any who leave and speak out are cast as ‘disgruntled former employees’ with personal axes to grind.

Only one potential gap exists. A licensed psychologist must perform an evaluation of every arrival. He also offers students optional one-on-one and group therapy, and is paid directly by parents. He is not employed by Tranquility because, as he stresses, ‘I need to be independent. I represent the kid and the family. That’s very important.’

Dr Marcel Chappuis was a juvenile court psychologist in Utah for 30 years, and has a PhD in clinical psychology. His manner, however, is more man-in-pub than medical, suggestive of both impatience and amusement at the teenagers’ problems. He looks like Tom Selleck, and on his desk is one book, ‘a national bestseller’ called Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway.

‘One of the groups I do here, it’s called Rape And Molest. They struggle with a lot of guilt in that group. You know, a lot of these girls dress and act provocative. They get involved in substance abuse. They place themselves at risk and then they get taken advantage of. Now, we always say no means no. We’re real clear about that. But then we say, you know, you’ve got to look at how you market yourself. Girls can be hard work to help,’ he chuckles. ‘They are so much more dramatic than boys!’

He also sees 30 adopted children - a remarkable ratio out of 250 students. Without irony, he tells me that adopted kids ‘have more issues with trust. You know, attachment and abandonment. These are the programme’s most difficult students. But they have to get ownership of the fact they were part of the problem, the reason why they were sent away.’

Dr Chappuis thoroughly enjoys working at Tranquility, and it shows. ‘It’s a lot of fun! I love it. Just the satisfaction of seeing these kids change.’ Here for two weeks a month, he visits other Wwasp facilities during the other fortnight. Wwasp must therefore account for most of his earnings. If parents want therapy for their child, they have no choice but to employ him, ensuring that the lone chance of an outside voice has successfully been eliminated. How Dr Chappuis can be described as independent is thus something of a mystery.

His good cheer only falters on the subject of criticism, at which point his great height and moustache become distinctly aggressive.

‘People who say this place is too harsh, they’ve never had their own troubled kids. If you criticise it you don’t know what the hell you are talking about. And if you think you have had experience, then I challenge the success of your experience.

I see 100 kids across this facility. I’ve got experience, and I will go nose to nose to you if you want to talk about it. I will go head to head with anyone. You get all kinds of people whining and complaining. They don’t know what they are talking about.’

And the truth is that I do not have my own troubled kid. He is right. I have no idea what it is like to be the parent of a teenager taking drugs, running away, sleeping around, breaking the law. I cannot imagine what it feels like to fear for my child’s life.

Tranquility parents say they know. They believe the programme is necessary and are usually very happy with the results, and who else is in a position to judge?

The US legal system has more or less agreed that they are right. In a crucial 1998 test case, a Californian court ruled that a parent had the legal right to send a child to Tranquility. Parental choice was sacrosanct.

What happens inside Tranquility would be illegal on British soil, but the facility falls under Jamaican jurisdiction and parents here are as free as Americans to send their children where they like. A spokesman for the Children’s Legal Centre in the UK confirmed, ‘I can’t see anything in the law that would stop a British parent from sending their child there. It is appalling, but it is down to the Jamaican government.’

And what incentive have the island’s authorities to intervene? National attitudes to child care are not famously progressive, Jamaican children aren’t involved and Tranquility is a major employer generating tax revenue. It’s easy to see why Wwasp locates facilities abroad in developing countries.

Four overseas Wwasp facilities have been closed down by local authorities in the past seven years. The latest occurred just last month, in Costa Rica, following claims of physical abuse and squalor by an ex-manager. But providing Tranquility meets Jamaican sanitation standards, it remains untroubled by government attention.

Emotional abuse is a more nebulous matter. Internet message boards are busy with former students chronicling the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. One writes, ‘At least once out of every three nights I wake up sweating and almost in tears from nightmares of being returned to Tranquility Bay. To this day, I am afraid that somehow I would have to return.’ But most students are already emotionally damaged when they arrive, with a quarter on medication for bi-polar, oppositional defiance, or attention-deficit disorders.

‘Show me one kid that they can prove has ever been psychologically damaged in my programme,’ demands Kay. ‘To have a clinician say yes, it was as a result of this? I would find that highly suspicious.’ And his confidence is probably justified.

There is very little that any opponent of Tranquility can do to prevent it continuing to do business. I don’t doubt the sincerity of Kay’s belief that far from damaging children’s lives he is saving them. ‘If I have kids, and they start giving me a problem, well they are going straight in the programme. If I had to, I’d pull the trigger without hesitation.’ And Tranquility parents undoubtedly believe they are doing the best for their children.

Once a year, Tranquility Bay has a Fun Day. There are sports and special food; girls can braid their hair; staff are smiling. And there is music. Ceaseless, bass-heavy, deafening music. It sends the teenagers out of their minds. They can’t stop dancing. Everywhere, students are dancing, demented with fever, as if a switch has been thrown and a surge of energy unleashed through the grounds.

I meet a student’s aunt visiting from Texas. ‘Oh, you would not believe the change in her! It’s amazing, the way they change a kid’s life. She’s so polite now, I wouldn’t know her. They all look so happy!’

A song by Usher is playing, and the words burn through the hard Caribbean heat. ‘You remind me of a girl that I once knew. See her face whenever I look at you.’ The Texan’s niece pauses her dancing. As she stoops to take a drink of water, I catch her face, and think she looks like the saddest girl in the world.

An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange [Forbes]

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:56:00 -0500

by Andy Greenberg

Forbes

December 2010

Admire him or revile him, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency, the leader of an organization devoted to divulging the world’s secrets using technology unimagined a generation ago.Over the last year his information insurgency has dumped 76,000 secret Afghan war documents and another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war into the public domain–the largest classified military security breaches in history. Sunday, WikiLeaks made the first of 250,000 classified U.S. State Department cables public, offering an unprecedented view of how America’s top diplomats view enemies and friends alike.

Interviewing Julian Assange, London, Nov. 11, 2010. Photo: Jillian Edelstein For Forbes

But, as Assange explained to me earlier this month, the Pentagon and State Department leaks are just the start.

For our cover story on Assange and the coming age of leaks, click here.

In a rare, two-hour interview conducted in London on November 11, Assange said that he’s still sitting on a trove of secret documents, about half of which relate to the private sector. And WikiLeaks’ next target will be a major American bank. “It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” he said, adding: “For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails.”

Here is an edited transcript of that discussion:

Forbes: To start, is it true you’re sitting on trove of unpublished documents?

Julian Assange: Sure. That’s usually the case. As we’ve gotten more successful, there’s a gap between the speed of our publishing pipeline and the speed of our receiving submissions pipeline. Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises, and our ability to publish is increasing linearly.

You mean as your personal profile rises?

Yeah, the rising profile of the organization and my rising profile also. And there’s a network effect for anything to do with trust. Once something starts going around and being considered trustworthy in a particular arena, and you meet someone and they say “I heard this is trustworthy,” then all of a sudden it reconfirms your suspicion that the thing is trustworthy.

So that’s why brand is so important, just as it is with anything you have to trust.

And this gap between your publishing resources and your submissions is why the site’s submission function has been down since October?

We have too much.

Before you turned off submissions, how many leaks were you getting a day?

As I said, it was increasing exponentially. When we get lots of press, we can get a spike of hundreds or thousands. The quality is sometimes not as high. If the front page of the Pirate Bay links to us, as they have done on occasion, we can get a lot of submissions, but the quality is not as high.

How much of this trove of documents that you’re sitting on is related to the private sector?

About fifty percent.

You’ve been focused on the U.S. military mostly in the last year. Does that mean you have private sector-focused leaks in the works?

Yes. If you think about it, we have a publishing pipeline that’s increasing linearly, and an exponential number of leaks, so we’re in a position where we have to prioritize our resources so that the biggest impact stuff gets released first.

So do you have very high impact corporate stuff to release then?

Yes, but maybe not as high impact…I mean, it could take down a bank or two.

That sounds like high impact.

But not as big an impact as the history of a whole war. But it depends on how you measure these things.

When will WikiLeaks return to its older model of more frequent leaks of smaller amounts of material?

If you look at the average number of documents we’re releasing, we’re vastly exceeding what we did last year. These are huge datasets. So it’s actually very efficient for us to do that.

If you look at the number of packages, the number of packages has decreased. But if you look at the average number of documents, that’s tremendously increased.

So will you return to the model of higher number of targets and sources?

Yes. Though I do actually think…[pauses] These big package releases. There should be a cute name for them.

Megaleaks?

Megaleaks. That’s good. These megaleaks…They’re an important phenomenon, and they’re only going to increase. When there’s a tremendous dataset, covering a whole period of history or affecting a whole group of people, that’s worth specializing on and doing a unique production for each one, which is what we’ve done.

We’re totally source dependent. We get what we get. As our profile rises in a certain area, we get more in a particular area. People say why don’t you release more leaks form the Taliban. So I say hey, help us, tell more Taliban dissidents about us.

These megaleaks, as you call them that, we haven’t seen any of those from the private sector.

No, not at the same scale for the military.

Will we?

Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.

Is it a U.S. bank?

Yes, it’s a U.S. bank.

One that still exists?
Yes, a big U.S. bank.

The biggest U.S. bank?

No comment.

When will it happen?

Early next year. I won’t say more.

What do you want to be the result of this release?

[Pauses] I’m not sure.

It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume. Usually when you get leaks at this level, it’s about one particular case or one particular violation.

For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.

This will be like that. Yes, there will be some flagrant violations, unethical practices that will be revealed, but it will also be all the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos that cames out, and that’s tremendously valuable. Like the Iraq War Logs, yes there were mass casualty incidents that were very newsworthy, but the great value is seeing the full spectrum of the war.

You could call it the ecosystem of corruption. But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not

done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest. But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest. The way they talk about it.

How many dollars were at stake in this?

We’re still investigating. All I can say is it’s clear there were unethical practices, but it’s too early to suggest there’s criminality. We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we’re very sure.

Can you tell me anything about what kind of unethical behavior we’re talking about?

No.

You once said to one of my colleagues that WikiLeaks has material on BP. What have you got?

We’ve got lots now, but we haven’t determined how much is original. There’s been a lot of press on the BP issue, and lawyers, and people are pulling out a lot of stuff. So I suspect the material we have on BP may not be that original. We’ll have to see whether our stuff is especially unique.

The Russian press has reported that you plan to target Russian companies and politicians. I’ve heard from other WikiLeaks sources that this was blown out of proportion.

It was blown out of proportion when the FSB reportedly said not to worry, that they could take us down. But yes, we have material on many business and governments, including in Russia. It’s not right to say there’s going to be a particular focus on Russia.

Let’s just walk through other industries. What about pharmaceutical companies?
Yes. To be clear, we have so much unprocessed stuff, I’m not even sure about all of it. These are just things I’ve briefly looked at or that one of our people have told me about.

How much stuff do you have? How many gigs or terabytes?

I’m not sure. I haven’t had time to calculate.

Continuing then: The tech industry?

We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.

U.S.? China?

The U.S. is one of the victims.

What about the energy industry?

Yes.

Aside from BP?

Yes.

On environmental issues?

A whole range of issues.

Can you give me some examples?

One example: It began with something we released last year, quite an interesting case that wasn’t really picked up by anyone. There’s a Texas Canadian oil company whose name escapes me. And they had these wells in Albania that had been blowing. Quite serious. We got this report from a consultant engineer into what was happening, saying vans were turning up in the middle of the night doing something to them. They were being sabotaged. The Albanian government was involved with another company; There were two rival producers and one was government-owned and the other was privately owned.

So when we got this report; It didn’t have a header. It didn’t say the name of the firm, or even who the wells belonged to.

So it wasn’t picked up because it was missing key data.

At the time, yeah. So I said, what the hell do we do with this thing? It’s impossible to verify if we don’t even know who it came from. It could have been one company trying to frame the other one. So we did something very unusual, and published it and said “We’ve got this thing, looks like it could have been written by a rival company aiming to defame the other, but we can’t verify it. We want more information.” Whether it’s a fake document or real one, something was going on. Either one company is trying to frame the other, which is interesting, or it’s true, which is also very interesting.

That’s where the matter sat until we got a letter of inquiry from an engineering consulting company asking how to get rid of it. We demanded that they first prove that they were the owner.

It sounds like when Apple confirmed that the lost iPhone 4 was real, by demanding that Gizmodo return it.

Yes, like Apple and the iPhone. They sent us a screen capture with the missing header and other information.
What were they thinking?

I don’t know.

So the full publication is coming up?

Yes.

Do you have more on finance?

We have a lot of finance related things. Of the commercial sectors we’ve covered, finance is the most significant.

Before the banks went bust in Dubai, we put out a number of leaks showing they were unhealthy. They threatened to send us to prison in Dubai, which is a little serious, if we went there.

Just to review, what would you say are the biggest five private sector leaks in WikiLeaks’ history?

It depends on the importance of the material vs. the impact. Kaupthing was one of the most important, because of the chain of effects it set off, the scrutiny in Iceland and the rest of Scandinvia. The Bank Julius Baer case was also important.

The Kaupthing leak was a very good leak. The loanbook described in very frank terms the credit worthiness of all these big companies and billionaires and borrowers, not just internal to the bank, but a broad spectrum all over the world, an assessment of a whole bunch of businesses around the world. It was quite an interesting leak. It didn’t just expose Kaupthing, it exposed many companies.

The bank Julius Baer exposed high network individuals hiding assets in the Cyaman islands, and we went on to do a series that exposed bank Julius Baer’s own internal tax structure. It’s interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring. We had some quite good stuff in there.

It set off a chain of regulatory investigations, possibly resulting in some changes. It triggered a lot of interesting scrutiny.

Regulation: Is that what you’re after?

I’m not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can’t be. But there are some abuses that should be regulated, and this is one.

With regard to these corporate leaks, I should say: There’s an overlap between corporate and government leaks. When we released the Kroll report on three to four billion smuggled out by the former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi and his cronies, where did the money go? There’s no megacorruption–as they call it in Africa, it’s a bit sensational but you’re talking about billions–without support from Western banks and companies.

That money went into London properties, Swiss banks, property in New York, companies that had been set up to move this movie.

We had another interesting one from the pharmaceutical industry: It was quite self-referential. The lobbyists had been getting leaks from the WHO. They were getting their own internal intelligence report affecting investment regulation. We were leaked a copy. It was a meta-leak. That was quite influential, though it was a relatively small leak–it was published in Nature and other pharma journals.

What do you think WikiLeaks mean for business? How do businesses need to adjust to a world where WikiLeaks exists?

WikiLeaks means it’s easier to run a good business and harder to run a bad business, and all CEOs should be encouraged by this. I think about the case in China where milk powder companies started cutting the protein in milk powder with plastics. That happened at a number of separate manufacturers.

Let’s say you want to run a good company. It’s nice to have an ethical workplace. Your employees are much less likely to screw you over if they’re not screwing other people over.

Then one company starts cutting their milk powder with melamine, and becomes more profitable. You can follow suit, or slowly go bankrupt and the one that’s cutting its milk powder will take you over. That’s the worst of all possible outcomes.

The other possibility is that the first one to cut its milk powder is exposed. Then you don’t have to cut your milk powder. There’s a threat of regulation that produces self-regulation.

It just means that it’s easier for honest CEOs to run an honest business, if the dishonest businesses are more effected negatively by leaks than honest businesses. That’s the whole idea. In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, we’re creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies.

No one wants to have their own things leaked. It pains us when we have internal leaks. But across any given industry, it is both good for the whole industry to have those leaks and it’s especially good for the good players.

But aside from the market as a whole, how should companies change their behavior understanding that leaks will increase?

Do things to encourage leaks from dishonest competitors. Be as open and honest as possible. Treat your employees well.

I think it’s extremely positive. You end up with a situation where honest companies producing quality products are more competitive than dishonest companies producing bad products. And companies that treat their employees well do better than those that treat them badly.

Would you call yourself a free market proponent?

Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets. Having lived and worked in many countries, I can see the tremendous vibrancy in, say, the Malaysian telecom sector compared to U.S. sector. In the U.S. everything is vertically integrated and sewn up, so you don’t have a free market. In Malaysia, you have a broad spectrum of players, and you can see the benefits for all as a result.

How do your leaks fit into that?

To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information.

There’s the famous lemon example in the used car market. It’s hard for buyers to tell lemons from good cars, and sellers can’t get a good price, even when they have a good car.

By making it easier to see where the problems are inside of companies, we identify the lemons. That means there’s a better market for good companies. For a market to be free, people have to know who they’re dealing with.

You’ve developed a reputation as anti-establishment and anti-institution.

Not at all. Creating a well-run establishment is a different thing to do, and I’ve been in countries where inst are in a state of collapse, so I understand the difficulty of running a company. Institutions don’t come from nowhere.

It’s not correct to put me in any one philosophical or economic camp, because I’ve learned from many. But one is American libertarianism, market libertarianism. So as far as markets are concerned I’m a libertarian, but I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free.

WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.

But in the meantime, there could be a lot of pain from these scandals, obviously.

Pain for the guilty.

Do you derive pleasure from these scandals that you expose and the companies you shame?

It’s tremendously satisfying work to see reforms being engaged in and stimulating those reforms. To see opportunists and abusers brought to account.

You were a traditional computer hacker. How did you find this new model of getting information out of companies?

It’s a bit annoying, actually. Because I cowrote a book about [being a hacker], there are documentaries about that, people talk about that a lot. They can cut and paste. But that was 20 years ago. It’s very annoying to see modern day articles calling me a computer hacker. I’m not ashamed of it, I’m quite proud of it.

But I understand the reason they suggest I’m a computer hacker now. There’s a very specific reason.

I started one of the first ISPs in Australia, known as Suburbia, in 1993. Since that time, I’ve been a publisher since that time, and at various moments a journalist. There’s a deliberate attempt to redefine what we’re doing not as publishing, which is protected in many countries, or the journalist activities, which is protected in other ways, as something which doesn’t have a protection, like computer hacking, and to therefore split us off from the rest of the press and from these legal protections. It’s done quite deliberately by some of our opponents. It’s also done because of fear, from publishers like The New York Times that they’ll be regulated and investigated if they include our activities in publishing and journalism.

I’m not arguing you’re a hacker now. But if we say that both what you were doing then and now are both about gaining access to information, when did you change your strategy from going in and getting it to simply asking for it?

That hacker mindset was very valuable to me. But the insiders know where the bodies are. It’s much more efficient to have insiders. They know the problems, they understand how to expose them.

How did you start to approach your leak strategy?

When we started Suburbia in 1993, I knew that bringing information to the people was very important. We facilitated many groups: We were the electronic printer if you like for many companies and individuals who were using us to publish information. They were bringing us information, and some of them were activist groups, lawyers. And some bringing forth information about companies, like Telstra, the Australian telecommunications giant. We published information on them. That’s something I was doing in the 1990s.

We were the free speech ISP in Australia. An Australian Anti-church of Scientology website was hounded out of Victoria University by legal threats from California, and hounded out of a lot of places. Eventually they came to us.

People were fleeing from ISPs that would fold under legal threats, even from a cult in the U.S. That’s something I saw early on, without realizing it: potentiating people to reveal their information, creating a conduit. Without having any other robust publisher in the market, people came to us.

I wanted to ask you about [Peiter Zatko, a legendary hacker and security researcher who also goes by] “Mudge.”

Yeah, I know Mudge. He’s a very sharp guy.

Mudge is now leading a project at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to find a technology that can stop leaks, which seems pretty relative to your organization. Can you tell me about your past relationship with Mudge?

Well, I…no comment.

Were you part of the same scene of hackers? When you were a computer hacker, you must have known him well.

We were in the same milieu. I spoke with everyone in that milieu.

What do you think of his current work to prevent digital leaks inside of organizations, a project called Cyber Insider Threat or Cinder?

I know nothing about it.

But what do you of the potential of any technology designed to prevent leaks?

Marginal.

What do you mean?

New formats and new ways of communicating are constantly cropping up. Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship. And in the same manner that very significant resources spent on China’s firewall, the result is that anyone who’s motivated can work around it. Not just the small fraction of users, but anyone who really wants to can work around it.

Censorship circumvention tools [like the program Tor] also focus on leaks. They facilitate leaking.

Airgapped networks are different. Where there’s literally no connection between the network and the internet. You may need a human being to carry something. But they don’t have to intentionally carry it. It could be a virus on a USB stick, as the Stuxnet worm showed, though it went in the other direction. You could pass the information out via someone who doesn’t know they’re a mule.

Back to Mudge and Cinder: Do you think, knowing his intelligence personally, that he can solve the problem of leaks?

No, but that doesn’t mean that the difficulty can’t be increased. But I think it’s a very difficult case, and the reason I suggest it’s an impossible case to solve completely is that most people do not leak. And the various threats and penalties already mean they have to be highly motivated to deal with those threats and penalties. These are highly motivated people. Censoring might work for the average person, but not for highly motivated people. And our people are highly motivated.

Mudge is a clever guy, and he’s also highly ethical. I suspect he would have concerns about creating a system to conceal genuine abuses.

But his goal of preventing leaks doesn’t differentiate among different types of content. It would stop whistleblowers just as much as it stops exfiltration of data by foreign hackers.

I’m sure he’ll tell you China spies on the U.S., Russia, France. There are genuine concerns about those powers exfiltrating data. And it’s possibly ethical to combat that process. But spying is also stabilizing to relationships. Your fears about where a country is or is not are always worse than the reality. If you only have a black box, you can put all your fears into it, particularly opportunists in government or private industry who want to address a problem that may not exist. If you know what a government is doing, that can reduce tensions.

There have been reports that Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who used to work with WikiLeaks, has left to create his own WikiLeaks-type organization. The Wall Street Journal described him as a “competitor” to WikiLeaks. Do you see him as competition?

The supply of leaks is very large. It’s helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It’s protective to us.

What do you think of the idea of WikiLeaks copycats and spinoffs?
There have been a few over time, and they’ve been very dangerous. It’s not something that’s easy to do right. That’s the problem. Recently we saw a Chinese WikiLeaks. We encouraged them to come to us to work with us. It would be nice to have more Chinese speakers working with us in a dedicated way. But what they’d set up had no meaningful security. They have no reputation you can trust. It’s very easy and very dangerous to do it wrong.

Do you think that the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative [a series of bills to make Iceland the most free-speech and whistleblower-protective country in the world] would make it easier to do this right if it passes?

Not at the highest level. We deal with organizations that do not obey the rule of law. So laws don’t matter.

Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.

What about corporate leaks?

For corporate leaks, yes, free speech laws could make things easier. Not for military contractors, because they’re in bed with intelligence agencies. If a spy agency’s involved, IMMI won’t help you. Except it may increase the diplomatic cost a little, if they’re caught.

That’s why our primary defense isn’t law, but technology.

Are there any other leaking organizations that you do endorse?
No, there are none.

Do you hope that IMMI will foster a new generation of WikiLeaks-type organizations?

More than WikiLeaks: general publishing. We’re the canary in the coalmine. We’re at the vanguard. But the attacks against publishers in general are severe.

If you had a wishlist of what industries or governments, what are you looking for from leakers?

All governments, all industries. We accept all material of diplomatic, historical or ethical significance that hasn’t been released before and is under active suppression.

There’s a question about which industries have the greatest potential for reform. Those may be the ones we haven’t heard about yet. So what’s the big thing around the corner? The real answer is I don’t know. No one in the public knows. But someone on the inside does know.

But there are also industries that just have more secrecy, so you must know there are things you want that you haven’t gotten.

That’s right. Within the intelligence industry is one example. They have a higher level of secrecy. And that’s also true of the banking industry.

Other industries that are extremely well paid, say Goldman Sachs, might have higher incentives not to lose their jobs.

So it’s only the obvious things that we want: Things concerning intelligence and war, and mass financial fraud. Because they affect so many people so severely.

And they’re harder leaks to get.

Intelligence particularly, because the penalties are so severe. Although very few people have been caught, it’s worth noting. The penalties may be severe, but nearly everyone gets away with it.

To keep people in control, you only need to make them scared. The CIA is not scared as an institution of people leaking. It’s scared that people will know that people are leaking and getting away with it. If that happens, the management loses control.

And WikiLeaks has the opposite strategy?

That’s right. It’s summed up by the phrase “courage is contagious.” If you demonstrate that individuals can leak something and go on to live a good life, it’s tremendously incentivizing to people.

Satan's Accountant (Portfolio)

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 12:06:08 -0500

by Claire Hoffman

May 2008

On the outskirts of Las Vegas, Warren Jeffs, the prophet and leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the polygamist sect of Mormonism known as the F.L.D.S., barreled down Interstate 15 in a red Cadillac Escalade. Driving him was Isaac Jeffs, one of his dozen or so brothers. Naomi Jeffs—a beautiful 32-year-old blond with hair to her knees who was both Warren’s former stepmother and the wife he reportedly called 91—rode in back. They carried $57,000 in cash in the lining of a suitcase, 16 cell phones, 12 pairs of sunglasses, four laptops, three wigs, a fistful of keys to other luxury vehicles, and a cache of handwritten letters addressed to “the Prophet.”

When a Nevada state trooper pulled the S.U.V. over for an obscured license plate, he didn’t know that the hollow-cheeked 50-year-old passenger offering only a contact-lens prescription as identification was on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted fugitives or that Warren Jeffs was fleeing charges of sexual misconduct in Utah and Arizona, where his colony of thousands of followers had lived by his word as though he were God. (View slideshow.)

That was in August 2006, long before the night this April when the sect became lurid Page One news everywhere, thanks to police raids on the West Texas compound that Jeffs’ church had financed. He had relocated hundreds of his most favored followers from Utah to a 1,700-acre former game ranch that he had anointed Yearning for Zion. Police reported that a 16-year-old girl had called a family-violence hotline and described being betrothed, beaten, raped, and impregnated by a 50-year-old man with multiple wives. For a moment, it looked like Waco revisited: Authorities faced off against dozens of Jeffs’ followers, who held hands and formed a human chain around their sacred white stone temple. When the polygamists finally relented, more than 400 children were removed from the ranch. Inside the temple, police seized evidence that pointed to a secretive world of power, sex, and submission, all reportedly controlled from prison by Warren Jeffs.

Over the years, as the leader of the F.L.D.S., Jeffs has had an ongoing conversation with God that’s resulted in prophecies both mundane and apocalyptic. He would have biannual revelations—usually on April 6 or December 31—that the end of the world would occur, wherein Christ would come to “lift up” his followers as the righteous, just as the rest of humanity was felled by pestilence and plague. Jeffs’ end-time visions meant real-life restrictions for those who followed him: no earthly entertainment, no flesh exposed from wrist to neck to ankle, no striped clothing, no dogs. Even the color red was banished: Jeffs predicted that Christ would return in red, former church members say, and that any mortal driving a red vehicle, or a convertible of any color, was committing blasphemy. But there he was on that hot August night, being arrested outside his own red S.U.V., a prophet hypocritical and humbled.

A year later, Bruce Wisan drives a convertible Mustang headed for Short Creek, Warren Jeffs’ polygamist community in the desert, on the Utah-Arizona border. The car is a rental—the only one Budget had left—and it’s very red. Wisan knows that isn’t good.

“Seeing me driving in a bright-red car is going to be a killer,” he groans. “The prophet said that to wear red is sacrilegious, and so people went through all their closets and got rid of red. You don’t see red anywhere in that town. I can’t believe they gave me a red car. You’re going to get shot.”

“Me?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “They wouldn’t dare shoot me.”

Wisan is neither a prophet nor a polygamist, but he holds an important position in the sect. In a sense, he has been hired by the state of Utah to replace Jeffs as the head of his community. Wisan has been put in charge of the United Effort Plan, the legal trust that the polygamists started by pooling their resources and creating a communal society 66 years ago. The U.E.P. owns about 85 percent of the land in this enclave and most of what sits on it. Worth an estimated $110 million, the trust holds all the assets—hundreds of homes, a few farms and factories, thousands of acres of land, a church, a zoo, several schoolhouses—accumulated by the labor, frugal living, and generous tithing of generations of these isolated believers. So conservative was their spending that, before Wisan, the trust never even had a checkbook.

Life under Prophet Warren Jeffs was restrictive and cruel, but his abuses went mostly unnoticed until 2004, when he seemed to have completely lost it. Jeffs, and the trust he controlled, had been hit with two civil lawsuits, later dismissed, charging the prophet with, among other things, sexually abusing a nephew. He announced in February 2005 that he’d ignore the suits, explaining that God had told him to fire the trust’s lawyer and refuse to defend himself against the unholy power of the state. There was also evidence that Jeffs had already begun draining the trust’s coffers, Wisan says.

So in May 2005, a state judge removed Jeffs from power and appointed Wisan to take over his orphaned flock.

Now Wisan is in the midst of trying to do something that, to his knowledge, has never been done: set up a functioning economy on the still-smoldering ashes of a theocracy. It is up to him to privatize the trust’s assets and get these radical believers on the grid, fiscally speaking. Wielding the blunt instrument of his accounting trade, he’s trying to use homeownership, property taxes, subdivision ordinances, and a few fire hydrants and other infrastructure amenities to bring these outsiders into the modern economic world.

But those he’s trying to help—Jeffs’ followers, including the police chief, two mayors, and virtually every resident—have tried to foil him at each turn. Meanwhile, Jeffs continues to advise community leaders, despite the fact that he is serving two consecutive five-year-to-life sentences in a Utah state prison for rape as an accomplice.

The polygamists believe Wisan is an agent of the devil, he says, and want nothing to do with him. They came up with a name for him almost as soon as he arrived: state-ordained bishop—S.O.B. for short.

“The people felt like, Oh, he’s going to take the land. He’s working for the devil. Why are you doing these horrible things to us? ” Wisan says. “There was great fear of me, great fear of what I was like.”

Bullheaded and bald, Bruce Wisan, 61, is a C.P.A. and a lifelong Mormon. His life appears well ordered. He has been married to one woman, Jean, for 37 years, and they have four children and three grandchildren. He and his wife enjoy golfing and boating and are active members of their church. Wisan says he disdained the practice of polygamy, like most Mormons, even before he took on the F.L.D.S. job. Most of his days are spent working at his office in Salt Lake City, where he heads Wisan Smith Racker & Prescott, one of Utah’s biggest accounting firms, with 51 accountants that serve 4,500 clients, including the state’s governor and many of its large construction firms. Wisan’s home, in a nearby neighborhood, is close to a golf course that he plays often, and he drives a BMW 545i, having recently sold his Porsche.

He frequently starts sentences by saying, “Well, you know me, I’m so bashful,” and then proceeds to prove the opposite, representing himself as a bit of a cowboy in the realm of accounting. “My business is advising; it’s consulting. People don’t call up their C.P.A. and say, ‘Hey, I’ve had a great day. Let me tell you about it.’ They call me up and say, ‘I’ve got this problem.’ So I’m a problem solver.”

Apart from his private clients, Wisan has worked for the state of Utah over the years as a trustee or as a court-appointed receiver. He has liquidated firms on the brink of bankruptcy, and helped others pay off debtors and back taxes and return to solvency. Over time, his work has made him the manager of a roadside motel, a wedding reception hall, a chain of Subway sandwich shops, an appliance warehouse, and a bowling alley and bar, even though he doesn’t drink. Often, those he was assigned to help were hostile, but nothing could have prepared him for the F.L.D.S.

We pull into Short Creek in the rented red Mustang. “Here we aaaarrrrrre,” he says, as though we’ve entered another dimension. The community sits in a 13-square-mile valley bracketed by a ridge of sandstone mountains. Cell-phone coverage ends as we drive past the Bank of Ephraim building. The streets are empty, and the only cars on the road are large S.U.V.’s and pickup trucks, all with darkly tinted windows. Technically, the community encompasses the border towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, but since the beginning, locals have called the area Short Creek for the dry riverbed that cuts between the two towns. For the most part, the towns function as one place, and their combined population of 7,000 or so is made up almost entirely of polygamist Mormons, direct descendants of the pioneers who came to the desert after the Great Depression to live in accord with their belief that multiple wives provided the passage to heaven.

“Do you understand the culture enough to understand what the hold on the people is?” Wisan asks me. Like most of his questions, this one is rhetorical. “Okay. F.L.D.S. lesson No. 1: Warren Jeffs’ hold on the people is through fear. When I first went down here, I knew two things: I knew that he controlled where people lived, and I knew that he controlled whom they married.”

When Jeffs took charge of the community, he quickly moved to make every marriage his decision. At his whim, marriages would also be ended and families evicted from their homes. “If I go home one day and I’m excommunicated, and Warren kicks me out of my house and reassigns my wife and tells my kids not to ever talk to me again, I mean, I’d lose everything,” Wisan says. The unfairness upsets him, his face reddening. “I mean, you don’t have any trial, you don’t have any hearing, you don’t have any, ‘Let me explain something…’ ”

He recalls, “After I got appointed, I talked to a girl who was on a moving crew. They do it at night, 2 or 3 in the morning, to make sure nobody is looking. They could move a house in less than an hour. They’d go in, and they’d Saran Wrap the dressers; they wouldn’t unpack anything. Couple hundred people, trucks—boom.”

Wisan pulls the Mustang into the driveway of a large brick home, hurries up to the door, and knocks. Stefanie Colgrove answers, her blond hair swinging down to her waist. Before she can say a word, he cracks a joke about how his red car makes us a moving target. She laughs knowingly and invites us into a living room the size of a hotel lobby, where a crowd of children—she has seven—are sitting around eating cereal.

Last year, Wisan allowed Colgrove to move into this house. It once belonged to John Nielsen Jeffs, a successful businessman as well as a stepbrother and close ally of Warren Jeffs’. Not long after Warren disappeared, his stepbrother and other pillars of the community left too, moving to Texas, Nevada, South Dakota, and other outposts. The home has 19 bedrooms and 23 bathrooms—four with Jacuzzis—and a waterfall in the yard. The three kitchens were used to feed John Nielsen Jeffs’ five wives and more than a dozen children. It is a polygamist’s dream home.

Meanwhile, Colgrove had been living a polygamist’s nightmare. She is the great-granddaughter of one of the men who founded the Short Creek community. But by the time she was a teenager, her family was on the outs with the priesthood, and her father struggled to support his three wives and 36 children. Colgrove was married off to a 45-year-old man shortly after she turned 18. She was his third wife, and such was her misery that after a year, she made up her mind to have a one-night stand with a nonpolygamist she knew from work. Afterward, Colgrove went to her father and her husband and told them she was no longer worthy of the marriage. At 20, she married again, this time to a polygamist in Salt Lake City who had one wife. Stefanie says she spent most of her time in the basement, where she tended to her newborn son. After less than two years, Colgrove left her second husband and married a Lutheran from Nevada. When the couple heard that Warren Jeffs was on the lam, Colgrove convinced her husband to move to Short Creek.

“When you grow up around this kind of land,” Colgrove says, “it’s the only kind of beauty you know.”

She applied to take over a house from the trust and made an appeal to Wisan: Let us live here, and we will help others. Wisan approved, with the caveat that the house also shelter women and children who have been banished or are fleeing the F.L.D.S. It’s called the Affinity Home.

As Colgrove tells this story, she asks if I’d mind running an errand with her to get milk and cheese for her brood. We drive in her ramshackle pickup to the only dairy store in town. “Are you ready for this?” she asks me. “I hope it doesn’t embarrass you that I’m paying in nickels and dimes.” Colgrove picks up an old baby-wipe container, filthy and full of change.

Inside the store, women in long dresses and braids quickly turn away from us. Men grab their sons tightly by the wrists and studiously avoid Colgrove as she pulls down a brick of cheddar cheese and a gallon of milk. Children stare at Colgrove, who wears jeans and bedroom slippers.

“They used to treat me like a ghost,” Colgrove says after saying hello to each person ignoring her, “but now I don’t let them.”

How this all came to pass is rooted in the Mormon Church’s early history. In the summer of 1843, Church of the Latter-Day Saints’ founder Joseph Smith announced a heavenly revelation stating that plural marriage was required to receive the highest glory from God. The following year, Smith and his closest followers were jailed, and in 1879, the Supreme Court upheld a congressional prohibition on the practice. In 1890, the Mormon Church’s fourth president, Wilford Woodruff, received a divine revelation decreeing that plural marriage should end. But it did not. Followers continued to practice polygamy in secret, splintering off from the main church.

In the 1930s, a group of rebels settled at a pioneer outpost 300 miles south of Salt Lake City, forming the Short Creek community. In addition to practicing polygamy, they also embraced unconventional communal economic policies and belief in total submission to church leaders. They incorporated these ideals into the United Effort Plan in 1942. Signed by a committee of men who called themselves the Priesthood Council, the U.E.P. was designed as a charitable trust to be administered by a group of male church elders. From the beginning, the trust document insisted that the funds be used for the sect’s security and protection, both from outside influence as well as unjust management from within the group. The assets included land from the gathered brethren—about 770 acres—along with seven horses, two dozen cattle, and farming equipment.

In the decades that followed, the community grew from a few dozen families to close to 10,000 people. Converts would donate their land to the trust, along with cash contributions to buy more real estate.

Warren Jeffs graduated from high school near the top of his class in 1973. He was the favorite son of Rulon Jeffs, a leader in the polygamist movement who controlled the Salt Lake Valley chapter. Warren was reportedly known in the community as humble and righteous. He worked for his father as an accountant, then as a teacher and principal at the F.L.D.S.’s private school.

At the same time, the leaders of Short Creek, 300 miles away, were tightening control over their flock. In 1987, according to court documents, residents received a letter informing them that they were “tenants at will” of the U.E.P. They were asked to sign forms acknowledging that their homes were not their own, essentially surrendering all economic agency to the leaders who ran the trust. Years later, after Rulon Jeffs had taken over the Short Creek community, Warren and the other trustees amended the trust to give themselves total control over the land and the people. This revision stated that “the privilege to participate in the United Effort Plan and live upon the lands and in the buildings of the United Effort Plan Trust is granted, and may be revoked, by the Board of Trustees. Those who seek that privilege commit themselves and their families to live their lives according to the principles of the United Effort Plan and the Church, and they and their families consent to be governed by the priesthood leadership and the Board of Trustees.”

When Warren took over after his father’s death in 2002, his domination became absolute. Whatever power was shared among the church elders vanished when Jeffs began evicting men and families from their homes for the slightest infractions, former members say. He squeezed his flock hard economically too. He liquidated assets and drained the coffers of local businesses. He closed the parks and the small local zoo, selling off the wolves and the wallabies.
Jeffs even closed the massive church where worship services were held, the social center of this isolated community, telling his followers that they weren’t worthy to attend.

Then Fred Jessop, who had spent decades as a church bishop and accountant raising cash for the tithing stockpile, vanished one night. His wives would later say that he had been relaxing in his La-Z-Boy recliner when four men who worked for Jeffs arrived and lifted him and his chair into a van. One of his wives reportedly jumped in after him, and they were taken to a small town in Colorado. Jeffs told church members later that Jessop was “called to another mission,” a former member said. Jessop died a few years later, his passing marked only by an obituary in a small Colorado paper. Jeffs’ purge culminated on January 10, 2004, when he announced that 19 other men, including the mayor and several prominent business leaders, had to leave. This news came at a weekly Saturday project meeting, according to one exiled member. There, Jeffs said God had given him a list of sins that the men had committed, and then he told them to exit the meeting hall, leave their families and businesses, and go away and repent. Their wives were later married off to other men.

After Jeffs finished naming the latest apostates, he darted out a side door. He was never seen publicly in the community again.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. and the criminal division of Utah’s Office of the Attorney General were pursuing investigations into Jeffs’ role in arranging marriages of underage girls in the community as well as allegations of tax evasion and welfare fraud. Utah’s Third District Court intervened in 2005 after several townsfolk filed a complaint, accusing Jeffs and the elders of secretly moving communal property out of the trust. At the same time, the lawsuits charging Jeffs with sexual abuse had been filed. In May 2005, a District Court judge placed Wisan in charge of the financially orphaned flock.

Today, Bruce Wisan has mastered Short Creek. He knows the grid of unmarked streets well and the byzantine laws that govern life there. He points out the hospital where women go to give birth. (The community reportedly has the highest rate of the birth defect fumarase deficiency in the world.) He drives past the cave in which followers built a bunker that could house hundreds in the event of government raids or the apocalypse. Wisan stops in front of the gargantuan compound, with more than six large homes, that Warren and Rulon Jeffs and hundreds of relatives called home. He steers down a gravel road, past looming gates and unfinished homes. Most of the houses are modest in design but monstrous in size, built to fit families of 20 or more.

The effects of Jeffs’ apocalyptic vision and the financial decimation it wrought are everywhere. Wisan looks at the dilapidated houses as he drives by and shakes his head. A number seemed to have been abandoned at critical moments of construction. They all lack something—siding, walls, windows, a porch, or even a roof. To Wisan, they are evidence of Jeffs’ crimes against his followers. In the years before he fled, Jeffs told his adherents that with the end of the world coming so soon, they must not invest money in earthly things. Instead, he told them that they should give the money to God, the church, him.

Wisan is here today to hold one of his occasional town-hall meetings. Weeks ago, he paid a few former F.L.D.S. members who’d been excommunicated to post notices in the area’s post office, only to learn that they had been ripped down. He isn’t expecting a large turnout. “Our contact with people on the inside is limited,” he says.

When Wisan was appointed to run the U.E.P., his mandate was to step in and quickly protect the trust against litigation and stop the bleeding of assets by Jeffs. Time was of the essence; two civil suits filed against Jeffs and the U.E.P. put the trust—and the thousands of people living on its property—at risk of bankruptcy, Wisan says.

One lawsuit, filed in August 2004, accused Jeffs of systematically expelling young men from the community to keep the young women available as wives for church elders. The other suit was filed by Jeffs’ nephew, Brent, who alleged that Jeffs had molested him when he was a child, telling him it was God’s will. Brent described years of being taken to a basement to be sodomized. He filed suit only after his brother, another alleged victim, shot himself in the head. (In March, the plaintiffs in both lawsuits filed court papers to dismiss the cases, saying that their goals—including removing Jeffs from power—had largely been achieved.)

Initially, the court appointed Wisan to take charge of only two large properties that Jeffs had put up for sale at a fraction of their value. Wisan sensed even then that what the F.L.D.S. wanted most was privacy. So he struck a deal with the men who Jeffs left in power: If they would quietly release the land to the U.E.P. without a fight, Wisan would use the sale proceeds to pay $500,000 in U.E.P. legal fees. When the land sold for more than $2 million, Wisan was also able to use some of the balance to pay his own accounting fees and those of an attorney. Soon after that victory, District Court Judge Denise Lindberg asked Wisan to tend to the entire U.E.P. trust.

Days after he started, Wisan received a report that one of the U.E.P.’s assets, Cozy Log Homes, an 18,000-square-foot steel commercial building, had been dismantled and vanished from U.E.P. land. It never turned up again.

Then, on New Year’s Eve 2005, Wisan was on the 15th hole of a golf course in Mesquite, Nevada, playing alongside his wife and another couple, when his cell phone rang. It was a former sect member calling. The agitated man said that a crew of dozens of church loyalists had gathered for a Saturday work project in order to dismantle a 60-foot-tall grain elevator. He described a scene of incredible efficiency, with two large cranes and several welders taking apart the elevator and carting it away. The court asked Wisan to find it and get it back. He filed a preliminary injunction, which enjoined any person from removing U.E.P. property. When police chief Fred Barlow was deposed weeks later, he refused to answer most of the questions.

In the deposition, a lawyer asked, “Do you understand that if Bruce Wisan requests that the police department do something to protect the trust that’s contrary to the desires of Warren Jeffs…you have a sworn duty to follow what Bruce Wisan asks you to do?”

Barlow answered, “I have a duty to uphold the law according to what’s on the law.”

But in a letter found following the arrest of one of Jeffs’ disciples and cited in court documents, Barlow addressed Jeffs as Uncle Warren and wrote, “I would first like to acknowledge you as the one man that was and is called of God to stand at the head of his priesthood and the Kingdom of God on the earth in this day and time.” Barlow went on to assure Jeffs that all the police officers were united in their desire to do Jeffs’ bidding and awaited further directives. He signed off, “I love you… I know that you have the right to rule in all aspects of my live [sic]. I yearn to hear from you.”

Roughly a year later, on the eve of a well-publicized visit to the city from state officials, the polygamists returned the elevator, rebuilding it piece by piece.

Next, Wisan tried to get Jeffs’ flock to pay their property taxes. He sent out written notices in 2006. But the letters, Wisan heard, quickly littered the floor of the local post office. Then, he hired exiled F.L.D.S. member Isaac Wyler to go from house to house, posting each family’s bill on the door. Wisan sent eviction warnings first to those whom he had been told were leading the community in Jeffs’ absence. Then he sent out a second round of letters, naming those who had paid their property taxes. Within a few months, about $1.5 million was collected—nearly all that had been due.

One of Wisan’s greatest challenges has been trying to distinguish exactly what belongs to the U.E.P. Since so much of the town and its businesses were formed by communal labors—called “the work” and performed in the name of God—it’s hard to tell what is private property. The church had long used Saturday work crews of local men that labored for the community, constructing widows’ homes and school buildings. But under Jeffs, those volunteer laborers spent their time working for businesses that then turned over their profits to the church. And they were used to build ever-larger homes for the families of the town’s elite. Former members told me that they received only half of their weekly wages; the rest was automatically deducted by their employers and turned over to the Prophet.

Over the past year, Wisan has worked toward his ultimate goal: liquidating the trust. He wants to end communal land ownership, subdivide the towns, and have the deeds to houses end up with the homes’ current residents. In 2006, Wisan hired surveyors and engineers at great expense in order to subdivide the area into individual lots, turning the community into a city like any other.

F.L.D.S. members who are loyal to Warren Jeffs have spent the past few years hiding from the public eye. Most homes are surrounded by fences. Windows of cars and houses are tinted black. While visiting the community, I would attempt to speak with the rare person I saw in the streets, but each time, the men would stare at me in icy silence and women would grab their children and flee. Wisan, despite his intimate involvement with F.L.D.S.’s financial future, gets the same treatment. He is proud to have cultivated a single secret source in the community. He has dined with the man and one of his wives, and they talk occasionally on the phone. One day, after much pestering, he agrees to put the source on a three-way call with me.

I ask the man what he thinks of Wisan’s vision of privatization. “We consider them consecrated properties,” the voice on the line says to me, thoughtfully and slowly. “And for us to accept or take on privatization of the properties that have been consecrated for the good people—it is just not acceptable.”

I ask him what the people think of Wisan and his work. “The feelings of the people were from the very first, and continue to be, that this is the takeover by the state of a private religious trust. It just doesn’t seem right. We are a religious people; the religious tenets are certainly going to take dominance. The people are the type of people that quietly live their lives. They’ve gone through this before; they quietly go on. Are they afraid of him? I don’t think they’ve ever been afraid of him. They’re disgusted by him.”

No one in Short Creek seems grateful for Bruce Wisan. He’s hated or, at best, tolerated. He has repeated to me several times the story about the lone F.L.D.S. member who once called and thanked him for his work. To date, Wisan’s firm has billed the trust $600,000. “It’s 50 percent of my time and 10 percent of my billable hours,” he says, explaining how the task has taken over his life. While the years he has spent trying to privatize the U.E.P. have made for some good stories, it has also meant hundreds of hours spent on a multitude of small details for the most infinitesimal of results. I ask him why anybody would ever get involved in such a morass.

“Well, I’m a boring old C.P.A.,” he says. “But I like excitement. Until just a few years ago, I rode dirt bikes out in the sand dunes, and I’ve always had fast cars, fast motorcycles. I like fast boats. So there is an element of that. But I looked at this as a chance to really do something different. I mean, how many C.P.A.’s do you know that affect hundreds or maybe thousands of people and the decisions they make? I looked at this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have an effect. To do something besides just be a bookkeeper.”

Since the raid in Texas, he says, residents of Short Creek have begun faithfully sending their monthly utility and trust-management payments to him. He wonders if it’s because sect members once planning to move to Texas are now determined to remain in Utah, which must look like a peaceful haven in comparison.

Wisan comes less frequently to the community these days. His office in Salt Lake City is sunlit and modern, taken over by neat stacks of paper that cover the floor, his desk, the couch, and the chairs. He shouts to his assistant and goes to lunch with other accountants and Jean, his wife, who works there part-time. Behind his wooden desk hangs an oil painting of an American Indian warrior, his men prepared for battle behind him. When Wisan sits at his desk, he faces a large aerial map of the Short Creek community. Despite his prosperous life in Salt Lake City, his heart and mind seem to often be consumed by the strange, distant world of the F.L.D.S.

I think that the fact I’m still here, that they haven’t run me out of town, that they haven’t intimidated me, is success,” he says. “They treat me like I’m Sherman in Atlanta at the end of the Civil War, but I still think somebody had to do it, and I feel as good as I can about what I’ve done.”

This story would have ended on that hopeful note, were it not for the April raid of the F.L.D.S. compound in Texas. Now it seems clear why Warren Jeffs was so intent on selling off the trust’s assets, where all that money was going, and why.

Eldorado, Texas, population about 1,900, used to be the kind of place where, says one resident, the local drama consisted mostly of “cousin killings and wife beatings.” But life changed one day in March 2004. The Eldorado Success newspaper ran a story about the sale of a 1,700-acre ranch on the outskirts of town, supposedly for a corporate hunting retreat. The paper received a phone call from a woman, who warned that the land was actually going to a radical group of polygamist Mormons who were building a temple in preparation for the apocalypse. The editor couldn’t quite believe it so he called the sheriff, who drove out to the ranch and found a series of large apartment buildings already being constructed. “When it first hit here, it was like a U.F.O. landing north of town,” the newspaper’s editor, Randy Mankin, says.

The polygamists, of course, had been sent to West Texas on a divine mission from Short Creek, in the Utah desert, and were said to have been handpicked by Warren Jeffs. In Eldorado, the F.L.D.S. seemed determined to avoid government interference; they paid their taxes on time and applied for the permits they needed to build a compound that could house more than a thousand believers—a small city.

Sam Brower, a private investigator who has spent the past five years investigating the polygamists for attorneys involved in a civil suit against Jeffs, says that a lot of Short Creek’s assets were funneled into Eldorado. “That’s what his followers do—they yearn to go to Zion. They buy in to that concept, and they are trying to buy their way into heaven.”

For the past few years, J.D. Doyle, technology director for the Eldorado school district, has flown his plane over the compound, taking photographs and posting them on a website that allowed locals to see what was happening inside the area. Otherwise, Doyle says, “There’s no way for us little podunks to know what’s going on.” He even used Google Earth to chart maps of nearly a dozen secret polygamist communities that have sprouted up around North America.

Months before the raids, Doyle took me up in his plane for a look. A six-foot-tall deer fence surrounded the compound. The centerpiece was the enormous three-story limestone temple. It was shockingly white against the dull scrub of the landscape. It looked illuminated.

Barely Legal (Portfolio)

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 12:04:15 -0500

by Claire Hoffman

Oct 2008 (Portfolio)

It’s close to midnight, and Dov Charney, the 39-year-old founder of American Apparel, lies in his bed staring at a massive flat-screen TV. A pair of boat shoes and a white electric muscle massager are on the floor nearby. Behind him, a huge window is lit up with a sweeping view of downtown Los Angeles. Inside his gated, marble, gold-encrusted mansion on a hill, Charney is insulated from the chaos below. His fleet of weathered Mercedeses and Cadillacs, parked bumper to bumper, fills the circular driveway.

Despite the safety of his lair, Charney is not at peace. On CNN, a powdered, sweaty Lou Dobbs is yelling about how “illegals” are destroying the U.S. economy, taking jobs away from real Americans, and taking our money out of the country. Dobbs declares that business owners who employ illegal immigrants deserve to be punished.

“This is a disgusting perennial problem, and we have the opportunity to fix it,” Dobbs sneers.

“He has an anti-immigrant piece every night,” Charney says. Then he shouts at the screen, “I’m an industrialist! I get to call myself an industrialist, you know! When you have a factory with more than a couple hundred people, you get to call yourself an industrialist!”

With a squeak of a vintage sneaker, Michael, a handsome 21-year-old, emerges from a creaky bronze elevator and asks Charney if he needs anything else for the night. Perhaps a stick of gum? Michael is both an assistant of sorts to Charney and one of his half-dozen roommates, mostly twenty-somethings who work at an American Apparel factory a few miles away and come home at night to their boss’s mansion (where Charlie Chaplin once lived), making it their own by hanging posters on the walls and piling clothing here and there. In return, they are on call to do Charney’s erratic bidding. As Michael leaves, Charney explains to me, “I used to have girls around, but it’s easier with boys.”

Charney is off the bed now, pacing, his lean frame hunched forward like a cartoon of someone walking fast. “Some people call me the masturbator,” Charney says. “Okay. But I’m the industrialist!” At his feet, Hedkayce, one of his mongrel Chihuahuas, starts yapping. “And he,” says Charney, gesturing toward the television, “doesn’t know what it is.”

Charney is an old-fashioned captain of industry, a manufacturing tycoon who came up with a concept (sexy T-shirt), made it, advertised it, sold it, and watched over it all like a madman. He is obsessive about the product, throwing tantrums about stock allocation and necklines with equal petulance. Along the way to taking his company public, Charney acquired an accounting history that at times seems more street corner than Wall Street. And he is widely characterized as a pervert, a libertine who has made his company’s image hypersexual and, some employees have alleged, his workplace too. (View an interactive map of the world showing where T-shirts are made.)

But lately, all that has faded into the background. In December 2007, just as his third sexual-harassment suit was headed to court, Charney took a wild and potentially hazardous stand by placing ads in such publications as the New York Times to state his progressive position on the subject of immigration. One ad, featuring a photograph of an earnest young Hispanic factory worker, read, “It’s time to give a voice to the voiceless. Businesses are afraid to speak to the media about immigration, frightened of reprisals by government agencies. But we cannot just sit in the shadows and watch the government and politicians exploit and misrepresent this matter to advance their own careers.”

Charney’s newspaper spots all but said that American Apparel, like many other U.S. employers, makes use of illegal-immigrant labor. The ads directly criticized the Bush administration and asked the public if maybe it was time to be open and honest about the subject.

Perhaps not.

Last December, Charney was served with a notice of inspection by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the largest investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security, informing him that he needed to prepare documentation on all of his workers for review. Charney and his growing team of lawyers and consultants have taken this as a warning. The company has given the feds records for thousands of workers; Charney says he hasn’t heard a word in response. Since then, he’s spent his days bracing for a raid at any time on American Apparel’s factories.

American Apparel is the largest clothing manufacturer in the United States, and in downtown Los Angeles Charney employs about 4,000 sewers, cutters, dyers, and other workers, most of whom were not born in the U.S. Although they have all provided documentation, he is still concerned about the legality of the majority of them. Now he is desperately trying to bulk up his workforce in order to keep his operations running smoothly. This year, he has hired an additional 2,000 workers, many of whom found out about the jobs from fliers that Charney himself handed to them on downtown L.A. sidewalks.

“I’ve spent every moment of my existence from the minute I wake up—I have a stomachache, and I get up, and this is what I do,” says Charney. “I do this every day. I do it on Sunday. I don’t even remember when it’s Friday. One day it’s Saturday, and one day it’s Monday. I just keep going and going and going.”

Maybe someday Dov Charney will be known as a tireless crusader for immigrant workers’ rights, but until then his current wicked reputation will probably remain in place. Mention him and people make a sound of distaste and then ask if he is really an exhibitionist-pornographer-compulsive masturbator. This mantle is one that Charney both encourages and abhors but is hard-pressed to shrug off. The public has reacted strongly to the images of out-of-control carnality beamed down from American Apparel’s billboards and splayed across its ads, often photographed by Charney himself, that show young bodies in various states of undress, sporting his company’s clothing.

This sexual aura has cut both ways for American Apparel. Charney has made his name in part through controversy. He once famously masturbated in front of a female journalist. Charney says the reporter, for the now-defunct Jane, took the masturbation out of context. “I was a younger man,” he says, wearily. “The lines were blurred between paramour and reporter.” The reporter has said that her tape recorder or notebook was in full view at all times and that the relationship was professional.

Since the resulting 2004 article was published, four female employees of American Apparel have filed three lawsuits against Charney. One suit was settled; another was dropped; and the third, by former sales representative Mary Nelson, 36, alleges that Charney wore a skimpy thong that barely covered his genitals. During Nelson’s initial job interview, which was held at Charney’s home, she says he referred to female employees as “sluts.” Nelson’s attorney, Keith Fink, told the Los Angeles Times that she was wrongfully terminated after she consulted with a lawyer. The suit was sent into binding arbitration at the beginning of the year; a settlement has not yet been reached.

Charney insists that Nelson, who worked for American Apparel for a little more than a year, was a bad employee who swore compulsively and hustled him, often referring to him as “donkey cock.” In court papers, Charney’s lawyers portray Nelson as a sales rep who performed below expectations. Charney says she was the mastermind of the suits, and he even drew a diagram for me of how three of the four women went to the factory roof to conspire to file them. He can talk for hours about what he calls their scheme and their betrayal.

Still, Charney hasn’t denied the majority of the allegations. His own lawyers have stated in court documents that “American Apparel is a sexually charged workplace where employees of both genders deal with sexual conduct, speech, and images as part of their jobs.” Charney has said that his behavior is the norm in the fashion industry and shouldn’t be considered harassment. He has defended himself by saying he is in the business of making underwear. He points out that in addition to being the company’s creative director, he is also one of its fit models—a simple explanation for why he would stride around his offices half-dressed. He has said that the real reason he had the underwear on was to show his employees and ask them how it looked. He has also said he “test-drives” the underwear to see how it fits “in action.”

He concedes that there was one point when he ran through the factory wearing his underwear, but says it was to entertain staff and film a spoof video. In a deposition, he said he “frequently” had been in his “underpants” because he was “designing an underwear line” while Nelson was working at the company. He says, “I’m very proud of my underwear.”

The sexual harassment suits torment Charney, if for no other reason than because they divert attention away from what he sees as his utopian American factory.

At the end of the 19th century, the U.S. finally got around to establishing its first immigration laws. Since then, much of the debate about who should and shouldn’t be allowed in has centered on California, where the gold rush and the construction of railroads drew a large influx of laborers from China and Mexico. Though the U.S. has dabbled in deportation methods in order to control a growing population of illegal immigrants, federal authorities have mainly turned a blind eye. But in recent years, illegal immigrants have become a potent political symbol. The blind eye seemed to open abruptly last summer, when Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, announced that federal authorities would crack down—not on workers but on employers.

Federal immigration raids on companies around the nation have increased, with 3,900 administrative arrests made since October 2007 and more than 1,000 criminal charges filed. States, too, have joined in the effort, with more than 175 bills introduced into legislatures throughout the country this year. In May, 389 employees were arrested in a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, and 230 sentenced to jail terms. (See “A Beef With the Rabbis”). In another instance, in late August, 350 workers were arrested at an electronics-manufacturing firm in Laurel, Mississippi.

Some estimates put the illegal-immigrant population of the U.S. at nearly 12 million. Most illegals perform at least a portion of their work either under the table or with the help of false documentation. If there’s a ground zero for this issue, it’s Los Angeles. By some economists’ estimates, 1 million of the city’s 10 million inhabitants are there illegally.

So in January, employers in Los Angeles gasped when federal authorities raided Micro Solutions Enterprises, a sleepy, long-established printer-cartridge manufacturer based in East L.A. that employed 800 workers. Federal officials said that 138 employees were undocumented, but owner Avi Wazana told his customers that the company had been verifying the legal status of all new hires through federal programs for almost a year.

“It’s very nudge-nudge-wink,” says Jack Kyser, the chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. “What you have is a large immigrant workforce. And if you are an undocumented immigrant, all you need is to get the documents necessary to get a job. They go in, and the employers look at it, but employers have to be careful.” That’s because state laws prohibit companies from asking prospective workers for more than two forms of identification, and they risk civil suits if they do.

This situation spurred California businesses to begin quietly lobbying public officials to push for change. In March, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wrote a letter to Chertoff criticizing I.C.E. agents for raids on “established, responsible employers” in the city; he asked the secretary to focus on those with a record of labor violations. Meanwhile, in April, Gavin Newsom, San Francisco’s mayor, said he would not cooperate with the federal crackdown.

In a recent interview, Chertoff defended his hard-line approach, saying, “We are not going to be able to satisfy the American people on a legal temporary-worker program until they are convinced that we will have a stick as well as a carrot.”

For most of the apparel business, illegal immigration is no longer an issue, since 97 percent of the clothing purchased in the U.S. is manufactured in foreign countries. In the world of T-shirts, all Charney’s major competitors—Hanes, Gap, and Fruit of the Loom—make their goods abroad.

Charney is in his office at 8:30 at night, typing on his computer. On the seventh floor of the 800,000-square-foot factory that houses most of American Apparel’s design, manufacturing, shipping, retailing, and customer-service departments, Charney’s spacious corner office functions as the control tower from which he wields his power in his own peculiar, Willy Wonka-ish way. He constantly calls out to anyone who passes by in the hallway, regardless of whether they are on their way to the bathroom or, worse, on their way home. “Hey, hey! What’s going on?” he shouts, always with a question. “What are we running out of? What’s selling? Did you get me those mannequins I asked for? Where are we at with that neckline?”

Charney’s desk faces a line of cheap black-leather chairs that could have been lifted from a nail salon. Behind him is a honeycomb arrangement of shelves where he has tucked items of importance—from vintage advertisements showing bare-breasted Polynesian women to a letter he wrote at age 11 asking for a refund for his not-quite-right bag of potato chips. There is also a handwritten list of what he believes fashion is made of: fantasy, function, status, anxiety. The shelves are lined with books with such titles as A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Population Studies, and Understanding Judaism.

His assistant Marina, a stocky woman with the patience of a saint, comes in and places two Hungry Man frozen dinners in front of him. “Chicken or turkey?” she asks. He ignores her. She looks up at me and rolls her eyes, like a bemused babysitter. Eventually, Charney stops his intense, jab-jab touch-typing (he’s severely dyslexic); grunts; points to the turkey; and then raises his head and flashes Marina a beaming smile. She wanders off, and he turns his attention back to his keyboard.

Charney’s project today and for the past few weeks has been to bulk up the immigration section of the American Apparel website called Legalize L.A., which is an extensive collection of news clips, pro-immigrant fact sheets, videos, an excerpt from John F. Kennedy’s 1958 book, A Nation of Immigrants, and other material advocating the legalization of L.A.’s workforce.

Charney has long been obsessed with immigration. He still has a copy of a school paper he wrote entitled “The Immigrant.” When I ask why he seems fixated on the subject, he shouts, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall! It’s because I’m a Jew! Birds are free! We want to go somewhere, let’s go! I just don’t believe in borders, in the end. The Americans who do just don’t trust humanity.”

A young, loud, pear-shaped man named Johnny Makeup wanders in wearing a Mickey Mouse sweater, purple jeans, and shiny loafers. Johnny says Charney recruited him from an American Apparel store in New York after being charmed by his sense of style. Now he’s apprenticing in the P.R. department, where his tasks include putting together music mixes, updating his MySpace page, making Charney salads, and keeping him company. He lives in Charney’s mansion and calls him Daddy.

“Daddy,” he says, as he plops onto the leather couch next to the desk, “I saw a vagina for the third time today.” Charney ignores him and continues to stare at his computer screen, scrolling through immigration fact sheets that he can use to bolster his arguments.

“Daddy, I know you don’t like doing anything fun right now, but my friends are going to Coachella,” Johnny continues happily. Charney picks up the phone and punches in a number.

“Mom,” Charney barks. “I need that picture, that picture from the march. No, I want it for the site. I’m putting it up on the site.” He wants a picture his mother has of them at a pro-choice demonstration march together 30 years ago. Then he asks her if she’s seen the photos of Zaida (the Yiddish word for grandfather); Charney’s grandfather is memorialized in countless photographs pinned to the office walls and on the American Apparel website. Charney is worried that people have the wrong idea about the company, so he wants to humanize it. If people know he’s human, he thinks, maybe they won’t be so hard on him.

He hangs up and turns to me with a funny look in his eyes. “What size waist are you?” he asks, rummaging in the corner and pulling out a teensy pair of periwinkle jeans.

“No way,” I say.

“Come on,” he wheedles. “These aren’t even in stores. I’ll leave the room if you want.” When I say no, he huffs in frustration.

If the feds do raid American Apparel, they will walk into a factory of 4,000 or more employees who are living in a sort of phantasmagoric Charney dream of blue-collar America: largely immigrant, Hispanic, hardworking, and at an average of $12 an hour, probably better paid than any other workers on the planet sewing T-shirts. Most clothing manufacturers have decamped to foreign shores over the past two decades, but here in downtown L.A., American Apparel offers health insurance, an in-house health clinic, subsidized meals, English-language classes, and a host of other cushy incentives. It is, in some sense, a utopian enterprise.

But it is also one that, some complain, exists only at Charney’s command. In 2003, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees attempted to organize factory workers at American Apparel. Its efforts failed. Charney says that it was his employees who didn’t want the union. But union organizers said Charney directed his managers to intimidate and threaten the workers. Five years later, union leaders in L.A. have arrived at a kind of cease-fire with Charney, but they remain critical.

“We think all employers have that obligation to take care of their workers, so we can’t say it is an exemplary employer,” says Kimi Lee, director of the Garment Workers Center, a nonprofit organization that deals with labor issues. “It isn’t a shining star, but it’s not a sweatshop. It could be better. Even though Charney talks about workers’ rights and trumpets all the things he’s done, he’s not letting the workers speak for themselves. It’s significant that he doesn’t. It’s very paternalistic. He believes he’s treating them better than anyone else could.”

When Charney finishes work, at 11 p.m., he nods at Johnny, who scampers after him, lugging an old tote bag. Charney walks down the hall, charges through a set of industrial doors, and plows across the cafeteria. Johnny vamps behind him, gesturing at Charney’s ass, and the night-shift workers sitting at the tables on break let loose with catcalls and whistles. Charney gives them a distracted smile and keeps going.

As a child, Charney showed signs of possibly having a future as a tycoon. When he was 11, he started a newspaper in his Montreal neighborhood. He contracted with an area printer to produce his weekly journal, which had about 50 subscribers and sold for 25 cents a copy. His mother, recalling the night when she almost lost her mind with fear because her son was missing, remembers him returning home in a cab at 2 a.m. with the latest edition of his newspaper under his arm.

“Dov has been driven since he was born,” Sylvia Charney says. “I never pushed him. In fact, I tried to pull him back. He’s always had that energy. He pushed, pushed, pushed until he got what he wanted.”

Charney came of age in the 1980s, an era that, since it coincided with a major shift in U.S. apparel manufacturing, laid the groundwork for his company. The major T-shirt makers left for cheaper pastures in China, India, and Pakistan. In love as much with the old-school model of in-house manufacturing as with clothing design, Charney is fervent about everything from his desire to maintain control of the total operation to the cut and feel of a polo shirt.

There are three main strands in the story of American Apparel: Charney’s obsession with free trade, his love affair with American T-shirts, and his fixation on sex. His love of T-shirts began early, with visits to his grandparents in Palm Beach, Florida, where he bought Lacoste, Gant, and Hanes shirts and proudly returned to Canada sporting the preppy look. In 1988, while a high school senior, Charney started American Apparel. “I was this little Jewish rat,” he recalls happily. He got his logo by tracing the eagle on a dollar bill and came up with the slogan “Canada’s direct source for American-made T-shirts and fleecewear.”

“I got so obsessed with it,” he says. “If you want to take the long view, I’m the only fucker still making this stuff. I was a Canadian in love with this iconic idea. It was like M&M’s if you’re from Moscow.”

At 19, he moved to Columbia, South Carolina, and insinuated himself into a world of aging manufacturers, from whom he learned elaborate formulas for how to produce apparel and make pennies on the dollar. He imitated the soft, basic simplicity of the Hanes T-shirts he’d grown up with and, trying to compete with the giants, sold shirts in bulk to printers and stores.

But for all of Charney’s passion, he was disorganized, and by 1996 he was having trouble paying his bills. That year, he filed for Chapter 11 and fled to California. He says he’s been ashamed ever since and has avoided talking about it. “It’s a disgrace!” he screams, when I ask. He arrived in Los Angeles and went to work in a sewing room downtown. He then met an apparel manufacturer named Sang Ho Lim; after the two had dinner at a restaurant where the sushi is delivered to customers on a conveyor belt, the two became partners.

With Lim’s backing, Charney retooled American Apparel in 1998, merging his existing operation with Lim’s cutting and sewing business. As the brand gained currency with antilabel young consumers—the clothing is famous for having no visible logo—the business began to grow. In 2003, he had three stores; in 2005, he opened 65 more.

But that year, the company’s then-C.F.O. Mark Schlein died of heart failure. Rather than hire a replacement immediately, American Apparel relied on an outside accounting firm to help oversee its finances. Meanwhile, Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank, which had given the company an early loan, grew uneasy with the rapid pace at which it was opening new stores and asked Charney to secure additional financing. By the end of 2005 he still hadn’t found a new investor, so U.S. Bank declared American Apparel in default of its covenant agreement. Then, says Charney, an internal audit discovered that the company’s earnings had been “accidentally” inflated by 30 percent for the year; rather than $26 million, it had earned only about $18 million.

In 2006, Charney hired Adrian Kowalewski, a newly minted University of Chicago business school graduate, to advise the firm on financing. The two met that spring when Kowalewski was writing a research paper on American Apparel. Shortly after, Charney was approached by Endeavor Acquisition, a recently formed special-purpose acquisition company. (Robert Kennedy’s daughter Kerry Kennedy is a board member.) Endeavor wanted to take a share of American Apparel; Charney would keep a 55 percent controlling stake, and American Apparel would receive more than $125 million. Endeavor would then take the company public, as long as Charney agreed to step down as C.E.O. and take the title of creative director.

Charney refused to step down but agreed to hire a real C.F.O. Kowalewski advised him not to take the deal, but Endeavor agreed to Charney’s terms, and it went forward anyway. On December 12, 2007, American Apparel began trading on the American Stock Exchange. Charney’s stock was worth more than $580 million. The deal also resulted in $67.9 million in cash for Lim, the company’s other principal shareholder. Hundreds of employees received cash bonuses totaling $2.5 million.

Still, Charney, ruminating on his negative image in the public eye, calls me late one night and spends an hour complaining about an article in the Wall Street Journal that details the company’s spotty financial history. “I just have to close my eyes and lie in bed with the windows open and let the wind blow over me and imagine I’m being covered in sand,” he says, sounding exhausted.

It’s four months after the notice from I.C.E., and the anticipated raid has yet to come. But Charney is convinced it will happen soon. On a blazing hot afternoon, he sets off on an employee-finding mission in his sparkling gray Land Rover. He pulls into a garbage-strewn parking lot in the old bank district in downtown Los Angeles. The ornate Beaux-Arts buildings in copper, stone, and wood that once housed the infrastructure of an early-19th-century city have been completely gutted and remade into sweatshops.

Charney hops out of the S.U.V. with a thick fistful of fliers advertising positions at American Apparel—sewing, dyeing, cutting, cleaning, security. He marches along the sidewalk, shoving papers at passersby with the zeal of a political propagandist. “Here you go,” he says, as he hands fliers to a homeless woman, a shop owner, a man eating a sandwich, and a woman walking down the street with a baby. We walk past two homeless men who reek of alcohol. “You don’t get a flier if you’re drunk,” he whispers to me.

“What about us?” one of the men yells. Charney stops and hands them a flier.

“You gave us this last week,” one of them grumbles.

Charney passes out the rest of his fliers and drives 10 blocks back to the American Apparel factory, where the unpaved and cratered parking lot is jammed with cars. Dozens of middle-aged women—Filipina, Chinese, South American, Mexican—are lined up at the gate waiting for the elevator. Job interviews are being conducted inside. A pair of twin blond surfer guys wander by in flip-flops. A tall redhead in purple jeans hurries past with a frantic look in his eyes and a measuring tape around his shoulders. One young woman is in hot-pink tiger-print pants; others wear miniskirts and tights and carry vintage Chanel purses. On a bench waiting with her mother is a little girl squeezed into a tennis skirt, eating a hot dog.

Inside the factory, on the high, white walls, hang large photographs of young women, their sweatshirts and T-shirts falling off. Employees—Charney’s soldiers—wear candy-colored T-shirts with the names of their departments (manufacturing, security, shipping) printed in both Spanish and English. Spend an hour in American Apparel’s factories, and you see two categories of employee: hipster and immigrant. There is some crossover, of course; Charney is quick to point out that he himself is an immigrant. But most of those who work on the factory floor are modestly dressed, tidily groomed, and Hispanic. The men wear loose jeans, T-shirts, or button-down shirts; the women wear embroidered tops and carry simple handbags.

On the second floor, a photo shoot is under way. A man in a turquoise nylon jacket and skintight jeans photographs a young woman in leggings. Standing nearby is Iris Alonzo, one of the company’s creative directors and a close Charney ally. “We’re living in a world of bullshit,” she complains. “They’re targeting us. Dov is a character, and it’s easy to make him a target. Older people, like government types, like to think of him as a pervert. But we put $100 million a year into the L.A. payroll. We’re a micro version of a macro problem,” she says.

In March and April, American Apparel interviewed between 3,000 and 4,000 people for factory jobs. They found fewer than 10 percent with impeccable documentation. “We’re not the bad guys. The I.C.E. guys are like rednecks,” says Alonzo. “Every time I drive in here I get teary. People are stoked to be here. It’s like a little team. It’s just really sad that—you know, we’re not evil. We had to let a small group of people go and give them severance.”

In the spring, Charney had to fire 30 employees—many of whom had worked at the company for a decade or more—when he discovered that they had improper paperwork. Each one had $30,000 worth of company stock to cash in, a kind of severance unheard of in the world of apparel-factory workers. When I ask Charney about it, his eyes seem to tear, and for once, he ignores me.

It’s noon on May Day, a pleasant 72 degrees, and in downtown Los Angeles the sun burns through the smog and onto cordoned-off streets. Long lines of police and firefighters coordinate crowd-control routines. In this city, May 1 has become the day to protest the treatment of immigrant workers. In 2007, during the annual march, police clubbed and teargassed protesters.

The American Apparel factory has closed early for the day so employees can take part. Charney pulls up to the factory in his Land Rover, parks, and stomps up the ramp with his mother trailing behind.

Today is supposed to be about the march, but the accounting staff is immediately in Charney’s face. It must file the company’s 10-K report by midnight. A series of whispered conversations takes place. He’s furious about something.
“You won’t understand what’s about to happen,” he tells me.

Nearly running, Charney barrels through the parking lot to the warehouse. The freight elevator is slow, so he runs up seven steep flights of stairs, his group of workers behind him, panting.

He silently plows through long rows of cardboard cartons, his chin thrust forward, moving spastically, jabbing at boxes. On this floor are products that have been identified defective. Charney says his company’s profits have been hurt by too much inventory designated “off quality.” He is convinced that lazy employees—those he’s summoned—are to blame.

“You’re robbing the company of profits!” he screams. “All these pink boxes need to be opened and accounted for.” The production manager sits on a box and starts to cry silently.

He seems angriest because he’s the one losing money. “You have to be a greedy monster in this world,” he says.

“Like a pig! Like a monster! That insatiable appetite is what drives business. I have the smell for it. I’m a pig! I’m an animal.”

Seven floors below,Bare in the parking lot, thousands of American Apparel workers holding protest signs are waiting for their leader. Charney and his aides have been gearing up for the march for weeks. Throughout the city, they’ve been giving away free legalize l.a. T-shirts in all their stores.

Charney joins his workers, but there’s still a delay: He’s waiting for a state senator who has promised to march with them. When the politician finally appears, Charney charges down the street, and within minutes his assistants are shouting that he has left the rest of the workers in the dust. He’s marching next to his mother, whom he ignores. But then she disappears, and he starts looking around, and then everyone is searching. In a soft voice, Charney says, “Where’s my mom?” and then his fabric guy, who is wearing an earpiece, announces that she’s been located.

Johnny Makeup shows up too, carrying a huge cutout of Paris Hilton, on which he has arranged a LEGALIZE L.A. dress.

“Immigrants are hot!” shouts Johnny. “Come party with the immigrants.” Johnny makes his way over to Sylvia, calling her Grandma. She doesn’t seem to like it.

Charney has said he wants American Apparel to be to L.A. what Levi Strauss was to San Francisco during the civil-rights era, when the jeansmaker desegregated its factories long before the federal government mandated it. But today, Charney seems conflicted about how much he will speak out. The march ends downtown, in front of the Los Angeles Times Building. A stage has been set up, where mariachi bands perform and local politicians take turns speaking out against I.C.E., Bush, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Charney has been looking forward to the march for weeks, but now, as politicians and activists are begging him to take the stage, he’s silently pacing. His mother urges him to go up there and speak.

But Charney says that politics doesn’t sell. Sex sells. And in the end, he wants to sell. I ask Charney about how all the pieces fit together—the sexual-harassment charges, the lewd advertising, and what he says matters most now, his political agenda of immigration reform.

“Fashion is about sexuality,” he’s shouting. “It’s hard to be fashionable and sanitize it and take the sexuality out of it. It’s tasteful. It’s utility—it’s not Frederick’s of Hollywood. It has to make you feel attractive. Sex makes you feel beautiful or handsome. And doesn’t it make you feel good that it’s made in conditions that are not deplorable? The whole sweatshop-free thing, it’s too complicated. It’s too sophisticated. So we were like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s not talk about it. People can’t get it.’ It’s a victory that we’re able to make clothing that people love in a place that isn’t embarrassing. Get over the ads. Get over the complaints. Get over the fact that I made a mistake making a comment to one or two girls. How selfish! Why couldn’t they just walk away? Think of the thousands of suppliers, the thousands of sewers, the workers!”

He continues, “Of course our clothing is intimate.” Then he switches briefly to his Québécois French. “Les intimes. It’s leisure. It’s intimacy. It’s a cold night, and you cuddle up with a blanket in your panties. You ever put on a pair of pants that made you look good, Claire?” he asks.

“Yes,” I tell him. “The pair I’m wearing right now.”

“See!” he shouts victoriously. “That’s what a beautiful, intelligent woman wants, to go to dinner in a pair of pants that makes her look good. She’s on top of the fucking world. That’s what it’s all about. The pants! The pants! That’s all a beautiful woman wants! A pair of pants that takes her into a restaurant. She looks beautiful. She looks intelligent! She’s got a pair of pants! She’s on top of the world—and it’s the pants, the pants!”

Excerpted from American Apparel Ceo Charney Profile - Executives - Portfolio.com
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/10/15/American-Apparel-CEO-Charney-Profile Readability — An Arc90 Laboratory Experiment http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readabilityFollow us on Twitter »Readability version 1.7.1

Sick on the inside (Harper's Magazine)

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 11:51:00 -0500

Correctional HMOs and the Coming Prison Plague

by Wil S. Hylton

August 2003

When David Hannah walked into a small office on the second floor of the Moberly Correctional Facility in Moberly, Missouri, last fall, carrying his belly like a hundred-pound sack of sand, the staff knew him well enough not to worry about what he might break or steal or soil in their private offices, which were normally not accessible to inmates, so I was able to close the door behind him and we sat together and talked about what was happening to his body. He was a pale, fifty-seven-year-old white male, serving a sentence of life plus three years for rape, and his gray hair was matted to his head. His face was as worn and gaunt as a much older man’s.

Hannah was angry. “Look at it,” he said, glaring at his gut. “Do you want to see it?”

I didn’t want to see it, but I nodded anyway. I had come precisely to see it, to witness Hannah’s disfigurement, the fruit of a long series of medical miscalculations. It had begun in the 1980s with two kinds of hepatitis, B and C, a condition that prison doctors had largely ignored for a decade, then treated with a series of botched, questionable procedures that caused David’s cells to cease performing osmosis properly, so that over time his natural body fluids began to collect, trapped inside his gut with no way to evacuate, his midsection swelling to accommodate those fluids, expanding to such a size and weight that the mere act of walking around had given David, by December 2000, a pair of hernias, neither of which the prison doctors had bothered to treat. David stood now to show me the belly and the hernias, the condition his body had arrived at through an utter lack of attention. He pulled his flannel shirt to the side of his waist and lifted his gray T-shirt, and, in spite of myself, I winced. His belly was enormous, taut and pasty, seemingly glued to his gaunt frame. At the front of it, a hot-pink hernia, about the size of a grapefruit, seemed barely attached where the belly button should have been, giving David’s midsection the overall contour of a giant breast and nipple. Bracing myself, I asked him where the other hernia had emerged. He studied me, obviously not fond of baring his physique. After a moment, he shrugged and unbuttoned his pants.

To describe David’s scrotum as swollen and red would be a failure of language. It was about the size of a rugby ball, so raw and irritated, shiny and crimson, that it almost seemed to be covered with blood. David hung his head. “They give me aspirin,” he said.

Later, when I heard that David had died of indeterminate causes and that his body had been cremated, I realized that I had probably been the last person outside of the prison staff to see David alive, to see what his body had become from all those years of mistreatment, and I wondered: Can such a secret be kept?

It occurs to me now that prisons are designed for keeping secrets, for holding inside not just men but also their lives and the details of those lives. In prison, social isolation is a matter of policy, and inmates are neither expected nor encouraged to have more than a modicum of contact with the outside world. This is not necessarily, or at least not ostensibly, vindictive. In many cases, isolation is the prison’s approach to rehabilitation. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed nearly two centuries ago, “Thrown into solitude [the convict] reflects. Placed alone, in view of his crime, he learns to hate it; and if his soul be not yet surfeited with crime, and thus have lost all taste for anything better, it is in solitude, where remorse will come to assail him.”

Still, the social isolation of prisoners creates a host of difficulties, not least of which is that of monitoring their treatment, of ensuring that they are assailed only by their own remorse and not by anything else—by, say, other prisoners, or by those who keep the watch. Opacity, after all, runs both ways, and if the prison walls keep convicts in, they work just as effectively to keep observers out.

This problem is only made worse inside the prison infirmary. By its very nature, medicine is a private matter, and a prisoner’s medical records are protected by the same confidentiality laws that protect free citizens. This means that a prisoner’s medical chart is both locked inside a physical fortress and shielded by a battery of privacy restrictions, all of which leaves the field of prison medicine cloistered and nearly impossible to survey. Compounding this is the fact that prison medicine, and, indeed, the principles of medicine itself, are fundamentally at odds with all other facets of prison life. Even the term “prison medicine” borders on oxymoron: Whereas prison is designed to alienate and punish, medicine exists to nurture and soothe. So were is the boundary between care and punishment? At what point do they meet?

IF THE SECRECY OF PRISON

MEDICINE SEEMS ABSTRACT, WAIT

UNTIL THE HEPATITIS EPIDEMIC

COMES FLOODING OUT

Until the 1970s, which is to say for the first two centuries of American life, these were not questions that anyone felt compelled to ask, let alone answer. As a matter of law, prison medicine had always been considered a privilege, not a right, and the final authority on treatment was not a doctor or even a court but the local warden. Prisoners whose medical needs were not being met, whose broken noses and diabetes were left untreated, who were stabbed and not sewn, feverish and not medicated, prisoners who had cancer but no treatment, who had prescriptions that wardens refused to fill, whose mental health teetered at the edge of self-destruction——-those prisoners had no recourse, nor reason to expect it. In the early 1970s, a survey of jails by the American Medical Association found that fewer than 30 percent had medical facilities and only about one in five had a formal arrangement with any medical provider.

Things began to change in 1971, when an uprising at the Attica penitentiary in New York forced the subject of prison conditions into the national conversation. Amid a flurry of laws enacted in response to Attica, state and federal legislators began crafting measures to guarantee basic health care to prisoners. Although the laws have changed over the past thirty years, little else has. If anything, prison health care is in further decline now than ever. Most departments of correction have chosen not to invest in medical infrastructure but rather to farm out the business to subcontractors, and these days a single, private corporation controls the health care of all prisoners in ten states and manages a portion of inmate health care in another seventeen, having underbid competitors everywhere it exists. Correctional Medical Services is not merely the nation’s largest provider of prison medicine; it is also the nation’s cheapest provider, a perfect convergence of big business and low budgets. But unlike the traditional HMO, whose risk of a malpractice suit is real, and is felt, and is reflected to at least some degree in the quality of medical care, companies such as CMS have little or no reason to protect themselves. Most juries are reluctant to decide in favor of a convict, and those juries that do favor the convict are often reluctant to award money. Cost-benefit analysis takes on special, human overtones behind bars.

Perhaps even more significantly, private companies such as CMS feel no responsibility, and have no legal obligation, to account to the public for what goes on inside their facilities. So, while CMS receives about $550 million of taxpayer money each year, the company chooses not to provide any accounting of how that money is spent or even how much of it is spent——-and how much unspent, to be pocketed as profit. And although lawsuits over the years have revealed discredited health-care professionals working in CMS facilities, the company refuses to reveal the names of its doctors and nurses for verification or to provide any account of how many have been disciplined or had their licenses revoked in other states. With CMS responsible for so many patients nationwide, it is fair to say that the practice of medicine in prison has reached an unprecedented level of inscrutability——-indeed, secrecy——-and if this fact seems abstract or unlikely to affect regular folks in the general population, well, just wait until the hepatitis epidemic comes flooding out of the gates.

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For those of you who have never been personally acquainted with the hepatitis virus, allow me to describe it briefly. In the spring of 1995, I downed the wrong glass of frozen margarita somewhere in the Chihuahua desert and unleashed the disease on my insides. Unaware, I took a bus back to Juarez a few days later, walked across the border, drove home to Albuquerque, and, when the travel itch returned a few weeks later, set out for Glacier National Park, where I intended to spend thirty days in the backcountry, mountaineering. By the time I arrived in Montana, however, the virus had begun to set in, and I found myself overwhelmed by fatigue. Deciding to get some rest before starting out, I found an empty cabin near the boundary of the park, crawled down to the basement, settled into a bed, and, with one last glance at my backpack by the door, passed out. When I woke up several days later, I was lying on my back in a medical facility 120 miles away with an IV in my arm and a sign on the door that said, “Warning Take Enteric Precautions Before Entering.” Asking around, I learned that I had been delivered to the medical center by a friend who worked in the park. My liver-enzyme levels, upon check-in, had been gauged at more than a hundred times the normal level. The first time I looked in the mirror, I saw that my jaundiced skin was roughly the same color and texture as a dried tangerine. I spent several days lying in place, flitting in and out of consciousness, playing host to an array of curious physician’s assistants, nurses, and certified nursing assistants, some of whom ran tests on my urine and blood while the rest mostly stood around marveling at how odd I looked. That was the beginning. For the next six months, I was forced to live at my parents’ house, where my daily priorities became eating healthy food, sleeping at least half of each day, and wishing that my perpetual headache would relent. This was the face of hepatitis A, the least virulent strain of the virus.

The difference between the type of hepatitis I contracted and, say, hepatitis C, which is the most severe strain, is mostly a matter of intensity. My hepatitis eventually went away; hepatitis C, in most cases, does not. It keeps on attacking your liver for the rest of your natural life. That means people with acute hepatitis C can essentially forget about all the wonderful things that livers do, such as fighting infections, filtering toxins, and storing energy. To make matters worse, people with hepatitis C are contagious for the rest of their lives. Even twenty years after their initial infection, even if the virus is in remission and they feel pretty good, they still constitute a walking weapon and had better be careful where they bleed. It is worth noting, then, that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of American prisoners are, at this very moment, infected with hepatitis C, and therefore quite contagious. It is also worth noting that most of them will eventually be released back into the general population, where the infection rate is, for now, only about 2 percent. The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials noted in a 2000 report that “an estimated 1.4 million HCV-infected persons pass through the correctional system each year.” And although the virus is most pervasive in prison because of the high incidence of injected drugs there, it can be transmitted just as easily on the outside through sex, blood, transfusion, or even a nasty fistfight.

With a scourge like this roiling on the inside, threatening to boil over to the outside, you might expect prisons to adopt some kind of screening policy for inmates and to institute a treatment offensive for the afflicted. Unfortunately, no such national program exists. Although the cost of a hepatitis test is only a couple hundred dollars, very few facilities volunteer to provide them, and there has been no federal legislation to require the measure. “It’s a missed opportunity,” says Dr. Cindy Weinbaum of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The number of prisoners with hepatitis C is incredibly high. It’s unbelievable.”

The fact that most prison doctors have not seized this opportunity doesn’t reflect any inherent challenge to their doing so. On the contrary, a couple of states have developed simple and effective hepatitis programs that test all prisoners upon intake, making the disease relatively easy to track and monitor. One of those states is Texas, and there, not surprisingly, prison health care is managed not by a private company like CMS but by two universities, the University of Texas and Texas Tech University. Dr. David Smith, who is the chancellor of Texas Tech and who led the battle to make hepatitis screening mandatory in Texas, assured me that the hepatitis program he created is not very special at all, or anyway that it shouldn’t be. “It’s just the smart thing to do,” he said. “We have almost 30 percent of our prison population in Texas infected with hepatitis. That’s not so different from the numbers you see in the Dark Ages with the plague.”

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When I visited a handful of CMS facilities last fall, I found a very different attitude. Under CMS care, 214,000 inmates are expected to petition for any hepatitis tests they want, and even if those petitions are granted, and the tests given, and the results positive, the chances of getting any kind of treatment are only slightly better than of getting a presidential pardon. This became most obvious to me when I heard the story of Larry Frazee.

I met Larry at the Western Missouri Correctional Center in Cameron, about four hours west of St. Louis. He was a gaunt little man with a circular face surrounded by brownish-gray hair, and his thin mustache seemed to weigh on his lips when he spoke. He walked with a silent shuffle, and from the black bruises under his eyes you could see that he hadn’t slept well in months, if not years. When I began reading through his medical record, it was easy to see why. Larry had first been diagnosed with hepatitis in the early 1990s, when a prison plasma center rejected him as a donor. The diagnosis had been confirmed by a prison infirmary in June 1994, but even so, between then and the end of 1997, he had managed to wrangle only a half dozen doctor’s visits. It wasn’t until January 2000, a full five and a half years after his diagnosis, that CMS doctors began formally monitoring his condition. Even then, treatment was not forthcoming. As Larry discovered, CMS doctors required him to meet a long checklist of conditions, known as a “protocol pathway,” before he could receive any treatment for his disease. Some of those items required off-site consultations. One of the things he needed, if he wanted treatment, was a liver biopsy. But when Larry went to the prison infirmary to ask for one, he learned that he had to have a psychological evaluation first, then enroll in a drug-abuse awareness class and sign a slew of forms releasing CMS from liability for anything that might happen during the biopsy. So Larry did those things one by one, and he signed the papers, and he went to see the biopsy specialist, who promptly sent him back to his cell because he didn’t know his virus genotype. Larry couldn’t find anything in the protocol pathway that required him to know his genotype, but to be a good sport he put in a request at the infirmary for a genotype test. A few weeks later, he got the test, but the laboratory somehow screwed up his results, so he had to file for a second test and wait for a second appointment and a second set of results before, in February of last year, he finally returned to see the biopsy specialist, who sent him away again, this time saying that Larry shouldn’t bother getting treatment anyway, because it can be somewhat dangerous. Larry argued that it was his decision to make, and that he wanted the treatment, or at least the biopsy that he was entitled to, and maybe afterward, when he had the biopsy results and could take an informed look at them, he would be willing to discuss the risks of treatment, but the doctor just shook his head. The decision was final, he sad. No biopsy. He sent Larry back to his cell, where Larry has been ever since, without a biopsy, without any treatment, feeling sick and tired and a bit like he failed himself.

But what Larry didn’t realize, and what he’s only now beginning to grasp, is that he never had much of a chance in the first place. As a matter of formal company policy, CMS discourages treatment for hepatitis, and the protocol pathway is just a way of making it harder for prisoners to demand it. Although a CMS spokesman insisted that CMS doctors are private contractors and that “it is the individual physician’s responsibility to make sure care is given to patients,” an internal memo from CMS regional medical director Gary Campbell to his fellow directors in February 1999 reveals just how much authority the doctors really have at CMS. “I am not encouraging anyone to undergo therapy,” the medical director wrote. “However, if you have someone that is insistent, then this pathway is to be followed.” Campbell added, “Unless I have given you specific approval to do Hep C testing, do not do so unless the patient has obvious moderate to severe liver disease or has exposure as described by the exposure policy of the DOC. Remember, all Hep C testing has to be approved by me.”

And so, for the 214,000 prisoners whose health is supervised by CMS, the hepatitis epidemic continues to grow, untested and untreated, virtually unencumbered by the forces of modern medicine, while people like Larry Frazee remain right where the company wants them: stalled along the protocol pathway. Whether or not this is legal remains to be decided. In January of this year, the University of Michigan law program filed suit against CMS for failure to address the hepatitis problem in that state. If their case is successful, similar lawsuits may follow in other states. Until then, however, the policy stands: No testing, no treatment.

“CMS is an HMO with a captive audience,” says David Santacroce, the professor who is spearheading the Michigan lawsuit. “The fewer patients they treat, the more money they make.”

“This is deliberate indifference,” adds Michael Steinberg, legal director of the Michigan ACLU. “There is a standard for testing and treatment of Hep C that the Centers for Disease Control came out with, and CMS simply is not heeding it. It’s not just hepatitis, either. You talk about the tip of the iceberg! There is a systemic problem of not providing good health care to prisoners. Hepatitis is the tip of it, but there’s a long list of issues below the surface that we haven’t even begun to address.”

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Some of those issues have been addressed in other courtrooms, however, in other states, by other groups, and taken as a whole, the litany of malpractice crimes committed by CMS doctors begins to read like a horror novel. Take the inmate in Alabama who died of dehydration and starvation in a CMS infirmary after receiving care that one medical director described as “non-existent” and “a gross departure from medical community standards.” Or the inmate in the same state who died when CMS staffers injected him with the wrong medicine. Or the CMS doctor in New Mexico who testified that he was required by the company to prevent off-site referrals. Or the district judge in Idaho who found that an inmate’s care in the state prison “more closely resemble[s] physical torture than incarceration.? Or the inmate in Nevada who died because a CMS doctor canceled her prescription for insulin. Or the federal judge in Michigan who described CMS follow-up care as “bureaucratic purgatory.” Or a U.S. Justice Department inquiry in Virginia, which found that CMS medical records “failed to meet any known professional standard.” Or the district court monitor in Georgia who found that CMS ran a “medical gulag” in the state prisons, giving one prisoner ibuprofen for his lung cancer and making another wait ten months to see a doctor for a broken arm.

Yet, perhaps because juries so rarely award money to convicts, there is essentially no incentive for lawyers to bring these crimes together into a comprehensive, class-action lawsuit. Without the lure of a large settlement, most trial attorneys are unwilling to fork out millions of dollars in research and lost wages to fund such a massive endeavor. As a result, the central figure in the movement against CMS is not a major national law firm or even a renegade lawyer, but an aging, confrontational activist named Karen Russo.

I met with Karen, who runs a prisoner-advocacy group called The Wrongful Death Institute, one evening last winter at her home in the suburbs of Kansas City, and she invited me inside to sit at the small wooden table in her dining room, where we ate meat loaf and potatoes while her three dogs scurried around and her teenage kids and their friends traipsed up and down the stairs. Karen was undaunted by the chaos around her. When she had finished eating, she smoothed her dark brown hair behind her ears, sat back in her chair, and, as if she were in an office or behind a podium, she cleared her throat, blinked her heavily painted eyes, and launched into a tirade against CMS, her voice ringing through the house fervently, sometimes furiously.

“WE HAVE NUNS WHO GO IN AND

BRING DOCUMENTS OUT.

IT’S A WAR FOR INFORMATION,

AND CMS KNOWS IT”

“They don’t want anyone to know what’s going on in these facilities,” she said. “Getting medical records and company documents is like going up against Fort Knox. We have to resort to all sorts of methods. We have a network of prisoners across the country who have ways of getting paperwork out to us, a couple of pages at a time. We have nuns who go in and bring documents out with them. We have nurses, doctors, whistleblowers. It’s a war for information, and CMS knows it. They’re just waiting to take me out. They hate me. Every Monday at noon I do a radio show on a local station, and it’s like a fireside chat. The CMS headquarters is just over in St. Louis, so they have people listening. Everybody wants to know, ‘Who’s she going to get today?’ And it could be anyone. I could go after a nurse, I could go after a doctor, I could go after the corrections staff. And I’ve gone after all of them. I’m putting together a file on every one of them. I call out their names on the air. ‘Nurse so and so , I want you to know that I’m onto you.’ And the prisoners are listening too. This thing is growing like wildfire. A couple of years ago I was getting maybe two or three letters a week; now it’s anywhere from twenty to thirty letters a day, from all over the country. Of course, some of those are from CMS decoys. That’s why they’re doing now——-they get offenders to write me letters that say, ‘I’m not sick, but I heard about what you’re doing and I was just wondering how you got started,’ and so on. You know, just dripping with it. They want to know what I’ve got. Bit I’m not naive: I can see right through that; I can smell it. They’re scared, and they should be. We’ve got them. I know what they’re doing.

Karen’s invective seemed over the top, but she was the genuine article: a nearly obsessive crusader who had long ago discarded any semblance of a normal life in favor of late-night phone calls with sick inmates and interminable afternoons poring over their medical records. The dust on her antique piano had become so thick and sticky that it made my eyes itch after only a few bars, and the ceiling in her bathroom was crumbling to the floor. Yet Karen’s memory was immaculate; she had converted herself into a database of detail, packed with accounts of prisoners met, their medical histories, life stores, and extraneous personal minutiae. To reinforce this glut of information, the back rooms of her house were stuffed with thousands of papers, most of which she could locate and produce within a few frenzied moments. When pressed, she could also furnish names and numbers for a whole range of sources, including guards and activists and prisoners’ family members (though she was more reluctant to reveal others, such as the nuns and nurses she claims to consult). In her utter submersion into the topic, Karen had even developed a personal bond with one of the prisoners, a man named Raymond Young, who was locked up nearby on drug charges and whose persistent back problems and hernias kept him in a wheelchair, but who gave off an almost eerie radiance on the day I met him, with a great, black, bald head that shone like an eclipsed sun and a grin full of golden teeth inscribed with the numbers 3, 3, and 1/3. (“Thirty-three and a third,” he said in a gravelly whisper. “I’m a traveler. A lone traveler.”)

On the night I visited Karen, however, she took me to meet a different friend, Leland Hunley, who had only recently been released from the prison where Raymond is housed. When I saw Leland’s apartment, it was hard for me to imagine that he was any more comfortable than he had been on the inside. His building, an indistinct brick high-rise, was in the kind of neighborhood that most middle-class people choose not to know about. There were crack dealers selling openly and loudly on the corner and drunks fighting in the street. The Plexiglas front doors were smeared with random grub and old graffiti, and the spun-polymer carpeting of the lobby seemed almost melted across the floor. Up the clattering elevator a few floors, down the narrow, echoing hallway, Leland’s door opened into a single shabby room where he sat in a wheelchair watching a fuzzy television set that was on top of a little table above a small collection of right-footed shoes. Leland’s left leg was missing.

“Come on in,” he mumbled to us, pointing toward a couple of chairs and wheeling himself around beside them. I sat down, and we made small talk for a minute, then Leland cut to the story. “Basically, what happened was, I was living on the bay,” he said. “That’s the common area. It wasn’t meant to be a living quarters, but the rooms were all full, so they had about thirty or forty cots in the bay, and I lived on one of them. I was there for about a year. The whole time, they never turned out the lights. But anyway, I was getting up for breakfast one morning and I reached over and put my sock on, and I felt a sting. So I pulled the sock back off and a spider run out of it. Well, I stomped it. I knew it was a brown recluse, pretty good size, so I scooped it up on a piece of paper to bring to the infirmary.”

Leland shook his head at the memory and ran a bony hand over his short white hair. “But see, you can’t just walk into the infirmary. You’ve got to fill out a whole deal called a Medical Service Request, and then they’ll call you whenever they get to you. By the time I got up there, it was a couple hours later. The bite was swelled up to the size of a quarter. I showed it to the nurse, and she put a salve on it and sent me back. I mean, you could just look at it and see that it was going to get infected. It was swollen, throbbing, hurting like crazy. So a couple days later, I put in to go back, and she soaked my foot in a solution. It got to where she was doing that every three or four days. I would put up an MSR and she’d soak it and wrap it up again. I could tell it wasn’t getting better, but I wasn’t allowed to look at it or anything. I could get a conduct violation if I took the bandage off. Every time she unwrapped it, though, it looked worse. It was a big black welt on top of my foot, with a red hole in the middle. After a while, you could see my bone through the hole. It kept opening up more. At one point they had a doctor to lance it and drain out the pus It looked like it might get better after that, but it didn’t. It just swelled up more. Eventually, my whole foot got black. It was just a big black scab. That’s when they started giving me antibiotics, but it was already too late. I couldn’t even walk. Finally, the nurse took off the bandage one time and just run out of the room. She was really upset. I don’t know what she told the doctor, but it wasn’t a matter of a day before they was taking me to the hospital. The doctor said, “I’m gonna have to take it off.” There was nothing I could say at that point. He told me, “If you refuse, it’ll kill you.” So I said, “Okay, take it off.”

At fifty-eight, Leland couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds, with knobby shoulders and elbows and a think wisp of a neck. He rubbed his knees while he spoke, hunched over in his wheelchair, weak and almost emaciated. Towardthe end of the interview, Karen, who had been struggling to remain silent, broke in to ask if he was okay. “You look like you’re losing weight,” she said.

He shrugged. “Well,” he said. “You know, I can’t get to the store by myself.”

To someone on the outside, what happened to Leland’s leg might sound, at the most fundamental, instinctive level, like a blatant case of malpractice. The notion of losing a leg to a spider bite has no place in the modern sensibility, and the suggestion that a person wait several weeks to receive antibiotics for an infection is almost unthinkable (though Leland’s medical records confirm it). But like so many other things in prison, the term “malpractice” is inscrutable. On the outside, if a doctor does not conform to certain standards of care, then he is guilty of negligence, plain and simple, and finding a trial attorney to sue him is no challenge. By contrast, in prison, mere negligence is not necessarily enough for a lawsuit. Most prison malpractice cases are filed under the Eighth Amendment, which guarantees protection from cruel and unusual punishment. Unfortunately, in order to convict a prison doctor under these terms, the inmate must prove not only that the doctor provided substandard care but also that he did so intentionally. This rather elusive criterion is called “deliberate indifference,” and under its protective banner a prison doctor is free to be as negligent and irresponsible and incompetent, as he wants, just as long as he is not intentionally causing patients to suffer. Needless to say, this makes the practice of prison medicine significantly harder to regulate, and the care of patients harder to ensure. What could be more difficult to prove—-or more secret—-than a man’s unstated intentions?

LIKE SO MANY THINGS IN PRISON,

“MALPRACTICE” IS INSCRUTABLE.

NEGLIGENCE IS NOT NECESSARILY

ENOUGH FOR A LAWSUIT

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While I was visiting Karen and Leland in Kansas City, I placed a call to CMS headquarters in St. Louis, hoping to interview someone there. I did not have high expectations. I had already called several times from my home in New Mexico (another CMS state) trying to arrange interviews with hospital administrators and doctors and nurses, but I had mostly been ignored. On those occasions when my calls were returned, the CMS spokesperson had, in an exasperated tone, made it clear that virtually every member of his medical staff was far too busy to spend time with reporters, and that furthermore this would remain the case indefinitely, no matter how flexible my schedule was, no matter when I offered to visit. The timing, he explained, was simply awful, and it was not likely to get any better, ever.

Still, I held out some hope. Calling from within the state, I figured, would seem more real and immediate to them; and besides I was no longer planning to ask for interviews with medical staff, or even company higher-ups, but to settle for a sit-down with the spokesperson, which seemed like a modest request, to say the least. I had even begun looking forward to that interview, wondering how the spokesperson might respond to the accusations I was hearing. I could imagine that some of his points might be reasonable. Certainly, prison medicine must difficult to administer, and I assumed that the spokesperson would be eager to point out just how difficult, and to illuminate the challenges of working with convicts, of sorting through faked illnesses and phony requests for medicine, ornery personalities and violent outbursts.

But when Ken Fields, the spokesperson, called me back, and I mentioned my desire to visit, he didn’t sound nearly as eager as I had hoped. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked. “How were your interviews with inmates?”

I explained that most of them were angry at CMS which was why I wanted to get his point of view. “I think we’re going to have to handle this on the phone,” he said. I suggested that it would be preferable to meet in person, since I had met the inmates in person and didn’t want them to have an advantage, but he replied, “We’ve had bad experiences with the media.” I assured him that I knew this, yet I felt that, as a member of the company’s communications team, he needed to communicate the company’s message, but he insisted, “I can’t do it this week. I’m too busy.” I offered to return the following week, but he repeated that he preferred to speak on the phone. So I repeated my preference to meet in person, and he repeated that he was too busy. Then I repeated my offer to return, and he repeated his preference to speak on the phone. So it went, until finally, perhaps just to stop the routine, he barked, “Well, I don’t want you to come back here. Why don’t you just stop by tomorrow?” I agreed and we hung up, but a couple of hours later, I found a message on my voice mail from Fields, saying that he had decided not to meet with me in person.

“It’s a situation where we have been misquoted at times in the past,” he said, “and we’re gonna respond to your questions in writing. So I wanted to give you notice of that. Thanks, bye.”

But even in response to written questions, Fields was hardly forthcoming: of the fourteen questions posed, he offered only eight complete answers. For example, he was willing to provide rudimentary statistics about the company, such as the total number of patients under CMS care, but would not describe any company protocols or reveal how much money the company actually spends on patients, except to insist that, of the more than half a billion dollars that CMS receives in taxpayer money each year, a “very, very significant portion to patient care.” Although he was quick to claim that all CMS doctors and nurses are licensed in the states where they work, he dodged the question of how many have been suspended or had their licenses revoked in the past or in other states, insisting that the company is “not obligated” to reveal those statistics. Nor would he answer the question of whether or not the company has any plans to begin screening for hepatitis, claiming that CMS leaves those decisions to state legislatures and individual doctors, a claim contradicted not only by the company’s detail-heavy and restrictive hepatitis pathway but also by the internal communications of its regional medical director.

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Since CMS officials were declining the chance to meet with me, or to set up interviews, or even to talk on the phone anymore, I decided to contact some of their employees directly. This turned out to be easier than I expected. Nurses tend to know one another, and after speaking with a few nurses who didn’t work for CMS, I was able to reach a few nurses who had once worked for CMS and, finally, nurses who still do. At the very least, I hoped they would take the time to reassure me that the gritty standard of “deliberate indifference” was not being met; that nurses and doctors were not intentionally ignoring their patients. But what I heard from CMS nurses was, in many ways, more upsetting than what I had heard from inmates. One conversation in particular stands out.

I had reached Christy through a series of referrals by other nurses and their friends. At first, she was anything but eager to speak with me. Her relationship with CMS was still good, and she didn’t want that to change. Although she was no longer working in the jail in the northern United States where she had been a CMS supervisory nurse for half a decade (she had left to manage a hospital facility), she was considering a return to the company and didn’t want to jeopardize her ability to do that. The money was good at CMS, she explained, and besides, she didn’t need them as enemies. But after thinking about it and talking with her friends, Christy decided to speak with me anyway, mostly because, as she put it, she needed to tell somebody what she had seen and done, especially what she’d done.

WHAT I HEARD FROM CMS NURSES

WAS, IN MANY WAYS, MORE

UPSETTING THAN WHAT I HAD

HEARD FROM INMATES

I was immediately drawn to Christy’s story, even before I had heard the details. As a supervisory nurse, she had been the highest-ranking member of the medical staff on duty, so she had been privy to many of the political and economic machinations behind company policy. I was also interested to hear about jailhouse medicine in general. People in prison, after all, have been convicted of a crime and have forfeited some of their rights (the right to vote, the right to own handguns, etc.), but most people in jail are still awaiting trial, and they haven’t necessarily been convicted of anything. Not only have those awaiting trial not forfeited their rights; they are still officially innocent. Our legal system takes great pains to insist on this, so I was curious to know whether or not it made any difference to CMS.

The short answer, according to Christy, was no. “The way we treated inmates was a horror,” she said. “Whenever a new inmate came in, they would have to see me, and I would assess their medical condition. If it looked like they were going to require any kind of serious treatment, I would go to the lieutenant and explain what I felt the cost of the treatment would be. I would say, ‘We have this person here, and the treatment is going to be horrendously expensive. We need to get them out of here.’ If they were a real serious criminal, like a murderer, the liability was high, so they would keep them under arrest and we would incur the cost of treatment. But if the lieutenant thought the person was not a serious risk to the community, he would proceed to get hold of judges and other people to try to release the inmate, or make arrangements to get the bail lowered. The lieutenants would often call judges late at night and on holidays to tell them the situation, then we would release the inmate, and take them to the hospital, so CMS wouldn’t incur the cost of treatment. The lieutenants went along with it because they didn’t want to incur the cost of a deputy to stay with the inmate in the hospital. So we would let them know, and they would make a call and release the inmate, then they would take them to the hospital. After the inmate got their medical treatment, we would immediately re-arrest them.

“We did this frequently also with pregnant inmates. If they went into labor, we would release them or given them a signature bond, then re-arrest them and the child was put into the custody of child services. I did that for years. You just ignore what you’re doing. The whole atmosphere of the jail was, these criminals, these convicts, these scumbags, they get what they deserve.”

“Appointments were made for weeks or months down the road, knowing that the inmate would not be there anymore. Or we would make appointments for days that we knew the inmate was going to be in court. They don’t keep the trial dates in the medical file, but you just call the booking desk up front and ask them when the trial date is. Then you make their next appointment for that date. We were told to tell them, there was a canned phrase, ‘Don’t worry, you have an appointment. We just can’t tell you when it is because of security reasons.’ So you would be consoling someone, knowing full well that they weren’t going to get to see anybody. You just put them right back at the bottom of the list again.” *

“It was absolutely appalling, to the point that I can’t even tell you. You knew that as long as you worked there, you did not challenge any of it. But your disgust builds as the horrible cases build. Even though a good majority of these people ended up being guilty. I just felt from a moral standpoint that it was wrong. They always play up, ‘Well, look what they did to this other person,’ so a lot of people say, ‘Okay, justice is served.’ But the way I feel is, we’ve all taken an oath and we have a license, and just because one person has died, that doesn’t mean that a second person dying or being denied care…one doesn’t justify the other. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re sick and you get into one of these places, you might as well be signing your death certificate. Even if you don’t have a death sentence.”

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The more I spoke with nurses like Christy, and looked at inmate medical files, and studied infectious-disease statistics, the clearer it became that, no matter where you looked or to whom you spoke, this was a medical system run amok, one that no only ignored sick patients but was actually skirting the limits of the law and, in the process, helping to unleash an epidemic on society. As one nurse put it bluntly, “We have no accountability. If I deny care, that’s it. You have no recourse.” Yet the clearer this reality became, the more baffling it seemed. Wasn’t anyone keeping track? Where had them media been?

In the course of nearly a decade, only two newspapers had undertaken major investigations of CMS, and both were located in Missouri, which has become a kind of ground zero in the debate over prison medicine, largely because CMS is headquartered there. Even more discouraging, the reporters who wrote those stories had, in the aftermath of their work, become just as tortured and frustrated as everyone else who confronts the company. Not long ago, one of the agreed to meet with me in the basement of his office, but within the first two minutes of our conversation he insisted that I keep his name out of my story. In the weeks after his articles appeared in the Columbia Daily Tribune, he said, he had been under attack by CMS lawyers and publicists, who deluged his editors with denunciations, and he didn’t want to be perceived as settling the score. He sat nervously with me, fidgeting, smiling, and trying to be as helpful as possible without getting further involved.

The other reporter I spoke with was less reserved, but only because he had less to lose. He had already lost it all. In 1998, Andrew Skolnick had been an editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association, a recent recipient of the Harry Chapin Media Award, and an inaugural fellow of the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship in the Mental Health Journalism, which is a $10,000 grant. Using these lofty connections, he had managed to get himself and two journalists from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch into CMS facilities, where they spoke with several inmates and doctors before publishing articles in both JAMA and the Post-Dispatch, revealing a national pattern of abuse and neglect by CMS. As the organizing force behind both projects, Andrew had helped expose several CMS doctors with checkered histories and had revealed more than a dozen cases of egregious mistreatment, some of which resulted in death. One story revealed a memo from the medical director of the New Mexico corrections department explaining that several prison doctors had quit because CMS administrative officials were “changing physicians’ orders and adding orders without seeing the patient or consulting the physicians directly.” Another story exposed a CMS doctor in Alabama who had been convicted of having sex with a sixteen-year-old “mentally defective” patient in Tennessee. Another described the chief of mental-health services for CMS in Alabama, whose license had been revoked in both Michigan and Oklahoma after he was found guilty of sleeping with patients, harassing female staff members, and defrauding insurance companies. The newspaper series had won awards from both Amnesty International and the American Medical Writers Association in the late 1990s, but even still, looking back, Andrew said that he wasn’t always certain it had been a good idea to publish it. After the articles appeared, he told me, CMS had sent a letter to JAMA, accusing him of hiding his involvement with the Post-Dispatch, which they called “fraud,” and threatening to sue the journal. Within a week, JAMA had fired Andrew and, although CMS later paid him to settle a defamation lawsuit,** his professional life never quite recovered Even today, the editors of JAMA refuse to comment on “the conditions surrounding his termination” or to defend his award-winning expose, which has never been refuted or retracted.

“I had an exploding career,” Andrew told me, “and it crashed. We may have won some awards, but the horrible fact is we lost. CMS won. After the articles appeared, they went to the state legislature in Missouri and protected themselves. They got a law passed expunging the records of physicians who are accused of malpractice in correctional facilities. So now, anytime the medical board doesn’t take action on an allegation they disappear it. This means no pattern can emerge against a doctor. That is our legacy. That’s our achievement. We actually made it worse.”

But Andrew’s investigation had a resonance far beyond that. It was his work that started CMS down the path of information lockdown, building barricades to public scrutiny, hiding numbers and statistics and the names of employees, refusing even to sit for a formal interview, and stifling the efforts of journalists to cover the field at all. Andrew’s series had put pressure on CMS, but that pressure had only deepened the company’s aversion to publicity. CMS officials were happy to continue operating with public funds, but they were no longer willing to provide any serious accounting of them.

(back to top)

Like almost any wound, the weakness of an institution festers without proper attention, and as CMS has retreated into its shell, its facilities have only grown worse. Outside of anecdotal evidence, however, it is difficult to assess exactly how much worse——it is nearly impossible, for example, to know how many doctors and nurses it employs, or how adequate its facilities are, or even what pathways and protocols it adheres to. Few lawsuits have managed to expose details of the company’s inner mechanisms, and aside from the Michigan hepatitis suit there is no major legal action pending against the company at the moment, only scattered individual lawsuits——the great majority of them, it is safe to say, doomed. In Massachusetts a small network of attorneys has been threatening to file a comprehensive class-action suit, but nothing has gained much traction so far. And although the U.S. Justice Department has reportedly kept an open file on CMS since the mid-1990s, collecting evidence and reviewing cases, no formal charges have been leveled against the company, and sources say it is not a high priority in the post-9/11 climate. Even Karen Russo has her doubts that CMS will change. “It’s not going to happen,” she says. “They don’t want to be rehabilitated. They probably can’t be rehabilitated. So the only solution is to get rid of them, and they’re going to fight that in every state, at every step. They’re going to use all their money and power, and they have a lot.”

But if the battle over prison health care is beginning to seem lost, littered with the bodies of the wounded, the sick and sickened alike, with inmates and nurses and journalists by the wayside, if the whole field seems deathly unwell and bordering on hopeless, it may, in the end, have more to do with the way we look at prisons in general than with anything CMS has done. This is not to obscure or to apologize for the company’s failures and crimes. It is simply to suggest that the secrecy afforded to prisons would be easy enough to strip away. When we, as a culture, choose to see our prisoners as a part of our society (which they are, of course, and an ever growing part), when we remove the wall of secrecy that surrounds the prison itself when we are willing to face and bear witness to the punishments we disburse, there will be no more need to wonder what is being done on the inside, in our names.

James Frey’s Fiction Factory (New York Magazine)

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:10:48 -0500

The controversial author is hiring young writers to join him in a new publishing company. The goal is to produce the next Twilight. The contracts are brutal.

By Suzanne Mozes
Published Nov 12, 2010

Photo-illustration by Gluekit (Photo: Christopher Lane (Frey); Gluekit (body); Archive Holdings Inc./Getty Images (background); Getty Images (typists))

In February, James Frey was invited to speak to a small seminar in the graduate writing program at Columbia called “Can Truth Be Told?” There were nine of us, and we were reading books like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Kathryn Harrison’s memoir The Kiss for our discussion about the ethical questions that emerge when writing nonfiction. We had read A Million Little Pieces, Frey’s 2003 memoir about his harrowing drug addiction and time in rehab, as well as The Smoking Gun’s report detailing Frey’s false claims. We were surprised Frey actually showed up.

The class took place during an intense blizzard. Frey arrived in a white T-shirt and khakis, promptly removed his boots, and walked around on a soggy carpet in his socks. Grinding down on a piece of gum, he asked the name of the class. Leslie Sharpe, the professor who had invited him, explained that we were studying the differences between “factual truth” and “emotional truth” and how memoirists address those disparities in their work. We all laughed awkwardly.

But he was game. “You don’t have to hold back,” he told us. “I’ve been asked everything.” And for the next two hours, as the snow piled up on the arched windows behind him, Frey delivered his opinions on the memoir genre (“bunk,” “bullshit,” a marketing tool that didn’t exist until several decades ago); fact and fiction (there’s no difference); truth (it doesn’t exist, at least not in the journalistic sense); Europe (where he turns for validation); America (which is obsessed with honesty and raises people up only to tear them down); the best writers (Mailer, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Cormac McCarthy); documentary (“a thesis on truth that hasn’t been proven yet”); Oprah (“I should have never fucking apologized”); the kind of writer he wants to be (the most controversial and widely read of his time); making literary history (he’s in it to “change the game” and “move the paradigm”; he won’t write anything that doesn’t change the world); self-editing (a trap for young writers); mistakes (part of the spontaneity of a work of art); and, most important, how to write (“don’t give a fuck”; sit for ten hours a day, 600 days in a row; “write what you want to write, and make sure there is one hell of a disclaimer at the beginning”).

When he was working on A Million Little Pieces, Frey told us, he wanted to write in the tradition of Tropic of Cancer, “A Season in Hell,” and Paris Spleen—transgressive works by transgressive authors. As he pointed out, heavy hitters never write like the established writers of their own time. Hemingway used short, declarative sentences; Miller wrote about sexuality in the first-person present tense; Mailer blurred the line between fact and fiction. These men created their own styles. Frey said Mailer even told him, right before he died, “You’re the next one of us.”

Frey said he never considered whether A Million Little Pieces was fiction or nonfiction—and anyway, before the memoir craze of the nineties, it would have been published as a novel. “If Picasso painted a Cubist self-portrait,” he suggested, “nobody would say it didn’t look like him.” Much of his performance for us echoed comments he’d made to journalists. “My best friends are almost all artists,” he told a Canadian reporter earlier this year. “I have very few friends who are writers … I’m a big fan of breaking the rules, creating new forms, moving on to new places. Contemporary artists like [Richard] Prince, Hirst, and Koons do that, but there are no literary equivalents. In literature, you don’t see many radical books. That’s what I want to do: write radical books that confuse and confound, polarize opinions. I’ve already been cast out of ‘proper’ American literary circles. I don’t have to be a good boy anymore. I find that the older I get, the more radical my work becomes.”

Frey also talked to the reporter about how contemporary artists make their work. “A lot of artists conceptualize a work and then collaborate with other artists to produce it,” he said then. “Andy Warhol’s Factory is an example of that way of working. That’s what I’m doing with literature.” At the end of the seminar, Frey elaborated on this concept and made an unexpected pitch. He was looking for young writers to join him on a new publishing endeavor—a company that would produce mostly young-adult novels. Frey believed that Harry Potter and the Twilight series had awakened a ravenous market of readers and were leaving a substantial gap in their wake. He wanted to be the one to fill it. There had already been wizards, vampires, and werewolves. Aliens, Frey predicted, would be next.

Full Fathom Five’s first book, written by Frey and Jobie Hughes under a pseudonym.

Frey said he was interested in conceiving commercial ideas that would sell extremely well. He was in the process of hiring writers—he said he’d already been to Princeton and was planning on recruiting from the other New York M.F.A. programs as well. We had probably heard of Jobie Hughes? Hughes was a former Columbia M.F.A. student who had graduated the previous spring. Frey told us that he and Hughes had sold the rights to an alien book they had co-written to Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. Before he left the classroom, Frey spelled out his e-mail and told us to get in touch if we had a good idea.

“I feel like I need to go take a shower,” one student muttered in the hall after the seminar. But many of us felt an adrenaline rush: Against all odds, Frey was still at it. He was thrilling, condescending, rude, empowering, and haughty. “He didn’t show an ounce of self-doubt,” says Philip Eil, then a first-year nonfiction student. “Not a second of wavering. He was 110 percent that there was no truth, that he would live forever through his books.”

Mostly, though, we talked about his invitation. We were desperate to be published, any way we could. We were spending $45,000 on tuition, some of us without financial aid, and many taking out loans that were lining us up to graduate six figures in debt. A deal like the one Frey was offering could potentially pay off our loans and provide an income for the next decade. Do a little commercial work under a pseudonym, sell the movie rights, and never have to suffer as a writer in New York. We wouldn’t even need day jobs.

Frey suggested that he would be highly involved—he would guide us through the process of writing a commercial novel, which wasn’t exactly a skill highly prioritized at Columbia, and he would connect us to his social network of agents, publishers, and directors. And rumors had indeed been racing all over the program about Hughes: Frey had paid off Hughes’s debt and was promoting him as a rising talent; Hughes was flying to L.A. to meet Spielberg; he had bought his mother’s house and an apartment in the Village; he was a multimillionaire. That’s what we heard, anyway. So why shouldn’t we pitch to James Frey?

“It’s funny to be in a room … ” I paused. He filled the silence. “With big, bad James Frey?”

Out of the nine of us in class that morning, at least five sent him ideas, myself included, and even the one who needed the shower.

Frey encouraged those of us who were interested in working with him to speak with Hughes about his experience. Hughes had been an outsider throughout most of his time at Columbia. He grew up in a small Ohio town of under 1,000—“a welfare kid who came from nothing,” as he often described himself—and had taught himself to write in college by reading Hemingway (he tattooed the initials E.H. to the inside of his left wrist). Hughes’s aggressive, masculine personality matched his writing style. He was sensitive to criticism and received a lot of it.

Hughes told me he first met Frey at an event at the Columbia film department in March 2008 and wrote him a fan letter afterward. He was smitten with A Million Little Pieces and Frey’s use of the RETURN key. Over e-mail, they developed a friendship. The following January, Frey approached him to co-author a young-adult novel—a commercial project he said he didn’t have time to write. “I remember Frey said he liked Hughes because he had been a high-school wrestler,” recalls Sara Davis, another student in the seminar, “so he knew he could take coaching and direction and had discipline.” Frey was also impressed that Hughes had actually finished a novel, called Agony at Dawn, about a twentysomething protagonist aspiring to literary greatness. Whether it was good wasn’t really the point; what mattered was that Hughes had demonstrated the ability to finish it.

When Frey asked him if he would be interested in working together, Hughes had every reason to say yes. He was looking to sell Agony at Dawn, and while he hadn’t enrolled in Columbia to become a genre writer, he figured that a relationship with Frey might deliver him into the arms of Eric Simonoff, Frey’s powerful literary agent.

Frey handed him a one-page write-up of the concept, and Hughes developed the rest of the outlined narrative. Frey’s idea was a series called “The Lorien Legacies,” about nine Loric aliens who were chased from their home planet by evil Mogadorians and are living on Earth in the guise of teenagers. Through early 2009, Hughes told me, he delivered three drafts of the first book, I Am Number Four, to Frey, who revised them and polished the final version. Hughes wrote the novel without any compensation and signed a contract, without consulting a lawyer, that specified that he would receive 30 percent of all revenue that came from the project. The book would be published under a pseudonym, and the contract stipulated that Hughes would not be allowed to speak publicly about the project or confirm his attachment to it. There was a $250,000 penalty Frey could invoke if Hughes violated his confidentiality terms.

James Frey and Some of His Social Circle: Larry Gagosian and Salman Rushdie. (Photo: Patrick McMullan)

Simonoff began circulating the manuscript as an anonymous collaboration between a New York Times best-selling author and a young up-and-coming writer. Publishing houses weren’t certain how to respond. Then, in June 2009, a bidding war ignited for the film rights, between J. J. Abrams and a joint proposal from Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. Spielberg and Bay won, for a reported high-six-figure deal. This, in turn, sparked publishing interest, and HarperCollins won the book rights. Together, Frey and Hughes signed a four-book deal. Rights to I Am Number Four have since been sold in 44 countries, and, at last count, has been translated into 21 languages.

In the weeks after Frey spoke to our writing seminar, I watched as other students began contacting him. Not all the pitches were accepted. One Columbia student, Jesse Thiessen, submitted an idea about high-school theater students who coalesce around a father figure who develops skin cancer; Frey’s assistant replied, “I’m sorry, but we’re looking for high-concept ideas that we can pitch in one sentence. We know it sounds cynical, but it’s what we know we can sell.” But two students who were in the February seminar were eventually accepted by Frey, as were at least four more from Columbia’s M.F.A. program.

This is the essence of the terms being offered by Frey’s company Full Fathom Five: In exchange for delivering a finished book within a set number of months, the writer would receive $250 (some contracts allowed for another $250 upon completion), along with a percentage of all revenue generated by the project, including television, film, and merchandise rights—30 percent if the idea was originally Frey’s, 40 percent if it was originally the writer’s. The writer would be financially responsible for any legal action brought against the book but would not own its copyright. Full Fathom Five could use the writer’s name or a pseudonym without his or her permission, even if the writer was no longer involved with the series, and the company could substitute the writer’s full name for a pseudonym at any point in the future. The writer was forbidden from signing contracts that would “conflict” with the project; what that might be wasn’t specified. The writer would not have approval over his or her publicity, pictures, or biographical materials. There was a $50,000 penalty if the writer publicly admitted to working with Full Fathom Five without permission.

Some writers consulted lawyers; some just signed on the dotted line. “It’s a crappy deal but a great opportunity” is how one writer put it.

After Frey’s forced mea culpa on Oprah in 2006, Riverhead dropped his two-book contract and his agent Kassie Evashevski moved on, explaining to Publishers Weekly that “it became impossible for me to maintain a relationship once the trust had been broken.” That wasn’t the worst of it, though. There was a barrage of lawsuits from Frey’s readers, which resulted in a class-action lawsuit that settled for $2.35 million. Tracked and harassed by reporters, he fled to the south of France for two months. Upon his return, his reputation and the media frenzy were as he had left them.

By the spring of 2008, however, he was again becoming a fixture in the downtown art and literary scene. He had released a novel, Bright Shiny Morning, for which he received a reported $1.5 million advance. It was met with mixed reviews and featured a cover designed by Richard Prince. Frey collaborated with photographer Terry Richardson on a book called Wives, Wheels, Weapons. At a Strand book signing, Frey said, “The idea was just to do a cool book that would piss people off.” He also launched Half Gallery, a collaboration with designer Andy Spade and former BlackBook magazine editor Bill Powers, in a tiny gallery space on Forsyth Street.

Now 41, Frey and his wife, Maya, live with their two children in a loft surrounded by a stunning collection of modern art. In July 2008, the couple lost their newborn to spinal muscular atrophy. “I’ve been through some difficult things in my life,” Frey told Vanity Fair last year. “Nothing comes close to this.” He and his wife have since adopted a young boy from a Russian orphanage. This summer, he finished a new book, called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, a novel about a man living in New York City who might be Christ but also might be the Jewish Messiah. He told us at the seminar that a limited edition of the book—bejeweled, platinum-covered, designed by Damien Hirst—is set to release next Easter. (It now appears that these limited editions will be not by Hirst but by Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, and Richard Phillips instead.) It will then sell in a conventional hardback form in dozens of countries, but Frey had pointedly told us he had decided not to sell it in the U.S.—a thumbing of the nose at the American literary Establishment, though it appears now that he has reneged on his threat and will publish here after all.

Frey’s Social Circle: Richard Prince. (Photo: Patrick McMullan)

In June, Frey invited me to his office, on the corner of Spring Street and Sixth Avenue. At this time, Full Fathom Five was growing quickly. Jessica Almon, Simonoff’s former assistant, had switched offices and bosses to help Frey full-time with editing and giving feedback. The company said it had thirteen writers working on various book, film, and television projects, and it expected to have at least 30 before the end of the summer. I was possibly number fourteen.

He described it as a Hollywood-style work-for-hire contract, “although Hollywood writers are usually paid more than $250.”

Frey met me in socks, and together with Almon, we talked about my concept. The idea I had cooked up was as commercial as I could imagine—something I thought I could write in a short time and fell within my interest in pre-Raphaelite art. I’ve been working on a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, so I imagined him as a child and granted him the superpower to enter into his painting. Frey had read my synopsis of the adventures of young Dante, and Almon had written to me that while I had a “strong grasp of character and detail, and an original voice,” my idea lacked tension. Would I be open to changes? Yes, I was open to changes. I wanted it to be commercially viable, and I trusted their judgment. In the meeting, Almon handed me a two-page outline, something that Frey said he uses in all his projects, to help my book with pacing. It was a classical Greek three-act structure, with suggested page numbers and advice on tracking the emotional narrative of the book, similar to a redemptive Hollywood movie.

Frey emphasized that this was collaboration—not my own project—and that he needed writers who will listen to him. He gave as an example a King Arthur adaptation he was working on with another writer. That author had listened to his criticism and rewritten it in a different voice; because the author was receptive, Frey was positive the book would sell, and big. Another project, a Gossip Girl–like series he had worked on with two writers employed at Star magazine, he said had gone south. The writers hadn’t made his requested character changes, so Frey had recently fired them.

He reintroduced the idea that he was modeling his company on Damien Hirst’s art factory, a warehouse in which a reported 120 employees work to create fine art signed by Hirst. He considered Full Fathom Five an improvement on the way traditional book packagers like Alloy work. Generally, a book packager conceives an idea, hires writers to generate the content, and sells the package to a publishing house, much like a film-production company selling a project to a studio. The book packager’s writer will sometimes share in the revenue but usually just take a standard fee, to the tune of $10,000. Frey seemed to think that writers who had a bigger share in the profits would deliver better books.

Hughes had told me about the confidentiality clause he had signed, and when I asked Frey about it, he said, “I’m a fair and reasonable guy.” He understood that people talk, and I wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t talked to Hughes, but he didn’t want Hughes speaking to reporters. “He sounds like a fucking idiot when you put a recorder in front of his mouth,” he told me. If Frey didn’t like whom Hughes was speaking to, he could invoke the confidentiality clause and hold Hughes in breach of contract. But since Frey was a fair guy, that wouldn’t happen, as long as Hughes behaved. Hughes had given an interview to a freelance reporter, and Frey had warned him that “there would be trouble” if he didn’t fall in line. But after the first book sold, Hughes renegotiated a 49 percent stake in all future deals, and Frey had no hard feelings. Even the two writers he had dismissed on the Gossip Girl–like project were treated generously. “They’ve done good work for me,” he told me. “I don’t have to give them anything, but I am.” He explained he would give them a small percentage of the revenue if their project sold, and he would find a new writer to build on their previous work.

“So, worst-case scenario, what happens if you can’t sell my book?” I asked. Frey walked me over to the window and pointed to a building across the street where former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman had started an e-book company, OpenRoad Integrated Media. “She told me she’ll buy whatever we can’t sell elsewhere,” I remember him saying. (Frey denied this through a representative.)

Frey and Almon told me they would send me a contract but warned me that I shouldn’t bother trying to negotiate. They weren’t acceding to other writers’ requests and wouldn’t accede to mine.

Frey’s Social Circle: Terry Richardson and Paula Froelich (Photo: Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images (Richardson)/Patrick McMullan (Froelich))

I asked, “So there’s not much to lose? Except my time?”

Frey smiled, sat back in his Eames lounger, and said, “I have nothing to lose.”

He encouraged me to start imagining product placement—“think Happy Meals”—because merchandise is where you make money in these deals. He mentioned the Mogadorian swords in I Am Number Four, which were described with unusual specificity. “We added that after Spielberg told us he needed stuff to sell.”

The whole conversation was very L.A. As we were wrapping up, I started to say, “It’s funny to be in a room … ” and then I paused, looking for the right phrase to express my surprise that we were in New York and not Hollywood. Frey filled in the silence with “ … to be in a room with big, bad James Frey?”

When I received the contract, I sent it over to the Authors Guild, a trade organization whose legal department advises writers. While I waited on their comments, I asked Full Fathom Five for a few changes on my own, over the telephone. They were now willing to negotiate, as they claim they always are, but only a little. They offered to redraft the contract to give me the option to walk away from the project at any time but were not willing to negotiate on copyright ownership or revenue. In an e-mail, Almon wrote, “James suggests you speak with Jobie. If the book sells, your experience will likely be very similar to his.”

The Authors Guild got back to me with serious concerns over the contract. Anita Fore, its director of legal services, suggested that I attempt to negotiate if I wanted to go ahead and sign with Full Fathom Five. I later spoke to Conrad Rippy, a veteran publishing attorney, who explained that the contract given to me wasn’t a book-packaging contract; it was “a collaboration agreement without there being any collaboration.” He said he had never seen a contract like this in his sixteen years of negotiation. “It’s an agreement that says, ‘You’re going to write for me. I’m going to own it. I may or may not give you credit. If there is more than one book in the series, you are on the hook to write those too, for the exact same terms, but I don’t have to use you. In exchange for this, I’m going to pay you 40 percent of some amount you can’t verify—there’s no audit provision—and after the deduction of a whole bunch of expenses.” He described it as a Hollywood-style work-for-hire contract grafted onto the publishing industry—“although Hollywood writers in a work-for-hire contract are usually paid more than $250.”

In the end, however, the decision to participate with Full Fathom Five wasn’t mine to make. Twenty-eight minutes after I sent an e-mail requesting amendments to the contract, I received an e-mail from Frey rescinding his offer to collaborate. “We loved the idea that we eventually arrived at together,” he wrote. “At this time, though, we don’t think this is going to work out.”

It appeared that putting out my first book wouldn’t be as easy as Frey had made it seem. But Full Fathom Five was proceeding apace. In June, Almon put out word that they were looking for new writers for four untitled young-adult projects: a project about a girl raised in a cult who “suddenly begins to remember her previous life”; an “untitled paranormal love story” about teen lovers, one dead, in which “we watch the couple struggle to communicate: he miserable in heaven, and she understandably distraught”; an “untitled apocalypse idea” about a girl who enrolls in a summer camp and “finds herself in for a hell of a lot more than rope climbing”; and a “high-school revenge project” in which “four girls from separate cliques at a high school discover they’ve all been date-raped by the same guy and team up to plot vicious revenge.”

And meanwhile, things were ramping up with the production of I Am Number Four. The movie, which stars Timothy Olyphant, Dianna Agron, and Alex Pettyfer, has a reported budget of $50 million to $60 million, and filming had begun in Pennsylvania. Hughes hoped for a cameo. He was also preparing for a vacation to Rome, his first time out of the country. But the success felt bittersweet, Hughes told me at the time. He still hadn’t sold Agony at Dawn. He was starting to sour on Frey—he believed that he had learned everything he could from his mentor and thought he was owed more of the proceeds. He told me he was behind on writing the second book in “The Lorien Legacies” and was considering leaving Full Fathom Five and writing his own spinoff.

Frey’s Social Circle: Bill Powers and Andy Spade (Photo: Derin Thorpe)

In late July, Hughes filed his first draft of the second book. He and Frey had an hour-long screaming match over the phone, Hughes told a friend. Frey complained the draft was too rough. Hughes threatened to walk from the project. Frey said he would rewrite the second draft himself if he had to.

I Am Number Four was published on August 3. It made it onto the Times best-seller list for children’s chapter books, but it failed to make a larger cultural impression. By this time, Hughes was aware that I was writing about my experience with Full Fathom Five, and so he declined to comment. But according to friends of Hughes, he felt muzzled—and exceedingly frustrated. He couldn’t publicize the book without authorization from Frey, or defend it when others dismissed it as a mediocre young-adult book.

In mid-September, Hughes was invited to be the featured reader at the Freerange Nonfiction series, a small monthly reading at the Cornelia Street Café. Hughes included in his bio that he “is the New York Times best-selling author of I Am Number Four.” His authorship was an open secret—HarperCollins had named him in a press release last year announcing its acquisition of the series. But after the Freerange listing was posted online, Hughes told friends, he received distressed calls from HarperCollins and Full Fathom Five. Another argument with Frey ensued.

By the end of the month, Hughes had walked away from the project. He hired a lawyer, and they prepared documents requesting 20 percent of all future proceeds related to “The Lorien Legacies.” Hughes and Frey’s legal dispute has reportedly been settled, but the terms are unknown.

“You could see it coming,” said one of Hughes’s friends. He didn’t understand why, after all his work and the news items about I Am Number Four, he still couldn’t come out as the book’s co-writer. None of his work with Frey had helped him sell Agony at Dawn—it had been rejected by dozens of publishing houses—and the stress that came with being invisible wasn’t worth it anymore. He refuses, he tells friends, to go back “to nothing.”

Full Fathom Five has shrouded itself in a degree of secrecy unusual in the publishing world, and Frey declined to participate in this story. But the company continues to sign up more writers—there are now 28, not only students from M.F.A. programs but also magazine editors on both coasts and established novelists. On September 30, an e-mail went out to students of the New School about available jobs. “Full Fathom Five, the New York–based best-selling book-packaging-, film-, and TV-production company, is currently seeking young writers to take on book assignments, in particular, creative-writing M.F.A. students or graduates in the New York City area.”

Full Fathom Five has yet to announce a sale as successful as “The Lorien Legacies”—the film version of I Am Number Four, scheduled to open in February, is being hyped as the first film to be released by the reconstituted DreamWorks. But the company recently sold the King Arthur adaptation, and Will Smith’s production company is reportedly preparing a film version starring his son Jaden. And on November 2, Publishers Marketplace ran a notice that Full Fathom Five had sold to HarperCollins something called The Montauk Project, “in which a Long Island teenager inadvertently travels back in time to 1944 and must struggle to write her own future while trapped in the past.” No author was named.

The Convict and the Congressman (Portfolio, 2007)

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:22:15 -0500

by Andrew Rice Oct 15 2007
How did a Kentucky entrepreneur, a Louisiana politician, and the vice president of Nigeria end up in one of the biggest scandals to hit America’s black elite in decades?

On August 3, 2005, tech entrepreneur Vernon Jackson walked outside, into a warm and hazy Kentucky morning. No one watching his modest red brick home from afar—as someone certainly was that day—would have noticed anything untoward. A sign staked in Jackson’s lawn displayed the Ten Commandments in big letters. Jackson opened the door of his car, a 1997 Mercedes-Benz S600, one of the few things he’d held on to from his paper-millionaire days. As an inventor, Jackson always had to prove the value of his ideas. And as a black man who’d lived his whole life in the South, he knew the power of outward appearances.

Physically, Jackson cut an imposing figure: over six feet tall, bald, thick-necked, and broad-shouldered. (“He is a David that looks like a Goliath,” says a friend.) He’d turned 53 the month before and was trying to get his considerable weight under control. Jackson and his wife of more than three decades, Denise, liked to take a brisk daily walk. On this morning, as they often did, the couple drove to a park not far from their home in Louisville, and it was there that F.B.I. agents intercepted them, flashing their badges and carrying a search warrant.

Vernon Jackson didn’t yet realize it, but he was a central figure in one of the most sprawling corruption investigations in recent American history, a tale of bribery and international financial chicanery that stretched from Louisville to Washington to Africa. At that very moment, the F.B.I. was conducting simultaneous raids in three states and the District of Columbia. Out in Maryland horse country, one team of investigators was mounting a search of a $2 million mansion belonging to Atiku Abubakar, then the vice president of Nigeria. Another was descending on the New Orleans residence of William Jefferson, a Democratic congressman from Louisiana.

Jefferson was a leader of the Congressional Black Caucus and a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. For years, he had acted as a tireless promoter of Jackson’s company, iGate, which had developed electronic components designed to transform ordinary copper telephone wires into conduits for extraordinary amounts of data. Jefferson’s advocacy had pushed Jackson—who’d already ridden an initial public offering to fortune once before, only to see the company crash into bankruptcy—to the brink of the biggest coup of his career: a $200 million-a-year deal to provide high-speed internet services to consumers in Nigeria. But according to the government, Jefferson’s interest in iGate was far from altruistic. Recently unsealed affidavits filed in support of the F.B.I.’s search warrants suggest that the congressman was a secret shareholder in iGate. More than that, the affidavits say Jefferson had conspired to further the deals by bribing Vice President Abubakar.

That morning, Jefferson, just awoken, answered his door unshaven and barefoot. As F.B.I. agents stuffed evidence into boxes, the congressman, a dour man at the best of times, sat sullenly at his kitchen table, flipping through papers. Then he moved to a living room recliner, where he nonchalantly stuffed the documents into a blue bag. Confronted by an F.B.I. agent, he turned over the papers, which included an iGate fax sent just that morning that sought Jefferson’s input on an equipment purchase—proof, prosecutors later alleged, of the congressman’s ownership interest.

The most incriminating find, however, came at Jefferson’s Washington townhouse. In drawers, in trash cans, and in stacks on the floor, F.B.I. agents found numerous documents relating to iGate’s African deals. Then the agents opened the freezer. Inside a Boca Burger box, they found two stacks of cash wrapped in aluminum foil. More money was stuffed into a Pillsbury piecrust box. There was $90,000 in all.

In the end, that’s all people remembered: the cash in the freezer. As details leaked into the pages of the Washington Post and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the story of the congressman with 90 grand in his icebox quickly became a national joke, another colorful example of Capitol Hill corruption. Yet the case would prove to have implications far more momentous than a punch line. In Washington, it would lead to William Jefferson’s indictment and a constitutional clash over the executive branch’s powers to investigate members of Congress. In Nigeria, it would scuttle Atiku Abubakar’s campaign to become the next elected leader of one of the world’s largest oil producers. And back in Louisville, it would upend the life of a flawed man with a promising idea.

The way Vernon Jackson later recounted the story, the F.B.I. agents who stopped him along the walking path that morning assured him that they knew he was a solid citizen and said they were just after Jefferson. Always confident in his charm, Jackson invited the agents back to his home. By around 10 that morning, several carloads of investigators had converged at the house, where they carted away Jackson’s laptop computer, phone bills, bank records, and company documents.

Later that day, after four hours of interrogation, Jackson went to see his company’s attorney, David Harper. “Jeff ’s in trouble,” he told the lawyer. To Harper, Jackson seemed more surprised than worried. He didn’t yet understand that he was a target.

Vernon Jackson is now serving a seven-year, three-month sentence at a minimum-security prison in Morgantown, West Virginia, having pleaded guilty to bribery-related charges. He’s expected to be a key prosecution witness in the trial of Congressman William Jefferson, scheduled to begin in January.

Jackson declined repeated requests for an interview. However, through a review of court documents, wiretap transcripts, internal company records, and interviews with Jackson’s professional acquaintances, family members, and friends, the story of the embattled businessman emerges. Jackson sold many people on a beguiling vision of technology that could bring broadband to the underprivileged and make millions in the process. Those who are embittered—claimants of bad debts and broken agreements—say he’s a scam artist. But his many admirers say optimism was Jackson’s fatal flaw. He never let anything slow him down—even reality.

If Jackson could think only in terms of best-case scenarios, it may be because his own life so utterly exceeded rational expectations. He was born into a large, poor family in Charlotte, North Carolina. His father was a janitor and a weekend preacher. Jackson attended segregated public schools, where he excelled, scoring extremely high on mathematical aptitude tests. “I was what they call a child prodigy for technology,” Jackson once said. He ended up in Louisville, where he worked in research and development at AT&T for two decades before striking out on his own in 1990.

At the time, the internet was still in its horse-and-buggy phase, but the problem of the future was obvious: what to do about the “last-mile” bottleneck, the copper telephone wires that still ran to every building? Jackson, working with a French engineer, devised and patented a switching system that allowed data to be transmitted over copper wires with enormous efficiency. It was as if he’d figured out a way to pump much more water through the same old narrow pipes.

At first, Jackson had trouble raising money to support his ventures. Bank officers, he complained, told him they were used to loaning money to minorities for cleaning companies, not telecommunications firms. Jackson managed to assemble some local black investors. One was Olden Lee, a retired PepsiCo executive who now serves on the board of Starbucks; another was the former N.B.A. guard Darrell Griffith, or “Dr. Dunkenstein.” Jackson used their capital to adapt his invention to then-futuristic uses such as videoconferences and telemedicine. He named his new company VideoLan Technologies, joined forces with Ted Ralston, a white venture capitalist from Ohio, and went public in August 1995 at $4 a share. Shortly afterward, the company announced a $50 million distribution deal with Samsung, and the stock took off, reaching a high of more than $47. In terms of percentage gain, it was the most successful I.P.O. of 1995, a year in which companies like Netscape, Pixar, and EchoStar also went public. At its height, VideoLan employed around 30 people, including engineering and sales staff, though like many startups, it operated at a loss.

On paper, Vernon Jackson was worth around $26 million, and he lived like it, wagering serious money at racetracks and riverboat casinos. He began constructing an enormous house overlooking the ninth fairway of an Arnold Palmer-designed golf course. Meanwhile, VideoLan was falling apart. There were delays in developing software and security features that would allow the system to move from its prototype stage to mass production, and Samsung said its price was too high. Amid complaints about Jackson’s management, Ralston, VideoLan’s biggest shareholder, brought in a new group of executives, who were also white. The internal tension took on a palpable racial subtext. In November 1995, even as the stock price was rising, Jackson allegedly changed the locks to the company lab so that only he and the engineers could enter. After production delays continued, Samsung backed out of its deal, and VideoLan’s stock price began to collapse in January 1996. Jackson’s half-constructed trophy home stood roofless and derelict. Eventually a court ordered the property sold at auction, and the structure was bulldozed.

Someone else might have walked away, but Jackson was convinced that his idea still had value. He lined up some new investors and paid $225,000 to purchase the rights to VideoLan’s technology from a bankruptcy court. In 1998, Jackson started a new company, iGate. This time, he vowed to avoid the traditional routes of business development, which he saw as hopelessly compromised by racism. “I developed a bad taste in my mouth for venture capitalists,” he later said. He talked of raising “angel money from Africa and places like that—our people, if you will.” He hired a black president, Joshua Smith, who serves on the boards of FedEx and Caterpillar and once chaired President George H.W. Bush’s Commission on Minority Business Development.

By the late 1990s, most big businesses had already solved their last-mile problem by installing T1 lines, so Smith drew up a new business plan that targeted other markets, institutions that still depended on antiquated infrastructure: military bases, government agencies, public schools. Jackson predicted initial sales of $20 million a year, rising to $155 million by 2004.

But he wasn’t able to deliver on his projections. The company’s key component, a three-by-five-foot switch box that sold for $96,000, was cumbersome. “Newer technology would allow you to build that box the size of a cigar box, and he never got there,” says Jerry Galler, who headed iGate’s marketing. “And then, all of a sudden, we quit getting paid.” None of the multimillion-dollar contracts Jackson was always talking about ever materialized. Eventually, Joshua Smith left the company, and Jackson laid off all but one of his dozen or so employees, saying that iGate was $2 million in debt.

The company limped along, expanding and contracting as Jackson struggled to locate new sources of financing. He kept working to shrink and refine his products, with some success. (One independent test found that iGate’s system provided 13 times the bandwidth of T1 lines.) But Jackson knew that if he was ever going to succeed, he needed friends in government. He hired a consultant named Jack White, who’d once pleaded guilty to federal charges related to his role in a public-housing scandal. White was well connected in African American political circles, and he introduced Jackson to William Jefferson. The congressman immediately grasped the idea’s potential. He told Jackson that he glimpsed iGate’s future: military contracts to start with but also deals that would bring the equalizing force of the internet to poor people living in urban neighborhoods that had been overlooked by the phone companies, or in rural areas, or even in Africa, where broadband remained a technological pipe dream.

“Vernon thought that he had somebody that would watch his back, because he had the same interests and same color and could understand how Vernon felt, believing that he’d been screwed over by some majority people,” says Jackson’s younger brother Dean, a lawyer. “The irony, as I see it from the court papers, is that the very person he was trusting turned out to be the one that was trying to do him in.”

Much like Jackson, William Jefferson—known around New Orleans as Dollar Bill—had lived a life of unlikely accomplishments tempered by questionable business judgment. Jefferson grew up picking cotton in northeastern Louisiana but made it to Harvard Law. He rose rapidly in the political world but was dogged by scandals related to tax problems and real estate investments. In 1990, when Jefferson mounted a campaign to become Louisiana’s first black congressman since Reconstruction, opponents circulated mock banknotes bearing his face. Jefferson won anyway and went on to become a prominent Democratic voice on economic policy, particularly regarding trade with Africa.

Despite the superficial similarity of their backgrounds—they were both high achievers from large, religious families—the congressman and the businessman had very different temperaments. Jefferson was slight and distant. Jackson was bearish and voluble. Nonetheless, the two men formed what appeared to be a genuine friendship. In 2000, Jackson began traveling to Washington, reporting back to his friends in Louisville about his frequent dinners with “the congressman.”

“His ego was inflated by all that,” says Michael Valenti, a civil attorney who represented Jackson and iGate. “Vernon would say, ‘Oh, you can’t imagine all the people I am meeting on the Hill. This congressman is a very powerful person. He opened this door and that door.’ ”

Officially, Jefferson was just doing his job: helping a struggling black businessman. In reality, according to a federal indictment, Jefferson had been using his office for personal gain since at least the fall of 2000, when he allegedly started demanding payoffs from sugar and oil companies in return for his assistance in Africa. Jefferson allegedly presented iGate with a more elaborate proposal. On January 22, 2001, Jackson signed an agreement with a Louisiana consulting firm headed by Jefferson’s wife. It called for iGate to pay the firm $7,500 a month, as well as a percentage of revenues and 1 million shares of stock. Whether or not Jackson saw the contract as a bribe is unclear; Jefferson’s wife was an administrator at Southern University in Baton Rouge, and iGate was trying to market its technology to historically black colleges. But there is a moment of decision in every journey into criminality, and this was Vernon Jackson’s crucial choice.

The relationship paid dividends, as the promise of government contracts gave iGate credibility. In 2002, the company signed a manufacturing and distribution agreement with Siemens Building Technologies, a subsidiary of the German electronics conglomerate, for Siemens to build and market iGate’s equipment. Siemens commemorated the partnership by putting iGate’s logo on the back of a company-sponsored stock car, and both Jefferson and a top executive of the Siemens subsidiary spoke at iGate’s 2002 shareholders meeting.

In Washington, where lobbyists dole out thousands of dollars in campaign contributions just to secure perfunctory access to members of Congress, the attention Jefferson devoted to this one small company was extraordinary. The congressman introduced Jackson to influential colleagues from the House, raised money for iGate from his friends from New Orleans, even met job candidates over dinner. Those who did business with iGate now claim they perceived Jefferson’s open involvement in company affairs to be simple public service. But clearly, many people—including Jackson’s partners at Siemens—took note of the unusually close relationship and sought to put it to use. In a July 2003 meeting, Siemens executives discussed several pending iGate deals and noted that “legislation and political business-related activities” would be “headed up by Vernon.” Siemens also asked Jackson to secure several favors from his friend Jefferson. For instance, when Siemens was hoping to compete for big military contracts in Korea, Tony LeDinh, the Siemens subsidiary’s vice president for international affairs, wrote to Jackson asking for an introduction to “top brass.” “I am sure our ‘congressman’ can help,” LeDinh wrote. Jackson forwarded the email on to Jefferson, who arranged a meeting in his Capitol Hill office with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

LeDinh declined to be interviewed for this story. Steve Kuehn, a Siemens spokesman, said the executive had a “cordial” relationship with both Jackson and the congressman, but downplayed the significance of the company’s deal with iGate, calling it a “straightforward business agreement, which fell apart.” Kuehn said LeDinh was never called to testify before the grand jury investigating iGate’s business dealings, and neither he nor Siemens are mentioned in the Jefferson indictment.

In July 2003, the Nigerian capital of Abuja played host to the Leon H. Sullivan Summit, a periodic gathering of African and African American political and business leaders. Representative William Jefferson addressed the gathering, sharing a stage with an important figure from the Nigerian government: Vice President Atiku Abubakar. In his speech, Abubakar told his audience the story of how his country—once known for coups and catastrophic corruption—had achieved (relative) democracy and stability. As the fifth-largest exporter of crude oil to the U.S., Nigeria was flush with riches.

“I am . . . inviting our American brothers and sisters to take advantage of the positive atmosphere in the country today,” the vice president told his audience.

At some point, amid the Americans in suits and the Nigerians in boubous mingling at the Abuja Hilton, with its hexagonal pool and thatch-roofed cabanas, Jefferson met with representatives of a Nigerian company called Netlink Digital Television. Nigeria has a population of more than 140 million people, many of whom live in cities and spend inordinate amounts of time in crowded, sweaty internet cafés. Netlink wanted to offer them digital television, phone, and internet service at home but faced the challenge of providing the necessary bandwidth, given Nigeria’s decrepit telecommunications infrastructure. Jefferson told the Nigerian businessmen about iGate.

According to a subsequent investigation by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Netlink was intimately tied to Abubakar, who allegedly steered almost $24 million to the startup company’s owner from a government oil-revenue fund intended to finance education. Some of Netlink’s dubious venture capital, the Nigerian investigation alleged, was kicked back to the vice president; some of it went to bribe an official in the government accounting office, who used the money to publish a book entitled Nigerian Laws on Public Finances. And millions in oil money ended up in Louisville with iGate and Vernon Jackson.

Shortly after the conference, Jackson and Jefferson flew to London, where they negotiated a $45 million deal to supply digital set-top boxes to Netlink. The Nigerian company paid iGate $6.5 million up front for exclusive rights to the technology. The congressman was to arrange for the balance of the money, in the form of a loan from the Export-Import Bank of the United States. In return—unbeknownst to Jackson—Jefferson allegedly demanded $1 million in fees from Netlink, as well as a $5 commission for every set-top box delivered.

Jefferson and Jackson made two iGate-financed trips to Nigeria, where they met with Netlink executives and government officials. Tony LeDinh set up an appointment for them with a local representative of Siemens Building Technologies, though the executive, Alexander Martins, says the meeting never took place. But just as the Samsung partnership had unraveled back in the late ’90s, the Nigerian deal had begun to fray by the summer of 2004. “After these people took money, iGate and Jefferson,” Netlink’s chairman later testified, “iGate did not supply a pin.”

Already, the congressman was lining up a partner to replace Netlink. In June 2004, during a trip to Washington sponsored by the Nigerian finance ministry, an internet entrepreneur named Suleiman Yahyah met Jefferson and handed him his card. The congressman told Yahyah about iGate. Two months later, according to the Nigerian commission’s report, Yahyah traveled to New Orleans, where he met Jackson and others at the offices of Jefferson’s daughter’s law firm. The following Tuesday, in an email to a business associate—sent to Siemens as well—Jackson wrote, “I’m just returning from New Orleans, where I spent last Friday and the weekend negotiating and finalizing terms with our new African, American, and European corporate partners,” adding that he would “brief Siemens on what has happened.” He and Jefferson met with Siemens executives the following week during a Siemens-financed trip to New York, where they attended the U.S. Open tennis tournament and staged a demonstration of iGate’s equipment.

Soon afterward, however, Jackson’s relationship with Siemens began to sour, as company executives voiced skepticism about iGate’s ability to perfect and market its system. The company had managed to make deals with a few institutional users—Howard University, an army base in Texas—but bugs were a problem, and sales lagged.

The Nigerian venture, meanwhile, had hit a snag. Netlink still owned the Nigerian rights to iGate’s technology and wasn’t going to give them up until some of its money was returned. Brett Pfeffer, a former aide to Jefferson, worked for a Virginia technology investor named Lori Mody. Jefferson and Jackson met with Mody in the congressman’s Capitol Hill office and told her that the joint venture with Yahyah would eventually produce revenues of $200 million a year.

Within months of making an initial $3.5 million investment, according to an F.B.I. affidavit, Mody became suspicious. It turned out Jackson had used only half of her money to reacquire the distribution rights from Netlink. Later, when Mody asked the congressman how Jackson had spent the rest of the money, he replied, “Don’t even ask.” Mody cut off contact with Jackson.

Jackson fell into uncharacteristic despair. “Sometimes I feel so alone when I have to face these kinds of situations,” he wrote to Siemens’ Tony LeDinh, with whom he’d become close, on March 26, 2005. “I believe that I was born to share the burdens of others and to bring relief where I can. However, because of my faith in Jesus Christ, my best friend, I know that I’m never alone, and I know that I will somehow find the money needed to sustain iGate so that we can continue to help those in need.”

A few days later, Mody unexpectedly contacted Jefferson and said she wanted to rescue the deal with iGate. To Jackson, it must have seemed like an answered prayer.

But it was a ruse. Lori Mody had gone to the F.B.I., and now she was acting as an undercover informant.

Over the course of a series of meetings and phone calls that spring, captured by wiretaps and hidden microphones, William Jefferson described his plan. The key hurdle, the congressman told Mody, would be winning regulatory approval in Nigeria. He said that task would fall to Suleiman Yahyah. “We got to motivate him really good,” Jefferson said in a taped conversation. “If he’s gotta pay Minister X, we don’t want to know. It’s not our deal. . . . That’s all, you know, international fraud crap.” At the same dinner, Jefferson allegedly scratched notes on a sheet of paper, indicating that he wanted an increased ownership stake in the Nigerian joint venture, about 20 percent. “All these damn notes we’re writing to each other as we’re talking,” the congressman said, laughing. “As if the F.B.I. is watching.”

When Yahyah encountered resistance from the Nigerian national telephone company, a serious obstacle, Jefferson allegedly decided to ask Abubakar for help. Given the vice president’s close relationship to Netlink, and the $2.3 million iGate still owed that company, he would need some convincing. But in a taped conversation, Jefferson told Mody that he thought Abubakar would negotiate. “He’s a very, well, the word might be . . . corrupt,” the congressman told the F.B.I. informant. Abubakar, he said, had “more deals going than the goddamn man in the moon.”

The vice president often passed through the Washington area. One of his several wives—polygamy is accepted in Nigeria—lived in a white-columned residence in Potomac, Maryland, near the Congressional Country Club. One day, Jefferson visited the vice president’s home, driven by an undercover F.B.I. agent posing as a chauffeur. After the meeting, Jefferson allegedly told Mody that Abubakar had agreed to wipe out iGate’s debt from the previous deal, as well as intervene with the phone company, in return for half a million dollars and a substantial cut of the venture’s profits.

The whole scheme was growing ever more complicated and treacherous. At one point, according to a Times-Picayune report, Lori Mody—who, by this time, was primarily interested in bringing down Jefferson—tried to warn Jackson that the F.B.I. was watching. Jackson just laughed her off. Even outsiders could see he was out of his depth. Valenti, one of Jackson’s attorneys, tells the following story: In early May 2005, Yahyah visited Louisville for a strategy session and a trip to the Kentucky Derby. Valenti’s law partner happened to run into Jackson, Jefferson, and several Nigerians inside the ornate Director’s Room at Churchill Downs. The Nigerians were feeding $100 bills into betting machines. “Vernon, for all this, he is a likable guy,” Valenti says. “I do think he genuinely has a religious side to him. I do not think it’s at all an act. I think he’s pretty devoted to his wife. Well, he comes up to [Valenti’s law partner] and says, ‘John, can you help me? These Nigerians want to know where they can find high-priced hookers.’ ”

Jackson had always feared one possibility more than any other: that some double-dealing investor might try to steal his company. But all the while, he’d allowed Jefferson to keep upping his family’s ownership stake. Jackson had hired the congressman’s brother-in-law as iGate’s chief engineer and his daughter as a lawyer. Jefferson, he thought, was his friend. But it was Jefferson who ended up wresting iGate away from Jackson. The congressman was worried about Jackson’s erratic decisionmaking. “I’m not gonna let him let me use my good offices, whatever they are . . . to make arrangements and then blow it out,” Jefferson said in a taped conversation. With funding from Mody and others, Jefferson allegedly proposed to pay off the $5 million to $7 million in debt iGate had accrued and to install an associate, a New Orleans riverboat-casino owner, as iGate’s C.E.O. “I’m in the shadows, behind the curtain,” he told Mody.

Jackson discovered the takeover plot and flew to Washington, furious. He swore to fight the congressman, but when he returned to Louisville, he abruptly announced that he’d signed a proxy agreement granting control of his iGate shares to Jefferson’s family. He said he was leaving business to preach the word of God. “He had this wild swing,” says Valenti. “I don’t know what Jefferson said or what he threatened.”

His control over iGate solidified, Jefferson allegedly sought to seal the Nigerian deal. He told Mody that Abubakar was scheduled to fly home on August 1. According to prosecutors, they discussed making a $100,000 down payment to the vice president. One Saturday morning, after a meeting at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Arlington, Virginia, Jefferson retrieved a brown leather briefcase containing marked $100 bills from the trunk of Mody’s car. At his office that day, he prepared two letters, one to Abubakar and another to the managing director of the Nigerian phone company.

At around 3 the following morning, an Abubakar aide was awoken by a phone call from his hotel’s front desk. According to the aide’s testimony, a female staff member from Jefferson’s congressional office was waiting for him in the lobby. She handed him a sealed envelope marked Capitol Hill—U.S.A. Congress. The following day, Jefferson and Mody met at the Ritz-Carlton again. “I gave him the African art that you gave me,” the congressman said cryptically, “and he was very pleased.”

William Jefferson’s trial is scheduled to begin in January. It may provide answers to several remaining mysteries. What did Vernon Jackson’s other business partners—including Siemens executives, who didn’t definitively sever ties with iGate until after the F.B.I. raids—know about his dealings with the congressman? What did Jefferson say to Jackson that convinced him to give up his company? Most perplexing of all, why did most of the $100,000 end up in Jefferson’s freezer, rather than Abubakar’s luggage? Prosecutors allege that Jefferson gave around $5,000 of the F.B.I.’s money to a staffer who was having financial problems and held on to the rest. Was the cash ever meant to reach Abubakar? Or was it one final betrayal—a case of New Orleans corruption trumping Nigerian corruption?

Abubakar has consistently denied that he ever sought a bribe from Jefferson, whom he has publicly labeled a “con man.” But a Nigerian anticorruption commission indicted him anyway. At the time, Abubakar was preparing to run for president. In a speech to Nigeria’s senate, Abubakar said he was “a victim of a well-orchestrated and vicious smear campaign aimed principally at preventing me from offering myself for service to the nation at the highest level.” But the scandal, along with a related feud with the outgoing president, hampered the onetime front-runner’s campaign, and he finished third. He is challenging the results in court, however, and remains a leading opposition figure. “As long as you have money, in Nigeria, you have a political future,” says Omoyele Sowore, an investigative journalist who chronicled Abubakar’s fall.

Jefferson, through his lawyer, refused to comment on any aspect of this case. But he appears to be preparing to argue that he is the victim of overzealous investigators. In May 2006, after many stymied subpoena requests, the F.B.I. raided his congressional office. Legislative leaders from both parties were outraged, saying the search violated the principle of separation of powers. Recently, a federal appeals court agreed, ruling that the raid, though constitutional, was too extensive, a decision that is expected to complicate Jefferson’s prosecution. Capitalizing in part on his black constituents’ distrust of the F.B.I., Jefferson easily won reelection last year. Outside the courthouse on the day of his arraignment in June, he called the government’s case “contrived.”

“Did I make mistakes in judgment along the way that I now deeply regret? Yes,” he said. “But did I sell my office or trade official acts for money? Absolutely not. This case involved private business activities and not official acts.”

At trial, Vernon Jackson is likely to be the most important prosecution witness. After iGate’s collapse, he became an ordained minister, and friends say he is eager to testify. “I’m just so hurt that a congressman would do this to me,” Jackson said last December, in a deposition in an unrelated civil case.

Jackson’s decision to plead guilty to bribery charges, in May 2006, shocked even close friends and family members. (Brett Pfeffer, the former Jefferson aide who helped set up the Mody deal, pleaded guilty to similar charges.) In keeping with his plea deal, Jackson did not speak at his sentencing hearing. “The tragedy of this case, in addition to what happened to him, is that this technology has yet to reach those [disadvantaged] communities,” said his public defender, Michael Nachmanoff. “And that, I think, hurts him as deeply as anything else.” The judge, unmoved, sentenced Jackson to seven years and three months.

By the following Sunday, Jackson was back at work, holding discussions after church with a prospective investor for a new company, one that was developing technology to provide internet service over power lines. Outside a restaurant called the Cheddar Box, the investor handed Jackson a check for $100,000. He eventually sued, claiming Jackson had assured him that he’d worked out a deal with prosecutors and wasn’t going to jail. “I knew what the court had done, but the court is not God. So I speak my own faith, that I believe I’m not going,” Jackson said in a subsequent deposition, adding that he intended to repay the money. “I have a problem when people say that I am corrupt.”

In March, Jackson began serving his sentence. In the end, his every hope went disastrously unfulfilled. Jackson wanted wealth, but now he’s penniless. He wanted to be a black role model, but now he’s a felon. He wanted to help Africa, but his actions only perpetuated the rotten system that keeps Africans impoverished. Prosecutors can request a reduction in Jackson’s sentence in return for his cooperation, but for now, he is not scheduled to be released until 2013, an eternity in internet time. By then, Jackson will be 60, and his invention will likely be worthless.

Obscene Losses (Portfolio, 2007)

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:55:00 -0500

by Claire Hoffman

Oct 15 2007

DVD sales are in free fall. Audiences are flocking to pornographic knockoffs of YouTube, especially a secretive site called YouPorn. And the amateurs are taking over. What’s happening to the adult-entertainment industry is exactly what’s happening to its Hollywood counterpart—only worse.

On Friday, May 18, Steve Hirsch, founder of Vivid Entertainment Group, the world’s largest producer of adult videos, was expecting a mysterious visitor. But Stephen Paul Jones was late. When Jones, an unknown figure in the pornography world, finally arrived in the all-white reception area of Vivid’s Los Angeles offices at 2 p.m., he was apologetic. His private plane had broken down, he explained, and he was forced to fly commercial. Hirsch, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, found that excuse a little slick. But he was eager to speak with Jones, so he let it slide and introduced him to two Vivid colleagues. When the four men sat down in the company’s conference room, Jones got right to the point: He wanted Vivid to buy his website, YouPorn.com.

As its name suggests, YouPorn lets users upload and watch a virtually unlimited selection of hardcore sex videos for free. The user-generated clips on YouPorn—like those on YouTube, the site it mimics—range from the grainiest amateur footage to the slickest professional product. Also, like YouTube, the site has far more traffic than income. Just nine months after going live, in September 2006, YouPorn was on pace to log about 15 million unique visitors in May, Jones told the Vivid executives, and its audience was growing at a rate of 37.5 percent a month. Today, YouPorn is the No. 1 adult site in the world; Vivid.com, a pay site, is ranked 5,061. According to Alexa, a website-ranking company, YouPorn’s overall rank is higher than CNN.com (84), About.com (114), and Weather.com (195). (Those numbers are averages for the three-month period from mid-June to mid-September.)

Blond, barrel-chested, and wearing a sport coat, Jones oozed Silicon Valley confidence. According to Hirsch, he mentioned his Stanford M.B.A. repeatedly. He offered reams of documents and audience data, emphasizing YouPorn’s global reach. (Only 12 percent of the site’s traffic comes from the U.S., he said.) Jones told the men that he and one other executive, a young Malaysian man living in Australia, were the owners of YouPorn, and he stressed that with the site’s traffic, its opportunities were manifold: dating, gaming, mobile content, pay-per-view, webcams (“already very popular in China”), and more. He shared his vision of turning YouPorn into a “very cool brand, perhaps the Virgin of adult entertainment.” As Jones rambled on, Hirsch and his executives traded raised eyebrows. Malaysia?

Still, they were intrigued by YouPorn—and more than a little intimidated by its size. In recent years, competition from the internet had cut deep into the porn studio’s revenues. DVD sales, once Vivid’s financial bedrock, were down almost 50 percent since 2004, and the proliferation of cheap Web-based videos was stealing market share from the company, which specializes in high-end sex films. Vivid and its top rivals—Wicked Pictures, Evil Angel, Digital Playground, Red Light District, Penthouse Media Group, and Hustler, to name a few—had lately been getting an unwanted glimpse of the overnight crisis that the file-sharing revolution brought to the music industry and Craigslist brought to newspaper classified ads.

The meeting lasted an hour. As Hirsch listened to Jones’ pitch, he considered the risks of acquiring YouPorn. Hirsch had been in the adult-entertainment business long enough to be mindful of its legal pitfalls, and that was a chief concern. How do you verify the age of the participants in these thousands of sex videos—or, for that matter, the age of the audience?

For the time being, Hirsch put those questions aside and focused on the business challenge: How, exactly, would you monetize this site? All the features were free, and, as Jones admitted, the advertising revenue was meager—about $120,000 a month. Jones said he wasn’t too interested in figuring that out himself. He planned to grow the audience as large as possible and then “exit” to an established company with the resources and know-how to parlay the traffic into revenue. Not that he’s expecting the $1.65 billion Google paid for YouTube or even the $580 million Rupert Murdoch coughed up for MySpace. Jones told Hirsch he’d be willing to part with YouPorn for $20 million. Hirsch said he’d be in touch.

“It doesn’t make any sense!” Hirsch tells me a month later. It’s a hazy afternoon in June, and he is sitting behind his oak-slab desk, his eyes flickering between a pair of flat-screen monitors, one tuned to Bloomberg News and the other showing a YouPorn clip featuring a gaggle of naked women and an oxygen mask. “They’re giving porn away. You can’t make money on this.”

A compact, well-exercised man of 46, Hirsch is one of the biggest names in the $12 billion adult-entertainment business. The very picture of a respectable, down-to-earth smut peddler, he lives with his wife and two young children in a gated community in a quiet suburb in California’s San Fernando Valley, the industry’s global capital. He’s proudly sober, eschewing the rollicking parties of the sex business for quiet passions, such as his prehistoric-amber collection.

Hirsch’s life in the industry started early. In 1970s Cleveland, his father left a career as a stockbroker, says Hirsch, to sell stag films for Reuben Sturman, the porn pioneer who eventually went to jail for tax evasion. Hirsch went to work for Sturman during high school, and Sturman nurtured the young man into a sort of porn prodigy. In 1984, when Hirsch was 23, he co-founded Vivid with the then-novel idea of signing actresses to exclusive contracts and marketing them like Old Hollywood stars. He was just in time for the dawn of the VCR, and Vivid grew quickly. It has been the largest producer of adult videos in the world for more than a decade now, in part because Hirsch borrowed heavily from the Hollywood studios he can see from his office window: expensive sets, big names (most famously Jenna Jameson), and slick packaging. By porn-industry standards, his films are expensive. He says they typically cost $50,000 to $300,000 to produce and $20,000 to market and distribute; they sell for about $25 on DVD. The company makes approximately 60 movies a year and posts roughly $100 million in annual revenue.

But lately, success hasn’t come easily for Vivid and its upmarket rivals. Three years ago, 80 percent of Vivid’s income came from DVD sales. Today, Hirsch puts that number at about 30 percent, with the rest coming from a fragmented range of sources: subscriptions to Vivid.com, pay-per-view TV, internet video-on-demand, merchandising, and mobile-phone deals. Domestic DVD sales are down 35 percent this year alone. His revenue is flat, he says, but that’s mainly because he’s been cutting costs. Within five years, he claims, DVD sales will be close to zero.

Vivid’s situation is grim but not unusual. DVD woes plague the entire Valley, from multimillion-dollar corporate operations to backroom bottom-feeders: Total sales fell 11 percent in 2006, to an estimated $3.8 billion, according to Adult Video News, the industry’s leading trade publication. Hirsch’s company shares the high end of the market with about 20 other studios that each claim more than $20 million in annual revenues. Outside of those are at least 100 small producers who bring in $500,000 to $5 million a year, estimates Paul Fishbein, president of Adult Video News. These companies shoot on shoestring budgets of $10,000 or less (sometimes much less) per film. “Those rinky-dink companies are struggling to get 1,000 to 1,200 DVDs out at $8 to $10 wholesale,” says Fishbein. “That barely pays for the cost of a cheap production.”

And the decline of DVDs will only accelerate. “You’re going to see a precipitous drop now,” Fishbein says. “Hopefully for producers here in the Valley, that will be offset by internet sales. Hopefully.”

As the portion of Americans with broadband connections (47 percent and growing) continues to rise, consumers are becoming increasingly addicted to the immediate gratification of Web video. But suddenly, there’s a chasm between porn consumption and porn sales. While sales of internet-based adult entertainment grew 14 percent last year, to $2.8 billion, that figure would be substantially higher if there wasn’t so much free competition, especially from the user-generated adult sites.

So far, the Valley’s biggest players have tried to combat this by offering subscription sites, which give users access to a deep trove of content in exchange for a membership fee, usually paid monthly. Vivid.com is one of the more successful. With about 40,000 subscribers paying $30 a month, Hirsch says, the site generates roughly $15 million in annual revenue. Ali Joone, the founder of Digital Playground, charges the same monthly rate and says he has a comparable number of subscribers.

Much like the TV networks, movie studios, and record labels on the other side of town, porn companies are also engaged in a frantic attempt to diversify their offerings, filleting their films into smaller pieces that can be easily sold via an ever-shifting variety of digital distribution channels. From the pay-by-the-minute model on video-on-demand sites such as Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network and Hotmovies.com, to the four- to six-minute clips edited for mobile devices, the industry is looking to take the 90-minute sex videos from its old business strategy and carve them into bite-size moneymakers.

But for many companies, the sum of these new revenue streams doesn’t even come close to offsetting the decline in DVD sales. What’s happening in porn right now is directly analogous to what’s happening to the music industry—CD sales are down 16 percent since 2005, according to Nielsen SoundScan—but worse.

“What you’re losing in the DVD market, you’re not making up on the paid internet side,” says Fishbein. “Instead of 99 cents a song on iTunes, these guys are doing 10 cents a minute for porn.”

The irony is that Hirsch and his ilk have always been the first to experiment with—and profit from—new technologies. The revolution began with VHS, which moved porn out of the theater and into the home. This made watching pornography private, an advance that created millions of new customers overnight. But to buy the stuff, you still had to venture out to the store, and who knew who you might run into?

The Web, in its early days, solved this problem. Few industries, if any, figured out e-commerce faster than the adult-entertainment business, and online DVD sales soared as a result. But Web 2.0, the catchall term for the crush of user-driven startups that have emerged in the past few years, has left the porn industry’s biggest players scrambling to keep up. For the first time, technology is hurting Big Porn. “Everyone was excited because they thought the internet was going to affect our business in a positive way, and it’s been the opposite,” says David Joseph, the founder of Red Light District. “It’s been a little scary.”

“Instilling the most fear are YouPorn and its closest competitors, Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network’s PornoTube and Megarotic, which draws in users with a limited layer of free videos, then tries to sell premium memberships that offer more content and faster video streaming.

These sites didn’t invent free porn; they just made it exponentially easier to access. Of the three, YouPorn most closely resembles YouTube, with its stripped-down interface, unobtrusive advertising, and—for now, at least—content that’s 100 percent free. PornoTube and Megarotic feel more commercial, with plenty of links to the for-pay features. But the free parts of all three sites are basically the same. Some videos are lengthy (30 minutes or more), but most are closer to three minutes. Some are bona fide amateur videos, shot and uploaded by exhibitionists, but most are clips of copyrighted professional pornography. Of these, some are scenes from high-end features, but a larger percentage are so-called gonzo clips—unscripted, rough-cut footage in which the camera operator often jumps into the action. Some clips are posted by the porn companies themselves, as trailers for the full-length versions available on their own sites, but most are uploaded by users from their own collections. Some are gay, some are straight.

In other words, there’s something for everyone—and the sites are ridiculously easy to use. You don’t even have to log in to watch videos, much less pay. (You’re simply required to say you’re 18 or older.) And the sites can’t prevent users from uploading proprietary material produced by the major porn studios. All of which is why Hirsch and his counterparts in the Valley are at least as nervous as the Viacom executives who have filed a $1 billion copyright suit against Google, YouTube’s owner.

But for now at least, there’s no significant push to shut down the sites. Although producers in the Valley have largely resigned themselves to the fact that the copyright genie is out of the bottle, they’re putting user-generated sites on notice about former moneymaking features that are now posted for all to enjoy. A few major porn companies say they regularly monitor postings on PornoTube and YouPorn and email requests to take down copyrighted material. In July, Red Light District sent a cease-and-desist letter to YouPorn after a user posted “One Night in Paris,” the “official” full-length version of the Paris Hilton sex tape, which Red Light distributes. YouPorn removed the video.

By their very nature, though, user-generated sites might be vulnerable to other kinds of legal problems. If anonymous users post child pornography, it could be difficult for site owners to verify the ages of the performers. While these sites generally require viewers to confirm that they’re over 18, “my 11-year-old could go on at any point,” says Red Light’s Joseph. Earlier this fall, a German internet provider temporarily blocked access to YouPorn because the site didn’t comply with German age-verification laws. Up to now, U.S. user-generated porn sites have not been prosecuted.

There’s no sign on the door of PornoTube’s headquarters, in Charlotte, North Carolina. The building is concealed in a low-slung office park on the outskirts of the city, next to the railroad tracks and an aluminum factory.

Inside the air-freshened warren of bunkerlike offices, Suzann Knudsen, a PornoTube marketing executive who moonlights as a D.J. for sex-fetish parties, shows me around. She explains that despite PornoTube’s 15 million monthly visitors, the website’s parent company, Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, views it as a marketing expense, not a profit center. The site was originally conceived as a feature within Xpeeps.com, A.E.B.N.’s X-rated social-networking site, to provide a way for members to trade sex videos. But soon after it launched, in July 2006, PornoTube had dwarfed Xpeeps’ traffic, and A.E.B.N. decided to turn it into a separate site. The company has tried to monetize it by striking profit-sharing deals with two dozen porn studios to create promotional channels that funnel traffic toward the studios’ own sites. A.E.B.N. won’t disclose the value of these agreements or the small amount of advertising revenue generated by the ads placed on page margins, saying only that PornoTube breaks even. It’s worth it, Knudsen says, for the traffic.

But when traffic means tens of millions of people sharing porn, there are some unique business challenges. Daphne Reeder, a customer-service rep for PornoTube, spends her days trolling the site, investigating clips that have been reported as problematic. On the July morning when I visit, she had more than 500 videos to review, most of which had been red-flagged because their descriptions included words such as little boys, force, or rape. She says the community polices itself, with users and porn companies emailing to alert the site about child pornography, copyrights being violated, ex-boyfriends uploading once-private videos, and other issues.

Adult-video producers are legally required to verify that performers are of legal age. The 2257’s, as the verifications are known (after the corresponding section of the federal code), are a costly hassle to the porn studios. Vivid, for example, has an employee whose sole responsibility is 2257 compliance, and Vivid makes only 60 films a year. Reeder is one of 10 people working on compliance at PornoTube, which has about 210,000 videos. Every clip on the site is supposed to contain a link to “2257 info” documenting the age and identity of the performers, but many of the clips (mostly the genuine amateur videos) include no such information. In these cases, PornoTube attempts to perform its own verification. If it can’t, the clip is removed.

One of the items on Reeder’s to-do list is an age-verification complaint about a video called “Adriana Lima Blowjob.” It has no 2257 info. So Reeder cuts and pastes the name into a search engine and clicks through a few sites that say Adriana Lima was born in 1981. Reeder is about to move on when I point out to her that Adriana Lima is in fact a fairly well-known model and that the woman in the video is probably not she. Is PornoTube concerned about that? Knudsen, standing behind Reeder, tells her to take it down quickly. “We do the best we can,” Knudsen tells me repeatedly.

So how are big adult-video companies coping with the borderless erotic geography of the Web? By creating ever more expensive product. Like their counterparts on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, the studios realize they can’t fight amateur with amateur. Instead, Penthouse, Vivid, and others are more committed than ever to their version of the Hollywood model—big budgets, big names, big marketing, and content distributed across a range of platforms.

In a hilltop home in an affluent corner of the Valley, Kelly Holland, the 47-year-old head of production for Penthouse Media Group, stands behind a camera monitor. She wears crisp khakis and well-worn white sneakers, and her lens is trained on a performer named Dee Lilly, who is wearing a beaded black corset. Lilly sways lazily to soft rock. Curtains billow in a fan-generated breeze.

“Beautiful, baby girl, it looks gorgeous,” Holland encourages, as she watches on the monitor 10 feet away. Sitting beside her, a beefy lighting guy stares blankly out the window at the dirty swimming pool. The rest of the heavily tattooed crew—more than two dozen—wander in and out of the kitchen, where the caterer has laid out platters of just-cooked salmon, rice, and vegetables. James Sullivan, the chief operating officer of Penthouse, is visiting from New York. He stands behind Holland, studiously casual in dress shoes and a T-shirt. As the scene wraps up, Holland asks the actress to leave the frame. When Lilly stumbles, tripping over her towering plastic stilettos, Holland sweetly reassures her. “You’re so cute,” she says, “you don’t have to know how to walk.”

Holland’s plan for the day is to shoot two features, each cut in a hardcore and softcore edition, plus softcore and topless content for the Web and on-demand cable. Time is tight, and the director hustles the performers around the set in order to get the most footage for their day rate: usually about $800 to $1,500 for women, less for men. Today’s shoot is a conscious counterjab at the cheaply produced, handheld hardcore videos that flood user-generated adult sites and chip away at the big studios’ bottom line. The total budget for three days of filming is about $110,000.

As Holland shoots Lilly for the softcore episode, designed to be downloaded onto a cell phone, another director is shooting a feature in a nearby room. Titled The Looking Glass, it’s the story of a young suburban couple who buy their first home, only to discover that one of its sliding glass doors is a portal into an alternate universe where people have nonstop sex. In a bedroom done up like a Pottery Barn showroom, performers Alec Knight and Carolyn Reese are staging a crucial scene. With blond extensions and a thick mask of makeup, Reese is attractive in a girl-next-door-in-L.A. kind of way. Knight is equally average, for the most part. As they go through the motions, the cameraman urges them to act lovingly toward each other. No matter what position they’re in, they find a way to gaze into each other’s eyes.

Holland, a veteran in the growing ranks of female directors, believes women—and the men who want to watch with them—are customers she won’t lose to online viewing. “Women are more reliable, they are more loyal, and they spend more money,” she says. “For women, you have to make sure the girls have great manicures, great pedicures, and great lingerie—put them in La Perla or Agent Provocateur—and you can serve up some pretty explicit material.” Holland cites HBO’s new sexually explicit miniseries Tell Me You Love Me as evidence of just how mainstream pornography has become.

“It’s not just a man thing,” agrees Samantha Lewis, the C.E.O. of Digital Playground, who estimates that 45 percent of her Web-based sales (which include site subscriptions and DVDs sold online) are to women. “As each year goes by, we’re realizing, Oh my goodness. The percentages are climbing.”

The porn industry has long wanted to expand its female audience, but some producers concede it will take more than fancy sets, gauzy lighting, and a story line. “Women are just as unpredictable as men, only more so,” says Phil Harvey, the 69-year-old Harvard grad who 35 years ago founded Adam & Eve, a $90 million adult-film producer and sex-toy retailer based in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Harvey is a pioneer in marketing toys and videos to women and couples, having instituted a “sex positive” approach to pornographic retailing in the late 1980s. But as important as women are to Adam & Eve’s business—Harvey says 40 percent of its Web customers are female—he cautions against overgeneralizing. “At least five times we’ve tried to produce a women’s catalog, with cuddling and coupling,” he says drily. “It didn’t work.”

What has worked, Harvey says, is porn that is best appreciated on the big screen—or at least a television. Last year, Adam & Eve teamed with Digital Playground to make Pirates, an adult take on Disney’s billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Shot in high definition, set to an original score, and driven by a plot involving Incan magic and sea battles, Pirates was billed by its producers as an “electrifying and swashbuckling sex tale.” Digital Playground’s Joone says the film cost the two studios more than $3 million to make—one of the biggest budgets ever for an adult video—and the resulting three-disc set initially sold for $50. Harvey credits Pirates, Adam & Eve’s bestselling film of all time, with helping to pull the company out of a five-year growth slump that he attributes directly to intense competition from free porn on the Web.

YouPorn—the site Stephen Paul Jones tried to sell to Vivid in May—is a strange and mysterious business. There are no links to founders’ biographies, no contact information, no hint of who is behind this booming Web entity. Its domain is registered using a service designed to mask the registrant’s identity.

Back in July, I sent an email to the lone address on the site. It went unanswered. I asked around and, after a series of dead ends, was told that a Stanford alumnus—an outsider to the industry—had started YouPorn. A porn producer gave me the man’s cell-phone number. I left a voicemail. Jones called back a few hours later.

“It’s a brave new world, man. People are crazy. What can I say?” he said, during a freewheeling two-hour conversation that swung wildly from the subjugation of female porn stars to federal regulations governing obscenity to the existence (or nonexistence) of God. Jones insisted that the site was not intended to make money. “It’s not a profit center; it’s more of an experiment. If you wanted to be philosophical about it, it’s kind of an exploitative industry, and this is sort of the opposite.”

Jones said that “Stephen Paul Jones” was an alias. He said that he was 27 years old and worked at a Newport Beach, California, hedge fund, where he managed billions in assets. He used the alias, he said, because his bosses would fire him if they knew about YouPorn. He said he wasn’t the owner of the site anyway. He said it was founded by “a German” who wrote the underlying software and now runs the site’s day-to-day operations.

Still, Jones seemed proud of YouPorn. “People have been telling me that this site would die and the traffic would go away, and they’ve all been wrong,” he said. “When a new model enters the market and impacts other companies’ business by 15 percent of their revenue in a year, that’s historymaking.

“Porn is recession-proof,” he went on, “so if other companies’ sales are going down, there’s a reason. If the reason is the world saying ‘We like to blast ourselves over the internet,’ and the consumers of the world saying ‘We like the amateur stuff better,’ then that’s significant. You could call it a revolution.” He liked the sound of that. “Sure, why not?”

It turns out there is a Stanford alum named Stephen Paul Jones. But he’s fortyish, not 27, and he lives in South Lake Tahoe, California, not Newport Beach. In the past two decades, this Stephen Paul Jones seems to have had no connection to the adult-entertainment business. Public records show that he was involved in a handful of security companies. According to Stanford alumni records (he earned his M.B.A. last year), he enjoys skydiving, stunt piloting, and snowboarding.

Meanwhile, the man who says he’s 27 and uses Jones as an alias has stopped returning my calls. So I drive north to Lake Tahoe.

I knock on the door of a lodgelike three-story house with an enormous backyard. A blond, barrel-chested man answers, an entourage of children in tow. I tell him my name and ask to speak to Jones. “Wrong house,” he says, as his face goes hard. His wife asks what this is about. I say I am a reporter writing about an internet company. “Oh,” she says and gives him a look.

He hustles his family inside, grabs a pack of cigarettes, and comes back outside to yell at me. And from the minute he starts talking, I recognize his voice and his patterns of speech. This is the man I spoke to on the phone. This is the same Stephen Paul Jones.

Jones confirms this, apparently without meaning to, saying he knew during our phone conversation that I had an agenda because I told him that I didn’t like porn. (I told him no such thing.) He threatens to sue me, saying he has “Google’s lawyers.” Then he asks if we can talk somewhere farther away from his home. He drives his S.U.V. about a mile down the road, with me following. For the next 2½ hours, in a diatribe that is always convoluted and occasionally hostile, he keeps returning to one theme: his amazement at the sheer number of people who visit YouPorn every day. And he repeatedly insists that he is not the site’s owner.

But in his emails to Vivid executives, Jones had described himself as “the decisionmaker at YouPorn” and said that he and his Malaysian partner, Zach Hong, “own 100 percent of the company.” (Hong, when reached at his home in Australia, confirmed his involvement with YouPorn but declined to answer further questions.) In these emails, Jones sounded like a no-nonsense M.B.A. with an articulate, if familiar, vision for growing his Web 2.0 company. Among other things, he said he would follow “the Skype model” and cited a quote he attributed to one of Skype’s founders: “If we have 100 million users, and if just 1 percent of them give us $10 per month, we will have $120 million in revenue.”

Now, though, leaning against my car on a dark country road, Jones refuses to answer the most basic questions about the financial particulars of YouPorn or his plans for its future. As the conversation wears on, he sounds proud of the site one minute and worried about tarnishing his family’s reputation the next. After all, he says, he has five kids. He seems deeply conflicted about being in the sex business, much less a mastermind of the most popular adult site in the world.

Back in the Valley, Vivid’s Hirsch says that while he envies YouPorn’s traffic, he has no plans to buy the site, mainly because of the legal exposure associated with hosting user-generated pornography. But he also says that he can’t figure out how to make money through YouPorn and that it would be inconsistent with his strategy of focusing on high-end feature films. A.E.B.N. was also approached by Jones, says an executive there, and passed on YouPorn too.

According to several industry executives who say they would have heard otherwise, YouPorn hasn’t been sold. After our conversation near his home, Jones continued to deny that he owns the site.

As this issue went to press, YouPorn’s Alexa rank was 51—and rising.

Beauty and the Beast [The Observer, 2004]

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:54:00 -0400

She was the biggest pop star in the Balkans, he was a bank robber, gangster, politician, paramilitary leader and war criminal. ‘Ceca’ Raznatovic tells Adam Higginbotham about living with Arkan.

Adam Higginbotham
The Observer
Sunday 4 January 2004

It’s been nearly four years now, but the concierge at the Intercontinental Hotel doesn’t need to think about it for a second. He remembers exactly where it happened and rattles out directions as if asked the way to a tiresome tourist attraction: ‘Outside restaurant,’ he says, in quick but fractured English. ‘Seating place - second seating place on the left.’

And over there, across the spotlit marble, chrome and glass foyer of New Belgrade’s flashiest hotel, on the cracked, aubergine-coloured leather banquette right outside the Rotisserie restaurant, is the very spot where they killed Arkan. Late in the afternoon of Saturday 15 January 2000, four men in tracksuits walked over to him and his bodyguards. One asked if they knew whether the hotel gym was open, and the others opened fire at close range with Heckler and Koch sub-machine guns. Investigators later said that at least 38 bullets were fired: Arkan was hit three times in the face. One bullet entered through his mouth, another through the temple, the third through his left eye.

Ceca was shopping with her sister Lidija in the hotel boutique at the time. ‘And when the shooting stopped,’ she says, ‘I ran out and saw what had happened…’ Sitting at a coffee table in the office of FC Obilic, the football club she and Arkan bought together, Ceca reaches for another of her Cartier cigarettes, and hesitates. She is on the brink of tears. ‘It’s very difficult for me to talk about it… I’ll never forget any of that day.’ Her husband was still alive when she and Lidija carried him out to the car. But by the time they reached the Belgrade Emergency Centre at 6.50pm, it was too late: ‘He died,’ she says, ‘in my arms.’

The murder seemed to mark the end of the unlikely story of Serbia’s most famous glamour couple; of the five-year marriage between Svetlana ‘Ceca’ Raznatovic - the biggest pop star in the Balkans - and Zeljko ‘Arkan’ Raznatovic - bank robber, gangster, politician, paramilitary leader and indicted war criminal. For Ceca herself, however, there would be more to come. ‘I’m only 30,’ she will say eventually, ‘but even in Hollywood you can’t find a life-story like mine.’

Barely anyone in Western Europe has ever heard of Ceca. You can’t buy her records in the shops and she’s never been on tour - indeed, for a long time, she was forbidden from entering many countries in the European Union. But in Serbia, Svetlana Velickovic Raznatovic has been as famous as Madonna for much of the past 15 years. In that time, she rose from local to international celebrity in the Balkans, sold millions of records and became hugely wealthy. At the same time, the country she lives in was transformed from the most cosmopolitan and liberal state in Eastern Europe into a backward, bankrupt province - one which has become a byword for atrocity and corruption.

As Ceca shot to fame against the backdrop of war and genocide wrought by Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, her life would provide captivating entertainment for the population of the unravelling nation. But by the time her husband died in her lap in the back of a car in Belgrade, she was much more than just a pop star with a curious taste in men: she had become the hood ornament of Milosevic’s gangster-state machine. And when she was arrested earlier this year - in the company of Belgrade mobsters connected with the March assassination of reforming prime minister Zoran Djindjic - the rise and fall of Ceca Raznatovic had become emblematic of the forces of greed and anarchy that destroyed Yugoslavia.

‘After Djindjic was killed, there was a lot of excitement about the organised crime arrests,’ says sociologist Professor Eric Gordy, a Balkan expert who has followed Ceca’s career since the outset. ‘But what people were really excited about was Ceca being arrested, because it seemed to signify the end of an era.’

Ceca rarely gives interviews these days. Since her arrest, the Serbian media have turned against her; Arkan, once described routinely as a patriotic hero by the press, has now been recast as the perpetrator of atrocities. She was recently stung to learn that one British paper had described her as being Eva Braun to Arkan’s Hitler. And when we finally meet, on a bleak, wet October afternoon in Belgrade - after weeks of negotiation and two cancelled appointments - she is friendly but nervous. She chain-smokes constantly and takes small sips from a tall glass of lager - ‘I love Heineken,’ she says. She wears leather trousers and stiletto boots, and a diaphanous white blouse designed to showcase her expensive cleavage to maximum effect. Every piece of jewellery she wears - the heart-shaped necklace, the giant hoop earrings, the watch, the enormous hemispherical ring - is studded with diamonds. But she looks quite unlike the hard-faced, orange-tinted marvel of contemporary plastic surgery depicted in photographs: in person, Ceca is quite beautiful.

She says she doesn’t speak English; she was only taught Russian at school; and although she’s learning English now, she can best express herself in Serbian. We have to speak through a translator, ‘so,’ she tells me, ‘follow my reactions closely’. But sometimes she answers a question before the translation is complete, and every now and then, when she wants to make a point, she will slip briefly into crisp English, look me straight in the eye and deliver an emphatic ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Ceca is full of convenient excuses and vaporous denials. When, for example, I ask if Arkan ever talked to her about the crimes he was accused of, she simply says, ‘No’. But in a country where criminality and corruption are so endemic that one cabinet minister says he fears Serbia is becoming ‘the Colombia of Europe’, the truth can be an elusive concept.

In conversation, she likes to characterise herself as a tragic icon of Serbian womanhood - a God-fearing Christian who loves her children above all else, struggling bravely against injustice. ‘I am fragile and emotional,’ she tells me. And, ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’. I ask Ceca what people in Serbia think of her now. ‘That I’m a victim,’ she says. ‘A victim of my name and my huge popularity, and of my great love… that I was married to Zeljko. I’m not a criminal. I’m not a Mafioso. I’m just a woman who’s fighting her way through life.’

Svetlana Velickovic always wanted to be famous: ‘Singing, or modelling… or perhaps as an actress.’ She grew up in Zitoradje, a small town in southern Serbia, near the Romanian border. She remembers two things about the bedroom she had as a child: that it was filled with dolls, and that it contained an enormous mirror. ‘I adored it. I loved spending hours and hours in front of it. Nobody could tear me away. I kept telling my mother, “I’m going to be a big star one day.”’ She has been singing in public since she was five. At the age of 10, she began appearing live as a guest of established Yugoslavian folk singers. She played up and down the country, to the almost exclusively male audiences of the kafana, the slightly seedy bar-restaurants at the heart of every Balkan town and village, where men gather to eat, drink and sing late into the night. She toured the Balkans and played for the expatriate communities of Yugoslav ‘guest workers’ in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

In 1987, she recorded her first album. Like all her material before and since, it dwelt on sentimental and dramatic love stories for Yugoslavia’s rural masses: for farmers, lorry drivers and housewives: ‘If I was American,’ she says, ‘I would definitely be singing country music. It’s the same as Serbian folk: it speaks to people.’

At 14, she had a perky, girl-next-door image, and her first hit: with the song ‘Cvetak Zanovetak’ - ‘the Nagging Flower’. It was a mildly suggestive song with risque words, which played on Ceca’s latent sexuality: ‘Until I was 16,’ she says now, ‘I didn’t understand what I was singing about.’

It made her a star overnight. By the beginning of the Nineties, Ceca was one of the biggest names in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, her future husband was about to get his big break - in 1991, war broke out in Croatia.

Like much of the recent history of Serbia, the life of Zeljko ‘Arkan’ Raznatovic seems to test the limits of credibility, and is shot through with myth, rumour and deliberate distortion. But there is a version of the story that has become recognised as true, if only through repetition. Some parts of it - especially the most horrifying chapters - are even supported by hard evidence.

Born in 1952, Zeljko was the son of a Yugoslav air force colonel, and apparently graduated from catering and hotel management college in Belgrade. But he had been a petty criminal since the age of 14 - snatching purses in Belgrade’s Kalemegdan Park - and in 1969 he was arrested for the first time and sentenced to three years in a juvenile prison. In an attempt to straighten him out, it’s said his desperate father appealed to contacts in the Yugoslav State Security Service - the UDBA - to find a suitable outlet for his talents.

Yet the next time he re-emerged, it was in Western Europe: as a career criminal with an uncanny ability for prison escapes. Throughout the Seventies, he crisscrossed the continent, holding up banks in Holland, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and Italy. Fellow gangster Goran Vukovic once infamously observed: ‘Of all of us, Arkan robbed the most banks; he walked into them like they were self-service stores… as far as robbery is concerned, he was really unsurpassed.’

Nevertheless, Zeljko kept getting caught. The Belgians got him in 1974, and the following year sentenced him to 15 years in jail. He escaped three years and eight months into his sentence. In late 1979, he was arrested in Holland for his part in three armed robberies, and sentenced to seven years. But he escaped again, less than two years later. In 1981, he was wounded and apprehended during the course of a raid in Frankfurt. The Germans put him in the prison hospital; he got away again. At one point, he is also said to have rescued an accomplice from a Swedish courtroom by bursting in armed with two pistols, and tossing one to his friend in the dock while threatening the judge with the other.

This remarkable series of break-outs was almost certainly facilitated by Zeljko’s friends in the UDBA, for whom, it seems, he had worked since leaving Yugoslavia. In return for their help in underwriting his criminal career, Zeljko had become a UDBA hitman, assassinating emigre opponents of Marshal Tito’s regime at large in Europe. He was said to have passports in three different nationalities and 40 aliases - including the name by which he was to become known. For the newly christened Arkan, it was the beginning of a long and profitable relationship with the authorities in Belgrade.

In 1986, Arkan went home and opened a renowned patisserie and ice-cream parlour near the Red Star Belgrade football ground. He built a house directly opposite the stadium. He was made head of the Red Star Supporters’ Club - with the tacit collusion of state and club officials, who wanted him to rein in fans that had begun to provide a focus for anti-communist, anti-government agitation. And, finally, on 11 October 1990, with the state of Yugoslavia beginning its long disintegration, Arkan officially incorporated his own paramilitary force: the Serbian Volunteer Guard - known as Arkan’s Tigers. The core of his private army was drawn from the Red Star terraces: ‘We trained fans without weapons. I insisted on discipline from the very beginning. You know our fans - they’re noisy, they like to drink, to joke about. I stopped all that in one go. I made them cut their hair, shave regularly, not drink. And so it began,’ he said, ‘the way it should be.’

When fighting broke out in eastern Slovenia, Arkan and his 1,000-strong football hooligan army - equipped and controlled directly by the Serbian interior ministry - became shock troops of ethnic cleansing. The Tigers murdered under the banner of Serbian nationalism, but were motivated by the dynamics of organised crime - looting front-line areas and stealing whatever they could lay their hands on, while Arkan took control of local sanctions busting, petrol smuggling and war profiteering rackets. They were there at Vukovar in 1991, linked by the Hague war crimes tribunal to the Vukovar hospital massacre, in which hundreds of mainly Croat patients were bussed to a deserted field and summarily executed.

They were there again at the outset of the Bosnian war at Bijeljina in 1992, killing or running the terrified Muslim population out of town and looting their homes. The things they did there would make Arkan and his men infamous throughout the world. That same year, Arkan was elected to parliament; in 1993, he founded his own political party. And on 11 October 1993, at the Tigers’ training camp in Erdut, at a celebration to mark the paramilitaries’ third anniversary, Ceca and Arkan met for the first time.

‘He was very cute, very handsome and very masculine,’ says Ceca. ‘I fell in love with him instantly. I respect people who are fighters, who succeed in life, who don’t give up - because life is a constant struggle.’

Did she ever find it difficult being married to such a controversial figure, someone regarded across Europe as a war criminal?

‘To me, what my people thought about it was the important thing. And we were the most popular couple in Serbia - in his own country, he had a reputation as a great patriot. And to me, he was a great husband. He had two children with me, and from a previous marriage he had had seven. And he was very much drawn to women, and always protective toward them. He was a great, great gentleman. And I’ll never love anyone like I loved him.’

Does she think she’ll marry again?

‘Hardly,’ she whispers.

In Serbia, the war changed many things beyond recognition. Pop music was one of them. During the Eighties, Yugoslavia had been renowned for its vibrant countercultural rock scene. But with the war came music custom-built for a profiteering regime peddling ersatz nationalism to an isolated populace: ‘turbo-folk’, a brash, plastic mix of traditional folk and modern electro-pop beats. It became the house style of expensive new venues in New Belgrade, such as the Folkoteka, and the sound of the trashy new Milosevic-sponsored television stations - TV Pink and TV Palma - which broadcast turbo-folk videos almost to the exclusion of all other music.

Serbia was being brought to its knees by hyperinflation - peaking, in 1994, at more than 313 million per cent. It eradicated the middle class and sent practically everyone reeling into grinding poverty. But turbo-folk celebrated the trappings of the new wealth - in the words of Dragan Ambrosovic, music writer for Belgrade’s Vreme magazine, it was ‘the money without origin’.

This was music for the new social elite created by the war: the gangsters who, in collusion with the government, were becoming wealthy from smuggling and racketeering. The videos of artists such as Snezana Babic - Sneki - and Dragana Mirkovic were filled with gold jewellery, luxury cars and huge new houses; they depicted young women in knock-off Versace living it up in the mirrored bars and casinos of Belgrade’s luxury hotels - the Intercontinental, the Hyatt and the Metropolitan. One famous turbo-folk lyric of the time runs: ‘Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Suzuki/Discotheques, guitars and bouzouki/That’s life, that’s not an ad/Nobody has it better than us’.

As gangsters took over Belgrade, turbo-folk became the soundtrack to the underworld - the music of choice for the shaven-headed young men known as the dizelasi, because of their fondness for Diesel clothes and the fuel smuggling from which they made their money. ‘Turbo folk,’ said Petar Popovic, director of the country’s state-run record company in 1994, ‘is the sound of the war and everything that the war brought to this country. It represents everything that has happened to this country over the past few years.’

And of all the turbo-folk stars, Ceca was the greatest. By 1992, the bubble-permed, folk-singing girl-next-door had been transformed into a smoky-eyed vixen in micro-minis and dresses slashed to the hip. TV made her a star: her videos were the flashiest and most expensive in the genre, and looked just like those on MTV.

She embarked on a scandalous private life to match. In 1991 she eloped to Switzerland with a Muslim restaurateur, and later hooked up with Dejan ‘Saban’ Majanovic, a minor Belgrade gangster. The beleaguered Serbian public loved it all. ‘In a country where the majority of the people are on the edge of poverty,’ says Ambrosovic, ‘no one questions any sort of success too much. And Ceca created the image of the modest-but-reckless girl from the village, who hit the big city looking for a better life, and took chances to achieve her dreams.’

Arkan and Ceca were married on 19 February 1995. ‘My parents are very proud, because I am going to marry the bravest man in the country,’ she said. It was the most spectacular wedding Serbia had ever seen. The event began before dawn, with a convoy of 40 SUVs driving the 300km from Belgrade to Zitoradje, where Arkan was to claim Ceca as his bride by shooting an apple off the roof of her parents’ house and, in a touch not drawn from any tradition more authentic than Cinderella, the best man fitted the bride with a golden stiletto. For the ceremony, Arkan wore a vintage First World War Serbian officer’s uniform; Ceca wore a dress inspired by Gone with the Wind. The event finished seven costume changes later - three for him, four for her - with a party at the Intercontinental Hotel.

The Milosevic regime embraced the event with gusto: the wedding was broadcast live on state television and made the front page of the government-backed newspaper. Ceca and Arkan were perfect for one another - she brought him added glamour and celebrity; he brought her the money and strong-arm influence that placed her beyond the reach of her closest turbo-folk competitors. ‘Arkan bought the best songs and video clips money could buy,’ says Ambrosovic. ‘She was simply untouchable.’ The marriage was the high point of a personality cult that made the couple aspirational role models throughout the country. ‘The relationship between Arkan and Ceca,’ wrote one magazine at the time, ‘is more than just an ordinary love affair between two mortals.’ When a two-hour video of the wedding, Ceca and Arkan, was released, it sold 100,000 copies, a record in Serbia.

The end of 1995 brought the signing of the Dayton Accords and the end of the fighting in Bosnia, officially putting Arkan’s Tigers out of business. But the war had made him one of the richest men in Serbia. He abandoned his military fatigues for Italian suit, and began to legitimise himself. In addition to the plush casino at the Hotel Yugoslavia and his chain of Serb Crown bakeries, he invested in boutiques, property development, oilfields, a radio station, and began planning to build Belgrade’s biggest business centre. And he finally managed to get his own football club. When overtures to his beloved Red Star were rebuffed, Arkan settled for buying FC Obilic, an old amateur club languishing in the third division.

As chairman, he quickly introduced new management techniques. Promising players were bought up from smaller, provincial sides; rival managers who didn’t want to let their players go were persuaded otherwise. Another prominent gangster-turned-football-manager was shot dead after refusing to sell a player to Arkan; the player himself was thrown into the boot of a car and driven to Obilic, where he sensibly agreed to sign a contract. The matches themselves were scarcely more sportsmanlike: opposition players would receive threatening phone calls the night before key games, and Arkan was known to simply walk into opponents’ dressing rooms on the day of the match and inform the team that they should lose - or face the consequences. One way or another, FC Obilic suddenly became a very successful side: by 1998, they were Yugoslavian league champions and playing in the UEFA Champions’ League.

But the most popular couple in Serbia was still dogged by the past. One story told has them appearing on a TV Pink chat show, when a female viewer called in to compliment Ceca on her beautiful gold and diamond necklace - and accurately described an inscription on it. The host of the show asked how she could possibly know what was written on Ceca’s jewellery. ‘Because Arkan stole it from me in Bijeljina,’ said the caller.

In September 1999 a sealed indictment to bring Arkan to trial on war crimes charges was finally made public; it made it impossible for him to travel in Europe, and UEFA made apparent their displeasure at having a man accused of mass murder at the head of a Champions’ League club. Ceca took over as chairman of FC Obilic shortly afterward. At the time of his assassination, Arkan was Serbia’s most well-connected and damaging potential witness against Slobodan Milosevic.

For a year after her husband’s death, Ceca says she barely left the house; she wore black and mourned. But in June 2001, she staged a huge ‘comeback’ concert for 70,000 fans - almost all of them the teenage girls who had grown up on her music - at the Red Star Belgrade stadium. It had always been Arkan’s dream to see her play there:

‘I was thinking of never going back to singing again, but I knew he would have insisted. That’s why I dedicated the concert to him.’

At eight o’clock in the morning on 17 March this year, the Serbian police arrived on Ceca’s doorstep. Four police vans sealed off the street and 100 paramilitary police began an eight-hour search of the house. Ceca was alleged to have been associating with and harbouring Milorad ‘Legija’ Lukovic and Dusan ‘Siptar’ Spasojevic, the principal figures in the notorious Belgrade mafia outfit known as the Zemun Clan, who were widely believed to have organised the assassination of prime minister Zoran Djindjic five days earlier.

Legija, a heavily tattooed former member of the French Foreign Legion - his nickname means ‘Legionnaire’ - is one of the most dangerous men in Serbia. He was at the heart of the gangster state run by Slobodan Milosevic, and a long-time friend of Arkan - first as his deputy in the Tigers, and, later, as commanding officer of the ruthless paramilitary force known as the Red Berets.

Formed by Serbian State Security, the Red Berets were ostensibly an ‘anti-terrorist’ Special Operations Unit. But they fought in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo and became domestic enforcers for the Milosevic regime - beating and threatening political opponents and becoming feared as a government death squad. In later years, members of the Red Berets were recruited directly from Serbian prisons; like Arkan and his Tigers, they - and Legija - were murderers and gangsters, but at the same time officially endorsed and uniformed agents of the state.

The Red Berets’ lack of intervention on Milosevic’s side was crucial to the successful overthrow of his government in 2000. In return for this, it’s said, Legija expected Zoran Djindjic’s new regime to let him and his friends in the Zemun Clan continue to act outside the law - maintaining friendly relations with senior judicial officials and government ministers while killing with impunity. So when Djindjic began a clampdown on organised crime, Legija and Siptar decided he had to go. The successful assassination in March was the fifth attempt on the prime minister’s life they had organised in six months.

When Djindjic was shot, the government immediately declared a state of emergency and launched Operation Sabre, a sweeping police action against organised crime and those connected to the assassination. They would eventually arrest 10,000 people, testing Serbia’s legal apparatus to breaking point and horrifying international monitors such as Human Rights Watch. Those taken into custody included supreme court judges, police officers, the country’s own state prosecutor, the former head of state security, his deputy and secret service chiefs.

The search of Ceca’s house brought results. In the basement, police came upon a locked, armoured door. Ceca had no keys to it, so they had to break it down. Behind it, they found 21 firearms, three boxes of ammunition, telescopic sniper sights, sub-machine-gun silencers, gas masks, police batons and a selection of number plates registered to cars owned by the Zemun Clan.

At four that afternoon, with the search concluded, the officer in charge of the operation, Dragan Karleusa, finally arrived at the house. Karleusa is a senior interior ministry official who has led several anti-corruption operations in Serbia. His daughter, Jelena Karleusa, also happens to be another prominent and pneumatic turbo-folk star: Ceca’s principal rival.

‘She’s not my rival,’ says Ceca, diplomatically, when I mention this. ‘That’s not how I see it.’

But did it seem strange that it was him, because he’s the father of - She cuts me off: ‘No, no,’ she says, and laughs lightly. Strange things like that happen all the time here: ‘This is Serbia,’ she explains. ‘He was just doing his job.’

Ceca says she was not arrested, but asked to go to the police station, ‘To give a statement for half an hour, because they had found 11 of Zeljko’s pistols. And then I stayed for four months.’

She was taken to Belgrade’s central prison - a forbidding concrete building directly opposite the FC Obilic ground - and placed in solitary confinement. That night, news programmes in Serbia broadcast secretly taped video of Ceca chatting amiably with Legija in a Belgrade restaurant. TV and radio stations promptly stopped playing her music.

So, where did the guns and equipment in the house come from? ‘Zeljko had his own army: he was the commander of the Serbian Voluntary Guard. I didn’t share a house with a music teacher - if I had they would have found manuscripts or conductor’s batons.’ And all that equipment? ‘They were all presents given to Zeljko, by the president, the interior ministers, his friends. He loved firearms, but I didn’t know those weapons were in the house.’

So the sniper scopes were just part of an arms collection? ‘I don’t know where they found those. I didn’t actually see the search being done. I live in a big house. And it was all useless - they had experts determine what was usable and what wasn’t. They found them in a cellar, and I’ve never been down there. I’ve never even had keys for that room.’

Is it true she continued to spend time with Legija and Siptar? ‘Legija was the best man at our wedding - what else would I do? And, for a long time, he worked for the secret service. He was a colonel, a commander of the Special Operations Unit.’

But she denies the accusation that she associated with people who were wanted in connection with Djindjic’s murder. ‘That’s rubbish,’ she says. And what does “associating with someone” mean? I haven’t seen him for six months - although we live in the same city. And these other people, I knew them - but to associate with someone means to go out with them to dinners or to parties, to all sorts of places. But it wasn’t like that: I was acquainted with them. They were very nice to me. When Ceca does it, it’s scandalous, but senior state officials associated with them, too: going to dinners and parties. And nothing happens to them.’

Ceca refuses to denounce or disown any of her friends. ‘I’m not a coward. These friendships have lasted for more than 10 years. They didn’t start yesterday. Do you understand me? They’re not recent friendships - where I made a mistake’ What kind of people are they?

‘I wouldn’t really like to talk about it. I think there are people more competent than me to talk about these things.’ She laughs. ‘I can’t say anything bad about them… I’m so sorry that all these things have happened. I was a great friend with Zoran Djindjic and his family. So many families are suffering because of what’s happened. I’m reluctant to talk about it. I’d like to put it behind me, and to protect my family from all the labels that were attached to me. And I wouldn’t want to say something that might be misinterpreted.’

The house that Zeljko Raznatovic built is a legendary landmark in Belgrade - it’s one of the most famous of the kitsch fortresses that went up in the glory days of the city’s criminal elite: the ‘turbo-houses’. It’s hard to miss, even at night - four storeys of floodlit pastel yellow-painted neo-classicism and mirrored windows looming out of the darkness beside a busy main road. Next door is the Mexican embassy; up the hill lies Dedinje, the exclusive residential suburb of Belgrade where Slobodan Milosevic lived throughout his time as president. Directly across the street are gates four, five and six of the Red Star Belgrade football stadium.

Ceca’s home is clearly designed to keep people out. Where the front door should be, there is a smoked plate-glass shop front hung with Venetian blinds: it looks like a cafe, or a minicab office that recently went out of business. Sightseeing is discouraged: the three of us - me, the photographer and our interpreter - spend only a few minutes dawdling around the building, staring up at it from the pavement, before three scruffy, thick-set men with shaved heads appear. They eye us menacingly, and follow us, until it seems prudent for the interpreter to explain that we are early for our second appointment with Ceca.

We are summoned into the cafe with a click of the fingers, and motioned to a table decorated with the Red Star Belgrade official calendar for 2003. There is a threatening silence. The bodyguards glower at a television set in the corner and say nothing. The room is dimly lit, filled with discarded pieces of odd furniture and hung with pictures of Arkan and Ceca - Arkan with a model of a football stadium; Arkan dressed in combat fatigues; Ceca standing astride the globe, microphone in hand; the two of them on their wedding day. There is only one picture in the room that doesn’t feature either Ceca or her husband. Up in one darkened corner is a framed colour photograph of a man who looks very familiar. I ask the translator who it is. He looks up at the picture, and then hurriedly glances back at the floor. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he hisses, ‘later.’ It is Radovan Karadzic, president of the breakaway Bosnian Serb Republic, indicted by the Hague war crimes tribunal in 1995 for crimes against humanity, genocide, murder, plunder and violation of the laws or customs of war. He is officially recognised as one of the most wanted men on earth.

Upstairs, Ceca herself is an enthusiastic hostess: more relaxed than before, she is warm and solicitous. She greets us at the door with her two children, seven-year-old Vjeko and five-year-old Anastasia. She invites us into the living room, and is not happy until I’ve agreed to accept a glass of whisky. ‘Because you’re here in my house,’ she says brightly, ‘it means you’re welcome here as friends.’

The house is gaudy and sprawling: the drawing-room, with its artificial waterfall; the swimming-pool in the basement, with its mosaics and the plastic palm trees Ceca had specially imported from Holland; upstairs, through a series of doors riveted and upholstered in leather, is a games room and the guest rooms. She takes me up to the turret at the top of the building, with its panoramic aspects of Belgrade and which afforded - until they built a roof over the stadium - a perfect view of the Red Star Belgrade pitch. Along the way, she points out Zeljko’s extensive collection of paintings by Serbian artists. Almost every one is a tableau of defeat and disaster from the First World War. Outside the children’s playroom is one depicting a man being blindfolded for execution; near the games room another shows a skeleton in a tattered uniform stretched out in a desolate landscape, a bayonet half-buried in the mud nearby; birds wheel overhead. ‘They’re all scenes from World War One,’ she says, when I ask what this represents.

‘I wouldn’t know what it is.’

Eventually, she leads me out on to a balcony, where we stand, buffeted by a freezing wind.

Below, traffic speeds past in the night. ‘Zeljko and I always wanted to be in the house whenever we could, to be with the family,’ Ceca says. ‘Many people believe that Zeljko’s house is a huge castle. But it’s not - it’s a family house.’

They say, I tell her, that Arkan built four storeys of the house above the ground, and three below it: levels of secret bunkers in case of attack. ‘It’s a lie, a lie. I’m showing you everything. There are a lot of misconceptions about some things - and exaggerations published by the media. This is everything there is, so you can see the truth for yourself. This is everything,’ she says, ‘when it comes to the real Arkan.’

When we sit down to talk again, she sends the children away. Vjeko, she says, is suspicious, and wants to listen in. While she was in prison, she sent them off to stay with her parents - who told them their mother had gone on tour in the United States. When she was finally released, her children begged her not to go to America again: ‘Because they don’t have phones there.’ She still hasn’t told them what really happened.

In the end, Ceca spent a total of 121 days in prison - 30 of them in solitary confinement and 10 of them on the hunger strike she began after her sister Lidija was arrested in May. Ceca was released in July. All allegations relating to the assassination of Zoran Djindjic were dropped, but others remain. She has been charged with the unlicensed possession of 11 handguns, and - rather more seriously - with embezzling more than £8.1m from the transfers of 15 players from FC Obilic to football clubs around Europe. This she dismisses with the explanation that stealing from Obilic would be like burgling her own house: ‘It’s impossible… that I’ve stolen from something I made together with Zeljko, with my own money. We invested our own personal money in the club.’

These days, nobody plays Ceca’s records on the radio any more; and TV Pink and TV Palma have stopped showing her videos. At the end of March, Siptar was cornered by Serbian police and shot dead; Legija is still on the run.

In spite of the events of the past year, Ceca says she isn’t afraid for her personal safety; she insists that everything that’s happened has made her even more popular.

‘People love me,’ she says. ‘They tell me when I go out - they come up to me on the street and want to kiss and hug me.’ But these days, she rarely leaves the house. ‘I live far from the limelight,’ she says. ‘I’m used to it now.’

What she likes best is to lie on the sofa, surf channels on the TV and chat on the phone. She’s working on a new album, and maybe, later in the year, she’ll play another big concert: ‘Because that’s what my audience - my fans - want of me.’

However she isn’t interested in becoming famous outside the Balkans. ‘To make a European career, I’d have to devote myself to it 100 per cent. And I can’t do that, because I’ve got small children - and they’re the most important thing to me.’ And Ceca certainly doesn’t want to have anything more to do with politics: ‘Politics - I despise it. I think politics, throughout the Balkans, made everyone’s life hell. Nations have fallen apart because of politics - demented politics. And I don’t think anybody in their right mind,’ she says, ‘could prefer that kind of situation to peace.’

As we prepare to leave, Ceca asks why none of us has touched the cake - a long sponge roll, carefully cut and laid out on the coffee table in front of us. It has sweet cream filling, and a banana running through the middle of it: the kind of thing you might bake for a children’s birthday party. Ceca made it herself. ‘I’m from the south, where all the women are very good cooks - especially when it comes to cake. On the street,’ she says, ‘I’m a star. But at home, I am a housewife.’

And before we go, Ceca shares one more thing with me: it’s about the 11 guns. Two of them, she says, are hers: they’re legal and licensed. Target shooting is something of a hobby. Her father taught her how to use a rifle when she was 15. ‘I am,’ she says, ‘an excellent shot.’

To illustrate her point, she tells me a story about visiting a shooting range with her husband, early on in their marriage. Zeljko asked the pistol trainer there to go easy on her - he suggested her target be brought up close, only 15ft away, ‘so,’ he said to the trainer, ‘she doesn’t embarrass me.’ Ceca asked for one at 30 metres, the same distance away as her husband’s. Ceca emptied her pistol down the range.

Zeljko looked from the precisely drilled target to his wife and immediately made a promise. ‘I’ll never cheat on you with another woman,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be faithful to you until the day I die.’

‘So you see,’ says Svetlana Raznatovic, granting me a dark smile, ‘even Arkan was afraid of someone.’

The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Himself

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 19:06:48 -0400

Tony Kushner is one of the last public intellectuals left standing in the theater—or America. Heavy is the head that wears that crown.

By Jesse Green
Published Oct 17, 2010

(Photo: Christian Weber)

Of the 100 or so books Tony Kushner lugged to Provincetown for a four-week holiday this summer, about the trashiest was The Oxford Book of Death. He gestured toward it on a bookshelf in the penitentially furnished guest bedroom he was using as an office. “Do you know Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks?” he asked, petting another spine. Also handy were The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx; Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite; treatises on suicide, Lenin, longshoremen, Horace, red-diaper babies, and probabilism.

Even Brecht, his hero, read detective novels for pleasure, but if you’re Tony Kushner, to whom everything is a dialectic, your concept of vacation will challenge your concept of vocation, and lose. Or something very different from either will emerge: a weird amalgam of cooking, board games, procrastination, paralysis, and the fear, often realized, of disappointing others. For Kushner, the conflict between being a good person and enjoying life—between the community and the individual or, if you like, between socialism and capitalism—is not an abstraction. His 1994 play Slavs! bears the subtitle Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, and he really does think about them constantly. In the bathroom of a previous house, in upstate New York, he installed subway tile that spelled out WE ENJOY BEING IN THE OPEN COUNTRYSIDE SO MUCH BECAUSE IT HAS NO OPINION CONCERNING US. A touch of ego-deflating Nietzsche in the shower is very Tony Kushner.

So is renting a gorgeous home on Commercial Street and then fretting, in the back, over revisions of a new play about the problem of economic justice in America. (Hence the books.) Officially and with characteristic exuberance called The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, it had its premiere at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis last year and will begin performances at the Public Theater in March, in a co-production with the Signature Theatre. At the Signature, the new play is a tent pole of its hagiographic Tony Kushner season, which begins next week with the first major New York revival of Angels in America and concludes with The Illusion, his 1988 Corneille adaptation, in April. Though the Signature has devoted seasons to playwrights who were younger than Kushner (he’s 54), it has never devoted so much money: Angels alone, says artistic director James Houghton, is “the largest project we’ve ever worked on.”

The canonization of Saint Tony—complete with miracles and a few stigmata—comes at an odd moment in his professional life. As a dramatic writer, he has never been more popular. The Signature sold all 10,000 subscription seats for Angels on the first day they were available; 10,000 nonsubscription tickets, released six weeks later, sold within an hour, crashing the website. And it’s not just Angels: Everything but his pocket lint is being remounted. An evening of early one-acts called Tiny Kushner has played Minneapolis, Berkeley, and London. Henry Box Brown, an unpublished oddity he’d all but disowned, was recently resurrected by NYU graduate students. The result is a useful overview of Kushner’s astonishingly fast transformation from early-eighties East Village egghead to Broadway radical darling of 1993. All the ingredients—the political ferocity, the high-low humor, the psychological acuity, the deep river of lyricism and daredeviltry of form—are there from the beginning; in his masterpiece you suddenly see them emulsify.

On the other hand, except for the new play, he has produced nothing big for the stage since Caroline, or Change in 2002. The man who could say, in 2000, “I love movies, but somebody else should write them” has spent much of the interim writing several, including two for Steven Spielberg, no less: the 2005 thriller Munich and an Abraham Lincoln screenplay he thinks may be “the best thing I’ve ever written.” Whether we will ever get the benefit of that achievement is an open question. Liam Neeson, long slated to star, dropped out this summer, leaving the fate of the project uncertain.

Weighing years of potential output in the theater against the inducements even an unmade movie can offer—well, such are the compromise calculations that can distract a progressive artist, if he’s lucky, at middle age. (Is befriending Daniel Craig adequate compensation for ceding copyright on one’s work?) But just as distracting to Kushner have been the compromises of progressiveness itself. He has arrived at the point where what he has created or might create, however valued, is not as politically fungible as what he can say right now from atop the pile of his published works. So the BlackBerry pings. Will you chair the New York Civil Liberties Union’s “Broadway Stands Up for Freedom” fund-raiser? Will you accept the Shofar Award from Central Synagogue and speak to the congregation afterward? What about a rally, interview, petition, preface, panel, blurb, favor for an old pal? Even with a business manager, a lawyer, a personal assistant, and three agents, he cannot handle it all, and his attempts to prioritize just wind themselves into circles. “The primary thing I should do,” he says, “apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I’m afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in The Nation or not. But you want to participate.”

A Flock of Angels
Two decades of millennium approaching.

That his writing time must be jealously protected does not mean he uses it more efficiently than when no one wanted anything from him. In Provincetown, the revisions of The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guidewere not exactly flowing, no doubt because the story hits close to home. Like Kushner’s own family, it features a widower father and three adult children. But in the play the father is a retired longshoreman and Communist Party member who, despairing over the compromises he made, gathers the clan around the dinner table to discuss his plans for suicide.

“I find this particular play very frightening,” Kushner says, “because I don’t feel in control. I don’t know that I’ll get to the bottom of it. It’s about old-fashioned Freudian things like death drives: things that are antithetical to progress and hope. But I have to explore it—not to get rid of it but to give it its full voice and power.”

One Minneapolis critic, in a grudgingly respectful review, said the play skated “precipitously close to the razor’s edge of incoherence.” That edge is pretty much where Kushner aims to be—“at the place where my abilities end.” But in this case he got there inadvertently; thanks to his immersion in Lincolnalia, he wrote much of the play on the fly. On the first day of rehearsal, the cast had no dialogue. By the end of the run, they had perhaps too much: three hours and 28 minutes of operatic family drama, where family is understood to mean not just a brownstone full of squabbling Italian-American leftists but also the country and the world. If the play grew great and cumbersome in its first gestation—the director, Michael Greif, described pages flying out of the printer, with most of the new material “so right that we were able to just incorporate it as is”—at least Kushner shortened the title, for daily usage, to iHo.

Kushner is loyal to gay themes. (In iHo the gay son falls in love with a hustler; his lesbian sister does something decidedly nonlesbian.) As a result, he often seems, in his plays but also in the work that distracts him from his plays, to be the gay world’s leading and perhaps only public artist. Also the theater’s. Also the left’s. There are, of course, gay commentators with a wider audience in America, but they aren’t artists; there are major playwrights who are produced more often, but they aren’t political; there are even a few bedraggled artists (aren’t there?) who sign petitions and talk to Charlie Rose about the redistribution of wealth. But they don’t work in the theater. The kind of figure that flourished in the arts from the fifties through the seventies, often using the stage as a venue—Mary McCarthy, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, Leonard Bernstein, Susan Sontag, and, later, in his AIDS plays, Larry Kramer—has all but disappeared. Surely replacements exist, waiting in the wings, but the theatrical platform they might in the past have mounted has shriveled almost to nothing. It’s hard to think of anyone but Kushner who has the intellectual heft, the opportunity, and the desire to balance on what’s left of it.

In any case, he tries. But while he can write a commencement address (as one friend put it) “in the time it takes the rest of us to turn on the computer and brew a cup of coffee,” the reputational writing comes insanely slow. The only thing that speeds him up is the passing of a deadline; until then, he desperately pursues distractions. First he must gather the “means of production”: not just reference works but also the perfect fountain pens and notebooks—eighteen for Lincoln so far. Soon enough he’s on Google “and going down a hidey-hole that leads to another and you never get back.” When that pales, there’s always life: e-mail, “closet-cleaning overdrive,” gardening, napping—“and, well, you know, other things.” Kushner performs a Blanche DuBois twinkle, pretending to be embarrassed. “You can become a lotus-eater, or one of those rats that stop asking for food and just die.”

Yet for all his fetishes and distractions, Kushner has produced a dozen or so major plays in the 23 years since he made his professional debut with A Bright Room Called Day. None has saturated the culture likeAngels, which ran for twenty months on Broadway, winning two Tony awards for best play and (as he calls it) the Poulet Surprise. Nor has its fame diminished; in this season’s premiere of The Simpsons, we learned that even 8-year-old Lisa is a fan of the “gay fantasia on national themes,” having played the Angel at arts camp.

That Angels came so close to the burning heart of the Zeitgeist left Kushner fearing he would never get there again. But in fact he has been there so often that he seems to have passed right through it. If you reread the plays in sequence, he emerges as a necromancer in black robes, consulting the dead to predict the future. Angels, so much a cry in the dark about AIDS when it was written, seems now to be as much about the Earth’s potentially fatal illness as gay men’s; the writing of Homebody/Kabul anticipated by years the U.S. war in Afghanistan. In East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis, an unproduced teleplay commissioned by Alec Baldwin, Kushner imagined an anti-tax radical website called www.teaparty .com—in 1996. And though Caroline, or Change, one of the two or three great musicals of the new century, couldn’t sustain an audience when it transferred to Broadway after a sellout run at the Public, it amazingly suggested, in 2002, the imminence of a black (if female) president.

The fate of the actual first black president has been on Kushner’s mind as he takes stabs at rewriting iHo,though the original was inspired, in part, by the Broadway stagehands’ strike of 2007. “I thought all us liberal-shmiberals would be out on the line with them,” he says, “but instead it was: ‘They’re ruining the theater with their featherbedding.’ It was stunning to me, because isn’t the idea of labor unions that you get working-class people to live in nice houses and send their kids to college? It’s great that they’re making $100,000 a year, why the fuck shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t they have an iPod?”

The strike got him thinking about the “old bad propensity for progressive people, when confronted with triumphant political evil, to take careful aim and shoot themselves in the feet.” The resulting play, he says, “is about a specific issue in terms of the American left, of which I consider myself a part. We are all aware of the monstrous price people pay for powerlessness, but are less honest with ourselves about how, when you have no power, you have some relief from responsibility. To be oppressed is to be given the opportunity to see certain things. It’s better, of course, to have power and try to retain the insight into powerlessness you personally gained or can glean from history. But I don’t know if we recognize the degree to which we’re satisfied with our inability to change. Revolution becomes a fantasy people hold without ever having to be responsible for it. I’m hugely impatient with it now. There is a failure to recognize that the infantile anarchism that was part of the sixties was co-opted by the counterrevolution, by the anarchism of the Reagan years, and turned into a kind of ego anarchism-libertarianism that meshed perfectly with Ayn Rand and all that nonsensical malevolent crap.

“Mark and I just had a discussion about it; we don’t see eye to eye”—Kushner married Mark Harris, a journalist who sometimes writes for New York, before a rabbi in Manhattan in 2003 and then legally in Massachusetts before a “lady motorcycle cop,” in 2008. “But I feel that after Obama’s inauguration the left immediately settled into our very familiar role of being the backseat drivers or principled opposition, and have expressed volubly every disappointment. Not even after the inauguration. The minute they heard that Rick Warren was speaking at the inauguration, LGBT people were saying, ‘It’s over, he’s just like all the others.’ Let alone those who say there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats, which I think is glib and profoundly dangerous. What frightens me is that I feel that we’re in the process of dismantling the coalition of constituencies that brought Obama to the White House.

“My feeling is that there are too many of us on the left who believe that politics is an expression of personal purity. Because of our divorcement from electoral politics and abandonment of a belief in the possibility of radical change through participatory democracy, we have become profoundly uncomfortable with, and ignorant of, the complexities and discomfort of making change in a democracy. I’m guilty of this in some of the earlier things I wrote, too. I have no illusion of being able to change Rush Limbaugh’s mind, or of being able to make John Boehner anything other than a profoundly indecent person, but what makes something happen in an electoral democracy is compromise, negotiation, and strategizing, and to a certain extent even what in the Clinton era became fashionable to call lying. There are lies, and those should not be tolerated. But there is a degree of rhetorical finesse that’s required to maneuver through very treacherous waters. I’m willing to believe that this man who got himself elected president is actually a very skilled politician and is negotiating imponderably difficult conditions.”

Harris assures me that the rushing streams of talk are not always so high-minded: “He’s surprisingly able to ask, ‘Is there another Project Runway on tonight?’ without its leading to a discussion of the Aeneid.” Maybe so, but the pressure of people seeking wisdom and a million other things from Kushner seems to have overprimed the pump.

“And the LGBT community, what are they, we, looking for?” Kushner continues. “Yes, we’ve been asked to wait a very long time, asked to eat oceans of shit by the Democratic Party; we’ve been 75 percent loyal for decades without a wobble and without a whole lot of help from these people. And it’s important that somebody keeps screaming; the trick is how do you scream, and who do you scream to? If we’re dissatisfied with these Democrats, let’s get better ones instead of fantasies about mass uprisings that are going to resemble the October Revolution. Yes, it might sometimes feel good to throw the newspaper across the room. There’s much criticism of Obama that’s legitimate. He backs down on things, he waffles, like on the mosque, and you wince. And I consider his decision to appeal the Federal court ruling abolishing DADT to be unethical, tremendously destructive, and potentially politically catastrophic. But is Obama really supposed to say, as the first African-American president, that same-sex marriage is his first priority? Clearly he believes in it; he’s a constitutional scholar. It’s not conceivable to me that he believes that state-sponsored marriage should be unavailable to same-sex couples, even if he has religious scruples. But do I think he should have lost the election for the chance to say he supported same-sex marriage? No. Given that we would have had John McCain and Sarah Palin, I would have said, ‘Say anything you need to.’ So if he’s moving very cautiously, with two wars he’s inherited and a collapsing global economy and the planet coming unglued—Okay!”

In Angels in America, Kushner basically clobbers the moral relativism of his stand-in, Louis Ironson. Played on Broadway by Joe Mantello (and in the revival by Zachary Quinto), Louis is a logorrheic gay Jew who leaves his lover the moment the lover shows signs of AIDS. This unpardonable, though hardly unthinkable, betrayal puts him in the doghouse for some six hours of stage time. Mantello, who asked to be dressed in hooded sweatshirts and vintage overcoats like those Kushner wore, says he could feel the audience turn on him—as much for Louis’s cowardice as for his relentless justifications. To hear Kushner, who gave the best lines to the character eviscerating Louis’s defense, offer a brief for patience and compromise is a bit of a shock. Has the man who wrote those blistering scenes—not to mention A Bright Room Called Day, which offers a straight-faced comparison of Reagan to Hitler—mellowed?

“I find this particular play very frightening, because I don’t feel in control.”

Yes and no. He now considers A Bright Room Called Day—about the “tragic failure” of socialism in Weimar Germany—an “immature play.” And while the “self-discipline and regulation” of mature artists like Haydn and Trollope remain somewhat beyond his grasp, he has made a connection between personal and political disorder. “The older I get, the less I see chaos as the goal of anything.” What he feels he has attained, at this “crossover moment” in his life, is a “more complex worldview, with more interesting doubts and confusions.” He is, he says, less angry and more forgiving, and better able to express both in his work.

He is certainly more comfortable with himself. He used to gnaw at his talent as if it were a manacle. Now “he’s made peace with it,” says Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public and Kushner’s longtime “comrade.” “He’s still tortured, of course, but not the way he used to be. His marriage has been very good for him in that regard”—even if his public appearances have sometimes left Harris feeling a bit like Pat Nixon, “waving benignly while sipping from a hip flask.”

Kushner’s public appearance has itself changed. The Jewfro of his first fame is now cropped tight; with the help of Weight Watchers, he has dropped and kept off the extra pounds that once made him look less imposing than, at almost six-foot-two, he really is. Still, he mitigates the effect of his beaky, high-domed, El Greco bearing with touches of camp applied like beauty spots. He bats his eyes, refers to his (male) “girlfriends,” plays peekaboo with intimate details. Then he flips right back to Thanatos and the Wobblies in beautifully parsed paragraphs. The alternation is so deft and funny it seems planned, a costume of casualness like his name. (He was born Anthony Robert Kushner.) You can almost read the stage directions—which is not to say he is false. Rather, he’s theatrical: a man of the theater. Serious past anyone’s requirement, he is also in every sense playful.

This is much more evident now, in what he calls “the Meistersinger years,” than it was in his youth. His origin story is, like his dramaturgy, a cabinet of curiosities: the “fairly chaotic” household of New Yorkers displaced to Louisiana, the clarinetist father and bassoonist mother, the hearing-impaired older sister, the musical younger brother, the bizarre combination of cosmopolitan culture and southern gothic. He was free to roam the “riverine, woodsy” landscape of his neighborhood but was left in the dark about matters closer to home. His mother’s disappearance during a harrowing bout of breast cancer when he was 11—she was poisoned by over-radiation after a mastectomy and only survived thanks to two surgeries over a period of six months—was explained in the local manner: “She was fine and in New York shopping and was way too busy to write.” His sister, Lesley, now a painter living in Brooklyn, was determined to discover the truth, but Kushner preferred to distract himself with anger: a version of the avoidance of emotional pain that is at the heart of his difficulty writing.

In any case it was, he feels, a sign of a kind of attention deficit that produced his magpie erudition. That he eventually pinned that erudition to the stage may be another of his mother’s inadvertent gifts; she was, he says, “the local tragedienne,” playing Betty the Loon, Mrs. Frank, and an “indelible” Linda Loman at a community theater in Lake Charles. In kindergarten, after seeing her carried into Freud’s office and laid on a couch in the melodrama A Far Country, Kushner got sick, became paralyzed, “and had to be carried to my bed.” In that strange, almost hysterical identification with a character played by his mother, many of the strands of his adult personality and profession find their origin. “It was then I became a playwright,” he says.

Also, one might infer, a dedicated analysand. His faith in therapy is so conflated with his progressive politics that he sometimes comes off as the commandant and sole internee in an endless reeducation camp. (To his non-fans, his plays feel like much the same thing.) It is one of his best features that, however grand he gets, he sees himself coming from miles away: the pretentiousness, the too-muchness, the debilitating anxieties that no real activist lets get in the way. But it is sometimes unclear whether his willingness to absorb all censure, and trump it with his own, is a sign of radical vulnerability or a diabolically clever defense against it. Into one of his iHo notebooks he has pasted a copy of a letter he received from Eustis’s stepfather, a very thoughtful old communist who took issue with the play’s portrayal of the radical left. But the man’s neatly typed criticisms do not compare with some of the things Kushner himself scrawls in the notebooks, such as “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing and I’m going to die in the gutter.”

Hollywood has paid him handsomely, though. It has also repaired the “bitter disappointment” he felt early on, when his television and film work had yet to achieve what he most wanted from it: “to provide its author a pretext to meet Meryl Streep.” (Streep starred in the 2003 HBO mini-series of Angels; the next year Kushner held her umbrella at a New Dramatists luncheon.) Though he struggled to adjust himself to a visual medium, he doesn’t disdain the product as many playwrights do: “The Wire and now Breaking Bad are the best drama being written anywhere,” he says. “It’s a race to the bottom to see who can depict the most awful things most truly.”

The Lincoln portrait isn’t that kind of story; Kushner took pains, he says, to avoid the feeling of a mini-series or “a pageant at the Mall of America.” And he has accepted not having the last word—as if a writer ever does. His Munich screenplay, intended as “a critique of state vigilantism,” had Israel absolutists apoplectic, and he is often the object of ad hominem—sometimes creepily homophobic—attacks for his politics. But within the theater his stances only enhance his status, and he gets what he wants. “Look, if you’re lucky in my profession,” says Eustis, “you encounter someone who you just believe in absolutely. I believe in Tony absolutely. He is the greatest living playwright; that’s a slightly provocative statement as long as Edward Albee is alive. He knows, although he acts sometimes like he doesn’t, that he has a standing offer from me to produce anything he wants me to produce.”

Keep in mind that this comes from a man who, after working on early versions of Angels for years, and co-directing the Los Angeles production, was basically fired by Kushner as the play headed to Broadway. (George C. Wolfe took over, to great acclaim.) Loyalty came in second place to what Kushner saw as the needs of the work—or, looked at less charitably, to ambition. It was, after all, the moment of his big break, and for a playwright those moments are surpassingly brief and rare. Of course, they are also brief and rare for directors. In any case, though the two men fell out for a year or two, they managed to repair the relationship to the point that Eustis, not exactly a meek personality, could say recently that it is sometimes the joy of his professional life “to carry Tony Kushner’s bags.”

“He wishes I was being ironic,” Eustis adds now, “but I wasn’t.”

The switch, and others like it, established Kushner’s reputation as a tiger in the guise of a pussycat. The reputation isn’t quite right; his sweetness is no less genuine than his fierceness, though it took a while before the fierceness (like his gayness) came out of the closet. When the playwright and actress Ellen McLaughlin met him in 1984 at the New York Theater Workshop, where he was associate artistic director and her play The Narrow Bed was in production, Kushner was so modest she couldn’t get a bead on him. “I asked him what he did,” she recalls, “and he said, ‘I sort of do plays and have this company,’ and I thought,How sweet. Then he showed me A Bright Room Called Day and I thought, Oh, fuck, he’s a genius!”

At the time McLaughlin had a little more clout than Kushner, and helped him get an agent. Later, when cast as the titular semi-deity early in the development of Angels, she was able to watch the Eustis drama, and many others, play out as if from above. “The promises you make when you’re in the happy thick of a great rehearsal process are not always promises you can keep,” she says. “And sometimes if you can keep them, it hurts the production. The thing about Tony that anyone who’s ever worked with him knows is that he’s simply not afraid of hurting people or pissing them off, because his dedication to the work is absolute. I admire that, but I’ve watched people suffer for it, and have been winged a few times myself. He gives notes that are difficult to hear or take in, he sheepdogs directors until he gets them to do what he wants”—true to form, he has attended almost every preview of the Angels revival, offering sheaves of opinions. “And radical rewrites come in far, far past the tolerance of a cast—some on the last preview, thank you very much! But then you look at the rewrite and it’s, well, brilliant, so what are you going to do?”

“Too many of us on the left believe that politics is an expression of personal purity.”

McLaughlin, like others who “became inessential to his work,” bears no malice toward Kushner. Rather the opposite: She misses his “remarkable company,” the “fireworks display of his mind,” and even the harness and twenty-pound wings that once let her fly onstage. Playing the Homebody in Seattle was “the most amazing thing I’ve ever gotten to do as an actor,” she says. “I suspect the reason no former colleague speaks with much bitterness about Tony,” she adds, “is that the good times were just too good to be completely poisoned by whatever happened after.”

And yet the irony is too rich—too Kushneresque—to leave at that. “Tony writes a lot about accountability,” says Mantello, who remains an unreserved admirer. “It’s almost poetic that it’s the thing that keeps him up at night. How am I going to be accountable to my collaborators? The dilemma is a human dilemma and the contradiction is in all of us. But it’s more acute in artists with superhuman standards like Tony. And what happens when your life’s work is about community but you have these other things inside of you that contradict what you’re writing about? Didn’t it blow your mind to find that Arthur Miller had a son he put away?” A recent biography revealed that the author of All My Sons—a play about man’s responsibility not only to kin but to all humankind—institutionalized his Down syndrome son at birth and never spoke of or to him again.

Well, Williams was a pill-popper, O’Neill a drunk, Brecht a womanizer. By the standard of the modern playwrights in his own pantheon, Kushner really is a saint: the soul of probity, kindness, and social engagement. And though he has certainly lost friends, he seems to have spent his professional life seeking to disprove Auden’s dictum that real artists aren’t nice: “All their best feelings go into their work and life has the residue.”

To the extent he has succeeded it is because there is such an extraordinary amount of feeling to begin with. It spills over the banks of the plays. He has compared the process to making a proper lasagne: “All the yummy nutritious ingredients you’ve thrown into it have almost-but-not-quite succeeded in overwhelming the design. A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.” What some critics find overstuffed and argumentative, others find rich and, in its refusal to dictate answers, humane. “The idea isn’t to hector people,” Kushner says. “I don’t know how to get out of the morass, either. I just know that there’s a great deal of value in not running away from it. That’s why we made this weird activity”—theater. “So we could find social occasions to encounter these things. If you have value as an artist it’s probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you’re going to have.”

Kushner freely admits the process isn’t good for much but the play. “When really writing I’m not a good friend. Because writing disorganizes the social self, you become atomized. It scrambles you, sometimes to the point that I’m incapable of speech. I feel that if I start speaking, I’ll lose the writing, like getting off the treadmill.”

But few try harder to live up to their ideals. And where should a playwright be his best self but in his plays? Kushner’s have the double vision of how things are and how they ought to be, the latter shadowing the former, sometimes as angels, sometimes as ghosts. (Sylvia Kushner died, after a recurrence of her cancer, in 1990.) His plots are therefore very crowded, but they gain power from that: “He puts almost indigestible things at the center to force them to expand, to force human insight,” says Eustis. Among those indigestible things are Ethel Rosenberg saying Kaddish over Roy Cohn in Angels, and Laura Bush reading Dostoyevsky to dead Iraqi children in Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy. And among the resulting insights are that people are not one thing or another but both; that they may betray and still be loved; that even as Louis Ironson can grow, so can a president, so can a country, given time and emergency. After all, it was that gradualist Lincoln who brought off the most radical change in American history.

“It’s about the messianic moment,” Kushner says, “making a leap of faith that you can change things you thought couldn’t change. We should recognize in developing a complex and somber view of the world that at some points recklessness counts. ‘I don’t know if this going to work, but let’s try it.’ ”

He’s talking about supporting Obama in the same terms he uses to describe his lasagne dramaturgy. Yet finally, it’s harder than it sounds. In writing Angels, Kushner struggled with the fate of Louis Ironson, who can’t reasonably leave the story when he leaves his lover in Act I. “It took five years to get Louis to come back into the hospital room,” says Eustis. “Finally Tony brought in the scene near the end in which Louis says, ‘Failing in love isn’t the same as not loving.’ It took him that long because he had to figure it out as a human being. It was his synthesis of the contradiction between freedom and responsibility that’s at the heart of Angels: Freedom doesn’t let you off the hook, and failing doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for trying.”

Nor, Kushner might add, does success.

The (Chinese) Gangs of New York [Village Voice, 1977]

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:28:00 -0400

by Mark Jacobson

First published in the Village Voice, January 31, 1977

Late last year, the young Chinese couple who ran the Szechuan D’Or restaurant on East 40th Street were murdered. The incident sparked fear that the crime which had riddled Chinatown was moving uptown. Police launched a citywide campaign to wipe it out. The crackdown played havoc with established vice in Chinatown. Youth gangs, foot soldiers of neighborhood crime, were forced out of town. Venerable gambling houses were shuttered. Extortion rackets that affect every restaurant in the area were interrupted. Even the Chinatown Connection, one of the city’s most active heroin conduits, was blocked.

But it will take more than a few gambling raids to shake the historical forces at work in Chinatown today. The Mott Street gangs are back. This is the story of who controls that street, and how they got there.

October 1976

Midnight in Chinatown, everyone seems nervous. The old waiters look both ways before going into the gambling joint on Pell Street. Ladies bleary from a 10-hour day working over sewing machines in the sweatshops are hurrying home and restaurants are closing earlier than usual. At the Sun Sing Theatre on East Broadway, underneath a hand-painted poster of a bleeding kung fu hero, a security guard is fumbling with a padlock. Ask him how business is and he shakes his head, “No good.” Ask him why and he points his finger right between his eyes and says, “bang!”

A Quiet New Year

Pacing back and forth in front of the coffee shop at 56 Mott Street, Nicky Louie has got a lot to lose if there’s any serious gunplay tonight. A good-looking skinny guy with searing brown eyes wearing a green army fatigue jacket, Nicky is the leader of the Ghost Shadows, the gang of 50 or so Hong Kong immigrants who’ve been terrorizing Chinatown for the past few years. Born Hin Pui Lui in the Kowloon slums 22 years ago, Nicky came to “low tow” (Chinatown) in the late ’60s.

The old Hong Kong people naively called this new slum “Gum Shan,” which means Gold Mountain. But Nicky is sharper than that. Now way he would end up a faceless waiter headed for the TB ward. He was born for greater things. When he first got into the gangs half a dozen years ago, people say he had the biggest mouth in Chinatown. He was the gun-wielding wild man, always up for action, willing to do anything to get attention. It paid off. Nicky’s been the top Shadow ever since 1973, when the gang’s former big boss Nei Wong got caught with a Hong Kong cop’s girlfriend. The cop, in New York for a surprise visit, ran across Wong and his betrothed in the Chinese Quarter Nightclub beneath the approach ramp to the Manhattan Bridge and blew off both their heads with his police revolver.

Since then Nicky’s rise in the Chinatown youth gang world has been startling. He has piloted the once ragtag Shadows from the bleak days when they were extorting a few free meals and dollars from the greasy spoons over on East Broadway to their current haunt, Mott Street, the big time.

Controlling Mott Street means the Shadows get to affiliate themselves with the On Leong tong, the riches and most influential organization in Chinatown. Working with the On Leong gives the Shadows a piece of the money generated by tong (the word means simply “hall” or “association”) activities. The gangs guard the gambling houses in the On Leong territory that operate in the musty lofts and basements along Mott Street. The Shadows also provide the muscle for their version of the age-old restaurant-protection racket (not to mention considerable “free- lance” extortion on the side). The gangs also act as runners in the Chinatown Connection heroin trade, bringing the stuff across the Canadian border and spreading it throughout New York. The money filters down to Nicky and his lieutenants; they filter the spoils down to the younger Shadows.

For Nicky, working with the tongs means a premiere position among the other warlords in Chinatown, plus a weekly income that ranges from $200 to $2000, depending on who you talk to. In any event, itís enough to buy a swift $7000 Peugeot to tool down Canal Street in.

But tongs are fickle. If another group of Hong Kong teenagers say their arch enemy the White Eagles or the hard-charging Flying Dragons, who take target practice on the pigeons down by the East Riveróshould show the On Leong theyíre smarter or tougher than the Shadows, Nicky’s boys could be gone tomorrow. After all, it’s happened before.

Shootout on Bayard Street

Could again. Two years ago Nicky and the Shadows pushed the surly Eagles off the street. In September, after licking their wounds over in Brooklyn and down in Florida, the Eagles with their leader Paul Ma, Nicky’s main rival, returned. And they were not going to be satisfied with crummy Elizabeth Street. Soon the Eagles started appearing on Bayard Street, part of Shadowland. Then Paul Ma, a ballsy dude, set up his own gambling house on the block; it was a direct affront to Nicky.

On September 8, the Shadows struck back, shooting a bunch of Eagles, including Paul Ma and a gang member’s wife, in front of Yuen Yuen Snack Shop on Bayard. It set off the most hair-raising month of streetfighting in Chinatown history; no weekend went by withoug a major incident. The now infamous Wong Kee chopchop was the highlight of the war. According to cops, the Shadows, including Nicky himself, crashed through the door of the Wong Kee Rice Shop on the Italian end of Mott and carved up one Eagle with chef’s kitchen cleavers and stabbed another with a fork. Which is why Nicky is on the street ‘watch’ tonight. His presence keeps things cool. Without Nicky pacing up and down Mott Street, the Shadows might as well go back to East Broadway. He’s a Chinatown legend. The Scientific Killer

Fifty years ago, chances are Nicky might have been lying around the “joss houses” and street-fighting alongside the hatchet and gunmen of Chinatown’s “tong wars.” In those days, the two big tongs, the On Leong and the Hip Sing of Pell Street, battled on the sidewalks over the few available women and the opium trade, and out of sheer boredom. Back then, there were legendary “boo hoy dow” (warriors): like Mock Dock, the great gambler known as “The Philosophical Killer,” and Yee Toy, “The Girl-Faced Killer.” Most famous of all, however, was the plain-faced Sing Dock. “The Scientific Killer.” Once, after hearing of an outbreak of war in New York, he rode in the baggage compartment of a train (Chinese weren’t allowed to ride up front) for six weeks from San Francisco. That was when Pell Street was called “Red Street” and the crook in Doyers Street was known as “The Bloody Angle.”

Today the Chinatown warrior has changed. The young gangs are not respected tong members, as Sing Dock was; they’re foot soldier-peons who are in it for the bucks. Nicky and the Shadows have given up black overcoats for fatigue jacket and puffy hairdos. (Asked if their hair is a Hong Kong fashion, the gangs say, “No, man, it’s cause we dig Rod the Mod, man.” Meaning Rod Stewart.) But the nicknames are still colorful. Hanging with Nicky tonight are old-time Shadows “Mongo,” the wild-man enforcer who got his name from Blazing Saddles, and “Japanese,” who shaved his head after he heard that things might go easier for him in jail if he looked like a “Muslim.” There are some guys with grade-B movie names like Lefty and Four-Eyes, but most of the kids go for names like “Stinkybug,” “White-Faced Tiger,” “Pointy Lips,” “Porkupine,” and “Nigger Choy.” There must be 20 kids named “Apple Head” running around Chinatown. Nicky, however, is just Nicky.

The Ghost Legend

Some say Nicky has nine lives. The estimates of how many slugs he carries around inside his chest vary. According to an ex-gang member, “When he turn over in bed at night, he can hear them bullets clank together.”

Last May teenage hitmen from the San Francisco-based Wah Ching gang flew across the country just to kill Nicky. Some say it was on an Eagle contract. For whatever reason they pumped a dozen bullets into the middle of a Saturday afternoon shopping crowd on Mott Street while Nicky disappeared across Canal Street. The Chings missed everyone and wound up getting pinched by two drug cops who just happened to be eating won ton in the nearby Joy Luck Restaurant.

The “ging cha” (police) have arrested Nicky for everything from robbery to extortion to murder to rape, but he’s never been convicted.

Detective Neal Maurillo, who is assigned full-time to the fifth Precinct’s Chinese gang section, is a smart cop. He realizes he’s got a crazy and hopelessly complicated job. Chinatown gangs aren’t like the bruisers fighting over street corners and ghetto reps up in the Bronx. There’s piles of money, history, and poitics behind what Nicky and his guys are doing. And since it’s Chinatown, they’d rather do it with hard-on things like “Savage Skulls” emblazoned on the back.

But Neal knows all the faces on Mott Street. He memorizes gang members’ names and birthdays, walks down the street and says, “Hey, happy birthday Pipenose, seen Dice around.” That blows minds. Sometimes Nicky Louie calls Neal up just to shoot the breeze. Neal says, “That kid is okay really. But I’ve been chasing him for five years and I’ll nail him. He knows it, too. We talk about it all the time.” Neal remembers the time he came upon Nicky lying face down in a pool of blood near the Bowery. He said, “Nicky, come on, you’re gonna die, tell me who shot you.”

Nicky looked up at Neal, his eyes blazing arrogance, and said, “Fuck you.” Of course, Nicky pulled through in fine shape and the two had a good laugh about it later.

Tales of this sort of exploit are enough tot keep the Dragons and the hard-case White Eagles at bay. The On Leong like Nicky’s style and probably have him tabbed as a future officer. If not, he might go over to the rival Hip Sing tong, which backs youth gangs of its own.

But you have to step back from all this for a minute. There hasn’t been a tong war in Chinatown since the ’20s. And Nicky Louis is not a reincarnation of Sing Dockóhe’s a disaffected ghetto kid growing into what most people would call a dangerous gangster. But you also have to remember that this is Chinatown. Down here the past and present are a little more difficult to sort out.

The Tenement Tongs

Toy Shan is a village in the mountainous region of Canton from which the great majority of those who settled New York’s Chinatown came in the mid 1800s. It’s possible that the Toy Shan settlement in New York was as closed a community as has ever existed in urban America. Much of this is bound up in mutual racism, including the infamous “Exclusion Acts” that effectively banned Chinese women from the United States for more than 60 years.

The havoc these laws wreaked on the Toy Shan consciousness is difficult to underestimate. Drinking and gambling, both venerable Chinese passions, became endemic. There were numerous gambling houses in Chinatown (contemporary houses pull in from $40,000 to $50,000 on a good night), and Chinese faces became familiar at the city’s racetracks, probably the only place they were, outside restaurants and laundries, which prompted wags to dub the Belmont subway special, “The Shanghai Express.” Prostitutes from uptown were frequent visitors to Toy Shan back then. Chatham Square was one of the best non-hotel beats in the city. By the 1940s, when the laws finally began to ease, the ratio of men to women in Chinatown ranged as high as 10 to 1.

The Toy Shans were not eager to mingle with the people they called “lo fan” (foreign devils) in any event. Determined to survive, they built an extralegal society based on furtive alliances, police bribes, creative bookkeeping, and immigration scams. The aim was to remain invisible and separate. To this day, few people in Chinatown are known by their real names; most received new identities, such as the Lees, Chins, and Wongs from the family associations, who declared them “cousins” to get them into the country.

In place of the “Western government,” they substituted the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), an organization to which the neighborhood’s 65-odd family and merchant associations belong. To this day every other president of the CCBA has to be a “Toy Shan” descendant.

It was, however, the Hip Sing and On Leong that carried much of the power in the community. Originally formed as protection societies for Chinese without strong family ties, the “tongs” set themselves up as “night mayors” of Chinatown. They controlled the illegal activities in a community where everyone felt outside the law. Their spokesmen, with hatchet men behind them, grew in power at the CCBA. Between themselves, they struck a parity that still holds. On Leong has more money and highly placed members, especially in Chiang Kai-shek’s old Kuomintang party and the Nationalist government. The Hip Sing, which is known as “the friend of the seaman” for its ability to sneak Chinese off boats and into waiter jobs, has more members and branches.

But in 1965 the Toy Shan traditions were seriously threatened. The federal laws were altered to allow open Chinese emigration to this country. Since then more than 200,000 Hong Kong residents have emigrated; half settled in the New York area, many of those in Chinatown.

Which makes sense. The New York pace is similar to that of teeming Hong Kong, and the business possibilities seemed good. In Boston, the Chinese community borders on a honkytonk area. In Chicago, the black ghetto is everywhere. In San Francisco, the Chinese have always thought of themselves as more sophisticated than the Toy Shan, but there the Chinatown is neatly stitched into a tourist patchwork quilt that cuts expansion possibilities. In New York, however, the old men have played it close to the vest for so long, anything can happen.

Toy Shan Changes

Chinatown is in the midst of a gut-wrenching change. The population is edging toward 75,000, a five-fold increase since the law change. It’s one of the fastest-growing neighborhoods in New York and without doubt the most densely populated. Once confined to the familiar pentagon bounded by Canal Street, Worth, and the Bowery, Chinatown is now sprawling all over the Lower East Side. Already Mott Street above Canal up to Grand, once solidly Italian is 70 percent Chinese. To the east, Division Street and East Broadway, formerly Jewish and Puerto Rican, have become centers of Chinese business and residence.

But much of the old Toy Shan separatism remains. Most Chinatown residents do not vote; currently there are fewer than 3000 registered voters in the area. In marked contrast to the Asian communities in California, no Oriental has ever held major office in New York. The Chinatown Democratic Club has been busted as a gambling house. Peter Wu, the club’s leader, has been called one of the biggest gamblers in Chinatown. The political base of the community is so weak that activists feel powerless to do anything about the assembly lines that bisect the area and cut the potential Chinese vote in half. Chinatown activists say this neglect is responsible for the compromised stand in the zoning fight with the Little Italy Restoration Association, which is seeking toward off the Chinese influx and zone large portions of the area for the dwindling Italian population.

Yet changes are everywhere. Chinatown now functions or Chinese; it looks like Hong Kong. Investigate the brand new Silver Palace Restaurant on the Boweryóit breaks the mold of the cramped, no-atmosphere Chinatown restaurant. An escalator whisks you up to a ding room as big as a football field. Almost all the 1000 or so people eating there will be Chinese, many middle-l-class couples who’ve motored in from Queens to try a more adventurous version of Cantonese food than this city is accustomed to. (Many Chinese will tell you the “exotic” Szechuan and Hunan food is the “American” fare.)

The mass migration has transformed Chinatown into an odd amalgam of boom town and ghetto. Suddenly half the businesses here are no longer in the hands of the old “lo fa kew” the Cantonese Toy Shans). In their place have come Hong Kong entrepreneurs and Taiwanese investors, who are fearful of the future of their island. A Taiwanese combine, the Summit Import Corporation, has already done much to change shopping habits in Chinatown by opening two big supermarkets, Kam Wah on Baxter Street and Kam Kuo on Mott.

The Taiwanese money is an indication that even though the Nationalist appear on the verge of international political eclipse, their influence in American Chinatowns is on the rise. A Taiwan concern is also behind the proposed block-long Golden Pacific National Bank on Canal Street. It’s one of the several new banks opening in this neighborhood of compulsive savers. The gold rush, prodded by extraordinary greed, has pushed real-estate values here to fabled heights.

All this has the Toy Shan posers hanging on for dear life. The newcomers, filtered through Hong Kong, come from all over China. The old Toy Shan loyalties don’t apply. These people got here without the help of the associations and owe them little. The tongs and the CCBA are beginning to feel the crunch. They’ve begun to see more and more store owners break away. Suddenly there are publicly funded social service agencies, most prominently the Chinatown Planning Council, to challenge CCBA rulings. And the younger Chinese, sons and daughters of the “lo fa kew,” have been openly critical.

The Old Men Act

But 100 years of power isn’t something you give up without a fight. On November 3, the CCBA held a meeting to discuss what to do about Nicky Louie and his Ghost Shadow buddies shooting up the neighborhood. Chinatown has traditionally been one of the safest areas in the city; it still is. Crime figures are remarkable low here for a place with so many new immigrants. That’s what made the recent violence all the more shocking. Especially in a neighborhood so dependent on tourism. Although the battles were being waged among the various Shadows, Dragons, and Eagles around, merchants were reporting 30 per cent drop in business. Places that stay open late were doing even worse.

The street fighting is “disfiguring” Chinatown, said one merchant, referring to the April shootout at the Co-Luck Restaurant on the Bowery. That night, according to the cops, a couple of Shadows roared up in a late-model blue Ford, smashed through the glass door, and started spraying .32 automatic slugs in the general direction of some Dragons who were “yum cha” (drinking tea and talking) in the corner. One of the Dragons, who may not have been a Dragon at all, got clipped in the leg. For the rest of the people in the restaurant, it was grimmer. By the time the Shadows were through, they had managed to hit three New York University law students, a waiter, and a lady from Queens who later died on the floor, her daughter crying over her body. The cops said, “The place looked like as slaughterhouse; there was blood all over the linoleum.”

Since then Co-Luck has been considered bad luck for prospective buyers. It remains vacant, rare in a neighborhood where no storefront is empty for long. On the door is a sign: “Closed For Alterations,” “Perhaps we keep it that way,” said a merchant, “as a scar to remind us of our shame.”

Restaurant owners say there won’t be so many wedding banquets this summer because of an incident in the Hung Gung a few months ago. Gang members crashed a banquet in the restaurant, stationing sentries outside to make sure no one came or went, and instructed a hundred celebrants to drop their valuables into shopping bags. “It was just like the Wild West,” says someone close to the wedding guests.

The police don’t see things looking up. In October they made 60 gang-related arrests, the most ever in a single month. They say there are more guns on the street than ever before and estimate gang membership before the recent crackdown at about 200, an all-time high. The gang kids are younger, too. 14-year-olds from Junior High School are common these days.

Pressured by editorials in the Chinese press, the CCBA swung into action. They called a public gathering at which the community would be free to explain its plight to Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morganthau.

Getting the Lo Fan Involved

This was quite a change in tactics for the CCBA. Until quite recently one of its major functions has been to keep the lid on Chinatown’s considerable and growing urban problems. That Chinese women sew garments for 12 cents a piece, that more than one third of the area’s males work as waiters, that Chinatown has the highest rate of TB and mental illness among city neighborhoods, all that was dirty linen better kept under wraps. But Nicky and the Shadows, they make noise. They get picked up for killing people and get their sullen pictures in what the Chinese still call “the Western press.” Keeping that quiet can make you look awfully silly. So, when Joseph Mei, the CCBA vice-president, told The New York Times, “We have no problem at all about youth gangs in Chinatown,” the day after Nicky’s people allegedly shot five White Eagles in front of the Yuen Yuen Snack Shop a policy change was in order.

The meeting was held in the CCBA’s dank auditorium (underneath an alternating string of American and Nationalist Chinese flags). Yut Yee, the 70-year-old CCBA president, who reportedly has been known to fall asleep during meetings, was unusually awake that night. He said, “Chinatown will become a dead city” if the violence continues. He urged residents to come forward and “report cases of crimes: we must be witnesses.” This seemed unlikely, for in a culture where the character for “revenge” means literally “report a crime,” the act of informing tends to be a complicated business. It confuses and angers the Lo Fan cops, who say that even though just about every restaurant in Chinatown has been robbed or extorted from in the past few years, the incidence of reporting the crimes is almost nil. Despite the fact that gang members have been arrested for more than a dozen murders in Manhattan there has been only one conviction: that, of Yut Wai Tom, an Eagle who made the mistake of putting a bullet through the throat of a Shadow in front of a couple of Puerto Rican witnesses.

Morganthau sighed during the debate of Chinese businessmen, looked at his watch, said he’d “help,” and left. But this time however, many people were openly restive. “My god, when will this bullshit stop?” asked a younger merchant.

No one talked about the tongs and their relationship to the gangs. H0w could the? Of the seven permanent members of the CCBA inner voting circle, one is in the On Leong, another the Hip Sing. No wonder people tend to get cynical whenever the CCBA calls a meeting at which the tong interests are at stake. Perhaps that’s why, when a Chinese reporter asked what the D.A. was planning to do to help the community, one of the Morganthau’s people said, “What do you want? We showed up, didn’t we?”

But, really all you had to do was watch Benny Eng. Benny is the director of the Hip Sing Credit Fund (which drug cops figure is a laundry room for dirty money). He is also an officer of the Chinese-American Restaurant Association, an organization that deserves blame for keeping waiter wages in Chinatown at about $50 a week for the past twenty years.

As people entered the CCBA hall, Little Benny, as he is called in deference to Big Benny Ong, the old Hip Sing bossman who recently got caught sneaking out the door of the gambling house at 9 Pell and spent the next day teaching cops how to play Chinese poker, greeted everyone with a hopelessly drawn face. He said, “so happy you are interested in the security of Chinatown” to everyone entering the meeting. But later, you could sear you say Benny nod respectfully to the skinnylegged kid pacing up and down Mott Street. **

Dispatches From the R. Kelly Trial [Slate]

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:42:00 -0400

By Josh Levin
Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Day 1: Unveiling the “Shaggy Defense”

As R. Kelly’s child pornography trial is about to start, the judge’s media liaison gathers all of the reporters together to announce that we’ll be watching a sex tape in open court. He then delivers stern advice about doodling. “I am here to warn you,” says Terry Sullivan, “that anyone who draws a depiction or a simulation can be committing the act of child pornography. … You don’t want to be doing that.” Since I have the artistic skills of someone with no hands, this isn’t much of a setback. The courtroom sketch artists, naturally, are more concerned. One of them asks if she can avoid prosecution by doing something “free form.” I have no idea what she’s contemplating, but I hope she remembered to pack a urine-colored pencil.

A little bit after 1 p.m., the blinds are drawn and the lights go down. For the jury, there’s a giant screen on wheels in front of the jury box. For the press, there’s a Sony flat screen, lashed to an A/V cart with thick orange straps as if it’s a flight risk. The VHS tape starts to roll, and the first voice I hear belongs to Hall of Fame Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer, the one-time spokesman for the Money Store. As Palmer explains how you can easily lower your monthly payments, a guy with a shaved head who looks a lot like R. Kelly hands a young woman a folded-up stack of cash. “Thank you,” she says softly. He pulls down his pants. Fellatio ensues. A few seconds later, a sitcom laugh track kicks up. He goes off-camera and turns off the television, perhaps fearing that canned laughter isn’t an appropriate backing track for a taped sexual performance.

The prosecution’s case hinges on Kelly’s auteurship. In her opening statement, prosecutor Shauna Boliker argues that he “choreographed, produced, and starred in” the nearly 27-minute video. Kelly denies the video is his work. Whoever the videographer may be, his style is utilitarian. The image is bright and clear, and the director-star occasionally steps out of the picture to make sure the shot is framed properly, or to zoom in on an essential detail—say, the girl urinating on a tile floor. The choreography is also straightforward. The girl gyrates her hips from side to side like an exotic dancer; he moans lasciviously and orders her to move faster. The filmmaker’s creativity comes through more clearly in the set design. The action takes place in what the prosecution says is the basement of Kelly’s former home, a room that looks a lot like a log cabin—there is a handful of tall, green potted plants, and the walls appear to be fashioned from gigantic felled trees. No longer will I have to wonder what an Abe Lincoln sex tape might have looked like.

Kelly’s lawyers tried, exhaustively but futilely, to prevent the jury from seeing the video. This is understandable—when you’re defending an accused child pornographer, it’s best not to have the jury hear a man who looks just like your client refer to himself, on tape, as “daddy” as he begins to have intercourse with the alleged victim. (The girl’s answer when he asks her to initiate sex: “Yes, Daddy.”) There’s also the matter of his prolonged urination on the girl’s face and breasts, which stops and starts, and stops and starts, for what seems like minutes on end. It’s excruciating to watch.

Before the tape started rolling, I thought that a few people might have to leave the courtroom. The vibe in the room, though, is more uncomfortable than appalled, like we’ve all been dragooned into watching Porky’s Revenge at grandma’s house. Aside from one guy who occasionally breaks into a nervous smile, the jury is stone-faced and intent on the big screen. The two obvious Kelly fans in the room—a pair of young girls who’ve scored visitors’ passes—watch with their hands in their pockets and slightly downturned mouths. Kelly, wearing a dark pinstripe suit and a blue tie with diagonal orange stripes, his hair immaculately braided, tilts his head every so often, putting his chin on his hand to peer at the video from a different angle.

If the defense is to be believed, Kelly is looking at someone other than himself. In the defense’s opening statement, Sam Adam Jr. proclaims, “Robert Kelly is not on that tape.” I predict that in the decades to come, law schools will teach this as the “Shaggy defense.” You allege that I was caught on camera, butt naked, banging on the log cabin floor? It wasn’t me.

Considering that the mystery VHS man and R. Kelly look exactly alike, this is not an easy argument to make. But if anyone on the defense team can make the Shaggy defense work, it’s the stout, bombastic Adam Jr. Compared with Kelly’s other lawyers—including Adam’s Uncle Fester-looking father, Sam Adam Sr., and lead attorney Edward Genson, who shambles about the courtroom with a cane on account of a neuromuscular disease—Adam Jr. has the benefit of youthful exuberance. Adam Jr. displays a photo of a shirtless Kelly, pointing to a “significant mole” on his back, a mole, he claims, that mystery VHS man does not have. Either that’s not R. Kelly on the tape, he shouts, or Kelly is capable of spontaneously producing moles, “like David Copperfield!” (The mole in the photo, which the defense sometimes calls a birthmark, looks a bit like it was applied with black Magic Marker. Is that David Copperfield’s secret?) Unfortunately, the judge does not permit Adam Jr. to show a still from the video during opening statements, and the video screen is too far away for me to do a rigorous mole analysis.

Proving that R. Kelly is mystery VHS man will be the prosecution’s easiest task. It’ll be harder to prove the identity of mystery VHS girl. The alleged victim, you see, says it’s not her on the tape, either, and she won’t testify against Kelly. “If she’s not here for you to see her, for you to hear her … there’s one reason for that,” Adam Jr. says. “It’s not her on that tape.”

After the first day, it’s hard to avoid thinking that the prosecution is building a roundabout case. Rather than have the alleged victim say she’s a victim, the state will have the girl’s relatives identify her. And rather than charge Kelly with statutory rape or sexual abuse, they’re trying him as a child pornographer. The facts of this particular case don’t come close to speaking to the nature and magnitude of Kelly’s alleged crimes.

In the last decade, there have been at least 11 separate accusations that Kelly had sex with someone underage. He has paid settlements to at least four girls who accused him of sexual misconduct. He married the now-deceased R&B ingénue Aaliyah Haughton when she was 15; her parents had the marriage annulled immediately. (For all the sordid details, settle in with Bill Wyman’s indispensable R. Kelly SexFacts.)

In hearings closed to the press, the prosecution petitioned to present evidence of all these alleged misdeeds. On the basis of today’s proceedings, Judge Vincent Gaughan seems to have ruled that none of them is fair game. The first clue comes when Dan Everett, the now-retired Chicago police detective who first received the tape from a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, says that he recognized mystery VHS girl from a previous investigation. Gaughan tells the jury to leave the room, then announces that he might declare a mistrial. Investigation, it seems, is the courtroom’s secret word, and not in a fun, balloons-falling-from-the-ceiling sort of way.

The judge, who served as an officer at Vietnam, isn’t so good at hiding disdain for his inferiors. He’s furious at “this retired detective” because everyone had agreed that Everett would say he knew the girl from a previous “interview” rather than an “investigation.” This word game was designed to get around having to reveal to the jury that the Chicago police had been investigating Kelly’s relationship with the girl for 14 months before the appearance of a video tape. “It’s an egregious mistake,” Gaughan says, rocking back in his chair, but he decides not to declare a mistrial. It’s been six years since this tape came to light, and after a litany of delays—Kelly’s burst appendix, the prosecutor’s pregnancy, Gaughan’s own tumble from a ladder—the judge isn’t going to let a marble-mouthed cop keep this trial from finally getting under way.

Though it’s not allowed inside the courtroom, evidence regarding Kelly’s mysterious power over young women is in abundance outside. Kelly doesn’t have a Michael Jackson-caliber rainbow coalition of superfan weirdos. Rather, the R&B lothario’s courthouse supporters are from a more uniform demographic: teenage African-American girls. As he steps into the fifth-floor hallway for a lunch break, four female fans scream in ecstasy and pull out camera phones—contraband inside the courthouse—and unashamedly snap away. When admonished by a bailiff for making so much noise, one member of the group says, incredulous, “How are we supposed to act when R. Kelly come?” Once we’re all outside, the Kelly-loving gaggle approaches me. They want to know how another fan scored entry backstage, aka the courtroom. “I’m gonna knock that girl out and take her pass,” one of them says.

Day 2: The “Little Man Defense” and the Case Against Sparkle

A day after converting the courtroom into the world’s least comfortable porno theater, it’s now time for the state to prove that we watched R. Kelly having sex in his faux log cabin—not an R. Kelly impersonator in some other guy’s faux log cabin. To that end, the prosecution calls Simha “Punky” Jamison, a 24-year-old hair stylist who was best friends with the alleged victim throughout junior high and high school. She’s a strong witness, composed if occasionally snarky. When prosecutor Shauna Boliker asks whether she and the victim saw each other every day, Jamison laughs to herself before saying yes, like it’s inconceivable that it could’ve been any other way.

Jamison says she met Kelly when she was about 13, through the alleged victim’s family. After church one Sunday, they all drove to Hoops, the upscale gym where Kelly played basketball. From that day on, Jamison and her friend would visit with Kelly on the court, at his recording studio, and in his log-themed residence more than 100 times. (While we’re on the subject, some new log cabin facts from today’s testimony: Along with the logs, the lower level of Kelly’s former residence includes a short lap pool and a basketball court with a mural depicting the singer shooting hoops with the Tasmanian Devil. From the outside, the red-brick residence—which you can take a gander at on Google Street View—looks less like a place where someone might live than some sort of small-time paper mill. His next-door neighbor was an Enterprise Rent-a-Car.)

Jamison says she heard rumors of an R. Kelly sex tape during her junior year of high school. She watched a bootleg copy at a friend’s house in early 2002 and ran home crying after seeing the girl on the screen—”I thought she looked just like my best friend.” The giveaways: her face and her mullet haircut. The girls had come to a mutual decision to look like Billy Ray Cyrus, and Jamison recognized the “short at the top, long in the back” style. She also contends that the financial transaction at the beginning of the video isn’t an indication that the girl on the video is a prostitute—Kelly frequently handed her friend various amounts of cash for shopping. (The prosecution also implies, but never says directly, that Kelly bought the girl a PT Cruiser.)

On cross-examination, Adam Jr. repeatedly confirms that Jamison relied exclusively on her best friend’s face and hair to identify the girl and time-stamp the video. “You can’t tell by looking at a person’s vagina how old they are, can you?” he asks, then takes a stab at answering his own question: “I don’t think you can.” Once it’s well-established that Jamison didn’t pay much attention to the alleged victim’s crotch and torso, Adam Jr. asks whether Jamison has seen a “Waymon Brothers” movie called Little Man. “They took the head of Marlon Waymons and put it on a midget, and it looked real, didn’t it?” Adam Jr. exclaims, emphasizing the last two words for maximum “gotcha” effect. Jamison looks at him like he’s a lunatic or, at least, an astoundingly bad film critic. “Not reeeally,” she says, her voice lilting in disbelief as the courtroom breaks up. Congratulations to the Waymon Brothers: This is the first time Little Man has generated laughter.

Amazingly, Adam Jr. is not kidding about any of this. Just as special effects turned Marlon Wayans (I know your last name, my friend!) into a little person, he suggests, so might the sex tape we saw on Tuesday be some sort of digital collage of faces and bodies. He asks Jamison whether she can tell if the video has been tampered with. Judge Gaughan doesn’t allow the question: “Just because she’s seen the Waymons’ movies doesn’t make her an expert on morphing.”

Kelly’s defense team can be forgiven for its ignorance of Little Man—rare is the man who will admit to having seen it. Still, you’d think some junior associate might have mentioned to his bosses that it’s (allegedly) a comedy, and derives its (nonexistent) laughs from the fact that the film’s Mini-Wayans is ridiculously unchildlike. Perhaps Adam Jr. would have done better with an analogy to a movie where the CGI trickery wasn’t played for laughs, something like, “They took off John Travolta’s face and put it on Nicolas Cage’s body, and it looked real, didn’t it?” Or maybe: “They took a sexy cartoon lady and had her kiss Bob Hoskins, and it looked real, didn’t it?” One must also consider that, despite being terrible, Little Man cost millions of dollars. The sex tape at issue here appears to have cost more like $1.50, a budget that would make it hard to employ Industrial Light & Magic.

Another problem with the Little Man theory: motive. I suppose it’s theoretically possible that someone might blackmail a rich, famous entertainer like R. Kelly by superimposing his face onto a sex-having, urine-producing body. But why would anyone want to pull a Little Man on the alleged victim? She’s not rich, and she’s not famous; the defense hasn’t explained what other possible incentive there could be to tamper with her image.

Having exhausted the Little Man line of inquiry, the defense tries to recruit Jamison to its side on the matter of the missing mole. The hair stylist, however, seems to agree with my Magic Marker theory. When the defense asks her to look at a photo of Kelly’s back, she asks whether the mole/birthmark is real or perhaps some kind of stray mark on the print. Her final conclusion: It could be “a cancerous mole, maybe.” Kelly tilts back his head and laughs heartily, by far the most emotion he’s shown all week.

The only other time Kelly cracks a smile is when he offers a demure wave to the two teenage female worshippers who are in the courtroom again, having thoroughly mastered the visitors’ pass system. (Discussion topic: Is it crazier for teenage girls to worship R. Kelly or for R. Kelly to wave at teenage girls in open court?) Based on Jamison’s testimony, these girls seem to have a familiar relationship with Kelly. Jamison says that she and her best friend would sit at the record studio and “do nothing”—just sit, talk, and watch R. Kelly from a slight remove. Tabling the more nefarious bits for now, it seems that Kelly, at the very least, enjoys the simple pleasure of having an underage girl entourage.

Not every prosecution witness is as strong as Jamison. Bennie Lee Edwards Sr., the uncle of the alleged victim, testifies that he recognized his niece on the video, and that she looked about 14. This testimony is less compelling once you hear Edwards take 10 long seconds to remember his own age, then botch his own son’s date of birth. He also gets in a long dispute with the defense over whether police once found crack rocks under his hat. He contends that the crack was in his truck.

Wednesday’s final witness is Bennie Edwards’ ex-wife, Delores Gibson. A Chicago police officer and the alleged victim’s aunt, Gibson admits that she first saw the sex tape, and identified her niece as the victim, way back in December 2001. The cops didn’t get a copy until the Sun-Times turned it over in February 2002, and Adam Jr. presses Gibson on why she didn’t follow her police training and turn over the tape immediately. “You’re not telling the ladies and gentlemen of the jury that you saw your niece on that tape, are you?” he asks with all the incredulity he can muster. Instead, she told the alleged victim’s mother to go to an attorney. Going to a lawyer, Adam Jr. contends, is a sign that for Gibson and certain other family members, this was always about money. This sounds like a preview of the defense’s strategy moving forward.

According to the defense, the mastermind of this plot was Gibson’s sister-in-law Stephanie Edwards, aka R&B singer Sparkle. Sparkle was once a protégé of Kelly’s—he produced one of her albums, and they did a duet together in 1998 called “Be Careful.” When Kelly declined to continue working with her, Adam Jr. shouts, Sparkle had an ax to grind. The sex tape was Sparkle’s tool to extort her former mentor, to solicit a hefty donation from the R. Kelly Foundation for Girls Who Have Been Abused by R. Kelly. The jury doesn’t know, however, that Kelly has a history of paying off his underage accusers, and the defense is hardly going to be the one to tell them about it. Instead, Adam Jr. sticks to attacking Sparkle’s credibility even before she takes the stand. Gibson denies the defense’s contention that she didn’t turn over the tape because she “knew it was a phony.” Here, the Sparkle and the Little Man theories converge: Maybe, just maybe, Sparkle knows the Waymon Brothers.

Day 3: Sparkle’s Revenge

If there’s a life lesson to be taken from the R. Kelly trial, it’s that when you’re trying to help your niece launch a music career, perhaps it’s best to widen the search for mentors beyond the man who sings “It Seems Like You’re Ready” and “I Like the Crotch on You.” On the stand this afternoon, Stephanie Edwards (aka R&B singer Sparkle) says that she introduced the alleged victim, a budding rapper and singer, to Kelly when the three of them met up in the log cabin to watch the Chicago Bulls in the NBA Finals. Depending on whether that was the Bulls’ fifth or sixth championship, the alleged victim would’ve been either 12 or 13. A basketball player herself, the girl was jolly, personable, and a little tomboyish—Kelly, Edwards says, “liked her spirit.” (This suggests a possible song title for the clean version of R. Kelly’s greatest hits: “I Like the Spirit on You.”)

Stephanie Edwards’ two hours of testimony are a reminder that the clichés of the televised courtroom drama aren’t entirely fanciful. As she remembers her niece’s personality, Edwards—her hair up in a tight bob, gold hoop earrings dangling down to the top of her long neck, a dash of Sparkle-y glitter applied neatly above her left cheek—dabs at her eyes, and one of the sheriff’s deputies in the room brings her tissues. Defense attorney Edward Genson, too, performs like a man in search of a camera. Genson, who looks like an unkempt sheepdog but questions witnesses like a flesh-hungry pit bull, presses her to admit that she was intimately involved with the production and distribution of the sex tape, including scheduling a screening for the girls’ parents. Sparkle says that never happened. “You have no idea why they’ll testify to that?” Genson asks, immediately withdrawing the question as the prosecution objects furiously.

For the first half-hour or so of cross-examination, Genson gathers details to support the defense’s Little Man theory. He asks whether she knows how many of the “hours and hours” of footage typically shot for a music video are never used (she has no idea), how many different videos Kelly has made over the years (a lot), and how many videos the alleged victim’s much smaller-time musical group starred in during its career (she says two or three).

Genson next establishes Sparkle’s motive: a bitter musical divorce. After her self-titled debut (released in 1998 and produced, written, and arranged by Kelly) was certified platinum, Edwards expressed a desire to work with other producers. This didn’t sit well with Kelly, she acknowledges, and the two of them parted ways contractually in 2000. Over Genson’s protestations, Edwards insists that she and Kelly still got along personally at this point—”he was my homeboy”—though she also admits that Kelly withheld royalty payments and claims that he still hasn’t paid for her decade-old album. A short while later, Sparkle started talking with record exec Barry Hankerson, Kelly’s one-time manager and now bitter enemy. (Genson asserts that Hankerson and Kelly are foes, though he omits the fact that Kelly’s child-bride, Aaliyah, was Hankerson’s niece; upon leaving the singer’s employ, Hankerson wrote a letter to Kelly’s record label saying that he “needed psychiatric help for his compulsion to pursue underage girls.”) Genson, with his voice raised to a near-shout, tries repeatedly and futilely to get Edwards to admit that she got calls on her cell phone from Hankerson, and that they talked about their common enemy. “Was part of the deal doing something bad to Robert?” a frothing Genson asks. When Sparkle says “of course not,” he repeats her words back sarcastically.

Genson leaves it to us to put all of this together. Let’s give it a try: Frustrated with her declining musical career (and perhaps resentful of Kelly’s astoundingly successful one), Sparkle hatched a scheme to extort her rich ex-mentor and to turn the words of her hit song “Be Careful” into reality. (“You better be careful what you do to me,” she sang, ” ‘cause somebody might do it to you.”) While Kelly was out making beats one night, she enlisted a pair of underemployed porn actors to bust into the singer’s log cabin and film themselves having sex, peeing, etc. Meanwhile, Sparkle and Hankerson harvested outtakes from Kelly’s copious back catalog of music videos, then took advantage of the thriving black market in Little Man-quality digital-effects wizardry to Frankenstein together Kelly’s face and the urinator’s body. (Sparkle’s motive for putting her niece in the video is less clear. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that she was mad at her for, say, borrowing her glitter without permission.) After Kelly refused to pay to keep the video under wraps, Sparkle sent the video to the Chicago Sun-Times, willing to make her niece collateral damage to disgrace the man who’d done her wrong.

The defense, of course, doesn’t have the burden of proving that all of this happened, and Genson does create a few slivers of doubt about Edwards’ story. Sparkle says that she first learned of the tape in December 2001 via a phone call from a lawyer named “Buddy something.” Her choice to omit the man’s last name—it’s Meyers, by the way—comes off a bit stagy, like she’s trying too hard to act like she’d never heard of or spoken to the guy. A couple of lingering questions: How did Meyers get the tape, and why would Meyers first contact the alleged victim’s aunt—a woman who happened to have a failed working relationship with Kelly—rather than the girl’s parents?

Near the end of her hours of testimony, Edwards cocks her head to the side with a quick snap, finally unable to hide her annoyance with Genson’s unrelenting inquisition. The defense attorney, perhaps noting the change in the witness’s mood, shifts into theatrical overdrive. Genson tries to get a rise out of Edwards by shouting that it is not Kelly on the sex tape. The conversation devolves into a testy exchange over whether the girl on the tape is or is not a prostitute and whether or not we’re all here today because Edwards is after Kelly’s money. “Sweetie, I am not trying to get any money with this,” says Edwards. Rarely has a term of endearment dripped with so much disdain. (“I am not your sweetie,” Genson states for the record.)

With the witness and lawyer playing the dozens, Judge Gaughan steps in to break things up before they get out of hand. Genson, however, won’t stop talking, and now it’s Gaughan who is ready to rumble—”Mr. Genson, you’re not listening!”—a military man clearly irked with having lost control of his troops.

From the beginning, Gaughan has been determined not to let this trial turn into a circus, going so far as to speak with court officials involved in Michael Jackson’s trial in the hopes of avoiding a similar zoo in Cook County. The lesson he seems to have drawn is that a judge must carry a big gavel to maintain order in such a high-profile case. The day’s proceedings had started with a short trial, conducted before the press, of a Chicagoan who had dared run afoul of Gaughan’s regime. Debra Triplett, a scraggly-looking 48-year-old woman, entered the courtroom with hands cuffed behind her back and wearing a baggy white T-shirt big enough to suggest it might also serve as her residence. Triplett had found herself outside the elevator that was transporting the jury to the courtroom. Seeing the jury disembark, she had been unable to resist the urge to shout, “Free R. Kelly!” Arguing that she had potentially tainted the jurors, Gaughan held her for contempt, set bail at $50,000, and scheduled a hearing on June 25. A few minutes later, Gaughan called in the jury and asked whether they’d heard anyone shouting. They had not.

The prosecution won’t call any more witness this week, so that’s all for me. Gaughan shouldn’t rest easy, though, as his resolve will surely be tested when Kelly’s attorneys unleash the long awaited I’m Gonna Git You Sucka defense. So long for now, Chicago.

The Last Ride of Jesse James Hollywood [LA Magazine]

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:52:00 -0400

Wanted for kidnapping and murder, a Valley Boy gangsta lives up to his name
By Jesse Katz
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Los Angeles magazine, February 2002

The boy in the video is named Jesse James Hollywood. That is what his birth certificate says. He is close to 20 but could pass for 15. His hair is short and blond. His eyes are blue. He is nearly as small—five feet five, 140 pounds—as most of his friends were in junior high school. Jesse James Hollywood is drinking a Heineken. He is smoking weed from a long yellow bong. He is wearing baggy jeans, a baby blue Dodgers cap turned backward, and a T-shirt manufactured by Serial Killer Inc. The shirt has a black-and-white movie frame on the chest, a scene from Heat, the 1995 L.A. crime saga. It shows Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer making their getaway from a downtown bank heist. The caption is a single word: MONEY.

The music thumping on the stereo is Mac Dre, an Oakland rapper. He once got five years for conspiring to rob a bank. The chorus goes like this: I live day by day not giving a fuck / And when they ask me why I pause for a minute then I reply / Because life’s a bitch and then you die. When Jesse James Hollywood speaks, he mimics the cadences of the hood, an act that is alternately reverential and derisive. He is pretending to be a Crip—a meticulous study—yet the fakery is spiked with contempt. “One time I was walking down the street, cuz,” he says, mugging for the camera. “Some nigga hit me up, cuz. I’m like, `What up, cuz?’ Nigga straight ran my ass over. That’s why I’m a little fucked up right now, cuz.” When he decides the shtick has grown old, Jesse James Hollywood says, “Get the camera away from me, cuz. Before I have to bust yo’ lip, cuz.”

The party is in Jesse James Hollywood’s home, a three-bed, two-bath staple of 1950s suburbia that he bought on his own. There is a big screen TV in the living room, along with a wave-shaped bubble lamp and a vase of artificial flowers; the kitchen has a built-in microwave and a double-door refrigerator; a gas barbecue grill sits on the patio. The house is in West Hills, at the far edge of the San Fernando Valley. It is among the whitest corners of Los Angeles—an affluent, educated, conservative bedroom community, once part of Canoga Park until home owners decided that a name change would enhance their neighborhood’s image. The pride of West Hills is its youth baseball complex, a collection of mini stadiums with padded outfield fences and electronic scoreboards, Marathon Sod and crushed-brick base paths. As a child Jesse James Hollywood played on those diamonds. He was an All-Star pitcher and third baseman. His dad was a coach. His mom brought snacks. At least three of his guests here—all drinking beer, smoking dope, taking turns with the camera—played in the same league, some years on the same team. One of them is Ryan Hoyt, a lefty first baseman. He aims the lens into the face of another ex-Little League friend.

“You been drinking tonight? Ryan asks, in a mock interrogation.

“Fuck the police!” his subject howls.

Ryan follows him with the camera, then breaks into the theme from the TV show COPS: Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? he sings. Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

The tape is more than an uncensored testament to cocky, middle-class, Valley Boy indulgence. It is evidence in a murder. By this time in his life, Jesse James Hollywood was the boss of a thuggish little drug ring. He trafficked in vacuum-sealed bricks of British Columbian marijuana, a potent strain known as “B.C. Bud.” His clownish friends were his marketing staff, breaking the pounds into ounces that went for $300 on the street. The arrangement served them all, funding their nightly binges and paying for Jesse James Hollywood’s mortgage, except for one problem: His cartel had a habit of smoking more than it sold. Ryan was the worst. His consumption had reduced him from dope dealer to indentured servant. He arrived at Jesse James Hollywood’s house every day to dean, garden, paint, and pick up after an ill-mannered pit bull named Chump, yet even after months of menial chores he was unable to erase his pot-smoking debt. At the time of the video he was in for $1,200, and Jesse James Hollywood was not about to let him forget.

“Now how much money you got in your bank?” Jesse James Hollywood asks, cornering Ryan in the kitchen.

“Stop recording,” Ryan says.

“How much? How much can you get from the bank?”

“Enough to pay you some money.”

“What’s gonna be there tomorrow, Hoyt? I’m serious, man. I can see it’s gonna be like nothing.”

“It’s not gonna be nothing.”

“What’s it gonna be then? Just tell me.”

The video was shot in early 2000. Six months later the party would be over, the tape seized by homicide detectives. A drug dispute had gone haywire, and Jesse James Hollywood and his crew were now implicated in the kidnapping and execution of a 15-year-old boy, the younger brother of one of their own henchmen. As a bunch, they might best be described as slackers with an edge, children of relative privilege yet barely functional as adults. They came from nice homes but broken families. They attended the finest schools without opening their eyes. When they lost their way, it had more to do with abundance—too much freedom, too much money, too much time—than with deprivation. Their violence was committed while numb, not in a rage. Part of that was surely the drugs, which turned their world into a full-scale PlayStation, no more real than the lives taken and restored onscreen. But there seemed to be something else going on in West Hills, a malaise born of entitlement, of parents who found it easier to grant independence than to set limits. How does a community without gangs breed an entire team of gangsta disciples? To what extent does living in a “good” area allow a false sense of security, even laziness, to creep into the work of raising kids?

To settle his debt Ryan agreed to be the triggerman. He was found guilty in November and sentenced to die. Three cohorts were accused of abducting the victim and digging his grave. They are being held without bail, awaiting trial. The final defendant is the ringleader himself, the one with the unforgettable name. He is nowhere to be found.

Of all the West Hills stoners selling Jesse James Hollywood’s pot, the one least in awe of him, the one most capable of doing him damage, was a neighbor named Benjamin Markowitz. He was in the same baseball league as a child but a couple years older—bigger and badder and just a bit nuttier.

By the time he was 15 Ben had slashed tires, stolen a car, cracked open a boy’s forehead with brass knuckles, and done eight months in a juvenile probation camp. His nickname was Bugsy. He had covered himself in tattoos, including the insignia of the Peckerwoods, a San Fernando Valley gang with white supremacist leanings—never mind that he was Jewish. His father, who makes aerospace parts in a family-run machine shop, tried everything he could think of to turn Ben around, from psychotherapy to Ritalin to martial arts. He tussled with Ben. He dragged him to work. He paid a tae kwon do instructor to take him in as a ward. “I didn’t know what the hell to do,” says Jeff Markowitz, who divorced Ben’s mother when their son was 4 and assumed custody when he was 12. “Ben was an urban legend in our town.”

Remarriage had introduced a stepmother, Susan, and a half brother, Nicholas, seven years younger than Ben. If the Markowitzes had tried to blur those lines of separation in the beginning, they took to drawing them more sharply as Ben careened through adolescence. Susan was especially doting with Nick, hoping to insulate him from his older brother. “My whole life, I was trying to keep Nick from seeing or knowing the truth about Ben’s trouble,” she says. “It was a lot of work keeping them apart.” In the end it was also futile. He came to idolize Ben, and Ben somehow managed to keep dragging the family into his craziness, like the time he showed up drunk, with a shaved head, at Nick’s bar mitzvah and demanded to drive his brother home in a low-rider Impala.

It would be trite to say that West Hills was too small for both Ben Markowitz and Jesse James Hollywood, but that might not be far from the truth. They lived only a dozen blocks from each other and attended the same prestigious high school, El Camino Real, winner of the state academic decathlon for five of the last ten years. Ben got expelled for hitting a girl who threw a milk carton his way. Jesse got expelled for spewing obscenities at an administrator who objected to the tank top he was wearing. Ben never finished school, but Jesse went on to graduate from Calabasas High in 1998. Compared with Ben—and every other member of his crew, for that matter—Jesse was the model of success, ambitious and status conscious. With five to ten dealers each netting him about $500 to $1,000 a month, Jesse was living on maybe $50,000 a year, tax free—enough for a thick bankroll in his pocket, a girl on his arm, and an endless supply of weed for his friends. He used to show up for school in a tricked-out silver ‘95 Honda Accord DX coupe, the ‘57 Chevy of the Fast and the Furious generation. Loaded with hydraulic switches, fluorescent lights, $2,000 Niche Gefell rims, and a sound system capable of rattling windows, the car drew envious stares in the student parking lot, even from kids who had no interest in the dope business. By 19 Jesse owned a $205,000 home on Cohasset Street, just a few blocks from his parents’. “He was slinging some spliff,” acknowledges his father, Jack Hollywood, employing a Rasta-flavored lexicon somewhat at odds with the image of a Little League coach. “But it wasn’t even that much of a bad rhythm. There was no trouble until this Ben Markowitz guy came around.”

Like most of the dealers in Jesse’s circle, Ben was often careless about money, losing product—or using it—and falling into debt. Unlike them he was a genuine hoodlum, refusing to take orders and damning the consequences. “Ben was a fly in the ointment,” says Ken Reinstadler, a Santa Barbara County sheriff’s lieutenant, who would later oversee the murder investigation. “Jesse James Hollywood is a wanna-be bad boy. Ben is one tough hombre.” During the first half of 2000, the two were locked in a tit-for, tat feud, at once childish and menacing. Ben would get messages on his voice mail: “I thought we were homes. Why don’t you come kick it? Let’s straighten this thing out.” Jesse would also get messages on his voice mail: “I know where you live, too, buddy, so you make the first move.” One night in February Jesse and his girlfriend went to a restaurant in Woodland Hills where Ben’s girlfriend worked. They ate and drank up a tab of $50, then left a note: “Take this off Ben’s debt.” Ben upped the ante, threatening to expose a $35,000 insurance scam that involved the customized Honda. Jesse had chopped up the car, sold the parts, then reported it stolen. “This is what Ben’s been doing forever—latching onto people, terrorizing them,” says Jack Hollywood. “My son was scared to death. He was going to move out and try to get away from the whole situation.”

The pissing match came to a head on August 6, 2000, a Sunday. Jesse had packed up his house and put everything in storage. Sometime during the previous day or two, Ben had come over and busted a couple of windows with a metal pipe. Jesse piled his crew into a cargo van, lent to him by a friend of his father’s to help with the move. In the driver’s seat was Jesse Rugge, a speedy center ridder from their baseball years. After his parents divorced, he split his time between his father’s house in Santa Barbara and his mother’s in West Hills. A high school dropout, he had a shaved head and a body covered with tattoos—scorpions on both arms, a skull on his fight leg, and a simulation of ripped skin, with exposed muscle, on his left—all courtesy of a brother-in-law who works at a parlor called Iron Cross. In the back was William Skidmore, probably the best hitter and ridder of them all. He was living in Simi Valley but grew up in West Hills, halfway between the Rugges and the Hollywoods. The others some times called him vato loco, a crazy dude—his mother is Latina—and he once told police, after being arrested on a minor drug charge, that Ns gang name was Capone. But his affiliations, oddly, were Asian; he had the logo of a Filipino gang, Satanas, tattooed across his stomach and chest. Ryan Hoyt stayed behind, ordered to sweep up the broken glass.

They had been planning to go up to Santa Barbara for Old Spanish Days, a Mardi Gras-style festival. But everyone inside the van agreed that Ben’s latest incursion could not go ignored. They talked of hunting him down, or maybe just swinging by the Markowitz home and shattering a few panes as payback. As they cruised the quiet, pine-shrouded streets of West Hills, the last thing they expected was to stumble upon Nick Markowitz, wandering past Taxco Trails Park at about 1 p.m. Nick was hardly the ruffian that Ben was—he had appeared in Shakespeare plays at school, volunteered as a peer counselor, and once signed a journal entry “Rabbi Nick”—but he was still having his troubles. He was regularly popping Valium and smoking dope. He had already been caught at school with a bit of weed and arrested. On Saturday night he had gone with friends to CityWalk and come home looking zonked. This morning, rather than face a confrontation with his parents, Nick had sneaked out while his mom was making breakfast. “He was just picking everything apart,” his father says, “the life that he was deciding to choose or not to choose.”

The van pulled up to the curb and Jesse’s crew jumped out. They pummeled Nick, kicking and hitting, then dragged him inside. As they did, Pauline Ann Mahoney came driving by on her way home from church. Before the van peeled out she got close enough to read the license plate. “All right, boys,” she said to the three children in her Cadillac, “this is the number.” They chanted it together, until Mahoney could get home and dial 911. “These guys were beating the crap out of this kid,” she told the emergency operator. “Four versus one. All white.” Two Los Angeles police officers were advised, but a series of missteps ended any chance of catching up. The 911 staff, it turned out, had coded the incident as an assault rather than a kidnapping in progress—even after a second witness made a similar call. Thinking the matter was less serious, an officer talked to Mahoney via cell phone but never took a direct statement. They also failed to reach the registered owner of the van, partly because they had misread his address. “This was not the LAPD at its best,” says Xavier Hermosillo, a member of the department’s Board of Rights, which investigated the lapse. The officers received written reprimands; two emergency dispatchers ended up with three-day suspensions.

It would be the first in a succession of opportunities to halt the crime, opportunities killed by an apathy that seemed to grip everyone who came in contact with Nick. Over the next 60 hours, at least two dozen people would meet him—or learn of his plight—and none would intercede. Jeff and Susan Markowitz would later sue them all, alleging that each could have, and should have, done something to save their son. To be fair, it was not always clear that Nick was a hostage. His captors acted haphazardly, sometimes leaving him unguarded. He went along with their instructions rather good-naturedly, believing that his cooperation would best serve his brother. At times he even romanticized the odyssey. “Don’t worry,” he said on the rare occasion that anyone expressed concern. “It’s just another story to tell my grandkids.”

With Nick in the van, Fiesta was pretty much out of the question, but Jesse James Hollywood and his crew drove up to Santa Barbara anyway, not knowing what else to do. On the way, Nick’s pager began to beep. His parents had given it to him the previous week, on the condition that he respond immediately when called. Now his mother was punching in their number, over and over. Jesse took it away. “If you run, I’ll break your teeth,” he said to Nick. Jesse rummaged through Nick’s pockets and pulled out several plastic bags of weed and Valium. He let Nick fire up and drop a pill. He also snatched a small address book from him. He ripped out the page with Ben’s number and tossed the rest out the window. For all his bluster, Jesse would not call Ben that day, or ever again.

When they got to Santa Barbara, they needed a place to stash Nick. That task fell to Jesse Rugge, the crew’s northern connection. He steered them to the home of a friend in the Hidden Valley neighborhood, a guy he often partied with named Ricky Hoeflinger. They herded Nick into Ricky’s bedroom, bound his wrists with duct tape, and blindfolded him with a sock. Ricky had a friend over, and he asked what was going on. “Hollywood is tripping out,” Rugge explained. It was loud enough for Jesse James Hollywood to overhear. “Keep your fucking mouth shut,” he snapped at Rugge. Then he whispered to Ricky’s friend, “You don’t say shit.” Ricky and his friend took off, leaving the kidnappers and their captive alone in his house. “I didn’t want to know what was going on,” Ricky says. “I didn’t want any involvement.”

Two guys in the crew also wanted out. One was Will Skidmore; the other was Brian Affronti, whom they had picked up after grabbing Nick. Not wanting to rouse Jesse’s suspicions, Brian made up a story about having a date that night back in the Valley. “That way it wouldn’t seem like I was just trying to get out of something,” he says. Jesse agreed to let them take the van, a concession that ended their role in the crime but not their liability. As one of the abductors, Will was legally responsible for Nick’s fate, even if he had no idea what would later happen to him; a plea bargain is being negotiated. Brian, only tacitly involved, was given a grant of immunity, one often that prosecutors would hand out in order to piece together events.

Jesse eventually took off, too, though his phone card was used later that night to call Ricky’s house, presumably to check on Nick. Freed of his duct tape, Nick was relaxed, maybe even a little tickled to be hanging with his brother’s older crowd. He and Rugge took bong hits, sipped Tanqueray gin, and played a James Bond 007 video game, Nick’s favorite. His computer screen name was remag—gamer spelled backward. “He was the best,” says Jeff Markowitz, trying to envision his son at ease. “I’m sure he was beating the pants off every one of those guys.”

At the end of the night, Rugge took Nick to his father’s place, about a mile away. Barron Rugge manages a biological-science greenhouse at UC Santa Barbara. His wife is active in her church, playing guitar and singing hymns on a Christian radio program. They both saw Nick but never questioned why he was spending the night in their home.

The next day, Monday, August 7, brought a new parade of witnesses. Two of them were gifts, Natasha Adams-Young, 17, and Kelly Carpenter, 16. They had been hanging out that summer with a 17,year, old boy named Graham Pressley, who was dealing dope for the crew in Santa Barbara. Now they were all at Rugge’s house, along with Nick, watching TV, smoking pot, grabbing food from the fridge. “Like everyone was really friendly and the atmosphere wasn’t tense at all,” Natasha says. “It was mostly light and like fun.” She took an interest in Nick. He lied, telling her he was 17, too. After a while they all jumped in Natasha’s car and drove to her house. She had learned by then that Nick was not in Santa Barbara by choice. “He told me that it was okay because he was doing it for his brother, and that as long as his brother was okay, he was okay,” Natasha says. “He was going along with it.” He had a scrape on his arm from the beating, and she brought him rubbing alcohol and ointment. Rugge took off a little bit later, leaving Nick alone with Natasha, Kelly, and Graham—the only time that none of the original kidnappers was present.

It could be argued that the kidnapping had, in fact, ended. By every indication, Nick was free to leave. “Frankly, in hindsight, all of us wish and hope he had done something different and just walked away,” says Santa Barbara County senior deputy district attorney Ron Zonen, who is prosecuting each of the defendants. He contends, however, that in Nick’s mind he was still a hostage. “Being passive,” Zonen says, “does not amount to consent.”

When Natasha drove everyone back to Rugge’s house later that day, essentially returning Nick to his captors, Jesse James Hollywood was waiting. He had introduced yet another person into the mix—a petite party gift named Michele Lasher, who was baring midriff and sitting in his lap. She lived with her parents in a gated community in Calabasas and taught children’s gymnastics in Woodland Hills. She also had JESSE JAMES tattooed just above her butt. During the investigation police would have doubts about whether Jesse and Michele were actually there that day; they were never spotted in Santa Barbara again. But Natasha and Kelly were adamant. How could they be so sure? Neither could stop talking about Michele’s boob job, reportedly paid for by Jesse. “Very lovely,” says Kelly, “but a little unreal.”

On Tuesday, August 8—his third day in Santa Barbara—Nick was still at the Rugges’. Of all the people who had seen him, only Natasha seemed to sense that something was wrong or that someone should speak up. She went to her mother, a criminal defense attorney, Natasha left out the names and addresses but explained that she knew of a boy who might be in trouble. Her mother urged her to call the police. Before sounding the alarm, Natasha wanted to be sure that Nick was really in danger. She went to see Graham and asked him to go for a walk in the park. Graham told her not to worry, that Nick would be fine. But he also told her to keep quiet or else they might all end up dead—”because Jesse Hollywood was quote-unquote crazy.” Natasha then went to see Rugge. “He looked me in the eye and he swore to me that he was going to take Nick home,” she says. Rugge told Nick the same thing, suggesting that he might give him some cash for a bus or a train that evening, but he wanted some assurance: “All I can say is there better not be a policeman coming at my door the next day,”

To celebrate Nick’s imminent release his keepers decided to rent a motel room and have a pool party, Needing a ride, Graham called his mother, a real estate appraiser. She was on her way to a 5:30 p.m. yoga class but agreed to swing by and pick everyone up. When they got in the car, Graham introduced Nick: “He is staying with Jesse for a few days.” Christina Pressley turned to the backseat to get a good look. She was worried about her son’s choice of friends, enough so that she had taken Rugge out to lunch a few months earlier, “because he had tattoos on him and my husband and I were concerned about the influence, because our son was coming out of his own rough time.” She knew that Graham smoked pot—though she had yet to learn that he was selling it—and she was in the habit of checking for warning signs. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “Nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Pressley,” Nick said. “Thanks for the ride.”

She dropped them off near the Lemon Tree Inn, a midrange motel on State Street, a good ways up from the tourist strip. For several hours they smoked dope and drank rum and Cokes. Nick even went swimming. The question of escape came up again. “I’m going home,” Nick insisted. “Why would I complicate it?”

For three days the Markowitzes had been in a panic, driving the streets of West Hills, tacking up homemade posters, tracking down every friend they could think of. On the third day they formally reported Nick missing to the LAPD. They remembered how, just six months earlier, he had gotten lost riding his bike and had called them in desperation. “He was so relieved to have made it home,” his mother says. “He didn’t even know where he was around our own neighborhood.” She used to sleep on the side of the bed closest to the door so that she could get to Nick’s room faster in the event of an earthquake. Now she switched to the side of the bed closest to the window.

Jesse James Hollywood was also worried, afraid to hold on to Nick and afraid to let Nick go. On that same Tuesday, about the time the others were planning their trip to the Lemon Tree, Jesse went to visit his lawyer. Stephen Hogg had been a friend of the Hollywood family for nearly 20 years. He had already represented Jesse on two previous criminal charges, resisting arrest and being a minor in possession of alcohol. While smoking a cigarette on the back patio of Hogg’s Simi Valley home, Jesse revealed that some friends were holding a boy hostage. When prosecutors tried to question Hogg about their conversation, he initially refused, citing attorney-client privilege. A judge later ordered him to testify.

“What do I do?” Jesse asked.

“You got to go to the police,” Hogg told him.

“I can’t”

“Jesse, you have got to.”

Jesse asked what kind of trouble his friends might be in.

“If they ask for ransom,” Hogg said, “they can get life.”

Jesse bolted from the backyard.

Hogg grew worried and began paging him.

Jesse never called back. Within an hour, though, Jack Hollywood called Hogg. He was in Big Sur with his estranged wife, Laurie, spending a few days at the Ventana Inn & Spa. Hogg explained the problem. “Get ahold of Jesse,” his father said, “and sit on him for me.”

Jack Hollywood also asked Hogg to track down John Roberts, another longtime family friend. Roberts was a 68-year-old retired wise guy with a checkered past in Chicago. He also happened to be the owner of the cargo van that had been used in Nick’s abduction. “I’m going to go out and find where the child is, and I’m going to do my Chicago act in front of these 20-year-old boys,” he concluded after speaking with Hogg. He would give the victim some money to keep his mouth shut. “That’s old-fashioned 1950s—you know what I’m trying to say?—it’s old-fashioned gangster talk.” Hogg continued to page Jesse. Before he checked out of the Ventana, Jack Hollywood made a flurry of calls: to Jesse’s pager, to Jesse’s cell phone, to Jesse’s girlfriend, to Roberts, to Hogg again. The one call that none of them made was to the police.

Jesse had heard enough. He went to see Ryan Hoyt and asked him if he wanted to erase his debt. “He said there was a mess that needed to be cleaned up,” Ryan says. “He said I needed to go take care of somebody.” Ryan is tall and lanky, with dark, slicked-back hair, a heavy brow, and droopy, slightly flushed cheeks. He was the gang’s whipping boy-“the quote-unquote lame guy,” His attorney says—a high school dropout who tried to join the navy but failed the drug test. His mother has battled mental illness and alcoholism most of her life. His father, a construction worker, allegedly beat her. His older sister is a heroin addict. She once dated Ben Markowitz. His younger brother is doing 12 years for armed robbery. As a teenager Ryan went searching for a family and found it among the Hollywoods. He baby-sat Jesse’s younger brother. He helped Jesse’s mom clean house. When Jesse bought his own place, Ryan was there every day, getting high, trying to please. He clams that his debt to Jesse was down to $200 by the time of the abduction. If a week were to go by without payment, though, Jesse wood add another $100 in interest to the tab. “That’s pretty brutal, I know,’ Ryan says. But falling from Jesse’s favor was an option Ryan could not afford. “Imagine how he wood treat me if I had told him to just—excuse my language—fuck off.”

Ryan’s 21st birthday was two days away. To be given the opportunity to clear his debt before that milestone was a better present than he could have hoped for. Not only wood he be free of Jesse’s taunting, but he would be moving up in the hierarchy, having been entrusted with an assignment far weightier than beer cans and dog poop. “This could be the change in his lifestyle he was looking for,” says Zonen, the prosecutor. “This had a certain feel to it that pleased him.”

Jesse gave Ryan a duffel bag. Inside was an assault pistol known as a TEC-DC9, a model whose role in rampages, including the Columbine shooting, has led to numerous lawsuits and legislation. This one had been modified into a fully automatic machine gun capable of spraying 12 rounds a second. About 8:30 p.m. Jesse’s phone card was used to make a call to the Lemon Tree. With Ryan on his way, “the thing with Nick is being taken care of,” Jesse explained to another friend. His final task involved Michele. She was turning 20 this day. Jesse took her to the Outback Steakhouse in Northridge. It wood keep her happy and help with his alibi. Dinner came to $108.98. He put it on his American Express card.

A couple hours later, up at the Lemon Tree, the party was coming to an end. “I’m sorry, ladies, I don’t mean to be rude, but you have to leave,” Rugge announced shortly before 11 p.m. “Some, one is going to come and pick up Nick.” On the way there, Ryan got lost and had to call for directions. When he arrived, Nick was alone with Rugge and Graham. Up to that point Graham’s role had been minimal; Ryan had never even met him before. Now he guided Ryan out Highway 154, up through the San Marcos Pass, to West Camino Cielo, a single-lane road that winds along the crest of the Santa Ynez Mountains. It is a 15-mile drive, spectacular by day, precarious at night. They pulled over and began hiking through the brush. After a hundred yards or so they came upon a boulder with a large gap in its center, known to Santa Barbara teenagers as Lizard’s Mouth. Graham began digging with a shovel. He wood later tell police that Ryan was aiming the TEGDC9 at him, saying, “You’ll dig if you know what’s good for you.” Ryan denies ever threatening Graham: “I didn’t have to.” The ground was dense and rocky. The grave was only a foot or two deep.

They drove back to the Lemon Tree and picked up Rugge and Nick. It was sometime after midnight, the early hours of August 9. They retraced the route to Lizard’s Mouth. Graham stayed in the car while Ryan and Rugge marched Nick up to the boulder. When Nick saw the gun, did he at last understand what was happening—or did he think they were merely trying to scare him? When they duct-taped his mouth, and his hands behind him, did he tell them that it was unnecessary, that he was still going along with their game? Detectives would later ask Ryan about that moment, if it haunted him, if he woke up at night thinking about someone saying “please”? Ryan sighed. “You don’t even want to know that one,” he said.

Ryan whacked Nick’s head with a shovel, then pushed him into the grave. He aimed the gun and, with a single squeeze of the trigger, sprayed nine bullets—a fusillade that stopped only because the weapon jammed. The shots hit Nick in the stomach, chest, neck, and chin. Most of them tipped through his insides and out his back. Ryan ripped the gun under Nick’s legs. They tried covering him with dirt, but the hole was too shallow. They piled branches on top. Rugge vomited. Ryan, for the moment at least, seemed pleased with his handiwork. “That’s the first time I ever did anybody,” he sad, back in the car. “I didn’t know he would go that quick.”

In the days that followed, everyone in Jesse James Hollywood’s crew lied—to their parents, to their friends, to each other, to themselves.

They dropped off Graham at the Lemon Tree and told him to check out in the morning. His curfew was normally 11 p.m., but his mother had fallen asleep, not realizing that he had been out all night until he called, at 6 a.m., asking for a ride home. “I asked him why he looked so pale—was he all right?” Christina Pressley says. “He said he didn’t feel very well and that he didn’t sleep much. He was clearly sick or shaken or something was very wrong.” When he got home, Graham called Natasha and told her that he had given Nick a ride back to the San Fernando Valley. Natasha was relieved and told her mom that everything had turned out okay.

Ryan drove down to West Hills. Jesse gave him $400. Ryan went shopping for new clothes at the 118 Board Shop, a skate and snowboard store in Granada Hills. Most days for him were a blur of brew and weed, but the next, August 10, was even foggier. “Mass consumption,” says Ryan, who was drinking, smoking, snorting lines, and popping muscle relaxants. “It was my birthday, my 21st birthday.” Most of the crew partied that night at the home of Casey Sheehan, another West Hills baseball alumnus who had once sold dope for Jesse. In his stupor Ryan confessed. “He didn’t show me that much emotion as far as, you know, like he had a lot of guilt on his conscience or anything like that, so I was still in disbelief about what had happened, what he had said to me,” Casey says. It was Casey’s car that Ryan had driven to Santa Barbara, and Casey was concerned enough to confront Jesse, who was also celebrating that night. “Just don’t worry about it,” Jesse told him.

The party might have gone on indefinitely had the killers only been more prudent in their disposal of the victim. Lizard’s Mouth may have seemed remote at two in the morning after a night of bong hits, but the grave was right in the middle of a trail—surrounded by graffiti, broken beer bottles, and the remnants of bonfires. That Saturday, August 12, three days after Nick’s murder, a group of hikers discovered the spot, alerted by the smell and the swarm of flies. They thought a dead animal was under the branches. When they saw a bloodied pant leg, they called the police. The summer heat had done terrible things to Nick’s body. His eyes and nose and wounds were filled with larvae. It took Santa Barbara County homicide detectives two days to identify him; a badly decomposed fingerprint matched the arrest record from the time Nick was busted with pot.

On Monday, August 14, detectives drove down to West Hills. They pulled up to the Markowitz home at 6:30 a.m. Susan was in bed. Jeff peeked out the window and told her that men in black suits were at the door. She knew Nick was dead.

The next day, August 15, the story was in the papers. It was accompanied by a photo of Nick at his bar mitzvah, in a white tuxedo and black bow tie. Natasha looked at the Santa Barbara News Press that morning and saw him—the sweet, funny, gangly boy she had worried about the week before. She collapsed in tears. She called Jesse Rugge. “It’s not what you think,” Rugge told her. She headed to his house. He was not wearing a shirt. “I could see his heart beating through his chest,” Natasha says. She went to her mom’s law office and talked to an attorney, who arranged for a grant of immunity. By 4 p.m. she was sitting with detectives, spilling the entire story, this time with names and addresses.

Jesse Rugge was arrested early on the morning of the 16th, followed by Graham Pressley, Will Skidmore, and by the end of the day, Ryan Hoyt. They all talked, implicating themselves and each other. From jail Ryan called his mother, Victoria Hoyt, a conversation that authorities recorded and later played at his trial. With her voice wavering between a growl and a whimper she pressured Ryan into talking to detectives without an attorney, never pausing to think that he might be guilty.

Ryan, Ryan, you are innocent, you are so innocent,” she said. “You are guilty by association.”

“I know,” he said.

“Who did this? You tell them right now!”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is Jesse? Where the fuck is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then find him! Spill your fucking guts and get out now! Do it for me, do it for your family, do it for yourself. Tell them what you know. Ryan, you tell them now! You fucking asshole. Don’t defend anybody. This is your life.”

Then she recited the Lord’s Prayer.

After hanging up, Ryan called a guard and said he wanted to speak to somebody about the crime. He was brought to an interview room equipped with a hidden camera and a microphone. He was wearing an orange jailhouse jumpsuit, slumped in a chair, rubbing his forehead. Two detectives arrived and asked him what he wanted to talk about. “If I talk, does it get said in court that I said it?” Ryan asked.

He would later claim to remember none of what he said, but jurors would get to see and hear him for themselves. He began to recount the story of the murder, hoping to minimize his involvement at every possible juncture. “What Ben owed Jesse didn’t, in my opinion—I’m going to say this off the record—in my opinion, didn’t justify this kid’s death,” Ryan said. He made it clear that he had nothing to do with the kidnapping. He was also offended by reports that he had dug Nick’s grave. “I feel like I’ve been shit on, excuse my language.” When he was told that the other defendants were ratting him out, saying he had put the duct tape on Nick, Ryan was indignant. “Really?” he said. “I love this one.”

There was one matter he wanted to set straight: “The only thing I did was kill him.”

While the rest were blurting out confessions, proving themselves to be as detached from their own interests as they were from Nick’s, Jesse James Hollywood was demonstrating a slyness that would confound just about everyone.

That is not to say that Jesse was discreet. He had always had a flamboyance about him, a compulsion to live out the mythology of the dope man—the pimp, the playa, the mac daddy—to a degree that exceeded the fantasies of most suburban kids. Jesse’s favorite alias, Sean Michaels, is the name of an African American porn star who sells replicas of his genitalia on the Internet for $69. When Jesse’s ghetto-fabulous “Hollywood Honda” ended up in the fall 1999 edition of Lowrider Euro, under the headline RIDING OFF INTO THE SUNSET WITH JESSE JAMES’ WILD RIDE, it was only because he had mailed photos of it to the magazines editor. “I never thought that I would take it to this level,” Jesse says in the article, referring to his investment in the car. “I guess I got addicted to it.” But if Jesse was obsessed with projecting an image that few five-foot-five, 140-pound white boys can command, he at least understood the game he was playing better than any of the lost souls in his crew.

In the days after the murder he began collecting on old debts. Brian Affronti, one of the boys who had driven the van back from Santa Barbara, owed him $4,000. He was also storing a shotgun for Jesse, wrapped in a sleeping bag. Brian was not home when Jesse came for the money but had told him where it was hidden—and instructed him to pick up the sleeping bag while he was at it. “That way it wouldn’t look odd to my parents,” Brian says. Now driving a leased Lincoln LS, Jesse headed to Palm Springs, where Michele was attending a modeling convention. He drained $24,000 from his bank account, and they took off for Las Vegas. Jesse checked them into the Bellagio, a place that could not possibly have more security cameras. This time he paid cash.

The day Nick’s body was identified in the newspapers, Jack Hollywood was stunned. Ever since he learned of the abduction, he had been pressing Jesse for answers but getting no response. He paged his son. Jesse finally called back to say that he was on his way to Colorado, where the family had lived for a few years in the mid 1990s. His father called Richard Dispenza, a 48-year-old assistant football coach at Woodland Park High School in Colorado Springs. Dispenza was Jesse’s godfather. “I think my kid is in some kind of trouble, and I’m not sure, you know, how involved he is or what’s going on, but the last I heard he was headed that way,” Jack Hollywood told him. On the day of the arrests Jesse and Michele stayed with Dispenza. Then Michele caught a flight back to L.A., and Dispenza checked Jesse into a Ramada Inn. When Santa Barbara County detectives interviewed Dispenza the next day, Jesse was still at the motel. Dispenza had just been named his school’s Teacher of the Year. He was the founder of an antismoking group called Tobacco-Free Teens. If he had wanted to, he could have ended the manhunt right then. But he lied. A judge later sentenced him to three years’ probation and 480 hours of community service for harboring a fugitive.

Jesse left the motel on August 20. He had abandoned the Lincoln at Dispenza’s house, along with a 12-gauge shotgun and an AR-15 assault rifle. He walked to the home of Chas Saulsbury, a friend from his early teens whom he had not spoken to in years. Jesse told Chas’s mom that he had been pickpocketed in Vegas. Chas agreed to give Jesse a ride back there. Jesse paid for everything out of a plastic bag full of $100 bills. In Vegas he convinced Chas to take him all the way to L.A., and during the drive he told Chas the whole story, saying they had snatched Nick to get back at Ben. “But, pretty much, like he said, they made a mistake grabbing him, and once they had him they kind of were just a little bit scared to let him go,” Chas says. Only after consulting with his attorney did Jesse decide to cut his losses. “He talked to his lawyer to find out the implications of the kidnapping and whatnot, and at that point, from what he told me, the lawyer says that he was in enough trouble already and they should get rid of the kid.”

By the time they reached West Hills, Chas was spooked. Jesse wanted to visit John Roberts. “Old John,” as he is known to the Hollywoods, was watching a baseball game—one that he had made a little wager on—when he noticed Jesse standing at the screen door. “I got up and went to the door and grabbed him, pulled him into the house and shut the door, and it was a very emotional meeting, both of us,” he says. Roberts had already taken it upon himself to have the van washed and wiped with solvent, hoping to erase any evidence of Jesse’s role in the abduction. But when Jesse asked for a fake ID, Roberts says he balked. “I knew people that used to do it, I knew people in Chicago that do it, but I couldn’t do it and I couldn’t give him any money and he could not stay at my house.” A week later Santa Barbara County sheriffs investigators showed up to serve a search warrant and thought they heard voices inside. When nobody came out, they called in a SWAT team. Roberts finally emerged, saying he had been asleep. Officers still bombarded the house with tear gas but found no sign of Jesse.

That was a year and a half ago.

Today Jesse James Hollywood is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. The bureau’s Web site features eight color photos of him. Agents even took the unusual step of hosting an Internet chat, hoping to generate tips. He has been profiled three times onUnsolved Mysteries, and four times on America’s Most Wanted. The reward for his capture stands at $50,000, of which $30,000 is being offered by the Markowitzes; if he surrenders voluntarily, they have pledged to put their share in a college fund for his 12-year-old brother. Yet for all of Jesse James Hollywood’s splashiness, his posturing, his arrogance, and his youth, there has not been another verified sighting—no leads, no arrests.

Jesse, in fact, is just about the only person tied to the case who has shown any initiative or moxie. Nearly everyone else who played a role in the crime or watched it unfold was hobbled by a kind of nonchalance, impassively going along with things—from the killers to the witnesses to, sadly, the victim himself. Most of them were stoned, which is not that unusual; half of all U.S. high school seniors have at some time smoked pot. This group’s pot smoking, however, was not merely excessive. Whether cause or effect, a stultifying moral indifference infected their partying; they stumbled through the ordeal with the vacancy of their video games, bereft of judgment or consequence. Even Natasha—the story’s heroine, to the extent that one exists—deluded herself into thinking that things were not how they appeared. “It didn’t really seem real,” she says in perfect teenspeak. The parents who wandered in and out of the picture also missed signals. So many of them saw only what they wanted to see, never asking the inconvenient questions that might expose the lie.

Jesse’s situation was different. He enjoyed not only a level of drive and talent that eluded the others but also a degree of support from his parents—especially his father—that set him apart. Far from being removed, much less disapproving, Jack Hollywood was Jesse’s role model. “It’s just that the father is much more sophisticated, savvy, low-profile, and seemingly has much better judgment than his son,” says Bruce Correll, chief deputy of the Santa Barbara County sheriffs department. For the past two decades, according to authorities, Jesse’s dad has been a large-scale San Fernando Valley marijuana trafficker—a pleasant, unassuming wholesaler who uses his love for baseball as cover. “Jack Hollywood is a mobster,” Zonen, the prosecutor, has said in court, contending that Jesse was successful “because he went into the family business.” Ben Markowitz has testified that Jesse got dope from his father. John Roberts also has testified that he and Jesse’s father “were involved together at one time, some time ago. But may I say, never in conjunction, never in conjunction with Jesse, ever.” During a search of Jack Hollywood’s residence, officers seized tax documents, check stubs, and mortgage statements, along with several small bags of marijuana and a cardboard box containing $7,600 in cash, but have yet to file charges. “They don’t charge me with anything,” Jack Hollywood says, “so how can I prove I’m innocent?

Unlike Jesse, who flouted the taboos of the suburbs, his dad knew how to blend into West Hills. At one point he opened a baseball-card shop. At another he ran a car-wholesaling business, advertising in Jesse’s Little League yearbooks. His passion for the sport puts a new twist on the old Yogi Berra quip, a saying featured on the West Hills baseball Web site: “Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the street.” The case against Jack Hollywood has yet to be proved, but prosecutors and detectives believe it will eventually explain everything about Jesse—why he was able to manipulate his cohorts so effectively and, more important, how he has managed to survive so long on the lam. They believe that his father knows where Jesse is hiding and is using his own underworld connections to keep him there. In the beginning Jesse did what most novice fugitives do, visiting familiar people and places, flashing cash, discussing the crime. Once he returned to West Hills, though, he vanished.

“That’s Jack Hollywood’s personality taking control,” Chief Deputy Correll says. “If he had not taken control, Jesse would be in jail fight now.”

In the time that Jesse James Hollywood has been missing, Jeff and Susan Markowitz have transformed their home into a shrine. The relics of Nick’s life are everywhere: baby handprints, stuffed animals, the decoration from his first birthday cake—and his second and third and fourth and fifth—a karate robe, the cast from a broken right foot, an ornamental egg filled with soil from his grave. Susan has tried to console herself by writing poems, their titles blunt and raw: “Denial,” “Fading,” “Drifting,” “What Day Is This?” The screensaver on her computer is a picture of Nick’s marble headstone. Her e-mail address is aching4nick.

Evidence of Ben’s life is scarcer. Four months after the murder he was arrested on a pair of armed robbery warrants. The cases were weak—one victim was a druggie; the other, a reputed prostitute, accompanied him to a strip joint and a cheap motel—but Ben still drew a 16-month prison term. Susan could not forgive his lack of repentance. “He’s rubbing his brothers name in the dirt,” she says.

When Susan talks, she seems to be floating. She wants to die. Inside, she says, she already has. Twice she has been hospitalized, after overdosing on a combination of sleeping pills and champagne. Instead of finding peace she managed only to rack up $20,000 in medical bills. She made it through the first trial by taking Nick’s leather jacket to court, clutching it as his final hours were relived. She has vowed to stay alive long enough to see that all of his accused killers are brought to justice—and that includes Jesse James Hollywood, if and when he is captured. She does not know how long that will be. But she knows it will fulfill her last obligation as a mother.

Confessions of a Car Salesman

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 17:53:50 -0400

Trapping the Lord of War: The Rise and Fall of Viktor Bout [Der Spiegel]

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 12:00:00 -0400

by Spiegel Staff

10/6/2010

Viktor Bout, who has been dubbed the “lord of war” and the “merchant of death,” has had his fingers in many bloody conflicts over the years. The Russian arms dealer, who has been in a Thai prison since 2008, is now likely to be extradited to the United States. Will he reveal the names of his backers? By SPIEGEL Staff

Anyone who meets with an arms dealer in Moscow can expect the rendezvous to take place in a dark bar in the suburbs, while walking in a densely wooded park or perhaps in an underground parking garage. The Starlite Diner on Mayakovsky Square, on the other hand, is an unlikely meeting point. The fast food restaurant is popular with local youth and foreign tourists and is brightly lit, saturated with the smell of hamburgers and covered with Elvis posters.

Nevertheless, Sergei Bout and Richard Chichakli, who are suspected of being involved in arms deals, have indeed chosen to meet at this popular diner. It isn’t only because they “were here often with him,” as they say under their breath. It’s also because the spot the two men have chosen, on the protected veranda and with a view of the door, gives them a good vantage point. The Starlite, with its red plastic chairs, is a restaurant frequented by many different people, a place where no one is conspicuous, young or old, jeans or dressed in a suit. The restaurant is easy to observe but difficult to monitor. Perhaps spy novel author John le Carré would even have given his blessing to this restaurant as a place to discuss business deals involving deadly missiles and Kalashnikovs.

Sergei Bout, 49, is a Russian citizen. His foreign bank accounts are frozen and he faces the threat of arrest if he travels to the West. Richard Chichakli, 51, is a Syrian-born United States citizen who fled from Texas and now lives in Moscow with his Russian wife. His bank accounts are also frozen, and his name is on a United Nations list of arms embargo breakers.

Right After Bin Laden on Most-Wanted List

The two men are believed to have had particularly close ties to the man they refer to as “him,” also known as the “merchant of death”: Viktor Bout, 43, who allegedly made hundreds of millions of dollars in the illegal international arms trade. If the allegations about Bout are true, his network of companies has provided weapons shipments to virtually every armed conflict of the last few decades. Some Western experts are convinced that Bout has spread more terror and is responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden, which explains why his name was listed second next to that of the al-Qaida leader on the US intelligence agencies’ internal most-wanted list.

Sergei, burly, casually dressed and foul-mouthed — a Bud Spencer type — is the brother of the merchant of death. Richard, athletic, distinguished looking and smooth-talking — more of a George Clooney type — was Viktor Bout’s business partner and best friend for years. The “Lord of War” himself has been in a Bangkok prison since 2008. After a prolonged legal tug-of-war, it now seems likely that Thailand will imminently extradite him to the United States.

His trial promises to offer an unprecedented glimpse into the shadowy world of the arms dealer, a prospect that undoubtedly has politicians and generals in Africa, Asia and Latin America deeply concerned. But they aren’t the only ones. Bout’s secretive connections reach all the way up to senior levels of government in Moscow and Washington. If he talks, the revelations could cause a serious rift between the two countries, or what Time magazine calls a “new ice age.”

‘Viktor Wouldn’t Hurt a Cat’

Chichakli believes his friend — and he too, by extension — is the target of a CIA conspiracy. “We made deals 15 years ago. It was a totally legal cargo business,” he says. Although Chichakli claims that he no longer had any business connections with Bout after 2004, a United Nations report suggests otherwise, indicating that Chichakli provided financial support for Bout’s weapons deals. US authorities seized his $1.5 million Texas estate and his two Mercedes sports cars, a slap in the face that still upsets him today. “I was never guilty of anything, and it’s out of the question that my gentle friend Viktor, who wouldn’t hurt a cat, could have smuggled weapons on a grand scale.”

Sergei Bout, an aircraft mechanic, describes his brother as a humanist, a family man, a vegetarian interested in saving the rainforest — and a clever businessman. The fact that Viktor happened to have purchased or leased aircraft at the right time, aircraft that he then deployed all over the world, was not only legal but a brilliant business concept, says his older brother.

What kinds of cargo did Viktor Bout transport? “Everything — from water filters to frozen chickens, refrigerators to stereos.”

When asked whether his brother transported weapons, Sergei Bout says, with a sigh: “No one looks that closely, especially in Africa, as long as the freight documents are in order. The owner and the pilot can’t be held responsible for what’s being loaded onto the plane. Why don’t you bring charges against a taxi driver if one of his passengers is carrying unpleasant things in his suitcase, or against a mailman who is unknowingly carrying nasty little packages?”

Deadly Cargo

But if investigators are to be believed, there were quite a few “unpleasant things” and “nasty little packages” on Bout’s planes. He certainly may have transported flowers, food and electronic devices with his dozens of Antonovs, Ilyushins and Yakovlevs. He was even known to have flown aid materials to disaster zones and UN peacekeepers to crisis regions. Nevertheless, Bout earned a large share of his profits with other, more deadly cargo.

In addition to Bout’s brother and his business partner, SPIEGEL has interviewed many other witnesses, including his wife, his Thai attorney, journalists who accompanied him in the chaos of African wars, a professional Bout hunter at the US National Security Council and an idealistic Bout pursuer who began tracking him down at a former Belgian monastery. Military experts and members of the intelligence community also provided information.

The saga of the merchant of death, a tale of blood diamonds and shipments of coltan and gold, unfolds in some of the world’s major cities, places like Moscow, Washington, Bangkok and Brussels. But the minor outposts of war also play an important role: poorly guarded arms warehouses in the former Soviet republics; a jungle airstrip in northeastern Congo; the American Balad Airbase in Iraq; Kandahar, a terrorist stronghold in Afghanistan; and a villa surrounded by bodyguards in Liberia’s war-ravaged capital Monrovia.

Taking Advantage of Globalization

The Viktor Bout story is the tale of an unscrupulous businessman who cleverly took advantage of globalization, and who appears to have provided weapons to virtually every army in the world: from the Americans to the Taliban and their enemies in the Northern Alliance, and from Marxist guerillas in Colombia to child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Still, there is one thing Bout cannot be accused of: discriminating against anyone because of their skin color or political views. Anyone able to pay was supplied — discreetly and reliably — with every deadly weapon under the sun.

The Bout case also shines a light on years of people looking the other way and ignoring the truth, and on strange alliances. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an effort to prevent the extradition of his fellow Russian, has spoken out publicly on his behalf, even taking the highly unusual step of suggesting that Bout is innocent. Officials in Washington have remained silent. Under these circumstances, will prosecutors even be able to prove that the arms dealer did in fact commit crimes? Will he pay for his alleged offences, and will others, people with political influence, be pilloried in the process?

The film “Lord of War,” in which Nicolas Cage portrays an arms dealer who strongly resembles Bout, caused a stir worldwide when it was released in 2005. In the film Cage’s character, Yuri Orlov, says: “There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every 12 people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?” When asked about the quote, Bout said: “It’s cynical. Too bad for Cage, though. He deserved a better screenplay.”

Who exactly is this Viktor Anatolyevich Bout?

Part 2: Secretive about His Past

Bout was born on Jan. 13, 1967 in Dushanbe, the capital of the then Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. But Bout is even secretive about this simple fact, saying that he comes from a place in Turkmenistan, a claim that mystifies even his brother, Sergei.

The two brothers grew up in a sheltered environment. The father was an auto mechanic and the mother was a bookkeeper — Russian atheists surrounded by a majority Muslim population on the southern edge of the USSR.

Viktor was the adventurous son, the more ingenious and clever of the two boys, copying banned pop songs to earn a little extra pocket money and teaching himself Esperanto in the belief that it would come in handy later in life. He also joined Komsomol, the Communist Union of Youth, because it seemed that the only career opportunities could be found within the Communist Party. After completing a special training program with Soviet military intelligence, which he continues to deny today, he attended the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow.

Portuguese became his favorite subject. In the late 1980s, the army sent him to Mozambique and Angola to work as a military translator. It was still a time of proxy wars between East and West, with Moscow backing the African anti-colonialist movements.

Skilled Linguist

Bout never lost his cool, always remaining levelheaded and calculating. He seduced a Russian diplomat’s wife, a woman named Alla, and then married her. Everything seemed to come to him naturally, and his language skills were legendary. During his time in Africa, Bout apparently met Igor Sechin, who was also working as an interpreter and who would later embark on an extremely successful political career. Some even believe that Sechin, now Russia’s deputy prime minister and a close ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, helped and protected Bout. To this day, both men deny having had any relationship.

Back in Moscow, Bout was discharged from the military in 1991, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. When the Soviet Union collapsed soon afterwards, an entire world fell apart for many in the military. But Bout, in his mid-20s by then, astutely saw the unfolding chaos as an opportunity. Unused aircraft stood idle on the tarmac at the waning superpower’s airports, and unsold weapons were piled high in the country’s weapons factories. The enterprising Bout purchased — with the help of military intelligence, some claim — three old Antonov cargo planes for the ridiculously low price of $40,000 apiece. Also working in his favor was the fact that there was no shortage of pilots, and that many were without work during those months of turmoil.

Perhaps Bout was clever enough to register his fleet, which soon grew to four dozen aircraft, in obscure countries and to creatively conceal the identities of his clients, and perhaps he received help from Moscow. In any event, Bout registered his planes in countries like Equatorial Guinea and the Central African Republic, benefiting from their lax regulations.

Reckless Pilots

In 1993, Bout, accompanied by his brother Sergei, moved his fleet to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. There they met Chichakli, another aviation buff, who told them: “Give me a few pieces of steel and I’ll build you an airline.” Like the Bouts, Chichakli paid little heed to what the planes were carrying, as long as they weren’t flying empty and the recipients of their cargo paid on time.

The cargos were often routed through the Bulgarian city of Burgas en route to Africa. The routes were mysterious and the pilots were reckless, flying ancient but robust planes that could land anywhere.

Africa’s elites needed a lot of things, but weapons were always part of the mix. In Nigeria and Angola, so-called liberation movements were battling so-called regular armies, while powerful politicians in both East and West served as interested onlookers — and often as clandestine players. Everyone wanted access to the region’s vast and valuable mineral resources.

Two US journalists, Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, learned that the Russian merchant of death and his fleet played a particularly shameful role in Liberia, where Bout reportedly supplied the brutal warlord Charles Taylor with large numbers of weapons after Taylor had assumed power. Armed with these weapons, Taylor’s child soldiers, often high on drugs, became notorious for mowing down everything in their path.

Part 3: The Respected ‘Mister Vik’

According to Farah and Braun, Bout bought a house in the Liberian capital Monrovia near Taylor’s official residence, where he was a frequent visitor and where Taylor’s servants respectfully called him “Mister Vik.” The dictator, who would send rebel units on raids into neighboring, resource-rich Sierra Leone, allegedly paid Bout with looted blood diamonds. Bout apparently brought his own gemstone experts to the meetings with Taylor to check the stones.

Bout must have known that he was violating UN arms embargos with his shipments to Liberia and Angola, because he made sure that his pilots always took along spray paint to paint over the call signs on their aircraft so that they couldn’t be identified.

Bout’s empire reached its zenith around the turn of the millennium, when Belgian reporter Dick Draulans was allowed to accompany him into the Congolese heart of darkness. Bout was there to drum up business with Jean-Pierre Bemba, the notorious rebel leader (and later vice president). He provided Bemba with combat helicopters. But this wasn’t enough for the rebels, who complained that there was something missing in the cargo: alcohol. Bout, sensing that the situation threatened to spin out of control, dispatched one of his pilots to fly over enemy lines at night. A few hours later the man, dripping with sweat, returned with a few cases of beer.

“It was typical Bout,” says Draulans, “clever, customer-oriented, jovial.” The reporter says that he never saw a different side to Bout during their trips together. The Russian never drank, was faithful to his wife and never lost his cool — a businessman from head to toe. His three Russian bodyguards, says Draulans, were “like characters in an Rambo film, always carrying machetes.”

Odious Business Partners

Only once did the Belgian experience the arms dealer in a sentimental mood. Bout was developing a sort of Marshall Plan for Africa. He said he wanted to attract investors, protect the virgin rainforests from clearing and the elephants from poachers. He, Viktor Bout, claimed to be determined to help Africa. He said he had already flown potential investors from Dubai to Central Africa, “to the heavenly landscape where I would like to live with my wife and daughter.” But Draulans wasn’t convinced, partly because of the nature of Bout’s business partners. Taylor and Bemba, who were already considered serious war criminals at the time, are now behind bars and face charges of war crimes in trials before international courts.

The year 2001 marked a turning point in Bout’s career. Two men, working independently of each other, had made it their mission to track him down. One of Bout’s aircraft, which had been chartered for a UN humanitarian mission, was identified as the same plane that had been filmed several weeks earlier with weapons being unloaded from it.

One of Bout’s pursuers, Johan Peleman, is self-taught when it comes to the arms trade. In the mid-1990s Peleman, an expert on medieval literature, was working for a charitable peace organization headquartered in a Franciscan monastery in Antwerp. While conducting his research, the idealist stumbled upon information about Bout and his airlines, which always seemed to be on the scene in war zones. “I was shocked that politics, ideology or moral considerations didn’t play the slightest role in Bout’s operations,” Peleman says. “He was supplying weapons to both Congolese rebels and the then president of Zaire, Mobutu, who he ultimately flew out of the country into exile.”

Peleman’s tenacity eventually convinced UN experts, to whom he had sent his detailed reports on flight movements and dubious ultimate buyer certificates. In 1999, the UN hired Peleman as a researcher. His new job gave him access to satellite images and bank accounts. In a report on Angola that Peleman submitted to the UN Security Council in late 2000, the Russian was mentioned for the first time in connection with the illegal arms trade.

Razor-Sharp Intelligence

Lee Wolosky couldn’t be more different from the chain-smoking outsider Peleman. Wolosky, an American lawyer and political careerist, operated within the system. Whereas Peleman pursued his mission with emotion and a deep sense of outrage, Wolosky was consistently coolheaded and approached his work with the razor-sharp intelligence of a Harvard graduate and Russia expert. He served at the White House as the director for transnational threats on the National Security Council staff.

In 2000, the Bout file, a hodgepodge of information that was only a few pages thick, landed on Wolosky’s desk. The case fascinated Wolosky, who later said: ”Bout represented a post-Cold-War phenomenon for which there was no framework to stop. No one was doing what he was doing. And there was no response. We needed to build a response.”

While doing his research for the administration of then US President Bill Clinton, Wolosky focused on Africa and, more importantly, on Afghanistan. Bout supplied the Taliban and, in doing so, began walking a tightrope in that part of the world, says Wolosky. He says that Bout’s fingerprints were everywhere.

But by mid-2001, Bout could no longer travel where he pleased. Many of his planes and companies were being monitored and his operating range seemed to have been reduced. Wolosky hoped to obtain an international warrant for Bout’s arrest, but his only supporters were the Belgians, who limited their charges to money laundering. Bout had fled to Russia, which was unwilling to extradite him on those charges.

Part 4: Hired to Supply US Forces in Iraq

Priorities changed after the horrific terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Wolosky, a Democrat, was at odds with Republican President George W. Bush’s new administration, and his special unit was dissolved. In a July 2002 opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, Wolosky sharply criticized Washington’s failure to act in the Bout case. He was also critical of Moscow, which had apparently given him “official protection.” Wolosky decided to return to the more lucrative — and less frustrating — pursuit of practicing law.

But then something happened that Wolosky couldn’t have imagined in his worst nightmares: The US government began collaborating with the merchant of death and hired him to supply its war in Iraq.

To this day, it remains unclear whether the collaboration was the result of sloppy work on the part of US officials or whether Washington knew who was the owner of Irbis Air, a company registered in Kazakhstan. It is clear, however, that Bout’s aircraft were subcontracted to the US Air Mobility Command, as well as to defense contractor KBR, a company owned by the Halliburton conglomerate. Then-US Vice President Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton until 2000. It is also clear that the subcontracted Irbis Air flights were landing in Baghdad and at Balad Airbase, for which all pilots required a special US military clearance.

Multi-Million Donation

Reporters Farah and Braun later discovered that Irbis completed at least 1,000 flights to Iraq in 2003 and 2004. They write: “U.S. taxpayers donated as much as $60 million to the Viktor Bout organization.” At a time when President Bush was demanding that the US’s allies be “either with us or against us” in the war on terror, the Russian arms dealer was accomplishing a balancing act. He was both a hunted man and a subcontractor to a US defense contractor.

The US State Department blacklisted Bout in 2005. From then on, he was only seen in Moscow’s expensive sushi restaurants or in the bars of five-star hotels. He also paid regular visits to the partially government-owned foreign trade company Isotrex, which dealt with Russian weapons factories. The party of ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky offered Bout a slot on its election list that would have guaranteed him a seat in the Russian parliament. “What would I do there? I can solve all my problems on my own,” Bout responded.

By 2008, things had grown quiet around Bout, who was living in a luxury apartment with his wife and daughter. Newsweek claimed that Bout was involved in arms shipments to Hezbollah in Lebanon, but if that was true, he must have been pulling the strings from a distance. He had grown cautious and no longer left Russia, with the exception of two mysterious trips to China.

That was also about the time that the individuals interviewed by SPIEGEL abandoned the idea that Bout could be brought to justice. Belgian journalist Draulans was still reporting from Africa, but now he was avoiding civil wars and arms dealers, trying to forget about Bout. Investigator Peleman still felt committed to his sense of idealism and was coordinating UN peacekeeping troops in Congo. Former National Security Council expert Wolosky had been made a partner at the New York law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, where one of his clients was the insurance company AIG, whose brokers — warlords of a different sort — almost brought down the global economy.

Now there was only one person left who could ruin Viktor Bout and bring him to justice: Bout himself. That could happen through his delusions of grandeur or his recklessness — or both.

Part 5: Bout’s Downfall

At some point in November 2007, a plan must have been assembled in the United States to set a trap for Bout. A special unit of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) made contact with Bout through a middleman named Andrew Smulian, who knew the Russian well. Smulian proposed a lucrative deal to Bout. He told the arms dealer that the Colombian guerilla organization FARC wanted to buy $20 million worth of weapons: 700 surface-to-air missiles, 5,000 AK-47 rifles, several million rounds of ammunition and an unspecified number of landmines.

Bout was suspicious and, using a photo, tried to identify the FARC members supposedly involved in the deal. He had done business with FARC a decade earlier, when he dropped weapons over the jungles of South America. At the last minute, Bout decided not to appear at a meeting in Bucharest. The frustrated DEA agents, who were waiting at the airport in the Romanian capital, cursed Bout for his professionalism.

The agents decided to try again, this time in Bangkok instead of Bucharest.

Off on Vacation

Apparently greed trumped Bout’s instincts the second time around. Convinced that nothing could happen to him in Thailand, he decided to fly to Bangkok on March 5, 2008 for a “vacation” in the country. After arriving on a night flight, he checked into a five-star hotel, the Sofitel Silom, in Bangkok’s business district, where he had reserved a suite on the 15th floor. Before hanging the “Do not disturb” sign on his door, Bout booked the hotel’s conference room for 3 p.m., and then he went to bed.

At the meeting, Bout spent two hours negotiating with the supposed FARC representatives. He discussed their weapons program and agreed to provide them with everything they had requested. When the undercover agents explained to him that the missiles had to be capable of shooting down American aircraft, he told them that he enthusiastically supported their efforts, and that he was always in favor of targeting Americans. That was when the men revealed themselves as US agents. Bout surrendered without resisting.

He was initially taken to a notorious prison for hardened criminals, where he was photographed in an orange prison jumpsuit, with his hands in handcuffs and shackles on his feet. At first, Bout was thrown into group cells together with murderers, rapists and child molesters. The other prisoners most likely included a provocateur or two who had been planted to encourage Bout to talk. But he kept his distance, and he was later moved to an individual cell.

“My cell is two by two meters,” he told his wife when she came to visit him. She was only allowed to see and speak to him through a glass wall. The conditions at the prison were brutal: The food was miserable, the heat was unbearable and the place was infested with cockroaches.

A Liking for Paulo Coelho

Bout lost his excess pounds. He took advantage of the daily 40-minute exercise periods in the prison yard, and he learned new languages from the other prisoners. “Urdu, Farsi, Turkish — please bring me dictionaries,” he asked his wife. He spent time reading, and developed a liking for the work of Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, author of “The Manual of the Warrior of Light.” Ironically, the amoral businessman had become enamored of the esoteric bestselling author, who preaches tolerance and civic engagement.

Bout has been in pretrial custody for more than two years now. His wife Alla has since moved to Bangkok. She is everything but the typical trophy wife so often seen at the side of rich Russian businessmen. A petite redhead who used to run a clothing store in Russia, she is fighting like a lioness for her husband, often sleeping in taxis or in front of the prison gates. Determined to prevent the Americans from secretly picking him up and taking him to the United States, she says: “They have turned him into a monster.”

Lak Nitiwatanavichan, Bout’s Thai attorney, says: “They have no solid evidence against my client. Tape recordings made under false pretenses are inconclusive, and pure statements of intent are hardly punishable.” The 74-year-old, with his thinning, snow-white hair and plastic sandals, is outraged.

High-ranking Russian officials have similar feelings about the Bout case. Foreign Minister Lavrov calls it “politically motivated” and has vowed to do everything in his power to bring the Russian citizen home. The Russian parliament, the Duma, adopted a declaration of support. And Moscow’s pro-government press is portraying Bout as a martyr who deserves to be freed from the clutches of the CIA.

Part 6: Offered a Deal

It is undeniable that some very strange things happened in Bangkok. Sirichoke Sopha, a member of parliament and a close adviser to Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, paid a visit to the prisoner on a Sunday in April.

Sopha allegedly offered the Russian a deal. The Thais wanted him to testify about an aircraft that authorities in Bangkok had seized in December 2009 with 35 tons of weapons on board, which was en route from North Korea to Iran and was being flown by a pilot Bout knew. If members of the Thai opposition are to be believed, the alleged deal also revolved around the possible extradition of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and allegations of abuse of office and incitement to terrorism. The Thai government wanted Bout to provide incriminating material. They also wanted the Kremlin to turn over the politician, who is currently spending much of his time in Montenegro and Moscow, to Bangkok. Only if these conditions were fulfilled would Bout be released and sent home to Russia.

Up to 30 Years

The American indictment — “08 CRIM. 365, Southern District of New York versus Viktor Bout alias Viktor Bulakin alias Vadim Markovich Aminov” — is based exclusively on the events in Bangkok. The principal charges are “conspiracy with the intent to kill American citizens” and the “support of a foreign terrorist organization.” Experts familiar with the US justice system believe that the defendant, if convicted, could end up behind bars for 20 to 30 years, unless he cooperates and accepts a plea bargain.

Did the American prosecutors limit their case to the sham FARC weapons deal, because they have no other solid evidence? Is Washington trying to protect possible Russian backers, at least temporarily? Or are the US intelligence community and the Pentagon blocking the prosecutors from leveling more extensive charges, hoping to quietly sweep their own embarrassing cooperation with the merchant of death under the table?

Bout, at any rate, seems to be homesick for Moscow. “That’s the only place I feel safe,” he told his wife. It’s arguably a sign of his close ties to senior government officials.

Both arms dealers and those who investigate them live very dangerous lives in that part of the world. Ivan Safronov, a journalist who wrote about shady deals, plunged to his death from a Moscow window in 2007. Though it was meant to look like a suicide, there are indications that it was a contract killing. Oleg Orlov, a Russian arms dealer, was arrested in Kiev and subsequently murdered in prison — supposedly by a fellow prisoner.

Dozens of Others

SPIEGEL has one last meeting with Sergei Bout, not at the “Starlite,” this time, but in a bar in downtown Moscow called “Monks and Nuns.”

It is the day on which the media are reporting on a remarkable legal weapons deal: Washington has signed the biggest arms deal of all time with Saudi Arabia. According to calculations by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the world’s 100 largest weapons makers sold $385 billion worth of munitions in 2008, a increase of 11 percent over the previous year. The world’s three largest arms exporters are the United States, Russia and Germany. During the same period, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development spent $122 billion on development aid.

Sergei poses a hypothetical question: If someone can no longer do the job himself, aren’t there dozens of others waiting to take his place? And are heads of state behaving any differently when they engage in their legitimate arms deals with each other? “I don’t know why the Americans are so obsessed about prosecuting Viktor.” He points out that anyone who thinks his brother will betray his country is deceiving himself. His brother, says Sergei, can take a lot and remains an optimist.

But then there is Viktor Bout’s latest letter from the prison in Bangkok, in which he makes statements that seem pessimistic on the eve of his probable extradition. “The Americans have ways to get anyone to talk. Perhaps they’ll torture me with chemical substances, or perhaps they’ll stick me in a camp like Guantanamo. At any rate, I won’t get a fair trial in the United States.”

Bout ends the letter with these ominous words: “If I die in prison, it won’t be a natural death.”

BENJAMIN BIDDER, ERICH FOLLATH, MATTHIAS SCHEPP

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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The Graveyard [The Miami Herald]

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:25:00 -0400

by Lynne Duke

Miami Herald, The (FL)

Sunday, April 5, 1987

The tiny woman with purple nails sucks on the makeshift pipe. The smoldering rock glows and dims, and now she is holding her breath, gasping back the smoke as long as her lungs permit. She calls herself Awful Thang, because that’s what she is when she’s high.

Another woman and a man with gold teeth sprawl on the grimy furniture in the living room, awaiting their turn. Hill Street Blues is almost over. Five little girls are asleep in a bedroom down the hall.

Awful Thang sinks back against the couch and exhales long and slow.

“Scotteee babeeeeee!” she howls.

They call crack Scotty. Scotty beams them up, they say, just like on Star Trek.

Judy, the taller woman, is staring off in space, her face a cloud. “I’m just thinking, just thinking,” she announces in a feeble whisper. This is her apartment. She is the mother of the children down the hall. She is 27, looks 35.

The Thang holds a cigarette lighter to the pipe. “Here we go! He’s at the door! Gotta let him in! Scotteeeeeeeee.”

Outside the door of Judy Williams’ apartment in this public housing project tenanted mostly by blacks, trees cast scary shadows across the courtyard. The lawn that some government architect had once imagined would be a commons, filled with the hardscrabble but hopeful life of a low-income community, is nearly dead. Soda bottles and beer cans litter the ground. Once in a while, the voice of a mother scolding her children rises over the noise of television sets from nearby apartments where
families prefer to stay locked inside.

Down the dirt stretch toward Northeast Second Avenue, yellow-eyed hustlers keep a nervous but constant watch for headlights signaling the arrival of customers at this apartment complex turned crack supermarket, on the corner of Northeast Second Avenue and 71st Street. It is a five-minute drive from Miami’s Design District, less than a mile from Miami Shores, a short bike ride from fashionable Bay Point.

The dirt stretch belongs to the pushers. Some of them, the cool ones, brazenly let the plastic bags of crack dangle from their lips, the equivalent in this time and place of sticking a spare cigarette behind an ear. Periodically, they climb in the smashed-out window of a vacant apartment to get high. Their bosses congregate in the east parking lot, closer to 71st Street, gathered around a fire burning in a trash can. These are younger, clearer-eyed men. They are wearing better clothes and beepers on their hips. When a customer pulls in, they look up, catlike, from their dice and bull sessions, ready at the sign of any wrong move, any violation of the drug game — pulling a gun or trying to snatch rocks without paying — to pummel the offender, or shoot him.

In the shadows, desperate women wander around the dark yards and breezeways where clotheslines are strung, hoping to mooch a hit, or find someone with whom to exchange food or sex for crack.

Some of the women walk out onto Second Avenue and try to flag down cars headed south toward the Gables and the Grove, north toward Miami Shores. When they are finished, they take their $20 and trade it for the little rocks of cocaine base that have taken over this place called The Graveyard.

By now, everyone knows a crack horror story. The woman who went berserk, grabbed a gun and a knife and forced a friend and the friend’s 2-year-old daughter to jump out of a fifth- floor window to escape. The newspaperman who got up from his computer terminal and drove down the road to rob a bank — to buy more crack. The lawyer’s husband who bankrupted his family in a two-month crack spree. When seen as isolated anecdotes, the crack story appears as freeze-frames of frenzy. Put as many together as you want, but you still won’t understand that there are places in this city where something extraordinary, something almost demonic is happening around this new form of an old drug. Here, in The Graveyard, the horror of crack is no freeze frame. It is a slow-motion slide into desperation, a prolonged, muffled scream. Crack is squeezing the life out of an entire community,
crowding out normal motivations, killing hopefulness, completely rewriting despair. The fear of the innocent people, the treachery of the guilty ones, the hopelessness of the victims — all have conspired to snuff out much of what once had been pleasant and good.

Crack isn’t like the drug scourges of the past, like heroin in the 1950s, LSD in the 1960s, cocaine tooting in the 1970s. It’s as seductive and addictive as any of them, and at least as
physically destructive, but it’s more plentiful, and its high can come as cheaply as a pint of bourbon. Only you don’t sleep this high off when you are finished; you are ravenous for more, right away, and the hunger feeds on itself. It is a macabre courtship, till death do us part.

Addicts literally race from the crack house to the street, to rob and beat and burgle merely to finance their next pipeful.

Care about the people of The Graveyard out of compassion, or, if you prefer, out of fear.

This is no way to live, says Schofield Flemming.

“Death live in the rock … . Death live there.” Disappointed and disgusted, he leans on the Mustang near the front door of his apartment. It’s his girlfriend’s car, but it doesn’t run, so the crack addicts — “basers” — have taken it over, as they have taken over so many other places. Now people call the Mustang a “base car,” because people climb in and get high there.

Schofield has been out of jail for 10 days; out in the real world for 10 days, he beams, without smoking crack. He is proud of it. He used to be addicted. But the time he spent in jail on a strong-arm robbery charge weaned his mind from the drug, helped him forget the way it changed him. Behind bars, he ate well, exercised and regained 30 pounds and now he is clean, his corduroys and hooded sweat shirt fresh, his beard neatly trimmed, his teeth glistening.

The 27-year-old former soldier left prison anticipating a new drug-free life at home with his girlfriend, the baby girl they conceived, and the boy and girl she had already. He does construction work when he can get it and tries to stay out of trouble.

It is hard, though, because crack’s people are all around him. Schofield could escape from them if his home were a safe haven. But while he was in jail, he says, his girlfriend took in a new roommate named crack, and crack’s people came along, too.

Schofield wants to get away. The place and the people remind him of the nights he stood on the avenue selling his body for whatever price he could, and of the mornings he woke up and wept for his manhood. They remind him of the meals he didn’t put in the children’s stomachs and the clothes he didn’t put on their backs. They remind him of the heads he smashed with pipes during crack-inspired robberies, of the homes he broke into.

Schofield stares at the dirt and shakes his head slowly. “I used to go in people’s houses at night while they asleep. I done had smoked four, five rocks. I’m already paranoid. I walked in this house, and all I could see was gunfire. Bam! Bam! Bam! They woke up and shot at me. I don’t see how they could have missed.

“I tried hundreds and hundreds of times to stop smoking. I’d stop for two days then — BAM — right back at it. It’s hard to stop when you around it, so close to it. Can you believe that something that small can affect somebody weighing 200 pounds?” But no more, never again, he says. “I’m off it. I don’t even get that taste. It’s the taste. It got a taste you can’t describe.”

Another man, a dealer, has been listening. He shrugs his shoulders. “It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s too beautiful for some people,” the dealer says. A Latin man walks up, desperation written all over his face. He’s got long-sleeved T-shirts for sale. He had just tried to trade them for a rock, but the dealers aren’t stupid. “Five dollars,” he pleads, holding the shirts out for the group near the Mustang to see. “I’ll give you three,” a woman says, goading. Everyone laughs.

The man’s desperation reminds Schofield of the time when he was still living with his wife and daughter and he sold his refrigerator and stove for five rocks. “That’s $50. I did it while my wife was at work. Can you imagine coming home and no stove, no refrigerator? It’s sad, real sad.” His wife believed him when he said they had been burglarized. But his marriage didn’t survive crack much longer.

“Never trust a person that smoke rock. Never trust ‘em,” Schofield says.

A seedy-looking man walks through the dark breezeway to Schofield’s apartment, his hands shoved into his pockets and his head hanging low. He’s been there before, like the others who know that inside they can get high and maybe find a woman to lie down with. Schofield’s homecoming has been reduced to guard duty. “What you want?” he barks. There is sympathy in his voice, but also a sternness that demands an answer. The man looks down and mumbles something. Schofield is yelling now. “Ain’t nobody here! Never EVER come ‘round here again!”

“I throw people out all the time. Like last night, I threw 20 people out. It was nothing like this when I was here.”

There is determination in his voice but also weariness. He knows what he’s up against. He’s surrounded by it.

Abrown-skinned doll skids across the pavement. A pack of small kids are kicking the stuffing out of its stomach and slamming it with sticks. Down the road, where the pavement turns to dirt, a man is lounging inside an abandoned burgundy Ford Pinto, getting high amidst the filth in the back seat. His name is Mico. He says he is 31. His glazed green eyes, framed by long lashes, look sad, but he is friendly and talkative as he defends crack. He’s been using it since 1978, he says, and hasn’t gone crazy yet. “I’m a very educated man. It’s just that I got put in the mix with something that, well, it’s illegal. See the way I’m sitting here talking to you all? I done smoked today two or three times. I’m not out of my mind or nothing. It’s a beautiful feeling. It makes you relaxed, keep you active, everything. Wide awake. Sometimes it takes the place of your woman. Guys forget about they women.”

Mico and his partner, a wild-haired man who calls himself Sweet ‘n’ Low, occupy the bottom-most echelon among drug dealers at The Graveyard. They are not interested in fancy clothes or cars or gold teeth. Mico and Sweet and their hangers-on wear the same clothes day after day, smell foul, don’t live anywhere in particular and spend just about all their time hustling rocks — buying them, selling them, smoking them, begging for them.

A group of about seven of the beeper-wearing young dealers
from the east parking lot appear around the corner of a building. They are taking long, meaningful strides into Mico and Sweet’s territory. They do not look happy. Shirtless and barefoot, a man in his late 20s who calls himself Bo-Sheep sees them and takes off running, literally churning up a trail of dust. The toughs chase him almost to Second Avenue. They surround him, throwing punches at his face and screaming threats. As Bo-Sheep twists and turns under the flailing fists, Mico watches calmly from afar, sitting on an FP&L power box.

Bo-Sheep is Mico’s brother.

Mico explains that Bo-Sheep owes the teen-age dealers $10. He shows no concern until the toughs knock Bo-Sheep to the ground and start kicking him. Mico starts toward the fight at a trot, yelling as he goes. But the toughs have finished with Bo- Sheep already. They didn’t want to hurt him too badly, just give him a warning. They strut back to their station. Bo-Sheep, a large lump over one eye, ambles back to the dirt stretch as if nothing had happened.

To the young guys, the serious dealers who look the part, hustlers like Mico and Sweet and Bo-Sheep are two-bit vendors. The dealers advance Mico and Sweet small quantities of crack and then collect the profits — or provide refresher courses in motivation for those who come up short. Mico and Sweet make money — or more often just get free dope — by cutting the rocks in halves or quarters and selling each piece for the same $10 or $20 price as regular-sized ones. There are so many customers at The Graveyard that somewhere along the line the dealers decided to carve up the territory. There are four crack “stations” located, roughly, at the project’s four corners: north, south, east and west. At each, dealers pull 12-hour shifts and can beep their suppliers if they run out of rocks. The story is told of one dealer, recently arrested, who had his bail bondsman make crack deliveries to his teen-age salesmen while the dealer was in jail.

A bearded white man with tattooed arms is sitting on a milk crate in the base house yard, smoking crack. The yard smells of feces and urine, but the man doesn’t seem to notice. He’s focusing all his energy on the rock that’s smoldering on a pipe made from a Schaefer beer can.

“You’re not the police, are you?” he asks blandly. No, a reporter and a photographer. He accepts the response and begins to talk. His name is Michael. He just got off work at his construction job. Tonight he goes to a weekend job as a bouncer. He is tall and his upper body is muscular. But his stomach is beginning to look caved in and his legs are thinning — too much crack and not enough food, he says. Michael is 29, and he’s been using crack for four months, since he moved to Miami from Detroit. He rode a raggedy girl’s bicycle down from his motel room on 135th Street and Biscayne Boulevard and bought three rocks — $30.

“I gotta get off this s—-. This s—- makes you schizo … .

“You guys ain’t got $10, do you?” he asks. He is unruffled by the negative response. While Michael talks, he reaches down and runs his fingers through the grass at his feet. Someone dropped a rock, he says. “I know this guy dropped it. I was here. But it’s hard to find.” He is on his hands and knees now, scouring the dirt for the lost rock.

He came to Florida with a traveling carnival, leaving his two daughters, Nicole and Sarah, back in Detroit. He carries their snapshots in his now-empty wallet. He’s spent all the money he had. “This is weird, man, talking about this s—-,” he says.

A shirtless young man with his baseball cap twisted sideways and his jeans falling off his behind swaggers over. His name is R.M. — Robbin’ Marvin — and he offers Michael a small rock. R.M. and Michael have done business before. Michael hits the can again. The photographer asks if he can take a picture, and Michael agrees. He sucks in the vapors so hard that his blond hair shakes and the veins in his forehead swell bigger and bigger.

“Can you lend me five bucks?” he asks again. “I wish I had another hit. You can’t get enough.” Michael keeps searching for the lost rock.

Sweet has been lurking in a yard nearby, and when he hears the camera clicking, he runs over and breaks into a hollering frenzy. He looks confused. “Get your ass from around here!” he yells at Michael. “Letting them take your picture digging through the ground like some f—-in’ duck. You stupid, man!”

Base heads may wear the same filthy clothes for days and not bathe much and steal from each other, but they manage to cling to an odd sort of pride. Some of them. Others, like Michael, are beyond even that tattered remnant of dignity.

A half-hour after he began, Michael is still squatting in the filth, picking up and scrutinizing every pebble he finds.

The pastel-colored plaque on a once white wall of Judy Williams’ apartment reads: “Lord, help me get my act together.” Across the room she has set up a display of the crack users’ tools for her guests. Two kinds of base pipes — one a beer can, the other a miniature plastic liquor bottle — plus aluminum foil and a razor blade sit on a piece of cardboard in the middle of a brown table cloth on her dining table in a corner of the living room. Judy has assembled the items to help her explain how the drug is used. You punch a circle of pinholes in the side of a can, put some cigarette ashes on top of the holes to keep particles of the crumbling rock from falling through, then inhale the drug through the can’s mouthpiece. It’s a similar technique with the bottles, except that most times you punch a thumb-sized hole in the side and place a piece of screen or foil over it.

Judy is nervous, not sure that it’s wise to talk. “Maybe ya’ll could help me, sit down and give me suggestions or something,” she says.

She rests an elbow on the table. Her arm has a circular tattoo-like scar where an ex-boyfriend bit her. Her neck has a half-inch-wide scar stretching halfway around it from the time the boyfriend stabbed her under her ear then tried to slit her throat. Judy’s big, droopy eyes, set above sharp, high cheekbones, seem to echo her plea for advice. Or are they just reflecting the hit of crack she had minutes earlier?

Four of her girls — Sherhonda, 11, Shaneira, 4, Shakeria, 3, and Shandina, 1 — are in the bedroom they share. Only the baby, Shaquendar, 9 months, remains in the front room. Judy says the infant is her “trick baby.” The child was conceived when Judy turned a trick to get a few dollars for food. Shaquendar, some might say, also is a base baby since Judy used crack during her pregnancy. Base babies are part of the crack user’s lexicon: “Big eyes, slow to move,” explained one woman. Judy says Shaquendar is normal.

Each of Judy’s girls has a different father, but none of them provide for the children. Judy supports the kids with considerable help from the government.

Judy worries that there could be repercussions from revealing the details of her troubled life. What she fears most is losing her kids. Judy never knew her mother and doesn’t know if she has any brothers and sisters; her father and the grandparents who raised her are dead, so her girls are all she has in the world.

“I feel like I’m a halfway good mother. I’ll be a good mother when I get off crack, and I don’t use the money for crack. But, right now, I’m a halfway good mother. I tries to do good.”

Judy started snorting cocaine when she was 15 and has been using the drug in the form of crack for two years. But she doesn’t do it all the time, especially not during the day, she says.

“I can’t get high in the daytime for the simple reason that I have kids, and if I’m sitting in there getting high and one of my kids gets hurt, first thing they gonna say at the hospital, ‘Well, where was you?’ Some people don’t care about they kids. But I care. Nobody take care of my kids like I do.”

Her eyes roam over her possessions: the mismatched sofas, one of them covered with a brown bedspread, another with a stained orange one; the black velvet painting of a tiger; the gold velvet painting of the Golden Gate Bridge; the dusty china cabinet near the front door.

A lot of people think base women are stupid, but she’s not, she says. She goes to her bedroom and rummages around to find something, then brings it back for her guests to see. She extends it shyly, with an uncertain smile.

Judditte Williams, Class of ‘78.

It is a framed diploma from Miami Jackson Senior High School.

A shiny navy blue Mercedes Benz with mag wheels pulls into The Graveyard’s east-side parking lot. A heavy bass beat blasts out of its open windows. The Benz rolls into a parking space amidst broken-down and abandoned cars, in front of a vacant apartment. Before the driver has a chance to get out of the car, a couple of the young thugs trot up to him and talk to him through the window.

He gets out of the car and struts to a nearby apartment, a cool little kick in every other step. The young guys trail him, and he stops now and then to chat with them. There is an obvious sameness to the looks of the young dealers, and this man is the prototype — smoother and more polished. His hair is closely cropped, and he wears a red leather cap and matching shoes. He’s not tall, but he’s well built. His skin is shiny brown and smooth. He wears a gold chain, as the others do, but his chain is inches thick and supports a medallion the size of a small fist. The people of The Graveyard call him The Master.

He is known to police as Leon Frederick, 28. Police, having made a couple of lucky arrests in or around The Graveyard late last year, believe he is one of the project’s main dealers. He used to drive a convertible brown Cadillac El Dorado that he paid for with $12,653 in cash plus a $5,500 trade-in on a 1980 Cadillac. It was outfitted with a cellular phone and a sound system valued at roughly $5,000. Police confiscated it when they busted Leon down the street from The Graveyard last December. He was carrying a bag with 429 cocaine rocks. His trial is pending.

For a short time after last year’s arrests, The Graveyard was hot. The dealers lay low, and the traffic slowed a bit. In time, though, the impact of the arrests faded; it was business as usual.

The customers arrive on foot, by car, in cabs. They are white people. They are yuppies. They are working-class black people. They are Latins. They are gray-haired men and teen- agers. Some of them prefer to wait outside The Graveyard, on the other side of the tracks, just beyond what’s left of a chain-link fence. The customers stop there and honk their horns, then Mico or Sweet or another hustler will scramble under the fence and across the tracks to serve them. Other customers do a drive-in business, buying the crack and smoking it right there in the base house. Some just smoke out in the open.

Once upon a time, hope was the glue that kept The Graveyard’s law-abiding residents together. Hope for a better life, a job, a chance. Though poverty was the condition in which many of them lived, they worked hard to keep it from becoming a condition of the spirit as well. They tended their yards; they
went to tenants’ meetings; they supervised activities for their kids. People in their 20s and 30s remember growing up there and sleeping outside on the grass without fear. “It was so beautiful,” said a 28-year-old woman who still lives in The Graveyard and is now a crack addict.

Sure, there always were problems. Its official name is Site 5, Project FL 527-B, but residents began calling it The Graveyard years ago. Poverty bred crime, and crime bred more of itself. But when a tidal wave of cocaine rocks descended on the place two years ago, crime seemed to put The Graveyard in a stranglehold. The pulse of the community grew faint. Residents began moving out of The Graveyard and prospective tenants refused to move in. So basers claimed the vacant apartments for themselves. A table, some light, and plenty of floor space for sleeping is all they require.

Judy’s sliding glass door is slightly open one day. The heavy plastic-backed curtains are closed, but Shakeira and Shandina are sitting on the floor by the door, playing and peeking outside. Shandina’s nose is running all over her pacifier. The apartment is dark even though it is midafternoon. The kids’ toys are scattered around the green indoor-outdoor floor covering. An aluminum garbage can in the kitchen is overflowing with trash. Judy rarely lets the children go outside. She doesn’t want them getting mixed up with other kids, and she doesn’t want to have to go outside to watch over them. Now she is sleeping on a couch. Daytime is rough for Judy. At night, she gets high.

When Sherhonda gets home from Little River Elementary School this day, her mother is still asleep. She lets herself in with her house key and watches TV. She plays with her sisters until Judy wakes up. It’s dinner time.

Judy is standing over the stove cooking pork chops. Sherhonda watches her closely. Something is churning behind those serene brown eyes, but the girl is slow to talk about it. “I think it’s wrong, that she shouldn’t do it,” the girl says in a whisper. She means crack. Sherhonda knows her mother smokes crack. Once, Judy took out a pipe and showed the tall, shy, heavy-set girl a rock. She told her how the pipe was used, then told her that crack was bad, that she shouldn’t smoke it like her mother does.

When Judy’s basing buddies come calling, Sherhonda sometimes turns them away at the door before Judy notices. “Sometimes I say she’s not here. Sometimes I say she’s busy. I think they shouldn’t give it to her.”

The younger kids scream and race through the room banging empty butter cookie tins filled with pennies. The racket brings Judy out of the kitchen yelling at them to shut up. When the girls quiet down she says, “Now you see why sometimes I have to smoke crack to keep me from knocking the mess out of them.”

Sherhonda helps her mother put the mashed potatoes, pork chops and corn on the dinner table for the younger kids. The little girls pick at their food, dropping a good portion of it on the floor.

“The rat gonna come,” Judy says, chiding them to eat. Her voice says she’s teasing, but there is a rat who visits from time to time. When the kids have eaten, Sherhonda takes them off to bed. Five minutes later, Robbin’ Marvin, who has been living with Judy since his mother moved out of the project, returns
from making a sale. Awful Thang, wearing a mini-skirt and ankle boots, emerges from somewhere in the back of the apartment. Judy settles onto the couch and takes a couple of hits from the pipe that’s going around. She slumps back and stares at the end of Hill Street Blues.

“I would actually be damn near a millionaire if I didn’t smoke,” R.M. says, exhaling hard. The smoke hovers overhead. R.M. is an indefatigable braggart, especially when he’s high. He describes himself as the king of the crack hustle and says he is in great demand by his customers. Many of them are white, he says, especially women who come looking for him for special sexual favors he refers to as “triple McNugget.”

R.M. has two kids who stay with their mother. He says he
keeps his roles as dope dealer and father separate. When he is around his children, he says, he is always clean. It’s under control. He doesn’t see any reason why he should change his ways.

R.M. is very high, and very talkative. He thinks he has this crack thing all figured out: “A nigga gonna be what he wanna be as long as he be what he is. As long as you know you’re f—-in’ up and facing it, you could see it. When you get tired of being that and doing that, you’ll stop. But one thing I do know: When the kids need something, motherf—- this,” he says, holding up the pipe.

Some basers call their pipes their “private dancer.” R.M. passes the pipe to The Thang, who couldn’t care less about R.M.’s philosophy or Hill Street Blues. She’s more interested in Star Trek.

“Scotteeeeeeeee.” He beams her up one more time.

If only they had Spock to show them another way. He might tell them that at any moment they could have a heart attack, even die, from crack. He might tell them that slowly, but most surely, the sensory pleasure that is a crack rush is exhausting their brain’s supply of chemicals called neurotransmitters. He might tell them that the craving they have after the euphoria goes away is really their brain pleading for nourishment, for replenishment. He might tell them that crack denies them the food and rest they need, that it over-stimulates the brain to the point of exhaustion, to the point where the brain may no longer be able to work the lungs, or may overwork the heart. He might tell them that they are becoming walking zombies, prone to depression one minute, prone to violence the next. They can simply go berserk, then drop dead.

Schofield Flemming is in the breezeway again, hands in his pockets, disinterestedly watching the crack salesmen work at the east-side station. Just three days ago, Schofield was turning crack sellers away from his girlfriend’s apartment, determined to keep the drug out of his life.

Now he shifts his weight from one foot to the other and smiles sheepishly. “I smoked a rock,” he confesses. “I’m very disappointed in myself.”

Then he looks up and the sheepish grin turns into a broad smile.

“But it was GOOD!

“It was so many other people, and I’m just sitting there like this.” He frowns like a basset hound. “I was bored. Nothing else to do. Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Believe me. It was GOODD, with two D’s in it.”

Schofield says that his second time around with crack will be easier than the first. “Now that I experienced it one time, this time I can control it.” He won’t become a rock monster. He won’t use his grapefruit-sized biceps to rob people, and he won’t let men pick him up off of street corners.

Two days later: Schofield is hanging out near the red base car again. His mood is darker. “I gotta get outta here. You don’t hear nothing ‘round here, but people talking about rocks. Don’t hear about no jobs, no movies, no nightclubs.”

His problem is his own weakness, he says, and the way his girlfriend’s habit feeds it. He’s miserable with her. “I wake up in the morning, see her sitting up with some other nigga getting high, first thing I wanna do is kill both of ‘em. She gonna wind up getting me locked up again. Uh-huh! I’m getting away!”

Schofield says he’s decided to go back to his wife, the one who visited him while he was in jail, who showed up at his court hearings, who kept on caring about him even when he didn’t care about himself. They’ve talked, he says, and she’s agreed to take him back. She’s a good woman, and he doesn’t know why he let crack make him leave her in the first place. She’ll be picking him up at 8 o’clock tonight, he says. “I already got my clothes in my duffle bag. The only thing I’m gonna really miss is the kids. If the police come and knock that door down, they gonna take the kids, too.”

Schofield softens for a second, thinking of the children. Then he turns angry. “When I leave here,” he says, his voice sharp and staccato, “I Won’t! Look! Back!”

Schofield’s wife never came.

A week later, he was back in jail, charged with armed robbery.

The front door to an apartment across the breezeway from the base house opens. A plump, caramel-colored hand reaches out and gropes for the mailbox a few inches away. The body attached to the arm is nowhere in sight. The hand finally touches the mail and sweeps it inside. The door is slammed shut.

Helen Sanders is scared stiff. She won’t even step out of her front door. The 53-year-old woman lives with her daughter and stays home most of the time taking care of the grandchildren. Like most residents, she rarely opens the curtains to let sunshine in. Too much danger lurks outside. Even talking about the crack heads and the dangers they pose makes her nervous.

“This place is terrible. You don’t know. I’m just scared they might do something. I don’t want them people to hurt me. I believe in God taking care of me, but you really got to be careful.” She cups a hand over her mouth. Her eyes water. If you ignore the crack dealers and crack heads, she says, maybe they’ll leave you alone. “That’s the whole idea — try not to pay attention to it.”

Sometimes it seems that everyone tries to ignore what’s going on in The Graveyard. The police come and go, housing officials — in the past, at least — have let the place deteriorate and the residents who have to live there must learn to fend for themselves in a housing project booby-trapped with danger.

When Lt. John Brooks and his street narcotics unit sweep into The Graveyard and set up for Operation Sting, residents who most times are too afraid to lounge outdoors grab a beer and a ringside seat. The excitement brings the place to life. Crack customers drive up, buy the drug from undercover police officers, and then get arrested. The undercover cops look like the real thing. They are young, black and surrounded by other young men wearing gold chains and beepers. They are surrounded, to the outrage of onlooking residents, by young men who, on every other night, are crack dealers.

Brooks says he’s putting a dent in their business by arresting their customers. The customers are much less likely to return to The Graveyard if they don’t know whether it’ll be a cop selling them crack or a bona fide dealer, he says.

But clearly, a dent is about the only damage the occasional busts have done to The Graveyard drug business. As soon as the cops leave, the young dealers, the real ones, resume sales.

The Graveyard has approximately 225 official residents. But that number leaps close to 300 when you include people who have moved in with friends and relatives and are not named on leases, officials say. The place is bulging at the seams, yet roughly a third of its apartments are vacant.

That’s officially vacant. In most cases, what really happens is as soon as a tenant leaves — flees — the apartment is taken over by Mico, Sweet and others like them. The vacant units then become base houses. Officials from the Dade County department of Housing and Urban Development (“Little HUD”) say they know how bad things are. They admit that years of mismanagement and downright neglect have contributed to the community’s downfall. But they insist that things will be different. Soon.

Little HUD director Alvin Moore and Eugene Smith, manager of the agency area that encompasses The Graveyard, have come up with a plan to reclaim the public housing project. They call it a “total approach,” but its total effect on Graveyard residents to date has been slight and superficial.

Since January, “no trespassing” and “no loitering” signs have been posted at the project’s entrances and its parking lots. Maintenance crews have begun clearing accumulated trash and hauling it away on a more regular schedule. A few of the vacant apartments are being renovated and prepared for rental. Others are being boarded up.

But when HUD boards up vacant apartments, base heads simply
break down the boards and move right back in. And the rest of the “total approach” is thus far only good intention: to require new tenants to attend “housekeeping training,” to pave the dirt road and parking lot on the project’s north end, to repair and expand a playground on its east side.

A HUD policy to evict any tenant who is arrested for drug activity, including the tenant’s family, has been in effect for months. But there is no evidence that the policy is being enforced in The Graveyard.

The Graveyard has no live-in manager or maintenance staff. Wendell Brewer, the site manager, says that he visits The Graveyard as seldom as once a week. There is a tenants’ council at The Graveyard, but its meetings are poorly attended. Last year, when the president of the tenants’ council attempted to organize a neighborhood crime watch to crack down on drug sales, gunmen shot up her apartment. She and her children dove onto the floor of the apartment and escaped injury. They have since moved away.

Excuse me.”

The deep male voice sounds menacing, the face that goes with the voice seems downright dangerous. “Are you the reporter that wants to know about crack?” The tall man’s eyes are lifeless. He has sharp, chiseled cheekbones, a pointed nose and a long neck. He carries his 145-pound body on easy, elegant strides. Although his short hair is uncombed and his fingernails are caked with dirt, his clothing and his sneakers do not bear the trademark dirt and wear of most Graveyard basers. There is a fierce dignity about this man and a startling humility that allows him to sit down and pour out his troubles.

Steven Jabar Lawson is 28. Eleven years ago he and another youth were convicted of beating and strangling to death a man who had picked up the pair off a street corner for sexual favors. Steven spent six years in prison and then, a year after his release, started selling and using crack.

He is not proud of that crime nor of the ones he continues to commit. But his past and the present are all he has. He cannot imagine a future. Once a busboy at a Hyatt hotel and a child-care worker, now he is a homeless predator.

“Right now, I stay no particular place, from the use of crack. It has got me on the street. I’m not doing nothing but smoking cocaine. I got two speakers now. As soon as one of these brothers buy them, I get me a dime. Oh why I got to be obsessed!”

There are two Steven Lawsons, he says. One loves his family — two young sons and the fiancee who can’t cope with his drug habit. The other — the robber, the male prostitute — is sitting in The Graveyard, high from the rocks he just smoked, and thinking of where the next rock will come from. Steven struggles with his two sides and tries to find some logic to his life.

“I think this is what I want to do — what I want to do in the sense that this is what I’m doing. Deep inside, this ain’t what I wanna do. But outside, I got these urgings, these cravings which give me some form of excitement. So it got to be what I want to do in the sense that this is what I’m doing.”

Steven’s hard exterior softens as a woman friend hands him a baby to hold. He holds the girl gently and feeds her milk from a bottle. As daylight steals away from The Graveyard, Steven rocks the baby on his lap. “There’s a need for me to change
because I have kids, and I’m not there, you know, little boys that need a father. I can imagine myself not on crack, very much so. A healthy tall black man. Clothes. Jewelry — pinky ring, nice rope around his neck. Don’t have to be no Mercedes, just a nice up-to-date car. Nice job. Going home to raid them pots, kick off my shoes, watch the color TV. Have my boys running around.” The sky has turned magenta. Steven stares into it. Slowly, the smile fades.

Steven started his day at The Graveyard. He got high all through the previous night, went to Larchmont Gardens for more rocks in the morning, then to Northwest 71st Street and Seventh Avenue, and now back to The Graveyard. Somewhere along the line he broke into a home and stole a set of stereo speakers that he has been trying to sell all day. This monotonous pattern is his life. He has come a long way from the days when he was selling cocaine and had money to support his habit. Now, he is a zombie, a rock monster.

“I based up $120 today. I’m right back where I started yesterday. But I’m not gonna let me being broke now keep my head down. I’m gonna look up, go ahead and do what I gotta do to survive this thing. Do that sound logical? Yes, that sound logical. I ain’t gonna look to the ground. I’m gonna look up. One day I will go up from where I’m at.”

The baby is squirming in his arms now. He buckles her tiny pink shoe, then rocks her on his shoulder. “You all right. You in good hands,” he coos.

The next week, Steven sat in a park along the bay. He had come to find the reporter and photographer he had talked to in The Graveyard, to somehow get help from them. He said the dealers in The Graveyard wouldn’t sell to him and that someone there fired three shots at him. He feared for his life, he said. “I didn’t know nowhere else to go. Sound logical?” He had a small green Bible in his shirt pocket, but no hope, he said. “I’m lost. If something should happen to me … ” He did not finish the sentence. The next day, through the reporter’s intervention, he checked into a drug rehabilitation center. A few days of counseling revealed that he had lied about the shooting. “That’s one lie I don’t feel bad about because through ya’ll I was able to get help.” There was a new glimmer in his eyes that wasn’t there before.

Steven stayed in the program for 45 days but was kicked out for being disruptive and uncooperative. The program directors told him he had “a jailhouse mentality.” Still, Steven vowed to stay clean. As of this writing he has found a job, and is sharing an apartment with another recovering addict.

Ya’ll don’t wanna go in there,” says a man standing near the sliding glass doors of the base house at unit 7218. Inside, Sweet, a man called Do-Do and two others have a fifth man in a headlock on the floor. The man had been smoking with them for hours — flashing just enough money to make them believe he could pay for all the crack he smoked. But he couldn’t pay. Sweet and Do-Do and the others kicked him and hollered at him. Sweet snatched a chain from his neck. The basers gathered outside the glass doors and watched the man get a whipping.

Afterward, Sweet is somber and quiet. He leans against the wall inside the base house. “I didn’t want to have to do that,” he says. The man’s gold chain now is wrapped around his wrist. Sweet says he hasn’t slept in 48 hours, so he goes into a bedroom in the base house and lies down on a striped, urine- stained mattress that’s on the floor. A green Singer sewing machine sits on the floor in the corner. Somebody traded it for crack. There are cigarette butts and match books and pieces of glass and beer cans everywhere.

He can barely keep his eyes open. A lit cigarette dangles
from his lips, hovering perilously close to his wild black hair, which he hasn’t cut in eight years. He hasn’t had a bath for two days. He wears the same black bell-bottomed slacks he’s worn for three weeks and a silver aviation-style jacket. His black high- tops are frayed around the edges.

Do-Do barges in, begging for a rock. He is a musty man with a huge gap between his front teeth. “I told you to go beam up with what you had!” Sweet yells. “Get on outta here!” Do-Do goes.

“I get tired of people begging. ‘Got a beer — gimmie a sip of beer. Got a cookie — gimmie half a cookie.’ “

“That’s life,” someone says.

“No,” says Sweet. “That’s crack.”

Hassle after hassle after hassle. If it’s not the cops, who cruise through daily, it’s the crack heads, the moochers. Sweet says he could be somewhere else doing something better if he wanted to. He studied computers and data processing at Miami- Dade Community College for two years, he says, and he’s skilled in drywall construction and plastering. Why isn’t he doing those things? ‘Cause he’s here. Is he happy? “No.” Does he get any satisfaction from the trade? “No.” Then why do it? “I don’t know.”

“You happy when you make the money. When you not making the money and the money’s gone, it’s treacherous. You wonder will somebody come up and buy mine.”

Sweet swears he doesn’t use crack. He reacts to the question as if it were an insult. His eyes are yellow and droopy
because he doesn’t get enough rest and he drinks too much, he says. His weight is low because he doesn’t eat the way he should.

“What I need to smoke it for? It don’t do f—-in’ s—- but run you nuts. You don’t believe it? You smoke it and see how ailin’ you be after you don’t have no more.”

A couple of nights later, though, Sweet is sitting on a milk crate in another base house. In front of him is an upside- down fish tank with a sheet of broken glass on top. Two women are sitting with him. One is extremely curvaceous and wears a sleeveless skin-tight T-shirt dress. The other woman describes herself as a “very reputable person.”

Sweet has rocks in his hand and a pipe sitting in front of him. “No, Unh-unh,” he says, waving off the intruders. A black bra is hanging off a shelf in an open closet. “Ya’ll ruinin’ it. Please leave,” he says. Sweet just sits there holding the rocks. The woman in the dress wants the rocks badly. “Come on, man,” she says.

“I’m bein’ polite. Please leave,” Sweet says. “Ya’ll disrespectful,” the woman says. This is their house, she says. The visitors argue that they have just as much right to this abandoned apartment.

It is an absurd confrontation in a surreal place. Sweet, his forearms resting on his thighs, hangs his head and just sits there until he is left alone.

Sweet and his crowd moved here as soon as the previous tenant, a bus driver with four kids, moved out. That was on a Sunday. “It’s a bad environment to raise kids,” the bus driver had said. Her move was perfectly timed for the basers, because a crew of county maintenance workers had boarded up and bolted the old base house the previous Wednesday. At the time, Sweet had predicted it wouldn’t hurt his business. He’d said he would “translate — move over to the next phase.” And he’d been right. “We got a new house,” Mico had said Wednesday morning, pointing to the upstairs apartment.

A woman and her 12-year-old daughter who lived next door now have new neighbors: rock monsters, a whole pack of them.
Neither the woman nor her daughter would talk about it. The girl swept the staircase one day. Crack heads brushed past her, traipsing up and down the stairs without so much as an “excuse me.” Behind their backs, the girl raised the broom as if she were about to beat them. Within days, the woman and her daughter had moved away. Sweet and the other basers took over her apartment, too.

It is dark inside the bus driver’s old home, except for the moonlight peeking in through a window. The living room and kitchen are empty. A light coming from a back room illuminates the hallway. Down the hall, Sweet’s stained old mattress is sitting on the floor. The door is off its hinges.

A light is on in the next room. A woman named Sue is huddled over a circle of blue and orange flames that leap from the puddle of alcohol and cocaine residue. She and her smoking companion of the moment — a 19-year-old who is pregnant — have poured the residue onto a broken mirror.

The high is better from smoking residue, Sue says. “I love rez. I love to smoke rez. I used to give nobody none of my rez. I like it. It burns faster.” The women got the residue by running alcohol through two pipes left by other basers who now have gone back outside to hustle for more.

The pregnant woman does not like to talk. When she’s not inside The Graveyard getting high, she’s out on Second Avenue turning tricks. For a time, Sue is silent, too. She smacks her lips and clasps her hands while the alcohol burns away. She adjusts the safety pin that keeps her bulging chest from popping out of her dirty, low-cut turquoise dress. She tugs at the lint- covered blue ski cap she wears over a matted auburn wig. Her face is hard, emotionless. Sue is like an object here, fitting in perfectly with the cigarette butts, ashes, empty plastic bags, matches and lighters, beer cans, discarded clothing, dried food and pipes that litter the room.

The flames have died away, and the residue is now a patch of brown crust. Hunched on the edge of an old chair, her legs straddling open, Sue scrapes up the residue. Her dirty, rough hand jerks quickly. The pregnant woman’s lips are gaping open. She is watching Sue make a small pile of residue, burn it with a cigarette lighter, then delicately pick up the sticky substance with the razor’s edge, and pack it into her pipe. The two women take turns with the pipe. They hold their breath after each hit. The pregnant woman jumps up and stifles a cough that could push the vapors out of her mouth and waste them. Her pants are unzipped to accommodate her bulging stomach.

Sue won’t say exactly how long she’s been using crack, but she’s been hanging around in The Graveyard for several months. Once, her life was good. But now she’s a baser and has no idea when or if she’ll ever change.

“Yesterday, meaning it might be tomorrow, and yesterday is gone, might not never come again. Today, tomorrow — might be in the next 10 minutes.

“I wanna quit, but they say you got to really want to quit. I hope nothing treacherous happen to me. I wanna wake up one morning and say ‘What the f—- I’m doing here with a bunch of nasty muthaf—-ers who don’t take no bath for weeks?’ I used to look at people like them and say, ‘Ooooh, not me!’ My hair like this with this s—- on my head. My hands all rough and s—-. I say, ‘Damn, this not me.’ “

It is failure, she says, that sent her into crack’s arms. For eight years, she had a decent job, made $250 a week. “I wore nice s—-. Dress up, plenty money, nice car …” Then she lost the job. Then she started smoking crack. “Now I got to worry about buying cigarettes, no less dinner. Those is the good old days, I guess.”

Sue makes no pretense about being happy with the way she lives. Happiness is one of those real-world concepts that seems to be foreign to her.

“I’m trying to see how far this’ll take me,” she says. “I never thought it would take me this low. I never EVER thought I would get this far. I pray to God, ‘Please, release me from this demon. Take it away!’ “

Schofield was released from jail. Prosecutors dropped the armed robbery charge for lack of evidence. For Schofield, it was a sign from God that it was time — truly time — to straighten up. The armed robbery charge scared him, made him wonder if he’d be sent to prison for life. But he also knew that prosecutors didn’t have much evidence against him, so while he was in jail he researched the law and he filed his own motion to have the charge dismissed. Outside the courthouse, a free man in a brisk February breeze, Schofield pledged to do right. He had talked to his 26-year-old wife and she had promised to give him yet another chance. He said he would go home to her and their 2- year-old daughter, get a job, and be the man both of them knew he could be.

“This is the real last time,” his wife had said the day before Schofield was released. She explained to a reporter why she’s willing to give him one more chance: “I met him when he was a different person, when he had potential.” Before crack, Schofield had been interested in electronics and could have gotten a job in that field, too, his wife said, because he has such a mathematical mind. “That man is a walking calculator. He’s very smart. I admire him. I know he can make it.”

The couple had agreed that he would go to her house if he was released. He promised he would not go back to The Graveyard. “If I stay in The Graveyard,” he said after the hearing, “I’ll probably wind up dead. I had a dream that I was dead, about four nights ago. How did I die? Over rocks.”

The day he was released, Schofield was supposed to meet his wife after she got off work. He had promised her never to set foot in The Graveyard again.

But he went anyway — just to pick up his clothes, he said.

That was three weeks ago. He’s still there. Caption: photo: woman Pat in crack den (t), abandoned apartment (t), Mico climbs in window (t), homeless prostitue sleeps (t), man smokes cocaine rocks (t), woman asleep in Pinto (t), man weeps after arrest (t), Judy Williams (t), Schofield Flemming (t), Frederick Thompson subdued by police (t), crack (t), men arrested in sting (t)

The Gangster Prince of Liberia [Details]

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 12:43:00 -0400

How a twentysomething small-time hoodlum from Florida may have become the most notorious murderer in Africa

By Adam Higginbotham
Details
November 2007

It was dark out early that night, and clear. But for the deputies of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office who worked the late shift in Patrol Sector Three, there was little to distinguish the evening of February 25, 1994, from any other in the crime-ridden western suburbs of Orlando, Florida. When the call came in from 1428 North Pine Hills Road, it was simply one of the dozens of armed robberies Deputy Cindy Turek heard called in on the radio every month.

When she reached the scene, just after 8:30 p.m., Turek took statements from the two victims: 16-year-old Steven Klimkowski told her that three men had asked him for money and tried to jump him. Klimkowski had broken free and run, fetched his father, Robert, and the two of them had pursued the three stickup men—whom they later identified as Roy Belfast Jr., Daniel Dasque, and Philip Jackson. As they caught up with the trio, the 17-year-old Belfast pulled a gun—a small black Lorcin .380 automatic. According to witness statements, Belfast leveled the weapon first at Robert’s head and then at Steven’s, as Jackson—at 21 the oldest of the three alleged assailants—repeatedly yelled at Belfast to pull the trigger. But the Klimkowskis escaped and called 911; Belfast, Dasque, and Jackson were apprehended within an hour. Almost everyone involved in the attempted robbery in Pine Hills would become a familiar face in Florida’s criminal-justice system: Although the charges against Jackson from that night were eventually dropped, he was later convicted of drug possession; Dasque spent years in prison for cocaine dealing; and even Steven Klimkowski was recently convicted of aggravated assault. Turek—at 49 a 22-year veteran of the county sheriff’s office—now recalls little about Belfast. He just went quietly; there was nothing remarkable about him, she says.

And yet after that night the life of the thug who’d flashed the gun on North Pine Hills Road would take a sudden turn, one that would make him infamous across an entire continent. Shortly after his arrest, Roy Belfast Jr. jumped bail and disappeared; it would be 12 years before the U.S. authorities found him again. When they did, he was using the name he was born with—Charles McArthur Emmanuel, a.k.a. Chuckie Taylor, the illegitimate son of Charles Ghankay Taylor, guerrilla leader, indicted war criminal, rumored cannibal, and former president of Liberia. And by then the things he’d done at the right hand of his father had made him one of the most feared and hated men in Africa.

On March 30, 2006, Emmanuel, five feet nine, heavily tattooed, and with a striking resemblance to Charles Taylor, was arrested at Miami International Airport by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and indicted for passport fraud; he claimed his father’s name was Smith. He’s currently being detained in Miami, the first American in U.S. judicial history to be charged with crimes of torture committed in a foreign country. As the former commander of his father’s Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU), the petty criminal from central Florida stands accused of overseeing a paramilitary force of some 2,500 men that raped, murdered, and terrorized the population of Liberia for more than five years.

The people of Liberia have always believed that they enjoy a unique and close connection with the people of the United States; Liberia was founded by U.S. citizens, its constitution was drafted at Harvard, and its flag is even copied from the Stars and Stripes. But the relationship has been characterized by U.S. exploitation and neglect since 1821, when the swampy island that would become the nation’s capital, Monrovia, was purchased only after an officer of the U.S. Navy held a pistol to the head of a local chief. After the barely literate Master-Sergeant Samuel Doe seized power in 1980— by disemboweling then-president William Tolbert in his bed at the executive mansion in Monrovia—the U.S. government was happy to overlook the staggering corruption and human-rights abuses of his regime in exchange for the benefits of a CIA station site, a convenient African base for U.S. aircraft, and a friendly vote at the UN. When plans were laid to destabilize Doe’s government and, later, to form the profusion of heavily armed insurgent factions that would destroy the country, the plotting began among Liberian exiles in Rhode Island, Philadelphia, and Massachusetts.

Charles Taylor was in his final year as an economics student at Bentley College, outside Boston, when the son he called Charles Jr. was born, on February 12, 1977. The boy’s mother, Bernice Yolanda Emmanuel, was one of Taylor’s many girlfriends at the time. Taylor was 29 years old, and although even he may not know how many children he has—or by how many different women—it seems possible that Charles Jr. was his first son.

Taylor had lived in the United States for five years and displayed little interest in studying or in working: “Charles has always been a gangster. He was not a role model to Chuckie,” says James Lyon, a fellow student at the time, who had first met the future warlord in the dance clubs of Monrovia in the mid-sixties. Taylor spent his time playing the numbers and hanging out at the dog track in Boston; he drove an enormous Mercury Cougar and, according to Lyon, made money running a ring of thieves who stole eight-track-tape players from cars. Lyon put him up on his couch when he was on the run from a jealous boyfriend. Nevertheless, Taylor had ambitious plans for the future: “He always used to say he was going to launch a guerrilla war in Liberia,” Lyon says.

In 1980, when Chuckie was 3, his father returned to the country of his birth. Having married the niece of one of Samuel Doe’s co-conspirators, the former street hustler was given a key cabinet position in the revolutionary government. Chuckie would barely see his father for another 10 years. Taylor fled Monrovia and returned to the United States in late 1983, pursued by accusations that he had embezzled more than $900,000 from the Liberian government— which requested his extradition. In May 1984 he was arrested by federal marshals in Somerville, Massachusetts, and detained in the Plymouth County House of Correction. He enlisted former attorney general Ramsey Clark to represent him. After he’d spent 16 months in Plymouth, a federal court ruled that he be extradited, and Taylor escaped, reportedly sawing through a bar on a window and lowering himself down a rope of knotted bedsheets. He returned to West Africa, gathering military and financial support and spending years in and out of prison in Sierra Leone and Ghana before making his way to Libya. There he and a small group of fighters were trained as insurgents in the camps of Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s World Revolutionary Headquarters. On Christmas Eve 1989, Taylor finally did as he had promised and began a guerrilla war in Liberia.

Back in Boston, Bernice Emmanuel had met a Trinidadian man named Roy B. Belfast, and in 1983 or 1984 they were married. In 1987, the new family moved together to a middle-class housing development in Orlando, Florida, where Roy would later work part-time as a welder. He officially adopted Chuckie, and in 1990 the boy legally changed his name to Roy McArthur Belfast Jr.

The Liberian civil war has been over for four years now, and Charles Taylor, its principal architect, is imprisoned in The Hague, awaiting trial on war-crimes charges. But when I arrive in Monrovia, on a stifling night lashed by tropical rain, the Liberian capital remains in ruins. Many government-ministry buildings are bullet-riddled shells and open to the elements; there has been no electricity or running water in Monrovia since Taylor’s militia, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), crippled the country’s hydroelectric plant in 1990; cholera, typhoid, and malaria are widespread; the air carries a sour tang, not only from the choking traffic but also from the generators that provide power in the private compounds maintained throughout the city for the privileged few. And although the country’s most notorious despot and his son are locked in jail cells more than 4,000 miles apart, many Liberians remain terrified of them. “Taylor may be in a cell, but he has big reaches,” Colonel Wolobah Zubah, acting director of Liberia’s National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), tells me ominously, late one Friday afternoon. “He is still a dangerous man.”

Before I arrived in Liberia, I was repeatedly warned to be careful whom I spoke to about Charles Taylor and his son, and few people I meet here are prepared to discuss Chuckie. Charles Taylor still has many supporters in the country, and his associates and former members of his security services remain at large and are eager for what they did under Taylor’s regime to remain unexplored.

John T. Richardson, Taylor’s smooth-talking former national security adviser and alleged mastermind of one of the most brutal NPFL offensives of the war, is now leader of a campaign to have the former president released from prison. Over tea at Monrovia’s Royal Hotel, he assures me that Chuckie was little more than a misbehaving child: “The whole thing is political,” he says, “unfounded.”

There are two stories, infamous and unproven, everyone in Monrovia will tell you about Chuckie: how in 2002 he allegedly had his driver beaten to death after the man ran over a dog, scratching Chuckie’s brand-new Mercedes, and how early one morning, Chuckie himself shot dead the deputy director of the Liberian traffic police under mysterious circumstances, on the highway to Robertsfield Airport. But few of those who know the truth—about the torture, the atrocities, the disappearances—are willing to talk.

Even upstairs in his office at the NBI headquarters—a concrete hulk apparently without a single intact pane of glass in its many windows, where a silent functionary with a shaved head, red flip-flops, and a gruesome limp accompanies visitors down passageways lined with deserted rooms—Colonel Zubah is reluctant to go into detail. During Taylor’s time, he says, the NBI—Liberia’s equivalent of the FBI—never investigated anything Chuckie did. Zubah says that the prospect of contact with the commander of the Anti-Terrorist Unit frightened him witless. “Of course!” he insists. “Who wouldn’t be afraid of Chuckie? Because you never knew—you never knew what you would end up like. Many who saw his face are not around today to say that they saw him.”

Michael Stanton first saw Chuckie Taylor during the dry season of 1991, when Stanton was an 18-year-old NPFL fighter as- signed to guard Charles Taylor’s compound in Gbarnga, capital of the rebel-controlled state-within-a-state that its “president” liked to call Greater Liberia, but many simply knew as Taylorland.

Now 34, Stanton spent much of his adult life as part of Charles Taylor’s militia: Pressed into service with the NPFL at 17, he later joined the paramilitary Special Security Unit (SSU) and eventually became an officer in the ATU. When I meet him in Monrovia, he asks that I conceal his identity. “Most of the ATU boys are here in town,” he says. “If you use my name, they might do something to me.”

When the president’s son arrived in Gbarnga, for a visit that would last two or three months, he seemed to Stanton like any other 14- year-old: He was into hip-hop, dressed in Timberlands and baggy jeans, and wore sunglasses and a do-rag. “He was just an ordinary American boy that came to see his father,” Stanton says. “We all gave him respect. Each time he met you he greeted you like a friend. You know, he wanted to be in with the big guys.”

By that time, many of the big guys were already veterans of the first of the wars that would make Liberia synonymous with previously unimaginable acts of cruelty—soccer played with human heads, checkpoints made by stretching a man’s intestines across a road, fighters betting on the sex of an unborn child and deciding the winner by slicing open the mother’s womb with a bayonet, others hacking out the hearts of their enemies and eating them to gain strength. Worse still, many of the big guys who did such things weren’t really that big at all: As the NPFL swept through central Liberia in 1990, the fighters began recruiting children—some as young as 9—to join them, organizing them into “Small Boy Units” (SBU). Armed with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and submachine guns, and often high on marijuana, speed, cocaine, or a special brew of sugarcane juice and gunpowder, the SBU proved to be some of Taylor’s most ferocious and merciless fighters.

And when Chuckie returned for a longer stay with his father, in 1992 or ’93, he naturally sought out kids his own age; he found one in James Wright, an SBU commander in his early teens who had joined the NPFL at the age of 10 when his father was killed and become a favorite of Charles Taylor’s. Chuckie began riding around Gbarnga in a jeep with Wright, who would introduce him to the troops. Slowly, Chuckie’s behavior began to change. “Small- small,” Stanton explains in Liberian English, “gradually.” But one day Stanton noticed a singular development in the relationship between the president’s son and the SBU commander: “James,” he says, “was taking orders from him.”

After each of his visits to Gbarnga, Chuckie went home to Florida. The effect that this new experience in Africa had on him can only be guessed at, but the evidence of his criminal record is stark: His juvenile rap sheet begins with a single offense in 1990, when, at the age of 13, he is arrested for car theft, which is followed by a first assault-and-battery charge in 1992. In the second half of 1993, Chuckie was charged with no fewer than six separate offenses, including resisting arrest and aggravated assault. By the time of the attempted robbery in Orlando at the beginning of 1994, he was a career criminal in the making, a young man described in his final juvenile psychiatric report as suspected of having suicidal tendencies and abusing drugs and alcohol. Soon after that report was written, Chuckie jumped bail and left the United States. When he failed to show up for trial in August 1994, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but the Orange County Sheriff’s Office could find no trace of him. The case was closed in March 2005; as far as the Florida State’s Attorney’s Office was concerned, Roy M. Belfast Jr. had vanished, never to return.

With the disappearance from Florida of the welder’s adopted son, Charles Taylor’s boy was reborn with the rights and privileges due an African warlord’s favorite child. Chuckie was enrolled in 1995 at an elite school in Ghana and later at the College of West Africa in Monrovia, but he didn’t much like it: “He never had the time, the patience, to stay long in class,” says J., his personal bodyguard at the time, who shadowed “Junior” everywhere. Chuckie preferred to spend his time cruising the streets, or in the clubs of the combat-scarred capital, hanging out with the children of other government ministers and wealthy businessmen, drinking champagne. Sometimes he’d stay in for days at a time, playing video games and watching movies on his big-screen TV. He was especially keen on SWAT-style action movies; every once in a while he’d keep J. and the other bodyguards up all night, acting out the process of “clearing” the house, room by room, at gunpoint.

“He liked good times,” J. explains with an indulgent smile. A tall, skinny man now in his forties, J. was at Chuckie’s side, on and off, for seven years—“He was a kid when I started with him. I brought him up,” he says. “He got a worse side—and he got some good sides, too.” J. recalls that Junior had a terrible and unpredictable temper: “Sometimes when he got vexed, I thought he would make decisions he’d regret.”

In July 1997, following years of fighting that had left at least 200,000 dead, 700,000 refugees, and 1.4 million people internally displaced, Liberians went to the polls to vote for a new president. Charles Taylor won 75 percent of the vote in an independently monitored election; it’s now generally accepted that most Liberians voted for Taylor because they knew that if he didn’t win through the ballot box, he would simply return to the gun. On the day he assumed power, Taylor promised the nation, “I will not be a wicked president.” This, of course, was a lie; one of his first acts as head of state, in direct contravention of the Liberian constitution, was to establish a militia loyal only to him: the Anti-Terrorist Unit.

In almost every nation whose citizens’ lives have been touched by government terror, there’s a place whose very name can make people shudder with fear—a black hole of torture and death. For Liberians, this place is known as Gbatala Base. The site of the ATU training camp lies in the thick jungle beside the highway leading toward Gbarnga, in an abandoned stone quarry in the former heart of Taylorland.

The Gbarnga road, unmaintained since the outbreak of war in 1989, is cratered with potholes and plagued by attacks by armed bandits. Ten years ago the 80-mile trip from Monrovia to Gbatala took three hours; today it takes even longer. The front gates of the camp are long gone, the buildings crumbling and overgrown with vines. Women and young boys have returned to the quarry to scrape out a living. But even they have arrived only recently, fearful of Gbatala’s reputation; it is said that when the ATU were here, anyone discovered near the base was arrested, and careless civilians would disappear, never to be seen again. In the town up the road, an old man playing checkers tells me that everyone knew what to do if his car broke down on the hill near the base: “You leave that car and run. If they arrest you and you go up there—if you come away you were lucky.”

He says no one here really knows what happened to the people they took away: “Who will talk?” he says angrily. “Nobody!”

And what about Chuckie Taylor?

“Chuckie Taylor,” he says, looking up from his game, “he was the commander. He was the main man.”

“See that house?” Michael Stanton asks as we walk across the overgrown parade ground toward a cinder-block building. “That was Chuckie’s house.” Stanton spent a year here in 1999, learning to be an ATU man; when he arrived, he discovered that his new commander had changed a lot from the boy he remembered in Gbarnga. Chuckie had trained for months, bulking up and learning karate; he ran every morning carrying a kit bag filled with sand and spent entire days on the firing range, perfecting his skills. The men were terrified of him.

Chuckie had always wanted to oversee an elite paramilitary unit, like the Hollywood-movie SWAT teams that so fascinated him, and the ATU was organized according to his specifications. No expense was spared: The latest weapons were procured and South African mercenaries were hired to teach the recruits. And why a remote camp like this? “Because of this movie he watched,” Stanton says. “Full Metal Jacket. Training movie. So that is what he decided to do.”

The Kubrick-inspired ATU induction process was brutal. New recruits were beaten and forced to crawl over a mile down a gravel road to the quarry, where they lived outside for two weeks. They were given little to eat, and since it was the rainy season, they were soaking wet most of the time. Stanton says that of his intake of 500 men, four died during the first month.

Once issued uniforms and equipment, the men, according to Stanton, were introduced to ATU discipline—subjected to ingeniously barbaric punishments that ranged from pinching a man’s lips with pliers to “dragging”: Stripped naked, a man would be forced to lie on the asphalt parade ground while another sat on his chest; two men would then take hold of each of his feet and drag him 200 meters until the flesh was torn from his back, then salt would be poured into the wounds. Finally, the victim was thrown into a hole in the ground and left there for three months—in an area of the Gbatala known as “Vietnam”; this treatment, unsurprisingly, often proved fatal.

Stanton takes me out to what used to be the shooting range, near the swamp where “Vietnam” once was; he searches through the long grass, his digital camera swinging at his hip, his wraparound Ray Bans in his hand. “Right here, there were different, different, different holes. Here and here,” he says. “One, two, three, four … ” Stanton saw many men thrown into these pits and kept in the dark for months at a time. When I ask whether the ATU ever brought civilians to “Vietnam,” he insists that he never saw anything like that: This was a military base. All the prisoners were “ex-combatants.” This is an important distinction. In the civil war, 9-year-old boys were of military age, and in Taylorland, ex-combatants were whoever the ATU said they were—former rebels, political opponents, a man whose car broke down on the wrong stretch of road.

“Maybe at that time they were in civilian life,” says Stanton, “but they were still ex-combatants. Then they would be picked up and brought here and given some VIP treatment.”

Chuckie Taylor was just 20 years old when his father became president of Liberia, and he found himself above the law, a gangster prince in a kleptocratic kingdom. Being commander of the ATU lent institutional weight and manpower to Junior’s gun-toting caprices, and he appeared to embrace the role with vigor; his body- guard J. tells me how much Chuckie enjoyed getting dressed up in his ATU uniform, “like Schwarzenegger,” pulling on his flak jacket and strapping a Glock to his leg. Jacob Massaquoi, a Liberian dissident whose brother was executed in front of him by Samuel Doe’s men and who was himself shot and tortured by those of Charles Taylor, says that the difference between the two regimes was that Doe’s agents came under cover of darkness, while Chuckie and his goons would come for you in broad daylight. This sent a message, Massaquoi says: “ ‘I can do anything—and nothing will happen to me.’ ” When he wasn’t in military uniform, Chuckie favored gold chains and the latest streetwear from the United States—Sean John and Phat Farm—and listened to dancehall reggae and gangster rap: Buju Banton, Snoop Dogg, Tupac, and DMX. Driving around with his bodyguards, he played instrumental CDs and rapped along to them. And although his father showed signs that he wanted Junior to enter politics, according to J., Junior wasn’t interested in anything beyond the gangster lifestyle: “He likes material things—cars, clothes, music. He used to be a lavish person.” Like his father, Chuckie proved adept at using Liberia’s natural resources to make himself rich, and in partnership with rumored Ukrainian mafia kingpin Leonid Minin, he ran a timber-export concession. Until Minin—a portly alleged cocaine addict from Odessa— was arrested near Milan in 2000, their company, Exotic Tropical and Timber Enterprises, enabled the president’s son to trade valuable Liberian hardwoods for cash and weapons, according to UN reports. It also allowed Chuckie to combine his love of action movies with his love of firearms. If a film he saw featured a weapon he liked, Chuckie simply added it to his shopping list: among the orders for hundreds of tons of arms shipped by Minin, UN investigators found notes about “special packages for Junior.” And when the new toys arrived, Chuckie would spend hours with them on the firing range at Gbatala. Back in Monrovia in 2000, Chuckie he married his American-born girlfriend, Lynn Henderson; three months later, she gave birth to a son, Charles Taylor III.

And yet, for all these comforts, the little warlord never felt at home in his fiefdom of theft and violence. Chuckie Taylor remained in touch with friends and relatives in America—frequently transferring money to individuals in Florida. And J. says that over the years he realized that Chuckie desperately wanted to return to the United States, but couldn’t because of something he’d done in the past: “He told me once that he was involved in some sort of heist, and if he had gone back he was going to serve some 20-to-25-year jail sentence.”

When I first meet Nathaniel Koah, I find him waiting in the dust beside the road in Paynesville, a sprawling township on the eastern edge of Monrovia. He carries a rolled umbrella and, despite the late-afternoon heat, wears a thick quilted-nylon jacket. He is suspicious and reluctant to talk. He will later tell me he is 43, though he looks much older. It’s been eight years since he was subjected to the “VIP treatment” at Gbatala.

Over the many hours that I spend talking to him about his experiences at the hands of Chuckie Taylor, he breaks down only once: when describing his journey from Monrovia to Gbatala. With his hands tied behind him so that his arms became paralyzed, he was thrown into the back of a pickup truck and covered with a tarpaulin by ATU guards. Unable to breathe, he began to struggle, and Taylor stopped the car to investigate. Chuckie had the guards pull back the cover. “‘We’re not yet ready to kill him,’” Koah heard him say. “‘So remove the tarpaulin, let him receive air. When we reach the base, he will die.’ ”

“You know the distance from here to Gbatala,” Koah tells me. “It’s 85 miles away. He put me in there in rope for three and a half hours.”

At the memory of the agonizing trip in the back of the pickup truck—a journey he thought was the last he would ever take—Koah chokes into silence and cries quietly. But the details of what he tells me later are far worse.

Koah was arrested by government troops on July 26, 1999, near the border with Sierra Leone, where he employed 160 men working a diamond creek. Koah says he was stripped naked and handed over to ATU troops, who beat him, tortured him by dripping melted plastic onto his body, and delivered him to Chuckie Taylor’s office at the executive mansion in Monrovia. On his desk Chuckie had a rock as big as a bar of soap. He accused Koah of having found a diamond of the same size, with which he was planning to fund political opposition to the Taylor regime; Chuckie wanted the diamond.

In the coming months, Koah was twice taken to see Charles Taylor himself, who told him he would free him if he told him where the diamond was; at one point Taylor offered both freedom and a suitcase filled with U.S. dollars in exchange for the stone. Each time, Koah explained that no such diamond existed. When he refused to change his story, Taylor simply turned him over to Junior.

Koah’s account of his experience at Gbatala is that he was taken immediately to “Vietnam,” where he was imprisoned with five other men in a five-foot-deep concrete-lined pit covered with metal bars. The men sat in pairs, up to their armpits in filthy water, fenced in with barbed wire. Koah says that Chuckie would visit the base every two or three days to personally oversee his torture. In Monrovia, he had been beaten—given 150 lashes with a piece of wood, until that broke, and then more with a strip of rubber cut from a tire—until he passed out. Later he had been hung upside down over a bonfire. But at Gbatala the cruelty became more creative: A bucket of forest ants was poured over the heads of the men in the pit; they were forced to drink the water around them, which was filled with their own urine and feces; Koah’s penis was tied with a rope, which the soldiers then pulled as hard as they could. In the second month of his imprisonment, Chuckie watched and took photos while Koah was sodomized by an ATU soldier.

And then, according to Koah, there were the killings. One prisoner, accused of being a rebel, was simply shot in the head one morning by Chuckie, who pulled out his automatic and told Koah and the other men in the pit to duck; another inmate, Richard Abu, was shot in the legs before being doused in gasoline and set on fire. “They burned him while he was still crying,” Koah tells me. “I was sitting there while they burned Richard Abu alive.”

It was nearly three months before Koah was finally released, in October 1999, as a result of a writ filed in Monrovia by Tiawan Gongloe, a human-rights lawyer who is now Liberia’s solicitor general. Before he was taken to the hearing, Koah was granted a final audience with Charles Taylor. There, Koah says, Taylor warned him that if he revealed anything of what he had seen at Gbatala, the government could not guarantee his safety. And then the president handed him two $100 bills. “A man cannot go to court with empty pockets,” he said. After his release, Koah gave a press conference about what had happened to him at Gbatala. Two nights later, armed men came to his house in Monrovia looking for him. He escaped the building, and when they came back later, they started shooting. Koah says that during the third visit, uniformed ATU men abducted his wife and 15-year-old daughter and raped them at gunpoint. But by then Nathaniel Koah had fled the country. He would remain on the run for more than six years.

Charles Taylor’s rule over Liberia finally came to an end on August 11, 2003. With much of the country in the hands of the rebel group known as Liberians United for Reconciliation and De- mocracy (LURD), and under pressure from the U.S. government, Taylor stepped down and was escorted by ATU personnel to Robertsfield Airport, where a plane took him into exile in Nigeria.

Chuckie did not wait for the bitter end: During the last week of July, word went around among the ATU boys at the executive mansion that the chief was leaving. Some heard that he’d gone to Nigeria, others that he was headed for South Africa. But on July 31—disregarding a UN travel ban—he was recorded traveling using Liberian passport No. 002858 on an Air France plane to Washington, D.C. Once in Washington, he changed planes and boarded a BWI flight to Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Much of what he did for the next two years is not clear. It’s rumored that he visited the Philippines, where he apparently had a girlfriend, and Ukraine, where he had military contacts, and one former ATU man says he saw him in the United States disguised as an Arab. But wherever he went, he rarely kept quiet for long: He repeatedly made phone calls to former associates and members of the ATU in Monrovia. One former ATU officer—now studying sociology at the University of Liberia—tells me that in 2005 one of Chuckie’s old bodyguards came to his door in Paynesville holding a cell phone and told him that the chief wanted to speak to him; he and Chuckie talked on the phone until the battery died. Chuckie said the same thing to him that he’d told the other ATU men: they should stay together, get an education, and await his return. “Go to school and learn something,” he said. “Tomorrow there will be another chance.”

Even now, four years after he last drove up the highway to Robertsfield Airport, Chuckie Taylor remains a dangerous presence in Liberia. Many of the hundreds of former ATU fighters still in Monrovia are eager to silence those who might incriminate them. Nathaniel Koah tells me that last year, days after he returned from exile, he spoke to investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice who were visiting Liberia to gather material for the indictment of Chuckie Taylor. Since then, he says, there have been three attempts on his life, including one in which a group of men armed with automatic weapons attacked the house where he was staying and burned it to the ground. He remains in fear for his life, and desperate to leave the country. He has asked U.S. authorities to help him get out; so far, he’s heard nothing from them. “Maybe they think America is like heaven,” he says bitterly. “Before you go to heaven you’ve got to die.”

Chuckie Taylor’s last attempt at reinventing himself was also his most audacious. During the final months of 2005, with his father in exile in Nigeria and plans for new elections under way in Monrovia, Junior was in Trinidad working on a future as a gangster rapper. In December of that year, Jethro Sheeran, a British musician who records under the name Alonestar, met Chuckie in Port of Spain and began recording with him at Eclipse Studios. At first, Taylor was reticent about his background and wouldn’t let anyone take his photograph. He had a gruff rapping style (“quite similar in tone to The Game,” Sheeran says), and the lyrics he wrote were disturbing and dark—war and murder, bullets tearing the faces off babies. “I’m the real deal,” he told Sheeran. “There’s all these American thugs that rap about this and that, but they haven’t lived the life and seen what I’ve seen.” He said he’d already thought of a couple of names for his crew: Alpha Tango Unit, or All Thugs United. Either way, they’d be known by their initials: A.T.U.

At the beginning of March 2006, Chuckie explained to Sheeran that he was planning a trip to Nigeria and he’d have to change planes in London. Perhaps, he suggested, he could stop over for a few days and the two of them could get together in the studio to work on some mix tapes.

But in the time since his flight from Monrovia, Chuckie had not been forgotten. He’d been under scrutiny by an agent of the Arms and Strategic Technology Investigations Unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in connection with Liberian arms trafficking. Between 2004 and 2006, the agent traveled throughout Europe and West Africa, conducted interviews in Liberia, and met Chuckie’s mother and stepfather. By the time Taylor walked into the U.S. embassy in Port of Spain on March 15 and submitted a falsified application to renew his United States passport, he had already been under federal investigation for two years.

Two weeks later, he returned to Florida aboard American Airlines Flight 1668 to Miami. This time around, nobody was in any doubt about the true identity of Charles McArthur Emmanuel.

In September of this year, Chuckie Taylor entered a plea of not guilty on eight counts of torture committed in Liberia between 1999 and 2002; his trial is set to begin in Miami in January 2008. His lawyer, the Miami public defender Miguel Caridad, refuses to comment on the case, but the probability of a conviction seems high; prosecutors are, a source close to the investigation tells me, quietly confident. But in the unlikely event that he’s acquitted, something else is in store for Junior.

Back in downtown Orlando, in the offices of the State Attorney, is a case file bearing the name Roy Belfast Jr., which contains a thick wad of witness statements and arrest reports related to a long-dormant investigation. Right at the back of the file, behind the nolle prosequi order from 2005, which marks the case closed, are two sheets of paper torn from a yellow legal pad. Here, someone for whom charges of torture in a distant land are of little consequence compared with matters closer to home has recently made a series of notes about the defendant: “D. was in a small country in Africa,” they read in part, “where his father was dictator. When his father was deposed he fled to Trinidad where he has been for three years.”

In July of last year, Florida Assistant State Attorney Steven Foster refiled charges of attempted robbery against Roy M. Belfast Jr.; for allegedly waving an automatic pistol in the faces of Robert Klimkowski and his teenage son in 1994, Chuckie faces prosecution for three third-degree felonies and one secondary felony, which alone carries a maximum sentence of 15 years. If he manages to convince the federal jury in Miami that he’s innocent of crimes committed in the streets and jungles of West Africa, those few moments in the dark on North Pine Hills Road may still ensure that the gangster prince of Liberia goes to jail for up to 30 years.

Some of the names of individuals in this story have been changed at their request.

In October 2008, ‘Chuckie’ Taylor was found guilty of charges of torture, conspiracy and possession of a firearm during commission of a violent crime, and later sentenced to 97 years in federal prison. In January 2010, Nathaniel Koah and his wife were among five of Taylor’s victims awarded a total of $22.4m in punitive damages by a US district court in Florida.