ARTS CRITICISM



AD DESIGN

SMALL

AD DESIGN

LARGE

ARTS CRITICISM

SMALL CIRCULATION

Out On The Prairie

Cowboys fall for each other in Ang Lee’s riveting, landmark “Brokeback Mountain.”

by Thomas Peyser

Ang Lee’s sumptuously shot, heartbreaking “Brokeback Mountain” is at once a meticulous homage to countless Westerns and an unflinching move into new territory that its forebears keep hidden in the subtext: love between men on the range. As a result, the love story of Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) at times feels as ancient and familiar as any well-worn piece of American legend, even if its content could set John Wayne spinning in his grave. “Brokeback” is arguably the first Hollywood picture that focuses steadfastly on a gay relationship, but in spite of this novelty, the mythic trappings give the story of Ennis and Jack an almost classic feel, as if the pair were ready to take their place with Bogie and Bergman’s Rick and Ilsa from “Casablanca” as screen icons. The effect is exhilarating. The film, based on a story by Annie Proulx, opens in 1963. Ennis and Jack are thrown together by chance when a rancher (Randy Quaid) hires them to summer his sheep on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. Jack is the more effusive one, a rodeoer with a chip on his shoulder, while Ennis emits only monosyllables — and only with the greatest reluctance. When, encouraged by some whiskey, he strings several sentences together, Jack is pleasantly stunned. One cold night forces them into the same cramped tent, and, as if out of nowhere, they throw themselves at each other.

Of the two, Jack is the most emotionally equipped to deal with this situation, but they’re both bewildered by what has overtaken them. They assure each other that they “ain’t queer,” then promptly strip and retire back to the tent. There’s not much sex on screen, and what is there is, by current standards, discreetly filmed. But in these scenes, the men are so conflicted that you can’t tell if they’re about to make love or beat each other up. It’s as if they’re trying to convince themselves that all this is nothing more than an unusual kind of manly roughhousing. Barely out of their teens, they lack the assurance to act decisively and split up at the end of the summer with shoulder slaps and mumbled goodbyes. They don’t even trade addresses.

They both marry, have children and settle into routines that eat away at them. When, four years after their summer on Brokeback, Jack tracks down Ennis, they’ve wised up enough not to waste a moment kidding themselves; within minutes they’re in a motel. The die is cast. What follows is two decades of furtive, sporadic “fishing trips,” from which they return to crumbling marriages and increasingly embittered reflections on the life together they don’t have.

Some critics have been bending over (backward, of course) to insist that “Brokeback Mountain” is a moving love story whose protagonists just happen to be men. However refreshingly open-minded that judgment may be, it’s a little like saying that “To Kill a Mockingbird” involves the story of a wrongly accused man who just happens to be black, or that Matthew Shepard — who died in the beautiful high country in which the film is set — was a murder victim who just happened to be gay.

This is not simply a movie about love denied, but an exploration of the particular traps, emotional and social, waiting for gay men of a certain background and disposition. In “The Ice Storm” (1997), Ang Lee masterfully demonstrated his ability to expose what was toxic in the now exotic-seeming milieu of 1970s suburbia, and he brings the same rigor, and the same painstaking craft, to the deftly observed particulars of “Brokeback” — the trailers, shacks and combine dealerships against which the tragedy unfolds. The power of these movies comes from their refusal to deal in hazy universality.

The fine screenplay by Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry admirably fills out the middle section of Proulx’s story, and the stunted lives chronicled in the film often call to mind McMurtry’s superb script of “The Last Picture Show” (1971). Gyllenhaal’s Jack is a study in poignancy, but ultimately it’s Ledger’s Ennis who most devastatingly captivates our attention. Having witnessed as a child the aftermath of a ritualized murder of a local gay man, he’s turned his quiet, stoic nature, a traditional value in a Western, into an elaborate mechanism of repression and self-torture. The movie’s triumph is showing us how events can conspire to turn a man within a hair’s breadth of happiness into someone who, in Ennis’ words, is “nobody, nowhere.”

#

Towers of Babble

“Sketches of Frank Gehry” explores the airy realm of the media-architectural complex.

by Thomas Peyser

With “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” longtime Gehry pal Sydney Pollack goes way out on a limb and more or less declares the biggest celebrity in contemporary architecture a genius. Gehry, whose massive, spaceship-like 1997 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao seemed to secure his place in the pantheon of supreme 20th-century artists, emerges as a charmingly rumpled, folksy Everyman, somewhat bewildered by his own powers to revitalize not just architecture but whole cities (Bilbao, a local official assures us, is enjoying a Gehry-invoked renaissance).

Adoring beauty shots of Gehry’s projects and sketches vie for screen time with the praise of clients, colleagues and cronies. It all goes down very easily — too easily, in fact. By sidestepping both the wide divergence of opinion about Gehry’s achievements and, surprisingly, even the logic of his stylistic development, “Sketches” comes across as something of a documercial for Gehry Partners, the architect’s Los Angeles design firm. Pollack has wasted an opportunity to turn the Gehry craze into a “teachable moment.”

At the start of the movie Pollack rather anxiously admits that he knows little about either architecture or making documentaries. He may be right. Gehry’s early work often played with L.A. vernacular styles, and we’re treated to fleeting glimpses of these sometimes-whimsical structures now and then. But we never hear a word about how or why Gehry transformed himself from an offbeat regionalist into the purveyor of a style that so disregarded its surroundings that his buildings are at home (or out of place) anywhere in the world — anywhere, that is, where a mammoth foundation, corporation or government can pony up his fee.

Lacking interest in the shape of Gehry’s career, Pollack more often contents himself with a tried and true staple of such films: the search for the origins and nature of artistic genius. Naturally, nothing much comes of this enterprise, although Gehry’s onetime therapist shows up to take credit for letting Gehry access his previously untapped talents, in part by giving him the go-ahead to dump his first wife. “There’s something in there, in that right brain, that allows him to take free associations and then make them practical realities,” he avers. Given the film’s flat-footed conception, it’s a miracle that Pollack doesn’t cut to an MRI image of that scintillating hemisphere.

What the movie lacks in depth, however, it makes up in star power. In fact, what’s most interesting about the movie is its exposure of the media-architectural complex. Paramount’s and Disney’s ex-CEO Michael Eisner waxes lyrical about the Gehry structures he’s commissioned. Barry Diller, the father of Fox Broadcasting, explains his role in inspiring a Gehry project this way: “Frank and I started talking about water, because he likes boats and I like boats.” Guess what the building Gehry designed for Diller looks like. That’s right, a boat. Rock star Bob Geldof? Big-time Gehry fan.

The one dissenting voice comes from Princeton art historian Hal Foster, who allowed himself to be interviewed in a wood-paneled, book-lined room that proclaims his debilitating distance from the cheerleading hipsters and business celebrities the movie pits against him. Shots of skeptical articles by Foster and others briefly flash across the screen like faded newspaper headlines tracking a string of gangland slayings.

What drama there is in the movie derives from Pollack and Gehry cagily using each other to burnish their images. Sporting a leather jacket and yellow Livestrong bracelet, Pollack praises his old friend for finding a way to be creative in an industry that makes such “stringent commercial demands.” Gehry, taking his cue, notes that Pollack, too, has accomplished much the same thing in pictures. They agree to agree.

Money, in fact, rarely comes up, but a documentary about architecture that doesn’t dwell on money is like “Hamlet” without the prince. Gehry’s meteoric rise owes something to the debt-financed boom of the 1980s. This film, however, makes little attempt to place Gehry in either an economic or cultural context. As someone in the movie admiringly wonders, Why is it that we’ve fallen in love with an architect whose buildings project an aggressive, glitzy monumentality, Egyptian in scale? Gehry explains his style in a single word: democracy. Maybe so. A more adventurous film might explore this question, but this coffee-table book of a movie is satisfied to gaze wonderingly.

#

“The Queen” a Human Being?

Stephen Frears gives Elizabeth II the royal treatment.

by Thomas Peyser

Elizabeth II ascended the throne just a few weeks after Eisenhower became president, and yet Stephen Frears’ smart, moving and altogether engrossing “The Queen” is the first feature film about her. It’s likely to remain the best.

Set mostly in the week following the death of Princess Diana, “The Queen” traces the aging monarch’s attempt to come to grips both with a population whose extraordinary outpouring of grief is entirely beyond her comprehension and with a new media-savvy prime minister, Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), whose political antennae vibrate in perfect sympathy with the mood swings of the masses.

The result is a fascinating and telling confrontation of old-fashioned British phlegm and newfangled demands that all public figures be emotionally accessible to the people. It’s the story, in other words, of how politicians and sovereigns can hold on to their positions only if they consent to become just a special kind of celebrity. That’s a story to which even the least Anglophilic among us can relate.

What catapults the film into the first rank is a mesmerizing performance by Helen Mirren, perhaps best known as the star of the PBS import “Prime Suspect.” Her Elizabeth is a fiercely complex character, deeply marked by the demands of her bizarre calling, one of which is the lifelong repression of the merely personal. Profoundly unsnobbish, she seems most at ease talking shop with her cooks, gamekeepers and mechanics (“I’ve broken my prop-shaft,” she barks into a phone when she’s driven her Land Rover aground on a ford), but is capable of exuding an icy majesty when facing down undesired interference, especially from the men in her life. These include a boorish Prince Philip (James Cromwell) and a simpering Charles (Alex Jennings), whom the film treats mostly as objects of ridicule. At one point Blair ends a phone call with the words, “Let’s keep in touch,” perhaps failing to notice that he has just issued his sovereign a command. With delicious indifference she replies, “Yes, let’s.”

At the center of the plot is the question of how the royals will respond to Diana’s death. For Elizabeth, this tragedy is a strictly private matter. But the media quickly seize upon her traditional British reserve as a sign of intolerable hauteur. Subject to increasingly skittish entreaties from the prime minister that she give her grief a public airing, the queen is brought to a painful awareness of the strange new world that has taken shape while she raised her beloved corgis in the Scottish Highlands.

In front of the news cameras, Blair shows himself, by contrast, right at home. Calling Diana “the people’s princess,” he at once cements his political position and endears himself to the populace, composed, as the queen mother tartly puts it, of “hysterics carrying candles” who need help with their grief. But “The Queen” asks about the cost of this glib sentimentality. When he talks to Elizabeth in person, Blair comes off as genial, but comparatively shallow and unformed, the king of the pygmies. Even as the Queen comes around to his views, Blair recognizes Elizabeth as, in many respects, a master.

Frears scored his first hit here with the still indispensable “My Beautiful Launderette” (1985), with its embrace of gays, punk and a postimperial immigrant culture that seemed utterly opposed to the supposed virtues of old England. Surprising that he should now turn a sympathetic, if judiciously critical, eye on the royals. But when Elizabeth graciously receives the curtsies of old women at the gates of Buckingham Palace, we know we’re witnessing the last rites of an epoch that is no less noble for being untelegenic. Like Elizabeth, these women were schooled on the austerities of war and sacrifice to the nation. Even Frears appreciates the old rigors that have, of necessity, been tossed aside to make way for the new openness. Although it would have taken a dreadful director to make Mirren’s remarkable performance look bad, Frears has adopted a beautifully restrained style that makes it all the more moving. Only once do we see Elizabeth give way to grief and sob — whether for Diana, her family or herself is not clear. But even then, we don’t really see her. Frears keeps the camera at her back, as if to rebuke our desire to see every weakness ferreted out and exposed. It’s a defining moment in this film about an extraordinary woman’s wish to keep a few shreds of her inner life to herself.

#

ARTS CRITICISM

LARGE

ARTS FEATURE

SMALL

Unipsycho

He’s an apparition, an anarchist, a one-wheeled circus sideshow. He’s Pink Man, and he’s riding straight for your head.

by John E. Citrone

It’s almost 1 a.m. on a sweltering Thursday at downtown nightclub TSI. Inside, a DJ spins Roy Orbison, while kids in tight T-shirts and studiously mussed hair consume beer and cigarettes. Outside on Bay Street, a doorman doles out wristbands and collects the cover charge. The night air is heavy. Other than the hiss of passing cars and snatches of conversation, it’s quiet. Really quiet.

Then someone shatters the silence. “No f *cking way! Pink Man!” In an instant the scene goes from mundane to surreal. A small man sheathed in pink spandex flashes by, a silver cape whipping behind him. He disappears into the long, dark corridor leading to the club, then emerges into the light at the opposite end of the tunnel. He turns and pivots, fluttering his hands, then flapping his arms. He looks like a flamingo on angel dust.

It’s a strange spectacle — stranger than the first glance suggests. Not only is he wearing a skin-tight hooded pink unitard, he’s riding a goddamn unicycle. It’s easy to miss as Pink Man zooms past, a neon blur beneath the streetlights. But as he stutter-stops and spins, drifts and hovers, his wheel carves a path through the small crowd. He whirls about, smiling big and scary. He utters a manic laugh. He sings his tuneless theme song: “Pink Man, coming outta nowhere/Pink Man, rollin’ on a wheel/What do you think, man?”

As his audience makes room for this herky-jerky sideshow, Pink Man dips off his cycle long enough to slide his head between the legs of a female bar patron.

“Oh my God!” she screams as he positions her on his shoulders, rises up onto the seat of the unicycle and rockets down the alley toward Bay Street. Covering her eyes, the woman gasps, then thrusts her hands skyward as Pink Man picks up speed. They nearly tumble out onto Bay Street when Pink Man stops short, spins his body and shuttles back through the tunnel. His passenger, unscathed, is elated and terrified.

Pink Man dumps her off where several others have gathered, does a few more stunts. Then, in a blast of sweat and color, he’s gone.

About a year-and-a-half ago, residents of Jacksonville’s Five Points neighborhood began sharing a mass hallucination. At the oddest times, in the oddest places, a skinny man in a pink bodysuit and pink high-tops would appear on a unicycle. In the middle of the night on a side street, at peak drinking hours at dive bars, at 3 in the afternoon in local parks, he’d show up, pedal around crazily, then vanish.

That was around the time Michael Maxfield came to town. His arrival in Jacksonville was just the most recent stop of a two-decades-long journey. He’s been on the road since his early 20s, unicycle, backpack and guitar his only companions. Part traveling minstrel, part performance artist, Maxfield has traveled on three continents and in most major U.S. cities, bringing his apolitical routine to the masses.

Born in the small town of Leominster, Mass., Maxfield grew up in what he describes as an average, working-class family. He began riding his brother’s unicycle at age 13 and liked it enough that it was one of the few things he took with him when he left home.

In 1982, in search of a place to express himself, Maxfield took a bus to San Francisco. He began to explore riding as a form of entertainment — years before donning his pink suit. Taking his unicycle around Bay area neighborhoods and on Berkley College campus, Maxfield would spin around poles and street signs, flapping his arms, messing with students and passersby. The experience was freeing, but it wasn’t until he joined a commune in Southern Oregon that he really discovered his creative side. There he lived in a teepee, read by kerosene lantern, wrote music, picked berries for breakfast and meditated. He also coauthored a children’s book called “Children for Peace,” which he promoted on a cross-country tour. While on the road, he entertained by singing songs he had written and by giving people rides on his shoulders while riding his unicycle.

After the book tour, Maxfield returned to Southern Oregon, where he married and had a couple of children. What seemed like the beginning of a happy, conventional life in fact turned into a very dark period for Maxfield — one that ended in divorce and thoughts of suicide. But it also prompted his decision to relocate to Eugene, Ore., where he first began to build his public persona. It was there Maxfield perfected his routines, creating odd moves and actually dancing on his unicycle. Though he loved the social aspect of his rides, he felt like doing something more substantial, along the lines of performance art.

“What I came up with was, I thought I would be a guy from outer space,” says Maxfield. “A spaceman on a unicycle.” While looking through a dancewear catalogue, he stumbled upon a pink unitard. “And I’m like, ‘Holy cow.’”

He took a trial ride in the unitard at the University of Oregon, and immediately people began yelling “Pink Man!” as he passed.

Pink Man was born.

Maxfield began “pinking” random bars, restaurants and nightclubs. (“Pink is a verb,” he insists.) He traveled to Portland, where, within 10 minutes of his arrival, a TV news crew picked him up for a story. As a result of the short segment and the political overtones of his chosen color scheme, Pink Man was hired to appear at a Portland Pride soccer game at the Memorial Coliseum. (Though often mistaken for being gay, Maxfield is emphatic that he is not.) He created havoc on the field with other costumed characters, including a mock Barney, whose head fell off and was kicked into the goal. The clip ended up on Dick Clark’s “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes.”

Though Eugene was a great place to test his new moves, Maxfield found it confining. He returned to San Francisco and began pinking Haight-Ashbury. He came up with slogans — “I pink therefore I am” — that he’d shout as he’d buzz the unsuspecting. Unlike street buskers, who remain stationary, performing for a finite amount of time, Pink Man would zip in, twirl and spin, sing a quick song, then disappear. Not only did this type of hit-and-run performance art help Maxfield deal with crowd anxiety, it also deepened the mystery of Pink Man.

“I like to be really enigmatic,” says Maxfield. “I love that it takes a while for people to fathom what just happened.”

As word spread about the wacky pink guy on the unicycle, Maxfield began working fairs and parades. He garnered TV coverage and newspaper profiles. He led the first “How Berkley Can You Be?” parade and was dubbed a “clown, superhero, flamingo” by The Berkley Daily. In the San Francisco Chronicle’s annual readers poll, Pink Man was ranked third in the category of favorite local personalities — behind Wavy Gravy and Jerry Brown.

Maxfield was on his way to reaching folk hero status. He decided to ride the momentum to Los Angeles.

Mike Maxfield’s Riverside apartment is nearly empty. There’s a pyramid of TVs along one wall; only the top one works. There’s a sofa, an acoustic guitar, an electric keyboard and one lamp. His unicycle leans by the door. Maxfield lives here rent-free in exchange for his services as quasi-groundskeeper. That’s how Maxfield makes his way — staying with friends, squatting, living off the kindness of strangers.

He’s broke and over his head in debt. His pink high tops are falling apart, and he needs a new unitard. He relies on a couple of big-money gigs in each city to get him by. Most of the time he performs for free.

Thin, with large eyes and expressive brows, Maxfield looks like a comic book character even without his pink suit. His balding pate and boney face turn a rosy hue when he gets excited, and he often gets excited — when talking about his travels, his exploits and the sheer joy he gets from being Pink Man.

“Check this out,” he spits as he bounds from the sofa to the kitchen. He returns holding a sapling he recently dug up from behind his building, its root embedded in a Florida license plate. The plate looks ancient, but the markings are clear: 13P.

Maxfield is moved by this coincidence and uses it as a launching pad to explain the legend of Pink Man. “Pink Man is from the 13th dimension,” he explains. “M is the 13th letter of the alphabet, and my initials are M.M. And I [was] born on the 13th. Also, you know what’s crazy? In scrabble, take the underlined M — so you know it’s not a W — if you put that underlined M on its side, it’s a 13. How about that? And Massachusetts, which begins with an M, has 13 letters.”

According to Maxfield, Pink Man hails from a universe where the beings have no legs, only a spinning vortex on which they hover. He contends this extraterrestrial bond is what generates the “amazing” coincidences of Pink Man. The license plate, for example: Maxfield says the P stands for “pink,” and the 13, well, that’s self-evident. Another prized possession is a plastic pink key Maxfield found after meditating on Venice Beach. (“Pink key,” he says. “Pinkie! Get it?”) He calls the trinket a “gift from the universe.”

There’s more. Much more. Maxfield has a mental library of coincidences and anecdotes — the time a pink flamingo flew over his car as he was leaving Miami, the fact that International Pink Week falls on the week of his birthday — which he uses to build the backstory of his alter ego.

Maxfield admits there’s an element of escapism in Pink Man. It’s evident in the way he carries himself off the unicycle. When holed up in his apartment, Maxfield is jittery, gnawing at his cuticles and chuckling uneasily. But when he’s on a ride, Maxfield is in complete control. His movements are fluid (his trademark handflap, his superhero glide) and staccato (his stutter stop, his rolling pivot). He seems unaware, or maybe unconcerned, that his body suit is so revealing. Every contour, every bulge, is well-defined. Sweat is an issue, too. Within a half-hour of hard riding, his spandex suit is sopping wet; people sometimes recoil when he hugs them. But his confidence is endearing, and most are thrilled to be fondled, tickled and embraced by the man in pink.

Of course, his unicycle skills are captivating. Maxfield is capable of executing triple spins, backpedaling, riding down stairs, and he is always adding new tricks to his repertoire. That’s not to say the performance is error-free. Maxfield has had his share of spills. One wipeout at Park and King streets sent him sprawling into the intersection. But Maxfield regards a fall as legitimate drama, and he works it, waving at passing cars as they honk at his apparent misfortune.

It’s all about the show, and Maxfield is happiest when Pink Man is entertaining people. He wants to spread joy. He needs to make people happy. It’s part of his redemption, part of leaving his painful past behind.

There are some things you just can’t live down. No matter how hard you try, no matter how sincere your efforts, no matter how far you run.

For Maxfield, it was the summer of ’91, a period he says was marked by “episodic dysfunctional behavior.” After engaging in conduct he declines to discuss other than to say it was “unacceptable” in nature, Maxfield crossed the line. While babysitting two prepubescent girls at his home in Southern Oregon, Maxfield, as he puts it, “touched them for a few seconds” while they slept. When the girls stirred and began to wake, Maxfield “backed off and left the room.” The encounter was brief, but the damage was done.

Maxfield spent the evening in a fog, questioning himself and his potential to repeat the behavior. He says he immediately understood the gravity of what he had done and wanted to seek counseling, but it took several months of painful introspection before he mustered the courage to come forward at a self-help workshop.

It wasn’t unusual that the girls were left in his care. Maxfield was married at the time and had children of his own in the house. The parents of the girls were friends of Maxfield and his wife.

After the incident, Maxfield felt like he had to do “whatever it took to ensure that it would never happen again.” He confessed to his wife and the girls’ parents. Maxfield says it was agonizing for everyone, but miraculously his wife and the parents of the girls supported him.

Maxfield was never arrested; no charges were filed. But word slowly got out. His relationship with his wife deteriorated, and they eventually divorced.

Soon after, Maxfield moved to Seattle, Wash., where he became suicidal. Feeling like he needed his family, he headed back to Leominster and tried to get his head together. He began riding his unicycle again, building his self esteem and finding a modicum of happiness in his daily jaunts. But Maxfield missed his kids, so he relocated to Eugene, Ore., close enough to visit his children but far enough from what he calls “the story.”

Soon after, he began riding at the University of Oregon, first in plainclothes, then in his pink outfit. Pink Man became a hit, and newspapers and TV stations from surrounding cities started doing features on Maxfield’s flamboyant alter ego.

But his visibility was his worst enemy. Two days after the local paper ran a front-page piece about Pink Man and his appearance at the “Eugene Celebration,” another front-page story appeared in the same paper documenting his troubled past. Turns out someone close to the family ratted him out to the publication.

He retreated to his girlfriend’s apartment and kept a low profile. A few days later, the police showed up, questioned him and searched the place, but found nothing incriminating. A neighborhood child had claimed Maxfield molested him, identifying him as the “guy from the newspaper.” Maxfield was out of the state during the time the incident allegedly took place, and he was never arrested or charged, but his name was mud. Again, he moved on.

In 1998, Maxfield was hired to perform at the Orange County Fair, titled “In The Pink,” in Southern California. The first few days were great — parents and kids eating up his shtick, positive press for both the fair and Pink Man. Then a local publication picked up the Oregon story, which was titled “Troubled Past Catches Up With Pink Man,” and he was forced to resign. The alternative newspaper OC Weekly came to his defense with the front-page headline, “He’s Gone! We Say That Sucks!” Letters to the editor ranged from vitriolic (“You child fag molesters will never print this. Your balls are in each others’ mouths”) to sympathetic (“While it is certainly difficult to dismiss his former life … I can only hope that he has redeemed himself via his pinkish existence by bringing joy and hysteria to a cynical public”). CNN, then in the process of doing a feature on Pink Man, dropped the piece when the story broke.

And so it has gone for Maxfield. For the past decade he has stayed on the move, traveling from city to city, alternately anonymous and high-profile, both cherished and vilified.

“That’s the punishment,” he says. “That’s the big cost. You can’t imagine how that feels.”

Maxfield makes no secret of his pain. His emotions are less stable than his gyrating unicycle, and he is prone to nervous laughter and full body fidgets. Sometimes he cries. His guilt is tremendous, his fear palpable. And yet his compulsion keeps him in the public eye.

Though Maxfield spent a year-and-a half in Jacksonville, he’s received relatively little media coverage. The Florida Times-Union approached him about doing a feature, but according to Maxfield, when he mentioned that he didn’t want his past disclosed, the reporter balked. Maxfield decided to come forward in Folio Weekly because, he says, he is tired of running, tired of letting others control his fate. He also hopes to dissuade others who are plagued with similar desires.

“If you are doing something abusive or taking advantage of children, you gotta stop. You gotta come forward,” he says. Maxfield has entertained the idea of speaking at local churches and colleges in hopes of helping others by telling his story. He even wants to publish his autobiography, a story he says he’s been working on for the past seven years. But he is realistic.

“No matter what, it doesn’t end until I die,” he laments, his hands beginning to shake. “The reason I am still on this path is because of the joy. As equally hard as it is, it must be worthwhile.

“[Children] are the best,” he continues, tears pooling in bloodshot eyes. “They’re the coolest people on the planet. I’ve been cut off from that — the most beautiful part of society, the most beautiful part of humanity. I can’t tell you how crushing that it.”

Maxfield’s biggest fan, his brother Andy, died in early 2002 from muscular dystrophy. His mother died shortly thereafter. It was a massive blow, the toughest time un his life, but it made Maxfield certain of his direction. He determined that he wanted to “pink the world.”

One of seven kids, Maxfield has had a rocky relationship with his family. His brother and mom seemed to understand his proclivity for performance, but the rest of his family has found it hard to accept Maxfield’s unpredictable lifestyle.

“As the world sees me, I’m a frickin’ loser,” says Maxfield. “But on the other hand, like the L.A. Times called me ‘a fold hero — an antidote for an all too-serious world.’ Well, so maybe that counts for something. Maybe having a positive impact on the world counts for something.”

If Maxfield is dubious about his station in life, he is convinced of Pink Man’s celebrity potential. He’s done his best to get as much exposure as possible, performing at high-profile events including several San Francisco peace demonstrations and a massive Hollywood Hard Rock Café Halloween street party. He’s even pinked the White House. But Pink Man had the greatest exposure when Maxfield was living in L.A. His image was used on “The Tonight Show” as a bumper before commercial breaks. He was invited to crash a fundraiser where he met Martin Short, Steve Martin, Diane Keaton and Matthew McConaughey. (After the party, Short called him a “genius.”) In Style magazine ran a piece about Mary Steenburgen, which mentioned that her son dressed as Pink Man for Halloween. And Pink Man has been featured on television in Canada, Germany, the UK, South America, China and Japan.

For Maxfield, who is keenly aware of all media coverage — good and bad – such prominence felt like validation. But it wasn’t until he met Will Wright, creator of The Sims computer games, that he was able to fulfill his dream of pinking the world.

Wright was a fan of Pink Man, even had a promotional Pink Man postcard on his fridge, says Maxfield. Through a mutual friend, the two met for lunch and talked about Maxfield’s desire to travel. Wright offered to fund Pink Man trips to Tokyo and, later, Paris. Maxfield pinked the hell out of both, hitting the cafes and shops of Paris and the crowded streets of downtown Tokyo. He captured it all on video.

Sitting in his apartment recently, laptop computer perched on a small table, Maxfield fast-forwards through a DVD of him pinking Tokyo. Narrating the action, he grows more excited as a particular moment approaches. Suddenly, he freeze-frames on a young woman, her eyes wide and mouth agape.

“[It’s] like she just saw a unicorn,” says Maxfield, overcome with joy. “It’s just so magical. I feel so blessed that I can have that effect — just screwing around.”

After returning from his international tour in early 2005, Maxfield found himself in Jacksonville. It was a choice of convenience more than anything — a friend offered him a place to stay. But the city soon became home. He recorded an album of original music, funded with money received in a settlement with an advertising agency that stole his image for a television commercial. He made a lot of friends here, too, and became a fixture at nightspots and restaurants around downtown. He even considered making Northeast Florida his permanent home base, a point from which he can travel and perform, then return to re-energize in relative comfort.

But Pink Man never stays in one place too long.

Sometimes being Pink Man is a bitch. For all the joy Maxfield has spread, all the laughter and songs, all the shoulder rides and madness, there have been some discouraging moments. Like much-maligned Teletubbie Tinky Winky, Pink Man is guilty by association — and color choice.

Blame it on homophobia, callous disregard or simple ignorance, it doesn’t hurt any less. Maxfield has endured his share of insults screamed from car windows, been flipped off and cursed at, all of which is perfectly OK with him. There’s always a level of risk involved for any performance artist — especially one dressed in pink and flitting about on a unicycle. But there is an undeniably effeminate quality to his presentation, a pervasive looseness that could easily be misconstrued. He rides with limp wrists dangling just above his shoulders. He thrusts his hips out as he pivots. He endures standard insults, like “faggot” and “homo,” but Maxfield’s been violently accosted a number of times, too, and that isn’t part of the Pink Man plan.

On more than one occasion, he’s had his unicycle taken from him and thrown to the ground. While riding in Berkley, he was pulled off his cycle and dragged beside a car. And in a Tokyo park, he was mobbed by the performance group the Japanese Elvises.

Imagine the scene: Pink Man descending upon six jumpsuited, rhinestone-spangled Japanese Elvises in hopes of joining their public performance. Having none of it, the Elvises attacked, pushing Maxfield down. They kicked at Maxfield as he lay on the ground, using his unicycle to deflect the blows.

“As I was backing away from them, I was just cracking up,” says Maxfield. “It’s like I popped out of my body, and I saw Pink Man getting his ass kicked by The Japanese Elvises. And that is funny stuff.”

Maxfield laughs when he tells the story, but the implication is clear. Some people just don’t like Pink Man. Even in Maxfield’s Riverside neighborhood, ill will sometimes prevails. One evening, while riding along Park Street in Five Points, Pink Man had his cape ripped from his shoulders by an inebriated troublemaker who then retreated behind the counter of Starlite Café. Maxfield went into the bar to retrieve the silver garment, almost getting into a fight with the man, but left capeless.

“I really try to make a conscious effort to not piss people off. That’s not my goal,” says Maxfield. “I don’t mind pushing buttons, but I want to connect. I love people.”

More often than not, Maxfield does connect. On a recent ride through the streets of downtown Jacksonville, Pink Man pedals into London Bridge. He grabs a pint and pedals out to the sidewalk where a group of friends shares drinks and smokes. He giggles and twirls, and they all raise a glass. A voice shouts, “These times need something crazy!” followed by an earth-shaking belch. Everyone laughs and salutes.

Later, Pink Man hits TSI. On the dance floor, the girls love him, circling around him as he dances on his wheel. Outside, he gives shoulder rides and sings his songs. He’s a self-contained circus — a little creepy, a little dangerous, a whole lot of fun.

“Pink Man is fucking crazy,” smiles Donnie Cook from behind an ambivalent puff of cigarette smoke. “I love him, but I hate him. He’s fucking crazy.”

During the course of this story, Mike Maxfield again decided to relocate. He expressed concern about the repercussions of acknowledging his past. He also had an altercation with his landlord and had to move out in a hurry.

Maxfield tried living in Key West but hated it. He considered Paris and New York, but wound up back in the San Francisco area, where he’s staying with a friend. He believes there are people in Jacksonville that would love to see him fail, but he also knows that others will mourn his departure. He may return. He just doesn’t know yet.

Of one thing he is certain. Pink Man is beyond him, a force to be obeyed rather than fought. He has to, in Pink Man’s words, “pink on.” In a way, Pink Man saved Mike Maxfield’s life, and that may be the bottom line. You don’t turn your back on a friend like that.

#

ARTS FEATURE

LARGE

Foie Wars

Force-feeding amounts to either animal farming or grotesque torture, but do our chefs give a duck?

by Lee Klein

The goose is nothing, but man has made of it an instrument for the output of a marvelous product, a kind of living hothouse in which there grows the supreme fruit of gastronomy.

— Charles Gérard, “L'Ancienne Alsace à Table”

The question is not "Can they reason?" nor "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?"

— Jeremy Bentham

In a galaxy foie, foie away … No, wait a minute, it's France. A park in France. A reed-riddled pond in a park, to be precise, around which families have flocked to admire the ducks and geese gracefully gliding across tranquil waters. Observe how the ducks gather in social groups, while geese swim only in pairs; the latter form lifelong pairs to raise their young. See how the mother goose snuggles her gosling; that's sweet. And behold those ducklings waddling up the hill; put them in blue jackets and caps and they could be Huey, Dewey, and Louie! Uh-oh — looks like the littlest ducks and geese are being taken from their habitat and shipped to a farm. They'll eventually relax as they grow accustomed to their new environment — until the last three to four weeks of their 16-week lives, that is, which is when the force-feeding process begins. Watch how the birds are grabbed by their necks and a metal tube nearly a foot long is inserted down each of their delicate throats. Look how they squirm as a mush of cornmeal, oil, and salt is either manually or pneumatically pumped through these tubes and into the gullet. In a few hours this process will be repeated, then one more time later on, until a 10-pound bird consumes a daily intake of 400 to 500 grams of feed — amounting to 44 pounds of pasta being pushed into a 175-pound person. Keep an eye on our fine-feathered friends over this time frame and witness a six- to tenfold increase in the size and weight of their livers. See them gasp for air as the grotesquely enlarged organ distends and displaces space normally reserved for the air sac. See them barely able to walk as they become so obese their legs get pushed out laterally — although that's not much of a problem because they're restrained in shoebox-size cages so small they can't even turn around or stretch their wings. Notice how they've become a bit nutsy because poisons normally filtered by the liver pulse rampantly through the bloodstream and brain. It's no day in the park.

On the other hand, the resultant foie gras does taste great on toast points.

Le gavage is the French term for force-feeding, and whether it amounts to farming or torture, it has fattened into a feisty worldwide fracas involving chefs, restaurateurs, animal-rights activists, state legislators, farmers, producers, Hollywood, France, Whole Foods Market, Governor Schwarzenegger, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the pope — to name but a few. South Florida's own gaggle of gastronomes has ducked the issue altogether. Until now.

"I love it! I love it!" chef Andrea Curto fairly yells into the phone when she's asked what she thinks of foie gras (pronounced fwah grah). At Talula in Miami Beach, she gently grills three-ounce slices of intensely rich duck liver and accessorizes them with blue corn arepas, caramelized figs, chili syrup, and crème frache. "When I go to a good restaurant, I always try foie gras. It's one of those dishes that helps you measure a chef," she says. Michael Bloise (Wish, South Beach), agrees the preparation of this delicacy "reflects a true sense of what direction the chef's coming from, and can even be a barometer of their personality." Bloise is evidently a whimsical guy, for he serves the seared liver with cascabel chili-roasted bananas and a black-pepper-crusted toasted marshmallow.

A glance at how our top chefs prepare foie gras bears out the notion of it being a buttery soft canvas upon which to splash their signature style. Allen Susser (Chef Allen's, Aventura), that crafty old Mango Ganger, pairs black-pepper-seared duck liver with mango jam. Contemporary Caribbean chef Cindy Hutson (Ortanique on the Mile, Coral Gables) also stays within her genre with seared, jerk-seasoned foie gras matched with mâche salad, duck confit, and a demi-glace perked with burnt orange marmalade. Michelle Bernstein (Michy's, Miami) frills her foie with pineapple, ginger, and an iconoclastic crackling of peanut brittle, while Norman Van Aken's (Norman's, Coral Gables) signature New World starter is his "Down Island French Toast" with curaçao-scented foie gras, passion fruit caramel, and candied ginger-lime zest. Robbin Haas (Chispa, Coral Gables) does it "the way my good friend Jean-Louis [Palladin, the late, great chef at Washington, D.C.'s Watergate Hotel] taught me, which is to roast a whole foie gras and then slice it." Pascal Oudin (Pascal's on Ponce, Coral Gables) prefers to place a whole liver on the grill, and also serves it in terrines and au torchon (wrapped tightly in a piece of muslin, briefly poached in flavored broth, and cooled in the liquid for a number of days). Those are Old World treatments, and so is the manner in which Jan Jorgensen (Two Chefs, South Miami) mixes foie gras with truffles when he's stuffing quails. He also mentions something of which all foie gras enthusiasts are keenly aware: "It is a very wine-friendly product. The tannins and fruits cut against the fat." A single tablespoon of foie gras, incidentally, contains 60 calories.

In France, the Shangri-la of foie, the populace has been liver-savvy for generations. Ask old-timers on the street to describe the difference between a goose from Toulouse and one from Strasbourg, and they'll tell you the former yields an ivory white and creamy liver, while the latter is pink and firm. The trend in recent years, though, has been toward using ducks, which require less space to house and can be slaughtered at a younger age. Duck liver is rougher in texture and has an earthier, more pronounced flavor than goose. Only ducks are raised to make foie gras in this country; specifically speaking, that would be the male Mulard, a hybrid of a male Muscovy and a female Pekin.

Foie gras is sold in grades of A, B, or C, though the last denomination is rarely used. A is the largest, a bulbous lobe about one to three pounds, while softer and darker B livers are generally closer to one pound. The main difference, as described by a manager at Marky's International Food Emporium in Miami, "is mostly a matter of which is cleaner. If a chef wants to save a little money, he can buy Grade B and just spend some more time deveining it."

Regardless of the grade, foie gras triangulates with truffles and caviar to form the Holy Trinity of culinary indulgences, and it is priced accordingly: A whole liver wholesales from $20 to $30 per pound; two packaged slices, or 2.6 ounces, retails at Marky's for $27.49. But does our eating it make us complicit in a cruel, inhumane practice? And if so, could it be that the moral cost is higher than the monetary?

Certainly a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.

— Pope Benedict XVI, speaking when still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

The food world is fraught with ethical choices. As Norman Van Aken notes, "The very nature of consuming anything that once breathed is always an issue in a moral mind." Yet although it's true that, as Johnny Vinczencz (Johnny V Restaurant, Fort Lauderdale) observes, "There is no pretty way to harvest an animal for consumption," it's also correct to say foie gras is the gateway organ that inevitably leads to comparisons to other acts of barnyard banality.

"It's the same with spring lambs," claims Jorgensen of Two Chefs. "We take them away from their mothers and kill them at 25 days old. Does that go under animal cruelty as much as foie gras? I don't know. It's a very tricky thing." Talula's Curto expresses the oft-repeated fear that "If you start with foie gras, what's next? Everything that's an animal." Indeed other chefs reference abusive treatment of pigs, cows, calves (for veal), pheasants, quail, farm-raised fish, and, most of all, chickens. Says Oudin of Pascal's on Ponce: "To define animal cruelty can be subjective and hypocritical. The production of foie gras is tightly controlled by the authorities, much more so than the chicken industry. How many people have seen the 'manufacture' of a chicken? How many will still eat chicken after that?" Van Aken wonders, "How capable are we of saying what is humane killing? We certainly have not been effective of this within our own species."

The dozen toques who spoke with New Times were all careful to characterize themselves as conscientious carnivores. The force-feeding issue, therefore, has a tendency to make them a bit defensive. "I like our planet," says Ortanique's Hutson. "I care about the world that my son will inherit," says Bloise of Wish. "I'm not a horrible person," says Curto, "but I'm a chef, and it's foie gras, a wonderful thing." Many, like Giancarla Bodoni (Escopazzo, South Beach), emphasize their use of free-range, grass-fed, or organic meats, "not animals that are cooped up in overcrowded pens, who succumb to disease and therefore have to be treated with antibiotics and steroids." And most of our culinarians have dealt with food controversies before.

"I was an early pioneer in the boycott of bluefin tuna and swordfish," recalls Jonathan Eismann of Lincoln Road's seafood-based Pacific Time. "I didn't serve tuna for three years, which was very difficult for us." Bloise bypasses "Chilean sea bass, swordfish from the not-yet-fully recuperated South Atlantic population, and farm-raised salmon." Hutson doesn't use Chilean sea bass, either, "or put billfish on the menu." Sounds painless enough to do without a few fish, but according to Chispa's Haas, that's not always the case: "You stop serving something because of a vocal minority, but ultimately it's the buying majority that's going to dictate whether you stay in business. When I took Chilean sea bass off the menu at Baleen, customers were up in arms about not having it. I thought I was going to get burned in effigy in the parking lot."

Yet resisting sea bass or farm-raised salmon, or even tender veal scaloppine is one thing. Forgoing foie gras, one of the consummate pleasures of the table, is, as Michy's Bernstein says, "like quitting tobacco" — or, as Bodoni prefers to put it, "like a child going to an ice-cream store and discovering that their favorite flavor is no longer served." She should know, because Giancarla was the first South Florida chef (and still one of just a few) to eliminate foie gras from her menu. "I stopped serving it at Escopazzo about one and a half years ago," she explains. "The decision wasn't an easy one, as our business is driven by what the market expects of us, and foie gras was one of my specialty dishes. Unfortunately the demand for foie gras has led the producers to handle their animals in such a way that meets those demands, but at an inhumane cost to the animals."

Princeton bio-ethicist Peter Singer and co-author Jim Mason, in their book “The Way We Eat,” ask whether callous farming practices are too high a price to pay for the provision of cheap food to the masses. In the foie gras debate, the question of cruelty concerns a luxury item lapped up almost exclusively by the affluent. Bernstein, however, thinks such distinctions should not be made. "Isn't eating any animal a luxury?" Besides, she adds, "Foie gras is part of something much larger than just an appetizer worth 20 bucks. It has given work to people, fed families, helped cities, and been part of cultures for a long, long time."

About 5,000 years, more or less. Ancient Egyptians are credited with discovering the delectability of domesticated duck and goose livers. Noting that the birds would gorge themselves prior to long migratory flights and use their livers to store the protein, the Egyptians mimicked this instinct by force-feeding them, albeit in lesser quantities than today. In the Roman Empire, geese were stuffed with fresh figs (which somehow seems gustatorially kinder than corn mush), and after slaughter, the fatted livers were plunged into a bath of milk and honey to further swell and flavor them. The fact that certain palmipeds have a genetic inclination to binge leads some people to proclaim force-feeding to be the extension of a natural physiological process, not a pathological one. Others argue that no bird would gluttonize itself to anywhere near the state brought on by gavage, and that the species of duck used in foie gras production neither migrates nor overeats.

In relatively modern times, the tradition of foie gras was perpetuated and developed in certain regions of France, especially Alsace and the Southwest, where the preservation of food in fat was vital to feeding the population; that's where terrines, torchons, and pâté de foie gras come into play. In 1998 the USDA certified eleven French foie gras producers for exporting to the United States, which ended decades of black-market livers being smuggled here inside fish bellies and wheels of cheese. Just two years later the U.S. developed new procedures to protect against possible contamination in the production process, but the French resisted, complaining the rules were expensive and unnecessary. In response, the USDA decertified four of the 11 French producers and, in 2004, enacted a full import ban on raw livers until facilities were brought into line.

America could afford to set strict standards, because by this time we had our own foie gras farms. Hudson Valley Foie Gras was opened in upstate New York in 1982, and four years later Sonoma Foie Gras was launched on the West Coast. Hudson is the larger of the two, processing 7,000 ducks per week and providing around 60 percent — or 220 tons — of all duck liver consumed in the United States each year. Yet while Hudson has had to deal with its share of zealous animal activists, Sonoma has borne the brunt of anti-foie-gras fury. Actually fury might be putting it mildly.

[Trotter] cooks like a guy who's never been fucked properly.

— Chef/author Anthony Bourdain, lashing out at Charlie Trotter after the renowned Chicago chef removed foie gras from his menu

Actress Loretta Swit tearfully compared the abuse suffered by ducks to Abu Ghraib. At the other end of the field, New York Times editor Lawrence Downes reported, "It was unnerving to see the tube going down, and late-stage ducks waddling bulkily in their pens, but no more so than watching the epic gorging at the all-you-can-eat buffet at Shoney's, where morbid obesity is achieved voluntarily, with knife and fork." That's funny. But no one was laughing when the children of a California chef were threatened.

"My friend Laurent Manrique was partner in a company, Artisan Foie Gras, that was looking to open stores on the West Coast," explains Pascal Oudin. "One day he came home and found his house painted red with graffiti. And some people had videotaped his children going back and forth to school. They buried the cassette in his garden and called him to recover it. The FBI became involved and offered protection to his family."

Manrique had been chef and co-owner, with Guillermo Gonzalez, of Sonoma Saveurs, a restaurant specializing in foie gras. Gonzalez, a Salvadoran immigrant, also runs Sonoma Foie Gras with his wife Junny. Their children, too, were photographed in an ominous manner, and vandals poured cement into water lines at their Sonoma farm, causing $60,000 worth of damage. Saveurs was burned to the ground. The Animal Liberation Front claimed credit.

Of course such isolated, incendiary incidents draw media attention — that's their main purpose — but nothing has discredited the movement more. Van Aken says, "I'm extremely put off by the tactics of a few of these activists ... and I have felt that the radical fringe was the real engine behind this animus." Bernstein relates, "I've received anonymous hate letters, warning me that if I used foie gras much longer, I would have to pay. Does it make sense to try and cause harm to others rather than on animals?" Bloise is likewise wary of the anti-foie-gras camp: "If I have to choose between the opinion of activists led by emotion or the official opinion of the American Veterinary Medical Association [AVMA], a well-respected organization speaking for over 71,000 doctors across the country ... well, the decision is easy."

What he is referring to is last year's unanimous vote by the AVMA's house of delegates to defeat a resolution opposing the practice of force-feeding. The AVMA, founded in 1863, is one of the oldest and largest veterinary medical organizations in the world. The delegates based their voting on "limited peer-reviewed, scientific information" that was gleaned from prearranged tours of Hudson Valley's facilities by two veterinary groups, whose observations indicated "a minimum of adverse effects on the birds involved." AVMA president Dr. Bonnie Beaver's summation: "We ... have found it is not necessary for the AVMA to take a position either for or against foie gras production at this time."

Foie gras, though, has been getting seared on most other sides. In 1998 the European Union asked its Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare (SCAHAW) to produce a report about force-feeding. SCAHAW, which includes a dozen professors of veterinary medicine and agricultural scientists from across Europe, found that methods used in foie gras production negatively affect the birds' physical and psychological welfare, and concluded that force-feeding should be discouraged. In 2003 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that force-feeding of geese and ducks was in violation of the Animal Welfare Act, and in 2005 made production illegal. Israel, once the world's fourth-largest producer of foie gras, is not alone: Germany, Poland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and the UK have also banned its sale.

Closer to home, in 2004 the California legislature passed a law, signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, to terminate production and sale of foie gras (it takes effect in 2012). This past April the Chicago city council voted unanimously to do likewise, and the ban began only weeks ago. Legislation has been proposed and is being debated in Philadelphia, New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and Illinois. You can partly thank or blame 26-year-old Ph.D. student Sarahjane Blum, who runs the website , because her surreptitiously shot videos stocked with shocking, gruesome images of abuse at various foie farms have propelled a portion of the public, and its elected officials, to jump on the boycott bandwagon.

The foie gras industry is having a difficult time swallowing this load of litigation and has begun to fight back to protect its estimated $20 million in annual sales. Hudson, Sonoma, Rougie (based in France and Canada), and D'Artagnan (one of the largest purveyors of American foie gras) pooled their resources to form the North American Foie Gras Producers Association. After hiring a public advocacy and lobbying group to examine the constitutionality of laws banning foie gras production or sale, the association fired its first shot: a lawsuit on behalf of Sonoma Foie Gras against Whole Foods, charging the natural-foods giant with "intentional interference with contract." According to the complaint, Whole Foods told Sonoma's supplier of ducklings, Grimaud Farms, to stop dealing with the foie gras company or the grocer would no longer do business with Grimaud. Whole Foods' account made up 20 percent of Grimaud's total sales, so the company did indeed cease its association with Sonoma. "Whole Foods does not respond to coercion," insists CEO John Mackey. "We re-examined activists' claims and decided they were basically right." The suit, meanwhile, winds its way through the courts. Apparently force-feeding is making lawyers fat too.

Chefs are split on the role government should play. "I'm not a big fan of them telling me what to do," declares Chispa's Haas. "It's like smoking; I think it should be up to the restaurant owner to decide. If enough of his customers complain that the smoke bothers them, then business will dictate the decision." Pascal Oudin believes, "A lot more important questions should be addressed by the government before even envisioning starting to speak about this one." And Susser concurs: "Too much energy is being wasted on this, instead of on better efforts. And I'm not talking about cleaning up hunger or world peace — I mean within the food industry. A much bigger threat looming is avian flu, about which we're not nearly prepared or educated enough."

Others, like Pacific Time's Eismann, think "the government needs to step in and determine if there is a cruelty issue. If that's the case, then it's the government's responsibility to regulate production. It's ridiculous to think, oh, it's foie gras, so it's all right to let these animals suffer." Johnny V agrees: "Force the people to whom we pay our taxes to do what they are there to do and regulate the treatment of all animals, not just ducks. The proper research should be done by the USDA, rules defining what constitutes cruelty should be established, and those who produce the products should have to adhere to those regulations. Everybody should just chill out, and real facts should be distributed."

Everyone is in favor of facts, and nobody, it turns out, supports animal suffering. But where, exactly, do our esteemed culinarians ultimately stand on the foie gras issue? Meaning: Will they continue to serve it?

There's this one jewel that I really love. Unfortunately it grows at the base of the spine of Ethiopian babies, so you have to debone the babies in order to extract them. I know it sounds bad when you say it out loud, but ... what an unbelievable stone this is.

— Comedian Sarah Silverman

Eleven months ago, Johnny V, like Giancarla at Escopazzo, removed foie gras from his menu. "I had been contacted by several of the organizations trying to stop the production of it. They sent me a pretty graphic video, but it was unclear if the footage was shot in the United States. So I began to research it and realized the movement was quite large and gaining momentum. I was only using foie gras as an accompaniment to one of my entrées, so after a couple of comments from customers who were supportive of the movement, I decided I would serve something else. It just doesn't mean than much to me."

Many chefs regarded the argument against gavage with skepticism, but after delving into the subject further, they took the potential for abuse more seriously — although most are still straddling the fence. "I tend to receive a pretty decent number of emails — some polite, some not so much — requesting that I remove the dish from my menu at Wish," says Bloise. "I follow the links, watch the videos. I can't say that I'm 100 percent in either direction — but what I really want, honestly, is to get to the bottom of all of this and figure it out for myself." Toward this end, he plans to take a trip to Hudson Valley Foie Gras (and has invited New Times to tag along).

Van Aken and Curto are likewise hesitant to take a stand without having visited the farms to witness things first-hand. Curto admits that until she does so, "I can't say I know what's going on. But I want to believe that [the bad] stuff isn't true. If it is true, then I have something to think about." Van Aken, too, vows to one day judge with his own eyes, and meanwhile "continue to think and reflect on this very meaningful subject." Hutson is "not swayed either way. I know about the stories of inhumane treatment, but I've never seen the gory details that people talk about." So we asked her to take a closer look at the argument for both sides and get back to us. She did not. Maria Frumkin (Duo Restaurant, downtown Miami) promised to discuss ducks and geese with us but then chickened out. She asked us to call back, asked us to call back again, and finally requested we email the questions, but never responded to any of our queries.

Some started out skeptical and remain so. Oudin, like a majority of chefs, takes into consideration the important role foie gras has played in "history, tradition, and culture," and stresses personal choice: "Chefs in the United States are becoming more skilled and refined, and the clientele have become more aware of delicate foods. Why deny this pleasure of life to everybody? Any individual is free to decide for him- or herself to enjoy it or not." Susser takes the same slant: "You have to let people vote with their fork rather than dictate what they can or can't eat. If you don't like it, don't buy it. That's why we've got vanilla and chocolate ice cream."

Two chefs who were on the fence jumped off. Haas doesn't proffer foie gras at Chispa "because it doesn't work within our price point or with our style of cooking. You don't find a lot of foie gras in Central or South America." But he consults for numerous restaurant groups, and places foie gras on quite a few menus nationwide. "I always knew how it was produced, but I hadn't given the issue much thought. Now that I've seen photos of it and watched videotapes of it, I'm not going to serve it anymore." But he won't be getting in line to picket or making speeches against it, either, because he agrees with Oudin and Susser that it's up to each person to decide. "If there's no market for foie gras," he says by way of deduction, "the producers aren't going to produce it."

Foie gras hasn't been on Pacific Time's menu for some time, either, at least partly owing to bloated costs. "There was a large price increase about 10 months ago, and I was concerned at seeing a $25 appetizer on my menu. It looked like it belonged in the entrée section. But we were contacted by a few groups, and though I've ordered it in other restaurants and eaten it, I've sort of subconsciously removed it from use. I think it's a worthy boycott — I mean I can live without it." Yet while Johnny V points to "an endless bounty" of products from all over the world to fill the foie void, Eismann isn't so sure about substitutions. "As far as I know, there's no tofu foie gras yet."

Nervous chefs who fear that foie's goose may be cooked have begun to contemplate alternatives. Jorgensen speaks of how he could "just as well be dealing with chicken livers. You can use them in pâtés, stuffings — and rabbit livers can be used as well." He recognizes, however, that these options will never hold the same mystique and awe as foie gras. "Do I want a piece of seared rabbit liver with blueberries on top?" he asks himself. "No, I don't." Haas, too, talks up chicken liver. "This Balkan chef at the Bakery, in Chicago, used to make a chicken liver pâté, that if you closed your eyes ... it was so silky, it was so good, you didn't need foie gras. I think there are enough creative guys out there to do stuff like this." Haas pauses and then adds, "On the other hand, it will be hard to get $19 for a chicken liver appetizer."

Bernstein confesses that taking foie gras off of her menu is "something I am heavily considering," but the decision "is not a very easy one. I have learned to use it, love it, live it for so many years. I understand the situation, and I am really trying to figure out the best way of dealing with it." And she, too, has reluctantly begun experimenting with chicken liver. "It will never replace foie," she laments, "but I have to start getting used to the idea."

#

BLOG

SMALL

A Director (Or Two) With A Concept

by Patrick Sharbaugh

There’s something inherently strange about sitting in a darkened concert hall in the middle of a beautiful spring weekday afternoon with 2,000 other people. But that’s just what this Spoletobuzz blogger found himself doing on Memorial Day yesterday, squirming around in a too-small Gaillard Auditorium seat at 2 p.m., looking around and marveling at the kinds of people who would choose to leave the holiday pleasures of barbecue, beer, and sun for a gloomy, three-and-a-half-hour performance set in a mortuary that leaves most of its main characters dead.

It’s an accepted truth that matinees are mostly for seniors, and scanning the audience at the festival’s second performance of “Roméo et Juliette,” I realized there a good reason it’s an accepted truth. With some infrequent exceptions, I felt like I was crashing an AARP convention. I kept expecting Wilford Brimley to enter the stage on a horse at any moment and make a pitch for Liberty Medical. That’s not all due to the fact that it was a matinee performance, of course. There’s also the simple fact that the festival’s audiences skew silver. And it’s not limited to Spoleto. On Sunday, at a standing-room-only 5 p.m. performance of “Rode Hard and Put Away Wet” at Theatre 99’s Piccolo Fringe, there was enough gray hair to keep Naturtint in business for a week. Having been to dozens of shows at Theatre 99 since it opened last fall, I can say for certain it was the oldest crowd I’d ever seen there. And judging from the looks on their faces on the way out, it had been some time since many of them heard the C word. Especially in combination with the F word and the P word.

But back to “Roméo et Juliette.” It occurred to me that only two years ago Spoleto gave us an opera based on pretty much the exact same story in not too different of a setting. In 2004 director Paul Curran produced “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” Vincenzo Bellini’s 1830 opera, at the Sottile Theatre. In that version, the story of the feuding Montague and Capulet families was dropped into a “Sopranos”-style mob setting. You’ve surely heard by now that in co-directors Jean-Philippe Clarac and Olivier Deloeuil’s version this year, the tale of the doomed lovers is set in a funeral home owned by Juliette’s family. It was heavily promoted by festival organizers as “Six Feet Under” meets “R&J.” My question is this: what exactly is Spoleto’s obsession with HBO? Sure, I love Sunday nights with Rome and Tony Soprano as much as the next guy, but what are we going to see next year? A Wild West “La Boheme” where “Deadwood” meets Puccini? (You heard it here first).

It’s hard not to be captivated by Romeo and Juliette’s remarkable set design, though. The updated, modern setting works wonderfully, and sometimes you just want to take a picture, it’s so damn beautiful. That’s as much a credit to the costume design as it is to the set design. For the balcony scene, a huge wall slides across the stage out of what was previously the stage left wall. Walking along the top behind a giant latticed window, dressed in a delicate white nightgown, Juliette (a radiant Nicole Cabelle) lights a wall of candles while Romeo (Frederic Antoun), outfitted in a modishly stylish all-pink suit, scales the exterior and pins her with a kiss. When the Montague thugs suspect an intruder, a black-suited, earbud-wearing security detail enters waving flashlights whose beams stab every which way through the darkened auditorium. Afterward, for the beginning of Act Two, the lower section of the balcony wall slides away to reveal Friar Laurent’s quarters in the morgue’s medical lab, where x-rays line the walls and beakers of luminescent green goo lie about. The end of Act Two takes place at the funeral home’s service entrance, where an actual hearse is parked amid a scattering of trash bins and an overall-clad cleaning crew. In the final scene before the intermission, a drizzle of rain falls on the gathered hoodlums as first Mercutio and then Tybalt are murdered. The scene ends with a soaked Romeo zipping his best friend into a body bag as the rain putters onto the plastic.

Pretty impressive stuff, even to this sometimes cynical Lovespotter.

The one complaint: 30+ minutes for an intermission? (And that’s being conservative.) At one point, the audience started up a spontaneous synchronized clapping in an effort to get the show going again. Call ’em old, but don’t call them indifferent.

#

A Preference For Pentameter

by Patrick Sharbaugh

As a long-ago lapsed Catholic, this Spoletobuzz blogger should have known that anything with the word “Mass” in its title would have the same effect on him as an intravenous double-shot of NyQuil, especially considering the schedule he’s been keeping lately. You just don’t forget that kind of conditioning. And so it was. As much as I wanted to exult in the music of Mozart’s “Great Mass in C Minor” last night, I was in sleepyland within minutes of plopping into my seat in the darkened back of the Gaillard. I may have remained there to this moment had it not been for soprano Ellie Dehn, who hit a high note — aimed directly at me, I suspect — and startled me awake, whereupon I found a river of drool the size of the Rhine leaking out of my face and into my lap. This I took to be my cue to slink out, confident that music critic Lindsay Koob was somewhere nearby, thrilling to the sounds of the Kyrie Eleison.

It was just as well, since I’d hoped to catch a performance from Chicago’s Improvised Shakespeare Company at Theatre 99 at 9 pm. So 30 minutes and one bracing double mochaccino later, I found myself above the Bicycle Shoppe on Meeting Street watching Blain Swen, Thomas Middleditch, and Ross Bryant play a dozen or so characters in an completely improvised Elizabethan play called “South Korea Has Soul” (don’t look at me — another audience member came up with the title).

As you might imagine, “South Korea Has Soul” opened with an exposition-filled soliloquy from a young man — the spindly son of a powerful Duke — who’s kneeling in prayer, sharing with God his concerns over leaving his childhood home at the local monastery and returning to his birthright and home. “I know you know all this already, God,” Bryant deadpanned. “I’m just saying.”

What followed was a mind-blowing 50-minute play about the effeminate young nobleman’s return to his house; his brutish, self-adoring father the Duke; his devoted, downtrodden mother who’s “like a flower whose petals are wilting,” a fraternal order of manly men called The Elkish Society and a pair of Asian agents who scheme to corrupt England by infiltrating the Society; the Duke’s noble half-brother, now his servant and in love with his wife; and several diamond-studded codpieces — all of it delivered convincingly in the language of Shakespeare, often in iambic pentameter and rhymed couplets and sewn up neatly at the end. It was one of the funniest, most amazing things I’ve ever seen.

You have two more chances to see the Improvised Shakespeare Company create a play before they return to Chicago’s ImprovOlympic theatre. You better act quick. Indeed, if thou dost not avail thyself of this chance most rare, thou art pigeon-liver’d and lack gall.

#

Parsing Spoleto ’06’s Most Memorable Moments

by Patrick Sharbaugh

With Spoleto 2006 officially in the rear-view mirror, it’s worth observing once again that there’s a hell of a lot more to festival season than just what happens on stage, as anyone who followed this blog regularly surely noticed. It’s no accident that Spoleto founder Gian Carlo Menotti jammed the whole thing into 17 days; he wanted Charlestonians to live the festival for two weeks, not just pop into and out of a show as they might any other day of the year.

So for three years now I’ve reported on the festival by blogging my daily experiences during each one, allowing for constant coverage, rather than just weekly overviews. Sure, it makes for a brutal schedule, but it’s allowed the City Paper to cover the entire event in a manner closer to the way people actually experience Spoleto and Piccolo — from the street, in the lobbies, at parties and open-air concerts, in the restaurants and clubs.

The best way, therefore, to truly grasp Spoleto Festival USA 2006 would be to read the Spoletobuzz Blog from its beginning on May 1 to its fevered end last weekend, with regular dips into the 12 audio podcasts I recorded with festival artists and lots of side-trips into Ida Becker’s Spoleto Scene blog. But I’ve dug up some highlights from the blur of curtain calls (40-plus total) and elbow-rubbing from the past three weeks. What follows, therefore, is a thoroughly arbitrary, entirely subjective look at a few of the things I found most worth remembering about Spoleto festival season 2006. —Patrick Sharbaugh

Best Subversive Swipe

Shortly after Spoleto revealed the festival’s official poster image — a sales-friendly watercolor of a heart from artist Jim Dine — local printmaker and graphic artist Johnny Pundt revealed his own Spoleto poster. It was a hand-printed red and yellow one, with the Spoleto name at the top, a Nike-style lightening flash in the center, and McDonalds’ current marketing tagline at the bottom: “I’m Lovin’ It.” If that sounds like a comment on the hegemony of corporate-owned and sanctioned art (can anyone say “the Ginn Clubs & Resorts Spoleto Festival Orchestra”?), congratulations, you get a gold star. The posters enlivened windows across the peninsula for all of 24 hours before Spoleto’s merchandising machine caught wind of the parody and swept the city clean of them. My guess: that response was as much a part of Pundt’s meta-commentary as the poster itself.

Strangest Premiere Of A New Musical Work You’ll Never, Ever Hear Again

A highlight of Spoleto’s Opening Ceremony was a weird musical performance that consisted of 13 cars with speakers on their roofs performing a new work, “Car-illon Fanfare,” created by minimalist composer Philip Glass in honor of the festival’s 30th anniversary. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on during the performance: a dozen tricked-out BMW’s looped around each other in front of the crowd while harpsichord music played from them. Board president Eric Friberg suggested that the work “shows the many sides of Spoleto.” Maybe. The most common sentiment was that it showed the many sides of festival sponsor BMW.

Most Visually Arresting Image In A Performance

For me, it wasn’t the giant bloody duck in Bill T. Jones’ “Blind Date.” Nor was it the four-minute tongue-in-teeth action of the two dancers in ASzURe and Artists’ “Lascilo Perdere.” It wasn’t the beautiful staging and costumes of either of the two operas, “Don Giovanni” and “Roméo et Juliette” — though they were both wondrous to behold. It was in Ong Keng Sen’s “Geisha,” whose spareness audiences found mostly unenthralling. But in the opening scene, actress Karen Kandel arose out of what we’d thought had been a pile of white sheets in the middle of the all-white stage and slowly drew the train of the dress she wore — which covered the square stage completely — toward her in massive folds as she recited her monologue. It was a hell of an image.

Most Boinkable Artists

Blog commentators were unable to settle on a clear favorite among the sexpots featured in this year’s festival. The highest marks, not surprisingly, went to Nmon Ford (Don Giovanni himself), Tristan Sturrock and Katy Carmichael (Tristan and Whitehands, respectively, in “Tristan & Yseult”), dancer/choreographer Aszure Barton, new harp hottie Catrin Finch, and tall, blond piano bad boy Andrew von Oeyen. To this list I would have to add my own list of festival foxes: about half the female membership of the Spoleto Festival Orchestra violin section (call me!); June Raphael of “Rode Hard and Put Away Wet” at the Piccolo Fringe (hey, you saw the promotional pictures), and Laura Lounge of Stelle di Domani’s “Trust” at Theatre 220 — and no, not just because she took her top off, you pigs.

Warmest Performance

There were plenty of hotties to be found underneath the big tent in Ansonborough Field at Circus Flora’s short run of performances there during the festival’s opening weekend, but it had to do more with the temperature inside the tent than high cheekbones. The phrase “like a sauna in here” gets tossed about a lot, but the only way the Circus Flora tent could have been any more like a sauna at noon on the first Saturday was if there’d been a pile of rocks in a corner. Audience members were dropping like flies (one did, anyway), and even the mosquitoes were panting.

Best Musical Theatre Production Charlestonians Heard Nothing Of

The Post and Courier’s new Spoleto overview critic, Joshua Rosenblum, is a composer, conductor, and lyricist whose classical music chops are well established. But in its lengthy description of his artistic background, the paper omitted one tiny detail: Rosenblum is also the creator, producer, and musical talent behind the current Off-Broadway hit “Bush is Bad: The Musical Cure for the Blue State Blues,” a satiric Tom Leher-style savaging of the Bush administration. Why would the P&C raise high the flag for Rosenblum’s other composing credits, which all closed long ago, and not even mention the current run of a hot-ticket anti-Bush musical which he created? Gosh, we’re stumped.

Most Welcome New Trend, If It’s Real

The festival’s first chamber music concert also featured the premiere cell phone performance of the’06 festival: “Have Nagila,” if I’m not mistaken. Despite that, audiences at this year’s festival seemed to take fewer mid-performance phone calls than in recent years. I don’t know if that’s statistically provable — and there were surely lots of exceptions. (A favorite occurred during the ‘Conversations With’ program featuring “Tristan & Yseult”’s Mike Shepherd and Craig Johnson. “Go ahead, take it.” Shepherd said. “We’ll wait for you.”) My own theory: Spoleto audiences aren’t becoming less inconsiderate, they’re just text-messaging a lot more.

Best Place To Get Your Laugh On

Theatre 99’s Piccolo Fringe was the 800-lb gorilla in this year’s theatre program. There was other stuff going on elsewhere, to be sure: PURE Theatre’s two shows, the CofC’s three-show Stelle di Domani series, Art Forms and Theatre Concepts and Robert Ivey at Footlight, Sheri Grace Wenger’s big music theatre series at Charleston Music Hall. But covering both Theatre 99 and the American Theater, the Have Nots!’ Piccolo Fringe loomed over everything else like a laugh-shaped thunderhead. With 11 national-level comedy acts from as far away as L.A., Vancouver, Chicago, and New York, it was damn near impossible not to find something worth busting a gut on. Highlights for this festival-goer included “Rode Hard and Put Away Wet,” Upright Citizens Brigade, “We Used To Go Out” (hands down the funniest thing in this year’s festival), and the brilliant Improvised Shakespeare Company — who, word has it, will likely be returning in January for the 4th Charleston Comedy Festival.

Best Use Of A Mattress

All five of Spoleto’s theatre productions this year were memorable for, among other things, dynamiting the fourth wall — that imaginary barrier between audience and performer that playwrights throughout history have used to create the illusion of a separate reality on stage. Monologuist Mike Daisey squeezed our hearts by speaking to us directly from behind a desk, while Danny Hoch alternated between beautifully nuanced characterizations and strident lectures on hip-hop culture, all the while merrily dropping f-bombs like confetti. In “Geisha,” actress Kandel and onnagata Gojo Masanosuke took us through a Brechtian exploration of the many aspects of the Japanese geisha throughout history, and da da kameras’s play “A Beautiful View” had the two actors stopping in the middle of scenes and addressing the audience with commentary on the scene itself. But the most engaging, purely entertaining example was Kneehigh Theatre’s extraordinary “Tristan & Yseult,” which made the audience as much a part of the play as the actors themselves. They also laid bare the normally hidden mechanics of the production, including a large black safety cushion which actors on the raised platform in the center of the stage variously fell onto and tripped over. “Mind that big black mattress there,” Frocin (Giles King) warned an actor after one such instance. “Don’t worry,” he then said, gesturing to the audience, “I don’t think they’ve seen it.”

Most Colorful Performance

It’d take a more astute observer than me to determine if this goes to neotraditional Indian Dance Troupe Nrityagram at Emmett Robinson Theatre or Sara Baras Ballet Flamenco at the Gaillard, so I’ll call it a tie. In both cases, the dancers were a kaleidoscopic swirl of energy, color, and grace, and the live accompaniment for each was as huge a part of the show as the dancing. I pity the poor fool who missed either one.

Most Annoying Pain In The Ass

There’s no contest: parking near the Simons Center for the Arts this year walks away with this one. Could the College of Charleston have timed its demolition of the parking garage at George and St. Philips streets, and the ensuing construction project, any more poorly? There were five major performance venues within spitting distance of the earthen pit that used to be the St. Philips Street garage: Sottile Theatre, The Cistern, Emmett Robinson Theatre, Recital Hall, and Theatre 220. Woe betide the sorry bastard who sought a parking spot anywhere near this blighted, accursed site.

Biggest Spoleto Controversy

It should have been no surprise that celebrated choreographer Bill T. Jones’ new work “Blind Date,” which landed smack in the middle of the festival, had a leftist political edge to it, given his history, but still there were those who gnashed their teeth over it. One audience member even booed the performance — though he waited until the ovation was over and the crowd had begun to file out of the Sottile Theatre before doing so. Jones rushed back to the stage and called out the booer, who engaged him in a testy exchange from the mezzanine. The incident set tongues to wagging for the rest of the festival, and opinions on the subject were as common as, well, you know. In the end, the incident affirmed once again Spoleto’s reputation for adventurous programming that pushes both envelopes and buttons. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

#

BLOG

LARGE

CARTOON

3 OR FEWER

CARTOON

4 OR MORE

COLUMN

SMALL

Danehy

A jury's strange decision may let a murderer back on the streets in a decade

by Tom Daheny

Dawn Wear is going to prison; of that much, we're sure. What is left to decide is for how long, and that is a point of great contention.

It's been one year, almost to the day, since Wear walked into her husband's place of business on Nogales Highway and fired a shotgun into the back of Annette Lucas, killing the 36-year-old married mother of two. Dawn Wear was convinced that her husband of 20 years, Ron, was having an affair with Lucas and, well, she certainly took care of that, didn't she? After fatally wounding Lucas, Dawn Wear calmly walked out of the office, still holding the gun, and answered her husband's frantic questions of "Why?! Why?!" with "You know why."

It should be noted that Ron Wear has never admitted to having an affair with Lucas, and no evidence was presented at the trial to back up that allegation.

All we have on that point are Dawn Wear's suspicions and hearsay accounts of conversations she may or may not have had with her husband the weekend before the murder. This didn't stop local media outlets from running with the prurient angle. An Arizona Daily Star article printed during the trial in January of this year began, "The day after she learned that her husband of 20 years was having an affair with a co-worker ..."

Certainly, the possibility exists that Ron Wear and Annette Lucas were treading outside the bounds of their respective marriages. It could have been anywhere from flirting to fondling to fornicating. Or it could have been nothing at all, simply the idle thoughts of small-minded people who have little better to do than imagine the worst in others. Whatever the case, last I checked (in this particular desert region of the world, anyway), adultery isn't punishable by death.

According to the convicted murderer's testimony, she and her husband had been on a dune-buggy getaway in Yuma the weekend before the killing, when he allegedly told her about his relationship with Lucas. Then she and her husband had sex a couple of times (which certainly would have been my reaction to such news), and then they returned home. He was called into work the next morning, leaving her alone in the house.

Now, if we are to believe her account (and, give her credit, because a majority of the jury obviously did):

· She looked around the house for some rope with which to hang herself, but found a shotgun in a closet instead.

· Thought about killing herself at home, but decided on Madera Canyon instead. She got in her car with the loaded shotgun and eight or nine extra shells. What, in case she sorta missed? It would be a bitch to reload under those circumstances.

· Drove to Desert Valley Landscaping, where both her husband and Lucas worked, thinking that it would be cool to blow her brains out in front of one or both of them.

· Walked into the office where the victim worked and shot Lucas in the back. The shot came from so close to Lucas' back that virtually nothing else in the office was hit by the blast — not the phone, not the computer, not pictures on the wall.

· Almost a year later, she tells a jury that it was all an accident, a suicide attempt gone awry, and would swear under oath that she didn't even see the victim sitting there when she pulled the trigger.

What's not to believe?

The jury deliberated less than three hours and came back with a guilty verdict. However, it was inexplicably for second-degree murder, which carries with it a sentence of anywhere from 10 to 22 years, depending on the discretion of the judge (the Honorable John Leonardo, in this particular case).

While it's a myth that women never use guns for suicide, they do so at a rate roughly one-fifth that of men. And for those who do go that route, the weapon of choice is, in almost all cases, a small-caliber handgun. That 4-foot-9 Dawn Wear would use a 30-inch shotgun to commit suicide is, at best, a long shot. (Pun unavoidable.)

The law being what it is — an ass — the jury was allowed to freelance, despite the fact that her story had more holes in it than Harry Whittington's face. It's bizarre that someone could attempt to rob a convenience store with a screwdriver, and if a customer happens to have a heart attack during the robbery, the thief could get life in prison. But if someone walks into a place of business with a loaded shotgun and kills a woman with whom she is furious, the murderer could be back on the street in a decade.

There is speculation that some or all of the women on the jury somehow sympathized with Wear's situation. For that matter, maybe some of the jury's men were glad she didn't shoot her husband. Whatever the case, the jury fumbled the ball.

Here's hoping that Judge Leonardo, who has a football background, picks it up and throws it the maximum distance.

#

Danehy

The UA showed a lack of heart when it revoked Sarah Low's music scholarship

by Tom Daheny

Sarah Low knows pain almost as well as she knows her Rachmaninoff. The UA student is at a crossroads in her career and her life, and as she prepares to make decisions on options that range from lousy to horrible, the big, bad university is poised to dump serious insult atop her chronic injury.

Things were great for Sarah not that long ago. She was a top student and a volleyball player at Ironwood Ridge High School. The volleyball team at the newly opened school was making quite a name for itself and would explode into the state championship game her senior year. Meanwhile, Sarah, as an individual, was making a run at a state title as well. A classically trained pianist since age 4, Sarah was a finalist in a Rachmaninoff competition and was drawing raves for her virtuoso performances of the difficult works of the Russian composer.

But then the pain started. It really wasn't much at first, but she definitely felt something in her hands. Because of her relatively diminutive stature, she had always played back row in volleyball, diving and digging the spikes that the opposing team sent her way. But her incongruous hands have long fingers that almost appear to have an extra set of knuckles on them. The fingers helped her play Rachmaninoff, considered by some to be the most challenging of all classical composers.

According to KUAT-FM's James Reel, Tucson's Casey Kasem of classical (and the Weekly's arts editor), Rachmaninoff's work requires an almost awkward spreading of the fingers. Reel says that the average pianist's hand, spread wide from the end of the thumb to the tip of the pinky, can cover about an octave on a piano keyboard. "But Rachmaninoff's hands could cover an octave-and-a-half," explains Reel, "from middle C to high G."

Sarah was so good that she received a full scholarship to study piano at the UA. She wanted to delve into theory and composition, but most of all, to continue to work on her playing. She had been branching off into Chopin and was working on some compositions of her own.

But the pain began to spread, first into her wrists, then up her arms, into her shoulders and then to her neck and back. Being something of a fitness junkie, she tried different forms of exercise, yoga and relaxation techniques — anything to keep from having to go the pharmaceutical route, which she felt would have a dulling effect on her playing.

She did give up volleyball before her senior year of high school and had to watch as her former teammates made it all the way to the Class 4A state championship game.

When that didn't work, she began seeing doctors. There was some concern because rheumatoid arthritis has shown up in her extended family; one relative has had to endure five hip replacement surgeries. But the doctors couldn't find anything physical to explain the pain. And when that happens, half the doctors start thinking "shrink," while the other half reach for their prescription pads.

"This one doctor started writing me a prescription before I was halfway through my explanation," she explains in frustration. "I don't want to take medicine; I really don't."

She can still play the piano for short stretches, but nowhere near long enough to approach what she used to be able to do. She continues to study music, but has now been informed by the university that her scholarship is being revoked because she is unable to perform musically at a high level.

I tried to ask somebody at the UA about this, but everybody these days hides behind the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which probably sounded like a good idea at first, but is used to cover all sorts of ills.

She'll be leaving town in a couple weeks to attend a summer program at UC-Berkeley. After that, she's not sure what she'll do. "I might take a semester off to just work. If they do take away my scholarship, I'll have to find a way to pay my way through school. Plus, if I'm not in the music department any more, I'm going to have to start all over again in another major."

She realizes that there are people far less fortunate than she, but she's still seriously bummed. "The other night, I was watching ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ and there's this part about halfway through where they're playing the piano, and I just started crying. It was so sad."

Oddly enough, when I was watching it with my wife, I had the exact same experience, but with me, it was because I realized that we were still only halfway through the movie.

She's holding on to the small hope that taking some time off will make things better. But even if she can't play, she can still study and compose. "I have a lot of music in me," she says.

Let's hope that the university finds its heart and helps her bring that music out.

#

Danehy

An NCAA committee shows that efforts in the name of gender equity can go too far

by Tom Daheny

Back in the early 1970s, my high school alma mater started a girls' softball team, one of the first schools to do so in the Los Angeles area. My twin sisters, Justine and Janine, played softball and loved the opportunity to compete. But one year, just before the start of the season, the team's coach died suddenly, and the school's response was to cancel the season because, as one administrator put it, "It's only girls."

This is actually one of the tamer tales that can be told of the pre-Title IX days, an era when men were men and women were cheerleaders. A lot has changed in the past 30 years, almost all of it for the better. There will be the occasional head-scratching moment (the UA starting a women's water polo team — a sport that virtually no one in Arizona plays — just to meet some nebulous guidelines), but for the most part, it has served to make America a better, fairer place by providing opportunities to girls and women that had long been denied them.

However, there is that old truism that when zealots form a firing squad, they assemble in a circle. And the latest such band of zealots, unfortunately, is a panel of kooks inside the NCAA. The Committee on Women's Athletics has come up with an idea so narrow-minded, so crackpot, so PC, that every time I read the report, I hear Marvin Gaye singing, "Makes me wanna holler, throw up both my hands ..."

The committee wants to ban the common practice of having college women's basketball teams practice against men. Apparently, this tactic, which is used by virtually every top basketball program in the country, "violates the spirit of gender equity."

It is a fact in sports that an athlete improves by competing against better athletes. In order to compete successfully against superior athletes, one must eliminate sloppy habits and must work toward developing an economy of motion and sharper on-court instincts. This is what is going on in women's college basketball (including at the UA), and it is elevating the level of play across the country.

Back in the Dark Ages, just about any discussion of women's sports would prompt some Jethro to spout, "Yeah, but they're not as good as men." This, of course, is both true and completely irrelevant. The best male basketball player is going to be better than the best female basketball player, and so on down the line. That's probably always going to be true, but the margin sure ain't what it used to be.

Nevertheless, sexist clods used to use that as some sort of argument against the growth of women's sports. Back in the 1990s, I played on a men's basketball team with three other Caucasians and an erudite, somewhat-haughty African-American gentleman whom I nicknamed Skippy. (He was the real-life forerunner to the snooty, Harvard-educated black characters they have on TV sitcoms these days.) We called our team Four-and-a-Half White Guys.

After a couple of seasons, we added Margie Torres, who, through no fault of her own, was (and remains) a Hispanic female. Margie, who couldn't guard a chair with a freakin' gun, was an offensive monster, able to bust threes with the best of them. I was disappointed, to say the least, at the reception she often received from opponents. One older guy refused to play. Some guys would ignore her on the court, while others would go out of their way to play rough against her.

I'm happy to report that, in just a few years, those attitudes have all but disappeared. A ballplayer is a ballplayer, deserving of and receiving respect from his/her opponent.

And now comes this. While most men have thrown off the shackles of their counterproductive views on gender, women on the inside are trying to limit their young sisters' progress by taking things to an extreme that virtually no one in the sport wants.

In fact, response has been swift and unsparing. Hall of Fame coach Pat Summitt of Tennessee said that practicing against men maximizes her team's improvement and helps everyone on her squad get better. She said that if it weren't for the men, the bottom five players on her squad would be relegated to duty as a "permanent practice squad." She then added that when she coached the Gold Medal-winning U.S. Olympic team back in 1984, they almost always scrimmaged against men. "The guys made us better."

UA women's assistant coach Todd Holthaus thinks it's "not a good idea."

Michigan State coach Joanne McCallie put it more strongly. "Absolutely absurd. This has nothing to do with equity and everything to do with politics."

Blake Masters, who played prep basketball locally at Green Fields Country Day School (where I coach the girls' basketball team) and has served as a practice player for the nationally ranked Stanford women's team, bristles at the committee's recommendation. "Somebody like me, who probably isn't good enough to play D-1 men's basketball, I get to keep playing against good competition; the women's team gets better; I get to know the players and coaches on the team; and we all feel like we're a part of something special. Where's the downside of that?"

That's the problem with zealots; they can always find a downside.

#

COLUMN

LARGE

24/Seven

Remember To Smile

by Seven McDonald

Behind a pair of burgundy, oversize Armani shades, 29-year-old “Alex,” as she’s asked to be known here, is navigating her way through Ventura Boulevard traffic. Audition sides and scripts line the floor of her SUV. Beer caps, receipts and a bottle opener clutter the center console; on top is a stuffed letter-size envelope, held shut with a rubber band and scrawled in Sharpie with the message: “Rent money, motherfucker. Don’t spend!”

The trim actress is apt to write such reminders to herself around her equally cluttered home. “Buy jeans for girls with no hips” ... “Vitamins” ... “Remember to smile.”

She was out late last night, woke up this afternoon at 2, got her Starbucks, threw on some jeans and a black T-shirt that says, “I like dirty boys with no money,” and is now rushing to pick up her new head shots, plus a money order from the post office to pay her rent, which is a week overdue. Her bank account is overdrawn, so she can’t write checks and has taken to doing all her business in money orders.

“I don’t even give a shit,” says Alex in reference to the fact that another pilot season has come to an end without her getting on a show. She did book two pilots this year, which is impressive, but neither got picked up.

“I just want to be happy,” she says, sipping from her grande soy latte as she approaches the post office on Laurel Canyon and pulls into the center turn lane.

“Basically, when it comes to the Hollywood shit, and the agents, and the managers, and the TV, and the movies, I just set low expectations. Because you can’t rely on it. I know brilliant actors who are 50 and nothing ever happened, so it’s like, ‘Whatever.’ I haven’t thrown myself on the bed and cried in over three years.”

Behind her, a guy honks for her to make the left turn. “Okay, guy! I see you!” she yells, pushing a sexy mop of bed-head hair off her face and furrowing her brow into the side mirror.

Things might be a whole lot more relaxed on this Monday afternoon if Alex’s marijuana prescription hadn’t recently lapsed.

Originally from Northern California, Alex has an impressive theater background. She studied formally at a prestigious school in San Francisco and earned critics’ awards. When she first came to Los Angeles, three and a half years ago, she booked a low-budget show for one season. Since then, she has been auditioning, occasionally landing work, and settling into her job at a popular nightclub.

“I remember when I first moved here, I thought it was horrifying. And the clichés … I used to meet people, and they would be doing some job that had nothing to do with the industry, and I would think, ‘What a fucking loon. They choose here?’ They’re breathing this air, fighting the traffic and hanging out with the dumb-dumbs for no reason!? Now L.A.’s grown on me and I get insane anxiety when I leave. I don’t know what it is. I always fly back, and I am like, ‘Ahhh.’ Relieved. Which is so weird, because it’s toxic and gross and yet somehow it becomes ... home.”

Alex had a serious boyfriend when she first moved here, but for the past two years she’s gone through a couple of relationships.

“It’s supposed to be the worst city if you want to get married and have a family. Everyone talks about it,” she says, as if this were common knowledge, like Sharon Stone’s plastic surgery.

“They say if you want a husband and kids, don’t look for it here. I think it can happen, ’cause clearly it does. But I have noticed that compared to other cities, it’s true. It’s because life is so hard here. Everyone is pursuing their individual dreams-slash-career. You have to put so much of yourself into yourself, there is not much left to give to someone else. Even the people having success are afraid of losing it. Everyone is kinda neurotic and nuts and selfish. You’re just looking out for your own ass.”

Though she hasn’t cried herself to sleep lately, Alex does admit she’s resigned herself to a certain type of malaise that maybe comes with having the first few waves of youth and optimism beaten out of her. Yet with that resignation has come a willingness to play the game a little better. She dropped some of her theater haughtiness and has started wearing short skirts and tight tanks, and has even mastered the skill of artful eye makeup. No matter how good the acting, she has accepted that it really comes down to sex appeal. After too many notes from her management saying that casting agents felt her hair looked greasy, she came to understand that truth.

For the MTV-style pilot she filmed a couple of months ago, the natural comedienne was originally cast as a funny tomboy. But once the producers got on set, they were like, “Uhhhh... the MTV audience isn’t really gonna get this. Can you dumb it down?”

They also asked, “Can you put your shoulders back?”

Which, she explains, really means, “Can you push your tits out?”

“I was working with another, very reputable actor, and we were praying, ‘Oh Lord, please don’t let this get picked up — it’s so humiliating.’ But then it ended, and I went back to my other job of mopping up vomit and urine on the dance floor, and I was like, ‘Please let it get picked up! I don’t care! I don’t care! Put me in a bikini, I don’t care!”

Inside the post office, she just pulls out a dollar from her purse, which she somehow accidentally rips in two. She pushes it to the side and purchases her cashier’s check. After she drops off the rent, she’s gonna call it a day. No more driving. Except she’ll work out at the gym and stop by Sav-On to look through the new tabloids. She can’t wait. She heard, “probably on Defamer,” that Tom and Katie were on the cover of Us Weekly, and it’s all about Scientology, and the baby, and that they might be breaking up!

#

24/Seven

After The Rapture

by Seven McDonald

Look at all those heavily accessorized 18-to-24-year-olds pouring out of the Rapture show at the Henry Fonda Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. They’re all so tipsy and sweaty and texting their friends. In some sort of euphoric bliss after the dance band’s energetic performance, most of them are heading toward Star Shoes to meet up and hang (they hope) with the New York-based Rapture, who apparently have a reputation for partying with their fans. A couple of those fans are sitting on the sidewalk, like one Asian girl, who has fallen on the asphalt in her shorts and tights and hat, and is laughing and reaching out and yelping for her friends to help her up. Most of them have been dancing; all of them are happy.

Camille Rousseau is 21, adorable and nearly naked. She is wearing a collection of bracelets, ankle boots and a black-and-white-polka-dot, backless one-piece ’80s mini that barely covers her breasts. That particular eye-catching aspect of her outfit is exciting for the small group of thick-haired boys who stand a couple of feet away repeatedly asking her for a light or calling out her name.

How was the show?

“I danced it up,” Camille says, pushing her shaggy, highlighted bangs off her face. “I wanted to see the Presets, but I was running late.”

Why?

“My ride fell asleep.”

Camille, who went to the Lycée Français, is standing with Ally Schwartz, who says the show tonight “was tight.” Ally is 24 and wears a couple bracelets herself.

Who are you texting?

“My friend inside,” says Ally, peering up from her handheld briefly. “I want him to get me a shirt.”

What do you do?

“I am a stylist for commercials and music videos.”

What about you, Camille?

“Nothing at the moment,” she says, looking at Ally with interest.

“I was supposed to be a stylist on a music video, so that is kinda funny.”

Oh, you didn’t know what Ally did?

“No. We just met.”

Down the block, Anka, who would prefer not to use her last name, is talking to two guys. One of them, Sean, came with her to the show tonight. Anka wears two thick, white-plastic bracelets and a black-and-white New Wave Lycra dress. The flat-talking 24-year-old wears no makeup, and her hair is pulled back. She is from New York and moved to West Hollywood a few weeks ago “just to see what’s going on.”

Did you like the show?

“I’ve been going to them for years,” she says with authority. “They are fantastic.”

“For years?” one of the guys asks Anka.

“Yes,” she answers with proper smart-girl attitude. “For years. In L.A. you guys hear about stuff when it’s on the cover of Spin. In New York, we see things when they are just starting to blossom, when they are a … little egg.”

When did you start seeing the Rapture, Anka?

“Before their first album came out. I think they’re from California, but I see them a lot in New York. They played at the Bowery and all these little clubs — super dark and super gritty, just like, very New York, very Lower East Side. The first time I saw them outside was at the Curiosa tour, with the Cure, and they just filled the space. You could take anyone — they just play music. So few bands do that anymore.”

What do you mean, “You could take anyone”?

“It is just a lot more … hippie environment, if you will. You could just take anyone. They play a lot of instruments. Everyone is dancing. The other shows I’ve been to in L.A., the people don’t dance.”

But tonight everyone danced?

“Yes.”

What do you do?

“I’m a writer.”

Fiction? Screenplays?

“Just a writer.”

But you’re a music fan?

“For sure. Good music, like a good painting, can inspire other art forms. If you are trying to describe an emotion to someone but you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary to do so, you can play them a song. Like most people relate to Van Gogh, for some reason — the man who couldn’t relate to anyone. You can show someone one of his paintings and they can relate. I think the Rapture has that. They have emotion to their albums, an emotional journey.”

Sean, do you think Anka knows a lot about music?

“Oh, yeah. She’s funky. I used to date her best friend — she had great taste in music too. They’re both kinda fun and wild.”

Anka, are you sure you don’t want to tell me your last name?

“I don’t know. I’m new to L.A. I don’t know the etiquette.”

#

24/Seven

Onward, American Soldier

by Seven McDonald

It’s sunny at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Los Angeles. Dressed in his service alphas (khaki shirt, olive-green service coat), Private First Class Rogelio Mendoza arrived here this morning on a bus from Bakersfield. Now he’s waiting for the 11:45 a.m. departure to Oceanside, where he is scheduled to begin training at Camp Pendleton.

The 19-year-old Marine sits in a blue-plastic chair, the type they have in elementary school playgrounds and in hospital waiting rooms, this one arranged in a short row. His hands, holding his ticket and perfectly folded cap, rest on his knees, which shake occasionally as he talks. His shoes are so shiny, they make the surroundings look even dirtier.

Mendoza, who wears glasses and got a 3.9 grade point average in high school, comes from Lamont, a city 10 miles west of Bakersfield. According to the latest census, Lamont has a population of nearly 13,000 and a median household income of nearly $25,000. He describes it as “just a little town with nothing but gangsters and a lot of trouble.”

“I had to get outta there,” says Mendoza, who enlisted this past August. “I was getting in trouble, doing a lot of drugs and just getting arrested.”

Born in Los Angeles, Mendoza lived here until 1995, when his neighborhood started getting too dangerous and his father decided to move the family north. When they first moved to Lamont, it was a safe area. But then it started getting overrun with gangs. Now, he says, besides a tiny area where his family lives, the rest of Lamont is “trashy, ghetto.”

His parents, both immigrants from Mexico, didn’t want him to join the military.

“They don’t like the war,” explains Mendoza, who has never voted or had a political discussion with either of his parents.

Do you believe in this war?

“I believe for one point it’s good, ’cause of the oil. The thing is, I don’t even think we are there for the oil anymore. Yes, we are trying to stop Iraq from getting into a civil war, but why do they have to send a lot a lot of troops just to make it stop? I don’t know, I can’t explain. It’s really hard.”

You think we went to Iraq for the oil. Why? To get it? To protect it?

“To protect it. I know it’s not ours. I just consider it, like, a battle to regain something we lost. That’s what it looks like from my point of view. We lost something and we are trying to get it back and the only way we can get it back is by shooting people.”

Do you believe in George W. Bush?

“Somewhat, and somewhat not. I heard from my staff sergeant that we already took over Iraq, so I don’t understand why [Bush] still has troops there. First we were fighting for something, now we are fighting for something else — right now it’s making me lost. Like, my staff sergeant told me, ‘You are gonna get lost, and you are gonna have a lack of information. Just go with the flow. If they give you orders, just do it. Even if you don’t like it or understand it.’ If they say, ‘Go in that house and shoot who is in there.’ That’s my job and I have to do that.”

You’re prepared to do that?

“Basically, yeah. Even if my consciousness says no. I have to erase that, like a robot.”

Mendoza knew people who killed other people back in Lamont.

“I had a lot of friends who were killed just for not giving [drug dealers] their money or something.”

And you saw people die before?

“Yes. I had friends lying there dead.”

What was the reason, a drug deal gone bad?

“Yes. And on a speed chase ... what was the reason? I can’t remember. Something to do with the homie’s sister getting raped and we went after the guy that raped her.”

You were in a car?

“Yeah. He took a wrong turn and flipped over. He got out of the car okay and the homies just blasted him.”

How old were you then?

“Seventeen.”

Mendoza says he decided to change his life this year. Since he’s enlisted, he gets more respect from people, the same people who he says used to hate him: teachers, neighbors, old friends. A few minutes ago, when he was waiting in line to ask a Greyhound employee about his departing bus, a fellow traveler issued him respect by allowing him to go ahead of him. Dressed casually, the older black gentleman shook Mendoza’s hand and told him that he had served in Vietnam.

Do you have a girlfriend back home?

“Yes. She was crying last night. I asked her if she wanted to wait for me. She said ‘yeah.’ If she does, [after training] hopefully I can get married. Her parents already said yeah. She doesn’t know.”

I won’t print that, then.

“It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

Mendoza, who in high school did best in economics and government, is making $1,040 a month and is, in his estimation, in the best shape of his life. Money and physical fitness were two of his goals when he enlisted; the political reasons behind the war were something he only began thinking about later.

So you feel as if you were taking care of yourself by enlisting, but the bigger political picture you don’t really understand?

“Basically, yeah.”

What is a good reason to go to war?

“Fighting for something you believe in. If you believe a country is not being right and torturing people, then take it over and make it how we are.”

What do you mean by ‘how we are’?

“Either Democrat or Republican.”

Did you enlist in part to save your life?

“Yes, to save my life, if I can. If I can’t, I will give it back. They train me. The only way to pay them back is ... well, hopefully not to end my life.”

The door to the terminal opens, and a young woman in Army fatigues walks by carrying a large duffle bag. She looks at Mendoza as she passes. Her shoes are shiny like his.

#

COLUMN — POLITICAL

SMALL

Editor’s Note

Eyes Wide Shut

by Anne Schindler

Bully. Browbeat. Humiliate. Hector.

These were the four horsemen of the political apocalypse that was last Tuesday’s City Council meeting. For those who didn’t have the privilege of watching the eight-hour marathon meeting, suffice it to say it was a debacle — an ugly, inside-the-sausage-factory tour of our legislators at work.

The council has never been what you would call a slick bunch of operators. They favor windy presentations and have a tendency to bumble. They aren’t good speakers, smart dressers or even especially polite. They are, for the most part, people who have the patience to sit through long meetings and win the backing of moneyed special interests. It is the mercy of this community that allows them to continue plowing their narrow path — on the taxpayer’s dime — with little interference.

But occasionally, an issue comes before the council that residents really care about. And the extra attention throws into stark relief this body’s failings. Tuesday was one such occasion.

We’ll put aside for a moment the council president’s decision to kick out (again) the city’s leading black activist, along with a few dozen kids who’d been promised jobs from the city but got nothing. It was a civic embarrassment, and a strong example of how different standards apply to black youth in all cases. But it wasn’t a decision made by a majority of legislators.

On the contrary, the decision to approve a new subdivision in the middle of the Timucuan Preserve was made by 14 councilmembers (only Lynette Self and Glorious Johnson voted against it). The vote will allow an environmentally damaging and wildly inconsistent land-use and zoning change on Black Hammock Island, along with 143 luxury homes. The decision pleased an influential developer, Paul Fletcher, his paid shills, and those on the council clamoring for more “executive housing” in the area. It displeased virtually everyone else, from the city’s own Planning Department (which rejected the project as inappropriate) to the state agency charged with reviewing land-use amendments (which said it violated the city’s comprehensive plan).

The development also drew strenuous objections from dozens of residents who came Tuesday to speak against the proposal. Undeterred by the three-and-a-half-hour wait, these citizens waited patiently for their allotted-three-minute window in order to express — in clear, scientifically compelling and often passionate presentations — how bad they felt the project was.

One would think that the council would be inspired by this outpouring of civic participation. One would at least think that the council would listen with respect and deference to the citizens they were elected to represent.

One would be wrong.

Instead, the council — impeccably prepared by the developer’s talking points (11 councilmembers admitted having “ex parte” communications with the developer’s lobbyists before the meeting) — willfully ignored science, planning data and the wishes of the people. Led by the arrogant antics of At-Large City Councilmember Lad Daniels, the council took every opportunity to challenge, dispute and assail people who dared make their voices heard.

It’s no surprise that Daniels has no respect for the citizens of Jacksonville. He didn’t even have to face voters in his first election — just raised enough money to scare off challengers. And he has never broken from the special interests that sent him to power; he remains president of the First Coast Manufacturing Association, whose interests are rarely in sync with citizens’.

Daniels appeared to delight in impugning the credentials of those who spoke, including an employee of the state Department of Environmental Protection and a man who owns property in Black Hammock but who lives in Ponte Vedra Beach. Daniels also challenged anyone who appeared in an official capacity, like Barbara Goodman, superintendent of the Timucuan Preserve. Although Goodman introduced herself as “representing the National Park Service and the Timucuan Preserve,” Daniels pressed her on this, asking if she was, in fact, an “official representative of the Park Service.” When she said she was, he retorted, “Is it the policy of the Park Service to place restrictions on property it does not own?”

Goodman responded that it was not — and began to say she had not done so. But Daniels cut her off. “That’s all,” he said.

Daniels’ display apparently inspired his colleagues. Both Suzanne Jenkins and Reggie Fullwood rose to ask, once again, whether Goodman was “representing” the Park Service — whether her superiors knew what she was doing, whether they endorsed it. Councilmember Ronnie Fussell got into the spirit, too, using a slight misstatement by Goodman as an opportunity to humiliate, rather than simply correct her.

It’s no mystery why councilmembers behaved this way. Like any schoolyard bully, they acted out of feelings of inadequacy and fear. Exposed for their fealty to developers, their disregard for the natural environment, their inability to handle a debate more nuanced than the cudgel of “property rights,” they reached for the only defense they could muster. Their shameful conduct didn’t hide their shameful vote, however. They chose McMansions over the Timucuan. They sacrificed an environmental jewel for the benefit of a wealthy developer. They promoted development at any cost. Most of all, they proved they don’t care what you think.

#

Editor’s Note

Hard Truths

by Anne Schindler

If there’s one thing Clay County government has hungered for, it’s one more white, middle-aged man in public office. Last week Gov. Jeb Bush heard the call and responded, appointing John Thrasher to replace indicted County Commissioner Christy Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald hasn’t done much to elevate gender politics, of course, having been removed from office after a grand jury charged her with five counts of petit theft and one count of official misconduct. Among her alleged offenses: using public works employees to fortify her home in advance of Hurricane Frances (a charge her attorney recently dismissed as a misunderstanding over “a few sandbags and two or three pieces of plywood”).

Into the vacuum created by Fitzgerald’s involuntary departure comes Thrasher, the 62-year-old former speaker of the Florida House, and, not coincidentally, one of Gov. Bush’s best friends. He’s also among the most well-connected lobbyists in the state, a man whose client list includes Disney World, Time Warner and a slew of medical interests.

If Thrasher’s clout seems outsized for a lil’-old county commission, it is. His years of lobbying and lawmaking have already earned him honors typically reserved for retirement from public life (like having the $19 million Thrasher-Horne Center for the Arts named after him). During the county’s illegal dumping scandal, he played the role of lawmaker emeritus, criticizing commissioners and suggesting the need for changes to the structure of county government. But it is his connections, not his experience that earned him the $55,000-a-year appointment. Thrasher readily acknowledged that Bush chose him because he’s a “known entity.”

Whether it’s a good thing for the governor to use the buddy system to make political appointments, especially when trying to erase the stain of good-ol’-boy corruption and cronyism, is worth discussing. But Thrasher and Bush apparently have different views of how the appointment came about. When asked about the process, Thrasher told the County Line newspaper, “It kind of evolved.”

“I shouldn’t say I wasn’t interested,” he added, “but I didn’t go looking for it.” But Bush told reporters that Thrasher asked for the job outright. “I would not have thought of it,” he said, but “I thought it was a great idea.” However it “evolved,” it’s strange that Thrasher would want to be a County Comissioner. Less than two months ago, he resigned from his job as Clay County’s official lobbyist, saying he didn’t have enough time to do it. Thrasher never did much as county lobbyist — the lack of return on the $3,000-a-month investment was a sore subject among some county lawmakers — but it certainly required less time than being a commissioner. (Thrasher has declined to give up lobbying while working for the county. As he jokingly told the Orlando Sentinel, “I’ve got to buy shoes for the grandchildren.”)

Thrasher’s decision to insert himself into local politics is nothing new. He started his political career as a Clay County School Board member and has never gained much distance. Just last year, he asked for an appointment to the county’s Charter Review Commission. (As with the governor’s appointment, he denied requesting the job, saying only, “If asked, I probably would [serve].”)

In announcing his decision last week, Gov. Bush expressed a desire to restore confidence to county government. He told reporters it was the “right thing” “given what is going on in Clay County right now to have someone of his stature, someone of his integrity, that can bring an even-tempered nature to the commission meetings.”

Unfortunately, integrity has never been Thrasher’s strong suit. He kicked off his career as a state representative with a whopper of a conflict, lobbying his own statehouse colleagues as a paid shill for the Florida Medical Association, a Jacksonville-based group that donates heavily to political campaigns and lobbies on behalf of insurance companies. Although the state Constitution prohibits legislators from earning money by representing clients before the state, Thrasher lobbied for FMA, introduced bills that benefited FMA, even testified before the state Board of Medicine on behalf of his client.

After the conflict of interest generated an ethics complaint, then-House Speaker Rudy Wallace dubbed Thrasher’s behavior “unethical” and advised the rookie lawmaker to “govern his future conduct accordingly.” Amazingly, Thrasher disregarded the warning, holding on to his $120,000-a-year FMA job for another three years. It wasn’t until 1996, when he was angling to become House Speaker, that he resigned (with a $250,000 parting gift from FMA).

More recently, Thrasher refused to give up his seat on the Florida State University Board despite legislation banning lobbyists from serving on university governing boards. (Because he was a board member before the law passed, Thrasher deemed himself “grandfathered” in.)

Apparently, none of that gave the governor pause. Bush overlooked five applicants for the job in order to pass a lollipop to his golf buddy. And Thrasher, without a shred of propriety, accepted.

So, to recap:

• It’s not what you know, but who you know.

• Integrity is all perspective.

• To the victor go the spoils.

For the people of Clay County, who hoped the corruption scandal would yield systemic change — forget about it. Meet your new county commissioner.

#

Editor’s Note

The Perfect Storm

by Anne Schindler

The 2004 hurricane season wasn’t all bad. Although the storms leveled homes, eroded beaches and walloped the tourism industry, they did us the favor of removing more than 285 pieces of visual blight from state highways. That was the approximate tally of destroyed billboards that did not conform to state law and cannot legally be rebuilt.

The 285 billboards didn’t make a huge dent in the state’s inventory. Florida had 15,000 billboards going into the storms, including 5,000 deemed “nonconforming,” meaning they can’t be rebuilt if destroyed by an act of God. But the number wasn’t insignificant, either. Acts of God don’t come along every day, and unless one takes out a billboard, these signs will remain in (near) perpetuity.

But the collective punch of hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne may be no match for the pugilists in the billboard lobby. Well before the end of the 2004 storm season, industry lobbyists began working to evade the laws that would keep the signs from being rebuilt. They initially asked the state Department of Transportation to waive the rules — just this one time. Despite DOT’s own hurricane concerns, like collapsed bridges and washed-out roads, the agency leapt into action. With the help of Gov. Jeb Bush, officials from DOT set up a meeting with Federal Highway Administration officials and top billboard industry executives in Washington, D.C., to ask for a special “hurricane exemption.”

They didn’t get the waiver — some media attention and the objections of groups like Scenic America persuaded highway officials not to grant it. Soon after, the state belatedly began sending notices to the billboard companies that their permits for the destroyed, nonconforming signs had been revoked.

Then a crazy thing happened: Billboard companies began denying the signs were destroyed. They simultaneously began rebuilding them in violation of federal law. Although the DOT had photographs of the splintered billboards, industry officials said the signs were just fine, thank you. Never mind their desperate pleas for mercy, their requests for a “hurricane exemption.” Never mind the photographs of new signs being constructed on the wreckage of the old. The companies — Lamar Advertising, Clear Channel and Viacom Outdoor among them — brazenly lied and, just as brazenly, broke the law.

But wait! It gets brazener! After receiving the notices of permit revocation, the billboard industry sued the state, challenging the notices and (again) claiming they had lost nary a billboard in the storms.

Not surprisingly, DOT, which just weeks prior had negotiated on behalf of the billboard industry, yielded. It entered into a settlement agreement that allowed two-thirds of the illegal signs to be rebuilt.

The DOT’s weak and embarrassing showing in this “enforcement” battle is currently being reviewed by the Federal Highway Administration. Scenic activists have asked the agency to force the state DOT to enforce the law or risk losing a portion of its federal highway funds.

In the meantime, the billboard lobby is continuing to look for new ways to dodge the law. In early May, it succeeded in attaching an amendment to a key federal appropriations bill — one that funds both the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina recovery — that allows nonconforming billboards destroyed by any hurricane in the past, or until the year 2009, to be rebuilt. But only in 13 Southeastern states. The amendment’s sponsor? U.S. Senator Bob Bennett of Utah.

Bennett’s interest in Southeastern billboards has less to do with acts of God than acts of finance. On Jan. 4, he received six campaign contributions from the family behind Reagan Outdoor and Reagan Advertising, each for $2,000. And Bennett isn’t even up for re-election for another four years.

It’s this kind of influence that keeps Florida transportation officials hopping, opens doors at the Capitol and allows the industry to get a non-appropriations-related amendment tacked on to a must-pass appropriations bill. And the bill did pass, incidentally, by a vote of 78-20.

The bill must still be reconciled with the House version, and it’s possible that special dispensations for billboard companies won’t make the final cut. But the Senate committee picked to negotiate with the House is stacked with billboard industry allies — including Bennett — and with mid-term elections looming, House members might just find the industry’s deep pockets irresistibly attractive.

There’s also the possibility that reason will prevail, along with the will of the people, who overwhelmingly oppose billboards and who, in city after city, have voted to reduce their presence. But one thing’s clear: This industry is hell-bent on rebuilding the signs lost in the 2004 storms and nothing — not the law, the government or Mother Nature herself — is going to stop them from trying.

#

COLUMN — POLITICAL

LARGE

Who Crowned Michael Brown?

Laws? The Riviera Beach mayor doesn't need laws.

by Bob Norman

If there is a driving force behind Riviera Beach's $2.4 billion redevelopment project, if there is one person who is imprinted on the effort like a cattle brand, it is Michael Brown.

The city's "weak" mayor.

Brown's post is meant to be largely ceremonial — he doesn't even have a vote unless there's a rare tie on the five-member commission. But he's used his nonvoting status as an excuse to ignore laws that govern all other elected officials. And it seems the further he treads into legally and ethically dubious territory, the more powerful he becomes.

Since he was elected in 1999, Brown has steamrolled the beachfront redevelopment plan through his city. He's brought in consultants and construction contractors, negotiated the terms of numerous development deals, and held sway over a majority of the five commissioners.

"It's called leadership," he told me last week. "If I had not stepped into the city, the city would have been bankrupt. It would have been a disaster."

In May, Brown engineered the passing of the giant redevelopment plan, which hinges on Riviera Beach's buying hundreds of people out of their homes through a dubious eminent domain scheme that will benefit private developers. The town's public beach space on the more affluent Singer Island is also slated to become home for a giant hotel and condo development.

Everyone seems to agree that the largely impoverished city needs new development, but a growing number of citizens is questioning whether Brown is doing it the right way. In essence, he's selling out the beach and selling short homeowners in favor of developers, including the family of billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, who stand to cash in on the deal.

But Brown is king of the city, and his way goes. How has he amassed that power? For one thing, he may be the only mayor in Florida who freely admits that he operates outside the state's Sunshine Laws, which prohibit elected officials from discussing government business with one another outside the public eye.

Brown believes that since he doesn't vote, he can speak with individual commissioners about his plans whenever and wherever he wants, whether on the dais or in a dark alleyway. "It allows me to pitch ideas and get things done," he explained.

There hasn't been a legal opinion based on his unorthodox stance, but I told him I thought he was violating the law.

"You have your legal opinion, and I have mine," countered Brown, a Florida native who is a lawyer by trade. "And if I was a betting man, I would bet on mine."

It's not just Sunshine Laws that he plays loose with — Brown also ventures into dicey legal territory when it comes to mixing his private law business and public duties as mayor.

In 2003, the City Commission voted to approve a Winn-Dixie shopping center in Riviera Beach. Brown was City Hall's biggest proponent of the grocery store, promoting it on the dais and helping to expedite the project through the bureaucracy.

Here's what has never been reported: As a private attorney, Brown also represented Byram Properties, the company that provided the land for the Winn-Dixie. And Brown readily admitted to me that the $1 million sale, on which he was paid a commission, was contingent on the city's approving the grocery store.

"And I single-handedly negotiated the deal through the city," he boasted.

Brown insisted there was nothing wrong with what he did. Why? Because he didn't vote, of course. Florida's unlawful-compensation statute forbids public officials from profiting on their elected positions. But Brown countered that Byram Properties was a longtime client and that he would have represented the company in the land sale whether he was mayor or not.

"I detest public corruption, and anybody who knows me will tell you [I'm] squeaky clean," he said. "I have made numerous sacrifices in my professional life. I could have taken the easy way out and taken the money, but I knew I wanted to help my community."

He's on undeniably murky ground, though, as he is in his longtime close relationship with Kimley-Horn and Associates, an engineering consulting firm Brown brought to the city shortly after he was elected mayor in 1999.

The firm has been paid huge sums of money as a consultant for the city's Community Redevelopment Agency. But a million dollars that the city paid to the company really stands out.

The check was in the amount of precisely $1,005,917. It was dated September 19, 2003. And Mayor Brown admits that he personally intervened on behalf of Kimley-Horn engineer Paul Cherry to make sure the city paid it.

"Kimley-Horn contacted me and said the check is approved; can you make a call to see what's going on?" Brown explained. "People call me all the time and say, 'Hey mayor, can you help me with the bureaucracy.' And in that case, I made a call to the administration."

The problem: The payment hadn't been approved by the City Commission, there was no contract in place, and a city contractor, PSA Constructors Inc., insisted that it couldn't be justified.

"We could not verify that the work had been done," recalled Michelle Andrewin, who was PSA's liaison to the city. "We could only verify that $400,000 worth of work had been done."

But the check was still issued and cashed by Kimley-Horn, all with the help of the mayor.

The conflict over the $1 million check was mentioned only in passing by the Palm Beach Post in 2005. But what I've learned is that Brown was involved in a private Kimley-Horn deal at the time to build a $64 million bridge in the Bahamas.

Under the direction of Cherry, the firm began planning to build a bridge from Freeport to Abaco Island in late 2002. In its proposal to the Grand Bahama Port Authority, Kimley-Horn listed the Riviera Beach mayor as a member of its development team.

Brown said all he did was recommend Kimley-Horn as a company that could get the job done. And he said he was never paid a dime for the project, which hasn't been built because the Bahamas couldn't come up with the funding.

"I was put on the plan because I was black — I mean, if you're doing business in Miami, wouldn't you want a Cuban involved?" he asked. "I would have helped [Kimley-Horn] in any way I could. If I was a consultant for them, I wouldn't have done it when Kimley-Horn was a consultant for the city. I could have, legally, but I wouldn't have, because of people like you who ask these questions."

Former Riviera Beach Commissioner Edward Rodgers, who also helped put together the bridge proposal, said he wasn't paid any money for his involvement and doesn't believe the mayor was either.

"Nobody to the best of my knowledge got any money out of it," said Rodgers, who left the commission this past April. "I think they just put Brown on there to drop a name to bolster their credibility in the Bahamas."

Rodgers — who traveled to the Bahamas with Cherry for the project and even had a breakfast meeting with Prime Minister Perry Christie about it — said the plan was never officially killed but just faded away because of a lack of funding.

"As far as I know," Rodgers said, "it's still sitting in someone's desk somewhere down there."

Cherry, though, said the plan was for Brown to be a consultant on the project, just not directly connect to Kimley-Horn. "Mayor Brown was going to be a consultant directly to the Bahamians," the engineer said. "But he didn't do anything on the project."

Whatever the truth, the episode is another illustration of Brown's habit of playing loose with ethics. And it might shed light on why Brown was so adamant about giving Kimley-Horn that million dollars.

"Brown was always very protective of Kimley-Horn," Andrewin said.

Today, Kimley-Horn works not only for the city but also for Viking Inlet Harbor Properties — the master developer for the city's $2.4 billion redevelopment plan.

Although that would seem to be a blatant conflict of interest, Brown doesn't see it that way. "It doesn't bother me," he says.

To add to the incest, Brown's brother, Jeff, has secured work for Viking Inlet Harbor Properties to demolish houses in the redevelopment zone. The mayor said he had nothing to do with helping his brother get that job.

"My brother does demolition for Viking," Brown said. "He is knocking down three or four more houses for them right now. And if you need a house knocked down, he'll knock yours down for you too."

In other words, it's business as usual in Riviera Beach — and it has outraged several city activists.

"Riviera Beach, a sunny place for shady people," longtime city observer Dawn Pardo said. "You can quote me on that."

Added Martha Babson, who recently sold her home in the redevelopment area: "I can't believe what goes on in this city."

Today, both women are incensed that another handpicked Brown consultant, Bernard Kinsey, has a city contract to negotiate the redevelopment deal. Kinsey's six-month contract, which is expected to be extended soon, is worth nearly half a million dollars — and as much as twice that with expenses.

It's the way Brown wants it. And he promises that his power will only grow after he gets the commission to approve a measure to make him a "strong" mayor.

"It's the story of my life — I'm always winning," he said. "And that's because I'm on the right side ... I will get more authority. Some people might not like it, but it's coming."

#

A Politician Weeps

Confronted with evidence of influence peddling, a school board member tearfully claims she'll quit her job.

by Bob Norman

It started with a hunch and ended with a Broward County school board member crying on the phone, promising that she would quit her day job and concerned there would be a criminal investigation of her financial ties to high-powered lobbyists.

"I don't want improprieties," a sobbing Beverly Gallagher, who represents southwest Broward residents on the board, told me. "I have very high standards ... My ethics are the most important thing, next to my children, to me."

The hunch was that Gallagher's outspoken support of the James B. Pirtle Construction Co. to build schools in her district was about more than just helping the children. That it might be tied to more than $100,000 she's made from a part-time job at another firm that does business with the school district.

Gallagher has voted for Pirtle to build three schools in her southwest Broward district, about $120 million worth of business. Not only that but she sat on the selection committee and ranked Pirtle the highest over competing firms, helping to steer the work toward the company.

As one school board insider put it, "Gallagher always backs Pirtle and has pushed his projects in committees. All you can do is ask, 'Why?'"

That question has taken on even more urgency since one of those three schools, the so-called LLL high school planned for Pembroke Pines, has become a symbol of school board waste and inefficiency, including the purchase of $4.3 million in swampland that proved an unsuitable site.

Still, Gallagher and other board members voted to approve the $70 million LLL contract with Pirtle last week.

In an email she sent to her constituents this past Christmas, she wrote about the advantage of one construction company building all the new schools in her district.

"Having Pirtle Construction build all three schools simultaneously will give the school district an economy of scale and actually save time and money," Gallagher gushed.

She neglected to mention that the lack of competition at the district has kept numerous construction firms from bidding on the projects and that the appearance of favoritism has for years marred the board's reputation.

The truth is that Gallagher has more than the "economy of scale" to like about her favorite construction company. Pirtle's high-profile lobbyists, former board chairman Neil Sterling and Hollywood-based politico Barbara Miller, either contributed to or helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for Gallagher's campaigns. Miller also helped run Gallagher's successful 2004 re-election bid.

That's perfectly legal, if a bit unseemly. But Gallagher's part-time job — which was supposed to pay her $50,000 this year — might cross the line into felonious territory.

In 2002, Gallagher accepted a job with Community Blood Centers, an outfit based in Lauderhill that is the recipient of school board blood drives. Gallagher, who makes $39,000 on the public dime from her school board job, continues to work as "executive director" of the CBC's new scholarship program.

Her bosses at CBC also have a lobbyist at the school board: Neil Sterling, the Pirtle rep.

I asked Gallagher this past Thursday how she found out about that job.

"I can't remember, but I think it was either on-line or in the newspaper," she answered.

Pressing her, I asked what role Sterling played in getting her the job.

There was a very long pause.

"I think I knew about the job before he told me about the job, but I don't remember, honestly," she finally said. "I really don't. He did write me a letter of recommendation."

As I continued asking her questions, she admitted that Sterling had procured the job for her but vehemently said that she is qualified for the position and that it had nothing to do with any support she has given Pirtle or any other clients Sterling represents before the school board.

"My job at the blood center is totally different [from the school board]," she said. "I love the work. I love to give scholarships to these kids. It's marvelous, and ... I keep it very separate from my political life."

I asked her about that $4.3 million piece of swampland that she had urged the board to purchase for the high school site. The architect for the school, Zyscovich Inc., had lobbied her to buy the land.

Zyscovich's lobbyists are, again, Neil Sterling and his partner, Barbara Miller. On top of that, Pirtle was slated to build the school.

She said she didn't remember Sterling ever lobbying her on the sale and blamed town officials from Southwest Ranches, which owned the land, for "deceiving" her and the rest of the board into buying the acreage.

But the connection is there nonetheless. And I felt that it was time to ask her some really tough questions about her job, Sterling, and the appearance of a quid pro quo.

I mentioned to Gallagher that there were unlawful compensation statutes in Florida that made it a felony to profit from public service. I told her that a case could easily be made that Sterling got her the job with CBC with the expectation that she would vote for his clients, which she has done with alarming regularity.

I added that prosecutors didn't need hard evidence that a corrupt deal had been struck. The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that all that is necessary for prosecution was circumstantial evidence that there had been a "meeting of the minds," in this case, between herself and Sterling.

The procurement of the job and the subsequent votes, I offered, seemed ample evidence of that. That's when she began to sob.

"I will quit my job and get another job then," she said through her tears. "But how am I going to pay my mortgage this month? How am I going to put my kids through college? And how will I get another job? If I ask my other friends, like George Platt... I can't do that either?"

Platt is another major lobbyist at the school board. I told her that wasn't a good idea.

"Then, Bob, I ask you, where can I find a job?" she asked through tears. "When people try to find a job, they network to find a job and they talk to people they know. That's the only way I know to get jobs."

I felt both great astonishment at what I was hearing and, call me a softie, some sadness for Gallagher. She was a parent activist and substitute school teacher before she ran for the board. Then the lobbyists and contractors wined and dined her and gave her a job so that she would cast a friendly eye — and a friendly vote — their way when the chips were down.

She became swept up in that swirling social scene, and now she was left with a bunch of "friends" like Sterling, Miller, and Platt — high-rolling users who only want a piece of the school board's whopping $2.1 billion construction budget.

And there's no reason to doubt that Gallagher really does need outside income. Her husband, a lawyer, left her shortly after she was elected in 2000 and, she says, doesn't pay alimony or help with the college bills for the children.

To help calm her down, I told her it would be all right. I told her that Broward State Attorney Michael Satz doesn't prosecute corruption cases, that the worst that would happen was that his office would start an investigation and sit on it for two years before quietly deciding not to file any charges.

This is all true, and I've reported on this pattern numerous times. Satz is sitting on several such cases right now. In fact, his office famously investigated the construction department at the Broward County School Board during the mid-1990s. The grand jury probe cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and came up with reams of evidence of corruption — but Satz failed to prosecute any elected officials or high-ranking school board staffers.

Gallagher only stepped into a culture of corruption and, unfortunately, she was all too susceptible to it. Neil Sterling, Pirtle Construction, Zyscovich, Ira Cor, and Gallagher have profited from it.

Only the taxpayers have been stiffed.

#

Mayor Al Has To Go, Bad

More bathroom breaks are featured in yet another questionable Capellini deal.

by Bob Norman

Deerfield Beach Mayor Al Capellini's bladder must have struck again. Or, as Capellini put it in a recent news release, his "urological habits" may have led him away from the City Commission meeting over which he was presiding.

It was September 7, 2004. Capellini sat on the dais at Deerfield City Hall as his partner, Marty Lamia, approached the commission. Lamia was representing Atlantis Environmental Engineering.

That's the mayor's company.

Atlantis was representing land owner Ivan Bruce Wexler, an investor from Chicago with a bit of a shady past. He was indicted in Operation Greylord, the famous federal investigation into the Windy City's judicial system. Wexler, who was then an attorney, pleaded guilty to cheating on his taxes in 1988. He did a short stint in prison and, after being suspended by the Chicago Bar in 1992, hasn't practiced law since.

Wexler planned to build 32 townhouses on land he'd purchased on SW Third Avenue in Deerfield Beach. The land, about 214 acres, is known in bureaucratic circles as the Pine Sands Plat. Wexler wanted an extension on a site plan that had been approved by the commission a year before. And the mayor's company was doing his bidding.

Before the vote, Capellini got up and left the room. After the rest of the commissioners approved the extension, he returned to the dais.

The mayor's failure to announce publicly his conflict of interest and abstain from the vote — rather than simply leaving the room temporarily — is yet another in a growing list of Capellini's apparent violations of Florida law. And the Pine Sands Plat represents another glaring conflict discovered during a continuing New Times investigation of Capellini's business dealings (see "For Sale: Keys to the City," June 1; and "Mayor Al Engineers Another Deal," June 8).

A look at public records reveals that the mayor hid his role in the townhouse project more than once and made hundreds of thousands of dollars on the land, which today remains vacant.

"We are making completely new plans," Wexler said during a phone interview from Chicago last week. "The whole idea was to do low-income housing, but now there's no place left to build down there. The price of the land went up so high, we've changed everything. Instead of building low-income housing, we're putting up $500,000 condos."

When the subject of the mayor's involvement in the development came up, Wexler said he doesn't talk much with Capellini. Instead, he says he talks mainly with the man who put him in touch with the mayor in the first place, whom he identified only as "Sam."

"We used the mayor's plans at first, but we may or may not use him as an engineer now," Wexler says. "Why are you asking so many questions about Capellini?"

Wexler eventually hung up the phone, refusing to answer any more queries. The mayor too has refused to comment. But records from the Broward County Property Appraiser's Office help tell the story.

The Pine Sands Plat was initially owned by a group of Jehovah's Witnesses who hired Capellini in the mid-1990s to help plan a church and housing development. In 1996, the project came up before the City Commission.

And Capellini, who'd been mayor for about three years, seems to have done the right thing. He announced at the beginning of the January 2, 1996, meeting that he had a possible conflict of interest and then abstained from the discussion. He even handed the gavel to then-Vice Mayor Kathy Shaddow. She handed it back to the mayor after the plan was approved by the remaining four commissioners.

In 1998, Capellini's involvement with the Pine Sands Plat deepened. On February 28 of that year, he purchased roughly 214 acres of the land from the Jehovah's Witnesses for $100,000, according to land records.

He transferred the land that April to a company called Sand Pines Ltd. for $130,000. The company's address, according to the warranty deed, was the same as that of Atlantis Environmental Engineering, the mayor's firm.

Capellini is the only principal who signed the deed. Just four months later, the land was transferred from Sand Pines Ltd. back to Capellini's name for $100. The reason for the brief change in ownership isn't known.

The mayor then set out to develop the land. In 1999, he partnered with architect William Gallo to come up with a development plan. Gallo Architects & Development came before the commission on January 25, 2000, with a plan to build 100 tax-subsidized, low-income housing units for the elderly on the mayor's property.

This marks the earliest known business relationship between Capellini and Gallo. It would bloom into a mutually profitable partnership that persists to this day and has caused numerous conflicts of interest for the mayor. The mayor's hiring of the architect at that time also casts more doubt on his June 2000 vote to hire Gallo as "vision architect" for the city. Since he clearly had a business association with Gallo before that vote, which paid the architect tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayers' money, it would seem Capellini should have abstained.

The tangled web of partnerships doesn't end there. After the Gallo plan fell through, Capellini sold the land to Wexler and a minor partner named Mark Kengott for $400,000 in March 2002, garnering a healthy profit over the $100,000 that he had paid for it four years earlier.

Though he sold the land, Capellini remained financially tied to the project as an engineer, and he and Wexler came up with the plan to build 32 townhomes.

That project initially came before the City Commission on January 7, 2003. Interestingly, the mayor didn't announce any conflict of interest during the meeting. When a motion was made to table the item until the following month, he voted against the motion. Again, since his engineering firm was tied to the project, it appears he should have abstained from the vote and filed a conflict-of-interest form with the city clerk.

The plan came before the commission again on February 4, 2003. This time, Capellini left the room, apparently another example of his peculiarly timed "urological habits." The commission, while the mayor was absent, voted to approve the plan.

The following year came the vote to extend the plan for another year, with the mayor again making an unexplained bathroom break.

Capellini isn't answering questions about Pine Sands Plat. But the mayor did hire Boca Raton public relations firm TransMedia Group. The company issued a news release on the mayor's behalf last week in which the mayor responded to the initial New Times story on his conflicts of interest.

"Yes, I admit to having business relationships with architects," he was quoted as saying. "Occasionally I may even have dinner with them. I'm an engineer by profession and engineers and architects work together. Hello? But any time Mr. Gallo brought a matter before the City Commission, I made it a point to declare a conflict and not vote. New Times says I have a 'convenient bladder' as I always excuse myself when Gallo brings a matter before the commission. I call it just Mother Nature calling."

In fact, the mayor failed to declare conflicts with Gallo's firm on several occasions. Capellini also claimed that the story contained distortions, though neither the mayor nor his PR firm has pointed out any factual errors or asked for a correction.

"I urge the press to look at a bigger picture," the mayor beseeches the public in the news release, "for that's what I do every day to earn my modest salary as the mayor of one of the best run cities in Florida, even if I have to do [sic] say so myself."

#

COVER DESIGN

SMALL

COVER DESIGN

LARGE

EDITORIAL LAYOUT

SMALL

EDITORIAL LAYOUT

LARGE

FEATURE

SMALL

Deepest Midnight

Cedric Willis and the Failure of Mississippi Justice

by Brian Johnson

“Cedric, wake up. Cedric, the police want to see you.”

Cedric Willis, then 19, stirred in his bed and looked up at his grandmother Sally. She had the smooth, dark skin of a woman 20 years younger, and her black hair, cropped short, rested atop her head like a crown. Bright beams of morning sunshine illuminated her through the blinds.

Two men in dark suits were in the doorway of his bedroom. One was an older white man, his hand already reaching for his belt, and the other was a tall African-American man with glasses and a goatee. Cedric knew him. He was Ned Garner. Detective Ned Garner.

“Cedric Willis, you have the right to remain silent,” Garner said. Cedric stood, and the white detective spun him around, clamping handcuffs down on his wrists.

“Cedric Willis, you are charged with aggravated assault, rape, robbery and the murder of Carl White.”

Cedric’s grandmother gasped and put her hand to her mouth, her face convulsed with disbelief.

“You all got the wrong man,” Cedric pleaded over his shoulder. “I didn’t have nothing to do with anything like that.”

The detectives rooted through Cedric’s dresser and the clothes on the floor, searching for the murder weapon. It did not take them long to go through his spare belongings. No weapon. They turned him toward the door and escorted him out into the kitchen.

“Put me in a line-up,” Cedric said. “Let these people see me, because they’ll know I didn’t do this.”

As they came into the living room, Cedric’s little sister Alana, who was 7 and dressed in a long T-shirt, burst into tears. His cousin Ryan, 8, stared down at the floor.

The living room was full of antique furniture that his grandmother had insisted they cover in plastic. Too many kids with too many drinks to spill, she said.

“Listen,” Cedric said as the detectives pulled him toward the door, “can I put some shoes on before you take me?” He was still wearing what he had worn to bed: just a white T-shirt and black cloth shorts.

Ryan ran to Cedric’s room and returned with socks and shoes. Because Cedric was cuffed, he dropped into a chair and Ryan knelt at his feet, pulling one sock and then the other over his feet. Then Ryan forced on Cedric’s Air Nikes and tied the strings carefully.

The detectives helped Cedric up and pushed him toward the door. He looked back at his sister, who was wailing on the floor, and his grandmother, whose hand still covered her mouth.

“Don’t worry,” Cedric said. “I’ll be right back.”

The detectives escorted him out into the blinding light of a June morning. It was already hot and muggy. The detectives pushed Cedric down into the back seat of their car and then drove toward the jail downtown.

“You gotta let these people see me,” Cedric insisted from the back seat. “Get me in front of these people so they know I didn’t do this.”

It was June 24, 1994. It would be more than 12 years before Cedric would return home to his family, after he was exonerated of all charges against him, on March 6, 2006. By then, his little sister Alana was 19 years old. His grandmother had long since passed, in 2001.

‘I Can Go, Right?’

On June 12, a husband and wife had pulled into their driveway on Queen Eleanor Street at close to 2 a.m. As they got out of the car, a lone African-American male approached them brandishing a handgun and demanded money. When the husband hesitated, the assailant shot him in the right leg, and the bullet passed through to penetrate his left leg as well. The perpetrator then demanded money from the wife, but she had none. “Well, since you don’t have any money, I’ll have to get it some other way,” the man said. He took her behind a tree in the front yard and brutally raped her. “I could have killed both y’all,” the man said as he left.

Four days later, the perpetrator went on a spree. He robbed four families in a single night, on June 16. His methods were always the same. He approached victims in their driveways. He shot the men in the leg and stole whatever was quick and easy. He did not rape any women that night, but one of the men he shot in the leg, Carl White Jr., died of his wounds.

The rapist had become a murderer.

Now it was June 24, and the police had their man: Cedric Willis. It was true that he did not match the description of the perpetrator that victims had given to police. Cedric was 60 pounds heavier, several inches shorter and possibly a different skin tone. But he was their man.

In the line-up room, all the other men in the room were wearing green-and-white jail fatigues, since they had already been processed. Cedric was the only one in street clothes, the same T-shirt and shorts he had worn to bed the night before he was arrested. The police let the men choose numbers for where they would stand in the line. They told Cedric he would be in position one.

Cedric and the other men filed into a narrow room with a large, one-way sheet of glass. They turned at an officer’s prompting, and each read the murderer’s words from a piece of paper.

“Is that all your money?” Cedric read in a monotone when it was his turn.

On the other side of the glass were members of the White family, the rape victim and several victims of the robberies of June 16, all studying the men together, coming to a decision. Then the witnesses were escorted from the room and asked separately whether the man who had assaulted them was in the lineup. None of the other robbery victims could identify Cedric, but both the Whites and the rape victim identified Cedric.

Meanwhile, Cedric waited, eager to be cleared. When the police entered his room, he hopped up.

“So I can go, right?” he asked.

The police held out a pair of green and white fatigues.

Little Bozo

Born June 3, 1975, Cedric Demond Willis was a rambunctious, carefree child. “He wasn’t an average baby that slept all the time,” his mother, Elayne, says. He was so full of energy that when he was a toddler, Elayne’s sister took to calling the boy “Bozo,” because he bounced off the walls and stood on top of his head. Elayne did not like the nickname, but it stuck. Cedric did not seem to mind.

Elayne had Cedric when she was only 17, near the house where she and Cedric live today, on Vardaman Street. She had Cedric out of wedlock, though Cedric always knew his father, who was his mother’s high school sweetheart.

His mother lived with her mother. Elayne’s people had moved to Jackson from Grenada in the 1940s, fleeing a share-cropping operation called the “Cooley Plantation.” Like so many rural African-Americans, the lure of real wages and urban freedom, however circumscribed, drew her grandmother to Jackson. Like so many African-American women, she was on the run from an abusive man. Two generations later, the family was still struggling to escape poverty.

Elayne taught Cedric to stand up to bullies. As a young boy, he would run home crying because other boys were picking on him. She told him to go back and stand up for himself. “If you get your tail whipped, that’s fine, but at least you’re not running home crying. Once you’ve stood up and fought, you don’t have to worry about that person anymore. You run and they’re going to chase you,” she remembers telling him.

The family moved several times during Cedric’s childhood, once because their house, which they rented for $250, was literally falling apart around them, and the landlord refused to pay for repairs. There were more kids Cedric’s age in their new neighborhood, midtown in Queens, and they zipped up and down Flag Chapel and the streets of Presidential Hill on their bikes. They gathered every day to play football, and though Cedric was smaller than most of the other boys, he ran so fast that few ever caught and tackled him. Cedric played for Green Elementary as running back and linebacker, and dreamed of one day going professional.

Those dreams were dashed by the time he reached junior high. When he was 7, Cedric had developed epilepsy, like his grandfather before him, and he could no longer play football. By the time Cedric entered Provine High School, he had lost his way. He always in trouble at school, usually for fighting with other boys. “There was so much crap going on over there,” Elayne says of Provine. “That principal called me every day. I thought, what’s going on over at that school that my son is getting into fights every day?”

Cedric admits that he started running the streets, selling drugs, and he never graduated from high school. When he turned 18, however, everything began to change. Cedric never carried a weapon or engaged in violence, but a close friend of his was shot in the head and robbed. “He had just called me and told me he was on his way to pick me up,” Cedric says, “but then he never came. Somebody robbed him and killed him. He was like a father to me. And I thought, ‘I was supposed to be in that car with him.’”

Soon, Cedric got a steady job doing construction with his Uncle Larry. When he found out that his long-time girlfriend, Tiffany, was pregnant, he renounced the street for good. “I knew I was gonna have to support my family,” Cedric says.

Tiffany had become pregnant at 17, just like Cedric’s mother. Cedric says neither of them understood birth control or even took seriously the possibility that they could make a baby. “We were young,” Cedric says now. “We were doing something we had no business doing.”

They didn’t marry, but Tiffany moved in with Cedric’s family. They all shared one bedroom, with Cedric and Tiffany in one twin bed and Elayne and Alana in another.

Cedric’s son C.J. was born at 11:15 p.m. on June 11, 1994, just two hours before Cedric allegedly robbed and raped the first victims. Cedric handed out cigars to his relatives, and he kept declaring: “I got a son. I got a son.”

The young father had insisted on watching the entire delivery, and he mocked men who were too squeamish to welcome their offspring into the world. Elayne did not really believe him when Cedric told her he wanted to be there through the whole delivery, but he stayed in the room as he had pledged. When the nurses asked Cedric if he would like to hold C.J., at first he refused.

“I was scared I was going to hurt him,” Cedric says. “Then I held him, and he looked so small. He wasn’t even crying. He was an arm baby.” That is, he could hold him on one arm. “I got to change him one time before they took me away.”

‘God, Keep Me’

“Cedric,” Tiffany sobbed into the phone, “have you read the newspaper?”

“What’s wrong?” Cedric asked. He was in his green and white fatigues, talking to Tiffany collect on one of the phones mounted on the wall by the showers in the county jail.

“Cedric, they say if they convict you,” Tiffany continued in tears, “they’re going to give you the lethal injection. They’re going to kill you.”

“No,” Cedric said, trying to hide the terror blooming in his heart, “that ain’t going to happen.”

Cedric was indicted on Oct. 11, 1994, on charges of aggravated assault, rape, robbery and murder, though he would spend the next three years in jail, waiting for his trial to begin. He was denied bail because he had been charged with capital murder. There was nothing Cedric could do but wait, his fate held in suspension.

While in jail awaiting trial, his only comfort was visits from his mother, Tiffany and his young son, along with a tattered, yellow-paged Bible his mother Elayne had brought him. He had never taken religion very seriously, but now he prayed in earnest for the first time in his life. As he followed newspaper accounts of the atrocities he had allegedly committed, he plunged into despair, and prayed every day and every night. God, keep my family, he prayed. God, keep me.

Without proper medication, Cedric had frequent seizures in jail. The guards accused him of faking the seizures because he was mad about being in jail. They told him that he would have to have three seizures in a row before they would call for an ambulance. “Jail is the worst place in the world to get sick at,” Cedric says.

Cedric had already volunteered to give a blood sample, so his DNA could be tested against the rapist’s, but the results were not ready by the time he was indicted. DNA analysis took much longer in 1994 than it does today.

When the DNA test results came in, they showed unequivocally that Cedric Willis could not have been the rapist. The police tested Cedric’s DNA again in disbelief, but the results were the same. Cedric could not have committed the rape, and prosecutors had to drop all related charges.

Nevertheless, the prosecution, led by then-District Attorney Ed Peters and Assistant D.A. Bobby DeLaughter, proceeded with the murder indictment. They also moved to have the rape evidence excluded from the trial, despite the fact that it cast significant doubt on whether Cedric was the murderer; witnesses had given consistent descriptions of the assailant. Ballistics testing showed that the same weapon had been used in all the crimes. Hinds County Circuit Judge William Coleman ruled against the prosecution, allowing the defense to argue that Cedric’s exoneration of the rape cast significant doubt on whether he had committed any of the crimes. The prosecution argued that the weapon might have been passed from the rapist to Cedric over the intervening four days.

Then, before the trial was set to begin, Coleman retired from the bench, and Cedric’s case was reassigned to freshly appointed Judge Breland Hilburn. Without any new evidence, prosecutors again moved to exclude any mention of the rape from the trial. This time, Hilburn agreed.

“Technically, you’re not supposed to do that,” current D.A. Faye Peterson says, “unless you’ve got some new information that wasn’t presented before. … It’s called forum shopping.”

“It’s certainly odd that he would do this,” Emily Maw, an attorney with the Innocence Project, says. “There wasn’t a reason to think that Judge Coleman’s previous ruling was wrong. If there is evidence that someone else was committing a similar crime in the vicinity at the time, and it could not have been you, the courts are clear that you can always present evidence that someone else committed the crimes.”

The prosecution filed further motions to exclude evidence. Cedric had an alibi for the other three robberies committed June 16, and in any case, none of those victims had chosen Cedric from the lineup. Although each robbery followed the same M.O.—approaching victims in their driveways and shooting the men in the leg, with the same weapon—the prosecution moved that no mention of the other robberies be allowed in Cedric’s trial.

The judge agreed.

Bobby DeLaughter, now a Hinds County circuit judge running for re-election, did not return calls for comment on this story. Peters could not be reached for comment.

The prosecution had only one real piece of evidence against Cedric: the eye-witness identification by Gloria White and her two children. There were no fingerprints, no weapon and no DNA. Moreover, there were serious problems with the Whites’ identification.

For one, the rape victim had identified Cedric, but DNA evidence showed that this identification had to be mistaken. This alone cast doubt on the Whites’ identification, because the same process led to a confirmed false result. Prosecutors moved that the defense be barred from presenting this false identification to the jury, and Hilburn agreed.

There were also serious questions about the protocols police used in both the live lineup and the photo lineup. When police show witnesses a photo lineup, they take notes on who appeared in it and log that into evidence, so they can re-create it later, if necessary. However, police were unable to produce any notes on the lineup, and the only photo they were ever able to find was one of Cedric.

“No one knows whether there even was a photo lineup,” Maw says. “If there was, no one knows who it contained, whether they looked like Cedric or not. It could have been Cedric and three white guys. But there’s good reason to think that they just showed witnesses a photo of Cedric and asked, ‘Is this the guy?’”

“If they just showed (witnesses) a photo, that totally taints the identification,” Peterson says. “The crime occurred maybe a week or two prior. There is ample evidence that an identification can be misleading when time has passed, especially when you’re dealing with a stressful situation, and the felon is a stranger. Later on, when the police show the victim a single photo, unfortunately it is very easy for them to say ‘yes,’ even if they’re uncertain. Then if they see the same person in a live line-up, he’s the only person who’s the same.”

Still, prosecutors moved that problems with the photo lineup be excluded from the trial. Hilburn agreed.

Police did take notes on who appeared in the live lineup with Cedric—and not only did none of them look anything like the perpetrator, none of them looked anything like Cedric. “They were so dissimilar from Cedric Willis that it was amazing,” Peterson says.

Also, police allowed all the witnesses to view the lineup at the same time, which violates procedure because even though witnesses made their IDs separately, they may have unwittingly influenced each other as they stared at Cedric through the glass. Witnesses are supposed to view lineups separately, and the suspect is supposed to be moved from one position to another between witnesses, just to be sure the identification is real. The witnesses saw Cedric all at once, in position one.

‘The Man’s A Killer’

When the trial finally started, in July 1997, in the Hinds County Courthouse, Cedric sat at his table in a new gray suit his mother had bought him for the trial. She sat behind him, dressed in casual dark slacks and a T-shirt. “It was agonizing, sitting in there listening to those lies,” Elayne says. “I was too exhausted to go dressed up.”

Cedric’s new attorney, James Winfield of Vicksburg, sat at his side. Cedric had fired the public defender assigned to his case and hired a private attorney he thought could put in more time. Friends of the family helped pay Winfield’s bills.

The courtroom was severe and ostentatious, covered in dark wood and the various banners and insignia of the law. Hilburn sat in black robes, his expression unreadable behind a sandy-brown beard.

Cedric tried to stay unemotional for his mother. He knew that if he broke down and cried in the courtroom, she would not be able to maintain her composure. But he had begun to despair. As members of the police and the White family took the stand to proclaim Cedric’s guilt to the jury, Cedric could only shake his head.

“The man’s a killer,” DeLaughter declared vehemently at one point in the trial, provoking an objection from the defense. “That’s what he is.”

Meantime, Cedric’s thoughts turned toward the darkness.

“This judge is going to do it to me. They’re going to throw me away.” He tried to keep his focus on God, but negative thoughts kept coming into his head. And panic. They’re going to throw me away. There was a war inside his head. He began to realize he would be convicted. “Oh Lord, please no,” he prayed.

As DeLaughter told the story of how Cedric supposedly locked the Whites’ daughter in the trunk of their car before he went into the house on Michael Clay Boulevard and shot and robbed, Cedric could see certainty of his guilt hardening in the faces of the jury.

The jury was never allowed to hear that the DNA from the rape excluded Cedric from a prior armed robbery. They never heard that there were four other robberies on the same night of the murder, committed with the same weapon. None of those robbery victims picked Cedric out of a lineup, but the jury never heard about these victims at all. They did not hear that the photo lineup was never logged into evidence, that police may have shown witnesses a photo of Cedric alone. They never heard that the description of the perpetrator did not match Cedric.

The jury did hear the Whites make a positive identification of Cedric. It was enough.

The jury delivered its verdict on Thursday, Sept. 11, 1997. They had deliberated throughout the previous day, and Cedric took the delay as a hopeful sign. As the judge ordered Cedric to rise, his heart was pounding. The foreman read out the first charge for robbery, and said that the jury had found Cedric guilty. There was a wail from Cedric’s family and exclamations of triumph from the Whites. Cedric looked back at his mother, and his heart lurched to see her sobbing out of control, along with his grandmother and sister. Cedric held back his tears to give his mother strength, but as the foreman read charge after charge and pronounced Cedric guilty on each count, he hung his head. My life is over, he thought. He was only 22.

The next day, Cedric was sentenced to life plus 90 years. The three 30-year sentences were consecutive, so that if Cedric somehow earned parole on his life sentence and one 30-year sentence, he would still face 60 years.

Welcome To Parchman

Now a guilty man, Cedric was transferred to Rankin County for processing. They took blood from him and ran a battery of tests for disease. They shaved his head. A week later, Cedric boarded a white school bus with metal grates over the windows. He was headed to the state prison at Parchman to begin serving his life sentence plus 90 years.

The journey took two hours, and Cedric gazed out at the other cars on the road, full, he thought, of happy families off to see their relatives. He wore red-and-white-striped prison clothes, his head bald, on a bus full of men who had been convicted of rape and murder. He would never be like the people in those cars again.

The bus drove on into the tropical September heat of the Delta, through fields of corn and cotton, just 40 miles west of the old Cooley Plantation. As the bus pulled up to Parchman, Cedric marveled that there were hardly any trees, only distant, green blurs on the heat-warped horizon.

Parchman began as a slave plantation; it was not turned into a prison farm until 1901. But there had been no need to house prisoners in 1875, when the Democratic Legislature passed laws virtually identical to the notorious “Black Codes” of 1865, which had been set aside by Reconstruction in 1867. These crimes were specific to “the free negro” alone, and included mischief, insulting gestures, mistreatment of animals and drinking alcohol. The convict population quadrupled in just a few years, and convicts were soon “leased” out to plantations as free labor. Whites no longer owned blacks—they leased them.

Mississippi pioneered convict leasing, and it was one of the last states to end the practice. It finally did so in 1901, under Gov. James K. Vardaman, who argued that a prison farm run “like an efficient plantation” would provide young African-Americans with “proper discipline, strong work habits and respect for white authority.” Thus, Parchman was born.

Parchman has 18,000 acres of fields planted with crops ranging from cotton to pumpkins tended by 5,000 prisoners. By 1930, Parchman generated the state more than $1 million in annual revenue. In 2004, Parchman produced 3.5 million pounds of vegetables. The 6 million eggs Parchman produced alone were worth $453,455.

Today, 70 percent of Parchman’s prisoners are African-American, though only 37 percent of Mississippi’s population is black.

The prison itself is an enormous camp surrounded by high metal fences topped with razor wire. Guards in towers cradle rifles, high over the assortment of old stone buildings and newer cell blocks. A tall, central tower is mounted with spotlights that cast light down in every direction at night. There is no escape from the towers’ gaze.

Cedric’s bus made its rounds in the camp, disgorging most of its prisoners at Camp 29, which houses general population prisoners. It took him to Camp 32, which is where prisoners in solitary confinement and those on death row are housed. Parchman employs a point system that weighs factors such as the prisoner’s age, the amount of time he has and his number of prior offenses. Even though Cedric had not yet had the opportunity to get into fights or resist guards, he was automatically consigned to solitary, which meant that he would spend 23 hours of every day alone in his cell.

The guards took Cedric into B building and up the stairs to tier five. There was a loud buzz of prisoners talking, rapping and shouting, even though all of them were alone in their cells. The guards stopped him at an open cell and uncuffed his shackles. The bars slid shut. The cell was long and narrow, approximately 8 by 16 feet. On one end, a concrete slab rose from the floor and held a white mattress. Next to it was a concrete shelf prisoners could use as a desk, along with a stool. A toilet sat next to the door, with a sink built in above and behind it. The walls were painted beige, but prisoners had long since scratched cabalistic gang signs and obscene sentiments into the paint. Cedric, dressed in a white T-shirt and his new striped pants, sat on his mattress and opened his Bible to Job 16.

Men open their mouths to jeer at me, they strike my cheek in scorn and unite together against me. God has turned me over to evil men and thrown me into the clutches of the wicked.

Cedric would spend the next five years in solitary confinement. He had no visitors—he insisted that his mother not visit because she had so little money for gas, and it seemed pointless to Cedric because she would only be able to visit for an hour. Instead, Cedric called her once a week. He was completely alone.

The prisoner spent most of every day alone in his cell, reading the Bible, struggling with despair. He spent long hours pouring over the Book of Daniel, praying for God’s protection. More than any other, he read the Book of Job.

Job is the story of a dispute between God and Satan in which Satan claims that Job is only a faithful servant because God has protected and nurtured him. To prove Job’s righteousness, God allows Satan to torment Job with every horror that can befall a man, from having his family killed to losing his property to becoming afflicted with sores. Job’s laments take up much of the book, as he pleads with God for mercy, protesting his innocence. Former friends of Job jeer at his arrogance and argue that he must be guilty of something, or God would not allow him to suffer. Eventually, God restores Job and punishes those who doubted his innocence.

“The Book of Job kept me sane,” Cedric says now, sitting back in his Vardaman Street home. “It was like the angel had already been sent from God with my salvation. He just hadn’t arrived, yet.”

‘You Still Have A Soul’

Every day, Cedric struggled.

“There were times he called me from prison and said he just wanted to break down and cry,” Elayne says. “I told him, ‘Son, there’s nothing wrong with a grown man crying. That lets you know you still have a soul, and you wish things were better. You can cry for that. You still have feelings — they didn’t take that away from you, so if you need to cry, do it. You have no business sitting up there trying to be strong for nobody but yourself.’”

Lights-out came every night at 10 p.m., and then the cell block became very dark, illuminated only by the spotlights outside and a few sparse lamps over the walkways. The cell block echoed with prisoners’ conversations. Cedric would lie on the floor, struggling to read his Bible in the darkness, or he would write letters to his family, his face held just above the paper.

As Cedric struggled, he awaited word on his appeal. Right after the trial ended, his attorney, Winfield, had filed for a direct appeal, which are usually ruled upon within two weeks. Hilburn heard the appeal, but he would not rule on it for another 12 years. Until Cedric received that ruling, he could not file for any post-conviction appeals, because the trial itself was not yet closed.

As a result, Cedric lived in legal limbo, stuck between steps in the system, in solitary at Parchman. The problem was compounded when Winfield withdrew as Cedric’s attorney because Cedric’s family could no longer pay him. Shortly later, Winfield died.

Cedric spent the next 12 years in prison while Mississippi’s criminal justice system sorted out a bureaucratic error.

An ‘Affront’ To Decency

Parchman has a long history of prisoner abuse. In 1970, civil rights attorney Roy Haber began to document widespread abuses there, including rape and murder. In 1972, U.S. District Judge William Keady ruled in Gates v. Collier that Parchman “was an affront to ‘modern standards of decency,’” and he ordered broad reforms, among them ending the practice of making lifers “trusties,” who carried shotguns, guarded other inmates and were paid based on how ruthlessly they kept their crews working.

More recently, in 2003, U.S. District Judge Jerry A. Davis ruled in favor of a prisoner on death row. Prisoners were regularly transferred to cells that were in a shambles, with feces and food smeared on the walls. They had no access to cleaning supplies. There was no heat in the winter and no air conditioning in the summer. The temperature inside cells routinely exceeded 100 degrees, and prisoners’ only relief came from one small, slatted window. Opening that window let in legions of mosquitoes, because the screens covering the windows had rips. Prisoners had no access to ice, and they were only taken to the showers twice a week.

Cedric says that in the summer, prisoners stripped to their boxers and lay on the concrete floor for relief from the heat. The prison sold inmates ancient, rattling box fans for $24, but then the prison seized the fans because prisoners turned them into weapons.

Then there were the ping-pong toilets where “fecal and other matter flushed in one cell will bubble up in the other cell unless the toilets are flushed simultaneously,” as Davis described it in court documents.

“When I was first in there, one time I looked over at my toilet in the morning, and I said, ‘Man, I know I didn’t do that,’” Cedric says. It was not unusual for toilets to overflow and disgorge feces into prisoners’ cells. “I remember one time it was backed up so bad that feces came up through the shower. The whole shower was full of it. I can’t even tell you what it smelled like in there.”

The food was so bad that Cedric could hardly bring himself to eat it on many days. Prisoners prepared the food, and they were always in a rush to get through with work. Old bologna sandwiches would be turned into watery bologna stew. Chicken came out so undercooked that it was still bloody and red in the middle.

“It ain’t like you can take it back and say, ‘Hey, this needs to be cooked some more,’” Cedric says. Prisoners who could afford it bought their own food from the prison’s canteen.

Maw says that Parchman is actually far worse than the legendary penitentiary at Angola, La. “At Angola, they bring in motivational speakers,” Maw says.

“They have long-timers’ day at Angola, where everyone who has served more than 25 years gets a big banquet. It’s awful, because all of these people are locked up for life without parole, but there’s community. In Parchman, it’s just bleak. There’s none of that. Nothing that humanizes people at all or gives them any opportunity to be a community.”

‘It Was A Real Blade’

After five years, in late 2001, Cedric was finally transferred from solitary to the general population at Camp 29.

“We called Camp 29 at Parchman Castle Grayskull,” Cedric says. “It was always going down over there. The ambulance stayed in 29. It was the throw-away camp.”

In the camp, violence erupted without warning and left men clutching at bleeding necks, while other prisoners scrambled out of the way. In 1990, there were more than 2,000 assaults in Camp 29 alone.

Prisoners routinely sharpened their shivs on the concrete in their cells. “Sometimes it sounded like a blacksmith in there. All you could hear was people hammering on their knives and sharpening them,” Cedric says.

Also from scraps, prisoners fashioned picks that would unlock handcuffs. One day, Cedric watched as two handcuffed prisoners talked to a third who was also in cuffs. Suddenly, the cuffs fell away from the two men, and they were stabbing the other prisoner in the chest and neck. “They sharpened them on both sides until they looked like Rambo knives. It was a real blade,” Cedric says.

For exercise, the guards released prisoners into the yard with their hands still cuffed behind their backs. They would have to hold their hands back through the bars for the guards to unlock their cuffs. Those few seconds of helplessness were more than enough time for a prisoner who had hidden a knife to run up and sink it into your belly.

“They called it ‘bar fighting,’” Cedric says. “If someone wants to get you, it’s over with, and the guards don’t care. They’re not going to run in there to save you, especially when those boys have knives in there.”

There was a narrow hall leading into the cafeteria in Camp 29’s K building, with gates on either end. If a prisoner pulled a knife, there was nowhere to run, no room to maneuver. Once, Cedric remembers, prisoners in the hall were splattered with a victims’ blood.

Even just walking down the hall could be perilous. “If you had a problem with somebody, and they couldn’t get you, they’d wait for you to walk by their cell when the guards took you to the shower,” Cedric says. Prisoners would take apart the electrical sockets in their cells and use pilfered wiring to make a “stinger.” They would tie wiring around screws, and then drop the screws in a bucket of water. The current brought the water to a quick boil.

A determined inmate could wait in his cell, watching with a mirror for his enemy. Prisoners made their own mirrors by stretching cellophane thin and tight over tins of chewing tobacco, which they also used to pass messages up and down the cell blocks. Cedric saw men get hit with buckets of boiling water many times. Prisoners added oatmeal, feces or chemicals to the water to enhance the effect. Once, a prisoner threw boiling water on a guard. When they peeled off the guard’s shirt, his skin came away with it.

“You have people in prison who are just evil,” Cedric says. “They did wrong, and they got locked up, and now the world won’t deal with them anymore. But we had to.”

Cedric admits that he was not a model prisoner, though he tried to avoid trouble. “If you carry yourself right, nine times out of 10, you’ll get respect,” Cedric says. “But sometimes, it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen a man get his throat cut open over a pack of noodles. The first time you show a sign of weakness when you’re in prison, then you’ll be dealing with it the rest of the time you’re there. Those guys who let someone take their stuff, it becomes a constant thing. Their lives become miserable. I’ve seen guys doing real bad.”

“But if you go after the guy who’s trying to steal from you, then people will leave you alone, because they know you’ll fight,” Cedric says. “A lot of them don’t want to fight, but they try to be bad, hoping that the man will be scared so he can play him like that. I thought, ‘My mama worked too hard to send me this stuff for you to take it from me.’”

Cedric says that the best way to survive a place like Parchman is to make trusted friends. “There’s good people in prison, too,” Cedric says. “I kept with people who were trying to go home, that wanted to go home even though they had all that time. People who didn’t just say, ‘This is my life, right here.’ They always had hope that some day something could happen for them. I surrounded myself by positive-thinking people, and we would look out for each other.”

Cedric says his friends rarely discussed the time they had left to serve, and he never asked anyone why they had been sent to prison. “It hurts to talk about the fact that you have all of this time. You tell someone you got a life sentence plus 90 years, they look at you different,” Cedric says.

“The whole time in there, I tried to stay focused on one thing: Bozo,” Cedric continues. “You have to stay focused so you mind your own business. You don’t borrow anything from anyone in the penitentiary if you want to make it, because it tends to go somewhere else. My friends and I would help each other. Ask me and you can have it, but don’t take it.”

He Had A Knife

The prisoners weren’t the only dangers at Parchman. “You’ve got nice guards, and then you’ve got troublemakers,” Cedric says. “Some were just decent people. They were there to do their job, and if you didn’t give them trouble, they treated you all right. But some guards, it’s like the job wasn’t enough for them. They had to bring something else.”

Cedric remembers a pervasive culture of corruption among the guards. The prison had video cameras to monitor violence, but they did little good because they were not taped, and the guards who were supposed to watch them often played cards or slept on the couch in the back of the video room. For months, the prison would be filthy and full of violations, but then the guards would hear over their walkie-talkies that inspectors were coming. They would correct the worst offenses before the inspectors arrived, Cedric says.

Sometimes, Cedric became very ill because the guards failed to bring him the medication he takes for his epilepsy. Some guards would talk through the night and only sign the sheet saying they gave out medications. There were nights when Cedric suffered seizures, and other prisoners would bang their shoes on the metal plates at the top of their cell doors to get the guards’ attention.

Abuses by guards went well beyond neglect, however. There were prisoners called “writ-writers” who would help other prisoners request cases for their appeals. “If you got a good writ-writer,” Cedric says, “his name starts to ring around the prison. People hear he might be able to help with a case. When the guards hear about it, they think that this guy is a threat. So they lie. They would write up writ-writers for bogus stuff just to get thrown into the hole.”

“Two-thirds of prisoners in Mississippi are functionally illiterate, and you can’t request cases until you have an active case number,” Maw says. “You can’t get a case number until you make your post-conviction appeal. To make that appeal, you have to list cases, but you can’t request cases to study because you don’t have an active case number. It’s a total catch-22.”

Some guards went beyond harassment to violence. Both male and female guards routinely struck shackled prisoners without provocation. Cedric says that such abuses are commonplace, and are tolerated and/or perpetrated by officials all the way up the chain of command.

“They can cover a man’s murder up,” Cedric continues. “I was locked up for armed robbery and murder. They already saw me as a violent man. So if they killed me, the guards would justify my murder, and no more would be said about it because I’m already locked up for a murder. All they had to do was say he had a knife, coming at me, and we had to do this. And that’s it.”

Old-timers told Cedric that Parchman has improved. Thirty years ago, they told him, guards would simply bury murdered prisoners in the farm’s peach orchards.

The Mississippi Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment on the allegations of abuse.

‘I Am Innocent’

One day in 1998, when Cedric was still in solitary, he sat alone in his cell reading an issue of Vibe magazine. His mother sent him magazines to read, but there were never enough. So Cedric read his magazines from front to back, from the feature articles to the tiny ads in back. That was where he first heard of the Innocence Project. He sat at his high concrete desk and wrote the project a letter.

“I don’t have any money for an attorney and my family doesn’t,” Cedric wrote. “I cannot even afford my (trial) transcript. I am innocent and I need help!”

The Innocence Project receives a daily deluge of letters from prisoners, and they can take only so many cases. Cedric’s aunt pled with the Innocence Project to look at Cedric’s case, and finally, an undergraduate intern, Richard Askin, began to examine Cedric’s case. He became obsessed.

“This case really got him,” Maw says. “He was answering inmate mail, doing basic intern stuff, but he kept reminding us to look at Cedric’s case. He took off three or four weeks, got the whole file, and started going through it.”

Askin went to visit Cedric in Parchman. “I was so happy to see him,” Cedric says. “I had grabbed all of my paperwork, even though I was shackled with handcuffs on, and brought everything down to the visiting room. When I got to see him, he was like, ‘Well, we’re looking at your case, but this is no guarantee. We’re not even appointed to your case, so don’t get so happy.’ And I thought, I don’t even care, as long as you’re looking at it and seeing what I’m seeing.”

The wheels of justice turn slowly. In 2002, Hinds County finally realized that Cedric’s motion for a new trial had never been ruled upon. He was still entitled to an attorney, so the county reassigned public defender Tom Fortner to the case. The Innocence Project contacted Fortner and asked whether they could help with the case. Fortner happily agreed. Three more years passed while Fortner and the Innocence Project built their case that the original trial was fatally flawed. If their motion for a new trial were granted, it would be as if the first trial had never even happened at all. Both the prosecution and defense would start fresh.

Finally, in 2005, Judge Hilburn finally ruled on Cedric’s motion for a new trial, 12 years after an answer was due. He granted it.

Do Not Shackle Him Again

With the new trial granted, Cedric was transferred to the jail at Raymond. Guards at Raymond immediately threw him into solitary again. They said they had to “classify” him.

“It was hard for me to adjust to Raymond,” Cedric says. “In solitary there, it’s a two-man cell. The guy I was with didn’t want to bathe, and man, it was stinky up in there. It was like a toxic cloud when I walked in there. And the food was so nasty. The water didn’t even taste like water—it was brown. I was there all through the holidays, and then one day they told me to get my stuff because I was going downtown.”

Cedric spent another three months in the jail in downtown Jackson, waiting for his pre-trial hearings. Finally, on March 6, 2006, Cedric appeared before Judge Tomie Green. Cedric was hopeful, but this was only a pre-trial motion, to rule once more on whether the evidence that could have exonerated him in the first trial would be admitted into the new trial. It was the point at which everything had gone wrong for Cedric 12 years earlier, but there were some differences this time. For one, Cedric was not sitting beside his attorney, dressed in a new suit. Instead, he sat behind his attorneys in a brown prison suit, his hands and feet shackled. And this time, he had vastly greater legal resources working for his defense.

The defense went through elaborate PowerPoint presentations on the evidence and why the eye-witness identification was tainted. They flew in an expert on eye-witness identification, Solomon Fulero, whose research showed that in cases where prisoners were later exonerated by DNA, the majority of them were wrongfully convicted on the basis of false eye-witness identification. But Green may already have been convinced.

When Fulero arrived in Jackson, his luggage did not arrive with him, and he had nothing formal to wear to the hearing. He rushed to a department store and bought a cheap suit off the rack, but when he took the stand to testify, he was still wearing his Converse All-Stars. The attorney apologized to Green, assuring her that under other circumstances, he would have worn formal footwear, but the airline had lost his luggage.

“Well,” Judge Green said, “at least you didn’t lose 12 years of your life.”

Tears began to spill down Cedric’s cheeks. “At that point, we knew the judge was really paying attention,” Maw says.

Green ruled that police had tainted the identification by Gloria White and her children, and it could not be used in a new trial. “Once the in-court identification was excluded, we had nothing else,” Peterson says. “We had absolutely no other evidence.”

Also, in the new trial, the exculpatory evidence excluded from the first trial would all be presented to a jury. The DNA would exclude him. His alibi for other crimes committed that night would exclude him. The description of the perpetrator would exclude him. “I had no choice but to remand the charges,” Peterson says.

Judge Green sat for a moment at her bench as Cedric’s mind reeled. Then she ordered the sheriff’s deputy to remove Cedric’s shackles. She called Cedric forward to the bench and apologized for all the time he had spent in prison.

“I believe you were innocent 12 years ago,” Green said, “and I believe that you are innocent today. The wheels of justice grind very slowly, but sometimes they grind in the right direction.”

Green ordered that Cedric be returned to jail immediately so he could retrieve his belongings. There would be no more delays, as Green ordered that Cedric was to be released that very day. And Green ordered that he not be shackled again.

“It was the most amazing moment—I haven’t seen a moment like that in court before,” Maw says.

“It took about an hour before they released me from the jail,” Cedric says. “They had to process me. They asked if I had any clothes to wear, and I said, ‘Man, I don’t care how I leave here.’”

Outside, Cedric’s family was waiting for him. Still dressed in his brown prison suit, he ran to his family, embracing relatives he had not seen in 12 years.

‘A Double Injustice’

Maw and Peterson point out that whoever did commit the rape, murder and robberies 12 years ago was never arrested for the crime. When prosecutors dropped the rape charge against Cedric, the police never returned to the case to find the actual perpetrator, which outrages Peterson.

“It’s really a double injustice,” Maw says. “Cedric lost 12 years of his life, and none of the victims ever got justice.”

Since his release, Cedric has begun the difficult task of restoring the life that was cut off when he was arrested. He has gotten a driver’s license and has enrolled in a GED class. He took a trip to Seattle to meet with other exonerated prisoners, and whenever someone is exonerated in Mississippi, he will be there to counsel them on adjusting to life on the outside.

Still, Cedric was released with no education in prison, no job training and not a penny to his name. Even getting his driver’s license was an ordeal that consumed most of two days. He did not have required paperwork because he had been in prison his entire adult life.

Cedric hopes to lobby the Legislature for a restitution law. “I feel that I should get some money. People’s lives have been totally wrecked. I can’t get back the time they took from me. Some of my loved ones have passed away while I was inside. My son has grown up, and I didn’t get to see it. Money would help me a great deal.”

For now, Cedric spends time with his son, now 12, hoping to make up for lost time. He has a new girlfriend; Tiffany is with another man who helped raise C.J. He works odd jobs for now, but he hopes to get a car soon so that he can find full-time work. He lives not far from the neighborhood where he spent his early childhood, in a house Habitat for Humanity built for his mother. She insisted that they build the house with an extra bedroom, because she had faith that one day Cedric would come home. He lives in that bedroom today.

Still, Cedric struggles with life after prison. “I’m walking around free,” Cedric says, “but jail just stays in front of me everywhere I go. The things that were happening in there, the things that I saw, they’re stuck in my head. I saw so many people get killed.”

Cedric is “shaky” in public. He makes note of potential alibis, hour after hour, day after day, in case police come for him again. If he hears sirens, he quickly heads to somewhere safe, where friends or family can see him.

Recently, Cedric returned to the house on Meadowview, where he lived when he was arrested. He went into the room where he was sleeping when the detectives came for him. He retraced his steps through the kitchen, and he stopped in the living room, trying to recall every detail of how it had looked 12 years ago.

In the old house, Cedric thought about his grandmother. Hers was the last familiar face he saw before he entered jail, and now she is gone. She never got to see him exonerated. He stood in the doorway, as bright June sunlight flooded in, just as it had a dozen years before. “This is the last place I lived,” he thought. “My life stopped right here, coming out that door.” It stopped with no warning, he says now. “I worry it could happen again.”

#

FEATURE

LARGE

Hog Wild

Feral pigs are ugly, destructive and mean. Some people in Texas just love to trap, stab or shoot them. Or put them in rodeos. With dogs.

by Todd Spivak

Pickup trucks haul yapping mutts in crowded trailers through the woods in a long, tedious procession, taking an hour to travel seven miles of cratered red-dirt road.

Homemade signs posted on trees point the way to a large grassy field where a woman wearing high-waisted Wranglers, scuffed cowboy boots and a long, frizzy mullet approaches the driver's-side window and demands a $5 entrance fee.

On this sweltering July afternoon in Fred, a tiny Texas town set 40 miles north of Beaumont, dozens of mixed breeds and pit bulls are collared and chained to trees and fence posts. Many are battle-scarred and lean, their rib cages exposed. Their forceful, incessant barking pounds the air.

At a pavilion men sip beer, kids sell barbecue and a lady hunches over a picnic table taking cash and placing bets. A few yards further lies the pen where the hogs are kept.

If you've never seen a feral hog, you need to expel from your mind the image of cuddly barnyard swine. Forget Wilbur, Porky and Babe. Feral hogs have neither soft pink bellies nor coiled tails. There's nothing cute or cartoonish about them.

These are swarthy, mud-colored beasts with large powerful heads and snouts. Wiry hair sprouts in clumps along their backbones. Spiked fangs and scissors-sharp tusks protrude several inches past their lips.

Just outside the pen, women recline in folding chairs with infants tottering on their laps. Men lean forward against the rusted metal enclosure, their hands dangling listlessly into the arena.

Standing on a plank where the hogs are huddled, a teenage boy in a dirty T-shirt and jeans uses a long wooden staff to prod a 200-pound boar through a caged chute. The hog swiftly and silently circles the pen, then stands motionless.

The dogs outside the pen are barking more rapidly now. Some are howling. The contest has begun.

Two curs are set loose in the pen. They race to within three feet of the hog, settle low on their haunches and bark steadily at it.

The dogs hold their ground. They never turn their heads or back away. The hog is four times their size, but they are the aggressors.

The hog does not resist. It just stands there, cowering.

Then, suddenly, the hog breaks, darting between them.

In the woods, the hog might have a chance at freedom. It could thunder through thick brush and cacti, causing the dogs to retreat. But in the pen there's no place to hide.

The dogs quickly catch up. One lunges and sinks its teeth into the hog's right ear. The hog, still running, shakes its head, trying to free itself. It's squealing and grunting loudly now.

The hog momentarily escapes. It leaps several feet into the air and crashes snout-first into the pen. But the moment it bounces back to the ground in a cloud of dust a dog latches onto its side, clamping down hard enough to draw blood, and the hog's high-pitched squeal becomes a deep-throated roar.

To an animal rights activist, this is the money shot: the image held up to convince juries and lawmakers that hog-dog rodeos -- a little-known rural Southern tradition that pits dogs against wild hogs -- are a vicious blood sport that should be outlawed.

In the last couple of years, several states across the South have taken this position. Long debates and impassioned editorials led to a tightening of animal cruelty laws and jail time for organizers and participants in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and the Carolinas.

In Texas, where hog-dog rodeos are held every weekend in rural communities throughout the state, there hasn't even been a conversation.

Jason Schooley is a self-described hawg-dawg fanatic.

"I love those frickin' hogs," he says. "I don't know what I'd do without 'em."

A 250-pound feral hog's head adorns Schooley's living room wall in Beasley, a farming town 40 miles southwest of downtown Houston. A tall gilded trophy stands in the corner from a recent hog-hunting contest. Framed photographs show him crouching with his dogs next to fresh kills.

The 31-year-old Fort Bend County equipment operator has hunted hogs with dogs for more than half his life. He trains hunting dogs and organizes an annual hog-dog rodeo, held at a public park in Needville, which became a point of controversy earlier this year. The event, billed as family entertainment, attracts hundreds of people from across the state.

"My daughter was five when she stuck her first hog," he says, beaming.

As a teenager, Schooley trapped feral hogs in neighboring counties and set them free in the woods behind his family's property, earning him the nickname "Catch-And-Release." These days, to the dismay of farmers whose crops and livestock are frequently ravaged by wild hogs, Schooley and other avid hunters throughout Texas have no problem finding them in their own backyards.

Feral hogs have roamed Texas for centuries. The first domestic swine escaped from Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto during his expedition across the southeast in the mid-1500s. Their survival was later fostered by wealthy American sportsmen who imported European wild hogs to stock hunting preserves and, in eastern Texas, by the herds of domestic hogs once allowed to wander freely.

Domestic hogs become feral after as few as three generations spent in the wild, during which they undergo a werewolf-like transformation. They grow bristly hair and curling tusks, become almost exclusively nocturnal when hunted hard, and develop a thick plate of gristle on their shoulders and sides tough enough to deflect small-caliber bullets.

Feral hogs multiply faster than rabbits, spawning hundreds of offspring during an average life span of 15 to 25 years. Sows can produce two litters a year, with as many as a dozen piglets per litter, and begin breeding at just six months old. They adapt to most any climate and have no natural predators. Nationwide, since 1990, the wild hog population has more than doubled and spread from 19 to 35 states.

Today, Texas is home to some two million feral hogs — more than any other state and nearly half the total population in the entire country. They're most densely populated in East, Southeast and South Texas, though their numbers have increased dramatically in recent years in the central and northern parts of the state. They live in nearly all 254 counties but are less prevalent in the more arid sections of West Texas along the New Mexico border.

An average mature feral hog weighs 75 to 150 pounds. A trophy-size hog prized by hunters ranges from 250 to 450 pounds. And then there are the freakishly large hogs, which tend to incite national media frenzies. In 2003 an 800-pound hog was killed near New Waverly, 60 miles north of Houston. That matches the actual weight of the notorious Hogzilla, the giant hog shot in Georgia that became the subject of a popular National Geographic documentary aired last spring. Several months after Hogzilla, a central Florida man gunned down an alleged 1,100-pound beast dubbed Hog Kong.

Feral hogs, regardless of their size, are enormously destructive. In a matter of hours, they can root up several acres of grain crops, destroying fields of corn, maize, rice and sorghum. They kill pets and small livestock, including calves, goats, lambs and fawns, as well as ground-nesting birds such as turkey and quail. They're also major disease carriers, capable of destroying entire herds of cattle with pseudo-rabies virus and swine brucellosis, which causes abortions and infertility. Every year they cause more than $50 million in damages across Texas, according to a 2004 landowner survey conducted by the Texas Cooperative Extension Service, a division of Texas A&M University.

Locally, in just the last few months, feral hogs have excavated soccer fields at George Bush Park in west Harris County; destroyed wetlands created in northeast Harris County to offset new development; and cost homeowners in Clear Lake, Conroe, Humble, Katy, Magnolia and The Woodlands thousands of dollars in landscaping fees. They run rampant in Brazos Bend State Park, according to Wes Masur, director of law enforcement for the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife. A couple years ago in Fairfield Lake State Park, 90 miles southeast of Dallas, a 150-pound sow attacked a little girl riding her bicycle in the camping loop. The girl, who escaped unscathed, initially thought she was being chased by a bear.

While nobody believes Texas will ever get rid of feral hogs, state officials and several individual counties have taken some creative measures to control the population. Earlier this year the Texas Department of Agriculture gave $500,000 to Texas A&M and Texas Tech universities to assess feral hog damage to crops and to research reproductive control methods. In 2003, officials in Van Zandt County, set 60 miles east of Dallas, instituted a bounty, paying trappers $7 for every pair of matched hog ears. In 14 months, the county doled out more than $14,000 for 2,062 sets of ears, according to Brian Cummins, who oversaw the program.

The state employs three techniques for killing feral hogs. They're baited into steel traps with shelled corn, then shot; lured into neck snares that can tighten and asphyxiate them when they squirm; and, most extravagantly, shot down from low-flying helicopters with 12-gauge semiautomatic shotguns. The state operates two helicopters and two small planes for predatory animal control. Historically these were used solely to kill coyotes in West Texas and in the Hill Country. About 10 years ago the state began employing the aircraft to hunt wild hogs.

Just last month state workers gunned down 320 hogs during a four-day hunt in Matagorda County along the Gulf Coast. In 2005 the state killed more than 11,000 hogs. One-third of these were caught in neck snares; half were taken in aerial gunning missions. A ground crew often coordinates with the pilots, scaring packs of hogs out of heavy cover and into open fields. The carcasses are left in the field to rot. "We try to finish 'em off," says Texas Wildlife Services district supervisor Gary McEwen, "and let 'em lie for the vultures."

The state also hosts workshops in which landowners are taught how to trap feral hogs and sell them to USDA-approved slaughterhouses, where the hogs are killed using the captive-bolt method, essentially a pistol shot to the skull. These plants pay as much as 25 cents per pound plus a $5 head bonus. A 200-pound hog brings $55. Feral hogs are said to have a lean, mildly gamy flavor and are considered a delicacy in high-end restaurants on the east and west coasts as well as overseas. "They end up on white-clothed tables across Europe," says Dick Koehler, vice president of Frontier Meats in Fort Worth, which sells the wild hog meat to distribution centers in Italy and Switzerland.

State officials depend heavily on hunters such as Schooley, who volunteers countless hours to killing hogs that destroy neighboring farmland. The Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife allows a year-long hunting season with no bag limits, no possession limits and no weapons restrictions. A license isn't even required when hunting on property damaged by wild hogs. "This time of year my phone rings nonstop because of that grain," Schooley says.

Like many hog hunters, Schooley pursues the animals on horseback. He goes out with several tracking dogs that corner the hog until he arrives. While the hog is preoccupied with the barking dogs, Schooley grabs the hog by its hind leg, flips it on its side and stabs it behind the front quarter with an eight-inch-long double-edged blade. "A knife to the heart is quicker than a gunshot to the head," he says.

It's a dangerous sport. Already this year two of Schooley's dogs were killed on hunts. One dropped from heat exhaustion; the other was gutted by a charging boar. Though Schooley has only been mildly cut up and nipped at, several years ago a friend in Brazoria County was gored in his upper thigh and nearly bled to death. Schooley doesn't worry, though.

"It's an adrenaline rush," he says. "It's an addiction."

Fort Bend County District Attorney John Healey is no fan of feral hogs. One evening last fall, while on their way to Sugar Land for dinner and a movie, Healey and his wife were cruising in their convertible Toyota MR2 when a 250-pound hog darted out of a creek bottom and into the road. Healey braked and swerved but couldn't avoid smacking into it. The hog was fine: It quietly darted back into the woods. The car wasn't: Repairs ran to $700. And their evening plans were dashed. But it could have been worse. "If I had hit it square-on," Healey says, "it would have been in our laps."

Healey never imagined that just a few months later he'd be defending the animals.

The controversy began with a complaint to the sheriff's department. A county resident saw flyers posted around town announcing the sixth annual Danny Hill Memorial Hog Baying taking place May 13 at the youth rodeo arena in Needville. They included a photo of a man straddling the back of a large tusked hog. Admission was $3. The event included a pig chase for kids. "No catch dogs or cameras allowed," it read. At the bottom was Jason Schooley's cell phone number.

The resident complained to a deputy sheriff and several local media outlets, which tipped off the Houston Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Healey had no clue what hog-baying entailed. So he called Schooley into his office for an explanation.

First thing you need to know, Schooley told him, is there are two kinds of hog-dog rodeos: bay trials and catch trials.

In hog-bay trials, one or two dogs are released into a pen with a wild hog. But they're not supposed to touch it. The dogs' job is to corner the hog, keeping it at bay. The dogs most commonly used are mixed breeds such as Catahoulas and black-mouth curs. Judges for these contests evaluate the following criteria: how close the dog gets to the hog, the constancy of its barking and whether it maintains steady eye contact with the hog.

In hog-catch trials, a pit bull is usually released into a pen with a wild hog. In these typically bloodier events, the dog's job is to catch the hog with its teeth on the ear, snout or chest and wrestle it to the ground for a five-second count. The dog often bites down so hard that several men are needed to step on the animals and pry them apart with what is known as a breakstick. A stopwatch is used to determine which dog catches the hog in the fastest time.

In both bay trials and catch trials, the hogs always lose. Their tusks usually have been removed ahead of time with bolt cutters or a steel pipe and a hammer, rendering them defenseless. But proponents say the purpose is not to get the animals to fight. Rather, they say, the purpose is to train the dogs, which compete against each other. Indeed, in bay trials dogs are docked points or disqualified for biting a hog. Some bay trial enthusiasts condemn catch trials as cruel to animals. Schooley says both events are critical for training dogs to hunt feral hogs.

Animal rights activists dismiss this argument, saying neither bay trials nor catch trials simulate actual hunts. And, they contend, people are unlikely to enter an inexperienced dog in a competition since there's money on the line.

Gambling at a hog-dog rodeo is completely different from what a horse- or dog-racing bettor would expect. In an open auction held before the contests begin, participants and spectators compete to sponsor a dog. Each dog can have just one sponsor, though you can sponsor multiple dogs. A Calcutta is held at the end of every round of 30 or more one-minute-long contests, in which 70 percent of the money in the pot is divvied up among the first- and second-place winners. The remaining 30 percent goes to the organizers to cover costs and make a modest profit. A winning dog can earn its sponsor hundreds, even thousands, of dollars, depending on the number of people betting.

Schooley shot straight with the D.A. Yes, it's true, there would be gambling, he admitted. But last year's contest, he said, also raised $11,000, which was donated to the Future Farmers of America program at B.F. Terry High School in Rosenberg, the Texas Dog Hunters Association and the American Cancer Society. He also admitted that although the Needville event was a bay trial, occasional biting was inevitable. After all, the dogs are trained to attack. In past years, Schooley said, it was not uncommon for a dog to shred a hog's ears, scrotum or snout. But, in such cases, the dogs are pried off as quickly as possible.

Healey prosecutes a handful of dogfighting and cockfighting cases every year. He pointed Schooley to Section 42.09 of the Texas Penal Code, which explicitly forbids causing one animal to fight with another. Both forms of hog-dog rodeos, he figured, broke the state's animal protection laws. "When an injury's inflicted, that's fighting," Healey told him. "It's a violation of the law waiting to happen."

The Office of the Attorney General of Texas upheld this view 12 years ago. State Senator John Whitmire, a 32-year veteran Democratic lawmaker who represents northern Harris County, requested the attorney general opinion after being sent a videotape of "dogs brutalizing hogs in a closed facility about the size of a garage."

Rick Gilpin, assistant attorney general under Dan Morales, concluded in response: "... We believe it is obvious that such conduct establishes on its face an awareness by the defendant that his 'conduct is reasonably certain to cause' ... a 'fight' between the dog or dogs and the other animal. Thus, we can state with confidence that the scenario ... describes an offense."

Hog-dog rodeos are still held every weekend in counties across Texas despite the apparent consensus by the attorney general's office and some district attorneys that both bay trials and catch trials are illegal. Many, including the event held last month in Fred, are advertised in Bayed Solid, a Louisiana-based monthly magazine named for the expression hunters use when a dog properly corners a hog. These advertisements include the names and phone numbers of the organizers and directions to the event. The August edition features ads for bay trials in Centerville, Lufkin and Village Mills.

In 1999, former Houston state representative Ron Wilson sponsored legislation to specifically ban hog-dog rodeos. Like Whitmire, Wilson had seen footage of an event held in East Texas. "They say they're training the dogs, but that's bullshit," says Wilson, an attorney who hunts wild hogs in Central Texas. "It's just a hedonistic, barbaric form of cheap entertainment."

Wilson received several death threats for carrying the bill, which died in committee after some 200 people attended a hearing to oppose it. "You'd be surprised how many supporters there are for practices like that in Texas," says Wilson. "They acted like I was trying to take the red off the flag."

Legislator Whitmire suspects law enforcement officials know that hog-dog rodeos are taking place but choose to ignore them.

"In many counties it's very difficult to get a prosecution, in part because of apathy of law enforcement," says Skip Trimble, a Dallas resident and member of the Texas Humane Legislation Network. "Some just don't think animal cruelty is a big deal."

Brazoria County District Attorney Jeri Yenne says she has heard that such events occur in her area but has never received a specific complaint. Even so, she's not entirely convinced they're illegal.

"What one person perceives as cruel, another does not," Yenne says. "Some people are raised with belts and switches; others think that's a felony."

In early May, less than two weeks before the hog-dog rodeo was set to take place in Needville, Healey "strongly urged" Schooley to cancel it.

The Fort Bend/Southwest Sun ran a front-page story on the controversy. Relatives of Danny Hill — the event's namesake, a childhood friend of Schooley's who died in a car wreck at age 31 — no longer wanted his name attached to the event if it was going to be denigrated.

Schooley called off the event, but he doesn't get what the fuss is about. The hog-bay trial, he says, offered good, clean family entertainment that raised money for the community.

He goes on to condemn the well-publicized raid earlier this month of a pit bull breeding operation in Liberty County, in which authorities seized more than 300 of the aggressive terriers used for illegal dogfighting. Ninety-five percent of these dogs will be euthanized, according to lead investigator Mark Timmers, a sergeant for Harris County Precinct 6.

"Why are these so-called animal rights folks considered humane when all they did is round up and kill the dogs?" Schooley asks. "Those dogs are amazing athletes bred to fight. They love it."

Once, Schooley says, while on a hunt, his dogs caught a hog several miles away. By the time he got to the scene, the dogs had eaten so much of the hog, they were passed out next to it. The hog was still breathing, though its face was completely chewed off from behind its ears to the tip of its snout.

"It was the most grotesque fucking thing I've ever seen," he says. "But putting a hog in a pen, where it's not gonna get killed, where it's probably not even gonna get hurt, that's against the law. Come on!"

Even Healey is sympathetic to this argument. Referring to the state's aggressive tactics for getting rid of feral hogs, he says, "Some would probably find aerial shootings to be more offensive."

In deep woods after midnight, under an enormous Texas sky aglow with constellations, Scott Trammell steps into a stirrup and sits atop his horse. One hand balances a flashlight with the reins; the other shields his face as he spurs the steed forward through heavy brush thick with cacti and tangled tree limbs. He pauses in a clearing. A thin line of blood streaks the left side of his face like war paint.

Crickets chirp; a merciful breeze whistles through the leaves; ten collared curs rustle the tall grasses on all sides. More than three hours have passed. Trammell, a construction worker in San Antonio, wonders aloud to his friend — Jason Fairchild, who rides alongside on a mule and knows these 1,000 acres 50 miles southeast of the Alamo City like the back of his hand — if they're going to come up empty.

Just then, the dogs disappear. The two men stop, cock their heads and strain to listen. A couple of minutes pass. Silence.

Faintly, in the distance, a dog barks. Another minute passes. More barking. A hog squeals. The men take off, breaking into a short gallop for a half-mile or so along an open trail. As they ride closer, the dogs rally, barking like mad. The hog's cries are like a woman's hysterical screams interspersed with deep guttural snorts and growls.

The men leap from their animals, tie them to trees and crawl through the dense brush. Trammell clicks his flashlight off, knowing a hog will charge at the light.

All 10 dogs are mobbing the 80-pound sow, which lies motionless, though it continues to shriek and squeal. The dogs' powerful jaws are clamped to every side of the hog, tearing at its limbs, ears and snout. They rip a hole in the sow's stomach, unravel its long, slimy intestines and drag them through the dirt.

The hog dies a few minutes later, but the dogs go on chewing at its flesh and playing with its innards. Trammell grabs a couple of dogs by their collars and yanks them off. He slaps the others on their noses with the back of a knife. "Dead hog," he tells them. "Dead hog; dead hog; dead hog; dead hog."

Trammell runs his knife along the sow's stomach and chest, then plunges a hand inside, searching for piglets. There are none. Even so, he says to his friend, triumphantly, "Killing that one little baby sow saved us hundreds of hogs."

John Goodwin has one word for the way most hunters kill wild hogs: obscene.

"Scaring a wild boar with a dog, then jumping on it, stabbing it with a knife, while the animal bleeds in agony — of course we're against that," says Goodwin, deputy manager for animal fighting issues with The Humane Society of America in Washington, D.C.

According to Goodwin, hunters "should be sharpshooters able to put a single bullet through a vital organ."

Many critics consider the Humane Society an anti-hunting group bent on outlawing the use of dogs for hunting any animals, including squirrels, doves, ducks, pheasants, quails and, yes, wild hogs. Goodwin doesn't deny this. But he says it's not an issue the group is currently working on.

By lobbying for legislation and assisting law enforcement in raiding events, the Humane Society has played a central role in efforts to crack down on hog-dog rodeos across the South.

Louisiana, one of just two states that still allow cockfighting, in 2004 became the first to ban hog-catch trials. Leading up to the vote, legislators engaged in "a boisterous hour-long House debate in which one lawmaker wore a hog nose and scores of others squealed and clucked animal noises," according to the Times-Picayune.

"I'm sure they still go on," says Republican state Representative Warren Triche Jr., who wrote the legislation. "Once we made it illegal, they started going underground with it."

The Louisiana law exempts the popular Uncle Earl's Hog Dog Trials, which draws hundreds of Texans every year. The event was started in 1995 to celebrate former governor and well-known hog hunter Earl K. (brother of Huey) Long's 100th birthday.

Also in 2004, law enforcement in Alabama, Arizona and South Carolina joined forces in what was the first major interstate crackdown on hog-dogging. The raids led to at least a dozen arrests and the confiscation of several dozen catch dogs and feral hogs. Many cases are still pending, including the forthcoming trial of Vicky Stultz Land, the top animal-control official for Chester County in North Carolina, who is charged with animal fighting and baiting by the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division.

Mary Luther, president of the South Carolina-based International Catchdog Association, was arrested in the raids and charged with animal fighting, though a jury later found her not guilty. Cases are pending against her longtime boyfriend and her son, who is autistic. "They have taken this to phenomenally ridiculous heights," Luther says, adding that her family owes $80,000 in legal fees.

Unrepentant, Luther says she continues to organize hog-dog rodeos across the South. Luther can't understand why hogs are being singled out for sympathy. She also organizes fights that pit dogs against raccoons and foxes in pens. "The dogs shred the foxes to pieces, but nobody cares about that," she says. "It's silly to care about hogs but not foxes and coons."

After Luther was acquitted, the South Carolina legislature responded by passing a bill that amends its animal fighting laws to include pitting dogs against wild hogs with the intent of causing them to fight. It also raised penalties for blood sports, which includes hog-dogging. It is now a felony-level offense to attend a hog-catch trial as a spectator, to supply the animals or to own the pit where it is staged. The bill was signed into law this summer.

Alabama, Mississippi and North Carolina also passed laws this summer banning the contests. Similar bills failed in Georgia and Tennessee. Goodwin says the issue will be raised again in each of these states during the next legislative session.

The Texas legislature has not broached the issue of hog-dog rodeos since Wilson's bill was quashed in committee seven years ago. There is no record of any prosecution or conviction in Texas against people who stage such events, despite the attorney general's 1994 opinion that they violate animal cruelty laws.

At the time of the raids two years ago, Goodwin says, the Humane Society was also investigating several Texans known for promoting hog-catch trials over the internet. "We just didn't get to these guys," he says. "But we shook that world up and forced them into the catacombs."

One of the organization's prime suspects was 45-year-old Steve Johnson, a carpenter and East Texas native who lives in Spring. For Johnson, hunting with dogs is a family tradition that began with his grandfather, an avid bird hunter.

Since being diagnosed with epilepsy four years ago, Johnson no longer hunts hogs on a weekly basis. Instead of hunting on horseback, he now goes out with friends every couple of months on an all-terrain vehicle. An American bulldog, used as a catch dog, rides along, perched on the hood of the four-wheeler.

Johnson admits he helped organize several hog-catch competitions in the Huntsville area but claims he's no longer involved. He says he knows many of the people who were arrested, as well as other organizers in states across the South.

Johnson isn't surprised that the Humane Society targeted him for prosecution.

"Apparently they take me as some cruel animal treater," he says. Pointing to the bulldog lying on his kitchen floor with a litter of two-week-old pups, he says: "It's bullshit; I'm an animal lover."

According to Goodwin, hogs are used repeatedly until they're severely mauled or killed by the dogs. Apple vinegar is often poured on the hogs' wounds to help them heal faster so they can return to the ring. Goodwin went undercover to a hog-catch trial in South Carolina and saw hogs with their ears completely torn off. One hog's face was bitten so severely, he says, that when it ate, pieces of corn fell through the wound.

Johnson says he has never seen a hog or a dog killed at a contest. People at the events take care of the animals, he says. After all, a good catch dog can fetch as much as $2,000. And processing plants won't buy hogs that are badly wounded.

He adds that a hog doesn't feel pain. A squeal, he says, is "an alarm signal sent out to other hogs." But this, he says, is something animal rights activists and city slickers in general don't understand.

"They think we're all uneducated, stupid poor people on welfare and food stamps thirsty to see gore and blood and guts," Johnson says. "We don't want to see gore. We want to see a dog perform. It's like a gymnast scoring a 10 on the uneven bars. When a dog makes a great catch, people go, 'Beautiful! That dog is awesome!' "

Pass a watermelon stand, a one-lane bridge and a tiny cemetery, then turn left onto a winding dirt road across from a barely legible homemade sign that reads El Perro Muerto.

Translation: The Dead Dog.

Disregard the morbid name. This popular all-night hog-bay trial, held on August 12 some 25 miles south of Seguin, has the feel of a town fair.

At the center of all the activity is a lit pen, 80 steps across. A pair of judges take their seats high above the pen on old barbershop chairs welded to garbage cans.

Hundreds of people come and go throughout the night. Some hail from as far away as Katy or even Louisiana.

A few miles down the road are exotic game ranches, where hunters pay top dollar to shoot animals such as elk, rhinos and zebras.

Nearby Nixon is home to Dan Moody, a commercial hunter who claims his Texas Dogs on Hogs video series — which depicts actual feral hog hunts edited with slow-motion effects and classic-guitar riffs — has sold 20,000 copies worldwide.

Two men stand along the inside of the pen holding plywood used to protect themselves and to break up any fights that may occur between the animals. Each dog has one minute to bay the hog. If a dog bites, it's disqualified.

In the first contest, the dog freezes, cowers just outside the gate and never even approaches the hog.

In the next contest, the dog boldly runs up to the hog and stops a few feet away, barking at it. The hog takes one step forward and the dog flinches, doubling back to the gate as the crowd roars in laughter.

A few matches later produces the only injury of the night. A black-mouth cur, just 11 months old and weighing less than 50 pounds, takes on a 225-pound boar. The puppy holds its own. But when the contest ends, the guys with the plywood have some trouble getting the hog back into the chute. It's then that the hog suddenly charges at the dog and slashes its neck, cutting into muscle.

"The dog was at fault because he quit baying," says Bill Seger, the dog's owner, who also organizes a hog-bay trial held every other month in Waelder. "He took his eyes off the hog and started sniffing the ground."

Seger cleans the dog's wound with povidone-iodine and hydrogen peroxide, administers a shot of penicillin and clamps the skin back together with a surgical stapling gun.

Many hog hunters are self-taught field veterinarians. A South Texas man at the event sells puncture-proof vests for dogs as well as suture kits and blood-stop powder. He travels to hog-dog rodeos every weekend plying his wares.

A couple of hours pass. No more scrapes or mishaps occur. The audience is generally good-natured, cheering on the dogs. Some put on spectacular performances. They get in front of the hog, bark incessantly and maintain a laserlike focus, keeping the hog completely still. When the hog takes a step the dog shadows it, cutting off its path and holding it captive.

"This is a way to make money off the sport," says 22-year-old Harry White, an avid hog hunter from Waelder. "If you show you have bad-ass dogs, people want your puppies."

During a break, a pig chase is held. A baby feral hog, just a couple of months old, its mouth taped shut, is dragged by its hind leg and dropped into the pen. A dozen or so kids run after it, screaming and laughing. "I pushed it down and jumped on it!" says ecstatic 8-year-old Deven Spurlock, describing his victory. "I want a hog-dog for my birthday!"

White and others say these events are especially fun for kids. But what about experts who say kids are more prone to commit violence after witnessing them?

"Then get rid of the cartoons," White says. "Take the video games away; take the TV away."

Nichole Trammell, whose 7-year-old daughter loves watching the hogs and dogs square off, agrees.

"To me, it's not violent," she says. "All the kids grow up with this. It's part of their lives."

Nichole's husband, Scott, who runs El Perro Muerto, puts it simply: "A lot of people would call this cruelty to animals. We don't."

So where do these folks draw the line?

"I've seen guys gut-shoot a hog in the woods and let it run off," says Seger. "That's way more cruel than anything that goes on here."

Jason Schooley is fine with all of it.

Hog-catch trials?

"The hogs don't even get hurt," he insists. "People don't realize how tough those bastards are."

#

FOOD

SMALL

Swirl N’ Spit

Gloria Ferrer Champagne Caves

by Daedalus Howell

Twenty years ago, world-wide sparkling-wine juggernaut Freixenet opened the sprawling Gloria Ferrer Champagne Caves on Highway 121, though technically, the popular winery and roadside attraction proffers neither Champagne nor, geologically speaking, caves.

Be assured, Gloria Ferrer has not eschewed ye old chestnut that true "Champagne" only hails from the Champagne region of France, though the winery does employ the same "méthode champenoise" process and uses traditional Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes. Rather, the winery had the chutzpah to carve a subterranean wine lair into a Sonoma hillside on the southern end of the Carneros appellation and simply call it a Champagne cave. When I called a tasting-room associate about the misnomer, she justified it as "freedom of speech." I could only reply, "Vive liberté!"

On a recent weekend visit to the winery, the large staff appeared comprised entirely of young women, ditto for the doe-eyed servers moving purposefully across the terrace clutching Champagne flutes. I entertained the passing notion that the winery might be some sort of ersatz gynotopia or a training camp for super-villainesses. Surely somewhere on the palatial grounds, jumpsuit-clad women were doing calisthenics or perfecting their death-yoga technique. I took a seat with a spectacular view of the valley and was soon presented with a tasting flight of sparkling wines. Echoes of Goldfinger ran through my mind:

"Do you expect me to drive, Goldfinger?"

"No, Mr. Howell, I expect you to drink."

And drink I did, though I later learned from my designated driver that I was merely expected to "taste" the wines.

The Sonoma Brut was a fine curtain opener — a spiny, mean little thing with an acid tongue that suggested a smack on the lips from a femme fatale's kid sister — haughty, brash and delightfully immature. Conversely, the languid Blanc de Noirs was a real wallflower. Notes of cherry and strawberry lurked among the bubbles, but ultimately the wine seemed reluctant. The 1996 Royal Cuvée was a nutty, toasty experience defined by a gorgeous over-ripeness, like a love affair postponed and finally realized. Its only rival was the 1996 Carneros Cuvée, which had a delicious full-bodied sizzle — the accompanying tasting notes crowed, "Eight years to create and six senses to impress." Indeed, it was so delectable, I could not help but quietly resent it.

Gloria Ferrer, 23555 Carneros Hwy., Sonoma. Open daily, 10am to 5pm. Cave tours at noon, 2pm and 4pm. $4-$10 tasting fee. 707-996-7256.

#

Swirl N’ Spit

Bartholomew Park Winery

by Daedalus Howell

The kid sister of wine juggernaut Gundlach Bundschu, stately Bartholomew Park Winery is nestled in the Sonoma hills on the site of a former women's prison — an odd but scenic locale for something that sounds like it belongs in a Henry James novel.

The warden and guards are long gone, and I was warmly greeted inside by a sage trio of wine women perched behind the counter. Kathy and Connie are veteran staffers recently joined by Mychal, to whom bits of their wisdom seem to drift, effortlessly, like the filaments of a dandelion. When I mentioned the local lore about a prison ghost at the winery, wide-eyed Mychal confessed to having just heard of it, Connie reiterated my query neutrally to Kathy, who effectively exorcised the ghost by nonchalantly saying, "She's gone." Public-relations lesson learned: there is no ghost. No worries, Bartholomew Park makes up for its lack of the supernatural with a bevy of preternatural wines.

Consider the 2005 Sauvignon Blanc sourced from San Lucas Vineyard in Monterey County; it's practically the summer solstice in a bottle. A sip of this wine, and you're a child running through the sprinklers, a flock of badminton shuttlecocks overhead and nary a weed underfoot. A pale blonde wine drenched in citrus kisses, it would pair well with a sundress and a mild sunburn (with just enough sting to prove you've been dancing in the sun). Serve poolside with a lawn chair and paperback.

Likewise, the 2002 Merlot, sourced from the Desnudos Vineyards (a former nudist colony looming over the Sonoma Valley), boasts hints of tobacco, brambly blackberry and the deepest black cherry — the breath of the wrong acquaintance whispering the right words in your ear at a party. It's a devilish wine, like the person you're not sure you're avoiding or saving for later and, made from 100 percent Merlot grapes, suffers no Pinot envy (curse you “Sideways!”).

I followed with the 2003 Kasper Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, an earthy, broad-shouldered wine with mature tannins and notes of currant, raspberry and, inexplicably, Fudgesicle, or more specifically, Fudgesicle on an Oak Stick. A pleasant, full-bodied wine, its closest rival on Batholomew's list is its older sibling, the 2001 Estate Vineyard Cab, which is marked by dark berry flavors augmented with notes of cooled espresso. Its suggested cellaring time is five to 15 years, but if you don't have a cellar, I suggest using the next best thing: a corkscrew.

Bartholomew Park Winery, 1000 Vineyard Lane, Sonoma. Open daily, 11am to 4:30pm. Tasting fee, $5. 707-935-9511.

#

Swirl N’ Spit

Wilson Winery

by Daedalus Howell

There are endless permutations of ye olde "friends don't let friends [insert your clever verbiage here]" trope, but what friends should certainly never do is let their pals drink shitty wine. To wit, whenever someone suggests a wine to me, I patiently explain that our friendship hangs in the balance should I find their palate wanting. So it was with some trepidation that I visited Healdsburg's Wilson Winery.

Wilson, of course, is the name of a volleyball manufacturer, whose popularity spiked when one of its balls cameoed as Tom Hanks' desert isle pal in Cast Away. That a replica of this placid prop was grinning from a corner of the tasting room momentarily caused me to want to flee and forever bid my friends adieu.

The notion was permanently washed away, however, upon tasting the 2001 Sydney's Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon ($28), the snake-oil pitch for which could be "an elixir that buttresses the soul, raises the spirit and gives you moxie." I believed every sip. Its earthy aroma recalled the rich scent of baker's chocolate. Remember when you were a kid and discovered this lost treasure in the pantry only to bite into a brick of bitter? This wine completely makes up for it--put some in your inner child's ba-ba.

If paired with a grapefruit, the 2004 Blushing Flamingo Merlot rosé ($16) would make the perfect Breakfast of Champions lite. A fine rosé with exotic guava and melon notes to spare, it's a fine way to start the day, particularly when friends don't let friends dry out. This bird is merely a curtain opener, however, for the 2004 Tori's Vineyard Zinfandel ($26), which makes such an honest stab at divinity that the blood of Christ looks like Kool-Aid in comparison. This deep, creamy flush of blackberries, freshly roasted coffee and pepper is a French kiss direct from God. Only 336 cases were produced — shall we go in on some together? And do you have a truck? After all, friends don't let friends drink alone.

Wilson Winery, 1960 Dry Creek Road, Healdsburg. Open daily, 11am to 5pm. Tastings are $5; $10 for reserves. 707-433-4355.

#

FOOD

LARGE

Out of the Flames

L.A.'s best roasted, grilled sizzled and wood-baked cooking

by Jonathan Gold

It is the coldest night of the year, the winds have started to blow, and I am driving along Olympic Boulevard in East Los Angeles, ravenously hungry, looking for one of the itinerant flame-throwing taco carts that sprout in that neighborhood around midnight. You also may belong to L.A.’s great brotherhood of taco eaters, huddled around trucks late at night, balancing three ounces of highly spiced meat and drawing furtively from an icy bottle of imported Mexican Coke.

There’s something about the smell of charring meat, the fire, the island of warmth and light in the cold dark, that can practically compel you to stand around, to eat off soggy paper plates balanced on the roof of your car, to inhale varieties of sweet, dilute fruit juice that you ordinarily wouldn’t drink on a bet, to watch the cone of marinated pork blackening on its flame-licked spit as if it were the final minutes of the World Cup. You munch still-muddy radishes to sweeten your breath, but the stink of onions and garlic and cilantro and pig flesh will haunt you like a friendly ghost for days.

You might actually strike up a conversation with your fellow devotees if not for the certainty that all that is beautiful and holy about the mess of corn and gristle in front of you would evaporate as soon as you said hello. If you’ve been there, you know: The chi, the elusive fire-energy of tacos, vanishes seconds after the tacos are served. Unless you happen to be standing outside in the dark, you’ll never experience it at all — the moment when the guy who owns the cart dips the tiny tortillas in a fetid-looking vat of oil, toasts them on his propane-fueled griddle, and sprinkles them with a few grizzled scraps of freshly grilled al pastor and a sliver of burnt pineapple that has been roasting atop the tower of flesh. You eat the tacos when they are still hot enough to raise small blisters on the roof of your mouth. There is no better food on earth.

Does it matter that my favorite stand, set up most evenings in front of an auto body shop, has no name, no license, and may not be there tomorrow or next week? Does the stand’s precariousness, the fact that its lights are powered through cables attached to the battery of a constantly running old car, and the surreptitious nature of the transaction flavor the experience? Or is it the lashings of cumin in the meat’s marinade, the careful grilling and the elegant green salsa that has a family resemblance to a hotly spiced Punjabi chutney?

There are few things in this world more primal than bits of meat and bread snatched off the communal fire, a form of eating as old as mankind itself, and there is scarcely a culture outside the Arctic that does not have its version of the ritual. Anthropologists tend to point to the transition from grilling to pot cooking as one of the earliest signs of civilization, but there is something about the smell of smoke, the dripping grease, the feeling of teeth tearing into flesh that awakens the hungry animal in us, probes the deepest pleasure center in our brains.

The meals that have meant the most over the years have almost always involved live fire — the plate of wild mushrooms roasted by the side of the road in the mountains of northern Catalonia; the sizzling skewers of lamb cooked by elderly Malay men on braziers set up near Singapore’s municipal cricket pitch; the flattened chickens crisping over a hot wood fire around the corner from Perugia’s cathedral; the magnificent skewers of beef heart grilling on half the street corners in downtown Lima.

When my wife and I hitchhiked across Gascony to eat lunch at Michel Guerard’s restaurant in Eugenie-les-Bains, the foie gras and the caramel dessert may have been the best of their kind in the world, but it is the buttery, fragrant chimney-smoked lobster that still inhabits my dreams almost 20 years later. Italians are geniuses of fire, and although I have eaten in many of the famous palaces of cuisine, it is the thick steaks cooked in the fireplace of a country house, the spit-roasted quail, the Umbrian flatbread born out of an olive-wood blaze, the cracker-thin Roman pizzas pulled out of wood-burning ovens, that speak most profoundly. I have never been able to go to a famous restaurant in Italy without looking longingly at that loud trattoria just off the main square, the one with grilling sausages in the window, a house wine grown within sloshing distance, and a menu of the gnarly local specialties that will never make it to Beverly Hills.

The welcome of the smell of wood smoke — the slightly acrid reek of mesquite, the spicy note of oak, the rustic, burnished sweetness of hickory — lets you know, from the moment you walk into a dining room, that you are someplace warm, safe and companionable, where nothing bad could ever happen to you. The inability of chefs to get certain dishes quite right in their traditional form — paella, bouillabaisse or even carnitas — may have less to do with the availability of ingredients than it does with the lack of a roaring, wood-fueled blaze.

Southern California cooking is an easy cuisine in its most basic form: Dad on the patio grilling steaks, Mom making a big salad, a pot of beans on the stove, a cold, sweaty beer. Los Angeles is a young city, but it has always had its own cuisine, based on the quality of its produce, the ease of its style, the pleasantness of being able to barbecue outside in your shirtsleeves almost every day of the year. The vaqueros ate like that in California’s early days, and so did the Midwesterners when they settled here at the beginning of the last century. The Sunset magazine, men-grilling paradigm of the 1950s was a continuation of the aesthetic. When it is 72 degrees outside and the surf is up and Vin Scully is on the radio, who has the patience for casseroles or stews? People may be flexible about Chinese noodle shops, but they will defend their favorite barbecue pit to the death.

Still, traditional high-end restaurant cooking has always shied away from live-fire cooking. Exalted Italian chefs leave the grilling to their country cousins. French chefs, I suspect, think that the flavors developed by the grill are too strong, too alarming, too likely to overpower the delicate bouquet of an old La Lagune.

“When I worked at the old Ma Maison,” says Mark Peel, feeding an oak log into a firebox at his restaurant Campanile, “we didn’t even have a grill in the restaurant. When somebody ordered a steak, we’d heat a metal rod until it was red hot, and then — sssss, sssss, sssss — we’d brand grill marks into the meat before we sautéed it. It looked great, and I don’t think anybody ever knew the difference.”

In 1982, the chef at Ma Maison, Wolfgang Puck, opened the original Spago on the Sunset Strip, the restaurant that took wood-fire cooking out of the patio in Los Angeles and placed it squarely in the context of fine dining, possibly the first kitchen in the United States to put the grill man (who happened to be Peel) at the number-one position on the hot line. At Spago, not just the steaks but the squab, the chicken, the John Dory, the tuna, the calves’ liver and the salmon came off the big grill. The duck and the lamb and the sea bass passed through the wood-burning oven, which also cooked the pizzas. There was a new kind of cooking in Los Angeles, with a flavor as old as time.

Nearly 25 years later, live fires still burn everywhere in every neighborhood, baking bread in Indian tandoors and Iranian tanours, charring Japanese yakitori and Indonesian satay, blackening Mexican carne asada and Peruvian chickens and African-American ribs. When Mario Batali, the most notorious Italian chef in the country, came to Los Angeles to open an upcoming restaurant with Nancy Silverton, the first thing they looked for was a space that would let them fire their ovens with wood.

But ironically, in the recent resurgence of fire in Los Angeles, Spago has reverted to its haute-cuisine roots, and less than a third of the food at the Beverly Hills restaurant ever sees live flames at all.

“The grill man is still the number-one guy,” says executive chef Lee Hefter. “But now he has to do the pan roasts too.”

The Sajj of the Orient

Alcazar is a garlic-powered vision of a seaside Lebanese café, a terrace perfumed with apple tobacco puffing from a dozen bright hookahs, the sharp scent of fried fish with garlic and tahini, the sweet aroma of chicken kebabs grilling over charcoal. Late on weekend evenings, when the patio fills with live Armenian music and the restaurant becomes a nightclub lubricated with Almaza beer and the tasty arak imported from Beirut, a cook fires up a special cooking device in a corner of the courtyard, a sort of vast, inverted wok fixed over a powerful flame, and bakes ultrathin sajj bread, smoky and pliant and as broad as a sailboat sail, to wrap around grilled meat or make into the thin, crisp, thyme-scented Arab quesadillas called k’llej. 17239 Ventura Blvd., Encino, 818-789-0991.

The Tandoor Trap

Tandoor ovens are among the most ancient of cooking devices, efficient, superheated earthen vessels that have served as communal hearths in Asia for more than 5,000 years; ovens that bake bread in a few seconds and roast meat in a couple of minutes. Wood ovens tend to burn hot, but tandoors are practically infernos. The halal Pakistani restaurant Al-Watan, whose kitchen is often obscured in a fragrant fog, serves what may be among the best tandoor-cooked meats in the United States, deeply spiced, properly tenderized and smacked with resinous flavor from the mesquite charcoal Al-Watan uses to fire the clay oven: smoky boneless chicken squirted with citrus and tossed with slivered onion; cubed lamb with the smoky chewiness you might associate with the best Texas pits; Cherokee-red tandoori chicken that has a family resemblance to the best barbecue. Even badly marinated meats seared in a gas-fired tandoor are pretty good, but Al-Watan’s charcoal-cooked chicken is remarkable. 13619 Inglewood Blvd., Hawthorne, 310-644-6395.

Crust Rules

L.A.’s notorious sushi-bar Nazis have nothing on Pepe Miele, the proprietor of Antica Pizzeria above the Gelson’s in Marina del Rey and more importantly the man who brought the elaborate bylaws of the Vera Pizza Napoletana movement from Naples to the United States. A certified pizza crust must be made with nothing more than yeast, water and flour, must not exceed 30 centimeters in diameter, and must be baked directly on the floor of a hot, wood-burning brick oven. A margherita, by fiat, must be topped with nothing more than sieved tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, olive oil, basil and salt. The crust must be soft and not crunchy; risen and not thin; and notably higher at the edges than in the middle. As far as I know, Miele has never booted anybody from the premises for daring to order a pizza with duck sausage and goat cheese, but I suspect it could happen.

If you get to Miele’s pizza the second it emerges from the oven, there is a faint smokiness to the crust, and a mild crisp skin that yields, like an artisanal bagel, to a pleasant, bready chewiness underneath. Even if you prefer muscular Brooklyn-style pies, the crust is unimpeachable. Still, the rigor of the basic structure is not necessarily carried through when it comes to the rest of the pie. The basic margherita tends to become soggy by the time it makes it to the table, and a topping of sausage and broccoli raab just lays there like yesterday’s spinach — you need to cook those particular ingredients together to bring out their succulence, not just toss pre-cooked clumps of them onto a freshly baked crust. 13455 Maxella Ave., Marina del Rey, 310-577-8182.

The Grill Next Door

You may not think of Beacon as a center of grill cooking. The restaurant, which in its scant year of existence has already helped to stoke the renaissance of Culver City’s downtown business district, is better known for its udon with pork belly, its miso-marinated cod and its delicious avocado salad. But chef Kazuto Matsusaka, who worked with Wolfgang Puck for more than a decade, is a past master of the big fire/big taste school of California cooking, and his shiso-flavored yakitori, grilled lamb kushiyaki and grilled hanger steak with wasabi relish are superb. 3280 Helms Ave., Los Angeles, 310-838-7500.

Whistling Past The Boneyard

Chefly barbecue, of course, is supposed to be an oxymoron. Decent barbecue is the stuff of distant roadsides, lonely highways and the wrong side of town. Until recently, creative American chefs spent their time reinterpreting stuff like burgoo, tamales and macaroni and cheese, but left the barbecue, which tends to leave dining rooms rather fragrant, to the other guys. But Leonard Schwartz, who practically invented the idea of high-end American comfort food, left his well-regarded kitchen at Maple Drive to open Zeke’s, a barbecue chain. Carolina-style pulled pork is showing up in upscale kitchens almost as often as goat cheese. And Aaron Robins, whose resumé includes a long stint with über-chef Charlie Trotter in Chicago, opened Boneyard Bistro, a full-fledged, beef-intensive barbecue restaurant with a strong side competency in things like pistachio-crusted baked Brie, whiskey-brined pork chops and porcini-crusted salmon.

Does the barbecued brisket match up well with Woody’s? Is the smoked duck spring roll as skillfully put together as it would be at Chinois? It’s not even close. But sometimes it is pleasant to eat spareribs and drink Chateauneuf du Pape. 13539 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, 818-906-7427.

Blame It On Rio

This is the essential appeal of the Torrance churrasceria By Brazil: You eat meat until you die, massive, garlicky heaps of short ribs and spare ribs and sausage and rump and chicken, roasted above a seething bed of live mesquite charcoal and sliced off metal spears onto your plate by a meat-bearing waiter, one hunk of protein at a time. Sausages are pink, garlicky things, like Portugese linguiça; short ribs are chewy, with a distinct tang of smoke; tri-tip is pink and profoundly meaty. Roast picanha, a dripping, rainbow-shaped slab of meat sometimes known as the rump cap, is crusted black, possibly the only piece of cow you’ll ever find that tastes better well-done than medium rare. Churrasco, this Brazilian barbecue feast, seems to be the favorite meal of everybody who goes to Rio on vacation, and By Brazil, where dinner also includes a pass through a rather extensive Brazilian buffet, is about as classic as they come. 1615 Cabrillo Ave., Torrance, 310-787-7520.

Log-o-philia

Mark Peel may be the most prominent chef in the country whose reputation largely rests with his prowess on the grill, and his Campanile may showcase more shades of fire and heat than any restaurant on Earth. Salmon grilled atop cedar planks takes on the cigar-box fragrance of that wood, and leg of lamb is sometimes flavored with the smoke from smoldering herbs. Rack of lamb is sometimes grilled directly on fresh rosemary, which is a different thing entirely. Thin, broad sheets of veal scallopine pick up all the heady fragrance of the cured oak logs burning beneath them. Sometimes there are even grilled live oysters, put directly over the flame just long enough for their shells to open and their liquor to swell with the essence of smoke. Grilled-fish soup is a sort of deconstructed bouillabaisse, a dish involving four or five sea creatures, each with a different cooking time and a different capacity for heat, taken off the grill and combined at the last moment — a feat of kitchen virtuosity with the same degree of difficulty as a 360-degree slam dunk. 624 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, 323-938-1447.

The Right Flank

Charles Perry, the well-known arbiter of both medieval Arab cuisine and Summer of Love Haight-Ashbury, likes to talk about the diet of his 1960s roommate Owsley, who was well known as an LSD millionaire. Owsley, who ate nothing but flank steak, had come to believe that all vegetables were poison. If you had access to as much high-quality windowpane as Owsley, you might harbor sinister thoughts about broccoli too. Argentineans may eat more vegetables than Owsley, but not much: In The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin marveled that “the Gaucho in the Pampas, for months together, touches nothing but beef.” At the Buenos Aires–style Carlitos Gardel’s, the idea of an appropriate salad runs to matambre, the classic Argentine roulade of cold flank steak rolled around roasted red peppers and chopped boiled eggs. As with almost any Argentine restaurant, the menu revolves around its parrillada, a cavalcade of charcoal-grilled meats — sweetbreads, blood sausage, skirt steak, short ribs, Italian sausage — served on a smoking iron grill, accompanied only by a small bowl of well-garlicked chimichurri and a large plate of mashed potatoes. Don’t miss the garlic fries. 7963 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, 323-655-0891.

Old Flame

If you spend much time watching period Asian movies, you will remember scenes of dark inns, a scrim of pale steam, a crew of women tending an ancient grill, prodding battered cookpots licked with yellow flame. The classic Koreatown tavern Dansungsa is nothing like a relic of the 19th century. In fact, its ambiance is supposed to recall a Seoul movie palace of the 1940s. But the guttering flames, the strong Korean spirits, the big, smoky plates of baby octopus and barbecued pork ribs and eel, the charred skewers of grilled garlic cloves, shrimp or hot dogs, the crudely delicious kimchi, all seem as if they came from another time and place. The spicy cabbage soup, which comes along with your first soju or beer, is served in a bowl so battered that the only possible explanation is 15 rounds with a chimpanzee. 3317 W. Sixth St., Koreatown, 213-487-9100.

Tacos al Carbon

If you’re into tacos, at one time or another you’ve probably noticed the conflagration outside El Gran Burrito, a stand tucked away near LACC. Like most great Los Angeles taco places, El Gran Burrito is less notable for the food served inside the restaurant than for the food served out back on evenings and on weekends, when the big grill is set up under an awning, and the aroma of charred beef permeates the air for blocks. El Gran Burrito is Hollywood’s entrepôt of carne asada, grilled beef, snatched from the fire, hacked into gristly nubs, and made into tacos in less time than it takes you to fish a couple of dollars from your jeans. They are grand tacos, sizzling hot, oily, glowing with citrus and black pepper. In the world of food, a truly fine taco may be as close as you can get to nirvana. 4716 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, 323-665-8720.

The Other Red Meat

I have been going to El Parian for many years now, grabbing a table in the long, stark dining room, settling in to a cold bottle of Bohemia, and preparing to devote myself to a sloshing bowl of birria, the roast goat served with amplified pan-drippings that is the café’s great Guadalajara specialty. I went on record in 1990 claiming that El Parian’s birria was the single best Mexican dish in Los Angeles, and nothing in the thousand L.A. Mexican meals I have eaten since then has done anything to sway me from that belief.

In the last few months, people whom I have cause to trust have been telling me that El Parian also has the best carne-asada tacos in Los Angeles, that the kitchen succeeds better than anybody else in town at drawing a sweet, meaty, garlicky taste out of thin, charbroiled steak. (The corn tortillas, of course, have always been homemade.) I hadn’t been aware that El Parian actually served carne asada — I hadn’t been aware that the restaurant actually had a menu — so I drove to the Pico-Union district to put the theory to the test. And it did serve carne-asada tacos, although given the choice between an unknown quantity and El Parian’s birria, I naturally ordered the birria instead. It’s a good thing I brought a friend along, because otherwise I never would have gotten to taste what did turn out to be probably the best carne asada in town, well-blackened, beautifully marinated, peppered with delicious pockets of liquified fat that exploded under my teeth. Will I order the carne-asada taco the next time around? Of course not. But I’ll at least think about it. 1528 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, 213-386-7361.

Peruvian Flake

The window of the original El Pollo Inka opens onto a log-heaped fire pit, flames leaping three feet into the air, and a barnyard’s worth of chickens riding through the inferno on a sort of diabolical Ferris wheel — skewered and spinning, crisping over the hardwood heat in a haze of garlic and smoke. To a passing motorist who has never noted the phenomenon of El Pollo Inka and its notorious Peruvian chickens, it looks very much as if the restaurant is on fire. El Pollo Inka is a big-city Peruvian restaurant, its menu filled with ceviches and fish chowders, sophisticated stews and vaguely Chinese-influenced stir-fries. All this is irrelevant: You will certainly order spit-roasted chicken when you come to El Pollo Inka, and probably another whole bird to go. 15400 Hawthorne Blvd., Lawndale, 310-676-6665. Also in Gardena, Torrance and Hermosa Beach.

Sword Play

Fogo de chão is the Brazilian term for campfire, more or less, overlaid with strong connotations of nostalgia and cuisine. In the window of the Beverly Hills restaurant of that name, a sort of fogo de chão smolders on a platform, slowly cooking a few racks of beef ribs, scenting the enormous dining room with its lazy smoke. Fogo de Chão, the expensive local outlet of a São Paolo–based chain, is less a restaurant than a sizzling theme park of meat — a quarter-acre of sword-wielding gauchos, crackling logs, batallions of military-grade knives, and all the dripping, smoking flesh you can eat for about what you’d pay for an afternoon at Disney’s California Adventure. The oily cut of beef rump called picanha may be cooked over mesquite charcoal instead of a campfire here, but it is like that caramelized strip of crusted steak fat devoured alone in your kitchen — oily and crunchy and salty and seasoned with flame, the crack cocaine of the meat world. 133 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, 310-289-7755.

Precision Short Ribs

In automobiles, technology is usually a good thing, making cars easier to drive, more pleasant and safer. In cuisine, this isn’t necessarily the case: Wood-burning ovens are capable of tastier bread than the most advanced electric model, and even the most expensive computerized steamers are less capable of perfect rice than a simple heavy pot on a stove. Live-fire Korean barbecue, although it tends to cook your clothing as efficiently as it does your meat, is delicious. But live-fire Japanese tabletop barbecue, sometimes called yakiniku, is pretty good too — the Korean experience re-engineered into sleek ritual, the meat and the smoke and the companionship without the stink, most of the garlic, or the funk. The Gyu-Kaku chain, which extends to 800 restaurants in Japan (and with the opening of the Pasadena restaurant later this month to four restaurants in the Los Angeles area), is the user-friendly Lexus of yakiniku restaurants, miso-marinated skirt steak, basil-flavored chicken, and pricey Kobe-style short ribs, sweet potatoes and broccoli, shrimp and chicken, small plates stretching on to the inevitable grill-your-own s’mores. 10925 Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles, 310-234-8641. Also at 163 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, 310-659-5760; 24631 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance, 310-325-1437; 70 W. Green St., Pasadena; 14457 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, 818-501-5400.

Corporate Firing Squad

California cooking as it was defined in 1982 is a species mostly extinct; the expensive but democratic restaurant featuring big flavors, buttery sauces and grilled everything mostly superseded by velvet ropes and the charismatic power of raw fish. Even nods to ethnic cuisines may have become too rarefied — does anyone but a specialist know what to do with romesco sauce, what espelette pepper is supposed to taste like, or the composition of chibouste? Houston’s may have a sushi counter too, but the megachain is where the 1980s went to die: open kitchens and gigantic dining rooms that at least smack of capital-A architecture; composed salads and flavored oils; and a menu turbocharged by the grill. Many locations, citywide.

Island Cuisine

Jay-Bee’s House of Fine Bar-B-Que would seem to have everything going for it: an epic pork-shoulder sandwich, decent ribs, super-hot barbecue sauce, and a location on a traffic island equally convenient to the Japanese commercial district of Gardena and the part of Compton that N.W.A made famous. And it goes without saying — the dining room is the front seat of your car. 15911 S. Avalon Blvd., Gardena, 310-532-1064.

Q Rating

Barbecue stands tend to be basic in their amenities, but J&J Burger & Bar B Que is probably the closest thing you are going to find to a country-road shack within the confines of Los Angeles, a ramshackle structure, a couple of blocks from the Santa Monica Freeway, that looks as if it is being held up by woodsmoke and prayers — unless somebody has tipped you off to the place, you could drive by the restaurant 300 times without ever being tempted to stop. (It is the only restaurant I have ever been to where the televised Lakers game is aimed inward, at the cooks rather than at the dining room.) The beans at J&J are pretty wonderful, a sticky, complex glop dense enough to hold a spoon upright, and the thick hot sauce, lashed with a couple different kinds of chile, reminds me of the superb sauce at the long-deceased Carl’s down on Pico. But it is the spareribs — blackened, saturated with hickory and profoundly spicy even without the sauce — that make J&J so compelling. 5754 Adams Blvd., Los Angeles, 323-934-5390.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Robata

What sort of barbecue is compatible with Pilates, $300 Tracy Cunningham highlights (honey-blonde) and the kind of size-zero clothes that you find at Kitson’s? The robata-yaki at Katana, apparently: exquisite skewers of meat, vegetables and fowl seared over imported bincho charcoal and meted out in portions that should probably be measured in milligrams. 8439 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, 323-650-8585.

Fowl Intent

O, sing of grilled chicken parts, of skin carefully pleated onto skewers, of hearts smeared with hot mustard, of unborn eggs, coiled intestines and wisps of chicken breast wrapped around okra. Dream of muscly slabs of breast meat textured like tuna sashimi, grilled over hardwood charcoal just until the center begins to film with heat, and double-strength chicken consommé served instead of miso soup, and chicken meatballs loosely packed as proper balls of pie dough. The word yakitori may mean “grilled chicken,” but it carries strong intimations of well-being, companionship and having enough to drink, and Kokekokko, whose menu is practically a thesaurus of what a talented Japanese kitchen can do with everything but the squawk, is as convivial as your best friend’s living room. 203 S. Central Ave., Little Tokyo, 213-687-0690.

Rotisserie League

Just look at those spit-roasted meats, bursting with juice, caressed by flame, kissed with sweet wood heat: glistening slabs of pork belly stuffed with fennel and dill; drippingly rich duck with orange; mahogany-skinned squab enveloping a rich stuffing of shiitake mushrooms flavored with strong herbs. What Gino Angelini is attempting at La Terza may be no less than re-imagining California food through the prism of his advanced Italian technique, and even the simplicity of his thick, smoky grilled rib steak is a revelation. 8384 W. Third St., Los Angeles, 323-782-8384.

It’s The Bacon

Do I love The Lodge for its double-fisted martinis or for the bowls of bacon chunks put out like peanuts at the bar? For the Thousand Island dressing on the twin-wedge salad, or for the onion rings as golden as the bangles on a Brahmin woman’s arm? For the dripping-rare New York steak or for the bone-in rib eye as big as some models of compact cars? For the banana-scaled crustaceans in the shrimp cocktail or for the Madiran on the wine list? When this dining room was Tiny Naylor’s, my parents used to take me here for patty melts. When it was reborn as an upscale coffee shop, the waitresses used to slip me after-hours beer in teacups. And now that it has been reinvented as a wood-paneled Googie-style ski lodge, I find it pretty hard to get a reservation. It must have something to do with the bacon. 14 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, 310-854-0024.

Afternoon Delight

Around three o’ clock at Musso & Frank Grill, an ashtray smell of cold, burnt things comes off the grill behind the counter’s middle, and a man in a white chef’s jacket pokes among the dead ashes. Within a couple of minutes, he coaxes the grill into crackling life. The warm scent of woodsmoke spreads across the room. A red-jacketed waiter comes over and pours a clear, cold martini from a pony into a tiny, frosted glass. It may be impossible to describe Musso & Frank as a restaurant, rather than one’s relationship to Musso & Frank, and the menu’s eccentricities and inconsistencies have been well discussed. But in the late afternoon, when you’re working on a Caesar salad and a cook flips a fat lamb chop onto the grill just for you, it is hard to avoid feeling that everything is pretty all right in the world. 6667 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, 323-467-5123.

Old Hickory

The line outside the original Phillips’ Barbecue bastes in hickory smoke, breathes it in like purest oxygen, soaks it into its pores to the extent that I always suspect that after a couple of hours even Luke Walton would glow with the dark, complex chiaroscuro of an unrestored Renaissance painting. At Phillips’, supper sometimes takes more dedication than some people think is strictly necessary. And if the atmosphere outside Phillips’ seems almost edible, the coarsely ground hot links, the lean, sinewy pork ribs and the shillelagh-size beef ribs are manifestly so. Foster Phillips has had his run-ins with the AQMD, sure, but to the barbecue connoisseur, requiring Mr. Phillips’ to comply with air-pollution controls is nearly as nonsensical as it would be for OSHA to make Jasper Johns stop using cadmium red. 4307 Leimert Blvd., Leimert Park, 323-292-7613. Also other locations in Los Angeles.

Pizza Inferno

From the nearby municipal parking lot, Pitfire smells like a barbecue pit, a Girl Scout campsite, a hamburger stand — anything but what it is, which is a franchise-ready pizzeria. But the pies, given a slow, two-day rise and fired on the floor of a ceramic oven, are superb examples of the breed, puffy in the Neapolitan manner and tinged with smoke, fresh mozzarella browned at its top like a toasted marshmallow, fennel sausage and roast pumpkin and other high-quality ingredients blackened and sizzling and crisp. You have had better pizza than this — Casa Bianca comes to mind — and the guy who came up with the recipes probably didn’t apprentice in Naples. I have heard that the crust was racier in the beginning, when it was grilled in the manner of Rhode Island’s Il Forno instead of baked. Still, this is the kind of neighborhood pizzeria we should all have in our neighborhoods, a testament to the goodness of flame. 108 W. Second St., Los Angeles, 213-808-1200; 5211 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, 818-980-2949.

Brasaville

The tiny patch of asphalt behind Pollo a la Brasa seems more like a lumberyard than it does like a parking lot most of the time, great stacks of cured oak, the smell of fresh sawdust in the air, muscled men cutting logs down into firewood. The savory fumes billowing from the smokestack perfume the noodle shops and brasseries across the street into Koreatown. Inside, spitted birds twirl on the restaurant’s creaking old rotisserie, chorus lines of pale, raw, skewered chickens alternating with their juicy, well-bronzed brethren, whose marinade of garlic and peppers is so intense that you can practically see the Hanna-Barbera smell lines rising off their crunchy skin. Does the Peruvian-style pollo taste like a shotgun marriage between a chicken and a smoldering log? It does indeed. Many aficionados consider this to be among the finest roasted chickens in town. 764 S. Western Ave., Los Angeles, 323-382-4090.

Heavy Metal Parking Lot

Does there exist a flame duller, more devoid of purpose than the weak, blue sputterings emitted by a propane barbecue? Is there a less-promising kitchen crew than an army of suburban dads? Could there be a more prosaic setting than a motel parking lot? Yet the clouds of spicy smoke billowing from behind the Duarte Inn on Saturday afternoons are entrancing in their intensity, and the cook in charge of the satay station works his bank of burners like Keith Emerson working the keyboards in a concert film. His skewers of grilled lamb and chicken are just great; caramelized, sizzling, dripping sweet juice. Pondok Kaki Lima is a weekly Indonesian food fair featuring 10 or so vendors pumping out fragrant beef soup, chile-red fried rice, ultra-hot combination rice plates and strange, translucent Indonesian desserts, most of them to go. The right bowl of pressed-rice cake with curry has the potential to change your life. Saturdays, 10 a.m–2 p.m., behind Duarte Inn, 1200 E. Huntington Dr., Duarte.

Volcano Love

Every Thai restaurant worthy of the name does at least a little live-fire cooking. It is hard to imagine a Thai meal without a skewer of satay, a charred-beef salad or Isaan-style barbecued chicken. Red Corner Asia describes itself as a Thai grill, and although you will find all the usual Thai curries, pan-fried noodles and crocks of chicken-coconut soup, the accent is on the big, flame-belching monster that dominates the open kitchen: chicken satay, grilled squid, honeyed spareribs. The signature attraction here is a phenomenon known as Volcano Chicken, a rotisserie-cooked creation brought to the table impaled on a vertical frame, tightly trussed, trailing liquid streamers of fire. Is the more orthodox Thai barbecued chicken better here, crisper, more tender? Perhaps, but there isn’t nearly the show. 5267 Hollywood Blvd., Los Feliz, 323-466-6722.

Red State, Blue Smoke

The Central Texas towns of legend have long since been turned into prettified versions of themselves, century-old hardware stores transformed into antique shops, saloons into genteel restaurants, and old clapboard houses into bed-and-breakfast joints with lace curtains in the windows. And sad as it is to say, the good barbecue place in Texas towns these days is less likely to be that scenic dining room in the square than it is to be in a prefab industrial building out by the Wal-Mart on the highway, a building that happens to be decorated with the old license plates and cow skulls and splintered butter churns that shriek louder of eBay than they do of tradition. Robin’s Wood Fire BBQ, which occupies the destination-restaurant slot in an east Pasadena shopping center, is a Texas-style barbecue of the latter-day ilk, splattered with rusty street signs and old advertisements for feed, beer neon and sports paraphernalia, crushed peanut shells, bottles of blue cream soda and dusty chicken bones. The menu prose gladhands the local city council and the Rose Bowl committee, butters up the owner’s in-laws, and describes the actual food in an overheated tone you haven’t seen since the 1970s. Robin’s is awfully, awfully proud of catering the tri-tip at Irwindale Speedway. Every order of barbecue comes with a giant slab of blueberry coffee cake and a bowl of cole slaw with blue cheese and pecans. The sauces are too sticky by half. But do they get the oak into the meat? They do, actually, especially into the beef ribs, a blackened, smoking order of which is the closest thing I have ever seen to that rack of brontosaurus ribs that tips over Fred Flintstone’s car. Robin’s, which may be more authentic than the owners even know, sets the standard for suburban barbecue. 395 N. Rosemead Blvd., Pasadena, 626-351-8885.

Persian Heat

At the back of Shaherzad, through the elegant dining room and set off in an enclosure of glass, the restaurant’s fiery tanour must put out enough heat to temper steel, a spherical oven that looks like a giant, blue-tiled eyeball whose iris seethes with yellow flame. The baker slaps huge ovals of dough against the oven’s hot stone walls, then snatches them up with an iron hook and twirls them through the flame to toast them to an ethereal crispness. When he is done, the tanouri are fragrant sheets of soft, hot flatbread, perforated like matzo and mottled with crisp bits of carbonized char. The regulars wrap entire lengths of grilled kebabs or ground-meat koobideh onto the bread, perhaps with some raw onion, a sprinkle of tart sumac powder and a handful of fresh herbs: delicious. Shaherzad is one of the better cafés on Westwood’s Iranian restaurant row, a sleekly modern center of kebabs, stews and the intricate rice dishes called polos, but it is the tanouri that pulls in the crowds. 1422 Westwood Blvd., Westwood, 310-470-3242.

Killer Kushiyaki

Of the many ways to translate the flavor of sputtering hardwood into meat, the Japanese art of kushiyaki is perhaps the most efficient, a straightforward gesture of toasting skewers of marinated protein over a hot, fragrant charcoal fire until the surfaces brown, the smoke insinuates its way into the flesh, and the chicken tails, or bacon-wrapped asparagus, or bits of beef tongue cook to a luscious medium-rare: the center barely touched by the heat and the outside brown and crisp. As practiced at ShinSenGumi, a mini-mall kushiyaki bar on the southern edge of Gardena, the process is extraordinarily precise, with each delicate meatball, each chunk of chicken thigh, cooked just enough and no more, and with an entire busy restaurant being fed from a grill that looks not much bigger than two or three steel shoeboxes welded end-to-end. 18517 S. Western Ave., Gardena, 310-715-1588.

Coal Chillin’

Other Korean barbecue restaurants in Los Angeles are more refined. Many serve more elaborate side dishes, and use pricier meat. Perhaps all of them feature tableware more elegant than the singed, battered, half-melted bowls, most of which have strayed too close to the flames of the inset tabletop grills. But the pop and crackle of the glowing live coals, the thick, blue haze that cloaks the dining room, the drifting embers that burn tiny holes in your sports jacket or sizzle when they hit the surface of your beer — nowhere else is the aesthetic of flame expressed quite so profoundly as it is at Soot Bull Jeep, where the deep, round aroma of smoldering hardwood charcoal plays across the sizzling, blackened surfaces of marinated short ribs, beef tongue or squid the way that last night’s best dream still flits around your mind. The first thing you see when you walk in the door at Soot Bull Jeep is a sign that reads “This Is a Non-Smoking Area.’’ Nothing could be further from the truth. 3136 W. Eighth St., Los Angeles, 213-387-3865.

Primordial Fire

The original Spago on Sunset was to New American Cooking what the Armory Show was to modern painting or “Meet the Beatles” was to rock & roll: the one that changed the rules. Designer pizza got its start in that Sunset Strip dining room, the casual miscegenation of Asian flavors and European technique, and the idea that fine dining could be casual and fun. It launched the idea of the celebrity chef. And it was also probably the first serious restaurant in the United States to put the grill station at the No. 1 position, so that an enormous percentage of the protein that passed through the kitchen (as well as the clothing worn in half the dining room) ended up being flavored with mesquite. The modern American grill has been such a dominant part of the restaurant culture for so long that it is hard sometimes to remember where it actually had its start.

When Spago moved to its current Beverly Hills location six years ago, chefs Lee Hefter and Wolfgang Puck, moving toward a new vision of the traditional luxury restaurant, de-emphasized the grill that they had made so famous — practically everything but steak is pan-roasted, seared or sautéed. Pizza is only served at lunch now, but game birds and rabbit are baked in the wood-burning oven, which tightens the skin and flavors their flesh in such a subtle way that you probably wouldn’t notice unless somebody pointed it out to you — the rabbit comes out of the oven especially autumnal and delicate, with a practically subliminal hint of burning leaves. Hefter points out that the iron grate of his grill is designed to flip up, so that he can cook seafood directly in the high heat of the charcoal flames as if he were using an Indian tandoor. If, as Levi-Strauss suggests, pot cultures are more advanced than fire cultures, Spago is leaving its atavistic ways behind. 176 N. Cañon Drive, Beverly Hills, 310-385-0880.

Put ’Em On The Glass

If live-fire cooking is like sex, the kitchen at Spark Woodfire Cooking is its peepshow, a glassed-in wonderland of shooting flames, ashy coals and hissing slabs of meat, carbonized pizza crusts and fire-roasted chickens, char-speckled vegetables and big, sloppy plates of lasagna that are smoking and blackened from their voyages through the ovens. Does the food approach the ethereal quality of Alto Palato, the old West Hollywood restaurant that was the progenitor of this tiny chain? Not yet. But as with a peepshow, quality may not quite be the point. 9575 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, 310-277-0133. Also at 11801 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, 818-623-8883; 300 Pacific Coast Hwy., Huntington Beach, 714-960-0996.

Big Meat

One of the mysteries of the universe may be the recent popularity of steakhouses among the former arugula set, sparked by a newfound female proclivity for strong alcohol and gargantuan hunks of charred Angus beef. Maybe it’s the license granted by Atkins, maybe it’s the music, maybe it’s the bartenders’ enthusiasm for cocktails that don’t happen to be vodka martinis, but for beef eaters, these are brand-new times. Sterling may be the ultimate Hollywood steakhouse, a discreetly marked VIP restaurant grand enough for premiere parties but sleek enough for a night out with the girls, a palace of $50 filets and $14 martinis that may actually be worth the expense. The hostess may have told you she was saving all the good tables for Gwyneth Paltrow, although Ms. Paltrow is probably sucking down macrobiotic twig tea at M Café instead, but when the meat arrives, prime and rare and dripping with butter, the satori of flesh is enough. 1429 N. Ivar Ave., Hollywood, 323-463-0008.

Into the Fryer

Sure, there’s the gumbo, the best in town, now served every day of the week. But the heart of Stevie’s on the Strip may be the big, black smoker out in the parking lot, through which runs the raw material for what the restaurant straightforwardly calls Smoky Fried Chicken, delicious chicken that carries a lovely smack of hickory underneath its crisp, peppery coat. Stevie’s smoky chicken is the stuff that makes house parties legend. 3403 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles, 323-734-6975.

Roastmasters

The mastery of the wood-burning oven at Vincenti can be deduced from a single bite — a scallop, say, sprinkled with bread crumbs and baked in its shell until it just sizzles. The scallop itself is impeccably sourced, still sparkling fresh, and the bread crumbs are buttery and lightly browned. There is a sharp herbal note in the mix, just enough to slice through the richness, and the scallop is marked with not so much the taste as the presence of smoke, of forests, stone chimneys and chilly afternoons. It is a spectacular mouthful of food. The oven exerts its alchemy on Dover sole, lightly breaded and elegantly flavored with garlic, on cuttlefish and octopi arranged into a salad, on a buttery-soft roast squab. The adjacent rotisserie turns out the best restaurant version of porchetta I have ever tasted in California, loin and belly wrapped into a spiral, seasoned with fennel, and spit-roasted to a crackling, licorice-y succulence. Perfection does not come cheap, and it is certainly possible to eat several mediocre Italian meals elsewhere in this neighborhood for the price of a single superb one here. At these times, it is good to remember that on Monday nights, pizza also comes out of these ovens. 11930 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood, 310-207-0127.

Cubist Masterpiece

First-time diners at the old Ginza Sushi-Ko were invariably surprised at the sight of Masa Takayama gracefully wrestling a squat clay brazier, adjusting its draft, fiddling with the single sculpted lozenge of bincho charcoal until it burned clear and true. The sushi bar took on a subtle, woodsy scent, not enough to detract from the clean, seashore aromas of the fish so expensively flown in from Japan, but a single note in the chorus. Takayama fussed with the grilling surface as if he were adjusting a complicated machine instead of a fine wire grate, making sure that the precious food was darkening to his satisfaction, and only after long minutes was his masterpiece ready to be served: the most exquisite toast points in human history. Hiro Urasawa, whose splendid restaurant Urasawa succeeded Sushi-Ko, also uses the pricey charcoal, but he uses it to grill ghost-white Kobe beef to a crisp-edged liquid succulence, like all the best steaks you’ve ever had compressed into a single two-by-two cube. Later, if he feels like it, Urasawa may grill a rare Japanese mushroom for you and make it into sushi. The charcoal, as well as the chef, has moods. 218 N. Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, 310-247-8939.

Pit Boss

In the late ’90s, in a year when I happened to end up at dozens of the country’s greatest barbecue pits, from St. Louis to Lockhart, Texas, from Kansas City to Oakland to Tuscaloosa, perhaps the most startling discovery was that the best Los Angeles barbecue does just fine by national standards, thank you. What persuaded me of that fact? A slab of Woody’s powerfully scented small-end ribs picked up on the way home from the airport, a slab good enough to make pleasant memories of Bob Sykes’ in Bessemer, Alabama, and Lem’s on the South Side of Chicago seem as irrelevant as the box score from a Cleveland Cavaliers game. 3446 W. Slauson Blvd., Los Angeles, 323-294-9443. Also 475 S. Market St., Inglewood, 310-672-4200.

Votive Confidence

The current aesthetic of Los Angeles restaurant design suggests that certain of its architects might spend more than a little time in front of their Xboxes. Their interiors resonate with dark wood and leather, stone and iron, surfaces oozing water and flame, like the fifth level of any first-person shooter you could name. You never know quite whether to order a Dirty Martini or to search the ground for a pulsing golden key. Wilshire, a serious, farmers-market-driven restaurant cleverly disguised as the kind of place where one might consort with supermodels, practically seethes with fire in its sprawling patio dining room, flickering votive candles in great cathedral banks, roaring bonfires, and seeping waterfalls of flame — it’s like the Backdraft set crossed with the patio at Koi. To the latent pyromaniacs among us, the pan-roasted kurobuta pork chops, the terrific wine list and chef Christopher Blobaum’s justly famous deep-fried poached egg are just icing on the organic, artisanally produced cake. 2454 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, 310-586-1707.

#

Flesh and Bone

Playing with Kobe at mighty Cut

by Jonathan Gold

Have you ever tasted Kobe beef? Not the admittedly decent Idaho-raised wagyu/Angus cow, but the real stuff, the $200-a-pound steaks imported from Japan?

A whole fillet of Japanese beef, as wrapped in ninja-black cloth and carried around by the beef sommelier at Wolfgang Puck’s steak house Cut, is as ghostly white as an alabaster slab, like steak as seen in a photographic negative, like something Francis Bacon might have carved out of soft stone. Cooked, a single mouthful of Japanese rib eye from Kyushu pumps out flavor after flavor after flavor, every possible sensation of smoke and char and tang and animal you can imagine until your teeth have extracted all the juices. If you happen to be at Cut, and you happen to have in front of you what would ordinarily be a perfectly splendid corn-fed Nebraska strip steak, aged 35 days, seared at 1,200 degrees, then finished over oak to a ruddy, juicy medium rare — or even an example of American wagyu rib eye — you would take one bite of your neighbor’s Japanese Kobe steak, cooked the same way, and look around for rocks to throw at your own hunk of meat.

If you have $120 million to spend on a painting, you might as well buy yourself a Klimt. If you have $120 to spend on a steak, you might want to consider visiting Cut — and splitting the Kobe strip four or five ways, because unless you happen to play in the NFL, there is no way you can digest even a small example of the plutonium-dense meat by yourself. There are always the American Kobe short ribs cooked into a jelly with Indian spices, the extra-juicy brined Kurobuta pork chops or the apple salad with dates and curls of Parmesan cheese to try as well.

Inserted into a new Richard Meier-engineered space in the Regent Beverly Wilshire, Cut is one of the most designed restaurants in the universe, a remodel of the room that used to house the Mandarin — and more to the point, Romanoff’s, which was probably the most fashionable Hollywood restaurant of the ’40s and ’50s, the Spago of its day. The dining room is in the shape of a pure, white semicircle whose angles make you feel as if you’re dining in a white-on-white mid-’60s Frank Stella painting, cut obsessively by architectural lines parallel to the diameter, drawing the eye toward a mysterious spot in the fuzzy middle distance rather than toward the windows, which face out, after all, onto the hotel’s unglamorous lobby and valet-parking zone. Meier also designed the plates, the chairs and the flatware, which is a neoclassic design probably influenced by Mackintosh, and if he could have, I suspect he would have found a way to design the plating of the food.

But if Spago is Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant, its menu plumped out with his easygoing air, his enriched stocks, his Austrian favorites, his signature tinge of wood, Cut, despite obvious signs of the master’s touch, is actually the love child of Puck’s senior chef Lee Hefter, whose obsessions lie as much in technique as they do in product, whose menus of warm veal-tongue salads, succulent maple-glazed pork bellies, and warm asparagus salads surmounted with dripping, barely fried eggs tend to be more modern but a bit less user-friendly than what one suspects Puck would turn out on his own. Sherry Yard, Spago’s resident dessert genius, is all over this kitchen too — a lot of the appetizers are stamped with her miniaturist aesthetic. Dana Farner, the indie-rock goddess sommelier, is perfectly cheerful selling Bordeaux or big-ticket Cabs, but she seems happier when you let her talk you into a bruising Nero d’Avola from southern Italy, a Malbec from the Mendoza area of Argentina or a supple, earthy wine from Languedoc. You’ll be happier too.

Omar Rodriguez, like a beef sommelier, presents Cut’s Japanese and Kobe beef.

Are there celebrities here? This is a Wolfgang Puck restaurant: Warren and Annette, Tom and Katie, Larry King, Martha Stewart, the occasional young star presiding over a tableful of models, and an impressive range of young waiters in well-cut black suits presiding over their food and wine. Is Cut really a steak house? Sure — if you’re a steak-house guy, you could have a butter-lettuce salad, a sirloin and a side of onion rings, and leave thinking you’ve been to the best restaurant in Los Angeles. Cut is to the other steak houses in town what Spago was to the pizza parlors back in 1981, the restaurant that defines Los Angeles at the moment, or at least Beverly Hills.

If you were going to paint current-day Beverly Hills in four quick strokes, you could do worse than Cut’s succession of canapés that seem to find their way onto the table of regulars: crisp, little potato knishes served with the haute-cuisine version of ballpark mustard; tiny hamburgers, “sliders,” made with ground American Kobe beef; the airy French cheese puffs gougères; and pied noir sandwiches of foie gras sandwiched between leaves of brik pastry and dusted with fierce Arabic spices, propped upright, like a duck-liver Stonehenge, in thick puddles of puréed dates. Ashkenazi Jew, dressed-up Middle America, luxury-loving Europe, Tunisian passing as French — a 700-page Jackie Collins novel couldn’t begin to do as good a job at illuminating the day traffic on Rodeo Drive.

There are at least a few dishes with the air of classics about them at Cut, dishes you would swear were plucked from the pages of Escoffier but seem to be straight from Hefter’s brain — for example, the appetizer of marrow extracted from roasted veal bones, whirred with cream and egg yolk, then spooned back into the bones and baked in a warm-water bath until the custard is set. There are few dishes in the world more delicious than Fergus Henderson’s roasted marrow bones at St. John in London, on which Hefter’s version is clearly modeled. Cut’s version, like Henderson’s, is served with coarse salt, slices of toasted brioche and a little salad of parsley chopped just enough to tame its weedy overtones. But Cut’s marrow bones may be even better, with all the richness, all the flavor, all the slightly transgressive sensation of feasting on a part of the animal that nature has so fiercely guarded, without quite the grossness — the charred ends, the charnel-house smell, the random pools of searing, liquid grease — that you sometimes find in the simpler preparation.

The potato “tarte tatin” is another Hefter invention I thought I would find in Escoffier, Pomiane or even Robuchon’s brilliant little book of potato recipes, but it too seems to be an original, a sort of melting potato dauphinoise completely encased in a thin, crunchy sheath of potatoes Anna, a crackly, buttery crispness giving way to the forthright creaminess of long-simmered spuds, close to, but more complex than, the potato cake at the Parisian bistro L’Ami Louis that may have been its inspiration. Fourteen dollars is a lot to pay for a side dish of potatoes, but it may be a reasonable price for art.

Cut, 9500 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, 310-276-8500. Dinner Mon.–Sat. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. California Contemporary. Main courses, $38–$160. Recommended –dishes: bone-marrow flan, warm veal-tongue salad.

#

Bring the Funk

Izayoi moves to the rhythm of the izakaya

by Jonathan Gold

The last time I went to Izayoi, a sleekly modern izakaya on the edge of Little Tokyo, my party was seated in a front dining room not quite wide enough for a stout man to stand in sideways. The particularly delicious morsels of grilled yellowtail collar, stewed radish and sticks of plum-flavored mountain yam tended not to make it all the way to the far end of the table, which was fashioned from a long plank that a self-respecting pirate would have found too narrow to walk. It’s a good thing I ordered extra sardine burgers. There might have been a mutiny halfway through the meal.

Izayoi’s mastermind is chef Junichi Shiode, the whiz who used to run Sushi Ryo, on Santa Monica at Highland, a fairly spectacular if traditional place that was empty most nights, possibly because Shiode’s traditional dishes were more austere than what used to be served at Ita-Cho when it was in that location, and possibly because the seediness radiating from the adult-video store next door was ultimately too much for some customers to handle. Sushi Ryo was one of those rare secret addresses in Los Angeles, beloved by chefs (Fred Eric, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger were regulars) for a cuisine that many customers didn’t even know it served: classic Japanese izakaya dishes prepared with the touch of an accomplished sushi chef. It was possible to dine superbly on sushi and sashimi without knowing that the other food even existed.

There is a rhythm to an izakaya meal that is unlike any other. Glasses of cold sake and big bottles of beer appear at regular intervals, then bits of raw fish and grilled meat and savory custard are served individually or all at once. It’s a waltz-time snack-sip-chat, snack-sip-chat dynamic that can go on for the length of a Mahler symphony ... animal-vegetable-mineral, warm-hot-cold, sweet-salt-funk ... until, before you know it, the restaurant is empty, the lights have been turned high, and the waitress is suggesting that you might want to start finding your way home. It is cruel, the end of the evening at an izakaya. At the end of a night at Izayoi, you can always walk around the corner to Haru Ulala, a loud, bare-bones izakaya with late hours and Kirin sloshing like water, but the fried croquettes and tumblers of sake are never quite the same.

Izakaya menus are typically long and hard to follow, with a host of different sections unfamiliar to anyone not versed in the style, and a list of daily specials often as long as the menu proper that seem randomly thrown onto the page. Here is the secret: Order lots of stuff.

Dinners at Izayoi proceed with glorious chaos, arrangements of gooey octopus sashimi popping up after ramekins of roughly chopped Spanish mackerel, bowls of room-temperature egg custard topped with sea-urchin gonads preceding chilly bowls of house-made tofu slicked with sweet miso paste, yakiniku skewers of grilled tongue coming simultaneously with a plate of braised tongue in brown sauce that could have been served at any tapas bar in Spain, but always — almost always — a bowl of ochazuke, brothy rice, at the end.

One night there were slices of marinated squid liver, which came as a surprise to everyone at the table — I have cleaned a lot of squid in my life, but I never knew that squids even had livers, much less livers the color, texture and very particular flavor of raw calves’ liver. This must have been a very large squid.

I liked the cream cheese flavored with bonito, even when I found out the flavoring was actually fermented bonito intestines. There are also dried and grilled skate fins cut into little salty curls. A glass of chilled Otokoyama sake might be the proper accompaniment for dried skate fin. Then again, Otokoyama is the proper accompaniment for just about everything.

Shiode has a particular deftness with sardines, which are bound to appear at any time (providing you order them, of course), grilled plain, chopped and stuffed into shiso leaves, which are then deep-fried, or mixed with green onions, patted into a scallop shell and broiled into a sizzling patty of deliciousness — the infamous “sardine burger,” which is as close to a mandatory order as you will ever find on a hundred-item menu. Hell — have some more sardine burgers for dessert.

Izayoi, 132 S. Central Ave., dwntwn., 213-613-9554. Lunch Mon.–Fri., dinner Mon.–Sat. Beer, sake and wine. Parking in Office Depot lot on Second St. at Central Ave. AE, MC, V. Inexpensive lunch specials. Dinner for two, food only, $25–$45 and up. Recommended dishes: “sardine burger,” ox-tongue stew, house-made tofu with uni.

#

FORMAT BUSTER

SMALL

FORMAT BUSTER

LARGE

ILLUSTRATION

SMALL

ILLUSTRATION

LARGE

IMMIGRATION

SMALL

Alienated

They live in the suburbs, own businesses and homes. Their children speak English and dream of college. But for illegal immigrants, at any moment

by Scott Bass

Before exurbs and McMansions took over, neighborhoods such as this one defined southern Chesterfield County. It’s a small industrial suburb off Jefferson Davis Highway, near the DuPont plant. Pickup trucks with ladder racks and boat trailers line the narrow streets, and the glare of 40-inch TVs flickers through living-room windows. Most nights, men work on their cars in boxy driveways while elderly couples sit on their front porches. Small children cackle as they romp through the freshly cut grass and red mulch surrounding a small ranch-style house. A half-eaten Popsicle escapes the hands of a 1-year-old toddler wearing sandals and shorts, his thick brown hair bouncing as he scampers after his two older brothers. The fun nearly comes to a halt when the boy grabs the garden hose and attempts to douse his brothers.

On warm spring nights like this, the rollicking boys are the surest sign that the suburban dream still has a pulse in this aging neighborhood, even if the boys are oblivious to the crisis that has befallen their family.

Their mother, Sara, and older sister Sendy, 14, are doing all they can to maintain normalcy. Sendy stands guard over her three brothers, Bryan, 5, Jason, 4, and Randy, the rambunctious 1-year-old who gets into everything. An elderly neighbor next door opens the gate to her back yard and lets the boys continue their rampage.

Sendy is expressionless, her eyes dull, her body tired. She gets up every morning at 6, after her mother leaves for work at 5:30, and gets her brothers dressed, fed and off to school and the babysitter. After school, she takes care of them until her mother gets home, which is usually after 6.

Mom is taking it the worst. Her eyelids are swollen from crying, her cheeks flushed pink. As the setting April sun casts a warm, orange glow over the yard, Sara, her feet tired from a 12-hour shift, leans against the silver sedan in the driveway and fights back tears.

Sara can’t speak English. But her 5-year-old can.

“I want my dad to come home,” Bryan says.

His father won’t be coming back. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers came to the family’s home on Jan. 31, they took the family’s father, Jose. After 14 years of living and working in the United States as an illegal immigrant — a native of Guatemala, he applied for political asylum but was denied — he was finally taken in the middle of the night. Sara begged and pleaded with the officers to let him stay. He was the sole breadwinner (she stayed home to care for the four children). Jose was a good man, she says, producing IRS documents that show they paid their taxes every year. He worked as an insulation mechanic for a company in Ashland.

The begging was futile. The immigration officers took him to Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover County. On April 13, Jose was taken to Washington, D.C., and put on a plane destined for Guatemala. His lawyer has filed an appeal with the Department of Justice, claiming Jose was deported without a proper hearing. But there’s next to no chance he will be brought back to the United States on appeal, says Chester Smith, an immigration lawyer from Virginia Beach who is representing Jose. “I think the process concluded with him being removed from the United States,” says Smith.

It appears he’s gone, probably for good. Sara, who has never possessed a work permit, doesn’t know what to do. They have nothing to go home to in Guatemala, they say. Jose is currently staying with his mother.

Shortly after Sendy was born in 1992, Sara and Jose left Guatemala, fearing for their lives, they say. They had lived on a tiny farm in Salama, where they had a couple of cows, grew beans and corn, and lived off the land. But guerrillas were ransacking homes and killing those who had nothing to steal. Their neighbors were murdered. Sara and Jose paid a man 70,000 quetzales, or $15,000 in U.S. dollars, to sneak them into the United States illegally. (The men are known as coyotes.) They somehow scraped together enough money from family members. They initially left their daughter, Sendy, with Jose’s mother — and left.

As the national debate over illegal immigration mounts, families such as Jose’s and Sara’s are quietly watching the dismantling of their dreams. Many come into the United States legally — often with six-month tourist visas — with the hope of finding work and then petitioning to become permanent residents and, ultimately, citizens. But along the way, they run into a broken, cumbersome system. The four illegal families who spoke with Style have been living and working in Richmond for more than five years. With the exception of the children who are born here — and who are thus automatically U.S. citizens — all of the family members saw their visas expire or, in the case of Jose, were denied asylum.

They say they’ve tried any number of avenues to become permanent residents. Employers attempted to sponsor them, a process that takes a minimum of five to seven years. Others tried to get their green cards through family or individual petitions, also at least a five- to seven-year wait. But as they waited in line, they found themselves in an intractable Catch-22.

Continuing to file the proper paperwork and go through the legal channels carries a great risk: The families worry that doing so only alerts immigration officials to their illegal status. So many stop trying. The families who spoke with Style did so on the condition that only their first names be used.

In the past week, their fears were heightened by the governmental crackdown on illegal aliens, particularly on the companies that employ them. In a national raid of pallet-maker IFCO Systems North America on April 19, Immigration and Customs agents and state police officers arrested 21 employees working at the company’s plant in Henrico County. The local plant was one of 40 in 26 states targeted in the raid, intended to send a sharp message to those companies that employ and, as federal officials are fond of saying, exploit illegal aliens.

Meanwhile, fear among illegal, or undocumented, immigrants in the region is growing exponentially. Extracting the political debate, the fact remains that those who are here now have few options, says Peter Von der Lippe, who is manager of multicultural services at the Greater Richmond Chapter of the American Red Cross. Crime has long been a problem in their communities, for instance, because illegal immigrants are afraid to call police for fear of being deported. They’re reluctant or unable to open bank accounts, too, so they keep their earnings in their homes or in their pockets. Thus they have become easy targets, particularly for robbery and burglary. Just last month, Guatemalan immigrant Celso Delcid Garcia was shot in the head in front of his family by a robber as he loaded groceries into his car on Jeff Davis Highway.

Now, Congress is considering legislation that would make an estimated 12 million illegal aliens felons, further fueling those fears.

It’s nearly impossible to know how many illegal immigrants live and work in the Richmond area, officials say. Demographers often simply double the U.S. Census numbers to come up with an estimate of Hispanic immigrants in a particular region, both legal and illegal residents. In the 2000 Census, the Richmond region reported it had more than 23,000 legal Hispanic residents (while there are other immigrant populations, the Hispanic population makes up the vast majority of those who have come here in the past two decades).

Therefore, there were probably at least 23,000 undocumented immigrants in the Richmond area in 2000 — bringing the total Hispanic population to about 46,000. Continuing the same pace of growth over the next six years — and many say it’s growing even faster — means there are probably close to 100,000 Hispanics living in the region, says Tanya Gonzalez, manager of Richmond’s Hispanic Liaison Office. Split that figure in half, and one can estimate there are about 50,000 illegal immigrants in metro Richmond.

Their presence here — and how they came into the country — has been at the heart of a vigorous national debate. But the problem is much more complicated than many realize, says Debra J.C. Dowd, an immigration attorney with Kaufman & Canoles who also serves as immigration counsel for the state’s Office of the Attorney General.

“People don’t understand the immigration system. It’s a strange system,” Dowd explains. For example, Dowd says, many of her clients come to her after they’ve overstayed their visas and are seeking renewal. But here’s the catch: “If you’ve violated the rules of your stay, I can’t fix you,” she says.

The long, excruciating wait involved with petitioning the government for permanent residency means most will ultimately wind up living in the United States illegally for some period of time — if not permanently.

If they do get through the system and the enormous wait, Dowd says, and finally get the opportunity to become permanent residents, most don’t realize that according to law they must then go home to their native countries and re-enter the United States. Following this law, however, activates a severe penalty. Illegal immigrants who have been in the country more than 180 days must wait three years before re-entering the United States legally. If they’ve been illegal for more than a year, the waiting period is 10 years. Because of this automatic barter, Dowd regularly advises clients to wait. One of the proposed changes to the guest-worker program circulating in Congress would eliminate the need to return home and re-enter, she says.

To get through the system legally and legitimately, however, if they began petitioning the government today it would take the families who spoke with Style a minimum of 15 years each to become legal residents.

For Stalin and his wife, Xime, they simply can’t wait that long. Originally from Ecuador, they’ve been living in the United States for 10 years. They spent their first five years in Florida and the last five in Richmond, in a townhouse off West Broad Street in Henrico, a quarter-mile from Parham Road. Stalin and his family came to the United States first on a tourist visa. He has a biology degree from Central University of Ecuador and quickly found a job paying $21 an hour doing engineering and construction work.

His plan was to petition for permanent residency. But shortly after his visa expired, terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001, changing the political environment dramatically. The process of becoming legal became more difficult, with more obstacles and tighter controls. He was advised that becoming a legal resident in the United States would be next to impossible then — and was told to wait.

So he kept working, obtained a fake Social Security number to get by, as did Xime. Now Stalin and Xime, who works at a nearby restaurant, find themselves trapped in a never-ending cycle. Every so often employers discover they’ve falsified their paperwork, sometimes during tax season or when a health insurance claim comes in. “They know I have bad papers, and we have to start again,” Stalin explains. They’ve lost more jobs than they can count.

Now he’s worried about educating his children. His 16-year-old daughter, Priscilla, is a junior in high school and wants to attend college. Her 13-year-old brother, Moses, is in the gifted program at Moody Middle School and hopes to attend college as well. Well-mannered and low key, both look and dress American. They speak fluent English. Moses wears a black Nike shirt with high-tops; Priscilla is strikingly pretty with shoulder-length brown hair and blue jeans. She’s already thinking about marriage. She turns 17 next year, she says, and can legally marry an American boy. Marriage, of course, is the easiest way out of the dilemma. If she marries, Pricilla can become a legal resident after one year. Five years later, her immediate family members can petition to become permanent residents.

Their youngest, 4-year-old Emily, is the only legal citizen in the family. She has long brown hair that often falls over her eyes, particularly when she’s dancing, or twirling the Hula-Hoop. They have a white dog named Rocqo, a Labrador-pit bull mix.

As for college, it’s simply too expensive. Because they are not permanent residents, attending school in Virginia means they’d have to pay out-of-state tuition, which is decidedly more than what they would pay as in-state students.

Stalin already pays $1,050 a month to rent the townhouse, with its chipped parquet floors, spacious living room and full kitchen. He works two jobs, and often logs 16 hours a day to put food on the table and pay utilities. He could save money and move his family near their friends along Jeff Davis, but he worries about the crime and likes the schools where they live.

The family’s options are limited, he says. Even if they wanted to go home, Xime says there is nothing for them to go home to. “We have no nothing left in my country,” she says, her voice rising. “It’s impossible just thinking about going back to my country.”

Stalin, who is better educated than most who are here illegally, says it angers him when politicians say they are a drain on the school system or on the economy. He and his wife pay taxes. (The IRS allows illegal immigrants to pay taxes by issuing them an Individual Tax Identification Number, or ITIN.) They are active with the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and are becoming increasingly vocal politically.

Next year, however, another crisis is looming for Stalin. He has a Virginia driver’s license, but the laws have changed and next year it comes up for renewal. It used to be that you didn’t need a Social Security number to get a license in the United States. Not anymore.

“I’m working as hard as I can,” he says.

Other families have many of the same problems. When Vladimir came to Richmond in the summer of 2000, he had a construction job waiting for him. He had worked as an airport security officer in Ecuador and had just lost his job when the company he worked for went bankrupt.

Working at the airport had its perks. He was able to get a tourist visa and fly into the United States. His family — his wife, Ana, and their three daughters — made the trek six months after Vladimir came to Richmond. Initially, they didn’t intend to stay in the United States. The plan was to earn enough money and get enough education and go back to Ecuador. But the lure of opportunity in the States was too much. Vladimir landed a good job. Ana quickly found work housekeeping. Their two oldest girls, Gabby and Kathy, got along well at school and started dreaming of college.

For the most part, things have worked out well. Gabby, 18, just started her first semester at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and is studying criminal justice. She hopes to become a criminal defense attorney, she says.

Kathy, 16, plans to get a nursing degree. She’s an honor roll student, a whiz at math and currently is a junior at James River High School, where she is a member of the step-dance team and serves on the Key Club.

The family lives in a spacious apartment near the Boulders office park. It’s well- furnished, down to the metallic bar stools, an entertainment center and the wine rack in the living room. At night, there’s some ruckus in the neighborhood, they say, noting that they recently had a car stereo stolen. But it’s better than their last place at St. John’s Wood Apartments near Chippenham, in the city just across the county line. Two summers ago, the girls were at the pool when a fight broke out and ended with gunshots. They moved.

The whole family works. Gabby has a job as a hostess at a nearby restaurant, and the entire family does commercial janitorial work at night, usually between 9:30 and midnight. (Ana and Vladimir give the girls Fridays and Saturdays off, however, so they can go out with their friends.)

Things were going so well that Vladimir recently started his own contracting business, specializing in commercial framing and Sheetrock. A few weeks ago, Gabby and Kathy had the opportunity to go to Chesterfield Towne Center while their father worked a job at the mall.

“We hope the legal situation gets better so we can stay here,” says Kathy, whose biggest problem seems to be fitting in with the rich kids at James River High. “They’re like, ‘Yo, let’s go to my parents’ summer house.’ And you’re like, ‘Yo, I live in an apartment,’” she says.

Still, they well know the difference. Compared to their lives in Ecuador, where they were poorer and jobs were scarce, their lives here have drastically improved.

The trend is as old as immigration itself: The men come first looking for steady jobs, often with the intention of working for a few years to earn enough money to buy land back home, says R. McKenna Brown, director of the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“He wants to get married and thinks, ‘How could I possibly get enough to buy enough land and there are no employment opportunities?’ So you leave for somewhere where that is possible,” Brown says. “Most immigrants come as single men, come with the intent to buy enough land and get set up.”

Now, with the intense labor demand in the United States and the rise of dual-income families even in more traditional countries in South America, many are coming over as couples, says Brown. “The changing patterns of gender roles make it increasingly acceptable for a woman to migrate as well,” he says. “So, what I think we’re seeing now is an increase in couples immigrating at different moments, the wife coming to the States to join her husband to double the earning power.”

They come to Richmond and Central Virginia because of the strong housing market. Construction jobs are plentiful, and, in turn, so are landscaping, restaurant and janitorial jobs. In his three-year study of Richmond’s Hispanic and Latino populations, Keo Calvacanti, a professor of sociology at James Madison University, says many are now coming from their native homelands directly to the Richmond area.

From 2000 to 2003, Calvacanti, while working at University of Richmond, found that 20 percent of those he and his research team interviewed (a total of 303 recently immigrated Hispanics) came directly to Richmond. Forty-three percent immigrated to Richmond for specific jobs or work-related opportunities, Calvacanti says. Some 34 percent came here to be reunited with family members.

As long as there are opportunities, they will find a way to come to places where labor demand exists, Calvacanti says, regardless of immigration laws. “People don’t leave their nations on a lark. As long as there are jobs on this side of the border, you are going to find a lot of people coming over,” he says.

Do the immigrants help or hurt the economy? The national debate could rage on forever. Calvacanti thinks simple economics will eventually win out. It’s the same reason that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and President Bush are pushing to make it easier for illegal immigrants, especially those who have been here and been paying taxes for five years or more, to find permanent residency and work permits.

Meanwhile, the Hispanic population is gaining political clout. On April 9, more than 4,000 immigrants, many of them here illegally, showed up in downtown Richmond to take part in a nationwide protest.

Laura Castro, an 18-year-old senior at L.C. Bird High School in Chesterfield County, was among the protesters. It was a bold move for Castro, who came over six years ago from Bogotá, Columbia. She first moved in with her grandmother, who lived in North Carolina, and then joined her mother in Richmond a year later.

She grew up in the economically depressed Bogotá, where she and her family regularly feared for their lives. When she was 9, she watched a man get shot to death while strolling down the sidewalk. Her grandfather was kidnapped when she was 10. Just before she left, there were regular reports of murderers dismembering their victims and putting their body parts in garbage bags. “It was not safe to live there,” she says.

Her life improved in the United States. Her mother, Blanca, works at a clothing store and recently saved enough to buy a condo off Cogbill Road in Chesterfield County. A senior with a 4.13 GPA, Castro has been accepted to four colleges, none of which she will be able to attend because of the expense, she says. Because of her illegal status, she doesn’t qualify for most scholarships, and student loans are out of the question.

She volunteers at the rescue squad and is a well-known student at school. She already has her prom dress picked out. The week before spring break, she was even the school’s mock principal during a role-playing exercise. As Principal Castro, she welcomed students to school over the intercom system.

“She didn’t crack any jokes and kept school in order,” says the actual principal, Joe Tylus. “She walked the halls with a walkie-talkie. We were happy to have her.”

Neither her teachers — including Tylus — nor her friends had any idea she was an illegal immigrant. Then her picture appeared on the front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch April 10 holding up a protest placard announcing her illegal status. Last week she went to school for the first time since the photo appeared. She was a bit nervous, she says. Students can be cruel. Once, a teacher made her cry when she made an offhand remark about illegal immigrants.

“To put that sign up, that was a huge step for me,” she says. “It was time that I stand up for what I believe.”

Principal Tylus says Castro came to him during spring break to talk about the picture. He told her how proud he was.

He told the entire school how proud he was over the PA system on April 18, the day students returned from spring break. (He also mentioned that Castro had been invited to meet with Gov. Tim Kaine and U.S. Sen. George Allen.)

“Whenever it’s one of our kids at Bird High School, we see the world a little differently,” says Tylus. “We’re their advocates, regardless of the situation.”

Sara and Sendy, the Guatemalans in southern Chesterfield, say they could certainly could use some advocates. They have one in Carmen Williams, who attends their church at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church on Beulah Road. Williams helped the family find an attorney and has led the drive at church to get additional help.

Williams, a native of Peru, has a master’s degree in international legal studies from American University in Washington, D.C., and plans to take the bar exam in July. She is also an active Republican who headed the Hispanics for Bush coalition during his re-election campaign in 2004. But lately, she’s become wary of both political parties because of the immigration issue. Recently, Republicans on the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors expressed outrage over the expense illegals impose on county coffers.

“They are forgetting that we are talking about people,” Williams says. Seeing families such as Sara’s struggle, she says, is case in point.

Sara, 34, seems to be in a state of emotional shock. She doesn’t know what to do. Her husband, Jose, has been deported, and there’s little chance he’ll return anytime soon — unless he does so illegally, which is getting more difficult.

When her young boys ask about their father, she tells them the truth. And she leans heavily on her faith. As a devout Catholic, it’s about all she has left.

“God knows that is immigration is bad,” she tells the children. “And God is taking care of your father.”

#

IMMIGRATION

LARGE

Mi Casa, Su Casa

About a quarter-and possibly as much as a third-of the population of little San Mateo, Mexico, now lives in Philadelphia.

by Kate Kilpatrick

San Mateo Ozolco, Mexico — On a chilly January day, smoke rises from Popocatepetl, the active snow-capped volcano that overlooks San Mateo, a tiny, humble pueblo that lies on the edge of a cliff two hours southeast of Mexico City.

Popocatepetl means "smoking mountain" in Nahuatl, the pre-Hispanic indigenous Aztec language still spoken in this isolated region where campesinos have lived off the rocky land for nearly 2,000 years. To the west lies the inactive volcano Iztaccihuatl, which translates as mujer blanca in Spanish, or "white woman" in English.

According to Aztec mythology, this area was once home to an Aztec warrior who was in love with the emperor's daughter. Hoping to extinguish the love affair, the emperor sent the warrior to war in Oaxaca in the hope he'd die in battle. But instead his daughter died of grief while her lover was away.

When the warrior returned, he learned of his lover's death. He carried her body out and buried it, and the gods covered her body with a blanket of snow. She became the silent, peaceful volcano Iztaccihuatl, while the still smoking Popocatepetl is said to be the angry spirit of the young warrior.

From Cholula, the nearest city, it's a windy ride to San Mateo, past corn and cactus fields. The white minivan loads and unloads sturdy old women carrying vegetables and flowers back from markets. When Hernando Cortes occupied this region in 1500, he ordered 365 Catholic churches — one for each day of the year — to be built in Cholula and its outskirts.

Although only about 175 churches were built under Cortes, there are now more than 365 churches in and around Cholula. Many of the pueblos are named after the patron saint of their church. As the van winds in and out of each town — stopping in San Lucas, San Pedro, Santiago Xalizitla and other small communities — the surroundings become more modest and the poverty more pronounced, until it reaches the farthest point and last stop: San Mateo.

Sacks Park, South Philadelphia — On a Sunday afternoon in this park at Fourth and Washington, the city's Mexican community has gathered to celebrate the spring equinox. Husband-and-wife teams heat tortillas on an oiled baking tray, chop big chunks of cooked pig into crumbly, meaty bits and refresh containers of shredded lettuce, cilantro and salsa. The line for tacos is long.

Events like this always take place on Sundays, when the city's undocumented restaurant workers — the dishwashers, busboys, line cooks and delivery men —are most likely to have time off to spend with family and friends.

Most of the young Mexican men standing around the park wear American jeans, name-brand sneakers and baseball caps. Some have lived here for five years or more. Others only months. Most speak little or no English. Almost all are from San Mateo. On this day there's a performance by a native Aztec dance group. Daniel Chico and Brujo de la Mancha formed the group three years ago as a way to keep the city's growing Mexican community in touch with its indigenous roots while creating new lives in a new country.

Before the DJ begins his mariachi and reggaeton mix, an announcement is made about Grupo Ozolco, a group of San Mateans who are attempting to organize a transnational community. They're trying to raise $25,000 to build a new high school in San Mateo (the existing school is housed in a structurally unsound building with broken windows and no running water) with dollars earned in Philadelphia.

The hope is to provide an infrastructure that can give San Mateo youth a shot at getting the education and skills necessary to find better jobs when they come to Philly. They dream of a time when San Mateo kids can be educated and attend universities at home so they don't have to cross the border and live in fear and isolation in an unwelcoming country that accepts their cheap labor but often rejects their humanity.

The first San Matean to come to Philadelphia was Efren Tellez, who arrived 11 years ago. Tellez hired a smuggler to bring him through the desert, across la frontera and up to New York, where relatives awaited him. That much is known.

But stories vary about what happened next.

One version has it that Tellez met up with a friend in New York, and together they went to Camden, N.J. But they couldn't find work, so they came to Philly instead. Here they found jobs at an Italian restaurant at Second and Walnut, where they worked for about a year before switching restaurants.

Another version has it that Tellez's smuggler never brought him to New York at all and dumped him in Philly instead.

Lost and speaking no English, Tellez wandered the streets of the city until, walking down Locust Street, he spotted a canopy outside a restaurant that read "comida Mexicana" (Mexican food).

"Imagine that," says Guillermo, who owned the Mexican restaurant Tellez had somehow stumbled upon. "This was 1995, and in Philadelphia there were no Mexicans, so for him to find that sign it was like an oasis in the middle of the desert."

Guillermo recalls Tellez as shy at first. "He was very afraid. He was very lost. He was kind of disoriented," Guillermo says. "He didn't know what to ask for — if he should ask for a job or food or money or help or what."

Tellez was in luck. The restaurant needed a dishwasher, and he was hired on the spot. But when he walked into the kitchen, another surprise awaited him.

"Where are the Mexicans?" Tellez wondered.

Today the undocumented Mexican community of South Philadelphia is about 12,000 strong.

If Tellez were alive today he could walk into just about any restaurant kitchen in the city and find fellow mexicanos hard at work.

Efren Tellez died of exhaustion three years ago. He left behind a wife and three children in San Mateo. His son, the oldest, is about 17. He arrived in Philly just more than a month ago.

Although it's a difficult population to track, community leaders estimate there are anywhere from 750 to 1,200 San Mateans now living in Philadelphia, most of them men age 18 to 45. The population of San Mateo as of two years ago was 2,600.

That means approximately a quarter — and possibly as much as a third — of San Mateo's population now lives in Philadelphia.

After Tellez spent his first two years living and working in Philadelphia, he went back to San Mateo to visit. There he spread the word about Philly — there were restaurant jobs, and they paid well. He soon rounded up about a dozen men — including two brothers-in-law, two cousins and some friends — and he brought the men back to Philly with him.

Once in Philadelphia, those men began telling their brothers, cousins and friends about Philly too. Soon Tellez was making regular trips to San Mateo, bringing as many as 20 more men back to Philadelphia each time.

Mario, a cousin and one of the original dozen to come back with him, estimates Tellez had brought about 200 San Mateans to Philadelphia before he died. He's remembered as a good guy, someone who wanted to help others find the same opportunities he'd found. Sometimes he charged them the coyote fee, sometimes he didn't.

For Philadelphia restaurant owners, the arrival of this new immigrant community was a blessing. For one thing, it coincided with the city's restaurant boom, which was then having a hard time finding reliable workers to take the low-end kitchen jobs.

And there was an added bonus: These new workers had already been trained in the food and restaurant business. Many of the San Mateans had worked in upscale restaurants in places like Cholula, Puebla and Mexico City before coming to Philadelphia.

And along with their labor and restaurant experience, the community also brought history, culture and values.

"They're very professional and very disciplined," restaurateur Guillermo says of the San Matean workers. "People who stay out of trouble."

The three main roads in San Mateo run parallel. Small houses line either side. There are no bars, restaurants or cafes. On a side street two young women sell roasted corn spread with mayonnaise.

The streets of San Mateo are mostly unpaved. As the minivans roll in, unloading San Mateans from their jobs in neighboring towns, the air becomes thick with dirt. Jeans and shoes get a thick coating of dust.

The town's gray concrete-block homes are splashed with graffiti painted by teenagers to represent local rival gangs: the Sex Pistols, the Cobras, the Ducks and the Shalacas (a Nahuatl word for scorpions).

Though gangs are a growing problem, San Mateo remains safe. Kids stay out late at night, hanging out on the basketball court in the town center. Even in the pitch black night no one fears for the children's safety.

San Mateo has many children, and many women and old people too. Young men, though, are pretty rare.

But on Sunday afternoons, in the dirt field behind the high school, whatever young men are still left in San Mateo come together for the weekly soccer match. On this day almost all of the assembled — some 50 young men — have lived in Philly for anywhere from one to six years. Some will return in another year or two, when their money runs out. Others are here for a short time — to visit friends and family — and will return to their Philadelphia jobs once the weather warms.

Watching a dusty soccer match in this tiny, tranquil village that sits on the edge of a cliff at the bottom of a mountain are several dozen members of Philadelphia's undocumented restaurant community — dishwashers, busboys, prep cooks and bar backs from Audrey Claire, Twenty Manning, Davio's, Smith & Wollensky, L2, Five Spot, Pietro's, Rouge, McCormick & Schmick's and other spots.

"Para el dinero es bueno," says 25-year-old David Tellez-Sanchez, not taking his eyes off the game in front of him.

These are men who work hard, long hours when they're in Philadelphia, who sleep in crowded South Philly apartments, who stay out of trouble and therefore hopefully under the radar. They come to earn money to feed their families back home in San Mateo.

Tellez-Sanchez last worked as a busboy at Susanna Foo. He spent six years living in Philadelphia before going home.

For the young men of San Mateo — brothers, sons, husbands, cousins — it's become a coming-of-age tradition to cross the border and find a restaurant job in Philadelphia.

Even the mayor of San Mateo came to Philadelphia four years ago. Today he works as a line cook at a restaurant on Columbus Boulevard.

"First you cry because you leave your family. You cry one hour, two hours," says 27-year-old Ruben, dressed in a red-and-blue Phillies ballcap, a crisp white T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. "After that, you're very depressed, because you don't want to lose this life you've got with your family, your friends, your country."

Ruben was part of the early wave of San Mateans to come to Philadelphia. It's been six years since he made the long and frightening trip across the border, led by a coyote he didn't know and joined by 80 other Mexicans he'd never met. His uncle made the same journey a couple months before him, his brother a month after him.

Ruben lives near Broad and Snyder. He works in the kitchen at a bar/restaurant on South Street, where he spends 45 hours a week washing dishes and prepping food. He brings home about $500 every two weeks. If he were back in Mexico this time of year, still a campesino working the land, he'd be planting corn, beans and ava all day, returning from the fields with no food, no money, no product of his labor.

Students attend high school in a crumbling building on the verge of collapsing.

Before he came to Philadelphia, Ruben attended secundario and preparatorio in neighboring towns outside San Mateo. His uncle (who works alongside him in the restaurant kitchen) had a job in Mexico City at that time and paid for his nephew's education.

Though Ruben was the only student from San Mateo to graduate from his preparatorio, there were still no opportunities for him in the pueblo. After resisting the inevitable for several years, he contacted a coyote and made the trip across the border into Arizona, then to L.A., and finally ended up in Brooklyn.

In New York Ruben worked a construction job for two months, making $250 a week. Though he shared an apartment with several San Mateans, he missed a sense of community. It seemed everyone cared only about their individual dreams.

"Where is the life?" he wondered.

"The life is gone," his friends would tell him.

Ruben called his uncle, who told him to come to Philadelphia.

"There are too many Latinos [in New York]," his uncle told him. "So there's not enough jobs. That's why you make only $250 a week. Come to Philly. There's like 50 Mexicans here."

"But what about the community?" Ruben asked. "It's very important, or else you lose your mind."

"Who cares about the community?" his uncle said. "Forget community."

Ruben came to Philadelphia, but still he was depressed. "I can't live like this," he told himself.

But things soon changed.

"They started coming — Mexicans, Mexicans, Mexicans — every day, every week," he says.

And for Ruben, many of these new Mexicans were familiar faces — friends and neighbors from San Mateo.

In the 11 years since Efren Tellez stumbled upon this city, the people of San Mateo have created a transnational community in South Philadelphia. It's a community that goes beyond the Washington Avenue taquerias and the shops selling tortillas, nopalitos, cumbia CDs, phone cards and money transfers that dot the Italian Market.

At least one business caters specifically to the Mexican people from San Mateo. One enterprising San Matean now runs a paqueteria, a package delivery business that makes trips back and forth between San Mateo and Philadelphia. Every few weeks he drives his van across the country and across the border, delivering clothes and gifts to family members in el pueblo, and returning with needed documents, like birth certificates and school diplomas, and even samples of San Mateo food and other reminders of home.

At St. Thomas Aquinas at 18th and Morris, a Catholic church that serves the neighborhood's longstanding Italian community, more and more Mexican faces fill the pews. El Charro Negro (so named for his uniform of black sombrero and black cowboy clothes) brought over a small folk art statue of St. Matthew, the pueblo's patron, and had it placed on a side altar beside the statue of Mary. (It stayed there only a short while, though. The church requested Charro remove the statue and take it somewhere else. It now resides in his home.)

Even the youth gangs that claimed their small sections of the pueblo back in San Mateo have transplanted themselves to Philly. The Shalacas, the largest and roughest of the bunch, have more members living in Philly than in the pueblo.

Although they don't control any territory here, the gang divisions sometimes represent historic family rivalries, and an occasional fight will spark up seemingly out of nowhere when members from rival families encounter each other unexpectedly on the street or at a baptism party. But most of the men are too busy working, too focused on saving money, and too intent on remaining under the radar of the authorities to cause any real trouble.

San Mateans have even managed to stay connected to their neighboring town, San Lucas. The people of San Lucas have formed a similar transnational community just over the bridge in Camden, N.J. A walk down Federal Street, Camden's main thoroughfare, will take you past the popular Restaurant San Lucas and a San Lucas food market, in addition to many other Mexican stores and restaurants.

Even the Sunday afternoon soccer matches that take place each week in the dusty field behind the high school in San Mateo have relocated to Philly. Ricardo Diaz, the primary organizer of the "Day Without an Immigrant" event back in February, runs a Latino soccer league with several Mexican teams.

El Charro Negro has helped unify a much smaller league for the women, with Sunday morning practices and the occasional Philadelphia (San Mateo) vs. Camden (San Lucas) match. Women playing soccer would be unheard of back in San Mateo, but over here it's a much-needed diversion, a chance for the women to get out of the house. The team's original name was Ozolco, but they changed it to Aguilas (Eagles) to honor both the eagle represented on the Mexican flag and Philly's own favorite sports team.

And then there's Grupo Ozolco, using the little free time they have to organize the community so dollars earned in the U.S. can be used effectively to address some of the overwhelming economic and social needs back home in San Mateo.

"I know everyone is here for the job, for the money, to take care of your family," Ruben tells the dozen or so San Mateans gathered at Casa de Soles, an organization hub for the South Philly Mexican community. "But I know everyone wants to go back. But when you go back, you have nothing there. We have a chance here in America to do something for people there — because I know everybody still has family there."

The dollars sent back to San Mateo mean new homes, new furniture, even new cars for the people there. But it doesn't change the fundamental poverty of the pueblo — the lack of opportunities for the youth.

Working closely with Casa de Soles' director Peter Bloom, Ruben and El Charro Negro formed Grupo Ozolco to determine the community's needs and how to address them using dollars earned in Philly restaurants.

At that first meeting about a year ago, Ruben invited everyone to share their personal stories. There were many to choose from.

There were issues of local corruption and mass unemployment. The group could raise money to install streetlights, or pave the road to San Pedro, or create recreation programs to give the youth something to do. (San Mateo has a recent but growing problem with bored kids and teens inhaling paint thinner and taking veterinary drugs.)

But the most pressing problem, they agreed, was education. Ruben had graduated from a preparatorio in nearby San Pedro, but guys like Charro had attended just three years of primary school.

And while San Mateo had finally opened its own high school two years earlier, it's in a crumbling building with three overcrowded classrooms. Its location in the town center means constant noise and traffic distractions. The building is hot, the windows are broken and there's no toilet. If students need to use the bathroom they either walk to the nearby primary school or go home. Of those who finish (the first graduating class will have 26 students), most of the women will get married and have kids. The men will come to Philadelphia to support them.

When San Mateans living in Philly return to San Mateo, whether for a visit or to stay, they find a very different pueblo from the one they left.

New concrete homes have replaced many of the previous era's homes that were made from a claylike material and sand. Though most new houses are still raw gray blocks awaiting further construction, a few are stuccoed and painted. Splashes of color and modernity surface here and there amid the ancient, quiet landscape.

Over in the Shalacas' neighborhood — what has historically been the poorest section of the pueblo — El Charro Negro's new two-story, six-room and two-bath home is getting its final touches.

As the sun goes down and the cold mountain air blows gusts of dirt across the bumpy roads, men and women return from el campo, as they have for decades, even centuries. Stray dogs sniff each other out in the middle of the road. Popocatepetl exhales his smoky breath across the sky. An old man, drunk off pulque, stumbles up the street laughing.

#

INVEVSTIGATIVE REPORTING

SMALL

Hard Cell?

New Mexico was sold on Wexford Health Sources’ promise to save money on inmate health care — but some former employees say the cost is too high.

by Dan Frosch

Tuberculosis tests take time.

First, there’s the initial injection when the patient is shot with a small dose of tuberculin solution. Then, there’s the 48- to 72-hour waiting period. Finally, the moment of truth: If the flesh around the syringe prick turns reddish and hard, the test is positive. If the skin appears normal, the patient is home free. A week later, the entire routine is repeated.

Inmates in New Mexico’s correctional facilities are regularly administered two-step tuberculosis tests because one missed case can morph into a dangerous situation. This is a disease that runs particularly rampant in close quarters: homeless shelters, refugee camps, prisons.

In late 2005, Dr. Gayla Herbel, then the regional medical director for New Mexico’s prisons, says she noticed that inmates’ tuberculosis tests seemed to be coming back from the nursing staff too quickly and in too large a volume.

One afternoon, Herbel says, she randomly chose an inmate whose files indicated he’d tested negative for the disease. According to Herbel, the inmate told her he’d been injected with tuberculin solution, but no one had ever examined him after to read the results of the test. When Herbel reviewed the inmate’s medical charts, she found he’d actually been treated for tuberculosis within the past six months. Herbel says she subsequently discovered the files of an additional “handful” of inmates who’d never been properly tested.

“‘If this truly is falsification of the tuberculosis testing and it is the norm, we are at risk for an outbreak,’” she recalls telling a colleague.

An endocrinologist by trade, Herbel says she alerted her employer: Wexford Health Sources. Wexford, a private, for-profit company, administers health care in nine New Mexico correctional facilities that house state prisoners and was Herbel’s employer. Based in Pennsylvania, Wexford has handled prison health care in New Mexico ever since signing an approximately $27 million contract with the New Mexico Corrections Department in July 2004.

Herbel says Wexford never fully addressed her concerns and placed her on leave when she pressed the matter. She says she was offered the opportunity to return in a lesser capacity but, instead, quit a month after she first noticed the files — approximately eight months after she began the job.

Sante Fe Reporter has no way to verify Herbel’s story, but it is similar to the accounts of five other former Wexford employees interviewed over the course of a month-long investigation.

Among their allegations, the ex-employees say Wexford staff improperly doled out prescription drugs to inmates; canceled inmates’ medical appointments because of staff shortages; and, to save money, failed to send sick inmates off-site to hospitals expeditiously.

Wexford, when contacted by SFR, requested all questions in writing and provided a written response to the allegations made by its former employees.

In that response, Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman categorically denies most of the allegations, although she acknowledges past problems with tuberculosis record keeping that have since been corrected. Gedman also points to numerous successful audits of Wexford’s New Mexico operation by national correctional health care organizations.

“We are very proud of the service we are providing in New Mexico,” Gedman writes. “We believe the best indicator that the services we are providing are appropriate is for you to consider the results from two external, independent organizations that have audited our services 13 times since May of 2005.”

Wexford, according to the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD), has indeed been audited successfully by the American Correctional Association and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care. But SFR’s review of Wexford’s history also shows lost contracts and critical reports, some of which include findings similar to these latest allegations made in New Mexico.

SFR also has learned that the State Board of Nursing is currently investigating Herbel’s allegations regarding the TB tests. Further, according to a September, 2005, letter written by Corrections Secretary Joe Williams, Wexford proposed paying the state approximately $35,000 to address state concerns about a shortage of hours worked by Wexford personnel.

Says Herbel: “Wexford management made it clear that it was not all about the quality of health care. It was about keeping down the cost and making up for money previously spent. There were cases where I believe that care of inmates was compromised.”

Wexford won New Mexico’s contract at a time when the state was looking to save money. In fact, Gov. Bill Richardson’s “Save Smart” initiative, launched in 2003, specifically identified state corrections as a primary focus.

In 2004, Wexford, the third largest private correctional health company in the country, successfully bid to provide health care for the state’s approximately 6,200 inmates.

Shortly thereafter, Richardson’s office issued an Aug. 12 press release touting a projected $7.2 million over four years in savings for inmate medical costs and vowing that the quality of care would be maintained or improved.

“We use a point system for bidders, and Wexford had the most points. They really stood out more than the other companies bidding,” Devendra Singh, NMCD’s quality assurance manager for health services and a member of the committee that recommended Wexford, says.

Among those companies was Addus Healthcare, which held the contract previously for two years. Company Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Heaney says he was consistently told by corrections officials that his company was doing a good job.

“We’re proud to say that the quality and responsiveness in our health care was excellent,” Heaney says. “But the state was looking to save money, and we did not agree that we could deliver the services at a lower rate.”

The same year Wexford won the New Mexico bid, it also unseated Addus in Illinois, where the latter provided health care in seven correctional facilities.

Despite Wexford’s success in New Mexico and Illinois, the company has a well-documented history of problems.

In the late 1990s, the US Justice Department launched an investigation of the Wyoming State Penitentiary, where Wexford provided health care to inmates. Following the investigation, the Justice Department released a report that criticized, among other things, the staffing, medication and chronic illness management at the facility. It concluded that the lack of sufficient health care, along with other inadequacies, created conditions that violated inmates’ constitutional rights. Shortly after the Justice Department’s report, Wexford lost its contract with the state.

A 1998 press release also notes that the state’s new contract with Correctional Medical Services includes “increased staffing and more stringent enforcement provisions for service delivery.”

Wexford encountered similar problems in Florida. In that state, the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability (OPPAGA), an arm of the Florida Legislature, issued a critical 2004 report on Wexford’s operations.

The Florida Department of Corrections initially contracted with Wexford in July 2001 with expectations the company would save the state approximately $24.6 million over four years. According to the OPPAGA report, however, Wexford kept costs down by compromising the care of its inmates. Specifically, the OPPAGA report cites record keeping, insufficient staffing and the postponement of specialty clinic visits as the most pressing problems.

“There were concerns about the adequacy of care provided under the contract with Wexford,” Kathy McGuire, OPPAGA’s deputy director, says. “There were repeated incidents of non-compliance. Wexford would be notified, they would make a response, but the problems would re-emerge. It was frustrating.”

The OPPAGA report was released in August 2004, the same month Richardson’s office touted the expected savings from its new relationship with Wexford.

Singh says he was unaware of Wexford’s problems in Wyoming and Florida, but that during the bidding process NMCD randomly called various corrections departments where Wexford worked and heard mostly high praise for the company. Singh does not know if officials from Wyoming or Florida were ever contacted.

Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman notes in an email to SFR that the Justice Department report on Wyoming covered much more than health care services. She maintains that the state was “very satisfied with the way in which we operated in a very difficult situation after an inmate there murdered a security officer.”

Gedman also writes that Wexford resolved all the OPPAGA issues that document raised and reported as much to the Florida Department of Corrections and the State Legislature.

“These entities were satisfied that we resolved all the issues that were raised,” Gedman writes.

Wexford has, from the start, saved New Mexico money. A review of the Save Smart initiative by the Legislative Finance Committee last April showed that of the 77 state agencies that successfully trimmed budgets, the Corrections Department was the most frugal. Of $3.7 million in total state savings, Corrections accounted for $1.9 million — more than half. Of that figure, savings for inmate medical services made up $1.3 million.

Some of Wexford’s former employees, however, allege those savings came at too high a cost.

Angela Billings, a tough-talking woman of 43, served as a military police officer in the Army for 10 years before going into nursing. Wanting to combine her law enforcement experience with her medical training, Billings thought correctional health care the perfect fit for a second career.

In 1999, she was assigned to the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility at Los Lunas, the medical intake center for the state prison system. Each of the state’s approximately 6,200 inmates pass through Central for a comprehensive diagnostic and psychiatric exam, and the facility also holds the state’s only prison hospital, long-term care and geriatric units.

Billings worked for two years at Central under Addus, a company she believes treated both employees and inmates fairly. When Wexford took over, she says, things changed dramatically.

To start with, Billings says, under Addus, there were roughly two nurses for every 37 inmates. According to Billings, Wexford cut that ratio down to one nurse. Staff became so scarce at Central, Billings says, that “sick calls” and “med lines,” during which inmates are seen for medical problems and receive prescription drugs, were sometimes cancelled because there wasn’t enough staff.

Billings says she also noticed a difference in the clearance process for inmates’ off-site visits to hospitals and specialists. According to Billings, Addus gave doctors and nurses discretion to decide when an inmate required specialized medial attention. Wexford, on the other hand, consistently denied approval.

“You were always being told that everything cost too much money,” she says. “But these are people’s lives you’re talking about. Inmates were suffering all the time and it was really disturbing to see them not taken care of.”

Billings also says she observed Wexford administrators at Central altering inmates’ medical records.

“They were hiding mistakes they’d made,” she says.

Linda Martinez, an ex-administrative assistant at Lea County Detention Center in Hobbs, and Burt Patterson, a former nurse at the Roswell Correctional Center, echo many of Billings’ concerns.

Martinez, a seven-year veteran of correctional health care, worked for CMS and Addus before Wexford. She says Wexford was so insistent on saving money it would deny doctors’ requests for medical supplies. Staffing was so short that a Wexford administrator once authorized a lab technician to start an intravenous flow on an inmate, something he was not legally licensed to do, she says.

Like Billings, Martinez was bothered most by the amount of time chronically ill inmates waited for off-site medical treatment.

“Our inmates stayed in pain a lot,” Martinez says.

Patterson, who also worked under CMS and Addus, agrees that the most glaring difference with Wexford was the company’s cost cutting.

“Under Addus, if an inmate needed something, well then, they needed it, and Addus helped them,” Patterson, who currently works for a correctional health care management firm in Colorado, says. “With Wexford, it was always the money. We had to wait until an inmate was practically dying before we could send them off for X-rays.”

Patterson eventually quit Wexford in July, 2005, in part, she says, because of her concerns. Billings and Martinez were fired by Wexford within the last year. Both women say they were terminated because they clashed with their bosses over, among other things, the adequate administration of health care.

In a letter to SFR, Gedman refutes all of the allegations made by Billings, Martinez and Patterson. The former employees were not identified, by name, to Wexford in SFR’s written questions; Wexford’s response notes: “We are understandably concerned that these questions appear to be coming from disgruntled former Wexford employees who seem to have some sort of axe to grind against Wexford and/or the New Mexico Department of Corrections.”

Specifically, Gedman says the ex-nurses’ assertions that Wexford delayed sending sick inmates off-site to cut costs is “absolutely untrue.”

“Wexford prides itself on its physician-driven model which ensures that doctors make the decision to treat a patient at the appropriate place of care, whether on or off site,” Gedman writes. “Wexford believes identifying and treating a medical need earlier, rather than later, leads to the highest quality service and in the long run lowest cost alternative; regardless of place or cost or the service.”

Gedman also denies there is inadequate staffing.

“Wexford’s staffing levels are constantly reviewed and monitored to ensure that appropriate service levels are maintained. Our turnover ratios are similar to the healthcare industry as a whole. Wexford continues to actively recruit for qualified staff for positions at all of our locations.”

Other Wexford ex-employees have raised additional concerns. Jennifer Hand began working as Wexford’s regional consulting pharmacist in July 2005. She oversaw the prescription drug distribution system, inspected medication rooms and reviewed patient records to ensure the appropriate use of medications. A few months into her job, Hand says she started noticing widespread problems.

According to Hand, she caught a nurse filling a baggie with a 30-day supply of the acid-reflux drug Zantac from a stock supply after the inmate’s individual prescription had run out.

One nurse, Hand says, admitted to her dispensing insulin from one diabetic inmate’s prescription to another inmate whose prescription had run out in order to save money. Other nurses, she says, administered psychotropic medications to inmates even after the physicians’ orders had expired, instead of obtaining renewals.

Overall, Hand says Wexford’s record keeping was so desultory, it was difficult to keep track of which inmate was getting which medicine. When she repeatedly informed Wexford’s chief health services administrator in New Mexico, Hand says she was roundly ignored.

“Inmates were hoarding doses and using them as currency [because] nursing staff were not adequately controlling medication dosage,” she says. “The nurses who did this were exceeding the scope of their licenses, breaking the law and jeopardizing patient safety.”

Regarding allegations that nurses illegally dispensed medications, Wexford’s Gedman writes: “We are not aware of this taking place.”

In January, Hand was fired; she says it was because she was barking too loud.

Shortly after leaving, Hand met with a team of state pharmacy investigators about her allegations. Board of Pharmacy Director Bill Harvey says that following

Hand’s initial contact, his agency conducted a routine review of the state prison pharmacies but found no “major violations.”

Hand says she plans to file a formal complaint with the Board of Pharmacy in the coming weeks.

Larry Brown, who has been a nurse at various correctional facilities, psychiatric hospitals and jails over a 24-year career, became Wexford’s director of nursing at Central in January 2005.

Almost immediately, Brown says, he noticed “glaring errors” in how Wexford staff kept medical charts. He says inmates received the wrong medicine, even the wrong dosages. In one instance, Brown says an inmate with an infection in one eye was refused access to a specialist for six weeks.

Brown says his complaints to Wexford fell on deaf ears. “There was no cleaning up this mess,” Brown says. “They were cutting corners and saying, ‘Let’s not worry about it.’ It was putting inmates’ health in jeopardy.”

Brown also confirms Dr. Gayla Herbel’s story of the botched tuberculosis tests; he was one of the medical staff Herbel first told and helped her sift through records that winter night.

Like Herbel, Brown alerted Wexford administrators in New Mexico. When Herbel was placed on leave, Brown quit, one month after taking the job.

Brown shakes his head as he recalls his brief time with Wexford.

“I have a license. I’m not going to lose it over shenanigans. It’s not happening,” Brown says.

Regarding tuberculosis testing, Wexford’s Gedman writes: “Wexford learned of a problem with record keeping regarding certain TB tests performed. Upon learning of the problem, we immediately took corrective action and ensured that the appropriate care and follow up was delivered and the problem was resolved.”

In May, Brown filed a formal complaint with the New Mexico Board of Nursing regarding the tuberculosis tests. Michaeline Kelley-Boyet, the agency’s nurse investigator, tells SFR that she is currently investigating the complaint. Kelley-Boyet says the Board of Nursing is in the process of subpoenaing medical records from Wexford and will be interviewing Wexford employees in the coming months.

On an unseasonably humid day in Los Lunas, a team of correctional experts leads this reporter on a tour of Central New Mexico Correctional Facility’s medical complex.

The team includes Dr. Tom Lundquist, chief medical officer for all of Wexford’s operations; Erma Sedillo, NMCD’s deputy secretary of operations; and Devendra Singh, NMCD’s quality assurance manager for health services.

Singh, a jovial man who jokes that he has more energy now than when he started with NMCD 26 years ago, chats away as he guides the group through Central’s labyrinth of rooms and hallways.

Currently, Singh is filling in for Dr. Frank Pullara, NMCD’s health services director. Pullara, who has been on medical leave since February, was directly responsible for assessing Wexford’s medical care. When contacted by SFR, he deferred all questions to Singh. Singh says he’s licensed to practice medicine in India but not in the US; therefore, he can only monitor Wexford’s administrative procedures and has no oversight over its clinical performance. That oversight is temporarily up to Wexford, Singh says — at least until NMCD hires a new medical director. That hire should come soon, according to spokeswoman Tia Bland.

Nonetheless, Singh says he is unaware of any problems with the company’s performance in New Mexico, and NMCD assiduously monitors Wexford through a quarterly system of site visits and records reviews.

“Through our auditing process, we have found they are doing a satisfactory job,” Singh says.

Regarding allegations about systemic staffing deficiencies, Singh says that it would have been difficult for Wexford to earn its accreditation from the American Correctional Association and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care if such gaping shortages truly existed. He does, however, acknowledge that hiring and retaining medical staff in the prisons is a challenge.

“In our line of work, this is our biggest battle. You could ask God to come down and sign a contract to run the health care, and he would have problems finding staff,” Singh says. “Wexford has spent a lot of money out of their own pocket to make sure we have enough staff. That’s how I’m able to sleep at night. I’m not completely satisfied, but I’m satisfied that they have satisfactory staffing on a daily basis.”

It’s difficult to assess the validity of the state and Wexford’s assurances of adequate staffing. On July 12, SFR filed a formal written request to the state for a list of all Wexford staff working in New Mexico. At first, spokeswoman Bland informed SFR that NMCD had no such record. Bland then told SFR she would try to track down such a list. Shortly thereafter, this reporter received a phone message from Bland that suggested SFR obtain that list from Wexford.

“We’re currently in the process of working with Wexford in getting a monthly report from them on their staffing,” Bland said in the message. “Before Dr. Pullara went on medical leave, he had been talking with Wexford about some issues concerning staffing at various facilities. We are not altogether clear at this point as to what agreements he may have made with them verbally. We are revamping the monitoring process for that.”

Per Bland’s suggestion, SFR requested a list of all Wexford staff and their positions in New Mexico from Wexford. Gedman initially responded that Wexford employs 210 individuals in New Mexico. When pressed for more information, Gedman emailed a list of medical positions that Wexford utilizes ranging from administrative assistant to X-ray technician. When SFR again asked Gedman for a list of individuals and their positions at each facility and noted that NMCD suggested Wexford maintained such a list, Gedman wrote back:

“As for providing a list of names for Wexford employees, we view that as personal and confidential information, which we are not willing to provide.”

Singh says he checks Wexford’s payroll to ensure each facility has enough medical staff and that he’s working on getting Wexford to provide regular staffing records to NMCD. Singh says he was unaware of a $35,000 payment agreement between Corrections Secretary Joe Williams and Wexford related to staffing issues last fall.

In a Sept. 23, 2005 letter, Williams writes of his “very serious concerns that Wexford was not providing the number of work hours or FTEs [full-time employees] required by the contract for its personnel, particularly its psychiatrists.” That letter indicates the payment was proposed by Wexford in response to state concerns about understaffing, and says that Wexford “proposed several detailed staffing changes to the current staffing pattern in an attempt to prevent any similar problems in the future.”

SFR was told by Tia Bland that Williams was unavailable for an interview.

Singh also says Wexford’s process for approving off-site visits — known as “collegial review” — is the best system he’s seen. Collegial review entails Wexford physicians discussing the details of individual cases, without any corporate input, and then making a collective decision on how to proceed.

Again, it’s difficult to evaluate the company’s collegial review process. On July 12, SFR requested in writing from NMCD a record of the total number of off-site medical referrals granted by both Wexford and its predecessor, Addus. NMCD responded, in writing, that the department has no such records. SFR re-requested the information in a July 27 email. On Aug. 7, following a telephone conversation with Bland, SFR received an email from Bland stating that off-site referrals, over the last six months, included: 439 hospital days; 1,251 out-patient appointments; and 147 inmate emergency room trips.

Regarding the tuberculosis tests, Singh also seconds Wexford’s assessment that all problems have been remedied. He says that the inmate Gayla Herbel refers to in her account did not speak English and had difficulty communicating with nursing staff, which caused confusion to the status of his test. Singh couldn’t confirm Herbel’s statement that the inmate was previously treated for tuberculosis. He points out that the inmate ultimately tested negative for the disease.

“We are very strict on TB tests. I am a stickler. TB testing is at the top of my list,” Singh says. “We don’t have inmates who are running around with [tuberculosis]. I’ll bet my job on it.”

Despite NMCD and Wexford’s assurances, private correctional health care companies have faced numerous problems around the country.

“It has become a merry-go-round. One company promises a lot, gets a government contract and does not perform well and so the government hires another contractor,” Elizabeth Alexander, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, says. “States think that going to a private contractor will save them money. Instead, it turns into a nightmare.”

State Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Bernalillo, co-chairman of the State Legislature’s Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee, believes private medical services in New Mexico’s prisons is the wrong approach.

“Obviously, the system is broken,” McSorely says. “Appropriate medical care is not being provided to state prisoners, and we’ve discussed this in various legislative committees. But nothing has been done from the executive branch through two different administrations other than to keep privatizing the services.”

Elizabeth Alexander points to last year’s New York Times exposé on Prison Health Services (PHS), a private company that has provided health care in New York correctional facilities. The Times story reveals how PHS managed to obtain lucrative contracts in New York with promises of cheaper costs and better care, despite warnings from ex-medical staff, critical reports on the company and a rash of inmate deaths.

PHS is one of Wexford’s main competitors.

Says Alexander: “Not every time you do something wrong will bad things happen. But if you play the odds long enough, eventually, it will result in disaster.”

#

Unhealthy Proposal

Lawsuit alleges doctors fired for refusing prison work.

by Dan Frosch

Two New Mexico doctors have filed a lawsuit against Lovelace Health Systems, charging that the company fired them because they wouldn’t go along with a plan to provide substandard care to state inmates.

Dr. Bradly Jay Keller and Dr. Jolynn Muraida say Lovelace Health System axed them because they refused to provide “telepsychiatry” services to inmates. The telepsychiatry was part of a proposed contract between Lovelace and Wexford Health Sources. Wexford, a private Pennsylvania company, has handled health care for New Mexico state inmates since 2004.

According to the lawsuit, the contract with Wexford would have required the doctors to treat inmates by “seeing them remotely for about five minutes each via a television screen, assessing and evaluating them, and prescribing medication for them.”

Lovelace’s outpatient behavioral health department, of which Keller was medical director, collectively agreed that the contract called for providing “substandard treatment to patients,” the lawsuit says.

According to the lawsuit, the State of New Mexico would have been billed for the telepsychiatry services.

The lawsuit also alleges that the contract was initially proposed because one of Wexford’s directors is “a friend” of David Vandewater, president and CEO of Ardent Health Services. Ardent is Lovelace’s parent company and based in Nashville, Tenn.

Once the doctors were confronted with the proposed contract last fall, Muraida, herself a former medical director of Lovelace’s outpatient behavioral health department, called Ardent’s ethics line to complain. Shortly after Muraida and others voiced opposition, the entire department — consisting of approximately 70 employees — was targeted for closure. Vandewater informed Muraida that the department was being closed because of its refusal to participate, the lawsuit says.

Carol Dominguez Shay, attorney for the plaintiffs, sent SFR an Aug. 21 email on the matter:

“We think that the factual allegations in the Complaint about the proposed Wexford contract state the essentials about what the doctors were asked to do — i.e., provide substandard psychiatric care to New Mexicans,” Dominguez Shay writes. “As the Wexford contract was proposed to them, the doctors were asked to see inmates with psychiatric problems for about five minutes each. From even a layperson’s perspective, this is inadequate on its face and would be merely a façade of treatment.” Dominguez Shay says her clients do not wish to comment on the lawsuit.

Susan Wilson, director of public relations for Lovelace, says the company is aware of the lawsuit but cannot comment because of the pending litigation. Wilson confirms that Lovelace decided to “discontinue” its outpatient behavioral department at the end of 2005. She says the decision was made because of changes in how the state provides care to Medicaid recipients, financial difficulties and “some conflicts within the department.”

Calls to Ardent Health Services were not returned.

Via email, Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman said Wexford had no comment “as we are not a party to the suit and we do not know the detail of the case.”

Wexford is not a defendant in the case. But the company has come under fire from former employees for its health care practices.

On Aug. 9, SFR reported that six ex-employees allege that Wexford shirks basic health care for inmates in order to save money [Cover story, Aug. 9: “Hard Cell?”].

According to the story, the former Wexford workers also claim that the New Mexico Corrections Department does not sufficiently monitor its multi-million dollar contract with the company. Both Wexford and NMCD deny the charges.

One of the primary allegations levied by the six ex-Wexford employees is that Wexford does not adequately staff the nine New Mexico correctional facilities where it operates. Both a US Justice Department investigation of Wexford’s operations in Wyoming during the late 1990s and a 2004 Florida legislative assessment of the company’s contract in that state cited staffing as a paramount concern.

Psychiatry services has been a particular problem for Wexford in New Mexico. Last fall, a $35,000 agreement was reached between NMCD and Wexford related to the state’s concerns that the company didn’t provide enough work hours for full time employees, especially psychiatrists.

According to NMCD spokeswoman Tia Bland, the State Corrections Department has no knowledge of the lawsuit against Lovelace nor of any relationship between Lovelace and Wexford.

“Overall, Wexford is currently doing a satisfactory job meeting staffing and other contract requirements for inmate psychiatric services,” Bland wrote to SFR in an Aug. 21 email. “The Corrections Department has a contract monitoring team to ensure accountability.”

The lawsuit originally was filed in the Second Judicial District Court in Bernalillo County on June 21. Attorney Dominguez Shay says she expects to hear back from the defendants some time in September.

“The fact that the Lovelace Behavioral Health Department as a whole rejected the proposal is a testament to the professionalism and decency of the providers,” Dominguez Shay writes in her email to SFR. “Because the Department refused to participate in this sham, it was shut down and all of the providers were terminated.”

#

Inmate Care Critics

Legislator also questions prison contract.

by Dan Frosch

A Santa Fe dentist and his assistant say they quit their jobs at the Penitentiary of New Mexico in 2004 because of concerns that state inmates were not receiving adequate dental care.

Dr. Norton Bicoll and Sharon Daily left their employment at Wexford Health Sources, which handles health care in nine New Mexico correctional facilities, because the company ordered them to cut their hours for inmates in half, they say.

Bicoll and Daily’s problems with Wexford follow a number of serious allegations levied by six ex-Wexford employees that also question the level of health care inmates are receiving [Cover story, Aug. 9: “Hard Cell?”].

Last week, SFR also reported that two Albuquerque psychiatrists have sued Lovelace Health Systems for firing them after they refused to participate in a proposed contract with Wexford. The contract would have called for the psychiatrists to provide substandard treatment to state inmates, the lawsuit alleges [Outtakes, Aug. 23: “Unhealthy Proposal”].

These latest assertions about Wexford appear to be part of a growing chorus of criticism of the company and its treatment of inmates.

Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman, who has responded previously to questions regarding the company, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.

According to Bicoll and Daily, shortly after Wexford took over operations in New Mexico in 2004, the company ordered dental hours at the Penitentiary slashed from four days a week to two.

In response, Bicoll and Daily began to book patients roughly four or five months in advance to deal with the large number of inmates who require serious dental work due to rotting teeth and gum disease. Both say that Wexford administrators told them to stop making the advance appointments.

Bicoll and Daily, both of whom served under Wexford’s predecessor Addus Healthcare, quit their jobs six months after the changes in policy.

“I had concerns about the timeliness of the care,” Bicoll, who has been practicing dentistry for 43 years and now works at the Santa Fe County Detention Center, says. “That’s why I left.”

Daily is more pointed about her frustration with Wexford.

“It was shocking to me. Inmates had to wait longer and they were in pain. All we could do was tell them to file a grievance,” Daily says. “It seemed like Wexford was doing all of this to save money.”

Daily says she complained to Wexford administrators and medical officials from the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) but to no avail. Finally, she and Bicoll left.

“I didn’t want to compromise the care anymore,” Daily says. “I didn’t want to lose my own [dental] certificate, or my radiology license.”

NMCD spokeswoman Tia Bland says she would not speak to “general

complaints” from former Wexford employees.

But Bicoll and Daily’s issues with Wexford relate to the company’s staffing shortages in New Mexico, one of the company’s most pervasive problems, according to ex-employees.

While both NMCD and Wexford have consistently played down such shortages, according to Wexford’s own website, there are currently 47 vacancies for medical personnel in New Mexico. That number comprises close to half of the 117 total positions Wexford, the nation’s third largest private correctional health care company, is currently advertising for.

Such vacancies not only include a range of nursing positions but also critical, high ranking administrative posts. According to the website, Wexford is looking to hire a director of nursing and medical director at the New Mexico Women’s Correctional Facility in Grants. The medical director position is also open at Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility in Las Cruces and Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs. The Penitentiary of New Mexico needs a director of nursing.

Only Illinois has more Wexford job vacancies than New Mexico — 61, according to the website. But in that state, Wexford’s operation is far larger; the company handles health care in 27 correctional facilities in Illinois, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Despite the appearance of systemic staffing shortfalls, Corrections’ Bland maintains that the situation is satisfactory.

“As far as vacancies go, the Corrections Department does not oversee Wexford employee recruitment strategy,” Bland says. “Today the staffing numbers are OK.”

But State Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Bernalillo, co-chairman of the State Legislature’s Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee, says his committee has been concerned with Wexford’s performance for “quite a while.”

McSorley says the contract with Wexford is not satisfactory and that NMCD is not doing enough to ensure that the company does its job. He says it’s up to the governor to scale back privatization in the prison system, before things get worse.

“As long as Wexford is assured that NMCD is going to keep signing its contract, then there is no pressure on Wexford to deliver what it promises,” McSorley says. “It’s a convenient excuse to say they can’t find staff. But it’s interesting that when the health care in the prisons wasn’t privatized, we could always staff positions even in the remotest parts of New Mexico.”

Ken Kopczynski, executive director of the Private Corrections Institute watchdog group in Florida, says charges of compromised prison health care in New Mexico warrant federal involvement.

“It would be good to get the Department of Justice involved if there are allegations of lack of care on behalf of the inmates,” he says. “The New Mexico Corrections Department and the Legislature can’t hide their heads in the sand and say they didn’t know about these problems if there’s ever a lawsuit. The inmates are ultimately the responsibility of the state, and you can’t contract that away.”

#

Checkup

Legislators, ACLU look at prison care.

by Dan Frosch

Concerns about prison health care reported exclusively by the Santa Fe Reporter will be discussed by a legislative committee next month.

The Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee will gather in Hobbs on Oct. 19 and 20 for a regularly scheduled hearing and discuss, among other items, the health care provided to state inmates by Wexford Health Sources.

Wexford, a private, Pennsylvania-based company, has come under fire from ex-employees who allege that inmates receive dangerously substandard health care [Cover Story, Aug. 9: “Hard Cell?”].

State Rep. Joseph Cervantes, D-Doña Ana, co-chairman of the committee, says those concerns prompted the Legislature to take action.

“The issues [SFR] has raised have not come before our committee recently. Inevitably, you get a perception that the management wants you to see, but we want to go beyond that,” Cervantes says.

Cervantes expects representatives from Wexford and the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) to answer questions at the meetings. He also encouraged all those who have concerns about Wexford’s health care in the prisons to come forward.

“We need these individuals to not only participate in the public portion of the meetings but consider presenting evidence and testimony to the committee,” Cervantes says.

State Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Bernalillo, co-chairman of the committee, echoes his counterpart’s sentiment.

“With the increasing outcry of health care in the prisons, Joe and I decided this was an issue that needs to be discussed,” McSorley says.

In a Sept. 11 email to SFR, Corrections spokeswoman Tia Bland says NMCD has not yet received an agenda from the Legislature regarding the hearings:

“As always, we will be prepared to answer any question legislators may have concerning operations at the Correction Department,” Bland writes.

Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman, also in a Sept. 11 email, says Wexford is unaware of the forthcoming hearings, but, “If we are invited, we will be happy to participate.”

Meanwhile, SFR recently obtained an Aug. 29 memo from Wexford that directs staff not to speak with this paper. The memo is from J Chavez, identified as director of nursing at Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas.

“It is important that you either contact the Pittsburgh office or myself if this reporter contacts you,” the memo states. “Please keep in mind that all of you have read and signed the business code of conduct …”

The memo also cites the company’s media relations policy, which prohibits employees from speaking with the news media on matters relating to Wexford.

In her email to SFR, Gedman writes that Chavez sent out the memo to address numerous concerns, including a feeling among employees that this reporter was “harassing” them.

“We were concerned that your numerous calls into the facilities trying to talk to our employees created a disruption and could cause unnecessary distractions when providing patient care,” Gedman writes.

In reporting for this and three previous stories on Wexford, SFR called state correctional facilities, for the most part only to seek comment from Wexford or NMCD officials.

ACLU-New Mexico Executive Director Peter Simonson says Wexford’s tactics, while probably legal because the company is private, are cause for concern.

“Wexford is fulfilling a public function, so I don’t understand why they are afraid to answer the public’s concerns, especially if people are registering complaints about the failures of their services,” Simonson, who examined the memo, says. “It seems like this is just a shallow attempt to do damage control. They are trying to control leaks of information that appear to be quite credible and quite significant.”

Simonson also says that ACLU lawyers are reviewing SFR’s recent stories on Wexford to determine if civil rights violations have occurred in the prisons.

Says Simonson: “We’ve been aware of Wexford’s poor services, and we’re examining the issue to see if we should consider litigation.”

#

Medical Waste

More allegations on prison health care emerge.

by Dan Frosch

Medical personnel at a New Mexico state prison don’t have protective gear to treat inmates with infectious diseases. Nurses at the same prison lack sanitary wipes for sick inmates who have soiled themselves. Inmates regularly miss doses of critical medicine because their prescriptions are not renewed properly.

These are just some of the allegations made by Norbert Sanchez, a nurse for Wexford Health Sources, the private company that administers health care in New Mexico’s state prisons.

Sanchez asserts that Wexford suspended him on Sept. 6 from his post at the Long Term Care Unit (LTCU) at Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in retaliation for continually raising concerns about Wexford’s operations at the facility. But he recently spoke with SFR in an exclusive interview. His account follows a series of stories by SFR in which a wide range of former Wexford employees have raised similarly serious concerns regarding Wexford’s treatment of inmates [Cover Story, Aug. 9: “Hard Cell?”].

“There were no guidelines, no policies from Wexford. It was unsafe for the inmates and the employees,” Sanchez, a 20-year veteran nurse, says.

Sanchez says he began to work for Wexford in April and quickly noticed problems. Incoming nurses received only scant safety training from Wexford and were immediately thrown into intense treatment settings to plug staffing shortages, he alleges.

More disturbingly, Sanchez says that there weren’t protective gowns and masks for medical staff who needed to treat inmates with infectious diseases, dangerous for staff, inmates and the general public. There also was a shortage of linens and sanitary wipes, which are particularly critical for chronically ill inmates.

“I was shocked,” he says. “You’d have to use a sheet or anything you could find to wipe off the inmates. They were living in unsanitary conditions.”

Another area where Sanchez found problems involved the dispensation of prescription drugs. Often, prescriptions would run out, and because of miscommunication between Wexford pharmacy staff and administrators, inmates had to wait before their dosages were renewed. In one instance, that meant an inmate with congestive heart failure missed nearly two days of medication, Sanchez recalls.

“I had to raise holy hell to get him the medicine he needed,” Sanchez says.

Sanchez claims he regularly complained to Wexford administrators at Central but got little response. Since SFR began its series on Wexford in August, Sanchez says, the company has frantically hired temporary medical staff from nursing agencies to fill staffing gaps. He says that in early September, too many agency nurses reported to LTCU for duty, further evidence of the endemic confusion at Central. When he questioned whether all of the agency nurses were needed, Wexford administrators placed him on leave, Sanchez says.

“I believe it was retaliatory for the times I raised my voice when I saw a problem,” he says.

Following his suspension, Sanchez says he sent a series of letters recounting his concerns and asking for further explanation about his suspension. In a Sept. 9 follow-up letter addressed to Wexford’s regional director of nursing, Catherine Moore, Sanchez refers to the medical shortcomings at Central. Specifically, Sanchez tells of an inmate recovering from hip surgery being moved into a room still dirty from another sick inmate. He also writes that systemic confusion over the dispensing of prescription drugs resulted in the altering of records by management.

Sanchez says he’s received no reply from Wexford to any of his letters.

Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman responded in a lengthy Oct. 2 email to SFR. She would not comment on the details of Sanchez’s suspension but denies he was disciplined for complaining.

With regard to Sanchez’ claim that there isn’t protective gear at Central, Gedman writes:

“Wexford provides Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Packs at all of the facilities where we provide medical services including the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility. We have verified that the PPE Packs are currently at all facilities.”

As for the alleged medical supply shortage, Gedman also denies any problem. Concerning the cleanliness of the rooms, Gedman says, “The linens and cleaning the rooms are not Wexford’s responsibility under our contract with NMCD and therefore we cannot speak to these issues.”

Gedman also denies any confusion with prescription drug dispensation, and cites the national accreditations the company’s New Mexico facilities have received.

“Wexford has numerous protocols in place to ensure that our patients receive their medication in a timely and accurate manner,” she writes. “We have installed a state-of-the-art PIXIS machine to assist in the timely and accurate ordering and administration of medication.”

Gedman also rejects Sanchez’ assertion that Wexford began hiring nurses after SFR investigated the situation and maintains that the company’s regional and national offices actively recruit in New Mexico to help combat a nationwide nursing shortage.

“The vacancy rate at Central New Mexico Correctional Facility is the lowest it has been in months,” Gedman writes.

SFR also queried New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) spokeswoman Tia Bland on Sanchez’ allegation of retaliation and his issues with Wexford’s health care. Bland says NMCD has no information on Sanchez’ employment status and is unaware of a shortage of medical supplies or protective gear, as well as prescription drug lapses, but that the Department is looking into it. As for Sanchez’s assertions about dirty linens, Bland says:

“The linens are our responsibility. We have gotten a little behind with linen laundry in LTCU because of some electrical problems. We’ve ordered new linens, and we’re working on fixing the problem.”

Regarding the staffing shortages Sanchez and other ex-Wexford employees have complained of, Bland says: “We’ve always acknowledged staffing challenges. We are happy to say the vacancy rate is the lowest it’s been in months. We applaud Wexford’s efforts and encourage them to keep it up.”

NMCD and Wexford could be in the hot seat in the coming weeks. Both will likely face tough questions from the state Legislature’s Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee at a hearing in Hobbs. State Rep. Joseph Cervantes, D-Doña Ana, co-chairman of the committee, has called for all those with concerns about Wexford to attend the hearing, slated for Oct. 20 [Outtakes, Sept. 13: “Checkup”].

Ken Kopczynski, executive director of the Private Corrections Institute watchdog group in Florida, says that aside from the hearing, NMCD should consider liquidating damages or fining Wexford if it refuses to live up to its contractual obligations.

NMCD hired Wexford in July 2004; last fall, a $35,000 agreement was reached between NMCD and Wexford over the state’s concern that Wexford didn’t provide enough work hours for its full-time employees, particularly psychiatrists.

“You’re only as good as your contract. And if there are systematic problems here, than the state might need to hit Wexford where it hurts,” Kopczynski says.

Ultimately, though, Kopczynski maintains that it is up to the Legislature and Corrections Secretary Joe Williams to ensure that Wexford upholds humane standards of care.

“Somebody needs to be enforcing that contract. And it should be up to the Legislature to hold the secretary’s feet to the fire,” he says. “And if the secretary chooses not to, then they need to get rid of him.”

Meanwhile, Sanchez says he plans on speaking at the forthcoming hearing in Hobbs.

“Wexford doesn’t care about its employees,” he says. “And they don’t care about the inmates.”

#

Corrections Concerns

Current prison health workers say they fear retaliation if they speak out.

by Dan Frosch

Just days before state legislators convene a hearing on correctional health care in New Mexico, a group of medical employees in the state prison system have come to SFR with allegations about how inmates are treated.

All four requested anonymity because they say they fear retaliation from Wexford Health Sources — the private company that administers health care in the prisons — if their identities are revealed.

The employees currently work at Central New Mexico Correctional Facility. They allege, among other things, that chronically ill inmates are forced to lie in their own feces for hours, are taken off vital medicine to save money and often wait months before receiving treatment for urgent medical conditions. Moreover, the employees say conditions at the facility are unsanitary.

“In my entire career, I’ve never seen this sort of stuff happening,” one employee says. “These inmates are not being treated humanely. They don’t live in sanitary conditions. They live in pain.”

Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman denies all the employees’ allegations in an email response to SFR. Corrections spokeswoman Tia Bland says the department is unaware of these allegations and that “none of these issues have surfaced during our regular auditing process.”

The employees’ allegations come on the heels of a series of stories by SFR, in which several former Wexford employees have publicly come forward with similar charges [Cover Story, Aug. 9: “Hard Cell?”].

As a result of the stories, the state Legislature’s Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee will hold a hearing on Oct. 20 in Hobbs to discuss the matter [Outtakes, Sept. 13: “Checkup”].

Wexford and the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD), which oversees the Pennsylvania-based company, have categorically denied charges that inmates are being denied proper health care.

These latest allegations are the first to come from current employees of Wexford. The employees describe an environment where medical staff must purchase their own wipes for incontinent patients because they say Wexford administrators say there’s no money for supplies. They say there’s a shortage of oxygen tanks and nebulizer machines (for asthma patients) and also scant protective equipment for those staff treating infectious diseases.

Gedman says, “Wexford is unaware of any shortage in medical supplies. Extra oxygen bottles and nebulizers are always on hand and ready for any emergency use. The oxygen bottles are inventoried daily as part of our emergency response requirement.”

The employees also allege that chronically ill inmates sometimes wait what they say is too long to be taken off-site for specialty care. Gedman says this also is false and that Wexford “strongly encourages all of our providers to refer patients for necessary evaluation and treatment, off-site when necessary, as soon as problems are identified that need specialty referral.”

All four employees say their complaints to Wexford administrators about the lack of supplies and treatment of inmates have been ignored, and all believe coming forward publicly will cost them their jobs. Gedman says this concern is unfounded because “Wexford encourages an open-door policy for all employees to bring issues to the attention of management so that they can be investigated and acted upon as appropriate.”

Bland says Corrections staff are “visible and accessible in the prisons. If any of Wexford’s staff would like to speak with us concerning these allegations, we welcome the information and will certainly look into the matter.”

As for the legislative hearing, State Rep. Joseph Cervantes, R-Doña Ana, co-chairman of the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee, says he hopes some of these Wexford critics will show up in Hobbs. And he says further hearings are a possibility.

“I hope there is a full airing of the issues. I would like to learn that the Corrections Department is working to resolve all of this, but if they haven’t, I expect to make deadlines for them so we can expect adequate progress,” Cervantes says. “We’d still like to protect the anonymity and bring to light any allegations and complaints.”

Cervantes also says he wants to introduce legislation during the next session to protect whistle-blowers. Ken Kopczynski, executive director of the Private Corrections Institute watchdog group in Florida, says the Legislature must do everything it can to safeguard current Wexford employees against retaliation.

“The Legislature is the ultimate authority, and they need to put pressure on the Corrections Department to find out what the hell is going on. They also need to protect these employees so they can come forward and testify about their specific experiences,” Kopczynski says. “And if there are allegations of civil rights abuse, which is what it sounds like, then the Justice Department needs to come in.”

#

Medical Test

Lawmakers request independent audit of prison health care.

by Dan Frosch

Following months of reports that state inmates are suffering behind bars due to deficient medical services, a state legislative committee has requested a special audit of health care in New Mexico’s state prisons.

During an Oct. 20 hearing at New Mexico Junior College in Hobbs, members of the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee voted unanimously to ask for the audit, which will focus on Wexford Health Sources, the private company that contracts with the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD).

The company’s operation in New Mexico has been the subject of a three-month investigative series by SFR, during which former and current Wexford employees have come forward with allegations of problematic health services for inmates [Cover Story, Aug. 9: “Hard Cell?”]. As a result of the series, the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee decided to address the issue during a regularly scheduled hearing in Hobbs [Outtakes, Sept. 13: “Checkup”].

Norbert Sanchez, a nurse suspended by Wexford in September after an alleged dispute with health administrators, spoke at the hearing about problems he witnessed at Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas. Sanchez recalled witnessing a wheelchair-bound inmate who sat in his own feces for hours and a sick inmate who missed critical doses of medicine for congestive heart failure.

Sanchez also expressed concerns that echo those raised previously to SFR by other former and current Wexford staff: a systemic lack of medical supplies, failure to properly dole out prescription drugs and reluctance to send sick inmates off-site for specialized treatment.

Though he was the only former Wexford employee in attendance, Sanchez referred legislators to a packet he’d disseminated with testimony from current Wexford employees. Those employees feared retaliation if they came forward, Sanchez said.

ACLU New Mexico staff attorney George Bach testified that his organization has been hearing similar concerns from Wexford employees and that many are, indeed, afraid to go public.

“These employees are so passionate about this issue that if you called them to testify, I’m certain they would do it,” Bach said.

Both NMCD and Wexford refuted Sanchez’ and Bach’s allegations.

Devendra Singh, NMCD’s quality assurance manager for health services, hashed through the nationally approved correctional health care standards to which he said the Corrections Department adheres. He also pointed to the strict auditing process he said NMCD uses to monitor Wexford.

“We go for auditing for every inch of every aspect of care,” Singh said.

Wexford President and CEO Mark Hale said his Pennsylvania-based company is subject to more stringent oversight in New Mexico than in any other state where it operates.

“If inmates need health care, they get it,” Hale, who categorized the attacks on Wexford as deriving from disgruntled ex-employees, said.

But Singh’s and Hale’s assurances were not enough for the legislators on hand, who peppered the two with questions.

At one point, State Rep. Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, referred to a recent SFR story in which a current Wexford employee at Central decried treatment of inmates as inhumane and noted that never before had the employee seen such deficiencies in health care [Outtakes, Oct. 18: “Corrections Concerns”].

“That’s pretty darn scary to me,” Wirth said of the allegation.

Committee co-chairman and State Rep. Joseph Cervantes, D-Doña Ana, questioned Singh’s assertion that medical complaints from inmates are rare and noted that on a tour of Lea County Correctional Facility the previous night, legislators had heard numerous inmate concerns about medical problems. Co-chairman Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Bernalillo, said on the same tour he’d seen an inmate suffering from a visible cystic infection. The cyst should have easily been identified through only a “cursory” medical evaluation, McSorley said.

Corrections Secretary Joe Williams said his agency welcomes a special audit of health care in the prisons. Legislators agreed that such an audit, under the aegis of the Legislative Finance Committee (LFC), should be conducted by an independent third party and include accounts from current Wexford employees who could remain anonymous.

LFC Chairman Lucky Varela, D-Santa Fe, says he has not yet received an official request from the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee, but will be keeping an eye out.

“We will seriously consider looking at the Corrections component to see what type of health care and what type of contracts are being approved by the Corrections Department,” Varela says.

Indeed, for Peter Wirth, the logical next step is an audit that examines Wexford’s services and NMCD’s oversight and that allows current employees to speak freely.

Says Wirth: “We really need to hear more from these folks. Obviously, we’ve begun a dialogue here, and we don’t want to short-change it.”

#

Prison Audit Ahead

Review of inmate health services could take up to six months.

by Dan Frosch

The New Mexico State Legislature is one step closer to an audit of Wexford Health Sources, the private company that administers health care in New Mexico’s prisons.

On Oct. 24, the Legislative Finance Committee (LFC) tentatively approved the audit, which will evaluate Wexford’s contract with the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) and also assess the quality of health care administered to inmates.

The request for a review of Wexford originated with the state Legislature’s Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee, which voted unanimously on Oct. 20 to recommend the audit after a hearing on prison health care in Hobbs [Outtakes, Oct. 25: “Medical Test”].

A subsequent Oct. 30 letter sent to the LFC by committee co-chairmen Rep. Joseph Cervantes, D-Doña Ana, and Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Bernalillo, refers to “serious complaints raised by present and former employees” of Wexford. The letter cites this newspaper’s reportage of the situation and notes that on a recent tour of Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs, “committee members heard numerous concerns from inmates about medical problems not being addressed.” It also refers to confidential statements Wexford employees provided to the committee that were then turned over to the LFC.

The decision to examine Wexford and NMCD comes on the coattails of months of reports that state inmates are suffering behind bars due to inadequate medical services, documented in an ongoing, investigative series by SFR. Over the past three months, former and current employees have alleged staffing shortages as well as problems with the dispensation of prescription drugs and the amount of time sick inmates are forced to wait before receiving urgent care [Cover story, Aug. 9: “Hard Cell?”].

The timing, Manu Patel, the LFC’s deputy director for audits, says, is ideal, because the LFC already planned to initiate a comprehensive audit of NMCD, the first in recent history.

Regarding the medical component of the audit, Patel says: “We will be looking at how cost-effective Wexford has been. Also, we will be looking at the quality of care, how long inmates have to wait to receive care and what [Wexford’s] services are like.”

Patel says the LFC plans to contract with medical professionals to help evaluate inmates’ care. As per a request from the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee, current Wexford employees will be given a chance to participate in the audit anonymously.

The audit’s specifics require final approval from the LFC in December; the committee will likely take up to six months to generate a report, according to Patel.

In a Nov. 6 email to SFR, Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman cites 14 successful, independent audits performed of Wexford in New Mexico since May 2005.

“Wexford is proud of the service we have provided to the Corrections Department as documented in these independent audits and looks forward to continuing high quality health care services in New Mexico,” Gedman writes.

NMCD spokeswoman Tia Bland echoes Gedman: “We welcome the audit and plan on cooperating any way we can,” she says.

Meanwhile, former employees continue to come forward.

Kathryn Hamilton, an ex-NMCD mental health counselor, says she worked alongside Wexford staff at the Pen for two months, shortly after the company took the reins in New Mexico in July 2004. Hamilton alleges that mentally ill inmates were cut off psychotropic medicine for cheaper, less effective drugs and that inmates waited too long to have prescriptions renewed and suffered severe behavioral withdrawals as a result.

Hamilton, who had worked at the Pen since April 2002, says she encountered the same sorts of problems under Addus, Wexford’s predecessor, but quit shortly after Wexford’s takeover because the situation wasn’t improving.

“They would stop meds, give inmates the wrong meds or refuse to purchase meds that were not on their formulary, even if they were prescribed by a doctor,” Hamilton says. “I felt angry, sometimes helpless, although I always tried to speak with administrators to help the inmates.”

Hamilton married a state inmate by proxy last month, after continuing a correspondence with him following her tenure at the Pen. Hamilton says she did not serve as a counselor to the inmate, Anthony Hamilton, but met him after helping conduct a series of mental health evaluations. Hamilton has been a licensed master social worker under her maiden name since 2000 (according to the New Mexico Board of Social Work Examiners). She emphasizes that her relationship with her husband did not begin until after she left the Corrections Department.

According to Hamilton, her husband, still incarcerated at the Pen for aggravated assault, recently contracted methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a serious staph infection. In a previous story, four current Wexford employees specifically mentioned MRSA as a concern to SFR because they allege Wexford does not supply proper protective equipment for staff treating infectious diseases like MRSA [Outtakes, Oct. 18: “Corrections Concerns”].

Wexford Vice President Gedman did not address Hamilton’s claims when queried by SFR. Corrections spokeswoman Bland also says she can’t comment on Hamilton’s allegations because she had not spoken with Hamilton’s supervisor at the time of her employment.

Says Hamilton: “I initially called the newspaper as the concerned wife of an inmate, not as a former therapist. With all the stories the Reporter has done, I wanted to come forward with what I had seen at the Pen.”

#

Unhealthy Diagnosis

Another employee leaves prison alleging poor care for inmates.

by Dan Frosch

The medical director of a state prison in Hobbs has stepped down from his post less than a month after a legislative committee requested an audit of the corrections health care in the state.

Dr. Don Apodaca, medical director of Lea County Correctional Facility (LCCF), turned in his resignation on Nov. 6 due to concerns that inmates there are not receiving sufficient access to health care. According to Apodaca, sick inmates are routinely denied off-site visits to medical specialists and sometimes have to wait months to receive critical prescription drugs. Apodaca blames the policies of Wexford Health Sources, the private company that contracts with the state to provide medicine in New Mexico’s prisons, for these alleged problems.

Wexford has been the subject of a four-month SFR investigation, during which a growing number of former and current employees have contended that Wexford is more concerned with saving money than providing adequate health care, and that inmates suffer as a result. On Oct. 24, the Legislative Finance Committee (LFC) tentatively approved an audit that will assess Wexford’s contract with the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) and also evaluate the quality of health care rendered to inmates [Outtakes, Nov. 8: “Prison Audit Ahead”].

LCCF’s medical director since January 2006, Apodaca is one of the highest-ranking ex-Wexford employees to come forward thus far. His allegations of Wexford’s denials of off-site care and the delays in obtaining prescription drugs echo those raised by other former and current employees during the course of reporting for this series [Cover story, Aug. 9: “Hard Cell?”].

Specifically, Apodaca says he personally evaluated inmates who needed off-site, specialty care, but that Wexford consistently denied his referrals. Apodaca cites the cases of an inmate who needed an MRI, another inmate who suffered from a hernia and a third inmate who had a cartilage tear in his knee as instances in which inmates were denied off-site care for significant periods of time against his recommendations.

When inmates are actually cleared for off-site care in Albuquerque, they are transported in full shackles without access to a bathroom for the six- to seven-hour trip, Apodaca says.

“Inmates told me they aren’t allowed to go to the bathroom and ended up soiling themselves,” he says. “The trip is so bad they end up refusing to go even when we get the off-site visits approved.”

When it comes to prescription drugs, there also are significant delays, Apodaca says. Inmates sometimes wait weeks or even months for medicine used for heart and blood pressure conditions, even though Apodaca says he would write orders for those medicines repeatedly.

“Wexford was not providing timely treatment and diagnoses of inmates,” he says. “There were tragic cases where patients slipped through the cracks, were not seen for inordinately long times and suffered serious or fatal consequences.”

Apodaca says he began documenting the medical problems at the facility in March. After detailing in writing the cases of 40 to 50 patients whom he felt had not received proper clinical care, Apodaca says he alerted Dr. Phillip Breen, Wexford’s regional medical director, and Cliff Phillips, Wexford’s regional health services administrator, through memos, emails and phone calls. In addition, Apodaca says he alerted Wexford’s corporate office in Pittsburgh. Neither Breen nor Phillips returned phone messages left by SFR.

Apodaca says he also informed Devendra Singh, NMCD’s quality assurance manager for health services. According to Apodaca, Singh assured him that he would require Wexford to look into the matter, but Apodaca says he never heard a final response.

“Wexford was simply not receptive to any of the information I was sending them, and I became exasperated,” he says. “It came to the point where I felt uncomfortable with the medical and legal position I was in. There were individuals who needed health care who weren’t getting it.”

Singh referred all questions to NMCD spokeswoman Tia Bland; Bland responded to SFR in a Nov. 20 email: “If Don Apodaca has information involving specific incidents, we will be happy to look into the situation. Otherwise, we will wait for the LFC’s audit results, review them and take it from there.”

Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman would not comment specifically on Apodaca’s allegations. In a Nov. 20 email to SFR, she wrote that Wexford will cooperate with the Legislature’s audit and is confident the outcome will be similar to the 14 independent audits performed since May 2005 by national correctional organizations.

“Wexford is proud of the service we have provided to the Corrections Department as documented in these independent audits and looks forward to continuing to provide high quality health care services in New Mexico,” Gedman writes.

Members of the Legislature’s Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee, which requested the forthcoming audit, toured LCCF on Oct. 19 and were told by both Wexford and NMCD officials that there were no health care problems at the facility. On the same tour, however, committee members heard firsthand accounts from inmates who complained they couldn’t get treatment when they became sick [Outtakes, Oct. 25: “Medical Test”].

That visit, along with Apodaca’s accounts, calls into question Wexford’s and NMCD’s accounts, State Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Bernalillo, says.

“We were told on our tour that nothing was wrong. And now to hear that there is a claim that Wexford and the Corrections Department might have known about this makes it seem like this information was knowingly covered up,” McSorley, co-chairman of the committee, says. “We can’t trust what’s being told to us. The situation may require independent oversight far beyond what we have. This should be the biggest story in the state right now.”

#

Backlash

Wexford hit with discrimination lawsuit.

by Dan Frosch

In the latest setback for Wexford Health Sources, a former employee has slapped the prison health care company with a civil lawsuit alleging racial discrimination.

The suit, filed Oct. 25 in US District Court in Albuquerque, alleges that former health services administrator Don Douglas was fired by Wexford last October because he is black. Moreover, the suit alleges that sick and injured inmates at Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs, where Douglas worked, received poor treatment and that the facility lacked critical medical staff.

Wexford, which administers health care in New Mexico’s prisons, has been the subject of a four-month SFR investigation [Cover story, Aug. 9: “Hard Cell?”]. As a result, the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee held a hearing last month, and the Legislative Finance Committee is slated to audit Wexford and the New Mexico Corrections Department [Outtakes, Nov. 8: “Prison Audit Ahead”].

The allegations in Douglas’ lawsuit echo many of the concerns from employees who have talked to SFR. Specifically, it charges that even though Douglas alerted a Wexford corporate administrator about medical and staffing problems, the company did not respond. Instead, according to the lawsuit, Douglas’ job was audited and he was found negligent, despite no prior problems and a record of exemplary job evaluations. On Oct. 10, 2005, Douglas was fired and replaced by a white woman, the lawsuit says.

“Wexford did not provide critical health care in a timely manner, and I called attention to that,” Douglas tells SFR. “Inmates have a civil right as incarcerated American citizens to be afforded adequate health care. But that service is not being provided, and Wexford is neglecting inmates.”

Douglas began working at Wexford in July 2004, but also worked for its predecessor, Addus. Shortly after his firing, Douglas filed a complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). A June 5 letter from the EEOC’s Albuquerque office says the agency found reasonable cause to believe Douglas “was terminated because of his race.”

When queried by SFR, Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman wrote in a Nov. 27 email that Wexford is withholding comment until the forthcoming audit is complete and referred to 14 prior successful audits of Wexford. Corrections spokeswoman Tia Bland also would not comment on the lawsuit and noted that NMCD does not oversee Wexford personnel matters.

Says Deshonda Charles Tackett, Douglas’ lawyer: “This is an important case. Mr. Douglas should not have to suffer racial discrimination in an effort to provide inmates with proper health care.”

#

SFR EXCLUSIVE: Wexford Under Fire

Governor takes action against prison health care provider.

by Dan Frosch

After two troubled years of administering health care in New Mexico’s prisons, Wexford Health Sources will lose its multimillion-dollar contract with the state.

Wexford has been the subject of a five-month investigative series by this paper.

Now, SFR has learned that on Dec. 8, Gov. Bill Richardson ordered the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) to immediately begin the search for a new health care provider.

“The governor has directed the Corrections Department to develop and implement immediate and long-term options for improving health care quality at the state’s correctional facilities,” Richardson spokesman Gilbert Gallegos says. “Those options are expected to include sanctions and seeking another provider — which basically means the Corrections Department will be crafting a request for proposal [RFP] to solicit a new vendor. They’re working out the terms of the RFP now and will most likely be terminating the contract with Wexford.” Wexford’s contract expires in June 2007, Gallegos says.

SFR has repeatedly and exclusively published allegations by current and former Wexford employees regarding inmate care [Cover story, Aug. 9: “Hard Cell?”]. Those accounts focused on dangerously low medical staffing levels at the nine correctional facilities where Wexford operates; Wexford’s refusal to grant chronically ill inmates critical, off-site specialty care; and systemic problems in administering prescription medicine to inmates.

Gallegos says the governor learned about the problems with Wexford through SFR’s stories.

“The governor had been concerned about the quality of care delivered in the correctional facilities and directed the Corrections Department to increase oversight of Wexford,” Gallegos says. “Corrections was doing that, but it appeared that many of those deficiencies were not being corrected.”

Wexford, which also administers health care in facilities run by the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD), will lose those operations as well, Gallegos says.

Wexford began working in New Mexico in July 2004, after signing a $27 million contract with NMCD. The Pittsburgh-based company has also lost contracts in Wyoming and Florida because of similar concerns over health care.

SFR also learned this week that Dr. Phillip Breen, Wexford’s regional medical director in New Mexico, has resigned, effective Dec. 31.

In addition, a dentist at a state prison in Hobbs tells SFR that facility is so understaffed that inmates sometimes wait up to six weeks to receive important dental care.

Dr. Ray Puckett, who has been working as a part-time dentist at Lea County Correctional Facility (LCCF) in Hobbs for approximately one year, alleges that some inmates are suffering because the backlog to receive dental treatment is so massive.

“I’ve heard about inmates pulling their own teeth after months and months. I’ve heard about inmates saying, ‘I just can’t stand it anymore,’” he says.

Puckett says Wexford should have hired a full-time dentist at LCCF because so many inmates require medical attention to take care of abscesses, cavities, tooth extractions and other painful dental problems. Puckett works at the facility only one day a week, during which he typically sees up to 16 patients. He says that Wexford also has another dentist who will occasionally work one day a week at the facility.

“What we have now is a poorly run operation. It’s grossly understaffed and disorganized. And it ends up being unfortunate for the inmates,” Puckett says.

Wexford Vice President Elaine Gedman did not respond to emails and phone calls from SFR.

Corrections spokeswoman Tia Bland says NMCD is not aware of a backlog of dental patients at LCCF, but will look into it. She adds that Wexford is only required to have a dentist at LCCF for two days a week.

With regard to the governor’s action against Wexford, Bland says: “It’s a fact. Wexford has not met its contractual obligations to the Department, and that’s something we can’t ignore. We have to do something about it. We will be putting a plan in place.”

In the coming year, both Wexford and NMCD are slated for an extensive audit by the Legislative Finance Committee. The audit was the result of a hearing on Wexford by the Legislature’s Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee in October. The hearings also were held in response to reports in this paper [Outtakes, Oct. 25: “Medical Test”]. It’s now unclear whether the audit will still take place.

As for Puckett, he has considered leaving his post because of what’s happening at LCCF. A veteran of correctional health care, he also worked for Wexford’s predecessors, Addus HealthCare and Correctional Medical Services. In his estimation, both companies, which operate to make a profit like Wexford, cared more about the inmates’ physical well-being and were willing to sacrifice dollars to ensure that medical problems were treated expeditiously.

Says Puckett: “It is my sense that Wexford doesn’t care what sort of facility they run. Everything is run on a bare-bones budget. They’re in it to make money.”

Not anymore.

When asked whether there was any chance at all that Wexford could remain in its current capacity at NMCD or CYFD, Richardson spokesman Gallegos responded: “They’re done. The governor’s intention is to replace Wexford with a new company. We expect to have a new provider in a reasonable amount of time.”

#

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING

LARGE

Death By Dust

The frightening link between the 9-11 toxic cloud and cancer

by Kristen Lombardi

It was October 6, 2004, three years after Ernie Vallebuona's three-month stint as a rescue and recovery worker at ground zero in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and he was hunched over and trembling, racked by a pain like nothing he had experienced in his 40 years of sound health. He had just returned to his Rockland County home after finishing the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift in the NYPD vice unit, where he'd reported to work for the last six years. Vallebuona had bought some fish from a street vendor near his office, on the Lower East Side. And as he drove the 35 miles from Manhattan to New City, he chalked up a searing stomachache to food poisoning. Maybe the vendor had filleted that fish with a dirty machete?

By the time he pulled into his driveway, the pain had grown excruciating, too horrible for him to even lie in bed that day. The chills swept over his body; so did the shakes. He called his doctor, who suggested ulcer medication. His mother advised him to forget that diagnosis and consult a specialist instead, but like a lot of young, healthy men, he didn't listen right away.

Vallebuona isn't much for complaining; what ailing cop is? But for six months, he had noticed his body betraying him. His toes had reddened; his joints had stiffened. They throbbed in prickly pangs, as if glass shards were wedged underneath his skin. When his own heartbeat began to hurt, he had visited the family doctor, who diagnosed him with gout. He was told to drink cherry juice and take anti-inflammatory medicine. Neither worked.

Now as his stomach convulsed, Vallebuona listened to his mother at last. Later that day, he found himself at a gastroenterologist's office in Pomona, lying on a table, watching a nurse poke at his abdomen. She felt a lump and ordered tests. It would take a month to reach a definitive diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphoid tissue. Evidently, Vallebuona had developed a golf-ball-sized mass in his abdomen that had grown so fast and so quick that pieces of it were dying and depositing into his blood, causing gout-like symptoms.

One week after that, he was at a Manhattan hospital, meeting his oncologist, hearing about the heavy-duty chemotherapy he would have to undergo over the next four months. At the visit, a nurse explained he had an aggressive cancer — a rare stage-three — and asked a battery of questions.

Did he ever do modeling with glue?

Did he ever handle insecticides?

Did he ever work with chemicals like benzene?

Vallebuona answered no to all the questions. He had led a clean life; before becoming a cop, he'd worked in a bank.

Sitting in the examining room with him, Vallebuona's wife, Amy, finally spoke up.

"What about 9-11?" she asked. "What about all that smoke and dust?"

Only then did Ernie Vallebuona first consider the possibility that the events of September 11 could be the cause of his cancer.

This is not the story of rescue and recovery workers at ground zero getting sick with respiratory illnesses from their exposure; you have read those stories, and you have heard those cases.

This is the story of 9-11 and cancer.

To date, 75 recovery workers on or around what is now known as "the Pile" — the rubble that remained after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001 — have been diagnosed with blood cell cancers that a half-dozen top doctors and epidemiologists have confirmed as having been likely caused by that exposure.

Those 75 cases have come to light in joint-action lawsuits filed against New York City on behalf of at least 8,500 recovery workers who suffer from various forms of lung illnesses and respiratory diseases — and suggest a pattern too distinct to ignore. While some cancers take years, if not decades, to develop, the blood cancers in otherwise healthy and young individuals represent a pattern that experts believe will likely prove to be more than circumstantial. The suits seek to prove that these 8,500 workers — approximately 20 percent of the total estimated recovery force that cleared the rubble from ground zero — all suffer from the debilitating effects of those events.

The basis for the suits stems from the plaintiffs' argument that the government — in a desperate attempt to revive downtown in the wake of the catastrophic events on 9-11 — failed to protect workers from cancer-causing benzene, dioxin, and other hazardous chemicals that permeated the air for months. Officials made these failures worse by falsely reassuring New Yorkers that they faced no long-term dangers from exposure to the air lingering over ground zero.

"We are very encouraged that the results from our monitoring of air-quality and drinking-water conditions in both New York and near the Pentagon show that the public in these areas is not being exposed to excessive levels of asbestos or other harmful substances," Christine Todd Whitman, the then administrator of the EPA, told the citizens of New York City in a press release on September 18 — only seven days after the attacks. "Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York … that their air is safe to breathe and the water is safe to drink."

Those statements were not only false and misleading, but may even play into the basis for the city's liability for millions of dollars in the recovery workers' lawsuits. Last February, U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts cited Whitman's false statements as the basis for allowing a different class-action lawsuit to proceed — this one, against the EPA and Whitman, is on behalf of residents, office workers, and students from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, many of whom suffer from respiratory illnesses as a result of 9-11.

"No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to Lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-term health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws," Batts wrote in her February 2 ruling. "Whitman's deliberate and misleading statements made to the press, where she reassured the public that the air was safe to breathe around Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and that there would be no health risk presented to those returning to the areas, shocks the conscience."

And that was before anyone knew of the apparent cancer link, first reported in the New York news media in the spring of 2004. Even more shocking is the incidence of cancer and other life-threatening illnesses that have developed among those participating in the recovery workers' lawsuits. Given the fact that some cancers are slower to develop than others, it seems likely to several doctors and epidemiologists that many more reports of cancer and serious lung illnesses will surface in the months and years to come. The fact that 8,500 recovery workers have already banded together to sue, only five years later — with 400 total cancer patients among their number — leads many experts to predict that these figures are likely to grow, meaning a possible death toll in the thousands.

In many ways, these illnesses suggest the slow but deteriorating health issues that faced the atomic-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where thousands died in the years and decades that followed the United States' use of nuclear weapons. And that similarity has not been lost on David Worby, the 53-year-old attorney leading the joint-action suits on behalf of those workers who are already sick, and even dying.

"In the end," Worby declares, "our officials might be responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden on 9-11."

In the five years since the attacks, much of the focus on the 9-11 health crisis has missed a broader question, the one that every ground zero worker fears most and the one that Ernie Vallebuona has already had to ponder: What about cancer? What if all that pulverized concrete and ground glass and caustic mist that Vallebuona inhaled while on the Pile didn't attack his lungs but instead went straight for his lymph nodes? Could this noxious mix have caused his lymphoma?

No one has done a comprehensive study of the health consequences on the estimated 40,000 rescue and recovery workers who raced to ground zero after the attacks. A study by Mount Sinai Medical Center — one that received widespread media attention two months ago — released statistics on the five-year anniversary of 9-11 that focused almost exclusively on respiratory problems and bypassed any mention of cancer today.

But David Worby has tracked the cancer patients among his growing client base for the last two years. Here are the latest tallies: Of the 8,500 people now suing the city, 400, or about 5 percent, have cancer. The biggest group by far consists of people like Vallebuona, who have blood cell cancers. Seventy-five clients suffer from lymphoma, leukemia, multiple myeloma, and other blood cell cancers; most are men, aged 30 to 60, who appeared in perfect health just five years ago.

The field of cancer research is not known for consensus. But six prominent specialists on cancer and the link to toxins — on the faculty of the nation's top medical schools and public health institutions — all come to the same conclusions when told these statistics. They are Richard Clapp and David Ozonoff, professors of environmental health at Boston University School of Public Health; Michael Thun, director of epidemiological research at the American Cancer Society; Francine Laden, assistant professor of environmental epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health; Jonathan Samet, chairman of the epidemiology department at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Charles Hesdorffer, associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. These doctors and epidemiologists agree that the incidence of cancer among this subset of workers sounds shockingly high, that they cannot and should not be dismissed as coincidence, and that the toxic dust cloud that hung over downtown Manhattan, and particularly the Pile, likely caused or promoted the diseases. Some even went so far as to say that the blood cancer cases, especially, indicate what could become a wave of cancer cases stemming from 9-11 over the next decades.

"Those numbers seem quite outrageous," is how Hesdorffer puts it. Now at Johns Hopkins, Hesdorffer directed until last year the tumor immunotherapy program at Columbia University Medical Center, where he treated two recovery workers who got cancer post–9-11. He notes that the average healthy adult person has a 20 percent risk of having cancer over a lifetime. Calculate that risk over five years — the time frame from the events of 9-11 until today — and it drops to about 1 percent. Yet 5 percent of the suits' workers — 1 percent of the overall worker population — have already been diagnosed with malignancies. And these patients don't include the thousands whose illnesses have yet to be recorded because they aren't participating in the lawsuits or in the World Trade Center medical-monitoring programs.

What the experts find most telling are the types of cancer now emerging. They say the blood cancer cases seem too disproportionate to be random. Two percent of these workers have been diagnosed with what amounts to related diseases, none of which fall into the "high-frequency" category, which includes prostate cancer. One out of 9,000 people nationwide gets lymphoma a year; for myeloma, it's one out of 30,000. By contrast, the 75 blood cancer patients translate into several dozen new cases a year.

"That's not just a fluke," says Ozonoff, who studies cancer clusters and toxic waste sites.

Samet, a worldwide expert on smoking and cancer, notes that when so many cases of related cancers emerge, it can signal a forming cluster. "It sounds like an impressive cluster of cancer cases, and I would want to study it," he says.

To be sure, the experts advise caution until more evidence is collected. They acknowledge that the data needed to draw a definite link between 9-11 and cancer don't exist. None of the cancers emerging now are the kinds that come only from toxic exposures — like, say, asbestosis, which is caused by asbestos and can take two decades to grow. This sentinel cancer would go a long way toward proving a 9-11 connection. Absent that, scientists would want to determine whether a higher proportion of cancer patients exists among the workers than in the general public. But because there are no independent data on the 40,000-strong group, they can't make this calculation yet. Meanwhile, the latency periods for most cancers from the time of a full-blown carcinogenic exposure to a full-blown malignancy can take years, if not decades. Says Thun, of the American Cancer Society: "It is the exception rather than the rule to have cancers develop this quickly."

Despite the lack of definitive data, we may still be in the midst of a cancer epidemic. Indeed, according to these experts, traditional data don't help much here because 9-11 represents such a singular exposure. No one can deny that the workers were exposed to a blend of pulverized and aerosolized toxins that had never existed in any occupational setting before. And this mix of toxins alone is enough to cause more aggressive cancers.

"It's also enough to throw out prescriptions on timing," Hesdorffer adds.

Back in May 2004, before most doctors even contemplated a 9-11 link to cancer, Hesdorffer provided testimony to the federal government's September 11 Victim Compensation Fund on behalf of one police officer who had developed pancreatic cancer within a year after his recovery stint. Hesdorffer finds it odd that two of his patients had been diagnosed with the rare cancer after working on the Pile. "It's strange to have two people who were subjected to the same exposure," he says, "developing the same cancer in the same time frame." Now that he has learned of Worby's statistics, he is convinced that "there is definitely more than a likely link between the 9-11 exposures and cancer."

Francine Laden, who specializes in air pollution and cancer, agrees. Because so many of Worby's clients have blood cancers — which have faster incubation periods than tumor cancers, forming in as little as five years — Laden confirms that it's not a stretch to attribute their diseases to the dust cloud. "Blood cancers are different," she says, noting the tie between benzene and leukemia, as well as dioxin and lymphoma. "It's not beyond the realm of feasibility that these chemicals caused these cancers."

Ozonoff puts it more firmly: "For an acute episode like this, it's definitely possible these blood cancers were caused by 9-11."

Ozonoff echoes all five of his colleagues when he draws parallels between the aftermath of 9-11 and that of another massive exposure: the atomic-bombs dropped on Japan. Bomb survivors experienced excessive spikes in leukemia rates within the first five years, a surprising discovery for epidemiologists in the mid 20th century. While this outbreak resulted from radiation, both it and 9-11 involved a sudden and intense blast of carcinogens. For bomb survivors, leukemia appeared first, followed by breast and lung cancer. "That could happen with 9-11," says Samet, the Johns Hopkins epidemiology department chair. "It might be what we're seeing today."

It's also possible that the carcinogens in the Trade Center dust accelerated cancers already dormant or developing in the recovery workers, epidemiologists say. According to Richard Clapp, who directed the Massachusetts Cancer Registry from 1980 to 1989, toxins can not only instigate the genes that cause cancerous cells to divide, but also hasten their dividing. That means that a person with an undetected cancer will develop it faster and in a more virulent manner. He calls this the "promotional effect" and says some toxins associated with 9-11 have been known to speed up lymphomas and leukemias. "The promotional effect could have happened already," he says.

Either way, Clapp adds, "It's hard not to attribute these cancers to 9-11." His gut, he says, is telling him one thing: "We'll be seeing a cancer explosion from 9-11, and we're starting to see it today."

At 8:30 on the morning of the terrorist attacks, Ernie Vallebuona was driving with his 3-year-old son, also named Ernie, to a nearby Home Depot in search of the perfect paint color for the family bathroom. Vallebuona always listens to 1010 WINS in the car, so he turned on the radio. He soon heard the incredible news that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers. Instantly, he got the call to respond.

"We're all mobilizing," his NYPD supervisor told him via cell phone. "Get to work as fast as you can."

Over in Pomona, some 36 miles away from Manhattan, 37-year-old NYPD detective John Walcott was at his suburban home, killing time before a midnight tour on the narcotics unit, where he'd worked for a dozen years. He was relaxing on the couch when a friend from St. Louis called.

"What the hell is going on in New York?" the friend asked, incredulously. Walcott had no idea what his friend meant. He flipped on the TV, only to see flames raging from the twin towers. Minutes later, he was behind the wheel of his minivan, speeding down the highway toward the World Trade Center.

Some 200 miles southeast of the Trade Center site, 49-year-old Gary Acker was working in a bomb shelter dubbed the "earth station," an undisclosed location where AT&T keeps its large satellite dishes. At the time, Acker was managing the company's disaster recovery team, which restores critical communications after catastrophes. He had long viewed the post as the crowning achievement in his 31-year career, one that suited his desire to make a difference.

When the first plane hit the north tower, he was sitting in an equipment room, four floors below ground, running emergency drills. No one had turned on the TV, so he remained oblivious to the events unfolding in Manhattan. His wife, Alison, called him.

"Look at the TV," she said, just as the second plane hit the south tower. Acker knew that New York City officials would be calling AT&T for help. "Pack up your equipment," he heard his wife say, "and get ready to ride."

Back in Manhattan, Jessy McCarthy was not about to roll anywhere. The Verizon field technician was sitting in his office on East 91st Street, listening to the news on the radio, when he heard about the planes hitting the towers. He froze in place, unable to pull himself away from the broadcast for hours that day. Only that afternoon did he manage to go to a nearby work site to repair phone lines. Sitting in his truck, he stared in disbelief at all the people doused in gray dust walking up Third Avenue from downtown. His eyes locked on the caravan of people who'd been caught in that cloud.

By the time McCarthy was taking in this ghostly scene, Vallebuona and Walcott had joined thousands of first responders at the World Trade Center. Both arrived at the site shortly after the 110-story twin towers came crashing down, and they spent the next 15 hours sifting through the wreckage. Racing to the scene from the Seventh Precinct, on Pitt Street, Vallebuona encountered a giant cloud of dust and smoke so hazy and dense, he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. He circled the periphery of what he thought was the scene, following the blaring sirens and running past pumper trucks and police cruisers twisted up like discarded tin cans. The dust caked his eyes and coated his lips. It filled his nostrils with a horrible smell, like burned plastic and flesh. Vallebuona happened to have a bandanna in his pants pocket, which he wrapped across his face. It did little to ward off the rancid odor.

Walcott was also experiencing the noxious effects of the chemical brew. While the massive cloud had dissipated, the crystalline particles hung in the air like speckles in a snow globe. He waded though mounds of pulverized dust, knee-deep, tasting it on his lips, spitting it out of his mouth. Without a mask, he was coughing immediately. First came the black mucus and ashen chunks, then the dry heaves and blood. For hours, he wiped away dark gunk dripping from his eyes. He couldn't help but think that something was wrong. But he focused on the mission at hand, on the faint hope of discovering survivors. That day, he stepped over the only human body that he would find intact — a female, burned beyond recognition, a charred bra over her face.

Acker arrived on the scene 24 hours later, after driving with 11 team members up the East Coast in a company trailer equipped with satellite transmission consoles and multiplex cables. He would spend the next 33 days in and around ground zero — first setting up a satellite at 1 Police Plaza, then manning phone lines across the street from what came to be known as the Pile. The plume enveloped the area from the moment he set foot there until he left. Many nights, he'd oversee the satellite atop 1 Police Plaza, just east of ground zero, and watch as the prevailing winds subsided and the bright-blue smoke settled in. It hung so heavily on the city that he couldn't see the guards stationed across the street.

In these early days, Acker, Vallebuona, and Walcott all struggled to protect themselves from the toxic dust. The foul odor clogged the air for the three months that Vallebuona ended up working at the site — first on the Pile, hauling rubble with buckets, then around the perimeter, providing security and escorting residents to their dust-laden homes. When he and Walcott searched the rubble as part of the initial bucket brigade, they wore nothing over their faces but surgical masks. Respirator masks came weeks into their months-long recovery work; sometimes they came with the wrong filters.

Because Walcott was a detective, he ended up spending his five-month stint not just at ground zero, but also at Fresh Kills. As much as he choked on the Lower Manhattan air, he dreaded the Staten Island landfill. Walcott knew everything in the towers had fallen — desks, lights, computers. But apart from the occasional steel beam, the detritus that he sifted through there consisted of tiny grains of dust — no furniture pieces, no light fixtures, not even a computer mouse.

At times, the detectives would take shelter in wooden sheds, in an attempt to get away from what Walcott likes to call "all that freaking bad air." One day, he was sitting in the shed with his colleagues, eating candy bars and drinking sodas, when some FBI agents entered. They were dressed in full haz-mat suits, complete with head masks, which they had sealed shut with duct tape to ward off the fumes. As Walcott took in the scene, contrasting the well-protected FBI agents with the New York cops wearing respirator masks, one thought entered his mind: What is wrong with this picture?

The same thought would cross Acker's mind only fleetingly, and only after weeks of working near ground zero, while he was hacking so hard he vomited something akin to chewed-up licorice. During his first days at the site, he wore the painter's mask that an NYPD lieutenant had given him, but it soon became too filthy from debris. By October, he was spitting up so much gunk that he called his doctor for an antibiotics prescription. But he wouldn't leave the site; when the fumes got bad, he'd sit in the company trailer and flip on the air conditioner. That had a filter, at least. AT&T had stocked its disaster trailers with almost everything — rubber boots, hard hats, rope, a first aid kit. Funny, Acker thought, staring at the shelves. All this stuff, yet no one had ever considered respirators.

Around this time, McCarthy was just beginning to report for recovery duty. When Verizon asked for volunteers to restore phone lines near ground zero, he didn't hesitate. He arrived for his first assignment in early October and wound up staying downtown for the next 13 months, going from basement to basement, moving from Wall Street skyscrapers to Chinatown walk-ups. The first thing he saw in the company terminals was the Trade Center dust, piled on top of consoles, crammed into corners. He had to wipe down the equipment with his bare hands to see the wires. The dust had an orange hue; at times, it twinkled. And it always stunk, an unforgettable smell he struggled to get past every time. Invariably, he'd find it in his hair, on his eyelashes, in his tool belt, even under his fingernails. Sometimes, he'd gaze at the ceiling and get the sense of standing in the middle of a meadow thick with pollen. He could see the soot and dust floating in the air.

When it occurred to these responders that they might be sacrificing their health for the sake of the cleanup — as it did to anyone who came in contact with the foul-smelling smoke and dust — they took comfort in the official word at the time. In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the EPA issued multiple statements on the air quality downtown. All were reassuring in nature. On September 18, the day after the New York Stock Exchange reopened for business, the EPA's Whitman said the air was safe to breathe.

It has turned out those words were, in fact, false. In August 2003, the EPA inspector general issued a scathing 155-page report concluding that the agency hadn't had the data to make such blanket declarations at that time. By then, more than a quarter of EPA samples showed unsafe levels of asbestos, and the agency had yet to complete tests for mercury, cadmium, lead, dioxin, and PCBs. The inspector general's report went on to disclose another disconcerting fact — that the White House had pressured the EPA to sanitize its warnings about ground zero. The inspector general revealed that the White House Council on Environmental Quality had taken a red pen to the agency's press releases, adding reassuring statements and deleting cautionary ones, creating the overly rosy picture that the air was clean.

In reality, the 9-11 fallout was like nothing anyone had been exposed to before. Everything in the towers had been ground into dust — concrete, steel, glass, insulation, plastic, and computers. Dust analyses would detect glass shards, cement particles, cellulose fibers, asbestos, and a mixture of harmful components, including lead, titanium, barium, and gypsum. In all, the dust contained more than 100 different compounds, some of which have never been identified. And then there were the fires that smoldered for three months. They gave off not only the putrid plume, but also a blast of carcinogens — asbestos, dioxin, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. They also emitted benzene.

In one disturbing analysis done by the U.S. Geological Survey, the dust had such high alkalinity levels it rivaled liquid Drano.

Thomas Cahill, a physicist who sent a team to analyze the plume from a rooftop a mile away from ground zero, says he got worried once he noticed the color of the smoke had turned a fluorescent blue. That's a sure sign that ultra-fine particles (which can go deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream) were coming off the Pile and permeating the air. When his team tested the plume, the scientists found higher levels of sulfuric acid, heavy metals, and other insoluble materials than anywhere else in the world, even in the Kuwaiti oil fields. "Not nice stuff," says Cahill, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California at Davis, who has published three papers on the 9-11 plume, "and it was all being liberated by that smoldering pile, so those people got the full force of it."

Today, Cahill is trying to identify what exactly the recovery workers were inhaling, but the data are incomplete. He does know one thing for certain: "You'd have to stand by a busy highway for eight years to get what these people on the site got in just four weeks." He then adds, "These poor people are part of an enormous experiment, I think."

In May 2003, John Walcott was 39 years old. He had just become a first-time father — of his daughter, Colleen — and had proudly coached a Bedford high school hockey team to the state regionals. That spring, he had noticed his energy fade. But he figured his 16-hour days juggling the narcotics beat, hockey practice, and parenthood were finally catching up to him. Still, the fatigue would consume him for weeks. He'd fall asleep at his desk or behind the wheel. Often he'd nod off in the middle of a conversation.

Then he got the diagnosis: acute myelogenous leukemia, a white-blood-cell cancer. He was ordered straight to the hospital, where he underwent chemotherapy for the next 28 days.

Eventually, a nurse would ask Walcott questions similar to those put to Vallebuona, the ones meant to pinpoint the possible causes for his cancer. Like Vallebuona, Walcott answered no to all the questions. And like Vallebuona, he didn't connect the dots between his time at ground zero and the cancer growing in his body.

Visiting him in the hospital later, his sister, Debbie, did.

"John," she said, "what the hell do you think you were around at ground zero?"

It was a question that Gary Acker would also have to confront that summer, in a visit to his own doctor's office. The AT&T manager had never shaken that World Trade Center cough, struggling with sore throats and lung infections for 18 months after completing his recovery work, suffering through all kinds of inhalers and antibiotic regimens. At one point, his doctor diagnosed him with sleep apnea and ordered him to wear a pilot-like mask strapped over his face at night, so as to reduce his roaring snores. It didn't work.

A perennial optimist, Acker ignored any hint that his health problems were 9-11 related. In September 2002, he got the first warning that his health was deteriorating from exposure to the dust cloud when he underwent a pulmonary test for the company. He was stunned by the doctor's response.

"How many packs of cigarettes do you smoke a day?" the doctor asked Acker.

"I don't smoke. I never have in my life."

"Well, you have a real breathing problem," the doctor informed him.

His second warning came in the summer of 2003, as Walcott was getting chemotherapy. In August, Acker was landscaping the backyard at his home, in Columbus, New Jersey, carrying two 50-pound buckets of stones, when his body buckled under a jolt of pain. It felt as if somebody had jabbed a fishhook into his rib cage and was slowly gutting him. He allowed for the possibility of a kidney stone and paid a trip to the doctor. Days later, he got a diagnosis that would stop his heart cold: multiple myeloma, a plasma cell cancer. Already, the super- advanced cancer had eaten its way through the bone marrow in his ribs, as well as many other bones in his body.

For a fleeting moment, Acker thought about that thick and foul plume hanging over the Pile; could it have caused his cancer? But his optimism flooded back and he focused on his treatment instead — on the chemotherapy pills that he would take twice a day for the next 28 days. Only days later, after his oncologist confirmed that his myeloma likely formed in the last two years, did he finally make the tie-in to 9-11.

By the spring of 2004, Acker and Walcott had endured not only months of chemotherapy, but also stem cell transplants. They experienced a series of life-threatening infections and trips in and out of the hospital before beating their cancers into remission.

Meanwhile, Vallebuona had just begun noticing gout-like symptoms. They started in his big toes, which doubled in size and became hot to the touch, and then moved to his knees, joints, and chest. For six months, he went back and forth to the doctor, getting more medicine, seeking more remedies. He wouldn't doubt that diagnosis until October 2004, when the searing stomachache tipped him off to what had really been causing pain in his abdomen.

When he got the cancer diagnosis, Vallebuona was relieved about one thing. His doctor had been wrong about the gout. If nothing else, at least he wouldn't have to live with that excruciating pain for the rest of his life.

As Vallebuona was coming to grips with his cancer in the fall of 2004, Jessy McCarthy was still feeling healthy. The Verizon technician had managed to evade the kinds of respiratory problems that have afflicted so many ground zero workers — the cough, the sinusitis, the asthma — in the two years since his recovery assignment had ended. He would experience nothing to suggest the grave disease that would sneak up on him.

At least not until one day in October 2004, while taking a shower, when he saw a swelling around the glands under his arm, about the size of a marble. He thought: This is not right.

But McCarthy didn't feel sick; there were no dizzy spells or nausea. A trip to the family doctor to ask about the lump yielded little information, just something questionable about his blood. So McCarthy plodded on with his life, holding down his full-time job, taking care of his teenage son.

Suddenly, within weeks, he noticed the lump had grown, and more had developed. His lymph nodes swelled all over his body, underneath his arms, in his groin, around his neck and chest. The lumps just seemed to sprout; they grew so big that they looked like mini-baseballs. Suddenly, McCarthy found himself undergoing a battery of medical exams — CAT scans, PET scans, blood tests, and anything else that would help narrow down the possibilities. It took six months to rule out every type of lymphatic infection. In March 2005, after a biopsy of one of his lymph nodes, McCarthy finally was given the definitive diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

By then, the recovery workers' lawsuits had been more than a year in the making. Back in the winter of 2004, Walcott had just survived the worst of his hospital stays, a 17-day stretch of 106-degree fevers, and was confined to his home. Months had passed since he learned that his leukemia likely resulted from his exposure to benzene while on the Pile, but he went in search of legal advice. He started with a lawyer friend, who encouraged him to keep looking. One attorney offered to take Walcott's case, as long as he put up his modest house to cover the fees. "Forget it," he said.

Eventually, parents of the kids on his high school hockey team heard about his plight. During a visit, Walcott told some parents about his fruitless search. They had an idea. They could contact a trial lawyer whose son went to the same high school; his name was David Worby.

"I took the case as a favor," the lead attorney in the recovery workers' lawsuits says, sitting in his spacious penthouse office in White Plains. A trim man whose brown hair is graying at the temples, David Worby exudes confidence as he reclines in his chair and recalls the early days of what has become his greatest legal crusade. Long before the 9-11 suits, he had built a reputation as a gladiator lawyer on personal-injury cases; in 1989, he set a Westchester record by winning $18 million for a construction worker run down by a car. Fifteen years later, he was settling into early retirement when one of the Bedford parents told him about the ailing Walcott.

"What was I supposed to do?" Worby asks.

What started out as a case for one sick recovery worker quickly snowballed. Today, a team of 20 attorneys at his firm of Worby Groner Edelman Napoli & Bern is handling the suits, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, for the thousands of workers associated with the Trade Center cleanup — police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, iron workers, and Latino day workers. Last month, Federal District Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected the city's claim for immunity in the Worby lawsuits and recently capped its liability at $1 billion. The judge is expected to appoint a special master to settle the workers' claims.

Worby's client list continues to grow. It now includes Vallebuona, Acker, and McCarthy, all of whom came to him after he filed the first suits in September 2004. They found out about him as most of his clients do — by word of mouth, one sick recovery worker to another, one worried spouse to another. Others have called him after hearing about the cases on TV or the radio or in the papers. Most of the clients have grown ill from respiratory problems like asthma, sinusitis, and bronchitis. But some have kidney failure, and 400 people have developed cancer. So far, 83 clients have died.

The number of cancer patients has multiplied at a rate that Worby says he never anticipated. Back in 2004, he represented only 20 workers who had cancer. But by last March, he had watched that number soar to 200, and within six months after that, it had doubled. Now he gets at least several calls a week from clients who have just been diagnosed with some cancer. Or from new clients who have had the cancer for weeks or months.

Like many trial lawyers, Worby has a penchant for talking in fervent, breathless tones, as though his words were writ large, in bright, blinking letters. Convinced that the 9-11 fallout has made for a cancer explosion, he doesn't hesitate to say so. "There is going to be a cancer catastrophe the likes of which we've never seen in this country," he says. "The numbers are going to be staggering."

Perhaps it'd be easy to dismiss him as another hot-aired plaintiffs' attorney were it not for his own command of numbers. He has become something of a gumshoe epidemiologist, compiling the data on his cancer patients that are lacking in the larger worker population, tracking their diseases, ages, diagnosis dates, and their 9-11 exposures. "Look at the cancers my clients have," he says, flipping through a dozen pages of a document entitled "Seriously Ill Clients." It's updated every month; this one is dated September 13, 2006. The document outlines what he calls his "cancer clusters" and lists rare cancers often associated with the 9-11 toxins, such as thyroid (30 people), tongue and throat (25), testicular (16), and brain (10). He keeps a separate document on the 75 people with blood cancers. Two dozen of them have various forms of leukemia; the remaining four dozen have various forms of lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and other blood cell cancers.

"If I had two blood cancers, it'd be a strong coincidence," Worby argues. "But 70? That defies coincidence. The word coincidence should not be in anyone's vocabulary."

Worby contends that it wasn't just the unprecedented amount of toxins in the air that caused his clients to develop cancer; it was that the toxins worked together. Worby calls it a "synergistic effect," and cancer specialists say there is such a thing as toxic synergy, which occurs when chemicals combine. They can enhance the damage that the other ones would cause. Think of it this way: The benzene at ground zero may have caused Walcott's acute leukemia; the dioxin probably sped up its development.

"This amount of toxicological exposure is going to speed up normal latency periods," Worby argues. He makes this assertion with the same zeal that he exhibits in the courtroom, citing medical studies on animals, rattling off the findings as if they were second nature. Why would the doctors monitoring the effects of 9-11 on people's health not understand this connection, he wonders. "Why would people not make this link?"

Five years after September 11, there's no doubt that the toxic dust cloud has devastated the lungs of those who participated in the Trade Center cleanup. In September, the Mount Sinai Medical Center released data from its WTC Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, which has tested 17,500 recovery workers to date. In that analysis, doctors found that nearly 70 percent of the 9,500 subjects they surveyed experienced new or worsened respiratory symptoms at ground zero; close to 60 percent saw those symptoms persist for years. Doctors have seen chronic sinusitis, laryngitis, asthma, gastroesophageal reflux disorder, and disabling musculoskeletal conditions. Even the famous World Trade Center cough has lasted much longer than anticipated.

"All of us have been badly surprised by the persistence and the chronicity of the World Trade Center diseases," says Robin Herbert, the director of the screening program.

But at the Mount Sinai program (and at the WTC program of the FDNY, which declined to comment for this article), the link between the dust cloud and cancer is discussed more as a possibility than a reality. It's not that doctors aren't extremely concerned about the connection, Herbert says, given the cancer-causing agents and other toxins in the mix. While individual cancer cases may be attributed to 9-11 toxins, she says, the doctors, so far, lack full epidemiological proof linking the two.

"We don't know if we're seeing a spike in cancer rates," Herbert says, as they have in the rates of respiratory illnesses. Herbert confirms that the Mount Sinai doctors have seen some workers with cancer, including unusual cancers, but says they'd expect some workers to develop malignancies over the last five years anyway. Is there more incidence of cancer among Pile workers than among those who didn't toil on the Pile? "That's the key question," she says. The Mount Sinai epidemiologists have just begun to try to answer that by launching an initiative to update medical records, document new diagnoses, and track less-common diseases like cancer. It's a slow process, with no timeline. Still, she says, "We are now aggressively investigating every case of cancer that has been reported to us."

But the WTC programs — funded by the federal government — have their share of critics, who wonder how interested the doctors are in the 9-11 and cancer issue. Al O'Leary, the spokesperson for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, says that many of its members feel as if the doctors are ignoring the signs of a growing cancer cluster. "It was our impression that no one in the medical-monitoring programs believed the cancers could be happening this early," he explains.

Over the past year, the police union has fielded a steady increase in calls from members who have developed cancer since working at ground zero. Last July, the PBA started its own World Trade Center health registry for its members, listing seven cancer cases at the time. Today, there are 20 cases; they include the 35-year-old who worked on the Pile and at Fresh Kills and now has multiple myeloma, the 45-year-old who surveyed the Trade Center site for two years and now has leukemia, and the 41-year-old who manned the landfill morgue for three weeks and now has myeloma.

"Now, don't you think this is all very suspicious?" O'Leary asks. "The medical community needs to be more open-minded about what diseases can be caused by 9-11."

Some cancer specialists agree. Hesdorffer, of Johns Hopkins, still remembers the reaction to his testimony before the Victim Compensation Fund, back in 2004. He was called back about a half-dozen times to explain why he would attribute the pancreatic cancer in his two patients to the dust cloud so soon after 9-11. It was as if no one wanted to make the connection; one patient lost his claim despite the doctor's opinion.

"We're in this period where no one wants to accept the link," Hesdorffer observes. Maybe the official denial stems from economics, from a desire to limit the amount of money owed to the thousands who have lost their health. Or maybe it has to do with politics. Admitting a link, as he points out, "would mean that the fallout from 9-11 was a lot bigger than we'd thought."

What it would mean is that people got cancer from government decisions. From the decision of Whitman to lie about the air quality in Lower Manhattan, which gave the recovery workers and many other New Yorkers a false sense of security. From the decision of the White House to put Wall Street ahead of public health, which the EPA inspector general found had influenced all those rosy statements. And from the decision to let workers toil without proper respirators for weeks, or without any respirators at all.

For Gary Acker, now 54 and still undergoing monthly chemical drips to heal his bones, gone are the annual trips hunting for caribou in Canada and fishing for trout in the Adirondacks. Those years in the late '90s when he threw the javelin and shot put in the New York version of the Olympics seem like an adolescent memory. No longer working at AT&T, he devotes his time to trying to relax, watching mindless sitcoms on TV, anything to make himself laugh. "If I'm laughing, I'm not stressed," he says. His doctors tell him that no stress means less chance of a cancer relapse.

Last year, Jessy McCarthy, now 48, had to work through his chemotherapy treatment, juggling the 72-hour drips with his job and his son for six months. He didn't have much choice; otherwise he'd lose his medical benefits. He could never afford the medical bills on his $65,000 salary; some of his medications cost $5,000 a dose. Now in remission, he continues to fix phone lines, though he knows the day will come when he can't anymore. Already, he has had to call for help on assignments he used to do alone. He also knows, in the back of his mind, that his cancer is the kind that will likely return, and possibly kill him.

Walcott and Vallebuona, both retired from the force because of their cancer, continue to live with the side effects of their treatments — the lost feeling in their hands and feet and the extreme fatigue. While Vallebuona has undergone chemotherapy, radiation, and a stem cell transplant, he still hasn't been able to beat his lymphoma into remission. They also grapple with what they both like to call "chemo brain." The drugs left Walcott, now 42, too incoherent to witness or recall the first time his daughter learned to walk or talk. For Vallebuona, now 41, the littler things seem to escape him, like the weekend plans his wife mentioned earlier in the day. But even their foggy minds have not erased the memories of two planes hitting the World Trade Center on that sunny September morning, when they had woken up healthy and happy to be alive.

#

MEDIA REPORTING

SMALL (TIE)

Uncovering Project Censored

There once was a time when you couldn’t trust anyone over 30. Today, some are wondering if that isn’t true of Project Censored.

by Kevin Uhrich

If there has been one fixture in an industry that’s on a never-ending quest for the next great idea, it’s been Project Censored, the brainchild of a university professor who combined academic research techniques with some standard journalistic practices to dig out stories that Americans didn’t hear or read much about in the popular media.

When Professor Carl Jensen started the Project as a 400-level course through Sonoma State University’s Sociology Department 30 years ago, alternative newspapers — many of them in their infancies with young writers wary of institutional authority and hungry to shake up the system — devoured the muck that Jensen and his team of student researchers raked up and dished out each year.

Tainted baby food and banned pesticides being sold by greedy American corporations to needy Third World countries and the influence of the Trilateral Commission on the Carter administration were hot topics in the early years of Project Censored.

In the Reagan era, exposés on government-backed death squads in El Salvador’s bloody civil war, the equally bloody and not-so-secret war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government by the CIA-backed Contras, and US and European countries using African nations as toxic ashtrays were some of the stories people didn’t know much about, that is until reading them in alternative papers like The Village Voice, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the L.A. Weekly.

Three decades is a long time to survive in any business, and for nearly a quarter-century most of the stories published by Project Censored went mostly unquestioned, if also largely unnoticed by most consumers of mainstream news.

But over the past six years, the playing fields in both journalism and politics have changed dramatically. For starters, mainstream news is now being controlled by giant corporations and the government like never before. For its part, the federal government has been literally buying good press by co-opting real journalists to write and broadcast the equivalent of press releases for Bush administration policies and passing that off as “real” news. And as that is happening, daily mainstream newspapers are being swallowed up by bigger news companies and being transformed into little more than advertising vehicles.

In the alternative journalism world, which some media watchers believe has now become really nothing more than an extension of the mainstream press, both the once staunchly liberal Village Voice and the L.A. Weekly, along with a host of other papers in major markets across the country, are now owned by the politically ambivalent former New Times chain of papers, a Phoenix-based national publishing company that is now known as Village Voice Media and assumes a largely libertarian political persona in its writing, a hard-knuckled approach to reporting and generally eschews liberal and party-line politics at all of its 17 weekly newspapers.

But more to the point — and more than partially because of the perceived extreme left-leaning bent that editors with Project Censored have assumed over the years in selecting, writing and publishing its stories — some in the alternative press, who themselves mostly leaned hard to the political left and once unconditionally supported Project Censored, aren’t so sure anymore: sure if the information being offered is really censored, if the information being reported is actually correct, and if Project Censored is still relevant, at least from a journalistic perspective.

Friends And Foes

While the Project has attracted its share of criticism over the years, it definitely has its supporters, some from unlikely places, like columnist Molly Ivins, who wrote a rare piece praising the Project that appeared recently in the Chicago Tribune, and Bryce Nelson, a USC journalism professor and former reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

Nelson spent most of his career in the mainstream press, but believes Project Censored is actually a “very useful” thing for readers, partially because, as he readily acknowledges, the mainstream press definitely has its share of failures and built-in biases.

Project Censored, Nelson noted in a subsequent email, “provides the reader a reminder (or alert) of stories that the public could have noted. Much of the press has a centrist bias, so any list, whether it’s left-wing, right-wing or just far out, can do a useful service in provoking consideration of other stories.”

But are Project Censored stories actually censored, as critics of the Project say they are not?

“It may be more a question of not paying sufficient attention,” Nelson wrote. “For instance, there were stories questioning the administration's claims on Iraq having WMDs, but they didn't receive the attention they deserved.”

True enough. But for Project Censored critics, more than anything it has been the Project’s perceived long leftward lean that has done the most damage to the its overall credibility, at least in the eyes of some in the journalistic world.

“It’s fair to say it’s predictably left in the same way that the Weekly was in its early years,” said Michael Sigman, who served as publisher of the L.A. Weekly from 1984 to 2002. Sigman is not a critic and didn’t really have an opinion on the overall worth of the Project. But, “The thing I remember the most,” he said, “is that [Bay Guardian Editor and Publisher] Bruce Brugmann, who is one of the more unquestioning people on the left, would just run it. That pretty much says it all.”

Brugmann, a white-haired and bearded bear of a man, started the Bay Guardian 40 years ago and is regarded by many in the industry, such as Sigman, to be a “larger than life” pioneer of the alternative press.

“It’s needed now more than ever, with the accelerating concentration of the press, and the one newspaper town turning into the one newspaper region,” said Brugmann, a past Project Censored award winner. “The thing that really works for me is very few daily papers ever run it. They are embarrassed to run it. And here we are, in the middle of the Bush administration, with stenographers in the mainstream press working away at top speed to take us into the war and to keep the pressure down … there’s even more reason for a Project Censored,” Brugmann said. “They ought to do a censored story every week, as far as I’m concerned.

“My problem with Project Censored was a minor one, which they knew about, and that was they did national and international stories rather than domestic or local stories as much as they should. But, to deal with that, when we run Project Censored, we do local censored stories and we check around with various activists in the various categories — media, environmental, consumer, political, etc. — then we do the stories that the local media don’t properly cover,” Brugmann said. “That’s makes a much fuller package and covers any of the holes that I’ve seen.”

Author and veteran Los Angeles journalist Marc Cooper, also a past Project Censored award winner, has possessed one of the country’s most important voices of the political left over the past 25 years. Now an editor and columnist with the L.A. Weekly, Cooper has written books and articles for magazines such as The Nation, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly, to name but a few. He’s presently writing an article for The Atlantic on left and right influences on the media.

These days, Cooper’s own politics have hardened somewhat, and his opinions on many issues that are dear to the left seem to be moving closer and closer to the political center. But be political predilections what they are, for Cooper the fact remains: Project Censored always did and probably always will lean to the left, just as it is a remote possibility that researchers and writers with the Project have really uncovered any information in recent years that was actually censored.

“Really, there are very few stories in American journalism that get censored. There are stories that get underplayed, that don’t get the attention that they should, but cases of stories being censored are few and far between,” Cooper said.

“Even before the internet boon, Project Censored celebrated these stories, when in fact there is nothing to celebrate,” said Cooper, who, like Nelson, teaches journalism at USC. “It’s not great news that the East Bay Express [another Village Voice Media weekly paper in Northern California] or some other publication covered the story. What is more relevant is that the story was not covered” by anyone, alternative or mainstream, he said. “To the degree that these stories are not covered, to the extent that these stories are quote unquote censored, what is there to celebrate about that?”

Plenty, said Peter Phillips, a sociology professor at Sonoma State who took the project’s reins after Jensen’s retirement a few years back. To say there isn’t censorship in American media is denying the reality of our times, which has seen not only an explosion of information availability by virtue of the internet alone but also increasing corporate and government control of the means of delivering those messages.

“We get accused of liberal bias all the time, but that is simply not the case,” Phillips said in a recent phone interview from his campus office in Northern California. “It’s certainly not the case relative to the Republicans and Democrats. I think we have a bias in terms of free press, freedom of information and the public’s right to know. Yeah, we are very biased in that regard. That’s what we advocate for.”

Cracks In The Armor

Darts and laurels for Project Censored have come from a variety of quarters over the years, with much of the recent criticism emanating from writers with the Village Voice Media (or, as some in the alternative world say, Evil) Empire, among them the particularly acerbic Matt Palmquist of the SF Weekly, bitter business and ideological enemies of Brugmann’s very proudly left Bay Guardian.

In a piece that appeared in the SF Weekly in 2002, Palmquist complained that Project Censored had become "a hallowed fixture of the alternative press," as predictable as any mainstream newspaper. And at the former New Times chain, an often-used phrase is, “Be predictably unpredictable,” which they contend Project Censored is not.

Of that year’s top 10 under-covered stories, nine, Palmquist wrote, had already received prominent coverage by mainstream institutions like The New York Times. Even Mother Jones magazine, “a bastion of the left,” he continued, “has slammed Project Censored.”

They were correct about that. Brooke Shelby Biggs two years prior to their column asked in Mother Jones, “Will Project Censored please go away?” Apparently not one to hold back, Biggs called the student-run project a “sacred cow” of the left that has become “predictable and boring,” not to mention “irrelevant, laughable, and cheesy.”

Today, even the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia acknowledges criticisms of the Project, writing that although it never explicitly takes a political stance, “Almost every story that Project Censored highlights has a leftist political slant, with stories criticizing big business, economic inequality, damage to the environment, war and the armed forces, and evildoing by rightist politicians, among other leftist ‘hot-button’ issues,” the entry states.

Further, states Wikipedia, “The group periodically is criticized for shoddy reporting or misrepresentation of facts, the same fallacies the group itself claims to battle. Occasionally these claims come from other leftist publications that are concerned that the Project's alleged misreporting will give an already fragile news development even less credibility. It is also at times criticized for reporting on stories which are arguably not ‘under-reported’ or ‘censored’ at all.”

These are clearly very well-known perceptions these days. But prior to all that, back in 2000, Project Censored enjoyed an almost unquestioned presence in the alternative news world. That is until Don Hazen, executive director of the AlterNet news website, openly criticized the Project Censored awards in an April 1 column — 10 days prior to the publication of Biggs’ screed — that was anything but funny.

In scathing published responses to Hazen, who is also executive director of the San Francisco-based Independent Media Institute, Brugmann strenuously defended the Project and some of its reporters and editors, some of whom were singled out for criticism by Hazen in subsequent posts.

The ensuing series of articles — more accurately war of words — opened the door for what little substantive criticism that the project had actually weathered over the years.

At the heart of the issue for Hazen, as Dan Kennedy of the Boston Phoenix explained at the time, was the selection of a story by Diana Johnstone, the former European editor of the leftist magazine In These Times, which argued in less than 1,000 words that the Kosovo crisis had been manufactured by NATO in order to build a pipeline to carry oil from the Caspian Sea through the Balkans.

The article, which Kennedy noted consisted mainly of quotes from the Washington Post and the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, didn’t substantiate any of its findings, but nonetheless went on to be chosen for a Project Censored award that year.

To Kennedy, the selection of Johnstone's piece “says something important about why much of the progressive press does, indeed, find itself marginalized, unable to get its message out into the mainstream,” as he wrote at the time of a sentiment that Cooper and Hazen couldn’t agree with more.

“And the ensuing battle over Project Censored itself,” Kennedy went on, “says a lot about the differences between the liberal left, which remains optimistic about the possibility of transforming the culture, and the radical left, which has grown as paranoid and conspiratorial as, say, Pat Buchanan or Alan Keyes.”

With entries like Johnstone’s winning major kudos, the independent press is moving in the wrong direction; driving mainstream media away from, not toward, the big stories being broken in the independent and alternative press, Hazen argued.

In an interview last week, Hazen, whose AlterNet site no longer sells stories and does not pick up the Project Censored annual list of winners, said he thinks that “the Project Censored notion is stale, because it plays into this victimization thing.

“The corporate media is the only way to communicate, and the corporate media is not going to like our stories, and the reason why they don’t like them is because of politics and so they are going to censor them and we are going to take those stories,” Hazen said, giving a breathy thumbnail of how he envisions the Project’s story selection process. “And, no matter if they are good or mediocre or whatever, we are going to award them and celebrate them,” when they should be trying to get those stories out to mainstream audiences, he said. “I mean, that would be a celebration. But to celebrate the ones that nobody ever reads is like a celebration of failure.”

In Phillips’ opinion, however, if there are any failures in relation to Project Censored they lay in allowing the corporate media to set the parameters of what is and what isn’t considered news; opting for easy, lengthy and empty entertainment pieces at the expense of telling real news stories that people should know about, but might pose a threat to a government institution or a corporate interest.

“There’s probably bias relative to corporate power versus human rights, but that’s the tradition of journalism, that’s what journalists have done at least since the Progressive Movement,” said Phillips, referring to a time when, he said, reporters “put a mirror up to the rich and powerful.”

Today, “As corporate media has become the powerful in themselves, and there is this loss of diversity of news sources around, corporations are interlocked with the corporate media so strongly they are no longer journalists of tradition that look at inequality and are finding their own issues along those lines,” Phillips said.

‘Very Predictable’

Cooper said his beef with Project Censored is somewhat personal. Cooper said he won an award from the group for his coverage of the invasion of Panama in December 1989, during the first Bush administration. But, a few years ago, he became disappointed in how another matter, a management struggle at a Pacifica radio station that Cooper worked at, was covered by the Project and was turned off to it.

Cooper was news and public affairs director of Pacifica Radio’s KPFK-FM, 90.7-FM, in the early ’80s and went on to host a daily talk show from 1998 to 2001. Cooper quit the show, according to Wikipedia’s very abbreviated take on the ongoing and complex controversy, over control issues with the station's parent Pacifica Foundation.

“I stopped paying attention to Project Censored some years ago,” Cooper said.

Hazen said he doesn’t doubt that censorship is real and at work in the American media. “But in terms of Project Censored, while I’m sure it’s done some great things, I think it’s kind of a mistake to celebrate as opposed to point out, and when I say celebrate, people treat Project Censored as an award, as a trophy, as a success-marker, when in fact what it is suggesting is that the story, for whatever reasons, has failed to break through to a broad enough audience so that people wouldn’t think it so quote unquote censored,” he said. “I’ve observed Project Censored for years, decades, and some of the stories that they cite you probably could make a case they may have been censored in some form. But what you might wonder: Was the story written very well? Does it make the case very well? Is it so obscure that no one really wants it? Could they have done it better? The article is incredibly important and we have to figure out a way to get it out there. So it’s kind of a defeatist kind of thing, and over the years people began to think they were really doing well to get a Project Censored award when, in fact, it’s all been failure. It’s been our inability to get big audiences for important information in those articles.”

Not surprisingly, Phillips, who recently returned with members of his class and others involved with the Project from an international investigative journalism conference in Copenhagen, believes just the opposite, and for good reason.

One of three stories profiled by Project Censored, Phillips said, is eventually picked up by the mainstream. Yes, the number of alternative papers running the list has dwindled over the years to just a few dozen, among them Brugmann’s Bay Guardian, but there are “between 20,000 and 50,000 hits” on the Project’s website each day, said Phillips, so it’s clear someone is reading the material being posted at .

And it’s not as though the Project is getting any smaller. Today there are 30 students, 50 interns and a dozen researchers working on 100 possible stories, or projects. Having grown from the press release that Jensen issued in the first few years, Phillips told Chicago-based author and public radio commentator Bob McChesney recently, the Project was compiled into a book 15 years ago, which this year tops out at 430 pages — the largest edition ever. The final 25 censored stories are ranked in order of significance by a national panel of members of the media, authors and educators. (Project Censored’s book is available at .)

Phillips remains convinced that “there is a deliberate effort at the highest levels now of corporate media, and particularly the ideological people on the neoconservative side of the fence. … They really do want to control media in this country and they really are spending a whole lot of money to spin news stories,” Phillips said.

And he bristles when he hears that some believe the Project predictable. “I don’t know where they ever get the idea that anything could be predictable with Project Censored. It’s just too big,” Phillips said.

One sign that the Project’s reports are finally finding their way into the mainstream is a recent column in the Chicago Tribune by Molly Ivins, who cited the Project’s top 10 stories in calling for a Media Accountability Day.

“I have long been persuaded that the news media collectively will be sent to hell not for our sins of commission, but our sins of omission. The real scandal in the media is not bias, it is laziness. Laziness and bad news judgment,” Ivins wrote. “Our failure is what we miss, what we fail to cover, what we let slip by, what we don't give enough attention to — because, after all, we have to cover Jennifer and Brad, and Scott and Laci, and Whosit who disappeared in Aruba without whom the world can scarce carry on,” Ivins wrote.

Phillips can attest to that disturbing fact of modern life after recently attending the journalism conference in Denmark, where top editors of mainstream European newspapers said stories about Africa don’t sell, unless, of course, they include photos of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie visiting there, validating Phillips’ contention that much of what passes for news these days is really just conscience-numbing entertainment.

“Happily,” Ivins continued in her column, one of the few acknowledgements of the Project in major mainstream newspapers, “the perfect news peg, as we say in the biz, for Media Accountability Day already exists — it's Project Censored's annual release of the 10 biggest stories ignored or under-covered by mainstream media. … Of course, the stories are not actually ‘censored’ by any authority, but they do not receive enough attention to enter the public's consciousness, usually because corporate media tend to under-report stories about corporate misdeeds and government abuses.”

Said Phillips: “These are stories about corporations and government that have been doing things that affect a lot of people, usually negatively, that the corporate media in the United States hasn’t covered. That’s what’s predictable about it: That the corporate media won’t be covering important news stories for the mainstream people in this country,” Phillips said. “That is predictable, and that’s gotten worse.”

Brugmann agreed and offered a suggestion to those editors who may not want to use the Project’s annual list of stories.

“There is no doubt that Project Censored is needed, and if anybody doesn’t like and they don’t think it’s needed, they should do their own [list] and run that at the same time. They should do their own stories, in their city, in their region, in their state, or even nationally.”

Project Censored, Brugmann said, helps dramatize the fact that “there are enormous problems with media concentration, there are enormous problems with the Washington Beltway press corps, there’re enormous problems with the way [mainstream media] handled the Bush administration and the war, there are enormous problems with the media.”

Project Censored’s Top 25 Stories Of The Past Year.

To read the full stories, visit .

1. Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government

2. Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Death

3. Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage

4. Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In

5. US Uses Tsunami to Military Advantage in Southeast Asia

6. The Real Oil for Food Scam

7. Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood

8. Iraqi Farmers Threatened By Bremer’s Mandates

9. Iran’s New Oil Trade System Challenges US Currency

10. Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy

11. Universal Mental Screening Program Usurps Parental Rights

12. Military in Iraq Contracts Human Rights Violators

13. Rich Countries Fail to Live up to Global Pledges

14. Corporations Win Big on Tort Reform, Justice Suffers

15. Conservative Plan to Override Academic Freedom in the Classroom

16. US Plans for Hemispheric Integration Include Canada

17. US Uses South American Military Bases to Expand Control of the Region

18. Little Known Stock Fraud Could Weaken US Economy

19. Child Wards of the State Used in AIDS Experiments

20. American Indians Sue for Resources; Compensation Provided to Others

21. New Immigration Plan Favors Business Over People

22. Nanotechnology Offers Exciting Possibilities But Health Effects Need Scrutiny

23. Plight of Palestinian Child Detainees Highlights Global Problem

24. Ethiopian Indigenous Victims of Corporate and Government Resource Aspirations

25. Homeland Security Was Designed to Fail

#

And Now The News

As mainstream and alternative newspapers struggle to remain relevant, ethnic media explodes, speaking to readers in their own languages.

by Kevin Uhrich

A day in the working life of Jackie Hsu begins much the same way as any editor of a major newspaper might. City editor of the Chinese Daily News, Hsu starts Friday’s 10-to-12-hour afternoon shift looking through press releases written in English and Mandarin, checking stories in the daily and weekly English-language papers, perusing wire services for breaking news and checking emails from correspondents in San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas. A little while later, she’ll be deciding which stories will be shipped off to the paper’s offices in San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, and New York.

The Chinese Daily News, also known as the World Journal, is a newspaper that many Angelenos have never read, much less heard of. But throughout the Chinese-language community, it is a giant. The paper is produced on the outskirts of Los Angeles in Monterey Park, in the middle of the one of the largest Asian enclaves in the United States, and covers national and international issues, devoting hefty amounts of its seven-section daily package to local school board and city council decisions being made in its home communities.

Today’s front-page headlines: More on the war in Iraq, the Oscars, and the start of a blockbuster special report on the Guantanamo Bay military prison camp, written and photographed by Special Assignment Editor Andrew Sun. Sun’s tour of the camps, the lynchpin of his largely uncritical three-part series of stories and photos, was the byproduct of his longtime friendship with camp commander Brig. Gen. John Gong. Just more proof that the Chinese paper is functioning much like the Los Angeles Times — only with a fraction of the local circulation and resources.

And, unlike the Times, its influence is growing.

Like perhaps no other time, major American newspapers are in big trouble. Circulation figures at some of the country’s top papers are hitting record lows, forcing upwards of 2,100 job losses nationwide, with 300 of those layoffs at the L.A. Times alone. The Tribune Co., which owns the Times, recently cut its storied City News wire service, where writing greats Kurt Vonnegut, Mike Royko and Seymour Hirsch got their starts.

But while all that is happening, the number of publications in languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Armenian, and Farsi is growing faster than ever — especially in Los Angeles. Also growing are the corresponding news, entertainment, and public affairs television and radio broadcasts. Once-marginalized people have now found their voices — and in their own languages — as major players in the American publishing business.

“The ethnic media is the fastest-growing media in the print world,” said USC communications professor and author Sandra Ball-Rokeach. And that is happening without much help from established publishing houses, philanthropists, traditional journalistic trade associations or the government.

“Our focus will definitely be on areas with large Asian populations, Chinese populations,” the 44-year-old Hsu says in flawless English, explaining the dynamic nature of the paper’s transnational audience and its increasing importance as a source of reliable international news.

Crisp color photos and splashy, even excessive use of red ink does a good job of explaining things and giving the paper — even with Chinese characters — a look and feel as lively as any major newspaper. But along with the Chinese characters setting it apart, there’s another major difference: “We might cover a little bit more than the L.A. Times; we try to do that,” Hsu says wryly.

Runaway Growth

Newspapering is a big business in the United States — $60 billion a year — but, for years, that number has been shrinking. The layoffs, buyouts and downsizing at the L.A. Times has become all too common nationwide. Buyouts have been offered at San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. And, according a recent report in American Journalism Review, The New York Times Co. expected to cut 45 newsroom jobs at The New York Times and 35 positions at its Boston Globe as part of a 500-person downsizing.

Whatever the cause of this disconnection between writers and readers in America’s English-language newspaper publishing industry — increased production costs and competition, distrust, disinterest, the internet — the bottom line is people aren’t picking up papers like they used to anymore.

Except, that is, in languages other than English.

Over the past 15 years, the US, and Southern California in particular, has seen a greater influx of new and non-English-speaking immigrants than at any other time. The papers and other news outlets that have come into being during this time have performed a vital function: Down-in-the-neighborhood reporting, giving readers what they want — and quite often need — to survive.

“The difference” between English-language mainstream papers and so-called ethnic papers, even those published in English, “is the ethnic media has extensive coverage of news from back home,” says Julian Do, co-director of New America Media, a San Francisco-based nonprofit association of ethnic and other-language publications and broadcasters. The group, with its Southern California headquarters on Grand Avenue, near MOCA in downtown LA, went nationwide earlier this year, changing its name from New California Media.

“Second,” Do continues, these ethnic papers focus on “the communities right here in America. And third, what’s happening at the national and state levels.”

A native of Vietnam who formerly worked as a reporter with Pacific News Service in Northern California, Do said New America Media members total more than 700; most of them print news outlets. When it comes to broadcasting, a recent survey by the Excellence in Journalism Project found that ethnic media — print, television, radio, the internet — reaches 84 percent of members in the three largest minority groups in California.

One major contributor to this flood of information is Spanish-language Univision television in Los Angeles, which has a larger audience than any of the city’s English-speaking stations. Another is La Opinion.

The L.A. Times was well aware of the potential cultural crossover in La Opinion, the Spanish-language paper that serves as the daily news, sports and entertainment bible for a huge number of Spanish-speaking Angelenos, and bought the paper a few years back. The paper, which is now owned by Spanish-language publishing giant ImpreMedia, is now so well put together that city newshounds feel the need to learn Spanish, if they don’t already.

Major magazines are also starting to tap into this exploding demographic, with Los Angeles magazine, for instance, starting its own Spanish-language magazine for hip, urban Latinos, Tú Ciudad.

But the Latino market is not the only one that’s growing, and growing fast. Today, nearly every Asian nationality is represented by their own press, with such Southern California-produced publications as Rafu Shimpo and Asahi Japan, the Khmer Monthly News and Serey Pheap for Cambodians and the Korea Daily, to give a small offering of the hundreds of publications that are currently operating in Los Angeles alone.

Among black-owned newspapers in the western US, The Sentinel is certainly one of the oldest and most influential papers in the region’s African-American community. That profile skyrocketed two years ago when Brotherhood Crusade founder and Pasadena developer Danny Bakewell bought the paper. Since then, Bakewell says he’s raised the professional bar on the writing and is looking for more investigative stories, such as the exclusive that ran last week on internal strife at the offices of the recently deceased lawyer Johnnie Cochran, a personal friend of Bakewell’s.

“We’ve put a lot of emphasis on the look of the paper and the reporting. Now we’re doing more than rewriting press releases — real investigative reporting,” says Bakewell.

The motto of the paper is “The Voice of Our Community Speaking For Itself,” and the combination of better reporting and improved cross-promotion with other media, such as radio stations Power 106 and KJLH 102.3-FM has raised its profile considerably.

“I remain excited, I remain motivated, I remain committed to providing a way for the black community to tell our story, from our perspective,” says Bakewell.

Unprecedented diversity

Ball-Rokeach once remarked to Terrence Smith of “The News Hour” on PBS that the academic world had been trying for years to get people to recognize the importance of ethnic media in the daily lives of large populations. “Not only for understanding their home country but also leading their everyday lives, like where to go to purchase goods, where to go to have recreation. Where is it safe? What's going on in the community that you should know about?” she said.

Today, she says, “I think the print world is in a period of adaptation to the internet and that they have an even more diverse audience that they need to reach.”

New America Media founder Sandy Close observed how these various other-language media are finding their ways into English-speaking publications. On a recent front-page story in The New York Times, for example, Close noted three Middle Eastern names on the tagline at the end, most probably because “the reporter couldn’t go out and do the reporting firsthand,” says Close.

“The fact is we are living in a society here in California of unprecedented diversity. How do we communicate with one another across these racial, social and linguistic lines? So the whole question of communication is very challenging. I’m finding more and more the paradigm of journalism that we have relied on for much of the 20th century needs to be expanded and reconstructed,” Close says.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism (), US Census figures show that the number of white people in America fell from 83 percent to just more than 75 percent in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000. During that same period, the number of Asian/Pacific Islanders grew from 1.5 percent to 3.6 percent. By 2000, there were 35.3 million Latinos representing 12.5 percent of the population, making Latinos the largest minority group in the country.

Even with all this growth, though, large newspaper chains have yet to make partnerships with these communities, and not much interaction exists beyond a handful of other ethnocentric publications and associations, such as the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ). The California Newspaper Publishers Association makes links between mainstream papers and non-English-language papers, but Close says those connections are actually pretty rare.

But that, literally, is where the country is going. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people not speaking English in their own homes grew by nearly 50 percent, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism report. Spanish speakers led that growth, with Chinese coming in second, going from 1.3 million in 1990 to 2 million in 2000, a 54 percent increase.

“I see this as a very confusing and fascinating time, with a lot of catching-up to be done with technological trends, popular trends and globalization trends that are now having a more visible impact in the media business,” says Ball-Rokeach.

Perhaps some of this confusion, as Ball-Rokeach calls it, is responsible for a credibility gap that continues to nag the non-English papers. The Project’s survey, which was published in 2004 and focused on African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics and Middle Easterners, found that second-language readers tend to trust English-language media outlets more than those in their native languages.

Latinos, by a 38 to 23 percent margin, found English-language media to be more trustworthy than that in their own language. Among Asians and Middle Easterners, the gap is wider, with 60 percent of those polled saying English-language media are the most credible. Nevertheless, independent publications continue to flourish in places where it seems their brand of basic journalism is most needed.

In well-heeled Glendale, for instance, a city of 214,000 in the foothills northeast of LA, where more Armenian-Americans reside than in many Armenian cities, there are at least a half-dozen Armenian-language newspapers competing for ad dollars against the mainstream papers like the Glendale News-Press, which is owned by the Times, among them Asbarez, which owns not only the international Asharez Newspaper, the nation’s oldest and largest Armenian-language paper, but also Horizon Armenian TV. There are also newspapers with names such as the Aravot Daily, Zhamanak newspaper and Aragast magazine

Likewise in Monterey Park, a burgeoning suburb on the edge of Latino-dominant East Los Angeles with a population of 64,000 that is now nearly 70 percent Asian, papers are thriving there in a variety of native tongues. Most are published in Mandarin and some, like the Chinese Daily News and the Hong Kong-based Sing Tao Daily News, the largest and oldest Chinese-language newspaper in the world with offices in San Francisco and Canada, have global distributions.

Worldwide Diasporas

These readily accessible diasporas give the Chinese and other-language papers an edge over their American minority counterparts in both the mainstream and independent press. According to numerous studies and anecdotal conversations, Chinese people often arrive in the US with a fairly high degree of education and are habituated to news consumption, thus making theirs a global newspaper and television market.

That should come as no surprise, considering China and Taiwan have been for decades steeped in print journalism traditions as the world's largest producers of daily newspapers, with mainland China alone accounting for 15 percent of the world's total daily production, with 90 newspapers in 13 languages, according to a recent Chinese government report posted at . Along with that, China has its own ethnic press, with 13 foreign-language newspapers, mainly in English and Russian.

But newspapers clearly mean different things to different people, as they do to different governments. According to a recent report published by UCLA’s Asian Media Center, communist government officials in China, who have never been exactly wild about the idea of free speech, at first closed down the popular publication Freezing Point and fired offending writers and editors for publishing what writer Minxin Pei described as “unorthodox views on Chinese history, Taiwan, and other sensitive topics,” including a revisionist take on the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. After intense protests by intellectuals and so-called liberals, government officials opened the paper again, but refused to rehire the editorial staff.

“China's prohibitions on livelier, more authentic news are growing stronger, sources say — and extend to radio, TV, newspapers and the internet,” said a recent story in the Christian Science Monitor, partially explaining why China leads the world in jailed journalists, with 39 under detention. The recent flap over attempts by the Chinese government to censor Google is only the latest in a long list of crackdowns on free speech by communist officials.

In America, few such restrictions exist on news content. Still, most Chinese-language papers tend to steer clear of political controversies, going so far as to avoid writing critical editorials or even endorsements in local elections.

This self-imposed censorship is largely rooted in basic economics. With a very targeted demographic, it doesn’t pay to risk losing readers. Also, the reporters are generally paid much less in the ethnic press than are their counterparts in the mainstream English-language press, despite all the stories they actually break.

The 152 workers at the Chinese Daily News, for example, attempted to unionize a few years back, as the Weekly reported at the time. At issue were mostly pay and benefit concerns. Had this effort been successful, the influential daily would have become not only the first Chinese-language paper in the country to be represented by a union, in this case the Newspaper Guild-Communication Workers of America; it would have been the only paper in the San Gabriel Valley, and one of the few in Southern California — mainstream, alternative or ethnic — to have union representation.

Journalists with the L.A. Times, the Pasadena Star-News, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Whittier Daily News all failed in their respective efforts to win the right to collective bargaining in the early 1990s. But five years ago, workers at the Chinese Daily News had won their fight, if only for a short while. Management appealed the vote to the National Labor Relations Board, which ultimately ruled against the workers.

Things at the Chinese Daily News have changed dramatically since that tumultuous time. For starters, the company, which is celebrating 30 years, has a new president, James Guo, a friendly and apparently well-liked man who served as editor in chief a few years prior to the union organizing and returned from Taiwan three years ago to take over as vice president of the company, just missing all the labor turmoil.

Since taking over, Guo says pay has improved across the board, starting with entry-level reporters, who are all at least bilingual and all possess at least one graduate-level degree, usually in journalism or mass communications. They now earn just short of $30,000 a year, around the same amount that a similar position pays in the alternative and mainstream worlds. A benefits package is also offered by the company. The paper is expanding, installing another press and soon launching a Sunday magazine.

Higher working standards have apparently had a positive effect, because “More than half of our reporters have master’s degrees,” Guo said with no small degree of pride during an interview in his office in Monterey Park.

“They have to be bilingual, they have to be able to read English and write in English and when it comes time to write, it has to be in Chinese, and they have to be good in Chinese,” he said.

The Chinese Daily News operates independently, but works closely with a Taiwan-based global newspaper network consisting of seven other papers with offices in Canada, Paris, Thailand, Indonesia and mainland China. For an example of a similar business model, think of Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group Inc., which publishes 50 daily newspapers in North America, including the Denver Post, the Salt Lake Tribune and, here in Southern California, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, the Star-News, the SGV Tribune, the Whittier Daily News and the Inland Empire Daily Bulletin.

“We offer a lot of information that people need to settle down in this new land,” Guo says. “Most of our readers are new immigrants. They need to know how to live here, how to rent a house, how to get food and transportation. This is all the information they need to live here.”

By this standard, then, we should all be reading everything. Because don’t we all need more tools to survive a globalizing world? Ethnic media, says New America Media’s Close, “has truly grown up out of the tremendous hunger to have some way to navigate this global society,” adding her group’s research shows more than 51 million people in the United States access other-language publications on a daily basis.

“They don’t want to just be informed. They want to be visible in society. I see that as a great resource for all of us, particularly for those of us in the business of communication,” Close says. “We need each other to create a new paradigm for journalism that really serves the global society.”

Sharing information and resources seems to be part of the answer for publishers like Bakewell, a developer who made millions at business, but readily admits that he didn’t really know what he had when he purchased The Sentinel.

Over the years, the 73-year-old newspaper has belonged to the National Newspaper Association, the National Newspaper Publishers Association and CNPA. Today, the plan is to start connecting dots. “The future of The Sentinel,” Bakewell says, “is a lot of partnering and a lot of consolidation of efforts.”

#

Dead Men Do Tell Tales

Judge sends a chill through reporters everywhere with ruling against newspaper in Pa. coroner probe

by Kevin Uhrich

No sooner do we finish celebrating National Sunshine Week — an effort to open up government to the citizens who pay the bills and the generous salaries of the public servants racking up those expenses — a law enforcement agency fires a potentially fatal broadside at what’s left of one of America’s most precious rights.

It’s not enough that hundreds of laws have been passed over the past five years in states around the country limiting our right to information on the doings of our public officials; now it seems the government believes it is time that newspapers start opening up their files to them.

Now that's a switch, and a very dangerous switch at that. We thought the First Amendment was a prohibition against government doing such things, but apparently not in Pennsylvania, ironically the very cradle of what we’ve come to call liberty.

Back in a state better known to many as The Land of Taxes, our most basic right is being dismantled by a judge and the state Attorney General’s Office, which two weeks ago seized four computers from the Lancaster Intelligencer-Journal daily newspaper (), according to reports by the McCormick Tribune Foundation-funded Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press () and Editor & Publisher magazine ().

The Intelligencer’s editor has had to travel to nearby Harrisburg, the state capital, to testify before a grand jury conducting a statewide investigation into official leaks to reporters, and some of his reporters are being represented by attorneys, but they have continued covering the story since Feb. 4. That’s when the paper first reported Lancaster County Coroner Gary Kirchner was under investigation by the grand jury for allegedly divulging the office website’s access code, which is only available to law enforcement personnel.

Call it one of the many tragic ironies of our brief history as a country. After all, this is Pennsylvania, the home of Ben Franklin, who made his first fortune in the publishing trade berating and belittling monarchs and would-be kings, and other Founding Fathers. Or call it just another unfortunate byproduct of the War on Terror.

Here’s what a “flabbergasted” RCFP Executive Director Lucy Dalglish called it: “[H]orrifying, an editor's worst nightmare," Dalglish told the Philadelphia Inquirer ().

On March 13, the Inquirer reported that Senior Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach stated that she did not believe this was a case of a journalist's right to protect a source, but an attempt to use the First Amendment to shield a crime.

Two weeks prior to that, the Inquirer’s John Shiffman reported that Senior Judge Barry F. Feudale had ruled in favor of the state’s motion to seize the computers.

In the newspaper's subsequent appeal, William DeStefano, a lawyer for the Intelligencer, broke it down: "Permitting the attorney general to seize and search unfettered the workstations will result in the very chilling of information," DeStefano wrote. "Confidential tips, leads, and other forms of information will undoubtedly dry up once sources and potential sources learn that [the newspaper’s] workstations were taken out of its possession and turned over to investigations."

But in the end, the state Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Feudale’s ruling stood and state investigators started wading through the computer files.

Good citizens that they probably are, officials with the paper maintain they did nothing wrong and even offered to provide prosecutors with print versions of the information being sought, including emails. But that wasn’t good enough.

“Feudale has stated that he will personally review all material before it is given to prosecutors,” according to the Reporters Committee report, presumably in order to filter out information outside the scope of the investigation.

That’s not very reassuring.

Judges are notoriously political animals, and often shamelessly cozy with prosecuting attorneys. That’s because all too often they are themselves former prosecutors. Judges are also extremely press-savvy, as one might expect of political animals, quite able to leak possibly sensitive and unpublished information for their own purposes to other reporters looking for scoops, and to others having nothing to do with the publishing business.

Think of it: What would prevent Feudale — who clearly doesn’t mind sacrificing sacrosanct obligations to preserve and protect the Constitution in order to aid law enforcement — from dropping dime on another case, one not related to this one?

Or what if investigators find information for a story about the judge or one of his family members, or friends, or associates? What then? Who’s looking over their shoulders?

Needless to say, there’s probably a lot of sweating going on right now in Lancaster County officialdom. And, not to get side-tracked, that’s probably not such a bad thing. But that’s not the point.

The question is: What is to stop Feudale, besides his word and his apparently limited commitment to preserving and defending our most cherished freedom, from divulging other sensitive yet unpublished and otherwise private information to other news agencies or other public agencies, like the FBI or Homeland Security?

They are supposed to be investigating the website breach. But what are they really looking for?

Especially in these perilous times, placing severe limits like this on the Constitution's guarantee of an unfettered press is too important for one person, even the most unimpeachable judge, to have the final say on what and what isn’t important to the public, no matter how important any individual case may happen to be at any given time.

It makes one thankful that we live in California, a state where public officials cherish the tenets of the First Amendment and deeply respect the public's right to know.

Such a thing could never happen here, could it?

#

Inside The Herald-Sun

One year after a traumatic takeover by the Paxton Media chain, Durham’s hometown newspaper offers more local content, but less news.

by Fiona Morgan

Outside the window of Bob Ashley's office are the piney woods that drew him back to North Carolina to take a job as editor of The Herald-Sun in Durham one year ago. From this part of The Herald-Sun building, just off U.S. 15-501, the view is peaceful, a wall of evergreen trees filtering the afternoon sunlight. To the left of his desk, however, the view is dreary: a newsroom that has seen its staff and its morale plummet since Ashley's first day of work, when 80 of its 350 employees were fired, including beloved executive editor Bill Hawkins, whom Ashley was sent to replace. Some reporters have described the atmosphere as toxic, with new owners imposing a production-oriented management style while simultaneously freezing salaries and cutting bonuses. One year later, the resentment lingers like an odor that won't come out of the carpet.

His wife and teenage son still back in Kentucky (she's still looking for a job here), Ashley has spent a lot of time in this office over the past year, often staying late and coming in on weekends. He has immersed himself in the job. He also attends scores of community events — government meetings, fund-raisers, basketball games and awards ceremonies — determined to show he and his newspaper are committed to Durham and Chapel Hill. He writes about these events in his weekly column, offering an upbeat, gee-isn't-Durham-great perspective in each one. In town, Ashley's persistent presence has begun to win over members of the community. But the newsroom itself remains unfriendly territory.

"It's been a difficult year for some folks here," Ashley says. But he's pleased with the changes in the paper, particularly the focus on local news. "A lot of people have been very affirming of what we're trying to do. I think we've had a mixed bag internally. We've had more turnover than I wish we'd had." About a dozen newsroom staffers quit this year. "A number of folks have decided that, either for their careers or maybe because they never could quite get over the memories of what things were like before Jan. 3, they needed to move on."

No question, it's been a difficult year for the paper overall. Numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulation released in November showed that The Herald-Sun's circulation plummeted in 2005. Weekday circulation fell 15 percent to 42,298; Sunday circulation fell 15.4 percent to 45,793; and Saturday fell a whopping 25.6 percent to 39,835. The Herald-Sun is by far the largest circulation newspaper in Paxton's chain; its flagship paper, the Paducah Sun, is less than 30,000. Newspapers all around are having a tough time, but The Herald-Sun's drop is worse than the industry average.

Page counts don't bode well either. Thanksgiving weekend is one of the biggest weekends for newspaper ad sales, generating the thickest newspapers. In past years, The Herald-Sun's page count has been between 80 and 96 pages, the maximum capacity of their presses. This past Thanksgiving, it was 56 pages.

Ousted editor Hawkins has been watching from South Carolina, where he has been executive editor of the Post and Courier, Charleston's 100,000-circulation daily, since March. "I really did underestimate these folks," he says. "They've got it down to Paducah quality and almost Paducah size in record time."

* * *

Even before the Rollins family sold it, The Herald-Sun was never a great paper. But even its critics admitted it was a scrappy paper with high ambitions about the kind of journalism it wanted to accomplish. It scooped its much larger and better-funded competitor, The News & Observer, on local stories having to do with municipal government corruption and crime. For instance, in 2004 reporter Ben Evans uncovered a delinquent city housing loan that had gone unpaid for more than eight years; he also discovered that a Republican fund-raising group was targeting senior citizens in North Carolina, a story that was picked up by The Wall Street Journal. It was a small-town paper with big-time goals.

"More local news" has become the catchphrase of the new Herald-Sun. Ashley expects at least three and as many as five local stories on the front page each day, with four local stories on each section front. That goal, along with the task of "restoring financial health" to the paper, has necessarily meant doing more with fewer reporters and fewer resources. Besides the staff reduction, the paper has cancelled its subscription to The New York Times news service and reduced use of syndicated photos. Many who survived the firings and stayed in the newsroom for the better part of last year say they were stretched thin, with poor communication and little oversight or guidance from the paper's management. Reporters say that for Paxton, production was more important than content, quantity more important than quality, and painting a flattering picture of Durham took priority over hard-hitting exposés.

"One of our jobs is to shine a light on things that are going wrong in Durham," Ashley says. "We need to write about the school board problems. We need to write about the too-high dropout and truancy rate. We need to write about the city commission decisions that seem to favor a sitting city commission member. We need to write about gangs and drugs. All those things are important. But what we need to do — and frankly we haven't done nearly as much of it yet as we need to, but it's where we're headed — we need to help explore solutions as well as identify the problems. We need to be supportive and celebratory when there are successes in those areas. We need to, institutionally and personally, be a part of the community, listening to people, talking to people, to try to reflect what's important. We need to, frankly, trumpet reasons when Durham and Chapel Hill have reason to be proud of themselves. There are a lot of things that Durham needs to celebrate, and it's not very good at that."

For readers, the result is something more akin to the small-town newspaper coverage of garden clubs, high school football and gala fund-raiser who's-who. Some readers really like that kind of coverage; the boosterism has certainly helped mend fences with some who were put off by the mass firings. But how can a newspaper maintain its role as watchdog when it's fired its most experienced reporters and devoted itself to community cheerleading?

* * *

He's not a bad guy, by all accounts. Of slight build with thinning white hair, a cheerful smile and an avuncular voice, Ashley works hard to make a good impression. Former newsroom staffers say they had either a neutral or a positive impression of him, though his ventures into the cubicles were infrequent.

Ashley admits this is true. "Looking back on the year, I've probably spent at least enough time with my management team and probably not enough time getting to know reporters and what they were working on, on a one-on-one basis," he says. "A couple of them told me that on their way out of the door," he says with a laugh. "I had a conversation with a very, very good reporter that I actually think I had a good rapport with, and she said, 'You've just got to spend more time out there. People don't see enough of you.'"

The need to improve public perception of The Herald-Sun's new management drove Ashley out of the office to win over readers. "We had to convince people that we really were a community newspaper with leadership that cared about the community." There's also a learning curve. He grew up in North Carolina and graduated from Duke in 1970 and worked for the Mount Airy Times and The Raleigh Times before spending 10 years at The Charlotte Observer. Much has changed since he left the Triangle.

Ashley has been the only public face of the paper's new management since Paxton took over. He's the only one to answer phone calls from outside media or to articulate Paxton's policies to the staff, a role usually reserved for the publisher. It hasn't been an easy job. At a party last month, he was introduced to a woman as one of the people who had joined The Herald-Sun with the new owners. "You know," the woman said to him, "I don't like you very much."

But that type of thing rarely happens anymore, he says. "The anecdotal feedback we get — which is just about all we get — is positive." He's banking on the hope that his efforts to rebuild goodwill will translate into better circulation in 2006.

Ashley is relentlessly positive about the dramatic changes in the newspaper over the past year. Brought up from the Messenger-Inquirer in Owensboro, Ky., he believes his local news philosophy is why he was chosen to steer the largest ship in Paxton's fleet. The Messenger-Inquirer has a circulation of 30,000, and like all of Paxton's papers except The Herald-Sun, it is the town's only newspaper. "Ironically, one of the concerns that was articulated, maybe by one of my friends at the [UNC] journalism school, was that we'd toss out all the local news and fill it up with wire copy because that was cheaper. In fact, what we've done is 180 degrees different."

Paxton gives him and publisher Bob Childress complete local control over editorial decisions, Ashley says. "It's one of the reasons I really like working for Paxton Media Group as an editor. Their policies are such that if this newspaper does a good job for this community, it's because of me, and if it does a lousy job for this community, it's because of me." He worked for 17 years for Knight-Ridder, a chain known for heavy corporate involvement in the management of its papers, and says the difference is dramatic. The only conversation he says he's had with Paxton executives was last January. "They said, 'Local news is real important,'" Ashley recalls. "That's the first, last and only discussion we've had about any content or any editorial decision or any news decision in this newspaper."

* * *

With local TV news showing pictures of distressed citizens throwing their newspapers back on the driveway of The Herald-Sun building, executives at The N&O saw an opening in the Durham market big enough to drive a delivery truck through. Adding another dimension to the rivalry is the fact that the McClatchy chain, which owns The News & Observer, bid on The Herald-Sun and lost to Paxton, which paid somewhere between $100 million and $125 million for the paper, more than analysts at the time said it was worth (the exact amount has never been disclosed).

The N&O hired Herald-Sun refugees Jim Wise, city historian, and Flo Johnston, a religion reporter, two of the paper's first casualties, and has recently lured away Ferreri and business reporter Anne Krishnan. (The Raleigh paper is now in a hiring freeze. McClatchy has a no-layoffs policy.) It has been offering $40 per year subscriptions to readers in The Herald-Sun's circulation area (the regular price is $158), forgoing revenue in order to make a dent in the market. In March, with backing from its parent company, it launched The Durham News, a weekly supplement delivered free to nearly 70,000 homes every Saturday.

"We had been thinking for some time about starting a community newspaper in Durham," says N&O managing editor John Drescher, "and then when the ownership changed, we saw an opportunity." He says The Durham News has "filled a void in community news in Durham. It's everything from breaking news to enterprise to more neighborhood-oriented stories. It's worked well for us."

Two managers from The N&O went on a reconnaissance mission to Owensboro in January to check out the competition. Paxton acquired the Messenger-Inquirer in 2001. "What we were looking for was a change in ownership situation," Drescher says. "It was part of an effort to learn about their company and their style of operation. We did our research on them, and I'm sure they've done some research on us."

The difference is, McClatchy is a much bigger chain than Paxton and has a lot more money to spend. Given their frequently stated concern that The Herald-Sun needs to tighten its belt — in part to cover the high price paid for the paper — it looks as if Paxton isn't willing to spend any more money.

"Our internal joke is The Durham News with tire tracks on them at the end of the driveway," says Ashley. "With all due respect to my colleagues — you included — in the business of free papers, it's of less value to an advertiser. A lot of them never get picked up."

Joking aside, The N&O's moves in Durham and Orange counties are of serious concern to The Herald-Sun. That steep Saturday circulation drop is especially painful because it indicates that The Durham News is a going concern. The N&O now has eight metro desk reporters covering news in Durham, compared to seven metro reporters at The Herald-Sun.

* * *

In 2005, The Herald-Sun saw a dramatic reduction in national and international coverage, with regional coverage usually left to wire services. For instance, a visit by President Bush to Kernersville (70 miles west of Durham) was front-page news in The New York Times on Dec. 6, and was the top story in The N&O that day, with coverage by staff writer Rob Christensen. It was a below-the-fold AP story on The Herald-Sun's front page, alongside staff-written stories on land-use rules, truancy, Partners Against Crime groups and an increase in rainfall.

Paid columnists such as Carl Kenney (who is a contributor to the Independent) were replaced with Community Comment, a weekly feature written by a rotating group of six or seven unpaid contributors. By doing this, Ashley says, "we've increased substantially the number of local columns, local commentary on the editorial and op-ed page." Contributor Leigh Scott, executive director of the Volunteer Center of Durham, says the column has been an effective way to get the word out about the needs of the nonprofits and public agencies her group serves.

Ashley attributes the circulation drop to several factors that seemed to reach their apex during the period the audit was taken. He and Childress made the decision to abandon aggressive telemarketing sales, which result in a high "churn rate" for subscriptions — people rarely renew when they didn't want it in the first place. They also abandoned an arrangement that allowed sponsors to purchase copies of the paper with in-kind contributions (ads, usually) to then be distributed free of charge, a perfectly legit but slightly misleading way to boost circulation figures. They also stopped delivering papers to southern Virginia, which was more expensive than it was worth.

But Ashley admits that another reason for the circulation drop is the bad PR his bosses created on their first day in town. It seems that many of those who pledged to drop their subscription to The Herald-Sun in protest of Paxton's bloodbath actually did. Yet another reason is the fierce competition that many say Paxton execs never counted on.

Hawkins says Ashley's "in a tough position. He's not in a position to call the shots. Ashley's the luckiest man in the world in some ways, in that [managing editor] Bill Stagg, [assistant managing editor] Rocky Rosen and [assistant managing editor] Nancy Wykle are still there. They're the only thing holding it together as a semblance of a real newspaper. They're very good editors. If he loses them, he's in big trouble."

* * *

One of those who defected was Mark Schultz, the former metro editor beloved by young staff for his mentorship and hands-on editing. "The shit didn't hit the fan until after Mark left," one reporter said. "He did such a good job of protecting us from all the stupid stuff." Shortly after the takeover, the paper dropped Nuestro Pueblo, a bilingual supplement Schultz had edited since its inception in 1998. Schultz left to oversee The N&O's Orange County coverage and edit The Chapel Hill News.

He's noticed changes in The Herald-Sun's coverage this year. "You see a lot of community stuff, you see quick hits. And there's value to that, but it's not the same kind of stuff we were doing even a few months ago. You don't see enterprise reporting."

Fewer reporters with less time to dig have to set their sights lower, Schultz says. "I don't want to be all negative, because I think there are positives, too. But I think there are fewer people putting out the paper and it shows. People are working really hard. I feel for those guys.”

"I think he's a good guy," Schultz says of Ashley. "I think he has a really hard job to do. I think he's committed to local news. The trick is he's trying to do it with many fewer resources than we had before."

Ashley bristles at the suggestion that his paper is no longer as competitive with The N&O. "We're deeply competitive with The N&O, but on our terms. In Durham and Orange counties, I think it's hand-to-hand combat. I will tell you that we track every day what we've beaten them on and what they've beaten us on." Managing editor Bill Stagg sends out a daily email listing stories exclusive to each paper. On one particular day in December, The Herald-Sun's list of eight scoops included a story on school zones in Durham, a fatal wreck on I-85 and coverage of the Durham holiday parade. The N&O had a piece on the Early College program at NCCU moving to another campus building. "None of these are barnburner stories," Ashley says.

Asked about any big scoops or enterprise stories over the past year, Ashley concedes there haven't been many. He mentions explanatory reporting on the Durham bond initiative written by Ginny Skalski and coverage of the Durham school board strife reported by Mindy Hagen. He does not mention that both of these reporters have recently left to work for papers in South Carolina. The N&O, meanwhile, broke two major Durham stories this year: about the hydraulic fluid used to clean surgical instruments at Duke hospitals and the extensive criminal record of mayoral candidate Vincent Brown, which The Herald-Sun was completely silent on for several days.

Drescher, The N&O's managing editor, says Durham is still a competitive newspaper town. "They beat us on some stories and we beat them on some stories. If you're a Durham newspaper reader, you really benefit by our being aggressive, and they're aggressive, too."

On a day-to-day basis, there's little question that The Herald-Sun still offers more timely, in-depth coverage of the city's goings-on. Sculptor Andrew Preiss grew up in Durham and has been reading the paper for most of his life. He's always had his problems with it. "I did quit the paper a few years ago to try the [N&O] out, but I just wasn't satisfied with the immediacy of the local political stuff." When his wife wanted to cancel after the Paxton takeover, he compromised by signing up for The N&O as well.

"The bottom line of why I get the paper is that, despite the efforts of The N&O to cover Durham more specifically, a lot of the local political issues are covered more thoroughly and quickly in the Durham paper. I'm very interested in local politics and activities in the community. I read it in the morning, and I'm interested in what happened at the city council meeting last night, and that's always covered. And the sports stuff, I think they cover Duke basketball more thoroughly."

In other sections, such as national news and the weekly automotive section, he says he's noticed an increase in syndicated stories. "It's not that I think those are bad articles necessarily, but it seems to me that without a huge additional effort, if they had a bigger staff, they could do those things locally. I know a lot of people in Durham, so in many of the stories, I know people who are in the story. There's a little bit less of that kind of connectedness when they use stuff from out of town."

Management decisions have set the paper's quality on a downhill slide, say many former newsroom staffers. Cost-cutting has turned out to be penny-wise and pound-foolish, and poor communication has made things worse, they say. "A lot of decisions they made are clearly along the lines of trying to squeeze more profit out of the paper as opposed to making it a better newspaper," says J.P. Trostle, former illustrator and designer who left The Chapel Hill Herald office in November. "It used to be a scrappy paper. Now it's just scrap."

"You'll find," says Hawkins, "that Paxton has among the highest profit margins in the industry. They squeeze 'em, and as a result they have one of the highest returns of any chain out there, well over the likes of Gannett. Which means they're not putting it back into the product. That's going to make it tough for them in that market."

The paper launched a "Faith & Family" section in March after firing its religion reporter in January. Feature writer Cynthia Greenlee found out she was to be the new religion reporter when someone congratulated her on her new assignment. An agnostic with no interest in covering religion, Greenlee says it was the last straw. She quit in November after failing to convince her editors to give her another assignment. The section is now mostly filled with wire copy.

Schultz's departure in March left the paper without a metro editor for three months. During that time, reporters say there was little oversight, which resulted in errors and anxiety. Young reporters especially felt like they were working without a net. "Lots of times editors were in meetings all day long, and you couldn't track down your editor to ask a simple question," said a former reporter. "It just seemed like editors didn't know what was going on a day-to-day basis in terms of what reporters were doing. We were essentially relying on our own judgment about what to get into the paper and who to quote because Stagg didn't really have time to vet stuff."

It didn't help that the new metro editor, Dan Way, made a bad first impression on an already demoralized staff. Way came from a paper owned by Gannett, which has very particular procedures for story planning. "Dan had very big shoes to fill," says a former reporter who asked not to be identified. "He came in with this very hard-line approach and it rubbed people the wrong way. We also felt like he was trying to make a good impression on the top editors. It didn't feel like he was supporting us, that he was on our side." Stagg and assistant managing editor Rocky Rosen eventually took reporters aside for confidential chats about how to improve communication with Way, which did make things better, the reporters said.

But the need to feed the beast continued to lead to embarrassing situations. Mundane and even weak stories ran as A1 centerpiece spreads — a profile of a dodgeball league, for instance, was front-page stuff — in order to make the local news requirements. One reporter confessed embarrassment at having written some stories with just one quoted source (journalism teachers will tell you to have at least three).

Then there was the front-page preview of the annual state high school football tournament with the lead sentence, "If you're a high school football fan, it doesn't get any better than today." Make that tomorrow — the preview ran a day early. A correction followed on the front page the next day.

Ashley says the mistake was a problem of miscommunication. "The person involved in putting that story into the paper was not a sports fan and did not have any knowledge beyond what was in the story. And the person writing the story and the people on the sports desk thought it was running a different day." He says it was not a case of institutional memory loss due to staff reductions, since everyone involved had been at the paper for some time.

Mistakes can and do happen at every paper, but the fewer pairs of eyes that see a page, the bigger and more frequent those mistakes can get. Yet reporters say corrections were rare.

* * *

Conversations in the newsroom reflected a general tension about news judgment. "Under Hawkins, this would be a much bigger, hard-hitting story," one former reporter recalled hearing. There seemed to be a preference at the top for good news over muckraking. And while there were no hard and fast requirements, Ashley's expectations of local news content amounted to a two-story-a-day workload for most reporters.

"My feeling is that more local news is great in theory," Greenlee says, "but quantity doesn't impress me, quality does. I wonder how a metro reporter can be appropriately aggressive and accurate when they have to do 10 stories a week. How can you maintain that pace and produce anything people want to read? I think the answer is obvious, that you can't do it if you have high professional standards and you want to have a life as well. I think this is obvious to most of the people in the newsroom, which is why they had such flight, but I don't know if that's obvious to Paxton yet. Maybe with this new generation of reporters they'll rethink this."

And perhaps they won't. Eventually, most if not all of the pre-Paxton newsroom will be replaced by people with no memories of Hawkins or Schultz or Christmas bonuses. Journalism is a nomadic profession, with reporters often moving up the ladder from small community papers to regional ones after accumulating a couple of years' experience and a stack of clippings. The Herald-Sun will continue to be a rung on that ladder. Gone are the days when reporters like Al Carson would spend more than 30 years there.

Ashley says he's excited about the caliber of applicants, citing a Harvard grad with a journalism degree from Stanford who's replacing Ferreri in the Chapel Hill office. A recent hiring boom has replaced nearly all of the reporters who quit this year, Ashley says, and raises were reinstated this month.

"There are many bright young people who can crank it out," says nine-year veteran Jim Shamp, who covered science and medicine for the paper until he left in December to work for a biotechnology company in RTP. "What you sacrifice in corporate and community memory and history, you can trade off for youth and enthusiasm. Perhaps."

People move on. Five or 10 years from now, if the paper's still going, there will probably be no institutional memory of Jan. 3, 2005. Paxton might be able to weather the circulation drop and continue on its track of local news, grinding through 20-something reporters who move on to bigger and better things. Good for Paxton. But is that good for Durham and Chapel Hill? Is that what readers want? Only time will tell. See you next year.

#

Technobarons Of The 21st Century

Telephone and cable companies are trying to create a vertical monopoly. If they succeed, they'll destroy the free market, along with everything else we love about the internet.

by Fiona Morgan

John D. Rockefeller realized that the way to control the oil market was to control the transport of oil. So in 1871, he colluded with the railroad industry to form a cartel called the South Improvement Company. The rate to ship oil doubled, but Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company would get rebates for every gallon of oil shipped, even those shipped by his competitors. South would also collect information on the destinations, costs and dates of competitors' oil shipments.

Once word leaked, independent oil producers revolted and managed to stop South before it shipped a single gallon. But to a great extent, the damage had been done. Rockefeller offered to buy out his competitors, showing them his books so they'd know what they were up against. They had a choice: Sell out now, or be run into the ground. Standard Oil went on to control the production of oil throughout the United States until the Supreme Court broke it up in 1911.

What does a 19th-century oil monopolist have to do with the modern-day world of ones and zeroes? Well, we all know how nicely things work out when oil men are in charge. But the real key is the railroad — the transport route, the superhighway. It's more than a stale metaphor for talking about the abstract technicalities of the internet. The way valuable goods are delivered — be they gallons of oil or binary packets — hasn't changed much. When the invention of radio and telephones spurred Congress to regulate communications, legislators used transportation law as a model. Now, as Congress is working on its first major telecommunications bill since 1996, telecom and cable companies are floating the idea of a preferred status for content providers who are willing to pay for fast downloads, with slower service for everyone else — an Information Super-Tollway.

By now, you've probably gotten an email or read a blog post about the issue of network neutrality. The term doesn't tell you much. (As Arianna Huffington recently observed on her blog, , "Why are the bad guys so much better at naming things? Especially legislation.") It's a term created by geeks, and it refers to the concept of keeping content separate from the operation of networks. Internet equality might be more evocative in the political arena. In any case, the concept has been essential to the internet since it was created.

The Telecom Act of 1996 deregulated the communications industry, bringing about widespread media consolidation. It opened the door for Clear Channel's acquisition of hundreds of radio stations. It allowed phone and cable companies to consume one another ravenously, undoing many decades' worth of anti-trust measures. From a public interest point of view, the law has been a disaster. It's also out of date: The internet is mentioned fewer than a dozen times.

Now the U.S. House of Representatives is preparing to vote on the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006. The COPE Act covers a lot of ground. It overturns state laws that prevent cities from setting up their own community internet services, which is good. It also establishes a national video franchise system to allow telephone and cable companies to offer broadband TV service without having to make the local agreements the cable companies currently have; thanks to public outcry, the bill also ensures funding for public access programming.

Most significantly, the COPE Act and its Senate equivalent would deregulate the internet in exactly the way telephone and cable companies want it to. COPE would allow the telcos to control the ongoing shift to broadband internet television by allowing thü telephone companies to enter the TV business, and would allow both telephone and cable companies to offer service only where they want to — i.e., where they can make the most money, with no obligation to build out into lower-income neighborhoods, which won't do anything to help the digital divide.

Neither the House nor the Senate bill includes net neutrality protections, which is why so many public interest groups oppose the bills. In the midst of all of this deregulation, Congress needs to make a clear stand against letting internet service providers filter content. Net neutrality would ensure that every web-based businesses and every site, be it personal, political or commercial, would be treated the same by the systems that power the internet itself. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced those protections into the COPE Act, but two separate committees voted them down. Last week he introduced the protections as a freestanding bill, the Net Neutrality Act of 2006.

Verizon, BellSouth, Time Warner, SBC, Comcast and AT&T — the main supporters of the COPE Act and virtually the only opponents of net neutrality — are using Congress to help them gain a competitive advantage. Collectively they claim 98 percent of the nation's internet customers, but they fear that they're losing ground in their other businesses. internet phone services like Vonage and Skype offer free-to-incredibly-cheap local and long distance calling online, and once internet TV gains a mass audience, cable TV will be outmoded. Suddenly there's real competition in voice and video services, and that's bad news for companies like Verizon and Time Warner.

So in order to get their cut from all this newfangled content, the telcos and cable companies have come up with a "tiered" system for the internet similar to that of cable TV (the one that makes you pay through the nose to watch “The Sopranos”). They would charge not only their subscribers but also the content providers themselves — Google, Yahoo!, iTunes, and every other site that could afford it — for "super-fast" service. A news content site like The New York Times would sign a high-dollar agreement with an ISP for that fast service, making its competitors less appealing to the 80 percent of Americans who get their news online. How slow will rank-and-file websites be in that system? How easy will it be to read the liberal blogs or download the indie podcasts? That would be up to the ISPs.

The industry says it needs a tiered system because all those little video clips people send to each to other are hogging bandwidth. The next time you see an ad for Time Warner's Road Runner broadband service, notice that streaming video is part of the lure of paying $44.95 a month. An Associated Press story earlier this week quoted Verizon and BellSouth spokesmen warning that as the video trend continues, the 'Net could choke — like an overbooked flight, an ISP would be overcapacity if all of its subscribers downloaded high-quality video at the same time. But as the story points out, internet traffic doesn't work that way. It grows along with the capacity, not ahead of it. We wouldn't be watching YouTube videos over a 64K modem, because it wouldn't be worth the aggravation. The industry says all that innovation will cost money, and that they will have no choice but to pass that cost on to consumers. Oh, we consumers would suffer, they warn us, even those of us who just want to check email. The fact is, ISPs have been whining about multimedia content since RealAudio first launched its streaming sounds in 1995. Not only has the 'Net survived, but ISPs have raked in billions in profits as a result. The COPE Act's video franchising piece, remember, would let phone companies set their own terms for launching nationwide video services.

Public interest groups are afraid that telcos would use their gatekeeping power to block access to the sites of their competitors and critics. Poppycock, the telcos say. We would never do anything like that. The FCC wouldn't let us get away with it! And anyway, we wouldn't want to. We believe in all this net neutrality stuff. Cross our hearts. Pinky swear. No need to make it part of the law, now is there?

And we should believe them why? Remember, AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon willingly sold the private phone records of American citizens to the Bush administration's illegal domestic spying operation.

At the very least, it's no stretch to think they would give preferential access to their own content. When AOL bought Time Warner in 2001, it was a delivery system merging with a content company. Time Warner owns CNN, HBO and a huge movie library. The ongoing convergence of content and telecom companies would reach its logical conclusion in offering faster Road Runner downloads for those sites and channels. Why wouldn't the industry go there? They'll do anything the law allows to make money. That's why we need a law.

Not surprisingly, Amazon, Google and every other major content site don't want to pay a toll. They've joined a coalition of groups urging Congress to enshrine net neutrality into law. Like the successful alliance that pushed back on media ownership deregulation two years ago, the net neutrality coalition spans the political spectrum. It includes not only lefty groups such as MoveOn and Common Cause, and mainstream groups such as the American Library Association and Consumers Union, but also Gun Owners of America, the Parents Television Council (crusaders for decency laws) and Prof. Glenn Reynolds, better known as the right-wing blogger Instapundit.

It's not hard to understand why this issue reaches across the political spectrum. The internet has made possible a democratic discourse that is truly stunning, transforming political organizing and communication while the mainstream tries harder and harder to suffocate ideas that don't follow the standard party lines. Consider Stephen Colbert's blistering address at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Broadcast on CSPAN on a Saturday night, completely left out of official newspaper accounts of the event the next morning, it was watched by millions of people online, thanks to the kind of video streaming that the telcos say is cramping their style.

Money, of course, trumps ideology, and the growing concern of the banking industry could ultimately be decisive. The financial services companies, as they're called, are beginning to wake up to the fact that they, too, would be expected to pay tolls for the secure high-speed transactions that have made them loads of money. In a memo leaked to the press last week, Verizon urged its consultants to talk the banking industry out of supporting net neutrality. "They are being fed a lot of cock-and-bull, Chicken Little stories about how the future of their industry is at stake because another network industry might have the freedom to price broadband services according to market demand," Verizon's chief congressional lobbyist, Peter Davidson, said in the memo.

In case the dismissive approach didn't work, Davidson also included the hard sell. He warned that the financial services industry "better not start moaning in the future about a lack of sophisticated data links they need" if net neutrality becomes law.

U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick, a Republican from Charlotte, has been a target of the net neutrality movement since she voted down a net neutrality provision in the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 26 and signed on to cosponsor the COPE Act. Myrick's phone number is listed on , which urges people to call and express their displeasure.

Andy Polk, Myrick's legislative aide, says her office has been flooded with calls from people who think Congress is passing laws that will keep them from being able to look at the websites they want to see. He says these people have been misinformed.

"Exactly what people are concerned about, the FCC has already drafted principles to deal with," he says, "which ensure that people have access to any internet site that they would like, that they can't be blocked by their internet provider. We fully support the principles that the FCC has laid out."

The FCC's connectivity principles are: 1) Consumers are entitled to access the lawful internet content of their choice; 2) consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement; 3) consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; and 4) consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers. Like the airwaves, the broadband lines are regulated by the FCC because they run along the public rights of way — those wires and cables are run along public streets and buried under people's backyards. ISPs charge us for the privilege of connecting, but nobody owns the internet.

But Polk calls net neutrality a "dicey" concept. "The problem with the current debate is, no one knows what 'net neutrality' actually means." In committee hearings, he says, its proponents all defined it differently. But in arguing against it, he gives a pretty good working definition. "It would require internet providers to treat all content exactly the same regardless of how much bandwidth it's taking up. If we define net neutrality in this bill, it would be seen by the industry as saying you have to allow people to see everything they want and take up as much bandwidth as they want. When industry people see that, they would raise the cost of providing the internet service because they would have to allow everybody to have equal access to the bandwidth."

Read the information telcos publish for their investors and you'll learn of unlimited bandwidth, a future without limits created by their technological prowess. But when they're discussing net neutrality, suddenly their broadband systems are packed tighter than sardine cans.

"At this point in time we're not sure we need to further regulate the internet," Polk says. "We want to make sure it's as free as possible and allow as much creativity and ingenuity as possible."

Incidentally, Myrick received $27,500 in campaign contributions from telecom PACs in 2004, including $10,000 from SBC, $8,500 from BellSouth and $7,000 from Verizon.

Polk's point about the FCC has some basis. There has been only one case in the United States in which an internet service provider blocked access to a specific website or service. It happened to be the Mebane, N.C.-based Madison River, which was fined $15,000 last year by the FCC for blocking traffic to Vonage, the online phone service. Madison River had approximately 121,000 residential phone subscribers and nearly 40,000 broadband internet subscribers at the time. Vonage had more than a million. About a month after Vonage complained to the FCC that Madison River was "port blocking," or preventing certain types of internet traffic from traveling through its networks, the agency took action.

But the FCC's principles don't address the kind of tiered system the telcos want to create. Nor do they establish clear methods of enforcement. Vonage was already hugely successful when it took on Madison River. What happens to the startups?

To Paul Jones, the Vonage v. Madison River case is evidence of what telcos can and will do if given the chance. "That really tells the tale of what net neutrality is about," Jones says. "It's about stopping providers from using their near monopoly of network connections to invisibly prevent you from connecting to a site, or to strong-arm content providers into paying fees."

In 1992, Jones launched one of the first websites in North America. He and a team of techies at UNC-Chapel Hill launched SunSITE, a public archive and information sharing project funded by grants from Sun Microsystems. As it collaborated on more academic, corporate and high-tech startup projects, it changed its name. In 2000, it became ibiblio, a digital archive and online public library. Ibiblio also nurtures open-source software projects, many of which are created by UNC students.

Like other online pioneers, Jones feels strongly that making neutrality law is necessary to preserve everything we love about the internet. "The great beauty of the internet is that it's dynamic, it's constantly in beta, people are constantly taking risks," he says, "and the market behaves like a true market, in which you have many, many choices. There are only a few players in the home connectivity market and the variety is out there beyond them."

It's absurd for the telcos to complain that content providers are making their money off the backs of internet service providers, Jones says. "It's kind of like the paving company getting mad when a truck drives on their work. They'd like to have a limited monopoly with not much competition and no responsibility. I want that job, too," he jokes.

"What we're talking about is preserving the ability of the internet to continue to be an engine for economic growth by keeping a diversity of access," Jones says. "North Carolina is the home of lots of small businesses and those small businesses need net neutrality so they can compete fairly."

In 1880, a company named for Alexander Graham Bell undertook the first nationwide long-distance telephone network. American Bell's project spun off into the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885. It was a regulated monopoly for almost a century — everybody needed a telephone, and AT&T had the ear of nearly every customer in the nation. The government set the rates, and AT&T enjoyed guaranteed profits. But new technologies changed the arrangement. In 1982, the Department of Justice ordered AT&T broken up into regional "baby Bells" in exchange for allowing the company to enter — what else? — the computer business. Then came massive deregulation with the Telecom Act of '96, and the monopoly re-emerged. One of those "baby Bells," Southwestern Bell Corp., acquired three others in the 1990s, and in 2005 SBC moved to buy AT&T (getting full control of Cingular Wireless in the process). That merged company, called AT&T, will be the largest provider of both local and long distance telephone services, wireless service and DSL internet access in the United States.

Today, we're facing another massive deregulation of the telecom industry, the first one to give century-old monopolists unfair advantage on the internet. Industry spin at the moment is that Congress needs a "cooling-off period" to "study the issue" of net neutrality. Industry money is funding a heavy-duty advertising and PR blitz, some of which is conducted by Astroturf — phony grassroots — organizations such as Hands Off the Internet ("Say no to government regulation of the internet") and Freedom Works ("Lower Taxes, Less Government, More Freedom"), which are funded by the telecom companies. They say net neutrality legislation will infringe on the free market. The situation is deeply ironic, because techies are notoriously libertarian, especially the core group of 'Net founders now urging Congress to pass net neutrality legislation.

The fact is, the internet supports the freest market in existence, and the tiered system would destroy it. Above all, it is this contradiction the net neutrality movement must get across to Congress — and the public. Otherwise, we'll be signing over American democracy's greatest asset to modern-day John D. Rockefellers.

Coping With Cope

Here’s a rundown of bills in Congress challenging — and supporting — “net neutrality.”

In the House …

Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement (COPE) Act of 2006 (HR 5252)

Introduced by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas). Rep. Sue Myrick and Rep. G.K. Butterfield, both North Carolina Republicans, are among the bill’s 49 cosponsors.

Summary (from , a net-neutrality advocacy group): “The COPE Act grants national video franchises to telephone and cable companies, promising competition in some areas in exchange for the elimination of franchise agreements with local governments. Also, for the first time, funding for public access programming is enshrined into national law, albeit imperfectly. The bill stops short of protecting a free and open internet, offering only half-baked network neutrality protections. It tightens up the rules on internet telephony with a focus on emergency services and interconnection between networks. This bill would overturn state legislation restricting deployment of Community internet systems. And it would compel phone and cable companies to sell broadband to consumers separately from TV and telephone service. Without fundamental changes, this major gift to the phone companies will negatively impact consumers and citizens.”

Status: Passed by House Energy & Commerce Committee, this bill could go to the floor of the House next week.

Action: Contact members of Congress directly regarding their position.

Net Neutrality Act of 2006 (HR 5273)

Introduced by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).

Summary: This bill contains the network neutrality safeguards voted out of an early version of COPE Act. It sets specific rules and expectations for internet Service Providers. The full text of the bill is at z87w5.

Status: Referred to the House Energy & Commerce Committee.

Action: Contact Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), a member of that committee, at 202-225-1976.

In the Senate …

Communications, Consumer’s Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006 (S 2686)

Introduced by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

Summary (from ): “This bill is a sweeping set of policy reforms all wrapped up in one giant package. It streamlines the cable franchising process for telephone and cable companies, promising cable competition in some areas in exchange for the elimination of local government negotiating power. Funding for public access programming is enshrined into national law, with significant flaws. The bill opens the door for internet gatekeepers, offering to study Network Neutrality rather than creating enforceable protections. This bill would overturn state legislation that restricts deployment of Community Internet (with some problematic conditions). Consumer protection rules would be created by the FCC and applied nationwide but enforced by the states. The bill would open up much needed spectrum for wireless broadband in empty television channels. And, unlike the COPE Act, the bill tackles reform of the Universal Service Fund, expanding the base of contributions and applying subsidies to broadband networks. Nonetheless, without some fundamental changes, the net effect of this bill will negatively impact consumers and citizens.”

Status: The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation will hold the first of two hearings on this bill Thursday, May 18 at 10 a.m.

Action: Contact Sen. Elizabeth Dole 202-224-6342 and Sen. Richard Burr 202-224-3154. Neither are members of the committee; a list of those members is at h9k7h.

#

A Tangle Of Telco Laws

by Fiona Morgan

Just as consumers are becoming aware of things like net neutrality and media consolidation, Congress and the North Carolina legislature are acting like nobody's paying any attention.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted down a bill that would have enshrined network neutrality in national internet policy, but gave the go-ahead to the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act. The COPE Act is a massive policy overhaul that would allow powerful telecommunications companies to roll out the next generation of technology — internet TV, especially — on the terms they've set for themselves, free from the public interest requirements of yesteryear. The Senate is now considering its own version; based on hearings held June 13 in Washington, things don't look good.

Also on June 13, the Finance Committee of the N.C. House passed the Video Service Competition Act without amending any of the no-brainer changes suggested by public interest groups that would have made it a little less of a travesty. A state version of the internet TV provisions currently winding through U.S. Congress, this bill would abolish the current rules governing cable television service. Telephone companies such as Verizon and BellSouth have been pushing hard for this bill, because it would allow them to expand from broadband internet to video service without having to negotiate with local governments. The bill will soon go to the full House for a vote; the Senate version, having passed one committee, makes one more committee stop before going to the floor.

Even progressive Rep. Paul Luebke (D-Durham) was an early supporter, but while working on the House committee that passed it, he said his past support turned to concern.

"When I co-sponsored the bill, I had been assured that the income and racial discrimination language was strong enough to protect consumers," Luebke said. "I now believe that we do need stronger consumer protections." But Luebke is in the minority. The telephone companies really want it to pass. And while public interest groups ranging from the N.C. Justice Center to the AARP have argued against it, the only group with real heft among legislators, the N.C. League of Municipalities, offered only lukewarm opposition. "When you have one side that really wants it and the other side that's mostly concerned with the revenue being intact, the consumer protection and public access issues don't get as much debate as they ought to," Luebke said.

As if that weren't enough to keep track of, the Federal Communications Commission is planning to unravel the very hard-fought victory won through public outcry by changing, once again, the ownership rules governing radio, television and newspapers. Last time around, it was FCC Chairman Michael Powell who pushed for further media consolidation; the relaxed rules passed, but widespread outrage led them to be overturned. This time around, it's Chairman Kevin Martin pushing the same agenda. An announcement is expected June 21 that will detail the plan to relax ownership rules in such a way as to allow, for example, one company to own a newspaper and a TV station in the same market.

A call to Martin's office was not returned at press time, so none of his staff could say whether Martin plans to attend a public meeting with FCC Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps in Asheville on June 28 to discuss these rule changes. Organizers don't expect to see him there, however. When Copps and Adelstein had one of these tour stops at Duke Law School in 2003 — the first time the rules were being changed — Powell didn't show.

Free Press, a national, nonpartisan media policy group, has helped organize similar hearings across the country as a way for local communities to give feedback directly to the FCC. Free Press has been at the forefront of a variety of interconnected telecom issues, including net neutrality (for it), funding for public broadcasting (trying to save it), and the COPE Act (trying to stop it).

On June 13, Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, urging members not to pass the Communications, Consumer's Choice and Broadband Deployment Act.

"We strongly support the goal of this legislation: to expand consumer choice and access to competitive video and broadband services," Scott said. "However, our haste to bring competition must not result in a blind giveaway to one industry or another."

Without requiring video and broadband providers to build out in poor and rural neighborhoods, the bill would allow those companies to cherry-pick wealthy neighborhoods, leaving the digital divide to widen. "The unintended consequence will be systematic redlining on a national scale," Scott said, "leaving millions of consumers with empty promises."

Which brings us back to Raleigh, where state legislators seem determined to make the same mistake. The Video Service Competition Act lacks build-out requirements, meaning the rural and minority communities clamoring for more choices in TV service are very unlikely to get them. But the bill would impose requirements on public access, government and educational (or PEG) channels — requirements that are so unrealistic they threaten to destroy the viability of those channels.

So the question is: Are state legislators aware of the consequences of this bill? Do they realize that, if it passes, it will mean the demise of small-scale public channels across the state? Do they understand that it means giving up the public services — some of which power school internet access, traffic light systems and the like — that were negotiated over the past 30 years? And are they aware that federal legislation, if it passes, will immediately override any state legislation on the matter? What's the big fat hurry anyway?

"I would like to see more amendments succeed on the floor," Luebke said. But he's not hopeful that much will change. "Mostly we have to hope that the consumer protections that we have in there will alert us to problems that might occur after the bill becomes law." The N.C. Attorney General's office is scheduled to make a report in 2008, which offers public interest groups a window to make changes. "Legislation is a multi-year process," Luebke said. "I think all of us with concerns about the bill need to monitor it extremely closely if it goes into effect this year, and be prepared to demand changes to the bill the next time the issue is considered."

The train is leaving the station. To pull the brake cord, we'll have to reach a critical mass of legislators through good old-fashioned

telephone, email and letter writing. And whether we succeed or fail, we've got to let them know we're paying attention — and we're in it for the long haul.

Free Press' "Town Meeting on the Future of Media" will take place Wed., June 28 at 6 p.m. in the Ferguson Auditorium in the Laurel Building at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College in Asheville. For more information, go to future/=asheville.

#

MEDIA REPORTING

LARGE

Meth Madness

How The Oregonian manufactured an epidemic, politicians bought it and you're paying.

by Angela Valdez

Editor's Note: The Oregonian initially cooperated with Willamette Week's investigation of the daily paper's reporting on meth. Reporter Steve Suo made himself available for interviews and shared information on several occasions. Editor Tom Maurer provided written answers to several early questions. Last week, when Willamette Week sought additional responses from editors and another reporter, Joseph Rose, Maurer said the paper had decided to stop cooperating.

Over the past year and a half, The Oregonian has dedicated itself to exposing the rise of methamphetamine addiction. Beginning with its five-part series "Unnecessary Epidemic" in October 2004 and continuing through this month, reporters have hunted down the causes of the outbreak, revealing a web of international suppliers and offering solutions that previously languished because of a lack of political will.

Devoting at least 261 stories to the subject in the past year and a half, The Oregonian's ongoing investigation is an example of what can happen when a newspaper decides to lead a campaign against a social ill. In part because of the daily's coverage, Congress has passed tough anti-meth laws and Oregon has become the home base for a rising national uproar over the powerful stimulant.

But there is a darker side to the newspaper's achievement.

In its effort to convince the world of the threats posed by meth, The Oregonian has sacrificed accuracy. According to an analysis of the paper's reporting, a review of drug-use data and conversations with addiction experts, The Oregonian has relied on bad statistics and a rhetoric of crisis, ultimately misleading its readers into believing they face a far greater scourge than the facts support.

Few local media watchers are willing to criticize The Oregonian's coverage of the meth problem. But skepticism about the growing frenzy has begun to appear in the pages of major papers across the country, from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times, where columnist John Tierney recently wrote that politicians have become so meth-obsessed, "they've lost sight of their duties."

Miami Herald media critic Glenn Garvin, who is critical of national drug reporting, says he is disappointed in The Oregonian's reliance on shaky numbers.

"This idea that we are in a meth hell, it is just not right," he says. "It does not comport to the numbers. It's nonsensical."

The implications of The Oregonian's meth obsession are twofold.

Through its focus on meth as the cause of so much pain and loss, the paper has skewed the truth at a time when journalism's integrity faces increased scrutiny. In addition, the constant coverage, with a wide reach into Salem and even into Washington, D.C., has rearranged governmental spending priorities, perhaps without justification, amid continued budgetary belt-tightening that has already forced cuts in education and health care.

The Oregonian defends its reporting, which has earned national and local awards for investigative journalism. Others, especially addiction-treatment experts, worry that the coverage has focused too narrowly on the evils of one drug.

Dr. Jim Thayer, medical director of the Portland addiction-treatment center Hooper Detox, says The Oregonian's reporting has helped create this "feeling of hysteria. The media latched onto this thing that's been going on for years. I just worry that they'll take resources away that have been working for years and just put them into meth."

Any reader of The Oregonian over the past 18 months would have to conclude that we stand at the epicenter of an incomparably profound and growing epidemic, a human tragedy perpetrated by a single drug that acts on the central nervous system to produce an hours-long high of unmatched euphoria, energy and well-being. Coming down off a long high can leave users depressed and physically exhausted.

The sentiment of The Oregonian's coverage was established in the title of its 2004 series, "Unnecessary Epidemic," and buttressed by subsequent stories in language that beat the drum of crisis.

The newspaper's editorials sounded the loudest alarm.

The editorials refer to "communities ravaged by an epidemic of meth-fueled crime and social breakdown" (Nov. 20, 2005) and describe the stimulant as a "plague" ravaging Portland neighborhoods and reaching almost every state in the country (Sept. 30, 2005).

Such characterizations by the paper's editorial board draw on conclusions reached in the daily's news stories. The first paragraph of the "Unnecessary Epidemic" series' first story said meth "was devastating the West." Stories both local and national in scope refer repeatedly to an "epidemic." The word has appeared in 91 Oregonian stories on meth since October 2004.

On Feb. 20 of this year, columnist S. Renee Mitchell wrote, without offering data to back up her claim: "The number of meth addicts — and the crimes they commit to support their habits — is exploding."

The Oregonian's reporting even prompted the investigative television program “Frontline” to visit Portland in the summer of 2005 to shoot a documentary for public broadcasting. “The Meth Epidemic” was produced in cooperation with The Oregonian and Oregon Public Broadcasting. Oregonian reporter Steve Suo, who has done much of the paper's meth reporting, says he collaborated on the project and reviewed the script line by line.

The resulting hour-long broadcast paints Portland as a war zone of marauding meth-heads. Against the crackling backdrop of a police scanner, an officer arrests a man who says his mother introduced him to meth. The voiceover intones, "This is the story of a disease that is sweeping across America. It begins here, in Portland, Oregon, where an epidemic is raging, an epidemic of methamphetamine abuse."

One haggard-looking woman sitting inside a Portland trailer says, "I think meth has destroyed this community. I think, in all reality, I think they need to take a bomb and blow it all up. It's that bad."

Maybe not.

In fact, meth use during the past four years has either declined or stayed flat, according to two major national drug-use studies. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that meth use did not increase at all from 2002 (two years before The Oregonian started its carpet-bombing coverage) through 2004, the last year for which there is data. The University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future Study, which examines drug use among youth, actually shows a decline in meth use among high-school students from 1999 to 2005.

In its defense, The Oregonian insists its coverage has hinged on a long-term rise in meth abuse, not the trends of the past several years. But a review of The Oregonian's coverage found no reference to the evidence that meth use had begun to plateau or even decline before its ongoing coverage began in 2004.

Asked if an average reader of The Oregonian would be likely to conclude that meth use was continuing to rise, Suo said, "I don't know. That's a good question."

A chief way The Oregonian makes the case for rising meth abuse is by pointing to drug-treatment data compiled by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which conducts the national drug-use survey. The administration has published several studies showing a steady increase in the number of people receiving treatment for meth from 1993 through 2003.

Oregonian crime-team editor Tom Maurer, who oversees a good deal of the paper's meth coverage, cited the most recent report as an indicator of increased meth use.

Problem is, a rising number of people receiving treatment is far from proof that the number of addicts is also rising.

In fact, a footnote in the very study cited by The Oregonian cautions that the rise in treatment comes primarily from an increase in the number of arrestees ordered by drug courts to enroll in addiction programs.

The Oregonian has not mentioned this fact. Nor has it explored other factors that make it hard to draw conclusions from treatment data, like the rising and falling availability of state-funded services.

Suo says he and his editors reviewed the issues with treatment data and decided they didn't change the paper's conclusions.

"We explored those potential problems and addressed them to our own satisfaction," Suo says.

Locally, the size of the meth epidemic is even less clear. There is no good count of the total number of Oregon meth users, nor any clear measure of whether that number is growing. While local treatment numbers also show an increase, that barometer suffers from the same pitfalls afflicting national treatment data, including a rising number of people coerced into treatment by drug courts.

The Oregonian has also blurred the distinctions among recreational users, regular users and addicts, suggesting a far higher level of dependence than actually exists.

On March 3 of this year, The Oregonian described meth as "a potent stimulant now consumed by 1.4 million Americans from Oregon to the Carolinas."

A reader could draw several conclusions from this sentence: that 1.4 million people use meth every day, use it regularly or have tried it once.

In fact, the number, which comes from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, refers to those people who report using meth at least once in the past year. They may have used it one time or 100.

According to the same study, fewer than 600,000 people report using meth within the past month — a closer approximation of addiction, according to drug-abuse experts.

Multnomah County addiction-program director Ray Hudson says it would be inaccurate to say all of the 1.4 million people who reported using meth in the past year are "users" or "addicts."

"It's a very coarse yardstick," he says, adding that most meth addicts would never go off the drug for an entire month.

As evidence of the social costs of the epidemic, The Oregonian has often reported that meth "fuels" 85 percent of the state's property crimes. The statistic — which has fluctuated between 80 and 90 percent — has appeared in at least 14 stories over the past four years, each time without any skepticism and four times without any attribution.

It's an amazing detail. And it's probably false.

When asked where the number came from, The Oregonian credited Gov. Ted Kulongoski, who used it in an op-ed piece published Oct. 5, 2004. Contacted by WW, the governor's office couldn't remember where the stat originated but said it was confirmed by Craig Durbin, the former state police commander for drug enforcement.

Durbin says the figure had been in wide circulation during the summer of 2004 and he decided to verify its accuracy on his own. "So I made an informal poll," he says. Durbin says he called several of Oregon's three dozen district attorneys (he cannot recall which ones or how many), and all agreed that meth caused about 85 percent of property crimes.

Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schrunk — who oversees the state's largest, most urban court system — says he can't remember Durbin calling to conduct a poll on meth and property crime. Nor could Schrunk's two deputy district attorneys assigned to prosecute drug cases and felony property crimes. All three men say they are well aware of a strong correlation between property crime and meth, but they are unaware of any statistical analysis to prove that connection.

Despite The Oregonian's reliance on this figure, there is no good evidence that meth causes 85 percent of the property crimes in Oregon.

Portland State University criminology professor Kris Henning says the number just doesn't make sense. Department chair Annette Jolin says the unsupportable statistic has become "something of a joke" among statistical researchers in the department.

For one thing, Oregon property crimes are much lower than they were 10 or even 20 years ago, the time period of the supposed meth "epidemic."

"If meth causes property offenses, and meth use has gone up," Henning says, "then property offenses should have gone up. And they haven't. It's either that, or all the people who commit property crimes have disappeared and been replaced by a small number of meth users."

Henning also wonders how a prosecutor could know for a fact that meth had been the underlying motivation for a crime. He adds, "A lot of the people committing the property crimes would probably be doing them regardless of whether they were addicted to methamphetamines."

Still, Durbin believes the 85 percent figure is accurate. He says his personal experience working the drug detail reinforces his belief in the accuracy of the statistic.

"I worked on the street for four and a half years," he says. "The unique thing about methamphetamine is that you can't work [because of the nature of the high]. You either produce it yourself, deal it, or you steal to support your habit."

Unlike marijuana or ecstasy, Durbin says, meth can hook users the first time. "Most often within a couple times of use, you're addicted," he says. "Some people, it's the first time they use."

Hudson, the addiction-program manager for Multnomah County, cautions against such blanket statements. People can use meth and not get addicted, he says, adding, a little nervously, "I'm not going to go around saying you can do these drugs and not get addicted. That would be crazy."

Hudson recalls the 1937 movie “Reefer Madness,” which linked smoking marijuana with an instantaneous plunge into crime and debauchery. He says the movie is now held up as a way not to talk about drugs.

"Trying to scare people with things that really aren't true," he says, "is really self-defeating."

Tom Bivins, who teaches journalism ethics at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, says it's irresponsible for a newspaper to publish statistics without fully understanding how researchers obtained them. Bivins commented on The Oregonian's use of statistics after WW presented him with specific examples.

"If there's no study, it baffles how you can report a statistic like that," Bivins says, adding that in order to come up with the 85 percent statistic, researchers would need to keep track of the motivations of every crime, a near-impossibility. "Other than that, it's basically hearsay."

Oregonian crime-team editor Maurer says Portland and state police have repeatedly told his reporters that the number is accurate. Maurer admits they have not always attributed the number to police and, in an emailed response to WW's questions, wrote, "We should have."

Reporter Suo admits the 85 percent figure cannot be backed up with data. "I don't think it's a perfect figure," he says. "It's a piece of anecdotal evidence."

The children of the meth epidemic have become the emotional center of The Oregonian's coverage. On Aug. 28, 2005, The Oregonian 's Sunday edition ran a front-page story with the headline, "Oregon's meth epidemic creates thousands of 'orphans.'"

Reporter Joseph Rose cited a new study by the state Department of Human Services that linked half of the state's foster-care cases to meth. He wrote, "Last year, roughly 2,750 children — more than half of all foster cases — were taken from parents using or making the potent drug, the study found" (WW's emphasis added).

The only hitch: There was no study. "We don't have a formal report," DHS spokeswoman Patricia Feeny says, adding, "When I use the word 'study.' I think there's going to be a product, a report."

Not only is there no document, DHS doesn't even track whether children are taken from their homes because of meth.

Instead, DHS coordinator Jay Wurscher compared a list of 2004 foster-care cases — containing the names of parents and other adults — with a database of people who had received treatment for meth. He came up with a roughly 50 percent match.

Wurscher's comparison did not show whether meth use specifically caused the children to be taken from their homes. The analysis did, however, reveal a possible correlation between the drug and child abuse.

But The Oregonian did not describe the findings as a correlation or an association. The paper wrote that "meth creates thousands of orphans," and later that meth "fuels" 50 percent of the state's foster-care cases.

The Oregonian's reports suggested to many readers, Wurscher concedes, that if meth were eliminated, 50 percent of the state's foster-care cases would evaporate as well. After the media began linking meth with foster care, Wurscher says, DHS employees have had to explain that getting rid of meth would not solve the problem of bad parenting.

The story ran with a picture of a child being removed from her home, with a caption that said police were investigating her parents for meth abuse. More than a week later, The Oregonian's public editor wrote a column explaining that the child's parents were not associated with the drug and that the photo had been misleading.

Surprisingly, nearly a year before crediting DHS with the statistic, reporter Rose stated it as fact. In November 2004, he wrote, "Methamphetamine is the leading reason Oregon children are removed from their homes."

Rose did not return calls for comment.

Like the 85 percent statistic, the large percentage of meth-related foster care cases would suggest a recent surge in the number of children being intercepted by social workers — which has not happened, according to state foster-care data.

Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at the libertarian Reason magazine, says he understands the temptation to print big statistics. Sullum has been a frequent critic of meth hyperbole and the war on drugs in general.

"It makes a better story," he says. "It's certainly striking. That makes it seem like a really big problem and something to write about and something to read about. There's always a chemical menace of the day that people focus all their fears on. At another time it was crack, at another it was marijuana. The hazards are always exaggerated, and the response is not necessarily rational."

The response is often to focus on one drug as the main cause of spiraling social ills rather than one of many causes.

University of California-Santa Cruz sociologist Craig Reinarman, who has studied the war on drugs for 30 years, says media reports fuel a governmental reaction that emphasizes imprisonment and law enforcement over social services and health care.

"These stories are pointed to as evidence of the epidemic and the horrible things that are caused by the epidemic," Reinarman says. "And tax dollars are diverted away from the underlying sources of people's troubles."

The Oregonian's reporting has indeed inspired increased spending on meth-focused law enforcement.

In August 2005, the Oregon Legislature passed a bill requiring cold medications containing a raw ingredient for meth — pseudoephedrine — to be sold behind the counter. Just this month, the U.S. Congress passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, which will regulate the sale and importation of pseudoephedrine and ephedrine, another precursor ingredient, and devote more than $100 million to fight the drug, mostly with beefed-up law enforcement.

When the law passed, Indiana Republican Rep. Mark Souder told an Oregonian reporter, "You became the source of information for members in Washington. If they were following meth, they were following to see what you were writing."

A very visible consequence of The Oregonian's coverage has taken place on the state's political battlefield, where meth has squeezed out issues that are equally or more important. Political hopefuls in Oregon regularly deliver get-tough-on-meth pledges worthy of the war on terror. Gov. Ted Kulongoski has incorporated meth into his maneuvering for the upcoming May primary. Earlier this month, his staff summoned television news cameras to a children's center in Oregon City, where the governor had heart-to-hearts with "meth moms" and called for more money for drug courts and treatment programs.

A Republican contender for governor, Ron Saxton, has joined the rush to battle. In a campaign ad on his website, Saxton calls meth a plague and promises to give "law enforcement the tools to fight this war."

And in perhaps the most far-flung example of shifting priorities, a partnership lobbying to build a new private casino in east Multnomah County (at the old greyhound track) has pledged to give 2 percent of all revenues to the fight against one drug: meth.

The Drugs Of Choice

[INSERT TABLE]

THE NUMBER OF AMERICANS WHO REPORT USING METH IN THE PAST MONTH tops heroin, but is less than cocaine, hallucinogenics, and non-medical use of prescription painkillers.

SOURCES: NATIONAL SURVEY ON DRUG USE AND HEALTH, 2002-2004: NATIONAL HOUSEHOLD SURVEY ON DRUG ABUSE, 1999-2001

In 2003, 35 percent of the people arrested for property crimes in Multnomah County tested positive for methamphetamine. About 37 percent of those charged with violent crimes tested positive for the rage-inducing super drug marijuana.

Since police make an arrest in only about 15 percent of property crimes, criminologists say it's difficult to draw conclusions about perpetrators or their motivations based on arrest alone.

In April 2005, The Oregonian published a story on the so-called "meth tax," a calculation by economists that said every Multnomah County household paid an extra $363 for losses including $88.4 million in stolen property and $6.1 million to care for the meth orphans in foster care. The stats are misleading, however, because they rely on the O's faulty statistics linking the drug with crime and child abuse.

Steve Suo's reporting did a good job revealing the ties between overseas pharmaceutical factories and the mega-labs in California and Mexico that convert over-the-counter cold medication into the potent street drug. Suo makes the case for stemming rates of addiction by imposing restrictions on factories that produce meth's precursor ingredients.

Drug-abuse experts stress that property crimes have long been associated with drug use. While crooks' drug of choice may change from time to time, they say, the central problem is still that desperate people do desperate things.

There is little evidence that the total number of illicit drug users is on the rise.

#

MUSIC

SMALL

Singing Cowboys & Englishmen

Cosmic American music was minted in 1960s Los Angeles

by Kandia Crazy Horse

He set the scene: In memory of Arthur Lee (1945-2006)

This is the tall tale of two canyons, Laurel and Topanga, and a fabled segment of West Hollywood called the Sunset Strip. Two recent books — Barney Hoskyns' “Hotel California” (Wiley), Michael Walker's “Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood” (Faber & Faber); two forthcoming documentaries, on country-rock icon Gram Parsons and cult pop songwriter Harry Nilsson (awaiting distribution); and a slew of recordings document the fleeting promise of late 1960s Los Angeles as rock & roll Mecca.

"The Southern California folk-rock scene seemed very much a reaction to the British Invasion, which had stolen so much from American traditional music," says John Bemis of Hillsborough, N.C., Americana act Hooverville, which comes to Charlotte on Aug. 11. "The scene in L.A. fused folk elements, such as tight harmonies and acoustic instruments, with rock & roll — not only rock's sound, but its sensibilities too. The lifestyle of the So-Cal scene was much more rock when compared with the earlier folkies, such as Pete Seeger and the Kingston Trio.

"Of all those [Laurel Canyon] bands, we're most significantly influenced by Gram [Parsons] and Chris Hillman. They were the traditionalists of the bunch, and Hooverville has covered several of their tunes over the years."

Bemis and company's latest CD, “Follow That Trail of Dust Back Home” (Back Up and Push), balances the singing and writing talents of the group's frontline trio, recalling the essence of a primary Laurel Canyon influence, The Band. Although mostly Canadian, the fabled Americana outfit recorded its second, self-titled album in L.A., and “Music From Big Pink” proved a watershed release for the area's aspiring singing cowboys. NYC's Ollabelle, which spotlights the soulful style of Amy Helm, also has a great new disc out, “Riverside Battle Songs” (Verve Forecast); "Fall Back" echoes the rootsy work of Helm's father, Southern Band legend Levon, acutely. And another prominent canyon rock heir, Chris Stills, has a fine EP out on V2 containing a cover of The Band's "The Weight" done en français as "Fanny."

Aside from The Band, my own romance with the period's resultant canyon/desert rock and singer-songwriter (aka confessional) genres begins with Texas-born classic rock legend Stephen Stills and ends with Georgia-born Gram Parsons. Although cosmic cowboy music was minted in Southern California, most folks forget just how vital the Southern part was to the equation. Many of the genre's leading architects and practitioners hailed from Texas and the Southeast, blending either folk-rock or R&B strains with the hard-core honky-tonk sound of Bakersfield.

I never go far without Stills' complex, varied output from the Buffalo Springfield through Manassas, and, in times of acute emotional trouble, Parsons' solo masterwork, “Grievous Angel,” is usually in heavy rotation. This stormy summer season has renewed my passion for both artists, with Stills currently touring in the company of his fellow Americana Rushmore figures Neil Young, David Crosby and Graham Nash, and Parsons reissued via the three-disc set “Gram Parsons: The Complete Reprise Sessions” (Reprise/Rhino). Filmmaker Gandulf Hennig has also released a documentary on the Waycross native who skillfully and fearlessly blended the Southern roots forms of country, R&B, rock, gospel to produce what he called “Cosmic American music: Gram Parsons — Fallen Angel” (Spothouse GmbH/BBC/Rhino). The rockbiz grapevine has it that Parsons' most (in)famous friend, Rolling Stone Keith Richards, owns the movie rights to Ben Fong-Torres' GP biography “Hickory Wind” and will presumably produce a narrative version soon. Barney Hoskyns, a Londoner and noted rock journalist, explored postwar Los Angeles music before, in 1996's “Waiting For the Sun.” Hoskyns' latest tome, “Hotel California,” revisits scenes from the earlier work but in micro focus, centered primarily on the singer-songwriters (think golden boy Jackson Browne) and studio misfits (like Brian Wilson's Mississippian ace Van Dyke Parks) who emerged in the wake of the Byrds' success, proceeding to revolutionize the music business (for a while) and American interiors. Scene midwives, like Hoskyns' fellow Brits — late Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, genius director Donald Cammell (a Stones associate) and Warner Bros. house hippie Andy Wickham — also co-star.

After the original Byrds' demise circa 1968 — when Parsons briefly joined and the classic “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” was released — no L.A. groups hold more importance for me than the aforementioned Buffalo Springfield, the multiracial dark horses of Love and proto-desert rockers-cum-funkateers Little Feat.

In fact, late Love front man Arthur Lee was born in Memphis but raised in L.A.'s black Crenshaw-Adams district; Little Feat icon Lowell George was bred in the West Side mountains when the area was still mostly ranch land. The Feats, whose influence is indelible in the new wave of Southern rock and jam bands, will be anthologized in September, with “The Best of Little Feat” (Rhino). A Lee benefit show in Manhattan in June saw ex-Zeppelinite Robert Plant channeling the force of Love's psych-rock oeuvre.

Meanwhile, Southern boy Tom Petty, who once apprenticed with former Byrds sideman Leon Russell, has just dropped yet another rich meditation on the So-Cal sound: “Highway Companion” (American). Chiming guitar, Farfisa and twangy rhythms worthy of one-time Topanga cosmic cowboy hangout the Corral abound, while Petty's song "Jack" actually lifts the central riff of Love's "Bummer In the Summer." The propulsive exhilaration and airiness of "Flirting With Time" unites past and present, exactly nailing the feeling of what L.A. rock once meant. Throughout, the disc limns why the Laurel Canyon Myth continues to hold sway over subsequent generations of artists, scribes, fair maidens, freaks and power-mad hustlers.

As Lee once penned about Sunset Strip magic, maybe the people would be the times — and briefly there was sonic catharsis to be gleaned from the murky sunshine at the limit of Manifest Destiny. Many young men went west from Greenwich Village's withering folkie scene, like Stills, Parsons and Byrds leader Roger McGuinn, hoping to slay societal dragons and personal demons with the plangent sounds of a 12-string guitar.

And the spell worked, depending on your view of the myth, until failed rock star Charlie Manson brought violence to the canyon vibe in 1969, and that same year ended with a brother's murder at the Rolling Stones' free concert at Altamont Speedway.

Yet there was value in the canyons' dark arts too: Aside from my Singing Cowboy hero Arthur Lee and his acolyte Jim Morrison, some of the scene's best music was made by underrated ex-Byrd bard Gene Clark, the Topanga-based band Spirit and Neil Young collaborator Jack Nitzsche, who produced the soundtrack for Cammell's occult-tinged cult film “Performance” with Ry Cooder and Randy Newman (among others). Even Young recorded "Revolution Blues," a brilliant ode to Manson and his family, and was originally meant to produce Love's masterpiece, “Forever Changes.”

Now-famed singer-songwriter standards issued by artists like Cackalacky Beatles protégée James Taylor and Canadian songbird Joni Mitchell — as well as the Eagles' easy, ubiquitous twangy template thieved largely from Parsons — arose as a reaction to the Manson murders and the general upheaval of the 1960s. And a new breed of talent brokers, like David Geffen and Eagles manager Irving Azoff, discovered different ways to bring the canyons' artists to market, perhaps garnering paeans in process (see Mitchell's "Free Man in Paris" about her now bitter enemy Geffen).

Ancient history, you say, decades after Parsons' corpse was burnt in Joshua Tree desert, the Eagles eulogized the Laurel Canyon spirit in "Hotel California," their friends in Fleetwood Mac transformed California rock from horse opera to soap opera and the Croz became the poster child for freebase. Yet 2006 has seen a startling array of reissued material from this scene and its 1960s satellites from both sides of the Atlantic. Cammell's been remembered with Rebecca and Sam Umland's biography “Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side” (FAB Press), and Nick Drake producer Joe Boyd has released his music memoir, “White Bicycles” (Serpent's Tail). Bi-coastal Elektra folk-rocker Tim Buckley is rumored to be getting the biopic treatment alongside his son Jeff. The mostly dormant form of protest music is again being spearheaded by CSNY with their Freedom of Speech tour. And even Laurel Canyon disciple Eric Clapton and raga-rock muse Ravi Shankar are coming to Charlotte in the fall.

Arizona indie Not Lame label has just released the Springfield tribute collection, “Five Way Street.” Here's what Mark Rozzo, rock writer and member of Brooklyn-based country-rock outfit Maplewood, had to say about his involvement with the project:

"What I love about Buffalo Springfield — along with the buckskin fringe and cool boots — is the fact that the band had so many great songwriters, so many great angles. Basically, they're the next step beyond the Byrds, and, along with the Byrds, they're a virtual clearinghouse for all that would be great in California — and American — music for years to come, from Neil Young to CSNY (and even Poco). They represent the birth of a sun-dappled, golden idyll for American pop."

Maplewood covered Rozzo's personal Springfield fave, "I Am a Child," on the tribute. He's also excited that 1970s easy rock titans America ("Horse With No Name") have recorded one of Maplewood's own canyon-tinged tunes, "Indian Summer," for their James Iha/Adam Schlesinger-produced comeback record, due out this fall from Sony.

Southern California may be going up in smoke and the cocaine cowboys' legacy may be tarnished, but the songs endure.

Hooverville plays Dilworth Playhouse on Aug. 11; 8pm; No cover. .

#

Mystery Black Boy

John Legend shows the way to grace

by Kandia Crazy Horse

Some would say the notion that a song could be your life is one best left to childhood fancy and rockcrit hyperbole. Yet here, on the eve of the winter of my discontent, there is such a composition that has penetrated my defenses: John Legend's "Show Me." The magnificent standout from Legend's second Sony release, “Once Again,” "Show Me" not only sounds like the late Jeff Buckley and Jimi Hendrix at play up from the skies (and thus vitally precious to my soul), but it may just be Legend's finest expression to date.

Among cherished rockcrit parlor games are the rush to anoint an artist and playing spot the influence. If I can be accused of the latter, it should be forgiven in the case of “Once Again” wherein Legend actively samples the Four Tops, evokes the mid-1960s bossa nova vogue on a pair of songs centering on the titular "Maxine," and — unconsciously or not — summons Sam Cooke and the Iceman-era Impressions to the same blue-light basement party on the sultry "Slow Dance." Indeed, a cursory first rotation of the disc triggered the thought: "Someone's been listening to a lot of Todd Rundgren;" only subsequently did I learn that Legend had cited "Hello, It's Me" as his favorite song in a Gap advert. The sonic case for Legend's deep adherence to a late ’60s/early ’70s AM pop aesthetic is made plain from the git-go through “Once Again”'s opener and "Stormy"-sampling hit single "Save Room" (a heartening, rockin' sign that producer will.i.am hasn't completely taken leave of his senses in thrall to Fergie's Londonlondonlondon).

Musician friends of mine have, at various times and in different ways, tried to denounce genre boundaries by proclaiming, "Music is music. It's either good or bad." Be that as it may — and certainly anyone who follows this space regularly knows these ears range wide — the world is not there yet. While music criticism is guilty as a deus ex machina ordering sound and subcultures via taxonomy and establishing arbitrary hierarchies, the average listener independently brings value judgments to bear on how they perceive and consume music. With an artist of Legend's provenance — Midwestern church upbringing, intersection with the Philly neo-soul elite as a Penn undergrad, a sonic CV featuring L-Boogie, Jigga, Common and Mary J., and, above all, his status as Kanye West protégé — it's disingenuous to ignore the ways in which black music traditions and an early so-called urban audience has shaped his career. These very factors are currently impacting the reception of “Once Again,” an uneven but great effort that is a quantum leap forward from the Grammy-winning “Get Lifted” as a work of art.

Even if the decline of the majors and radio has signaled the impossibility of monoculture in the 21st century, some local Charlotte listeners on the black hand side, most avowed fans of “Get Lifted” and primed for Legend's upcoming December 1 concert at Amos' SouthEnd, have expressed lukewarm appreciation for the new CD because they claim it eschews the debut's more hip-hop-oriented sound and seems an obvious bid for crossover status. Only groupie lament "Stereo" and the West-produced "Heaven" overtly heed hip-hop soul convention — the rest of “Once Again” sees Legend striving through the mostly mid-tempo compositions to keep pace with accelerating sounds in his head. Meanwhile, Stereogum has taken umbrage at Legend's Buckley tribute — the artist explicitly told Rolling Stone that this was his aim — couching its prejudices in the arch hipster argot of the Blogosphere. But I hear Legend's simulation and echo of Buckley's soaring croon on "Show Me" as a heartening sign of potential for moribund pop as a whole, not just the neo-soul plantation Stereogum's invested in. If his G.O.O.D. label head West can famously collaborate with hip L.A. producer Jon Brion (Fiona Apple), why shouldn't Legend expand his sonic horizons without censure?

And speaking of prejudices, it's time to confess my own where Legend is concerned. I've never denounced him as "the male Alicia Keys"; however, after a few years in this profession, one becomes inured to incessant hype and that surrounding "Ordinary People" last year was almost beyond bearing. To be sure, it's not Legend's fault that a plainfolks piano ballad should be overburdened with such fervent kudos. Yet a music writer's desk is bombarded with scores of talented comers, many of whom will never get the exposure they deserve since they lack West's current Midas touch — what makes a self-anointed Legend more significant than those who will toil in obscurity or the indie ghetto? More to the point, I was bred in an era and environment when a song well sung was the standard (a given extended even to the dance floor: Sylvester, Donna Summer et al.), and young artists expected to apply and apprentice themselves before the laurels were flung. Hopes were not so diminished that the industry and audience could be rendered weak at the mere sight of a young man capable of writing a simple song and playing piano instead of going multi-platinum due to how many times he'd been shot. And Legend's professions to the press of admiration for my Chocolate City homeboy Marvin Gaye as a career model only gave me foreboding.

Regarding Legend, the turning point for me was his solicitation of my dear friend, record producer Craig Street, as a collaborator on “Once Again.” Street co-produced "Again" and "Where Did My Baby Go," as well as augmenting Raphael Saadiq's work on the stunning "Show Me." At Manhattan's Right Track studios this past summer, I had the honor of witnessing them at work on the charmingly risqué "P.D.A. (We Just Don't Care)" with its infectious Shalamar handclaps, and being mesmerized by Italian composer Daniele Luppi conducting the string section for "Show Me." If Legend's true self remains hidden in plain sight, at least I do know courtesy of his association with Craig that he is serious and his aesthetic is maturing in a strong direction, that he wants to work hard on the quality of his songs and add something indelible beyond the market to give his music a chance at endurance.

Craig, noted for his past work with artists as different on surface as Cassandra Wilson and Charlie Sexton, is himself unafraid of a radical realm of the senses — as well as very creative and talented. He's the sort of music man of whom it used to be said, "He has ears," and has been a great influence on me and how I hear. So Craig's enthusiasm for working with Legend got my attention, per his comments from his Manhattan home:

"I think one of the great things about John is that he doesn't have any limitations. I think without question he's probably one of the most talented younger singer-songwriter-performers out there at this point in time ... There's other people that are good and interesting in pop music, but he's definitely one of the most talented. I mean, if I were to look at the pop world right now, it'd be him and Feist and Jack White and a handful of others that actually know how to write songs and know how to play their instruments and know how to sing. And, just by the fact that they can do those three, are light years ahead of everybody else.

"[John] listens to everything. His influences are all over the place. He can write a classically structured, great song that sounds new; it doesn't sound dated. If he decides he's going to wear an influence on his sleeve, it still sounds modern. I think his wordplay is what separates him from a lot of folks. ... He's really not constrained by anything that the public or critics or record companies or anyone else puts on him. He probably could've done 'Ordinary People, Part Two' and he chose not to. He really steps out on a limb with this one. There's things that sound like they could have been on ‘Get Lifted,’ and there's others that're completely different. He's absolutely fearless when it comes to exploration, which is probably one of the signs of a really great artist — when the need to explore and try things is greater than the need to simply stay where the success has been."

Although he and I disagree about the voice of "Coming Home" (and I might have tweaked the disc's sequencing), the end result is a complete work unafraid to take the many shades and vicissitudes of romance as its central theme. Without prematurely forecasting, “Once Again”'s power is evident. When artists find it easier to (belatedly) drop anti-Bush rants than sing about love in all its complexity, “Once Again” is definitely Legend's gauntlet cast at apathy and mediocrity.

And "Show Me" has elevated Legend above the fray, moved me beyond thought. In my opinion, the late Jeff Buckley, aka the Mystery White Boy, was the greatest, bravest soul singer of the past 15 years — and truly one of the minute cadre of artists that gave my generation any claims to glory at all. Early spins of “Once Again” had already caused me to jokingly refer to Legend as "sepia Rufus" in reference to the disc's arrangements (especially the exquisite, string-laden Street songs and another favorite, the hothouse lush "Maxine's Interlude"), similar to Rufus Wainwright's in confounding the narrow purview of pop. Wainwright is also an avowed Buckley heir, and the finest piano man preceding Legend to have expanded song craft and pop's lyrical vocabulary in the recent digital age.

Personally and as a music fanatic, I remain disconsolate over the loss of Jeff Buckley; as a critic, I am pained and baffled by my colleagues' generally poor reception of Wainwright. And so I had resisted writing this story; this is my saison en enfer, and I cannot carry the burden of caring about artists of John Legend's caliber. I know my late Mother would have loved "Slow Dance," if not all of “Once Again”; I can envision her bouncing around her flat, pestering me, "Who's that boy? That's my song!" — dancing a fearlessly sensual, funky drag from her youth in West Philly, where Legend honed his skills. Four days after she died, listening to "Show Me's" spectral strings in the studio, I was haunted and moved to tears. I do not want to feel nor be reminded of why music is my Great Mystery, and yet there it is: "Show Me," ghost notes speaking volumes, refuses to diminish its glory. In performance, Legend delights in sonic dialogue with Buckley's spirit, bravely lifting his voice as the guitar emotes and rises with him intimately, and I, who don't believe in God but my Ancestors, can hear them aloft where my Mother has joined them, cloud splitting over Legend's divine accomplishment. I may'nt want to, but still ken carnal and spiritual meaning when he sings: "Show me that you love me / Show me that you walk with me / Hopefully, just above me / Heaven's watching over me..." It is ethereal beauty, it is truth for the floating world I am adrift in and, yes, it's my song.

John Legend makes his sole Carolinas appearance at Amos' SouthEnd, with special guest Robin Thicke; Dec. 1; 8 p.m.; $32.50 adv., $35 d.o.s.; the show is sold out but see for details.

#

The Black Atlantic

Or, 2006 – the year the music died

by Kandia Crazy Horse

RIP Ahmet Ertegun (1923-2006)

The terrible news came last Friday evening, courtesy of one of my dearest friends in Manhattan: Ahmet Ertegun, founding chairman of Atlantic Records, had died at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He passed away after lingering in a coma for weeks as a result of a fall backstage at the Beacon Theatre during the Rolling Stones' command performance for Bill Clinton. And so I immediately scrapped the year-end opus I had been laboring on most of last week that was meant to run in this space; what do the fancies and follies of today's parade of callow pop stars matter when a real record industry giant like Ahmet Ertegun has gone to Glory? That this loss of someone I never even met should impact me so might seem strange to some. And yet I am devastated. Truly, the demise of Mr. Ertegun feels like an amputation — this in a time when my heart is already cleft in two.

The year 2006 was, for me, the year the music died. As early as late January when we saw Terence Malick's Powhatan saga “The New World” — illuminating our ancestral heritage just in time for Jamestown's 400th anniversary in 2007 — and then my ailing mother undertook her last voyage to the Motherland (South Africa), sounds had begun to disenchant in the wake of the high point of British singer-songwriter Lewis Taylor's sole U.S. show (at New York's Bowery Ballroom). And these last six months have seen me turn recluse, inured to electric ballrooms, record fairs and such. Only the release of Gnarls Barkley's magnificent “St. Elsewhere” (Downtown/Atlantic), the soundtrack to my mother's fadeout in the spring, penetrated my perpetual fog.

Even if regular readers, family, friends and foes are tired of my sorrow, the immensity of the loss of my mother this past summer cannot be overstated. Yet the impact and aftereffects of this life-altering death were considerably worsened by the music world's losses, in rapid succession, of Malian master Ali Farka Touré (I lived as a child in Mali, when my mother became the third black woman Ambassador in American history, appointed to steward U.S. interests in that country of the Western Sudan); Southern rock 'n' soul legend Phil Walden Sr. (whom I vainly attempted to eulogize in this space with a paean to the leaders of the new Dixie-fried breed, Hobex and Mofro); swamp-rock cult hero Johnny Jenkins (one of Walden's artists on Capricorn Records); (my Philly acquaintance and erstwhile Atlantic artist) Rufus Harley, the world's first soul-jazz bagpiper; and one of my all-time rock 'n' roll heroes, Arthur Lee of Love, the Singing Cowboy and O.G. Pied Piper of Freak-Folk.

Arif Mardin, another Turkish émigré legendary in the 20th century music business and an intimate colleague of Ertegun's at Atlantic Records (aka The House that Ruth Built) in its early postwar heyday, died within a day of my mother, also in Manhattan, of the same brutal pancreatic cancer.

I had met Mr. Mardin and was friends with his producer/musician son, Joe. I too am acquainted with Jerry Wexler, through my Southern gentleman mentor Stanley Booth, and friends with his musician daughter, Lisa. Papa Dip Wexler has not only been influential to me as the onetime music journalist who coined the term "rhythm & blues," for helping foster the Skydog and shepherding Aretha Franklin to her greatest heights, but also for kindly regaling me with personal tales of the immortal soul icon Donny Hathaway, extolling the virtues of session legends like the late great Eric Gale, and turning me on to “Dusty in Memphis” and the glories of King Solomon Burke (whose latest CD, “Nash8ville”, was among the triumphs of the year).

I had dealings with various younger Waldens as well, throughout the 1990s while I toiled on the trail of such new wave Southern rock outfits as Gov't Mule. But, despite having never encountered the man Otis Redding called "Omlet" in the oh-so civilized flesh, I can never forget that the first person I ever knew of in the record trade was him. He was my first hero, besides my mother — the first person outside of my immediate family of whom I have any consciousness whatsoever. And I will never forget the immeasurable contributions he made, not only to the music industry, but to American culture itself — and that of the African Diaspora. Indeed, the sole reason to look forward to the imminent return of Black History Month in February will be to heavily rotate Atlantic recordings from Brother Ray to the Dirty South's current favorite Rev. MC, Cee-Lo (as half of Gnarls Barkley).

If we people who are darker than blue put the African in Atlantic during the centuries of our bodies and spirits' theft via pernicious Triangular Trade, then our Afro-Asiatic cousin Ahmet Ertegun ensured that the Atlantic remained black in the most crucial era of the Civil Rights Movement, which irrevocably transfigured the very Southland we live and listen upon this day.

If I were to be inappropriately facetious, I could say my first words were "Ahmet Ertegun" (although Spanish was my first language, it really is a version of the truth). Somehow, as a babe in my crib in Chocolate City, listening to the strains of Atlantic (and affiliate) recordings drifting down the hall from the trusty KLH stereo of my parents (who loved Ray Charles, who hailed from Père's hometown of Albany, Ga., aka Thronateeska; they attended grad school at Howard while Donny Hathaway studied music there), I knew that this distinct, important person existed — "Ahmet Ertegun" — and that somehow his odd, exotic name represented a titan of taste. Later, as a diplomatic corps brat and music fanatic myself, I thrilled that Mr. Ertegun, as the Turkish Ambassador's son in mid-century, had consummated his love for R&B on the very same D.C. streets I inhabited, that he knew the owner of our 'hood-celebrated record chain Waxie Maxie's (Max Silverman) and had gone to church at the local, (shuttered) Chitlin' Circuit stop, the Howard Theater. I identified with the suave, urbane, cultured record executive in his bespoke suits and yearned to meet and have him serve as my rabbi in the rockbiz.

It may be hard for younger readers to ken the visceral, emotional attachment music heads of my generation and older have to albums as objects — especially since 2006 was the year when user-generated content (particularly via MySpace and YouTube) overtook physical recordings themselves. Yet my earliest memories other than pure sound are of toddling past my parents' system and nanny's console stereo, watching platters with the iconic red-and-green Atlantic label drop down the stack, emitting such strange, wonderful sounds never to be duplicated again — above all, those from Hathaway (produced to raw perfection by Mardin and Wexler on the crate-digger classic, “Donny Hathaway Live”). If I was ready for revolution in my Afro and red-black-and-green diapers, it's because classic Atlantic soul sides made it sound infinitely stirring and possible.

I was a melancholy, fanciful child; one of twins and yet a loner within that duality. My father had no sons and my male cousins lived far enough away in southwest Georgia so that I had the full benefit of his sonic sermonizing. More to the point, I had no boys to compete with for stereo time nor to mock and dismiss my fascination with music and its related biniss. So, then as now, the albums in the flat were my friends, their liner notes my gospel. And early on I knew the great significance of the powerful, erudite, sound-obsessed men who orbited Atlantic Records and its satellites Atco, Cotillion, Stax/Volt/Ardent, Capricorn: Ertegun, Mardin, Wexler, Tom Dowd, Nesuhi Ertegun, Phil Walden, Joel Dorn and Jim Stewart. These legends' very names were akin to music, and they (plus their concert-related associates, promoter/manager Bill Graham and live sound guru Wally Heider) were my personal superheroes in the manner that Huey and Superman were to the youngbloods on the playground.

As ancient Kemetic civilization is to the world, Atlantic Records is to my private universe. Although Brer Booth has been the most important influence on me as a southern raconteur, I never aspired to rockcrit; I always secretly nursed the romance of becoming an A&R executive because of the class and example of the Erteguns, Mardin and Wexler (I hadn't even heard of colored Columbia producer Tom Wilson yet and most of the great black independent labels had gone the way of race records by the early ’70s, yet Ertegun definitely didn't seem white, making the impossible seem possible — now, gender issues are another story). Simultaneously, my abiding passion for Southern rock and soul was triggered largely by Wexler's association with Stax and Dowd's miracle working at famed studios in Memphis, Miami and northwest Alabama. Out of the Atlantic fount came my love for the Allman Brothers Band, the Buffalo Springfield, peerless Hathaway and Roberta Flack duets, CSNY, Eugene McDaniels (whose 1971 hip-folk masterpiece that raised Nixon's ire, Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse, was reissued in March), Manassas, John Coltrane, David Crosby's solo masterpiece “If I Could Only Remember My Name ...” (re-released by Rhino this fall), Big Star and Jim Dickinson, the Mule (for whom I wrote liner notes) and so much more; the label's existence reflected and nurtured my love for soul, country-rock, bluegrass, jazz and, very belatedly, metal (via Led Zeppelin). And dontcha know that Capricorn Grail Eric Quincy Tate was delivered from the misty vaults of time this season by Rhino Handmade?

The very marrow of my biracial, hybrid dream of Southern transcendence rests with Walden's symbiotic management of Redding, as well as his label Capricorn and its flagship act, the Allmans (Jaimoe saved my life twice — once metafizzik-ly, once literally). I would not have devoted my career to supporting the 1990's rebirth of Southern rock nor new South culture without the shining beacon of Atlantic; I'd have never come to Charlotte. What would the world look like without Atlantic's revolutionary North-South quid pro quo or the East-West aesthetic it engendered?

Inasmuch as any of my dreams came true via music, Atlantic was the architect, shaman and vehicle of fortune.

In the future, my existence will echo one of my favorite Frida Kahlo paintings: call me “The Two Kandias.” The first, the daughter of Anne and Ahmet in love with wax long-players and perpetually in thrall to sound, will never come again. The second, born on New Year's Day 2007, will linger on in a half-life, with complex polyrhythms of creolized African bluenotes falling on her ears like ash.

Atlantic Records made me and my whole world. Conversely, it doomed all of my personal relationships; it's been a lifelong struggle to love anyone more than "Bluebird," "In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed," "Someday We'll All Be Free," "Tighten Up" and that supernatural wonder in Neil Young's "Country Girl," when Graham Nash's voice kisses Olorun's cosmos. (Now, add "The Last Time.")

And yet Atlantic rescued my African redbone self from the aftershocks of Manifest Destiny. Certainly, the vital necessity of releasing the Allmans' Live at Fillmore East (Dowd's shining star) became clear at year's end when the music stopped, and I sat alone in the dark witnessing Apocalypto as '06 redskin bookend, Jaguar Paw knee-deep in blues and running for his life on the eve of Columbus' dance across the big water. Without my mother and other heroes, I now know the sound of Apocalypse.

The label's back catalog is how I understood the Jim Crow world of my parents and the souls of black folk in mid-century. Here's hoping that birthright blessing can never be undone. And so, next Monday morning, when I perform my annual ritual of spinning Hathaway's exhilarating, exquisite holiday classic, "This Christmas" (originally released on the Soul Christmas compilation, Atco 33-269/November 1968), I will also pour libation for Ahmet Ertegun and all of those who've returned this year to Afrolantica's regenerative, watery embrace.

#

MUSIC

LARGE

Just Say No Más

In which we examine Cancuntry music

by John Nova Lomax

With each passing week, my stack of country-CDs-with-cheesy-songs-about-Mexico-on-them grows ever taller, and another Cinco de Mayo is upon us. What better time than now to examine this strange phenomenon?

Back in the ’50s and before, the Mexico of popular American song was a place you went at your peril. The songs were like audio versions of Westerns, and the narrators were sure to either come across a doomed romance with a sweet señorita or end up at the wrong end of some pistolero's Colt .45. Or both — in the Marty Robbins classic "El Paso," the young cowboy met his doom on the north side of the Rio, all for the love of a Mexican girl.

In the ’60s and ’70s, there was still a whiff of danger, and the songwriters were still pretty focused on gritty border towns — and the whoring and smuggling therein. This is Boys Town music, fraught with sex and death: Sir Douglas Quintet's "Nuevo Laredo" begins with a Zona Rosa flirtation with a black-haired beauty and ends with a pell-mell flight back to San Antone; in a Billy Joe Shaver song made famous by Waylon Jennings, a railroaded loser declares from a Matamoros jail that "There Ain't No God in Mexico"; Warren Zevon sang that he was "all strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town" in "Carmelita"; and ZZ Top sang the praises of Acuña's "Mexican Blackbird."

But in about 1975, with the advent of cheap air travel to coastal resorts, people quit traveling to border towns, and the music followed. (Today, only real live Mexicans sing about border towns and the drug trade.) Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville," James Taylor's "Oh Mexico" and Eddy Raven's "I Got Mexico" presented us with Mexico as the land of perpetual escape, and today, the Mexico of American song — mainly country — is as sanitized for your protection as any Mayan Riviera all-inclusive worth its salt. (And lime and tequila.)

"Margaritaville" and the others marked the advent of what we like to call Cancuntry music (that's pronounced "con-COON-tree" — get your mind out of the gutter). It sounds like regular mainstream country, but there are usually flourishes of Spanish guitar, odd bits of accordion and the occasional marimba riff. Cancuntry's most obvious trait is the lyrics.

In almost every example, all of Mexico is reduced to a breeze-kissed spit of palm-shaded sand, dotted with thatched bungalows and awash in gallons of tequila, rum, cerveza and the jagged jangling of Spanish guitars, a place devoid of clouds, concrete and demanding bosses on the one hand, and actual Mexicans on the other, save for waiters and bartenders. (And, of course, the occasional exotic and compliant señorita.)

There's a popular bit of armchair Freudianism that goes like this: Canada is the cerebral, conscientious superego of North America, and Mexico the pleasure-seeking id. America is the ego, torn between logic and its Puritan work ethic and animal desires for money, sex and violence. In an interview with NPR correspondent Scott London, Mexican-American intellectual Richard Rodriguez agreed with the idea. "Yes, that's quite accurate," he said. "And isn't it curious how it corresponds to the topography of the body, too? Mexico is sex and Canada is mind."

And apparently the writers of these songs agree too, because today Cancuntry is ubiquitous. The editors of a website called even put together a top 10 list of Cancuntry tunes, though they didn't use the term. (The Buffett, Taylor and Raven songs were all in the top six.)

Another on the list is Toby Keith. When ol' Toby's not a-sangin' about kickin' the crap out of A-rabs, he loves him some Mexico. In "Good to Go to Mexico," an Okie couple chafes in the bitter winds of November and starts pining for "siestas underneath the sombrero." "It'll be just you and me," Keith croons, "And the moonlight, dancing on the sea / To the Spanish guitar melody of a mariachi band." An actual Mexican person makes a rare cameo appearance — "We'll find that little man / Who owns that taco stand" — as do more usual suspects, such as margaritas and sand.

Other Keith songs are a little raunchier than most Cancuntry. In his "Stays in Mexico," "Steve" and "Gina" are very bored and very married middle Americans on vacation sans spouses. They meet at a cantina where they shoot some tequila, dance and then do what comes naturally after that. "Don't bite off more than you can chew / There's things down here the devil himself wouldn't do," Keith advises. "Just remember when you let it all go / What happens in Mexico / Stays in Mexico." And the next day, after a few pangs of guilt — the phoned-in call to the family, the guilt-ridden shower — they decide to take those words to heart. "They walked down to the beach and started drinking again / Jumped into the ocean for a dirty swim."

In "Hello," Keith's narrator is just as horny and married but free of regret. This ol' devil's kickin' it in a beachfront bungalow, "doin' that Caribbean thing / I was listenin' to a Spanish guitar, drinkin' margaritas under the stars / With a pretty señorita when the telephone started to ring, guess who?" After a strained conversation and a forgotten deadline for a call-back, "the party was a-rollin' at ten / See, I was workin' on tequila and lime / I guess I never even noticed the time / I was dancin' the iguana when the phone started ringin' again."

Sometimes Mexico figures less as a place to cheat on your spouse than merely a refuge from their crap. In fact, in "That's Why God Made Mexico," Tim McGraw posits that as the sole reason for the nation's existence — it was ordained by the creator as a sanctuary "where [haggard husbands and worn-out wives] can lay low / And the Cuervo goes down nice and slow / And the warm wind blows." Nags and chauvinist pigs can and should expect their spouses to jet down to Cozumel, where they can "learn to dance the fandango" and "get used to beans and chili paste."

And last but not least, there's Kenny Chesney, who is to Cancún and Cozumel as Jimmy Buffett was to Key West. In "Another Beer in Mexico," his restless thirtysomething narrator is bewildered by his station in life — "So many thoughts to sit and ponder about life and love and the lack of and this emptiness in my heart / Too old to be wild and free still / Too young to be over the hill still / Trying to grow up but who knows where to start?"

So what to do? "I'll just sit right here and have another beer in Mexico / do my best to waste another day ... Let the warm air melt these blues away."

In "Tequila Loves Me," Chesney's still boozing in Mexico, but drunken sulking replaces midlife angst as the rationale. (Powerful American dollars ensure that "forgettin's cheap" down there.) "There's a worm at the bottom of a bottle / That's well within my reach / And the heart that you broke will soon be a joke / As soon as he and I meet." Slightly confusing his Mexican booze — mescal has worms, not tequila — and his Romance languages, Chesney's chorus wails that "Madam Tequila's a fine señorita / All my compadres concur / She won't lie, she won't leave in your hour of need / So we're raising our glasses to her."

Yep, if you haven't guessed it yet, lushin' it up is the common thread of all these songs and more. In Chalee Tennison's "Me and Mexico," her lovesick protagonist "drank some tequila / said who needs ya / I don't have to do this alone / me and Mexico are letting you go." Brooks & Dunn's "Tequila Town" is something of a throwback to the ’70s in that it's set in a border town, and there's an element of death to the proceedings, albeit one of the slow suicide variety. His lovesick protagonist is also drinking solo in a Mexican bar — where he found "her memory in some mescal haze." He plans to "live it up till I live her down / lost in tequila town." Even the underage (in America at least) Blaine Larsen gets in on the act. In "I've Been in Mexico," he explains away his newfound shoddy work ethic on the fact that he's recently been south of the border — in the song he grandiloquently dubs it "the land of the Aztec sun." And along the way he throws in the obligatory lines about getting over a heartbreak, Mexi-style: "When she left me for another I was down and out / But there's a little cactus cure I've learned about."

And there's plenty more in that jug of Sauza — Kevin Fowler sings that "all the tequila in Tijuana won't help me feel any stronger / I know it won't help but I'm gonna try / goin' down to Mexico and drinkin' 'em dry." Terri Clark's "Not Enough Tequila" prates on in a similar vein: "Between the sandy beaches and the margaritas / thought I'd find a way to let you go / but there's not enough tequila in Mexico."

Ay, pero seguramente that is enough tequila references for this article. And it all gets me to thinking. It's often said that there are 11 million illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States. While Minutemen types often tar them as drains on the economy because of their insistence on obtaining "luxuries" like health care and educations for their children, even the staunchest Mexiphobe generally admits than the vast bulk of these people come to this country to work.

Which is much more than can be said for the people in these songs. Mexicans come here to work and hope, but if Cancuntry music is to be believed, Americans go there to drink and forget. Looks like NAFTA's working after all.

#

Screw October

Justin Furstenfeld orders us to hate him. We obey.

by John Nova Lomax

For the past five years, I've resisted ragging on Blue October. They were our only local rock success story, and I was glad for the HSPVA grads when they signed with Universal, sad when they were subsequently dropped and happy again when they were picked up again.

And since every other band in town and every last white-belted hipster from the Proletariat to Onion Creek would invariably sneer when they mentioned Blue October, it suited my rebellious tendencies to take up the opposite position. While admittedly I never could work up much enthusiasm about it, I would tell people that the guys weren't that bad, you just had to be in the right frame of mind (read: high) when you heard them, or I would call ’em jealous haters or some such. And the band really was more interesting than most of the shitehawks the major labels were signing around 2001. Which is like saying rectal cancer is more interesting than arteriosclerosis, but still.

And this year, Blue October has started to approach world-domination levels. The band's new album, “Foiled,” has spawned the huge hit "Hate Me," and its already eager Hater Parade has obliged. I heard the usual hails of derisive laughter around town, and then the Dallas Observer, our sister paper to the north, ran a list of five reasons why Blue October sucked, taking special care to point out that they were a Houston band. (Which they are not, but more on that later.)

Fuck all that, I thought to myself. I resolved to attend a Blue October show, where I hoped the band would furnish me with enough critical ammo to silence some of the naysayers. Surely I would be able to find something about the band to enjoy, and failing that, I could at least ask some people what it was that they liked about them, and maybe, just maybe, some of those people would make sense.

Sadly, that scheme was rendered utterly moot by the band's appearance on Leno the week before. I caught it and was frankly horrified.

What was up with singer Justin Furstenfeld's face? Had someone punched his lights out? No, that was just two enormous dollops of eyeliner he had caked on. As general developments go, this one was ridiculous. Dude is 30 years old, and he wasn't sportin' that crap when I interviewed him four years ago. Unless you're Robert Smith and you started rockin' the heavy makeup when you were 13, 30 is way too late to start, even if you are insanely jealous of My Chemical Romance's sales figures.

And once I got past that, I had to come to terms with his cockeyed, bobble-headed stage manner, which reminded me of a woodpecker trying to dislodge water from its ear.

And then, lo, there was the song he was singing. "Hate Me" is yet another in a line seemingly without end of Buzz-friendly, post-rehab, downtuned mush-guitar wankfests, complete with the requisite too-hastily-arrived-at chorus and 12-steps lingo-ridden lyrics about losing yet another girl after yet another bout with an (unspecified) addiction. And oh, yeah, bleeding brains, cockroaches leaving babies in his bed, porn and ye gods, he even spliced in a phone message from his mom. Evidently, the old dear's worried about his fragile state. (Hmm, maybe the song isn't about a breakup with a lover — maybe it's about his mom. To which all I can say is "Yuck.") The snippet of classical violin at the end of the song only adds a veneer of cheesy grandeur to the horrific proceedings, sort of like slapping a Greek temple facade on a strip-mall proctologist's office.

To make matters even worse, Furstenfeld is still singing in an array of fake accents, including his default Peter Gabriel-esque setting, and in a new wrinkle, inserting random R's in words like "accomplishment," which comes out as "accormplishment."

The whole thing is so goddamned awful it honestly gives me chills.

So, no, I couldn't conceive of going to see that show. I would enter my normal quasi-sane self, and to survive, I would have to ingest more drugs in two hours than Furstenfeld has shot, snorted, drunk or smoked in his debauched lifetime. And thus I would emerge utterly as icky and whiny as Furstenfeld, perhaps even with two enormous gobs of black goo under my eyes.

Out of the question. Whatever I was gonna write about Blue October was gonna have to be from a safe distance. Which was hardly far enough. I Googled up the band's MySpace page, where I found some of the most deranged publicity I've ever seen. "Hate Me" was not a premeditated welding of My Chemical Romance angst onto Nickleback sludge; no, instead it "recalls such aching rock anthems as Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' or Jane's Addiction's 'Jane Says' for songwriter Justin Furstenfeld's unflinching look at his own illness, which caused him to be committed to a mental hospital back on that fateful Blue October day back in 1997."

Now wait just a cotton-pickin' minute! These people are gonna sit there and tell the world with a straight face that "Hate Me" compares favorably to "Jane Says" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart"? And use phrases like "fateful Blue October day" with a straight face, to boot?

Okay, then. Surely they would tamp down the hyperbole when it came time to describe the band as a whole, right? Wrong. According to the bio, Blue October's "wide screen sound" "evokes an array of eclectic influences such as fellow Texas psychedelic bands Tripping Daisy and 13th Floor Elevators as well as prog-rockers Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, Flaming Lips, U2 and Coldplay, attracting a hardcore group of fans who not only relate, but ardently sing along with, the band's songs."

First off, Tripping Daisy and 13th Floor Elevators have about as much business in the same comparison as Townes Van Zandt and Dan Fogelberg or Scarface and Vanilla Ice, and all of them are about as comparable to Blue October as a jellyfish is to an eagle. And Blue October sounds nothing like Pink Floyd, Flaming Lips, U2 or Coldplay, but I have to admit they got the Peter Gabriel part right.

The bio went on to note that numerous fans had told the band that their music had checked their suicidal impulses. Quoth Furstenfeld: "If I have saved other people, I don't know what to say. But if I can do that for them, why the fuck can't I do that for myself?"

Well, you ain't dead yet, so something must be working, son.

Man, sometimes I wonder if this is all some huge parody. If Furstenfeld is half as crazy as he insists he is, no treatment center worth its warehouse full of meds would release him and tell him to go out and front a rock band. So surely it's all an act, or maybe just a partial one. Maybe Furstenfeld is crazy like a fox – he knows this tortured-artist crap sells with the kiddies, so he plays it up, so much so that he actually now believes he's crazier than he, in fact, is.

But one thing I am certain about is this: While Furstenfeld might not be as crazy as he thinks, the world at large is much, much crazier than I think. How else to explain Blue October's runaway success? "Hate Me" was recently No. 2 on the modern rock chart, right up there with Tool, Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters. Dude has 58,000 MySpace friends (57,600 more than I have; maybe I should start writing songs about going to see a shrink in eighth grade), and they have played "Hate Me" on the MySpace page more than 800,000 times.

But there was some good news on the MySpace front. Blue October has pretty much disavowed Houston as their hometown. In their info box, they now claim to represent "The Great State of Texas" as opposed to Houston. Ordinarily, that would piss me off, but not in this case. And in all honesty, they really are more the Dallas type, anyway. They are ambitious to the point of crassly selling out and pretentious beyond belief. And they have a violin, as opposed to a fiddle, in the band, which positively shrieks of Dallas's high-art "We're not rednecks, we're really just like New York" airs. And the band seems to be more at home there anyway, as it was a Dallas indie label that took them in after Universal gave them the ax, it was in Dallas clubs that the band rebuilt their invincible aura, and it's a Dallas number listed as their official contact. (In the Texas Music Directory, they list San Marcos as their hometown.)

So there's what little damage control I could come up with. While in this case I cannot take up my customary anti-hipster, anti-hater stance, I can at least semi-officially sever Houston's ties with this increasingly wretched band. Dallas and San Marcos, you can have 'em.

#

The Hype Of March

Who will be the band of 2006, and why you shouldn’t care

by John Nova Lomax

Ah, March, the time of year when the music business heats up, the world's hot bands descend on Texas and the hipsters get their marching orders on which groups to worship for the next few months.

By the time you read this, Racket will be in Austin, wallowing in the rock and roll phantasmagoria of South By Southwest – more than 1,100 bands playing on probably twice that many stages amid fields of fajitas, kegs of Lone Star, breakfast tacos by the ton and caramel-colored oceans of Shiner Bock, all at the world epicenter of twitching, frenzied, clench-jawed hype.

While SXSW was once a place for labels and unsigned talents to hook up (in the old-fashioned nonsexual way, usually) and cut deals, today's South By is almost entirely about hyping bands already signed and anointing two or three of them as the best bands in the history of the universe until Christmas shopping season, when two or three new ones will take their place until March 2007, when SXSW next gathers.

This will be my sixth straight one, and I've learned a few things along the way. First, don't waste your time at the trade show or the panels or even, to a lesser extent, the official showcases. Only mooks go to those. Instead, find a way to hit the coolest day parties. That's where the real action is nowadays.

Second, and more important, know going in that the whole "it" bands are foreordained. Barring a complete meltdown at South By, the bands that have the most and best hype going in will have the most and best going out.

The decisions have been made in smoke-filled rooms in London, New York and L.A. and in Pitchfork's Chicago office. The Arctic Monkeys, the Go! Team, Editors, Art Brut and Love Is All have already been bathed in the holy waters of Pitchfork's raves and are sure to wow everybody at their shows.

Why? Why are their shows sure to be epic? Because those who will be attending have been told they will be, by cool people on the internet. I know this is true because I read the March issue of Harper's, wherein super-cool person Bill Wasik – the evil genius behind the "flash mob" social experiment of a couple of years back, served up an amazing article on the state of hipness in the year 2006.

First, Wasik dredged up the old, now-neglected social psychology term "de-individuation," which is defined in the article as "a state of affairs in a group where members do not pay attention to other individuals qua individuals." (Sorry about that qua. It will never appear in Racket again.) Wasik elaborates thus: "When in a crowd or pack, the theory ran, each man sees he doesn't stand out and so his inhibitions melt away."

And then he applies the theory to today's hipsters – whom he defines as "those hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes." In other words, the target audience for South By's Anointed Few, who, in Wasik's words, "make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an 'alternative' culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes."

Wasik traces this phenomenon back to 2002, when Strokesmania was willed upon Hipster Nation, who embraced them for a few months and then junked them along with their trucker hats, ironic mustaches and white belts in about October. And after that, the cycle was repeated – Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Bloc Party and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah all followed, a list of Wasik's to which I would add Wolf Parade, and now, the Arctic Monkeys, who have yet to experience the full force of the inevitable backlash and discarding. (The case of CYHSY is particularly interesting. A few years ago, they would be seen as coming into SXSW with force-five momentum. In today's hyperkinetic hype-backlash world, they are already yesterday's news.)

But while this phenomenon might be new in America, it's been going on a lot longer in the UK. Britain is and has always been much more interconnected than the United States – it is tiny compared to America (England, shorn of Scotland and Wales, is only about the size of Alabama) and densely packed, and until the relatively recent rise of Sky TV, it was dominated by state-run media. Also, compared to the States, the UK lacks cultural diversity. Yes, there are lots of Asians and black people in the big cities, but for the most part the British cultural scene is not divided into country, rap, rock and the dozens of other camps that dot the landscape here. Most Brits would identify as fans of "pop," which includes everything from rock to rap to Eurodisco.

And for many, many years, the Brits have operated on the same hype-backlash paradigm that has recently taken root here. Here's how it worked over there: Some band – let's make one up called the Librarians, since "mundane professions" seems to be a de rigueur template for hipster band names right now – gets together and creates a stir in their native woebegone pub scene in Wigan. Needless to say, their sound features angular post-punk guitars and a razor-sharp rhythm section. They cut an album and tour grotty clubs in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh. And then the Librarians take London. They diss the Fall in an interview, and then a week later pose for a beery pic with Mark E. Smith.

The NME sends a scribe out to their big show, and said writer is either cynical or naive or lager-pissed enough to actually go to print with his paid expert opinion that "the Librarians are the best band in the world." A couple of weeks later, the NME releases a list of the 100 Greatest Albums of All Time, and the Librarians' “Daft as a Brush” comes in at No. 3, behind whatever Beatles album the hipster canon is highest on in any given year (a five-year cycle that churns through “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver,” “Sgt. Pepper's,” the White Album and “Abbey Road”) and maybe “Astral Weeks” or “Pet Sounds” or “Exile on Main Street” or some punk landmark like “London Calling” or “Never Mind the Bollocks.”

And then the Librarians were launched upon America. Every once in a while, it clicked here too, and you would get an Oasis or something. But far more often, these bands foundered on Plymouth Rock and were tossed overboard like so much unwanted tea. Our critics savaged them mercilessly. American fans knew and mocked the British music press. The NME had about as much credibility as Tom DeLay pontificating about ethics. Americans were immune to British hype.

But ever since everyone got on the internet, we have succumbed to an American version of the same. Pitchfork is the Yank NME. All it takes is a grade above 9.0 for a band to have it made here – at least until the backlash sets in, which will arrive with your second release. If you fail to heed their advice and just go away, the scorn will intensify with wild abandon on your third album. After all, no one likes to see a puffy, bloated hulk, a shadow of that once lean 'n' hungry hero, sneaking belts of cut-rate vodka behind the potted plants and bloviating loudly to all and sundry about those long-gone wild nights in Silverlake, SoHo or Williamsburg with Winona, Kate and/or Drew. (Or Paris Hilton, if you were into fucking ironically.)

And given that Pitchfork deems 99 percent of reissues as superior to 99.9 percent of new albums, you won't be cracking the nines until your boxed set comes out in 2031. Then, on that joyous day, some yet-unborn Pitchfork geek will give your reissued music a 9.6, singling out for special praise your "criminally underrated second and third albums." (Of course the next week, they will give a 9.7 to Revenant's 16-CD set “Crack Corn: 337 Joints of Funky-Fresh Golden Age Hip-hop from Topeka's Phiendin' Pha Phat Label.”)

"Over those who would sell to the hipsters, then, hangs the promise of instant adoption but also the specter of wholesale and irrevocable desertion" Wasik writes. In other words, at any given moment, only one band matters, and that band matters only until the next one comes along.

Yep, to quote that much-mocked sage Huey Lewis – or is he ironically appreciated now? Or is he cool? What does Michael Ian Black think about him? Can I quote him? Will people laugh at me?

Anyway, as I was saying, to quote Huey Lewis, now more than ever, it's hip to be square. And it's hipper still not to care either way.

#

NEWS STORY LONG FORM

SMALL

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Why the Montana Meth Project isn’t all it’s cranked up to be

by Jessie McQuillan

Never has a so-called picture of success sported such a gruesome mug. It was one year ago this September that the Montana Meth Project launched its efforts to transform the face of methamphetamine’s impact on the youth of this state. All at once, images of young faux junkies and their nightmarish trappings became omnipresent on Montana’s billboards and airwaves and in print media as the $5.5 million campaign, bankrolled by billionaire Tom Siebel, rocketed into place as the state’s largest advertiser. The citizens and the media of Montana have responded, by and large, with gusto for the high-profile effort. Most recently, more than 650 teens encouraged by $300,000 in prize money are holding their breath for the Aug. 9 results of the Paint the State contest, for which they created public art incorporating the campaign’s “Not Even Once” slogan. Ghastly images and draconian messages—“Curiosity killed the kid,” for instance—have turned up in the form of painted barns and cows, emaciated sculptures and crashed cars throughout our communities.

On the cusp of its first anniversary and the autumn launch of a third round of ads, the Montana Meth Project’s aggressive, confident and moneyed approach has been lauded as a raving success in more than 500 media stories in publications as close to home as the Missoulian, as prestigious as The New York Times, and as far afield as the UK’s Guardian. Montana officials at every level have cozied up to the project and are now working to secure public funding to sustain it, while the state’s congressional delegation is looking for ways to export it beyond Montana’s borders through federal grants. Arizona and Utah are hastily trying to import the ads, encouraged by their dramatic profile and the unanimous support they’ve received from politicians and news coverage alike. The Montana Meth Project has successfully developed a public image of itself as not only a bighearted offering from a deep-pocketed man, but also as a revolutionary and, more important, successful attempt to rein in Montana’s meth problem.

But look closer and that picture changes. Conspicuously absent from the discussion are simmering concerns about the Meth Project’s shock-and-awe approach, as well as unfavorable data the campaign has collected through commissioned surveys about its own impact. Most observers seem all too eager to latch onto the Montana Meth Project as a stylish solution to a difficult problem, though some are starting to question that popular logic. It’s not easy to find people in Montana willing to publicly take a hard look at the project—though some will do so off the record—but conversations with politicians and drug prevention officials in the states now on the brink of duplicating the campaign reveal plenty about the Montana Meth Project you wouldn’t know by reading its press.

Read an article about the Montana Meth Project and you’re guaranteed to walk away with the impression that untold but certainly increasing numbers of Montana teens are succumbing to the ravages of meth, and that the campaign is Montana’s new secret weapon for turning that tide.

“We’re losing a generation of productive people,” Gov. Brian Schweitzer told The New York Times for its February feature on the project. “My God, at the rate we’re going, we’re going to have more people in jail than out of jail in 20 years.” At its unveiling, Rep. Denny Rehberg praised the project as a brilliant solution, saying, “Tom Siebel has hit on the head what no other public agency has figured out.” In April, Montana newspapers reprinted Associated Press stories following the Arizona Republic’s lead in reporting the unattributed and untrue claim that the campaign here “has saturated the airwaves, helping to reduce meth use among teens by as much as 30 percent.” At an April press conference Siebel announced, “We’re starting to move the meter on meth,” citing data from a commissioned survey that gauged the efficacy of the campaign and found an increase in discussions about the drug among teens and their parents, and growth in the number of teens who perceive specific risks, like tooth decay and brain damage, accompanying meth use.

What you won’t learn from project officials, the mainstream media or politicians is that meth use by Montana teens, the specific target of the Montana Meth Project, has been on the decline for seven steady years. You won’t hear that the project’s own survey, conducted once before the ads ran and again six months into their run, found a statistically significant increase in the number of teens who said they saw no risk in trying meth once or twice. Nor will you learn of the survey’s finding that large numbers of teens report that the project’s ads exaggerate meth’s risks, or that decades of drug prevention research has found similar scare tactics to be ineffective.

In 1999, 13.5 percent of Montana high-schoolers reported meth use to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is conducted every other year and didn’t begin collecting meth figures until 1999. That figure dropped to 12.6 percent in 2001, 9.3 percent in 2003 and 8.3 percent in 2005. Among seventh- and eighth-graders, the same span saw a drop from 7.5 percent in 1999 to 2.8 percent in 2005, the year the Montana Meth Project launched its ads, and the most recent year for which numbers are available.

Local trends mirror national movement too, though teen usage in Montana remains slightly higher than in the rest of the country. Nationwide, 9.1 percent of surveyed teens reported meth usage in 1999, dropping to 6.2 percent in 2005.

At the two state teen drug treatment centers, 9 percent of residents report meth as their primary drug of choice, according to data provided by Chemical Dependency Services Chief Joan Cassidy.

For context, usage rates of other drugs are much higher. In 2005, 35 percent of Montana high schoolers reported binge drinking within the last month, compared to 25 percent nationally. A full 42 percent of Montana teens admitted to smoking marijuana at some point or another; 15 percent said they’d used inhalants; 9 percent reported cocaine use.

The Montana Meth Project’s striking appeal and purported success almost hooked Arizona State Sen. John Huppenthal. Like Montana, Arizona—where 8.8 percent of teens reported having used meth in the 2005 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey—is looking for a solution. Earlier this year, Huppenthal introduced a bill seeking to fund a $4 million public meth de-glamorization campaign after seeing dramatic results from an anti-tobacco campaign in the state.

Huppenthal, acting on a tip from the Arizona Department of Health Services, looked into the Montana Meth Project and thought at first it might be just what teens in his state needed.

Then the Republican took a closer look and changed his mind.

“I ended up dropping support of my own bill, and it failed,” he says. For the most part, he says, it was a close look at the meth project’s own data that caused Huppenthal’s reversal.

Before the ads ran, 93 percent of teens said there was “great” or “moderate” risk involved in trying meth once or twice, but after six months of watching ads, that number dropped to 87 percent, a decline labeled statistically significant by researchers. On the flip side, teens who saw no risk in giving meth a try or in using it regularly increased from 3 to 8 percent.

It’s worth taking a moment to discuss the survey itself and the care with which conclusions about it should be drawn: The Meth Project commissioned national survey researchers Millward Brown for the Montana Meth Use & Attitudes Survey, which was conducted online in August 2005 and February 2006, with sample sizes of about 1,200 and 1,400, respectively. Survey responders, which included teens age 12-17, young adults, parents and American Indian teens, were solicited through internet banner ads and recruited to the survey website by phone. Kathy Kuipers, a UM sociology professor who specializes in methodology, says it’s dangerous to draw many conclusions from the survey given the participants’ self-selection. In a state where only 50 percent of the population is connected to the internet, many segments of society may not be represented. How that impacts the survey data is unknowable, but important nonetheless.

“I would be really concerned about what types of people aren’t included in this,” Kuipers says.

Given that caveat, the survey data are the only available numbers by which to judge the program’s efficacy.

Huppenthal says he was especially turned off by survey findings that up to 50 percent of teens said particular ads exaggerated meth’s dangers. Once kids think you’re overblowing the drug’s risk, he says, you’ve lost their trust and decreased your influence. Among American Indian teens, who were surveyed as a separate group, exaggeration was a much bigger issue: 47 percent said the “Bathtub” ad, where a young woman in the shower screams bloody murder when she’s joined by a scabby, strung-out version of herself, was over the top, and a full 75 percent said the same of “Tim,” the radio ad where a young man tells about losing his job and everything he owns within a month of his first high.

When he talked with Siebel to learn what the campaign was doing to alter its approach in light of this not-so-glowing data, Huppenthal says, he was disappointed by the response.

“I wasn’t sure that they had read and understood their own research,” he says. “I wasn’t sure they were of a mindset where they even wanted to use the research to change their campaign, even tough it’s screaming to be changed.”

Others in Arizona disagree with Huppenthal’s take. In April, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said he planned to import the Montana Meth Project and have it up and running by this August.

“I just don’t think we have time to waste,” he told the Associated Press. Since then, Arizona officials have been working out the details. They flew to Montana in April and Siebel and Montana Attorney General Mike McGrath returned the visit in mid-June. Siebel has pledged to offer the campaign to other states at no cost, with the stipulation that they not alter the ads. Though Arizona has since fallen behind its August goal, Goddard spokeswoman Andrea Esquer says “We’re determined to bring it out to Arizona.”

At the bottom of Huppenthal’s concerns about exaggeration is the fear that these anti-meth ads may replicate other unsuccessful antidrug campaigns. For example, a 2003 government-funded study of the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s 1999-2003 National Anti-Drug Media Campaign found that though about 70 percent of youth and parents had been exposed to the campaign’s antidrug messages at least once every week, “There [was] little evidence of direct favorable Campaign efforts on youth.”

Similarly, thanks to its oodles of private capital, the Montana Meth Project has been able to reach 70 percent of Montana teens an average of three times a week, which is one sign of success repeatedly cited by the campaign. But just what that high level of saturation is leaving behind in terms of teens’ understanding of and beliefs about meth isn’t as well known.

Jeff Linkenbach, director of the Most of Us Institute in Bozeman and an MSU faculty researcher, is one of the few prevention experts in Montana who will publicly voice his concerns about the Montana Meth Project. Though he commends Siebel’s contribution and intentions, he’s skeptical of the project’s approach, which he calls “health terrorism” in its attempt to “scare the health into people.”

“Decades of research have demonstrated again and again that scare tactics don’t work and often backfire,” Linkenbach says.

The notion that saturated public awareness equals success is characteristic of a private advertising agency perspective, Linkenbach says, but strikingly different from the broad-based approach required by a public health issue stemming from social and economic ills, not a mere lack of awareness that meth can ruin lives.

Linkenbach also says the project’s attempts to raise awareness by linking first-time usage to extraordinary consequences ventures into the Reefer Madness realm.

“Although the message that you shouldn’t use meth even once is absolutely the right one to communicate, we need to make sure we don’t obfuscate that by alluding to the ‘fact’ that you can get addicted with a one-time use, because that’s not in the scientific literature,” Linkenbach says.

“What happens is we erode our credibility with our audience because their experience doesn’t bear out [the ads’] reality,” he says.

Others, too, are concerned the one-hit-and-you’re-hooked message won’t play well to young audiences who know, from firsthand or secondhand knowledge, that that isn’t strictly true.

“Very few of the meth users actually end up looking the way they do in the Montana Meth Project,” says Pat Fleming, director of Salt Lake County’s Division of Substance Abuse in Utah. “We know that some kids may say, ‘Did you see those crazy ads? I use it on weekends and I’m not a meth fiend who’s robbing laundry mats or stealing money.’”

Fleming sits on the meth initiative taskforce convened by Utah Gov. John Huntsman, who’s intent on bringing the Montana Meth Project to his state. In June, Huntsman invited Siebel to pitch the idea to a roomful of potential donors who could back an incarnation of the project there.

The task force voted unanimously July 18 to pursue some anti-meth effort, but is still circling on what form it will take. Fleming says the group is evenly split among those who support Siebel’s approach, those who oppose it, and those who remain ambivalent.

Another prevention community concern cited by Fleming is the Montana Meth Project’s depiction of addicts as intensely repulsive figures, and how that can impact the general public’s perception of meth treatment and its usefulness.

“It further characterizes drug users as these fiend demons that people are afraid of,” Fleming says. “What lawmakers are going to want to do, and it mirrors the reaction of the average citizen, is lock that guy up. And that’s the opposite of the direction we need to go.”

It’s no wonder Montana’s drug prevention community is collectively hesitant to voice the potential drawbacks of the Montana Meth Project’s approach. After all, how often do millions of dollars drop from the sky in a private, goodwill effort to improve one of Montana’s ugly societal problems? Even those who sound cautionary notes about the project are quick and careful to thank Siebel for throwing his money and influence toward a compelling cause.

Besides drawing attention to meth abuse, the high-profile nature of the Montana Meth Project may also have the collateral effort of drawing attention to other drug prevention efforts in the state, say some who are thankful for Siebel’s efforts, though skeptical of the campaign’s approach and its claims of success.

Montana media, though, don’t have such a logical excuse for not taking a decently hard look at the state’s largest advertiser, particularly as public officials embark on a path to find public dollars to sustain and expand the effort.

And yet, in the dozens of stories that have appeared around the state about the project, there’s no evidence of any such analytical attitude. Though the Montana Meth Project released all the data from its survey, only the skin-deep signs of success offered up by project officials at the press conference made it into the news. Most every story parrots state officials’ claims about an increasingly ravaging meth epidemic without any mention of empirical data that indicates otherwise, as well as conclusions that the meth project is a model solution.

But Montana media isn’t alone.

A national report examining the meth epidemic released in May by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group advocating sentencing law reform, highlighted escalating media coverage of meth despite steadily low rates of meth use nationwide. For the last five years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health has consistently found 0.2 percent of Americans reported meth use within a month of the survey. Four times as many Americans reported regular cocaine use; 30 times more reported regular marijuana use and 90 times more reported binge drinking, according to the report’s data. Seizure of meth labs nationwide fell by more than 30 percent nationwide in 2005—66 percent in Montana specifically—and the leading provider of workplace drug testing reported a 31 percent decrease in positive meth tests in the first half of 2006, and a 45 percent decrease since 2004.

The same period has seen increasing amounts of ever-more intense media coverage. In August 2005, Newsweek called meth an “epidemic” and a “plague” and slapped the headline “America’s Most Dangerous Drug” on its cover.

“A general lack of critical analysis coupled with widespread reporting of opinions masquerading as facts have resulted in a national media that has been complicit in perpetuating a myth of a methamphetamine epidemic,” says Ryan King, author of the report.

Jack Shafer, editor at large for and a media critic and longtime drug reporter, says the public also plays a role.

“There’s no constituency out there who’s demanding accurate reporting about drugs,” Shafer says. “The first time somebody allows in print in a Montana newspaper that actually there are many people who’ve used the drug once and not become stone-cold addicts—if the editor can even get it into the paper—the readership is going to go insane.”

And so instead, the vast majority of articles you’ll find are based primarily on anecdotal stories with extreme dramatic appeal, which relays one aspect of the meth issue, but falls well short of the full story.

Imagine, says Shafer, if reporters used a different kind of anecdote to tell the same story.

“If I were to find the many thousands of people in Montana who did methamphetamine once or twice and never touched it again, and they were my anecdotes for the story and I used that to lead to the conclusion that, therefore, methamphetamine is harmless, I would be doing the truth a real disservice … There’s a narrative arc that’s easy for journalists to hitchhike onto and write an easy story, but it doesn’t take much thinking or work, and it doesn’t serve the truth,” Shafer says.

It’s worth noting that Montana’s statewide media are substantial partners in bringing the Montana Meth Project, the state’s largest single advertiser, to the public.

Every minute of radio and TV broadcasting, every billboard and every newspaper ad that the project purchases is matched one-to-one by media entities. The project’s 30,000 radio minutes, 30,000 TV minutes, 150 pages of newspaper ads and 60 billboards so far constitute a sizable contribution—and a substantial financial windfall—for the state’s media.

Having advocates in the media world’s high places can’t hurt either. Mike Gullege is one of nine “influential Montanans” who make up the Montana Meth Project Advisory Council, which includes Attorney General Mike McGrath. Gullege is also publisher of the Billings Gazette and vice president of publishing for Lee Enterprises, which owns five newspapers in the state that have provided substantial coverage on the Montana Meth Project.

In the Sentencing Project’s report, King zeroed in on coverage of the Montana Meth Project as an example of poor media treatment of the challenges of and solutions to the meth issue. The fallacious and mysterious 30 percent drop in teen meth use attributed to the Montana Meth Project and reported by the Associated Press is a perfect example. Reporters at the Arizona Republic who first reported that number did not return several calls seeking a source for that figure, so it’s hard to know where it might have originated. One potential, though inadequate, explanation could be Siebel’s reported goal of cutting first-time teen meth use by one-third in the first year of the campaign.

So what’s the harm in presenting incomplete pictures of both the “meth epidemic” and the Montana Meth Project? Many will argue that it’s counterproductive and downright ungrateful to examine Siebel’s gift horse with a dentist’s gaze. Meth use in general, particularly among adults and reflected by prison inmate usage reports, is a clear problem in Montana with severe impacts on the law enforcement and social services fronts, and any effort that contributes to ending the problem is worthwhile, some say. If even one teen watches Siebel’s ads and turns down a hit of meth, the Montana Meth Project is a success, the logic goes.

Part of the problem with that reasoning lies in the fact that Montana officials, not to mention those in other states, are increasingly seeking public funding to sustain and expand the Project.

In mid-July, Sen. Max Baucus told Missoula’s KPAX news he was fighting for a $4 million allocation to the Montana Meth Project as part of the 2007 federal budget. Representatives from Baucus’ office did not return repeated calls inquiring about progress on those efforts. Sen. Conrad Burns has said he’d like to see the Montana Meth Project become a national template, and has been working to secure federal grants with which other states could launch their own campaigns.

In the budget-crunching era, public dollars dedicated to one cause inevitably means fewer dollars directed to other efforts, whether they’re antidrug campaigns following a different model or other aspects of the meth issue, like treatment, that sorely need more funding. So the prospect of publicly funding the Montana Meth Project’s approach, which goes against the grain of decades of drug research into antidrug message efficacy, doesn’t appear to be justified. Montana’s Linkenbach says there’s growing recognition nationwide that throwing massive resources at a single drug, particularly in the form of a scare campaign, doesn’t make sense, since there will always be another popular drug waiting to take its place as long as the underlying causes of drug use are left unaddressed.

But there’s also the matter of politicians, media and the campaign itself latching onto the Meth Project’s recent efforts as a model solution when the data isn’t there to back that up.

Richard Rawson, associate director of the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Program in Los Angeles, says he had two conversations with Montana Meth Project officials while they were developing their first round of ads. He says he cautioned them “about making sure what they presented was accurate and that it didn’t have an artificial, horrific flavor to it that would discredit it.”

Rawson won’t judge whether the Montana Meth Project followed his suggestion, but he says the most important thing for the project and others in the state at this point is to fully and honestly evaluate all the findings and data of the project and tweak its efforts accordingly.

“If it really wants to be a program that develops credibility and not just a marketing campaign, you need to have a discussion of all the findings and not just the ones that speak to your success,” Rawson says.

As far as he’s concerned, “the jury is still out” on how the project’s approach works and what its survey data mean: “I’m not sure it is wise for anyone to be claiming any victories or defeats at this point; it’s just too early,” he says.

Peg Shea, executive director of the Montana Meth Project, is a well-known and respected figure in Montana’s drug prevention community. The former director of Western Montana Addiction Services with nearly 30 years of experience in the field presents thoughtful ideas about the Montana Meth Project and its potential.

“I think it’s an experiment that we need to try and we need to measure and we need to watch and we need to get out of our comfort zone,” says Shea, who also says that making the leap from longstanding public prevention efforts to a private-sector experiment took no small amount of guts.

The teens in the focus groups who were consulted during development of the ads, as well as the thousands of kids she’s talked with since the campaign’s launch, have convinced her that the ads’ in-your-face style is getting through.

“I think in today’s world we’ve really got to shake kids up in a different way,” she says.

About concerns of losing credibility with teens by showing such extreme portraits of meth abuse, Shea says 30-second ads call for a dramatic treatment and simply can’t capture all the complexities of the issue. What they can do, she says, is show and remind teens again and again that meth ruins lives and that their decision to try meth could be the watershed decision that ruins theirs. Other community efforts, like websites and the Paint the State Contest, are raising awareness in ways that the ads themselves may not, she says.

As far as the project’s survey data, results showing that teens who reported having two or more discussions about meth with their parents increased from 34 percent to 49 percent and that parents who said their discussions were prompted by a TV commercial increased from 30 percent to 48 percent show the Montana Meth Project is impacting lives, Shea says. So too do survey results showing increased perception of specific risks like tooth decay, brain damage, insomnia and stealing that can accompany meth use.

As far as the inconclusive or downright negative survey data and why the project didn’t include it in its report summary or press conference, Shea says merely that, “In a press conference you only have so much time.” She maintains that the drop in teens who saw “great” or “moderate” risk in meth use isn’t significant because “when you do a survey online, you’re not necessarily surveying the same people,” though it would necessarily follow that the same logic would also invalidate the data the project has been highlighting nationally.

She says she agrees with Rawson’s assessment that all data is a valuable part of informing the project’s evolution and says the Montana Meth Project is taking an honest look at many of the issues those numbers raise. Already, she says, some of the survey findings are helping to tweak the third round of ads, now in production, that will launch this fall. She knows that usage among teens has been trending downward for years, though she still says the number should be cut in half.

Shea presents an image of the Montana Meth Project and thoughts on what it’s accomplished so far that are reassuringly down to earth. She says she welcomes criticisms of the project because at least that prompts discussions about the meth issue and how to tackle it.

“We’re out there; we’re going to take shots, and that’s okay actually. It comes with the territory. We’re trying something new,” Shea says.

Shea’s reflective comments, though, don’t reflect the victorious self-image that the Montana Meth Project has set forth for consumption by Montana politicians and media. To the contrary, public officials’ comments and news stories circulating through the state generally speak to an escalating teen meth problem that’s being beaten back by a revolutionary campaign, both of which are tenuous claims.

In a June guest column in the Arizona Republic, Siebel, who was not available for an interview with the Independent, wrote, “Large-scale meth prevention is beginning to work in Montana. We are putting a dent in this enormous problem.”

It’s painfully tempting for politicians, and remarkably easy for media, to latch onto the Montana Meth Project as the state’s saving grace. But it’s an utterly different story when that easy answer evolves into eager exportation of the ad blitz to other states, and when taxpayers face the possibility that they, not the billionaire with the big idea, may be called upon to begin bankrolling the effort.

Faced with those prospects, it’s increasingly important to look long and hard at the stories that haven’t been told about the Montana Meth Project: that teen meth use is a serious but not prevalent issue; that the Meth Project’s fear-based approach recalls other ineffective and discredited antidrug campaigns; and that the data gathered so far fails to demonstrate results. If Montanans are to pour their money into the Montana Meth Project, they should insist their dollars fund effective, positive efforts. Despite the hype, the Montana Meth Project hasn’t shown itself to be that effort. Not even once.

#

NEWS STORY LONG FORM

LARGE

The Painmaker

The D.C. Council closed Richard Luchs’ favorite loophole. So the real-estate attorney found another.

by Ryan Grim

In 1985, a then-14-year-old Carlos Baruca emigrated from El Salvador and rented an apartment at 2351 Champlain St. NW, in Adams Morgan, with his brother. He supported himself during high school by washing dishes and waiting tables at a neighborhood restaurant, Mr. Henry’s. After getting his diploma from Cardozo Senior High School in 1988, he waited for the next eight years at Galileo restaurant downtown. He saved his money, and by 1996, he and three of his brothers had rented space for a restaurant on 14th Street NW.

The restaurant, El Paraiso, thrived; he and his brothers used their profits to open a market nearby and were able to buy the building that houses the restaurant. Carlos got married and started a family at the Champlain Street apartment. All the while, they and other tenants, says Carlos, saved for the day when they could finally buy the apartments they were living in.

Thanks to a tenant-friendly provision in D.C. law, that day appeared to have come in early 2001, when one of their building’s owners, Lucy O’Brien, sold her 50 percent share to an investor named Dennis Lee. The tenants learned about the sale two weeks later, when Lee offered to sell his share to the tenants for nearly five times what he had just paid. The tenants thought that the transaction between O’Brien and Lee should have triggered their right to buy, a right guaranteed by the District’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA).

But it didn’t. Somehow, the transaction didn’t qualify as a ‘sale’ under the terms of TOPA. The tenants hired an attorney to challenge the move, arguing that they hadn’t been given a legal opportunity to purchase. After a two-year legal battle, the tenants lost. “Our lawyer said, ‘That’s that. We lost the case. We have to move,’” says Carlos Baruca. Carlos; his wife, Carmen Baruca; and their three children were bumped from their two-bedroom apartment, eventually accepting $2,500 for their troubles, says Carlos. The Barucas were able to find an apartment in the neighborhood; other tenants, says Carmen, moved to Prince George’s County. “I miss the building,” she says, “I miss the people.”

The tenants at 2351 Champlain had been outfoxed by a savvy owner and buyer — and an even savvier lawyer. To consummate the sale, O’Brien had hired Richard W. Luchs of the D.C. firm Greenstein DeLorme & Luchs. With Luchs handling the paperwork, the arrangement sailed through the offices of the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA), the agency entrusted with enforcing TOPA. As long as the transaction didn’t convey 100 percent of the property, according to the agency, the tenants were out in the cold.

Luchs, 54, was a wise choice. Real estate is in the man’s blood. Both his father and grandfather were District real-estate attorneys. And for more than two decades, he has found ways to keep tenants from buying a building or to clear them out of it — often both at once. Dozens of times since 1987, Luchs has assisted landlords in minimizing their obligations under TOPA, usually through a loophole that has come to be known as the “95/5” sale, in which a seller transfers around 95 percent of a property and retains the remainder. For years, the city interpreted such transactions to be something other than a “sale,” thus depriving tenants of their right to buy. In many cases, the “sale” was to a developer who could then pay off the required number of tenants to facilitate a lucrative condo conversion.

Luchs’ productivity in this arcane yet highly profitable segment of real-estate law has fundamentally altered the course of one of the grand social experiments of the District’s home-rule era — that is, the ideal that tenants should have the opportunity to buy their building when it comes up for sale.

The Champlain Street case is one of the first-known instances of a group of tenants challenging a sale involving Luchs. Thanks to the attention it garnered among D.C. tenant activists, though, it wouldn’t be the last.

Recent transactions involving Luchs’ clients have caught the attention of officialdom. The most feared landlord’s attorney in the District has come under scrutiny in at least three investigations focusing on various efforts to empty buildings or push through sales without first offering buildings to tenants.

In August 2005, the DCRA launched a recently concluded probe into whether Luchs and his clients had evaded TOPA in connection with a massive deal to wring greater revenues out of 11 District buildings. And in December, Luchs was subpoenaed to testify before the Committee on Consumer and Regulatory Affairs in connection with another investigation, headed by Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham. The DCRA is separately investigating the same deal that led to the council probe.

Regardless of what the investigations turn up, Luchs’ line of work has left him with some determined detractors. In 2001, Luchs was asked to help the Adams Morgan advisory neighborhood commission wage a liquor-license battle against an area business; the attorney even did some of the work on a pro bono basis. “Somewhere out there, there’s a letter with my name on it thanking Luchs for his service” in the liquor fight, says Bryan Weaver, a member of the commission. “That was before I learned he was a bloodsucking scumbag.”

For years, Luchs conducted his business in what can only be characterized as a favorable regulatory climate. A DCRA bureaucrat named Linda Harried — whose official title was housing regulation specialist — endorsed the 95/5 approach, allowing Luchs and other lawyers to draw up worry-free transactions for their clients. Harried’s approvals came swiftly, yielding the stable regulatory environment that business groups dream about.

Nor was the D.C. Council inclined to shake up the industry. From 1999 through 2004, DCRA oversight fell to Ward 6 Councilmember Sharon Ambrose, a cheerleader for gentrification and a friend to landlords. “[Ambrose] adopted an attitude that landlords can do no wrong in this city. They were almost a protected class,” says Jim McGrath, chairman of a local tenants’-rights organization called the Tenants’ Advocacy Coalition (TENAC).

The landscape changed in early January 2005. That’s when Graham, an old-school liberal, took over Ambrose’s spot atop the committee. The same month, Patrick Canavan, a fierce DCRA critic with a reformer’s reputation, took over as the agency’s director. An ideology heavy on tenants’ rights was on the rise.

Investigating the ways landlords were getting around TOPA was among Graham’s top priorities in his new council slot. “As soon as I got [the committee chairmanship], everywhere I looked, I saw Luchs’ name,” says Graham, who held hearings in February 2005 to look into the 95/5 sales. The hearings spawned some press coverage and an amendment later passed by the council clarifying that a sale is, in fact, a sale. Ambrose abstained — the only member not to vote in favor of closing the loophole.

The council’s action ended the decade-long heyday of the 95/5 transaction. Luchs says that the first such sale — which he was involved in — occurred in 1987 but that the practice didn’t really take off until 1994. Whatever its starting date, the loophole was a favorite of Luchs’. There are, says Graham, “possibly hundreds of buildings where he was involved in extinguishing tenant rights.”

Graham isn’t far off the mark. Between the summer of 1999 and the summer of 2004, the DCRA’s Harried issued at least 85 letters exempting a sale of a property from the tenant-purchase requirement. (There may be more, but DCRA files aren’t in the best shape.) Of those 85, 22 went to Luchs and 20 went to his law partner Vincent Policy.

The exemption letters add up to big money. A compilation and analysis of the approvals, done by tenant advocate and economist Kevin Fitzgerald, assess the value of all the properties at more than $340 million. The value of the buildings owned by clients of Luchs and Policy comes to nearly three-quarters of the total; Luchs’ portion alone clocks in at more than $170 million.

Most of the exemption letters procured by Luchs related to decrepit buildings that housed immigrants and other folks with little political clout — just like the situation at 2351 Champlain. As long as Luchs stuck to those kinds of deals, he faced little public backlash. As the recently concluded real-estate boom wore on, however, prices rose and so did the profiles of the buildings that Luchs was after.

In 2004, Luchs took on the ultimate gentrification project: a complex sale and potential condo conversion that involved 11 properties clustered mainly around Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant. The deal was worth more than $80 million and involved such iconic D.C. buildings as the Park Plaza Apartments on Columbia Road NW and the Sarbin Towers on 16th Street NW.

To make the transfers, Luchs stretched the 95/5 loophole to its breaking point. He wrote to Harried that owners would be transferring 99.99 percent of each property, retaining 00.01 percent. In a DCRA land-speed record, Harried determined in three days that tenant protections didn’t apply to the sales. Just in case, the sale was explained to tenants as a “change in management.”

Tenants protested Harried’s hurried ruling, and in August 2005, the city jumped in on their side, launching an investigation into the legality of the sales. Luchs sued to nullify the city’s action, but a D.C. Superior Court judge tossed out his complaint.

The DCRA concluded its investigation of the $80 million deal and issued a ruling on Dec. 16. It found that the 99.99/00.01 sale was “consistent with a longstanding practice” Graham says he is “quite unhappy” with the finding and has told Canavan as much.

Luchs wasn’t so fortunate when he took on the 76-unit Embassy Apartments in Mt. Pleasant. His client, Harvard Limited Partnership, wanted to evict the tenants and convert the buildings to condos, relying on incomplete conversion paperwork filed in the early ’80s. In November 2004, residents were given 120-day notices to vacate. Tenants went to Graham and the DCRA, and the city issued a cease-and-desist order in April. When Luchs challenged the order in D.C. Superior Court, the attorney general defended the agency and Luchs’ challenge was defeated. The condo conversion has since been ruled invalid.

Graham is pleased that the bureaucracy has found a spine. “We determined we really had to make a forthright stand. The attorney general backed the tenants. This was a radical difference,” he says. “I think we have the makings of a new era.”

Housing has always been the trenches of the District’s ongoing class war — two sides pitted against each other, a political no-man’s land in between. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, tenants’ rights were in vogue, fueled by a growing black-power movement. In 1980, the council passed TOPA, one of the more far-reaching tenant-protection acts in the nation. Luchs has spent the bulk of his professional life battling that law.

And for good reason, as far as his clients are concerned. TOPA can place significant hurdles in front of someone who wants to buy or sell an occupied building. While it may seem that building owners wouldn’t care whether their money came from PN Hoffman or from a group of tenants, the reality is quite different. The law grants tenants time to form an association, vote on proposals, and seek financing — a process that can take up to 660 days, according to Raenelle Zapata, a former rent administrator at the DCRA.

As tenants go about weighing their options, various calamities can ruin the building’s marketability, including a simple cooling of the real-estate market. And at the end of the period, tenants can still turn around and sell their right-to-buy to a completely separate buyer. And for a variety of reasons, it’s a rare bunch of tenants that actually ends up buying the building. “Tenants, in reality, don’t buy buildings,” says Luchs. Instead, he says, they use their opportunity to purchase as a way to “extort” landlords into offering cash payments in exchange for their right.

For Luchs, it’s the district’s idealistic but poorly conceived laws that are the real cause of tenant misery. Where thought has been given to housing policy, says Luchs, it has been for the benefit of tenants only. “Everything I’ve seen over the last 30 years is: Put the burden on the housing provider [for] what is in essence a social policy … It’s a real Hobson’s choice,” he says.

The city itself, says Luchs, is now learning what it’s like to deal with hot property. “In Southeast,” where the baseball stadium is proposed to be built, “poor people will be bought out or forced out.” He suggests that, instead of promoting tenant buyouts, the city should “provide some mechanism whereby landlords could recover costs [of repairs and renovations] … The reality is developers are in business to make money. If they can’t, we’ll go back to the ’70s and ’80s, when rent control first came in” and a stream of rental units came off the market as landlords, restricted on the rent they could charge, sought to profit by selling the units.

Graham is unsympathetic to Luchs’ attempt to blame the laws for the unfortunate consequences that befall tenants in his path. Anyhow, says Graham, the council has closed Luchs’ favorite loophole, so there are now fewer laws to blame. “I’m glad we could relieve him of that moral burden,” says the councilmember.

A flaw in the blame-the-law defense is that Luchs and his partners have helped shape D.C. housing policy. Luchs is a registered and active lobbyist with the influential Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington (AOBA). Policy is also a powerful lobbyist. “These are the guys who wrote the laws,” says Graham.

Luchs’ firm has provided a lucrative pasture for retired government regulators. For instance, the bio of Abraham Greenstein says that the firm’s co-founder was “in charge of all of the City’s housing code enforcement, housing rehabilitation, and condominium and cooperative regulation programs.” Miriam Hellen Jones, an associate attorney, ran the District office in charge of condo and co-op conversions and sales from 1979 until 1983, and she also held high posts in the DCRA from 1991 to 1997.

Then there’s Byron Hallstead, the regulator who Luchs says approved the first 95/5 sale and now consults for his firm. Partner Richard Wise was a trial attorney with the D.C. Office of Corporation Counsel from 1972 until 1980. Policy was a member of the committee that advised the District of Columbia Rent Control Study in the ’80s. Lyle Blanchard, an associate attorney, worked as a staff member for two councilmembers, a role that his bio says included frequent involvement in tenant and housing-regulation issues.

“He has a very cozy relationship with the regulators,” says Graham of Luchs. Luchs readily admits that the DCRA can be a difficult agency to work with and that he benefits from his relationships. “If you don’t know the people, and you haven’t worked with them before, you’re in real trouble,” he says.

Graham is doing his best to keep the landlord lobby from getting around the intent of D.C. tenant protections. The first step, says the councilmember, was stopping the 95/5 sales. Then came changes on the personnel front. In April 2005, Harried, as Graham puts it, “was allowed to retire.” (She was unable to be located for this article.) Zapata, a high-level functionary who OK’d the DCRA’s 95/5 policies, was next to go, fired in late November. “There’s no more Raenelle Zapata, no more Linda Harried, no more 95/5,” says Graham, who seems to have made it his personal mission to bring down Luchs, a man he describes as a “key element in the effort to manipulate TOPA and rob tenants.”

The allegations bounce off of Luchs. “Graham can say whatever he wants about me. I’m a fourth-generation Washingtonian. I’m not going to criticize these people on the council who came from other places and have their own opinions.” The out-of-towner comment is a swipe at the transplanted Graham, who, Luchs says, is on a political crusade to become council chair.

Though Luchs makes no apologies for his legal adventures, he does concede that they can inconvenience tenants. ‘”Nobody likes to evict somebody. You have to put their stuff on the streets, and other people might take it,” he says, adding that there are lockers that evicted people can use to store their belongings.

In the end, Luchs’ public-relations problems, he says, are mostly a matter of media bias. “The Washington Post is on the tenant-advocacy side,” he says. “It’s more interesting to color someone as a villain.”

Luchs has emerged as tenants’ Class Enemy No. 1 largely because of the clients he represents — but also because of the ruthless way he represents them. “I have gotten exercised. I’ll readily admit that,” he says.

In March 2005, Kim Fahrenholz, then a third-year law student at the University of the District of Columbia, saw the litigator exercised. She had previously heard of him through his role as the attorney for owners attempting to sell her building without giving tenants the right of first refusal. It was all part of Luchs’ $80 million deal. On June 30, 2004, 99.99 percent of her Mount Pleasant building was transferred from Park Plaza Apartments LLC to Park Plaza Apartments II LLC.

In early 2005, while Fahrenholz and fellow tenants fought the sale of the building, she decided to challenge her rent as well. She had discovered that the DCRA did not have on file the proper paperwork for her past rent increases. She filed a tenant petition demanding a rebate for every month she had overpaid, plus triple damages because her landlord had acted in “bad faith,” she says.

At least for the rebate, Fahrenholz thought she had an open-and-shut case. She didn’t think her landlord, embroiled in a legal battle over the sale of the building, would bother to put up much of a fight. “I was like, They wouldn’t pay Richard Luchs, a $500-an-hour attorney, to fight against me,’” she says. But Luchs, who says he charges $340 per hour, doesn’t fight just the big battles. “I got [to the hearing], and there he was,” she says. “I was like, Damn, it’s Mr. 95/5 himself.”

It didn’t take long for the administrative hearing to heat up. Luchs pulled several documents out of his briefcase and entered them into evidence as the proper paperwork needed for the rent increases. Fahrenholz objected, saying that the documents were not in the DCRA’s records. She explicitly questioned their authenticity and, by implication, Luchs’ integrity. She says that stamped DCRA documents not in the agency’s files conveniently materializing at the hearing raised questions for her. Hearing Officer Gerald Roper also expressed skepticism. “This registration form, or amended registration form, does not give the rent charged,” he said. “I don’t know why. It looks like it was altered.”

Luchs countered that the registration form did not technically need the missing information, but Roper didn’t seem convinced. “I’ve been doing this long enough to know that an amended registration always has the rent ceiling and the rent charged on them. This does not have them on it,” he said to Luchs.

Roper called a recess so that the DCRA’s hard-copy files could be searched for the documents Luchs was presenting. When they didn’t turn up and Fahrenholz continued to question the authenticity of the documents, Luchs issued a direct threat. “I’ll deal with her law school on this,” he said.

And Luchs did. After the hearing, he called Fahrenholz’s adviser, Ed Allen, furious that his integrity had been called into question. According to a letter from Allen to Fahrenholz, Luchs threatened to go to the bar’s admissions committee and “yell and scream.” Fahrenholz called the bar herself to find out what damage Luchs could do and was reassured, she says, that Luchs could not block her admission.

Luchs remembers the confrontation and confirms that he reported what he considered to be her “unethical conduct” to Allen. Roper has yet to rule on the case.

In early October 2005, residents of two apartment buildings on Vernon Street NW, in Adams Morgan, found fliers posted on their doors instructing them to set up a meeting with a “representative” of the landlord to discuss “issues related to the condition of the building.” Kendall Golladay, a tenant since 1998, scheduled his meeting. “I was expecting the men in black to show up and give a lawyerly spiel,” he says, not fooled by the fliers’ (technically accurate) promise to discuss building conditions. Instead, the shakedown was disappointingly low-budget. “It was just some guy,” he says.

The guy, who called himself only “Bill,” handed Golladay a copy of a letter written by Raenelle Zapata approving a request to evacuate tenants from the building within 120 days. He then handed him a form labeled across the top: NOTICE TO VACATE. In reality, the form was not a notice but an agreement that he would voluntarily vacate his apartment. If he signed on the spot, he’d be given a check for $500; Bill already had one made out in Golladay’s name. Golladay would receive another $500 when the entire building was cleared. He refused the offer, as did all but five tenants in the four buildings Bill would visit.

“The purpose of that flier was to trick the tenants out of their rights,” says Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Alan Roth, who lives across from the buildings.

Zapata’s letter was based on a previously obscure provision of D.C. law. Section 501(f) of the housing code allows a landlord to clear out a building for substantial repairs if those repairs can’t be made safely with tenants still in the building. In principle, the idea is a sound one. If major repairs are absolutely necessary and can’t be done with tenants in the building, landlords need a way to temporarily empty the building for everyone’s safety and benefit. Safeguards are written into the law that guarantee tenants an “absolute right” to return to the building once repairs are done and to do so at the same rent if the repairs were made to get a building up to code through no fault of the tenant. In practice, though, the provision is rarely used as intended. It’s not in a landlord’s interest to empty a building of paying renters, pay to make repairs, and then invite the same people back in at the same rent. However, it does make financial sense to empty a building and improve it, then convert it to condos, rent it at a higher rate, or sell the building.

TENAC’s McGrath says more and more tenants have been coming to his group with 120-day 501(f) notices to leave their buildings. “It’s a sham process,” he says. “There’s nothing more permanent than temporary removal.” The misuse of 501(f) is considered to be a particularly egregious abuse of tenants’ rights because it encourages landlords to allow buildings to run down so that they can claim they need substantial work. Not only do tenants get evicted, but they also live in a steadily crumbling building for a long time beforehand.

The DCRA reports four 501(f) cases in 2003 and just three in 2004. That number jumped to 13 in 2005, with Richard Luchs’ name on nine of the applications. Tenant advocates and Graham figured they had found the latest Luchs loophole. “I recognized immediately this was a new variety of mischief,” says Graham, though Luchs says he helped a client with a 501(f) petition as many as four years ago. Graham called hearings again, meeting twice in November, and passed emergency legislation to close the loophole last month.

But Graham wanted more. He subpoenaed Luchs, who had twice ignored nonbinding requests to testify, as well as three other individuals. The parties gathered for a nine-hour hearing on Dec. 21. This time, the session was more than the standard wonkfest on Channel 13; it was part of an official investigation.

The ongoing investigation focuses on four buildings — the two Vernon Street buildings plus one on T Street NW and another on 16th Street NE. The stipulated facts: Jackson Parker transferred 50 percent of each of these buildings to Perseus Realty, a D.C. firm that specializes in upscale development. In exchange for the share, Perseus would be responsible for the management of the buildings and some capital improvements. Attorney Mark Jackson arranged the transaction, then suggested Perseus work with Greenstein DeLorme & Luchs for its next move. Graham asked Jackson at the hearing why he recommended the firm. “I don’t evict tenants,” Jackson said.

When tenants of the buildings in question were given notices to vacate, the “Bill” character who approached them with $1,000 go-away offers was Bill Salmon, who was working for Perseus. Very few of the tenants took the offer — and that’s about all that the parties agree on.

John “Woody” Bolton, a Perseus owner, claimed in the hearing that nothing shady was going on. He testified that Parker transferred the share to Perseus because Parker, who was ill and no longer able to properly manage the buildings, had become embarrassed by their “horrid conditions.” The 501(f) filing was necessary because there are significant structural, lead, and asbestos problems at the buildings, said Bolton, who added that all Perseus wanted to do was help the tenants. Once repairs were finished, Bolton claimed, he’d be happy to allow the tenants to return at the same rent. At the hearing, he lost his temper at one point, loudly scolding Graham for pushing the anti-501(f) legislation, which he said was preventing him from making needed improvements.

Parker, who was not subpoenaed because he is living in Florida with terminal cancer, echoes Bolton’s story and dismisses Graham’s “gentrification nonsense.” Parker says he has no problem allowing tenants to move back into the building after it’s renovated to “Watergate-quality.” He says, though, that most of them will either decide not to move back or can be convinced with cash payments not to. Those who declined the initial $1,000 payments can be bought out for more, he says; those who can’t be bought out at all will be welcomed back at a loss. Parker argues that the units could be sold for $340,000 to $350,000 as condos, or rented at a higher rate if vacant.

Graham has his own hunch about what happened: There was concern, as Jackson testified — and as Parker confirmed in an interview — that the buildings were “underperforming.” In order to get them to perform, Parker brought in Perseus and its development expertise. A window into Perseus’ plans for the buildings emerged from Bill Salmon’s contract with the company, which promises him payment and a stake in the properties if his work “facilitates the redevelopment of the Property.” Before the buildings could be redeveloped, they had to be cleared of low-riding tenants, Graham theorizes. So Perseus went to the master, Richard Luchs, who had an idea: commission reports that show the buildings need repairs for lead, asbestos, structural decay, or whatever, and have Zapata approve the 120-day notices. Take a year or two to redevelop the buildings, and the tenants won’t come back. Checkmate: four new, empty, market-rate buildings.

At the Dec. 21 hearing, Stan Jackson, a Vernon Street resident manager who followed Salmon around the building as he dished out his “Notice to Vacate” contracts, lent credence to Graham’s theory. “Personally, I figured they wouldn’t want the same people back,” he said. “If they got new tenants, they could get more money.”

The undercards finished, Graham moved on to his headline clash with Luchs. The councilmember, a former Georgetown adjunct law professor who once clerked for a retired Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, was ready with a stack of questions for the real-estate attorney. Graham’s strategy was to interrogate Luchs on the notice to vacate that Salmon had passed around; it was at the very crux of the building-clearing operation that Luchs was assisting. But Graham got nowhere with his inquiry, because Luchs denied writing the notice and liberally asserted attorney-client privilege. A flustered Graham sat with his stack of unasked questions hanging from his hand. He then understood what Luchs’ opponents have long known. “I never thought for a second he would deny drafting it,” Graham would later say.

The fate of the buildings is now in question, with both sides vowing to fight on. T Street’s tenant-association president, Nancy Miranda, has been active for years in attempting to get the management firm, Barac Co., to make repairs, and she took it to court in 2002 when her ceiling caved in on her daughter. “We know they have us in a bind. If we complain about conditions, they’ll clear the building. If we don’t, the building collapses,” she says.

Gene Analuwicz, a vice president at Barac, denies that his company intentionally allowed the building to deteriorate. “We were not apprised of the sale … We only know what we’ve read in the newspapers,” he says. “We couldn’t have let it deteriorate to facilitate a sale, since we didn’t know about the sale.”

Whether or not the Perseus deal comes out clean, Luchs & Co. may not have anticipated the level of scrutiny that’s now being applied to their 501(f) application. For starters, the survey reports that are used to back up the 501(f) claim are labeled as having been conducted on a building in Leesburg, Va. Some of the addresses of the buildings are wrong. At least one of the buildings’ floor plans is clearly wrong. And, according to an expert hired by Housing Counseling Services (HCS) to review the submissions, the lead and asbestos evidence cited in the Vernon and T Street surveys isn’t enough to warrant the evacuation of the building — whether in Leesburg or the District. The expert also found, according to HCS, that there was no need to empty them for purposes of structural repair. A preliminary survey by the DCRA came to the same conclusion.

The particulars of certain other Luchs transactions also wither under prying eyes. Early last year, Luchs assisted in the preparation of a 501(f) application for a Mount Pleasant building. The building’s owner, the Newton Partners, cited evidence that the building needed to be emptied for repairs. The evidence was supplied by an inspection company owned by the same person who owns Newton Partners.

In February 2005, Luchs’ client Horizon Properties submitted a 501(f) application to clear out and renovate the 13th Place Apartments. But on the blueprints submitted along with the application, the property is erroneously — if tellingly — referred to as 13th Place Condominiums.

Tenants insist the slip-up was Freudian. The purpose of the 501(f) application, they say, was to get them out so the buildings could be sold and converted to condos. Horizon’s website is also fairly clear about the potential the company sees in the buildings:

Description: Built in 1939, this 64-unit complex was purchased in 2004 as a repositioning target. Despite its deteriorated physical condition, the attractive location gives way to significant yield opportunities through substantial rehabilitation or condominium conversion.

After a long battle of attrition, only 11 units are currently left occupied. Attorney Elizabeth Figueroa, representing the holdouts, says that the existence of two separate buildings neatly allows the owners to make any repairs they want, while moving the tenants between the two. Instead, the owners are allowing dozens of affordable units to sit vacant. She says Horizon has told her that moving tenants from one to the other would not be “economical.” Horizon declined to comment.

Asked about Horizon’s 501(f) application, Canavan and the new rent administrator, Keith Anderson, said they were unfamiliar with it. Canavan said he would look into the filing when told about the website and the blueprints labeled “Condominiums.” The questionable application will likely become part of Graham’s ongoing investigation, which shows no signs of slowing.

Luchs isn’t slowing, either. “My grandfather died in the saddle, my father died in the saddle, and I plan to die in the saddle,” he says.

#

NEWS STORY SHORT FORM

SMALL

The Material Curl

by Dave Maass

Kinky’s mini-mercenaries came from China, arriving in Texas on 20-foot pallets like grunts on the beaches of Normandy. They are a 12,000-strong Judeo-Hick action-figure army, ready for deployment at $30 apiece. Each doll is a foot tall, molded from cheap plastics, torso stuffed with integrated-circuit organs, and a 25-catchphrase arsenal that spews forth from a washboard belly. Batteries included.

The Kinky Friedman gubernatorial campaign invested $45,000 in the dolls. So far, they’ve sold 10,000. Do the math: that’s $255,000 in profit.

Yes, profit. E-commerce fuels his campaign: online merchandise with a 200-percent markup. In the first half of the year, the Kinky “store” generated more than $515,000 for the campaign, and several hundred thousand more since, $200,000 in September alone. “That’s basically paid our overhead since day one,” said Kinky’s campaign manager Dean Barkley, who was part of the successful push to get another third-tier celebrity, Jesse “The Body” Ventura elected governor in Minnesota.

“Obviously it’s tailored after, I would say, rock ’n’ roll or country-western merchandise,” he said. “That’s the background Kinky’s come from; the band scene and the merchandising that goes on there, with T-shirts and albums and everything else.”

He added, “Whatever we thought would sell, we marketed it. And we’ve done a dang good job.”

Any response, Kinky Doll?

Kinky Doll: Kinky’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

And that’s all Perry left me-e-e. We get it, though Kinky’s campaign-finance report didn’t show a pay-out to Kris Kristofferson through ASCAP.

For the moment, we’re done shrieking about contributions, who took how much from whom. It’s time to look at how they spent it this year. As of September 28, Perry dropped more than $500,000 on private charter flights. Chris Bell sponsored the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign for $800. Grandma Strayhorn bought herself several dozen turkey-sandwich box lunches at Apple Annie’s in Austin.

Kinky’s the most interesting of all. In July, he was third in both contributions and expenditures, but comparing the size of Kinky’s campaign-finance reports to, say, Strayhorn’s, is like comparing “Gravity’s Rainbow” to “The Crying of Lot 49.” Some of the largest and most numerous expenses were for merch: That’s where they getcha.

The Kinky Friedman franchise existed long before he threw his Stetson into the ring. The campaign strategy has been to turbo-inject his established merchandise system with hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars. Kinky paid his label Sphincter Records (owned by collaborator Little Jewford) 60 G’s for CDs, DVDs, and labor. From January to September, he gave his signature salsa distributors about $200,000 to handle his distribution. He bought $400 worth of cowboy gear from his ex-college-roommate’s outfitters in Houston. (But not his stogies. “I don’t know where he gets his Cuban cigars, and I don’t ask,” Barkley said).

It’s a perpetual-motion device — the more merchandise he sells, the bigger he becomes, and the bigger he becomes, the higher the demand for his merchandise. Hell, collectible dealers are already hawking the Kinky Doll on eBay for as much as $56 a pop. (Of course, the buyers are morons who don’t know that the campaign’s website’s currently running a $10-off clearance special).

In other words, you could say it’s the products that sell the man, and it doesn’t matter what came first, man or merch, chicken or egg. When the campaign’s over, win or lose, Kinky will land sunny side up. Care to explain, Kinky Doll?

Kinky Doll: Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love will make him wag his tail.

If Kinky loses, he’s not going to leave with his tail between his legs. Although his standard response is that he’ll retire in a “petulant snit,” that’s not exactly true. He’s working on an album, and five days after Texans go to the polls, he kicks off the promotional tour for his new book, “The Christmas Pig,” about a mute, clairvoyant, idiot-savant, nativity-scene-painter’s friendship with a talking pig.

Some folks would see that as a bit inappropriate and not just because he’s Texas’s most famous Jew (Yes, Kyle, it can be fun to be a Jew on Christmas). That explains why, unlike his music, Kinky’s been very careful to keep his literary sales completely separate from his campaign. Kinky Doll, do you think your supporters will buy your book, or feel exploited as a market?

Kinky Doll: I’m running for governor, not God.

That’s not exactly true, either.

“One of the things we’re talking to him about is doing a book called ‘What Would Kinky Do?’ and just have him talk about all the hot issues of the day with his inimitable answers,” Kinky’s nonfiction editor at St. Martin’s Press, Diane Reverand said. She’s also very adamant that the campaign is not an elaborate publicity stunt; he’s genuine about winning and they aren’t yet planning for a campaign memoir.

Nevertheless, with a late release for the novel, his fiction publisher Simon & Schuster barely mentions his detective novels and is selling “The Christmas Pig” on Kinky’s maverick politician image. He’s a hot property now, Reverand said.

“His core market for his fiction is there, and they’ll read anything he writes, they’re so devoted,” Reverand said. “But once he decided to run for office he became really a national figure and people who had never been exposed to him are suddenly seeing him interview on ‘60 Minutes’ or they’re reading a seven-page profile of him in The New Yorker, and they’re captivated and fascinated.”

Can you comment, Kinky Doll, on any of this, or your seven MySpace pages?

Kinky Doll: I don’t know how many supporters I have, but they all carry guns.

Dave Maass: Are you threatening me? Come back when you’ve got a Guy Juke tee-pee for my bunghole.

#

Tommy Pitches a Tent

by Dave Maass

Among the citizenry of Phoenix, Arizona, there are only two sentiments for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio: you either love the tough son of a bitch or loathe the sick bastard, and there ain’t nothing in between. Dubbed “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Arpaio’s brought back the chain gang, installed webcams in jail intake, and forced inmates to wear pink underwear and eat green bologna. He’s best known, though, for his outdoor tent jail with a neon “Vacancy” sign hung from the overlooking watchtower.

Back in early November, Bexar County Commish Tommy Adkisson took a long detour from his road to re-election to visit Arpaio’s “Tent City” at Estrella Jail. It’s a magical place where inmates, wrapped in intentionally humiliating pink thermals under robber-striped scrubs, can bask in the sun from their bunks in 25-man tents, saving taxpayers millions and millions of dollars. That week, Bexar County’s jails were operating at 97.5 percent of their capacity, making the county the third-most-crowded jail system in Texas among counties with more than 1,000 detainees.

Adkisson’s opponent, Larry Click, and the Express-News speculated that Adkisson’s interest in tent jails was a tough-on-crime gimmick, and doomed to failure because of two major obstacles: a state law banning all but temporary tent jails, and the Bexar County Sheriff’s office, which hates the idea.

Rather than petering out now that Adkisson has been re-elected, the tent-jail idea is still rolling along. Representative Phil King, a legislator from Parker County, has pre-filed a bill to allow the Texas Commission on Jail Standards to approve permanent tent jails. The idea, according to one of King’s aides, is further bolstered by Cameron County’s recent approval of its own $15,000-$20,000 tent facility to house 48 inmates.

For Adkisson, tent jails are first and foremost a tax-payer relief measure. Inmates currently cost the county $40 a day; with a population hovering at 4,000 that’s $58 million annually, excluding medical expenses. Tent jails wouldn’t necessarily reduce the daily expense, but instead save the county from building costly new brick-and-mortar jails.

The lobby of Arpaio’s Estrella Jail has a poster that tells visitors not to complain about the conditions, and instead think about our soldiers in Iraq, followed by images of fully geared soldiers sleeping under trucks or in grave-like foxholes. Phoenix’s incredibly mild winter weather makes Tent City preferable to the accompanying indoor facility, according to a jail tour guide. And indeed it is a choice: an inmate can choose to live in fresh-air tents and join a work scheme, or else live indoors.

Estrella jail administrators have no qualms about escorting visitors directly through the middle of the three male units, which houses 800 inmates, and the 200-inmate female unit. The inmates walk freely between their tents and the indoor dayroom, where they can eat, shower, and store their personal effects in lockers; guards watch from the safety of surveillance towers.

Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union take issue with this portrayal, claiming Tent City doesn’t meet human-rights standards, particularly in terms of inmate safety, vermin infestation, and temperature control (inmates may not prefer the tents during the 110-degree-plus summers). Nevertheless, the facility enjoys widespread support in Phoenix, and helped Arpaio win multiple re-elections.

Adkisson’s selling his idea with contradictory pitches. On one hand, he denounces our current jails as luxury resorts for criminals for whom incarceration is calculated into the cost of doing business.

Adkisson’s catchphrase (repeated half a dozen times during our interview): “Six to 10 percent of our jail population, which is about 400 inmates, go [to jail] for three square meals, air conditioning, color-cable television, and medical attention in a secured setting.”

He added: “I think the lower-echelon criminals that go into a tent jail may have a very sober moment to reflect on what they’re doing and say, you know, this really sucks.”

On the other hand, Adkisson claims inmates actually love Arpaio’s Tent City, going so far as to suggest that female inmates think to themselves that the sheriff is “the father we missed having when we were raised.”

The Bexar County Sheriff’s jail administrator, Deputy Chief Dennis McKnight isn’t having it. A switch to tents, he says, would require renegotiation of employee contracts, and represents a significant decrease in detainee safety. Besides, he asks, where the hell would they put the thing?

“We’re not in the punishment business here, for the most part,” McKnight said. “We’re in the ministering business, which means we take care of them, protect them, keep them in good shape.”

McKnight say there are too many pre-trial detainees and probationers in his jail. He’d like to see the time between arrest and court appearance cut from seven days to one, and judges should use other tools at their disposal. For example, electronic monitoring: Although the Sheriff’s office has 60 devices, only 29 are currently being used.

Adkisson and McKnight agree the real problem lies in our judicial system, in which judges are elected rather than appointed.

“I understand that judges have to have the appearance, at least the public persona, of being law-and-order minded, because if they don’t they’re not going to get re-elected,” McKnight said. “The citizenry generally says put the bad guy in jail and keep him there, get him off my street. So at this point what do they do? They put him in my jail.”

Adkisson describes the public mindset more explicitly:

“‘Lock and Sock’ is what Texas is famous for. Just throw ’em in jail. Jail ’em! We love jail. It’s right up there near sex. We just loooove jail. We LOVE it. Because you know what? Out of sight is out of mind.”

If Sheriff Ralph Lopez’s office continues to oppose permanent tent jails, Adkisson says he hopes Adult Probation Chief Bill Fitzgerald, who also visited Tent City, will pick up the cause. A probation facility may allow them to bypass the Commission on Jail Standards.

McKnight would be happy with that.

“I’ve long said you can build whatever kind of facility you want for probationers, and I have suggested we build [live-in] facilities for probationers because it’s cheaper, it’s more efficient, and the taxpayer gets more for his buck,” McKnight said. Judges may even order offenders to pay their own way as a condition of probation, he says.

Fitzgerald’s office opened a new drug-treatment facility on Tuesday, but when the Current called the idea of a tent facility was news to them.

Fun Fact

Statistically speaking, as of November 1, the Karnes County Jail was the most overcrowded in the state, operating at 125 percent of its capacity. It held 15 instead of the 12 detainees it’s designed for. “I think that night we had a few drunks sleeping it off,” said one Karnes County Sheriff’s employee.

#

Is No MySpace Sacred?

by Dave Maass

It ain't easy being against the death penalty. The Governor-writing, the cross-country journeys, the heartbreak and frustration, and threatening phone calls — all just to keep a human being alive. Now anti-death-penalty activists are facing the threat of their own deletion from the system.

By system, I mean , the social-networking site that has added a whole new layer of communication and interconnection to modern society. Two months ago, Andy Kahan, the Houston Mayor's director of Crime-Victim Services, logged on to MySpace to hunt for villains. He struck gold: MySpace hosted profiles and blogs supposedly for serial killers Richard "Night Stalker" Ramirez and David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz, mass murderers Charles Manson and his female disciples Squeaky Fromme and Susan Atkins.

"I just figured 'where there's one, there's others — OK, let's see how many Texas inmates we find,'" Kahan explained.

He found at least 30 Texas death-row inmates with MySpace profiles, and with that, he decided to pull the train whistle and unload the media circus. He fed the list to the Houson FOX-owned station and next thing you know, a one-sided shock piece was smeared across the country proclaiming that America's children were at risk of seduction by Texas's vilest killers.

"For the life of me, as much as I'm a firm believer in the First Amendment and free speech, I think you've got to draw the line somewhere," Kahan told FOX Investigates reporter Carolyn Canville.

Once FOX took his bait, Kahan decided to act. He MySpace-messaged the ubiquitous "Tom," MySpace buddy-to-all, demanding that the company "disavow themselves from being a public forum for some of the most heinous, despicable, and diabolical killers of our time."

Kahan says the line should be drawn at death-row inmates. But Texas inmates don't have direct access to the internet. In actuality, he's pushing for MySpace to cut off the anti-death-penalty activists who are responsible for the pages.

Earlier this year, surpassed as the most visited site on the net, reflecting its expansion from a simple friend and dating site to the primary point of contact for almost everything: bands, films, political campaigns, local nightclubs, even the Marine Corps. There are just as many fan and spoof pages for every possible subject, from Nancy Pelosi to dill pickles. And indeed criminals.

The anti-death-penalty message is strongest when the individuals facing death are humanized for the public, says Danielle, who manages two MySpace pages for death-row inmates, and asked to remain anonymous to protect her employer. Danielle says the main reason she supports "Sarge" Cleve Foster's page is to spread the word about his innocence claim in the 2002 rape and murder of a 28-year-old woman.

"We're not fan clubs, we're not groupies," says Danielle, who lives near the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, which houses Texas's death row. "For [Sarge's] birthday, people were leaving 'Happy Birthday' [comments] for him, and I sent him those ... I prefer to look at it as an anti-death-penalty activist page."

While many inmates also have individual web pages, MySpace's popularity makes it a vital resource for directing traffic to the sites.

"If I've got a sister site on MySpace, people that may not have heard of the main domain will see it ... It's almost the same thing as if your website comes up in a search engine or not," says Jennie, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid harassment. She operates a MySpace page [anarchy_in_chains] and a website [] for Texas death-row inmate Steven Woods to bring attention to the conditions on death row and last month's inmate hunger strike. "Our main visitors come from MySpace. They may be like, 'Oh I was just going through my friend's list and I happened to see this and it really touched me, and I never realized the death penalty was like this.'"

Kahan and FOX paint the pages almost as dating avenues, and the activists who run the pages do forward messages to the inmates and post prisoners' writings in their MySpace blogs. However, Danielle's page for Mark Stroman, who admits to killing a South Asian convenience-store clerk after September 11, is designed to help him get in touch with people who knew him before he was incarcerated. Jennie estimates she mails printouts from the profile to Woods as often as twice week.

"As much as people want to say it's hurting the victims, MySpace is also a bridge to the loved ones of these men, too," Jennie says, and that's how Woods's mother was able to re-enter his life. "She was so hurt by his situation, but now she writes him all the time. It was a stepping stone to get back into his life."

Kahan has a history of persecuting anti-death-penalty activists in the name of "victim rights." In 1999, Kahan successfully lobbied the Texas legislature to pass the "Notoriety for Profit" law, banning inmates from selling personalized items for profit. He also spearheaded a national campaign to pressure to ban "murderbilia" from its auction site, and his efforts earned him the Ronald Wilson Reagan Award from the national Office for Victims of Crime. It's all right and righteous on the surface: of course it's abhorrent when serial killers sell autographs or bits of hair for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. It's immoral. But that's not how Kahan's used the law.

In 2005, Kahan attacked the Texas Moratorium Network's annual art exhibition of death-penalty-inspired artworks by professional artists and inmates. The Austin Chronicle described the event as "a must for anyone with strong feelings, mixed feelings, or even few feelings on the death penalty." Kahan emailed the organizer, Scott Cobb, several times inquiring whether they were selling art by inmates. The gallery was eventually investigated by Austin police for breaking the "Notoriety for Profit" law.

Gallery Lombardi did indeed sell a drawing of a cross by an inmate for $50 — to a nun. The money went to the Network, not the inmate.

Kahan's and FOX's current attack on MySpace isn't just frivolous, but fraught with distortion and disinformation. For example, Kahan says "very few" of these death-row-inmate pages identify themselves as such. This is patently false. Both Kahan and FOX claim MySpace is primarily for young people, and that's why hosting these pages is dangerous. But according to statistics released by the company's Vice President of Marketing, Jamie Kantrowitz, speaking in London in April, 78 percent of the 80 million MySpace users are between the ages of 18 and 40. MySpace's terms of agreement bar anyone under the age of 14 from joining.

As an additional precaution, many activists filter out minors.

"We have gone through and made sure that there is no one under the age 18 [on their buddy lists]," Danielle says. "The main people I have on my pages are Christians who are anti-death-penalty. I'm sure there are groupies out there, but if I know about them, I block them."

Following the media reports (AP jumped on it as well), activists have also begun setting the pages to "private" status to address Kahan's concerns. This status requires the site manager to approve users before they are able to view the full pages. Others, including Jennie, have edited the texts of the profiles to clarify that they're activist rather than personal.

MySpace's official response to Kahan and FOX's demands was "Unless you violate the terms of service or break the law, we don't step in the middle of free expression. There's a lot on our site we don't approve of in terms of taste or ideas, but it's not our role to be censors."

Kahan's not going to give up. It took two years to beat eBay, he said. He told FOX he'd consider lobbying for legislation.

That may not be necessary. FOX's parent company, News Corp., bought for $580 million in July 2005, and this week the company's chairman, Rupert Murdoch, gave in to pressure to cancel a two-part interview with O.J. Simpson to promote his kinda-confessional, “If I Did It.” Of course, in O.J.'s case, it wasn't news so much as it was promotion and profit, since he would've been interviewed by his publisher at ReganBooks, an imprint of FOX's sister publishing house, HarperCollins. Murdoch also cancelled the book's publication.

For me, as a journalist, there's another issue at stake. In the last year I have used MySpace as a first point of contact in about one-third of my articles, especially those involving the friends and family of death-row inmates. If Kahan's successful, it will not only sever a vital communication link, it will set an unacceptable precedent. My concern is there will be nothing to stop Kahan from harassing internet providers until they ban anti-death-penalty websites, and it will encourage other self-appointed morality police to petition MySpace to censor anything else controversial.

#

NEWS STORY SHORT FORM

LARGE

Heap Of Trouble

Downtown’s top landowner hauled away toxic buildings — without permits

by Jeffrey Anderson

When it comes to real estate, some laws seem to bother Richard Meruelo, the land banker and prolific campaign contributor who dumped more than $190,000 into Antonio Villaraigosa’s race for mayor last year.

Meruelo’s ascent to the rank of downtown’s largest private landowner is legend, right down to the quaint tale about his mother’s dress shop where he attended the proverbial School of Hard Knocks. Stories about his lavish spending in the mayoral election are rivaled by his seemingly prescient decision to snatch up property at Taylor Yards along the L.A. River — one step ahead of the school district, which was planning to build a school there and has been forced to invoke eminent domain.

Less is known about what Meruelo did with the toxic debris he removed last year from an industrial site at 1060 N. Vignes St., a property he bought in September. Or what will become of his four acres wedged between the County jail, California Drop Forge Inc., and Best Way Recycling Center, just beneath the elevated tracks of the Metro Gold Line.

Or why the Department of Building and Safety looked the other way for four months after discovering he tore down seven structures laced with asbestos, lead paint, PCBs and mercury — without a permit. “That’s not a trivial project,” says Stephen Masek, a certified asbestos consultant from Mission Viejo who gave a report on the toxic substances found on the site to Meruelo’s property managers, L.A. Alameda Group, last July. “It’s hard to imagine a demolition that big being done without permits in this day and age. You’d be violating so many laws and regulations.”

Last Friday, Building and Safety spokesman Robert Steinbach said, “We’re not into penalties. I don’t care who tore down the buildings. We have no recourse against them. Best we can do is force the owner to file a permit now.” On Tuesday, however, Dave Keim, chief of code enforcement for Building and Safety, struck a punitive tone: “I just heard about this yesterday. We undoubtedly will be issuing a notice of violation to [Meruelo] and will initiate enforcement procedures.”

Keim said the crackdown could range from a “scorched earth” action, which prevents Meruelo from developing the property for five years, to a referral to the City Attorney’s Office, which could prosecute the violation as either a misdemeanor or an infraction. The maximum penalty for a misdemeanor is six months in jail per violation, he said.

Michael Bustamante, a spokesman for Meruelo, said his client handled the demolition and removal of toxic materials on an “in-house” basis. He would not specify whether Meruelo’s crew was licensed, nor would he say where the toxic materials were taken. “The metal was sold for scrap,” he said. Bustamante said Meruelo is focused on removing soil contamination from the site, which was in industrial use for more than 80 years, according to a remedial-action plan filed with the L.A. County Fire Department on February 9. “It’s finally getting the attention it deserves,” he said. “Once it’s cleaned up it could be used for affordable housing.”

The site has a long history in manufacturing. Noise from the neighboring dropforge can be deafening. The remedial plan shows Fulton Engine Works operated a foundry there before 1905. Permits on file with Building and Safety show new structures being added periodically from 1912 to 1971. Houston-based Hydril Company, a manufacturer of oil-drilling products, occupied the site from 1940 until 1987, according to the historical Sanborn Maps. Activities included metal heat-treating, fabrication, machining, welding and painting. Bustamante says Hydril leased the land to the city from 1987 to 1999. Sources familiar with the property — whose location county records identify as 1000 Alhambra Ave. — say that Hydril turned away would-be renters such as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a Korean church, various trucking companies and Sheriff Lee Baca and Volunteers of America, who wanted to build a homeless shelter.

L.A. developer Stephen Zimmerman of ZDI Inc. also showed interest in the property some five years ago. He declined to share his environmental testing with the L.A. Weekly. However, a remedial plan on file with the Fire Department’s Health and Hazardous Materials Division shows that Smith-Emery GeoServices was hired in November 2000 to do an environmental site assessment. The company found concrete vaults, drains, sludge tanks, test pits and signs of two underground fuel-storage tanks, which, according to city records, were removed in 1987. In 2002, another company, Stechman Geoscience Inc., found the soil contained copper, lead, heavy oil, degraded diesel fuel and benzene compounds. (The Fire Department has now asked Meruelo to test for groundwater contamination, according to AEI Consultants, who prepared the remedial plan.)

Meruelo paid $3.6 million for the property on September 19, 2005, according to county records. A former caretaker recalls asking him what he planned to do with it and he replied, “I’m going to tear down the buildings and sit on it.”

By September 30, just 11 days after the deal was closed, the buildings came down — hauled off in a single heap, according to bystanders. “He was being a good neighbor by removing the buildings,” Bustamante says, noting vandalism and drug activity in the vacant warehouses. Building and Safety records state that in November, a nuisance-abatement inspector named John Cordin contacted a Meruelo representative and informed him of the requirement to obtain a demolition permit. Another call was placed in January, according to Keim, the chief of code enforcement. John Horrigan and John Durham of L.A. Alameda Group, Meruelo’s property managers, did not return calls for comment.

In addition to potential prosecution for failing to obtain demolition permits, Meruelo could be in trouble with state regulators. Reading from a report prepared on July 16 and provided to L.A. Alameda Group, consultant Stephen Masek says he found materials that require special handling: asbestos in vinyl tiles and the fireproofing of steel supports, lead paint on window frames and structural components, mercury in the thermostats, and PCBs in old fluorescent-lighting tubes.

“There’s three ways to get in trouble,” Masek says, “direct exposure to toxic substances, being held liable for contamination on a property, or violating laws or regulations.” Demolition of any building site with more than 1 percent of asbestos requires a 10-day notification of the regional Air Quality Management District, according to Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the AQMD’s South Coast office. Fines begin at $25,000 per day, Atwood says. As of Wednesday, the regional air-quality district had not been notified by Meruelo.

The California Occupational Safety and Health Administration also requires notification; the Los Angeles office could not confirm having received any from Meruelo. “They wouldn’t send us a notification if they didn’t bother to get a building permit,” said a Cal-OSHA representative on Tuesday. Masek says the city Fire Department asbestos-removal unit also needs to be notified. That unit did not respond to the L.A. Weekly’s calls for comment.

Leo Orellana, office manager at Specialized Environmental Inc., says that his company bid on the job at 1060 N. Vignes St. The company has done work for L.A. Alameda Group, Orellana said. “You pull the building permits and then call AQMD. We didn’t get that job in L.A. though.”

Masek, who provided a copy of his report to Specialized, noted that, “Not only does the demolition and removal company need to be licensed, its employees and supervisors have to be trained and certified.” Toxic material must be taken to a specially lined waste facility, he said, not a typical municipal dump.

Lisa Sarno, the mayor’s former deputy chief of staff when he was a councilman, who also served as caretaker of Council District 14 before Councilman Jose Huizar was elected in November, says her office was not consulted. “Antonio liked to keep a close eye on property development in his district, and even during the transition we worked closely with Building and Safety, especially on demolitions. They were instructed to notify us if there was historical significance to the property, a possibility of affordable housing or controversy related to development plans.”

#

Sex, Justice and the D.A.'s Office

Could a prosecutor’s affair with a stripper bring down a death-penalty conviction and Steve Cooley?

by Jeffrey Anderson

The 1982 murder trial of Adam Miranda and its aftermath played out like a particularly salacious episode of “Law & Order.” There was the key witness, a stripper named Donna Navarro, testifying against her former classmate, and the prosecutor, Curt Hazell, an ambitious young lawyer, who was the college roommate of future Los Angeles D.A. Steve Cooley. The prosecutor and the witness had an affair that produced a child and more than two decades’ worth of fodder for the downtown rumor mills. In the background was Cooley, who, 20 years later, faces questions about whether his good buddy’s affair with Navarro tainted the death-penalty case.

Ordinarily, what a prosecutor does on his own time is his business. But sex with anyone involved in a murder case, whether it be an informant, a juror or the government’s key witness, looks bad. It amounts to at least an appearance of impropriety. Even if the relationship began after the trial, death-penalty appeals often last decades. The defense has the right to know exactly when the prosecutor crossed the line — and whether the affair affected the case.

After more than 20 years, that inquiry is just getting under way in the case of People vs. Adam Miranda. Lawyers for Miranda did not learn about Hazell’s paternity — no secret within the D.A.’s Office — until May 19. The confirming letter from the D.A.’s Office, obtained by the L.A. Weekly, is but the most recent development marring the death-penalty conviction, which now rests on shakier ground than ever.

Hazell’s failure to turn over other potentially exculpatory evidence to defense lawyers has already led to lengthy state and federal court appeals. This recent revelation, which ends a two-decade cover-up, further threatens to overturn the case. Equally troubling is the taint of cronyism that comes with Cooley’s 2005 promotion of Hazell, one of his closest friends, to a top assistant in charge of capital crimes. Hazell, who, according to public records, lives with Special Assistant D.A. Patricia Doyle, another high-ranking officer, also oversees the head of the Public Integrity Division. It all comes as Cooley eyes a run for a third term in 2008.

“Hazell is protected at the highest level,” says a veteran prosecutor in the D.A.’s Office. “Prosecutors don’t like prosecutors having sex with witnesses. Especially not the prosecutors who run the office. You can’t trust them to correct this sort of behavior, and you can’t trust them not to punish anyone who comes forward and exposes it.”

Neither Cooley nor Hazell returned calls for comment. On Thursday, spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said Hazell has never hid the three-year relationship from his superiors, including Cooley. Neither did he hide that it led to the birth of his son. “Why should he? He didn’t do anything wrong,” Gibbons said, adding that the relationship began after the trial, and that Hazell has raised the child on his own. “That’s pretty damn commendable.”

Miranda was convicted of fatally shooting an Eagle Rock convenience-store clerk named Gary Black in 1980. At the 1982 trial, Hazell charged Miranda with the special circumstance that he had committed another murder, the stabbing of a drug dealer over a dispute about $10. An accomplice in the stabbing case testified against Miranda, who was sentenced to death.

What Miranda and his lawyers did not know, despite a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires prosecutors to disclose evidence that diminishes guilt, was that prosecutors had received a letter from an inmate named Larry Montez stating that Joseph Saucedo, the accomplice, admitted to doing the stabbing. Instead, the jury heard Saucedo finger Miranda, whose lawyers were unable to refute the damning witness testimony.

Miranda’s lawyers now plan to amend his appeal on grounds of witness tampering, undue influence and the failure of the D.A.’s Office to disclose the relationship between Hazell and Navarro, the witness in the shooting case. “If a prosecutor has a relationship with a witness, that has to be disclosed,” said defense attorney Kerry Bensinger. “It’s remarkable that we didn’t hear about this sooner.”

The truth surfaced in May, in the context of a civil-service grievance by veteran prosecutor James Bozajian, a three-term councilman from Calabasas and a board member of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys. Bozajian got crossways with Cooley’s front office in 2003, when he protested a performance evaluation given by Hazell.

In a May 17 memo to the Civil Service Commission, which the D.A.’s Office attempted to seal, Bozajian disclosed Hazell’s relationship with Navarro. According to sources in the D.A.’s Office, prosecutors have openly speculated about the matter for years. Despite persistent requests by defense lawyers for any information that could aid Miranda in his defense, the D.A.’s Office, and Hazell, have kept quiet.

Two days after Bozajian’s memo, however, on May 19, Lael Rubin, head deputy of the D.A.’s appellate division, wrote to Miranda’s lawyers, “Out of an abundance of caution, I want to inform you [that] after sentencing in the capital case, the trial prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Curt Hazell, had a relationship with Donna Navarro, a witness. Mr. Hazell and Ms. Navarro had a child who has been raised by Mr. Hazell.” Navarro, who later compiled a lengthy rap sheet of theft and drug-related crimes, died in 2002.

Despite Hazell’s claim that the relationship began after the trial, there are signs that a bond between the prosecutor and the mother of his child formed earlier. Court records state that Navarro was coming home from work one night in 1980 and happened upon the convenience store where Gary Black was murdered. She recognized Miranda, her former junior high school classmate, leaving the store with a gun in his hand. After Navarro testified against Miranda, in 1982, Hazell and executives from Atlantic Richfield Co. — owners of the convenience store — gave her a $25,000 reward, according to a news report. The reward, paid for by ARCO, allowed Navarro to move away from her neighborhood, where she feared for her life, Hazell told a reporter in the 1980s. “What she did was incredibly courageous,” he said, noting that neighborhood youths had made her life “absolute hell.” Court transcripts further show Hazell protecting Navarro from being harassed by refusing to reveal the club where she stripped.

Since Miranda was sentenced to death, Hazell has played a role in his appeals in both state and federal court. But the larger issue in the case has been the letter by Larry Montez, which was left buried in a prosecution file for 14 years, until a federal judge ordered that the file be turned over to the defense. In December 2000, Hazell swore under penalty of perjury that he had no recollection of the letter from the time he began prosecuting the case: “I have no reason to believe [the letter] was not provided to the defense.” However, on June 4, 2002, a judge concluded that defense lawyers never received the Montez letter.

In 2005, Cooley elevated Hazell to chairman of the office’s Special Circumstances Committee, which allows Hazell to sign off on all decisions about whether to seek the death penalty. He did not usher in an era of candor. Last September, in response to a public-records request by Bozajian for “all documents in the D.A.’s possession in connection with the Miranda case,” the D.A.’s Office stated it was “unable to locate” the file.

#

The Steve And Bob Show

Ex-D.A. Philibosian has a good friend in Cooley

by Jeffrey Anderson

Every criminal defendant needs a good lawyer. Better if the lawyer is a close personal friend of District Attorney Steve Cooley.

The benefits of such coziness are described in an 11-page memo by a former Los Angeles prosecutor who resigned over what he considered to be questionable backroom deals that Cooley’s pal Robert Philibosian cut with the D.A.’s Office.

Cooley and Philibosian go way back. When Philibosian was the district attorney in 1984, he tapped Cooley as the youngest head deputy in the office’s history; he campaigned for Cooley in 2000; he emceed Cooley’s inauguration and worked on his transition team. Philibosian and Cooley own property together at Lake Arrowhead.

So what was Philibosian, a partner at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, doing in the middle of the recent campaign-money-laundering conviction of power lawyer Pierce O’Donnell? Or the Newhall Land & Ranch Co. environmental-crimes investigation? Or the investigation into allegations of corruption in the city of Cudahy? Or the Venoco oil-well-emissions investigation at Beverly Hills High School?

Former Deputy District Attorney Matthew Monforton raised questions about Philibosian’s influence with Cooley in two memos sent to Cooley’s director of fraud and corruption prosecutions. He got nowhere. His February 2005 memo, obtained by the L.A. Weekly, came on the heels of criminal charges against O’Donnell. Monforton was outraged that the D.A.’s Office, despite objections from the Public Integrity Division, agreed to a request by O’Donnell’s lawyers to seal the criminal complaint. This allowed O’Donnell to finish a trial he was handling. “I am informed by sources I consider reliable that O’Donnell’s team recruited Philibosian, who successfully lobbied members of this [office] for just such an [agreement],” wrote Monforton, who later resigned in protest.

O’Donnell pleaded no contest in June — the same as a guilty plea — to five misdemeanor counts of making campaign contributions to former Mayor Jim Hahn under false names. He was fined $300,000 and banned from making political contributions and contracting with the city for three years. But he ducked a jail sentence. By contrast, former councilman Art Snyder pleaded guilty in 1997 to nine misdemeanor counts of money laundering and conspiracy; he served six months in jail and paid a $216,000 fine. O’Donnell was represented by Sacramento lawyer George O’Connell, but sources familiar with his prosecution say he benefited from Philibosian’s involvement in a plea bargain that spared him jail time.

On Tuesday, Deputy District Attorney Juliet Schmidt confirmed that Philibosian was one of three lawyers who negotiated the deal. Schmidt defended the plea agreement, and characterized Philibosian as a stealth presence. “I never saw [Philibosian] in court and his name is not on any court papers,” she said. “But the sentence was harsh and there was nothing done wrong.” Reached at his Sacramento office on Monday, O’Connell objected to questions about Philibosian. He would not talk about the role that Cooley’s friend played in the O’Donnell case: “I couldn’t talk about that.” When the L.A. Weekly contacted Philibosian’s office this week, his secretary confirmed Pierce O’Donnell as a client. Philibosian did not return calls for comment.

Cooley’s office would not respond to written questions about its dealings with Philibosian, but agreed to make lead prosecutors in various cases available at a later time for interviews, to describe their interaction with the influential defense attorney.

The D.A.’s Office has had ample opportunity to rectify the conflict posed by Philibosian’s friendship with Cooley, according to Monforton’s memo. In 2004, Monforton got riled over Sheppard Mullin’s representation of the city of Cudahy. The firm was hired in 2001 to deal with a grand-jury investigation into whether former Councilman George Perez violated state law when he stepped down and was immediately appointed city manager by his peers on the council; no charges were ever filed. Details about the firm’s hiring quickly overshadowed the allegations facing Perez and his colleagues. Former assistant city manager Aurora Martinez testified that the city was not properly advised about a retainer agreement that allowed Philibosian’s firm to jointly represent both the city and its council members, who were under investigation. In general, elected officials have their own lawyer when there are allegations of public corruption. Yet a similar arrangement in the South Gate political-corruption scandal later caused Philibosian’s firm to pay $2 million in damages to that beleaguered city.

Monforton’s 2005 memo states that in Cudahy, Sheppard Mullin fraudulently secured waivers from city officials then racked up $1 million in legal fees — a hefty tab for Cudahy residents. “A retainer agreement executed by Philibosian formed the basis of [the firm’s joint] representation,” Monforton wrote to Richard Doyle, director of the D.A.’s fraud and corruption prosecutions, and Lael Rubin, head deputy district attorney in the appellate division. Former head deputy district attorney George Palmer initially agreed with Monforton that the joint representation looked fishy and should be referred to the state attorney general, the memo states. But nothing was done.

Palmer, now retired, did not return calls for comment. But former veteran Los Angeles prosecutor Roderick Leonard, one of Monforton’s colleagues, recalls a failed attempt to disqualify Sheppard Mullin for not securing a valid waiver to represent both the city and its council members. After five years, the ruling still doesn’t sit right with Leonard, a statewide legal-ethics expert now in private practice.

The Monforton memo states that the D.A.’s Office rightly questioned the waiver by Cudahy council members of their right to separate legal representation, but that the office never challenged the city’s waiver of that right. State law requires that both parties to a potential conflict of interest knowingly waive their rights to separate counsel. After Los Angeles Judge David Wesley ruled against disqualifying Sheppard Mullin, the firm was free to represent the city, its employees and the council members, whose legal fees were paid with taxpayer money. In his memo, Monforton states that Sheppard Mullin deceived Wesley with “fraudulent misrepresentations.”

Leonard, who worked on the case, sees it differently, though he, too, questions the credibility of witnesses who testified that city officials knew what they were doing when they agreed to joint representation in a grand-jury investigation of Perez and the council members who appointed him city manager. “I have high regard for [Monforton] but I don’t know if there was fraud there. I do believe there was a conflict of interest. I have problems with the factual finding by the judge. I believe our witness was telling the truth and should be believed — as opposed to Sheppard Mullin’s witnesses. The city lost a huge amount of money. Sheppard Mullin ate into [the city’s] reserves.”

Monforton, who would not elaborate on his memo, points to documents he claims will show that “Sheppard Mullin attorneys knew they lacked the city’s consent [to joint representation] even as they declared the exact opposite under penalty of perjury.” He states that the council members had no right to legal representation at taxpayer expense, and that the retainer agreement, executed by Philibosian, violates state law. “Philibosian and the other Sheppard Mullin attorneys who used the retainer to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal fees, therefore, are also potentially culpable as either conspirators or aiders and abettors.”

Ties between Cooley and Philibosian become more troubling considering how many corruption cases Philibosian’s firm handles. In 2003, when investigator and activist Erin Brockovich and attorney Ed Masry sued Venoco and two dozen other oil companies for alleged hazardous emissions at Beverly Hills High School, the D.A.’s Office investigated for possible environmental crimes. Philibosian handled the matter, which resulted in no charges. In 2002, Sheppard Mullin partner Tom Brown was forced to stop representing the Entertainment Industry Development Corporation and its president, Cody Cluff, who later was convicted of embezzling public funds, when Brown disputed a decision by city and county officials to place Cluff on leave pending the investigation. What irked the officials was Brown’s placing Cluff’s interests above the publicly funded film agency’s.

In 2003, Deputy District Attorney Richard Sullivan was punished with a demeaning assignment for going public with concerns over the investigation of allegations of environmental crimes and perjury by the Newhall Land & Ranch Co. According to Monforton’s memo, Philibosian represented Newhall in the case. But when prosecutors, who suspected the company of lying about the presence of the endangered spineflower, sought a search warrant to obtain business records, Cooley blocked the effort and branded them “reckless and unethical,” according to the memo. No perjury investigation ever occurred. The company later paid a small fine.

A former veteran prosecutor in the D.A.’s Office, Sterling Norris, now the head of judicial monitoring in California for Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog, says Cooley and Philibosian have crossed the line. “Someone should declare a conflict,” says Norris, whose group is weighing a legal action on behalf of the city of Cudahy. “Cooley and Philibosian have been friends for years ... These guys are all in bed together. Cudahy officials were buying juice. They were buying Philibosian — with taxpayer money.”

#

PHOTOGRAPHY

SMALL

PHOTOGRAPHY

LARGE

SPECIAL SECTION

SMALL

SPECIAL SECTION

LARGE

WEBSITE CONTENT FEATURE

SMALL

WEBSITE CONTENT FEATURE

LARGE

WEBSITE DESIGN

SMALL

WEBSITE DESIGN

LARGE

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download