How the light gets out
Consciousness is the 'hard problem', the mystery that confounds science and philosophy. Has a new theory cracked it?
by Michael Graziano 3,400 words
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Illustration by Michael Marsicano
Illustration by Michael Marsicano
Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist, novelist and composer. He is a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. His latest book, Consciousness and the Social Brain, is out next month.
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Scientific talks can get a little dry, so I try to mix it up. I take out my giant hairy orangutan puppet, do some ventriloquism and quickly become entangled in an argument. I'll be explaining my theory about how the brain — a biological machine — generates consciousness. Kevin, the orangutan, starts heckling me. 'Yeah, well, I don't have a brain. But I'm still conscious. What does that do to your theory?'
Kevin is the perfect introduction. Intellectually, nobody is fooled: we all know that there's nothing inside. But everyone in the audience experiences an illusion of sentience emanating from his hairy head. The effect is automatic: being social animals, we project awareness onto the puppet. Indeed, part of the fun of ventriloquism is experiencing the illusion while knowing, on an intellectual level, that it isn't real.
Many thinkers have approached consciousness from a first-person vantage point, the kind of philosophical perspective according to which other people's minds seem essentially unknowable. And yet, as Kevin shows, we spend a lot of mental energy attributing consciousness to other things. We can't help it, and the fact that we can't help it ought to tell us something about what consciousness is and what it might be used for. If we evolved to recognise it in others – and to mistakenly attribute it to puppets, characters in stories, and cartoons on a screen — then, despite appearances, it really can't be sealed up within the privacy of our own heads.
Lately, the problem of consciousness has begun to catch on in neuroscience. How does a brain generate consciousness? In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that 'I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,' and so on. But how does a brain become aware of those propositions? The philosopher David Chalmers has claimed that the first question, how a brain computes information about itself and the surrounding world, is the 'easy' problem of consciousness. The second question, how a brain becomes aware of all that computed stuff, is the 'hard' problem.
I believe that the easy and the hard problems have gotten switched around. The sheer scale and complexity of the brain's vast computations makes the easy problem monumentally hard to figure out. How the brain attributes the property of awareness to itself is, by contrast, much easier. If nothing else, it would appear to be a more limited set of computations. In my laboratory at Princeton University, we are working on a specific theory of awareness and its basis in the brain. Our theory explains both the apparent awareness that we can attribute to Kevin and the direct, first-person perspective that we have on our own experience. And the easiest way to introduce it is to travel about half a billion years back in time.
In a period of rapid evolutionary expansion called the Cambrian Explosion, animal nervous systems acquired the ability to boost the most urgent incoming signals. Too much information comes in from the outside world to process it all equally, and it is useful to select the most salient data for deeper processing. Even insects and crustaceans have a basic version of this ability to focus on certain signals. Over time, though, it came under a more sophisticated kind of control — what is now called attention. Attention is a data-handling method, the brain's way of rationing its processing resources. It has been found and studied in a lot of different animals. Mammals and birds both have it, and they diverged from a common ancestor about 350 million years ago, so attention is probably at least that old.
Attention requires control. In the modern study of robotics there is something called control theory, and it teaches us that, if a machine such as a brain is to control something, it helps to have an internal model of that thing. Think of a military general with his model armies arrayed on a map: they provide a simple but useful representation — not always perfectly accurate, but close enough to help formulate strategy. Likewise, to control its own state of attention, the brain needs a constantly updated simulation or model of that state. Like the general's toy armies, the model will be schematic and short on detail. The brain will attribute a property to itself and that property will be a simplified proxy for attention. It won't be precisely accurate, but it will convey useful information. What exactly is that property? When it is paying attention to thing X, we know that the brain usually attributes an experience of X to itself — the property of being conscious, or aware, of something. Why? Because that attribution helps to keep track of the ever-changing focus of attention.
The most basic, measurable, quantifiable truth about consciousness is simply this: we humans can say that we have it
I call this the 'attention schema theory'. It has a very simple idea at its heart: that consciousness is a schematic model of one's state of attention. Early in evolution, perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago, brains evolved a specific set of computations to construct that model. At that point, 'I am aware of X' entered their repertoire of possible computations.
And then what? Just as fins evolved into limbs and then into wings, the capacity for awareness probably changed and took on new functions over time. For example, the attention schema might have allowed the brain to integrate information on a massive new scale. If you are attending to an apple, a decent model of that state would require representations of yourself, the apple, and the complicated process of attention that links the two. An internal model of attention therefore collates data from many separate domains. In so doing, it unlocks enormous potential for integrating information, for seeing larger patterns, and even for understanding the relationship between oneself and the outside world.
Such a model also helps to simulate the minds of other people. We humans are continually ascribing complex mental states — emotions, ideas, beliefs, action plans — to one another. But it is hard to credit John with a fear of something, or a belief in something, or an intention to do something, unless we can first ascribe an awareness of something to him. Awareness, especially an ability to attribute awareness to others, seems fundamental to any sort of social capability.
It is not clear when awareness became part of the animal kingdom's social toolkit. Perhaps birds, with their well-developed social intelligence, have some ability to attribute awareness to each other. Perhaps the social use of awareness expanded much later, with the evolution of primates about 65 million years ago, or even later, with our own genus Homo, a little over two million years ago. Whenever it arose, it clearly plays a major role in the social capability of modern humans. We paint the world with perceived consciousness. Family, friends, pets, spirits, gods and ventriloquist's puppets — all appear before us suffused with sentience.
But what about the inside view, that mysterious light of awareness accessible only to our innermost selves? A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, once told me about one of his patients. This patient was delusional: he thought that he had a squirrel in his head. Odd delusions of this nature do occur, and this patient was adamant about the squirrel. When told that a cranial rodent was illogical and incompatible with physics, he agreed, but then went on to note that logic and physics cannot account for everything in the universe. When asked whether he could feel the squirrel — that is to say, whether he suffered from a sensory hallucination — he denied any particular feeling about it. He simply knew that he had a squirrel in his head.
We can ask two types of questions. The first is rather foolish but I will spell it out here. How does that man's brain produce an actual squirrel? How can neurons secrete the claws and the tail? Why doesn't the squirrel show up on an MRI scan? Does the squirrel belong to a different, non-physical world that can't be measured with scientific equipment? This line of thought is, of course, nonsensical. It has no answer because it is incoherent.
The second type of question goes something like this. How does that man's brain process information so as to attribute a squirrel to his head? What brain regions are involved in the computations? What history led to that strange informational model? Is it entirely pathological or does it in fact do something useful?
So far, most brain-based theories of consciousness have focused on the first type of question. How do neurons produce a magic internal experience? How does the magic emerge from the neurons? The theory that I am proposing dispenses with all of that. It concerns itself instead with the second type of question: how, and for what survival advantage, does a brain attribute subjective experience to itself? This question is scientifically approachable, and the attention schema theory supplies the outlines of an answer.
Attention is a data-handling method used by neurons. It isn't a substance and it doesn't flow
One way to think about the relationship between brain and consciousness is to break it down into two mysteries. I call them Arrow A and Arrow B. Arrow A is the mysterious route from neurons to consciousness. If I am looking at a blue sky, my brain doesn't merely register blue as if I were a wavelength detector from Radio Shack. I am aware of the blue. Did my neurons create that feeling?
Arrow B is the mysterious route from consciousness back to the neurons. Arrow B attracts much less scholarly attention than Arrow A, but it is just as important. The most basic, measurable, quantifiable truth about consciousness is simply this: we humans can say that we have it. We can conclude that we have it, couch that conclusion into language and then report it to someone else. Speech is controlled by muscles, which are controlled by neurons. Whatever consciousness is, it must have a specific, physical effect on neurons, or else we wouldn't be able to communicate anything about it. Consciousness cannot be what is sometimes called an epiphenomenon — a floating side-product with no physical consequences — or else I wouldn't have been able to write this article about it.
Any workable theory of consciousness must be able to account for both Arrow A and Arrow B. Most accounts, however, fail miserably at both. Suppose that consciousness is a non-physical feeling, an aura, an inner essence that arises somehow from a brain or from a special circuit in the brain. The 'emergent consciousness' theory is the most common assumption in the literature. But how does a brain produce the emergent, non-physical essence? And even more puzzling, once you have that essence, how can it physically alter the behaviour of neurons, such that you can say that you have it? 'Emergent consciousness' theories generally stake everything on Arrow A and ignore Arrow B completely.
The attention schema theory does not suffer from these difficulties. It can handle both Arrow A and Arrow B. Consciousness isn't a non-physical feeling that emerges. Instead, dedicated systems in the brain compute information. Cognitive machinery can access that information, formulate it as speech, and then report it. When a brain reports that it is conscious, it is reporting specific information computed within it. It can, after all, only report the information available to it. In short, Arrow A and Arrow B remain squarely in the domain of signal-processing. There is no need for anything to be transmuted into ghost material, thought about, and then transmuted back to the world of cause and effect.
Some people might feel disturbed by the attention schema theory. It says that awareness is not something magical that emerges from the functioning of the brain. When you look at the colour blue, for example, your brain doesn't generate a subjective experience of blue. Instead, it acts as a computational device. It computes a description, then attributes an experience of blue to itself. The process is all descriptions and conclusions and computations. Subjective experience, in the theory, is something like a myth that the brain tells itself. The brain insists that it has subjective experience because, when it accesses its inner data, it finds that information.
I admit that the theory does not feel satisfying; but a theory does not need to be satisfying to be true. And indeed, the theory might be able to explain a few other common myths that brains tell themselves. What about out-of-body experiences? The belief that awareness can emanate from a person's eyes and touch someone else? That you can push on objects with your mind? That the soul lives on after the death of the body? One of the more interesting aspects of the attention schema theory is that it does not need to turn its back on such persistent beliefs. It might even explain their origin.
The heart of the theory, remember, is that awareness is a model of attention, like the general's model of his army laid out on a map. The real army isn't made of plastic, of course. It isn't quite so small, and has rather more moving parts. In these respects, the model is totally unrealistic. And yet, without such simplifications, it would be impractical to use.
If awareness is a model of attention, how is it simplified? How is it inaccurate? Well, one easy way to keep track of attention is to give it a spatial structure — to treat it like a substance that flows from a source to a target. In reality, attention is a data-handling method used by neurons. It isn't a substance and it doesn't flow. But it is a neat accounting trick to model attention in that way; it helps to keep track of who is attending to what. And so the intuition of ghost material — of ectoplasm, mind stuff that is generated inside us, that flows out of the eyes and makes contact with things in the world — makes some sense. Science commonly regards ghost-ish intuitions to be the result of ignorance, superstition, or faulty intelligence. In the attention schema theory, however, they are not simply ignorant mistakes. Those intuitions are ubiquitous among cultures because we humans come equipped with a handy, simplified model of attention. That model informs our intuitions.
Many people believe that they can feel a subtle heat when someone is staring at them
What are out-of-body experiences then? One view might be that no such things exist, that charlatans invented them to fool us. Yet such experiences can be induced in the lab, as a number of scientists have now shown. A person can genuinely be made to feel that her centre of awareness is disconnected from her body. The very existence of the out-of-body experience suggests that awareness is a computation and that the computation can be disrupted. Systems in the brain not only compute the information that I am aware, but also compute a spatial framework for it, a location, and a perspective. Screw up the computations, and I screw up my understanding of my own awareness.
And here is yet another example: why do so many people believe that we see by means of rays that come out of the eyes? The optical principle of vision is well understood and is taught in elementary school. Nevertheless, developmental psychologists have known for decades that children have a predisposition to the opposite idea, the so-called 'extramission theory' of vision. And not only children: a study by the psychologist Gerald Winer and colleagues at the University of Ohio in 2002 found that about half of American college students also think that we see because of rays that come out of the eyes. Our culture, too, is riddled with the extramission theory. Superman has X-ray vision that emanates from his eyes toward objects. The Terminator has red glowing eyes. Many people believe that they can feel a subtle heat when someone is staring at them. Why should a physically inaccurate description of vision be so persistent? Perhaps because the brain constructs a simplified, handy model of attention in which there is such a thing as awareness, an invisible, intangible stuff that flows from inside a person out to some target object. We come pre-equipped with that intuition, not because it is physically accurate but because it is a useful model.
Many of our superstitions — our beliefs in souls and spirits and mental magic — might emerge naturally from the simplifications and shortcuts the brain takes when representing itself and its world. This is not to say that humans are necessarily trapped in a set of false beliefs. We are not forced by the built-in wiring of the brain to be superstitious, because there remains a distinction between intuition and intellectual belief. In the case of ventriloquism, you might have an unavoidable gut feeling that consciousness is emanating from the puppet's head, but you can still understand that the puppet is in fact inanimate. We have the ability to rise above our immediate intuitions and predispositions.
Let's turn now to a final — alleged — myth. One of the long-standing questions about consciousness is whether it really does anything. Is it merely an epiphenomenon, floating uselessly in our heads like the heat that rises up from the circuitry of a computer? Most of us intuitively understand it to be an active thing: it helps us to decide what to do and when. And yet, at least some of the scientific work on consciousness has proposed the opposite, counter-intuitive view: that it doesn't really do anything at all; that it is the brain's after-the-fact story to explain itself. We act reflexively and then make up a rationalisation.
There is some evidence for this post-hoc notion. In countless psychology experiments, people are secretly manipulated into making certain choices — picking green over red, pointing left instead of right. When asked why they made the choice, they confabulate. They make up reasons that have nothing to do with the truth, known only to the experimenter, and they express great confidence in their bogus explanations. It seems, therefore, that at least some of our conscious choices are rationalisations after the fact. But if consciousness is a story we tell ourselves, why do we need it? Why are we aware of anything at all? Why not just be skilful automata, without the overlay of subjectivity? Some philosophers think we are automata and just don't know it.
This idea that consciousness has no leverage in the world, that it's just a rationalisation to make us feel better about ourselves, is terribly bleak. It runs against most people's intuitions. Some people might confuse the attention schema theory with that nihilistic view. But the theory is almost exactly the opposite. It is not a theory about the uselessness or non-being of consciousness, but about its central importance. Why did an awareness of stuff evolve in the first place? Because it had a practical benefit. The purpose of the general's plastic model army is to help direct the real troops. Likewise, according to the theory, the function of awareness is to model one's own attentional focus and control one's behaviour. In this respect, the attention schema theory is in agreement with the common intuition: consciousness plays an active role in guiding our behaviour. It is not merely an aura that floats uselessly in our heads. It is a part of the executive control system.
In fact, the theory suggests that even more crucial and complex functions of consciousness emerged through evolution, and that they are especially well-developed in humans. To attribute awareness to oneself, to have that computational ability, is the first step towards attributing it to others. That, in turn, leads to a remarkable evolutionary transition to social intelligence. We live embedded in a matrix of perceived consciousness. Most people experience a world crowded with other minds, constantly thinking and feeling and choosing. We intuit what might be going on inside those other minds. This allows us to work together: it gives us our culture and meaning, and makes us successful as a species. We are not, despite certain appearances, trapped alone inside our own heads.
And so, whether or not the attention schema theory turns out to be the correct scientific formulation, a successful account of consciousness will have to tell us more than how brains become aware. It will also have to show us how awareness changes us, shapes our behaviour, interconnects us, and makes us human.
Published on 21 August 2013
Article topics: Consciousness, Neuroscience, Psychology
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The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Formula For Success
The "umami" craze has turned a much-maligned and misunderstood food additive into an object of obsession for the world's most innovative chefs. But secret ingredient monosodium glutamate's biggest secret may be that there was never anything wrong with it at all.
posted on August 16, 2013 at 7:41am EDT
John Mahoney
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In the last three years, perhaps the boldest thing Chef David Chang has done with food is let it rot. In his tiny Momofuku research and development lab in New York's East Village, Chang and his head of R&D Dan Felder have obsessed over the many delicious things that happen when molds and fungi are treated like gourmet ingredients rather than evidence that you need to clean out your fridge.
Without fermentation, we would live in a sad world without beer, cheese, miso, kimchi, and hundreds of other delicious things humans have enjoyed for centuries. But in the carefully labeled containers stacked around the cramped confines of their lab, Chang and Felder have been fermenting new things. They've turned mashed pistachios, lentils, chickpeas, and other legumes into miso-like pastes Chang calls "hozon" (Korean for "preserved"). They've created variations on Japanese tamari — a by-product of miso production that's similar to soy sauce — with fermented spelt and rye they call "bonji" ("essence"). They've even replicated the Japanese staple katsuobushi (a log of dried, smoked, and fermented bonito that's shaved into bonito flakes) using fermented pork tenderloin instead of fish.
The flavor Chang and Felder are chasing in creating these new fermented products is umami — the savory "fifth taste" detectable by the human tongue along with salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. When bacteria and fungi break down the glucose in foods that are fermenting, they release waste products. And the waste valued in Momofuku's lab above all others is glutamic acid, the amino acid that creates the taste of umami on our tongues.
Also on the shelf in Chang's lab, underneath the jars containing foods in various states of controlled spoilage, is a giant tin of monosodium glutamate, more commonly known as MSG — perhaps the most infamously misunderstood and maligned three letters in the history of food. It just so happens that inside that tin of MSG is the exact molecule Chang and his chefs have worked so hard for the last three years to tease out of pots of fermenting beans and nuts. It's pure glutamic acid, crystallized with a single sodium ion to stabilize it; five pounds of uncut, un-stepped-on umami, made from fermented corn in a factory in Iowa.
We've only known for sure that our tongue has specific taste buds for glutamic acid for 13 years. So for chefs like Chang, the Fat Duck's Heston Blumenthal, Umami Burger's Adam Fleischman, and many others around the world, umami's flavors have become one of cooking's most exciting new frontiers. The new flavors they're creating use advanced methods to expand on what millions around the world (but especially in east Asia) have known for centuries — that foods rich in glutamic acid are delicious, and we want to eat them.
For these chefs, the path to understanding umami inevitably leads them to MSG, which is chemically identical to the glutamic acid they're creating from scratch. And yet Chang wouldn't think of using MSG in his restaurants today. He told me he doesn't even use it at home, despite being a professed lover of MSG-laced Japanese Kewpie mayo. After decades of research debunking its reputation as a health hazard, and uninterrupted FDA approval since 1959, MSG remains a food pariah — part of a story that spans a century of history, race, culture, and science and says more about how we eat today than any other.
Glutamic acid is one of 20 amino acids that are crucial to the human body's proper functioning. Without it, we would die, but it is referred to as a nonessential amino acid because our bodies can produce all we need on their own, and we don't depend on consuming it directly with our food. Glutamic acid is found throughout our bodies, where it is crucial to cell metabolism. In the brain, it is an important neurotransmitter, regulating learning and memory. Every second in our heads, quadrillions of microscopic glutamate bombs explode every time a neuron fires, passing electrical signals through our synapses.
According to FDA estimates, we consume 13 grams of glutamic acid in food every day, and it comes to us in one of three ways: Proteins are long chains of amino acids bound together, and most proteins contain some glutamic acid. Some foods, like Parmesan cheese, tomatoes, seaweed, or soy sauce also contain "free" glutamic acid, which is not bound with other aminos in proteins and is what our tongue reacts to when we taste umami. Fermentation can also significantly increase the amount of free glutamic acid found in a food.
The third way we typically consume glutamic acid is from MSG — the FDA estimates that most of us eat a little over a half a gram of it every day. If you eat Doritos, you've just eaten MSG. Same with practically any other snack with cheese powder, Kentucky Fried Chicken, many types of cold cuts, canned soups, soy sauce, and hundreds of other processed foods. MSG is made by pairing a single glutamic acid ion with a single sodium ion to form a salt — hence the full name, monosodium glutamate. When we eat MSG, our saliva dissolves the sodium ion from the glutamate ion, releasing free glutamic acid almost immediately and signaling to our brains that we're eating something tasty and protein-rich.
Today, MSG is manufactured commercially by fermentation that is more or less the same as what's happening in the Momofuku R&D lab. In factories around the world, a bacterium known as Corynebacterium glutamicum (so named for its prized waste products) is fed plant glucose (corn, beets, wheat). As it eats, it releases glutamic acid. The resulting fermented product is filtered and centrifuged to isolate the glutamic acid and remove by-products and impurities, it's crystallized, and out comes MSG.
Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
This summer, Chang and his team outgrew the tiny East Village R&D space and moved to a larger facility in Brooklyn to prepare Momofuku's hozon and bonji for sale to home cooks around the world. Exactly how they'll be sold he won't yet reveal, but Chang says they are "a month or two away from getting it to a commercial product. We have it all tested, everything's ready to go." In using new source ingredients for the fermentation, Chang and his team are "trying to harness [glutamic acid] in ways that quite frankly we don't know have ever been done before," he says.
"Everything changed for us when we made our pork katsuobushi," Chang says. "It caused us to learn about cell structure, enzymes, proteins, amino acids — stuff that quite frankly I didn't care at all about. But I realized, Oh my god, how am I ever going to understand this, because this is vital."
To get from an almost accidentally delicious fermented pork katsuoboshi to a line of umami-enhancing products ready for sale in three years, Chang and his team had a crash course in glutamic acid: They sent samples to microbiologists from UCLA and Harvard who identified the strains of bacteria responsible for the fermentation. They also advised them on how glutamic acid works in the body. "We asked them, 'So you're positive that if I ingest MSG and I eat the same amount naturally, the body digests it in the same way?' Chang recalls. "And they said, '100 fucking percent.'"
Like so many scientific discoveries, the origin story of MSG involves a special combination of curiosity and serendipity. The legend goes that one evening in 1907, Kikunae Ikeda, a chemist at the University of Tokyo, was feeling especially curious while he enjoyed a dinner of his wife's dashi and tofu soup. Rather than simply enjoying his dinner like any other night, he stopped to ponder what made dashi not only so delicious on its own, but so complementary to other savory foods. He suspected that the unique flavor of one of its primary ingredients, the seaweed kombu (giant kelp), might hold the secret to dashi's unique flavor-boosting ability.
Dashi is the mother stock of Japanese cooking. It's made by boiling seaweed and dried fish together briefly and straining, which creates a light, savory stock. The most common variety is made with kombu and shaved katsuoboshi, the fermented fish (the one Chang replicated with pork). Meat wasn't eaten widely in Japan until the 19th century, so for a large period of Japan's culinary history, savory flavors came from fish, vegetables, and soy products. For over 1,000 years, Japanese eaters have known that adding dashi to fish and other ingredients amplified the savory flavors in even small amounts of protein and vegetables. But they didn't know why.
Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
Back at his lab at the University of Tokyo, Ikeda ran dashi through a series of evaporations and tests to isolate its individual chemicals as solids. Eventually, he came across a brownish crystalline substance that had a mild but intriguing flavor, and the same flavor-boosting powers of dashi. The residue was mostly glutamic acid. Kombu seaweed, it turns out, has one of the highest concentrations of naturally occurring glutamic acid of any food — it's made of 1.6% free glutamic acid by weight. Connecting the dots to the foods made tastier with its addition, Ikeda became the first scientist to associate glutamic acid with savoriness in food. He called this taste umami — based on the Japanese root "umai," meaning "delicious," or simply "good."
Ikeda was as enterprising as he was curious, so soon after his discovery, he refined and patented a way to produce pure glutamic acid, stabilizing it with a salt ion to create what we now know as monosodium glutamate. He called the company he founded to produce MSG Ajinomoto ("the essence of taste"), thus forever linking umami, the taste, with glutamic acid, the chemical. It remains one of the largest producers of MSG in the world today.
An Ajinomoto advertisement in a Chinese magazine from the 1920s. Ajinomoto kabushiki gaisha shash
Ajinomoto began selling MSG in 1909 and in the next few years expanded across east Asia. On its own, MSG is salty, mildly bitter, and relatively flavorless compared with other seasonings. But when combined with products and dishes already rich in glutamic acids like the dashi stocks, soy sauces, and miso of Japan, the fermented fish sauces of Thailand, Chinese fermented bean sauces, Korean kimchi, or even Italian tomato sauce, the savory elements in those foods are amplified significantly. So for the cuisines of East Asia already focused around products rich in glutamic acid, MSG was a natural fit, and soon became as commonplace as salt in restaurant kitchens and on dining room tables.
After World War II, banking on new developments like more refrigerators in homes and advances in manufacturing and transport, the processed-food industry exploded. For most of the country, heating up a TV dinner or even finding tidy rows of colorful shelf-stable canned vegetables at a grocery store was exciting and novel. During this boom in food processing, MSG found a strong foothold in American food. In 1947, pure MSG was introduced for sale in America as the "flavor awakener" Ac'cent, which remains available today. When seasoned with MSG, products like soup bouillon cubes or hot dogs were able to taste nearly as savory as their freshly made counterparts for months or even years after manufacturing. By the late 1960s, MSG was found in countless processed products, including baby food. Babies loved MSG just like adults, which is not a surprise. Human breast milk contains 19 milligrams of free glutamic acid per 100 grams — cow's milk has 1 milligram. We're programmed to crave umami from the womb.
MSG began in 1968 as an FDA-approved food additive eaten throughout Asia and used widely by food processors in America to make their blandest products taste better. It ended that year at the center of an international health scare with vaguely racist undertones that sent Ajinomoto's stock price into free fall. MSG's sudden downfall is a meme in the purest sense — an idea that doesn't simply spread but evolves, abiding closely to the rules of evolution and natural selection. "I believe that given the right conditions, replicators automatically band together to create systems…that carry them around and work to favour their continued replication," wrote Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, in which he coined the term "meme." And in America in 1968, conditions could not have been better for the MSG meme to take root, thrive, and replicate.
At that time, there was not much research proving MSG was safe, because there had yet to be any real reason to spend the money to prove otherwise. There were young people who hated just about everything their parents stood for — their politics, their cheesy music, their conservative haircuts, and their processed food. There was a fading notion of corporations as triumphant post-war engines of patriotic capitalism, and a rising realization that many of them were putting profits well before the safety of their consumers. To many Americans, Asia was still a deeply foreign place where we fought most of our wars. But most importantly, people were only just beginning to understand certain crucial tenets of human biology. The idea of DNA as a tightly woven spiral of nucleotides that holds the entirety of our genetic code was just 15 years old.
It started with a single letter, published in the correspondence section of the April 4, 1968, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine under the perhaps tongue-in-cheek editorial heading "Chinese restaurant syndrome." It was written by a Chinese-American doctor in Maryland, Robert Ho Man Kwok. "For several years since I have been in this country, I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant," Kwok wrote. The most prominent symptoms included "numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, and general weakness and palpitation." As an immigrant of Cantonese descent, Kwok was familiar with MSG's widespread use in Asian cooking. But in his letter, he was very specific about only experiencing these symptoms after eating Chinese food in American restaurants.
"The cause is obscure," he continues. In discussing the symptoms with colleagues, he at first thought it might be caused by an allergy to something in the soy sauce, but discounted this theory because he used the same type of soy sauce at home. The usage of cooking wine was also mentioned, as the symptom set he experienced "resembles to some extent the effects of alcohol." But what Kwok appeared to suspect most was the high sodium content of the food. "The Chinese food causes thirst," he wrote, "which would also be due to the high sodium content. The syndrome may therefore be due merely to the large quantity of salt in the food." MSG was almost an afterthought: "Others have suggested it may be caused by the monosodium glutamate seasoning used to a great extent for seasoning in Chinese restaurants." He closed ruminating on the idea that the presence of MSG might make the sodium-related symptoms "more acute."
But it was the MSG bit that people focused on. The New York Times quickly followed the NEJM's lead, publishing a small write-up on the issue a month later (Chinese Restaurant Syndrome' Puzzles Doctors," May 19, 1968). Also fueling the burgeoning myth was a latent distrust of what happened behind the kitchen door at Chinese restaurants, even as they became increasingly common to American diners in the late 1960s. "To be suspicious of the goings on in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant was not uncommon," food historian Ian Mosby writes in his paper "'That Won-Ton Soup Headache': The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, MSG and the Making of American Food, 1968–1980." For many, suspicions of mysterious meats and other "excessive" practices were still present.
The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Formula For Success
The story's origin point in the largest and most influential medical journal published in the United States also ensured it caught the eye of many doctors and scientists. It also touched a nerve with the public — in an issue a few months after publishing Kwok's letter, the journal ran those from several more who had felt the same symptoms. And so began a flurry of research in the late 1960s and early 1970s, attempting to isolate the symptoms Kwok described in clinical settings. Ironically, NEJM's jokey headline stuck, and the broad group of symptoms Kwok described became known as "Chinese restaurant syndrome" in both the scientific literature and to the general public.
Like most research done in response to a surge in public interest, the methods and results of these initial studies varied widely. Many of the studies did identify an association between MSG and the symptoms Kwok described in his letter, but did so using extremely high doses administered without double-blind, placebo-controlled testing. Symptoms like flushing and headaches could not be objectively measured like blood pressure or heart rate, so the studies depended on self-diagnosis of the test subjects, making them prone to error.
Meanwhile, a second path of research into MSG's longer-term effects throughout the body emerged. John Olney, a psychiatrist and neuropathologist at Washington University in St. Louis, became especially interested in glutamic acid's role as a neurotransmitter, and how changing concentrations of it could affect processes in the brain. In his most famous study, Olney injected large doses of MSG into newborn mice, and observed brain lesions and other problems as a result. He attributed this to "excitotoxicity": when high levels of a neurotransmitter substance (in this case, glutamic acid) cause neurons to fire haphazardly and eventually die. Olney was convinced that high doses of MSG could have similar effects in humans, and became a figurehead of the anti-MSG world.
Just over a year after Dr. Kwok's letter, in July 1969, Ralph Nader, a rising champion of the burgeoning consumer safety movement, took on the cause of MSG. Testifying before Congress along with Olney and several other scientists involved in early MSG research, Nader was successful in banning MSG from baby food. (It remains banned for infants to this day, although Nader, via a spokesman, says that he is "not up on the issue's latest developments so he really could not comment further.")
Yet after that initial wave of research, many studies that followed came to sharply differing conclusions. These later studies had an advantage: Once the story was out, people began to self-diagnose as being sensitive to MSG. In several double-blind studies that administered either dosages of MSG or placebo to people who already claimed to experience "Chinese restaurant syndrome," no statistically relevant increase in symptoms has been identified with those given real MSG over those given a placebo.
As for MSG's potential long-term effects on the nervous system, Olney's continued study of glutamate excitotoxicity helped broaden our understanding of neurological disorders that stem from an imbalance of glutamate in the brain, like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. And in 1972, Olney found similar lesions in the brains of rhesus monkeys injected with MSG, suggesting the problem could affect primates as well. But other researchers who have tried to replicate his results with monkeys have failed, and no link between dietary consumption of glutamic acids and glutamate levels in the human brain have been found.
This is thanks to the blood-brain barrier, a membrane of tightly bound cells that acts a protective filter, keeping substances like excess free glutamic acid from disrupting its precise chemical balance. "The brain is basically the North Korea of glutamate: a closed world. It makes all the glutamate it needs, and does not let glutamate in," Samuel Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University, told me in an email. In the case of newborn mice (Olney's were 2 to 9 days old), the development of their blood-brain barriers would be roughly equivalent to a human infant's in the second trimester, Wang says. And the high dosage of MSG administered (0.5 to 4 milligrams per gram of body weight) would be equivalent to a 165-pound human eating nearly 300 grams of MSG — about 600 times more than we typically consume daily.
If anything resembling a consensus emerges from the tangle of research that follows Dr. Kwok's letter, it's that perhaps a very small number of humans may experience a mild reaction to eating large amounts of MSG, often on an empty stomach — a statement that could describe nearly everything else we eat. Yet no evidence suggesting anything resembling a proven allergy like gluten sensitivity, a diagnosed autoimmune disorder, has been found. The FDA, while acknowledging "short-term, transient and generally mild symptoms" in "some sensitive individuals who consume 3 grams or more of MSG without food," has never removed MSG from its "generally recognized as safe" list. So why, after almost five decades of science that is vaguely inconclusive or inaccurate at worst, or definitively affirmative of MSG's safety at best, does the ingredient remain divisive?
On the 19th floor of an office building in Fort Lee, New Jersey, amid the maze of turnpikes and highways that greet New Yorkers upon exiting the George Washington Bridge, the full force of Ajinomoto's defense against decades of cultural bias is on display. I am met by Miro Smriga, who greets me with an endearingly halting East-meets-West accent — a product of his birthplace (Czechoslovakia) and where he's worked as a science and regulatory manager for Ajinomoto for much of his adult life (Tokyo) before moving to New Jersey two years ago. Smriga is the opposite of the lock-step PR robot I was expecting, but like all good public relations executions, I get the feeling that even this seemingly minor detail had been carefully considered.
As we sit down in a conference room, I am given a stack of published research papers by scientists around the world claiming MSG is safe to eat. Most of these papers were funded at least in part by Ajinomoto itself. I am handed a promotional pamphlet disguised as a book on dashi, umami, and Japanese food culture, printed on paper that is clearly very expensive. I am offered a glutamate-rich yet ethnically neutral chicken, tomato, mozzarella, and avocado sandwich.
As he begins his PowerPoint, Smriga speaks casually, and moves in and out of presentation mode with ease to address my questions, but his message remains focused: Despite MSG's bad name, science gives us no reason to believe that it is harmful. The first slide contains a chart of the five known tastes discernible by the human tongue: Bitter is caused by acetic acid, salty is sodium chloride, and sweet is sucrose, not sugar. And there is monosodium glutamate, responsible for umami. This is a reminder — most certainly a calculated one — that almost everything we eat has a scientific name just as artificial-sounding as "monosodium glutamate."
Smriga has clearly given this spiel before (including once to chef Heston Blumenthal, he says). It was born from a moment when his company was caught squarely on the defensive in response to Dr. Kwok's letter.
"Before the accident, Ajinomoto was a science company, but all the science was based in production," Smriga tells me, his word choice ("accident") revealing how unexpected the MSG backlash had been. "But now we are a company based on broad science. We have nutritionists, pharmacologists, doctors of all kinds — more scientists by percentage than any other company."
But by the time Ajinomoto joined other MSG producers and food companies like Nestlé and Unilever to form the Glutamate Association in 1977 — a trade group to fund scientific research and lobby regulators in Washington, D.C. — the damage had already been done. "The company made a mistake because they didn't do anything," Smriga says, referring to the years immediately following Dr. Kwok's letter. "The mistake was huge, and we paid for it."
And they're still paying. Search for "MSG and autism," "MSG and obesity," or "MSG and seizures," and the top results belong to
msgtruth.org, a website devoted to perceived health risks presented by both MSG and aspartame. It is the work of Carol Hoernlein, a New Jersey woman who spent four years working for food companies before becoming disillusioned with their practices and quitting in 1992. Hoernlein has battled high blood pressure for most of her life due to a series of serious kidney problems, and would often suffer blood pressure spikes, headaches, and stomach problems after eating. When she removed MSG from her diet after a relative told her she believed Ac'cent had caused her uncle's heart attack, she says her symptoms reduced dramatically. Her site links MSG consumption with not just the standard "Chinese restaurant syndrome" symptoms but also depression, seizures, diabetes, autism, multiple sclerosis, and seemingly every other conceivable health problem in an elaborate flowchart.
"I'm a scientist — I can't just assume something, I have to check it out," she tells me, describing her motivation to create the site in 2002. Hoernlein clearly has an understanding of food science, but she also has a tendency to oversimplify the conclusions of research, and to connect dots that aren't there. Both on her site and in our conversation, Hoernlein frequently cites the studies by Olney and others that have associated glutamic acid with obesity, brain and retina lesions in infant mice, using them as evidence that MSG could do the same thing to humans. Yet she does not mention that no such symptoms have been reproduced consistently in primates, let alone humans, and that the lesions were induced from extremely high doses of injected MSG.
When I ask her about this disparity, she deflects my question toward her desire for more thorough, independent research, which she sees as her site's main purpose, despite its alarmist tone. She is certainly correct in pointing out that research funded by a company with a massive financial stake in its outcome presents a problem, and can make hacking through the literature for a clear signal difficult.
But Wang, the Princeton neuroscientist, dismisses conflict of interest as a strong enough force to significantly steer the research process into MSG worldwide. A trade group like the Glutamate Association, even though it might be footing the bill for individual papers, is "not in a position to send tentacles into the entire scientific establishment and bend all our minds to its will," he says. "Whoever could demonstrate an actual biological effect of MSG on behavior, mood, or the brain would make his or her mark on science forever. And every scientist wants to make a lasting mark."
Hoernlein tells me most of the people who email her with stories of their health improving after avoiding MSG have a history of other medical problems, as she does. When I ask her which foods she has to avoid to control her exposure to MSG and her blood pressure, her list includes canned soups, Caesar dressing, sausage, "anything Parmesan encrusted," soy sauce, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Science is never going to prove definitively to someone suffering from high blood pressure that eliminating these foods won't make them feel better. But it's also not going to conclude that MSG is to blame more than any of the other ingredients with proven negative health effects those foods have in common. Nothing we eat is risk-free, and so the language of food safety regulations speaks of "acceptable levels of risk" or "the reasonable certainty" that foods won't harm us, not of absolutes. Science is the same; to assume that published research can account for every individual's differences, every perceived "canary in the coal mine" as Hoernlein likes to say, is to confuse scientific research with personal health care. Another instance of the MSG meme's power — its cultural currency is not proportional to its truth.
Flickr: theotherdan / Creative Commons
The simple fact that has perpetuated the MSG stigma in our culture more than any other is that food high in MSG is almost always bad for you. Almost all of Ajinomoto's MSG is bought by the processed foods industry — upward of 21 million pounds per year, according to one estimate. Only in poorer countries that lack industrialized food infrastructure is the sale of "over-the-counter" MSG for use in home kitchens significant, Smriga says. Simply put, the foods that provide an average American his or her FDA-estimated half-gram of MSG daily are not healthy. But not because of MSG.
For chefs in search of quality ingredients, it's perfectly rational, if not an imperative, to question the usage of not only MSG, but all chemicals found in the foods we eat. And as chefs at the highest levels of cuisine gravitate toward not just umami, but a more scientific approach to cooking, glutamic acid and MSG are being seen in an entirely new context. It's not a coincidence that the most outspoken chefs questioning the stigma of MSG today are of this mentality. David Chang, Nathan Myhrvold, Heston Blumenthal, as well as Harold McGee, whose 1984 book On Food and Cooking has become the bible of gourmet food scientists, have all publicly called for MSG's reevaluation. None of them have found any convincing science that indicates MSG is unsafe for use.
No one today is championing a scientific approach to food more than the lab of Myhrvold, the former Microsoft executive whose six-volume opus Modernist Cuisine is one of the defining texts for this new approach. (The book calls for MSG in several recipes, including its instructions for reverse-engineering Kentucky Fried Chicken). Scott Heimendinger, the Modernist Cuisine lab's director of applied research, has noticed this shift in perception of food as an inherently chemical process.
"There's certainly a growing movement of people who are cool with white powders and who have their collection at home, just like I do," says Heimendinger. "I think there is a class of people who understand that synthetic versus natural is a very arbitrary boundary that falls apart under scrutiny."
When Chang asks his chefs how things like miso production or fermentation work, "'Like magic' or 'I don't know' isn't good enough any more," Chang says. "I think we are at our best when we're questioning and challenging everything. Which is why I'm sore when I hear comments like, 'I hate molecular gastronomy.' That means you hate learning. You only think that there's one way of doing something. It's that narrow-mindedness that drives me fucking insane."
Because here's the thing — nothing is stopping chefs from creating the same "natural" MSG that Ikeda "discovered" in 1908. Chang says he and his Momofuku chefs make kombu salt by more or less the same method "all the time," as do chefs at several other restaurants. The chemical, glutamic acid, is the same, whether it is created by fermentation in a factory or in the R&D lab of Momofuku. The question for Chang comes down to why the stuff called MSG is demonized, and the "natural" evaporated kombu salt is considered gourmet.
"The funny thing is that I can make some stupid fucking hipster dish with Dorito powder and serve it on roasted corn with fucking lime juice and people would eat the shit out of it," Chang says. "If I say, 'That's got MSG in it,' no one's going to say, 'Well, that sounds delicious.' But if I put Doritos on it…for fuck's sake, Taco Bell's marketing it directly."
So how long until we see MSG used as a finishing salt in high-end restaurants? "I think that it's a matter of time," Chang says. "I know there are a couple of places out there that already do that. But they're in the closet. Everyone's so afraid of being outed that nobody wants to talk about it."
So for many chefs, the most direct way to umami is to sell your own glutamate-rich products — like Chang is about to do with his hozons and bonjis from the R&D lab, and like L.A.'s Umami Burger chef Adam Fleischman already does on his website, which offers products called "umami spray" and "umami dust."
Or you can go straight to the source yourself.
I'm at home. It's late. I've decided to run a study of my own — I've decided to make a glutamate bomb posing as a pasta meat sauce. It'll have tomatoes (246 milligrams of free glutamic acid per 100 grams), mushrooms (71 milligrams), Parmesan cheese (1,680 milligrams!), ground beef (10 milligrams, with more bound in its proteins). And from the red plastic Ajinomoto bag I spoon in 1.5 grams of pure MSG, three times the average daily American dose. I put a fingertip of crystals to my tongue before dropping them into the pan. From birth, Americans know salt is salty and sugar is sweet, but for this peculiar taste of umami on its own, we have no context.
I add the first half-gram of MSG to the ground beef as it begins to brown in olive oil, and it feels almost illicit. I feel a tingle of excitement, and take a deep whiff of the sizzling meat. Is it just that this beef is good (it is; I got it from a fancy shop at Chelsea Market, although it's been in my freezer for almost a month), or does this smell better than usual? I remind myself that MSG has no odor, and I continue. Out of the pan comes the beef, and in goes shallot and garlic, sautéing in the MSG-doused beef fat. Is it possible that MSG is making one of the best smells in the world (onions and garlic sautéing in fat) even better?
Next comes a deglaze of red wine, then the tomatoes, mushrooms, some dried thyme and fresh rosemary, and a little salt and pepper. I finish it with a healthy shaving of aged Parmesan, pour some red wine, and sit down to eat. It is delicious.
But wait, is that a flush I feel on the back of my neck as I begin to shovel it in? I am hyper aware of my own body. My humid apartment on this warm summer night has been further heated by all this cooking and simmering, and yet this rational explanation doesn't immediately trump my suspicion that the MSG may be doing things to me. Is this "homemade Italian dinner syndrome," right here in my own living room?
I sit in the breeze of a fan and cool down. The feeling subsides. I take another bite. Nothing happens.
The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Formula For Success
David Chang and friend. Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
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Contributionsandrewh76 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about a day ago
olegk5
about 2 days ago
"When bacteria and fungi break down the glucose in foods that are fermenting, they release waste products. And the waste valued in Momofuku's lab above all others is glutamic acid, the amino acid that creates the taste of umami on our tongues."
Lol thats absolutely wrong. It happens when proteins are breaking down, not glucose. "Umami" is just a signal that you are eating food, rich in protein (basically cooked meat) and your brain reacts accordingly, giving you command to chomp and nom nom, simple as that. What matters is how much this glutamatic additives you put in your food, not the fact that you do it.
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C V-K The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about 3 days ago trents6 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's EW about 3 days ago
nobuzz
about 4 days ago
Was this article abetted by the MSG/preservatives/chemical lobby? What's up next: "DDT: the lie behind Silent Spring." "Agent Orange: Safe as OJ."
There is no doubt that I am sensitive to large quantities of MSG in that it produces headaches and extreme thirst. Some people I know have a similar reaction, others have none at all. Any knowledgeable MD will verify that some people get MSG headaches. The main source for this opinion piece, David Chang, is a notorious hack who will tell reporters anything they want to hear—and the last time I looked, he's not a doctor.
But, hey, its legal, by all means gorge on it at Momofuku, bathe in it when you get home, down it by the table spoon for a midnight snack (btw, did you ever finish that MSG bomb of yours?) but don't tell people their bodies' reaction to it is placebo driven. (A concept which you don't seem to understand.)
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wwew
about 3 days ago
It's obvious you didnt bother to read the article, just the first few paragraphs, and obviously care nothing about the science or facts of chemicals or the results of the multiple studies done that show you and anyone else that claims MSG gives them headaches is full of shit.
and david chang, who is NOT the main source of this article, is not a hack either.
RESPOND 2 1 SHARE
nobuzz
about a day ago
your "science" is like the science of creationism, or, at best, climate-science denialism. that you would call me "full of shit" (and anyone who says they have MSG headaches too!) rather than "mistaken" shows your intellectual limitations. what do I have to gain by calling out the effects of MSG? More to the point what do you and your ilk have to gain by calling it harmless?
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YourDirtyMind1
about a day ago
It is interesting that all of your "symptoms" just coincidentally happen to be known side effects of ordinary garden-variety salt. It's also interesting that the cuisines usually vilified in the MSG witch hunt also happen to be very high in salt. Several orders of magnitude higher than they are in MSG. But I'm pretty sure it's the MSG causing it. (Just as the woman in the comments above with the high blood pressure probably has the issue because of the MSG and not salt. Because we all know high sodium intake has no effect on blood pressure.) Just in case, maybe ask those knowledgeable MDs you were mentioning, since no legitimate scientist on the planet would make the verification you refer to.
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nobuzz The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's EW about 4 days ago dehonnab The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about 4 days ago
bernardg2
about 4 days ago
On occasion, I have reacted to MSG by getting very hot and sweaty. When questioned, the chef or cook will acknowledge that they have added MSG. But a friend, now deceased, reacted by not only getting getting very sweaty, but often followed by fainting. This before the NY Times column. In my case, it has not been at Chinese restaurants.
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richieortegat The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about 4 days ago javierlee The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about 5 days ago arjunb3 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about 5 days ago bradys3 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about 5 days ago livec4t The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about 5 days ago
depaulsunny
about 5 days ago
To the author - Excellent article! Your writing is great and it bears resemblance to the likes of Malcolm Gladwell. Looking forward to more!
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depaulsunny The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about 5 days ago janice! The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's OMG , WIN & OLD about 5 days ago
☁Spam Of God☁
about 5 days ago
According to the commenters on this post: MSG causes not only the migraines it is generally credited with but also vomiting, panic attacks, "a feeling of warmth and irritation", deformed body limbs, addiction, psychotic episodes and heartburn… hmmmmmmm.
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scarlet The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about 5 days ago nahyunnanak The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about 6 days ago
marcg4
about 6 days ago
I am a gourmet cook.
I add MSG to all of my veggie
and some of my meat entrees.
I credit MSG with magical power.
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Meredith P.
about 6 days ago
Am I the only one who was expecting to read about the band Notorious MSG?
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viennak The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about 6 days ago zoew4 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about 6 days ago
dennisc18
about 6 days ago
Carefully research Placebo and Nocebo effects then get back to me about MSG "syndrome." Your physical body is highly suggestible as any Doctor with a bottle of sugar pills can attest and MSG is little different
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dennisc18 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about 6 days ago christinadyrlands The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about 6 days ago dicka The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's OLD about 6 days ago jamisonb The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about 6 days ago
johnr56
about 6 days ago
Dude tehm some serious MSGs oh yeah!
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rinaa3 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN & LOL about 6 days ago
ernestoc4
about 6 days ago
Glutamic acid and glutamine does NOT contain sodium, and is not identical to MSG, a highly addictive substance. It is added to foods to boost sales and foster addictive behaviors. It is also psychoactive due to its similarity to the neurotransmitter glutamate, which is key to learning and memory. MSG is a addictive drug, not food. This article is food industry propaganda at best…
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☁Spam Of God☁
about 6 days ago
MSG is no more addictive than table salt or sugar or vinegar or cocoa, it's a highly concentrated flavor compound that responds to our tastebuds (and frankly it's probably a much healthier food additive than salt or sugar)
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joed42
about 6 days ago
There is nothing unhealthy about salt or sugar. Unhealthiness comes from quantity, and it's likely the quantity of MSG that is added to food that causes problems (just like too much salt, or too much sugar does).
Also, MSG is just ONE form of Glutamic Acid, and thus its concentrated use in food is not natural. Food naturally contains Glutamic Acid in various forms, but never as one concentrated form.
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ernestoc4
about 6 days ago
Glutamic acid and glutamine does NOT contain sodium, and is not identical to MSG, a highly addictive substance. It is added to foods to boost sales and foster food addictions. It is also psychoactive due to its similarity to the neurotransmitter glutamate, which is key to learning and memory. MSG is a addictive drug, not food. This article is food industry propaganda at best…
RESPOND 0 1 SHARE
prb15
about 5 days ago
Our bodies, about 70% water, are full of ionic mixtures. Glutamic acid dissociates at physiological pH to yield glutamate. Since there's plenty of sodium in your body, your body is thus full of dissolved monosodium glutamate. This would be true even if you had never consumed any MSG in your life. No, solid, crystalline glutamic acid (which doesn't exist in the body) is not identical to solid, crystalline MSG, but the glutamic acid inside your body (glutamate in aqueous solution) is most certainly identical to the MSG inside your body (glutamate in aqueous solution).
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marleyf The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about 6 days ago jessies15 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about 6 days ago
nathanielg
about a week ago
Your nonscientific test at the end seems like asking someone without lactose intolerance to drink three times as much as the average dairy consumer to reproduce an alergic reaction. It's not going to happen. Chinese food syndrome is very real for many of us. If not the MSG than what?
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watch me boogie
about 6 days ago
Soylent Green.
RESPOND 1 0 SHARE
☁Spam Of God☁
about 6 days ago
Imagination!…
RESPOND 2 0 SHARE
YourDirtyMind1
about a day ago
Even if the "syndrome" (which has as many different sets of symptoms as sufferers) were to be verified to be real, it would be much more likely to be caused by simple salt than by MSG. The latter sounds scarier because of its long, science-y name, but there is no biochemical mechanism has ever been suggested by which it could have those effects.
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ricardoc5 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about a week ago kizourh The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about a week ago claytona2 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about a week ago frankieb4 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about a week ago juliejeylit The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about a week ago georgeesantosv The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about a week ago michaelv26 The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... about a week ago sylgui The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about a week ago sangfr0id The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's WIN about a week ago
cameronchapman
about a week ago
Amazing!
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Chris Stokel-Walker The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's FTW about a week ago aliciareneeg The Notorious MSG's Unlikely Form... and thinks it's COOL STORY BRO about a week ago
What Ever
about a week ago
If you don't talk about migraines, you've missed a key part of the discussion.
Also, please don't compare North Korea to the brain.
RESPOND 3 2 SHARE
☁Spam Of God☁
about 6 days ago
Ok let's talk about them, have you ever heard about how powerful the placebo effect is? or how powerful suggestibility is to episodes of hypochondria? Why doesn't most of Asia (who use MSG with abandon, as commonly as table salt) suffer from migraines, and why weren't the VAST majority of migraines reported until a scare article with dodgy research about "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" was printed?
RESPOND 2 1 SHARE
joed42
about 6 days ago
Asians process certain foods differently from other groups of people. Just because they have metabolic factors that allow them to cope with MSGs, doesn't mean other races of people do as well.
RESPOND 0 1 SHARE
☁Spam Of God☁
about 6 days ago
"cuz Ayjuns r differnt" is not a legitimate response to actual logic.
RESPOND 1 1 SHARE
Heihachi Mishima
about 5 days ago
when I was a kid, I would get horrible heartburn and headaches whenever I had Chinese food. My grandparents loved to eat it and would take us kids out for it whenever we would visit…and while they had a couple of favorite restaurants, we went to several over the years and I experienced this no matter where we went. This was from the time I was very young until I decided I wouldn't eat it anymore in my teens, when, shocker - the problems stopped. I have since made sure to ask for no MSG and had no problems (even when I went back to a Chinese restaurant). Was I experiencing the "placebo effect"? Was I a hypochondriac?
RESPOND 1 1 SHARE
☁Spam Of God☁
about 5 days ago
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Inside the double life of Aaron Hernandez
By Bob Hohler | GLOBE STAFF AUGUST 15, 2013
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BRISTOL, Conn. — When Aaron Hernandez was a child in this faded factory town, his mother, Terri, twice turned to the courts for bankruptcy protection.
When he was in sixth grade, she began taking bets for an illegal gambling organization. Police would later seize reams of evidence from the home.
There is no way to know how much, if anything, Hernandez knew about his mother's activities, or about the darker side of her second marriage to a violent ex-convict who had previously wed his cousin.
But the events reflect a strained family dynamic that grew more tangled as Hernandez rose from schoolboy prodigy to prime-time Patriot, living a double life of sorts.
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As his celebrity status grew, Hernandez was never far from his Bristol roots, never free of the orbit of his childhood — a fact that has become increasingly clear over the last 50 days, as he has gone from national football star to prisoner No. 174594 in the Bristol County jail.
Hernandez has long nurtured an image of himself as a former honor student whose deeds were worthy of the 2013 Pop Warner Inspiration to Youth Award. He has also cast himself as a loving father to his young daughter, and a committed partner to his fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins, a high school classmate.
But in his alternate life, the lavishly tattooed multimillionaire allegedly consorted with a cadre of ex-convicts from Bristol in a volatile underworld of guns, drugs, and violence. He has been linked by prosecutors and a civil lawsuit to a series of assaults, shootings, and, ultimately, three killings.
Hernandez and his lawyers have proclaimed his innocence. But much remains unexplained, and perhaps unexplainable — including the influences of his childhood in Bristol, and growing up in a home where crime was no stranger.
Impact of father's death
Police wiretaps allegedly intercepted Terri Hernandez relaying betting lines for games involving many sports teams, including the New England Patriots. Her alleged accomplice, Martin Hovanesian, was convicted of felony racketeering and professional gambling. The outcome of Terri Hernandez's case — she faced several charges, including professional gambling — is not available under Connecticut law.
"It was a big-time operation in a little town,'' said William Gerace, Hovanesian's lawyer. "She was the phone operator, a minor player, not the brains.''
Aaron Hernandez set several state records in high school.
ESSDRAS M SUAREZ/GLOBE STAFF
Aaron Hernandez set several state records in high school. Above, his yearbook photo from Central Bristol High School.
Terri Hernandez has refused interview requests, and her former lawyer, a longtime family friend, declined to comment.
By the accounts of friends and acquaintances, Aaron Hernandez's father loomed largest in his life, and his death in 2006 from complications after routine hernia surgery was a turning point.
For more than 30 years, the elder Hernandez was known on the streets of Bristol as The King. The son of Puerto Rican immigrants, Dennis Hernandez reigned as street royalty from his days as a three-sport star at Bristol Central High School and a running back at the University of Connecticut through his career as a school custodian.
Bristol changed over time, as ESPN's headquarters swelled, helping to offset the jobs and taxes lost to shuttered factories. But Dennis Hernandez steadily kept his boys, DJ and Aaron, productive in school and sports.
Portrayed by friends and former teammates as generally popular but street tough and sometimes abrasive, Dennis guided DJ toward UConn, where he played football and earned a master's in school counseling. DJ, 27, is now a graduate assistant football coach at the University of Iowa.
Aaron, who shattered several Connecticut high school records for pass receivers, regularly made the high school honor roll and earned enough credits to depart for the University of Florida midway through his senior year as the top-rated prep tight end in the nation.
His father's death "ate him alive,'' said Jordan Carello, a high school friend and football teammate. "He wasn't as outgoing. He wouldn't really talk. You could tell he was devastated.''
Aaron Hernandez used his athletic prowess to take himself from his childhood home in Bristol, Conn., to Central Bristol High School and eventually the NFL.
ESSDRAS M SUAREZ/GLOBE STAFF
Aaron Hernandez used his athletic prowess to take himself from his childhood home in Bristol, Conn., to Central Bristol High School and eventually the NFL.
Hernandez was, by his own account, unsure where to turn.
"Everyone was close to my father, but I was the closest,'' he told USA Today in 2009. "When that happened, who do I talk to? Who do I hang with? It was tough.''
Unsavory associations
A high school picture has since surfaced of Hernandez purportedly flashing the sign of the Bloods street gang while dressed in red, the gang's color. Jail officials say an evaluation of his possible gang affiliation was inconclusive.
But his behavioral changes triggered alarms. Bristol school officials have declined interviews since his arrest, but his high school football coach, Doug Pina, told the Hartford Courant in 2010, "Personally, I've always had concerns.''
Citing Hernandez's youth — he was 17 when he entered college and 20 when he joined the Patriots — Pina said, "He's still finding himself. With the right people around, [if] he keeps his head straight, he'll do very well.''
It was no secret Hernandez began running with some unsavory characters after his father died and continued some of those associations after he left Bristol.
"A lot of guys come into the NFL haunted by the past,'' said Tully Banta-Cain, Hernandez's Patriots teammate in 2010. "Some guys overcome it and some continue to be haunted throughout their careers if they're not able to disassociate themselves from certain people or certain atmospheres. Aaron may have fallen victim to that.''
Nowhere was the criminal element in Hernandez's life more evident than at a powder-blue Cape house at 114 Lake Ave. in Bristol, across from a field where he once played football. The home is owned by Hernandez's uncle.
The house became a way station for Hernandez's inner circle, including Ernest Wallace and Carlos Ortiz, who allegedly accompanied him when Odin Lloyd, a semi-pro football player from Dorchester and Hernandez's one-time friend, was killed near Hernandez's home in North Attleborough.
Investigators planned to question another ex-convict, Thaddeus L. Singleton III, who lived at the Lake Avenue house. But Singleton died June 30, four days after Hernandez's arrest, in a single-car crash in a vehicle registered to Valderrama.
Singleton was married to Tanya Cummings-Singleton, Hernandez's cousin. She was jailed Aug. 1 in Boston for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Hernandez.
Police had previously seized Cummings-Singleton's cellphone and credit cards during a court appearance by Wallace, Hernandez's alleged "right-hand man.'' A police affidavit alleges she bought Wallace a bus ticket to Florida after Lloyd's slaying.
Yet Cummings-Singleton's role in the Hernandez family history runs deeper than her relationship with Wallace. In 2005, she married Jeffrey Cummings, an ex-convict who would become Hernandez's stepfather. They had a son before they divorced a year later.
Cummings then married Hernandez's mother on a trip to Las Vegas in 2009. There is no indication that Aaron, then in college, attended the ceremony. It occurred eight days after he helped Tim Tebow and Florida defeat Oklahoma, 24-14, for the national collegiate title.
But this was much clear: Even before his mother found herself in a problematic marriage with Cummings, Hernandez began behaving badly in Florida, where he never seemed far from his Bristol cronies.
Four months after he arrived in Gainesville, the 17-year-old was out with teammates, Tebow among them, at The Swamp bar when he punched a bouncer over a disputed bill, police stated. The punch allegedly broke the man's ear drum.
The incident took few of the Gators by surprise.
"Of course everyone knew about [Hernandez's] troubled past," one of his former Florida teammates said. "Starting college at 17 is a lot for a person to handle."
Hernandez also tested positive for marijuana, triggering a one-game suspension. But he excelled on the field, winning both the John Mackey Award as the nation's top tight end and first-team All-America honors as a junior.
But once he de termined he would skip his senior year to join the NFL, Hernandez was seen more frequently with his Bristol buddies, according to former college friends.
During his final year at Florida, according to an image TMZ released this year, Hernandez photographed himself wearing red and hoisting a handgun.
At home, the violence continued. A month before Hernandez reported to his first Patriots training camp in 2010, his stepfather knifed his mother. Terri Hernandez suffered lacerations to her right cheek, right shoulder, and left wrist. Cummings went to jail, and she divorced him.
During the same period, several of Hernandez's other Bristol acquaintances landed in jail.
From 2010 and 2012, Wallace, the right-hand man, was sentenced to 120 days in jail for various crimes, including larceny. Ortiz, 27, a career criminal with a ninth-grade education, also gave police the Lake Avenue address. Since 2004, he has been convicted in Connecticut of 15 crimes, from threatening to assault.
When a Globe reporter recently knocked at the Lake Avenue house, a woman pulled back a curtain several inches and said the occupants had no comment. A man who arrived moments later with a case of beer said Hernandez's friends and relatives "don't want to talk to the press.''
A contract, but more trouble
The house at 114 Lake Ave. continued to be a hub of activity, some of it of increasing interest to police.
Court records indicate that authorities, in the course of investigating the shooting deaths of two Cape Verdean immigrants on a Boston street last summer, recovered a sport utility vehicle of interest at the home.
Police suspect Hernandez and the victims clashed at the nightspot Cure before the men were shot by a suspect in a silver SUV. The vehicle at 114 Lake Ave. registered in Hernandez's name.
In searching the property, police also seized documents and nearly 100 rounds of ammunition. The case is now before a Suffolk County grand jury.
A month after the killings, Hernandez and the Patriots agreed to a five-year, $40 million contract extension, with $12.5 million guaranteed. Hernandez vowed afterward that his life as "the young and reckless Aaron'' was behind him.
But with his rich contract secured, Hernandez increasingly isolated himself from his teammates, and he was involved in a series of incidents this year before Lloyd's slaying that suggested the "reckless Aaron'' and his Bristol sidekicks remained active.
The first occurred in January, when a trooper clocked an SUV on the Southeast Expressway traveling 105 miles per hour. The driver was Alexander Bradley, an ex-convict from Bristol who has described himself as Hernandez's former paid assistant.
Fifteen days later, Hernandez allegedly shot Bradley in the face in Florida, according to Bradley's civil suit against him. Bradley lost an eye.
Hernandez next surfaced in California, where he was scheduled to work out with Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Soon he was involved in two disturbances at his rented condo in Hermosa Beach, police reported.
On March 25, Hernandez had been drinking and was arguing with Jenkins when he cut his wrist punching a window, a police report stated. Jenkins called 911 for an ambulance, saying Hernandez was "losing a lot of blood.'' No charges were filed.
Eight days later, police returned when a neighbor reported a disturbance. Again, Hernandez and Jenkins were arguing. Police took no action after restoring calm.
Six weeks later, Hernandez and his Bristol pals were back in New England, where police responded at 2:30 a.m. to the Viva lounge in Providence, to disperse a crowd after a New York Jets fan followed Hernandez out of the club, taunting him. Police reported seeing a man toss a .22-caliber handgun under a car before he fled. In court, prosecutors suggested the man was Ernest Wallace.
Wallace was in Bristol on June 16, when Hernandez — before taking Jenkins on a date — tapped out a Twitter message: "happy father's day to all the great dads out there.''
Before the date ended, prosecutors say, Hernandez set in motion a plan to kill Lloyd. A law enforcement source has told the Globe the motive for Lloyd's slaying may have been linked to his knowledge of Hernandez's possible involvement in last year's double homicide of the Cape Verdean immigrants.
Father's Day had ended by the time Hernandez, Wallace, and Ortiz picked up Lloyd in Dorchester and drove to an industrial park in North Attleborough. There, Lloyd was shot five times.
Several minutes later, prosecutors allege, a surveillance camera captured an image of Hernandez at his home carrying a handgun.
Wallace and Ortiz returned to Lake Avenue before they were arrested. Hernandez also was arrested, at his home, before police began investigating an alleged effort to cover up the crime.
In a police affidavit released last week, investigators stated Shayanna Jenkins and Cummings-Singleton made "overt attempts to hide evidence,'' possibly including the murder weapon.
On Tuesday, police suspended an exhaustive search of Pine Lake, not far from 114 Lake Ave., without locating the weapon.
Hernandez, meanwhile, sits behind bars, with only memories of Pine Lake, the football fields of his youth, and his childhood home on a steep hill overlooking a little city that once adored him.
His next scheduled court date is Aug. 22.
Ben Volin of the Globe staff and Globe correspondent Stephen Sellner contributed to this report. Bob Hohler can be reached at
hohler@globe.com.
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OUTSIDE MAGAZINE APRIL 2002
FRIDAY, JANUARY 04, 2002
BIT
Joe's hand began to tingle, and he called the group together. The toxins would leave his system in 48 hours, he said. He'd be conscious the whole time.
By: MARK W. MOFFETT
0 2 6 506
The fatal krait. Photo: Mark W. Moffett
THAT MORNING I WOKE at dawn and crawled from my tent into the big unpainted schoolroom where the members of our biology expedition slept. We were in Rat Baw, a village in the far north of Myanmar. Outside, expedition leader and herpetologist Joe Slowinski and his best friend, photographer Dong Lin, stood wearing matching green T-shirts stenciled with one of Dong's photos of a cobra, poised to strike. I walked up as Joe's Burmese field assistant, U Htun Win, held out a snake bag. "I think it's a Dinodon," he was saying. Joe extended his right hand into the bag. When it reappeared, a pencil-thin, gray-banded snake swung from the base of his middle finger. "That's a fucking krait," Joe said. He pulled off the snake and kneaded the bitten area, seemingly unmarked, with a fingernail.
Other scientists have been known to cut off their finger at such a moment. Joe sat down to join the rest of us for breakfast at a long wooden school table, joking about his thick skin. It was 7 a.m. on September 11, 2001.
I'D KNOWN JOE FOR TWO YEARS, seeing him most often when he drove over to Berkeley for evening herpetology seminars at the University of California. A 38-year-old field biologist with the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, he had published papers on evolutionary theory, systematics, and the origins of biological diversity—but mostly he was the man to talk to about cobras. For years, Joe had been concentrating on the rich biological triangle of Southeast Asia where Myanmar—still commonly known as Burma—and Laos meet southwestern China. He was conducting a comprehensive survey of the herpetofauna of Burma; on ten expeditions since 1997, he'd found 18 new species of amphibians and reptiles, including a new spitting cobra, Naja mandalayensis—which he considered "the ultimate discovery." He hoped to help the country establish a biodiversity museum; eventually he wanted to write the definitive book on the area's natural history.
Before a seminar, Joe, Dong Lin, and I would share beers at La Val's Pizza. Dong, now in his midforties, told me how, after surviving Tiananmen Square with 60 stitches, he had escaped China in 1990 and made his way to a position in photography at Cal Academy. There, Joe helped guide him through the book English as a Second F**king Language, and soon after, Dong started to join him as expedition photographer. Over Coronas, Joe would describe his upcoming trips, slapping me on the back and telling his best adventure stories to entice me to "come along this time, bro."
As an entomology researcher at Berkeley, I recognized in Joe someone like myself, someone who in earliest childhood fell hard for a disrespected creature—in Joe's case snakes, in mine ants—and managed to retain that fascination into adulthood and even build it into a career. He had a boy's sandy hair and freckles, and his habitual expression of sheer uninhibited wonder was matched by a precise and agile mind. His fieldwork had the same old-fashioned sense of exploration I'd grown up admiring in 19th-century scientist-explorers like Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.
Time and again, Joe's schedule and mine had conflicted. Then one night in La Val's he described a trip coming up in September. He'd recruited colleagues from different disciplines to conduct a broad species inventory of Burma's remote northern mountains. Perfect.
THE EXPEDITION WOULD TAKE us into the foothills of the Himalayas; it was scheduled to last six weeks and span 200 miles. Our group of eight American and two Chinese scientists and four Burmese field assistants gathered on September 3 in the village of Machan Baw—the dusty remnant of an old British outpost—and started walking, accompanied by a long line of porters. Machan Baw sits at 1,400 feet; the plan was to climb above 10,000 feet, surveying a range of habitats from subtropical forests to temperate highlands, and traveling eventually into the new Hkakabo Razi National Park.
Adventures are made mostly in the recollecting mind; the doing is generally more drudgery than drama. It was monsoon season, and our path, more mud trough than trail, was hard slogging. Leeches emerged in droves. We tried to keep them at bay by spitting tobacco juice onto our legs or wearing panty hose but Joe, trekking in shorts and sandals, simply put up with them, as did many of the porters. At times I'd look down and see the rain puddles along our route were red with blood.
The first week took us through farmland and villages. Houses with roughly stacked pole walls were raised on stilts so that pigs and chickens (and their legions of fleas) could sleep in the slightly protected muck below. Each evening sandflies speckled our arms with welts, while mosquitoes threatened us with a malaria resistant to most prophylactics—one reason we zipped ourselves into tents even when sleeping under a roof.
In patches of rainforest between rice paddies we found enough species to keep us moving eagerly toward richer territory. The sonic duet of gibbons and two huge-beaked hornbills passing overhead indicated more pristine habitat nearby. After each trek, Joe would gather bags with the day's specimens from his Burmese team and from our frog specialist, Guin Wogan, one of his graduate students at Cal Academy. Dong Lin would video the most unusual individuals. If venomous snakes were involved, Joe would wrangle them so Dong could get the best footage, shooting from inches away—greatly impressing the inevitable crowd of Burmese onlookers. Joe was careful with snakes; he'd chased them since he was a boy in Kansas City, Missouri. He was also famous for close calls. Bitten by a copperhead in college in Kansas, he'd gone back the next day to catch another, left-handed. On a previous trip to Burma, a spitting cobra had struck through the bag Joe put it in, stabbing his finger. He waited calmly for the venom to take effect. Luck of the draw, he would say, telling the story: Sometimes a snake bites without injecting its toxins. On a later Burma trip, a cobra squirted venom into his eyes. After a few hours the excruciating pain passed. Joe never paused much over these incidents. He seemed to embody the understanding that a fully natural world includes the possibility that nature can kill us—and afterward glide freely away into the wet grass it came from. That love in any form involves an element of risk.
IT WAS GOOD TO SEE JOE AT WORK in the country he'd described so often. He was proud of his Burmese field assistants, on permanent loan to him from Myanmar's Department of Forestry. In a country with few scientists, Joe saw these young men and women as an essential resource for the future. Species inventories are a big part of conservation, and his assistants caught, preserved, and documented specimens year-round. Joe had struggled hard over the past five years to build government contacts—research in heavily militarized Burma is no simple thing.
Returning late at night by headlamp, Joe would unload his catch of snakes and frogs and sit with whoever was still awake, usually Dong Lin and me. During those conversations I began to see the different sides of my friend. Some nights it seemed he felt invincible. Downing Burmese rum, he knew he would rise high enough in the hierarchy of science to put a stop to the "political bullshit" he saw all around him. Much of what he imagined seemed possible: He'd just been awarded a $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation, already a sponsor of his ongoing Burma research, to study biodiversity in China's Yunnan province. He confided a thousand ambitions, certain he'd realize them all.
Other times Joe raged into the night, once about another biologist working in Burma who he believed had blocked the original funding for this trip. Joe had hastily cobbled together funds from his other grants and gone anyway. His tirade explained something. I'd wondered why our expedition had come during the rainy season, when (as was evident once we started walking) we could have taken jeeps along much of the route any other time of the year. Remembering how discovery breeds rivalry and how scientists can turn research into races, I sat in a small dry spot surrounded by what seemed a world of mud, an understanding comrade to Joe's fury.
Still other nights Joe grew melancholy. For years he'd focused only on science, he said; he'd been too single-minded, traveled too much, even for love. Now, though, he'd started a relationship with an ornithologist back home. He wondered if he should devote less time to snakes.
Managing the people and logistics along with his research on this trip was clearly taking a toll. There was a lot to worry about. Among the multitudinous supplies we'd brought were drying ovens and pounds of newspaper for the plant specimens, snap traps and mist nets for the mammals and birds, gallons of alcohol to preserve reptiles and insects, a generator and its gallons of fuel to recharge batteries for cameras and computers and to run the blacklight for attracting insects. Ninety-odd porters hauled the equipment of ten academics. Many of the inevitable problems were handled by a Burmese guide, but Joe had to think about them all. In addition, he'd paid $44,000 to a well-connected expedition coordinator to cover the in-country expenses, yet somehow such basics as rice and bottled water were in astonishingly short supply, so Joe kept spending more, out of pocket. Nor was there any sign of the two military doctors and radiophone the government had promised. Joe guessed the real cost of the trip was probably a tenth of what the expedition had put down.
Then there were the scientists. Each of us wanted to work at our own pace and had our own agenda. Personalities often clash in the field, and for Joe, feeling responsible for the group's harmony must have been one more stress, along with our long daytime treks and his own additional nocturnal collecting. I noticed the accumulating effect on him during a walk on September 10, the seventh day of the trip. Joe was moving sluggishly, and each time he paused to pull a leech from his leg, his fingers were visibly shaking.
AFTER IT WAS OVER, we'd all wonder why Joe had reached into the snake bag with barely a glance inside. As with any pivotal moment, the exact words exchanged beforehand would be endlessly debated. Snakes of the genus Dinodon are harmless, but some are near-perfect mimics of the multibanded krait (Bungarus multicinctus), a cousin of the cobra and much more deadly. As field team leader, U Htun Win should have known the difference—but he told us he'd been bitten by the snake the day before and nothing had happened. Joe, however, was the authority. Possibly simple exhaustion brought his guard down; perhaps he failed to heed the uncertainty in U Htun Win's tentative identification.
Following breakfast, around 7:30, Joe lay down. At 8 he noticed a tingling in the muscles of his hand, and asked Dong Lin to call the group together. By 8:15, two Burmese assistants started the run of eight miles to Naung-Mon, the nearest town with a radio. Joe calmly told us what would probably happen and what we should do. He described the effects of a slowly increasing paralysis, eventually requiring mouth-to-mouth respiration until he could be taken to a hospital. If he lived, the neurotoxins would work their way out of his system in 48 hours. He would be conscious, he told us, the whole time.
As the morning went on Joe had to reach up to open his eyelids. His breathing grew raspy; his voice was reduced to a slur. In time he could only write messages: "Please support my head, it's hard for me." "If I vomit, it could be bad." "Can I lean back a little." By noon he could no longer breathe on his own. "Blow harder," he wrote. In his final message, minutes later, Joe spelled out "let me di." We won't let that happen, Guin Wogan said. Kick butt, Joe, I added.
At 3 p.m. our runners returned alone, and told us the military had requested an update before they would send an air rescue. Two fresh assistants were sent back, again insisting that a helicopter be sent. By evening the weather turned from the best we'd seen in a week on the trail to a renewed downpour; low clouds would impede the rescue again the next day. That night soldiers arrived on foot with an ancient field radio and a young Burmese doctor with two nurses and a little equipment, including an old respirator no one could get to work.
Throughout that long night, we all helped out as we could, but much of the time was spent in simple exhausted witness. From time to time, Dong would put his arm around various members of the group and say, "I love you." In one long moment of vertigo, as someone who's had his own close calls with snakes, I looked at Joe in the torchlight and saw how alike we were in build, complexion, even our features, and I felt I was somehow watching myself die. Looking at Dong, Guin, and U Htun Win standing silently nearby, I wondered if they felt something similar.
By 3 a.m. Joe could no longer signal us except with his big toe. His final communication occurred when ornithology assistant Maureen Flannery, whose strength had been keeping us all going, asked if she and Guin could stop doing mouth-to-mouth and let the guys take over. Joe's toe signals indicated a preference for the women.
During the 26 stifling, sandfly-infested hours that the artificial respiration continued, four airliners plowed into their final destinations in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The only one of us who knew was David Catania, a Cal Academy ichthyologist so unobtrusive I often forgot he was there. Dave had listened to his shortwave radio after collapsing briefly in his tent late in the night. Keeping the news to himself, he came out and gave Joe mouth-to-mouth for hours, his face showering sweat. He refused to let anyone else take over, even long after Joe's heart had stopped.
At 12:25 p.m. on September 12, the doctor told us Joe's pulse was gone. We began three hours of CPR, in anticipation of a rescue helicopter that was never able to land.
JOE'S BODY WAS CREMATED in a small Buddhist ceremony two days later in the town of Myitkyina, and Dong Lin and some of the team brought his ashes back to San Francisco, along with many of the expedition specimens. Other members made their way home as best they could. It was not until two months later that I returned from Asia and visited Ground Zero in New York. Compared to the devastation before me, Joe's tragedy had been such a small, intimate drama. For everyone in Rat Baw but our team, September 11 had seemed an ordinary day. It was a place where death from such natural causes as snakebite was a common event—there are more snakebite deaths in Burma than almost anywhere else in the world. Children played in the field within yards of the room where our small circle performed CPR. Elders sat on benches outside, talking softly and watching the rain, as one supposes they always had.
One of Joe's gifts was the way that for him the ordinary always seemed to yield to the extraordinary. The day before the bite Joe had returned from a walk in Rat Baw flushed with excitement—he'd found a pair of entwined kraits. "It was beautiful. Goddamn beau-ti-ful! Courting like that, right in the middle of the trail. I've never seen anything like it." His arms sliced arcs in the soupy air. The weight of all our petty concerns had vanished from his face, and his eyes seemed to glow, as they always did at moments like this, with the love of snakes.
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The Wiz
By David Finkel
Sunday, June 13, 1993
THE SOUND COMES from the back of the throat, a tiny noise that is doomed to failure even as it begins. "Wait," Elizabeth Mann is trying to say, attempting to slip into a discussion that is swirling around her. It is a loud discussion with overlapping voices, but Elizabeth is a close listener, and she has heard something that needs correcting, or at least elaboration. She also is a patient listener who doesn't blurt out her thoughts, but waits for an opening to fit into. Now, hearing the other voices drop off, sensing her moment, she begins to speak, only to realize immediately that she has miscalculated, that the opening has already closed, that she doesn't stand a chance, that she is on the precipice of another of those moments in which, sooner or later, she will end up awkwardly trailing off into silence without having been heard. And so she does what she often seems to do in these situations: She gives in, chokes off the word, lets it die as a squeak and goes back to listening, patiently listening, waiting for the next opportunity. She doesn't seem bothered, and neither does she seem surprised.
The setting for this is Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring. It is third period, Quantum Physics, the most difficult class in the school's math, science and computer magnet program. The class's mission is nothing less than trying to understand the forces that rule the universe, and to that end, seven of the country's brightest high school seniors sit around a table, working their way through a book on Einstein's general theory of relativity. There is Steve Chien, Blair High's valedictorian. There is Josh Weitz, the salutatorian. There is an intense-looking boy named Sudheer Shukla, and another boy named Danilo Almeida, and another named Jeff Tseng, and another named Jeff Wang, and lastly there is Elizabeth. The girl.
This day's topic: something about the failings of Euclidian geometry and an equation called the generalized Pythagorean theorem for Gaussian coordinates. It all seems indecipherable, but as soon as the bell rings, the discussion is off and running, and very quickly, as is usually the case, it is dominated by Steve, who sits to Elizabeth's right, and Josh, who sits to her left.
Steve talks. Josh interrupts. Steve mumbles. Josh interrupts that. Steve grabs a marker, goes to the board and tries to work something out. Josh goes to the board too, using one hand to draw and the other to hold a cheese sandwich, which he has been wolfing down.
And through it all, Elizabeth sits, listening.
She tries to say, "Wait," and falls silent.
She tries again. "Soooo," she manages to get out.
She tries a third time, this time snapping her fingers and lightly slapping the table, and finally, after that has failed, she gets up, draws something on the board, and explains in her always polite way, a way that often turns a statement into a question, that maybe this is the way to look at what they've been talking about? Then she sits and resumes listening, not to Steve or Josh or any of the other boys, but to the teacher, who is complimenting her for what she has done. "Beautiful," he says. "It really simplifies what we've been talking about. Very nice. Very nice."
The moment, surely, is sweet, but vanishes in an instant. This seems not to surprise Elizabeth either. She is in her second year of this class, of being the girl among the boys, and by now she knows the pattern. The discussion resumes, voices again overlap, and Elizabeth says nothing more, not until long after the bell has rung, when she tries to explain why the class, once her favorite, has lately made her feel uncomfortable. She says, "All last year I loved it, and for most of the beginning of this year I did, and now sometimes I'm just scared." She says, "I feel like 'The Girl' in the class. It's something I'm very conscious of, almost every minute in there." She says, "I have a certain fear that somehow when I'm in that class, I'm this impostor who doesn't really understand."
She does understand, though. She gets nothing but A's in the class, and the teacher, Harvey Alperin, says if she isn't the best student, she is one of the top two. Her discomfort, it turns out, has nothing to do with studying the forces that rule the universe. Those she can figure out. Instead, it comes from forces far more puzzling, the ones that rule the life of a 17-year-old girl who happens to be smart.
SHE IS MORE THAN SMART, in fact. She is brilliant. She scored 1570 (out of 1600) on the SATs, 800 (out of 800) on her Achievement test in math and 800 on her Achievement test in physics. She is a National Merit finalist and a presidential scholar semifinalist, and she was accepted into every college she applied to, finally settling on Harvard. She also has never smoked a cigarette nor drunk the first drop of alcohol, rarely fights with her parents and doesn't yell at her younger brother. She also has perfect hearing, and pretty good vision, and clear blue eyes, and strawberry-blond hair, and cream-colored skin, and a good smile, and perfect teeth, and short fingernails that sometimes, at night, when she is on the phone, and no one is around to see what she is doing, she will paint pink. "And then I'll think: Should I take this off before school?" And she always does.
Pink, she knows, doesn't fit in with her reputation, and neither does anything else that could seem too frivolous. She is seen as someone who never falters and never has any doubts about her academic abilities. Some of the younger girls in the magnet program look at her as a kind of role model, while teachers seem to regard her as the student they've been waiting for for their entire careers. Her computer teacher, Mary Ellen Verona, says, "I think Elizabeth's the most incredible girl I've taught, no two ways about it." Her guidance counselor, Leah Cutler, uses the term "lovely modesty" to describe her, and her journalism teacher, John Mathwin, says, "Elizabeth's amazing. I wrote a recommendation for her earlier this year. She gave me her resume, and it was three pages long, single-spaced, with things like 'Sixth in the World' in some kind of competition."
Actually, the listing says "Twelfth-Place in World." This was for something called Odyssey of the Mind, which is one of the many competitions that exist as a kind of subculture for the smartest high school students around the country. The best known of these is probably the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, in which Elizabeth placed ninth and received a $10,000 scholarship, but there are plenty of others too. There is the SuperQuest national supercomputing challenge, in which a team consisting of Elizabeth and three other Blair students placed first, winning for their school a free year of access to a supercomputer. There is the American Regions Mathematics League, in which Elizabeth scored so high on tests that she was selected to go to Russia as part of a math exchange program. The competitions go on and on, all year round, all with their differences and one common characteristic: For years they have largely been the province of boys.
Which Elizabeth knows as well as anyone. After being named one of the top 10 Westinghouse winners, she volunteered that gender might have had something to do with the results, that the judges might have seen in her a way to send a signal that girls can do well too. Never mind that the first-place winner was a girl, which might be signal enough; this was how Elizabeth said she felt, and no wonder -- every year, every month, every week seems to bring another study detailing how dismal things are for females in math and science and how they need to be encouraged. One study says that the number of women going into either field is "disproportionately low." Another says that "gender differences in science achievement are not decreasing but increasing." Another says that although girls have as much ability as boys, they often start developing sour attitudes toward math and science in middle school and soon lose all interest. Others say that's because in classrooms boys dominate, that girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong, that eventually girls reach the point where they not only don't do well but decide they're incapable.
On and on the studies go, endlessly on, all making the same points about how lousy things are for females. Math, it seems, eventually becomes nothing more than a skill to balance a checkbook, while science, horrible science, becomes a nauseating memory of formaldehyde and some frogs. And meanwhile, at Blair High School, in the midst of all of this, held up constantly as proof of what girls can be, is Elizabeth.
There are other girls in Blair's magnet (about one-third of the 400 students are female), but as Mary Ellen Verona says of even the best ones, "They're pretty sharp, but Elizabeth's always going to come out on top." A few might be smarter in a particular subject on a particular day, but as Mike Haney, who ran the magnet program until going on leave last year, says, "I suppose if there's any Renaissance person at Blair High School, it's Elizabeth."
She wins science awards. She wins math awards. She wins computing awards. She wins writing awards. She is co-editor of the school paper. She has a 4.0 grade-point average. She speaks French, and some German, and Basic, and Fortran and Pascal.
And her resume is actually four pages long.
SHE IS ONLY 17, so there isn't that much of a life story to tell, but this is the outline so far:
She was born in Philadelphia in 1975, the first child of Jim Mann, who was pre-med at Harvard before deciding to become a journalist, and Carolyn Dexter, a professor of classical literature, who grew up thinking she would go to MIT until the day she confided this to her favorite uncle, "and he laughed and said, 'Girls can't go there, don't be silly,' and I never breathed that thought to another person."
The family moved here in 1977, settling in Silver Spring in a house not far from Blair. From first through third grade, Elizabeth attended an elementary school that offered a French immersion program. Then, because of Jim's job as a correspondent with the Los Angeles Times, the family moved to China, where Elizabeth attended grades four through six. Then she came back to the math-and-science magnet program at Takoma Park Intermediate, where she had a teacher named Darlyn Counihan, who pushed and pushed her into joining the school's math team and remembers her blossoming into someone "brighter than I am, or ever was." And then it was on to Blair, where Steve Chien, who has known Elizabeth since seventh grade, who remembers writing an essay then in which he used the word humankind rather than mankind, who remembers Elizabeth seeing that word and drawing a smiley face next to it, says she has become:
"The Darling."
"A good diplomat," is what her father says of her.
"Totally cooperative," says her mother. "She's obliging, obedient. She's everything our school system rewards.
"Has she shown you her re- sume?" she asks. "It'll make you embarrassed about your own."
Of all the forces shaping Elizabeth's life, her mother, arguably, has been the strongest. She is a person of high energy and strong opinions who, since Elizabeth was a baby, has been trying to indoctrinate her against the various subliminal ways of the world. Once, in first grade, Elizabeth brought home a work sheet that had a drawing of a woman and another drawing of a man, and other drawings of various things that Elizabeth was supposed to match to the appropriate person. "There was a scrub brush, a needle and thread, a broom," Carolyn remembers. Also "a hammer, a saw, a screwdriver . . ." She remembers being offended by the assignment, phoning the teacher and saying, "You must have gotten a lot of calls on this," and the teacher saying, "Well, no, actually, you're the only one." She also remembers explaining to Elizabeth what she was upset about, that in their house, for instance, Mother fixes the broken things and Father does the dishes, and lastly she remembers Elizabeth, pointing to the drawing, saying, "But Mother, this is reality."
So the lessons continued, and, in fact, continue still: Here's what's wrong with this advertisement, here's what's wrong with this picture, here's what's wrong with this song. Once, last year, when the two of them were in the car, the song on the radio was one Elizabeth really liked, with the refrain "You're every woman in the world to me," and Carolyn began explaining that the lyrics suggested women were generic, interchangeable, even irrelevant. Elizabeth didn't say too much back, not then, but later she wrote an essay about it. "It was a great song," she wrote, "the kind you can play over and over with a tape but wait for it to come on the radio because it just makes your day to hear a great song completely unexpectedly -- it means the Radio is on your side. But near the end of the song, my mom piped up as usual and pointed out a different interpretation, one which made the entire song sound demeaning to women. And that always leaves you wondering, and you can never love the song as much because you always have to wonder. I hated her in that moment, hated her for forcing me to interpret things this way, because once you see you can't forget and it begins to poison everything you find." Not only did Elizabeth write that, she entered it in an essay contest. And, of course, won. And Carolyn, being a good mother, told her how proud she was, and a year after the fact continues to brag about its thoughtfulness, even though, when Elizabeth is out of earshot, she explains, "What she's furious about is I'm right. It's a displaced anger. What she's really angry about is it's a sexist world, and she personalizes it by being angry at me."
All of this is said pleasantly. Carolyn is a steady, supportive presence to her daughter, as is Jim, as is every other part of Elizabeth's home life, including the home itself. It is a comfortable place through and through, not at all dressed up. There's a fat, likable dog at the front door, a Statue of Liberty lamp with a red fringe shade in the living room, a world map in the dining room, some red sneakers under the kitchen table that Carolyn reminds Elizabeth have been there for a week, a front yard that needs weeding, a back yard that needs mowing, books everywhere, a TV that's rarely used and a stereo playing classical music. Up the stairs, past the wall of old family photographs, is Elizabeth's room. Nothing in it offers a recipe for how to raise a brilliant child; it is simply a room, a little cluttered, books here, magazines there, a few pieces of art on the walls and half a dozen stuffed animals on the trundle bed. The view out the window is of a park across the street, while just beyond the tree line, a little too far away to see, is the other great force in Elizabeth's life so far: old, sagging Montgomery Blair.
Even without the magnet program, it would have been her high school. Blair is in the lower eastern part of Montgomery County, the most multicultural part, which is one of the main reasons Elizabeth's family decided to move to the neighborhood. Eight years ago, however, as the school's minority population was nearing the 70 percent mark, a consensus formed that things were a little out of whack. That's when the magnet program was installed at Blair, put there as a way to even things out by attracting white students from other parts of the county.
It has done that, but slowly. Mike Haney, the first coordinator of the magnet, remembers how unnerved parents from the more affluent parts of the county were by the thought of sending their children to Blair. "A real tough sell," is how he describes the first couple of years. "And the problem was greater with girls because parents seem to be especially protective of their daughters." The first year's magnet class of 72 students was about 26 percent female; the second year's class wasn't much better. Just as troubling, a disproportionate number of girls who did enroll began dropping out and returning to their neighborhood schools.
The reason for that, Haney came to believe, wasn't Blair, but the magnet program itself. It had been structured to mirror a boy's emotional development, he realized, which in many ways was at odds with a girl's. For instance, an early emphasis on physics, rather than life sciences, was something many of the girls said they didn't like. They also didn't like the strong emphasis on using computers. "Why?" Haney remembers asking a girl one day as they looked at some boys in the computer lab who were busy typing away. "They like it," he said. "They'll sit there all day." "Yeah," the girl said, "but look at the social skills of those boys."
So the program was recast to seem a little friendlier toward girls -- competition was de-emphasized, group work was stressed -- and by the time Elizabeth arrived four years ago, things were humming nicely along. The number of girls still hadn't come close to 50 percent (and hasn't so far), but at least the migration had stopped.
Not that everything was perfect, or is perfect yet. These are students, after all, who operate at levels different from the rest of the students at Blair, or most any other high school for that matter. Out of this year's magnet class of 94 graduating seniors, 21 applied to Harvard. "Twenty-one applications to Harvard is ridiculous," says Leah Cutler, the guidance counselor. But that's the magnet. Whether or not the program consciously tries to avoid competition, these are students who are highly motivated to achieve, and, as a component of that, are sensitive to any break, any advantage, any hint of favoritism or extra attention that might not go their way.
All of which is to say that Elizabeth, The Girl, "The Darling," the joy of almost every teacher who has taught her, has had her share of difficult moments.
"Elizabeth has always borne the burden of teachers being absolutely charmed by her," says Cutler. "They are in awe of her. They have set her up as a paragon in their minds, and, I think, in the mind of her peers, which has made her road that much harder."
"She's in a very difficult position," agrees Mike Haney. "I think she is held in such high esteem by teachers that other students, no matter how gifted they are, feel they're always being compared to -- Elizabeth."
Sure enough, in class one day, a teacher refers to a list of history's greatest mathematicians and predicts that someday Elizabeth could be among them.
And Elizabeth, upon hearing this, can't help but cringe a bit.
Another day, the pronouncement involves Elizabeth's eventual place in a book a teacher has of the 100 smartest people of all time.
And Elizabeth, hearing this, cringes some more.
"From what I've heard and what I can see, you get the general impression they're all overly enamored of me," she says of her teachers. "I guess in and of itself, that's nice. I mean, you can't ever be upset that people like you. So that's fine.
"The consequences of it are what make me uneasy."
"What'd you get?"
"What'd you get?"
Elizabeth is talking to Steve Chien, whose up-and-down friendship with her has been one of the consequences.
"You first."
"You first."
They are trying to settle a bet about who got the better score on a 20-question quiz. At stake is a bag of M&M's.
"Is your number even?" Steve asks, trying to pin down the number of questions Elizabeth got right.
"No."
"Is it a prime?"
"No."
"Is it a perfect square?"
"No."
"Aaggh," he says, realizing she had to have gotten a 15, knowing that he got less.
"Aaggh," she says back, knowing that they had classified the bet as "modest," which means the quiz was considered so negligible that the lower score wins, as opposed to "immodest," which means the higher score wins. She looks at his expression and realizes the M&M's are his.
"It's not competitive," Elizabeth says later, but anyone who knows Elizabeth and Steve would say that it isn't anything else. "It's just sort of joking around," Elizabeth says, but both she and Steve know there's more to it than that, that what began as an essay with a smiley face scribbled on it has developed into a complicated relationship that gets toward the heart of Elizabeth's unease.
"Do you know what the Kellogg-Briand Pact is?" Steve asks one day. "It was signed in, I think, August 1928 between 62 nations, and it basically outlawed war. Well, Elizabeth and I have had so many arguments, we actually signed our own Kellogg-Briand Pact."
There was a period when the arguments might have been about books or music, but over time they edged toward being about Elizabeth herself and how much attention she seems to receive. Steve too was a Westinghouse finalist, finishing one place higher than Elizabeth. He too was a member of the SuperQuest team. And yet, as he knows so well, she gets written about in the paper, she gets interviewed on TV, she gets the attention of teachers, she even got to go to Russia as part of the American Regions Math League exchange program even though his test scores were at least equal to hers. She got to go to Russia, and he got to stay home. He was so bothered by this, by the thought that gender rather than raw score might play a role in the selection, he began wearing a T-shirt that read, "The National Science Foundation uses quotas to send females and minorities to the Soviet Union on the ARML Soviet exchange program, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." He wore it, and he got in trouble for it, and she went to Russia, and she never gets in trouble for anything.
Those who know Steve would say that his complaints aren't rooted in jealousy -- that he and Elizabeth are too close for that -- but in the belief that preferential treatment of any type is fundamentally unfair. He is known to his friends as a moralist, and also, just as applicable here, as a feminist. In the classes he and Elizabeth take together, the two of them always look at each other and exchange half-smiles whenever someone uses a male pronoun, rueful acknowledgment of how narrow the modern world remains. He wants things to be equal, nothing more, nothing less, which is why it gnaws at him that Elizabeth gets treated as if her achievements are that much more remarkable because she's a female. "If you look at what's happened to Elizabeth in her four years in the magnet, there isn't one example of her being disadvantaged," he says. "I have a hard time complaining. I've gotten a lot out of the magnet program. But no one has gotten as much out of it as she has. Let me make it clear. Nobody has gotten as much attention out of the program as her.
"I'm not the only person who feels this way," he adds.
And he isn't.
"No one dislikes her, because she's not dislikable, but I think there's a lot of resentment," says Elizabeth's closest friend, Valerie Wang.
"I think she continually underestimates the depth of resentment there is," says Steve. Nonetheless, she is aware it exists, he says, has to be, no doubt about it, because of a phone conversation they had last school year around the time of the SuperQuest competition.
That was the competition in which Steve, Elizabeth and two other Blair students went to Alabama for three weeks to compete against several other schools. That was when Elizabeth ended up spending a good part of her time with a boy from a Louisiana school, and at the end of the three weeks sat with him on the plane to Atlanta, and only after he got on a different plane, to Louisiana, did she sit with Steve, who thought she had behaved in a way that was "not intellectual." Even "goofy."
The phone conversation, though, wasn't about that. It was about the perception that Elizabeth, in preparing her entry for the competition, had gotten an inequitable amount of assistance from Mary Ellen Verona, the computer teacher. That they had worked side by side for hours on end to the exclusion of other students who wanted Verona's help. That Verona had actually done some of Elizabeth's work. "Nonsense," Verona says, but such was the word around school, and Steve felt it was his moral duty to call Elizabeth and tell her.
So he did. And when word came that her entry had been chosen as one of the winners -- a truly remarkable achievement -- she was of course happy, but she also felt a little diminished. "It was partially jarring," she says of Steve's call, "because I guess I didn't realize there was that resentment. I guess I was pretty disturbed." She said nothing about it, though. It's not her way. And that might have been the end of it except for another phone call a few months later, this one from Josh Weitz.
Josh is the one who sits to Elizabeth's left in the third period physics class, the salutatorian, who, like Elizabeth and Steve, is in the stratosphere of high school students. He is also the boyfriend of Kristen Ault, one of Elizabeth's closest friends, and although he doesn't talk to Elizabeth as much as Steve does, he and Kristen talk about the same kinds of things. For instance, there was a discussion about the role of gender in the way people behave in class. "Like in Complex Analysis," Josh says of one math class he and Kristen take together. "She hadn't raised a point all year, and after I had gone through an explanation one day, she said she'd had that down, and I asked her why she didn't say anything, and she said, well, she just wasn't sure about it. I said, 'Well, there's no reason not to speak up.' " And so a day or two later, Kristen did speak up. Except, says Josh, what she said was "slightly off. And I corrected her." Which of course embarrassed her, although Josh, who is the one always going back and forth with Steve, correcting and being corrected as if both things are as rudimentary as blinking, didn't realize this until later when Kristen told him.
This, then, is who called Elizabeth when everyone was getting applications ready for the Westinghouse competition. He asked if she could bring a printout of the project she had done, along with her entry application, to school the next day. He said he just wanted to see it, that's all, but what he really wanted to know was whether she had listed Verona as her adviser, a role that suggests general help, or as her mentor, which suggests help at a higher level of involvement. "I didn't realize what he was asking," Elizabeth says. "I sort of hung up, and then as soon as I hung up, it was just this trembling, this 'What is he asking, and why?' " So there was a second conversation in which Josh said he wanted to know how Verona had been listed, and Elizabeth said as adviser, and Josh zeroed in on her from there, asking if she was really satisfied with that designation, if it really explained Verona's role. "What I really wanted by calling her was for her to think about it," he says now, "because sometimes the problem of getting a lot of help is you get so used to it you don't acknowledge it."
That may have been his intent, but what happened was that Elizabeth became terribly upset, and the conversation was concluded, and out of 1,600 entries Josh went on to finish in the top 300, and Elizabeth went on to finish in the top 10, and once again, even though she had achieved something truly remarkable, she felt somewhat diminished.
Which makes Carolyn, her mother, incensed. "It would be one thing if she had come out of nowhere and ended up in the top 10 of Westinghouse, but look at her resume since seventh grade. Go back to fourth grade," she says. "She is succeeding at every level of what males traditionally have been good at.
"You know what it is?" she continues. "You can't any longer say she got it because she's a girl, which is what they think, so they say, 'Well, she got it because she got extra help because she's a girl.' It's just another way of saying, 'She's a girl.' "
Elizabeth thinks her mother is "probably" right about this. Once again, however, she said little about the conversation to anyone, not even to Verona, who would have assured her that "adviser" was indeed the appropriate designation. Instead, she kept all of her thoughts, including some rising doubts, to herself.
And that might have been the end of it except for one more thing, a final contest, the Montgomery Area Science Fair, which would start off with 350 students competing against one another and come down to Elizabeth, Josh and Steve.
The contest, a weekend affair, is always held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It is a vast complex in Gaithersburg with polished hallways and endless laboratories, and also a portrait gallery of 78 distinguished alumni, 76 of whom are men. Elizabeth was here once before, on a field trip, and found the windowless laboratories so dulling that she went home wondering whether a life in science was really for her. But here she is, back again, competing against such projects as "Fluoride, Schmloride?!" "Development of a Helical Shunt for Use in Heart Bypass," and "The Confused Digger Wasp."
Her project's title: "A Parallel Implementation of the Wavelet Transform."
"This project implements a wavelet transform on a massively parallel computer, the nCUBE 2," her summary says. "{It} develops the algorithms required to parallelize the wavelet transform, performs a transform on an nCUBE 2 supercomputer, and shows that with an optimum number of processors, the parallel transform can indeed be performed more quickly than the preexisting recursive algorithm."
This is the project with which she won SuperQuest and Westinghouse. It is not only a paper, but also an actual computer program that she worked on for more than year, using a hookup to a university supercomputer to refine it. The program is on display, as is her research paper, as is her summary, as is a journal she kept of the daily progress of her work. "Oh horrors," is the entry one day, early on, when things seemed to be falling apart. "Hey, this is slick!" she penciled in a few months later, when she finally got the program to work.
Steve too is here with his Westinghouse project, a mathematical computation called "Multi-Dimensional Extension of Wythoff's Game," while Josh has come with something completely new, begun after the Westinghouse competition ended. Its title is "Particle Displacement Velocimetry Analysis," but more interesting to Elizabeth is that it's a computer-science project. His other project would have been entered in the physics category of the fair; his new one is in the same category as hers. Not only that, but the physical setup puts them just around the corner from each other. Standing by her project, she can't see Josh, but she can hear everything he says.
Now, here come the first judges, and Elizabeth hears Josh explaining his project in that engaging, barge-ahead way of his, pausing at one point to say, "Stop me if you have any questions." He waits, hears no questions, plunges on. Elizabeth, meanwhile, starts twirling an amethyst ring that her parents gave her for her 17th birthday, and is slipping one foot in and out of a shoe when the judges round the corner and stop in front of her. "Hi," she says, smiling, trying to get her foot back in the shoe, and then, in that polite way of hers, the way that turns answers into questions, she begins telling them about what she has done.
"You start with one mother wave?" she says. "And break down the frequency of it by dilating it? And . . ."
And this is how it goes all morning long. There are two types of judges circulating -- the judges for the fair, who will choose a winner from each category to compete for a few Grand Awards, and the judges representing several dozen companies and organizations, who will be giving out certificates, prizes and cash. The group that Elizabeth is talking to is from TRW; not far behind is NASA; and the American Nuclear Society; and the CIA; and then comes Richard Gonchar, the first of the category judges for computer science.
"Tell me about it," he says to Elizabeth, and as she does, the second of the category judges, David Hillman, approaches Josh and asks the same thing. For a time, the two of them are talking at once.
"My project is the 'Particle Displacement Velocimetry Analysis' . . ." Josh says.
". . . the wavelet transform . . ." says Elizabeth.
". . . do you have any questions? . . ." says Josh.
". . . right, right. Yeah. Yeah . . ." says Elizabeth.
This goes on for several minutes. Then Gonchar makes his way toward Josh, and Hillman makes his way toward Elizabeth, and the whole thing starts again, except that this time, before Elizabeth can get going, Hillman says to her, "I've seen you somewhere before."
"Oh?" she says.
"Were you here last year?" he asks.
"No."
He thinks about this while she stands in silence, hands clasped, feet together, ankles almost touching, waiting. He shakes his head, and she continues to wait. Perhaps there is an urge to tell him that he might have seen her picture in the paper, that she was in the paper after winning Westinghouse, that she finished ninth in Westinghouse, ninth out of 1,600 students, students not just from Montgomery County but from the entire country, the Westinghouse! But Elizabeth would never say anything like that. Never. Patiently, she waits until finally he shrugs, and then she goes on explaining her project.
"Any practical applications?" he asks.
"Okay. Yes," she says. "Cardiology . . ."
"I know," he interrupts. "I talked to you last year when you were trying to find somebody to talk to about the wavelet transform."
"Oh," she says, suddenly remembering too.
"Who'd you find?" he asks.
"Well, no one," she says.
"And you went ahead anyway?"
"Yes."
"Well," he says. "I'm impressed."
She smiles and unclasps her hands, and he asks a few more questions and moves on to the next display. There are a few more judges from some of the various organizations still floating around, but the judging for her category is done, and at noon the decision is announced.
Elizabeth wins first place.
And so does Josh.
A tie.
Kristen -- Elizabeth's friend and Josh's girlfriend -- is there with a camera and asks the two of them to stand side by side. "Look friendly," she says. They move a little closer. "Look chummy," she says, and for a moment they both smile. She takes one picture, just one, and they separate and go on to the next level of competition, the Grand Award level in which they'll be judged not only against each other, but also against the other category winners, including the winner of the math category, Steve.
For this, a new batch of judges is engaged. They come to Elizabeth first, spending about five minutes asking questions before moving around the corner to Josh.
Where they spend six minutes. Maybe seven.
Then they move down the hall to Steve. He is too far away for Elizabeth or Josh to hear what is being said, but after five minutes they can see he is still talking, and after 10 minutes they can see he is still talking, and after 15 minutes not only is he still talking but the judges are now sitting in chairs, leaning forward and appearing in no particular hurry to leave.
So it surprises no one when, the next day, at the awards ceremony, after the special awards have been given out and Elizabeth, Josh and Steve have won an assortment of certificates and savings bonds and calculators, it is announced that one of the two Grand Award winners for physical science is Steve.
"Yessss!" he says when he hears his name. He pounds his fist on his leg and runs up on stage, grinning all the way, where he joins the other Grand Award winner, who also is grinning:
Josh.
They are the winners, and Elizabeth is named the first runner-up. They will go on to the International Science Fair, and Elizabeth won't. They come offstage and are surrounded by their families and friends, and Elizabeth walks over to them with their other prizes, which she has thought to gather up from under their seats. "Thanks," says Josh, taking his things from her. He is still smiling. So is Steve. So is Elizabeth, but then she isn't. She is not quite happy and not quite sad, and she walks out of the auditorium by herself, nearly bumping into one of her teachers as she goes through the door.
"Whoops," she says.
"Congratulations, Elizabeth," the teacher says.
"Thank you," she says.
"It hasn't been a bad year for you."
"Thanks."
"It's only the beginning."
"Thanks."
Politely then, Elizabeth's last high school competition comes to an end. Soon she will be on to Harvard; followed, she imagines, by graduate school; followed, she imagines further, by a full life in which, one day, a line will be crossed, and all of the breathless moments that once were at the heart of her four-page resume will be far gone. But not forgotten. "I think I'll recognize that this year was pretty hard," is how she supposes this time will one day look. "I think the first three years were relatively good ones. I learned a lot. I've had a lot of opportunities. But I guess this winter and spring will always be pretty painful."
It is nearly the end of high school when she says this, only a matter of weeks until graduation. It's a time when most seniors are in their final slide, but for Elizabeth everything is the same as ever. At home, as usual, she is the first awake and the last to bed, working until all hours on whatever is left to do. And at school, in third period physics, she is back to trying to a get a word in edgewise, back to being caught in every way between Josh and Steve.
"It was nice not only to get the grand prize, but to beat her," Josh is honest enough to say of the science fair.
Steve, meanwhile, decides it's time to give Elizabeth another call.
They have been doing well. Their Kellogg-Briand Pact has been working. Instead of arguing, they have been talking about "intellectual" things, as Steve describes them, "arcane things . . . poetry, and music, and books," but this time the conversation becomes personal, and, as they will later remember it, Elizabeth says she's going to go to Harvard, and Steve says he's going to go there too, and Elizabeth says, "I'm living in your shadow," and Steve says, "I'm living in your shadow," and suddenly, to Steve's astonishment, Elizabeth begins to cry.
"You're the genius," she says. "I'm a teacher's pet."
"How can you say that?" he says.
"Well, look at our projects," she says. "You had a brilliant project, and I had help from Ms. Verona."
"I don't think I've proven anything here to teachers," he says.
"Well, at least you don't feel like you haven't proven anything to yourself," she says.
On it goes, into the night, and the next day Steve is still thinking about it, still replaying it, still surprised. "Because on the outside, Elizabeth is the cheeriest person you'll ever see. On the outside, Elizabeth is always confident," he says. "Maybe it was the harshness of what she said, the brutality of the extremes. It was so blunt. I mean, I'm not a genius, and she's not a teacher's pet. I mean, it never really occurred to me that she had any doubts about herself."
But everyone has doubts, even Steve, even Josh, and , even the smartest girl of all, who on the day after Steve's call is sitting outside of her house, idly making wishes. They are the wishes of someone who is brilliant, and someone who is a girl, and is as yet unsure how to be both.
"I wish I had beautiful hair," she says.
"I wish I were better at physics and math than I am."
"I wish I could stay awake 24 hours a day."
"I wish I had a car."
"I wish I could figure out why I've lost so much respect from Josh, and what I could do about it, and what I'm doing wrong."
"I wish teachers wouldn't single out people."
"I wish I could be respected for my mind and yet liked as a person regardless of what my mind is like."
"I wish, well, this is a hard one. I wish people knew about my insecurities, so they wouldn't think I'm conceited, as apparently they do."
She says this knowing that someone does know now, someone who has known her for nearly six years and yet didn't seem to realize until their phone call that being the smart girl, being Elizabeth, can be difficult; realized this not so much because of what she said, or because of what has been said to her, but because for a few minutes one night he heard her cry.
And that brings Elizabeth to her last wish.
"I wish he didn't know," she says. "Because now my secret's out."
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Against the Law
For Jacques Verges, no client is indefensible. But does his defence of a top Khmer Rouge leader undermine the principles he has spent his career proclaiming?
By STEPHANIE GIRY • THE REVIEW (ABU DHABI) • AUGUST 2009
Khieu Samphan and Jacques Vergès, two old men with thin-rimmed glasses and thickened waists, were sitting on a floor mat, shoeless, having tea. It was late August 2006, in a room at the Renakse hotel, a converted colonial mansion in central Phnom Penh. Khieu, the former president of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and a Pol Pot loyalist to the end, was still free. But he was growing nervous as a UN-backed tribunal was ramping up its efforts to indict the few surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. So he had called on his old friend Vergès, defender of terrorists and tyrants. Khieu wore brown polyester pants, Vergès a beige linen suit. They called each other "Maître" and "Président" and reminisced about the time when they had no titles—their student days in Paris in the 1950s. And they strategised.
Vergès' first move was to present Khieu as neither a monster nor an ideologue but a reasonable man and a patriot. Vergès had already argued, in a preface to Khieu's 2004 memoir The History of Cambodia and the Positions I Took, that while Khieu had been Cambodia's president under the Khmer Rouge, he had only been their "fellow traveller". It was true, according to most accounts, that Khieu, a well-respected populist economist and member of Cambodia's parliament in the early 1960s, had only joined Pol Pot's group after he was forced to flee to the jungle to avoid being assassinated by the regime of King Norodom Sihanouk. But Vergès was going further. "The Khmer Rouge leadership resorted not to persuasion but to coercion and eventually to crimes against the human person," he wrote, with deliberate vagueness, of the regime's 1.7 million victims, and "in these crimes, Khieu never took part directly."
Now Khieu was in my hotel room, across the street from the Silver Pagoda, where he and Pol Pot and other top Khmer Rouge had set up headquarters soon after marching into Phnom Penh in April 1975. He was explaining away some of the regime's fateful decisions: the evacuation of the cities, the abolition of money, forced collectivisation. "I am asked how I could have killed my own people. Please! Me, wanting to kill my people?" Khieu said, pounding his chest. On the other hand, he explained, "once engaged, one must go all the way. One cannot anticipate the costs. It's true, the costs turned out to be very high, but we had no choice."
A month earlier, in Paris, Vergès had asked me, "Do you know who was the Soviet head of state under Stalin? No? Well, that's Khieu Samphan's defence." Khieu's defence, in true Vergès style, would also argue that the United States, with its bombing campaigns in eastern Cambodia and its backing of the hapless government of General Lon Nol, had created the conditions for the Khmer Rouge's rise—namely, an impending famine and the risk of annexation by Vietnam.
At one point during the course of our week-long conversation, I asked about torture and executions under the Khmer Rouge. Khieu became agitated. "There are instances when one cannot both respect human rights and protect a country's independence," he said. Americans and Europeans don't understand this, he chided, because the survival of their nations is no longer in question. Vergès chimed in with a small smile and his clear, magisterial voice: "And when their independence is threatened, Western states also are capable of committing acts that the laws condemn." He recited a litany of atrocities committed by the Allies during the Second World War—from Dresden to Hiroshima—and added, "there was never any question of prosecuting them". Yet today, Western governments were professing to judge the Khmer Rouge experiment before an international tribunal. Victors' justice then and now.
This was vintage Vergès. With Khieu, he was returning to his first political love—the anti-colonial struggle—and applying the tactics he had honed in half a century of polemical advocacy: politicising a legal matter, flipping the charges back against the accuser, appealing to public opinion. Vergès' list of clients includes two dozen members of the Front de Libération National (FLN), who bombed Algeria's way out from under French domination in the 1950s, and the extended clique of pro-Palestinian lefty radicals who bombed their way to nowhere in the 1970s and 1980s (chief among them Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal). It includes despots the West has forcibly deposed (Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein) and African strongmen it has propped up (Idriss Déby, Omar Bongo, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Denis Sassou-Nguesso). And it includes one-of-a-kind clients: the Nazi Klaus Barbie and Charles Sobhraj, the serial killer known as the Serpent.
These people are deemed to be indefensible, and for defending them Vergès is often called the Devil's Advocate. He relishes both the moniker and the attention. Jean-Louis Simoën, his editor and friend, explained, "Some people take drugs. He gets high on television." His provocative arguments, legal showmanship, political radicalism and grand pronouncements suggest some combination of Alan Dershowitz, Noam Chomsky and Voltaire.
But this flamboyance easily misleads. Vergès may be a megalomaniac who is fascinated with the peculiar integrity of fanatics, but he's also a committed polemicist with a deep compassion for political underdogs. He has represented many sympathetic defendants and quirky causes: Muslim girls who want to wear headscarves in school, a prostitute seeking back pay from her pimp, Aids patients contaminated by tainted blood transfusions because the government skimped on screening procedures. What brings together all of Vergès' cases, the notorious and the anonymous, is a unified theory of law that is at once political, prudential, moral, and aesthetic. Crime isn't an aberration, he says; the capacity for transgression is what distinguishes humans from animals. This is why Vergès believes it is wrong and dangerous, not to mention inelegant, to treat criminals, terrorists and despots as if they were exceptional, to believe that the rest of us are impervious to the forces that shaped them. He adds a noblesse-oblige twist to this view by arguing that to properly defend a criminal a lawyer must restore his dignity and present "his" truth."The profession of lawyer is not only the exercise of a certain technique," Vergès has said, "it is also—and first and foremost—a way of coming to terms with the humanity of all men, guilty or not."
These notions could be construed as a kind of radical humanism, but Vergès is so unrelenting and defiant in their application that the bien-pensants find it difficult to agree with him. Instead, they identify him with his clients and consider him immoral. Rather than deny the charges, Vergès plays along—and relishes the bravado. Of course he would have defended Hitler, he has told reporters many, many times. He'd even defend George W Bush, he always adds—so long as Bush pled guilty.
But behind this provocation, too, there are principles, including one that runs like a motto through Vergès' conversations and thirty-some books: "a lawyer must be capable of defending everyone so long as he remains coherent". There are no indefensible clients—just indefensible arguments.
Khieu explained to me why he had turned to Vergès, "I couldn't accept to be defended by someone who would ask me to denounce Pol Pot to save my own skin. Only Vergès could do that for me." But can Vergès defend Khieu without jeopardising his own coherence? His work for the FLN at the beginning of his career helped midwife the independence of one country, but now he is defending a movement that turned another into a charnel. This poses a challenge for Vergès not so much because the Khmer Rouge ended up on the wrong side of history. It's a challenge because what brought them there—oppression, slavery and torture—are crimes that Vergès has spent his career denouncing.
***
Born in Thailand in 1925, Jacques Vergès grew up in a quirky, brainy household in the far-flung French territory of La Réunion, raised largely by a doting great aunt and his father, a globe-trotting doctor and part-time consul. It was while serving in Indochina, before practising medicine in La Réunion—where he would found the local branch of the French communist party—that Vergès' father married his mother, a young Vietnamese. (She died when he was three.)
From this upbringing, Vergès absorbed an idiosyncratic mix of principles, including this defining combination: a keen sensitivity for the plight of the colonised alongside a full education in the soaring values of the French Enlightenment. He came of age fighting for independence: as a teenager during the Second World War, with Charles de Gaulle's forces; then, as a communist student activist in Paris and Prague; finally, in the mid-1950s, by joining a lawyers' collective to defend the FLN, the main group opposing France's occupation of Algeria.
Representing the FLN meant denouncing both colonialism and torture, and in Djamila Bouhired, an FLN runner facing the death penalty, Vergès found an uncannily perfect embodiment of the cause: a young woman of unshakeable commitment, stoic and eloquent, who had been tortured by French officers. But it was a hard case. A lynch-mob vibe dominated her trial. Paratroopers packed the courtroom daily; the prosecutors and the judges took procedural shortcuts. Vergès was threatened; a colleague was assassinated. With Vergès effectively muzzled, Bouhired was sentenced to death.
Vergès immediately launched a massive public relations offensive. He published the closing argument he hadn't been allowed to deliver in court, prompting waves of petitions, letters of sympathy, and demonstrations clamouring for her pardon. "Djamila" became a cause célèbre. And soon, her death sentence was commuted to life in prison.
The "rupture" defence was born. Vergès had managed to exploit the irreconcilable gap between the French military tribunal, which considered the members of the FLN to be terrorists, and the defendants, who saw France as an illegal occupier and called themselves Algerians and freedom fighters. Facing a certain loss in court, Vergès thought that "the only way to change the power dynamic" was "to turn to public opinion"—and put the court and its patrons on trial. This was a simple notion but a bold departure from the conventional defence strategy adopted by Vergès' liberal colleagues—what he calls la connivence, or collusion—which sought leniency in sentencing by minimising the guilt of the accused.
Some say Vergès' approach flopped in Algeria: all of his clients were sentenced to death. He says it succeeded: none were executed. It was the defendants who played nice and pled extenuating circumstances that went to the guillotine. That's because, explains Vergès, "carrying out an execution is a political decision that takes public opinion into account." Vergès may have lost the legal case in court, but he won the political battle outside it. In fact, he won two political battles: he saved his clients' lives while publicising their struggle, and he exposed the French government's practices in Algeria.
Vergès' campaign continued after Algeria's independence, in 1962, but the golden years were over. He married Bouhired, who had been released from prison and was now a national heroine (he had separated from his first wife, with whom he had one son, a few years earlier). They had two children and a half-settled domestic life as he shuttled between Paris and Algiers. He failed to get the job he had hoped for working in the first Algerian government, and began to edit one, and then another, Maoist political magazine. He took on cases defending Palestinian terrorists—the big national liberation struggle of the time—but with limited success. Already, it seemed that Vergès' political, professional and personal interests might never converge as perfectly as they had in his work for the FLN.
Meanwhile he continued to theorise. In 1968, he published La Stratégie Judiciaire, which set out the main tenets of the rupture defence, tracing its roots to great historical trials (Socrates, Antigone) and literary classics (Dostoievsky, Stendhal). The trials of Jesus and Joan of Arc were textbook rupture cases; that of Dreyfus, archetypal connivence. He also returned to the lessons of the Algerian War. It was important, he wrote, to remember who the real culprits were: to denounce torture "without referring to its political context, to treat the executioner as a criminal while feigning to believe in the conscience of the minister is to pretend that a colonial war can be pursued in white gloves and with the UN Charter in hand."
Grand thoughts for days tamer than he would have liked. The student riots of May 1968, even though they eventually helped bring down the French government, seemed "like a mockery" to Vergès, "a kind of happening for earnest bourgeois and prudent dissenters, like a huge ideological orgy". One evening in February 1970, after attending a political rally in Paris, he vanished, leaving his family, his friends, and his career behind. He didn't reappear for almost nine years.
***
Vergès lives and works in a private house near Pigalle, Paris's mouldy red-light district. It is white, with a grey slate roof and scarlet geraniums along the windows. Its shutters are always closed. He spends much of his time in a dark office on the second floor, past a vast antechamber with two big African statues lording over a collection of chessboards. The room is a picture of well worn opulence: a dark cerulean rug, champagne silk on the walls, the complete works of Balzac and Nietzsche. It was in this lair at the end of our first meeting, in 2004, that I asked him the obligatory question about his disappearance. Fat cigar in hand, head framed by a majestic peacock on the tapestry hanging behind him, he fed me one of the stock answers he routinely repeats to journalists: "Those were my sabbatical years." (Another favourite: "I stepped through the looking-glass.") Vergès' disclosures are as carefully curated as his decor.
He mongers mystery to spark speculation: although he volunteers no information about where he spent the 1970s, he denies almost no theory. He might have left to escape creditors, a life grown too mundane, or a shady affair involving the unexplained death of former Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba's presumed assassin. Or, struck by the revolutionary's midlife crisis, he might have gone off looking for a new cause. According to Henri Leclerc, the former head of the French League of Human Rights, "Vergès isn't the type to philosophize on a Greek island and watch birds fly. He is not a mystic. He is a man of action". A favoured hypothesis is that he rallied the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia—but Barbet Schroeder's documentary, Terror's Advocate, seems to disprove it, based on a private investigation and denials from Pol Pot's second-in-command. Stints at PLO bases in the Middle East appear more likely, if marginally so, as does, perhaps, an extended visit to China. (Vergès and Bouhired had met Mao on their honeymoon.) In his preface to Vergès' book Je Défends Barbie, the writer and publisher Jean-Edern Hallier claims to have met Vergès "successively in the Bolivian maquis in 1973, with the Khmers Rouges, and in a whorehouse of Tel Aviv". Carlos the Jackal says that Vergès travelled "here and there" until he was arrested, tortured and flipped by Western secret services. "The French had him by the balls," Carlos told me by phone, in 2006, from the maximum-security prison where he is serving a life sentence. Vergès won't talk about that time, according to Carlos, "because he cannot, because he broke down."
In saying so little, Vergès reveals a steely discipline, and a public persona both genuine and thoroughly constructed. He is flamboyant the better to be withholding. Vergès, now 84, is calm but sprightly, witty and irreverent — altogether charming company—but interactions with him have a hollow quality; they lack emotional resonance. The third floor of the house in Pigalle, which is where he lives, is off-limits to even his closest friends. Jean-Louis Simoën recalled with a chill the reunion between Vergès and the cartoonist Siné, one of Vergès' old friends, after his years of disappearance. "I'll remember the scene for the rest of my life," Simoën told me a couple of years ago. Joy flashed for a minute at most, and then, "once the emotion had passed, the man was of marble. Everything slid off him. Nothing. Impenetrable."
***
Vergès reappeared in Paris in late 1978 the same way he had vanished, with no warning and no explanation. Djamila had left with the children; he had a practice to rebuild. François Mitterrand was soon elected president, marking the ascent of la gauche caviar, an elite socialism that Vergès abhors as wimpy and hypocritical. It was also the heyday of radical leftist terrorism, and in short order, Vergès became one of its regular counsels. He resumed his work for the Palestinian cause and started representing its new foot soldiers in Europe: Magdalena Kopp and Bruno Bréguet (who ferried explosives for Carlos); Georges Ibrahim Abdallah (who had murdered the US military attaché in Paris); Khomeini's hitman Anis Naccache (who botched the assassination of the Shah of Iran's last prime minister); and later, Carlos himself. For Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, then Vergès' apprentice, now Carlos's lawyer and wife, the 1980s were days of "ébullition" and fun.
They were also among the shadiest of Vergès' career. Declassified Stasi documents suggest that Vergès was in regular contact with Carlos, before and beyond what was required to defend him or his associates. (Vergès denies this.) He is said to have been on a hit list of the French government antiterrorism's unit. (Of this, he is convinced.) He was certainly playing politics at the highest levels: in a sketchy deal with the French and Iranian governments, he managed to get Naccache released from prison. Haunting a number of these cases was the spectre of François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi sympathiser and Hitler's literary executor, who is believed to have paid the legal bills. Genoud is also said to have funded the most infamous of Vergès' cases: the defence of the SS Klaus Barbie.
Barbie, aka the Butcher of Lyon, was arrested in Bolivia in 1983 and extradited to France, for killing members of the French Resistance and ordering the deportation of some 300 Jews when he was the head of the Gestapo in Lyon four decades earlier. Vergès took the case, confounding people who had admired him for fighting the Nazi occupation of France. Even those who agreed that Barbie deserved a lawyer, and a good one, and maybe even Vergès, never forgave him the violence of his tactics.
The trial opened on May 11, 1987. It was to be a grand affair: a history lesson and morality tale played out before a national audience—France's Eichmann trial. The largest room in Lyon's main courthouse, with vaulted ceilings and giant colonnades, was converted to accommodate a raised stage for the judges and 800 folding chairs for the audience. To the left of the bench were rows of prosecutors and representatives of victims' groups—39 in all. On the other side, sat the 73-year-old Barbie, looking elegant—dark suit, dark tie, an Italian collar—and below him, Vergès, with his chin raised. Barbie had a Sphinx's smile that offended and made headlines. On the second day he contested the court's authority: having been kidnapped, he stood before the judges as "a hostage, not a prisoner." He appeared in court again only once.
In Barbie's absence, Vergès stole the show. Despite his promises in the lead-up to the trial, he never delivered any dirt about betrayal among top Résistants. But he inflicted plenty of damage anyway. He argued, halfway convincingly, that the one document linking Barbie to an order to deport 44 Jewish children was a fake. He challenged, brutally, little old ladies from the Resistance as they choked up recounting scenes of torture. (It was "anatomically impossible" for a dog to rape a woman, as one witness claimed to have seen.) He was accused of singing German love songs in Barbie's cell (an erroneous rumour, he told me, but why contest it?); he was spotted dining at Bocuse with Barbie's daughter and son-in-law ("extremely respectable people"). He delivered his closing argument—dazzling, shocking—over the course of three days, flanked by two other lawyers, an Algerian and a Congolese. And the trio, a kind of "We Are the World" legal coalition, claimed that European slavery and recent massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Chatila were crimes against humanity no less than the Nazi concentration camps had been.
Françoise Capéran, a philosophy teacher who was covering the trial for French radio, recalled the rhetorical power of Vergès' argument: "There had been others. There had been worse. The construction of the railroad in Congo: one black dead for every crossbeam! Vergès was inhabited by this. And you could hear it! You could hear it! The dead were speaking. Any dead. Blacks, yellows, those who are less educated than we, those who believe in gods we find silly—no matter. A man is a man." Capéran signed up on the spot to work for Vergès and, then to help ward off charges that he was an anti-Semite, asked to be called Bloch, her mother's maiden name. Today she keeps his books, screens his calls, and orders his flu shots.
If denying the Holocaust its specificity inspired Bloch as a kind of universalism, to many more observers the argument reeked of bigotry. In his book about the trial, Remembering in Vain, the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut claims that "the spectacular collusion of the representatives of the Third World with a Nazi torturer" made "a mockery of the Nuremberg Trials." Friends and colleagues of Vergès also balked at the moral equivalency, though for their part it was because it appeared to betray his own values. Vergès had lambasted the French in Algeria for behaving as badly as the Nazis, and now he was absolving a Nazi for doing no worse than the French? The revolutionary seemed to have become a cynic, a mercenary paid in publicity.
Vergès insists he was being coherent. "I would like to defend my worst enemy; that would be the greatest moral," he has said. He explained his decision to take the case: "Friends told me: 'Barbie must be defended but not by you.' But he cannot be defended by a collaborator: Nazis and collaborators meet. If he is defended by a former Free French, then it was worth fighting the war, then we have a real democracy." Over the years, Vergès has told me, "I wouldn't have defended Barbie if I had had to argue the superiority of the Aryan race," and "I used to tell Barbie, 'You are not innocent. You are not better.'"
In other words, Vergès wasn't defending Barbie's actions, his values, or his character; he was explaining Barbie's plight. For Vergès, Barbie was, much like a French officer in Algeria or an American soldier during the Vietnam War, "a tragic character of our time: the subordinate officer of an occupation army in a country that resists". And as in Algeria and Vietnam, in Nazi-occupied France, the real culprits were the politicians. "By turning him into a monster, you exonerate Nazism. But if you say that he is a simple, pious character, then you condemn the regime, and that is much more important."
It was especially important for Vergès. Insisting on the "extreme modesty" of Barbie's position allowed Vergès to transcend the apparent contradiction of his defending a man who embodied the type of oppression and torture he had denounced in his work for the FLN. With that rhetorical pirouette, Vergès turned Barbie's trial on its head and indicted the French government—including the sitting president, Mitterrand, who had served as interior minister and justice minister in the late 1950s—for having once ordered crimes similar to those for which they were now trying Barbie. The Barbie case was not a detour from Vergès' path; it was a return to its starting point. It was a chance for Vergès to relitigate the Algerian War, and on a far grander stage.
***
Vergès' style can be so dramatic and provocative as to overshadow, at least in the eyes of the prudent and the polite, the purpose it is meant to serve. It can also make him appear callous toward his clients' victims. He handled some of the witnesses at Barbie's trial with inexplicable virulence. He seems generally unconcerned with the victims' experiences. He has not seen Shoah: "It doesn't interest me. I'm not a negationist, but whether 500,000 or six million were killed does not change the horror of the story." He has never visited—and has refused my invitations to go to—S-21, the prison in Phnom Penh where the Khmer Rouge tortured and executed more than 12,000 people. Last December, at a press conference following a hearing about the detention of Khieu Samphan—he was arrested in 2007 -- Vergès appeared vaguely amused when a brawl almost ensued between his Cambodian colleague and an overwrought court visitor who'd lost family members under the Khmer Rouge. Predictable in their pain, anger, righteousness, the victims tend to be less interesting to Vergès than the perpetrators. "I understand immediately the 3,000 questions posed by the victims of September 11," Vergès told me. "The one who poses a real question about our time is bin Laden."
Some claim that, though Vergès is more interested in his clients, he is just as ruthless with them. He described defending Barbie as an "opportunity to see the Resistance at work in France. Who betrayed? How did the Germans behave?" But others believe he used Barbie for his own ends. The Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, who had helped track down Barbie in Bolivia and represented victims' families at his trial—and so might be expected to care only moderately about the details of the man's defence—lambasts Vergès for "burying his client in prison". (Barbie was sentenced to life and died of leukaemia four years into his term.) Vergès "acted against the interests of his client" by "returning him to his cell", Klarsfeld told me in late 2006, still in a rage some 20 years after the trial, because Barbie's presence in court would have intimidated witnesses in a way that Vergès, who "hadn't studied the file," could not. Vergès, goes the implicit charge, is an opportunist: rather than mastering the technical aspects of his clients' cases, he uses them to grandstand in the limelight.
By now, however, a quid pro quo has developed between Vergès and his customers: some may serve his notoriety, but his reputation serves them, too. In 1994, he defended Omar Raddad, a Moroccan gardener accused of murdering the rich Ghislaine Maréchal, his employer, based on flimsy circumstantial evidence. A note drawn on a wall in Maréchal's blood named Raddad as the killer. Vergès claimed she hadn't written it—it contained a spelling mistake a woman of her standing would never have made; therefore, Raddad was being framed. The jury convicted him anyway, to 18 years in prison. A lawyer familiar with the case told me that though Vergès underperformed in court, he was "admirable" afterward. As soon as the verdict was announced, Vergès made a stink about some procedural irregularities. Turning to journalists on the steps of the courthouse, he indicted the judgment, the tribunal, the judicial system, and all of French society with one swift reference to the Dreyfus affair. "One hundred years ago, an officer was condemned for being Jewish. Today, a gardener is condemned for being North African." Raddad was pardoned within two years and free within four.
***
One very hot morning in late July 2006, a motley bunch of reporters and civilians is assembled in the courthouse in Bobigny, a northern suburb of Paris, to see Maître Vergès in action. The occasion is a hearing in one of the biggest drug busts in French history: the Saudi prince Nayef bin Fawwaz al Shaalan has been charged with smuggling two tonnes of Colombian cocaine into France—stashed in 66 Samsonite suitcases in his private jet. The subject of an international arrest warrant, Nayef has sensibly decided to stay put in Saudi Arabia; he is being represented today by his twin brother Saud, in tight powder-blue pants and pointy lizard-skin pumps.
A half-dozen journalists hover in the atrium, hoping for sound bites. Vergès is happy to oblige. As is typical for French justice these days, he says, in this case, too, "the judge already knows who is guilty; his pinkie told him". He goes on to explain why the evidence—plane tonnage, flight patterns, luggage size, among other things—doesn't hold up and concludes that the prince is really on trial, at the behest of the US government, for doing oil business with the wrong people, namely the Venezuelan government and the Medellín drug cartel. "I know lawyers and magistrates who spend their nights in Pigalle," he says, to expose the problem. "And that doesn't make them pimps." A reporter teases: "But you, Maître, are the greatest bandit in the world."
The hearing, it is announced, will be delayed until the afternoon, and so a small crowd decides to repair with Vergès to the terrace of the nearby Restaurant du Palais for refreshments. Joining him and Saud are two Saudi bodyguards; Hélène, an assistant of Vergès'; Claude, a social scientist struggling to make sense of the Khmer Rouge; Régis, a psychiatrist who once treated Vergès' client the Serpent; and an unidentified young man with a black eye. Orders are taken: apricot nectar, Orangina, Perrier, beer, and, for the wounded, champagne and a banana split.
For many hours—hours lengthened by the asphalt-melting heat—the group talks about oil prices, Saudi-Iranian relations, the ongoing war between Lebanon and Israel, Abu Ghraib. The mood is playful. Vergès quotes Napoleon, à propos of nothing: "I win my battles with the dreams of my sleeping soldiers." A passerby interrupts his cell phone conversation to yell that he's seen Vergès on TV. Claude challenges Vergès: "How dare you put on the same level the crimes of dictatorships and the crimes of democracies? In democracies, there are human rights." "Precisely," Vergès replies. "In democracies, we are that much guiltier."
That evening, finally in court, Vergès's fans fill the first few rows of an aggressively modern room -- brick walls, concrete ceiling, bright blue metal beams. Vergès, now donning his black robe, has approached the judges to submit a brief arguing that the arrest warrant against his client is invalid. The prosecutor, a frizzy brunette, balks and asks for an extension. Vergès says, "These are standard legal arguments; no new facts are presented. You are equipped to answer this." She challenges him, "What if I'm not equipped?" "Then you should quit," he answers.
Saud shuffles and sighs. Vergès walks over to him and asks, "Did you hear that? Unbelievable!" Régis says, "The bustard fears the falcon." Claude: "It seems as though she's under direct orders." Vergès: "All for fear of addressing the substance." Saud: "This whole thing is corrosive on the inside. It's like a rape." Vergès, wrily: "And yet searching for the truth should be a consensual process." The judges grant the extension and the meeting is adjourned, though not before the prosecutor, seeing Vergès on his way out, mumbles a complaint about his failing to formally take leave of the Prosecution, as is "customary" and "courteous". Vergès frowns, and struggling to hear her, says, "articulate, articulate", and walks away.
Whatever the forum, whatever the audience, Vergès wants to have the last word; every case, every conference, every interview is his show. This hasn't ingratiated him to the authorities, but over the years, at least in France, it's earned him quite a few groupies. Just a few weeks after the Nayef hearing, he was in Geneva to compete in an orators' joust. A cab picked him up at his tony hotel by the lake to take him to the Palais de Justice in the old part of the city on the hill. The driver, an Algerian in his thirties, greeted Vergès like he knew him ("Bonjour, Maître") and then wouldn't let such "a friend of Algeria" pay for the ride. An hour later, in a hallowed hall filled with blondes in beige and men in pin-stripes, Vergès drew coos of delight by riffing on the transformative power of trials, by way of Socrates and Antigone, Joan of Arc and Stendhal.
***
Now Vergès seems on a mission to outbid himself, in and out of court. These days, he is performing in a one-man show called Serial Plaideur, a play by him, with him, and for him. For two hours at a time, on a stage recreating his office, with some of his own furniture on loan, he again invokes Socrates and Antigone, Joan of Arc and Stendhal to riff on the transformative power of trials. One evening in late February, after the 60th show, he revelled visibly in the claps and the compliments, in the confetti of "Bravo!" and "You touched me terribly!" showered on him on the sidewalk outside the Théâtre de la Madeleine. Vergès is always ready for his close up, and he never pretends otherwise.
Having spent decades excoriating the French establishment, he is now increasingly turning his ire toward the United States and the international community, and volunteering to represent bigger and badder clients—Saddam, Milosevic, Khieu Samphan . In Simoën's view, Vergès seeks out these "hypertrophic beings to feed his own self-image." But his appetite is growing even as international criminal law is strengthening, which means that the gap between these legal norms and Vergès' views is widening. "The notion of crimes against humanity, of which democracies are so proud," he has written, "is, in its application, obscene. It applies only to crimes committed by others."
When there was talk, in 2004, of his defending Saddam, Vergès warned that he would summon then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to explain a certain well-photographed handshake. He also filed a complaint before the International Criminal Court claiming that Saddam had been mistreated while in the custody of the British government—this, somehow, intended as a jab to Washington. In 2006, Vergès and Dr Patrick Barriot published the pamphlet How The Hague Tribunal Eliminated Slobodan Milosevic, arguing that the ailing Milosevic had been left to die in detention. Again and again,Vergès denounces traditional bourgeois society for embracing grand principles but readily renouncing them when they become inexpedient. And for him, international criminal law, western democracies' grand contribution to contemporary jurisprudence, expresses this hypocrisy to the nth degree.
Françoise Vergès, Vergès' niece and an academic, says that his contribution during the Algerian war allowed everyone to "be less ashamed later". But what about his work now? When Vergès points out that the West's motivations are political, he seems to imply that such inconsistencies necessarily invalidate any effort to call other groups—the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge—to account for their crimes. Be perfect or be quiet. He doesn't ask the harder, and perhaps more important, question of how to confront all the parties' wrongs without letting the flaws of one foreclose an assessment of the others.
Khieu's trial is another easy opportunity for Vergès to flay the West, especially the United States, which helped set up the rickety tribunal to judge Khmer Rouge leaders only after backing them diplomatically for two decades. But it is complicated in every other respect. Vergès could defend the FLN in the 1950s, and wholeheartedly, because his values and the movement's converged perfectly: they both opposed colonialism and torture at once. He could also defend Barbie in the 1980s, paradoxically, because Barbie stood for the exact opposite on both counts. All he had to do was to turn the case on its its head—as he did, with a combination of rupture and connivence. The Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, might be said to have fought for independence and in its name to have justified torture and more—utopian social reengineering, mass deaths.
In other words, Khieu's trial, unlike the FLN cases and the Barbie affair, pits Vergès' two main causes against each other. Hence the need for Vergès to argue that Khieu wasn't a big decider, just a "fellow traveller"—the need to tone down his rupture approach with some connivence, as with Barbie. Only Khieu wasn't just a police captain in an occupying army that was eventually defeated. He was the president of a regime that bankrupted itself. And he was Vergès' friend. Against this far more complicated backdrop, the bold, sweeping style that made Vergès' reputation a half century ago could very well disserve him now. Unless he can bring down the whole tribunal before Khieu's trial even begins, his bombast, no matter how brilliant, risks turning him into a caricature of himself.
***
Vergès travelled to Phnom Penh in April to argue that Khieu should be released from detention as preparations for his trial were dragging on. Vergès had failed to show up at a hearing about just this question in February—dilatory tactics, his detractors had said; in fact, Bloch needed emergency surgery after a bad fall. Suspicions were high because of the run-in with victims last December, and because Vergès had already been reprimanded for claiming that the court's failure to translate every single page of the case file into French voided the whole procedure. In the meantime, the tribunal had also got itself into some trouble. Long accused of being too slow—only one of the five defendants, Duch, the commander of the S-21 torture centre, is on trial—more recently it had been hampered by budget shortages, corruption charges, and a disagreement among the prosecutors about whether to indict more surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, including a few who sit in the current Cambodian government.
The night before the hearing, Sa Sovan, Khieu's Cambodian lawyer, treated some colleagues to dinner at a favourite Chinese restaurant. Vergès, Duch's lawyer François Roux, and two junior attorneys were ushered into a windowless back room. A TV on a metal arm jutted from a yellow wall. Sa Sovan ordered for the table, and the conversation soon turned to court news: the latest bailout from the Japanese government and prime minister Hun Sen's recent warning that more indictments would prompt civil war. Vergès was high from a strategy meeting that afternoon at which several defence lawyers had discussed leveraging the corruption issue to their clients' benefit. He was tempted to raise the matter in court the next day. Roux said, "Word is, the United Nations is thinking of pulling out and letting the Japanese foot the bill." Vergès was sceptical the Japanese would agree. Sa Sovan thought they might: "They'd really get to stick it to the Chinese." The smoked pork and black-chicken soup took a spin on the Lazy Susan. Roux goaded Vergès. "You really should raise the corruption issue. You'd get a second warning." Vergès smiled. "Last time, I was thunderous. Tomorrow, I will be perfidious."
The next morning, behind a wall of bulletproof glass, Sa Sovan and the prosecutors droned on in Khmer debating whether the ageing and ailing Khieu would flee or intimidate witnesses if released. Vergès didn't bother to listen to the translation through his headphones. Slouched back in his swivel chair, he was staring at the ceiling and spinning around, at times with his back to the bench. Eventually, Judge Rowan Downing, an Australian with silver curls, asked him to reply to the prosecutors' objections. Vergès said he wanted to express concerns about corruption. Downing responded that the matter was not on the agenda and should be postponed.
Vergès, suddenly stentorian, claimed to agree: "I will be quiet because I should not be more concerned about your honour than you are yourselves—if you believe that we should not discuss corruption here, I will not force the discussion on you. I will be quiet because I understand your caution in this regard and believe that the presumption of innocence you sometimes deny the accused might benefit you. I will be quiet because the head of state who hosts you has said publicly that he wants you to leave, turning you into moral squatters. I will be quiet because the head of state who hosts you has said that you are interested only in money, corroborating the accusations, grounded or not, that corruption plagues this tribunal."
Roux wasn't in court for Vergès's "J'accuse" moment, and when he unexpectedly walked into the defence lawyers' office late that afternoon, wearing a straw hat and ready to call it a day, Vergès debriefed him. Vergès repeated his tirade point by point. Roux chuckled along the way. "I think this tribunal is over," Vergès said. "And I think I made my contribution, by turning the possibility into a probability. I tell you, it was like saying to a call girl, 'You're such a whore.'" Roux went "Ohhhh," in mock outrage. They laughed.
Soon Vergès said his goodbyes. In a few hours he would be flying to La Réunion—the next stop, before Beirut, Damascus and Spoleto, on the world tour of his new one-man show.
Stéphanie Giry is editor on the op-ed pages of the International Herald Tribune in Hong Kong. An archive of her work is available at
stephaniegiry.com.
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The Cruelest Sport
by Joyce Carol Oates
Originally published in the New York Review of Books, February 13, 1992, and reprinted in On Boxing (expanded edition).
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
—Walt Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric"
A boxer's victory is gained in blood.
—Greek inscription
Professional boxing is the only major American sport whose primary, and often murderous, energies are not coyly deflected by such artifacts as balls and pucks. Though highly ritualized, and as rigidly bound by rules, traditions, and taboos as any religious ceremony, it survives as the most primitive and terrifying of contests: two men, near-naked, fight each other in a brightly lit, elevated space roped in like an animal pen (though the ropes were originally to keep rowdy spectators out); two men climb into the ring from which only one, symbolically, will climb out. (Draws do occur in boxing, but are rare, and unpopular.)
Boxing is a stylized mimicry of a fight to the death, yet its mimesis is an uncertain convention, for boxers do sometimes die in the ring, or as a consequence of a bout; their lives are sometimes, perhaps always, shortened by the stress and punishment of their careers (in training camps no less than in official fights). Certainly, as in the melancholy case of Muhammad Ali, the most acclaimed and beloved heavyweight in boxing history, the quality of the boxer's post-retirement life is frequently diminished. For the great majority of boxers, past and present, life in the ring is nasty, brutish, and short—and not even that remunerative.
Yet, for inhabitants of the boxing world, the ideal conclusion of a fight is a knockout, and not a decision; and this, ideally, not the kind in which a man is counted "out" on his feet, still less a TKO ("technical knockout"—from injuries), but a knockout in the least ambiguous sense—one man collapsed and unconscious, the other leaping about the ring with his gloves raised in victory, the very embodiment of adolescent masculine fantasy. Like a tragedy in which no one dies, the fight lacking a classic knockout seems unresolved, unfulfilled: the strength, courage, ingenuity, and desperation of neither boxer have been adequately measured. Catharsis is but partial, the Aristotelian principle of an action complete in itself has been thwarted. (Recall the fury of young Muhammad Ali at the too-readily-defeated Sonny Liston in their second, notorious title fight, of 1965: instead of going to a neutral corner, Ali stood over his fallen opponent with his fist cocked, screaming, "Get up and fight, sucker!")
This is because boxing's mimesis is not that of a mere game, but a powerful analogue of human struggle in the rawest of life-and-death terms. When the analogue is not evoked, as, in most fights, it is not, the action is likely to be unengaging, or dull; "boxing" is the art, but "fighting" is the passion. The delirium of the crowd at one of those matches called "great" must be experienced firsthand to be believed (Frazier–Ali I, 1971, Hagler–Hearns, 1986, for instance); identification with the fighters is so intense, it is as if barriers between egos dissolve, and one is in the presence of a Dionysian rite of cruelty, sacrifice, and redemption. "The nearest thing to death," Ali described it, after his third title match with Joe Frazier, in 1975, which he won when the fight was stopped after the fourteenth round. Or: "This is some way to make a living, isn't it?" as the superlightweight Saoul Mamby said, badly battered after a title fight with the champion Billy Costello, in 1984.
A romance of (expendable) maleness—in which The Fight is honored, and even great champions come, and go.
For these reasons, among others, boxing has long been America's most popularly despised sport: a "so-called" sport, even a "meta-" or an "anti-" sport: a "vicious exploitation of maleness"1 as prostitution and pornography may be said to be a vicious exploitation of femaleness. It is not, contrary to common supposition, the most dangerous sport (the American Medical Association, arguing for boxing's abolition, acknowledges that it is statistically less dangerous than speedway racing, thoroughbred racing, downhill skiing, professional football, et al.), but it is the most spectacularly and pointedly cruel sport, its intention being to stun one's opponent's brain; to affect the orgasmic communal "knockout" that is the culminating point of the rising action of the ideal fight. The humanitarian argues that boxing's very intentions are obscene, which sets it apart, theoretically at least, from purer (i.e., Caucasian) establishment sports bracketed above.
Boxing is only possible if there is an endless supply of young men hungry to leave their impoverished ghetto neighborhoods, more than willing to substitute the putative dangers of the ring for the more evident, possibly daily, dangers of the street; yet it is rarely advanced as a means of eradicating boxing that poverty itself be abolished; that it is the social conditions feeding boxing that are obscene. The pious hypocrisy of Caucasian moralists vis-à-vis the sport that has become almost exclusively the province of black and ethnic minorities has its analogue in a classic statement of President Bush's of some months ago, that he is worried by the amount of "filth" flooding America by way of televised hearings and trials: not that the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearing and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial revealed "filth" at the core of certain male–female relations in our society, but that public airings of such, the very hearings and trials, are the problem. Ban the spectacle, and the obscenity will cease to exist.
Black boxers from the time of Jack Johnson (the first and most flamboyant of the world's black heavyweight champions, 1908–1915) through Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Mike Tyson have been acutely conscious of themselves as racially other from the majority of their audiences, whom they must please in one way or another, as black villains, or honorary whites. (After his pulverizing defeat of the "good, humble Negro" Floyd Patterson, in a heavyweight title match in 1962, Sonny Liston gloated in his role as black villain; when he lost so ingloriously to Muhammad Ali, a brash new-style black who drew upon Jack Johnson, Sugar Ray Robinson, and even the campy professional wrestler Gorgeous George for his own public persona, Liston lost his mystique, and his career soon ended.)
To see race as a predominant factor in American boxing is inevitable, but the moral issues, as always in this paradoxical sport, are ambiguous. Is there a moral distinction between the spectacle of black slaves in the Old South being forced by their white owners to fight, for purposes of gambling, and the spectacle of contemporary blacks fighting for multimillion-dollar paydays, for TV coverage from Las Vegas and Atlantic City? When, in 1980, in one of the most cynically promoted boxing matches in history, the aging and ailing Muhammad Ali fought the young heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, in an "execution" of a fight that was stopped after ten rounds, did it alleviate the pain, or the shame, that Ali was guaranteed $8 million for the fight? (Of which, with characteristic finesse, promoter Don King cheated him of nearly $1 million.) Ask the boxers.
Boxing today is very different from the boxing of the past, which allowed a man to be struck repeatedly while trying to get to his feet (Dempsey–Willard, 1919), or to be knocked down seven times in three wholly one-sided rounds (Patterson–Johansson I, 1959), or so savagely and senselessly struck in the head with countless unanswered blows that he died in a coma ten days later (Griffith-Paret, 1962); the more immediate danger, for any boxer fighting a Don King opponent, is that the fight will be stopped prematurely, by a zealous referee protective of King's investment.
As boxing is "reformed," it becomes less satisfying on a deep, unconscious level, more nearly resembling amateur boxing; yet, as boxing remains primitive, brutal, bloody, and dangerous, it seems ever more anachronistic, if not in fact obscene, in a society with pretensions of humanitarianism. Its exemplary figure is that of the warrior, of some mythopoeic time before weapons were invented; the triumph of physical genius, in a technologically advanced world in which the physical counts for very little, set beside intellectual skills. Even in the gritty world of the underclass, who, today, would choose to fight with mere fists? Guns abound, death to one's opponents at a safe distance is possible even for children. Mike Tyson's boast, after his defeat of the twelve-to-one underdog Carl Williams in a heavyweight title defense of 1989, "I want to fight, fight, fight and destruct the world," strikes a poignantly hollow note, even if we knew nothing of subsequent disastrous events in Tyson's life and career.2
Consider the boxing trainer's time-honored adage: They all go if you hit them right.
These themes are implicit in Thomas Hauser's Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times and The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing; but it is only in the latter work that theoretical, historical, and psychological issues are considered—Hauser sees boxing as "the red light district of professional sports," in which individuals of exceptional talent, courage, and integrity nonetheless prevail. His Ali is the heftier and more ambitious of the two, befitting its prodigious subject—the most famous athlete of all time, until recent years the most highly paid athlete of all time. An authorized biography, it would appear to be definitive, and is certainly exhaustive; Hauser spent thousands of hours with his subject, as well as approximately two hundred other people, and was given access to Ali's medical records. The text arranges these testimonies into a chronological history in which (is this New Age biography?) the author's voice alternates with, but rarely comments upon, still less criticizes, what these others have said. Compassionate, intelligent, fair-minded, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times might have benefited from further editing and paraphrase. Specific subjects (an imminent fight, financial deals, Ali's marital problems, Ali's health problems, the Nation of Islam, et al.) become lost in a welter of words; frequently, it is difficult to locate dates, even for important fights. And no ring record of Ali in the appendix!—a baffling omission, as if Ali's performance as an athlete were not the primary reason for the book.
As it happens, Hauser's succinct commentary on the Ali phenomenon and his shrewd analysis of the boxing world, including Don King's role in it, in his earlier book, The Black Lights, can provide, for the reader of the biography, a kind of companion gloss; the books are helpfully read in tandem. It is a remark of Ali's, in 1967, that gives The Black Lights its ominous title:
They say when you get hit and hurt bad you see black lights—the black lights of unconsciousness. But I don't know nothing about that. I've had twenty-eight fights and twenty-eight wins. I ain't never been stopped.
Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 17, 1942, grandson of a slave, began boxing at the age of twelve, and, by eighteen, had fought 108 amateur bouts. How is it possible that the young man who, in his twenties, would astonish the world not just with the brilliance of his boxing but the sharpness of his wit seems to have been a dull-average student in high school who graduated 376th out of a class of 391? In 1966, his score on a mental aptitude test was an Army IQ of 78, well below military qualification. In 1975, Ali confessed to a reporter that he "can't read too good" and had not read ten pages of all the material written about him. I remember the television interview in which, asked what else he might have done with his life, Ali paused, for several seconds, clearly not knowing how to reply. All he'd ever known, he said finally, was boxing.
Mental aptitude tests cannot measure genius except in certain narrow ranges, and the genius of the body, the play of lightning-swift reflexes coupled with unwavering precision and confidence, eludes comprehension. All great boxers possess this genius, which scrupulous training hones, but can never create. "Styles make fights," as Ali's great trainer Angelo Dundee says, and "style" was young Ali's trademark. Yet even after early wins over such veterans as Archie Moore and Henry Cooper, the idiosyncrasies of Ali's style aroused skepticism in boxing experts. After winning the Olympic gold medal in 1960, Ali was described by A.J. Leibling as "skittering…like a pebble over water." Everyone could see that this brash young boxer held his hands too low; he leaned away from punches instead of properly slipping them; his jab was light and flicking; he seemed to be perpetually on the brink of disaster. As a seven-to-one underdog in his first title fight with Sonny Liston, the twenty-two-year-old challenger astounded the experts with his performance, which was like none other they had ever seen in the heavyweight division; he so out-boxed and demoralized Liston that Liston "quit on his stool" after the sixth round. A new era in boxing had begun, like a new music.
Ali rode the crest of a new wave of athletes—competitors who were both big and fast. . . . Ali had a combination of size and speed that had never been seen in a fighter before, along with incredible will and courage. He also brought a new style to boxing. Jack Dempsey changed fisticuffs from a kind of constipated science where fighters fought in a tense defensive style to a wild sensual assault. Ali revolutionized boxing the way black basketball players have changed basketball today. He changed what happened in the ring, and elevated it to a level that was previously unknown.
(Larry Merchant, quoted in Muhammad Ali)
In the context of contemporary boxing—the sport is in one of its periodic slumps—there is nothing more instructive and rejuvenating than to see again these old, early fights of Ali's, when, as his happy boast had it, he floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee and threw punches faster than opponents could see—like the "mystery" right to the temple of Liston that felled him, in the first minute of the first round of their rematch. These early fights, the most brilliant being against Cleveland Williams, in 1966, predate by a decade the long, grueling, punishing fights of Ali's later career, whose accumulative effects hurt Ali irrevocably, resulting in what doctors call, carefully, his "Parkinsonianism"—to distinguish it from Parkinson's disease. There is a true visceral shock in observing a heavyweight with the grace, agility, swiftness of hands and feet, defensive skills, and ring cunning of a middleweight Ray Robinson, or a featherweight Willie Pep—like all great athletes, Ali has to be seen to be believed.
In a secular, yet pseudo-religious and sentimental nation like the United States, it is quite natural that sports stars emerge as "heroes"—"legends"—icons." Who else? George Santayana described religion as "another world to live in" and no world is so set off from the disorganization and disenchantment of the quotidian than the world, or worlds, of sports. Hauser describes, in considerable detail, the transformation of the birth of Ali out of the unexpectedly stubborn and idealistic will of young Cassius Clay: how, immediately following his first victory over Liston, he declared himself a convert to the Nation of Islam (more popularly known as the Black Muslims) and "no longer a Christian." He repudiated his "slave name" of Cassius Marcellus Clay to become Muhammad Ali (a name which, incidentally, The New York Times, among other censorious white publications, would not honor through the 1960s). Ali became, virtually overnight, a spokesman for black America as no other athlete, certainly not the purposefully reticent Joe Louis, had ever done—"I don't have to be what you want me to be," he told white America. "I'm free to be me." Two years later, refusing to be inducted into the army to fight in Vietnam, Ali, beleaguered by reporters, uttered one of the memorable incendiary remarks of that era: "Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong."
How ingloriously white America responded to Ali: the government retaliated by overruling a judge who had granted Ali the status of conscientious objector, fined Ali $10,000, and sentenced him to five years in prison; he was stripped of his heavyweight title and deprived of his license to box. Eventually, the US Supreme Court would overturn the conviction, and, as the tide of opinion shifted in the country, in the early 1970s as the Vietnam War wound down Ali returned triumphantly to boxing again, and regained the heavyweight title not once but twice. Years of exile during which he'd endured the angry self-righteousness of the conservative white press seemed, wonderfully, not to have embittered him. He had become a hero. He had entered myth.
Yet the elegiac title of Angelo Dundee's chapter in Dave Anderson's In The Corner3—"We Never Saw Muhammad Ali at His Best"—defines the nature of Ali's sacrifice for his principles, and the loss to boxing. When, after the three-and-a-half-year layoff, Ali returned to the ring, he was of course no longer the seemingly invincible boxer he'd been; he'd lost his legs, thus his primary line of defense. Like the maturing writer who learns to replace the incandescent head-on energies of youth with what is called technique, Ali would have to descend into his physical being and experience for the first time the punishment ("the nearest thing to death") that is the lot of the great boxer willing to put himself to the test. As Ali's personal physician at that time, Ferdie Pacheco, said,
[Ali] discovered something which was both very good and very bad. Very bad in that it led to the physical damage he suffered later in his career; very good in that it eventually got him back the championship. He discovered that he could take a punch.
The secret of Ali's mature success, and the secret of his tragedy: he could take a punch.
For the remainder of his twenty-year career, Muhammad Ali took punches, many of the kind that, delivered to a nonboxer, would kill him or her outright—from Joe Frazier in their three exhausting marathon bouts, from George Foreman, from Ken Norton, Leon Spinks, Larry Holmes. Where in his feckless youth Ali was a dazzling figure combining, say, the brashness of Hotspur and the insouciance of Lear's Fool, he became in these dark, brooding, increasingly willed fights the closest analogue boxing contains to Lear himself; or, rather, since there is no great fight without two great boxers, the title matches Ali–Frazier I (which Frazier won by a decision) and Ali-Frazier III (which Ali won, just barely, when Frazier virtually collapsed after the fourteenth round) are boxing's analogues to King Lear—ordeals of unfathomable human courage and resilience raised to the level of classic tragedy. These somber and terrifying boxing matches make us weep for their very futility; we seem to be in the presence of human experience too profound to be named—beyond the strategies and diminishments of language. The mystic's dark night of the soul, transmogrified as a brutal meditation of the body.
And Ali–Foreman, Zaire, 1974: the occasion of the infamous "rope-a-dope" defense, by which the thirty-two-year-old Ali exhausted his twenty-six-year-old opponent by the inspired method of, simply, and horribly, allowing him to punch himself out on Ali's body and arms. This is a fight of such a magical quality that even to watch it closely is not to see how it was done, its fairy-tale reversal in the eighth round executed. (One of Norman Mailer's most impassioned books, The Fight, is about this fight; watching a tape of Ali on the ropes enticing, and infuriating, and frustrating, and finally exhausting his opponent by an offense in the guise of a defense, I pondered what sly lessons of masochism Mailer absorbed from being at ringside that day, what deep-imprinted resolve to outwear all adversaries.)
These hard-won victories began irreversible loss: progressive deterioration of Ali's kidneys, hands, reflexes, stamina. By the time of that most depressing of modern-day matches, Ali–Holmes, 1980, when Ali was thirty-eight years old, Ferdie Pacheco had long departed the Ali camp, dismissed for having advised Ali to retire; those who supported Ali's decision to fight, like the bout's promoter, Don King, had questionable motives. Judging from Hauser's information, it is a wonder that Ali survived this fight at all: the fight was, in Sylvester Stallone's words, "like watching an autopsy on a man who's still alive." (In The Black Lights, Hauser describes the bedlam that followed this vicious fight at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, where gamblers plunged in an orgy of gambling, as in a frenzy of feeding, or copulation: "Ali and Holmes had done their job.") Incredibly, Ali was allowed to fight once more, with Trevor Berbick, in December 1981, before retiring permanently.
Hauser's portrait of Ali is compassionate and unjudging: Is the man to be blamed for having been addicted to his body's own adrenaline, or are others to be blamed for indulging him—and exploiting him? The brash rap-style egoism of young Cassius Clay underwent a considerable transformation during Ali's long public career, yet strikes us, perhaps, as altered only in tone: "Boxing was just to introduce me to the world," Ali has told his biographer. Mystically involved in the Nation of Islam, Ali sincerely believes himself an international emissary for peace, love, and understanding (he who once wreaked such violence upon his opponents!); and who is to presume to feel sorry for one who will not feel sorry for himself?
The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing describes a small, self-contained arc—a few years in the career of a boxer named Billy Costello, at one time a superlightweight titleholder from Kingston, New York. Like Muhammad Ali, it is a sympathetic study of its primary subject, Costello, his manager Mike Jones, and their families and associates; yet, in the interstices of a compelling narrative taking us through the preparation for a successful title defense of 1984, it illuminates aspects of the boxing world generally unknown to outsiders—the routine and discipline of the boxer in training; the complex role of the fight manager; the exhausting contractual negotiations; the state of this "red-light district"—
Professional boxing is no longer worthy of civilized society. It's run by self-serving crooks, who are called promoters . . . . Except for the fighters, you're talking about human scum . . . . Professional boxing is utterly immoral. It's not capable of reformation. I now favor the abolition of professional boxing. You'll never clean it up. Mud can never be clean.
(Howard Cosell, quoted in The Black Lights)
Like others sympathetic with boxers, who are in fact poorly paid, nonunionized workers with no benefits in a monopolistic business without antitrust control, Hauser argues strongly for a national association to regulate the sport; a federal advisory panel to protect boxers from exploitation. His portrait of Billy Costello allows us to see why a young man will so eagerly risk injuries in the ring, which is perceived as a lifeline, and not a place of exploitation; why he will devote himself to the rigors of training in a sport in which, literally, one's entire career can end within a few seconds.
Black Lights ends dramatically, with Costello retaining his title against a thirty-seven-year-old opponent, Saoul Mamby, and with his hope of moving up in weight and making more money. Since its publication in 1986, the book has become a boxing classic; it is wonderfully readable, and, unlike Ali, judiciously proportioned. Yet to end the book with this victory is surely misleading, and even, to this reader, perplexing. The "black lights of unconsciousness" would be experienced by Billy Costello shortly, in a bout with a dazzlingly arrogant and idiosyncratic Ali-inspired young boxer named, at that time, "Lightning" Lonnie Smith, who would KO Costello in one of those nightmares all boxers have, before a hometown audience in Kingston. Following that devastating loss, Costello would fight the aging Alexis Arguello, one of the great lightweights of contemporary times, who would beat him savagely and end his career. To end with a tentative victory and not supply at least a coda to take us to the collapse of Billy Costello's career deprives Black Lights of the significance it might have had—for boxing is about failure far more than it is about success. In the words of the battered Saoul Mamby, "I'll miss it. I love boxing. Everything passed too soon."
Notes
1. See Gerald Early's brilliantly corrosive essays on boxing in Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (Ecco, 1989).
2. See Montieth Illingworth, Mike Tyson: Money, Myth and Betrayal (Birch Lane, 1991), p. 330.
3. See both Dave Anderson, In the Corner: Great Boxing Trainers Talk About Their Art (Morrow, 1991), and Ronald K. Fried, Corner Men: Great Boxing Trainers (Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1991). Irresistibly readable and informative books of interviews: Angelo Dundee, Eddie Futch, Ray Arcel, Charley Goldman, Lou Duva, Emanuel Steward, Kevin Rooney, et al.
BOXING
Mike Tyson: 1986
Mike Tyson: Blood, Neon, and Failure in the Desert
Mike Tyson: Tyson/Biggs: Postscript
Mike Tyson: Rape and the Boxing Ring
Mike Tyson: 1997
Muhammad Ali: The Greatest
Floyd Patterson: The Essence of a Competitor
The Cruelest Sport
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Mailman at 72 With America's Longest Route
By Tom Moroney - 2013-08-20T13:55:08Z
Tom Moroney/Bloomberg
His sorting finished inside the Mangum, Oklahoma, Post Office, Jim Ed Bull heads out to load his Ford Ranger with the day's mail. Bull is responsible for the longest mail route in the U.S., 187.6 miles (301.8 kilometers) around and through the tiny towns of Duke and Eldorado in drought-stricken southwest Oklahoma. Bull, a retired high school principal at 72, went back to work for the Post Office and is part of the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. labor force -- those who work past their 65th birthdays.
He's on County Road 1680 moving like a black-tailed jackrabbit under the big-bowl Oklahoma sky, a tiny dot in his Ford Ranger out on the edge of the world when the flying red stinger ants show up.
Enlarge image Mailman at 72 With Longest Route Leads Disruption of U.S. Labor
Postman Jim Ed Bull's red pickup truck moves along his postal route, the longest in America. Bull is one of 7.2 million Americans who were 65 and over and employed last year, a 67 percent jump from 10 years before. Photographer: Tom Moroney/Bloomberg
Attachment: Bloomberg Ranking: Seniors at Work
Enlarge image Older Americans Working Longer
The median age of employees at the at the Vita Needle factory in Needham, Massachusetts, is 73. Older Americans' reasons for staying in the workforce cover the spectrum in the post-recession economy. Photographer: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images
One, two, now three, they invade. Jim Ed Bull swats with a big hand. "They can hurt ya bad," he says.
Other on-the-job nuisances include hail, mud, diamondback rattlers, wild boars, coyotes, bobcats, porcupines and skunks. Bull keeps on driving. Past stunted wheat fields of drought and disappointment, he rolls.
Fifty, 55, 60 mph. Turning up a driveway, he reaches out the window and, snap, the mailbox opens. Bull is a letter carrier with the longest postal route in America, 187.6 miles (301.8 kilometers) across some of the loneliest territory in the country. He's 72, and part of the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. labor force -- those who work past their 65th birthdays.
Into the mailbox goes the weekly Southwest Oklahoma Shopper and a letter from Stockmans Bank, and slam, the door shuts tight. Snap-and-slam wasn't always the soundtrack of Bull's workday. He was a high school principal, coach and referee who retired in the late '90s only to come back to a payroll. Now he's one of 7.2 million Americans who were 65 and over and employed last year, a 67 percent jump from 10 years before.
They work longer hours and earn more than they did a decade ago. Fifty-eight percent are full-time compared to 52 percent in 2002, and their median weekly pay has gone up to $825 from $502. In the second quarter, government data show, Bull and his peers made $49 more a week than all workers 16 and older.
Perpetual Employment
Retirement is rarely the discrete here's-your-gold-watch event it once was. With pensions ever more scarce, millions face perpetual employment.
"It's becoming the norm," says Kevin Cahill, research economist at Boston College's Sloan Center on Aging and Work.
Older Americans' reasons for staying in the workforce cover the spectrum in the post-recession economy. Some need the money to live day-to-day, some want to build up battered 401(k) plans or put more away for their kids, some find that the daily activity organizes their lives in ways they can't on their own, keeping them connected and useful.
For Bull, who has a pension and Social Security and a $62,000 annual salary, it's mostly about family. With what his wife, Susan, a second-grade teacher, makes, they earn six figures. He says his working helps them maintain a comfortable lifestyle, and allows him to save to leave something substantial for Susan, who's 17 years his junior, and for his grandchildren.
No Resentment
While Oklahoma's economy thrives on a robust oil and gas industry, Bull worries about the two grandkids, and the prospect of their generation facing a staggering national debt.
Eddie Beard, 75, is a fellow rural letter carrier whose route is a mere 147 miles. A Church of Christ preacher, he came to the U.S. Postal Service 18 years ago for the retirement plan "because the clergy doesn't have one."
Lawyer Mike Henry, 73, a customer on Bull's route, still goes to the office because he declared bankruptcy in 1987 after losing his Texas real-estate investments when crude oil prices plunged. "I need the money," Henry says. He figures he'll work "until I die."
Like Bull and Beard, he harbors no resentment.
"It keeps me alive and alert and it gives me something to do where I can help folks," says Henry, who estimates half his legal work these days is pro bono. "I have said if I won the lottery, I wouldn't quit."
Longevity's Downside
The longevity has a downside. Seniors are, in some cases, "crowding out" younger unemployed workers waiting for spots to open, says economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institute.
They've expressed their frustration to Jeanette Dwyer, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, an Alexandria, Virginia-based union with more than 100,000 members, including Bull. "The economy has had an effect of everybody staying longer in their current jobs," she says.
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Postmaster Jeff Real at Bull's home office in Mangum says every one of his rural drivers has a backup, or sub, and they can wait six or seven years to get their own routes.
With military veterans and retirees from first jobs in the mix, the Postal Service abounds with grayhairs. Of 615,360 employees, agency data show 46 percent are over 50 compared to 39 percent at the grayest Fortune 500 company, American Airlines. (AAMRQ) Five thousand postal employees are 70 or more and 695 of those are exactly Bull's age, 72. Another 223 are over 80.
Improbable Run
Bull says the job keeps him youthful: "A guy guessed I was 55. I corrected him: 39."
His improbable run stretches across the southern reaches of the Great Plains through and around the tiny towns of Duke and Eldorado where the emptiness makes the stars, the moon, the edge of a riverbed appear larger than life to the uninitiated.
The land moves north from the Red River, quiet and flat, its dusky iron-rich earth cracked and blistered by two years of drought. Wells dried up and wheat folded over and died.
Farmers recall with some anxiety stories from their parents about the 1930s Dust Bowl, when the sky turned black and deadly. Steinbeck found his characters here for "The Grapes of Wrath," left with nothing, "hungry and restless, restless as ants."
While some towns in Bull's region had 2.12 inches of rain the last 10 days, that won't make up for what's lost.
The June harvest of wheat -- called winter wheat for it's already long in the ground -- fell to 3.5 million acres statewide, 800,000 less than in the dry year before. The 150,000 acres of cotton planted this year were the fewest since 1909.
Fiery Red
The county where Bull picks up his mail, Greer, and where he mostly delivers, Jackson, remain fiery red on the U.S. Drought Monitor map -- each of them 4 on a scale of 5.
"There wasn't much good that's come out of there this year or the last four or five," says Mike Schulte, who heads the Oklahoma Wheat Commission, a state agency. "You've just got to be a really strong person to make it."
In 36 years with three school districts, Bull counts his sick days on one hand -- five -- and tallies just as many in 13 years as a carrier, first as a substitute in 2000 and then as a full-timer in 2007. The temperatures he works in can swing 120 degrees Fahrenheit, from 115 (46 Celsius) in the summer to below zero in the winter's wind.
Five years ago, the snow and ice were so deep on the road that his power steering gave out. He zigged and zagged and tore through an electric fence, leaving a hole for 50 head of cattle to roam free. He pushed on the gas, nudging the truck out of trouble and on to the nearest farm for help.
"You just never know what might happen," Bull says over rib-eye and potato salad at his favorite steakhouse.
New Knee
Bull stands without a stoop at six-foot-three, 215 pounds. His resting pulse is 43. He had his left knee replaced in 2009. He takes one prescription drug, Lisinopril, to regulate his blood pressure. A Southern Baptist, he neither smokes nor drinks, though he does favor an occasional plate of greasy ribs.
His facial features are long and angular and his complexion ruddy. In summer, he wears sneakers, dungaree shorts and a red T-shirt with a "Postal Worker" icon nestled over an eagle, his only identifier. (His truck has no lettering because "they already know it's me coming.") His white hair belies his energy. His arms are toned, his gait quick.
Still, by the end of the week, Bull is tuckered out. He says he hopes to keep going for another three years, if his health holds up. Daily, he confronts the aches, pains and muscle pulls of sitting for hours, steering with one hand and snapping open mailboxes with the other.
"I'm kind of weary by Friday," he admits. "But then I can recuperate on the weekend."
How does he do that? "I mow my lawn."
'Something Clicked'
Every day starts with as many as 50 push-ups and 50 sit-ups. Home is a neat and modern three bedrooms in red brick at the end of a small suburban development in Altus, big enough for the two grandchildren to spend the night. Seven sets of old golf clubs are tucked away in a backyard shed, proof of his love for the game.
He and his wife bought the house four years ago for $215,000. He has one son from his previous marriage, she has a son and daughter from hers. They met through her father, a preacher who thought enough of Bull to pass him his daughter's number after Bull saw her sing at a church fellowship meeting.
"We looked at each other and something just clicked," he recalls.
By 7 o'clock each morning, Bull is at the McDonald's inside the Wal-Mart around the corner from home. He checks his wristwatch as he chews a bacon-egg-and-cheese biscuit. A dab or two of jelly makes it onto the biscuit. The rest he squeezes from two foil packets into his mouth, like astronaut food.
Dust, Mud
Bill Berry, one of the regulars, walks over. "Watch that mud today, Jim Ed," the retired firefighter says. The rain has turned more than a few of Bull's pathways into mailman quicksand, and once he had to be pulled out by a tractor.
"The dust and the mud, those are my enemies," he says.
He warms his coffee with a half refill and heads for the parking lot. It's 16 miles through long stretches of pastureland to the post office in Mangum, in the old courthouse. He's been driving there since last year when his route was redrawn to become the longest. It was part of the agency's effort to reduce costs and offset debt.
In Mangum, the empty streets and abandoned storefronts evoke the loneliness of "The Last Picture Show," the 1971 movie adapted from Larry McMurtry's novel about small-town Texas. Inside, Bull hurries to his work station, metal cabinets with myriad slots set at right angles, one cabinet each for Duke, population 424, and Eldorado, 446.
Ice Cubes
By 9:45, he's separated the letters into five bundles about the size of bread loaves but a lot heavier. He's ready to leave with the bundles, 100 weekly shoppers and eight packages when another carrier walks over with a stack that was inadvertently sent to his pile.
"Dad gummit," Bull says.
At 10:04, he pulls up to the drive-through window at his first stop, The Shop Around the Corner, and passes the mail to the woman at the cash register. In turn, he's handed a large Styrofoam cup of ice cubes that will sit on the truck floor and melt, generating his cold drinking water.
"Here we go," he says. The Postal Service doesn't supply rural carriers with vehicles, and Bull eschews modifications to his truck or special equipment. Instead, he sits between the two front seats, his body in the middle of the cab. His left hand holds the steering wheel, his left foot operates the gas and brake, and his long right arm inserts the mail.
Untamed Mesquite
Every rural route is assessed a time for completion. Using a formula based on volume of mail and number of stops -- he has 198 -- postal inspectors who followed Bull around for two weeks decided the route, including the sorting of mail or "casing," could be done in 9.4 hours. That number determines his salary.
Bull opens a brown mailbox door twisted and bent. Inside is a week's worth of bills and notices. Slam.
"Husband's in jail," he says in explaining the backup. When it comes to his customers, there's not a lot Bull doesn't know or see. One man has appeared in his front yard on three separate occasions this summer totally naked. "I don't want to get too close," Bull says.
By 11:30, he's made about 90 stops and heads for Eldorado along some of his longest stretches without a single delivery. Past untamed mesquite, cottonwood, bois d'arcs and gray wooden windmills that bring up water for the cattle, he flies, dodging chugholes and more mud.
Every Drop
Obstacles like this and the sharp road gravel force an average of one flat tire a week, two brake jobs a year and the purchase of a reliable used truck every four. The Postal Service pays 73 cents a mile for maintenance and gasoline, a sum Bull says barely covers costs.
At one early stop, Audy Edwards is in his front yard. "How much you get here in Eldorado, Audy?" Bull calls out. "We had 2.55 inches last night," Edwards says, referencing a rain gauge mounted on back of the box. "Another .30 this morning."
Every drop counts.
Bull follows a slow-moving black car. "I hate to drive behind these farmers," he grumbles.
His dad Hurshel was a farmer, a stout and strong man who married Bull's mother, Ola Mae, in 1933. She died in 2009 at age 93. She'd been the high school valedictorian, as were each of their three children -- Anita Louise, Jim Ed and Ricky Lynn.
Energy Bars
All of them went to college and earned teaching degrees. Bull rose through the ranks to become principal of Mangum's junior high and then the high school. As a student, he excelled in baseball and basketball, earning a scholarship to a community college. His dream was major-league baseball but the closest he ever came was coaching two high school players who were drafted.
Minutes after noon, he pulls a plastic bag from behind his seat with a bagged assortment of Slim Jim beef sticks, raisins, energy bars and peanut-butter-and-crackers. He settles on the raisins and points the truck to more open spaces.
"I'll eat when I get home," he says of the meager lunch fare. He leans over to turn on the AM radio. Talk host Sean Hannity on 1290 AM declares George Zimmerman, acquitted in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, "had no duty to retreat."
Bull likes Hannity. Financial planners who host shows too. "I hang on their every word," he says with a grin.
He retired as a principal in 1995 and went to Arkansas to play golf at a course a friend owns, working part-time as a landscaper. He came home in 1998 to take care of his sister when she was diagnosed with cancer. After he married Susan, he began to rethink his finances. As a teacher, she's entitled to a pension. Still, the age difference looms. He figures she'll outlive him, and then there are the grandchildren.
Last Words
"You couldn't say I'm worried," he says. "I just want to feel secure and not worry about my family."
His earnings also allow the couple to do something they don't like to broadcast: good deeds. That could mean delivering groceries to the home of a student who shows up to his wife's class hungry or paying the fuel bill to help a family through a cold Oklahoma winter.
"He takes taking care of people seriously," Susan Bull says of her husband.
That sense of duty gelled for him at 18, she says, when his world caved. His father, mentor and friend suffered severe whiplash roping a 500-pound steer. Bull's uncle drove him to the hospital in his '55 Chevy. For Bull, the pace was too slow.
"I would have floor-boarded all the way into town," he says. On the last mile, Bull, in the back seat, cradled his father. As Hurshel Bull gasped for air, he uttered his last words: Take care of your mother and Ricky, the younger brother who was only two months and two days old.
"I promised him I would," Bull says, choking back tears as he drives.
Dinner Prayer
That was 1959 and his father, just 45, had been on the verge of a breakout year as a cattleman. Having put together enough money to amass what farmers call a section -- 640 acres of prime pastureland -- he was on his way to expanding the operation and lifting his family out of poverty.
His death, Susan Bull says, cemented her husband's lifelong commitment to work and providing for his family.
Bull grips the wheel and looks toward the horizon. There's just one stop left. A woman who lives alone gets the shopper. Snap, slam. He drives back to Mangum to fill out his timecard.
On the way home, he drops by his favorite rib joint, the All-American in the town of Blair. A plate of pork ribs and a large sweet tea in front of him, he looks down and prays.
"Thank you, Lord, for the food, for the rain and for keeping us safe another day."
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An awesome speech by Bill Watterson delivered at the Festival of Cartoon Art, Ohio State University, October 27, 1989
The Cheapening of the Comics
I received a letter from a 10-year-old this morning. He wrote, "Dear Mr Watterson, I have been reading Calvin and Hobbes for a long time, and I'd like to know a few things. First, do you like the drawing of Calvin and Hobbes I did at the bottom of the page? Are you married, and do you have any kids? Have you ever been convicted of a felony?"
What interested me about this last question was that he didn't ask if I'd been apprehended or arrested, but if I'd been convicted. Maybe a lot of cartoonists get off on technicalities, I don't know. It also interests me that he naturally assumed I wasn't trifling with misdemeanors, but had gone straight to aggravated assaults and car thefts.
Seeing the high regard in which cartoonists are held today, it may surprise you to know that I've always wanted to draw a comic strip. My dad had a couple of Peanuts books that were among the first things I remember reading. One book was called "Snoopy," and it had a blank title page. The next page had a picture of Snoopy. I apparently figured the publisher had supplied the blank title page as a courtesy so the reader could use it to trace the drawing of Snoopy underneath. I added my own frontispiece to my dad's book. and afterward my dad must not have wanted the book back because I still have it. Peanuts, Pogo, and Krazy Kat have inspired me the most over the years. These strips are different in almost every way, but their worlds captivated me. Looking back on them, I think they can teach us something about comic strip potential.
Peanuts was my introduction to the world of the comic strip, and Peanuts captured my imagination like nothing else. Because it was the first strip I read, its many innovations were lost on me, and I suspect most readers of Peanuts today have forgotten how it single-handedly reconfigured the comic strip landscape in a few short years. The flat, simple drawings, the intellectual children, the animal with thoughts and imagination - all these things are commonplace now, and it's hard to imagine what a revolutionary strip it was in the '50s and '60s. All I knew was that it had a magic that other strips didn't.
A lot of the magic for me is in those deceptively simple, stylized drawings. For me, the few lines that make up each character, their faces, and gestures are remarkably expressive. Two dots with parentheses around them have become the cartoon shorthand for eyes looking uneasy or insecure. When Charlie Brown's eyes do that, you know his stomach hurts, Peanuts has held my interest for many years because the strip is very funny on one level and very sad on another. Charlie Brown suffers - and suffers in a small, private, honest way. Schultz draws those quiet moments of self-doubt: Charlie Brown sitting on the bench, eating peanut butter, trying to work up the nerve to talk to the little red-haired girl - and failing. As a kid, I read Peanuts for the funny drawings and the jokes, and later I realized that the childhood struggles of the strip are metaphors for adult struggles as well.
Peanuts is about the search for acceptance, security, and love, and how hard those self-affirming things are to find. The strip is also about alienation, about ambition, about heroes, about religion, and about the search for meaning and "happiness" in life. For a comic strip, it digs pretty deep. Of course, the strip has a flair for weird humor, too. Snoopy in goggles, his doghouse somehow riddled with bullet holes, yelling, "Curse you, Red Baron!" is, I submit, as bizarre an image as anything ever seen on the comics page. Peanuts defined the contemporary comic strip.
And Pogo? Pogo was an almost opposite approach to the comic strip. The drawings were as lush as the foliage of its Okefenokee setting, and the dialogue was as lush as the drawings. With the possible exception of Porkypine, there was not a soul-searching character in the cast of hundreds. Pogo was trusting, good-natured, and innocent, which generally meant it was Pogo's larder that got ransacked whenever someone got hungry. Most of the other characters were bombastic, short-sighted, full of self-importance, and not just a little stupid. What better vehicle for political satire and commentary? Pogo was largely before my time, so, like Peanuts, I can only imagine how it must have shocked its first readers. Considering how controversial many papers find Doonesbury in the 1980s, one has to wonder how Pogo got away with its political criticism 30 years earlier.
Again, much of Pogo's magic for me was in the beautiful drawings. where the animals looked so real and animated you imagined their noses were probably cold to the touch. Part of the magic was the amazing dialects they spoke, which mangled English with awful puns and unintended meanings. Part of it was the gutsiness of attacking the fur right on the "funny" pages and pulling no punch. Part of it was the strip's basic faith in human decency underneath all the smoke and bluster. Part of it was the rambling storytelling, where every main road to the conclusion was avoided in favor of endless detours. Part of it was that Grundoon talked only in consonants, P.T. Bridgeport talked in circus posters, and Deacon Mushrat talked in Gothic type. And, of course, part of it was that it was very, very funny. The strip had a mood, a pace, and atmosphere that has not been seen since in comics.
I discovered Krazy Kat when a large anthology of the strip was published in 1969. The book is an editorial disaster, but it did show a lot of Krazy Kat strips, and I admired the work immediately. Krazy Kat seems to be one of those strips people either love or don't get at all. Krazy Kat is nothing but variations on a simple theme, so the magic of the strip is not so much in what it says but in how it says it. Ignatz Mouse throws bricks at Krazy out of contempt, but Krazy interprets this as a gesture of affection instead. Meanwhile, the law - Offissa Pupp - futilely tries to interfere with a process that's completely satisfying to all parties for all the wrong reasons. This weird, recycling plot can be interpreted as a metaphor for love or politics - or it can just be enjoyed for its own lunatic charms. The strip constantly plays with its own form, and becomes a sort of essay on cartoon existentialism. The background scenery changes from panel to panel, and day can turn to night and back again during a brief conversation.
Similarly, Herriman played with language and dialect, inserting Spanish, phonetically spelled mispronounced words, slang, and odd, alliterative phrases, giving the strip a unique atmosphere. The drawings are scratchy and peculiar, but they provide a beautiful visual context to the equally idiosyncratic writing. Krazy Kat's sparse Arizona landscape, like Pogo's dense Georgia swamp, is more than a backdrop. The land is really a character in the story, and it gives a specific mood and flavor to all the proceedings. The constraint of Krazy Kat's narrow plot seems to have set free every other aspect of the cartoon to become poetry, and the strip is, to my mind, cartooning at its most pure.
These three strips showed me the incredible possibilities of the cartoon medium, and I continue to find them inspiring. All these strips work on many levels, entertaining while they deal with other issues. These strips reflect uniquely personal views of the world, and we are richer for the artists' visions. Reading these strips, we see life through new eyes, and maybe understand a little more - or at least appreciate a little more - some of the absurdities of our world. These strips are just three of my personal favorites, but they give us some idea of how good comics can be. They argue powerfully that comics can be vehicles for beautiful artwork and serious, intelligent expression.
In a way, it's surprising that comic strips have ever been that good. The comics were invented for commercial purposes. They were, and are, a graphic feature designed to help sell newspapers. Cartoonists work within severe space constraints on an inflexible deadline for a mass audience. That's not the most conducive atmosphere for the production of great art, and of course many comic strips have been eminently dispensable. But more than occasionally, wonderful work has been produced.
Amazingly, much of the best cartoon work was done early on in the medium's history. The early cartoonists, with no path before them, produced work of such sophistication, wit, and beauty that it increasingly seems to me that cartoon evolution is working backward. Comic strips are moving toward a primordial goo rather than away from it. As a cartoonist, it's a bit humiliating to read work that was done over 50 years ago and find it more imaginative than what any of us are doing now. We've lost many of the most precious qualities of comics. Most readers today have never seen the best comics of the past, so they don't even know what they're missing. Not only can comics be more than we're getting today. but the comics already have been more than we're getting today. The reader is being gypped and he doesn't even know it.
Consider only the most successful strips in the papers today. Why ate so many of them poorly drawn? Why do so many offer only the simplest interchangeable gags and puns? Why are some strips written by committees and drawn by assistants? Why are some strips still stumbling around decades after their original creators have retired or died? Why are some strips little more than advertisements for dolls and greeting cards? Why do so many of the comics look the same? If comics can be so much, why are we settling for so little? Can't we expect more from our comics pages? Well, these days, probably not. Let's look at why. The comics are a collaborative effort on the part of the cartoonists who draw them, the syndicates that distribute them, and the newspapers that buy and publish them. Each needs the other, and all haves common interest in providing comics features of a quality that attracts a devoted readership. But business and art almost always have a rocky marriage, and in comic strips today the interests of business are undermining the concerns of the art.
Part of the problem is that the very idea that cartoons could be art has been slow to take hold. I talked about Krazy Kat, Pogo, and Peanuts to show that the best cartoons have a serious purpose underneath the jokes and funny pictures. True, comics are a popular art, and yes, I believe their primary obligation is to entertain, but comics can go beyond that, and when they do, they move from silliness to significance.
The first comic strip cartoonists were staff artists of major newspapers, and consequently, from the beginning, cartoonists were regarded as simple employees of their publishers rather than artists. when the creator of a popular strip left his employer, the cartoonist was rarely able to take his creation with him intact. Very early strips, such as The Yellow Kid, The Katzenjammer Kids, and Buster Brown, all appeared in two versions, one by the original creator and one by an imitator hired by the publisher who lost the creator. The comic strip came into being as a staff-produced graphic, and comics have never escaped the perception that they are a newspaper "feature," like a weather reap, instead of a forum for individual expression. In fact, despite the grim violence of Dick Tracy, the conservative politics of Little Orphan Annie, the social satire of Li'l Abner, and the shapely women that have graced dozens of other strips, the comics have somehow come to be thought of as entertainment for children. Cartoonists are widely regarded as the newspaper equivalent of Captain Kangaroo. The idea that comics are potentially one of the most versatile artforms is sadly foreign. Our expectations and demands for comics are not high.
Today, comic strip cartoonists work for syndicates, not individual newspapers, but 100 years into the medium it's still the very rare cartoonist who owns his creation. Before agreeing to sell a comic strip, syndicates generally demand ownership of the characters, copyright, and all exploitation rights. The cartoonist is never paid or otherwise compensated for giving up these rights: he either gives them up or he doesn't get syndicated.
The syndicates take the strip and sell it to newspapers and split the income with the cartoonists. Syndicates are essentially agents. Now, can you imagine a novelist giving his literary agent the ownership of his characters and all reprint, television, and movie rights before the agent takes the manuscript to a publisher? Obviously, an author would have to be a raving lunatic to agree to such a deal, but virtually every cartoonist does exactly that when a syndicate demands ownership before agreeing to sell the strip to newspapers. Some syndicates take these rights forever, some syndicates for shorter periods, but in any event, the syndicate has final authority and control over artwork it had no hand in creating or producing. Without creator control over the work, the comics remain a product to be exploited, not an art.
Why does this happen? As the syndicates will tell you, no cartoonist is forced to sign the ridiculous contracts the syndicates offer. The cartoonist is free to stay in his $3.50 an hour bag boy job until he can think of a better way to get his strip in the newspapers. Simply put, the syndicates offer virtually the only shot for an unknown cartoonist to break into the daily newspaper market. The syndicates therefore use their position of power to extort rights they do not deserve.
Sacrificing ownership has serious consequences for the artist. For starters, it allows the syndicate to view the creator as a replaceable part. To most syndicates, the creator of a popular strip is no more valuable than a hired flunky who can mimic the original. Some syndicates can replace a cartoonist at will, and most syndicates can replace a cartoonist as soon as he quits, retires, or dies. This attitude is simply unconscionable, but it's the standard practice of business.
Cartoonists and syndicates alike tend to exaggerate the syndicate's role in making strips successful. Ultimately, though, the level of sales is determined a lot more by how good the strip is than by who sells it. Reader polls across the country shows surprising consensus about which strips are good, and editors do their best to print what the readers want. The syndicates bring the cartoon to the market, but they can't keep it there. Only the cartoonist can do that. Syndicates simply do not need or deserve comic strip ownership for the job they do.
By having complete control over the comic strip, the syndicate can ruin the work. Although there has never, ever been a successor to a comic strip half as good as the original creator, passing strips down through generations like secondhand clothes has been the standard practice of the business since it began. Incredibly, syndicates still today tell young artists that they're not good enough to draw their own strip, but they are good enough to carry on the work of some legendary strip instead. Too often, syndicates would rather have the dwindling income of a doddering dinosaur than let the strip die and risk losing the spot to a rival syndicate. Consequently, the comics pages are full of dead wood. Strips that had some relevance to the world during the depression are now being continued by baby boomers, and the results are embarrassing.
Suppose you're a painter and you go to an art gallery to see if they'll represent you. They look at your work and shake their heads. But, since you show some basic familiarity with a paintbrush, they ask if you'd like to continue Rembrandt's work. After all, you can paint. Rembrandt's dead, and some buyers would rather have a Rembrandt forgery than no Rembrandt at all. It's an absurd scenario, but this is what goes on in comic strip syndication.
Comic strips have a natural lifetime. and any cartoonist ought to be able to quit or retire without fear that his syndicate will hire some hack illustrator to keep the work going. It's time syndicates stopped maiming their comic strips by passing them on to official plagiarists. It's also time that the would-be successors of comic strips had more respect for their own talents and for the work of those who created something original. If someone wants to be a cartoonist, let's see him develop his own strip instead of taking over the duties of someone else's. We've got too many comic strip corpses being propped up and passed for living by new cartoonists who ought to be doing something of their own. If a cartoonist isn't good enough to make it on his own work, he has no business being in the newspaper.
Syndicate ownership of strips also gives them control over comic strip merchandising. Today, newspaper sales can't bring in a fraction of the money that licensing can bring. As the number of newspapers has diminished, and as the remaining papers run pretty much the same 20 strips everywhere, the growth of a syndicate now depends on dolls and greeting cards more than newspaper sales. Consequently, the quickest contracts are going to strips with licensing potential. One syndicate developed a comic strip after it had settled on the products: the strip was essentially to be an advertisement for the dolls and TV shows already planned. The syndicate developed the characters and then found someone to draw the strip. Lots of heart and integrity in that kind of strip, yes sir. Even in strips with more honorable beginnings, the syndicates are only too happy to sell out a comic strip for a quick and temporary buck, and their ownership and control allows them to do just that.
Of course, to be fair to the syndicates, most cartoonists are happy to sell out, too. Although not to the present extent, licensing has been around since the beginning of the comic strip, and many cartoonists have benefitted from the increased exposure. The character merchandise not only provides the cartoonist with additional income, but it puts his characters in new markets and has the potential to broaden the base of the strip and attract new readers. I'm not against all licensing for all strips. Under the control of a conscientious cartoonist, certain kinds of strips can be licensed tastefully and with respect to the creation. That said, I'll add that it's very rarely done that way. With the kind of money in licensing nowadays, it's not surprising many cartoonists are as eager as the syndicates for easy millions, and are willing to sacrifice the heart and soul of the strip to get it. I say it's not surprising, but it is disappointing.
Some very good strips have been cheapened by licensing. Licensed products, of course, are incapable of capturing the subtleties of the original strip, and the merchandise can alter the public perception of the strip, especially when the merchandise is aimed at a younger audience than the strip is. The deeper concerns of some strips are ignored or condensed to fit the simple gag requirements of mugs and T-shirts. In addition, no one cartoonist has the time to write and draw a daily strip and do all the work of a licensing program. Inevitably, extra assistants and business people are required, and having so many cooks in the kitchen usually encourages a blandness to suit all tastes. Strips that once had integrity and heart become simply cute as the business moguls cash in. Once a lot of money and jobs are riding on the status quo, it gets harder to push the experiments and new directions that keep a strip vital. Characters lose their believability as they start endorsing major companies and lend their faces to bedsheets and boxer shorts. The appealing innocence and sincerity of cartoon characters is corrupted when they use those qualities to peddle products.
One starts to question whether characters say things because they mean it or because their sentiments sell T-shirts and greeting cards. Licensing has made some cartoonists extremely wealthy, but at a considerable loss to the precious little world they created. I don't buy the argument that licensing can go at full throttle without affecting the strip. Licensing has become a monster. Cartoonists have not been very good at recognizing it, and the syndicates don't care.
And then we have established cartoonists who have grown so cavalier about their jobs that they sign strips they haven't written or drawn. Anonymous assistants do the work while the person getting the credit is out on the golf course. Aside from the fundamental dishonesty involved, these cartoonists again encourage the mistaken view that once the strip's characters are invented, any facile hireling can churn out the material. In these strips, jokes are written by committee with the goal of not advancing the characters, but of keeping them exactly where they've always been. So long as the characters never develop, they're utterly predictable, and hence, so easy to write that a committee can do it. The staff of illustrators has the same task: to keep each drawing so slick and perfect that it loses all trace of individual quirk. That way, no one can tell who's doing it. It's an assembly line production. It's efficient, but it makes for mindless, repetitive, joyless comics. We need to see more creators taking pride in their craft, and doing the work they get paid for. If writing and drawing cartoons has become a burden for them, let's see some early retirements and some room for new talent. And while cartoonists and syndicates continue to cheapen their own product, newspapers worsen the situation by continually shrinking the comics to ever smaller sizes.
The newspaper business has changed. Afternoon papers are failing everywhere, and few papers are in the competitive situation that comics were invented to promote. Television brings that latest news at six and 11 in full-color action. Newspaper circulation is not increasing with the population, while newspaper costs continue to grow. Consequently, over the last several decades, newspapers have been squeezing the comics into less and less space to cut expenses.
When Krazy Kat was drawn, comics regularly ran a full page on Sunday - an entire newspaper page all to itself. Comics were like posters. Now most papers commonly print strips a quarter of a page on Sundays, and sometimes even smaller. Daily strips have shrunk, too. Strips had already lost a lot of space by the time I cut out a Pogo strip in 1969. Today, 20 years later, I work with almost a third less space than that. As comic strips are printed smaller and smaller, the drawings and dialogue have to get simpler and simpler to stay legible. Cartoons are just words and pictures, and you can only eliminate so much of either before a cartoon is deprived of its ability to entertain.
The adventure strip, a newspaper staple in the '40s, has all but pasted away, and we've lost much of the diversity of which the comics are capable. It's not too surprising. At current sizes, there is no room for real dialogue, no room to show action, no room to show exotic worlds or foreign lands, no room to tell a decent story. Consequently, today's comics pages are filled with cartoon characters who sit in blank backgrounds spouting silly puns. Conversation in a comic strip is a thing of the past. The wonderful dialects and wordplays of Krazy Kat and Pogo are as impossible now as the beautiful draftsmanship that characterized those strips and others. All the talk about how "sophisticated" comics have become shows a woeful ignorance of what comics used to be like.
Comics are simpler and dumber than ever. The situation is ironic. All across the country, newspapers are going to great expense to add color photographs, fancy graphics, and bold design to their pages in order to entice readers away from the steady blue light of their TV screens. It is strange that after all that expense and work, newspapers refuse to take advantage of the comic strip, the one newspaper graphic that television cannot imitate. When 20 strips are reduced and crammed into two monotonous columns on one page, the result is singularly unattractive and uneffective. Newspapers pay for their comics and then refuse to let comics do their job.
Here, then, is the situation: despite the proven popularity of the comics, newspapers print them miserably, while syndicates have taken it on themselves to control, exploit, and cheapen their product. Between the two, cartoonists all but abandon the artistic responsibilities of their craft. Somehow, I can't shake the idea that this isn't how cartooning is supposed to be... and that cartooning will never be more than a cheap, brainless commodity until it's published differently.
What can be done? I'm not a businessman, but I'll toss out some ideas just to start some discussion.
First of all, we should keep in mind that newspapers and syndicates are by no means essential to the production of comics, There are all sorts of ways to publish cartoons, and if syndicates and newspapers won't hold up their end of the bargain, maybe there's an opportunity for a new kind of publisher let's start with eliminating both the syndicate and the newspaper. Consider for a moment that there may well be a market for comic books that has never been tapped simply because comic books have traditionally been an even sloppier; dumber, and more exploitive market than newspaper comics. But suppose someone published a quality cartoon magazine. Imagine full-color, big comics in a lush, glossy format. Why not? Just because cartoons have always been treated as schlock doesn't mean that sleazy packaging, cheap paper, poor color; bad writing, and crude art are what comics are all about. Imagine a publisher who recognizes that the way to attract readers is to give them quality cartoons... and that the way to get quality cartoons is to offer artists a quality format and artistic freedom. Is it inconceivable such a venture would work?
Or let's say we keep the syndicates but abandon the newspapers. So long as newspapers refuse to respect the legitimate needs of the comic strip, why don't the syndicates take control of their product and publish the comics themselves? Each syndicate could put out a weekly comic book of all its strips. Comic books originally started as reprints of newspaper comics, and they were so popular an industry was created to produce new comic books to fill the demand. Suppose the syndicate gives each of its cartoonists five pages to draw and color any way he wants, then binds the results, and sells them at chain bookstores and in supermarkets with the magazines and tabloids. Offer subscriptions, too, what the heck. Think of all the kids who unload $10 a week collecting miserably done super-hero comics, and you know there's got to be a market out there somewhere. What syndicate is going to try something new to showcase the talent it's collected?
Or let's say we keep the syndicates and the newspapers. There are still ways to improve comics. For one thing, the syndicates could again take over the printing, and the comics could be sold to papers as a preprinted insert. Or the syndicates could print the insert with advertising, and let the ads pay for its inclusion in the newspaper. Either way, the syndicates could start printing their comics big, in color, and on good quality paper that people could keep and collect. If advertisers are paying for the comics section inserts, for example, editors can hardly complain that they don't get a citywide exclusive on their strips.
Or, if we assume no syndicate has the foresight to promote the quality of its own product, at the very least one would think an imaginative newspaper editor could come up with a way to add another half-page of space to the comics section and print the work as it was intended to be published. Given the readership of the comics page, couldn't an advertiser or two be persuaded to sponsor the comics section for a single ad of his alone at the top of the page? I don't believe all the possibilities have been exhausted.
I admit my ideas here are rough. Obviously, if I had any business savvy at all myself, I'd lump the whole business tomorrow and self-publish. See, that's another alternative! My point is simply that cartoons are not necessarily doomed to increasing stupidity and crude craftsmanship. With the right publishing, comics can move into whole new worlds we've never seen. Moreover, I think any effort to improve the quality of comics would very likely be rewarded in the marketplace. Think of the people who cut out certain comics to put on refrigerators, or to put in scrapbooks, or to send in letters, or to stick on their office walls. Give them a nicely printed, big color comic on good paper and see if they don't jump. I think the public would respond if there was a publisher out there with an ounce of vision. For too long, syndicates and cartoonists have been congratulating themselves whenever things don't get worse. I don't think that's good enough. This very weekend we've got syndicate executives, cartoonists, readers, and newspaper people all together. let's knock some heads together and see what we can do. Let's ask people what they're doing to improve the state of comics.
I started out talking about Peanuts, Pogo, and Krazy Kat. These strips suggest a world of possibilities that cartoons can offer. Comics are capable of being anything the mind can imagine. I consider it a great privilege to be a cartoonist. I love my work, and I am grateful for the incredible forum I have to express my thoughts. People give me their attention for a few seconds every day, and I take that as an honor and a responsibility. I try to give readers the best strip I'm capable of doing. I look at cartoons as an art, as a form of personal expression. That's why I don't hire assistants, why I write and draw every line myself, why I draw and paint special art for each of my books, and why I refuse to dilute or corrupt the strip's message with merchandising. I want to draw cartoons, not supervise a factory. I had a lot of fun as a kid reading comics, and now I'm in the position where I can return some of that fun. I try to draw the kind of strip I'd like to read, but I'm not entirely able to. This business keeps me from doing the quality work I'd like to be doing... and because I'm being cheated, so arc my readers.
Newspapers can do better. Syndicates can do better. Cartoonists can do better. The business interests, in the name of efficiency, mass marketability, and profit, profit, profit are catering to the lowest common denominator of readership and arc keeping this artform from growing. There will always be mediocre comic strips, but we have lost much of the potential for anything else. We need more variety on the comics page, not less. Those of us who care about the comics need to start speaking up. This is an excellent place and time to do it.
Source of transcript.
Webcomic artist Dave Kellett (creator of "Sheldon") has an excellent new generation follow-up to this article, see them here: YouTube part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It's called "The Freeing of the Comics", and while Watterson told how and why newspaper comics were (and are) dying, Kellett explaines how webcomics can (and do) replace them. (via geek art gallery)
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Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business
With big profits on the line, the drug industry is pulling out campaign-style dirty tricks to keep selling the meds that cooks turn into crank.
—By Jonah Engle | July/August 2013 Issue
270
meth lab cleanupState troopers clean up a meth lab found on school board property about a block from a London, Kentucky elementary school. Photos by Stacy Kranitz. See more of her photos from Laurel County, Kentucky.
THE FIRST TIME she saw her mother passed out on the living room floor, Amanda thought she was dead. There were muddy tracks on the carpet and the room looked like it had been ransacked. Mary wouldn't wake up. When she finally came to, she insisted nothing was wrong. But as the weeks passed, her 15-year-old daughter's sense of foreboding grew. Amanda's parents stopped sleeping and eating. Her once heavy mother turned gaunt and her father, Barry, stopped going to work. She was embarrassed to go into town with him; he was covered in open sores. A musty stink gripped their increasingly chaotic trailer. The driveway filled up with cars as strangers came to the house and partied all night.
How Big Pharma Keeps Meth Cooks in Business
Photo Essay: Chasing Meth in Laurel County, Kentucky
Timeline: Big Pharma's Fight to Protect the Drugs That Cooks Turn Into Meth
Stats: The Price of Big Pharma's Pseudoephedrine Addiction
Horrifying Before and After Photos of Meth Users
Her parents' repeated assurances failed to assuage Amanda's mounting worry. She would later tell her mother it felt "like I saw an airplane coming in toward our house in slow motion and it was crashing." Finally, she went sleuthing online. The empty packages of cold medicine, the canisters of Coleman fuel, the smell, her parents' strange behavior all pointed to one thing. They were meth cooks. Amanda (last name withheld to protect her privacy) told her grandparents, who lived next door. Eventually, they called police.
Within minutes, agents burst into the trailer. They slammed Barry up against the wall, put a gun to his head, and hauled him and Mary off in handcuffs. It would be two and a half years before Amanda and her 10-year-old sister, Chrissie, would see their father again.
The year was 2005, and what happened to Amanda's family was the result of a revolution in methamphetamine production that was just beginning to make its way into Kentucky. Meth users called it the "shake- and-bake" or "one-pot" method, and its key feature was to greatly simplify the way meth is synthesized from pseudoephedrine, a decongestant found in cold and allergy medicines like Claritin D and Sudafed.
Cops are waging two battles: one against meth cooks, the other against wealthy, politically connected drug manufacturers.
Shake and bake did two things. It took a toxic and volatile process that had once been the province of people with Breaking Bad-style knowledge of chemistry and put it in the bedrooms and kitchens of meth users in rural America. It also produced the most potent methamphetamine anywhere.
If anyone wondered what would happen if heroin or cocaine addicts suddenly discovered how to make their own supply with a handful of cheap ingredients readily available over the counter, methamphetamine's recent history provides an answer. Since 2007, the number of clandestine meth sites discovered by police has increased 63 percent nationwide. In Kentucky, the number of labs has more than tripled. The Bluegrass State regularly joins its neighbors Missouri, Tennessee, and Indiana as the top four states for annual meth lab discoveries.
As law enforcement agencies scramble to clean up and dispose of toxic labs, prosecute cooks, and find foster homes for their children, they are waging two battles: one against destitute, strung-out addicts, the other against some of the world's wealthiest and most politically connected drug manufacturers. In the past several years, lawmakers in 25 states have sought to make pseudoephedrine—the one irreplaceable ingredient in a shake-and-bake lab—a prescription drug. In all but two—Oregon and Mississippi—they have failed as the industry, which sells an estimated $605 million worth of pseudoephedrine-based drugs a year, has deployed all-star lobbying teams and campaign-trail tactics such as robocalls and advertising blitzes.
Perhaps nowhere has the battle been harder fought than in Kentucky, where Big Pharma's trade group has broken lobbying spending records in 2010 and 2012, beating back cops, doctors, teachers, drug experts, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. "It frustrates me to see how an industry and corporate dollars affect commonsense legislation," says Jackie Steele, a commonwealth's attorney whose district in southeastern Kentucky has been overwhelmed by meth labs in recent years.
Map of the US
See more stats on the price of Big Pharma's pseudophedrine addiction.
BEFORE IT MIGRATED EAST to struggling Midwestern farm towns and the hollers of Appalachia, methamphetamine was a West Coast drug, produced by cooks working for Mexican drug-trafficking organizations and distributed by biker gangs. Oregon was particularly hard hit, with meth labs growing ninefold from 1995 to 2001. Even then, before shake and bake, police had their hands full decontaminating toxic labs that were often set up in private homes. Social workers warned of an epidemic of child abuse and neglect as hundreds of kids were being removed from meth houses.
In despair, the Oregon Narcotics Enforcement Association turned to Rob Bovett. As the lawyer for the drug task force of Lincoln County—a strip of the state's central coast known for its fishing industry, paper mills, and beaches—he was all too aware of the scourge of meth labs. Having worked for the Oregon Legislature and lobbied on behalf of the State Sheriffs' Association, he also knew his way around Capitol procedure.
Bovett knew that law enforcement couldn't arrest its way out of the meth lab problem. They needed to choke off the cooks' supply lines.
Bovett first approached the Legislature about regulating pseudoephedrine in 2000. "The legislative response was to stick me in a room with a dozen pharmaceutical lobbyists to work it out," he recalls. He suggested putting the drugs behind the counter (without requiring a prescription) to discourage mass buying, but the lobbyists refused. They did eventually agree to a limit on the amount of pseudoephedrine any one person could buy, but the number of meth labs remained high, so in 2003 Bovett tried once again to get pseudoephedrine moved behind the counter. "We got our asses kicked," he admits.
Then, in Oklahoma, state trooper Nikky Joe Green came upon a meth lab in the trunk of a car. The cook overpowered Green and shot him with his own gun. The murder, recorded on the patrol car's camera, galvanized the state's Legislature into placing pseudoephedrine behind the counter and limiting sales in 2004.
The pharmaceutical industry fought the bill, saying it was unlikely to curb meth labs. But Oklahoma saw an immediate drop in the number of labs its officers busted, and Oregon followed suit later that year.
But the meth cooks soon came up with a work-around: They organized groups of people to make the rounds of pharmacies, each buying the maximum amount allowed—a practice known as smurfing. How to stop these sales? Bovett remembered that until 1976, pseudoephedrine had been a prescription drug. He asked lawmakers to return it to that status.
Pharma companies and big retailers "flooded our Capitol building with lobbyists from out of state," he says. On the eve of the House vote, with the count too close to call, four legislators went out and bought 22 boxes of Sudafed and Tylenol Cold. They brought their loot back to the Legislature, where Bovett walked lawmakers through the process of turning the medicine into meth with a handful of household products. Without exceeding the legal sales limit, they had all the ingredients needed to make about 180 hits. The bill passed overwhelmingly.
Industry's motto has been "stop meth, not meds." One lawmaker likens it to the NRA's "plea to people who own weapons that they are coming for your guns."
Since the bill became law in 2006, the number of meth labs found in Oregon has fallen 96 percent. Children are no longer being pulled from homes with meth labs, and police officers have been freed up to pursue leads instead of cleaning up labs and chasing smurfers. In 2008, Oregon experienced the largest drop in violent-crime rates in the country. By 2009, property crime rates fell to their lowest in 43 years. That year, overall crime in Oregon reached a 40-year low. The state's Criminal Justice Commission credited the pseudoephedrine prescription bill, along with declining meth use, as key factors.
For Big Pharma, however, Oregon's measure was a major defeat—and the industry was not about to let it happen again. "They've learned from their mistakes in Oregon, they've learned from their mistakes in Mississippi," says Marshall Fisher, who runs the Bureau of Narcotics in Mississippi. "They know if another state falls, and has the results that we've had, the chances of national legislation are that much closer. Every year they can fight this off is another year of those profits."
ON A SUNNY WINTER AFTERNOON, narcotics detective Chris Lyon turns off a country lane outside the town of Monticello in southeastern Kentucky, the part of the state hardest hit by the meth lab boom. In a case that shocked the state in 2009, a 20-month-old boy in a dilapidated trailer nearby drank a cup of Liquid Fire drain cleaner that was being used to make meth. The solution burned Kayden Branham from inside for 54 minutes until he died.
This afternoon, Lyon is following up on a call from a sheriff's deputy about several meth labs in the woods. His Ford F-150 clambers up a steep muddy slope turned vivid ochre by the night's rain. In the back are a gas mask, oxygen tanks, safety gloves, and hazmat suits, plus a bucket of white powder called Ampho-Mag that's used to neutralize toxic meth waste. Cleaning up labs is hazardous work: In the last two years, more than 180 officers have been injured in the process. The witches' brew that turns pseudoephedrine into meth includes ammonium nitrate (from fertilizer or heat packs), starter fluid, lithium (from batteries), drain cleaner, and camping fuel. It can explode or catch fire, and it produces copious amounts of toxic gases and hazardous waste even when all goes well.
Halfway up Edwards Mountain, Lyon pulls over in a clearing along the forested trail. Scattered over 50 yards are a half-dozen soda bottles, some containing a grayish, granular residue, others sprouting the plastic tubes cooks use to vent gas. Lyon snaps on black safety gloves, pulls a gas mask over his face, and carefully places each bottle in its own plastic bucket. Further up the mountain he finds more outdoor labs and repeats the procedure.
Police cleaning up a meth lab
Cops in Laurel County, Kentucky, work a meth lab—or, as they put it, a "glorified garbage pickup."
Lyon will drive his haul back to the Monticello Police Department, where a trailer is jam-packed with buckets he's filled in the past few days. "No suspects, no way of making an arrest—it's pretty much a glorified garbage pickup," he says with an air of dejection. "We have all kinds of information of people selling drugs," but there's no time for investigations. "About the time that we get started on something, the phone rings and it's another meth lab to go clean up."
It's a problem Lieutenant Eddie Hawkins, methamphetamine coordinator for the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, was all too familiar with before his state passed its prescription bill in 2010. Since then the number of meth labs found in the state has fallen 74 percent. "We still have a meth problem," Hawkins says, "but it has given us more time to concentrate on the traffickers that are bringing meth into the state instead of working meth labs every night." Now, he says, they go after international criminal networks rather than locking up small-time cooks.
The spread of meth labs has tracked the hollowing out of rural economies. Labs are concentrated in struggling towns where people do hard, physical work for low wages, notes Nick Reding, whose book Methland charts the drug's rise in the Midwest: "Meth makes people feel good. Even as it helps people work hard, whether that means driving a truck or vacuuming the floor, meth contributes to a feeling that all will be okay." But the highly addictive drug can also wreak havoc on users, ravaging everything from teeth and skin to hearts and lungs. And the mushrooming of shake-and-bake labs has left its own trail of devastation: hospitals swamped with injured meth cooks, wrecked and toxic homes, police departments consumed with cleaning up messes rather than fighting crime.
Meth-related cleanup and law enforcement cost the state of Kentucky about $30 million in 2009, the latest year for which the state police have produced an estimate. That doesn't include the cost of crimes addicts commit to support their habit, of putting out meth fires, of decontaminating meth homes, of responding to domestic-abuse calls or placing neglected, abused, or injured kids in foster care. Dr. Glen Franklin, who oversees the burn unit at the University of Louisville Hospital, says his unit alone sees 15 to 20 meth lab burn patients each year, up from two or three a decade ago. They are some of his most difficult cases, often involving both thermal and chemical burns to the face and upper body from a bottle that burst into flames. Many, he notes, have also been abusing OxyContin or other prescription opiates, "so it makes their pain control that much more difficult." According to a study coauthored by Franklin in 2005, it costs an average of nearly $230,000 to treat a meth lab victim—three times more than other burn patients—and that cost is most often borne by taxpayers. Meth use as a whole, according to a 2009 RAND Corporation study, costs the nation anywhere between $16 billion and $48 billion each year.
WITH SILVER HAIR, glasses, and a gentle manner, Linda Belcher looks like the retired grade school teacher she is. Though her district, just south of Louisville, has a meth lab problem, she didn't know much about the issue until Joe Williams, the head of narcotics enforcement at the Kentucky State Police, invited her and a few other lawmakers to state police headquarters. After a dinner of barbecue, coleslaw, and pork and beans, the guests descended to the basement to be briefed about key public safety issues. One was meth labs, whose effects and increasing numbers were depicted in a series of huge charts. One of Williams' officers laid out the startling facts. Meth labs were up for the second year in a row in Kentucky, and they were spreading eastward across the state. They were turning up in cars, motel rooms, and apartment buildings, putting unsuspecting neighbors at risk. Police had pulled hundreds of children from meth lab locations. Prisons were filling up with cooks, and officers were being tied up in cleanup operations.
Belcher had been aware of methamphetamine, but she'd had no idea how bad things were getting. She set about learning more. "I went to a meeting and there was a young lady there who had been on meth," Belcher recalls. "During the time she was on it, she didn't care about anything—not her daughter, not her parents. All she wanted was to get money and get meth. That convinced me."
A man and a woman kissing
Theresa Hall kisses her boyfriend goodbye. For being caught with meth paraphernalia and violating house arrest, she faces a year in jail.
Belcher asked Williams and other law enforcement officials what they thought should be done. They told her about what had happened in Oregon. It could work in Kentucky, they said. In February 2010, Belcher filed a bill to require a prescription for pseudoephedrine.
Soon her phone started ringing off the hook. The callers were angry. If her bill passed, they said, they would have to go to the doctor each time they were congested. It wasn't true—more than 100 cold and allergy drugs made without pseudoephedrine, such as Sudafed PE, would have remained over the counter. And for those who didn't like those alternatives, doctors could renew prescriptions by phone.
Members of the House Health and Welfare Committee, the key panel Belcher's bill had to clear, were also getting calls. Tom Burch, the committee's chairman, says the prescription measure garnered more calls and letters than any he's dealt with in his nearly 40 years at the Capitol, except for abortion bills. "I had enough constituent input on it to know that the bill was not going to go anywhere."
Yet the legislation had gotten hardly any media coverage. How had Kentuckians become so outraged?
In April of that year, Donnita Crittenden was processing monthly lobbying reports at the Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission when a figure stopped her in her tracks. A group called the Consumer Healthcare Products Association reported having spent more than $303,000 in three weeks. No organization had spent nearly that much on lobbying in the entire previous year.
Curious, Crittenden called CHPA. It was, she learned, a Washington-based industry association representing the makers and distributors of over-the-counter medicines and dietary supplements—multinational behemoths like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. CHPA had registered to lobby in Kentucky just weeks before, right after Belcher filed her bill. But it had already retained M. Patrick Jennings, a well-connected lobbyist who'd earned his stripes working for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and GOP Rep. Ed Whitfield.
The bulk of CHPA's record spending, though, was not for lobbyists. It was for a tool more commonly used in hard-fought political campaigns: robocalls, thousands of them, with scripts crafted and delivered by out-of-state PR experts to target legislators on the key committees that would decide the bill's fate.
CHPA's Kentucky filings don't show which firm made the robocalls, but the association's 2010 and 2011 tax returns show more than $1 million worth of payments to Winning Connections, a robocall company that typically represents Democratic politicians and liberal causes such as the Sierra Club's campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline. On its website, the company boasts of its role in West Virginia, where it helped defeat a pseudoephedrine bill that had "strong backing among special interests groups and many in the State Capitol" via focused calls in key legislative districts. CHPA's former VP for legal and government affairs, Andrew C. Fish, is quoted as saying that Winning Connections helped "capture the voice of consumers, which made the critical difference in persuading legislators to change course on an important issue to our member companies." Nowhere does Winning Connections' site mention the intent of the bill or the word "methamphetamine." CHPA spokeswoman Elizabeth Funderburk says the association used the calls, which allowed people to be patched through directly to their legislators, to provide a platform for real consumers to get their voices heard.
Belcher's bill never came up for a vote. Over the ensuing months, the number of meth labs found in Kentucky would grow by 45 percent, surpassing 1,000.
Belcher had learned a lesson. When she reintroduced the prescription bill in 2011, it had support from a string of groups with serious pull at the Capitol—the teachers' union, the Kentucky Medical Association, four statewide law enforcement organizations, and Kentucky's most senior congressman, Hal Rogers. Belcher also had bipartisan leadership support in the Legislature, and the Republican chairman of the judiciary committee, Tom Jensen—whose district included the county with the second-highest number of meth labs—introduced a companion bill in the state Senate.
But the pharmaceutical industry came prepared, too. Its team of lobbyists included some of the best-connected political operatives in Kentucky, from former state GOP chairman John T. McCarthy III to Andrew "Skipper" Martin, the chief of staff to former Democratic Gov. Paul Patton. In addition to a new round of robocalls, CHPA now deployed an ad blitz, spending some $93,000 to blanket the state with 60-second radio spots on at least 178 stations. The bill made it out of committee, but with the outcome doubtful, Jensen never brought it up for a vote on the Senate floor.
Soda cans and an ice pack laying on the ground
Meth cooks often set up shop in the woods.
John Schaaf, the Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission's counsel, describes CHPA's strategy as a game changer. "They have completely turned the traditional approach to lobbying around," he says. "For the most part, businesses and organizations that lobby, if they have important issues going on, they'll add lobbyists to their list. They'll employ more people to go out there and talk to legislators. CHPA employs very few lobbyists and they spend 99 percent of their lobbying expenditures on this sort of grassroots outreach on phone banking and advertising. As far as I know, nothing's ever produced the number of calls or the visibility of this particular effort."
In other words: Rather than relying on political professionals to deliver their message, CHPA got voters to do it—and politicians listened, in Kentucky and beyond. There has been no major federal legislation to address meth labs since 2005, when pseudoephedrine was put behind the counter and sales limits were imposed (see "The Need for Speed," page 37). Lawmakers in 24 states have tried to pass prescription bills since 2009. In 23 of them, they failed.
The single exception was Mississippi, where a prescription measure supported by Republican Gov. Haley Barbour passed in 2010. The head of the state Bureau of Narcotics, Marshall Fisher, says one key to the bill's passage was making sure it was not referred to the Legislature's health committee, where members tend to develop close relationships with pharma lobbyists. Fisher has testified about prescription bills before health committees in several other states. "It seems like every time we've done that, the deck is stacked against us," he says. "You can't fight that." Following the bill's passage, the number of meth labs busted in Mississippi fell more than 70 percent. The state narcotics bureau, which tracks the number of drug-endangered children, reported the number of such cases fell 81 percent in the first year the law was in effect.
Next Page: Everywhere else, industry has prevailed.
Page 1 of 2Next
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Jonah Engle lives in Montreal and frequently writes about drug policy.
Photoessay: Meth In Laurel County, Kentucky
Horrifying Before and After Photos of Meth Users
In the early 2000s, a sheriff's deputy in Portland, Oregon, was struck by the way people locked up for meth offenses seemed to age years in just a few months between bookings.
Timeline: Big Pharma's Fight to Protect the Drugs That Cooks Turn Into Meth
Crystal Math: The Price of Big Pharma's Pseudoephedrine Addiction
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Stoneyjack 08/12/2013 06:22 AM
Respect patient/doctor/manufacturer confidentiality. Don't rat to cops. If efficacious medicine such as Dexedrine & Desoxyn could still be prescribed, there wouldn't be a home-made meth problem.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 06:51 AM in reply to Stoneyjack
I don't know what those are, but yes, find something that works as well without the addiction issue. That's more like it, instead of another expansion of the police state.
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Stoneyjack 08/12/2013 07:23 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
Dexedrine was dextroamphetamine sulfate, manufactured by SKF; Dessies were methamphetamine hydrochloride low-dosage tablets, manufactured by Abbott Labs. Both were freely prescribed as appetite suppressants, energy-boosters, & antidotes for narcolepsy, but the Feds wanted more crimes to fight, justifying bigger budgets. Now the DEA budget is real big.
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Andrew Payne 08/12/2013 03:36 PM in reply to Stoneyjack
Regular amphetamines aren't safe over time either. How can you say that directly selling amphetamines instead of an amphetamine precursor would be better? All you have to do then is take more of them and you don't even have to risk making it yourself. That's like saying if you legalize any drug it won't be a problem anymore. Pharmaceutical grade amphetamines are not safe because they were made in a professional lab. Then you say they were freely prescribed as though that makes it ok. They also freely sprayed DDT and agent orange on people and fucked them up.
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Steve Christensen 08/18/2013 09:22 PM in reply to Andrew Payne
The whole drug war is a fraud, I knew somebody released from prison in 98 to cook for the DEA. Everybody knows the government brings in the drugs, 90+ percent of the worlds heroin supply comes from Afghanistan now since we invaded while the taliban had banned it. Fast n Furrios?? trading guns to cartels for drugs... hmmm go to leap dot cc for more info (law enforcement against prohibition)
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Law 'n order 08/13/2013 01:43 PM in reply to Stoneyjack
You are trying to rewrite history. The amphetamines were restricted in the 1960s for two reasons. First, doctors started noticing a startling high incidence of psychosis among nice suburban housewives who were taking those prescription appetite suppressants. Second, hippies noted that "speed kills".
This represented one of the few times that drug enforcement responded to a genuine public health problem. They responded wrong; in my opinion prohibition is NOT the answer; but they responded to a very real problem.
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KurtToni 08/12/2013 10:41 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
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Elwyn Palmerton 08/15/2013 03:54 PM in reply to KurtToni
The only way she could possibly be making that type of dough is if she cranked up on speed all month.
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Kevin F. Casey 08/16/2013 08:43 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
A better way is Legalize meth & slap tons of regulations on the production require all sellers to posses a License for the product as well as be a Pharmacy place a 5% sales tax & require that the product can not be sold for more than 5 cents. As no profit is to be made folks will stop producing it.
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Muddy_Road 08/16/2013 10:01 PM in reply to Kevin F. Casey
Use and abuse of substances has been going on...forever.
For example, mj was used medicinally 2000 years ago, and to get a buzz.
Seems no government has worked out a good way to control abuse except via the most coercive force imaginable.
Your plan might work or not, but it's certainly worth discussing.
One thing I know, however, is abuse and oppression of law abiding citizens in the name of drug control is plain wrong.
Should we require persons to submit to presenting ID and computer logging to buy gas for the car? After all, isn't that the main ingredient of Molotov Cocktails?
And, again, the reason there is a proposal to make pseudoephidrine a prescription drug is the ID at the counter law FAILED.
In general, I agree the route to go is regulation of substances, rather than oppressive criminalization.
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Darque Wing 08/12/2013 11:26 AM in reply to Stoneyjack
"Respect patient/doctor/manufacturer confidentiality." Manufacturer? Oh, yeah, that's right, I forgot, corporations are people. Too bad respecting patient/doctor confidentiality doesn't rank so high when it comes to abortion.
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whatever 08/13/2013 02:59 PM in reply to Stoneyjack
Stoneyjack finally says something that makes sense.
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Byard Pidgeon 08/13/2013 05:50 PM in reply to Stoneyjack
Stoneyjack is well named to promote the addict's and dealer's point of view, which is what he's doing. I live in an area, in Oregon, that still has a meth problem. It's not nearly as bad as before the legislation, but most criminal activity here has a meth connection, along with the foster care situation, medical problems the general citizenry is footing the bill for...not to mention the car breakins, burglary and shoplifting by addicts, and the cartel presence.
Oh, I almost forgot...this is in a scenic, rural small city and large county.
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TracyMartin 08/16/2013 08:57 AM in reply to Stoneyjack
I'm not sure what to think about your post and am surprised you got 4 likes. I really wish at least one had explained why they agree with you so maybe I could understand better, because Desoxyn hardly falls into a safer category. Back in the day, that was the pill of choice for many speed freaks.
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Vanessa Pacheco 08/17/2013 04:49 AM in reply to Stoneyjack
Dexadrine is still being prescribed - at least in California. My son was prescribed it for ADHD just a few years ago.
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Guest 08/22/2013 04:37 AM in reply to Stoneyjack
I agree. I remember when your family doctor could prescribe diet pills. There was some abuse, but there were also a lot less obese people walking around.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 06:45 AM
I'll be frank. I have sinus problems and need Pseudoephedrine to breathe right. I detest being treated like a criminal just to buy my quota package from the leery pseudo-cop clerk and especially listen to "the lecture". I didn't commit a crime, why an I being PUNISHED ...as well as everyone with a sinus issue?
It's almost inevitable a prescription will be the next hurdle. But, you can't get a prescription without the $50-100 office visit and maybe a few unnecessary but costly tests to get the medication. So the cost will escalate a great deal.
I certainly have no sympathy for big pharma and their obsession with profit at any cost. However, this business of restricting my liberty to keep others from committing a crime is completely ludicrous.
The War on Drugs has cost America much more than inconveniences at the drug store. The War has allowed the government to nullify large portions of our formerly inalienable rights and freedoms.
Why not set up a colony for the drug addicts and give them all they want of whatever on condition they stay on their side of the line? Then the rest of us could...
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clemans 08/12/2013 07:19 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
in my city, in one of the areas where rich republicans live, some kid set up a meth lab in his mother's home. The city found out about it on the evening news. Along with scenes of firemen trying to put out the fire that completely destroyed their home. We had three houses that blew up within a month, all in wealthy or upper middle class neighborhoods. Windows up and down the streets were blown up. I hadn't seen anything like it.
Haven't paid much attention to meth, well not until I saw what happened to the other homes. Your rights aren't more important then mine. And I don't care what color my neighbor paints their house, don't care if their garage door is open or where they plant their flowers......all things that my republican neighborhood wants to make law in my housing area and around the city. I do care if someone blows up my house or breaks my windows when blowing up theirs.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 07:54 AM in reply to clemans
That was a fine post pointing out the pitfalls of living in a Republican community and being a Republican.
I used to be a Democrat, until they became useless. Now it seems I have no neighborhood or party.
ps: I don't care about your rights either.
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clemans 08/12/2013 09:40 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
I used to be republican, now I am independent.
And I don't NOT care about your rights, yours to do what you want, aren't more important than my rights to be safe in my own neighborhood and home. But from your post, it was a given that you didn't appear to care about anybody's equal rights. But thank you for making it absolutely clear to anyone who might not have seen that for themselves.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 09:49 AM in reply to clemans
Liberty and Safety is not a trade off, a balancing act, or give and take.
Life itself is never 100% safe. Ever. Not 90% or 17.5%
When you give up liberty, you become a slave.
I don't believe in slavery.
Do you?
Better a free man than a slave to the police state.
You don't have the right to make me a slave.
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moar_coffee 08/12/2013 12:35 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
If you work for wages, you're already a slave...
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 01:27 PM in reply to moar_coffee
Yes, and the owners think you make too much. In the late 1800's farm hands worked for room and board... no wages at all.
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wordmonger 08/12/2013 12:45 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
Oh, but you have a right to make other people slaves to a higher tax and prison burdens so you don't have to jump through hoops. Crystal clear.
Absolutes of any kind are restrictions on someone else, and we all have to be responsible. If you truly don't want to work to get your medicine, put in the work required to make improvements to the system. Don't just go around posting "Liberty!!11!". You can convince people like me that a system like what Portugal has can work. Or what Ammyth proposed.
Otherwise, accept the consequences of your inaction when people lobby for the easier but less effective solution of making it prescription.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 01:35 PM in reply to wordmonger
I think my posts here would be considered "action" in other times and places.
And, from reading the posts here, I would guess the majority would submit to much worse humiliation if it made them feel a little safer.
The prison issue is not relevant here.
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clemans 08/12/2013 01:53 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
I would much rather live where I know my city government is trying to protect my home and family from meth labs. I like having order and laws that encourage civility and that help make it possible for 380 million people to live and work together.
I don't believe in slavery. However, I reject your definition of liberty. By your definition, I would rather live in what you call a police state than have a meth lab in my city. Meth labs cost a lot of tax payer money.
We have legal rights to make laws to govern people. Nobody has the right to make you a slave, you are certainly free to leave America if you can't convince the majority to vote for what you want. I am not sure where you think you could find a better place to live with no rules or regulations, but go for it if you want. There could be places where you could legally live next door to a meth lab. If you find that place, I hope you are happy with your choice.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 02:28 PM in reply to clemans
I think if I knowingly ended up living next to dopers I would of course first snitch them out in minute detail and if the police wouldn't do their job move somewhere else. A couple other thoughts crossed my mind, too, but might not be socially acceptable.
I never said the police shouldn't "protect" us from dopers, where did you get that?
As for "love it or leave it "...I am here to stay. That's a false choice.
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clemans 08/12/2013 06:03 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
One can't always control where the ind wanders, but it is a good thing to be able to control what one says or does in public.
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derbear 08/12/2013 06:46 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
Muddy_Road Then you would have no problem raising state taxes to increase funding for law enforcement, child protection services, and prison management to handle the epidemic of meth labs in the country, right ?
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Limi 08/13/2013 01:49 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
I was just wondering earlier today what an entire post of bumper stickers would look like! Can I have a go?
Don't tread on me!
God don't make no trash.
Don't blame me, I voted for nader!
I honk for beautiful butts
You're soaking in it!
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OutPastPluto 08/12/2013 01:11 PM in reply to clemans
> And I don't NOT care about your rights
Well, that's the problem right there. Your own narcissism is your own worst enemy. Like many busy bodies and similarly minded individuals, you think that "it can never happen to you". You will happily help build the machine of the police state until it's too late to turn back.
If you have people in your neighborhood who want to make meth, you've already got a problem that intrusive government meddling won't solve.
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clemans 08/12/2013 02:24 PM in reply to OutPastPluto
not in my neighborhood that I know of, but in some more expensive neighborhoods.
You will have to explain on what you are basing your claim that I am a narcissist. I am actually the opposite, but lets here your explanation. And that I am a busybody.
I think it would be better for your image if you asked me how or why I felt one way or another, of IF I did than for you to jump to conclusions with nothing to base it on.
Maybe you are fine with having a meth lab next door to you, but I am betting that more people will agree that it is not in the best interest of their family or their property to do so.
You don't get to form my opinions or decide what I believe or don't believe. All you can do is give your opinion. Right now, in my city at least, it is against the law to manufacture meth. Nobody I know is complaining about it. We voted to ban it by choice.
I helped entertain two East German guest just after the wall came down. I also was hostess...
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Aquarian_Dreamer 08/12/2013 04:15 PM in reply to OutPastPluto
you do realize that " And I don't NOT care about your rights" includes a double negative,right? and, therefore, was a snarky way of saying that clemans does care about others, even if the OP couldnt care less(if I read his post correctly) about anyone other than himself if he tried. if your going to attack someone might I suggest a better grounding in the English Language?
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Ammyth 08/12/2013 11:23 AM in reply to clemans
I may be mistaken about what you're arguing for, but I believe you're in support of the restrictions on cold medicine as described in the article, because illegal meth labs are a danger in your neighborhood, and you believe that limiting the availability of cold medicine would also limit the danger from those labs.
But you're going at this from the wrong direction. Those illegal labs are springing up in people's basements because of the War on Drugs. Safe meth labs aren't practical because they need to be secret. People can't learn how to manufacture the drug safely because those types of classes are illegal. And even with the risks it's still worth it because the illegality of drugs makes the price, and hence the profits, skyrocket.
Making MORE things illegal isn't going to solve any problems.
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Guest 08/12/2013 02:08 PM in reply to Ammyth
Comment removed.
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Ammyth 08/12/2013 02:24 PM in reply to Guest
"As a society, we have a right to make laws designed so that 380 million
people can live in more safety and in peace as much as possible."
Absolutely true, to a point. Though we also have the responsibility to look at the laws we've implemented and asses the impact they've had, and make changes where necessary. The War on Drugs has had devastating effects across numerous facets of our society, while simultaneously completely failing to keep drugs out of people's hands. At what point do we admit that we can't stop drugs from being manufactured or consumed, and admit that maybe treatment is a better option?
I'm sorry you've had to see people suffer through meth addiction. But consider the possibility that they may have ended up better off if they weren't treated as criminals, and instead were encouraged to seek help.
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clemans 08/12/2013 02:33 PM in reply to Ammyth
in one of my posts made for this story, I pointed out that I would have drug users go to rehab and put the dealers in prison, I could even sign on to having them executed. But users are not helped by being in jail.
And I don't see that meth users care how they are treated after a certain point.
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Crissa 08/15/2013 10:42 PM in reply to Guest
Then why, as sales of it go down, meth labs go up?
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clemans 08/16/2013 05:44 AM in reply to Crissa
I don't know that they do. But maybe people hope to sell it, maybe people start labs for their own use. I don't know very much about illegal drug use. We have a family member who was a meth user. I am not certain I understand your question though. Very quickly they went from a loving, hard working family person, to not caring about anything but meth.
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eaglerider 08/12/2013 09:42 PM in reply to Ammyth
There is no such thing as 'safe meth.'
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Ammyth 08/13/2013 10:25 AM in reply to eaglerider
But there may be such a thing as a "safe meth LAB" which is what I said.
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Byard Pidgeon 08/13/2013 05:53 PM in reply to eaglerider
Absolutely true.
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gwern 08/16/2013 09:41 PM in reply to eaglerider
Wrong. Meth, like many of the amphetamines, has a long history of safe use in civilian and military populations, as you could have learned if you had simply checked Wikipedia instead of peddling scaremongering myths:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It has useful stimulant properties, and increase cognitive performance:
http://www.nature.com/npp/jour...
The effects on addicts like those mentioned in this article come from the massive impurities in their 'shake and bake' meth, overdosing, dosing over drugs and other issues most of which stem from making it illegal and prosecuting it. Much like heroin.
(And let's not even talk about how this article strews lame arguments like 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' all over the place. Crime fell in some random state from 2006 to 2011? That's adorable that they think it means anything, given that pretty much all forms of crime fell in all states in that time period!)
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dirkmcquigley 08/12/2013 09:21 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
And good luck finding a doctor that will write a prescription for an OTC med. The other ironic thing is that I need to show MORE ID to buy sudafed for my wife than I do to pick up her pain pills. She has chronic pain and gets two different kinds of pain medication. The pharmacy writes down my DL # for their own records, but is not required to by law. OTOH, my DL is taken and the strip is run through a state database so I can only buy so much sudafed per month.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 09:43 AM in reply to dirkmcquigley
That's what I'm talking about! More surveillance over nose meds than some strong drug.
And once they get you to scan for nose pills, then it's anything some fool politician thinks will get him an extra vote or too in the name of: FEAR!
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Ima Pseudonym 08/12/2013 01:44 PM in reply to dirkmcquigley
If there was something that worked as well as Pseudoephedrine I would buy it. But there isn't. Once or twice a year usually in early Spring I buy a box. I have to show my ID and they run it through their registers. So I'm in a data base along with lots of other people who don't cook or use meth.
Sadly, our little corner of rural Virginia has an exploding meth house every few months and a ring gets busted once or twice a year. So how does putting people's info into a data base help stop the meth making? I never see local stories about people going to jail for buying cold meds.
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Jexpat 08/12/2013 10:59 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
You're not "being punished" -you're simply being asked to help out with a public health and crime problem.
And failing. Miserably.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 11:29 AM in reply to Jexpat
Asked? Surely your jest!
How dare you accuse ME of being a failure because I value freedom and the US Constitution?
You are the one who craves suffering, slavery, punishment and serfdom.
Real Americans want liberty and freedom to live without being watched, dominated and controlled by the police-state.
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Jexpat 08/12/2013 11:35 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
Spare us the libertarian claptrap.
You're being asked to do a very small bit to help out with a much larger problem in a way that the evidence demonstrates to be effective.
And yet you whinge and moan about "liberty," "serfdom," "suffering" and "punishment" over the slightest inconvenience.
How pathetic.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 11:46 AM in reply to Jexpat
And when it's a thousand inconveniences, ten thousand?
How many is too many?
Submitting to abuse for a necessary med is only one example.
I am guessing you are abuser and so you respond with insults and bully talk.
Figures.
("Jexpat"? Are you an American? Do you live in America?)
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schrodinger 08/12/2013 12:22 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
Muddy, we do appreciate "liberty" remembering at Mother Jones, we wish all to be truly "free".
Please read through or scan this link, may it provide a clear perspective to enjoy these muddy roads that we all traverse.
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NZL72 08/12/2013 12:33 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
What about the other meds that do not contain Psuedoephedrine?
How much are you paying in taxes due to law enforcement costs related to the issues from this drug?
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DudeistPriest 08/13/2013 12:55 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
Just like that Red light is impinging on your freedoms...
"Give me Liberty or give me Death?"
Go ahead run that red, don't worry about that dog... it's just a Greyhound...
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TracyMartin 08/16/2013 09:31 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
Next you'll be demanding the freedom to make purchases in the nude. When will it ever stop?
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Muddy_Road 08/16/2013 05:06 PM in reply to TracyMartin
No, but I can sure see you,the little woman, grandpa and grandpa stripping down for the TSA right there in line so it would make you feel so SAFE!
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AllTheWordsInThere 08/12/2013 12:01 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
Muddy_Road, you just said "Why not set up a colony for the drug addicts and give them all they want of whatever on condition they stay on their side of the line? Then the rest of us could be free of them and the oppression they cause."
Doesn't that statement involve a certain degree of suffering, punishment, and serfdom? Certainly it involves a restriction on freedom, and indeed domination and control by the police state.
It seems then that what is most important to you is your own right to be free, at the expense of others'. And that's fine; you can believe what you want. To me, though, it seems that only when everyone has respect for everyone else's rights that more people can be truly free.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 12:20 PM in reply to AllTheWordsInThere
I agree that was not a well thought out example or solution.
I could tweak it to make it sound "voluntary" and thus free, ("Move to MJ Land Cheap Dope, No Cops") but it's not realistic.
To me it's discouraging to see so many people submitting to the boot. It's happened many times in the past and never ended well. Except, for the slave owners, of course. Temporarily.
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AllTheWordsInThere 08/12/2013 12:53 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
Well now, I see a big difference between slavery and this situation: in the instance of slavery, people were taken unwillingly from their homes, with no input on their fate. Through our system of government, if prescription drug laws were enacted, they would be, ostensibly at least, through the will of the people through the legislative process. If you don't want to see these laws enacted, unlike in the case of slavery, you have a say in the matter.
That said, I respectfully disagree with you on this issue, if only because I have different priorities and perhaps a greater faith in the government. If there is something out there that reduces meth arrests by more than 75%, the side effect of which is that some people have to change their cold medicine to another substance, I will support it. You could make the argument that it's a slippery slope to other inconveniences, but personally, I believe the utility of having fewer cases of meth addiction overall outweighs the harm of having to go further down the aisle.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 01:23 PM in reply to AllTheWordsInThere
I'm sorry you feel that way, but I respect your opinion.
China found a way to deal with opium addicts, they created a law that mandated summary execution of them.
That worked very well.
In this instance bowing down to the store clerk and accepting humiliation merely to obtain needed medication is one very small lash of the whip. It's only a matter of degree being humiliated by kidnapping and chains in my opinion.
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Guest 08/12/2013 04:21 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
Comment removed.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 04:30 PM in reply to Guest
Yet, the same Constitution still applies to foul mouthed thugs like you!
It's an enigma alright.
We are the government btw. WE the PEOPLE and WE decide our rights.
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Aquarian_Dreamer 08/12/2013 05:12 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
wait Im a thug now for pointing out the contradictory nature of the post? try looking up the Commerce Clause.
although I like your last sentence, it shows some limited understanding of government and society; there may be some hope for you after all. you also decide if others are to be considered just as important as you are...you have already declared(elsewhere on this article), however, that the only important person is you, which hinders your understanding somewhat.
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TracyMartin 08/16/2013 09:34 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
"China found a way to deal with opium addicts, they created a law that mandated summary execution of them.That worked very well."Is this what you'e advocating just so you don't have to ask for a product from behind a counter? Are you speaking for all Libertarians? I think not.
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Muddy_Road 08/16/2013 06:27 PM in reply to TracyMartin
I am not a Libertarian.
The Chinese method was applied to dopers and dealers, not all citizens, and worked. Of course I do not support it.
I would like to point out the reason scared ninnys want to make cold medicine prescription only is because forcing the citizenry to have their license scanned and entered into the big brother data base is ineffective in stopping small time users and chemists.
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TracyMartin 08/16/2013 09:29 AM in reply to Muddy_Road
I'm a "real" American and I do not pursue personal liberty to the detriment of my community.
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Muddy_Road 08/16/2013 06:29 PM in reply to TracyMartin
If you are saying you support prescription pseudofed, then you are pursuing oppression to the detriment of the community.
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Theresa Klein 08/12/2013 09:17 PM in reply to Jexpat
I don't think "asked" is exactly the right word, since it's a crime to not comply.
"Commanded" would be a better verb.
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Theresa Klein 08/12/2013 09:19 PM in reply to Jexpat
I don't think "asked" is exactly the word. "Commanded" is more like it.
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Law 'n order 08/13/2013 01:49 PM in reply to Jexpat
Note that I am not expressing an opinion about rights and wrongs; I simply make a semantic point.
There is a huge difference between "asked" and "required".
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Crissa 08/15/2013 10:41 PM in reply to Jexpat
There's no evidence this 'help' helps anyone.
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1 person liked this. Like Reply
Rpupkindl 08/12/2013 02:19 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
Hey Muddy,
I used to be on Pseudoephedrine for years just be able to breathe, too. The whole thing with meth made it so difficult to buy. I live in NY, and went to a great ENT who did a procedure called balloon sinuplasty. Look into it. All the allergies and sinus infections blocked me up. I haven't breathed this great in years.
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Muddy_Road and 1 more liked this Like Reply
Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 02:24 PM in reply to Rpupkindl
Been there, done that...except I think he used a dull screwdriver. Flonase does nothing.
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1 person liked this. Like Reply
Carmen Salgado 08/12/2013 04:40 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
Try boiling your urine and inhaling the mist, that'll help with your sinus.
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Muddy_Road 08/12/2013 04:49 PM in reply to Carmen Salgado
...now it's getting to potty talk.
I am done with this thread.
Bye all!
Flag
1 person liked this. Like Reply
eaglerider 08/12/2013 09:43 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
Got all your trolling in, comparing ID laws for buying pseudoephedrine, with slavery in chains? Bye.
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TheAmused and 4 more liked this Like Reply
Gabriel Hickey 08/15/2013 01:32 PM in reply to eaglerider
Having a different opinion from you doesn't make him a troll. Your personal attacks on him, however, sure do tilt your hand. Whom do you work for, I wonder?
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Lady_Ashmire and 1 more liked this Like Reply
DudeistPriest 08/13/2013 12:59 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
please don't leave us Stoneyjack...
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josefbh 08/12/2013 04:49 PM in reply to Muddy_Road
What about pushing fluids, eating a well balanced diet, getting plenty of sleep and buying a box of tissues?
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moleman and 4 more liked this Like Reply
Mojrim ibn Harb 08/12/2013 05:52 PM in reply to josefbh
You're being sarcastic, right? Help me out, my irony meter is wonky.
Flag
1 person liked this. Like Reply
Jexpat 08/12/2013 09:30 PM in reply to Mojrim ibn Harb
How hard is it have your doc or clinic call in a script?
Wow, that's really some imposition.
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Taken, the coldest case ever solved
Home | Video | NewsPulse | U.S. | World | Politics | Justice | Entertainment | Tech | Health | Living | Travel | Opinion | iReport | Money
CNN Homepage
Taken A child vanishes Women wronged Bulldogs on the case 'That's him' The whole truth?
REFERENCE PEOPLE TIMELINE EVIDENCE
Maria Ridulph was 7 when she was kidnapped from a street corner in Sycamore, Illinois, on December 3, 1957. Her murder went unsolved for half a century.
Photo: Family photo courtesy Chicago Sun-Times
SYCAMORE, ILLINOIS
Maria was the pretty one, slight and graceful at 7 with big brown eyes that shined with warmth and intelligence. Everyone said the second-grader was special and Kathy, who was a year older, felt honored to be her friend.
They lived a few doors away from each other on a side street called Archie Place. It was their whole world in 1957, a time when children played hide-and-seek outside instead of watching television. People didn't lock their doors in this Midwestern farm town because everyone knew everybody else.
Sycamore and its 7,000 souls felt safe on the morning of December 3, 1957, but the feeling wouldn't last.
That first Tuesday in December started like any other for Maria Ridulph and Kathy Sigman, with a short walk across the street to West Elementary School. It was cold, with a promise of snow in the air. After school, they went to Maria's house to cut out paper snowflakes.
A few blocks away, a man in an overcoat spotted two other girls walking along State Street by the public library and tried to strike up a conversation. It was 4:15 p.m. The girls felt uneasy, so they ducked into a restaurant. When they emerged, the man was gone — but he'd left something disturbing behind. Scattered on the sidewalk were half a dozen photographs of nude women.
That wasn't Sycamore's only peculiar hint of the dirty and forbidden. Since Halloween, someone had been scrawling obscenities in chalk on a tree and stop sign at the intersection of Center Cross Street and Archie Place. Maria and Kathy made plans to play there after dinner. It was a favorite spot they hadn't been to since summer.
At 5 p.m. sharp, Kathy went home. Maria's family gathered around the table for her favorite supper: rabbit, carrots, potatoes and milk. She finished off two rabbit legs, but barely touched her vegetables. She pleaded to go back outside as the first flurries of the season started to swirl in the night sky.
Excited, she called Kathy on the phone: I can go outside tonight, can you?
Kathy lived in a white cottage at the end of a long driveway, and her family was the first on the block to own a clothes dryer. Her freshly laundered jeans still felt warm as she met Maria at mid-block and they raced in the dark to the massive elm tree on the corner. They were playing "duck the cars" — scurrying back and forth between the tree and a street pole, trying to avoid the headlights from oncoming cars — when a good-looking young man approached. He wore his blond hair swept back in a ducktail. Kathy remembers his narrow face, big teeth and high, thin voice. She'd never seen him before.
Hello, little girls, he said. Are you having fun?
He asked whether they wanted piggyback rides and gave his name as "Johnny." He told Kathy and Maria that he was 24 and wasn't married.
Do you like dollies?
The girls nodded.
A trial exhibit shows Kathy Sigman with the mittens she fetched from home; when she returned to the corner, Maria was gone.
Photo: Court exhibit/Jessica Koscielniak/Getty Images for CNN
By the time these events were recalled in a Sycamore courtroom 55 years later, memories had faded and many details noted in police and FBI reports were lost to time.
But nobody could forget the piggyback ride. That was how Johnny won Maria over.
Down he trotted, 20 feet to the south along Center Cross Street and back again, Maria giggling with glee on his shoulders. When it was over, she ran to her house, three doors away at 616 Archie Place, to fetch a doll for the next piggyback ride.
Kathy waited on the sidewalk with Johnny. He asked whether she wanted to take a walk around the block or go on a trip in a truck, car or bus. No, she told him. He told her she was pretty, but she sensed it was Maria he liked more.
Maria burst into her house to find her father, Michael, in the living room watching a Western. Her mother, Frances, was reading a newspaper. Maria picked out a favorite doll from the toys piled by the door, but her mother suggested she take an older rubber doll out into the snow instead.
Kathy felt a chill as Maria joined them on the sidewalk. Now it was Kathy's turn to run home, to fetch her mittens. She asked Maria to come along, but she didn't want to go.
When Kathy returned a few minutes later, Maria and Johnny were gone.
The trouble with cold cases
The kidnapping and murder of Maria Ridulph is the nation's oldest cold case to go to trial. It required family members to turn against one of their own and haunted a small town for 55 years. Even now, the case may not be over.
Maria was taken in a more innocent time — decades before Amber Alerts and photos of missing children on milk cartons became part of our cultural landscape. In 1957, the kidnapping of a little girl shattered everyone's sense of safety. It was huge news.
Reporters flocked to Sycamore from the big city papers in Chicago and New York and from the fledgling television networks. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover demanded daily updates from his men and sent teletypes with detailed instructions. President Dwight D. Eisenhower followed the case. But the weeks of urgent activity were followed by half a century of silence.
Secrets often lie at the heart of crimes that remain unsolved so long they are said to go "cold." Most are cracked by advances in science, or by someone's need to come clean.
In the Ridulph case, there was no DNA, no confession by the killer. This mystery was solved by circumstantial evidence amassed over four years by bulldog cops and other outsiders who came to Sycamore to stand up for a little girl whose life was stolen.
But it is difficult to reconstruct the past in a courtroom. People die, memories fade and facts can become distorted by the passage of time or shaded by personal grudges and agendas.
As tough as it is to build a cold case, it may be even harder to defend one. Imagine trying to explain what you were doing a year ago. Now imagine trying to explain what you were doing a lifetime ago.
The man convicted last September of kidnapping and murdering Maria Ridulph maintains his innocence. His wife of nearly 20 years and his stepdaughter say he was sacrificed to bring peace of mind to Sycamore. An appeal has been filed and likely will take two years or more to be heard.
Who's who?
Two familes torn apart and the strangers who solved a 55-year-old mystery.
Winning a conviction in a crime that occurred in 1957 is a remarkable accomplishment – proof that no one should get away with murder, even if justice takes 55 years. But a close examination of the case by CNN raises questions about the strength of the evidence, the motives of some of the witnesses and the ability of the court system to fairly and accurately reconstruct history.
The case was reopened after a dying woman implicated her own son 36 years after the fact. Her words, as recalled by two of her daughters, were somewhat cryptic, and there's no way to seek clarification. Even the daughters don't agree on what she said. And, separate from this crime, two siblings had powerful reasons to fear and despise their half brother.
Much of the physical evidence in the case was lost or destroyed over the years, including Maria's doll, which was handled by her killer. Instead, prosecutors relied heavily on evidence that in the past has often proven unreliable: eyewitness identification and the testimony of informants.
Eyewitness identification is not as simple as it might seem. Factors influencing misidentification include the witness's distance from the perpetrator, the lighting at the crime scene and the conditions under which a witness later views a lineup. Jailhouse informants bring their own baggage: They're criminals, or at least accused of crimes, and can be looking to trade testimony for leniency.
In the Ridulph case, three inmates locked up with the suspect told different stories about how he described killing Maria: by dropping her on her head, or by suffocating or strangling her while trying to silence her cries.
Yet a forensic pathologist testified Maria was stabbed.
The eyewitness whose testimony was crucial in winning a conviction was a child when she saw the kidnapper for just a few moments. More than half a century passed before she picked him out in a photo lineup. She is certain she chose the right man, but others question whether she picked up cues from the investigators and tried to please them with her choice. They wonder whether the photo itself — slightly different from the others she was shown — could have prejudiced her.
Illinois is second only to Texas in mistaken eyewitness identifications, according to the Innocence Project, which began its work in 1992. Faulty identifications played a role in 24 cases – more than half of the state's 43 wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA evidence. Nationwide, 75% of 309 wrongful convictions involved faulty eyewitness identifications; 15% were based partly on the testimony of informants who later recanted or were proven to have lied.
The case caught the attention of the FBI and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It was the job of Judge James Hallock to sort everything out. The defense requested a bench trial, and so prosecutors had to prove guilt to just one person, not 12. That one person, Hallock, had little experience with murder trials.
Hallock's verdict in this case came after four days of testimony. It was based, the judge said, on the credibility of the eyewitness and the jailhouse informants.
He expressed confidence that his decision would be upheld on appeal.
The goal in every trial is a fair hearing of both sides. And in most trials, witnesses take the stand to recount what they saw with their own eyes, what they heard with their own ears. But in cold cases, those witnesses often are dead.
When that's true, prosecutors and defendants are sometimes forced to rely on second-hand evidence known as hearsay. And in some states, including Illinois, the law is evolving to allow hearsay evidence under exceptional circumstances.
In this cold case, a hearsay statement that favored the prosecution was allowed into evidence; other hearsay evidence that favored the defense was kept out. And so, a mother was able to accuse her son from the grave, but his alibi, buried in thousands of pages of old FBI reports, was never presented in court.
A man was convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his life. A victim's family embraced long-awaited justice, and Sycamore breathed a sigh of relief. But was the courtroom reconstruction of history unfairly one-sided?
Was justice really served?
A trial exhibit shows the crime scene as it appeared in 1957. Blacked out are the names of these locations: Left, the garage where Maria's doll was found; center, the elm tree on the corner where she was playing; right, Maria's house on Archie Place. Photo: Court exhibit/Jessica Koscielniak/Getty Images for CNN
'I can't find Maria!'
"Mah-reeeee-ah!"
Kathy ran up and down Archie Place, calling her best friend's name as a gentle snow fell on the evening of December 3, 1957. There was no sign of Maria.
Kathy rushed up to a side door at the Ridulphs' house, where Maria's big brother, Chuck, was spinning records on the hi-fi with his friend Randy. Maria's lost, she told them. I can't find Maria!
Chuck and Randy set out down Archie Place, all the way to the corner of Fair Street, by the elementary school. The boys saw a police car go by and realized – too late – that they should have stopped it. They headed back home.
By then, Kathy had told her mother about the nice man who called himself Johnny. More details emerged as Maria's mother, Frances, and Kathy's mother, Flora, exchanged several frantic phone calls.
The doll Maria was carrying when she disappeared, held by police magistrate Arthur Ayers, is among the evidence that has been lost over the years.
Photo: Chicago Sun-Times
Maria's father was reluctant to summon police because he didn't want to be embarrassed if she had just wandered off. About a year earlier, Maria had strayed several blocks away to Elmwood Cemetery while playing. She turned up just as a search party organized.
But Frances Ridulph let worry overrule her husband. She drove to the Sycamore police station to report her daughter missing. It was 8:10 p.m.
Chuck continued looking for Maria, but the 11-year-old wasn't yet sure how concerned he should be about the little sister he walked to school every morning. He traipsed down a long driveway and through a garden that opened onto a field. Then he circled back to the alley that ran behind their home, where a sense of foreboding overcame him. There, next to Ida Johnson's garage, a searcher spotted Maria's doll.
That evening, men pounded on the door of 227 Center Cross Street, the home of Ralph and Eileen Tessier. Ralph ran the hardware store, and the men wanted him to open up so they could gather up flashlights and lanterns to use in the search.
The Tessiers were a large family crammed into small quarters about two blocks from the Ridulphs. Eileen was Ralph's Irish-born war bride who'd sailed to the United States on the Queen Mary with her son John from an earlier marriage. Together the couple would have six children: Katheran, Jeanne, Mary Pat, Bob, Janet and Nancy.
The girls resented the way their mother seemed to favor John. At 18, he was artistic, a bit of a dreamer. He seemed to get a pass with her even when he screwed up. He was expelled for pushing a teacher and calling her an unsavory name. But in their mother's eyes, he could do no wrong.
Ralph Tessier, who had just arrived home from picking up 12-year-old Katheran at a 4-H social, joined the men in the search that night. Eileen headed to the armory, where the women were making sandwiches and coffee for the searchers. Before they left, the couple locked the front door, even though the key had been lost for years. The back door didn't lock at all, so Ralph jammed it shut with a board.
The girls huddled with Bob inside; they'd have to let their parents back in when they returned.
They said they saw no sign of John.
In the days to come, police would knock on the door and question Eileen Tessier about the events of December 3. The older girls stood back and listened as their mother told the officers something they knew wasn't true: John was home all night.
'I know she is still alive'
The headline on the front page of Sycamore's afternoon paper screamed the bad news that everybody in town already knew: "Missing Girl, 7, Feared Kidnapped."
Police stopped and searched every car that entered and left Sycamore in the days after the kidnapping.
Photo: Chicago Sun-Times
Foul play was suspected, but there were no clues. When she vanished, the newspaper said, Maria was wearing a brown, three-quarter-length coat, black corduroy slacks, brown socks and freshly polished saddle shoes. She was 43 inches tall, weighed about 55 pounds, and wore her hair in a wavy brown bob with bangs.
The man who called himself Johnny, police said, wore a striped sweater of blue, yellow and green. He had long, blond hair that curled in the front and flopped onto his forehead.
Already, there were conflicting reports about the exact time of Maria's disappearance. Was she snatched closer to 6 p.m.? Or did it happen later, at about 7? Police and FBI reports, as well as news accounts from the time, contain details that support both scenarios.
Sycamore's police chief, William Hindenburg, told FBI agents that Kathy and Maria went out to play at 6:02 p.m., but the DeKalb County sheriff said Maria didn't call Kathy and ask her to come out and play until 6:30. Maria's mother later altered her original estimate, saying the girls could have been outside as early as 10 minutes to 6.
When the case was reopened half a century later, every minute would matter.
As the days passed, Maria's mother pleaded with the kidnapper for her daughter's safe return. "God forgives mistakes. We would, too," Frances Ridulph, 44, said, using the media to send a message to whoever might have her daughter. Maria was "nervous," she said, a nail biter who could quickly become hysterical if things didn't go her way.
Maria would make a noise if something seemed wrong, her mother said. And no kidnapper "would put up with that for long."
"Whoever took her away hit her weak spot. He played with her," the frantic mother added. On television, she delivered a message to her baby: "Don't cry, Maria. Above all, don't cry. Don't make a fuss. We'll be with you soon."
Maria's father, Michael, who earned $80 a week at a wire and cable factory in Sycamore, scolded reporters camped out at the police station: "For God's sake, quit saying she is dead. I know she is still alive. Nobody would have any reason to kill her."
Later, he pulled one reporter aside and explained, "I want fathers to help look for my little girl."
Chuck Ridulph accompanied his dad to the fire station on the morning of December 4 and was assigned to a search team. Hundreds of people fanned out over the fields surrounding Sycamore. Others opened car trunks and cellar doors.
"People were even carrying guns," he recalled.
In a neighborhood called Johnson's Greenhouse, where new streets were going in, Chuck was asked to climb down a manhole because he was the only one in the search party small enough to fit. Later, searchers joined hands as they walked in a line through the frozen cornfields where Sycamore High School now stands. They found a gunnysack of abandoned kittens, and that unnerved Chuck. Other searchers discovered a torn, bloody petticoat in a farm field, but it was not Maria's.
Two FBI agents took up residence in the Ridulphs' parlor. A half dozen crop-dusters and military planes circled the sky, searching. The J-11 Roping Club sent riders out on horseback.
Local police with bullhorns urged residents to keep their porch lights on and report anything suspicious. The Illinois State Police set up half a dozen roadblocks; railroad cars, motel rooms and the bus station were searched — as was every house in Sycamore.
Maria's doll and blue hairbrush were shipped off to the FBI lab near Washington for analysis. So were her schoolbooks, a toy oven, a tin saxophone and records of songs such as "Three Little Kittens" and "The Farmer in the Dell." They bore witness to a childhood interrupted.
Her little friend, Kathy Sigman, found herself under 24-hour police guard. The family doctor checked her for signs of sexual molestation. The newspapers ran a picture of Kathy showing off her mittens and pointing to the corner where Maria was snatched.
Kathy spent hours poring over mug shots of ex-cons and what police called "known perverts," but she didn't see Johnny. She remembers the shouting reporters and flashing camera bulbs that appeared every time she was escorted to a police lineup. At first, she enjoyed the attention, but as the case dragged on she felt exposed, like she was being put on display.
She recalls her mother bending down, placing her hands on her shoulders and looking her square in the eye.
Remember his face, Kathy, she said. You have to remember his face because you are the only one who can catch him. You are the only one who knows what he looks like.
'We have found exactly nothing'
There was no ransom note. No phone call from the kidnapper. Authorities believed Maria's abductor had a twisted motive: He was a sexual predator.
A Chicago Tribune illustration showed what Maria was wearing, the doll she was carrying and maps of the crime.
Photo: Chicago Tribune/ MCT /LANDOV
The police chief was certain nobody from Sycamore would do such a thing. It had to be the work of a trucker or someone else passing through. The FBI wasn't so sure. As its investigation revealed, there was no shortage of potential suspects in town.
Hindenburg, the police chief, told reporters his men had rounded up and questioned "all known sexual deviates." They looked into a local Peeping Tom and followed tips about men nicknamed "Commando" and "Mr. X."
Investigators dug up a collapsed grave at Elmwood Cemetery. They traced freight cars that passed through Sycamore the night Maria went missing. They scoured lovers' lanes, drained a lake, set off dynamite in a quarry. And still they came up empty.
"We have chased down countless clues, and we have found exactly nothing," said a frustrated Carl A. Swanson, the state's attorney. FBI agents came and went, according to a writer for one of the Chicago papers, "checking into everything with the quiet persistence of bulldogs."
Three days after Maria vanished, an anonymous female caller alerted the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office to a boy named "Treschner" who lived in the neighborhood and fit the suspect's description. A pair of FBI agents showed up at the Tessier home on December 8.
Ralph and Eileen Tessier acknowledged that they had talked about how their son, John, fit the general description, but they insisted he was not in Sycamore when Maria was taken: He was 40 miles away, in Rockford, enlisting in the U.S. Air Force.
Phone records seemed to verify their story. Someone had made a collect call from Rockford to the Tessier home at about 7 p.m. John Tessier and his parents said he called for a ride home. This was the second alibi Eileen Tessier had given for her son. Earlier, as her daughters listened, she'd told Sycamore police that John was home all night.
Nobody questioned the young Tessier sisters, and they kept silent.
'Unusual individuals'
After a week of fruitless searching, authorities alerted residents to look out for scavengers: "It is entirely possible that her body has been discarded in a field or a nearby farm. Be alert to large gatherings of buzzards and crows, and if a body is located make sure nothing is touched."
The FBI was running out of steam.
"Our temporary office at Sycamore has been functioning for two weeks. Per diem cost for 29 agents is $3,600," Chicago's supervisor wrote in a December 15 memo to Hoover. They'd tracked down 250 leads and processed 200 suspects — "all with negative results."
Agents still had about 125 leads to go.
The Chicago G-man found it "most peculiar" that such a rigorous investigation had not turned up a suspect. The locals were passing on tips about "all of their homosexuals, queers and fairies, etc." when the FBI was looking for "sex deviants of a different kind," the supervisor wrote in the pejorative and politically incorrect language of 1957.
Agents were hampered by the "sheer volume" of leads, he stated, adding this observation: "I have never seen as small a city as Sycamore with such a large volume of these unusual individuals."
Hoover urged them to keep going: "This case must receive continuous, aggressive, imaginative, investigative attention."
The best evidence they had was Kathy's story. Some of the details varied — did Johnny have a missing tooth or a gap in his teeth? But she never wavered on the core facts. An agent described her as "the most completely mature little girl I have ever seen," seemingly fearless during questioning and police lineups. "She has remained steadfast," he reported, even though the FBI's bulldogs had "ridden her hard."
Maria's family held out hope that she would come home by Christmas. From left: Patricia, Chuck, father Michael, Kay and mother Frances.
Photo: Chicago Sun-Times
It was a somber holiday season in Sycamore. The local papers carried front-page stories about the Ridulphs, including a large photo of Maria's family sitting by their Christmas tree. Her mother had bought a typewriter for Maria and wrapped her other gifts.
Their leads exhausted, the FBI agents packed up and went home for the holidays. With no new developments, the case dropped from the headlines, but folks in town remained jittery. One Chicago newspaper noted at the end of January that Sycamore was afflicted with "a wound that won't heal." The place had changed, and not for the better.
"Let a strange man walk down an alley in Sycamore today and the police are likely to get a call," said James E. Boyle, an assistant prosecutor who went on to become state's attorney, and then a judge. "I tried to help two young girls across a busy intersection the other day. They just looked at me wide-eyed."
The giant elm tree on the corner of Archie Place and Center Cross Street was cut down. Sycamore settled into a fugue state.
Looking back, Kathy remembers her childhood in two parts: Before Maria was taken, and after.
"We were safe before, but not afterward," she said. "People can disappear in big cities but somebody doesn't disappear in a small town like Sycamore."
'There wasn't much left to her'
Maria was found in the spring, 120 miles from home. A man scrounging for morel mushrooms found her skeleton tucked under a fallen tree on Roy Cahill's farm off U.S. 20 outside Woodbine, not far from the Iowa border.
Birds and animals had fed on her corpse, clad only in a black-and-white checked shirt, an undershirt and brown socks.
Maria's body was found 120 miles from home on April 26, 1958, by a man hunting for mushrooms.
Photo: Chicago Tribune/MCT/LANDOV
At a coroner's inquest, Frank A. Sitar, a retiree from Minnesota, described the scene he encountered on the afternoon of April 26, 1958:
"I thought it was an old deer hide. I came up to it then and I could see some bones and I thought somebody had shot a dog. Then I looked closer, and it looked like human bones. I noticed the jacket, but I didn't pay any attention to it until I noticed the skull. Then I started to look further, and I noticed the hair. And I saw then that it was a little girl."
He walked back to the car, told his wife, and they drove to a farmhouse and summoned authorities.
"There wasn't much left to her," observed James Furlong, the 28-year-old rookie coroner of Jo Daviess County. Son of the local funeral home director, he'd never handled a murder case before. No crime scene photos were taken, he said, because he didn't want them "slobbered all over the front pages."
Neither the autopsy nor the inquest determined a cause of death, beyond "suspected foul play."
Frances Ridulph always said if a child's body was found wearing brown socks, it would be Maria. Sure enough, the size and manufacturer's information stamped on the instep of Maria's socks could still be read. Her mother touched the patch she'd sewn on the black-and-white flannel shirt, recognizing the material. Dental records confirmed what the family already knew.
Maria was laid to rest in a small white casket on a warm spring day. An overflow crowd, at least 300, filled the Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. John. Her friend Kathy was there under police guard.
Maria was remembered as a bright little girl who had a perfect attendance record at Sunday school.
"This little girl has entered into everlasting peace, probably on the night she was taken," said the Rev. Louis I. Going. "Maria was taken out of life through unusual circumstances, but nothing could deprive her of God-given salvation."
The church organist played "Jesus Loves Me." It was Maria's favorite hymn.
The trail goes cold
The disappearance and death of her best friend never left Kathy. Nothing could fill the space where Maria once was – the games, the laughter, the shared secrets. She was left with survivor's guilt and the social stigma of being connected to a notorious crime.
Maria was laid to rest in a small white casket. She was remembered for her perfect Sunday school attendance.
Photo: Chicago Tribune/MCT/LANDOV
"It robbed me of my childhood," she said recently. "I was labeled. I was the girl who was with Maria. A lot of parents wouldn't let their girls play with me. They were afraid he'd come back and take their child.
"I couldn't wait to get out of Sycamore. It bothered me my whole life why he took her and not me. For years I would ask myself, 'Was she prettier than I was?'"
Kathy's family moved away from Archie Place in 1961 to a subdivision on the outskirts of town. When a young man named Mike Chapman met her at a bowling alley, his mother tried to talk him out of dating her. "Don't you know who she is?" the mother asked. "She's the one who was with Maria. Can't you find someone else?"
But Mike wanted only Kathy, and she knew he was the key to a new life. They left Sycamore in 1969 and married in San Antonio, Texas, where Mike attended technical school. They moved around a bit, then settled in Tampa, Florida, before returning to Sycamore to care for aging parents. They raised three children.
Kathy says her own parents were so overprotective she felt like a prisoner. As a mother, she went the other way, letting her kids make their own decisions and their own mistakes. The couple now lives in St. Charles, about a half-hour drive from Sycamore.
No matter where they went, Kathy looked back over her shoulder.
Johnny was still out there.
NEXT: Where's 'Johnny?'
A trail of women wronged
How this story was reported
The 1957 kidnapping and murder of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph is the nation's oldest cold case to go to trial. This story was pieced together by CNN's Ann O'Neill through interviews and public records.
She and video producer Brandon Ancil traveled to Sycamore, Illinois, and Seattle, Washington, to interview investigators, witnesses, prosecutors and family members of the man convicted of the crime. They interviewed the convicted killer in prison and obtained a video copy of his eight-hour interrogation by police.
O'Neill reviewed numerous documents, including transcripts of the trial and key pretrial hearings. She obtained several hundred pages of 1957 FBI reports from the National Archives through a public records request. Thousands of pages more remain classified, according to the U.S. Justice Department. The exhibits presented at trial were unsealed at CNN's request by the Second District of the Illinois Appellate Court.
Some of the people quoted in this story are dead. Their quotes come from police and FBI reports and media reports from 1957.
Maria's brother, Chuck Ridulph, declined to be interviewed, as did the defendant's half sisters, Janet and Jeanne Tessier. Their accounts are based on their trial testimony, public records and interviews with other media.
Development and design: Curt Merrill, Bryan Perry, Kyle Ellis, Ken Uzquiano, Rick Hallman, Judith Siegel and Alberto Mier
Photo editing: Cody McCloy
Copy editing: Phil Gast
Director, Photography: Simon Barnett
Senior Director, News Design: Aimee Schier
Supervising Producer, Original Video: Michael Senzon
Director, Interactives: Manav Tanneeru
Senior Editor, Enterprise: Jan Winburn
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Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?
Walter Keller had nearly lost his battle with leukemia when he went to Penn's Carl June and his group of researchers for a radical new cancer treatment. What happened next may change medicine forever.
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By Jason Fagone
August 2013
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Carl June and his group of researchers at U Penn may have found a cure for cancer.
What's your full name?
Where are you?
What month is it?
What day of the week is it?
Walter Keller tried to speak, but no words came out, only a dry rasp. The man asking the questions had dark, close-cropped gray hair and a kind, level gaze.
Eventually the man left the room. Walt wriggled up in his bed. Someone put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him gently back into the mattress.
Walt—tall and rawboned, with marbly green eyes and muscles hardened by a lifetime of physical labor—tried to elevate himself. An earsplitting noise went off. A nurse came running in and told him to get back down. When she left, Walt found that the nurses had clipped an alarm to his bed that would alert them whenever he tried to get up. He ripped it off and threw it to the ground.
The man was back:
What's your full name?
Where are you?
What month is it?
What day of the week is it?
Walt had to get out of this room. He had a baseball game to coach, over at the ball field in Upland, California. The Upland Pony Giants were waiting for him. Michael was waiting, the skinny kid with the cannon arm, and Cody, the kid who could steal two bases on one pitch. The game was starting in five minutes—didn't anyone understand that?
Walt glanced to his side and saw his 19-year-old son, Dustin. Dustin was here, thank God. Dustin would listen.
"Dustin, get my shoes," Walt croaked. "Dustin, I have to get out of here. I'll give you a ride on the boat."
Walt knew his boat was right outside the door of the room—the wakeboard boat he drove every year up and down Lake Mohave in Nevada, giving water-ski rides to his grandkids. His boat was right here at the hospital. If he could only make it out of the bed, to the door, he could climb into the boat and drive it back to his house.
Dustin shook his head: broad shoulders, soft voice, cherubic face, dark brown hair.
"Dustin," Walt said, eyes soaked with confusion, "you are infuriating me."
Walt wasn't in California, as he thought. He was 2,700 miles east, in Philadelphia, where he'd come to be a guinea pig in a test of a new kind of cancer treatment. Leukemia had invaded his bone marrow and spread like a stain through his lymph nodes; the traditional options, including chemo and radiation, had failed. He was 58, and his body groaned with tumors potentially weighing as much as seven pounds. Walt needed something radically different if he was going to live. And the treatment he'd been given a few days ago was certainly that.
Over the past several years, a couple of hundred mice had received it, but Walt was only the seventh adult human. (Six men had preceded him, as well as a six-year-old girl.) The treatment wasn't a chemo drug, and it wasn't a vaccine. Instead, doctors at the University of Pennsylvania had tried to make Walt's own body the drug. In an approach known as gene therapy, they'd taken his own immune cells, modified them to give them new powers, and injected them back into his blood.
Gene therapy represents a break from the medical past. Like open-heart surgery, antibiotics and low-cost medical imaging, it's a "disruptive" technology capable of changing the way doctors do business. It could transform how we treat many types of cancers in people of all ages—if it can be made to work. But that's the problem. Before this trial at Penn—a Phase 1 trial, the earliest possible human test of a new treatment—gene therapy had scarcely worked in cancer, anywhere in the world. A typical gene-therapy experiment in cancer was as exciting as a sip of warm tea. Nothing happened, good or bad. In other kinds of gene-therapy trials, there had been tragedies: At Penn in 1999, in a trial run by doctors unrelated to the team treating Walt, a teenager with an inherited liver disease had died after a gene-therapy infusion sparked a runaway reaction.
But Walt's doctors had done things differently than past scientists. Their approach was original and new. And, incredibly, they'd already succeeded in making tumors vanish in a few of the patients who'd come before Walt. Using their custom technology, the Penn physicians had jolted two cancer-riddled men into sudden apparent remission—an outcome dramatic enough to earn mentions on TV news and a write-up in the New York Times. In September 2011, the paper described Penn's work as "a turning point in the long struggle to develop effective gene therapies against cancer."
But now, eight months later, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, something dramatic was happening inside Walter Keller's body—a riot of cells and signals. His blood pressure had crashed, so doctors had pumped him full of fluid to raise it, and the fluid had blown up his neck like a balloon. Socks were wrapped around his bloated legs to help with blood circulation. His kidneys were failing. He shook at times with "the rigors," excruciating full-body shivers that made his whole body feel the way his heart would if he had just run up a huge hill.
Scientists don't talk about "curing" cancer. A cure is the hope so great, so seemingly out of reach, that it must never be invoked. They've built a wall around the word. Still, the Penn researchers—as careful as they were, as professionally sober and skeptical—couldn't help but wonder: Was their small experiment the start of something that could one day affect thousands, tens of thousands, more? Was it revealing a secret about the human body that could point the way to treatments for other cancers, not just leukemia? There was no way to know until they gathered more data. They needed to show that the therapy was safe. And they needed to prove that the early patients—the men whose tumors they'd blasted away—weren't flukes.
Which is why so much now depended on Walter Keller. If Walt's condition improved and his tumors diminished, the trial would move forward, and the potential of the Penn therapy—the result of a decades-long quest of scientific passion and discovery—would continue to grow. But if he suffered harm, Penn would have to pause the trial and maybe stop it altogether. Then everything would spiral down. Other scientists would argue that gene therapy was a dead end. Funding would dry up; research would wither. The Penn doctors might never get another chance to prove the merits of their idea, and we might all lose out. It had taken 20 years to get to this point, and it could all be over in the space of a few moments.
1996, Bethesda, Maryland
Captain Carl June had a way of making science seem almost mischievous—something in the curl of his lip, the folding of his hands in his lap. He was an intense character even by the standards of the U.S. Navy medical community, which tended to attract driven personalities. He'd played football as a younger man. He was 42 now and ran ultra-marathons; his calves were like titanium rods.
He directed a research lab on a Navy medical campus. The main goal of his lab was to make the human immune system do things it hadn't evolved to do. Improve it. "Put it on steroids," he liked to say.
June had a tinkerer's temperament, a fascination with inventing tools to make new kinds of inventions possible. Some of this he had absorbed from his father, a chemical engineer in the San Francisco Bay area. As a kid, June planned to go into science, but then the Vietnam War came, he enlisted in 1971 and received a congressional appointment to Annapolis. He trained for a time as a sailor on a nuclear sub. "Very cool technology," June would later recall. "And then the war was over, so they said, 'You don't have to do this stuff. You can go to medical school.' So I did that, and it was cool." After med school, the Navy sent June to Seattle to learn how to perform bone-marrow transplants. If there ever was a radiation leak on a sub, the Navy would need doctors to give the sailors new immune systems, which is essentially what a bone-marrow transplant does. The procedure saves lives, but at considerable risk; it's estimated to kill one in five. June saw heroic transformations as well as tragic deaths.
Now, in his Bethesda lab, June mostly studied HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It was another lens for looking at the immune system, its powers and limitations. HIV is so insidious because it infects the very immune cells, called "T cells," that would normally kill it. June wanted to know everything about T cells. But it was hard to study them, because it was hard to grow them in the lab. So June created a better way. Working with a quiet, meticulous researcher named Bruce Levine, June discovered that he could coat artificial beads with proteins that mimicked the natural cells that normally coax T cells to divide. The beads, round and about half the size of a cell, were made partly of iron; when you wanted to use the T cells that had grown, you just passed the cells and beads over a magnet. The beads got stuck on the magnet, and the cells flowed through.
June enjoyed his work at the Navy, and peers across the country respected his creativity—"a real genius," Laurence Cooper, an immunologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, calls him—but by 1996, he'd begun to feel restless. The Navy only funded research into infectious diseases like HIV, and he wanted to study cancer. His wife, Cynthia, had recently been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. They had three kids in high school and college. June wanted to use what he'd learned about the immune system to tackle the disease. And more than that, he wanted to find a way to get his ideas out of the lab and into the wider world of suffering and need.
June retired from the Navy in 1996. For the next three years, he continued working in the same lab as a civilian, employed by a foundation, while caring for his wife as she endured chemo. "I learned a lot about being on the other side of a bed," June says, "and what it's like going through the ups and downs of cancer therapy. I had no idea of the impact."
In 1999, Penn offered June a prestigious appointment at its medical school. It was the chance he'd been waiting for. He moved to Philly, bringing Levine with him, and launched a new lab to translate basic science into drugs that could be commercialized, including cancer drugs. Meanwhile, Levine began to build a pilot facility that could produce drugs and vaccines in small batches: the Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility. It was like a biotech company in miniature. In 2005, Levine scaled it up, moving into a warren of renovated lab space in a hospital building off Spruce Street.
Some of its first creations were custom cancer vaccines for the benefit of June's wife. "She wanted to go for the home run," June recalls. She wanted to see her kids grow up. He was sympathetic, of course; in her place, he'd have wanted the same. But in talking to some of his colleagues about risk, June came to realize that not everyone would. "Some people are not risk-takers at all," he says. For the first time in his career, June was forced to think about what it really meant, on a human level, to become a guinea pig in a cutting-edge medical trial—or to turn down that chance. What's more rational? To fight, or to accept your fate with grace?
The vaccines didn't work well enough to save Cynthia June. After five years of treatment, including two bone-marrow transplants, she died in 2001.
1996, Upland, California
Robin was on the phone. She was down at nearby Ralphs supermarket, where she worked checkout. The union had brought one of those mobile health vans to the store. Walt should come get a physical exam, she said. Why not? It was free.
To humor his wife, Walt drove to Ralphs and climbed into the van. He gave a sample of his blood. A few days later, he picked up the phone. "There's something wrong with your blood," a voice said. "We're praying for you."
Leukemia. Walt, it turned out, had the most common type: chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL. Walt had always worried he might get cancer one day—his father had died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and Walt had spent decades sucking down wood-stain fumes in his job as a cabinet refinisher—but still, the diagnosis felt like an ambush. At 43, he was scared of losing everything he'd built. He'd come so far from the little house in neighboring Montclair, where he'd grown up poor and afraid.
One day when Walt was 14, his stepfather burst through the door, carrying a gun. He told Walt not to move. He grabbed Walt's mother around the waist and pushed her out into the side yard. Walt heard a gunshot, then two more. He went into the yard. His stepfather and mother were both splayed out on the ground. The man had shot her, then shot himself. Walt stood there in shock. His mother was bleeding from her nose and ears. He went back into the house, got a pillow from his room, and put it under her head.
After the murder-suicide, Walt's birth father moved back in. An alcoholic painting contractor, he was too drunk to work. He made Walt ride his bicycle to the liquor store to fetch whiskey. The eldest boy of six siblings, Walt had to drop out of school at age 16 to support his brothers and sisters.
So his current prosperity, 30 years later, struck him as faintly miraculous. Two grown daughters, Chelle and Shawna. A three-year-old son, Dustin, whose birth had leveled him with a joy so intense, he didn't know what he'd done to deserve it. A spacious house with a courtyard and palm trees in Upland, just 15 minutes from Montclair but a world away, where Walt ran his own cabinet business and coached youth baseball. Walt wanted to see Dustin grow up; he wanted to see Chelle and Shawna start families of their own. He told his oncologist, Linda Bosserman, that he'd try anything.
After monitoring his cancer for two years, Bosserman started Walt on chemo in 1998. Up to three times a week, three weeks a month, Walt sat in a recliner as poison poured into him. One day he came home from a chemo treatment and Dustin was there, looking up at him. Dustin's dark brown hair was only thickening as Walt's was falling out. "Dad," he said, "if you die, how am I going to talk to you?"
The chemo was preparation for a course of full-body radiation, which crisped Walt's skin and left his mouth so full of blisters that he needed morphine to dull the pain. After that came a stem-cell transplant, a procedure in which blood is drawn from the body and spun in a centrifuge to extract pure stem cells, which can generate new, healthy bone marrow cells. Then, after chemo and radiation wipe out the bulk of the cancer, the stem cells are injected back into the veins.
The stem-cell transplant, in 1999, bought Walt five and a half years of remission. He built a rudimentary batting cage in his backyard and worked with Dustin there, sitting on an overturned milk crate in the cage and tossing his son dozens of underhanded pitches. When the cancer returned, in 2005, Walt went through the whole procedure again: more chemo, more radiation, a second stem-cell transplant. "That's like going to hell twice," he says.
It worked, until it didn't.
In 2010, when Walt was just shy of 57, he began to feel abnormally tired and weak. He knew what it meant. Eventually he went in for some blood work. The next time he saw Dr. Bosserman, in August, she spoke to Walt in a tone he'd never heard before.
His cancer was back again. And there were no good options left. A third stem-cell transplant wasn't in the cards. None of his family members were a genetic match for a bone-marrow transplant. All Walt could do was place himself on a waiting list to receive a transplant from a stranger. In the meantime, Bosserman would start him on a third course of chemo and hope for the best.
Almost immediately after starting on the drugs, Walt sensed that he had reached the end.
Meanwhile, his sandy-haired daughter Chelle, a birthing consultant at a local hospital, started talking to him about heaven. She had a family of her own now, and was raising her children to know Jesus. "Heaven is real," she'd say, "and we know how to get there. We'll see each other again."
Walt had never been much for church. But he thought about his love for his daughter, that feeling so powerful you can't put it into words, and he thought about how God knows when you're low and what's in your heart, and suddenly it all made sense: He is using my love for my daughter to reach me. He is using Chelle as a vehicle.
He tried not to be afraid. He climbed into his van every day and went to work. In the van, he listened to Vin Scully call the Dodgers games on the radio, marveling at how Vinny could make you see the action in your head: every pitch, every hit and stolen base, a game of seemingly infinite complexity mastered and mapped.
One day, Walt was finishing up some French doors by the pool of a client when the man of the house rushed out, eyes aflame. "Walt, Walt," the man said, "there's a lady on TV, and they say they have a cure for what you have."
"Ah, there's no cure for what I have," Walt mumbled, and went back to work.
When he got home that night, he turned on the evening news. The newscaster started talking about leukemia.
Walt's cell phone lit up.
2004, Philadelphia
T cells. Carl June had an idea for a new kind of cancer treatment involving T cells, those building blocks of the immune system.
In their natural state, T cells usually aren't able to kill tumor cells, partly because they can't latch on strongly enough. But June was fascinated by scientific papers showing it was possible to change this. A few researchers—first an Israeli named Zelig Eshhar in the '80s, then other investigators around the world—had discovered that you could force a T cell to stick to a tumor cell and kill it. To pull this off, you built an "engineered T cell"—a T cell never before seen in nature. You altered the T cell's genetic blueprint by injecting a new gene into the cell. The new gene would tell it to build a new molecular limb. The limb, called a "chimeric antigen receptor," would sit partly inside the cell and partly outside, and it could send signals either in or out. One signal it could send was: kill. Another was: replicate.
June loved this approach. So elegant. Put the immune system on steroids. What if you could train the body to fight cancer on its own? What if, instead of replacing a patient's immune system (as in a bone-marrow transplant) or pumping him full of poison (chemo), you could just borrow some cells, tweak them, and infuse them back into the patient? In theory, the engineered cells would stay alive in the blood, replenishing themselves, killing any tumors that recurred. It occurred to June that one infusion could last a lifetime.
He was also excited by the flexibility of engineered T cells. Normally, a drug for one kind of cancer couldn't ever work on another kind; you had to start over from scratch. But here, since you were starting with a T cell and adding a limb, you only had to change the shape of the limb. You could snap a new piece on the end, like a LEGO, that fit into a molecule on the surface of a breast-cancer cell, or a pancreatic-cancer cell, or whatever kind of cancer you wanted to attack.
June and Levine had actually tested engineered T cells before, in patients with HIV. The cells hadn't cured anyone, though they did improve immune-system function. But June wondered if the cells could work in cancer. Around 2003, he started discussing a cancer trial with a few colleagues at Penn, including Levine and an oncologist, David Porter. Porter ran the bone-marrow transplant program at Penn, and he was passionate about investigating new treatments. Together, the men decided to work toward a test of engineered T cells in patients suffering from a certain family of leukemias, including chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
In 2004, June and Porter won a $1 million grant from a small foundation, the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy, created by two parents whose daughter-in-law had died of breast cancer. It was enough to get started. But before they could make much progress, scientific opinion shifted against them. By 2006 and 2007, teams at other universities had run their own trials of engineered T cells in cancer patients. Invariably, the cells didn't replicate well and simply died in the blood. In one trial, they only lasted a day. The cells had no effect. They didn't work. The whole idea was starting to seem like a bust.
This is a story about science. But science is performed by people, and people are fallible, and people are stubborn. Carl June had seen before how a field could get it wrong. Back in med school, he used to lift weights pretty seriously. Some of the guys in his gym started experimenting with anabolic steroids. June saw them suddenly zoom from benching 220 pounds to a superhuman 320. The stuff obviously worked. But when June looked up steroids in his med-school textbook, it said that they were bogus; they only appeared to work because they made your muscles retain water. It wasn't until decades later, when juiced-up sluggers like Barry Bonds ruled the ballparks, that sc ience acknowledged steroids really could build muscle.
Even as others sprinted away from engineered T cells, June ran toward them. He couldn't shake a sense that they were so beautiful, they had to work. The concept was sound; only the execution was lacking. It was a matter of getting the details right.
June thought he and his team at Penn could succeed where others had failed. They had a few advantages. One was a better way of growing T cells—the June/Levine system of magnetic beads, developed at the Navy. Another advantage was a custom "vector," a sort of molecular truck for hauling new genes into a T cell. Other teams had built their trucks out of parts from viruses that cause leukemia in mice. Penn's truck was more efficient, because its researchers had made the bold decision to build it out of HIV. HIV works by squirting its genes into T cells. Nothing on Earth is better at this task. Why not exploit it? In the lab, a researcher named Michael Milone, along with others on June's team, had snipped away at the virus, removing the dangerous parts—the ones that let it multiply and cause AIDS—while keeping the basic chassis.
Penn had a set of unique tools, then. And the doctors used those tools to create and test various shapes of molecular limbs that no one else had tried. They injected their custom T cells into mice that had been genetically modified to accept human cells. By 2007, after testing several varieties of cells, Milone had identified one that seemed to work best, and was able to show that it could cure leukemia in mice.
Of course, scientists can cure a lot of diseases in mice that they can't cure in people. It's far easier and cheaper to do mouse trials than human trials. The first human-sized batch of vector—40 liters, filtered down to less than a shot glass's worth of slightly opaque fluid for use in the trial—would cost $300,000 to make. The problem now was getting the money to scale up from mice to humans, which meant finding a funder who believed in the idea.
No one just hands money to scientists. They have to fight for it. It turned out that the main funder of cancer research in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health, didn't want to pick up the check. Influential scientists there didn't think engineered T cells could ever work. June reached out to a few drug companies, but they were no help, either. Big Pharma didn't see a way to make money; the therapy was too different, too logistically demanding.
In 2008, the economy crashed, and June struggled to find money to pay his postdocs and lab assistants. He considered canceling the trial. Eventually, though, he managed to patch together funds to make the first batch of vector. It was enough for three patients.
2010, Philadelphia
They could feel the cancer through his skin—acorn-sized nodules of tumor in the lymph nodes under his arms. He was Bill Ludwig, a 65-year-old retired corrections officer from New Jersey. He'd come to Philly to be Patient No. 1.
At HUP, nurses hooked him up to an "apheresis" machine, which spun his blood in a centrifuge, separating his red cells and platelets from his T cells. The T cells then traveled to Levine's Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility, which was full of biosafety cabinets and scales and flasks, and refrigerators named after characters from The Simpsons: the Otto Fridge and the Maggie Fridge, along with the Krusty Freezer. Levine and his technicians added the magnetic beads and the vector to Ludwig's T cells and put the cells in a nutrient medium that provided everything they needed to divide and grow. At this point, the mixture was the color of Earl Grey tea. The cells sat in a bag for the first few days, then were placed on a machine that rocked them gently to promote further growth. Then a magnet removed the beads, and the cells were frozen to preserve them while Levine and his team performed quality-control tests required by the FDA. After the tests were complete, the frozen bag of cells—about three ounces' worth, or a quarter-can of soda—was taken down to Bill Ludwig's bedside (a journey that involved rides on two elevators) and warmed in a water bath. Then a nurse hung the bag on a pole and connected it to an IV line. The fluid flowed into Ludwig.
Five days later, his temperature spiked.
David Porter studied a chest scan to try to figure out what was going on. He saw that Ludwig's lungs looked like they had pneumonia, which is common in CLL patients. The doctors treated it with antibiotics, and it went away. But Ludwig's fever only increased. Over the next few weeks, he grew sicker and sicker, quaking with chills, sweating with fevers. The doctors worried that maybe he was suffering from something called cytokine release syndrome, an immune system overreaction that had killed patients in other trials. Soon Porter and the other Penn doctors were dealing with end-of-life issues, like whether to put Ludwig on a respirator. Ludwig's wife called the whole family to the hospital, fearing he would die.
In all the commotion, no one thought to look at the patient's tumors. It wasn't until Day 21 that an intern tried to palpate the lumps under Ludwig's arms—and couldn't find them.
Ludwig began to feel better. His blood counts improved; his fevers subsided. On Day 30, the team performed a battery of tests, including a CAT scan. When P orter looked at the scan, he couldn't see any evidence of cancer. Then the team extracted some bone marrow and analyzed the cells several different ways. The first two tests showed no tumor. The third and most sensitive test showed less than one tumor cell in several hundred thousand, which more than met the definition of a complete clinical response.
Carl June thought it had to be a mistake. He asked for another bone-marrow biopsy, and for the tests to be repeated. The results of the second tests were the same: no cancer. If Ludwig still had the disease—and he might—it was beyond the current ability of medical science to detect.
The doctors obviously took this as good news, but it wasn't as dramatic a moment for them as you might think. Medical investigators working on new kinds of treatments tend not to expect wild success. "We've all been involved in new approaches in treatments where the first patient, it's miraculous, and then you treat nine people and it doesn't work again," Porter says. Besides, it didn't make sense to celebrate when they didn't yet know what was going on. All the team had was a suspicion—a rough hypothesis about what was happening inside Bill Ludwig's body.
Sometimes when doctors give chemo drugs to patients who have never had chemo before, large quantities of tumor cells die and crack open all at once, releasing high levels of toxic junk into the blood: chemicals that mess with heart rhythms and cause other dangerous problems, as well as uric acid, which clogs the kidneys. This is called tumor lysis syndrome. Porter and June hoped that tumor lysis was the cause of Ludwig's fevers, because if it was, it meant that the T cells were working; they were killing Ludwig's tumors. But if it was indeed tumor lysis, it was a kind never seen before. Usually, symptoms of tumor lysis occur within a day or two of treatment. Ludwig hadn't gotten sick until Day 5.
The Penn doctors went on to treat their second patient, who responded much as Ludwig had, with severe flu-like symptoms that swelled and ebbed; follow-up tests revealed that much, but not all, of the patient's cancer had been eliminated. Two successes were better than one, but two could still be a fluke; two could be an accident. It wasn't until the doctors treated Patient No. 3, a 64-year-old Bucks County man named Douglas Olson, that they got a clear picture of what they were achieving.
Olson, a scientist himself and a longtime patient of Porter's, had come into the trial with three pounds of tumors in his body. The tumors had proven resistant to all other therapies, and he didn't want to try a bone-marrow transplant. "If you survive it," Olson says, "you may not be cured, and you can't do it again. So this trial was a chance to beat this thing."
Something was different about Olson, something that made him a particularly useful test case: His T cells hadn't grown well in the lab. The team could only give him one one-hundredth of the dose of T cells given to the first patient. It was such a low dose that some colleagues at Penn didn't think it was ethical to treat the patient at all. Says Porter, "There were people who were going to insist he sign a consent that he knows this is futile. And we just argued, 'We don't know that.'"
The team won the argument and went ahead with the infusion. Fourteen days later, Olson woke up with fevers and chills. He called Porter, who told him to come in for some tests. "Now I had a sense of what was going on," Porter says. "That this was, in fact, good news."
Over the next week, Olson felt nauseated and suffered from diarrhea; he couldn't eat. (As the doctors would later discover, what was making the patients feel like they had the worst flu of their lives was cytokine release syndrome.) On the evening of Day 21, Porter was walking across the Penn campus when he got a text message on his pager. It was a series of lab results on Olson.
June got the results the next morning in his office. He scanned through columns of numbers, mouth agape. One of his colleagues, Michael Kalos, had spent years designing a series of ultra-precise assays to measure the activity of T cells in the blood, and now Kalos's assays were telling an incredible story. On Day Five, there had been almost no engineered T cells in the patient's body. By Day 18, there were billions. They had multiplied a thousand-fold from the original tiny dose. Almost every T cell in the patient's body was one of Penn's special genetic creatures. The patient was growing the drug in his body.
What's more, the lab results painted a picture of cataclysm in Olson's blood. As the T cells grew exponentially, the patient's kidneys had begun to shut down, and all sorts of chemicals associated with tumor lysis syndrome were wreaking havoc. It was really happening, all of it—cell growth, tumor death—exactly as the team had intended.
Two days later, Olson's bone-marrow biopsy came back clean. Three days after that, doctors discharged him from the hospital, an apparently healthy man. "I was absolutely cancer-free," Olson says. "I gotta tell you, every time I say that, it just gives me the shivers." The day he left the hospital, Olson drove to Maryland with his wife, to the Annapolis Boat Show, and bought an 18-foot sailboat.
The temptation was to say that pounds of tumors had "melted away," but melting implied a gentle process, and what had happened to the tumors was more violent than that. They'd been either torn to shreds directly by T cells that acted like serial killers, moving from one tumor cell to the next, slashing membranes and spilling innards, or they'd been destroyed by enzymes secreted by the T cells.
In follow-up tests six months later, the team would find high levels of engineered T cells still alive in Olson's blood. And no detectable tumors.
It was ingrained in them, through their training, to resist celebration. After June and his colleagues got the initial results for Olson, they thought about all the things they still didn't know. Why, exactly, had the therapy worked so well? Was it the particular structure of the engineered cells? Was it the way they'd grown the cells, using the body as a sort of bioreactor? Was cancer still lurking below the threshold of detection?
They knew it would take years to answer these questions. They also knew that "something unprecedented had happened," June says. The responsible thing to do with such data is to publish it and let other scientists take a look, and that's exactly what the Penn doctors did. They submitted papers to two prestigious journals, the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine, and as the papers circulated, scientists quickly recognized their significance—especially the handful of researchers who, like June, had always believed that this approach could work. "The Penn trial was definitely a turning point," says Michel Sadelain, a researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who has made important contributions to the study of engineered T cells. "In the first three patients Carl treated, two of them showed a very dramatic response. It couldn't be any more dramatic. They had large tumor burdens that essentially vanished." Laurence Cooper at MD Anderson describes the transformation of the initial patients as "a sort of Lazarus moment."
Lazarus moment or no, there were still scientists who didn't buy that Penn was onto something big. The argument for skepticism rested less on science than logistics. Penn was a small operation—a boutique. Sure, they could treat three patients, but what about 300, or 3,000? Penn hadn't shown it could even begin to meet the need. Maybe the therapy was inherently impractical.
No one was more painfully aware of Penn's limitations than David Porter. In late 2011 and early 2012, after news of the breakthrough spread from the scientific literature into media around the world, more than 5,000 emails flooded into Penn, begging for access to the trial. "She is our first-born and only girl," went a typical letter from a mother and father hoping to get treatment for their daughter with leukemia. "We both love her very very much."
Porter read these letters with anguish. He knew Penn only had the capacity to treat seven or eight more people over the next year. Besides, the therapy was still so new. He didn't know all the side effects yet. It wouldn't be responsible to throw the trial open to more than a few.
How do you explain the need for scientific caution to the parent of a dying child?
Here is what Porter ended up telling people: "We're doing this as fast as we can."
Walt got into the trial because his family fought for him. It's really that simple.
Penn had set up an online application for the trial. Walt wasn't good with computers, so his eldest sister, Nancy Nelson, a woman in her early 60s with dirty-blond hair and glasses, filled out the form and hit SEND.
Nancy and Walt had always been extremely close; they'd bonded as kids in Montclair, relying on each other to process the trauma of their mother's murder. Nancy had already decided that if Walt got into the trial, she would leave California to be at his side for however long it took. Walt's wife, Robin, couldn't do it. Their relationship had lately become rocky; besides, she had to stay at her job to keep Walt's health insurance current.
Nancy received a brief email response from Penn—a form letter. Then, nothing. "We figured out pretty quickly that it was just going into a black hole," she recalls.
Eventually, after two weeks of calls and prayers, Walt's daughter Chelle connected with a researcher who worked for David Porter. They spoke for half an hour. "He explained to me that it was very high-risk," Chelle remembers. "That my father could die. The new cells could eat up his whole body." She asked the researcher a question: If it were his father, what would he do? According to Chelle, the man said, "Oooooh. I don't know."
Chelle didn't hesitate: Her father had made his wishes clear. She set up an appointment for Walt to meet Porter.
Walt and Nancy flew to Philadelphia for the meeting in November 2011. "If you let me into the trial," Walt told Porter, "I promise I'll be the best patient you've ever had. I promise I'll make it." Porter took this as a good sign; an early-stage medical trial demands "some incredible amount of optimism" on the part of the patient. It also boded well that Nancy was here, wearing a silver necklace that said CURE WALT. Porter didn't commit, though. He told them how difficult the journey would be. A bone-marrow transplant was the tried-and-true option.
Walt said no. He wanted this.
Porter agreed to run blood tests to see if Walt's cells would respond to the vector. In March 2012, Walt got the call: He was in.
The next few months were among the most agonizing of his life. His health began to fluctuate, because his leukemia was progressing. Doctors at Penn requested extra tests. Next, Penn ran out of vector—they'd used up their first two batches on the first six patients—and he had to wait for a new batch to be ready. He had to cool his heels. By now, he and Nancy had left California and come to the Philly area in anticipation of Walt's infusion. They were staying in Cheltenham, in a free hotel for cancer patients and their caregivers called Hope Lodge, run by the drug company AstraZeneca. They ate their meals in a communal dining room, chatting with the other patients about the Phillies.
Then, in April 2012, Penn suddenly suspended the trial. They'd begun treating their first child patient, Emma Whitehead, a six-year-old girl who suffered from acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a disease similar to CLL. After Emma received her dose of T cells, her body's immune system had revved up, releasing cytokines that caused fever, nausea, hypoxia (low oxygen) and low blood pressure. Doctors decided to administer an anti-cytokine agent called tocilizumab. They paused the trial to make sure she'd be okay.
When Emma recovered, the trial resumed. Walt finally received his infusion of T cells on Tuesday, May 15th. Chelle couldn't be there, so she texted Nancy a prayer to read out loud:
Father God, we ask for your blessing on these cells. Let this blessing flow right from you to Walt. May these cells be of You, Lord. May they heal, restore and give life. …
The first night, Walt spiked a fever.
This was unexpected. Previous patients had taken five to 14 days to get sick. The doctors tested Walt's blood. What they found surprised them: By Day 3, Walt had higher than expected levels of engineered T cells in his blood. His bioreactor was churning with astonishing speed.
Walt started feeling better over the next few days. He even penned some coaching advice for his players in an online journal Nancy had been maintaining:
Wyatt, remember to pick up the target early and on your fastball make sure to keep your hand behind the ball.
Alec, don't worry about your speed. Your strength is hitting your spots and changing speed of pitches.…
On the morning of the sixth day after infusion, Nancy woke up in Hope Lodge and checked on Walt. Walt wouldn't get out of bed. He seemed more tired than ever. Nancy couldn't get him to eat or to drink much water. She called Porter, who said to bring him to the hospital right away. When they arrived, a nurse tried to get blood from Walt but couldn't find a vein. His blood pressure had crashed. Doctors rolled him into the emergency room.
From here on in, Walt's memories are fuzzy. He has a particular way of characterizing this lost time: "I fell into the ditch."
His kids came to Philly when they heard he was worsening. Chelle arrived on the night of Wednesday, May 23rd; Shawna and Dustin came the next day on a red-eye flight, sprinting from the airport to a cab and from the cab to the hospital. "I thought I was coming to say goodbye," says Shawna, a 38-year-old with curly hair who works in an orthodontist office in California. When she finally got to Walt's room, she had to step back and take a minute to compose herself. It was mostly his eyes: They looked like they were bleeding.
The kids slept fitfully in chairs next to their father's bed. They chatted with the nurses caring for Walt and looked forward to the twice-daily visits from Dr. Porter, whose archetypically calm bedside manner helped reassure them that Walt would be okay. Porter had seen many of Walt's symptoms crop up in previous patients, and by now he had a better sense of how to deal with them. He knew he could tamp down the activity of the T cells by administering tocilizumab, the anti-cytokine agent. What he didn't know was this: By suppressing the T cells, would he also prevent them from killing Walt's tumors?
When Porter asked Walt if he wanted the anti-cytokine agent, Walt shook his head vigorously: He didn't want to risk stopping the beneficial part of the reaction.
Let these puppies work, Walt thought.
By Friday night, though, 10 days after infusion, Walt was no longer able to make decisions for himself. He started babbling to his sister and his children about Elvis Presley. He told them he had to get out of his bed.
Porter talked to Chelle and Nancy, and they all agreed that even though it might reduce the efficacy of the T cells, they shouldn't wait any longer to administer the agent. The staff gave it to Walt, then moved him into the intensive-care unit.
The scariest moment for Walt's family came a short time later, around 10 on Saturday night, when Walt started to repeat the same phrase over and over. "I need to go," he said, a faraway look in his eyes. "I need to go. I see the white wedding." To Dustin, it was like something out of a movie: His father was telling him that he could see the light, that he was sick of fighting and he wanted to die.
Chelle said, "That's okay, Dad. You can go." She'd miss him if he died, of course, but the way Chelle saw it, God was in control, not the family. If God wanted to take Walt, that was His will.
"No!" Shawna screamed.
Dustin began to cry. "No, Dad, don't go."
Dustin held his father's hand. Walt gripped back, tightly. Then he let go.
This is it, Dustin thought.
But then Walt opened his eyes.
He did that a few more times, gripping and letting go, gripping and letting go. Finally, he slept.
The next morning, when Walt woke up, his family thought he looked better. It seemed like he had regained his voice and some of his vigor. The anti-cytokine agent was working. Over the next few days, Walt's physical state continued to improve. His thinking was still muddled, though, which meant that things got harder for the family, not easier, because now Walt could actually pull himself up onto the rails of his bed in an attempt to escape. Nancy and the kids took turns playing prison guard. They would lie on top of him, hug him close, just to keep him down. There was a rope above Walt's bed attached to a hook that the nurses could use to hoist him up. At one point, Walt grabbed onto the rope with both hands like it was a water-ski line and said to the nurses, "Hit it," which is the signal a water-skier gives to the speedboat driver to start the engines.
Then, over the next several days, Walt was moved to a regular hospital room and started to climb out of the ditch. Nancy had taken to playing Motown music on her iPad. One day she noticed Walt humming along to "You've Really Got a Hold on Me":
I don't like you, but I love you. …
Don't wanna kiss you, but I need to.
Another time, Walt elevated himself on the side of the bed and started jiggling. A nurse asked him what he was doing. "Shaking my booty," Walt said, and sang: Shake shake shake, shake shake shake your booo-tay.
The day they really knew Walt was back, though, was the day Dr. Porter walked into the room to ask the four questions—
What's your full name?
Where are you?
What month is it?
What day of the week is it?
—and Walt answered them before Porter could even speak: "I'm Walter Robert Keller, I'm at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, it's May, and today's Thursday."
"That was awesome, Walt," Porter said.
Soon Walt got out of bed, moseying through the hallways with a walker. Around that time, on June 5th, Porter took a sample of Walt's bone marrow to check on the status of his cancer. The lab report came back six days later, on June 11th. Accompanied by several staffers, Porter came to Walt's room to give him and Nancy the news.
The doctors clustered around Walt. "All of us were trying not to jump up and down," Porter recalls.
Before the trial, 90 percent of Walt's bone marrow cells had been cancerous. Now, doctors couldn't find any trace of the disease, Porter said. They still had to do more tests. But Walt appeared to be in complete remission. Up to seven pounds of tumor, obliterated, gone.
"His eyes were, like, lit up," Walt recalls of Porter. "When someone tells you you have cancer, and then when someone tells you you don't have any—oh, it was like a monkey just jumped off my back."
Walt stayed in the hospital for a few more days, working with a physical therapist to regain strength in his atrophied muscles. He and Nancy moved back to Hope Lodge for a time, then returned home to California in July.
Meanwhile, in Philly, the Penn team went on to treat adult patients No. 8, 9 and 10, as well as a second child, for a total of 12. (One of the patients in the second trio—4, 5 and 6—had a partial response to the therapy, while two others saw no effect on their cancer; another adult among the first 12 patients also did not respond.)
Last December, at a medical conference in Atlanta, the team presented its results to a rapt audience. The data boiled down to this: Nine out of the 12 patients, including both of the children, had responded to the therapy. Nine out of 12 had grown the engineered T cells in their bodies. Nine out of 12 had experienced some degree of tumor lysis syndrome and had seen their tumors vanish, either partially or completely.
Even more encouraging were the follow-up data on the two early cases of compete remission—patients No. 1, Bill Ludwig, and No. 3, Douglas Olson.
One big question all along has been the durability of the T cells. How long will they stay alive in the blood? Months? Years? Will cancer return in these patients? Doctors don't know. "I don't think we've proven that we've cured anyone," Porter says. Still, when Ludwig and Olson returned to Philly for their two-year checkups in the fall of 2012, they told doctors they felt great. The team checked their blood. The T cells were still alive, two years after infusion. Cancer undetectable.
"I think of these guys as the first astronauts, right?" says Levine. "They didn't know what they were getting into. They signed up for something, and it's wonderful to see how it's turned out."
"I mean, I thought it might work," June says, "but I didn't think it would work as well as it did."
Science is incremental. It's a slow and global grind, a steady accumulation of facts wrested from failure. But every once in a while, there really is a leap, and a small group of people can change how thousands think about the possibilities.
Carl June argued for years that engineered T cells could work, without much to show for it. But thanks to the trial, people are starting to listen. Even Big Pharma wants in.
For months, Penn has been working with the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, which manufactures the cancer drug Gleevec and the ADHD drug Ritalin, among others. According to the terms of a deal struck last year, Novartis will soon construct a new building on the Penn campus, the Center for Advanced Cellular Therapies, where Penn researchers will partner with scientists from Novartis to develop the T-cell technology.
Pharmaceutical companies have collaborated with universities before, but never to address the unique challenges that lie ahead for this particular drug. Novartis will help Penn learn more about the inner workings of the therapy so they can better channel and control it, hopefully sparing future patients ordeals like Walt's. It will pay for the costly Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials required to win FDA approval. It will help test the technology in other kinds of cancers: June and his team now have trials in the planning stages for mesothelioma (a lung-lining cancer); pancreatic, brain, prostate, breast and ovarian cancers; and other blood cancers. And for the first time, a pharmaceutical company will design a manufacturing system that takes blood from the patient, modifies it in the lab, and gives it back to the patient. The biggest challenge here isn't proving that the drug works; the biggest challenge is making it.
These days, Carl June spends a lot of time thinking about biology on an industrial scale—the unsexy details of cell cultures and workflows in the factory he wants to build. But when he's not thinking about the very large, he marvels at the very small. At the power of the Penn trial, given its size. A few well-described cases "can really change the whole field," he says. A couple of brave men. Two kids. That's all. And look.
2012, West Covina, California
"Nice and easy, okay?" Walt tells the starting pitcher of his Upland Underdogs, a 13-year-old named J.J. with orange sunglasses. It's a bright October Sunday, and Walt is in the bullpen with J.J. before a game. "You struck out nine guys on this team last time," Walt says. "Okay, remember, you're like a tree falling in the forest, okay? Don't overthrow." A spindly arm wheels around, and the ball smacks into the catcher's glove. "Good, J.J."
The opponents, West Covina, are batting first. Walt jogs out onto the field and takes up his position as first-base coach. He can jog now. He can stand in the sun and shout at the kids in the dugout to stop goofing around and pay attention to the pitcher's moves.
It's been three months since Walt came home from Philadelphia. His kidneys aren't quite back to 100 percent. When he goes out in public, he sometimes wears one of his painting masks to protect his immune system, and from time to time his feet go numb and he has trouble pressing the gas pedal on his truck. Yet he can feel his body coming back. There are days when he wakes up clear-headed, when he's full of weird energy and he wanders around confused until it suddenly occurs to him: This is what it feels like to be healthy. A year ago, Walt had given up planning for a future he didn't think would ever come, but now he's thinking about expanding his wood-fin ishing bu siness. He's even started to wonder, half seriously, about scoring his ultimate dream job: pitching coach for a minor—and eventually major—league baseball team. Decades of coaching experience under his belt—why not?
Walt's kids are here today, Dustin and Shawna and Chelle, watching in the stands, telling stories about the trial.
"It's an indescribable feeling, finding out his bone marrow is clean," Dustin says, gazing out at the diamond. "It's surreal. It's still surreal. I'm in disbelief."
West Covina cycles through three pitchers in four innings. The game finally tips in the fifth, when Walt's team explodes for 15 runs. The rally-capper is a home run that sails well over the second fence in center field.
Final score: 22-5, Upland. A football score. Walt shakes his head. He tucks his chin into his neck and smiles. Then he jogs across the diamond with the kids to shake hands with the vanquished.
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Home » Family » Knight of the Swan: A Longread
Knight of the Swan: A LongreadMolly Minturnon August 16, 2013 in Family23 Comments
Knight of the SwanThe first time I heard about my father's godfather was at a family dinner. We were in my grandmother's dining room celebrating my father's birthday. It was the usual ritual of slicing the cake with the silver triangle onto the square, flowered plates, passing each one to my grandmother to slowly scoop ice cream upon, like a queen giving her blessing. Along with that were the usual jokes about my father's birth and therefore his peculiar place in the family–how he was ten years younger than his siblings, and really, if we are being honest, an accident.
"A damn good accident!" my grandmother would say from the end of the table, the light from the chandelier gauzy on her cheekbones. And we would laugh. When I was eleven, I saw my aunt, my father's sister, lean over to my mother and mutter, "And of course we all know about Bobby Putnam."* And so there he was, like an empty locket found in a thrift store.
I was too naive to understand fully what my aunt was saying–that my father was not only an accident, but illegitimate. This information was passed down to my aunt from an older relative many years ago, and mostly stayed underground. The very idea of it seemed ridiculous, vaguely sickening, like the old horror trope of looking at yourself in the mirror but seeing the back of your head.
He was always a shadowy figure in my life, my father said of his godfather, his "Uncle Bobby." I never met him, though he lived not all that far from us until I was 12 and died when I was 22. When I first asked my father about the rumor, he shook his head, smiling but exasperated. What does it matter? he said. It's all the same gene pool. Bob Putnam, like my grandfather, had gone to prep school in New England and then Yale, then served in the Navy in World War II, somewhere in the Pacific. Like my grandfather, he enjoyed camping in the Adirondacks, parties in smoky living rooms, and hard liquor.
I started searching for him early on. As a teenager, I spent hours poring over photos of my grandparents' mid-20th century cocktail parties. I found them in the drawer of a writing desk in my grandmother's basement and sat beside the massive dollhouse on the concrete floor, hunched over the photos as if to physically absorb them.
In each one the party got wilder and wilder–my grandmother holding a martini and cigarette in one hand, leaning over to her friend and gesturing to make her point; my grandfather with a lady's mink curled around his chin, his eyes closed, looking both like a sleeping child and a man about to dive in; a man in a top hat, his back to the camera, stalking through the living room holding a shot gun.
My father is in the background of one photo, his hands in his pockets and tie askew, grinning. In the forefront, my grandfather, in a checked vest and paisley tie, seems to be dancing the twist with a blonde. My grandfather was handsome, with high cheekbones and thick hair that went white when he was in his 30s. I remember staring at him in those photos, waiting for the same chill you get when "someone walks over your grave," that moment when you see yourself in an ancestor–the eyes, the eyebrows, the lips, the shape of the head. With my grandfather, it was like being in the self-checkout aisle at the supermarket, repeatedly scanning an item across the red light but getting no beep.
My grandfather died when I was six–my only memories of him are in a hospital bed set up in his own bedroom, where he lay for months after a severe stroke. So I was left with stories–his romance with a woman in Bermuda in the 1930s, before his family yanked him back to the States (soon afterward he married my grandmother); his attempts at a career in real estate after he left banking in the '60s, showing young couples around ramshackle estates on the Gold Coast, mumbling, I don't know why anyone would want to buy this goddamn house. He never was proud of himself, never thought he accomplished anything, my father said.
*****
When I was a child, I used to get my grandmother confused with both Queen Elizabeth II and Julia Child. Tall and bossy with a transcontinental accent, she was the one who explained to me the real concept of death soon after my grandfather's funeral, sitting in her kitchen. I remember her in the chair across from me, working on her rug hooking. "When someone dies, they go away and don't come back," she said. She looked up at me and then back down to her work. "It happens to everyone," she said, piercing the burlap with her crochet hook and pulling the yarn through. She was making bluebells. "It happened to my parents and it will happen to me."
"Will it happen to my parents?" I asked.
"Of course."
I started to cry in embarrassing, shuddering sobs. My grandmother looked at me, horrified. She reached across the table and touched my hand. "It happens to everyone," she repeated. She said nothing more on the subject.
*****
My memories of my early childhood are of solitude, in what felt like the great expanse of my bedroom—the Nutcracker ballet poster on the wall, white walls and white curtains, frost on the windows. At night the room would become a snowy forest in Russia. I hardly knew what Russia was, but I knew girls wore furs there and often faced tragedy. In my bed, I would lie on top of my covers, letting my body grow cold. I would squint and my nightlight kaleidoscoped into stars. I let myself feel lonely until I became an orphan, abandoned among the trees.
Eventually a sleigh would come through the snow and pause beside me. And then the experience switched to the passive voice; I was pulled into the sleigh–it was never clear who pulled me in. Furs were wrapped around me, I was taken to a castle that turned out to be my home all along. I had been suffering from amnesia and forgotten my origins, my true family. I don't know why my rescuer was blurry.
Many years later, I read about the Knight of the Swan, a medieval tale about a mysterious stranger who travels through a forest in a swan-drawn boat to defend a damsel. His sole condition was that he must never be asked his name. I can't explain how I felt reading the story–only that it was like remembering a dream.
*****
Four years ago, my father moved his mother to an assisted living home in our Southern city. She was ninety-two years old and could barely walk, but still seemed to control our fates, just as she had when I was six. We still all visit her at least once a week and sit in her presence, internally trembling, in her apartment that my father carefully decorated with her heirloom paintings and Herend animal figurines. My mother brings her fresh flowers from her garden at each visit. My grandmother sits in her chair, her spine twisted from many failed operations, her hair so white I think, each time, of snowy owls.
At the time my grandmother moved to our city, I was eight months pregnant with my first child. My father's godfather hadn't appeared in my thoughts for years. But in the otherworldly moment when I gave birth to my daughter, I could see a trail of ancestors hovering over the room, like ghostly paper dolls. (Let it be known I had as many drugs coursing through my system as the anesthesiologist would allow.) Later, when my husband and I were home with our daughter, I sat on the couch with her, and wept because I could see, behind my eyes, her eventually leaving me, having her own children and dying. I was in the eye of a storm of ancestors and descendants. I had never felt so important or so insignificant.
It was perhaps all of these things that led me to start wondering, again, about the rumors about my father's paternity.
*****
I'd given my daughter my surname as her middle name, partly because my uncle has no children; my brother and I are the end of the line, so to speak, for the family name. Week after week visiting my grandmother, I would look at the photos of my grandfather around her apartment, studying his face, just as I studied my daughter's at home. His features were almost delicate–high cheekbones, small nose, and a resolute mouth that very much resembled my aunt's and uncle's. My mother always said, when my brother and I were growing up, I don't know where my children got their mouths.
My brother and I started poking around the Internet, searching for photos of Bobby Putnam, something to do at work when we were bored. In late 2010 we found a photo of Bobby as an old man from a PDF of a newsletter. I remember opening the file in my cubicle and saying, aloud, Jeeeeesus, which was, coincidentally, my grandfather's favorite expression of exasperation, surprise, or fear, passed down to my father and then to me. I say it frequently; I find it comforting, as if I can invoke my ancestors' breezy WASPiness to shield me from any real despair or disaster.
Ha.
There he was–old, but familiar. He was my father in twenty years. His eyes had the same shape, creases, and folds, the eyebrows arched and sparse just like my father's (and mine), low, swooping cheekbones that appeared, just as my father's and mine do, with close-mouthed smiles. His wry smile with my lips, my brother's lips, my father's lips. Motherfucker, was all I could think.
My brother, deft with all things technological, immediately cropped Bobby Putnam's face onto a photo of my father's face and applied a transparency. Chills, he wrote to me. On my screen, my father's and his godfather's faces merged as one, the structures lining up perfectly. God dammit, my brother wrote. We're bastards sent to roam the earth poor and penniless.
*****
There were swan children as well as the swan knight. They were not as well known, of course, and thought to be the knight's predecessors. Seven royal siblings, six boys and one girl, carried into a forest and left to die by Markes, a servant.
How Markes bears the seven children into forest…
Who ordered the servant to do this? The queen mother, jealous of the younger queen and her progeny.
I have advised that it is better to drowne them or make them to die in their childe hode than to have a greater sclaunder.
Sclaunder, an archaic version of slander. There is perhaps no better word for this entire saga.
Earlier this year I was in New York for a funeral. The family gathered at my grandmother's house, which is still full of her furniture, cleaned and landscaped weekly, though no one lives there. My grandmother, too infirm to travel, stayed behind in the South. As my relatives reminisced downstairs, I dug around for photo albums, and once found, threw them on the closest bed and started flipping through, searching for treasonous history.
And there it was again, my father's face seemingly pasted on a man who was not my grandfather. Bobby Putnam and my grandmother sitting close on a sofa, sometime in the '60s. His arm around her protectively, her face tilted toward his, skin touching. They look at the camera with utter confidence, an easy intimacy. Bobby wears his watch on his right hand, just as my father does.
I shoved the album into my bag and took it back home. I took the photos to work and scanned them, zooming in and in and in on Bobby's eyes. You realize this means our family line is dead, my brother said to me when I sent him the photo.
And I prai you on my peril and my will to take the children and goo kyll them or caste them into some river, in suche wise that never be tidinges of them.
*****
It became comforting to look at the photos late at night on my computer, trusty glass of pinot grigio at my side, my shield, listening to "Thrift Shop." I would zoom in and out, making Bobby dance.
I'mma take your grandpa style, I'mma take your grandpa style, no for real, ask your grandpa. Can I have his hand-me-downs?
The hunt for more photos of Bobby became a constant pastime and soon, an obsession. I read the fragments of his obituary available online. I found photos of his son through Facebook and saw my brother's face in his. I read articles about paternity and inherited anguish.
Traumatic experiences in our past, or in our recent ancestors' past, leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA, I read in Discover magazine.
I thought of my grandfather, whose father died suddenly when my grandfather was a boy, and of my grandfather's brother, who committed suicide as a young man.
Like silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes, our experiences, and those of our forebears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten.
I thought of my grandfather wandering through empty houses, doubting his ability to sell them, doubting his ability in general.
They become a part of us, a molecular residue holding fast to our genetic scaffolding.
The DNA remains the same, but psychological and behavioral tendencies are inherited.
What if that sadness, distance, and doubt had not been passed down, at least genetically, to my father? And if not, what was passed down to him, and to my brother and me? I looked at the photo of Bobby on the couch again and again, the steadiness of his gaze, his eyes the same eyes I have looked into from across the table at countless family dinners. The eyes look utterly content.
My father was born on All Saints Day, and walks in goodness. When I was about six or seven, we were one of our hikes deep in the woods. I must have been picking my nose–I held out my nose filth on my finger to him. He spread out the front of his shirt and sort of tilted his head back. "Go ahead and wipe," he said. My mother quickly swept in with a leaf. And this is the way it's been my entire life–my father would sacrifice his comfort—probably his wellbeing, though I've never pushed it–for me. My mother would do the same, but her first instincts are more practical.
An architect, my father has designed rooms in every home my family has lived in. The exact opposite of my grandfather and the empty houses he tried to get rid of–my father transforms houses until they fit our family, until they are practically breathing. Is Bobby Putnam to thank for this?
I found an old article in the New York Times about DNA testing and the havoc it creates for fathers who find out they are not biologically related to their children. It was thousands of words long, but could be summed up by a quote from a nine-year-old girl, discussing the man she grew up thinking was her biological father, but turned out not to be:
At first, it made me scared, because if my dad wasn't related to me, then I was living with someone who wasn't a part of my family, like a stranger. I want him always to be my real dad. Because if he's not my dad, then who is he?
How was it possible that I felt something along the lines of love when I looked at photos of Bobby Putnam, a man I'd never met, and like a student studying a complicated painting in a museum when looking at my grandfather? Which one was the stranger? Who was the blurry figure I imagined rescuing me as a child in the snowy field?
*****
When I showed my father an image I found on Ancestry.com of Bobby Putnam's Yale freshman yearbook photo, my father closed his eyes and then opened them again, grimacing, as if he were viewing an autopsy photo.
Oh God, he said. He drew closer to the screen. It's me. And it isn't me. But it's me. It's the nose. And the eyes. And the mouth. And shape of the face. His face! His whole face! The two of us were standing in my parents' kitchen midway through washing dinner party dishes. The many glasses of wine I'd consumed were telling me I was a girl detective, triumphantly solving a 60-year-old mystery. I don't know what I thought my father would do–shake my hand, embrace me, thank me tearfully? Instead, he backed away to the sink and silently scrubbed a pot. I dried the wine glasses. Do you think they all knew, my father said, his back still turned to me. He continued scrubbing. Do you think everyone in town knew and were laughing about it? How could they not know when I looked just liked him? What a fucking joke.
*****
After that, I tried to avoid bringing it up in front of my father. One day, standing beneath a magnolia tree outside my office, hunched over my cell phone, I called a forensic identity lab to find about genetic testing. It would have to involve cheek swabs from my father and uncle, not to mention their assent. The woman on the other end sounded far away, her voice tinny, as if I were calling overseas on an old landline. I felt like a child, talking to her, and hung up quickly without giving my name. It wasn't my place, I realized. I had no right.
I stopped thinking about it as much as I could. A few months passed.
On a recent Sunday, I brought the albums I'd taken from my grandmother's house to her apartment for our weekly visit. That week, my mother happened to be away, and so it was just my grandmother, father, my daughter, and me. Four generations. My father blanched slightly when I pulled the albums from my bag and placed them in my grandmother's lap, but truly, I brought them only as something to do during our time together.
My grandmother is often in her own world when we visit, sleepy, and hard of hearing, but with the photos in front of her, she came back to us, identifying every person in each photo, even neighbor children from 1935. At first, my father stood apart from her but he slowly drew closer as she said the names aloud. I stood over her other shoulder, waiting for her to flip to the pages. There was my father as an infant, my grandmother young and luminous, red lipstick and plaid skirt, cradling him. There was my father in his crib, alone, his sweet face pressed close to the bars.
And there's Bobby Putman, she said. I snapped my head up and stared at my father. He looked back at me above her snowy head, that familiar wry smile on his face.
He looks nice, was all I could think to say. I could feel my heart–sped up, pinpricked. She turned the page.
And here you are with your father at Spitfire Lake, she said, pointing to a photo, her neck turned toward my dad.
Yes, I remember that, he replied. He leaned closer, the two of them far off in a place I will never visit.
*Names and locations in this essay were changed to protect certain identities.
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by Molly Minturn
Molly Minturn's poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Poetry Daily and elsewhere.
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+3 thesarahgirl's avatar - Go to profile
thesarahgirl · 1 week ago
This made me unexpectedly weepy - what a beautiful piece, thank you.
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+15 MalloryOrtberg's avatar - Go to profile
MalloryOrtberg · 1 week ago
GODDAMN MOLLY
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+7 Sharone@zizzivivizz's avatar - Go to profile
Sharone@zizzivivizz · 1 week ago
This story, and your telling of it, are breathtaking.
There's a similar rumor in my family about my grandmother and an Italian man who lived in their village in Cuba. I've mostly not wondered, except when I quietly do. My sisters and I are the last of our line too. Or not, I guess.
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+3 Dancercise's avatar - Go to profile
Dancercise · 1 week ago
This was an incredible, fascinating read. It reminds me a little of the show Who Do You Think You Are?, but better.
Thank you for writing this, Molly. I love it.
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+17 robotosaur's avatar - Go to profile
robotosaur · 1 week ago
I'm adopted. This spring, I stood in a room surrounded by my biological family, and the experience of being with people who look like me--something mundane, even superficial, that so many people have had their entire lives and that I hadn't--touched me profoundly. It was so unimportant that I looked like them, and so unfamiliar, and I felt guilty for caring so much.
This is piece so beautiful. Thank you for sharing it.
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1 reply · active 1 week ago
+1 mminturn's avatar - Go to profile
mminturn · 1 week ago
<3
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+1 Stacey's avatar
Stacey · 1 week ago
Molly Minturn! Damn good essay.
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+2 anachronistique's avatar - Go to profile
anachronistique · 1 week ago
Wow.
....WOW.
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+4 mminturn's avatar - Go to profile
mminturn · 1 week ago
Thank you all so much for reading. It is indeed a LONGread.
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1 reply · active 1 week ago
+9 roxythroatpunch's avatar - Go to profile
roxythroatpunch · 1 week ago
But worth every second. Beautifully done.
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+4 's avatar - Go to profile
Diana T. Nicholson · 1 week ago
A beautiful and very touching essay, Molly. And a fascinating topic. I love your description of your grandmother presiding over the celebratory dinners - it brought back many happy memories. I certainly never heard a whisper of the story when i was growing up, although I considered myself close to the entire family. And my mother, who adored your grandmother, never said anything. I wonder what she knew?
In any event, your father is one of the special members of the family and while possessing many characteristics from our side, has always walked a different and wonderfully creative path of which I know you are very proud.
Thank you for this very personal glimpse of family history.
with love from the Montreal cousins.
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+2 Chickensalad's avatar - Go to profile
Chickensalad · 1 week ago
OH MAN this was just so so good. I love how you wrote this, it made me want to cry and smile and right now I am having so many feelings I don't even know how to describe them. Reading this was almost cathartic, and that word sounds wrong but see: not knowing how to sentence at the moment
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+1 Erin's avatar
Erin · 1 week ago
I felt like I was there looking at the photos with you. Or listening to thrift shop. Thank you for a lovely story
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+1 Cynthia Saltzman's avatar
Cynthia Saltzman · 1 week ago
This is beautiful, evocative, and also a page-turner. Congratulations!
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+5 Katie Jones's avatar
Katie Jones · 1 week ago
Such a gorgeous essay. The final scene is just stunning; without spelling it out--with only your observations, which you filter and display perfectly--you get so clearly at the ways this element of family history both matters and doesn't matter at all. It's so interesting to consider what value(s) there is in digging deeper into old infidelities. Because there is value in knowing, I think, especially in light of the way it's allowed you to explore the physical and emotional inheritances that stretch through generations of a family. And the knowing is a delicate thing: not a scandal, not a betrayal, not the stuff of confrontations, not entirely sad, not entirely happy, not exactly a problem, but with the potential to be a little bit of all of those things. Reading this was such a pleasure.
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+1 Es_Petal's avatar - Go to profile
Es_Petal · 6 days ago
Absolutely beautiful read - I started it yesterday and knew I had to wait until I could do it properly.
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+1 wendyliv's avatar - Go to profile
wendyliv · 6 days ago
Beautiful essay. Thank you so much. Reading it made my day!
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+1 Jilly's avatar
Jilly · 6 days ago
My children have a similar glitch.....their paternal grandmother was actually the child of her oldest "sister", raised as a "surprise" child by their mother. We do have her birth certificate with her biological father's name on it, but I have been unsuccessful at finding him so far. The family story goes that his family would not let him marry her and sent him to ND even though they were both 21. I have pieced together enough to surmise that it was a religious thing, as most people with that last name in that state are Catholic and her mom was a Presbyterian. Other than that, there are so many things about some of our kids that we can't explain.....
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+1 Genie's avatar
Genie · 6 days ago
I was riveted, especially by your query, "if-it-is-true-what-does-it-matter?" with Russian forests and a blurry knight. What a wonderful image. The resolution: to those most concerned, it is of no final significance. Mother and child remain unchanged. Just lovely (and what a relief!)
Sounds like you have a beautiful family.
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+1 Susan's avatar
Susan · 5 days ago
Mesmerized by both your story and your writing. Brilliant!
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+2 a_shirty_dame's avatar - Go to profile
a_shirty_dame · 5 days ago
This is so, so gorgeous.
Some years ago my great-aunt told me, as if no big deal, that my grandfather (reckless, popular, ugly-handsome) was the Bobby Putnam in someone else's family.
At some point in the late 1940s he worked at a chocolate factory for a while and got a co-worker pregnant. She was already engaged to someone else, and they went on with the wedding. The husband (shy, loyal, reliable) raised the kid as his own.
Everyone knew: the big nose, the heavy brow, the cheekbones, the overbite. It was a small town. My grandfather moved away.
Back then our family was big. These charismatic, tall, irresponsible athletes and singers with high cheekbones and ape-like brows called themselves "the clan" because there were so many siblings and they were so recognizably made of the same wood. Then stuff happened, people died and genes were mostly not passed on. I and my siblings are the only ones left.
So I kind of want the story to be true; I want to have a charming, flaky, big-nosed 65-year-old half-uncle out there. And maybe cousins? I'd like cousins.
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Body and Soul
Dan was the most physical person I knew. Then he broke his neck
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DAN HARVEY was a fat kid, which is probably why we became friends in the first place. In the rigid corporeal hierarchy of childhood, you're either the right weight or you're not: too big and you're a fat-ass; too skinny and you're a faggot. We were a perfect pair, like something out of a children's tale: the Elephant and the Giraffe, as we nicknamed ourselves during a trip to the Toronto Zoo. What might it be like to take up a different kind of space in the world? But Dan and I were stuck with the bodies we had.
We grew up on neighbouring cul-de-sacs in Guelph, Ontario, and our elementary school was nearby. During recess, Dan sat by himself near the school doors, flicking pebbles at nothing. I was stick thin and bookish. Without a father, I had never learned to move like the other boys, didn't know how to throw a football or swing a bat. So Dan and I found each other. In junior high, as cliques hardened, we drew closer, sitting for hours in his wood-panelled basement, where we talked about bands—Radiohead, Tool, Pink Floyd—in the rockist shorthand of teenage boys.
Dan played the saxophone then, and he looked as if he were fighting the thing, his cheeks red and puffed, his pudgy fingers manipulating the keys. He was, more than anyone I've ever known, an embodied person, moving like a tank and altering the gravity of any room he entered. He highlighted his curly brown hair with blond, and often wore two shirts at a time, as if trying to constrain his bulging proportions.
In grade nine, Dan and I attended the Halloween dance. Kids strutted around like pubescent bowerbirds, and we lurked on the fringes, terrified of the costumed girls around us. A few of them approached. One, a short brunette with blue eyes and a wide smile, had noticed Dan. She was dressed as a bee, black and yellow antennae wiggling on her head. I pushed Dan—who was convinced that he'd die a fat virgin—in her direction.
"I hear you like me," Dan said.
"Yeah."
"Do you want to go out? "
"Yeah."
They danced the rest of the night, the girl's hands reaching up to rest on Dan's shoulders, his fingers closing around her waist. As we walked home, Dan realized that he had forgotten to ask her name. It was Jess.
By now, Dan's rolls were starting to solidify. While I remained gawky, he developed into a natural athlete, his size—six feet four and nearly 300 pounds—an asset instead of a humiliation. He played football and basketball but grew to adore rugby, addicted to the sheer physicality of the sport. Acting also drew him in, and though he was usually typecast as the dumb jock or the idiot sheriff, he loved the attention. It was a way of attracting the spotlight on his own terms; you couldn't call him fat if he called himself fat first. When we formed a band—I took up the guitar, Dan played bass—he sometimes prefaced performances with an apology. "If I mess up, it's not my fault," he told the audience. "I was born with fat fingers."
He was still the closest friend I had, but I resented him, too. He had buddies on the football team and a girlfriend; he lost his virginity two years before I did. When he got his driver's licence, I started treating him like a chauffeur. I was not allowed to stay out past midnight, and I was terrified of driving, so after parties Dan took me home in his parents' Sebring before returning to the kegger to get drunk and sleep on the couch. Even as he ferried me around, I made sure he knew which of us was the smart one, who was the better musician, and who could name the studio where The Bends was recorded. Dan rarely said a word in reply. He just fidgeted uncomfortably, pushing his mass deeper into the seat, lifting one hand from the steering wheel to adjust his blue Tar Heels cap.
At the beginning of grade eleven, Dan got the red and yellow Superman logo tattooed on his right bicep. He had always been obsessed with the superhero, collecting comic books and Christopher Reeve movies and T-shirts. Superman, originally from the dying planet Krypton, is an attractive idol, his body a hard pile of muscle, capable of scattering bullets and soaring through solar systems. In Superman: The Movie, from 1978, he even turns back time by reversing Earth's rotation. Superman is so unbeatable that his creators had to invent an antidote to his abilities: kryptonite, a mysterious green element that renders him powerless.
ON FRIDAY, May 23, 2003, just before the end of the school year, a few gym teachers and a dozen student athletes headed to a resort on Lake Rosseau, in Ontario's cottage country, for the weekend. Dan and some friends rode with their teacher in his black Chevrolet Monte Carlo, and during the long trip north the guy rolled down the sunroof and lobbed a full paper cup of Tim Hortons coffee at another car in their convoy. The cup arced in the air, brown liquid spooling out, before bursting across the windshield. The boys in the Monte Carlo laughed. Dan did, too, but then he paused. Jesus, he thought. We could have killed them.
At the camp, the students played golf and tennis, and Dan showed off his easy confidence, hoisting other students on a rope swing and playing guitar around a bonfire. On Saturday night, though, the sky opened up and it rained. Forced indoors by the spring storm, the kids headed to the gymnastics building. As he jumped on a trampoline, Dan landed awkwardly and broke one of his big toenails, which began to bleed. He considered stopping, but instead he wrapped his toe in a Band-Aid and continued bouncing. He felt weightless up there in the air. Around 8 p.m., an instructor announced that their time was up. The kids begged for an extra ten minutes. She relented.
Dan turned his attention to the tumble tramp, a long, narrow track made of flexible fibreglass rods and foam mats, stretching toward an L-shaped concrete pit filled with yellow foam blocks. He took a breath and ran, springing off the stiff give of the tramp, preparing to cannonball into the foam. Then, at the very end, his newly bandaged toe caught the tramp's protective edge, and he was thrown forward, curling into a crouch, and hurtled headfirst into the pit.
Dan plummeted downward, all 290 pounds of him, slicing through the yellow foam blocks at a near-perfect ninety-degree angle. He fell one, two, three metres below the surface, and he felt his forehead against the mesh that held the blocks a few precious centimetres from the pit's concrete bottom. The net gave way beneath his momentum, and against that unforgiving floor he hit the crown of his head—the part that when he was a newborn was still soft, before the plates of his skull closed. He felt a spark of pain in his neck. Then the net pushed back and his body came to rest on the blocks, and in the suffocating darkness of the pit Dan realized that he could not move.
UNLESS YOU'RE PARALYZED, it is difficult to understand the sensation of actually being paralyzed. Your brain tells your body to do something, and your body doesn't respond. Dan tried to lift an arm; nothing. He tried to kick a leg; nothing. He saw visions of faces—his parents, Jess, maybe even me—and each face was weeping. "Help me," Dan tried to say, but his voice was weak, and he had difficulty breathing. "Help me."
Sensing that something was wrong, two teachers and two students leaped into the pit and started flinging the blocks out. As they uncovered him, Dan flailed his head, the only part of him now responding to his mind's commands. "Please, just turn me over," he begged. He was convinced that everything would be fine if only he could look up. The teachers knew enough not to listen to him and called 911. Forty-five minutes later, an ambulance arrived. One of the paramedics jumped into the pit, lost his balance, and fell on top of Dan. In a rage, a teacher lifted the man up and threw him off.
The paramedics fitted Dan with a plastic cervical collar and secured him to a backboard. Only then did they turn him over. "He's heavy," someone said. "We're going to need help." Six people hoisted him from the pit, and the paramedics carried him outside toward the ambulance. It was pouring. As he looked up at the night sky, he could feel the rain on his face, but nowhere else.
The paramedics hooked him up to IVs for fluids and sedatives, and as the ambulance tore across the Canadian Shield Dan repeated three words, over and over: "I'm so scared." It took about an hour to reach the hospital in nearby Parry Sound. He was taken to a triage room, where doctors measured his blood pressure and started to cut off his clothes. He was wearing one of his favourite T-shirts, adorned with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon rainbow, and he asked the staff not to damage it. They told him they had no choice.
"Well," Dan said, "at least don't cut the logo. Cut around it."
The hospital staffers looked at one another. One of them, a younger man, cracked a smile. "It is a pretty sweet shirt," he said. They did as Dan asked.
Between the panic and the drugs, it was hard for him to make sense of what was happening. The doctors and nurses swirled around him, and he heard someone use the word "catheter." He wasn't sure what a catheter was; it just sounded bad. As the staff continued their work, he sensed, but could not feel, that they were sliding something into his genitals.
Later, a teacher came to see him and asked how he was doing. "They stuck something," Dan said, his mind looping, "in my balls."
THE HUMAN SPINAL COLUMN has thirty-three vertebrae: the first twenty-four are separated by flexible discs, while the bottom nine are fused—five into the sacrum and four into the tailbone. When Dan's head hit the floor of the pit, his spine collapsed on itself like an accordion slamming shut, an injury called a compression fracture. His C3 and C5 vertebrae, at the midpoint of his neck, jammed themselves together, shattering the C4 in between. As it burst, shards scattered and partially sliced Dan's spinal cord, the bundle of nerves that connects the brain to everything else in the body. Those stray pieces, some of which still pressed against his spinal cord, had to be removed to prevent further damage. He was put in an ambulance again, this time heading to Sudbury Regional Hospital, two hours away and better equipped for such delicate surgery.
He was intubated and hooked up to a ventilator; his diaphragm had been partially paralyzed. The next day, over the course of several hours, the doctors operated. The surgeons sliced open the right front side of his neck, clamped back the skin and muscles, and removed the remnants of his C4. They then embedded a small chunk of bone, scooped from the iliac crest on the rim of his pelvis, and grafted it between the C3 and C5. Over time, the graft would fuse with the rest of his vertebral column.
The day after the surgery, he lay in his hospital bed. The ventilator breathed for him, his chest rising and falling. The intubator had been replaced by a tracheotomy, which bypassed his voice box, and he could no longer speak properly. A middle-aged doctor came in with a group of interns. "This is one of our quads," the doctor said, as if Dan were not there or could not hear him. "He'll never walk again."
ON SUNDAY MORNING, I was awoken by a phone call. It was Debbie, Dan's mother. "Dan got in an accident," she sobbed. "My baby is going to be in a wheelchair forever." The light was pale grey through my window, and I was still half asleep. I had never known Debbie, who had a difficult relationship with Dan, to call her son her "baby."
That day, as I did every Sunday, I went to work at the Cinnabon in the local mall. My mind raced. Would Dan truly be in a wheelchair forever? Would he be able to use his arms or hands? Could the injury be temporary? News of the accident spread, and over the course of the day a stream of kids from school trickled into the Cinnabon to ask me for details I didn't have. There were even rumours that Dan was dead.
Here's how you make a dozen Cinnabons: Sprinkle a little flour on the counter. Take a mound of prepared dough and roll it out into a large rectangle. Smear it with room temperature margarine, then apply a layer of brown sugar and spices. Roll the rectangle into a long tube, slice it into individual buns, bake, and top it off with a dollop of sweet cream cheese icing. The task, which I loathed, felt different on this day. I noticed the dexterity of my fingers as they manipulated the dough, the shift of the muscles in my forearms, the effortless way my limbs seemed to know what to do. Under the fluorescent lights, in my ridiculous fast-food uniform, my movements seemed graceful for the first time, their possibility a miracle.
THE SPRING OF 2003 was the height of the SARS outbreak in Toronto, and hospitals closer to home wouldn't take Dan. Unable to visit him in Sudbury, I wrote to a Radiohead fan site, asking if they could inform the band of his injury. They responded with a letter saying they were very sorry about the accident, and that they would tell Radiohead when the band returned from touring. I also snapped a picture of our band's practice room, in my mother's basement. On the whiteboard on the wall, I had written, "Your babies are waiting to be played," with arrows pointing to Dan's Fender P-Bass and his fifty-watt Yorkville amplifier.
Although his C4 was destroyed, meaning he should only have been able to control his neck and (partially) his diaphragm, Dan's spinal cord was not fully severed. This meant his brain might eventually manage to send some signals to certain areas for which the nerve connections happened to be intact. In other words, he might regain some limited movement. Even while I allowed that he might be permanently paralyzed, I imagined him as one of those sporty, active paraplegics who play basketball and rocket down the sidewalk. I even thought having a bassist in a wheelchair would give our band some cachet.
One afternoon, his father called me from the hospital and offered to hold the phone up to Dan's ear. Because he couldn't really respond to my words, it felt as though I were speaking into a void. Although I genuinely wanted to talk to him, to offer reassurance and a familiar voice, my words seemed somehow dishonest, my tone falsely upbeat. What could I tell him that was true? Only that I loved him, that I was sorry. But both of these things seemed too naked, too gloomy, so I said neither.
A WEEK AND A HALF after the accident, Dan was airlifted to Hamilton General Hospital. There, he underwent another operation, to remove more bone shards from his neck and stabilize the graft with titanium rods. Nurses switched his indwelling catheter for an intermittent one, which carries a lower risk of bladder infection but must be inserted and removed every few hours. (Before the accident, Dan had endlessly fantasized about women touching his dick, but this was not what he had in mind.) They also slowly weaned him off the ventilator, a half-hour or an hour at a time, and it was a relief for him to be able to smell and speak properly during those brief windows. On my first visit, he was still intubated, and we struggled to communicate. His skin was green and translucent, and he refused to meet my gaze, as if angry that I had come.
I spent as much time as I could with Dan as the weeks wore on. One day, I was hanging out in his room when his leg moved. He had been having regular muscle spasms, which, several times a day, seized his legs in violent tremors. This looked different, more controlled—a shift rather than a sudden kick. I was elated.
"You can move your leg!" I said. When a nurse came in, I pointed. "That's not a muscle spasm, right? He can move his leg."
The nurse looked at Dan, then shifted her gaze to the floor. She was silent for a moment.
"I'm pretty sure," she said softly, "that's a muscle spasm."
The blood drained from my face. The nurse left the room, and for the first time since Dan was injured I felt tears in my eyes. He would never walk again, and there was no point in pretending otherwise. I stood at the foot of his bed, watching his leg, which was now twitching uncontrollably. My face began to move in spasms, too, and I wept.
ONCE DAN TRANSFERRED to a nearby rehabilitation hospital, Chedoke, life settled into a routine. After a fitful night of sleep, the nurses arrived every morning at eight to insert a catheter and serve his breakfast of choice: Froot Loops and chocolate milk. Around nine, they gave him a rectal suppository, which they nicknamed the "magic bullet." They turned him onto his side and, with gloved, lubricated fingers, stimulated his bowels until they emptied. He said it was like being probed by aliens.
If it was a Tuesday or a Thursday, the nurses used a Hoyer lift—a sinister-looking mechanical arm on wheels—to transfer him into a shower wheelchair. He evacuated into a toilet, where gravity could do most of the work, and the nurses washed him in the roll-in shower. Then they dressed him in a T-shirt and sweatpants.
At noon, an attendant wheeled him to the cafeteria for lunch. By now, he had some use of both arms. His right, especially, was growing stronger, thanks to physiotherapy and reduced spinal swelling, and he slowly learned to feed himself, using a white Velcro strap around his wrist, into which he inserted a fork or a spoon. Different types of food were more or less difficult to eat. Peas were a nightmare, but he loved Chedoke's big Swedish meatballs, which were easy to spear. He had lost over 100 pounds since the injury.
Physio was at 2 p.m. Early on, the physiotherapists attached straps to his arms and legs and roped him to a metal grate anchored to the ceiling, for stretching exercises. They focused on his shoulders, which were in constant pain due to his lack of mobility. Later, he lifted small weights on pulleys and pedalled a device called an arm bike, but only with his right arm. His left was still too weak.
Hand class, which he despised, came at three. The patients performed exercises such as drawing pictures, to help their dexterity. One particularly humiliating task involved stacking small plastic cones. Although Dan could use his arms, he could not move his fingers, which curled limply, so he had to pile the cones by holding them between his wrists. "I have no hands," he said. "Why am I going to hand class? "
Not all physiotherapy felt like medieval torture. After a few weeks, he began to swim in the pool. A pair of physiotherapists attached a flotation device to his neck and transferred him onto a lift, which rotated and lowered him into the warm water, and he just floated there for a half-hour or so. The reduced gravity made it easier for him to move his arms, and it was surreal to simply not touch anything. He was so accustomed to lying in a bed or sitting in a wheelchair. Visiting hours started at four, dinner at 5:30. Bedtime arrived a few hours later, whether Dan was ready for it or not.
Photograph by Tim Georgeson
DAN'S FIRST powered wheelchair was the bulky Invacare Storm. He felt that its prominent headrest made him look sickly, and it had rear-wheel drive, which made turning on the spot difficult. Next he tried the Quickie S-646, a chair that advertised its RockShox—the same shocks he had once had on his mountain bike. Eventually, he settled on an Invacare Xterra, which was smaller, with mid-wheel drive. It was blue, like Superman's uniform, and Dan had his younger brother attach small Superman stickers to the hubcaps. He also bought a manual backup wheelchair. It was neon green, and he could not move it himself, so he called it his kryptonite.
As his recovery progressed, Guelph newspapers frequently ran profiles of him, because his story lent itself to triumph over adversity narratives. Thanks to his love of the comic book hero, the reporters gave him a rather condescending nickname: Superdan. One front page photo showed him wearing a Superman shirt emblazoned with abdominal muscles as fake as his smile. In those stories, there was never any mention of a certain disquieting parallel: Christopher Reeve had become a quadriplegic in 1995 when he was thrown from a horse.
Playing his part with the reporters, Dan was upbeat, sometimes referring to his accident as a "speed bump." In real life, his self-deprecating wit took on a new edge of bleakness. He wheeled around in mad circles and sang a song to the tune of the Toys "R" Us theme:
I don't wanna grow up. I'm a handicapped kid.
Fell off a trampoline, and look what I did.
I fell into some foam, and they couldn't find me.
I screamed for my life, and now I can't go pee.
On Halloween, a group of us decided to go trick-or-treating around Chedoke. We were far too old, but Dan insisted: "Who's gonna say no to a kid in a wheelchair? " He went as a cheerleader. He already wore white compression stockings to improve his blood circulation, and with a plaid kilt and a long blond wig he looked like a slapdash drag show on wheels. We roved around a nearby suburb, silently daring the homeowners to refuse us.
Later that night, he went dark, as he often did. When the nurses put him to bed and the rest of us lingered on, he turned to our friend Jef.
"Jef," he said, "I think you're going to have to learn how to play bass."
"I don't really want to do that, man," Jef said.
"Well," Dan said, "you're going to have to. I'll never be able to play again. I just won't."
THAT YEAR, my mother was diagnosed with cancer and required immediate surgery. Although her initial stay in the hospital was brief, my sister and I regularly accompanied her to follow-up appointments and a few additional surgeries. (She has since recovered.) My life began to feel like an infinite cycle of interchangeable hospital visits: the sweet chemical smell of hand sanitizer, the rooms full of downcast eyes and pale pink furniture, the fluorescent lights, the long, dark hallways, the kindness or brusqueness of doctors and nurses.
There is a story my mother likes to tell. Many years ago, when my father was dying of melanoma, she took me to the hospital for a visit. I was two. Chemotherapy had ravaged my father, robbing him of his hair and his athletic build. But when she put me on his bed, I looked up at him and said, "My big, strong daddy."
Now, sitting in a succession of waiting rooms, I did not feel so resolute. The bodies of those around me had turned against themselves: cells divided in a panic, limbs refused to flex. Through it all, my own flesh remained intact, unharmed. The athlete was paralyzed, and the bookworm walked on. Whatever force had decided Dan's fate, I thought, it preferred great tragedies to small ones.
DISCRIMINATION AGAINST physically disabled people is so insidious because it is material, built into the infrastructure of bipedal existence. Liberal meritocracy finds ways to subsume women and queers and ethnic minorities, but it freezes in the face of disabled people, who make clear the extent to which we must evolve if we want to broaden the scope of our empathies. It is one thing to change a law or a bigot's mind; it is quite another to install a ramp and an elevator in every building in the world.
Dan moved home at the end of November. His parents had bought a wheelchair-accessible van for $52,000 and converted their main-floor sunroom into his new bedroom. With the addition of a new bathroom and a roll-in shower, this cost $55,000. They installed an elevator in the back of the garage, as well as a ceiling-track lift in his room, and purchased an adjustable bed, all for about $20,000. Although fundraising helped offset the costs, his parents still went about $75,000 into debt. They considered selling the house and buying one that was already accessible, which probably would have cost less, but Dan asked them to keep it. He wanted things to remain as normal as possible.
But when he returned to high school, he struggled to reintegrate. Mercifully, at least, he turned out to be a talented student. The old Dan's highest academic ambition was to become a gym teacher (neither of his parents had gone to university), and the only novel he had ever read from beginning to end was a Hardy Boys book, when he had chicken pox as a child. In his wheelchair, without the distractions of rugby or the band, he realized he was pretty smart.
Still, he had missed a whole semester and could not manage a full course load. He would not graduate with the rest of our class. He felt conspicuous in the hallway. Everyone knew him, and everyone was too nice. He continued to use the intermittent catheter, which meant that every day one of his parents came to school to help him pee. One day, before his scheduled urination appointment, his bladder grew too full and he pissed himself in drama class, a puddle spreading on the floor beneath his wheelchair.
Meanwhile, his relationship with Jess was suffering. Before, he had loved to drive; now that he couldn't, he literally became a back-seat driver. When Jess drove his van, he grew agitated, telling her she was taking corners too fast or parking poorly. She faced the impossible task of making an unhappy person happy, and her patience wore thin.
Dan often did not want to go out at all. Getting strapped into the van and finding somewhere wheelchair accessible to go was just too much hassle. I spent a lot of time with him at his house, watching cable television and superhero movies, although not in the basement, where we had wasted so much of our youth. The only way to get down there was by using the stairs.
I wasn't always there for him. Just as Dan had predicted, Jef learned to play the bass, and with Dan's reluctant blessing I formed a new band with a few others. A grade twelve event that year featured musical acts performing at the school. We set up our equipment at the end of a hallway, near the display cases and swinging doors. High on the neck of my Fender Telecaster—black with a white pick guard, just like Jonny Greenwood's, from Radiohead—I played the opening notes: D-A-A-D-A-A, then two ringing strikes of a harmonic G.
A crowd gathered, and Dan came to listen, his unusable hands folded in his lap. He stared glumly at the floor. Although he had known this moment would arrive, he was overcome. He should have been up there with us, roaming the stage like a dinosaur as he once had. His wide, ruddy face grew red as tears poured down his cheeks, and he fled into a corner. When the other students stopped to help, he begged them to leave him alone.
PROM SNUCK UP on the rest of us, but Dan had made meticulous preparations. He ordered a suit from Moores, specially tailored for his needs: longer in the back, to comfortably tuck beneath him, and shorter in the front to avoid bunching. He made sure to book a limousine bus that was wheelchair accessible. When the day came, we went to Jess's house in the country for photographs. There is one photo in particular that I love: five of us—Dan and me and three of our closest friends—our arms around each other's shoulders, corsages on our lapels, faces grinning and eyes squinting in the light.
But once we arrived at the convention centre, Dan sat on the sidelines, watching the rest of us dance, pressing against each other, young and self-conscious but in full possession of our bodies. He recalled an event he had attended a few months earlier, where he saw men in wheelchairs dance with their lovers in their laps, and he remembered the first time he met Jess, back when her arms still wrapped around his neck and her blue eyes looked up at his. He turned to her. "Do you want to dance? " he asked.
She refused, embarrassed at the thought. That night, during the prom's Most Likely To awards, Dan and Jess won Most Likely to Get Married.
LATER THAT SUMMER, Jess came over to Dan's house and sat on his adjustable bed. "We need to talk," she said. She didn't want to be his nurse; she needed to have her own life. He said goodbye to her in the driveway, and as she drove away he let himself cry. No one would ever want him again. Who would fuck a guy in a wheelchair?
I left for university in Montreal that August. For the first time ever, Dan and I lived not just in different neighbourhoods or even different cities, but different provinces, hundreds of kilometres apart. Dan, though, resolved not to stay in Guelph either. The following year, he was accepted into the media, information, and techno-culture program at the University of Western Ontario, in London, where he fell in love with theory. He devoured Donna Haraway's seminal feminist essay, "A Cyborg Manifesto," which posits that because there is no longer any distinction between humans and the machines we create, we are all organic-inorganic hybrids. He was also intrigued by the Freudian theory of scopophilia—the voyeuristic pleasure derived from looking at others. Thinkers like bell hooks had applied the theory to racial othering, and Dan recognized it in the gaze of those around him, who either gawked at his wheelchair or scrupulously avoided looking his way.
At least one person, though, did not seem to find Dan repulsive: a young, good-looking personal support worker. As Dan neared the end of undergrad, they had a fling, which, to put it mildly, is against the rules. Their relationship was brief, but it proved to Dan that he was still attractive. He began to research vibrators—some men with spinal injuries are able to achieve orgasm with sufficiently intense pulsation—and settled on a Hitachi Magic Wand. The day after it arrived, he sent me a Gmail chat message:
Dan: I've got a good story for you, but I'll save it for later.
Drew: no, tell me now!
Dan: well, I've been doing some research for a while and talking to various urologists about my "baby making juice." And after almost 7 years of hibernation, I finally made it work last night…
I had a party. I was/am the happiest person on the planet. It's gross, but I had to tell you.
Drew: ahahahahahahahahahahahaa
thank you so much for sharing
wicked
i'm happy for you
Dan: Ha ha. Thanks, dude…
I wonder if Hallmark has a card for this occasion.
DAN STILL LONGED to drive again. He found an American company, Electronic Mobility Controls, that manufactures equipment for disabled drivers, and he bought a white Ford E-250, which he had modified to fit his chair. (A lawsuit against the athletic camp and the school board, settled out of court, had brought him enough money for such purchases.) A company called Sparrow Hawk Industries, in Waterloo, Ontario, put it all together. He took driving lessons, and in 2008 he became the first disabled Canadian owner of a van with EMC's joystick controls, using a computer system called Advanced Electronic Vehicle Interface Technology, or AEVIT 2.0.
That December, I went home to Guelph for Christmas, and he invited me for a ride. I climbed into the van. He sat in his wheelchair on the driver's side. He pressed a button, and a robotic woman's voice spoke.
"You now have voice activation. Please press the Alert icon on the display if you wish to disable AEVIT. The AEVIT is performing a backup self-test. Do not move the input devices during this test."
He paused while the system ran.
"I am now verifying your control of the gas-brake functions," the voice said. "Please manually operate the AEVIT input device in both the gas and brake directions."
He pushed the joystick forward, then back.
"I am now verifying your control of the steering functions. Please manually operate the AEVIT input device so the vehicle's steering wheel rotates all the way to the right and to the left."
He pushed the joystick to the right, and I watched in awe as the steering wheel followed, as if by magic. He pulled out of the driveway, and we roamed around the suburbs, the snow falling around us. Occasionally, the computer misheard his voice commands, randomly turning on the blinker or the windshield wipers. I laughed at the science fiction futurism of it, and I felt very young. We were sixteen again, and Dan was chauffeuring me home.
I HAVE LEARNED things from Dan: how to sit quietly beside a person who needs my presence, how to operate a lift and strap a wheelchair into a van. But I am resistant to the idea, occasionally suggested, that disabled people are here to teach us something about the value of human existence, that the rest of us should treasure what we have, for it might be taken from us tomorrow. The lives of disabled people have intrinsic importance, independent of whatever they might offer the able bodied. When accidents like Dan's occur, our first instinct is to scour them for meaning, but there is no cosmic truth here. There is only the random lightning strike, the explosion of a dying planet—only suffering and our capacity to overcome it.
Today Dan looks completely unlike the boy he once was. His cheekbones and shoulders and elbows and knees are as sharp as knives. A permanent catheter enters his bladder through an incision in his abdomen, and he takes a litany of medications: baclofen for muscle spasms, gabapentin for neuropathic pain, Senokot to soften his stool, Fosamax to strengthen his bones. He fidgets in his wheelchair, leaning forward and then back, lifting his arms as high as he can. The Superman logo on his bicep has deflated, but his right forearm now bears a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: "So it goes." He also has a puzzle piece tattooed on the back of his neck, just above that ruined vertebra—a reminder that a part of him is missing.
He still lives in London, in an accessible house also bought using money from the lawsuit, with two cats and his fiancée, Jennifer, an occupational therapist (they've asked me to be best man at their wedding this summer). He drives himself almost everywhere. Last year, he finished his master's at Western; his thesis examined television coverage of the genocide in Rwanda. Before he begins his Ph.D., he is taking a break to write a novel about a boy paralyzed in a car accident.
I don't see Dan as often as I used to. We talk on the phone and visit when we can. Last summer, I stayed with him for a few days in London, where we barbecued veggie burgers on his back deck and went to the movies. We were supposed to see Radiohead in Toronto, but the day of the concert the stage collapsed. Three crew members were hurt. A drum technician died.
The Banff Centre literary journalism program supported the writing of this story.
Related Links
#10: Body and Soul by Chris Berube (September 2013) • Author Drew Nelles, joined by his friend Dan Harvey, discusses his powerful memoir about the accident that broke Dan's neck
Fresh Ingredients by Drew Nelles (April 2012) • After the NDP's Orange Wave, a rookie MP learns to cook
Montreal Is Burning by Drew Nelles (December 2011) • Arcade Fire's meteoric rise changed a city and redefined a subculture
Drew Nelles is editor-in-chief of Maisonneuve. His chapbook, The Off-Season, came out in January 2013.
Tim Georgeson has earned two World Press Photo awards.
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The magazine about Canada and its place in the world, published by the non-profit charitable Walrus Foundation. Available on national newsstands, for digital download, and by subscription
September 2013
VOLUME 10, NUMBER 7
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Body and Soul by Drew Nelles
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Stephanie Sliekers This was beautiful. Thank you for writing it and sharing Dan's story.
BODY AND SOUL · 12 HOURS AGO
cheryl you have given great voice to the experience...my son was injured 20 months ago @ the age of 20...T6 complete...he was thrown back into the nest from which he had almost flown...it's been...
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ccmccall Now THIS was worth reading!
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Shreya Ila Anasuya beautiful
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by SABRINA RUBIN ERDELY
AUGUST 12, 2013
The black Chevy Tahoe picked up speed as it careened down the curving Wyoming mountain road, the two frightened children inside clutching their seats, certain that they wouldn't make it alive to the school bus at the bottom of the hill. It was only 7:30 in the morning, but their stepmother at the wheel already had liquor on her breath. The kids had seen her this way before; two years earlier they'd been in the car when she was pulled over for a DUI. This morning, she seemed even more wasted.
"Slow down! Please! Please!" 12-year-old Georgia begged from the passenger seat. In the back, her twin brother, Patterson, sat frozen in horror.
"Shut the fuck up!" their stepmother, Daralee Inman, snarled. Her right hand shot out to smack Georgia's face, while her left clutched a glass filled with Trix cereal, leaving no hands on the steering wheel. Pine trees whizzed by to their right, a cliff to their left. "Did I ever get you into a motherfucking wreck?" Daralee demanded, as faster and faster they descended the steep road that served as the family's half-mile-long driveway. "Did I ever get you into a motherfucking wreck?"
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The kids reached for their seat belts, too late, as the Tahoe hit a bump, tipped toward the cliff – "God take my soul! Forgive me all my sins!" Georgia cried out – and then veered left and slammed into a tree. The exploding air bags felt like a punch, the windshield like cement. The twins struggled free of the car. Dazed, they began limping back up the mountainside, their stepmother staggering close behind.
As they crested the hill, their house finally came into view: a 10,000-square-foot log-and-stone cabin of preposterous proportions, filled with expensive antiques, valuable artwork and, stashed behind the steel door of a walk-in vault, sacks of gold Krugerrands, bars of silver and gold, jewelry, and millions of dollars' worth of collectible firearms. This wasn't some no-name clan of backwoods hillbillies, Georgia and Patterson Inman were among the wealthiest kids in America: When they turn 21, the family claims, the twins will inherit a trust fund worth $1 billion. They and their father were the last living heirs to the vast Industrial Age fortune of the Duke family, tobacco tycoons who once controlled the American cigarette market, established Duke University and, through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, continue to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.
The twins' father, Walker Inman, 57, lumbered from the mansion, his tattooed sleeves visible under a black T-shirt, drinking his morning rum, bellowing, "What the fuck did you do to my children?" Morbidly obese after a lifetime of debauchery and heroin addiction, he looked past his keening kids to glare at his fifth wife. "Honey," Walker rumbled, "we're going for a ride." He grabbed Daralee, hopped into his red Dodge truck and took off in a spray of gravel toward the wreckage down the mountain – then promptly lost control of the vehicle, which rolled onto the driver's side and skidded to a stop.
Inside the house, the twins called 911. The dispatcher at the police station couldn't make out what the hysterical children were saying, but local troopers knew exactly where they were needed, and quickly left for the remote Inman property, which Walker had dubbed "Outlaw Acres." Later on, in the presence of the Inmans' high-priced attorney, an officer would confront Daralee with the fact that she'd been driving with a blood-alcohol content of .05 – violating her probation – with her stepkids in the car, and Walker would admit he'd been drinking and driving too. And yet no charges would be levied that November 2009 morning; the Lincoln County Sheriff's department would simply close the case. As ambulances and police cars came screaming up the hill, past the demolition derby of wrecked cars to where Georgia and Patterson sobbed in the grand arched entryway to their palace, it was just another day at the Inmans', home to the poorest rich kids in the world.
Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell. And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation. While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances, the children lived like terrified prisoners, kept at bay by a revolving door of some four dozen nannies and caregivers, underfed, undereducated, scarcely noticed except as objects of wrath.
"We were so fearful. I would hide in cupboards smaller than that," says Georgia in her Southern-tinged lilt, pointing to a two-foot-tall cabinet in the kitchen of their spacious Park City, Utah, home where the twins, now 15, are reassembling their lives and residing with their mother, a woman who has seen her own share of trouble and who has only recently become a presence in her children's lives. Patterson anxiously paces across the house's open floor plan with its panoramic view of snowcapped mountains while he and his sister take turns narrating their harrowing history. Unfailingly polite, earnest and occasionally skittish, the twins radiate a sheltered naiveté that can make them seem far younger, or like visitors from another culture. For instance, Georgia confesses she's never heard of the children's party game musical chairs.
"What is it?" she asks, her eyes wide and curious. "No, really, tell me!"
Such frank sweetness, delivered in their mushy drawl, tends to take the edge off some of the harsh and surprising things they will say in the coming days, as when Georgia wistfully recalls her toddler years: "I remember walking to my dad's room and holding a gun to his head. I don't know what stopped me," she says before bursting into giggles. "I'm sorry, that's terrible, I laugh when I'm nervous or upset."
"Pretty crazy," agrees Patterson with a duck of his head.
Having spent their formative years in a struggle for survival, the kids now find themselves trapped in yet another fight: A court battle under way with JP Morgan, the bank that manages the Duke trust, has found its way into the tabloids, as well as a parallel legal battle over their assets, which they claim are being raided by hangers-on. All told, millions of dollars are at stake. But that squabbling is part and parcel of Georgia and Patterson's miserable inheritance, as is their epic tale of pain, isolation and woe. "People can look at this as a blessing all day long, but it's blood money," Georgia says of their fortune and pedigree. Her green eyes – flashing now with anger – and slim, flared nose resemble those of her great-aunt Doris. "I never asked to be born into any of this," she adds. "Sometimes I wish I was never born."
For the twins' father, Walker Patterson Inman Jr., few things in life were as much fun as blowing things up. He never missed an opportunity to squeeze a trigger or light a fuse, cackling away under the brim of his cowboy hat while engaged in the cleansing act of destruction. Each July Fourth he'd put on an elaborate fireworks show at Outlaw Acres, staring at the exploding sky while spectators ran from the falling embers. Though he fancied himself a great outdoorsman, Walker's favored way of communing with nature was chucking dynamite into a body of water, a pursuit he called "DuPont fishing." And when Walker decided to plant some pecan trees, he eschewed a backhoe and instead blasted holes on his land, pushing down the plunger with a maniacal grin like Wile E. Coyote. More than mere amusement, Walker's destructive urges doubled as therapy, as when his first wife left him, in the early Seventies, Walker strode into the empty horse-racing arena he had built in South Carolina – and shot the place to bits with a machine gun.
He'd been full of dangerous mischief since he was a child. As a 13-year-old orphan in 1965 taken in by his aunt Doris Duke, Walker – then called "Skipper" – had romped around her lavish 14,000-square-foot Hawaiian estate without regard for property or propriety, shooting her Christmas ornaments with a dart gun, setting fire to crates of expensive teak and exploding a bomb in her pool. He was hideously spoiled, and stinking rich from three trust funds: one from his father, Walker Inman Sr., heir to an Atlanta cotton fortune and stepson to American Tobacco Company founder "Buck" Duke; one from his mother, Georgia Fagan; the third from his grandmother, Buck's widow Nanaline Duke, who left the bulk of her $45 million estate to her little grandson. Altogether, on Walker's 21st birthday he would inherit a reported $65 million ($500 million in today's dollars), a fortune so vast that Time predicted the boy would rank as "one of the wealthiest men of the late 20th century."
And yet while Walker abounded in riches, he had no stability. His alcoholic father had died when Walker was two; his mother, who swiftly remarried and gave birth to his half sister, Susan, died when Walker was six. Awaiting heart surgery shortly before her death, Walker's mother had written her attorney with her wish that her boy live a secure life with her sister Caroline, imploring, "I have it in my will, but I just want to be sure. In his short life, he's already had too many emotional upheavals." Instead, Walker was shifted from household to household until he wound up with his father's half sister Doris Duke.
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Doris knew nothing about raising children, nor much cared. The witheringly wry, worldly heiress was among the most celebrated women of her day, a six-foot glamour queen hounded by paparazzi, who brushed elbows with every midcentury icon from Jackie Kennedy to Elvis Presley, pronouncing Greta Garbo "boring" and, after dating Errol Flynn, theorizing that bisexual men made the best lovers: "I should know," she declared. "I've done exhausting research on the subject." As a child – and sole inheritor of her father Buck's $100 million fortune – she'd become famous as "the richest little girl in the world." She'd been raised by nannies in a chilly, silent Fifth Avenue mansion, with her parents taking little part in her upbringing; family lore holds that her father, on his deathbed in 1925, told 12-year-old Doris, "Trust no one." Now saddled with her pesky nephew Walker, watching him toss ketchup-covered tampons into her pool, Doris Duke regarded him with pity. He was desperate for love and attention, much like herself as a child. But Doris had her own fabulous life to live, and so she shipped Walker off to boarding school. "We were all too self-centered to be bothered with a problem child," she would later tell her cousin Angier St. George Biddle "Pony" Duke.
With no need to work, no guidance and no self-motivation, Walker set himself adrift, fighting back his melancholy with world travel and fast times. By the end of the Seventies he had become a dedicated gadabout, and at parties he unspooled wild stories of his adventures, claiming he studied meditation in India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi alongside George Harrison; getting tattooed in the Galapagos by female artists who worked naked, in pairs; meeting royalty in his wanderings through "Arabia"; learning gourmet cooking in Thailand, where he also developed an abiding love of heroin. Although some of his stories were surely embellished – as when he talked about partying with the Rolling Stones and Jimmy Buffett – and the drunker he got, the likelier he was to reach into a hidden holster and fire off a shot, Walker always had a rapt audience. He was the richest guy in the room.
Walker's quest for love proved more elusive than his quest for attention. In 1983, when he met Daisha Aunday, a high-strung raven-haired aspiring model living in Hawaii, he'd already burned through two marriages. He soon proposed, and they set off on his 80-foot yacht, Devine Decadence, for what Walker declared would be a 10-year sail around the world. It started out promisingly, the two of them bronzing on the deck, Walker expertly cooking their meals in the galley with a giant spliff hanging from his lips. They sailed through the Caribbean, docking stateside every so often to stay with Aunt Doris Duke in one of her various homes.
"I was in a whirlwind," recalls Daisha fondly. "I was young, and this guy was wonderful." But the happy couple's lifestyle soon spiraled out of control as Walker graduated from pot and pills to morphine – Daisha says she found him passed out in a bathtub with a needle in his arm – and from snorting cocaine to freebasing. The idyll came to an end in Panama, after two years together, when Daisha declined an orgy, but Walker participated; in the ensuing spat, Walker simply boarded the yacht and sailed off, leaving Daisha behind. Months later, he called her to announce his wedding to another woman.
Ten years passed before Walker contacted Daisha again, contrite. They rendezvoused in 1995 in New Orleans, where 43-year-old Walker, single again, looked worn but still dashing in the candlelight of a French Quarter restaurant. He told Daisha he'd made the mistake of his life leaving her and wanted to try again. They also spoke of how his Aunt Doris had died two years earlier, a loss that pained him in more ways than he could say. Doris' life of glamour had been deeply lonely, with few lasting friendships, two failed marriages and no children – her only baby, born premature, had died less than 24 hours after birth – and in her old age she'd turned eccentric, briefly adopting a 35-year-old Hare Krishna devotee before closing down her social circle altogether. Surprising everyone, Doris had replaced Walker as an executor of her will and instead named her butler as sole executor of her $1.2 billion estate, nearly all of which she left to charity. Although Doris had provided a $7 million trust for Walker, he felt sorely betrayed by his beloved aunt. Walker said nothing to Daisha of his heartache, but assured her that he remained well provided for; court records would later reveal that his grandmother Nanaline Duke's trust alone paid him as much as $90,000 each month. As for the hard drugs, Walker claimed to be clean, though he warned with a grin that he'd always be a "chipper" – a dabbler.
At 35, Daisha was at the end of her own string of failed relationships, and had long since given up on her modeling dreams; Walker told friends she was "practically homeless" and working as a topless dancer (which Daisha denies). She could hardly believe she was getting a second chance at comfort, happiness, maybe even love. At their wedding four months later at Greenfield Plantation, Walker's inherited 300-acre property in Georgetown, South Carolina, Daisha wore the bridal gown she'd been saving for a decade, and Walker wore a white tux with a red bow tie and a holstered ivory-handled pistol. After the exchange of vows, boxes of white doves were opened, but nothing emerged. As Walker kissed the bride, a caretaker scooped out a handful of dead and dying birds and tossed them skyward, where they fell in a pile on the grass.
Walker wanted children right away, and hustled Daisha into in-vitro fertilization. Daisha found his readiness for fatherhood a touching sign that he was ready to assume the responsibilities of being an adult. Still, Walker confided an additional motive to a friend. His grandmother's will had stipulated that if Walker left no heirs, upon his death his trust would be funneled into the Duke Endowment, a $2.8 billion foundation established by Buck Duke that nourishes, among other institutions, Duke University. The idea repulsed Walker: The very name that had given him such unearned bounty also stood for everything he felt he'd been deprived. "He despised Duke!" says longtime friend Mike Todd. "Duke University, Duke Foundation – everything Duke, he hated."
The twins were born two months early, a boy and a girl, purple and shriveled at three and a half pounds each. "I can't believe I created something so beautiful," Walker marveled when he and Daisha brought the babies home to Greenfield Plantation after more than two months in the NICU. He'd never thought himself capable of doing much in life, other than being a professional hedonist, but if he accomplished nothing else at least he'd done this – miraculously created these two exquisite beings. He named the children Georgia and Walker Patterson Inman III, after his absent parents. He vowed to become the father he himself never had.
A year and a half later, Walker and Daisha's marriage was broken beyond repair. Daisha says he turned to drugs and beat her, and Walker told friends that her partying was interfering with her parenting (which she denies). Either way, Daisha had taken the kids to her parents in Oregon, an arrangement intolerable to Walker. He concocted what seemed to him a reasonable solution. Walker called Daisha asking to reconcile, inviting her to join him in the Cayman Islands. Once there, according to Daisha, Walker offered her a night off by taking the 17-month-old twins and their nanny out to dinner – then hustled them all aboard a waiting private plane and took off for the States, leaving Daisha behind.
In the wake of what she refers to as "the kidnapping," Daisha says she called the FBI in the hopes of being reunited with her children, but no charges were filed. Even after that outrageous escapade, when the divorce finally came through in 2000, the children's court-appointed legal representative judged Walker the more stable parent, despite "his multiple marriages; his drug, alcohol and cigarette use; limited parenting experience; and his unusual, perhaps dysfunctional, upbringing." The judge expressed concern over Daisha, whom a psychologist had assessed as suffering from paranoid symptoms, anxiety, PTSD and "borderline intelligence." It had also been determined that Daisha was incapable of handling her own case. The court assigned her a Guardian ad Litem to aid her legal decision-making, a move normally reserved for minors and disabled adults (years later, Daisha's lawyer would discredit the psych report in court). Walker was granted primary custody of the twins. He moved the family to Wyoming, where taxes were low and the wide-open spaces appealed to him – he'd always considered himself a cowboy at heart.
In the spring of 2002, word got out in the remote Afton, Wyoming, area that the new family in town was hiring a nanny for their four-year-old twins. Ninety minutes from the Grand Tetons, nestled between two mountain ranges and with a population of just 1,900 souls, Afton was a hub of the Star Valley, though its modest downtown, notable for its archway made of elk antlers, boasted little more than a post office, a bar and a car dealership. The Inmans had moved to nearby Grover, an enclave of 147 people, and the baby-sitting job they offered was a bonanza, with a salary of $30,000 – a third more than the per capita income – plus health insurance, free lodging and international travel. Over the next few years, the Inmans would come to employ dozens of caregivers, some of whom would last just a few days. One after another, they would arrive at the massive property, marveling at the sheer size of the house framed out on the hilltop, as big as a ski lodge, ringed by smaller cottages. There was a tractor-trailer on the property, and according to former employee Teddy Thomas' affidavit, it was filled with explosives, artillery and "enough ammunition to start a small war."
The tableau would become only more alarming as a barefoot Walker Inman stomped into view, his gray hair sticking out in all directions, his shirtless back covered in an enormous tattoo of a nude woman in sexual congress with an octopus – an image inspired by Walker's admiration of "tentacle erotica." If his tattoo caused others discomfort, Walker showed no sign of caring, and that lack of courtesy – indeed, that aggressiveness – set the tone of the volatile household. "There was a lot of anger & threatening going on," wrote former nanny Lizzie Hull in a blind letter later on, at Daisha's request. "It was chilling. I felt I was watching a gangster movie." Among Hull's first tasks was to help Walker hang a machine gun on a wall of the cottage where the family was staying, where guns, knives and swords lay everywhere. Every ashtray in the house overflowed, every surface was mottled with cigarette burns, and the air hung with smoke. Out of the haze scuttled Walker's new wife, Daralee Inman, nee Steinhausen, whom he'd said he'd picked up hitchhiking: a tall, rough-mannered farm girl with straw-blond hair from Wheatland, Wyoming, who scratched and picked at her skin, and who was rarely seen by any employee until well into the afternoon. Many days, Daralee would hide out in the couple's bedroom, a room the staff dreaded having to clean for its acrid smell and the objects they'd find: white substances, needles and a blackened, bent-back spoon. "When they came out there would be a strange smell," wrote Thomas, adding that he saw drug paraphernalia in the house "too many times to be specific about dates." Once, former nanny Rebecca Hatton walked in and discovered the couple huddled on the bed, holding a flame underneath a broken light bulb.
But the new nannies' most shocking encounter was meeting the twins, as when Hull was ushered to the children's door and the caretaker slid back the deadbolt; staring silently out of that squalid prison cell stood the two toddlers. "They were very skinny and had dark circles under their eyes," noted Hull. Several witnesses attest that the kids were locked in their room each night, and, according to Hatton, there was food strewn across the floor and a foul smell from where the kids had been relieving themselves in a corner.
The children were accustomed to this sort of living – it was all they knew. They'd spent the past three years in Jackson Hole, playground to the rich, living in a $6,000-a-month rental home that resembled a glorified drug den. A later lawsuit described $30,000 in damages including walls pocked with holes; leather furniture, artwork and carpeting destroyed; and even after two defoggings, a smoke odor so sickening that all mattresses needed replacing. Here, during the kids' tenderest years, terrible things had taken place. Walker had recently been overheard in the Afton pharmacy explaining why he needed new nannies: He'd fired the old ones after discovering them hurting the twins. "[He] also stated he had surveillance video of the abuse," one witness wrote in an affidavit. But the twins' maltreatment had also apparently come at the hands of their father. When plantation caretaker Vick "Butch" Deer flew in from South Carolina, he'd been stunned at where he found the preschoolers. "Walker made them stay down in the basement all the time," wrote Deer in an affidavit. "The basement was covered in feces and it was smeared all over and it smelled terrible. It was so bad that I wouldn't leave a dog in that condition."
The new Afton nannies were advised that their little charges were strange due to past abuses – that previous nannies had taped their mouths shut, among other evils – and possibly mentally retarded. Instead, the women were surprised to find the kids bright and friendly. Hull remembers them clambering into her lap for a story, and, brimming with mischief, constantly sprinting off into trouble, which she recognized as a ploy for attention. But there was something off about the children. They didn't know how to hold a pencil or draw with a crayon and were afflicted with serious speech delays. The few toys on the property were locked away.
All the while, the children had limited exposure to their mother, because Walker was engaged in a bitter fight to keep Daisha away from the kids – a fight that only escalated after Daisha made the unfortunate decision in 2003 to briefly marry a convicted sex offender, Randy Williams. Despite his own flaws as a parent, Walker became obsessed with protecting his children from Daisha and her new husband.
As the custody battle wore on, Daisha was often forced to represent herself for lack of funds, while Walker made use of his fortune to hire as much legal firepower as he needed. Thanks to his efforts, Daisha's role in her kids' lives would continue to shrink until she would virtually disappear; between 2003 and 2008, Georgia and Patterson would hardly see their mother at all. During those years, Walker would convince the twins that their mother was the enemy. He concocted stories that she was a hopeless addict who'd given them fetal alcohol syndrome, which explained why they were "retarded." "They kept telling us that she didn't want to see us," says Georgia. "That she was a drugged-out mess and drunk, that she fed us alcohol, put it in our sippy cups." The twins learned to fear and resent Daisha. One courtordered therapist who tried to intervene reported that Walker threatened to sue him.
Not that the kids seemed especially attached to their father and stepmother, either, and vice versa. Days into her employment, Hatton was asked to take the twins home with her for a week or more, and not only did the children go uncomplainingly, but neither parent ever called to check on them. In 2002, when nanny Phyllis Jasperson brought the kids to one of their infrequent visitations with Daisha, Jasperson observed the kids' excitement and unusual candor as they played with the cats and the Easy-Bake Oven. "They ran from one thing to another like kids do on Christmas," Jasperson later wrote in a letter at Daisha's request. "All the time telling their mother how daddy and the nannys hit them and made them bleed, they begged their mother not to let the mean people hurt them any more."
Jasperson and Daisha called 911. When the next day Jasperson arrived at Walker's home for work she found the door locked; her employment was abruptly over after two weeks. None of the nannies were allowed to say goodbye to the children upon their sudden firings. Not Lizzie Hull, who burst into overwhelmed tears on her third day, and arrived the following morning to find she'd already been replaced. Not Rebecca Hatton, who after expressing concern about Walker's smoking around the children, returned to the estate from baby-sitting the twins for two weeks and found Walker firing guns, and drunkenly shouting, "Get your ass off my property and mind your fucking business if you know what's good for you!" Though the women were concerned about the kids, they were relieved at their dismissals. "Those people scare me," wrote Hull of her three whole days with the Inmans. "I never want to see any of them again."
When Patterson was 10, his dad got him his first tear-gas grenade. He already had access to his father's arsenal of guns, of course, and made use of Dad's choicest toys, roaming their property with an antique Gatling, shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, even an AR-12 with "Dragon's Breath" incendiary rounds that ignited anything in their path, with which Patterson accidentally started a forest fire. But a couple of days after acquiring the grenade, Patterson and Georgia got to bickering. "I'm gonna throw this into your room!" Patterson threatened his sister. Much to the kids' surprise, Walker roused himself to intervene, snatching the grenade from Patterson – and then pulled the pin. The plan was to teach the boy a lesson. But when Walker tried sliding the pin back into place, his glee turned to panic. The pin wouldn't go back in.
"Aaagghh!" Walker hollered, tossing the grenade deeper into the house as tear gas sprayed out. Georgia had already fled; father and son screamed all the way to the front door, Patterson hurdling the stairs and Walker hobbling as fast as he could on account of his bad leg, where he'd once accidentally shot himself. When the house was finally aired out enough that they could re-enter, the children's pet goldfish were belly-up in their bowl.
"Ha-ha-ha! My dad was pretty crazy," recalls Patterson, wiping his eyes from laughter. It's one of Patterson's happiest childhood memories. When he'd overhear his father guffawing while retelling the tear-gas story to friends, he'd thrill to hear his own name in the co-starring role. The best way to capture Walker's attention was to partake in his enthusiasms – in Patterson's case, the joy of blowing things to kingdom come. Georgia found a different angle: She joined Walker in his epic bad-mouthing of their mother, Daisha, whom Walker called "Douchebag"; Walker never tired of hearing Georgia parroting him. But their efforts were of little use: Dad was absorbed in his own world. Sometimes it was a far-off place in his mind, but other times he'd disappear, either into his stinking bedroom; to auctions to bid on collectible guns and other trinkets; and to farther locales, as when one night he announced, "I'm going for Thai food," then called days later – from Thailand.
With their stepmother, the kids tried to be as invisible as possible. She'd been accumulating quite a rap sheet: Adding to her prior record of felony drug possession in Colorado, she was arrested in Utah for possessing meth and heroin, pleaded guilty to felony drug possession, and was sentenced to house arrest. Then, in Wyoming in 2007, police spotted her swerving into oncoming traffic, and pulled her over to find she had heroin, crystal meth, meth pipes – and both children in the car. The kids had been overjoyed at the prospect that she'd go to prison, but upon her guilty plea Daralee received only probation. (Daralee declined to comment for this article.)
"If I wanted kids I would have had my own!" Daralee would shout. She made no effort to hide her loathing of the children. Teddy Thomas wrote in an affidavit that Daralee yelled at Walker, "I don't want anything to do with the kids, and that was our deal when we got married!" The twins never understood why Walker and Daralee got married at all. They never saw them kiss, but often heard their rowdy fights and vows to divorce. And the children claim they were frequent recipients of their stepmother's fury: that she smacked them around, once clubbing Georgia in the stomach with a baseball bat, and pushing Patterson down a flight of stairs. The worst part, they say, was when Daralee skulked around in the night. "Everything happened in the dark," says Georgia. It felt as though they hadn't had a good night's sleep in years.
At school the twins had trouble connecting with classmates, few of whom were allowed over to the Inmans' mansion a second time after gaping at the guns, the explicit art and sometimes an eyeful of Walker, who preferred to be nude. Other kids went to summer camp, but the Inmans went to Abu Dhabi to bid millions at auctions; to Japan, where their father introduced them to friends who were supposedly yakuza; to Fiji, where Dad praised them as they dined on poisonous puffer fish. There were getaways aboard the Devine Decadence, which was docked in New Zealand. One day toward the end of second grade, when their father had yanked them out of school without warning, they told themselves it was for the best.
"Home schooling," however, turned out to be little more than a revolving cast of tutors with no teaching experience. Instead of book learning, Georgia and Patterson honed their survival skills. They learned how to hide when Daralee called their names, not to complain when their bellies grumbled and never to cry: "Buck up and be a man," Walker would chide Patterson. They learned not to snitch to anyone who came around asking about their family life, especially cops. They learned, from their dad's warning, that if they ever heard a shot from the basement gun vault, not to come in; they knew he was talking about suicide, or "kissing the Luger," as he'd call it with a raise of his eyebrows.
Among the kids' first memories, as toddlers, are of being trapped in cribs turned upside down and the terror of being locked in the basement. Recalling those abuses, Georgia lapses into a halting monotone. "They. Stuck my brother and I. In hot boiling water in our bath," she says, forcing out the words. "It felt like our skin was melting away." Her eyes zone out and her entire body convulses in a shudder, which happens occasionally when she discusses her childhood past. "I get a lot of flashbacks," she says faintly.
Meanwhile, the simple pleasures of childhood missed them entirely. They don't recall ever having been tucked into bed. Birthdays went by forgotten by their parents, and one Christmas, Santa filled their stockings with coal. The kids were on high alert for all manner of surprises, as when one time, a skunk wandered into their lavish Great Room – filled with family heirlooms, including a portrait of Doris Duke – and Walker pulled out a machine gun and mowed the animal down. And at least four times, Walker overdosed, sometimes while the kids were home. "The ambulance flew up the hill, the kids were hysterical," tutor Susan Todd wrote in a letter. "Walker was out cold on the floor covered in vomit and no one could wake him." Georgia began using her dad's computer to learn CPR online. "You're gonna die," she warned him.
"I promise you, I will live forever," Walker told her. "I am invincible."
On a series of supervised visits with their mother that year, 2008, it became clear the strain was taking its toll. As psychologists watched from behind a two-way mirror and a video camera filmed the proceedings, the children uttered non sequiturs that made plain their anguish, as when 10-year-old Georgia declared, "My dad never abused us! He would take us to the hospital every time! He's a good dad!" and, apropos of nothing, "Our house is so expensive. Mom [Daralee] kicks my butt, Dad never kicked my butt." Patterson, who spent the visits edging longingly toward his mother and accepting her hugs, looked directly into the camera, then turned away.
"I'm gonna be dead," he murmured. "The truth is eating me."
One of the many troubling aspects of Georgia and Patterson's story is how many people witnessed their torment, and yet no help came. Certainly the kids were on the radar of Wyoming authorities for years. After nanny Phyllis Jasperson called 911 in 2002, the Lincoln County Sheriff's deputies interviewed the kids at the station – "It appears to be a custody battle," one officer noted. "In my opinion the children appear to be in fine physical condition" – before forwarding the matter to Wyoming's Department of Family Services. According to Daisha's notes at the time, DFS took no action for lack of evidence. Still, there were plenty of other chances to step in, because through the years at least three other people claim they reported the Inmans to Wyoming's DFS and still no action was taken.
Investigating the family may have proved challenging. Georgia and Patterson say they did get occasional visits from DFS, which works in conjunction with local law enforcement, but that before the agent's arrival, their father would get a heads-up, hide his drugs and make the home presentable. (A DFS spokesman declined comment, citing privacy issues.)
When Walker's friend Mike Todd once broached the subject of sending Walker to rehab, Walker's lawyer shot down the idea, Todd says, arguing, "If you go to rehab, they will use this against you, and you will lose custody of the children." And yet during a 2007 custody hearing about whether Walker could relocate the family, his lawyer announced to the court, "There's never been any evidence of abuse and neglect. . . . In fact these are some of the most well-cared-for children there is." Eventually, the courts allowed the family to temporarily move across the country, to Greenfield Plantation.
Not long after their arrival in South Carolina in 2008, the state's Department of Social Services would field three separate calls about the Inmans. One was from Georgetown County police, who were summoned to a restaurant when Walker shouted at and hit Georgia so violently that two patrons said they feared for her safety. (Georgia told police she "deserved to be yelled at.") Another report came from a psychologist who evaluated the kids and was tipped off to the parents' drug history. And DSS was also notified by Todd, whom Walker had hired to do restoration work to the decrepit manor. Nothing seems to have resulted from any of the reports. The inaction came as a shock to Todd, who could hardly believe the degree of madness playing out on Greenfield Plantation, a former rice farm where a pet camel named Sinbad roamed and where the family had once owned a lion cub until Walker fed it too many fast-food burgers and it died. "It was like living in an insane asylum," remembers Todd. "Like a nightmare you couldn't wake up from."
Though Daralee was enrolled in a Florida rehab – trying to catch a break on the sentencing from her latest drug bust – she and a band of friends visited Greenfield on weekends, leaving behind glass pipes and little brown packages, says Todd. The kids, then age 11, were left in the care of a pair of married nannies, whom Todd says were engrossed in their own doings, with the husband strolling the grounds swilling beer and shooting alligators, while the wife, stringy and unkempt and with one burst breast implant, would get so furious with the children that she once beat them with a steel ladle. The kids were locked in their rooms at night. By day, they wandered the grounds unwatched, heedless of the snakes and alligators, and once had to be rescued from the fast-moving Black River, which they'd tried to sail in a homemade raft. Even Walker's longtime drug dealer Carl Richardson was shocked at the kids' danger, and by Walker's obliviousness. "Walker was usually so drugged up that he didn't care what the children were doing," he wrote in an affidavit.
Walker spent that summer nodding out all over the house, scarcely able to keep his head up. He'd become sick and monstrous-looking. Pallid but for his purple-veined nose, he tried to add color in his cheeks by scrubbing them with Borax powder. His top teeth had fallen out, and his dental implants wouldn't stay in, leaving him a mouthful of titanium pegs. Walker was beginning to shut out longtime friends, dismissing them as either money-grubbers or unwilling to "ride with the brand" – traitors, in cowboy lingo. His paranoia was so extreme that he lugged a huge case of guns wherever he traveled. He'd come to think himself so capable that when he accidentally cut his thumb to the bone, and the wound became infected, Walker performed surgery on it himself in a Las Vegas hotel room, using a scalpel from a 19th-century surgical kit he'd bought at auction. He had no fear of death, he'd told Todd, because years earlier, while in India, he had learned to stop and start his own heart. "The monks were amazed," Walker slurred.
And yet once in a great while, a shaft of self-awareness penetrated. In a mildewing closet in the plantation's main house one day, Walker came across a shoe box filled with his father's belongings. Walker sat cross-legged on the floor and took out the items one by one: his pilot's license; a newspaper notice of his 1954 death from "consumption" in this very house. There at the bottom of the box were a pair of oval lenses in gold wire frames: Walker Sr.'s spectacles. Walker lifted them out. His father had been a spoiled heir who'd loafed his life away, drinking himself into oblivion, becoming nothing more than a specter in the imagination of his love-starved son – a biography of failure that Walker had duplicated. Walker closed his hand around the spectacles, hung his head and wept.
There were flirtations with sobriety. As Walker attempted to ease off the hard stuff – soothing himself with swigs of pink syrupy methadone – he started cooking family meals again, always the first sign of his resurfacing. New plantation caretaker Ron Altman had initially been appalled at the way Walker brushed off Georgia's hugs and barely glanced at Patterson, but now saw a change. "He was not a warm parent, but I watched this man and his family grow," says Altman. "I tell you what I think, those kids finally got to him."
Walker became playful, amusing the twins by singing loud choruses of "Witch Doctor." "When he was in his right frame of mind he was really funny," Georgia says. The children hung on their father's every word as he told them the adventure tale behind each of his tattoos; laughed about his childhood havoc at Aunt Doris'; and confided for the first time the miseries of boarding school, where Walker said he was bullied by the other boys, and had vented his fury by blowing up a latrine. As Georgia and Patterson drank in their father's attention, they felt as though he was revealing himself for the first time. And in those moments of vulnerability the twins recognized something crucial. "My dad was really sad," says Patterson. "My dad was really lonely. He didn't really have any friends."
By the time the Inmans returned to their Wyoming home in 2009, Walker had slipped back into self-absorption and the kids were stuck with their stepmother, whom they say had become scarier than ever. Much later, in April 2011, a government authority would finally render a decision on Daralee when, according to a document from South Carolina's Department of Social Services, a two-month investigation determined that in retrospect, "minor children Patterson and Georgia Inman were physically abused by their step-mother Daralee Inman." DSS declined to comment beyond confirming the investigation's existence. But the twins claim that back in Wyoming, Daralee's abuse spun out of control.
"Daralee was mad and she fucking hit me with a kitchen knife," says Patterson. "Look, it's right here." He's standing shirtless in the finished basement of their home, taking a break from his Xbox to show me a thin four-inch white scar trailing from his right armpit down his side. "I'm not lying," he adds. Georgia had earlier recounted that after the stabbing, she had run to her brother's rescue by grabbing a first-aid kit, straddling Patterson to hold him still and, incredibly, sewing up the wound herself. When I ask Patterson about it, however, he reels backward at the suggestion.
"I don't know what the hell she's talking about. I'm not gonna let her stitch me! Are you crazy?" he hollers. Later Georgia insists she's telling the truth, explaining that her brother has repressed parts of their childhood. "He doesn't really remember," she says calmly. "He's real mad about it."
Though many of the painful details of their childhoods are backed up by sworn affidavits from family employees and other records, other stories the twins tell about their lives have a surreal, if not downright implausible, tinge. They talk of their stepmother encouraging them to read a satanic bible, holding Georgia down to inject her with drugs, and serving them meat crawling with maggots, which Patterson can't discuss without dry-heaving. They tell me that while visiting Japan, they witnessed a yakuza torture session; that in Wyoming, they once hid in the trees while drug dealers opened fire on their house; and that during a road trip through Nebraska, their father shot dead a posse of would-be carjackers, after which Walker slid back into the driver's seat, bloodied, lit a cigarette and muttered, "Don't talk."
As fantastical as they sound, these memories are as real to the twins as all the rest. It's as though the Inmans' trauma is so deep that ordinary tales don't describe the horror. Georgia nonchalantly speaks of seeing ghosts hanging by their necks from trees, and of a china doll she once owned turning its head to leer at her. That theatrical quality extends even to some of the twins' happy memories, as when they delightedly recount the time they and their father tranquilized a bobcat, stuffed it into a suitcase, left it by a South Carolina roadside, and watched from hiding as unlucky passers-by opened the case to discover the pissed-off contents – "It jumps out, blood everywhere, and you can hear them screaming," Patterson says while Georgia screeches with laughter – surely that couldn't be true, could it? Other stories are sweeter. When they tell me with pride about the time their father took them to an Eagles concert in Myrtle Beach, and they were brought onstage to sing "Hotel California," I don't have the heart to tell them that no such thing happened; I've already been told by Todd, who accompanied them to the show, that Walker had been so incapacitated that he'd lain semiconscious in the grass until they'd left early.
On the morning of February 25th, 2010, the clerk of a Lakewood, Colorado, Holiday Inn found Walker Patterson Inman Jr. dead on the floor of his hotel room. From the disarray it was evident how Walker had spent his final eight days on Earth: with a butane torch; a water pipe made from a soda bottle; a Ziploc baggie filled with heroin; and prescription meds including an opiate blocker, which, the coroner noted, heroin users often take in the mistaken belief that it counteracts overdoses. The official cause of death was a methadone overdose. His death certificate listed his occupation as "lifetime adventurer."
Without their father in the picture, the custody battle took a bitter new edge. Daralee demanded that the twins call her "Mom," and forbade them from attending Walker's burial in South Carolina, warning the kids that Daisha would be there to scoop them up. In August 2010, Daisha arrived at Outlaw Acres with a court order, a fleet of police cars and two ambulances to claim her children. Georgia threw rocks at her mother's windshield, screaming, "Fuck you, Daisha," while, Patterson says, Daralee instructed him to get his gun and shoot Daisha. After an hourlong standoff, the kids grudgingly surrendered. Marching past Daisha in the driveway, Georgia kicked her mother hard in the shin, a gesture her father would have appreciated. Then the twins were loaded into an ambulance for the six-hour drive to a children's psychiatric facility, where they would be institutionalized for the next three months.
"My brother's really mad now," observes Georgia, seated at the breakfast nook of the Inmans' spacious rental home, morning sunshine pouring in the wraparound windows. It's a Friday before school, for which Georgia is overdressed in a brown Calvin Klein dress, her chin-length golden-brown hair still shower-damp. Behind her, Patterson is pacing with agitation, hands clenched at his sides as he listens to his sister recap their troubled upbringing. "My brother, he has serious issues," Georgia continues. "He can't even recall whether our father ever said he loved him. But yet he likes to say–"
"Wait, wait, wait–" Patterson, in jeans, a black T-shirt and a newsboy cap, interrupts to defend his father. "He's not a bad man," Patterson says of Walker. "He isn't!" Upset, he storms off across the room with Daisha in pursuit to try and comfort him. Daisha, a hyper, distractible woman whose green eyes blink from behind a duck blind of false lashes, has been grateful for her reunion with her kids but also overwhelmed by the parenting needs of two emotionally disturbed teenagers. She tries to keep them upbeat with cheery slogans posted throughout the house, like the note taped to a bathroom mirror that says "Anger is for losers and we are winners"; or the framed sign over the fireplace where Patterson and Daisha are now heatedly arguing, reading, A MOTHER'S HEART IS A SPECIAL PLACE WHERE CHILDREN HAVE A HOME. At the table, Georgia tries to keep her composure despite the rising voices in the background, then loses it.
"Rainbows and butterflies!" she yells viciously at her mother and brother, her own taunting affirmation.
The past three years have been a struggle for the twins as they've grappled with their past. Before they were able to live with Daisha, they were sent to the Wyoming Behavioral Institute. The twins were suicidal, uncooperative and dangerously underweight. Therapist Jennifer Greenup had never seen such extreme emotional deprivation before. "If even a quarter of what they said happened to them happened, they are severely traumatized children," says Greenup, adding, "Their symptoms are real. Whether it's paranoia, lack of trust or hostility." Eventually the kids were able to move in with Daisha and began bonding, a triumph unto itself. But although they've taken positive steps, Greenup says the scale of their trauma is so great that she can't gauge their progress: "I can't say they're progressing well, because there's nothing to compare it to," she admits.
Seeking security while they work on their issues, Georgia and Patterson have retreated into familiar isolation. They're enrolled in ninth grade at a special private school that provides one-on-one tutoring, which is getting them caught up to grade level, but have limited real-world contact with other kids. When not at school they're hiding here at the house, where Patterson plays Grand Theft Auto with an online crew called Reapers MC. Georgia, though the more outgoing of the pair, is even more cautious. "I don't think I'm ready for friendship yet," she says heavily; she feels ill-equipped for the vagaries of teenage drama when all she really wants is to extend for a little longer a childhood she never fully had. The twins still believe in Santa Claus. They wrote him letters last year; Patterson's poignant note, his scrawl as sloppy as a first-grader's, read, "Dear Santa I know I havn't been good But if you do come all I want is to say hi to you in person." The kids insist that not only did Saint Nick reward them with gifts – "I mean, explain to me how three huge bags get into a house basement!" argues Georgia – but that they actually saw him. Georgia has also glimpsed another unlikely person lately: her father, who has appeared to her since his death. In fact, she says in a hushed voice, "I think he's here." She indicates the empty chair beside her at the breakfast table.
The twins clearly have a lot of healing to do. Though they're now in therapy, the banks that control their trust funds had at one time claimed that the children hadn't demonstrated the need for mental-health help. It's a bone of contention in one of the two financial struggles that currently dominate the kids' lives. Because they were minors when their father died, any disbursements from the trusts they inherited must be approved by the banks that oversee them. They need to provide receipts for every penny spent, and most requests for funds require prior bank authorization, a cumbersome process that leads to e-mails like this one from a JP Morgan vice president: "I received your email regarding Patterson's kickboxing, and will advise you on that request after we have had a chance to review with the Committee." Such bureaucracy resulted in the kids being temporarily suspended from school – which costs up to $20,000 a month – for nonpayment.
"Those damn trustees!" fumes Daisha. "They had no oversight when Walker was alive, and they funded two severe drug addicts and let them run amok," yet the banks subject her to what she sees as unreasonable scrutiny. For example, when she and the kids moved from a converted church in South Carolina to Park City without warning last fall, she was outraged that trustees insisted upon ousting the family from their $120,000-a-month St. Regis Hotel suite. "We were forced into the only house available!" Daisha shrieks, referring to their current $20,000-a-month spread. "Between ski season and Sundance, we were almost on the street!"
JP Morgan and Citibank declined to comment, but in documents filed in Manhattan Surrogate Court, JP Morgan has argued it needed to be vigilant in protecting the kids' money, because since Walker's death it has been bombarded with outrageous financial requests from Daralee, who asked for $1.9 million; from Walker's attorney, who wanted "unlimited funding" in connection with his role as a trustee of Walker's estate; and from Daisha, who asked for a lump sum of more than $430,500. She later asked for $50,000 to buy the kids' Christmas gifts and a trip around the world. Unhappy wasting money on rental properties, Daisha also recently looked into buying a $29 million ranch, which she claims could be had for a mere $15 million: "What's that to the children, seven and a half million apiece, cut and dried?" she scoffs. But JP Morgan nixed the request as expensive enough to decimate the trust. Because for all the family gossip about Walker's riches, it appears there may be very little left of the family fortune: According to sources, the children stand to inherit not a billion-dollar trust, but a comparatively paltry $60 million.
While the twins sort out their money with the banks, they're also waging battle in Wyoming, because they claim their father's estate is being raided. Walker left behind not much in the way of liquid assets but a lifetime's worth of possessions, which he willed to his children in trust. At the moment, however, the kids can't set foot on their properties in Wyoming or South Carolina, because Daralee has a legal right to reside in both houses; when they tried to visit their father's grave on Greenfield Plantation, police were summoned. And they've spotted some of their dad's precious collectibles being sold online. In 2011, a Maine auction house unloaded 25 of Walker's fine firearms, many engraved w.p.i., for $300,000. "I don't let anybody take my dad's things. It's our family's history," says Patterson angrily. After a lifetime of powerlessness, being robbed of his father's mementos is one more degradation than he can stand. He and Georgia would like to exact revenge on everyone they consider responsible for their abuse. "I'm taking everybody's asses downtown," says Patterson. "Everybody that fucked with my family, and fucked with me and my sis."
The kids need to figure out what comes next for them – how they can start creating a life for themselves, and connect with others. Daisha has devised what she thinks is a terrific idea for an appropriate new set of playmates: She's working on getting the twins together with Michael Jackson's kids, with whom she thinks they'd have tons in common. "Wouldn't that be historic? The Jacksons and the Dukes, two of the most famous names, together?" Daisha asks.
As for the kids' own plans, Patterson seems to hope for a quiet life. "I hope I don't have to live alone. But I actually don't mind. I'll just sit at Greenfield, fishing by my dad's little tomb, just talking about life," he says. "You can't trust anyone," he adds mournfully, repeating the words he learned from his father, which Walker learned from his aunt Doris, which she learned from her father, Buck Duke.
Georgia is more optimistic. Inspired by self-help books, she wonders if she might turn their experiences into something positive, perhaps by becoming a motivational speaker for abused kids. "There's gonna be some things that are harsh and you can't undo them," she says. "But the choices you make are what make you." The idea appeals to her: That you need not be shaped by your past, but rather that the path ahead can be forged solely by your own actions, starting now. It happens to be the same can-do mentality of Buck Duke's father, Washington Duke, whose sense of possibility more than a century ago transformed the Dukes from North Carolina dirt farmers into tycoons. But for Georgia and Patterson to truly turn their lives around, they'll ultimately need to step outside of the bubble that great wealth affords and learn some of the life skills that eluded so many in their lineage. If only there was someone to teach them.
"Hey, Georgia! Patterson! You ready for your Power Thought reading with me?" Daisha yells across the house, and the twins gather in her spacious bedroom. Daisha dashes around lighting incense and putting on a tootling New Age CD, explaining that they've been drawing healing strength from a melding of Christian forgiveness, crystals, Native American folklore, a Spirituality for Dummies book and a three-foot cherrywood Buddha statue she keeps in her walk-in closet. She picks up a small glossy-paged book of affirmations. "You want to pick the Power Thought, or should I?" Daisha asks brightly. Neither child answers, but slump back against her four-poster bed and stare with blank faces at the carpet, quietly waiting for it to be over. For a long moment there's no sound but soothing spa music while their mother thumbs through the book, searching for the mantra that will get the twins through another day.
This story is from the August 15th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.
Meet The Dread Pirate Roberts, The Man Behind Booming Black Market Drug Website Silk Road
This story appears in the September 2, 2013 issue of Forbes.
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An entrepreneur as professionally careful as the Dread Pirate Roberts doesn't trust instant messaging services. Forget phones or Skype. At one point during our eight-month preinterview courtship, I offer to meet him at an undisclosed location outside the United States. "Meeting in person is out of the question," he says. "I don't meet in person even with my closest advisors." When I ask for his name and nationality, he's so spooked that he refuses to answer any other questions and we lose contact for a month.
All my communications with Roberts are routed exclusively through the messaging system and forums of the website he owns and manages, the Silk Road. Accessing the site requires running the anonymity software Tor, which encrypts Web traffic and triple-bounces it among thousands of computers around the world. Like a long, blindfolded ride in the back of some guerrilla leader's van, Tor is designed to prevent me–and anyone else–from tracking the location of Silk Road's servers or the Dread Pirate Roberts himself. "The highest levels of government are hunting me," says Roberts. "I can't take any chances."
If Roberts is paranoid, it's because very powerful people really are out to get him. In the last two and a half years Silk Road has grown into the Web's busiest bazaar for heroin, methamphetamines, crack, cocaine, LSD, ecstasy and enough strains of marijuana to put an Amsterdam coffee shop to shame. The Drug Enforcement Administration won't comment on whether it's investigating Silk Road but wrote in a statement that it's aware of the site and is "very proactive in keeping abreast" of the digital underground's "ever-evolving technological advancements." Senator Chuck Schumer has demanded Silk Road be shut down and called it "the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen … by light-years."
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An Interview With A Digital Drug Lord: The Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts (Q&A)
Andy GreenbergAndy Greenberg
Forbes Staff
Here's What It's Like To Buy Drugs On Three Anonymous Online Black Markets
Andy GreenbergAndy Greenberg
Forbes Staff
The Collected Quotations Of The Dread Pirate Roberts
Andy GreenbergAndy Greenberg
Forbes Staff
Every Important Person In Bitcoin Just Got Subpoenaed By New York's Financial Regulator
Kashmir HillKashmir Hill
Forbes Staff
Anyone can download and run Tor, exchange some dollars or euros for the digital currency Bitcoin and go shopping on Silk Road for drugs that are vacuum-sealed and discreetly mailed via the U.S. Postal Service, right under the federal government's nose. By the measure of Carnegie Mellon researcher Nicolas Christin, Roberts' eBay-like service was grossing $1.2 million a month in the first half of 2012. Since then the site has doubled its product listings, and revenue now hits an annual run-rate of $30 million to $45 million by FORBES' estimate. One analysis of the Tor network performed by a student at Dublin's Trinity College found that Silk Road received around 60,000 visits a day, mostly users seeking to buy or sell drugs, along with other illicit items including unregulated cigarettes and forged documents. Silk Road takes a commission on all of its sales, starting at 10% and scaling down for larger transactions. Given that those commissions are collected in Bitcoins, which have appreciated close to 200-fold against the dollar since Silk Road launched in 2011, the Dread Pirate Roberts and any other stakeholders in Silk Road have likely amassed millions in profits.
Despite the giant DEA crosshairs painted on his back and growing signs that the feds are probing the so-called "dark Web" that Silk Road and other black market sites inhabit, Roberts spoke with FORBES in his first-ever extended public interview for a reason: As with physical drug dealing, a turf war has emerged. Competitors, namely a newly launched site called Atlantis with a real marketing budget and a CEO with far less regard for his privacy, are stealing Roberts' spotlight.
"Up until now I've done my best to keep Silk Road as low profile as possible … letting people discover [it] through word of mouth," Roberts says. "At the same time, Silk Road has been around two and a half years. We've withstood a lot, and it's not like our enemies are unaware any longer."
Roberts also has a political agenda: He sees himself not just as an enabler of street-corner pushers but also as a radical libertarian revolutionary carving out an anarchic digital space beyond the reach of the taxation and regulatory powers of the state–Julian Assange with a hypodermic needle. "We can't stay silent forever. We have an important message, and the time is ripe for the world to hear it," says Roberts. "What we're doing isn't about scoring drugs or 'sticking it to the man.' It's about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we've done no wrong."
"Silk Road is a vehicle for that message," he writes to me from somewhere in the Internet's encrypted void. "All else is secondary."
While Roberts waxes philosophical, his competitors are finding motivation enough in grabbing some of Silk Road's lucrative drug trade. On June 26 a video ad for Atlantis appeared on YouTube telling the story of "Charlie," a friendly-looking cartoon hipster. Charlie, according to text that popped up around the video's frame as jingly music played, is a "stoner" who moves to a new city for work and can't find any marijuana. That is, until he discovers Atlantis' "virtual black market," orders some pot and gets "high as a damn kite."
YouTube removed the video within days for violating its terms of service but not before it had received close to 100,000 views and pulled the new Bitcoin-based black market into the public Internet's awareness. Atlantis' ad took a direct shot at Silk Road, calling itself "the world's best anonymous online drug marketplace."
The next day, an employee of Atlantis named "Heisenberg" held a group chat with reporters where he described the site as the "Facebook to [Silk Road's] Myspace." In comments now deleted from an ask-me-anything session on the social news site Reddit, Atlantis' chief executive, who goes by the name "Vladimir," listed advantages over Silk Road like less downtime and smaller fees for sellers. "The road has more users," he wrote, "but our site is better (to put it bluntly)."
The battle for the Web's drug corner is on.
***
THE DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS isn't shy about naming Silk Road's active ingredient: The cryptographic digital currency known as Bitcoin. "We've won the State's War on Drugs because of Bitcoin," he writes.
Bitcoin, which came into widespread use around the same time as Silk Road's creation, isn't exactly the financial-privacy panacea some believe it to be–its transactions can be traced using the same mechanisms that prevent fraud and counterfeiting within the Bitcoin economy. But unlike with dollars, euros or yen, the integrity of the nearly $1 billion worth of Bitcoins floating around the Internet is maintained by the distributed computing power of thousands of users who run the crypto-currency's software, not by any bank or government. That means careful users never have to tie their accounts to their real-world identity. As a result Bitcoin-funded services deep within the dark Web, masked by anonymity tools like Tor, claim to offer everything from cyberattacks to weapons and explosives to stolen credit cards.
Mix up your coins in one of many available laundering services–Silk Road runs one automatically for all transactions on the site–and it becomes very difficult to follow the money. Even the FBI, according to one of the bureau's leaked internal reports, worries that Bitcoin's complexity and lack of a central authority "present distinct challenges" for tracking criminal funds. The result is a currency as convenient as PayPal and theoretically as anonymous as cash.
"We're talking about the potential for a monumental shift in the power structure of the world," Roberts writes. "The people now can control the flow and distribution of information and the flow of money. Sector by sector the State is being cut out of the equation and power is being returned to the individual."
Of course, Roberts' lofty words on individual liberties provide a convenient veneer to justify his profitable business selling illegal, dangerous and addictive substances. But Roberts argues that if his users want heroin and crack, they should have the freedom to buy it and deal with the consequences. Unlike other Bitcoin-based underground sites, Silk Road bans all but what Roberts defines as victimless contraband. He won't permit the sale of child pornography, stolen goods or weapons, though the latter is a gray area. The site has experimented with selling guns and may yet reintroduce them, Roberts says.
side from the thorny ethics of the Bitcoin underground economy, the currency's wild fluctuations present a more practical problem. Silk Road allows the site's dealers to peg their Bitcoin prices to the dollar, so that a typical gram of heroin on the site costs around $200 regardless of whether Bitcoins are worth 50 cents apiece, as in early 2011, or $266, at their precrash peak in April 2013. (They're around $100 today.) The site also offers a currency hedging system that protects dealers against swings in Bitcoin's value while their drugs are in transit.
Bitcoin did more than enable the modern online black market, Roberts says. It also brought him and Silk Road together. Roberts isn't actually the site's founder, he revealed in our interview. He credits Silk Road's creation to another, even more secretive entrepreneur whom he declined to tell me anything about and who may have used the "Dread Pirate Roberts" nom de guerre before it was assumed by the person I interviewed. The current Roberts discovered the site shortly after its creation in early 2011. Around that time, he says, he found a security flaw in the "wallet" software that stored Silk Road's funds. The bug could have allowed a hacker to identify the site's hardware and steal its Bitcoins. Instead of exploiting the weakness, he helped the site's founder fix it, gained his trust and became an active partner in the business. Eventually, the current Roberts says, he bought out Silk Road's creator and assumed full control. "It was his idea to pass the torch, in fact," says Roberts. "He was well compensated."
In February 2012 a post appeared on Silk Road's forums proclaiming that the site's administrator would henceforth be known as the Dread Pirate Roberts, a name taken from the dashing, masked protagonist in the fantasy film The Princess Bride –tellingly, a persona that is passed down in the film from one generation of pirate to another. He soon began to live up to his colorful alter ego, posting lofty manifestos about Silk Road's libertarian political ideals and love letters to his faithful users and vendors; he's even hosted a Dread Pirate Roberts Book Club where he moderated discussions on authors from the Austrian school of free market economics. Commenters on the site describe Roberts as a "hero," a "job creator," "our own Che Guevara" and a "name [that] will live [on] among the greatest men and women in history as a soldier of justice and freedom."
When I ask Roberts how he defines his role at Silk Road–CEO? Owner?–he tells me that he considers himself "a center of trust" between the site's buyers and sellers, a tricky task given that all parties want to remain anonymous. Silk Road has slowly demonstrated to users that it isn't a typical counterfeit-drug scam site or a law enforcement trap. It's made wise use of the trust mechanisms companies like eBay and Airbnb have popularized, including seller ratings and an escrow that releases payment to sellers only after customers receive their merchandise.
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An Interview With A Digital Drug Lord: The Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts (Q&A)
Andy GreenbergAndy Greenberg
Forbes Staff
Here's What It's Like To Buy Drugs On Three Anonymous Online Black Markets
Andy GreenbergAndy Greenberg
Forbes Staff
The Collected Quotations Of The Dread Pirate Roberts
Andy GreenbergAndy Greenberg
Forbes Staff
Every Important Person In Bitcoin Just Got Subpoenaed By New York's Financial Regulator
Kashmir HillKashmir Hill
Forbes Staff
"Silk Road doesn't really sell drugs. It sells insurance and financial products," says Carnegie Mellon computer engineering professor Nicolas Christin. "It doesn't really matter whether you're selling T-shirts or cocaine. The business model is to commoditize security."
With millions flowing into Silk Road, the "vast majority" of which Roberts says is reinvested back in its booming black market, the Dread Pirate brushes off questions about his wealth and lifestyle. He says he carefully limits his spending to keep a low profile but admitted in one forum post to partaking in a few "first-world pleasures." The only such pleasure he would describe to me is smoking "a bowl of sticky indica buds at the end of a long day."
"As far as my monetary net worth is concerned, the future value of Silk Road as an organization dwarfs its and my liquid assets. … I wouldn't sell out for less than 10 figures, maybe 11," he writes with a dash of vainglory. "At some point you're going to have to put Dread Pirate Roberts on that list you all keep over at Forbes. ;)"
***
IT'S A RULE AS TIMELESS as black markets: Where illegal money goes, violence follows. In a digital market that violence is virtual, but it's as financially real as torching your competitor's warehouse.
In late April Silk Road went offline for nearly a week, straining under a sustained cyberattack that left its sensitive data untouched but overwhelmed its servers. The attack, according to Roberts, was the most sophisticated in Silk Road's history, taking advantage of previously unknown vulnerabilities in Tor and repeatedly shifting tactics to avoid the site's defenses.
The sabotage occurred within weeks of rival site Atlantis' launch. Commenters on the Reddit forum devoted to Silk Road suggested that Roberts' customers and vendors switch to Atlantis during the downtime, leading to gossip that the newcomer had engineered the attack.
"Rumors, nothing more than that," says Atlantis' CEO Vladimir when I interview him in an encrypted chat room. (Like Roberts, Vlad doesn't share much about himself, other than a background in software development, some experience as a small-time pot dealer and a love of psychedelics.) "I have suspicions [about whether] an attack ever took place. It's far more likely they were having infrastructure issues."
Roberts, for his part, won't comment on the April attack's source. He tells me he's happy to see competition in the Web drug market, even as Atlantis boasted in June that it surpassed $500,000 in cumulative transactions. Roberts points out that another site, Black Market Reloaded, has long copied Silk Road's model–even offering a wider variety of merchandise, including illegal firearms–while still attracting only a small fraction of Roberts' customers. "I like having them nipping at my heels," Roberts tells me. "Keeps me motivated."
In a comment on "copycats" posted to Silk Road's forums a few days after Atlantis released its video ad, however, Roberts seemed to fire back. "If you take someone's invention, tweak one little thing and then go around telling everyone that you are 'better,' you get zero respect from me," he wrote. Though the rest of the message focused on the difference between Bitcoin and a newer crypto-currency called Litecoin, users interpreted the comment as a thinly veiled dig at Atlantis.
Meanwhile, Silk Road has also been adopting some of Atlantis' marketing tactics: In addition to Roberts' first real interview, he's created a new public site at SilkRoadLink.com that serves as an online guide to accessing Silk Road, bringing his business, at least tentatively, outside Tor's obscured network.
Competition aside, Roberts has chosen a risky time to raise his profile, as law enforcement tightens its net. Dealers in South Carolina and Australia have been arrested after allegedly selling on Silk Road, although both may have also been dealing in the physical world. In May the proprietors of a Bitcoin-like digital currency system called Liberty Reserve were indicted and accused of helping to launder $6 billion. That same month the biggest Bitcoin currency exchange, Tokyo's Mt. Gox, announced it would require identification for anyone seeking to trade in real world currencies. Then, last month, the FBI exploited a vulnerability in Tor to capture the alleged administrator of a child pornography site in Ireland. And, perhaps most threatening to Roberts, the NSA has been revealed to have fed intelligence to the DEA and other law enforcement agencies.
All of that gives Roberts good reason to distrust any means of communication and payment that could possibly be cracked by law enforcement. In 2012 the operators of a Silk Road-like site known as the Farmer's Market were identified and indicted in a DEA operation called "Adam Bomb." Though they had used Tor to hide their domain, they had communicated with one another using the encrypted e-mail service Hushmail, a service known to cooperate with law enforcement, and had accepted payments through PayPal instead of Bitcoin. Just days after Atlantis' Vladimir insisted that he and his "chief operating officer" communicate with me using an encrypted IM program called Cryptocat, a bug in the program was revealed that could have allowed all of our communications to be read.
Despite his caution, Roberts' personal security remains an open question. But the potential lifetime in prison he might face if identified hasn't slowed down his growing illegal empire. "We are like a little seed in a big jungle that has just broken the surface of the forest floor," he wrote in one speech posted to the site's forums last year. "It's a big scary jungle with lots of dangerous creatures, each honed by evolution to survive in the hostile environment known as human society. But the environment is rapidly changing, and the jungle has never seen a species quite like the Silk Road."
—
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boom.2013.3.1.34-f02
The Tomato Harvester
Posted in Analyses
by Carolyn de la Peña
From Boom Spring 2013, Vol. 3, No. 1
If you've driven the highways and back roads of the Central and Sacramento Valleys in the summer, when the tomatoes are at their ripest, you may have seen them. And maybe like me, the first time you saw them you had to stop and watch for a while. It's difficult not to be mesmerized by the strangeness of a tomato harvesting machine. "Factories in the field" is what some scholars have called them, and it's easy to see why.
The most visible component of the harvester is the men and women on its sorting crew, who work on each side of the machine, almost as if they're on a stationary assembly line. Yet the machine itself is constantly moving. Up and down the rows of tomato plants it travels, pulling with its giant blade whole tomato plants into its body, shaking them to free fruit from vine, tossing the vine back out into the field while pushing the fruit up onto conveyor belts, where human hands and machine processes merge as the sorters quickly separate bad fruit (along with the occasional snake or mouse) from good fruit, allowing only the good to move into waiting bins that will eventually be transported to processing plants.
The individual elements of the harvester seem incongruous. The object, as a whole, appears unstable. And yet, somehow, it achieves something that is difficult to imagine. It pulls ripe tomato plants from the earth, subjects them to blades, shakers, conveyor belts, and metal bins, and, at the end of this violent process, delivers not field-made gazpacho—but piles of ripe, intact, harvested tomatoes.
There are many stories we could tell about the harvester and its impact on California agriculture, California eating habits, and California's farm labor. One of them would explain how it displaced thousands of mostly Mexican-American farm laborers in the 1960s, and then became the subject of a major lawsuit against the University of California, ultimately resulting in a new ethos of worker-impact-centered agricultural research on our campuses. Another would illuminate the lightning-fast implementation of the machines and the rapid changes they brought to farming and consumer practices.
In 1963 about one percent of California's industrial tomato harvest was picked by about 60 machines. By 1968, there were over 1,450 machines across the state delivering 95 percent. Almost as quickly, tomato growing shifted geographies, moving from the small fields of the Sacramento Delta and the Davis/Woodland/Sacramento region to towns around Fresno, in order to find the flat land and consistent irrigation possibilities required by the machine.
With its price tag reaching $200,000, the farmer using the harvester needed higher tomato acreages. Small side-line tomato farmers were pushed out and mega-farms moved in. Farmers in search of higher yields layered on new pesticides, beefed up irrigation, and eliminated competing crops. The proliferation of tomatoes for processing enabled food companies to produce cheap sauces, catsups, and pastes. These things, in turn, fueled the ever-expanding industry of fast and convenience foods.
Still, watching a harvester in motion, it's difficult to avoid pondering the machine itself. And this is good. We should spend time thinking about the machines that have industrialized our food supply and displaced field labor in California. Thanks to the work of scholars like Deborah Fitzgerald, Julie Guthman, and Michael Pollan, we understand that industrialized agriculture has had negative environmental, human, and health consequences. Matt Garcia and William Friedland explore in depth the devastation mechanization brought to farm worker families across the state. These are important stories of consequences. Still they do not fully illuminate the human motivations that created the objects—like the harvester—which enabled our agricultural systems in the first place. This can more easily come into view if we study the machines. If we want to create a better agricultural system we need not only to advocate for what we want; we need to also understand the human motivations that delivered what we have to us. Tomatoes, it turns out, have not been the only things made in these fields.
Building the Machine and the Tomato
When UC Davis seed specialist Jack Hanna began to work with aeronautical engineer Coby Lorenzen in 1949 to create a machine that could pick and sort tomatoes, no one seems to have thought they would succeed. As one professor who worked with them during those years put it, the two men were "kind of the laughing stock around here" for nearly a decade.1
The main problem was the tomato. While varieties could be easily manipulated through seed selection and cross-breeding, no tomato existed that could withstand the violence of mechanized cutting, separating, sorting, and loading. Hanna, a vegetable crops researcher with previous experience in asparagus crops, spent years traveling the US, exploring variations on tomato seeds, creating new hybrids, and raising the seeds to plants, only to fail time and time again when the fruits came into contact with Lorenzen's prototype harvesting machines. Some tomatoes were too soft, and squished on contact with the cutting blades that detached the stalks from the ground just below the soil. Others were too fixed on the vine, and refused to separate when pulled into the machine's internal shaker, turning to sauce instead. Even when a tomato could make it through those rigors, it failed to move regularly up the conveyor belt, or its skin thickness wasn't quite sufficient to withstand the eventual hurl off the harvester into the tight compression of waiting bins. Well into the 1950s, few people took their efforts seriously. They had limited funds, no research assistance, and an industry that in spite of rumblings about the end of the Bracero Program, did not yet prioritize a push to develop tools for automation. For colleagues at UC Davis, the repeated attempts and failures continued to be "highly amusing." 2
It's hard to know exactly what kept Hanna and Lorenzen working through these apparently insurmountable problems. One thing we do know is that both of them were fascinated by the requirement that they think about tomatoes through the machine.Historical evidence lets us imagine what the two might have experienced on one of their typical annual road trips to El Centro to test the latest model harvester in a field of experimental tomatoes. The date might have been 1956. Hanna, after six months of hybrid seed development and months of waiting for the plants to mature, has just watched the latest prototype fail with each of the varieties. Some tomatoes refused to separate from the stem. Others smashed on contact. Others made it through the process, only to collapse under the weight of their fellow fruit in the bins. Lorenzen, an aeronautical engineer by training, has just watched his machine, perhaps his eighth or ninth prototype, liquify the fruit. It's a long drive back to Davis. Nevertheless, Hanna remembered years later, that these drives—with hours on the road and nothing to distract them—was when their most fruitful collaborative thinking took place. They'd analyze the problem, reconsider the plants and the machine process, and come up with their next set of modifications. Gradually, as the years passed, Hanna knew nearly as much about the machine as Lorenzen did. He understood the limits of what the machine could do in the field, and, with this machine perspective, set about finding the fruit that could succeed. The key was a change in perspective. Instead of looking for flavor, texture, or even color or appearance, as he would have otherwise, he had in this project to learn to "look at a plant mechanically." Flavor, liquid content, shape, and appearance were secondary to finding the properties that could be run successfully through the harvester. For Lorenzen, who in 1949 knew "nothing about tomatoes," exchanges with Hanna, and years of watching tomatoes, allowed him to build machines that bent ever closer to the specifications of nature. In 1959 the team at last discovered, in tandem, a tomato whose thicker skin and oval shape could survive an automated harvest and a machine that could pick it. Called the vf-145 (sometimes referred to as the "square tomato"), this valuable seed proved that an unlikely and imperfect collaboration had finally blossomed.
Learning to Master the Machine
If the tomato was the puzzle for the engineer and plant hunter to solve, the machine was the puzzle for the grower. In the early years of production, the harvester broke down almost as often as it ran. First, there was the night before its big debut, when journalists and growers from all over the state were invited to see the harvester process the vf-145 on a real farm near Davis. One of the conveyors broke, and no one had a replacement part, and, as one machinist on the scene recalled, "it didn't matter who you were, you jumped in with a monkey wrench" to get it going again. In the first year of the machine's mass production, nearly all of them had to be brought back to the machinist for repairs and imperfections.
The first commercial harvesters were produced by Ernst Blackwelder, a local machinist who became one of the project's later but crucial collaborators. By 1965, when the machines were mass-marketed, their imperfections had been recast as appealing challenges for prospective buyers. Advertisements featured growers like Al Fornaciari, of Roberts Union Island in the Delta, who had harvested an "amazing" 4,290 tons of tomatoes over 36 days without a single breakdown. It was Fornaciari's skills as a machinist (not as a farmer) that made the difference. Only with "preventative maintenance" could the machine stay in the field. In another ad, Steve Arnaudo looms large in front of his harvester, weeds held authoritatively in his hand, with the statement "weeds didn't stop my UC-Blackwelder" stamped over the scene in bold. In spite of following extension agents' recommendations for irrigation, row spacing, and heavy fertilizing for weed control, weeds controlled his field, threatening repeatedly to down the machine. Arnaudo's skill directing the harvester and navigating the weeds meant the difference between epic failure and his successful "four to five loads a day." 3
The truth, really, was that no one knew how to grow for the machine or how to run it successfully through the fields once that crop was grown, universally ripe, and in need of immediate picking. At $50,000 to $200,000, each machine was an enormous investment, and risk, for the growers who bought it. To get their money back, growers had to expand their holdings. Many had to move to new fields where irrigation was more constant. All had to learn new pesticide practices and adjust to timetables in seed planting and harvesting so that as many fruits as possible could be picked in a single pass through a field. As one extension agent put it, in the early years of harvester experimenting, "we are all going to have to re-learn how to grow tomatoes." The "we" here was, not so subtly, the growers, in a trial by fire. By 1967 most farmers who were growing tomatoes in 1960 had been pushed out. Those few who succeeded commanded not only fleets of machines and acreage quadrupling their old holdings, but respect as leaders. Tomatoes had become a crucial industry for the state. For Ernst Blackwelder, the reason other farmers failed is because they just couldn't get the machine. If you could not "grow for the machine," he explained, you simply "fell by the wayside." 4
At each phase of its development, the tomato-harvester project threatened to collapse and to take its human participants down with it unless they learned to think for the machine. In the end, a sufficient number of those humans did just that, thereby turning probable failures into success. They did this because the complexity of the task—the need to alter one's way of thinking entirely about machines, tomatoes, harvesting, and irrigation—demanded that they tie their personal and professionalidentities to the success of the harvester. Yes, the goal was to make money, keep the tomato crop in California, and address what many believed was a permanent labor deficit because of the end of the Bracero Program. But on the way to those practical goals, farmers, seed specialists, machinists, engineers, plant hunters, and extension agents also enhanced their opinion of themselves as innovators, risk takers, and leaders in California agriculture. This, as much as the industrial tomato, was what was made in the fields.
And maybe this is at least part of what we see when we're hailed from the road. Watching the tomato harvester at work, marveling at the synchronicity of metal and fruit, and puzzling over how such a thing can be even possible, we become simply the latest in a long line of believers thinking ourselves into this machine.
Sleeping Together
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
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She bowed and introduced herself as Yukiko and I knew it was her real name. I'd heard about the games played by the women in Tokyo's hostess bars, that they introduced themselves first with a fake name, then, after a few minutes, reintroduced themselves to their "special" customers with their real name, i.e., a different fake name. But I was and remain sure that the name she gave me, which was not Yukiko, was her real name. She was from Saitama prefecture, the New Jersey of Tokyo. I told her I was from New Jersey, the Saitama of New York. She was twenty and this was only her second time. She wore her own pajamas: a gray top with yellow flowers and puffy gray shorts with a ruffled hem.
For ¥3,000, or about thirty dollars, I had gotten a membership card at Tokyo's first co-sleeping café, and then I paid another ¥3,000 for forty minutes of sleeping; it's ordinarily ¥5,000, but as a first-timer I was eligible for a promotional rate. (A ten-hour package costs ¥50,000, a 20 percent discount off the hourly rate.) The café had a video explaining that all sexual overtures, regardless of financial incentivization, would be refused. But there were add-ons available: I chose staring into each other's eyes (1 min, ¥1,000) and being patted on the head (1 min, ¥1,000). Other options included having the woman change her pajamas once, spooning, or sleeping with your head in her lap. As appealing as they were, those had all struck me as crossing some sort of line.
Yukiko and I lay down on our foam pallet and she covered us with a flimsy blanket. It had the overwashed nap of a child's transitional object. She leaned toward the cubicle wall to set one of two pink egg timers she'd withdrawn, along with her phone, from a pink pencil case, then flopped onto her back. I followed her lead. We looked at the ceiling. Our bodies did not touch. There wasn't even a pretense that we were actually going to sleep.
First of all, we were too nervous. Second, it was seven p.m. Third, she was going to be switched out for a second-round sleeper after twenty minutes. Furthermore, there was too much to talk about. Her English was surprisingly not bad — when she was fifteen she took a vacation to Australia, the only time she ever enjoyed to leave Japan — but she kept her phone nearby for assistance. It was a white iPhone 5. This was, she said again, only her second shift at the co-sleeping café.
"Did you sleep the first time?"
"No. I don't think many people sleep here. I think only maybe real otaku sleep here. I only heard of some sleeping." Otaku is, roughly, obsessive nerd culture — manga, cards, collectibles, schoolgirls.
"I thought so, yes, before I came — it is in Akihabara, electronics place, for otaku. But it is more celerymen. My first time, was celeryman."
"Wait, what?"
"Ce-le-ry-man. Ce-re-ry-man." I shook my head. "Se-ra-ry-man."
"Salaryman!"
"Salaryman!"
"And, with this salaryman, you didn't sleep?"
"Didn't sleep, no."
"Did you talk?" Yukiko nodded. "What did you talk about?"
"We talked about his work. He talked about his work at a company."
"Do you mind if I write this stuff down?"
"Yes, okay to write down." Yukiko smiled, seemed to loosen a little bit. Her teeth were small and even and spaced far apart. I reached for my notebook, which I'd hidden on the windowsill behind the heart lamp in the hope that, if I failed to fall asleep, I might record what it felt like to be here, not sleeping.
"What was his work?"
"It was . . . hokken." She felt around beside her for her phone, decided she could just explain it. "Like, when I get sick, when I hurt myself, I get money." She waved her arms in rapid swoons toward her chest, as though she were in one of those game-show flying-money wind chambers.
"Insurance?"
"Yes, insurance! Insurance. That's right. He was insurance-salesman celeryman."
"Did he get any of the options?"
"He wanted five-second hug option."
"How much does that cost?"
"Sen yen." A thousand yen.
"What was it like?"
She mimed wrapping her arms around a thorn tree. She wincingly patted the thorny emptiness.
"Why do you think he came here, to the sleeping café?"
"He wanted five-second hug maybe because he had no one to hug. Japan is haji culture. Shame. Is shame culture. Or maybe also is shyness. I don't know why. Tokyo people . . . very alone. And he does not have . . . " She thought for a second, shrugged, reached for her phone. "Please hold moment."
She held it close to her face, multitouched the screen not with thumb and forefinger but with tiny forefinger and middle finger. I could hear another customer whispering in Japanese in the silk-walled cubicle at our feet. His co-sleeper laughed loudly, then laughed softly. Yukiko tapped a button and shone the phone at my face. The screen said courage.
"You also got option." She looked up at a laminated card posted over the bed. "Two option. First option, we watch." She pointed to her eyes, which were small and black and wide-open. It looked as though she was wearing those contacts that make your pupils seem larger. She smoothed her hair, tucked it behind her ears, smoothed it again. She started the second pink plastic timer and we turned toward each other. A Pikachu looking like a blandly benevolent sack of flour peered down at me over her shoulder. We laughed and she covered her open mouth. She smoothed down her hair again. The timer beeped that our minute was up, but we didn't look away right away.
"You're pretty good at this, for only your second time."
She laughed. "No."
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My Name Is Not Robert
How sloppy police work, a hands-off justice system and an asleep-at-the-wheel prison turned one man named Sanders into another.
By BENJAMIN WEISER Photographs By OZIER MUHAMMAD
Nearly every day inside Green Haven prison in Stormville, N.Y., behind the 30-foot-high concrete walls and 12 watchtowers, within the endless gray corridors and tiers of windowless cells, the inmate Robert Sanders asked the same question: Why am I here?
He asked the guards in the main unit of the maximum-security prison, where he spent most of his time alone in Cell No. 22 on the third level, crying and praying and drinking too much coffee. He asked the doctors, social workers and nurses in the psychiatric unit, where he was often sent to deal with the voices in his head.
To the staff members, his questions were evidence of his psychosis. "He becomes delusional," they wrote in his chart. "He has bizarre behavior." The prisoner had a habit of picking cigarette butts up off the floor, but not of showering. Everyone complained that he gave off an unbearable smell, and the red-hooded sweatshirt he habitually wore was caked with food and dirt. They complained at night, too, when his chattering echoed down the narrow hall of A Block. The psychiatric team urged him to improve his hygiene and attend classes in "daily living skills." He was given 15 minutes of weekly therapy and heavy doses of Haldol, an antipsychotic drug that left his body rigid and his emotions flat. But his bewilderment grew. "Pt. said he has no idea why the
plane took him to N.Y.," a nurse wrote in Sanders's chart. He also "does not know what crime he did and his name is not Robert."
Benjamin Weiser is a Metro reporter for The New York Times.
Prison records showed that Robert Sanders was a career criminal from New York who tried to kill a man over cocaine in 1990 and escaped three years later while on work release at a minimum-security prison in the Bronx. Within months, he was recaptured and sent to Green Haven, a virtual fortress that houses the state's only execution chamber and 2,194 of its most violent criminals.
There, the inmate told the staff about his life in Los Angeles. He talked about his mother, Mary, who had given birth to eight children before she had her youngest child, a boy named Kerry. He knew a lot about carpentry. And he remembered spending time at a mental hospital in Los Angeles because he was sick. But he could not understand why he was in prison or why everyone was calling him Robert.
"He looks somewhat confused," wrote Dr. Edward Y. Chung, the psychiatrist who oversaw the inmate's care, "and the response to the questioning is illogical." Harold Roberson, a therapist in the psychiatric unit, recorded similar observations. "He has on several occasions made statements that would indicate delusional thinking," Roberson wrote in the chart. "He stated we are holding him here because he committed no crimes."
The inmate's assertion might well have seemed implausible, given the extensive system of checks and safeguards used in law enforcement to ensure that one person is not mistaken for another. There is a national database of fingerprints and photographs, which are taken when people are arrested; there are lawyers and judges to protect and administer justice; and there are prison staffs with files on the medical, personal and criminal histories of inmates. The United States has had its share of wrongly convicted people, but the idea that a man who had never even been convicted was behind bars seemed inconceivable. That a prison did not know whom it had in custody would mean it had failed the most basic test of its competence and security.
So Sanders was shuttled from his cell to the psychiatric unit and back to his cell again. The staff continued to give him Haldol. He continued to sink deeper into depression and invisibility. Weeks, months and finally two years passed as Mary Sanders Lee searched for her youngest son in the streets of Los Angeles. But she would never find him there.
Kerry Sanders was in Green Haven prison in Stormville, N.Y., serving time for a man named Robert.
Kerry Sanders had a sweet disposition, but he was not someone who had much luck in life. Being born on the particular day of June 25, 1966, would turn out to be his greatest misfortune. He had grown up in the neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles, and by the time he was 27, he had been in and out of mental hospitals for seven years, his body and spirit losing out to the voices in his head. He was found to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and like many people with the disease, he felt the relief and desperation that came with going on and off his medication.
In Mary Lee's search for her son, she wore the colors of the gangs whose territory she passed through.
When Sanders was not in the hospital, he stayed with his mother or one of his sisters. When his demons became too great, he would leave for the streets. On the morning of Oct. 5, 1993, he was sleeping on a bench outside the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center when Richard S. Bentley, a county police officer patrolling the hospital grounds, approached him.
"What's up?" asked Sanders, who was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans and had just opened his eyes.
Officer Bentley's police report shows that he asked Sanders if he was all right or needed medical assistance.
"Of course I'm all right," Sanders replied. "I was just sleeping."
There was a bandage on his leg, and he said he had been treated at the hospital earlier that night. He told the officer he was homeless and showed him hospital identification, which gave his name, Kerry Sanders, and date of birth. The officer asked whether he had "any business" at the hospital.
"No, sir," Sanders answered.
Bentley then cited Sanders for trespassing and radioed the information to a police dispatcher. Up came two warrants under the name Sanders with the birth date of June 25, 1966. One was for Kerry Sanders, for failing to appear at a hearing over a jaywalking ticket in Los Angeles. The other was for Robert Sanders, an escaped felon from New York; it advised "caution."
The warrants listed each man as African-American. Robert Sanders was described as 5 foot 8, 175 pounds and a native of New York City. He had scars on both arms. Kerry Sanders was described as 5 foot 6 and 155 pounds. He had one scar on his left arm.
Bentley said in a recent interview that when he asked Sanders if he used any other names, he responded, "Yes -- Terry and Robert." "I asked him whether he was the Robert Sanders they were looking for in New York," Bentley said, "and he looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Yes, I am."' But in his police report, Bentley listed only "Terry" under nicknames and made no mention of the exchange about New York.
'Well, he's got to be somewhere, kidnapped,' his mother said. 'Somebody got him somewhere locked up, and he can't get to me.'
Bentley told his superiors that he suspected Kerry Sanders was the fugitive Robert Sanders. The case was turned over to the Los Angeles Police Department, and at 11:56 a.m. Kerry Sanders was arrested and booked as Robert Sanders. The booking sheet included Kerry's physical characteristics -- his height and weight, his right thumb print, the scar on his left arm -- and Robert's birthplace and fugitive warrant number.
Within 24 hours, Kerry Sanders's extradition was approved. Within two weeks, he was in the New York State correctional system, answering to the name Robert as well as his own, a confused response that would have devastating results.
A man incapable of making his own breaks, Sanders never got one along the way. In Los Angeles, he was not given the required screening that could have revealed his poor mental state. Police and corrections officials in Los Angeles and New York never noticed that the photographs of the two men did not match -- nor that Robert had multiple tattoos, while Kerry had only a small one on his hand. No one saw that the jaywalking ticket Kerry Sanders received in Los Angeles on July 14, 1993, was issued while Robert Sanders was serving a three-to-nine-year prison term more than 2,800 miles away.
No one ever compared the two men's fingerprints and matched them through the vast national computer database. Had they been checked, a routine law enforcement practice when a felony suspect is apprehended, it could have taken just hours to show that Kerry was the wrong man.
Instead, he found himself in the Municipal Court of Los Angeles the next day, stuck in a holding tank with dozens of other prisoners awaiting hearings. He was assigned a deputy public defender, Stanley I. Efron, who met briefly with him, encouraging him not to fight extradition. Efron said in an interview that he examined the warrant and noticed the physical discrepancies between the two men. But he found them to be innocuous, so he asked his client whether he was Robert Sanders from New York. "Yes," Kerry replied. Efron explained that if he fought extradition, he would only prolong his stay in the county jail before being returned to New York anyway. He said Kerry agreed to sign a waiver.
In his own records, the public defender summarized his meeting with Kerry Sanders this way: "Admits ID. Can't bail. Wants to waive." Efron left blank the other sections on the form for information about the defendant's family, pending cases, prior record and financial status. Efron, 58, who has worked for 30 years in the public defender's office, said Kerry "answered all the questions, and I was convinced he was the guy."
It was one of four extradition cases the public defender handled that morning, and he remembered Kerry as being subdued and slow. "I had to explain things to him more than once," Efron recalled. But he said Kerry's behavior did not set off any alarm bells, nor did the events that followed.
Kerry's fragile grasp on reality grew even weaker in prison.
When Efron gave Kerry copies of the waiver, which began, "I, Robert Sanders, do hereby freely and voluntarily state that I am the identical Robert Sanders," he signed them "Kerry Sanders" and drew doodles all over one copy. The case then moved to Judge Abraham A. Khan, who stopped the proceeding after Kerry said he hadn't even read the form.
"Did you sign it?" Judge Khan asked.
"Yeah," Kerry replied.
"Why did you sign it?"
"Because they told me to sign it."
Khan had the public defender review the form again with his client. Within minutes, both said it had been read and understood. "The court is satisfied," Khan said, moving on.
Kerry's fate now belonged to New York, and on Oct. 20, Sgt. Joseph H. Badstein Jr. and another state correctional officer picked up their prisoner in Los Angeles. It was raining late that night when Kerry, shackled in leg irons, handcuffs, a waist chain and black lockbox, arrived with the two officers at the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, N.Y., a processing center for inmates. The watch commander wrote in his logbook: "11:04 p.m. Received absconder from Fulton C.F. Sanders, Robert #90 A 8885." He was issued an inmate ID card, which he signed "Kerry Sanders." The corrections department typed "Kerry Sanders" into the name line as well. He was taken to the infirmary, given a delousing shower and examined by a nurse, Linda A. Rohling. Within 15 minutes, she concluded that he might be mentally ill. Sanders "claims past psych history," Rohling wrote. He had been taking Haldol, an antipsychotic drug, and Cogentin, which was given to alleviate the physical side effects of Haldol. "Last dose five months ago," she noted.
A social worker, Michelyne Duvivier, who examined him the next morning, checked the records on Robert Sanders, who was in prison five months earlier, and found no history of mental illness. "No records found of psych in prison," she wrote. The significance went unnoticed.
Over the next 12 weeks, Kerry remained in the mental-observation unit at Downstate, one of 35,801 inmates who entered the New York State prison system in 1993. Withdrawn and quiet, he paced back and forth in the unit's recreation area. He giddily said he had "special powers," but they were "good powers" he used to help others. One morning he flooded his cell with water. "He tried to 'wash his clothing' in the toilet," the chart says. "Sees nothing unusual about this behavior." He also repeatedly asked why he was locked up, pleading with one nurse, "When can I go home?" The nurse later wrote that he was still confused about where he was, even claiming "disbelief that this was a prison."
At the end of December, Kerry was transferred to Green Haven, a maximum-security prison about 60 miles north of Manhattan. Given that Robert Sanders had absconded from a minimum-security site, it was determined that he would require a more secure location. The New York authorities, now believing they had their man, pulled Robert Sanders's fugitive warrant from the national computer system.
The youngest of nine children, kerry sanders had a singular connection with his mother, Mary Sanders Lee. When she dropped him off at elementary school, the teachers told her that she might as well stay, too, because her son would chase after her anyway. When Kerry and his friends swooped through the streets on their bikes, she followed them in her car. "He was the leader of all devilment," Lee said of her rambunctious son. "He was a good little boy."
Kerry's father, John Sanders, a gas-station attendant in Watts, was Lee's second husband. She has been married three times and widowed just as many, and for long periods struggled financially to support her nine children.
As a young child, Kerry had a healthy mind and body, and his family remembers the little boy who played with his hamster and his dog and loved to read. "He was a whiz in books," said his sister Diane, who is three years older than Kerry and used to get help from him with her homework. But as Kerry got older, his family life became increasingly turbulent. His father died when he was a teenager. His brother Carl was killed in a police shooting. Two other brothers were in and out of jail.
'He got medication, free meal, food, everything,' one of Kerry's prison doctors said. 'He should say, "Thank you, for two years you guys treated me very nicely."'
Mary Lee hoped Kerry would go to college like another son, Gilbert, who became a music professor. But her youngest child was not inter-ested. "He wasn't going to go to no college," she said. "I wasn't going to make no professor out of him."
After high school, Kerry enlisted in the Job Corps in San Bernar-dino, Calif., where he learned carpentry skills and fell in love with a girl named Kim, whose name he had tattooed on the back of his right hand. They had a baby, a daughter. But Kim's parents didn't approve of him and soon took mother and child away.
By the summer of 1986, when Kerry was 20, psychological problems began to manifest themselves. He told doctors at one psychiatric ward that he had been hearing voices for five years. "He kept the voices a secret until one month ago, when they became intolerable," a doctor wrote. "The voices now tell him to kill himself, and he feels he may lose control." The doctors diagnosed schizophrenia and chronic paranoia and put him on antipsychotic medication.
Over the next six years, Kerry floated among hospitals, the streets and the homes of family members, struggling with the hallucinations and delusions, the disorganized speech and erratic behavior, caused by his illness. He could be stubborn and frightening and difficult to control. "Every once in a while he would at least come home to eat," said a cousin, Linda Evans. "We'd have to hold him down to get a shower."
Mary Lee welcomed her son at the door when he showed up and prayed when he left. She took him to psychiatrists and to hospitals. She befriended the owners of delicatessens, doughnut shops and check-cashing stores on the streets where Kerry roamed, asking them to keep an eye out for her son. And she tried to focus on the better times: Kerry, when stabilized on medication, would dance with his niece and watch his baby cousin and spend hours at his mother's home, reading magazines and mysteries and books on carpentry. He promised to build her a house someday. "I told him, 'I be so old I won't be able to sit down in it,"' Lee recalled. "He said, 'Momma, you don't know what I'll do for you, so hush."'
In the summer of 1993, Kerry was once again off his medication and living on the streets, and he was out of touch with his family for weeks at a time. On July 14, the police stopped him for crossing against a red light. He was issued a ticket for jaywalking but did not appear for a hearing. A misdemeanor warrant was issued for his arrest and entered in the police computer.
By late fall, Lee became alarmed when she still hadn't heard from Kerry and he hadn't shown up to get his monthly disability check. She said she took the uncashed check to the Social Security office, telling a clerk that she had no idea where her son had gone.
On Dec. 29, 1993, Kerry Sanders arrived at Green Haven, a sprawling compound of weathered concrete buildings on 928 acres of Dutchess County farmland. Low-rising corridors connect each of its nine cellblocks like a maze, giving boundary to several grassy prison yards and numerous guarded checkpoints.
Sanders was constantly being moved between his cell and the psychiatric ward. He was a stocky man, soft-fleshed and gentle, and his round face made him look much younger than his 27 years. From the beginning, he was a peculiarity to the staff and other inmates -- silent, withdrawn, disoriented.
Soon after his arrival, Sanders met Dr. Chung, the psychiatrist who would supervise his care. The prisoner was cooperative but had problems, Chung wrote in the chart. His posture was rigid, his gait not spontaneous. "He looks like a zombie," the doctor noted, ordering that Kerry remain on Haldol and stay in the psychiatric unit "for closer observation."
On Jan. 3, 1994, Sanders attended his first weekly session with the mental health team assigned to his case. A nurse, Silvia Koola, wrote in his chart that he "observed that he was confused and does not know why he is in New York prison; even his homeland is Los Angeles." She added, "He also was telling he does not know what crime he did and his name is not Robert."
In mid-January, Sanders was transferred to the third tier of A Block, one of several cramped cellblocks on the west side of the compound, near the psychiatric facility, a prison yard and the mess hall. At times, the grayness of the place was consumed by its own monotonous noise, of bars clanging, of inmates being led through the corridors, of guards yelling out orders and counting the jumpsuited men in their cells.
It was a world in which Sanders feared to be alone but was more fearful of being with others. He spent most of his time in his cell, making occasional trips to the yard to smoke, to watch television or to play dominos or cards. His counselors remarked that he befriended no one and that they could not get him to participate in group activities like the video club or table games. "He has a psychiatric disorder," a social worker, Donald L. Hanson, noted. "He needs a supportive environment."
The staff listened to him talk about his family, his woodworking and his stays in mental hospitals in California. They wrote it all down, meticulously. None of it matched the information the prison system had on Robert Sanders, but no one noticed anyway.
Chung continued to see Kerry regularly, usually once a month, in his office in the psychiatric unit. The doctor reported after each session that the patient was "doing well." Other mental health workers described a grimmer picture.
On the evening of July 7, 1994, a guard found a frightened Sanders acting bizarrely in his cell and escorted him to the psychiatric unit. "He appears somewhat confused," wrote Dr. Stanley Skollar, the psychiatrist on duty. "He is willing to accept medication but indicates that because of this 'fright' he didn't sleep last night and 'will not sleep tonight.' We will give him his Haldol."
On Aug. 5, Chung wrote in his notes that Sanders said he was pregnant; the doctor also observed that Sanders was "doing well" in his daily activities.
That month, Hanson, the social worker, noted that Sanders was doing poorly in his academic classes. Harold Roberson, the recreational therapist, wrote that Sanders was depressed and tired. "Client continues to feel that we are holding him here," he added, "often asking when are we going to let him go home."
On Sept. 16, Chung wrote that Sanders no longer believed he was pregnant and that he was doing better in his classes. "He sleeps well and eats well."
One week later, on Sept. 23, Roberson observed Sanders to be hearing voices and talking to himself. That same day, Chung noted that he was smiling and laughing inappropriately. He said he was 24 years old, even though he was 28. "He is doing well," the doctor wrote.
On Oct. 20, 1994, as Sanders's first year in prison ended, Roberson wrote that the prisoner was still hearing voices and complaining, "They won't let me go home."
Mary Lee tied a handkerchief around her head and set out by bus and then foot to search the streets of South-Central where she knew Kerry liked to hang out: Florence, Hoover, Figueroa. She had been looking for her son for months, knocking on doors, going in and out of stores and showing Kerry's photograph to as many people as she could. Her road map, she said, was "wherever you think his mind would think to take him."
The blocks, many of them burned out and deserted, the remnants of the Rodney King rioting in 1992, were controlled by rival gangs, and Lee, 60 and practical, did not hesitate to rely on them to help her on her way. When she finished on one block, gang members guided her to the next one, whistling loudly as they passed her into new territory. She changed the handkerchief around her head to match the next gang's colors and kept going.
The search was exhausting. One day, dispirited, she found herself being encouraged by a young boy who walked alongside her. "Mary Mother, she been crying like you when Jesus was missing them three years," he told her. "So you crying about your son? What about Jesus, who died for us?"
It was "the beautifulest thing that I ever heard a young boy tell me in my life," said Lee, the granddaughter of a Baptist minister. "I really did step fast then, when that child told me that."
She felt driven to find her son, she said, despite the conviction of family members that her search was futile. Some of her children suggested that she hold a memorial service for Kerry and grew concerned when she said she could hear his voice. "Round by dusk, dark, I could hear him calling," Lee explained. "I could hear the sound of keys, the rattling of keys. I kept telling them: 'Well, he's got to be somewhere, kidnapped. Somebody got him somewhere locked up, and he can't get to me. I keep hearing him say, 'Momma,' and I know I'm not going crazy."
She combed the parks, skid row and hospitals and pleaded with the homeless. She sent Kerry's picture to the Sally Jessy Raphael show after seeing a program about missing family members. And she forced herself to make trips to the county morgue, where she asked about the latest "John Doe" bodies. "I didn't have it in my heart that my son was dead," Lee said. "If he's dead, I'm dead."
She became a regular at the police station in her neighborhood, seeking out officers who patrolled the streets and knew her son. When she wasn't at the station house, she was phoning the officers there to see if there was any news. "Did you pick him up or anything?" she asked them. "I hope I'll find him 'fore you do."
When Kerry Sanders arrived at Green Haven, his hold on reality was faint and fragile: he knew his name, he knew details about his family and life in Los Angeles and he remembered his time in the Job Corps. By the fall of 1994, as he entered his second year in the prison, that thread of sanity was all but vanished. As the voices in his head grew louder, so did his chattering. "He said he was aware of it and it will not happen again," Hanson wrote after other prisoners complained that Sanders was keeping them up at night. As the months dragged on, so did Sanders's solitary routines. "He rarely comes to staff to complain about anything except, 'When am I going to be let out of here?"' Roberson observed on Nov. 23, 1994.
There was a widespread view among the staff that Sanders's questioning did not need to be investigated. Juan Villalba, a correctional officer assigned to inmates with psychiatric problems, would later say that Sanders came to him at least once a week, asking: "Mr. Poncho, when they going to let me go? I didn't do nothing." Villalba, who said he heard such complaints from many prisoners, humored Sanders, saying he would be released "one of these days."
Michael S. Rassin, another recreational therapist, would also later acknowledge that Sanders possibly said to him as many as 75 times, "I don't know why I'm here." Rassin told him to write to the superintendent.
At the start of 1995, Sanders's questioning became more frequent as he grew more desperate. The psychiatric chart shows:
JANUARY: Admits he hears voices. States he is depressed because he is in prison and there is nothing he can do about it.
MARCH: Says we are holding him here because he committed no crimes. Will be encouraged to come to the staff and talk when he feels he has a problem.
Chung said in a recent interview that he saw his job as limited to treating the patient's psychotic symptoms, not exploring his claims of wrongful imprisonment. "Not my responsibility," he said.
Chung was the only employee at Green Haven who agreed to be interviewed for this article. At 71, he is a veteran of the state system, having spent 10 years at Green Haven before recently moving to another prison. Born in North Korea, he escaped at the age of 15 to the South, where he went on to attend medical school. In 1977, he moved to the United States and completed a residency in psychiatry.
At Green Haven, he said he saw 50 to 75 patients a week and did not remember the Sanders case specifically, but after reviewing a copy of his handwritten notes in the chart, he confirmed his participation. Chung said that many prisoners made claims of innocence: "Ninety-nine percent of people deny that they are criminals." He said some of his patients "claim they came from heaven, and some of those, that they are Jesus Christ."
By the summer of 1995, the line between reality and delusion disappeared for Sanders. Some members of the staff were calling him Kerry as well as Robert. The chart continues:
JUNE: "I hear these voices." Says he sees his mother in the prison.
AUGUST: Says people are coming out of the walls. Unable to sleep.
SEPTEMBER: Expressing thoughts about being held in prison by the staff against his will.
A man who was known on the streets as "chicken" was waiting for the bus and 26 pounds of crack cocaine at the Greyhound terminal in Cleveland on Oct. 7, 1995, when the federal agents showed up. The Drug Enforcement Administration had been tipped off about the drug deal, but its agents had no idea what else they were about to discover when they made their arrest.
The man they apprehended had a muscular build and a long face. He had many tattoos and scars. He showed them a license bearing the name Laradney J. Dixon and an address in Cleveland. One agent suspected that it was a fake, especially after noticing that one tattoo on his arm read "Robert." Unsure of the man's identity, the agents took fingerprints and sent them to the F.B.I. in Washington. Within hours, the D.E.A. learned that the prints matched those of a felon named Robert Sanders. But he was supposedly sitting in a prison in New York.
Lillian Capuano was working as a clerk in charge of inmate records at Green Haven when the D.E.A.'s call came in. An agent told her he had the fugitive Robert Sanders in custody. She said that was impossible; he was already at Green Haven. The agent, to prove his contention, asked her to send Robert Sanders's fingerprints to the F.B.I.
Capuano, suspicious, noted in a memo that she called the bureau to verify that the D.E.A.'s request was real. Reassured, she sent the prints the prison system had on file for Robert Sanders, taken during his initial imprisonment in 1990. They matched those of the man arrested in Cleveland.
Mystified, officials at Green Haven then fingerprinted the inmate they had imprisoned for two years as Robert Sanders. In all the time since Kerry's arrest on the bench in Los Angeles, this was the first instance his prints had been taken and examined. They matched none in the F.B.I.'s files. On Oct. 26, Capuano began to pore through prison records and discovered that since the inmate was brought back to New York, he had been "signing Kerry Sanders, not Robert Sanders."
Later that day, George W. Seyfert 3rd, a deputy inspector general with the New York State Department of Correctional Services, was called to Green Haven and began his own review of the files on Robert Sanders. They showed that Robert Sanders had been arrested several times before he shot a man over cocaine in Harlem in 1990. He was sentenced to three to nine years in prison. He was fingerprinted, photographed and assigned identification No. 90 A 8885. A clerk wrote that he was "adjusting without incident" and that he had no medical or psychiatric problems. The files also showed that after three years in the New York system, Robert Sanders was moved to Fulton State Correctional Facility in the Bronx. Under its work-release program, he was allowed to leave each morning at 8 to work in a Harlem barbershop. He came back every day at 3, except on Aug. 30, 1993, when he didn't.
At 12:30 p.m. on Oct. 26, 1995, Seyfert, who had settled into a conference room that is used for parole hearings, called for the "inmate who claims to be Kerry Sanders." He looked at Kerry and at the photograph of Robert Sanders. There was no resemblance. Over the next hour, Seyfert questioned Kerry, who responded slowly, mumbling and slurring his words at times. But the inspector heard and wrote down what he needed to know:
Kerry Sanders. Date of birth: June 25, 1966. Born in Los Angeles in a hospital near the Coliseum where the Rams played. His father was John Sanders; he died in 1982. His mother was Mary. His sister was Roberta. He had a brother who died. He named his other brothers: Don, Rickey, Gilbert. He gave his Social Security number. "I used to work as a carpenter," he said.
Kerry told Seyfert that he was arrested for "sleeping on a park bench" in Los Angeles. He said he answered to the name Robert after his arrest there but had never used the name before that. Seyfert asked him if he ever did anything wrong. Kerry began to ramble on about an incident in which he said he shot a wall while baby-sitting in Arizona.
Had he ever done anything else wrong? Seyfert asked.
"Masturbate -- that's it," Kerry said.
The inspector had one more question. "How are you doing here?"
"I'm O.K.," Kerry replied. "It's good here, but you wouldn't like it."
With Robert Sanders now in federal custody in Cleveland in the crack cocaine case, the authorities in New York were determined to have him serve out the remaining time on his original state sentence. So they reposted the warrant for his arrest in the national database.
Meanwhile, Seyfert began trying to reach Kerry's family. On the afternoon of Oct. 27, he tracked down Mary Lee's phone number and began dialing. She picked up the phone. Seyfert asked her to hold for a minute, and then put Kerry on the line.
"Hello? Yes -- Momma?"
Five hours after Seyfert's phone call, Sergeant Badstein, one of the New York correctional officers who flew to Los Angeles two years earlier, took Kerry back home. "Here come Kerry with a red sweater on and some blue jeans, and he's so glad to see his Momma, he didn't know what to do," Lee remembered. "I said: 'Where your coat at? You been in New York? You mean to tell me that you didn't have no coat on up in New York? You get devil cold."'
Lee hugged her son and hugged the two Los Angeles police officers who escorted him from the airport. She invited them in for coffee as she and her family celebrated Kerry's return, but the officers declined. Badstein, in a memo to his supervisor, seemed pleased with Lee's reaction and that New York's role had remained largely invisible. "She was only interested in his safe return," Badstein wrote, adding that Kerry's mother "thanked us profusely."
He noted that there were "no press or media cameras or the like" and that Lee "did not ask my name, nor did anyone else in her apartment. No identification was requested and none was offered. All parties seemed satisfied to see only the uniforms of the L.A.P.D. escorts." Badstein said he left Kerry with nothing that "bore the name" of Green Haven or the New York corrections department. Kerry was sent home with $48.13, a plastic bag with some medicine, a soda and a pack of cigarettes -- but with no explanation for his imprisonment or recommendations on following up his psychiatric care. It was Kerry who told his family about his time in prison. "They took me to New York," he said to his sister Roberta. "It was so cold there. They put me in this little room."
Then his family tried to find out more. His mother ultimately contacted Green Haven's superintendent, Christopher P. Artuz. "My son is mentally challenged," she wrote on Dec. 6, 1995. "He does not remember everything, and I need this information."
Anthony J. Annucci, deputy commissioner and the top lawyer for the corrections department, responded two months later. He suggested that Kerry was mostly to blame for his imprisonment, noting that he had answered to "Robert" at the time of his arrest and in Green Haven. "The diminished mental faculties of Kerry Sanders apparently were a significant reason why this error went undetected for as long as it had," Annucci wrote. "I deeply regret any hardship to Kerry Sanders and his family occasioned by this case of mistaken identity."
In the two years after Kerry's release, his family said they saw a disturbed man deteriorate further. "He wasn't the same," Roberta said. He had flashbacks and shortness of breath. He told his sister and her daughter that he had been sexually assaulted in prison. When he slept at Roberta's house, he kept the lights on. When they watched television, she said he would suddenly shout as if he were back in his cell, "Man, leave my stuff alone!" or "Don't get on my bunk." His moods grew more erratic, his behavior more volatile. He went on and off his medication and often went back to the streets.
On the evening of Jan. 10, 1997, two officers spotted Kerry crossing against a "Don't Walk" sign on Florence Avenue, forcing cars to brake suddenly as they exited the freeway. They stopped him and asked him for his name and birth date. They radioed the information to the dispatcher and heard back about the felony warrant for Robert Sanders from New York. The police in Los Angeles apparently did not notice that Robert Sanders was in prison in the federal cocaine case. The officers pressed ahead.
According to their report, they asked Kerry whether he knew there was a warrant for him in New York and he responded: "Yes, I was there 10 months ago, and I used the name Robert Sanders. Here, in California, I use the name Kerry Sanders so no one will know I'm Robert Sanders."
Kerry Sanders was booked and jailed as Robert Sanders, with "Kerry" listed as an alias. Again, the police did not check fingerprints. They notified prison authorities in New York that they had Robert Sanders in custody. Three days later, New York said to let him go, and the case was dismissed. "Wrong suspect, exonerated," the police report says. When he saw his mother, Kerry told her what happened. "I been in jail for Robert Sanders again," he said. "Momma, they cannot keep Robert Sanders in jail. He got to do his own time by himself, Momma."
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you." So read the sign hanging in the waiting room of the psychiatric unit at Green Haven when Benjamin Schonbrun, a lawyer in a small civil rights practice in Los Angeles, visited the prison in May. Its sting was not lost on Schonbrun, who went there to talk to staff members who treated Kerry during his time there.
Shortly after her son's return, Mary Lee hired Schonbrun's firm to file a federal civil rights lawsuit against the authorities in New York and Los Angeles. Five years later, they are still trying to sort out moral, legal and financial responsibility for what happened. Lee hopes that any damages will enable her son to afford better psychiatric care, a wish that has become a backdrop of the case.
The lawsuit argues that Kerry's imprisonment not only damaged his already poor mental health but has also had residual effects in the years since his return home. In the spring of 1998, he was arrested three times. The police said he defaced a window at a Jack in the Box, destroyed a beauty shop door and was found one day with a semiautomatic rifle he had picked out of a garbage bin.
This January, the law firm negotiated a $290,000 settlement with Los Angeles County for its role in the case. In a letter to the county board of supervisors, the county's own lawyers sharply criticized the police, the public defender and jail officials, noting that the most basic screening tools of law enforcement, fingerprints and photographs, were abandoned. "Further," the county's lawyers wrote, "there was no suspicion that Kerry Lee Sanders suffered from mental illness that would have alerted individuals to the fact that they might have the wrong person in custody."
In New York, the attorney general's office has chosen to fight the lawsuit in Federal District Court in Manhattan, not disputing that Kerry was wrongly imprisoned but denying any liability. It first claimed that the suit should be dismissed because the statute of limitations had run out; it soon withdrew that argument. It also contended that to bring the suit, Kerry had to meet strict legal requirements that apply to prisoners. Judge Deborah A. Batts, who has not hid her disdain for some of the state's arguments, found this one to be "without merit." The requirements didn't apply, she ruled, because Kerry shouldn't have been a prisoner in the first place.
State officials, including spokesmen for the Department of Correctional Services, the Office of Mental Health -- which runs the psychiatric unit at Green Haven -- and the attorney general's office have refused to comment because of the pending lawsuit.
Paul Shechtman, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the correctional system from 1995 to 1996 as the criminal justice adviser to Governor Pataki, called the case remarkable. "Whatever else," Shechtman said, "it does seem that it's appropriate for the state to say mea culpa."
As recently as this spring, the state attorney general's office informed Kerry's lawyers that except for the psychiatric records, all other files pertaining to his two years in the prison had been lost. A trial date has not been set.
Since last October, Schonbrun and two of his partners, Wilmer J. Harris and Michael D. Seplow, have been taking depositions from prison and mental health employees involved in the case. Almost all those involved see themselves as blameless, saying they were not responsible for checking into Sanders's claims of innocence. "I let him know there was nothing I could do," said Michael Rassin, the recreational therapist.
"I am not a legal aid society," Harold Roberson, the other recreational therapist, said.
"It's not my job -- I don't do that," said Silvia Koola, the nurse.
Questioned about Kerry's release from Green Haven, Sergeant Badstein, the correctional officer who wrote to his boss that he did not show ID when he accompanied Kerry home, said, "All of our transports are low profile." Badstein also now maintains that he told Mary Lee who he was.
Seyfert, the deputy inspector general, asked whether he arranged any follow-up care for Kerry, said it was not the state's responsibility. "My jurisdiction ended at the door of the Green Haven Correctional Facility." Seyfert, who has worked for the corrections department for 25 years, said the Sanders case was the only one he was aware of in the state system in which an innocent man, unable to speak for himself, was picked up and put in jail in place of an escaped convict. He acknowledged, however, that he had not investigated whether there were any other such cases.
In the suit, the lawyers also contend that Kerry was sexually assaulted in prison and that his comments to the staff that he was pregnant should have been seen as a sign from a mentally ill man that he was raped. Dr. Chung, asked in his interview about Kerry's pregnancy comment, said it can be viewed only one way: "Just nonsense."
"Do you think it makes any sense that a male is pregnant?" Chung asked. "If the patient is female, then it can make sense. Maybe rape or some relationship. Even if he had a relationship with others, a male can't be pregnant." Asked whether Kerry might have been signaling that he had been raped, Chung said, "We say, G.O.K. -- God only knows."
Of the more than 20 people who have testified in depositions or been interviewed for this article, only one official expressed shock at Kerry's imprisonment. Wayne L. Strack, a deputy commissioner for corrections at the time, said he was "flabbergasted" when he learned about the case.
"With all the checks and balances that we've got, I can't understand how it happened," Strack said in a deposition. "I mean, it's drilled in you from Day 1 of the job: You take an inmate, you're responsible, you identify him. I mean -- my mind goes boggled." He said the responsibility was broad because "too many things happened."
The issues of responsibility and culpability, of quality of care and of monumental and systematic failings continue to surround the lawsuit. Yet in 2,000 pages of depositions, there have been few displays of compassion and fewer of outrage. At Green Haven, no one on the staff was even told what happened, and no one asked. One day, Kerry Sanders just disappeared.
Chung, only recently learning the details, said it was better for Kerry to be in prison than wandering the streets. "He got medication, free meal, food, everything," the doctor said in his deposition. "He should say, 'Thank you, for two years you guys treated me very nicely."'
Kerry Sanders turned 34 on June 25 and he says he is "ready for the future." Since March, he has been staying at a supervised board-and-care residence in Los Angeles, where he has his own room and a structured schedule. A psychiatrist visits him once a month, and a nurse dispenses his medication, cooks his meals, organizes his activities and makes sure he rises each day at 6 so he will be ready for a van that takes him to a therapy center for counseling and classes.
His room at the residence is spare but neat, and he has his own stereo. He spends his time playing cassettes -- the Temptations and Tyrone Davis are among his favorites -- watching Superman cartoons and talking with his housemates. "Two girls and six guys -- and me," Kerry said in one of several recent interviews. He can sign out to walk to a nearby park or to a grocery store, where he buys cigarettes and chips. His mother, now 67, visits him regularly, and she can take him home on weekends to her apartment in Inglewood, where he can see his sisters and their children.
Kerry remains stocky, his movement slowed by medication, his speech tentative, his memory clouded. But he can recall some of his two years at the prison. "When I got invited to go to New York, I don't know what happened," he said. "They picked me up, and they asked me if I was Kerry Sanders or Robert Sanders. I told them my name was Kerry Sanders."
"It was just horrible," he added. "Going in and out of cells every day. Going to dinner. Standing at attention." He cried and prayed a lot. "I wanted to get out, and I wanted to come home," Kerry said. "It was like losing oxygen."
After so many chaotic years, Kerry's life is more stable now, and he seems unencumbered by bitterness or anger over what happened to him. Yet he has a sad resignation about what he knows his future will mean. "It will be the same as it is today," Kerry said.
Robert Sanders remains in federal prison in the Cleveland drug case, serving a 15-year sentence. New York still has the warrant out for his arrest.
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COMMENTARY
D'Andre Brown's basketball dream
Updated: August 21, 2013, 7:24 PM ET
By Kiese Laymon | ESPN.com
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Players worked out for the D-League in 2008.
"They judge us for wanting to be professional basketball players, and I get it," he tells me. "I'm trying to be great at my job. That's what I'm doing. How many of us can ever say we're working an honest job we love and chasing a dream? What's wrong with that?"
D'Andre Brown is not rich; nor is he comfortable. Most folks in Brown's hometown of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., don't know he averaged 22, 10 and 5 in a professional league called the Mongolian National Basketball Association. People in airports around the world see a 6-foot-5 frame, long tatted arms, dunking scars on his wrists, hands as expansive as spider webs, gear slightly less weird-boy-fresh than Russell Westbrook, and they wonder, often aloud, if Brown is a professional athlete they should know.
"I'm a baller," he tells me, sitting outside the gym where we met 10 years ago. "That's all people need to know. That's my profession."
"So what," I tell him. "The kind of balling you do, isn't that more like a part-time job? Don't you want to actually have a profession?"
"I have a profession," he smirks. "I told you. I'm a baller."
"You get insurance for balling?" I ask him. "Professions usually come with insurance."
"I'm doing what makes me happy and healthy," he tells me. "And I'm getting paid for it."
Brown eats, sleeps and travels the world off of his ability to help professional teams in Mexico, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and recently, Mongolia, put a 22-ounce orange ball through a hole more times than the opposing team. "That," he wants to convince me, "is the only thing real ballers do. I don't need insurance for that."
"That is exactly why you need insurance. Look at Lenny Cooke and [Allen] Iverson," I tell him. "They were real ballers, too, until they weren't. Don't you think all young black men need multiple plans, or at least two dreams, nowadays?"
"Word?" he says, slowly shaking his head and looking past me. "This is where we're going with this interview, Kiese? You gonna tell me to pull my pants up and take off my hoodie next?"
I
met Brown after I'd come to work at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., from graduate school at Indiana University. Before moving north at 20 years old, I grew up in Jackson, Miss., a city that helped produce blue-chip ballers: James Robinson, Lindsey Hunter, Othella Harrington, Jerrod Ward, Ryan Lorthridge, Ronnie Henderson, Trey Johnson, Mo Williams and Monta Ellis.
At some point in junior high or high school, thousands of black boys in Jackson believed we, too, were destined for the NBA because we could shoot the 3, or touch the top of the square, or knock down a midrange jump shot with ease. Realistically, we were black boys whose baller dreams far eclipsed our baller talent, and Jackson was small enough that nearly all of us had some relationship with real ballers who were literally some of the best players in the country.
Most of us could point to that one day, in someone's backyard, at the Air Base, at Lake Hico, at the Y or in a high school gymnasium, when one of those real ballers dunked, blocked, no-looked or shot the air right out of our NBA aspirations.
For me, it was the night I came back to Jackson for Christmas break. I made the varsity team the previous year as a 9th grader at St. Joe High School in Jackson, and spent my 10th grade year playing junior varsity at nationally ranked DeMatha High School in Hyattsville, Md. During the Christmas break, I watched a sophomore I played pickup with named Othella Harrington make every shot he attempted in warm-ups, the first half, halftime and the second half of a game at Murrah High School. Harrington finished with over 40 points, 12 dunks and over 20 rebounds and hardly played the fourth quarter.
The next year, Harrington and Jason Kidd were the No. 1-ranked juniors in the country, and I started imagining life as a teacher and writer.
[+] EnlargeD'Andre Brown
Courtesy of D'Andre Brown
You've probably never seen D'Andre Brown dunk, but he plans to change that.
Brown had a far different experience. Though there were plenty of supremely skilled, slightly older players in Poughkeepsie like Renard Brown and Dasham Allah, he'd never seen a nationally ranked basketball player born and raised in Poughkeepsie.
I met Brown playing in Vassar's gym during the summer 2003. At 16, he had a 40-inch vertical, the ability to finish and size that I didn't see in a lot of younger players in the area.
Brown told me the second time I played with him that he was going to the NBA. He also told me that he had never played a quarter of organized basketball because of poor grades.
Before his 10th grade season even started, Brown and one of his best friends, Stef Singleton, went into the Arlington High School gym where the cheerleaders left their purses, cell phones and book bags during a football game.
One cheerleader's cell phone left the gym in Brown's pocket.
A couple of days later, a cop knocked on the door of his Canterbury Garden apartment. After the arrest, his high school coach said that no matter how good Brown was, he and the other assistant coaches didn't feel comfortable with a thief on the team.
"They didn't trust me," Brown tells me with a deep sigh. "It's deeper than that, but in the end, I should have known I had a shorter leash because of who I was, you know? I just messed up. Bad. No excuses."
The following summer, Brown was admitted to a school in New York City called Our Savior New American School after one of the coaches saw him play at the Stony Brook basketball camp. Oumar Sylla, who later played at Richmond, and Juan Diego Tello Palacios, who later played at Louisville, were on the team when Brown arrived.
"Our Savior was the first place I'd ever really second-guessed my skills. Tello was the best I'd ever seen at that point. Period. And Oumar just murdered people on defense," Brown says, leaning back in his chair. "He was so good that he made you second-guess every move you wanted to make. He was the first player to show me that good defense had to be played offensively. I never forgot that."
Brown says his Our Savior team regularly competed against future NBA players like Rudy Gay, CJ Watson, Leon Powe, Sebastian Telfair, Joey Dorsey and Danny Green.
"I didn't respect those dudes at all," Brown tells me. "No one on my team respected them. And they didn't respect us either. Maybe it was a New York thing. We just figured, 'Hey, they gotta stand in front of us just like we gotta stand in front of them.'"
Brown came off the bench and contributed significantly his first year at Our Savior. He received a number of letters from Division I programs and claims his coaches at Our Savior told him he would move into the starting lineup the following year. Over the summer, Our Savior picked up three recruits from France and Brown was coming off the bench again. Though his first year at Our Savior had been success on and off the court, Brown felt misled by his coaches.
"My problem was my attitude," he says. "I just didn't think anyone was really better than me, which meant that no one could coach me. I remember playing in the same tournament where LeBron's team was playing. I didn't even think LeBron was better than me. It's weird but I'm serious. If you had better numbers than me, I assumed it was because of the system you played in, or because you were more coachable than me. The thing was, I never learned to be coachable because I was never coached."
A tiny prep school called Christian Military & Industrial School from my hometown traveled to play Our Savior early in Brown's second season. Two of Brown's friends from Poughkeepsie, Tatum Butler and Ricky Bailey, were doing post-grad years at CM&I. Our Savior beat the brakes off of CM&I that night, but Brown didn't play nearly as much as he wanted to. After the game, Brown talked to the CM&I coach about his situation.
An hour later, CM&I had a new player on its bus named D'Andre Brown. He was headed to Jackson, Miss.
On Jan. 2, 2004, a month after Brown left Our Savior for CM&I, a van carrying Brown's former teammates flipped on North Carolina Highway 150. One of Brown's closest friends, Kevin Mormin, a 7-foot-3 junior center from Paris, was killed in the accident. Three other players ended up in critical condition.
"I made a bad decision leaving Our Savior the way I did, but that bad decision, it literally saved my life because on most of our trips, I sat right across from Kevin."
Reeling from the death of his friend, Brown tried to make the most of his experience in a new environment. "Everybody was nice in Mississippi. We stayed with the headmaster sometimes and with a host family other times. I thought Poughkeepsie had poverty, but you don't even know poverty until you see how they live in Mississippi. I remember putting sheets of loose leaf paper underneath our palms when we did push-ups in the house just so roaches wouldn't crawl over our hands."
Brown earned a B average during his time at CM&I. He says he had every intention of playing for Florida International after he graduated. "I passed my ACT but I was late getting the information to the [NCAA] Clearinghouse so the coach suggested I go to Daytona Beach Community College until all the paperwork was taken care of. Daytona held my transcript. I put myself in the worst position of looking for a hook-up, and when that hook-up didn't come through, I was back to square one."
A
fter less than a semester, Brown was back in Poughkeepsie. His new plan was to take courses at Dutchess Community College and hopefully transfer to a Division I or II program after a year.
On the morning on Dec. 5, 2005, Brown got a call that a Cadillac SUV belonging to his childhood friend, Stef Singleton, was abandoned over on Corlies Avenue. When Brown got to Corlies, he saw Stef's SUV surrounded by uniformed and plainclothes policemen.
"They described the dude who was shot and that description didn't match Stef, so I figured someone must have tried to jack him and Stef just did what he had to do to defend himself."
Brown managed to get closer to the SUV and eventually saw Singleton's body slumped in the driver's seat.
"I needed to be home when Stef got murdered." Brown stands up for the first time during our conversation. "Even if I was somewhere far away like California, I would have come back home after Stef died. I would have had to. Bad decisions led me back to Poughkeepsie but that's where I needed to be."
Brown fell into a deep depression after Singleton's murder and didn't leave his house for four months. He stayed away from organized basketball for the next three years. "That was the only time in my life that I can say I gave up on my dream. It's more like I gave up on dreaming all together. I think I'd always used basketball to like, cope, to bring some joy to my life. After Stef got murdered, I don't know man. It's just, Stef was a dreamer, too. Just like me."
In 2008, Brown was recruited by Indian River Junior College, in Fort Pierce, Fla. Brown ended up averaging close to 8 points and 4 rebounds his first season, and upped those averages to 11 and 6 his second season. Then, he says, "The school went from a two-year junior college to a four-year state school."
While Brown was preparing for his junior year in 2010-11, at what is now called Indian River State College, he got a call from an agent saying that a league in Mexico wanted him to come play professionally.
"I didn't care about NCAA eligibility," he says. "I thought playing professional basketball, even if it was in Mexico, would get me closer to the NBA than playing two more years at Indian River. I couldn't wait for tomorrow."
At this point in the conversation, Brown is watching me shake my head. He wants to talk about the past three years of his life he's spent playing professional basketball in Mexico, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and recently Mongolia. "Go ahead and say it," he says.
"You already know what I think," I tell him. "I just know you'd have more stability and more choices in your life if you stayed in school and earned that degree."
"It's good to be getting paid to do what I love," he finally says. "But my dream is the NBA. I'm closer to the NBA than I was when we met. Plus, I'm working. I have a job. You see how many of us are unemployed our here?"
"But you already reached a dream," I tell him. "At some point, we all wanted to get paid to play. You don't get it but you already reached the dream we all had. You traveled the world off of basketball. Who can say that? Don't you think it's time to start working a real job?"
"A lot of people who come from places like us, they chase that fast money because tomorrow, you could be locked up," he tells me. "Or worse. They always say that we should be working, but they never look at it from our perspective. That's what LeBron meant when he said, 'I'm not even supposed to be here.' People think he meant on that stage, but for so many of us, it means just being alive doing what we love. We aren't supposed to be here. You aren't supposed to be here writing and teaching." Brown's left hand is loosely balled up in a huge fist. "But you are here. And I'm proud of you. Be proud of me. I understand the system, Kiese. I'm not chasing fast money. I'm not even chasing slow money. I worked for almost nothing in Mexico. In the Dominican Republic, they tried to jerk me out of my whole check. But still, I was working a job I loved, chasing a dream. And I'm better at my profession today than I was a few months ago. I'm a good basketball player, and I'm still getting better."
K
arl Egner, an older guy who manages the gym, tells us it's time to leave. Brown grabs his ball and his bag. I grab my computer and my notebook. Out in the parking lot, I ask if he needs a ride to his mother's house.
"I know that people think I should be chasing a regular job right now," he tells me from the passenger seat of my car. "I'm not dumb. Right now, I'm working. And my work took me to countries I never even knew existed."
I'm quiet for a few seconds before admitting to him that I just got a passport a few months ago in order to go to an American Studies conference in Puerto Rico.
"But you don't need a passport for Puerto Rico," he tells me and laughs for about three blocks. "You're a professor at Vassar and you didn't even know that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory?"
I'm laughing with him.
"You see what I'm saying then?" he says. "People like us, we don't get to go to Mongolia following our dreams. Look at you. You got a good job, a nice car, books, and you just got a passport. You're like a role model to us but you ain't even been out of the country. That's crazy."
[+] EnlargeKhanbogd Secondary school
Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
Kids in Mongolia love hoops, too.
We reach the driveway of his mother's house.
"Good look on the ride," he tells me. "You think they'll publish this even though I'm not in the NBA yet?"
"Maybe they will," I tell him. "The story is all about the politics of American dreaming, not just the NBA, right?"
"If you say so," he says, with one foot out of the car.
I ask him one more time to at least think about life after basketball if he doesn't make the NBA. I don't tell him that I asked my college coach, Satch Sullinger, what advice I should give him before our conversation.
"You play the game the way you live your life," Coach Sullinger told me. "Bad players fight their roles. Good players accept their roles. Great players dominate their roles. D'Andre has to decide who he is going to be on and off the court. You can't solve a problem using the same line of thinking that created problem. Hurt me with the truth but never comfort me with a lie."
I take Coach's advice to heart and decide not to let Brown leave my car without telling him my truth. Without looking at him, I tell him that I want to him consider full-time teaching, coaching, or creation of a mentoring program. I tell him that 50 percent of the first 10 NBA draft picks are out of the league after two years, and 12 of first 20 selected are generally gone after two. I tell him that by age 28, even if he made the league, he would be two years from being considered an older NBA veteran. Finally, I tell him that it's not fair that so many folks in the nation obsessively rely on a tough love approach for young black men chasing athletic dreams, yet have nothing to say about broke aspiring writers, photographers, soccer players, filmmakers and small business owners. "But," I tell him while finally looking at him, "I think fear is stopping you from accepting the possibility of multiple dreams. I think you're afraid to change, man."
"I can't lie to you," he finally says, both feet out of the car. "I just can't see giving up on my dream, or my job, just because it's not somebody else's dream of what happiness is." He reaches his huge right hand through the window and gives me some dap. "I'm working, Kiese, and I'm happy. That's what you have to understand. I'm getting better at my job, and I'm working every day. How many people like us can say that they're working and they're happy? I'm not stupid. I know the NBA ain't right around the corner. But I'm working. I'm happier doing this work than any other work in the world. Right now, I know it's not what you or anyone else reading this will want to hear, but I'm working. I'm happy. That's enough for me."
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THE DRONE DEBATESEPTEMBER 2013
The Killing Machines
How to think about drones
MARK BOWDENAUG 14 2013, 8:20 PM ET
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Tribesmen stand on the rubble of a building destroyed by a U.S. drone strike that targeted suspected al-Qaeda militants in the southeastern Yemeni provence of Shabwa on February 3, 2013. (Khaled Abdullah/Reuters/Corbis)
I. Unfairness
Consider David. The shepherd lad steps up to face in single combat the Philistine giant Goliath. Armed with only a slender staff and a slingshot, he confronts a fearsome warrior clad in a brass helmet and chain mail, wielding a spear with a head as heavy as a sledge and a staff "like a weaver's beam." Goliath scorns the approaching youth: "Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?" (1 Samuel 17)
David then famously slays the boastful giant with a single smooth stone from his slingshot.
A story to gladden the hearts of underdogs everywhere, its biblical moral is: Best to have God on your side. But subtract the theological context and what you have is a parable about technology. The slingshot, a small, lightweight weapon that employs simple physics to launch a missile with lethal force from a distance, was an innovation that rendered all the giant's advantages moot. It ignored the spirit of the contest. David's weapon was, like all significant advances in warfare, essentially unfair.
As anyone who has ever been in combat will tell you, the last thing you want is a fair fight. Technology has been tilting the balance of battles since Goliath fell. I was born into the age of push-button warfare. Ivy Mike, the first thermonuclear bomb, capable of vaporizing an entire modern metropolis, of killing millions of people at once, was detonated over the Pacific before my second birthday. Growing up, the concept of global annihilation wasn't just science fiction. We held civil-defense drills to practice for it.
Within my lifetime, that evolution has taken a surprising turn. Today we find ourselves tangled in legal and moral knots over the drone, a weapon that can find and strike a single target, often a single individual, via remote control.
Unlike nuclear weapons, the drone did not emerge from some multibillion-dollar program on the cutting edge of science. It isn't even completely new. The first Predator drone consisted of a snowmobile engine mounted on a radio-controlled glider. When linked via satellite to a distant control center, drones exploit telecommunications methods perfected years ago by TV networks—in fact, the Air Force has gone to ESPN for advice. But when you pull together this disparate technology, what you have is a weapon capable of finding and killing someone just about anywhere in the world.
Drone strikes are a far cry from the atomic vaporizing of whole cities, but the horror of war doesn't seem to diminish when it is reduced in scale. If anything, the act of willfully pinpointing a human being and summarily executing him from afar distills war to a single ghastly act.
One day this past January, a small patrol of marines in southern Afghanistan was working its way at dusk down a dirt road not far from Kandahar, staying to either side to avoid planted bombs, when it unexpectedly came under fire. The men scattered for cover. A battered pickup truck was closing in on them and popping off rounds from what sounded like a big gun.
Continents away, in a different time zone, a slender 19-year-old American soldier sat at a desk before a large color monitor, watching this action unfold in startlingly high definition. He had never been near a battlefield. He had graduated from basic training straight out of high school, and was one of a select few invited to fly Predators. This was his first time at the controls, essentially a joystick and the monitor. The drone he was flying was roughly 15,000 feet above the besieged patrol, each member marked clearly in monochrome on his monitor by an infrared uniform patch. He had been instructed to watch over the patrol, and to "stay frosty," meaning: Whatever happens, don't panic. No one had expected anything to happen. Now something was happening.
The young pilot zoomed in tight on the approaching truck. He saw in its bed a .50-caliber machine gun, a weapon that could do more damage to an army than a platoon of Goliaths.
A colonel, watching over his shoulder, said, "They're pinned down pretty good. They're gonna be screwed if you don't do something."
The colonel told the pilot to fix on the truck. A button on the joystick pulled up a computer-generated reticle, a grid displaying exact ground coordinates, distance, direction, range, etc. Once the computer locked on the pickup, it stayed zeroed in on the moving target.
"Are you ready to help?" the colonel asked.
An overlay on the grid showed the anticipated blast radius of an AGM-114 Hellfire missile—the drone carried two. Communicating via a digital audio link, the colonel instructed the men on the ground to back away, then gave them a few seconds to do so.
The pilot scrutinized the vehicle. Those who have seen unclassified clips of aerial attacks have only a dim appreciation of the optics available to the military and the CIA.
"I could see exactly what kind of gun it was in back," the pilot told me later. "I could see two men in the front; their faces were covered. One was in the passenger seat and one was in the driver's seat, and then one was on the gun, and I think there was another sitting in the bed of the truck, but he was kind of obscured from my angle."
On the radio, they could hear the marines on the ground shouting for help.
"Fire one," said the colonel.
The Hellfire is a 100-pound antitank missile, designed to destroy an armored vehicle. When the blast of smoke cleared, there was only a smoking crater on the dirt road.
"I was kind of freaked out," the pilot said. "My whole body was shaking. It was something that was completely different. The first time doing it, it feels bad almost. It's not easy to take another person's life. It's tough to think about. A lot of guys were congratulating me, telling me, 'You protected them; you did your job. That's what you are trained to do, supposed to do,' so that was good reinforcement. But it's still tough."
One of the things that nagged at him, and that was still bugging him months later, was that he had delivered this deathblow without having been in any danger himself. The men he killed, and the marines on the ground, were at war. They were risking their hides. Whereas he was working his scheduled shift in a comfortable office building, on a sprawling base, in a peaceful country. It seemed unfair. He had been inspired to enlist by his grandfather's manly stories of battle in the Korean War. He had wanted to prove something to himself and to his family, to make them as proud of him as they had been of his Pop-Pop.
"But this was a weird feeling," he said. "You feel bad. You don't feel worthy. I'm sitting there safe and sound, and those guys down there are in the thick of it, and I can have more impact than they can. It's almost like I don't feel like I deserve to be safe."
After slaying Goliath, David was made commander of the Israelite armies and given the hand of King Saul's daughter. When the Pentagon announced earlier this year that it would award a new medal to drone pilots and cyber warriors, it provoked such outrage from veterans that production of the new decoration was halted and the secretary of defense sentenced the medal to a review and then killed it. Members of Congress introduced legislation to ensure that any such award would be ranked beneath the Purple Heart, the medal given to every wounded soldier. How can someone who has never physically been in combat receive a combat decoration?
The question hints at something more important than war medals, getting at the core of our uneasiness about the drone. Like the slingshot, the drone fundamentally alters the nature of combat. While the young Predator pilot has overcome his unease—his was a clearly justifiable kill shot fired in conventional combat, and the marines on the ground conveyed their sincere gratitude—the sense of unfairness lingers.
If the soldier who pulls the trigger in safety feels this, consider the emotions of those on the receiving end, left to pick up the body parts of their husbands, fathers, brothers, friends. Where do they direct their anger? When the wrong person is targeted, or an innocent bystander is killed, imagine the sense of impotence and rage. How do those who remain strike back? No army is arrayed against them, no airfield is nearby to be attacked. If they manage to shoot down a drone, what have they done but disable a small machine? No matter how justified a strike seems to us, no matter how carefully weighed and skillfully applied, to those on the receiving end it is profoundly arrogant, the act of an enemy so distant and superior that he is untouchable.
"The political message [of drone strikes] emphasizes the disparity in power between the parties and reinforces popular support for the terrorists, who are seen as David fighting Goliath," Gabriella Blum and Philip B. Heymann, both law professors at Harvard, wrote in their 2010 book, Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists: Lessons From the War on Terror. "Moreover, by resorting to military force rather than to law enforcement, targeted killings might strengthen the sense of legitimacy of terrorist operations, which are sometimes viewed as the only viable option for the weak to fight against a powerful empire."
Is it any wonder that the enemy seizes upon targets of opportunity—a crowded café, a passenger jet, the finish line of a marathon? There is no moral justification for deliberately targeting civilians, but one can understand why it is done. Arguably the strongest force driving lone-wolf terror attacks in recent months throughout the Western world has been anger over drone strikes.
The drone is effective. Its extraordinary precision makes it an advance in humanitarian warfare. In theory, when used with principled restraint, it is the perfect counterterrorism weapon. It targets indiscriminate killers with exquisite discrimination. But because its aim can never be perfect, can only be as good as the intelligence that guides it, sometimes it kills the wrong people—and even when it doesn't, its cold efficiency is literally inhuman.
So how should we feel about drones?
II. Gorgon Stare
The Defense Department has a secret state-of-the-art control center in Dubai with an IMAX-size screen at the front of the main room that can project video feed from dozens of drones at once. The Air Force has been directed to maintain capability for 65 simultaneous Combat Air Patrols. Each of these involves multiple drones, and maintains a persistent eye over a potential target. The Dubai center, according to someone who has seen it, resembles a control center at NASA, with hundreds of pilots and analysts arrayed in rows before monitors.
This is a long way from the first known drone strike, on November 4, 2002, when a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator over Yemen blew up a car carrying Abu Ali al-Harithi, one of the al-Qaeda leaders responsible for the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Killed along with him in the car were five others, including an American citizen, Kamal Derwish, who was suspected of leading a terrorist cell based near Buffalo, New York. The drone used that day had only recently been reconfigured as a weapon. During testing, its designers had worried that the missile's backblast would shatter the lightweight craft. It didn't. Since that day, drones have killed thousands of people.
John Yoo, the law professor who got caught up in tremendous controversy as a legal counselor to President George W. Bush over harsh interrogation practices, was surprised that drone strikes have provoked so little hand-wringing.
"I would think if you are a civil libertarian, you ought to be much more upset about the drone than Guantánamo and interrogations," he told me when I interviewed him recently. "Because I think the ultimate deprivation of liberty would be the government taking away someone's life. But with drone killings, you do not see anything, not as a member of the public. You read reports perhaps of people who are killed by drones, but it happens 3,000 miles away and there are no pictures, there are no remains, there is no debris that anyone in the United States ever sees. It's kind of antiseptic. So it is like a video game; it's like Call of Duty."
The least remarkable thing about the system is the drone itself. The Air Force bristles at the very word—drones conjures autonomous flying robots, reinforcing the notion that human beings are not piloting them. The Air Force prefers that they be called Remotely Piloted Aircraft. But this linguistic battle has already been lost: my New Oxford American Dictionary now defines drone as—in addition to a male bee and monotonous speech—"a remote-controlled pilotless aircraft or missile." Even though drones now range in size from a handheld Raven, thrown into the air by infantry units so they can see over the next hill, to the Global Hawk, which is about the same size as a Boeing 737, the craft itself is just an airplane. Most drones are propeller-driven and slow-moving—early-20th-century technology.
In December 2012, when Iran cobbled together a rehabilitated version of a ScanEagle that had crashed there, the catapult-launched weaponless Navy drone was presented on Iranian national television as a major intelligence coup.
"They could have gone to RadioShack and captured the same 'secret' technology," Vice Admiral Mark I. Fox, the Navy's deputy chief for operations, plans, and strategy, told The New York Times. The vehicle had less computing power than a smartphone.
Even when, the year before, Iran managed to recover a downed RQ-170 Sentinel, a stealthy, weaponless, unmanned vehicle flown primarily by the CIA, one of the most sophisticated drones in the fleet, it had little more than a nifty flying model. Anything sensitive inside had been remotely destroyed before the Sentinel was seized.
James Poss, a retired Air Force major general who helped oversee the Predator's development, says he has grown so weary of fascination with the vehicle itself that he's adopted the slogan "It's about the datalink, stupid." The craft is essentially a conduit, an eye in the sky. Cut off from its back end, from its satellite links and its data processors, its intelligence analysts and its controller, the drone is as useless as an eyeball disconnected from the brain. What makes the system remarkable is everything downrange—what the Air Force, in its defiantly tin-eared way, calls PED (Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination). Despite all the focus on missiles, what gives a drone its singular value is its ability to provide perpetual, relatively low-cost surveillance, watching a target continuously for hours, days, weeks, even months. Missiles were mounted on Predators only because too much time was lost when a fire mission had to be handed off to more-conventional weapons platforms—a manned aircraft or ground- or ship-based missile launcher. That delay reduced or erased the key advantage now afforded by the drone. With steady, real-time surveillance, a controller can strike with the target in his sights. He can, for instance, choose a moment when his victim is isolated, or traveling in a car, reducing the chance of harming anyone else.
I recently spoke with an Air Force pilot who asked to be identified only as Major Dan. He has logged 600 combat hours in the B-1 bomber and, in the past six years, well over 2,000 hours flying Reapers—larger, more heavily armed versions of the Predator. He describes the Reaper as a significantly better war-fighting tool for this mission than the B-1 in every measure. The only thing you lose when you go from a B-1 to a Reaper, he says, is the thrill of "lighting four afterburners" on a runway.
From a pilot's perspective, drones have several key advantages. First, mission duration can be vastly extended, with rotating crews. No more trying to stay awake for long missions, nor enduring the physical and mental stresses of flying. ("After you've been sitting in an ejection seat for 20 hours, you are very tired and sore," Dan says.)
In addition, drones provide far greater awareness of what's happening on the ground. They routinely watch targets for prolonged periods—sometimes for months—before a decision is made to launch a missile. Once a B-1 is in flight, the capacity for ground observation is more limited than what is available to a drone pilot at a ground station. From his control station at the Pentagon, Dan is not only watching the target in real time; he has immediate access to every source of information about it, including a chat line with soldiers on the ground.
Dan was so enthusiastic about these and other advantages of drones that, until I prodded him, he didn't say anything about the benefit of getting to be home with his family and sleep in his own bed. Dan is 38 years old, married, with two small children. In the years since he graduated from the Air Force Academy, he has deployed several times to far-off bases for months-long stretches. Now he is regularly home for dinner.
The dazzling clarity of the drone's optics does have a downside. As a B-1 pilot, Dan wouldn't learn details about the effects of his weapons until a post-mission briefing. But flying a drone, he sees the carnage close-up, in real time—the blood and severed body parts, the arrival of emergency responders, the anguish of friends and family. Often he's been watching the people he kills for a long time before pulling the trigger. Drone pilots become familiar with their victims. They see them in the ordinary rhythms of their lives—with their wives and friends, with their children. War by remote control turns out to be intimate and disturbing. Pilots are sometimes shaken.
"There is a very visceral connection to operations on the ground," Dan says. "When you see combat, when you hear the guy you are supporting who is under fire, you hear the stress in his voice, you hear the emotions being passed over the radio, you see the tracers and rounds being fired, and when you are called upon to either fire a missile or drop a bomb, you witness the effects of that firepower." He witnesses it in a far more immediate way than in the past, and he disdains the notion that he and his fellow drone pilots are like video gamers, detached from the reality of their actions. If anything, they are far more attached. At the same time, he dismisses the notion that the carnage he now sees up close is emotionally crippling.
"In my mind, the understanding of what I did, I wouldn't say that one was significantly different from the other," he says.
Drones collect three primary packages of data: straight visual; infrared (via a heat-sensing camera that can see through darkness and clouds); and what is called SIGINT (Signals Intelligence), gathered via electronic eavesdropping devices and other sensors. One such device is known as LIDAR (a combination of the words light and radar), which can map large areas in 3‑D. The optical sensors are so good, and the pixel array so dense, that the device can zoom in clearly on objects only inches wide from well over 15,000 feet above. With computer enhancement to eliminate distortion and counteract motion, facial-recognition software is very close to being able to pick individuals out of crowds. Operators do not even have to know exactly where to look.
"We put in the theatre [in 2011] a system called Gorgon Stare," Lieutenant General Larry James, the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, told me. "Instead of one soda-straw-size view of the world with the camera, we put essentially 10 cameras ganged together, and it gives you a very wide area of view of about four kilometers by four kilometers—about the size of the city of Fairfax, [Virginia]—that you can watch continuously. Not as much fidelity in terms of what the camera can see, but I can see movement of cars and people—those sorts of things. Now, instead of staring at a small space, which may be, like, a villa or compound, I can look at a whole city continuously for as long as I am flying that particular system."
Surveillance technology allows for more than just looking: computers store these moving images so that analysts can dial back to a particular time and place and zero in, or mark certain individuals and vehicles and instruct the machines to track them over time. A suspected terrorist-cell leader or bomb maker, say, can be watched for months. The computer can then instantly draw maps showing patterns of movement: where the target went, when there were visitors or deliveries to his home. If you were watched in this way over a period of time, the data could not just draw a portrait of your daily routine, but identify everyone with whom you associate. Add to this cellphone, text, and e-mail intercepts, and you begin to see how special-ops units in Iraq and Afghanistan can, after a single nighttime arrest, round up entire networks before dawn.
All of this requires the collection and manipulation of huge amounts of data, which, James says, is the most difficult technical challenge involved.
"Take video, for example," he says. "ESPN has all kinds of tools where they can go back and find Eli Manning in every video that was shot over the last year, and they can probably do it in 20 minutes. So how do we bring those types of tools [to intelligence work]? Okay, I want to find this red 1976 Chevy pickup truck in every piece of video that I have shot in this area for the last three months. We have a pretty hard push to really work with the Air Force Research Lab, and the commercial community, to understand what tools I can bring in to help make sense of all this data."
To be used effectively, a drone must be able to hover over a potential target for long periods. A typical Predator can stay aloft for about 20 hours; the drones are flown in relays to maintain a continuous Combat Air Patrol. Surveillance satellites pass over a given spot only once during each orbit of the Earth. The longest the U-2, the most successful spy plane in history, can stay in the air is about 10 hours, because of the need to spell its pilot and refuel. The Predator gives military and intelligence agencies a surveillance option that is both significantly less expensive and more useful, because it flies unmanned, low, and slow.
Precisely because drones fly so low and so slow, and have such a "noisy" electronic signature, operating them anywhere but in a controlled airspace is impractical. The U.S. Air Force completely controls the sky over active war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq—and has little to fear over countries like Yemen, Somalia, and Mali. Over the rugged regions of northwestern Pakistan, where most drone strikes have taken place, the U.S. operates with the tacit approval of the Pakistani government. Without such permission, or without a robust protection capability, the drone presents an easy target. Its datalink can be disrupted, jammed, or hijacked. It's only slightly harder to shoot down than a hot-air balloon. This means there's little danger of enemy drone attacks in America anytime soon.
Drone technology has applications that go way beyond military uses, of course—everything from domestic law enforcement to archeological surveys to environmental studies. As they become smaller and cheaper, they will become commonplace. Does this mean the government might someday begin hurling thunderbolts at undesirables on city sidewalks? Unlikely. Our entire legal system would have to collapse first. If the police just wanted to shoot people on the street from a distance, they already can—they've had that capability going back to the invention of the Kentucky long rifle and, before that, the crossbow. I helped cover the one known instance of a local government dropping a bomb on its own city, in 1985, when a stubborn back-to-nature cult called Move was in an armed standoff with the Philadelphia police. Then-Mayor Wilson Goode authorized dropping a satchel packed with explosives from a hovering helicopter onto a rooftop bunker in West Philadelphia. The bomb caused a conflagration that consumed an entire city block. The incident will live long in the annals of municipal stupidity. The capability to do the same with a drone will not make choosing to do so any smarter, or any more likely. And as for Big Brother's eye in the sky, authorities have been monitoring public spaces from overhead cameras, helicopters, and planes for decades. Many people think it's a good idea.
The drone is new only in that it combines known technology in an original way—aircraft, global telecommunications links, optics, digital sensors, supercomputers, etc. It greatly lowers the cost of persistent surveillance. When armed, it becomes a remarkable, highly specialized tool: a weapon that employs simple physics to launch a missile with lethal force from a distance, a first step into a world where going to war does not mean fielding an army, or putting any of your own soldiers, sailors, or pilots at risk.
III. The Kill List
It is the most exclusive list in the world, and you would not want to be on it.
The procedure may have changed, but several years back, at the height of the drone war, President Obama held weekly counterterror meetings at which he was presented with a list of potential targets—mostly al-Qaeda or Taliban figures—complete with photos and brief bios laid out like "a high school yearbook," according to a report in The New York Times.
John Brennan instituted weekly conclaves—in effect, death-penalty deliberations—where targets were selected for summary execution.
The list is the product of a rigorous vetting process that the administration has kept secret. Campaigning for the White House in 2008, Obama made it clear (although few of his supporters were listening closely) that he would embrace drones to go after what he considered the appropriate post-9/11 military target—"core al-Qaeda." When he took office, he inherited a drone war that was already expanding. There were 53 known strikes inside Pakistan in 2009 (according to numbers assembled from press reports by The Long War Journal), up from 35 in 2008, and just five the year before that. In 2010, the annual total more than doubled, to 117. The onslaught was effective, at least by some measures: letters seized in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden show his consternation over the rain of death by drone.
As U.S. intelligence analysis improved, the number of targets proliferated. Even some of the program's supporters feared it was growing out of control. The definition of a legitimate target and the methods employed to track such a target were increasingly suspect. Relying on other countries' intelligence agencies for help, the U.S. was sometimes manipulated into striking people who it believed were terrorist leaders but who may not have been, or implicated in practices that violate American values.
Reporters and academics at work in zones where Predator strikes had become common warned of a large backlash. Gregory Johnsen, a scholar of Near East studies at Princeton University, documented the phenomenon in a 2012 book about Yemen titled The Last Refuge. He showed that drone attacks in Yemen tended to have the opposite of their intended effect, particularly when people other than extremists were killed or hurt. Drones hadn't whittled al-Qaeda down, Johnsen argued; the organization had grown threefold there. "US strikes and particularly those that kill civilians—be they men or women—are sowing the seeds of future generations of terrorists," he wrote on his blog late last year. (See Johnsen's accompanying article in this issue.)
Michael Morrell, who was the deputy director of the CIA until June, was among those in the U.S. government who argued for more restraint. During meetings with John Brennan, who was Obama's counterterrorism adviser until taking over as the CIA director last spring, Morrell said he worried that the prevailing goal seemed to be using drones as artillery, striking anyone who could be squeezed into the definition of a terrorist—an approach derisively called "Whack-A-Mole." Morrell insisted that if the purpose of the drone program was to diminish al-Qaeda and protect the United States from terror attacks, then indiscriminate strikes were counterproductive.
Brennan launched an effort to select targets more carefully. Formalizing a series of ad hoc meetings that began in the fall of 2009, Brennan in 2010 instituted weekly conclaves—in effect, death-penalty deliberations—where would-be successors to bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed were selected for execution before being presented to Obama for his approval. Brennan demanded clear definitions. There were "high-value targets," which consisted of important al‑Qaeda and Taliban figures; "imminent threats," such as a load of roadside bombs bound for the Afghan border; and, most controversial, "signature strikes," which were aimed at characters engaged in suspicious activity in known enemy zones. In these principals' meetings, which Brennan chaired from the Situation Room, in the basement of White House, deliberations were divided into two parts—law and policy. The usual participants included representatives from the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, National Counterterrorism Center, and, initially, the Justice Department—although after a while the lawyers stopped coming. In the first part of the meetings, questions of legality were considered: Was the prospect a lawful target? Was he high-level? Could he rightly be considered to pose an "imminent" threat? Was arrest a viable alternative? Only when these criteria were deemed met did the discussion shift toward policy. Was it smart to kill this person? What sort of impact might the killing have on local authorities, or on relations with the governments of Pakistan or Yemen? What effect would killing him have on his own organization? Would it make things better or worse?
Brennan himself was often the toughest questioner. Two regular meeting participants described him to me as thoughtful and concerned; one said his demeanor was "almost priestly." Another routinely skeptical and cautious participant was James Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state for the first two and a half years of Obama's first term, who adhered to a strict list of acceptable legal criteria drawn up by the State Department's counsel, Harold Koh. This criteria stipulated that any drone target would have to be a "senior member" of al‑Qaeda who was "externally focused"—that is, actively plotting attacks on America or on American citizens or armed forces. Koh was confident that even if his criteria did not meet all the broader concerns of human-rights activists, they would support an international-law claim of self-defense—and for that reason he thought the administration ought to make the criteria public. Throughout Obama's first term, members of the administration argued about how much of the deliberation process to reveal. During these debates, Koh's position on complete disclosure was dismissively termed "the Full Harold." He was its only advocate.
Many of the sessions were contentious. The military and the CIA pushed back hard against Koh's strict criteria. Special Forces commanders, in particular, abhorred what they saw as excessive efforts to "litigate" their war. The price of every target the White House rejected, military commanders said, was paid in American lives. Their arguments, coming from the war's front line, carried significant weight.
Cameron Munter, a veteran diplomat who was the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 2010 to 2012, felt that weight firsthand when he tried to push back. Munter saw American influence declining with nearly every strike. While some factions in the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence believed in the value of strikes, the Pakistani public grew increasingly outraged, and elected officials increasingly hostile. Munter's job was to contain the crisis, a task complicated by the drone program's secrecy, which prevented him from explaining and defending America's actions.
Matters came to a head in the summer of 2011 during a meeting to which Munter was linked digitally. The dynamics of such meetings—where officials turned to policy discussions after the legal determination had been made—placed a premium on unified support for policy goals. Most participants wanted to focus on the success of the battle against America's enemies, not on the corrosive foreign-policy side effects of the drone program.
At the decision meetings, it was hard for someone like Munter to say no. He would appear digitally on the screen in the Situation Room, gazing out at the vice president, the secretary of defense, and other principals, and they would present him with the targeting decision they were prepared to make. It was hard to object when so many people who titularly outranked him already seemed set.
By June of 2011, however, two events in Pakistan—first the arrest and subsequent release of the CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who had been charged with murdering two Pakistanis who accosted him on the street in Lahore, and then the Abbottabad raid that killed bin Laden—had brought the U.S.-Pakistan partnership to a new low. Concerned about balancing the short-term benefits of strikes (removing potential enemies from the battlefield) and their long-term costs (creating a lasting mistrust and resentment that undercut the policy goal of stability and peace in the region), Munter decided to test what he believed was his authority to halt a strike. As he recalled it later, the move played out as follows:
Asked whether he was on board with a particular strike, he said no.
Leon Panetta, the CIA director, said the ambassador had no veto power; these were intelligence decisions.
Munter proceeded to explain that under Title 22 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, the president gives the authority to carry out U.S. policy in a foreign country to his ambassador, delegated through the secretary of state. That means no American policy should be carried out in any country without the ambassador's approval.
Taken aback, Panetta replied, "Well, I do not work for you, buddy."
"I don't work for you," Munter told him.
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stepped in: "Leon, you are wrong."
Panetta said, flatly, "Hillary, you're wrong."
At that point, the discussion moved on. When the secretary of state and the CIA director clash, the decision gets made upstairs.
Panetta won. A week later, James Steinberg called Munter to inform him that he did not have the authority to veto a drone strike. Steinberg explained that the ambassador would be allowed to express an objection to a strike, and that a mechanism would be put in place to make sure his objection was registered—but the decision to clear or reject a strike would be made higher up the chain. It was a clear victory for the CIA.
Later that summer, General David Petraeus was named to take over the intelligence agency from Panetta. Before assuming the job, Petraeus flew from Kabul, where he was still the military commander, to Islamabad, to meet with the ambassador. At dinner that night, Petraeus poked his finger into Munter's chest.
"You know what happened in that meeting?" the general asked. (Petraeus had observed the clash via a secure link from his command post in Afghanistan.) "That's never going to happen again."
Munter's heart sank. He thought the new CIA director, whom he liked and admired, was about to threaten him. Instead, Petraeus said: "I'm never going to put you in the position where you feel compelled to veto a strike. If you have a long-term concern, if you have a contextual problem, a timing problem, an ethical problem, I want to know about it earlier. We can work together to avoid these kinds of conflicts far in advance."
Petraeus kept his word. Munter never had to challenge a drone strike in a principals' meeting again during his tenure as ambassador. He left Islamabad in the summer of 2012.
By then, Brennan's efforts to make the process more judicious had begun to show results. The number of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen fell to 88 last year, and they have dropped off even more dramatically since.
The decline partly reflects the toll that the drone war has taken on al-Qaeda. "There are fewer al-Qaeda leadership targets to hit," a senior White House official who is working on the administration's evolving approach to drone strikes told me. The reduction in strikes is "something that the president directed. We don't need a top-20 list. We don't need to find 20 if there are only 10. We've gotten out of the business of maintaining a number as an end in itself, so therefore that number has gone down."
Any history of how the United States destroyed Osama bin Laden's organization will feature the drone. Whatever questions it has raised, however uncomfortable it has made us feel, the drone has been an extraordinarily effective weapon for the job. The U.S. faced a stateless, well-funded, highly organized terrorist operation that was sophisticated enough to carry out unprecedented acts of mass murder. Today, while local al-Qaeda franchises remain a threat throughout the Middle East, the organization that planned and carried out 9/11 has been crushed. When bin Laden himself was killed, Americans danced in the streets.
"Our actions are effective," President Obama said in a speech on counterterrorism at the National Defense University in May.
Don't take my word for it. In the intelligence gathered at bin Laden's compound, we found that he wrote, 'We could lose the reserves to enemy's air strikes. We cannot fight air strikes with explosives.' Other communications from al-Qaeda operatives confirm this as well. Dozens of highly skilled al-Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers, and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted that would have targeted international aviation, U.S. transit systems, European cities, and our troops in Afghanistan. Simply put, these strikes have saved lives.
So why the steady drumbeat of complaint?
IV. Drones Don't Kill People. People Kill People.
The most ardent case against drone strikes is that they kill innocents. John Brennan has argued that claims of collateral carnage are exaggerated. In June 2011, he famously declared that there had not been "a single collateral death" due to a drone strike in the previous 12 months.
Almost no one believes this. Brennan himself later amended his statement, saying that in the previous 12 months, the United States had found no "credible evidence" that any civilians had been killed in drone strikes outside Afghanistan and Iraq. (I am using the word civilians here to mean "noncombatants.") A fair interpretation is that drones unfailingly hit their targets, and so long as the U.S. government believes its targets are all legitimate, the collateral damage is zero. But drones are only as accurate as the intelligence that guides them. Even if the machine is perfect, it's a stretch to assume perfection in those who aim it.
For one thing, our military and intelligence agencies generously define combatant to include any military-age male in the strike zone. And local press accounts from many of the blast sites have reported dead women and children. Some of that may be propaganda, but not all of it is. No matter how precisely placed, when a 500-pound bomb or a Hellfire missile explodes, there are sometimes going to be unintended victims in the vicinity.
Ground combat almost always kills more civilians than drone strikes do. When you consider the alternatives, you are led, as Obama was, to the logic of the drone.
How many? Estimates of body counts range so widely and are so politicized that none of them is completely credible. At one extreme, anti-American propagandists regularly publish estimates that make the drone war sound borderline genocidal. These high numbers help drive the anti-drone narrative, which equates actions of the U.S. government with acts of terror. In two of the most recent Islamist terror attacks as of this writing—the Boston Marathon bombing and the beheading of a soldier in London—the perpetrators justified their killings as payback for the deaths of innocent Muslims. At the other extreme, there is Brennan's claim of zero civilian casualties. The true numbers are unknowable.
Secrecy is a big part of the problem. The government doesn't even acknowledge most attacks, much less release details of their aftermath. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a left-wing organization based in London, has made a strenuous effort, using news sources, to count bodies after CIA drone strikes. It estimates that from 2004 through the first half of 2013, 371 drone strikes in Pakistan killed between 2,564 and 3,567 people (the range covers the minimum to the maximum credible reported deaths). Of those killed, the group says, somewhere between 411 and 890—somewhere between 12 percent and 35 percent of the total—were civilians. The disparity in these figures is telling. But if we assume the worst case, and take the largest estimates of soldier and civilian fatalities, then one-quarter of those killed in drone strikes in Pakistan have been civilians.
Everyone agrees that the amount of collateral damage has dropped steeply over the past two years. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan fell to 12 percent of total deaths in 2011 and to less than 3 percent in 2012.
No civilian death is acceptable, of course. Each one is tragic. But any assessment of civilian deaths from drone strikes needs to be compared with the potential damage from alternative tactics. Unless we are to forgo the pursuit of al-Qaeda terrorists entirely, U.S. forces must confront them either from the air or on the ground, in some of the remotest places on Earth. As aerial attacks go, drones are far more precise than manned bombers or missiles. That narrows the choice to drone strikes or ground assaults.
Sometimes ground assaults go smoothly. Take the one that killed Osama bin Laden. It was executed by the best-trained, most-experienced soldiers in the world. Killed were bin Laden; his adult son Khalid; his primary protectors, the brothers Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and Abrar al-Kuwaiti; and Abrar's wife Bushra. Assuming Bushra qualifies as a civilian, even though she was helping to shelter the world's most notorious terrorist, civilian deaths in the raid amounted to 20 percent of the casualties. In other words, even a near-perfect special-ops raid produced only a slight improvement over the worst estimates of those counting drone casualties. Many assaults are not that clean.
In fact, ground combat almost always kills more civilians than drone strikes do. Avery Plaw, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, estimates that in Pakistani ground offensives against extremists in that country's tribal areas, 46 percent of those killed are civilians. Plaw says that ratios of civilian deaths from conventional military conflicts over the past 20 years range from 33 percent to more than 80 percent. "A fair-minded evaluation of the best data we have available suggests that the drone program compares favorably with similar operations and contemporary armed conflict more generally," he told The New York Times.
When you consider the alternatives—even, and perhaps especially, if you are deeply concerned with sparing civilians—you are led, as Obama was, to the logic of the drone.
But don't drone strikes violate the prohibition on assassination, Executive Order 12333? That order, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, grew out of revelations that the CIA had tried to kill Fidel Castro and other leftist-leaning political figures in the 1960s and '70s. It was clearly aimed at halting political assassinations; in fact, the original order, signed in 1976 by Gerald Ford, refers specifically to such acts. Attempting to prevent acts of mass murder by a dangerous international organization may stretch the legal definition of armed conflict, but it is not the same as political assassination. Besides, executive orders are not statutes; they can be superseded by subsequent presidents. In the case of President Bush, after the attacks of September 11, Congress specifically authorized the use of lethal operations against al‑Qaeda.
When Bush branded our effort against al-Qaeda "war," he effectively established legal protection for targeted killing. Targeted killing is a long-established practice in the context of war. According to international treaties, soldiers can be killed simply for belonging to an enemy army—whether they are actively engaged in an attack or only preparing for one, whether they are commanders or office clerks. During World War II, the United States discovered and shot down the plane carrying Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, the commander in chief of the Japanese navy, who had been the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The order to attack the plane was given by President Franklin Roosevelt.
But beyond what international treaties call "armed conflict" is "law enforcement," and here, there are problems. The 1990 United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders laid out basic principles for the use of force in law-enforcement operations. (The rules, although nonbinding, elaborate on what is meant by Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States has agreed.) The pertinent passage—written more than a decade before weaponized drones—reads as follows:
Law enforcement officials shall not use firearms against persons except in self-defense or defense of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, to prevent the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life, to arrest a person presenting such a danger and resisting their authority, or to prevent his or her escape, and only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives. In any event, intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable to protect life.
Once the "war" on al-Qaeda ends, the justification for targeted killing will become tenuous. Some experts on international law say it will become simply illegal. Indeed, one basis for condemning the drone war has been that the pursuit of al‑Qaeda was never a real war in the first place.
Sir Christopher Greenwood, the British judge on the International Court of Justice, has written: "In the language of international law there is no basis for speaking of a war on al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group, for such a group cannot be a belligerent, it is merely a band of criminals, and to treat it as anything else risks distorting the law while giving that group a status which to some implies a degree of legitimacy." Greenwood rightly observes that America's declaration of war against al-Qaeda bolstered the group's status worldwide. But history will not quarrel with Bush's decision, which was unavoidable, given the national mood. Democracy reflects the will of the people. Two American presidents from different parties and with vastly different ideological outlooks have, with strong congressional support, fully embraced the notion that America is at war. In his speech at the National Defense University in May, Obama reaffirmed this approach. "America's actions are legal," he said. "Under domestic law and international law, the United States is at war with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces." He noted that during his presidency, he has briefed congressional overseers about every drone strike. "Every strike," he said.
Bin Laden himself certainly wasn't confused about the matter; he held a press conference in Afghanistan in 1998 to declare jihad on the United States. Certainly the scale of al‑Qaeda's attacks went well beyond anything previously defined as criminal.
But what are the boundaries of that war? Different critics draw the lines in different places. Mary Ellen O'Connell, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, is a determined and eloquent critic of drone strikes. She believes that while strikes in well-defined battle spaces like Iraq and Afghanistan are justified, and can limit civilian deaths, strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other places amount to "extrajudicial killing," no matter who the targets are. Such killings are outside the boundary of armed conflict, she says, and hence violate international law.
Philip Alston, a former United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, concedes that al-Qaeda's scope and menace transcend criminality, but nevertheless faults the U.S. drone program for lacking due process and transparency. He told Harper's magazine:
[International] laws do not prohibit an intelligence agency like the CIA from carrying out targeted killings, provided it complies with the relevant international rules. Those rules require, not surprisingly when it's a matter of being able to kill someone in a foreign country, that all such killings be legally justified, that we know the justification, and that there are effective mechanisms for investigation, prosecution, and punishment if laws are violated. The CIA's response to these obligations has been very revealing. On the one hand, its spokespersons have confirmed the total secrecy and thus unaccountability of the program by insisting that they can neither confirm nor deny that it even exists. On the other hand, they have gone to great lengths to issue unattributable assurances, widely quoted in the media, both that there is extensive domestic accountability and that civilian casualties have been minimal. In essence, it's a 'you can trust us' response, from an agency with a less than stellar track record in such matters.
President Obama has taken steps in recent months to address Alston's concerns. He has begun transferring authority for drone strikes from the CIA to the Pentagon, which will open them up to greater congressional and public scrutiny. He has sharply limited "signature strikes," those based on patterns of behavior rather than strict knowledge of who is being targeted. (Because most signature strikes have been used to protect American troops in Afghanistan, this category of drone attack is likely to further diminish once those forces are withdrawn.) In his May speech, he came close to embracing "the full Harold," publicly outlining in general terms the targeting constraints drafted by Koh. He also made clear that the war on al-Qaeda will eventually end—though he stopped short of saying when. American combat troops will be gone from Afghanistan by the end of next year, but the war effort against "core al-Qaeda" will almost certainly continue at least until Ahman al Zawahiri, the fugitive Egyptian doctor who now presides over the remnants of the organization, is captured or killed.
Then what?
"Outside of the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal," Alston wrote in 2010. Mary Ellen O'Connell agrees. "Outside of a combat zone or a battlefield, the use of military force is not lawful," she told me.
Yet this is where we seem to be headed. Obama has run his last presidential campaign, and one senses that he might cherish a legacy of ending three wars on his watch.
"Our commitment to constitutional principles has weathered every war, and every war has come to an end," he said in his May speech. "We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us. We have to be mindful of James Madison's warning that 'no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.'
The changes outlined by the president do not mean we will suddenly stop going after al-Qaeda. If the war on terror is declared over, and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) is withdrawn, then some other legal justification for targeting al-Qaeda terrorists with drones would be necessary, and would likely be sought.
"We believe we have a domestic and international legal basis for our current efforts," Ben Rhodes, who is Obama's deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications, told me. "If you project into the future, there are different scenarios, you know, so they are kind of hypothetical, but one is that you might have a narrower AUMF that is a more targeted piece of legislation. A hypothetical: the Taliban is part of the AUMF now, but we could find ourselves not in hostilities with the Taliban after 2014." In that case, the military authority to attack Taliban targets, which account for many drone strikes and most signature strikes, would be gone. Another scenario Rhodes sketched out was one in which a local terrorist group "rose to the level where we thought we needed to take direct action. You might have to go back to Congress to get a separate authorization. If we need to get authority against a new terrorist group that is emerging somewhere else in the world, we should go back to Congress and get that authorization."
You can't know in advance "the circumstances of taking direct action," Rhodes said. "You may be acting to prevent an imminent attack on the United States or you may be acting in response to an attack, each of which carries its own legal basis. But you have to be accountable for whatever direct action you are taking," rather than relying on some blanket authority to strike whomever and whenever the president chooses. "You would have to specifically define, domestically and internationally, what the basis for your action is in each instance—and by each instance, I don't mean every strike, per se, but rather the terrorist group or the country where you are acting."
Seeking such authorization would help draw the debate over continued drone strikes out of the shadows. Paradoxically, as the war on terror winds down, and as the number of drone strikes falls, the controversy over them may rise.
V. Come Out With Your Hands Up!
Once the pursuit of al-Qaeda is defined as "law enforcement," ground assaults may be the only acceptable tactic under international law. A criminal must be given the opportunity to surrender, and if he refuses, efforts must be made to arrest him. Mary Ellen O'Connell believes the Abbottabad raid was an example of how things should work.
"It came as close to what we are permitted to do under international law as you can get," she said. "John Brennan came out right after the killing and said the seals were under orders to attempt to capture bin Laden, and if he resisted or if their own lives were endangered, then they could use the force that was necessary. They did not use a drone. They did not drop a bomb. They did not fire a missile."
Force in such operations is justified only if the suspect resists arrest—and even then, his escape is preferable to harming innocent bystanders. These are the rules that govern police, as opposed to warriors. Yet the enemies we face will not change if the war on terror ends. The worst of them—the ones we most need to stop—are determined suicidal killers and hardened fighters. Since there is no such thing as global police, any force employed would likely still come from, in most cases, American special-ops units. They are very good at what they do—but under law-enforcement rules, a lot more people, both soldiers and civilians, are likely to be killed.
It would be wise to consider how bloody such operations can be. When Obama chose the riskiest available option for getting bin Laden in Abbottabad—a special-ops raid—he did so not out of a desire to conform to international law but because that option allowed the possibility of taking bin Laden alive and, probably more important, because if bin Laden was killed in a ground assault, his death could be proved. The raid went well. But what if the seal raiding party had tripped Pakistan's air defenses, or if it had been confronted by police or army units on the ground? American troops and planes stood ready in Afghanistan to respond if that happened. Such a clash would likely have killed many Pakistanis and Americans, and left the countries at loggerheads, if not literally at war.
There's another example of a law-enforcement-style raid that conforms to the model that O'Connell and other drone critics prefer: the October 1993 Delta Force raid in Mogadishu, which I wrote about in the book Black Hawk Down. The objective, which was achieved, was to swoop in and arrest Omar Salad and Mohamed Hassan Awale, two top lieutenants of the outlaw clan leader Mohammed Farrah Aidid. As the arrests were being made, the raiding party of Delta Force operators and U.S. Army rangers came under heavy fire from local supporters of the clan leader. Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and crashed into the city. We were not officially at war with Somalia, but the ensuing firefight left 18 Americans dead and killed an estimated 500 to 1,000 Somalis—a number comparable to the total civilian deaths from all drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 through the first half of 2013, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalists' estimates.
The Somalia example is an extreme one. But the battle that erupted in Mogadishu strikes me as a fair reminder of what can happen to even a very skillful raiding party. Few of the terrorists we target will go quietly. Knowing they are targets, they will surely seek out terrain hostile to an American or UN force. Choosing police action over drone strikes may feel like taking the moral high ground. But if a raid is likely to provoke a firefight, then choosing a drone shot not only might pass legal muster (UN rules allow lethal force "when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life") but also might be the more moral choice.
The White House knows this, but it is unlikely to announce a formal end to the war against al-Qaeda anytime soon. Obama's evolving model for counterterrorism will surely include both raids and drone strikes—and the legality of using such strikes outside the context of war remains murky.
Ben Rhodes and others on Obama's national-security team have been thinking hard about these questions. Rhodes told me that "the threat picture" the administration is mainly concerned with has increasingly shifted from global terrorism, with al-Qaeda at its center, to "more traditional terrorism, which is localized groups with their own agendas." Such groups "may be Islamic extremists, but they are not necessarily signing on to global jihad. A local agenda may raise the threat to embassies and diplomatic facilities and things like [the BP facility that was attacked in Algeria early this year], but it diminishes the likelihood of a complex 9/11-style attack on the homeland."
If terrorism becomes more localized, Rhodes continued, "we have to have a legal basis and a counterterrorism policy that fits that model, rather than this massive post-9/11 edifice that we built." This means, he said, that post-2014 counterterrorism will "take a more traditional form, with a law-enforcement lead. But this will be amplified by a U.S. capability to take direct action as necessary in a very narrowly defined set of circumstances." What U.S. policy will be aiming for, Rhodes said, is "traditional [law-enforcement-style] counterterrorism plus a limited deployment of our drone and special-forces capabilities when it is absolutely necessary."
To accommodate the long-term need for drone strikes, Obama is weighing a formal process for external review of the target list. This might mean appointing a military-justice panel, or a civilian review court modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees requests to monitor suspected foreign spies and terrorists in the United States. But this raises thorny constitutional questions about the separation of powers—and presidents are reluctant to concede their authority to make the final call.
How should we feel about drones? Like any wartime innovation, going back to the slingshot, drones can be used badly or well. They are remarkable tools, an exceedingly clever combination of existing technologies that has vastly improved our ability to observe and to fight. They represent how America has responded to the challenge of organized, high-level, stateless terrorism—not timidly, as bin Laden famously predicted, but with courage, tenacity, and ruthless ingenuity. Improving technologies are making drones capable not just of broader and more persistent surveillance, but of greater strike precision. Mary Ellen O'Connell says, half jokingly, that there is a "sunset" on her objection to them, because drones may eventually offer more options. She said she can imagine one capable of delivering a warning—"Come out with your hands up!"—and then landing to make an arrest using handcuffs.
Obama's efforts to mitigate the use of drones have already made a big difference in reducing the number of strikes—though critics like O'Connell say the reduction has come only grudgingly, in response to "a rising level of worldwide condemnation." Still, Obama certainly deserves credit: it is good that drones are being used more judiciously. I told Ben Rhodes that if the president succeeds in establishing clear and careful guidelines for their use, he will make a lot of people happy, but a lot of other people mad.
"Well, no," Rhodes said. "It's worse than that. We will make a lot of people mad and we will not quite make people happy."
No American president will ever pay a political price for choosing national security over world opinion, but the only right way to proceed is to make targeting decisions and strike outcomes fully public, even if after the fact. In the long run, careful adherence to the law matters more than eliminating another bad actor. Greater prudence and transparency are not just morally and legally essential, they are in our long-term interest, because the strikes themselves feed the anti-drone narrative, and inspire the kind of random, small-scale terror attacks that are bin Laden's despicable legacy.
In our struggle against terrorist networks like al-Qaeda, the distinction between armed conflict and law enforcement matters a great deal. Terrorism embraces lawlessness. It seeks to disrupt. It targets civilians deliberately. So why restrain our response? Why subject ourselves to the rule of law? Because abiding by the law is the point—especially with a weapon like the drone. No act is more final than killing. Drones distill war to its essence. Abiding carefully by the law—man's law, not God's—making judgments carefully, making them transparent and subject to review, is the only way to invest them with moral authority, and the only way to clearly define the terrorist as an enemy of civilization.
