http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/are_law_schools_lying_to_their.html he says basically the same thing as Tucker about grad school
http://www.thepensblog.com/pensblog-news/tpb/link120.html you gotta read the comments, the one long thread with "sweaterguy" make sure you look at the picture first.
The Last Action Hero
How Jason Statham became the world's biggest B-movie star.
By Jody RosenUpdated Friday, April 17, 2009, at 11:05 AM ET
Among Friday's movie releases, Jason Statham will star in The Mechanic, a gritty remake of Michael Winner's 1972 thriller that showcases the same violence and gratuitous daredevilry that have come to define the Statham canon. Read more about Statham's undeniable allure in Jody Rosen's 2009 assessment, reprinted below.
Jason Statham and Amy Smart in Crank: High Voltage Jason Statham's greatness announced itself early in his acting career—88 seconds into his motion picture debut, to be precise, in the opening sequence of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Statham plays Bacon, a small-time criminal peddling stolen merchandise ("Handmade in Italy, hand-stolen in Stepney") on a London street corner. Suddenly, the police show up; Bacon and his accomplice take flight; and then, rounding a rain-slickened corner with a suitcase under his arm, he nearly tips over, performing a ridiculous little shuffle-step at an almost-45-degree angle to the pavement, his feet moving furiously but his forward motion momentarily stalled, like Wile E. Coyote in the instant before he realizes he has run out of clifftop road and is about to plummet 5,000 feet into a canyon. Whereupon Bacon regains his footing, vaults a barrier, and spills the entire contents of his suitcase as he races down a flight of stairs.
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This is the essence of Statham-ism, a mix of bionic brute force and slapstick—Robocop meets Keystone Cops. It's a formula that has made Statham the biggest action hero going: Since 2001, Statham star vehicles have grossed $500 million worldwide. Currently, Statham is the face of two hit franchises: The Transporter, whose latest sequel, Transporter 3 (2008), earned more than $100 million, and Crank, whose second installment, Crank: High Voltage, arrives in theaters this Friday with the irresistible tag line "He was dead … But he got better."
For those keeping count, that's one more action movie franchise than any other Hollywood leading man can claim, unless you want to put a check-mark in Vin Diesel's column based on his voice-over work in the Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay video game. But Statham is largely unsung. Critics prefer Matt Damon's Jason Bourne movies—and why wouldn't they? With their virtuoso camerawork and existentialist overtones, the Bourne films are action flicks for cinéastes, and Damon's performances are admirably taut and understated. Of course, Damon is a thespian. Jason Statham is merely the biggest B-movie star in the world.
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It's a distinction Statham has won through charm, which is unlikely since so much of his time on-screen is spent snapping necks and braining his adversaries with firehose nozzles. He has underdog appeal, coming across as a harried Everyman even as he performs superhuman feats of ass-kicking. In nearly all his films, he plays regular Joes: two-bit crooks (Snatch, Revolver, The Bank Job), law-enforcement lifers (The One, Chaos, War), a hard-luck ex-racecar driver (Death Race), and in the almost unwatchable fantasy epic In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2008), a humble farmer named, um, Farmer, who leads a ragtag army against the legions of the evil wizard Gallian. His suavest character, the Transporter series' Frank Martin, is also a working stiff. He's a chauffeur, a freelance courier hired to ferry stuff—contraband, bound-and-gagged Asian women—from Point A to Point B, no questions asked. In the opening scene of Transporter 2, Martin beats up five thugs who try to steal his car. "I have an appointment," he explains. "I don't like to be late." He's an action hero for economic downtimes: a contract worker stressed out about losing his clients.
Although his films don't always call for it, Statham can act. Guy Ritchie's movies have a way of bringing out the worst in actors—the macho over-emoting that ramps up absurdly amid explosions of Cockney rhyming slang. But in Lock, Stock, and Snatch (2000), and Revolver (2005), Statham got his parts just right, channeling the daffy spirit of the original Cockney caper movies, Ealing Studio classics like The Ladykillers (1955). He can do dramatic roles: He was touching as the car-salesman-tuned-heist-leader in the '70s period piece The Bank Job. And in the big popcorn movies, he has a knack for delivering stupid dialogue like he means it. It takes a special performer to bellow, "Tomorrow, we gouge evil from its shell!" like Statham does in Name of the King—with real feeling, without a hint of shame, while wearing a "medieval" tunic that looks like a bathrobe.
Statham's real genius, of course, is physical. Jaw clenched, sinews tensed, pate gleaming, Statham churns across the screen, as aerodynamic as the Audi A8 he drives in the Transporter movies. (Given a choice, you'd rather collide with the car than the chauffeur.) The athleticism is not a special effect. Before getting into acting, Statham was a member of the British National Diving Team. And he is an accomplished mixed martial artist, which explains his finesse in the kinetic Transporter fight scenes and in the climactic showdown in War (2007), where Statham and Jet Li face off, armed with sledgehammers and shovels. In fact, Statham's combination of brawn and flair is very Li-esque, very Hong Kong. Turns out, Hollywood's biggest Asian action star in years is a white guy from Sydenham, South London.
The actor Statham most closely resembles is another Hong Kong great, Jackie Chan, whose physical comedy emphasizes the zaniness of violence. Like Chan, Statham is madcap—never more so than in his best film, Crank (2006). Crank has a ludicrous premise: Statham plays Chev Chelios, a hitman who is injected by a rival with a poison that stops the flow of adrenaline, gradually slowing the victim's heartbeat to a standstill. To stay alive, Chev must keep his adrenaline surging, which he accomplishes by rampaging across Los Angeles, leaving a trail of shattered glass, ruined shopping malls, decapitated lawn jockeys, and dead Triad gangsters. He injects drugs, steals police motorcycles, forces an E.R. doctor at gunpoint to "juice" him with a jolt from a defibrillator. In one memorable scene, Chev gets a natural adrenaline boost by having rough sex with his girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) on a Chinatown street corner while a throng of onlookers gape and cheer.
Crank's co-directors, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, do not disguise their amusement at the movie's plot device, upping the ante with each new set piece, as they whip their cameras around showily and flood their frames with day-glo colors. Statham, meanwhile, hurls himself into his role, milking the scenes for all their screwball potential. The spectacle of Statham sprinting through the sun-strafed L.A. streets wearing only a hospital gown, socks, and sneakers brings to mind not just Chan but the breakneck antics of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
The Transporter movies are less frantic than Crank, but they have their own tour de force sequences. In Transporter 3, Statham's Frank Martin steers his Audi off a bridge and into a lake to avoid being shot, surviving for several minutes underwater by breathing the air that he sucks out of his car's tires. Forget Jason Bourne and the riddle of existence: It's in moments of deadpan hilarity like this—when the bug-eyed Transporter wraps his lips around the valve of a Goodyear radial—that Jason Statham offers an edifying theory of action cinema.
The Bourne pictures (and other movies of their ilk) try to have it both ways, endowing their heroes with superhero powers that they present in a gritty, verité style. But Statham revels in the artifice and absurdity of an art form that suspends all physical and metaphysical laws, that gives us a guy dangling from a minute hand above the bustling midtown grid and an archeologist outrunning a giant boulder—that shows us a man driving his car into a lake and, minutes later, shows us the same man, careening across dry land in the same car, in a suit as crisply pressed as it was before man, car, and couture got dunked. Call them action-adventure movies if you like. The truth is, they're comedies, and they're telling a joke that never gets old: He was dead … but he got better.
Study Shows Meditation Changes Brain Structure in Just 8 Weeks
Written by Suzannah Moss - FHG Senior Writer
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Participants in an 8 week mindfulness meditation class experienced structural brain changes including increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection.
This is the first research to document meditation-produced changes in the brain.
Previous research has identified differences in brain activity and structure between practised meditators and non-meditators.
Researchers noted that long-term meditation alters brain-wave patterns, with greater activity in brain circuits involved in attention. They also found that brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing were thicker in meditators than in controls. The question was whether people with a thicker brain cortex in areas associated with awareness and sensory processing were more likely to meditate.
The current study is the first to document that these structural changes are in fact produced by meditation.
"This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing," said study author Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program
During the study MR images of participants' brain structure were taken two weeks prior to and immediately following an eight week mindfulness based stress reduction programme. MR brain images were also taken of a control group over a similar time interval.
The meditation course consisted of weekly meetings including guided meditation and audio meditations to do at home on a daily basis. Analysis of MR images found increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection. Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress.
"It is fascinating to see the brain's plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life." says Britta Hölzel, PhD, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany.
The research will be published in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging
Further health benefits of meditation
Several studies designed specifically to understand the beneficial effects of meditation have shown that meditation helps to prevent heart disease, reduce pain, reduce blood pressure, reduce cholesterol, decrease anxiety and help manage asthma2.
Meditation has been shown to increase alpha waves (relaxed brain waves) and decrease production of the stress hormone cortisol. It appears that some of the positive physical changes associated with meditation have their roots in stress management.
Conditions benefitted by meditation
• Pain: There is a body of research work indicating that meditation can reduce chronic pain3. One notable study conducted at the Texas Tech University found that meditation in conjunction with traditional medicine enhances the effectiveness of western medical treatment. In another study published in the Journal of Behavioural Medicine, patients suffering from backache, chronic migraine and tension headaches were able to significantly reduce pain medication4. Another study found that people who meditate regularly find pain less unpleasant.5
• HIV: There is emerging evidence from other studies that shows that meditation and behavioral stress-management programs can buffer HIV declines in HIV-positive people6
• High Cholesterol: In two prospective, random assignment studies, meditation reduced total cholesterol over a relatively short period (three months)7 as well as a long period (11 months)8.
• Anxiety and Depression: Since the early sixties, scientists have speculated that meditation improves mental functioning. Meditation decreases oxygen consumption, heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure, and increases the intensity of alpha, theta, and delta brain waves, the opposite of the physiological changes that occur during the stress response.
• Diabetes: Meditation also aids in controlling blood sugar levels. Researchers at the University of Virginia have shown that following meditation, reduced stress levels correlate with a decrease in blood glucose levels.9
• Hypertension: Besides its role as a stress buster, meditation also reduces blood pressure10 and contributes to the overall reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease.
Meditation is more that just a way for us to get in touch with ourselves and calm a busy mind. It appears that meditation has a direct effect on the physical body, brain activity and underlying brain structure. So what are you waiting for? Benefits of Meditation and How to Get Started
Vandelay's Coffee Talk with Dan Moriarty
By Art Vandelay
Thursday, January 27, 2011 12:19 pm
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Sorry you have not heard from me in a while. Krundle has sent me on a special assignment doing interviews for PenguinPoop. Having never done and interview, I thought I would do my first interview with probably the best NHL interviewer out there, Dan Moriarty and maybe get some tips along the way. Dan was the host of several NHL shows like NHL Cool Shoots, Inside the NHL, Pioneers, and Relive the Magic. He also had his own radio show in LA. Dan joined me for "Coffee Talk." Some of the topics we talked about were: Sidney Crosby, Max Talbot, playing for the Minnesota Wild, and Jack Bauer.
Coffee Talk with Art Vandelay
Art Vandelay: Dan, in 2007 you sat down with Sidney Crosby and interviewed him for Inside the NHL. What did you think of him?
Dan Moriarty: "I first met Sidney when he was fifteen years old. We crossed paths when I was working with, Game on Communications. He was a quiet, shy, and nice young kid. He has respect for the game and has not forgotten who he is. He is a class act!"
Art Vandelay: Dan you also sat down with Max Talbot in 2007. What did you think of him?
Dan Moriarty: "I believe that Max Talbot is the heartbeat of the locker room and the energy of the team. He is a fun guy to be around and he keeps Sid grounded." Dan's Max Talbot Interview
Art Vandelay: You hosted a NHL show called Relive the Magic. Unfortunately, you never taped an episode of the Pittsburgh Penguins cup winning teams of the 90′s. If you had the chance to ask Mario Lemieux one question during that episode, what would it be?
Dan Moriarty: "Wow, great question. What was the pressure like for a young man that did not speak the language, saving the team twice, winning two cups, and battling Hodgkin's?"
Art Vandelay: You interviewed a ton of people in your career. If you had to group hockey players as whole, what would you say about them?
Dan Moriarty:Hockey players are honest and the most simple down to earth people."
Art Vandelay: During a season of NHL Cool Shots you got to attend training camp for a week and play a shift in an exhibition game for the Minnesota Wild. What was the experience like?
Dan Moriarty: "It was the coolest thing I have ever done! I got to train with the guys for the week. I got hazed non-stop. I was out on the ice for the anthem with players like, Pascal Dupuis and Sean O'Donnell. I played 55 seconds of the first shift and contrary to what the internet says I did not fall or embarrass myself. After the game the Wild washed my game jersey. The current team autographed it for me. I still to have it with my entire equipment I wore from that game. The Minnesota Wild is a first class organization that treated me and the crew of NHL Cool Shots with nothing but respect."
Art Vandelay: I read that you are a big fan of the show "24″, any truth?
Dan Moriarty: "Yes, it was a show I would DVR and watch by myself. I have interviewed Kiefer Sutherland several times at his studio and on the actual set of 24. He told me that the coolest thing his friends think that he has actually done is the voice over for the NHL." 'This is the NHL."
Art Vandelay: Dan, is there any one person that you wish you could have interviewed that never had the chance?
Dan Moriarty:"The Richard brothers, Henri and Maurice. Henri won more Stanley Cups then anyone in history. Maurice who could do it all is one of the greatest players of all time."
Art Vandelay: Dan do you have any tips for me when it comes to a good interview.
Dan Moriarty: "Be interested in what they are saying. Do your research. You can never have enough research. Let the person you are interviewing go the direction they want to go, but be able to bring them back."
That information about "Do your research. You can never have enough research." would have been very useful before I did the interview. If I did my research I would have known that he guest starred as himself on Jim Belushi's sitcom and many other things.
But seriously, last week when I talked to Dan I talked to him for 45 minutes and I honestly could of talked to him for a lot longer. Dan is very easy to talk too, it felt like we were two guys sitting at a bar chatting about old stories, and I would love to have the chance to talk to him again. He is a wealth of knowledge. I considered it an honor an a privilege to be able to talk to him and have him tell me "Great conversation, wonderful questions, you made it fun and interesting for me to relive good times. looking forward to the read…." My own mother doesn't even tell me that kind of stuff, but what do I know, my name is Art Vandelay, I'm an architect.
You can follow Dan on FaceBook here: Dan Moriarty
Here are some more great Dan Moriarty interviews from when he was with Inside the NHL:
Matt Cooke when he was with the Canucks
Jordan Staal
Colby Armstrong when he was with the Pens
Dan Moriarty, Max Talbot, Sidney Crosby
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Scorecasting Tackles Sports' Biggest Myths
• By Jeremy Repanich
• January 27, 2011 |
• 7:00 am |
• Categories: Data, Statistical Analysis
•
Repeated often enough over the years by players, coaches, newspaper columnists, and ESPN talking heads, clichés have the habit of becoming fact to the sports cognoscenti. These truisms tend to shape debate among fans and inform the decisions of team executives.
But as we've learned from the stat-head revolution led by the likes of Bill James as well as the good folks at Basketball Prospectus, Baseball Prospectus and Football Outsiders, there may be more myth than fact behind many of our long-held beliefs.
The latest salvo in the revolution comes from Jon Wertheim, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated (right), and Tobias Moskowitz, a finance professor from the University of Chicago, with their Freakonomics-influenced book Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won.
Like Moneyball and Soccernomics before it, Scorecasting crunches the numbers to challenge notions that have been codified into conventional sports wisdom.
Wired.com recently sat down with Wertheim to talk about notions of home-field advantage, referee bias and the decades of futility from his beloved Chicago Cubs.
Wired.com: How did you and a University of Chicago professor team up to write this book?
Jon Wertheim: He's a friend from way back. We went to camp together in the '80s, grew up together, and played tennis as a doubles team together. It wasn't just two random guys who met on the street. We would talk about how there was so much data for sports and so many sports truisms that people take for granted that are left unexplored, so we thought, Why don't we play around on this?
Wired.com: How did you go about figuring out what truisms you wanted to address?
Wertheim: We brainstormed like we were sitting a bar with your buddies watching a game, and you say, "Is that the right decision to punt or to go for it?" Or "Does defense really win championships?" They're the questions every sports fan wonders about, like, "Is it really true that home team wins more often?" We assume it is and we crunched the data and, sure enough, for a century's worth of games in every sport the home team wins more often.
Wired.com: So it wasn't just about overturning conventional wisdom. You found some of those old clichés to be true?
Wertheim: The cliché that the home team wins more often is 100 percent accurate, so there's nothing to overturn there. That there's "no 'I' in team" is flatly untrue. The best teams almost always have a top-tier player, if not two of them. But some things we researched, like draft strategy, are less obvious. It leaves you saying, "Well, X, Y, and Z have to also fall into place." So in some cases, you can just topple the conventional wisdom. Some of the wisdom out there isn't patently false; it just isn't quite what we always thought it was.
Wired.com: So why does the home team win more often?
Wertheim: What's really interesting is how consistent that truism is. The WNBA has almost the exact same home winning percentage as the NBA. A soccer league in Central America is almost the same as the Premier League. Japanese baseball has almost the same as MLB.
Before you even dig into the "why?" of home-field advantage, you see the data that 100 years ago the home winning percentage in Major League Baseball was almost exactly the same as it is today, and you find the same in other sports.
I think most people think, "Well, you're playing at home and you've got people cheering for you and booing the other the guy," but we didn't find that to be the cause. Then you have the theory that home teams get to sleep in their own beds and road teams had to fly in the night before, but that didn't seem to be the case either.
Wired: Right. You made the point in the book that travel has gotten so much better than 100 years ago, but winning percentage didn't change from when teams were on buses to now, when they're taking charters.
Wertheim: Yeah, and in games like when the Angels play the Dodgers or the Ravens play the Redskins — games where there's negligible travel — the winning percentage stays the same. If you fly across the country, you're not losing any more than you are when you're the Chicago White Sox playing across town at Wrigley Field.
So we looked at how games are called and that's where the data went berserk. Yellow and red cards in soccer, calls in the NFL before and after replay's implementation, called balls and strikes in baseball — that's where we saw games are called totally differently based on where they're played. And the more attended the games are, the more striking the bias.
Data culled from 1.1 million pitches shows that umpires will expand the strike zone when there is a 3-ball count on a batter and reduce the strike zone when a batter has two strikes.
Also, how close the fans are matters. In some European soccer stadiums, the track acts as a moat to keep the fans away and that reduced bias. So everything we found pointed to the home teams winning more because the games are being called differently.
Wired.com: That kind of explains Super Bowl XL when the Seattle Seahawks got jobbed by the officials in a way we hadn't seen in a Super Bowl before.
Wertheim: Exactly, that's right. The percentage of fans made that basically a home game for the Steelers.
The other thing we found out about officiating is "swallowing the whistle." Officials don't want to insinuate themselves on the game. It's not necessarily of a bias, but the refs want to stay out of the game in the waning minutes.
Wired.com: Like when there's a touch foul in the NBA postseason and you hear people say, "You don't make that call in the playoffs."
Wertheim: Yeah. When you think about it is absurd, like with Serena and her foot fault in the US Open, you make that call or you don't, but it's something we've become accustomed to and that gets to the officials.
We also wrote about the Chris Webber "timeout game." In the last 30 seconds the UNC-Michigan Championship Game and Webber gets the ball and has the most egregious travel ever. If this happens at my kids' grade school basketball game, you have to call it. It's three loping steps — he even stops for a second and looks around guiltily. But nothing, they let him play. That's subjective. I mean, not totally subjective, but it's easier to let a travel call slide. Well, he signals for timeout and that's a call where there's no room for subjectivity. It demonstrated that there are points when referees have to act and times when they can let them play.
Wired.com: You guys show that refs are biased toward the home team and you show with PitchFX that umpires adjust their strike zone depending on the situation, so do you think we should just get rid of umpires in baseball?
Wertheim: That's a good question. PitchFX calls it accurately; it's unambiguous, so from a fairness perspective it's hard to argue against it. But as fans we like whistle swallowing. I don't think fans overall are opposed to games being called differently at different times. We found that a player like Albert Pujols gets very few called third strikes, but also very few ball fours because the umpire internalizes that fans want to see him put the ball in play — you want him to strike out swinging, you want him to hit a home run, but you don't want a judgment call. So, in some ways, whistle swallowing is following what fans want.
From a fairness perspective, if you have the capacity to call balls and strikes pretty flawlessly, it's hard to argue against that. But I think we want more from our officials from a robotic ball and strike. I think we like to have our officials to have sensitivity to the rhythms of the game.
When a hitter has a 3-0 count, the umpire becomes much less likely to call a fourth ball, expanding the strike zone considerably. Conversely, when a hitter is facing a 0-2 count, his strike zone will shrink.
Wired.com: Speaking of flow of the game, you two analyze the idea of momentum and the "hot hand" in sports and conclude that it doesn't exist.
Wertheim: There was a famous study by these two Nobel Prize winners a generation ago that made that case and we found the same thing. There's not a "hot hand" per se, but there's no doubt that there are streaks and that a guy can hit four in a row. The same way that a batter that bats .250 doesn't go out, out, out, hit, out, out, out, hit. When you flip a coin it will be 50/50, but that doesn't mean it alternates. I think people don't understand the probability. If you talk to athletes there's no doubt there's a "hot hand" and there's no doubt that they're "feeling it," but it's a hard case to make statistically.
Wired.com: You're a tennis guy, so think about when you're actually playing. Are there times when you feel physically and mentally locked in and you're just hitting lines and you have a "hot hand"?
Wertheim: Yeah, and one of the hardest things about all of this is isolating variables. If a guy's wife dumps him the night before the game, that is something you can't control for. Again, there's no question that some days athletes are healthier than others, some days they feel better, some days the climate is more conducive, but as a matter of probability, it doesn't really support the idea of a hot hand.
Wired.com: As a matter of probability, the Chicago Cubs are certainly an anomaly. Why did you want to write about them?
Wertheim: One of the first chapters we did was on the Cubs because we both like them and grew up in the Midwest. We found some really cool things and went forward from there. The Cubs really are bad — it's not just because they're unlucky and cursed by a goat.
Wired.com: You two make a pretty convincing case that plenty other teams are more "unlucky" than the Cubs and that their shortcomings have been more a result of mismanagement. Has the team just been milking the idea that it's "cursed" to absolve itself of blame?
Wertheim: I don't think the Cubs intentionally lose games, but their incentives to win economically are a lot different than most other teams. I don't think that it's a leap that at some level it leaks down to the players that no matter what the fans are going to come and WGN is going to be there and Cubs baseball kind of has this persona now.
Wired.com: That's another theme of your book. You're not just parsing actuarial tables, you're trying to get to the psychology behind the numbers. There are places in the book where you show that the statistics favor one action, but our own psychology gets in the way.
Wertheim: We talk about that with punting and going for it on fourth down. You're never an idiot for punting. You're called "conservative," but if you go for that fourth down and you turn the ball over, you get a lot of heat. So coaches will make the sub-optimal choice statistically, but they're not going to subject themselves to all sorts of hell if they go for it. We do that in life, too. If you're a fund manager, no one is going to fire you if you invested a client's money in Walmart.
Look at New England coach Bill Belichick and how he almost never went for it when he was the head coach in Cleveland. When he was there, his job was in peril, there was a rabid fan base, and the team was not doing well. But after he goes to New England and wins three Super Bowls, he's called a genius and has job security and his whole strategy changes. The math didn't change.
Wired.com: As the stats revolution grows, will it help change that psychology?
Wertheim: There's still Joe Morgan. You still have this segment of the population that thinks, This is just geeks and their numbers and they know it when they see it and what the right play call is. I had someone in the NBA once tell me, "A few years ago, it was all about taking kids out of high school and look at Kwame Brown. Then it was all about taking European players and you look at Ricky Rubio and similar busts and I guarantee that in a few years no one is going to care about your pie charts and there's going to be a new trend."
So there's still a segment that thinks this is a trend just for the geeks, but there are enough credible people who support analytics. No one is saying every single time that you follow the number you're going to be successful; you're just tilting the odds in your favor.
Wheelin' and Dealin' with Ray Shero
Penguins general manager Ray Shero is the architect of a Stanley Cup championship, but one trade had him skating on thin ice at home.
By Sean Conboy
Illustration courtesy of Stephen Bosela and ThePensblog.com
Ray Shero's wife, Karen, still hasn't gotten over something he did in 2002 while he was general manager of the Nashville Predators. He didn't forget their anniversary or anything like that. Instead, he made a decision that every GM dreads: He sent a popular player packing.
"Tom Fitzgerald was our captain in Nashville, and we traded him at the deadline," Shero says. "My wife really liked Tom, and she's still mad at me for that one."
Shero is able to laugh about the trade now, especially since he hired Fitzgerald as one of his assistants after coming to the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2006. But as the architect of the franchise's meteoric rise to Stanley Cup glory, Shero has had to make life-altering decisions with the team's $60-million salary cap budget.
"It's hard as a manager, because I can't exactly be buddy-buddy with these guys, but it's hard not to grow to really like a person and his family. As soon as you make that phone call to a player that's been moved, someone's life has changed. And not only them—but their family, too," Shero says.
Pittsburgh magazine recently sat down with Shero to talk about tough phone calls, trade rumors and the never-ending question: wingers for Sidney Crosby.
Q: First off, let's tackle a rumor that refuses to die: Has Sid or any other player ever come to you and said, "You need to upgrade my linemates."
A: Never once. And it'll never happen. No. 1, Sidney's not that type of person. I read and hear all the things about wingers and all that stuff, and you know, going out and getting a 40-goal winger would be great, but that's going to cost you. With the salary-cap structure, you're going to have a hole somewhere. No team has it all. It's not possible.
You made a big decision in 2009: firing coach Michel Therrien mid-season and appointing a very green coach in Dan Bylsma to take the reigns ...
At that point, we were in dire straights, and it was quite a whirlwind for Dan. Funny story: In Dan's first game behind the bench, we lost in a shootout on Long Island. On the plane home after the game—this is how much of an "interim" coach he was—Dan walked up and gave me a tug on my sleeve and said, "Umm, Ray … Am I coaching practice tomorrow?" I think we all know how that season turned out.
"I say this every year, 'This might be the year we don't do anything [at the deadline].' But, really, this might be the year we don't do anything."
Not all the players you bring to Pittsburgh are stars. What do you look for in grinders and role players?
There's certain criteria we look for in Penguins players. Perfect example is Craig Adams, who was on waivers when we picked him up. He went 82 games last year without a goal, but not once was he taken out of the lineup, and that may be hard to believe. But then he scores two goals in the playoffs. What he brings every night is hard work and character and physical play. Every successful team needs a guy like that. Our identity to people outside of Pittsburgh might be the high-scoring Penguins, but to me we're a blue-collar team. I want that to be our M.O.
We've got these two superstar players in Crosby and Malkin, and maybe if I managed another team I'd build it differently, but the way we're set up here, we're looking for character and leadership traits. There might even be better players out there, but maybe they're not what we're looking for in a Penguin.
Photo ©2010 Pittsburgh Penguins/Gregory Shamus
What's the most difficult trade you've ever had to make?
When we traded [former defenseman] Ryan Whitney in 2009, that was a difficult one because I really liked Ryan as a person. His father is a really great guy, and I still keep in touch with him. When the trade happened, it was bad timing and Ryan's mom was in the hospital, and I knew that. It was really, really difficult. But that's the job.
Does the so-called "hometown discount" actually exist? Do players take less money to stay here?
I think in the end, it's money. How much will a person leave on the table? How much is enough? I can't answer that, but in Pittsburgh, what we have to offer is good ownership who spends to the salary cap limit, the players' families are treated first-class here, and our goal is to win Cups.
Take [defensemen] Zbynek Michalek and Paul Martin, who we signed this summer. They had numerous other places they could've gone and they chose Pittsburgh. It starts with guys like Crosby, who take less than they can get to stay here. Brooks Orpik did the same thing; Jordan Staal, Kris Letang. Every player that's really wanted to stay here we've been able to retain, and it's worked out pretty well for them and for us.
So, what's going to happen at the trade deadline this year?
A lot of the times it's gone down to the final minute of the deadline to make a deal. I say this every year, "This might be the year we don't do anything." But, really, this might be the year we don't do anything. And just because you make a move doesn't mean it's going to work out. Last year with [Alexei] Ponikarovski, it didn't work out.
Why do you think Ponikarovski didn't work out?
He got off to a really good start with us, then he hit a rut and really started pressuring himself to score. He thought he had to score goals, which really wasn't the case. He just had to be a second or third line player. At the end of the day, I can live with what we gave up for him. That's sports.
Do other GMs ever take the Internet trade rumors seriously?
Not really. Before the 2008 draft, there was a story going around that we had a deal going with L.A. to trade Evgeni Malkin. And I'd never, ever talked with their GM, Dean Lombardi, about that. So it was funny because I got a call the day before the draft from Dean saying, "Ray, obviously, we're supposed to be talking about Malkin. Should I be calling you?" [Laughing] I said, "Nope, you shouldn't be calling me." That's exactly how far that went.
Seems as if someone always has you trading away Malkin.
Well if that ever happened, we're not going to get the best player in the deal. We've already got the best player. This summer, when we were kicking around the idea of Geno playing winger, I texted him about it. He was somewhere in Europe at the time, but he texted me right back. I didn't know what he was going to say, like, "Are you guys nuts? I want out of here. I'm a center!" But the first thing he replied was, "What does coach think?" He's a great kid and a great teammate. When someone says something about Evgeni, I mean *points up to the rafters at CONSOL Energy Center*, there's the Stanley Cup banner."
"What are they gonna do, call their mom? This is hockey."
What are your thoughts on these disputed mega-long-term contacts that players like Kovalchuck have signed? Would you consider giving one to Crosby before his deal expires in two years?
If you sign a guy for 12 or 15 years and you think you have him forever, well let's be honest, if he doesn't like the way the team's run or he doesn't like the ownership and he's not happy, in today's game players will come to you and say, "Look, this isn't working out like I thought," and then you're stuck. But if you sign a guy to a five-year contract like Crosby, or anybody else, and you make every attempt to win and you make a commitment with a brand new building like we have, then you'll have a much better chance to retain that player. So I'm hopeful that Sidney will want to stay here his entire career and retire a Penguin like Mario did.
HBO's "24/7" series revealed that you and coach Bylsma meet to evaluate players' performances on a 1-5 scale. Do players ever get mad about their rating?
I think in that segment [on HBO], Matt Cooke got a two, and then he scored the next night. All I can say is, Cookey must've done a few things right in his career to get a contract from me. It's a reality series—and that's reality. Some guys have a really bad game and they get a one! Tough. What are they gonna do, call their mom? This is hockey. They'll get over it.
Blade Runner
His legs were amputated when he was a year old. Now Oscar Pistorius is on track to make the South African Olympic team. Is he an engineering marvel — or just one hell of a sprinter?
By Josh McHugh
* Story Images
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Fast Track
Fast Track
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Footage by Baerbel Schmidt. Music by Michael Calore.
I first hear it as I'm coming out of a turn on the track at the University of Pretoria's High Performance Centre. It's 100 meters to the finish line. I'm pumping my legs as fast as I can when a sort of snick snick snick snick starts getting louder, like I'm being chased by a giant pair of scissors. At 50 meters to go, the sound is at my left shoulder, and then Oscar Pistorius blows past me; the snick snick fades away ahead. By the time I cross the finish line, the South African sprinter has already turned around and is catching his breath, leaning forward, hands on his knees.
He ran 200 meters. I ran only 150; he spotted me the difference. Still, his win comes as no surprise. Two years ago Pistorius ran the 200 in 21.34 seconds, matching the women's world record time set by Florence Griffith Joyner in 1988 and missing the qualifying time for the 2008 Olympics by just three-quarters of a second.
"Nice running, bru," Pistorius says in his Afrikaans-tinged lilt. Then he turns his attention to a pair of sprinters from the women's track team, stretching before their workout. He suggests they upgrade to more streamlined running gear: bikinis. "Naughty!" one of them squeals, tousling his frosted curly hair.
Pistorius and I grab bottles of water, and then he trots to the infield. He sits, undoes a couple of straps, and tosses his legs onto the grass. The Cheetahs, elegant, swooping lengths of carbon-fiber composite, are
better at running than walking.
I'm not the only runner who has learned to dread the scissoring sound of Oscar Pistorius. Marlon Shirley and Brian Frasure, both of whom are below-the-knee single amputees, were the world's top two runners going into the Athens Paralympics in 2004. Shirley finished in 22.67 seconds, breaking Frasure's world record for a one-legged amputee. But they were racing for silver. Three strides ahead, Pistorius had demolished them both, clocking a time of 21.97.
Since Athens, Pistorius has been running in Paralympic events, but also against able-bodied runners. After overhauling his training regimen and working with redesigned, customized prototype prosthetics, Pistorius is on pace to run the 200- and 400-meter sprints fast enough to earn a spot on South Africa's Olympic team. He'd be the first amputee runner to cross over.
Pistorius is forcing the sports world to rethink what it means to be a disabled athlete. Is he so close to world-class that his limitations, his prosthetic legs, represent a disadvantage? Or are the Cheetahs an advantage, an artificial enhancement that makes him faster than he would be if he had natural legs? After all, improvements in human performance are normally limited by biology and evolution. Not in Pistorius' case. His legs are constantly upgraded by a pit crew of Icelandic gearheads at one of the world's most sophisticated prosthetic manufacturing facilities.
No one expects able-bodied runners to compete head-to-head with wheelchair-bound marathoners. The wheels confer an obvious speed advantage, and maybe Oscar Pistorius' Cheetahs do, too. So the real question is this: Do able-bodied athletes need protection from him?
Pistorius was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1986, with five digits on each hand and two toes on each tiny foot. Each leg was missing its fibula, the long, thin bone that anchors the calf muscle and forms the outside of the ankle. His parents had a choice: consign their child to a wheelchair or amputate his lower legs and let him learn to walk with prosthetics.
His father, Henke, head of the family's zinc-mining company, asked a dozen orthopedic surgeons which three doctors in the world they would choose to perform a lower-leg amputation on their own child. Of the top three they named, two were in the US and one was in South Africa. A month before Oscar's first birthday, Gerry Versveld removed the baby boy's legs halfway between his knees and ankles. Six months later, Oscar took his first steps, on a pair of fiberglass pegs.
Spending a week with Pistorius makes you feel slow in all sorts of ways. When I hear he is going to pick me up at the airport, I figure someone will drive him there to meet me, or maybe he'll be driving a car modified with hand controls for accelerating and braking. I am mistaken.
As I emerge from customs, he picks me out of the blinking crowd with a shout, grabs my suitcase, and bounds up a set of stairs ahead of me on a pair of "street" prosthetics. I look surreptitiously at his baggy jeans for some sign that he doesn't have biological legs. Maybe he looks a little bowlegged.
His car is modified, but not in the way I'd imagined. It's a little black sled straight out of The Fast and the Furious — a low-slung, five-speed manual SEAT Ibiza hatchback with about 4 inches of ground clearance. oscar pistorius is emblazoned across the doors in 6-inch-high white letters above the name of his sponsor, Hatfield Motors.
Slaloming along the N1 freeway between Pretoria and Johannesburg at about 125 percent of the speed limit, Pistorius hands me his cell phone to show me a text message he just received. "I go back to Denmark in 2 weeks. I want to have as much fun as possible before I go. What are u doing 2nite?" He tells me he's going to decline this invitation — he's quite sweet on his current girlfriend — but he can't resist texting back, one hand (thankfully) still on the wheel, to inquire what she has in mind. He passes her reply over for my perusal: "I cd tell u but it would be much easier to show u!"
Later, while Pistorius is parking his little rocket at a coffee shop, I ask whether sometimes, maybe if he's in a huge hurry, he ever parks in handicap spaces.
"Yoh! Never," he almost spits. "There's nothing that cheeses me off worse than seeing somebody pull into a disabled spot, then get out of their car and walk off.
"People ask me all the time if I wish I had the rest of my legs," Pistorius continues. "No. I guess it's a kind of an inconvenience, having to put on different legs to do different things, but there's nothing that anyone else can do that I can't do."
Sometimes his managers and coaches wish Pistorius would do a little less. Last spring his then–business manager Lizl Schutte chewed him out when she learned he'd spent the weekend on an ATV bike, competing with friends to see who could launch themselves the farthest off a ramp into a lake. Steven Ball, his strength trainer, reports that although Pistorius has been destroying Paralympics records for two years, he began a hardcore weight training program only a year ago. Ampie Louw, Pistorius' running coach since 2003, says the biggest thing standing between the sprinter and the two seconds he needs to cut from his time in the 400 meters to make the Olympics may be his robust social life.
"Getting him to come here and train every day — that's the challenge," Louw says with a rueful laugh. "Look at the best sprinters' upper bodies, and look at Oscar's. We're not matching the Asafa Powells yet." Two seconds is about 5 percent of a world-class time in the 400, no small improvement for Pistorius. But Louw is convinced he can do it. Since 2004 Pistorius has trimmed more than three seconds off his time in the 400, and Louw is still working to correct a persistent problem in his running mechanics. "He always wants to make his stride too long," Louw says. "It puts enormous pressure on his hamstrings, and he spends too much time in the air." A new pair of Cheetahs, specially designed for use by double amputees, might also help.
At the track for a workout, Pistorius opens the hatch of his car and takes out the new legs. The South African flag is emblazoned on the sockets that grip Pistorius' stumps; there's a line of 2-inch-high foam-rubber pyramids down the rear face of the blades with a plastic wire connecting the points. Pistorius says he and Trevor Brauckmann, the man who builds and fits those sockets, are going to stretch fabric across the framework in an attempt to cut down wind resistance — in other words, he's going to add aerodynamic cowling. Just another enhancement.
A company called Flex-Foot debuted the Cheetah in 1996, but the prosthetic blades remained a bit crude until Flex-Foot was acquired by the Icelandic firm Ossur in 2000. If you are missing a leg, owning an Ossur is like driving a BMW M-series.
The current Cheetahs look a little like the rear leg of a horse or cat, extending straight down from the socket, cantilevering backward, and then angling forward sharply. But last September, Pistorius and Brauckmann went to Reykjavik to test prototypes designed for double amputees. The new ones, which Pistorius hasn't debuted at a major race yet, make just one smooth curve, an arc of pure engineering.
Ossur's R&D team met them at the company's workshop and unveiled the prototypes. Brauckmann attached the blades to the sockets, and Pistorius walked around on them, testing the design.
They were too soft, Brauckmann told Ari Clausen, an engineer at Ossur. Oscar would to break them.
Clausen didn't believe it. His team had factored in every force Pistorius could possibly apply to the carbon fiber. So the next day, Pistorius put them on, jogged a bit, and cracked them. Clausen built a new set; that afternoon he took the South Africans to a track to try out the replacements — Brauckmann had doubts about the new pair as well, but Pistorius wanted to give them a try. He strapped in, stretched a bit, and started to jog.
When Pistorius falls while running, it's less like a stumble and more like a skiing wipeout. A few months before the Reykjavik trip, at a training day in South Africa, one of his blades split with a sound like a snapping two-by-four. He hit the rubber track going about 25 miles an hour, and bounced and slid 10 yards before stopping. He didn't break any bones, but the road burn took weeks to heal.
This time, as Pistorius started running he heard some creaking noises from his right leg — something felt wrong. Sure enough, the blade splintered. But this time Pistorius was able to pull up and slow down. He avoided the fall and hopped back to a chagrined Clausen, who tossed the prototypes into his huge tundra-and-magma- field-crawling Dodge Ram pickup and headed back to the workshop.
The testing room at Ossur is a bustling space where titanium-jointed prosthetic legs are stacked under racks of silicone feet and hands in various skin tones. It looks like Geppetto's workshop, if Geppetto were building an army of life-size super puppets. On my first look around, I see a guy sitting at a workbench, tightening screws that attach a prosthetic foot to a computer-controlled bionic knee called the Rheo. It's a joint project between Ossur and the MIT Media Lab. The man swivels in his chair, fastens the bionic leg to the stump of his left leg, stands up, and walks out of the room. I catch up to him on his way back after he's tried out his tweaked Rheo on a set of stairs. His name is Gísli Jónsson; he's a technician at Ossur.
What's the best thing about the Rheo? I ask.
"I don't fall down anymore," Jónsson says. "Even after I've been drinking."
Pistorius' Cheetah blades aren't particularly well-suited for a night of debauchery, and they don't have any of the sophisticated electronics software or servos of a Rheo. They are purpose-built, starting their life at Ossur as rolls of resin-impregnated (or "pre-preg") carbon fiber, stored in a van-sized industrial freezer. The rolls are cut into square sheets and pressed onto the outside of a steel mold milled in the shape of the legs' final profile.
Depending on the size of the athlete the blades are being made for, anywhere from 30 to 90 carbon-fiber sheets are layered one on top of another. Then the whole thing is swung into an autoclave that melts and fuses the resin and sheets into a solid, contoured carbon-fiber plate. Using pre-preg sheets instead of adding resin cuts down on air bubbles that can cause breaks. Once the compound cools, a robotic arm with a high-pressure water jet on the end carves the now-curved sheet into several Cheetah legs. Each one costs between $15,000 and $18,000.
To give me a sense of how they feel, Ossur's engineers bolt a pair of Cheetahs to the back of two rigid plastic-and-leather motorcycle boots. I clamp in and trot across the room a few times. The Cheetahs seem to bounce of their own accord. It's impossible to stand still on them, and difficult to move slowly. Once they get going, Cheetahs are extremely hard to control.
It shouldn't come as any surprise that the most highly functional prosthetic limbs come from Iceland. It's not a culture that embraces self-pity or, as far as I could tell from my week in Reykjavik, any pity at all. Iceland has just begun killing whales again after a 20-year hiatus, and nearly every Icelander I talk to is mystified by the international condemnation aimed at their tiny country. Mothers sit in Reykjavik's restaurants devouring smoked puffin, casting occasional glances through the window at their heavily swaddled babies in carriages parked on the sidewalk in the cold wind.
There's a word in Icelandic: upphafning. Literally it means "elevation," but when the folks at Ossur use it, it's more like "self- elevation." Cutting slack to someone who's disabled is frowned upon here — pity is just condescension by another name.
Pistorius says he wouldn't change a thing about his life — he's a world-class athlete and bona fide celebrity in South Africa who gets pestered for autographs and ogled by girls. Just one problem: Pistorius wishes that his carbon-fiber prostheses were beside the point. That's not likely. They'll be precisely the point when the world's best able-bodied sprinters start losing heats to a bilateral lower-leg amputee.
If only because of their shape, the Cheetahs, especially when they are lined up at the starting blocks next to seven pairs of biological legs, elicit amazement and fear. They look dangerous. Bionic legs! Part man, part machine! The twin ghosts of Steve Austin and John Henry (well, not twins exactly, but you see what I mean) will always dog Pistorius.
Eventually, sports fans might be made to comprehend the distinction between bionics — mechanical joints with moving parts, microprocessors, and power sources — and what Pistorius runs on: pegs. Hyper-engineered, autoclave-forged, epoxy-impregnated, elastic pegs, but still really just pegs.
But even that recognition might not be enough to quell concerns that Cheetahs confer an advantage. After he blew past them in Athens, Americans Shirley and Frasure accused Pistorius of "running tall": adding length to his stride by using longer prosthetics. "He's able to manipulate something that's out of other athletes' control," Shirley told Sports Illustrated. "Just because he has a double amputation, why should he have a different set of rules?" It was a spurious accusation; both men are, like Pistorius, sponsored by Ossur. They know, or ought to know, that Cheetahs have to be longer than biological legs. Nature built the ankle as a hinge that compresses and extends with every step, but Cheetahs supplant that localized up-and-down movement with elastic compression along their entire curve ... which means Cheetah users are permanently on tiptoe.
Perhaps more important, the limits of the human body — any human body — are a matter of math. It takes 3,556 joules to move 80.5 kilograms, Pistorius' weight, at 9.4 meters per second. That's his average speed on his fastest 200-meter run. Those joules have to come from somewhere. Running is basically a matter of forcing that power into the legs and using them, springlike, to bounce the body forward.
The lower legs of able-bodied sprinters return all the energy pumped into them by the muscles at the hips and knees — and they give back more, thanks to power from the calves and ankles. Pistorius doesn't have feet, ankles, or calves, of course, so he compensates: His strength trainer estimates that 85 percent of his power comes from his hips and the rest comes from the knees. That hip- generated stride, combined with the odd shape of the Cheetah itself, means that Pistorius has to waddle slightly, his feet flailing out to the side a bit on each rearward kick. The blades make that scissoring noise as they grip the track, compress, and return to their original shape.
Pistorius' street legs are modeled and painted to look as much like natural legs as possible, color-matched to his thighs. But covered by the flesh-tone paint is a doodled-on depiction of calf muscle a friend inked in red and black permanent marker before the Athens Paralympics. It's an interesting tattoo, a reminder that no matter how good Cheetahs are, Pistorius is still missing a natural calf.
So, sure, artificial legs are lighter than natural ones. Pistorius will never blow out his ankles or break a toe, though presumably his knees are as vulnerable as anyone's to old age and trauma. But does any of that constitute an unfair advantage? Does being able to modify and tune a prosthetic limb belong to the same category as blood doping (banned) or altitude training (A-OK)? If there's an issue of fairness here at all, it's not that Pistorius is using technology superior to what evolution has built for human beings. As Robert Gailey, who studies the biomechanics of prosthetics at the University of Miami, puts it, running on stilts isn't exactly a plus. The real asymmetry is that Frasure and Shirley each still have one natural leg, and it's holding them back.
You can see it when they run. Mixed-leg sprinters piston up and down, energy lost to vertical movement when they're trying to go horizontal. When Pistorius runs, his gait has a circular smoothness. He looks like he's on wheels. (Watch Pistorius run at wired.com /extras.) And while runners lose speed coming out of a turn as they straighten up, Louw thinks that Pistorius may actually be able to use that inward lean to push more energy into the Cheetahs. He'd come out of a turn going faster.
Sitting in the stands overlooking the track in Pretoria, Pistorius admits to some of his shortcomings as a runner. The 100-meter will never be his event: It takes him too long to get the right rhythm going, and the top single-amputee sprinters (not to mention the able-bodied ones) will probably continue to beat him. No, for Pistorius it'll be the 200 and the 400.
The first 30 meters, he says, are all about keeping his head down and taking short, quick strides. Then he upshifts, breaking each curve into three straight lines and hitting the afterburners in the stretch. He points to the stride patterns of Michael Johnson, the drug-enhanced sprinter's physique of Tim Montgomery, and the all-around greatness of current champ Asafa Powell. All the people he wants to emulate are able-bodied.
"I have full respect for the Paralympics," Pistorius says. "But I tell people this all the time: You'll never progress if your mind is on your disability."
But he's a Paralympic champion, I say.
"I'd really like to dominate the Paralympics until the end of my career," he answers. "But in able-bodied racing, I'd like to be a known name for a long time."
In November, John Einmahl and Jan Magnus, econometrics professors at the Netherlands' Tilburg University, released an article called "Records in Athletics Through Extreme-Value Theory." In the paper — which hasn't been accepted for publication yet — they apply probability theory to the peak performances of thousands of athletes over time in 14 track and field events to determine the extreme values, or the limits, of athletic capability. In some events, their models showed that current world records are fairly close to the limits. They model the fastest-possible men's marathon time as 2:04:06, only 49 seconds, or 0.7 percent, faster than the current world record. In other events, the models predict a major improvement — the limit to the men's 100 meters is 9.29 seconds, they say, and the current world record is a dawdling 9.77, a difference of 5 percent.
True, sports statisticians are always drawing graphs like this. Charts of world-record performances do indeed tend to look asymptotic, forever approaching but never reaching some theoretical limit. But the curve of records laid down by Paralympic athletes, Pistorius in particular, is approaching the limit line much more rapidly and at a much steeper angle. The average track and field world record for able-bodied athletes is nine years old for men and 10 for women; in Paralympics track and field events, that number is just two years. Every time amputee jocks get together for a major meet, they break half of the world records on their books.
It's also true that the Cheetahs Pistorius hopes to run on in Beijing, with their pure-engineering swoop, are in quantifiable ways better — faster — than the ones he ran on in Athens. Does that bother you? Pistorius' handlers have a saying: If you think having carbon-fiber legs will make you a faster sprinter, have the operation and we'll see you at the track. In their eyes, Cheetahs — for all their sophistication — are a disadvantage that Pistorius has transcended.
The International Association of Athletics Federations is supposed to decide if Pistorius is eligible for the Olympics this spring. The possibilities: If Pistorius is a black swan, a statistical freak who would have been a world-class sprinter on natural legs, too, then no problem — let him run. And, if being an amputee is what gave Pistorius something to prove and turned him into a world-class sprinter, then no problem — let him run. But if he is the vanguard of a legion of plastic track-and-field terminators whose upper speed is a function of materials science and software instead of determination and training? The International Olympics Commission better start hiring some engineers.
Back at the track, Pistorius scissors around a turn, halfway through half a dozen 300-meter reps. Louw whistles through two fingers and barks at the runner to shorten his strides. Pistorius doesn't seem to hear. He accelerates, muscles and carbon fiber reaching in unison toward a point just beyond the finish line.
The Lockerbie Deal
In 2009 the convicted Lockerbie bomber was sent home to Libya from a Scottish prison on grounds of "compassionate release"—he had only three months to live, authorities said. A year and a half later the man is still alive—and a Vanity Fair investigation reveals new details about the business interests and private dealings that lay behind the prisoner's release. At the heart of the matter: the cozy and "profitable relationships" between the Blair government and Qaddafi's Libya.
By David Rose
WEB EXCLUSIVE January 26, 2011
Clockwise from top left: Libyan intelligence agent and convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi; Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi; former British justice secretary Jack Straw; Scottish first minister Alex Salmond; Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill; former British prime minister Tony Blair. By Mahmud Turkia/AFP/Getty Images (Megrahi), Artyom Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty Images (Qaddafi), Oli Scarff/Getty Images (Straw), Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images (MacAskill, Salmond), Neilson Barnard/Getty Images (Blair).
In the 10 years that he was Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair did much that was unexpected. The Labour Party that he led and rebranded as "New Labour" was supposedly a party of the center left, but Blair became President George W. Bush's closest ally. His predecessors had called themselves socialists, but Blair cultivated the wealthy and eased the regulation of Britain's profligate banks. In the eyes of many, the venue chosen by Blair for his final foreign summit tour, in 2007, a month before he left office, was among the most unexpected decisions of all. The venue was Libya.
Only six years earlier, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, had been convicted of mass murder for his role in the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The aircraft exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground. No one was ever charged with the murder of Yvonne Fletcher, 25, a London police officer who was hit by a bullet fired from the Libyan Embassy in April 1984. For almost two decades, Libya had been the Irish Republican Army's main supplier of arms and high explosives—matériel used in a conflict which caused approximately a thousand deaths and for which Libya had never offered redress. Yet on May 29, 2007, Blair went to Libya to be fêted by Muammar Qaddafi, the dictator who first seized power in 1969 and was the ultimate author of these and other crimes.
By the late 1990s, an array of stringent international sanctions had left Libya's oil- and gas-rich economy reeling. In the end, Qaddafi had been forced to make the concessions that would remove the stigma of Libya's pariah status: first, in 1999, by giving up Megrahi and another man for trial by a special Scottish court convened in the Netherlands; and then, in 2003, by abandoning his nuclear- and chemical-weapons programs. After it completed payment of $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of the Lockerbie victims, Libya became one of the few countries to be expunged from the U.S. State Department's list of sponsors of terrorism, although, in contrast to Iraq, it did not first expunge its leader.
By 2007, however, the fulcrum of the Anglo-Libyan relationship had shifted, and Blair approached Qaddafi as a supplicant. His journey was far from convenient: first a flight from London to Libya's capital, Tripoli; then the transfer to a Libyan plane, which brought him close to Sirte, Colonel Qaddafi's birthplace and tribal home; and finally a hot and bumpy drive across the Sahara desert to Qaddafi's Bedouin tent, which is guarded around the clock by a phalanx of female bodyguards. Blair spoke to reporters on the trip's first leg. Describing how he felt about Qaddafi, he said, "It is a very good relationship.… He's very easy to deal with. There is nothing I have ever agreed with him should be done that hasn't happened." Blair said they spoke by telephone several times a year, and used one another's first names.
VF.com's slide show of Colonel Qaddafi's life in fashion.
Like a medieval prince, Blair was accompanied on his journey by a retinue not just of government officials but of merchants—the top executives of several major U.K.-based companies. The companies included General Dynamics U.K., the military-hardware and communications specialists; the missile manufacturer MBDA, which was hoping to sell Qaddafi its Jernas air-defense system; and the petroleum giant BP. All three firms had been assured by the Libyans that their executives would accompany Blair into Qaddafi's tent, where the colonel would approve the deals they had been negotiating.
But then, as one of those accompanying Blair relates, something went wrong. "Qaddafi was sensing that Blair was set on signing a big agreement to seal his departure," he recalls, and so the Libyan leader "insisted on putting in all these linkages." Chief among the linkages was a demand that Blair finalize a "Prisoner Transfer Agreement"—a standard form of international treaty that allows foreign prisoners to serve part of their sentences in their country of origin—in order to allow the Lockerbie bomber, Megrahi, to leave his cell at Greenock Prison, near Glasgow, and return to Libya. According to the sentence handed down by the Scottish judges, Megrahi was not due to be considered for parole for another 20 years.
"It was nearly a complete wash-out," the eyewitness says. "On the day of the meeting, the guys from MBDA and General Dynamics were told there wouldn't be any deal. It was too expensive, not right; the French might have something better. So the guys from these military companies were literally left outside the tent." Qaddafi did approve the BP contract, granting exclusive rights to drill for oil and gas in three giant blocs— one offshore in the Mediterranean, the size of Belgium, and two others onshore, the size of Kuwait—an area equivalent to about 2,000 of BP's blocs in the Gulf of Mexico. The deal is potentially worth many billions of dollars.
As for General Dynamics, it had to wait another 11 months, until May 2008, before Libya finally signed a contract worth $165 million to equip the Libyan army's elite second brigade, which was commanded by Qaddafi's son Khamis. In poker, there is a stratagem known as "deep stack," in which a rich player with mediocre cards intimidates opponents into folding by raising the stakes to levels so high that they dare not call his bluff. And that, says one frequent visitor to Libya, is the way Qaddafi does business. But if Tony Blair found himself outplayed in 2007, he gave no hint of it when he took his leave. "The relationship between Libya and Britain has completely transformed," he said. "The commercial relationship, as you can see by this huge investment deal today, is simply going now from strength to strength." Blair knew what he was talking about. He was about to become one of its beneficiaries.
It is a matter of record that on August 20, 2009, two years after Tony Blair left office, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was freed and flown home to Libya. In the end, the legal rubric under which this was done was not the Prisoner Transfer Agreement. The head of the Scottish prison medical service, Dr. Andrew Fraser, had certified that Megrahi's cancer of the prostate had advanced to such a degree that a three-month prognosis was a reasonable estimate. Fraser's opinion was supported by one of Britain's most eminent oncologists, Dr. Karol Sikora. Upon receiving the medical certification, Scotland's justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, granted Megrahi "compassionate release." As of January 2011, Megrahi has remained stubbornly alive, his survival a cause of anguish to many of the Lockerbie victims' families. President Obama has said that the release of Megrahi left him "surprised, disappointed, and angry." Despite fruitless attempts to persuade Scottish and U.K. officials to testify, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on the Megrahi release at the end of September 2010. Among the questions explored by the committee was whether the interests of big business, particularly the interests of major banks and of the oil-and-gas industry, played a decisive role in winning Megrahi's release. The committee's report, signed by the four senators from New York and New Jersey, was published in December 2010, and was highly critical of the decision to release Megrahi and of the process by which it was made.
New evidence, disclosed for the first time in this article, suggests that commercial interests did indeed play a part. It also suggests that, despite fervent denials, the Scots were willing to cut a self-serving deal with the British government—to let Megrahi go, as London wished, in return for a specific quid pro quo. Further new evidence obtained by Vanity Fair also supports the senate committee's conclusion that, even as the Scots released Megrahi, they should have been aware, and probably were quite aware, that he had longer than three months to live.
The first thing that must be understood about the Megrahi affair is the vastness of the entanglements among Libya, the oil companies, and the Blair government. This is no ordinary set of relationships, and the economic stakes are high. As the Blair era wound down, and as officials began looking toward wealth and security in the afterlife, the opportunities available in Libya loomed very large. They had everything to gain by a show of cooperation. As a result, what one sees in the final years of Tony Blair's government is the transformation of New Labour into something that might be called New Libya.
There has long been a symbiotic connection between BP—the biggest corporation listed on the London Stock Exchange—and the British government. Tony Blair's first trip to Libya came in March 2004—a reward for Qaddafi's decision at the end of the previous year to give up his attempts to acquire nuclear armaments and other weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.). John Browne, BP's chief executive officer at the time, had already been appointed to the House of Lords. Now Blair gave BP the opening that was to lead to the exploration deal by taking Browne to meet Qaddafi. BP's deal was still some way from being done by the time Lord Browne was forced to resign, in 2007, in the aftermath of a sex scandal. But having made at least one further visit to Qaddafi, he later said: "It did not happen but I think I got quite a way forward."
The central role in negotiating Qaddafi's renunciation of W.M.D. was played by Sir Mark Allen, the head of counterterrorism at Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Allen had held a series of secret meetings with one of Qaddafi's sons, Saif al-Islam, in London hotels and at a traditional watering hole for spies, the Travellers Club, in Pall Mall. In 2004, a few months after Lord Browne had met Qaddafi, Allen resigned from MI6 and took a senior position at BP, with a focus on Libya. One of Blair's closest associates was already there: Anji Hunter, his chief political assistant from early in his political career until 2001. Hunter was once described as "the most influential non-elected person in Downing Street." The traffic between the government and BP was not all one-way. From 2002 until 2006, BP's vice president for policy and strategy development was Nick Butler. Butler left BP to later work for Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, as a Downing Street special adviser. "Allen and Butler were the kind of Englishmen who regularly visited us to discuss the prospects for British oil companies moving to Libya, and what we wanted in return," says a Libyan government official. "The answer was always pretty straightforward—al-Megrahi."
British commercial interests in Libya go well beyond BP. Even when its economy labored under sanctions, Libya could still sell its oil. But there was little it could do with the money—the country was denied access to foreign financial institutions. The accumulating cash was held in a number of funds which, in 2006, were consolidated into an entity called the Libyan Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund controlled by Qaddafi himself. (Its current value is about $70 billion.) In July 2009, soon after Scotland's Kenny MacAskill met a Libyan government delegation to discuss the possibility of Megrahi's compassionate release, the Libyan government opened up an office in London which later became a branch of the Libyan Investment Authority. In February 2010, its director, Mohamed Layas, said that the authority planned to spend $8 billion. Among the first declared investments was the purchase of a substantial slice of Pearson, the publishing company that owns the Financial Times. The L.I.A. also owns 15 percent of BP's petroleum-exploration deal.
It is striking how many former New Labour luminaries are now involved with the Qaddafi regime. One of the new peers Blair created, Baroness Liz Symons, served in his government for many years, where her posts included a spell as minister of defense procurement, and a later stint in the foreign office as the minister responsible for the Middle East and international security—a post that gave her deep involvement with Libya. Symons now has a paid position as an adviser to Libya's National Economic Development Board. In July 2010, she convened a conference in London, the Libya IV Trade and Investment Forum, that was attended by numerous Libyan officials and U.K. businesspeople. Symons, who has declined to disclose how much the Libyans have paid her, has set up what supporters describe as a "virtual network" to provide mutual contacts and opportunities for British and Libyan firms.
Adam Ingram, Blair's armed-forces minister until 2007, has been a paid consultant to Argus Libya U.K., a firm that specializes in "sniffing out" Libyan business opportunities. Howard Davies, appointed by Blair to head the Financial Services Authority, has been an adviser to the L.I.A. Davies's main job is as director of the London School of Economics, where Qaddafi's son Saif al-Islam studied for a Ph.D. in human rights and democratization. (After getting his degree, Saif al-Islam gave the school $2.4 million.) And then there is Lord Peter Mandelson, a confidante of Blair's for decades. As business secretary, in January 2010, Mandelson signed a joint statement with Libya's education minister that agreed to greater cooperation in higher education and research. Saif al-Islam makes no secret of their friendship, and indeed uses an unusual turn of phrase to describe Mandelson—he once called him "a killer of a man." In 2009, Mandelson and Saif were guests of Lord Jacob Rothschild at his villa in Corfu, and later that year they attended a weekend shooting party at Waddesdon Manor, Rothschild's country home in Buckinghamshire. Until 2009, Rothschild was an adviser to the Libyan Investment Authority.
And then there is Blair himself, who in the three and a half years since stepping down as prime minister has reportedly earned at least $30 million from his various business dealings around the world. Like many retired politicians, Blair commands high fees for public speaking, but in terms of income these fees represent a sideshow. In January 2008, Blair accepted a position as a consultant to the American bank J.P. Morgan Chase for a reported compensation of $3 million a year. Zurich, the insurance corporation, paid him an additional $3 million a year. Blair has also set up his own private consulting firm, Tony Blair Associates, modeled on Kissinger Associates. The firm's clients include the government of Kuwait and the $627 billion Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund.
Blair's combative media spokesman, Matthew Doyle, seems reluctant to give straightforward answers to inquiries about ties between Blair and Libya. I repeatedly asked him two basic questions: How many times has Blair been to Libya since he stepped down as prime minister? And what has been the purpose of his visits? Doyle eventually responded with a carefully worded statement, which says, in part: "Tony Blair has no role whatsoever, paid or otherwise, with the Libyan government or the Libyan Investment Authority. Both Tony Blair and Tony Blair Associates have no commercial relationship with Libya or with any Libyan company." No doubt that is accurate, if strictly parsed. Libyan sources insist, however, that Blair has visited Libya half a dozen times since stepping down as P.M. (Doyle declines to comment on this assertion, but does say that Blair visited Libya once in the 18-month period ending November 2010.) But Blair's employer, J.P. Morgan, does have commercial relationships with Libya. Three senior British officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say that Blair has made numerous trips to Libya since leaving Downing Street, at least partly on behalf of the bank. "The Blair magic still works with Qaddafi," one of these officials observes. "Qaddafi will drop everything to see Blair." Saif al-Islam, Qaddafi's probable heir, said last summer that Blair was "a personal family friend" and added that Blair had visited Libya "many, many times" since leaving office.
One such visit took place in June 2010. "His plane landed at Mitiga airport"—a few miles east of Tripoli and used by V.I.P.'s—"and a car took him straight to a minister with whom he had private business," according to a well-placed source. "Then he went straight to Qaddafi." There he briefed the dictator about what to expect from the new British coalition government led by David Cameron. Afterward, he spent the night at the British ambassador's residence.
Neither Blair nor the bank will say anything about what he does to justify his salary, either in Libya or elsewhere. Executives at other banks with Libyan interests say that J.P. Morgan now handles much of the Libyan Investment Authority's cash, and some of the Libyan central bank's reserves. Blair joined J.P. Morgan in early 2008—just as the authority began to ask foreign banks and asset-management companies for specific proposals as to what they might do with its billions. There was no shortage of takers. A Libyan official says: "We were besieged." A voice at the table like Blair's would get attention.
For J.P. Morgan, there was a further factor at work. It was able to start looking for Libyan money in 2008 because the climate had improved thanks to Qaddafi's payment of the final tranche of compensation to the families of the Lockerbie victims ($10 million per family), a rapprochement sealed by the visit by then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to Tripoli. By the summer of that year, says a Libyan financier, "a great percentage of the L.I.A.'s funds were in the interbank money markets, channelled through the central bank. They have given mandates to some of the international banks to manage this liquidity"—including J.P. Morgan. J.P. Morgan has not indicated whether it intends to take the next logical step and apply for one of the licenses being offered to foreign banks to set up operations there. I asked J.P. Morgan's spokesman, Brian Marchiony, about this specific matter, about the bank's handling of Libyan assets in general, and about Tony Blair's role in developing its business. He replied by e-mail, saying simply: "We're going to decline to comment."
The second thing to be understood about the Megrahi affair is how power relationships have shifted during the past decade. Thaw or no thaw, Libya is not like other countries. With authority centralized in the hands of Qaddafi, foreign companies soon learn that a business agreement on paper does not mean an agreement will be implemented. The structure of the state is opaque. "Business regulation in Libya is not visible to the naked eye," observes Sir Vincent Fean, the British ambassador to Libya from 2006 until 2010. Qaddafi does not suffer slights easily.
And, as the Swiss discovered to their regret, his vengeance can be swift. In July 2008, Qaddafi's son Hannibal was arrested and detained for two days in Geneva after allegedly assaulting two servants at the President Wilson Hotel. Qaddafi retaliated by denying the new Swiss ambassador a visa, withdrawing $5 billion from Swiss banks, and ordering the arrest of Max Goeldi, a Swiss engineering executive based in Tripoli, for allegedly breaching immigration laws. Goeldi was to spend nearly six months in a Libyan prison, including 53 days in solitary confinement, and then a year at the Swiss Embassy, before being allowed to return home. Megrahi's diagnosis of prostate cancer was confirmed two months after Goeldi's arrest. As they nervously contemplated Megrahi's future, British executives with business interests in Libya could not help but wonder if what happened to the Swiss would happen to them.
The saga of Megrahi presents a paradox. In the 1990s, when America and Britain were calling the diplomatic shots, handing over Megrahi for trial (along with another man, later acquitted) was the first condition Libya had to meet before normal relations could be restored. Once he was convicted and sanctions began to be lifted, pressure began to be exerted in the other direction. As far as Qaddafi was concerned, Megrahi's return to Libya was the price of fully opening up Libya to the bankers and the oilmen.
There was never any doubt that Megrahi's release was one of Qaddafi's key foreign-policy objectives. As early as July 2002, soon after Scotland's appeals court declined to reverse Megrahi's conviction, Libya opened a "people's bureau," or consulate, in Glasgow. Its purpose was to press for Megrahi's freedom, to monitor his conditions of imprisonment, and to give him access to an Arabic interpreter. Despite making enormous compensation payments, Qaddafi has never admitted responsibility for the Pan Am 103 bombing. The Libyan government has publicly compared Megrahi to Jesus Christ. When Qaddafi pushed for a Prisoner Transfer Agreement during Blair's audience at his desert tent in 2007, Megrahi was in fact the only Libyan inmate in a British jail who interested him. At the time, there were 21 other Libyans in prison in England and Wales, but Libya has never asked to have any of them returned.
Including Megrahi in an Anglo-Libyan P.T.A. was always going to be problematic. First, the Scottish National Party, which controls Scotland's regional government and is responsible for all its judicial affairs, was strongly opposed to it. If there was going to be a P.T.A., Scotland's first minister, Alex Salmond, insisted, then Megrahi had to be specifically excluded from its scope. Second, when the United States, Britain, and Libya agreed on the protocols for the Lockerbie trial, in 1998, the U.S. and U.K. governments set out the terms in a letter to the U.N. secretary general. It said: "If found guilty, the two accused will serve their sentence in the United Kingdom." Testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in September 2010, the State Department's Nancy McEldowney stated that Washington had received assurances from Tony Blair's government that "if convicted, Megrahi would remain in Scotland until the completion of his sentence"—until, at the earliest, 2019.
It fell to Jack Straw, who was Britain's foreign secretary when Libya gave up its W.M.D., and who served as justice secretary from 2007 to 2010, to handle the details of the proposed P.T.A. I asked him how he and Blair dealt with the commitment their administration had made to the Americans. Apparently they simply forgot about it. "It didn't really come up," Straw says, thinking back. "Of course it was on the record, but it just wasn't on my radar." The Scots, however, were very much on his radar, and on July 26, 2007, Straw wrote to the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, saying he favored a P.T.A. that excluded Megrahi, as the Scots demanded. When this intention was communicated to the Libyans, Qaddafi reacted with fury. He believed that he and Blair had made a deal.
BP became the target of Qaddafi's anger. John Hamilton, a reporter with excellent Libyan sources who works for the respected newsletter African Energy, and is the author of "Libya's Energy Future", nosed out the details. BP might have thought it had an oil-exploration contract, Hamilton reported in the fall of 2007, but its implementation had now been delayed. Before BP could start to drill, the contract had to be "formally entered into the records," a process controlled by Qaddafi. "This apparently formal procedure could be highly protracted for political reasons," Hamilton wrote. Qaddafi may be holding it up "in an attempt to apply pressure on the United Kingdom to return convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohammed al-Megrahi."
Back in England, the lobbying began. "BP had a big deal here, and they were being run ragged over the fact we wanted a special exclusion clause on Megrahi," Straw recalls. Straw held talks with his foreign-office counterparts, who were coming under intense diplomatic pressure, and he held talks, informally, with Qaddafi's son Saif. He also took two calls from BP's Mark Allen, whom he knew very well, not only as a result of the 2003 Libyan-W.M.D. negotiation but also from dealing with the painful matter of MI6's deceptive intelligence before the war with Iraq. "I knew Mark and I trusted him completely," Straw says. "The long and short of what I was getting was that a P.T.A. without any specific exclusion was critical to the BP deal going ahead."
Straw also talked with the Scottish first minister Salmond, and discovered, says a senior official who was privy to their phone calls, that the Scots' insistence on excluding Megrahi was more flexible than it might have appeared. Salmond, the official says, made an extraordinary offer to Straw of a quid pro quo, revealed here for the first time. Salmond indicated that the Scottish government would drop its objections if the parliament in Westminster would engineer an amendment to the Scotland Act, which sets out the constitutional arrangements between the Scottish government and the larger United Kingdom. Specifically, Salmond wanted a statute of limitations placed on tort claims by prisoners who alleged they had suffered human-rights abuses in Scottish prisons. This demand was important: Scotland was facing a raft of lawsuits, which had already cost many millions of pounds, from former prisoners in Scottish jails who had, throughout their confinement, been made to use slop buckets instead of toilets. After Megrahi's release, Salmond would make no mention of any quid pro quo, and he vehemently insisted that he had always been firmly against dropping Megrahi's exclusion. When I asked Straw directly if Salmond had, in fact, suggested the terms outlined above, Straw would neither confirm nor deny it, saying: "My conversations with Alex Salmond were private." Salmond's spokesman Kevin Pringle denied it, describing the claim as "complete and utter garbage without a shred or scintilla of truth."
In any event, Salmond failed to stop Megrahi from becoming eligible for transfer to Libya. As Straw said, "I gave instructions that we were to sign the P.T.A. without a specific exclusion." Straw wrote to MacAskill on December 19, 2007, stating for the record: "In view of the overwhelming interests for the United Kingdom, I have agreed that in this instance the P.T.A. should be in the standard form and not mention any individual." In other words, Megrahi was covered by the treaty, and could be sent home under its terms. Six weeks later, BP's contract was duly "entered into the records" in Tripoli. It should be noted that, after an interval, the parliament in Westminster did indeed amend the Scotland Act, which allowed legislation for the desired statute of limitations on human-rights claims. Straw half expected that the P.T.A. would not need to be used, because Megrahi was still pursuing a legal appeal, and P.T.A.'s cannot be used while an appeal is ongoing. Megrahi and his lawyers had for years been protesting that he was innocent, and in June 2007, two years before the P.T.A. came into force, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, a quasi-judicial body that has the power to re-investigate cases and refer them to the appeals court, decided that Megrahi should have a new hearing. It rejected almost all of the dozens of claims made by Megrahi's defense, but found there were doubts as to whether Megrahi had purchased the clothing that was believed to have been inside the suitcase in which the bomb exploded, and whether he had been in Malta at all when the clothing was bought. In the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2009, the Scottish judiciary conducted 12 days of hearings, widely spread apart, and at the last one, at the end of May, the five judges announced that they would convene again on July 7, when they would indicate whether they were ready to reach a decision.
That hearing—which might have ended with Megrahi's release—never took place, because one of the judges had to undergo heart surgery. The hearing was rescheduled to start in the fall—which, in the eyes of Libya, would be too late. After his diagnosis, in September 2008, Megrahi had been given hormone treatments, and had initially responded well. Now, however, his condition seemed to be deteriorating. Meanwhile, Qaddafi was planning a grand celebration on September 1, 2009, to mark the 40th anniversary of the coup that brought him to power. He wanted Megrahi there.
The Libyans demanded that Megrahi should either be allowed home under the P.T.A. or, as someone close to death, should be granted special "compassionate release." Under Scottish law, compassionate release may be considered if life expectancy is less than three months. On October 27, 2008, a high-level delegation of Libyans had held the first of many meetings with Scottish officials. The Libyans included none other than Mousa Kousa, a former intelligence chief and soon to be foreign minister, acting as "interpreter." According to the minutes of the meeting, the Libyans told the Scots that "death in custody would be akin to a death sentence without the benefit of the court and 'they want a way out.'" The Libyans returned to Scotland three weeks later, led by Abdulati al-Obidi, Libya's deputy foreign minister, and came back on at least five subsequent occasions before Megrahi's eventual release. On March 12, 2009, according to the minutes, al-Obidi discussed a recent visit to Tripoli by a British foreign-office minister, Bill Rammell: "Mr al-Obidi confirmed that he had reiterated to Mr Rammell that the death of Mr Megrahi in a Scottish prison would have catastrophic effects for the relationship between Libya and the U.K. . . . Mr Rammell had stated that neither the Prime Minister nor the Foreign Secretary would want Mr Megrahi to pass away in prison."
The Scots were feeling the heat from other quarters, too. In June 2009, first minister Salmond had received Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah, Qatar's acting minister of business and trade. Al-Attiyah told Salmond that Qatar was exploring the possibility of making large investments in Scotland—welcome news at a time of deepening recession. But al-Attiyah was also concerned about Megrahi, and because Qatar's ruler was then president of the 22-nation Arab League, his words carried special weight. Al-Attiyah followed up with a letter to MacAskill on July 17. It stated that Megrahi's condition had "worsened dramatically," and that "time is now of the essence."
Lord Trefgarne, the chairman of the Libyan-British Business Council, whose blue-chip membership includes both J.P. Morgan and BP, added to the pressure with a letter sent the same day. If Megrahi were to die in prison, he wrote, "there will be serious implications … speed is of the essence principally, of course, for humanitarian reasons, but also because of the shadow which may otherwise fall over U.K.-Libyan relations."
To qualify for a P.T.A., Megrahi withdrew his appeal. MacAskill, meanwhile, considered both options—transfer to Libya under the P.T.A., and compassionate release. He did not announce his decision until August 20. But he almost certainly knew that he was going to let Megrahi go. Two weeks earlier, his government was in discussions with the Libyans over the exact means by which Megrahi could be flown home on a Libyan jet, with both al-Obidi and Saif al-Islam at his side. On August 13, the U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, phoned MacAskill and in the strongest possible terms voiced her objections to Megrahi's being sent back to Libya. But for all intents and purposes, the deed was already done.
Megrahi was not then, and is not now, a well man. Dr. Jim Swire, the effective spokesman for the U.K. Families Flight 103 advocacy group, who has long believed Megrahi to be innocent, went to see him in Libya in September 2010. He says that Megrahi was still able to walk, but visibly in great pain. Obviously he has lived longer than the three-month span his Scottish doctors had allotted him in August 2009. Some 18 months have now gone by. It is clear that a fix was in when it came to persuading Scottish authorities to acquiesce in the P.T.A. Was there also a fix when it came to ensuring that Megrahi's prognosis was exactly what it needed to be to secure his release?
Predicting precisely when a cancer will claim its victim is an inexact science. But although it may well have been the case that, without any further treatment at all, Megrahi would have been dead by Christmas, there is documentary evidence that his doctors had already decided to give him chemotherapy, which they must have known was likely to prolong his life by many months. More to the point, patients are not subjected to chemotherapy, and such treatment is not contemplated, when it is a certainty that the end is near. Megrahi referred to the impending chemotherapy himself. On August 6, he submitted a handwritten three-page statement for MacAskill, asking for compassionate release. It says: "I know that you have a difficult decision. All that I would ask you to do is to bear in mind my circumstances. It is likely that I will have to commence chemotherapy treatment soon. That is something that no one would look forward to. I need my family for support not simply for the physical symptoms that inevitably will come with that treatment … but also for their help and affection as I turn to face my destiny."
Karol Sikora, the founder and medical director of Britain's main cancer-research network, CancerPartnersU.K., and a former professor of oncology at Imperial College, London, says that with patients like Megrahi, who have not responded to hormone treatment, chemotherapy is indeed the usual next step. The standard drug used is Taxotere, which clinical trials have shown allows for a 17 to 19 month median survival rate. Sikora was one of three doctors from outside the prison who examined Megrahi in the employ of the Libyan Embassy. But even before he saw the patient, he says, "the Libyan ambassador told me, 'We've got to say it's three months.' I said, 'Well, there are no hard and fast rules here. Let's just go and see.'" Sikora's report, dated July 30, 2009, was taken into account by MacAskill. "On the balance of probabilities," Sikora wrote, Megrahi had less than three months to live. Meanwhile, the Scottish government asked four local experts to assess the case. All declined to give a three-month prognosis.
Sikora's report, obtained by Vanity Fair and quoted here for the first time, contains further evidence that, until Megrahi's release was ordered, the Scots were planning to administer chemotherapy. The report states that chemotherapy had never been given at the prison, which was capable of delivering only primary health care. However, it goes on, "there have been discussions with a private company which specialises in providing chemotherapy at home to administer chemotherapy in prison. This would solve the issue of the expert delivery of chemotherapy."
Anxious to prolong Megrahi's life as much as possible, the Scots, it seems, were considering an even more effective drug than Taxotere. In September 2010, Bryan Wright, an investigator working with Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, met with George Burgess, the Scottish government's deputy director of criminal law. Burgess confirmed that chemotherapy was being pursued for Megrahi. But it would not have been possible to begin the treatment immediately, Burgess told the investigator, because there had to be a "cleaning-out period" to allow Megrahi's body to expel the hormones already administered. There is a new drug, Abiraterone, which clinical trials suggest may be more effective than Taxotere in prolonging the lives of terminal prostate-cancer patients. In August 2009, these trials were still under way, and according to their protocols, patients had to have been given Taxotere first. However, it might well have been possible, says Sikora, to have administered Abiraterone to Megrahi without having put him on the trial. But, Sikora says, this would have been "off piste" (out of bounds), under what he terms an "expanded access program." This may have been what the Scots had in mind. Whatever the possible treatment scenarios, none of them is consistent with the notion that Megrahi had only three months to live.
But three months was the officially desired prognosis. Megrahi was sent home, where he was met with a hero's welcome. The circumstances surrounding his repatriation are only now beginning to be understood, but one consequence became clear immediately: his return was good news for business. According to Saad Djebaar, an Algerian lawyer who has advised the Libyan government, it served to "unblock all the contracts" that British companies had signed and been prevented from implementing. On the plane home, Saif al-Islam made sure that Megrahi understood exactly what Libya had done. Every time the Libyans had negotiated with British companies over oil and gas, Saif al-Islam told Megrahi, his name had been on the table.
Wrongly Accused
Terry Harrington spent 25 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit
Story Highlights
Terry Harrington was a football star in Nebraska with dreams of going big time
In 1977 he was arrested for a murder in Iowa and later convicted of the crime
Harrington maintained innocence and finally was cleared thanks to unlikely source
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By Jon Wertheim, SI.com
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25 Years In Prison: The saving power of football
Source: SI
The story of Terry Harrington, a high school football star who spent 25 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit, the woman who freed him and the sport that sustained him.
The full moon rose steadily like movie credits and then hovered on the other side of the Missouri River, backlighting downtown Omaha. It was Homecoming Night at Central High. The Eagles hosted Millard South at their new football stadium, built largely from donations from the city's first family, the Buffetts. Over the din of cheering parents, the strains of the pep band and the refs' whistles, a distinct voice, deep and firm, pierced the autumn air. C'mon Jemal, remember your stance!
Seated on the bleachers, eight rows back, Terry Harrington wore loafers, low-slung jeans, a denim jacket, a neatly trimmed beard and a white Kangol cap covering his bald head. "Hey, it's Samuel L. Jackson," an old friend yelled. Harrington, 51, caught hugs, winks and slaps on the shoulder. Behind his back, he was the object of you-know-who-that-is? looks. That's the dude who spent 25 years in jail for a murder he didn't commit. Harrington fixed his gaze on the game, though, tunneling in on the defensive backfield, alternately gripping a rolled-up program and then opening it to check names on the roster. That's it Jack, get inside. Grab his pads and it ain't holding!
A few years ago, Harrington had coached some of Central's best players. They were in middle school and he was the defensive coordinator for their Heartland little league football team, a program run through the Omaha Boys and Girls Club. "Coach Terry," a volunteer, taught technique and exposed the kids to the dark arts of football, tricks like stripping the ball from running backs (grab the nose and twist) and bumping receivers. He preached the virtues of defense, importance of defending terrain, as opposed to acquiring it. He challenged the best players, installing a complex "5-2 Monster" scheme. He also comforted the less-talented players, explaining how they could be leaders from the sidelines.
"Up and down the line, the kids respect that man," says Sherri Brown, whose son played on the team. "He knew what buttons to push." That year, Harrington took three teams to Kansas City for a regional tournament. Two of them placed first; the other one played up an age division and came in second.
The boys are novice adults now -- "growing taller and, hopefully, growing up," says Harrington -- some of them rising high school stars. He would like to think that their success is at least partially a legacy of those sessions at the Boys Club. One player, Jack Davis, only a sophomore, was Central's starting tailback and cornerback. Jemal Shabazz, a broad-shouldered junior, started at linebacker and has designs of playing Division I. A third, Andre Kincaid, a junior, is already 260 pounds and plays center and nose guard. "That's it, twenty-five. Stand your ground!"
*****
As Harrington watches the kids, he can't resist the urge to coach. He also can't resist playing time-traveler and rewinding the clock. In the mid-1970s, a mile or so up Dodge Road, Harrington was a junior at Omaha Technical High. The school closed in the 80s, but it had a rich athletic tradition, trophy cases filled with relics of graduates like Bob Gibson, 1972 Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Rodgers, and longtime NBA players Ron Boone and Bob Boozer. Harrington fit into the jock tapestry, too. He played some baseball and some jayvee basketball, once matching up ("not very well") against Mike McGee, who'd eventually suit up for the Lakers. But Harrington's passion was football. A fierce linebacker, number 52, he offset average speed and modest size (175 pounds and 5-foot-11, even accounting for a mountainous Afro) with a taste for contact and unfailing instincts.
He lettered as a freshman and started as a sophomore. "I called him Captain Crunch," says Tech tailback Kenneth Colbert, who dispensed the nickname after Harrington leveled him in an intrasquad scrimmage. "Lemme tell you something, boy: Terry was a hitter." Terrence Mackey, who played Boys Club football with Harrington and then competed against him at Omaha's Benson High, adds: "There were better athletes but not many kids with better technique."
Harrington lived in north Omaha with his mother and sisters. An older brother was off fighting in Vietnam. Money was tight, but no one felt poor. It was a time of optimism. Saturdays were for sports. Sundays meant church and movies. In high school, Harrington was a capable student and popular kid, nominated for homecoming court. Small colleges inquired about recruiting him for football. Others simply wanted him as a student, including, he says, Yale. "You know how sometimes sports allow you to get an education?" he says. "With me, the academics were going to let me keeping playing football."
In his senior year, he went through a lapse familiar to anyone who has -- or has been -- a teenager. Having already accumulated enough credits to graduate, he lost motivation for school. When he slacked off in football practice, Omaha Tech coach Carl Wright, a former Marine, benched Harrington hoping it would galvanize the kid to work harder. When it didn't, Wright moved Harrington to defensive end. Harrington quit the team.
Without sports, his friends changed, and so did his attitude. One night, Harrington was talked into driving the getaway car in a botched robbery, earning him probation since it was his first offense. He graduated in 1977, but with Yale out of the question, he enrolled in a local community college with hopes of transferring and playing football. "Peer pressure, bad choices, stupidity," he says, shaking his head. "Man, one bad stage at that age can change everything."
On July 22, 1977, Harrington and a group of friends went to a concert by the funk band Ohio Players at Peony Park, an Omaha arcade. Outside the gates, Harrington bumped into Carl Wright, there chaperoning his daughters. Outgoing as ever, Harrington chatted up his coach and asked a question that had been in the catacombs of his mind for months: Why did you bench me? The two men talked, first about football, then about life. They missed most of the concert. Harrington vowed to resume what had once been a promising football career. "Coach Wright said he was disappointed in me," says Harrington. "I could respect that because at the time, I was disappointed in me, too."
*****
That same night, a few miles from the concert on the other side of the river in Council Bluffs, Iowa, John Schweer was working as a security guard at a car dealership. Schweer had recently retired as a police captain and was making some extra money. On this night, he heard a noise, left his post to investigate and was shot in the chest with a 12-gauge shotgun, left to die flanking the nearby railroad tracks. Crime was rare in Council Bluffs, a drowsy, middle class town on Iowa's western border. Murders were almost unheard of. Police had extra motivation to solve this one: the dead man was a former colleague.
Harrington says he never heard about the murder that summer. He enrolled in community college in early fall, but his studies were halted when he was arrested. An informant claimed Harrington had stolen a car in Fremont, Neb. He says he was more confused than anything else. "I just figured it was a mistake that would be corrected," he says.
But instead of being released, Harrington was charged with murder. Relying largely on the testimony of an alleged co-conspirator, the police theorized that Harrington and another Omaha friend, Curtis McGhee, had attempted to steal a car that night. When Schweer left his post to investigate, Harrington opened fire. Harrington told anyone who would listen that he hadn't attempted to steal a car that night, and he sure as hell hadn't murdered anyone. Again, he figured he'd get his day in court, there would be justice and he could get on with his life.
The prosecution's case against Harrington was riddled with holes. There was no physical evidence linking Harrington to the crime, nor was a weapon recovered. Police found bullet residue in a jacket Harrington had owned (Harrington had a hunting rifle), but it wasn't from a 12-gauge and it was too minute a specimen to be consistent with a blast fired at close range. Harrington had an alibi that he was at the concert and Carl Wright was willing to testify.
The most intriguing clue was a set of fresh paw prints near Schweer's body, yet Harrington didn't own a dog. Despite the absence of forensic evidence and the various unanswered questions, Pottawattamie Assistant County Attorney Joseph Hrvol would testify that there were no other suspects.
The prosecution's chief informant was Kevin Hughes, who lived near the Harringtons in Omaha. Harrington remembers his mom opening their door to the kid when there were fights in the Hughes home. Hughes was now 16 and already had a criminal record. When first questioned, he named three other men as the killer before fingering Harrington. He alleged that Schweer was killed with a pistol, then a 20-gauge shotgun and finally settled on a 12-gauge.
And while Hughes wasn't the most credible of witnesses, his testimony against Harrington was supported by various other mutual friends and acquaintances. One by one, they rebutted Harrington's alibi, claiming that Schweer's murder occurred after the concert, and asserted that Harrington had gone to the dealership intending to boost a car. A parade of witnesses claimed that they'd seen Harrington's car, an Oldsmobile, on the night of the murder; yet, Harrington's car had been hit over July Fourth weekend, and, for all the meticulous descriptions, no one mentioned the prominent dent in the car. "I just kept thinking, 'Why are y'all doing this to me?'" says Harrington.
Harrington's representation was not always vigorous. Coach Wright, now deceased, expressed shock that his testimony wasn't used prominently. ("They didn't ask me anything that would help Terry," he once complained to a reporter.) Cynics suggested that law enforcement in overwhelmingly white Council Bluffs were feeling pressure to solve the case -- especially with the election of the prosecutor, David Richter, coming up. They simply rounded up some black teenagers from across the river.
On Aug. 4, 1978, an all-white Iowa jury convicted Harrington of first-degree murder. He was given a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole, the maximum sentence in Iowa, a state that abolished the death penalty in 1965. In a separate trial, McGhee, the alleged accomplice, was also convicted of first-degree murder. Harrington stood before the court, defiant that the wrong man had been convicted: "I just want you to know that no matter what happens, I know I'm innocent, and as long as I feel that inside, then I'm going to keep on fighting because I know I can't see myself locked up for the rest of my life for something I didn't do. ... I feel I was judged by the color of my skin and not the content of my character."
*****
It hadn't hit Harrington until the sentencing. He was going to jail. Not just any jail, but the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison, a sliver of hell on the banks of the Mississippi in Eastern Iowa. Coming from out of state and without ties to a street gang, Harrington would be a complete outsider. Having just turned 19, he was the youngest inmate in the complex. And his conviction for killing a cop wasn't going to earn him favor among the guards. "A year before, I was a normal kid, just wanting to go to college, play football," he says, stopping to summon the moment. "Now I have to get my head right. Everyone said the same thing: Terry is too nice. He ain't gonna survive in prison."
Harrington isn't sure whether it was conscious or simply survival instincts, but he hatched a plan. On the other side of the concertina wire, he was no longer Terry. He was T.J. "It was a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing," he says. Whereas Terry was an outgoing joker, T.J. was a badass, economical with his words. Terry had never been prone to violence, at least not off the football field; T.J. managed to procure a knife within his first day in the joint, figuring out that the workers tasked with cleaning the cells also trafficked in weapons. Terry was open and transparent; T.J. was opaque. "If I cried all night -- remember, I'm in prison for the rest of my life and they ain't never letting me out -- by morning no one knew it."
Harrington recalls the prison experience with a string of "de" words: demoralizing, degrading, dehumanizing. He has stories of gang fights and riots and inmates throwing feces on guards. He says that by the end of his first week, two inmates had been killed, one of them "cut up and put in a laundry bag." Still in possession of his faith, Harrington went to church services. He soon quit when he saw the chaplain, also a prison guard, clutching a rifle, threatening to blow an inmate's head off. "This guy's going to teach us about morals and forgiveness?" says Harrington. "No, thanks."
Early into his sentence, Harrington developed Crohn's disease -- caused by the stress, he figures -- a gastrointestinal disorder that made him feel as though his insides were burning. His survival instincts again kicked in and he finagled a job in the kitchen just to make sure he had access to mild food. His biggest fear, he says, was dying in prison. He stayed alive in part by filing a series of appeals against his conviction. One by one, they were dismissed by the courts, but the mere possibility of justice kept him going.
Sports helped sustain him, too. Wearing pads donated by the Iowa State football program, Harrington was the star of the prison football team. He played on the basketball team, averaging, by his own reckoning, 44 points a game. ("Couldn't no one stop me!") Before the Crohn's became unbearable, he ran on a 4x400 relay team. Sports were therapeutic, a way to alchemize anger into something more productive. Sports were a way to climb the social hierarchy in the prison yard. Sports were also lucrative. Wagering on free-throw shooting contests, games of around-the-world and other tests of athletic skill, Harrington claims he made thousands of dollars over the years.
Back in his cell, he tracked time with the sports calendar. He spent innumerable hours watching Big Ten basketball games. Even today, he can recall the lineage of the conference's best players, from his old Omaha nemesis Mike McGee (Michigan) to Magic Johnson (Michigan State) to Isiah Thomas (Indiana) to Glen Rice (Michigan) and Glenn Robinson (Purdue). He watched football, too, but it came with acute pain. "I see all those guys out there playing and I'm thinking, 'I'm as good as that!'" he says "Well, maybe I was, and maybe I wasn't, but I never even got the chance."
It was full-time work suppressing his anger. Harrington felt as though he'd been kidnapped. Here he was, in the prime years of his life, and he was locked up. He didn't see his friends. Shortly before his sentencing, Harrington's girlfriend got pregnant. The first time he saw his daughter it was through Plexiglas. Through the years, she would come to Fort Madison and he'd help her with homework in the visiting room. Birthday after birthday, Christmas after Christmas, he celebrated, best he could, behind bars. All for a crime he steadfastly maintained he did not commit.
Sometimes he couldn't suppress the rage. In Harrington's 16th year in jail, another inmate taunted him and made vague threats. Terry might have stayed away. With T.J., the guy had no chance. When Harrington was certain other inmates were watching he grabbed his knife and sunk it into the bully's back. When he was sent off to "lock-up," solitary confinement, he barely flinched. Solitary? I'd rather be alone anyway. "It's like, why follow the rules if I'm in here for life anyway?"
*****
Carrying her supplies in a milk crate, Anne Danaher endured a symphony of whistles, catcalls and unprintable taunts as she walked through the yard of Fort Madison. You could hardly conceive of a less likely figure to work at the joint. A slight, pleasant looking 35-year-old woman, Danaher spoke in such a gentle Midwestern lilt that listeners needed to lean in to hear her. But there Danaher was, the prison barber, dutifully standing before her chair, shearing inmates from "lock-up." They sat before her, cuffed and in shackles. Mirrors were forbidden -- contraband that could be used as weapons -- so she used a sheet of polished stainless steel to check her handiwork.
At five bucks a head, the money was nice. But mostly, working at Fort Madison fed something deep inside Danaher. She had grown up in Kansas City, the eighth of 16 siblings, and had always identified with the underdog. Even in high school debate class, she was the one arguing against the death penalty. In the early 90s, she was living in Iowa near a brother who owned an oil brokerage company. When the job at Fort Madison came open in 1993, she was happy to take it. "I just wanted to give them some dignity for a few minutes," she says. She took her work seriously. When she realized how many inmates were African-American, she ventured to an inner-city Kansas City barber shop to learn how to performs fades and lines.
During one of her first shifts she saw a family emerge from a car with Nebraska license plates. "You sure came a long way," she said.
"Eight hours," a woman responded. "Been doing it for years."
"Well," Danaher said, "I hope the person you're visiting gets out soon."
Not likely, the woman explained. "He's in for life without parole. And he was framed."
Danaher thought little of it. More than a few prisoners had proclaimed their innocence and offered conspiracy theories. But a few days later Danaher cut Harrington's hair. When he mentioned that he was from Nebraska, Danaher stopped cutting. "I think I met your mom." she said. "She said it was all suspicious." As Danaher went back to work, Harrington calmly and meticulously recounted the details of his case, the inconsistencies, his alibi, his failed appeals, and the role of race. "To this day I don't know what it was," says Danaher. "But I knew he was telling the truth and he had exhausted his remedies by this point. [God] was saying, He has no voice. You have to be his voice. You have to bring him back to life."
In her off-hours Danaher familiarized herself with Harrington's case and began poking around. This was the mid-1990s, the infancy of the Web, so much of her work was done using phone, fax and regular mail. Combing the white pages, Danaher assembled a phone directory of everyone attached to the case. She went to the local library and read about the case on microfilm. Danaher had no legal training, but she quickly sensed that her instincts about Harrington and his case had been accurate. Early on, for instance, she learned that his first lawyer had not been licensed to practice in Iowa. Something wasn't right.
Soon, advocating for Harrington became a full-on obsession. She quit her prison job so she could devote all her time to the case, moving back to Kansas City, where one of her brothers was an attorney, so she could have access to a law library. She requested records, read thousands of pages of transcripts, filed post-conviction papers, badgered legislators for meetings, and wrote letter after letter to the editor of the Council Bluffs newspaper, the Daily Nonpareil. Published letters by Anne Danaher, Kansas, Mo. Carried headlines like: "Harrington should be allowed 'new' life," "Handling of murder case is unacceptable," "Harrington lost best years of his life," and "Courts, police deny people the truth."
Figuring she had nothing to lose, Danaher wrote to Barry Scheck, head of the Manhattan-based Innocence Project, an organization that uses DNA testing results to exonerate falsely convicted inmates. When Danaher explained that there was no physical evidence used to convict Harrington, Scheck responded that there was, unfortunately, little he could do to help. In 1998, Gerry Spence, the flamboyant Wyoming lawyer, passed through Kansas City on a book tour. Danaher intercepted him at a radio station and told him about Harrington. She recalls Spence playfully telling her that if she got him out of jail, he'd "walk it across the finish line" and handle the civil lawsuit. "If I had known more I probably would have been more discouraged by the doors that kept shutting," she says. "But I was so naive, so idealistic. I just wanted to be sure something like this never happened to anyone else."
Danaher set out to dismantle the prosecutors' case brick by brick. The first was discrediting their witnesses. When she located Kevin Hughes in a Nebraska jail and asked about his testimony, she was surprised by his response. He recanted his entire testimony, claiming he'd lied on the stand and had been coached by the prosecution. He never saw Harrington that night. He'd lied to collect $5,000 in reward money and also because he was promised that the charges against him would be dropped after he agreed to testify against Harrington.
Danaher then went to other witnesses who'd backed Hughes. They, too, recanted their statements. After Danaher ventured to the inner city of Omaha to find Clyde Jacobs, he broke down in tears and said he'd been stealing cars with Hughes and he, too, implicated Harrington to avoid being prosecuted. Candace Pride, who was dating Hughes at the time, said in 2000, "I just said what Kevin told me to say." Based on that, Danaher asked Iowa governor Tom Vilsack for clemency. Vilsack, currently the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, told her that he wasn't going to get involved.
Harrington wasn't entirely sure what to make of this Erin Brockovich of the Heartland, this tenacious woman who showed more interest in his case than anyone else had. But if she were willing to devote Lord-knows-how-many hours to his case, he was happy to accept her as a teammate. Danaher supported herself delivering Hallmark cards, working as a night nurse for the elderly and even working at Kansas City Chiefs games. But if anyone asked what she did, well, she was working to get a man his justice.
Around the same time that witnesses began recanting, Danaher contacted Lawrence Farwell, an Iowa researcher developing a technology he called "brain fingerprinting." Farwell theorized that information stored in a subject's brain can be accessed by measuring brain wave responses to relevant words or pictures flashed on a computer screen. When Farwell tried his technology on Harrington, his brain did not react to critical details of the crime. In 2000, 60 Minutes prepared a segment on brain fingerprinting and Farwell chose Harrington for his demonstration. Using brain fingerprinting, Farwell was not only convinced that Harrington was innocent, but also that Kevin Hughes had lied on the stand.
Hoping that the show's producers would devote less time to the technology and more time to the specifics of Harrington's saga, Danaher contacted the Council Bluffs police department. Under the guise that she was "researching police deaths in the Midwest," she requested the entire police file from the Schweer murder. The clerk, she recalls, said, "It's a closed case and two guys are locked up, but if you pay for it, I'll send the files." Danaher didn't find a smoking gun; she uncovered a smoldering gun with fresh fingerprints.
No sooner had she sent a money order for $91, than a series of folders arrived. Danaher identified at least eight police reports that had never been released to Harrington and his attorneys. One of them contained a note that Schweer had written to the dealership owner, a few days before the murder, asking him to install floodlights after he'd chased off a man carrying a shotgun, accompanied by a dog -- suggested the killer had already been in the neighborhood. Another report mentioned a witness who had seen a white male running from the scene of the crime carrying a shotgun, trailing his dog. Stunned, Danaher kept reading.
Though the prosecution had denied under oath there were other suspects aside from Harrington, this was, demonstrably, a lie. Another report revealed that early in the investigation, they had identified Charles Gates, who was 48 at the time, lived with a dog and was also a suspect in a 1963 murder that was never solved. A witness at a nearby service station told officers he'd seen a man walking a dog in the area; from a photograph he identified that man as Gates. Another report noted that Gates was administered a polygraph test and was "not truthful in his denial of owning a shotgun or having shot John Schweer."
Still another report indicates that the Council Bluffs police took the unusual step of interviewing a local astrologer and providing her with the birthday of Gates -- identified as "our suspect in this matter" -- and asked her to create an astrological chart. None of this had ever been revealed to Harrington. (Under oath, no police source could recall why Gates was dropped as a suspect.)
It was a classic "Brady violation," the suppression of evidence that is favorable to the defendant and relevant to the issue of guilt. Had Harrington and his lawyers known of Gates, they surely would have crafted their defense differently. They also likely would have noted that Gates' brother-in-law was, at the time, Council Bluff's fire captain, a plausible reason why Gates was never pursued more aggressively. "It was a classic cover-up," says Harrington. "And they almost got away with it. The only thing was they were counting on me disappearing and not putting up a fight for all those years."
It took years of enduring delays and negotiating bureaucratic morass, but in early 2003, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled 5-1 to overturn Harrington's conviction, stating that he was entitled to a new trial, given the prosecutorial misconduct, the suppressed evidence and recanted testimony. That April, Vilsack granted Harrington a reprieve. He walked out of prison, along with Curtis McGhee
Harrington's hair was thinner, his belly thicker. He had grayed a bit and wore glasses. But at 43, he still looked like an athlete. He wore a jersey from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues, a gift from Danaher. The racial overtones were lost on only the densest of observers. The uniform number, 25, represented the number of years he'd been incarcerated. He held a press conference, his gratitude and joy trumping anger and bitterness. Reporters asked what he was going to do now. "I'm going to Disneyland!" he blurted out before adding: "Right now, I am so relieved. I can breathe normal. I may go home and do a Rip Van Winkle. I hope I don't, you know, because there's so much I've missed out on already."
*****
In the Hollywood version of the story, the triumphant music kicks in right about now and the credits start rolling. Real life seldom breaks so neatly. Though Harrington was now out of jail, there was still the possibility that he could be retried. In what appeared to be an effort to save face, the prosecutors offered Harrington and McGhee a deal: they'd drop the charges in exchange for time served. McGhee took it, happy simply for some measure of closure, and even agreed to testify against Harrington if asked. When Harrington was offered a similar deal, he laughed. He even turned down a pardon. "A pardon would have forgiven me," he says shaking his head. "Forgiven me? I didn't do anything!"
By the end of the year, a judge had dismissed the case. After Harrington's release, Pottawattamie County Attorney Matt Wilber held a press conference and explained that, reluctantly, he would not retry Harrington. Memories had faded. Witnesses after witness had recanted and disavowed their testimony. (Kevin Hughes died in 2009.) There wasn't enough admissible evidence to sustain another conviction. But then Wilber -- who was in elementary school when John Schweer was murdered -- added: "I have no doubt that Terry Harrington committed the murder of John Schweer in 1977 [and] the jury made the right decision." Harrington was enraged. He was still going to bear the stigma of a murderer. (Wilber did not respond to messages seeking comment.)
Released inmates often struggle to re-enter society and put their lives back together. Socially, Harrington made a remarkably smooth transition. He moved to Omaha and reconnected with friends and family, including his daughter, Nicole, by then a graduate student in Minneapolis. He re-enrolled in community college. He caught up on movies and music and technology. He joined a church and became more religious, the personalized license plate on his maroon truck reading: TRI GOD. He credits the alter ego. "It was almost like Terry never went to jail and never accepted jail -- T.J. did.," he says. "So Terry was always on the outside."
But there was a biting reality: a quarter century behind bars had deprived him of an education and work experience. The only jobs he could find were menial. He drove a garbage truck and worked seasonally for UPS and removed lead for the EPA. Whereas paroled prisoners, deemed to have repaid their debt to society, have a structure and network that oversee their reintegration, Harrington was left to his own devices. "It was, OK, you're free. You can get a driver's license, do whatever. You're not our problem any more."
Now that Harrington and Danaher were no longer bound by a fight for justice, suddenly there wasn't much else uniting them. Inspired by her work on the case, she became a private investigator and is currently working on behalf of another Iowa inmate convicted of murder -- she's already found a suppressed FBI report. She felt hurt, however, when Harrington returned to his old environment, declining an invitation to start a new life near her in Kansas City. He, in turn, felt hurt when, to his mind, she began taking too much credit for his freedom. Upon his 2003 release, Harrington told a Des Moines reporter, "I think God put [Annie] in my life to be the vessel through which I worked." Now he's more tempered, "She did great work for me, but so did a lot of good lawyers"
When you're wrongfully deprived of a quarter-century of freedom, it stands to reason that you're entitled to some compensation. Both Harrington and McGhee sued the local prosecutors and the Council Bluffs police force under a federal civil rights law. Harrington was cautious about choosing his lawyers. "I didn't want white lawyers getting me out and then bringing in black lawyers -- people said 'Get Johnnie Cochran!' -- to get the money." He settled on the law firm of ... Gerry Spence.
Harrington and Curtis McGhee sued Pottawattamie County and the case against the prosecutors went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The legal issue: Harrington was attempting to sue the prosecutors personally for their misconduct. The defense held that, even if the men were framed, there is prosecutorial immunity, shielding prosecutors from personal liability. On the one hand, it's intuitive: if you frame a man for a murder he did not commit, you ought to shoulder responsibility. On the other hand, if prosecutors could be held personally liable it would have a chilling effect on pursuing "borderline" cases and flood the courts with cases filed by convicted inmates against district attorneys. Besides, as the prosecution put it in a brief, there is "no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." (Harrington lawyer's disagreed: "The Constitution is offended," they wrote in their brief, "when investigators fabricate evidence ... to frame innocent citizens.")
Harrington traveled to Washington last November, as his lawyers argued his case before the highest court in the land. Paul Clement, a star in the legal community and the Solicitor General under George W. Bush, took the case pro bono to argue on Harrington's behalf. Harrington sat in the gallery as his saga was relayed before the highest court in the land. In the days after the oral arguments, however, the sides reached a settlement. Pottawattamie County would pay Harrington and McGhee $12 million. (Harrington's share was $7.03 million, because he had a child and McGhee did not.)
For Harrington, it was bittersweet. Even after paying the attorneys, it was a lot of money. But he'd also filed the lawsuit in hopes of establishing precedent, making it harder for prosecutors to put other citizens in that position. The settlement rendered the case moot. There would be no Supreme Court decision. And while the size and circumstances of the settlement were massive, the agreement contained a clause expressly stating that there is "no admission of wrongdoing by the county." The settlement also called for Harrington to drop a defamation suit he'd filed against Wilber. Harrington pre-empts the question: "Did I do the right thing [in settling]?" He pauses for a beat. "I still don't know."
*****
A few years ago, Terrence Mackey, Harrington's little league football teammate in the 70s, encouraged his old friend to help coach kids at the Boys and Girls club in North Omaha. Now an Omaha youth parole officer, Mackey figured it would be a good idea to involve Harrington in the community. "I also remember that he knew football." The club director, Dave Felici, was all for it, provided Harrington passed the background check, which he did. "There was one mother who was concerned, thinking, Terry had been in jail because he murdered someone," says Felici. "We explained the situation and by the end of the season she thought he was great."
Alongside with the teams' offensive coordinator, Abdul Muhammad, who once played wingback for Nebraska, Harrington ran methodical practices and wasn't shy about dispensing discipline. He was happy to stay late, offering tutorials on, say, the finer points of leverage. But most of his teaching had little to do with football itself. There were lessons and sermons about focus and accountability and hard work. Felici says that he was particularly impressed by Harrington's devotion to the least talented kids. "A team's a team," Harrington says flatly. "It's not a star and a bunch of other kids."
When Harrington coaches, he recalls his own experiences as a teenager. He thinks he had it right putting education ahead of football. "It's all about getting to college," he says. "Football without academics is like fool's gold." He points to Thunder Collins, a former Nebraska running back now serving a life sentence for a murder. Harrington has been known to suspend kids from practice who are underachieving in school, even when their parents have allowed them to play. He also remembers his disastrous senior year of high school, how one lapse changed the entire trajectory of his life. "I don't know how many times these kids have heard me say, 'You gotta stay focused. We can't afford to lose you and you can't afford to lose yourself.'"
By the end of his first season, Harrington had ingratiated himself, but rumors and half-truths about Coach Terry's backstory swirled. Harrington asked Felici if he could address his past. Sure, said Felici. On a trip back from a road game, Harrington screened his 60 Minutes episode on the bus' DVD player. They sat in silence. "These are kids who might be stopped by the police or get in trouble with teachers," says Felici. "The point isn't that everyone is innocent. It's that regardless of what happened you deserve to be investigated fairly."
Harrington's Crohn's disease flared up again this fall, consigning him to bed for days. He had to put his Omaha Community College studies on hold and had to sit out the football season. Telling as few people as possible, he helped subsidize the leagues and the best teams' return trip to Kansas City. He says he'll be back in the spring, demonstrating technique, working with the kids, sermonizing when necessary. And they'll listen.
At that Central Omaha homecoming game last fall, the home team took an early 10-0 lead. Then the defense collapsed, appearing to have signed a non-aggression pact, while the offense sputtered. The opponents ran off 42 straight points and won in a rout. As the dispirited Omaha Central players left the field, Harrington walked to the front row of the bleachers and summoned the players he'd coached at the Boys Club. They approached. He leaned in and complimented them for individual plays but scolded them for openly moping once their team started losing. "Keep your heads up, guys," he implored. "Don't ever stop fighting. You can't quit. You can't quit, because you never know what can happen."
They nodded back.
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Is that really Ryan Kesler? It sure looks like him, with that steely stare and perpetual scruff. And whoever is wearing that number 17 Canucks sweater sure plays like Kesler—with the same physicality and explosive speed. But the Ryan Kesler known throughout the NHL as one of the more annoying agitators in hockey would never skate away from a confrontation, especially one with a trash-talking rookie. Last season, if a 23-year-old kid like the Oilers' Theo Peckham had warned Kesler that, in so many words, he should prepare for the longest night of his life (as the hulking defenseman did in Vancouver three weeks ago), the Canucks' second-line center would have shot back with something like, "Who are you again? Am I supposed to know you?" But this mystery man isn't even barking back.
Indeed, as Peckham skates just a stride behind Kesler, jawing away in hopes of provoking a reaction, the target of his taunting simply rolls his eyes and shakes his head. But he does not engage. Not anymore.
Meet the new Ryan Kesler. These days, when he wants to send a message he lets his play do the talking. During what became a 6--1 drubbing of the Oilers on Jan. 7, Kesler spoke rarely and carried a big stick. Early in the second period he swooped into the zone and loosed a blistering wrist shot from just inside the blue line. Edmonton goalie Nikolai Khabibulin got a piece of the puck with his glove, but not enough; it popped into the air and over his head, then dribbled into the net. Kesler then scored on a pair of deflections in the third, the last one while screening Khabibulin on Vancouver's formidable power play, which through Sunday is humming along at 23.3%, third best in the NHL. Even when his second hat trick in 12 games was in the books, Kesler resisted the urge to point out to Peckham that his night hadn't been so bad.
Trading in a smart mouth for smarter play has been nothing but a boon to the production of the Livonia, Mich., native—and not just because his penalty minutes are down from 1:16 a game last season to :50. With 26 goals through Sunday, Kesler has equaled his career high and is on pace for his first 80-point season. Skating on the top power-play unit, on the penalty kill and, usually, in shootouts, he leads all Canucks forwards in ice time (20:38). He is winning 56.5% of his face-offs, and even though, as the Canucks' second-line center, he's often matched against opponents' top lines, he's +16. With five game-winners, he is the midseason favorite to earn his first Selke Trophy, annually awarded to the league's best two-way forward.
"The bottom line is that he does everything [you can do] to make players around him better," says USA Hockey's assistant executive director of operations Jim Johannson, for whom Kesler played at the Olympics last February.
This season that's no exaggeration: As Kesler goes, so go the Canucks. Through Sunday, Vancouver (29-10-9, tops in the West), which has lost only three games in regulation since Dec. 5, is 24-1-5 when Kesler gets a point. And the secret to his success—as well as his club's—seems wholly attributable to his new attitude.
The call to action—or in Kesler's case, inaction—came last spring when general manager Mike Gillis and coach Alain Vigneault conducted year-end meetings with each of their players. They believed Kesler, along with a handful of his teammates, needed a dose of behavioral rehabilitation. The constant chirping, the extracurricular hits, the retaliatory penalties all "camouflaged immaturity," according to Gillis. Kesler and his mates, in other words, were wasting energy on insignificant parts of the game, more interested in ego battles than in victory.
Gillis and Vigneault explained to Kesler what they saw, then told him what they wanted to see. The fiercely competitive forward has always played with tenacity, but in moments of frustration his emotions often got the best of him. If he missed a shot on a breakaway, for instance, it wouldn't be surprising to see him shatter his stick on the way to the bench. On nights when things went poorly, Kesler would brood over the game, replaying it over and over again in his head. In the eyes of his G.M. and coach, he had a hard time letting things go. And that needed to change.
"If I see you break a stick on the boards again," Gillis warned him, "you won't be playing the next night."
It was the first time anybody—besides an opponent—had really confronted him about his lack of self-control. "When your boss says something to you, you're going to listen," says Kesler, 26. Chastened, he went to Michigan to talk to his father, Mike, the man who taught him how to play the game. At the time, Ryan and his wife, Andrea, had one child, two-year-old daughter Mikayla, and were expecting a second. (Their son, Ryker, was born last month.)
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"You've got a kid and another on the way," Mike said. "What would they think of you if they saw you breaking your stick after you missed a breakaway?"
It was exactly what his son needed to hear. "That really put things into perspective for me," Ryan says, smiling. "You don't want your kids thinking you're a hothead or anything like that. You're supposed to be the mature one and set a good example.... So from then on out, I've been this positive person who doesn't get rattled. Even my friends see a change. And, uh, they like the new me." He chuckles.
Kesler wasn't laughing when he began the season without so much as an assist through the Canucks' first four games. Skating away from scrums became almost unbearable for a player who had grown accustomed to a life in the middle of them. "I knew it was part of my game that I had to let go," he says. "[But] it was definitely pretty hard to try this new thing when you're not having success."
When Kesler finally scored in the third period of the fifth game, a one-timer from the top of the left circle on a power play, "it felt like a thousand pounds lifted off my shoulders," he says. The goal itself was rather insignificant—the last in a 5--1 win over the Hurricanes—but it gave him confidence that his new approach wouldn't dilute his play.
Kesler now acknowledges that, if anything, reserving his focus and energy for his play between the whistles has probably strengthened his game. "As far as him playing with an edge, him playing with grit and being physical and feisty when he needs to be," Vigneault says, "that hasn't changed one iota."
It was always easy to spot Mike Kesler up in the stands. While the other dads were shouting instructions to their sons—things like Skate! and Shoot!—Mike was the one screaming Backcheck! In the Kesler household defense and hard work were non-negotiable. If Ryan didn't give his best effort, he knew what he'd be hearing on the long ride home. He also knew what Mike would have him doing once they got there. "He had this thing called the basement drill," Ryan says. "If I didn't play well, I had to put on all my equipment except my skates and basically do a half hour of cardio after the game....
"Yeah, I definitely didn't like him at the time," Ryan laughs now. "But you look back on things like that, and I think that's why I pride myself on playing to my best every night and not leaving anything in the gas tank."
In the closing seconds of the first game between Team USA and Team Canada last February in Vancouver, Kesler turned in one of the great hustle plays in U.S. Olympic hockey history. With the Americans clinging to a 4--3 lead, he outraced Canada's Corey Perry to a seemingly innocuous dump by U.S. teammate Zach Parise into the Canadian zone. Kesler tracked Perry down like a lion on the hunt and dived from behind to the outside of the forward's left leg. Splayed on the ice and using only his left hand, Kesler swept the puck across Perry and into Canada's vacant net. "That just kind of sums up his game right there," Parise says. "He likes to outwork players, and he makes that second, third effort that a lot of guys don't."
It was the highlight of an impressive tournament for Kesler, one in which he turned even some of his most ardent haters into fans. In the first round of the 2009 playoffs, during a four-game Canucks sweep, television cameras had caught Kesler and teammate Alexandre Burrows taunting Blues forward David Backes. It was the kind of stuff the old Kesler did as a matter of routine. But after Team USA—with Backes and Kesler playing major roles—came tantalizingly close to upsetting Canada for the gold medal in Vancouver, Backes began to soften. "I've said before that I hate to play against the guy," he said. "But I'm starting to admit that I might like playing with him." Well, it's a step.
Along with his new attitude, Kesler has added to his arsenal a nasty wrist shot, one so fast it can strip a goalie clean. He's been perfecting it for more than a year, shooting 500 pucks a week at a tarp festooned with five targets. Last summer Kesler experimented with a whippier shaft but found that in games, with his adrenaline pumping, he had trouble controlling his shots. So he set aside those 82 flex sticks for practices and warmups only. They stayed in his bag until last month, in a game against Columbus, when his game stick broke late in the first period. Returning to the bench, he unknowingly grabbed one of his practice sticks. Rearmed, he exploded for his first career hat trick, scoring every Vancouver goal in a 3--2 overtime victory. It began a run that saw him score 12 goals in the next 15 games, while the Canucks went 12-1-2.
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Kesler, like his Vancouver teammates, is quick to quash any sense of complacency. The Canucks have been ousted by the Blackhawks in the second round in each of the last two years. It's obvious this is not one of Kesler's favorite topics. As he tries to explain what those losses were like, he appears to travel seven months back, the discontent still evident in his face, still ringing in his voice. "No words can really explain it," he says, staring blankly ahead. "It's motivating, I guess. But at the same time, it was tough."
It's not like the new Kesler to dwell on such a thing anyway. He would rather consider the opportunities ahead. The Canucks, among the most consistent teams in the league, rank second in the Western Conference in goals scored and fewest in goals allowed. The Sedin twins—Henrik (58 points) and Daniel (61)—are on pace to top 100 this season, and goalie Roberto Luongo, after relinquishing his captaincy last summer, has had top 10 numbers in GAA (2.35) and save percentage (.922). "We don't get too high in that dressing room," says Kesler. "We're not satisfied and haven't been satisfied this entire stretch."
Making the playoffs is no longer enough in Vancouver. Only the Stanley Cup matters now.
Kesler doesn't doubt the Canucks are up to the task. "I think this is the best team we've had in the last three years," he says. "There's a different mind-set." He knows better than anyone that changing your attitude can change everything.
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