Russia Rebounds / The Last Nazi Trials
Newsweek
04 . 24.2015
THE KILLER
PHARMACY
INSIDE
A MEDICAL
MASS
MURDER
CASE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2015 . 04.24
Newsweek
FEATURES
KILLER
PHARMA CY:
INSIDE A
MEDICAL
MASS
MURDER
CASE
How a seemingly innocuous pharmacy
was making millions of dollars by cutting
corners, fabricating records and ignoring
laws designed to keep contaminated drugs
off the market.
NEW YORK CITY
WOULD REALLY
RATHER NOT TALK
ABOUT ITS
SLA VERY-LOVING PAST
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2015 . 04.24
DOWNLOADS
WHAT SANCTIONS?
THE RUSSIAN
ECONOMY IS
GROWING AGAIN
THE COMPLEX
POLITICS BEHIND
THE CHAOS IN
YEMEN
THE RACE A GAINST THE HIDDEN COSTS
TIME TO CONVICT OF THE WORLD ’S
SUR VIVING NAZIS GHOST APARTMENTS
CALIFORNIA 'S
FARMS WOULD
ONLY NEED TO
CUT WATER BY
6.6 PERCENT TO
MATCH URBAN
RESTRICTIONS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2015 . 04.24
NEW WORLD
A ROBOT THAT
CAN INSERT
CATHETERS,
COMING SOON
TO A HOSPITAL
NEAR YOU
DOWNTIME
ELI KLEIN ON
RIDING THE WA VE
OF CHINA 'S
CONTEMPORARY
ART SCENE
HOW ALBERT
MAYSLES
T A UGHT
AMERICA TO
FEEL
THE LAST
(OR AT LEAST
LOONIEST)
NEWSPAPER IN
AMERICA
RENTING A
GOAT FROM
AMAZON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2015 . 04.24
BIG SHOTS
COVER
2015 . 04.24
Minnesota Department of Health/AP
KILLER PHARMACY:
INSIDE A MEDICAL
MASS MURDER CASE
HOW A SEEMINGLY INNOCUOUS PHARMACY WAS
MAKING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS BY CUTTING CORNERS,
FABRICATING RECORDS AND IGNORING LAWS
DESIGNED TO KEEP CONTAMINATED DRUGS OFF THE
MARKET.
It was just another colorless trade show, one of thousands
held each year in hotels across the United States. But it was
there, at an Embassy Suites in Franklin, Tennessee, that
COVER
2015 . 04.24
the simple handoff of a business card proved to be the first
link in a two-year chain of events that led to the horrific,
tortuous deaths of the first victims in a mass killing that
trailed from New England to Tennessee, from Michigan to
North Carolina.
Health workers packed the hotel for the annual meeting
of the Freestanding Ambulatory Surgery Center Association,
hoping to network, listen to medical presentations and
meet industry salespeople plying their wares. Among
the hundreds wandering about on the second day of the
conference — September 24, 2010 — was John Notarianni,
regional sales manager for the New England Compounding
Center (NECC), a Massachusetts pharmacy. Like any good
salesman, Notarianni was glad-handing prospects while
passing out business cards and advertising material. At
some point, he crossed paths with Debra Schamberg, a
nurse and facility director with the St. Thomas Outpatient
Neurosurgery Center in nearby Nashville.
For a few minutes, Notarianni pitched his company,
telling Schamberg about the pharmaceuticals NECC
had available, including injectable methylprednisolone
acetate, a steroid commonly used for pain management.
Since her outpatient center spent much of the workday
injecting steroids into hips, joints and backs, Schamberg
was intrigued. She took Notarianni ’s business card and
pamphlets and then went on her way, thinking she may
have found a great alternative to the usual pharmacies the
outpatient center used.
But NECC wasn’t a promising drug supplier — it was
a lethal, venomous scourge. This seemingly innocuous
pharmacy in a Framingham strip mall was making millions
of dollars by cutting comers, fabricating records and
ignoring laws designed to keep contaminated dmgs off the
market. NECC perpetrated what may be one of the most
murderous corporate crimes in U.S. history by pumping out
deadly medicines that infected more than 800 people with
fungal meningitis in 2012, 64 of whom died.
Vials of the injectable steroid product made by New England
Compounding Center implicated in a fungal meningitis outbreak that were
being shipped to the CDC from Minneapolis are seen on Oct. 9, 2012 credit:
Minnesota Department of Health/ AP
The outbreak traced to this one pharmacy set off
investigations by federal and state health officials, the
Justice Department and Congress. Three months ago, a
federal grand jury indicted 14 people who worked for or
were connected to NECC on 131 charges, which included
assorted counts of murder, racketeering, fraud, conspiracy
and other alleged crimes.
Despite the scale of the killings and the scope of the
investigations, the inside story of the events that led to
the lethal outbreak and its discovery is being told for the
first time here. Newsweek’ s examination of the NECC
deaths was pieced together from emails, order forms,
investigators' notes, drug company and court records, and
COVER
2015 . 04.24
sworn statements of participants, as well as interviews with
people connected to the case.
No More Mickey Mouse!
The murderous tale begins with that innocuous meeting
between Notarianni and Schamberg, neither of whom was
ever charged with wrongdoing and may well have been
no more than unsuspecting pawns in a cruel and deadly
multimillion-dollar scam.
Like any good salesman, Notarianni called Schamberg
every few months after their encounter at the trade show,
urging her to purchase the steroids and other drugs sold by
his company. “I went back to my manager, and he said he
really would like to offer you better to earn your business,”
Notarianni wrote in an email on May 17, 201 1. “What price
would we need to give you to gain your business on the
[injectable steroids]?”
Notarianni’ s timing could scarcely have been better.
Within a few weeks, Clint Pharmaceuticals, the outpatient
center’s usual supplier of injectable steroids, boosted its
price by $2.46 per 1 -milliliter vial of the drug, to $8.95;
the cost of sterile manufacturing was climbing and supply
was shrinking. Schamberg pushed Clint for a better deal,
but no go. So she typed an email to Notarianni on June 11,
2011: “If pricing is still $6.50 [per vial], I am willing to do
business with you.”
Over the next few months, officials with St. Thomas
Outpatient Neurosurgery Center sent orders to NECC. Mario
G. Giamei Jr., Notarianni ’s successor as regional sales
manager, took over the account, court records show. Things
between NECC and the outpatient center continued to go
well until around early 2012, when Giamei, who has not
been charged with wrongdoing, dropped by the clinic and
told Schamberg a problem had emerged — NECC needed a
lot of patient names, and fast.
COVER
2015 . 04.24
The waste management operation owned by Conigliaro Industries
behind the New England Compounding Center (NECC), which is connected
to an outbreak of meningitis, October 16, 2012. Credit: John Humadd/The Boston Globe/
Getty
Unlike a drug manufacturer or wholesaler, NECC was a
compounding pharmacy, licensed only to sell medications
to fill individual prescriptions. In other words, it wasn’t
allowed to market drugs in batches to clinics and doctors
— even though that was exactly what it was doing. NECC
was conducting business like a manufacturer while being
regulated as a pharmacy.
NECC began selling large shipments of drugs without
prescriptions as early as 2009. That year, some health care
providers who wanted the convenience of having their
prescription drugs in stock — which helped them speed up
how quickly they could see patients — had complained about
NECC’s prescription requirements. On September 15, 2010,
Barry Cadden, the president and head pharmacist at NECC,
sent an email to Robert Ronzio, the national sales manager,
regarding a prospective client that was balking at the idea
of assembling and providing all the prescription paperwork.
Perhaps, Cadden said, NECC didn’t need the prescriptions
COVER
2015 . 04.24
but instead could just attach names to the orders at some
point — even after the medications were injected. That way,
if regulators checked, they would see every dosage linked to
a patient.
“We must connect the patients to the dosage forms
at some point in the process to prove that we are not a
[manufacturer],” Cadden wrote. “They can follow up each
month with a roster of actual patients and we can back-fill.”
There were two problems with that plan. First, it was
illegal. Second, obtaining patient names from clinics and
other medical providers after drugs had been injected was
time-consuming. By the following year, some customers
were just submitting the names of people on their staff,
which Cadden thought was dangerous. “There are better
ways to do this,” he wrote in a May 2, 201 1, email. “Same
names all the time makes no sense."
NECC’s various schemes to get around the prescription
requirement ran from the clever to the absurd. Some
customers were exempted from sending names, while others
provided names that were ridiculous. Big Baby Jesus was
listed as having received an injection at a facility in San
Marcos, Texas; so were Donald Trump, Calvin Klein, Jimmy
Carter and Hugh Jass. A facility in Lincoln, Nebraska, placed
orders for Silver Surfer, Hindsight Man, Octavius and Burt
Reynolds. And orders came in from Elkhart, Indiana, for
Filet O’ Fish, Squeaky Wheel, Dingo Boney and Coco Puff.
That kind of silliness stirred up outrage back in
Massachusetts. On March 20, 2012, Alla Stepanets, an
NECC pharmacist, sent an email to a sales representative
complaining about a customer saying that “[the] facility
uses bogus patient names that are just ridiculous!” The sales
representative replied that “[t]hese are RIDICULOUS.” But
no matter — Stepanets told the sales representative the order
was sent anyway.
COVER
2015 . 04.24
By early 2012, St. Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgery
Center had been an NECC customer for more than six
months but had not yet been told of the need to provide
patient names. It was then, according to court documents,
that Giamei, the recently appointed regional sales manager,
told Schamberg, the clinic’s facility director, that the
pharmacy needed to start receiving names with the
outpatient center’s drug orders.
That was impossible, she replied. There was no way
to predict at the time of the order which patients would
be receiving the drugs. That wouldn’t be a problem,
Giamei replied — NECC just needed a list of patient names.
Schamberg consulted with the medical director, Dr. John
Culclasure, and then a receptionist suggested printing out
daily patient schedules and submitting those with each
NECC order. That idea was put into practice right away,
but still, just like at other clinics, employees at St. Thomas
couldn’t help but have a little fun — one of the patient names
they submitted to NECC was Mickey Mouse, although no
one at St. Thomas has been charged with wrongdoing.
The use of the cartoon character’s name set off more
anger at NECC. On May 21, 2012, Cadden, NECC’s
president, sent a steaming email to Sharon Carter, the
director of operations. Carter added to the email, then
printed it out and posted it in the office. “A facility can’t
continuously provide the same roster of names unless
they are truly treating the exact same patients over and over
again!” the email said, with all the ellipses. “All names must
resemble ‘real’ names no obviously false names!
(Mickey Mouse.)”
The Filthy Clean Room
That same day, as NECC executives were fuming
about obviously fake names, a horror was unfolding just
yards away from them in another part of the company’s
Framingham offices, one that ultimately would lead to the
painful death of scores of patients.
COVER
2015 . 04.24
Glenn Adam Chin, former supervisory pharmacist at the New England
Compounding Center, departs federal court, September 11, 2014, in
Boston. Prosecutors say Chin oversaw the sterile clean rooms at the New
England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass., which custom-
mixed medications in bulk and where tainted steroids blamed for the 2012
outbreak were made, credit: Steven Senne/AP
Even as Cadden was typing his angry email, Glenn A.
Chin, a supervisory pharmacist at NECC, stepped over a
dirty mat into an area known as the Clean Room. According
to government charges, Chin prepared a 12.5-liter stock of
the injectable steroid methylprednisolone acetate, which
was labeled with the lot number 05212012@68. Proper
sterilization procedures required exposing the drugs to high-
pressure saturated steam at 121 degrees in an autoclave for at
least 20 minutes.
Chin used the autoclave for only 1 5 minutes and four
seconds, almost five minutes short of the minimum time
required — a shortfall that, if extended over an eight-hour
day, would allow for at least two extra batches of drugs to be
produced. And this was not a one-time error; charges filed
COVER
2015 . 04.24
by the government suggest that shortchanging the autoclave
process was standard operating procedure at NECC.
There were plenty of reasons to fear that steaming the
compounds for too little time was dangerous. Surface and
air sampling for each of the prior 20 weeks had detected
contamination in the air and on the surfaces of NECC’ s
Clean Room — and even on the hands of Chin and other
staffers. But NECC regularly and blatantly ignored the laws
on decontamination, according to the government charges.
Chin allegedly instructed subordinates to prioritize faster
production over sterilization and ordered them to falsify
documents to suggest they had cleaned areas when they had
not.
There were other hazards in that Clean Room: a leaky
boiler stood in a pool of stagnant water; powder hoods,
which are designed to suck microscopic particles out of the
room, were covered with dirt and fuzz; and the air intake
came from vents that were about 30 yards from a dust-
spewing recycling plant.
COVER
2015 . 04.24
U.S. Rep. Ed Markey speaks at a news conference outside the New
England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass., November 1, 2012.
Markey outlined a plan to more closely regulate compounding pharmacies
like the NECC which is linked to a deadly nationwide meningitis outbreak.
Credit: Elise Amendola/AP
Still, these sloppy procedures alone did not put the public
at risk. Under the law, once the manufacturing of a drug
batch was completed, NECC was required to conduct a
series of comprehensive tests to make sure the medication
was sterile. For compounding pharmacies that follow the
rules — making small quantities of drugs to fill individual
prescriptions — the tests were hardly burdensome. But by
illegally acting as a manufacturer and creating mass batches
of drugs — while telling regulators it was mixing one order
at a time — NECC had decided to simply ignore the safety
check procedures. After all, how could a company comply
with rules designed for testing five or six vials of drugs
when it was illegally manufacturing thousands for sale all
over the country?
And so Lot 05212012@68 was scarcely tested. Its safety
was supposed to be verified by a process involving what is
called a biological indicator; that rule was ignored. Also,
COVER
2015 . 04.24
although the entire batch was required by law to be tested
for sterility by an independent laboratory, Chin sent only 1 0
milliliters of drugs in two vials for analysis. On June 5, after
the lab found that the first vial tested was sterile, officials at
NECC declared the entire lot ready for shipment. In other
words, the batch was deemed safe for injection into humans
based on the testing of just 0.0004 percent of the total. This
would be the equivalent of a grocery store deciding that
all of its fruit is fresh after taking a bite of a single apple —
except that customers can spot spoiled fruit on their own. . .
and a rotten apple won’t kill you.
On June 8, NECC started filling orders for injectable
steroids from Lot 05212012@68. Over the next seven
weeks, 6,500 vials of injectable steroids were shipped
to customers around the country. St. Thomas Outpatient
Neurosurgery Center’s order of 500 vials was filled on June
27, 2012. Unknown to anyone, many of those tiny bottles
carried a deadly fungus.
Thirty-three days later, on July 30, Thomas Rybinski, a
56-year-old autoworker from Smyrna, Tennessee, walked
into Nashville’s St. Thomas Hospital, a building of concrete
and tinted glass that resembles a monstrous, ill-formed
wedding cake. He took the elevator to the ninth floor and
entered the office of St. Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgery
Center. He had come for a steroid injection for chronic back
pain caused by a degenerative disk disease.
In the exam room, a doctor screwed a needle onto a
syringe, inserted it into a 1 -milliliter vial of liquid steroid
and pulled back the plunger to fill the syringe. Then he
carefully slid the needle into Rybinski ’s back, near his spine.
As the doctor slowly pushed down on the plunger, he was
unknowingly injecting a microscopic fungus that had been
floating unseen inside that contaminated vial.
Knowing He Would Soon Die
Dr. April Pettit was perplexed. The 34-year-old internist
at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville had
COVER
2015 . 04.24
been reviewing the medical records of Rybinski, and nothing
made sense. In late August, Rybinski had come to the
hospital complaining of nausea and fatigue. After running
blood tests, a spinal tap and a CAT scan, the medical team
diagnosed him with a community-acquired meningitis. He
was loaded up with antibiotics and sent home.
A week later, Rybinski ’s family brought him back to
Vanderbilt. His speech was incomprehensible. He was
agitated and suffering headaches. Another spinal tap was
followed by intravenous antibiotics, and again Rybinski
seemed on the mend. But on his sixth day at the hospital,
he showed signs of seizures, and the right side of his face
drooped.
COVER
2015 . 04.24
Roseann Fusco shows the scar that is a result of her receiving a
shot from the Marion Pain Management Center from the New England
Compounding Company, for pain that she was suffering from a slipped disk
in her neck on August 24, 2012. On September 9, 2012 she had symptoms
of meningitis. She was in the hospital for three months and nearly died after
Contracting fungal meningitis. Credit: Doug Engle/Ocala Star-Banner/Landov
Pettit then had a thought — a long shot. Bacteria were the
most frequent cause of meningitis, but could the problem
here be a far rarer scenario of fungal meningitis? Pettit
told the lab to reexamine Rybinski’s spinal fluid, this time
checking for fungus. The results came back positive for
Aspergillus fumigatus, a fungus that looks like a monstrous
dandelion and is usually found in decaying organic matter,
like a compost heap. Yet somehow it was growing inside a
Tennessee autoworker, and slowly killing him.
Pettit and other doctors went to Rybinski’s family,
quizzing them about anything unusual he might have done
in the weeks before symptoms started appearing. Someone
COVER
2015 . 04.24
mentioned the steroid injection at St. Thomas Outpatient
Neurosurgery Center for his chronic back pain.
As the doctors worked on piecing the puzzle together,
the fungus from NECC was tearing Rybinski apart. Brain
tissue died as vessels that bathed the areas in blood became
blocked or leaked. On his 1 1th day in the hospital, Rybinski
abruptly became unresponsive and started shaking his head
rhythmically. He was placed on a ventilator, but his brain
started to swell. Doctors cut a hole in his skull and set up
a catheter to drain excess liquid. He showed signs of an
aneurysm and continued to have seizures.
At that same time, in another part of the hospital, 78-
year-old Eddie Lovelace was barely clinging to life. He
had suffered what seemed to be a mild stroke but had been
expected to recover; then his health started to deteriorate.
His family gathered by his hospital bed, knowing he would
soon die but not knowing why. His 98-year-old mother
telephoned him to say her goodbyes, telling her son that he
was her “dear, sweet boy.”
On September 17, 2012 — less than a month after his last
steroid injection at St. Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgery
Center — Eddie Lovelace died. Unknown to his doctors,
he had been killed by fungal meningitis. He was the first
victim of NECC’ s heinous crimes, a link that wouldn’t be
discovered for weeks.
The next day, unaware that a patient at Vanderbilt
had just died from the same infection she had discovered
in Rybinski, Pettit was still scrambling to deal with his
rapidly deteriorating condition. She emailed the Tennessee
Department of Health on September 1 8 with a copy of the
lab results showing the fungal infection. State officials
immediately asked for more information. Then they called
St. Thomas Hospital — where the Outpatient Neurosurgery
Center is based — and discovered doctors there were treating
two other patients suffering from meningitis. Both patients
had also received steroid injections.
COVER
2015 . 04.24
As health officials in Tennessee scrambled, Giamei, the
NECC regional sales manager, dropped by the St. Thomas
outpatient center on September 24. According to court
records, Schamberg, the facility director, and Culclasure,
the medical director, spoke to him about the meningitis
outbreak. “This could not possibly be coming from us,"
Giamei stated confidently, adding that NECC complied with
all sterility procedures and had a state-of-the-art facility.
Perhaps they should come for a visit to Framingham, he
suggested, just to see the quality of the company.
Shawn Lockhart looks at the meningitis-causing fungus Exserohilum
rostratum at the mycotic lab at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention on October 12, 2012 in Atlanta. Credit: Pouya Dianat/AP
By the next day, September 25, state officials working
alongside the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) had identified eight patients with
meningitis, all of whom had received steroid shots at the
outpatient center. Health officials called NECC to inform
it of the investigation and to identify the lot numbers of
the steroids linked to the deaths, but NECC executives
said there had been no other complaints about these drugs.
Within 24 hours, state health agents in Massachusetts
COVER
2015 . 04.24
raided NECC. They were horrified by what they saw. While
a few employees were desperately scrubbing the Clean
Rooms with bleach, the filthiness of the place could not be
covered up. Every lot of NECC steroids suspected of being
contaminated was recalled that day.
But it was too late. The next morning, September 27,
officials at the CDC received the worst news possible — the
outbreak was not limited to Tennessee. State health officials
in North Carolina called to report that a patient at High Point
Regional Hospital was suffering from meningitis with the
same symptoms as the Tennessee patients. The patient,
Elwina Shaw, had received a steroid injection a few weeks
before at the High Point Surgery Center, a NECC customer.
The day after health officials reported her condition,
Shaw suffered a stroke. And less than a day later, Thomas
Rybinski, the autoworker whose case first alerted health
authorities to the emerging crisis, died at Vanderbilt
Hospital.
FDA-OCI agents entered New England Compounding Center (NECC)
in Framingham, Mass., Oct. 16, 2012. Credit: Barry Chin/The Boston Globe/Getty
Dressed and Ready to Go to Jail
COVER
2015 . 04.24
The NECC meningitis outbreak sickened and killed
patients in 20 states. The worst hit was Michigan, with
264 cases and 19 deaths. Tennessee had the next worst
toll, with 153 cases that left 16 people dead. Hundreds of
lawsuits were filed — against NECC, its executives, their
related companies, the outpatient centers and the hospitals.
NECC filed for bankruptcy in December 2012, and the
court issued two rulings enjoining the executives and
owners from moving their money. Almost immediately
after the first order was handed down, Carla Conigliaro, the
majority shareholder of NECC, and her husband, Douglas
Conigliaro, transferred $33.3 million to banks in a series
of 18 transactions in violation of the court’s instructions,
according to the government indictment.
By the fall of 2014, NECC’s once-respected executives
and pharmacists knew they faced criminal prosecution
for a wide range of serious offenses. On September 4,
Glenn Chin, the supervising pharmacist, was arrested at
Boston’s Logan Airport as he prepared to board a flight
with his family for Hong Kong. Then, on December 17,
federal agents launched a series of pre-dawn raids, arresting
14 NECC executives, owners and staffers. Cadden, the
company’s president, was dressed and waiting when law
enforcement officials reached his door; he was expecting
them and had climbed out of bed at 4 a.m. so he would be
ready to go when they knocked on his door.
In U.S. District Court in Boston, all 14 defendants
pleaded not guilty to a wide assortment of crimes, including
racketeering, fraud, conspiracy, violating federal drug laws
and financial crimes. Only Cadden and Chin have been
charged with murder. They face a maximum sentence of life
in prison if convicted on all counts.
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
NEW YORK CITY WOULD
RE ALL Y RA THER NOT
TALK ABOUT ITS
SLA VERY-LOVING PAST
NEW YORK CITY WAS A PLACE THAT FACILITATED
BONDAGE WHILE PREACHING FREEDOM.
It was the summer of 1863, and Abraham Lincoln needed
troops. That March, Congress had passed the Enrollment
Act, requiring all males between the ages of 20 and 45 to
register for a military draft. Since that May, Ulysses S.
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
Grant laid costly siege to the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi,
a strategic Confederate fort on the Mississippi River; by
June, there would be 80,000 Union soldiers surrounding
that city. In late April, “Fighting Joe” Hooker crossed the
Rappahannock River, trying to catch Robert E. Lee in a
pincer movement. The maneuver failed and the Union
lost 17,000 men at the ensuing Battle of Chancellorsville,
perhaps Lee’s finest victory. Just two months later, Lee
suffered his worst defeat, at Gettysburg. Though victorious
there, the Union lost 23,000 men.
The draft began in New York City about two weeks after
Gettysburg. The draft would do what all drafts do, which
is compel men who do not have the natural constitution of
a warrior to become one anyway. You could avoid it by
paying $300. Otherwise, you would don the Union blue.
The first day of the draft, Saturday the 1 1th, went well.
The second, Monday the 13th, was a disaster. The Irish
had not wanted to work alongside blacks on the docks
of Manhattan. They had even less interest in fighting
what some called “the nigger war,” so that, presumably,
emancipated blacks could come north and take their jobs.
Their anger first erupted at the draft offices near today’s
United Nations headquarters on the East Side of Manhattan.
“The men seemed to be excited beyond expression,”
reported The New York Times. The mob “danced with
fiendish delight” as it set buildings aflame and attacked
blacks, killing dozens.
On the second day, the rioters set upon a four-story house
at 339 West 29th Street, in what is today the Manhattan
neighborhood of Chelsea. Here, on what was then known
as Lamartine Place, stood the graceful home of Quaker
abolitionists James Sloan Gibbons and Abigail Hopper
Gibbons. It was, according to their friend Joseph H. Choate,
“a great resort of abolitionists and extreme anti-slavery
people from all parts of the land.” The Hopper-Gibbons
house was a known stop on the Underground Railroad, a
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
network of routes and safe houses that, in the first half of
the 19th century, whisked runaway slaves across the Mason-
Dixon Line. Choate reports that he dined there with William
Lloyd Garrison. Present at the dinner was “a jet-black negro
who was on his way to freedom.”
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
1. The Reign- of Terror during the Draft Riots in New York.— The infuriated
Mob attacking Mrs. Gibbon’s House. 2. The Tombs, the City Prison.
An Illustration depicts a mob attacking the home of Abigail Hopper
Gibbons (at 339 West 29th Street) during the New York City draft riots,
NeW York. Credit: Interim Archives/Getty
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
Two men on horseback led the mob to the Hopper-
Gibbons house. “The horsemen stopped one at each side of
the courtyard and allowed about a dozen men with pickaxes
into the house while the kept the rest of the mob back,”
writes the historian Iver Bernstein. “Finally the advance
team was joined by the throng without.” Books were set on
fire, art destroyed, furniture defenestrated. Troops fought off
the rioters, but after the troops left, the rioters returned.
Choate came to the rescue by “the merest accident.” He
had gone to see if there was “trouble in the negro quarters,”
only to stumble on the chaos in front of the Gibbons house.
One resident of the block, he would later report, had
already been “killed in remonstrating with the crowd” (that
neighbor, Daniel Wilson, actually appears to have survived
the severe beating). Choate went inside but found only
pillaging rioters. Nobody from the Hopper-Gibbons clan was
there; but two doors down, at the residence of Samuel and
Rachel Brown, two Gibbons daughters, Julia and Lucy, lay
in hiding. They “threw themselves into my arms,” Choate
wrote, “almost swooning.”
It was too dangerous to take the girls down to the street,
so Choate went up instead, “over a dozen adjoining roofs,”
through the house of Esther and Henry Herman (other
historians hold that they descended through the Hebrew
Orphans Asylum; in either case, they had sympathetic Jews
to thank). Choate had a carriage waiting. He and the Gibbons
daughters made it safely to his house on 21st Street. The
riots were finally quelled that Thursday, July 16, in part by
troops who had fought at Gettysburg.
Today, the Hopper-Gibbons house is covered in funereal
construction mesh. It was bought in 2004 by developer
Tony Mamounas; the following year, he sought to build
a penthouse atop the four- story structure and was granted
permission to do so by the Buildings Department. The city
first told Mamounas to stop building in 2009; that same
year, the Landmarks Preservation Commission created
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
the Lamartine Place Historic District, which includes the
remaining huddle of rowhouses on 29th Street. The Hopper-
Gibbons house fell under the district’s auspices, making
any further alterations difficult. Mamounas appealed, and
there followed a flurry of court motions and recriminations.
Finally, the appellate division of the state Supreme Court
ruled against Mamounas this February. If the ruling stands,
the penthouse will have to come down.
What will remain, in that case, is just another nice
building for people who can afford nice things. Mamounas is
hardly the villain here; to build and build higher is a primal
Gotham urge. He could have been more tactful in dealing
with the local preservationists who mounted the campaign
against him. He could have also been more blunt. New
York is not a city, he might have pointed out, that succumbs
easily to history. Or to guilt. Yes, the aforementioned Joseph
Choate had heard of a black man lynched on the corner of
Sixth Avenue and 32nd Street. And now there stands the
Manhattan Mall. You call it forgetting, I call it progress.
People walk past a sign indicating the history of Lamartine Place near
the former Hopper-Gibbons House at 339 W 29th St. in Manhattan on April
8, 2015. Credit: Jared T. Miller for Newsweek
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
There is, at least, a sign. Courtesy of the Landmarks
Preservation Commission, it hangs from a lamppost on
29th Street and explains the history of the block once
known as Lamartine Place. It is, as far as I know, the only
acknowledgment of the Draft Riots on any kind of historical
marker in the city. No historian I spoke to could think of any
commemoration more significant. So, if the city itself has
to exert no more effort than to stamp out a single sign on
a metal sheet the size of a cafeteria tray, then why should
Mamounas have to sacrifice his penthouse? Is a small-time
real estate developer really to bear the full weight of history?
The battle over the Hopper-Gibbons House is instructive
of a broader New York attitude toward slavery and abolition.
That era seems almost too complex for us to remember,
eluding the easy narratives of triumph and redemption
while calling into question New York’s liberal self-image.
Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University professor widely
regarded as the preeminent historian of New York City,
points out that while Southern cities like Charleston, South
Carolina, unequivocally supported slavery and New England
ones like Boston thoroughly opposed it, New York was
probably the most ideologically conflicted urban center in
the nation. Jackson surmised that New York’s complicity
in the slave trade remains an “unpleasant topic” to this day.
It is not the kind of conversation we can conduct with a
well-meaning Starbucks barista. But we will have to have
it sooner or later. “There is no future,” Jackson warns, “in
denying the past.”
Yet even as its hold on us expires, history manages to
intrude like the aggrieved ghost of Hamlet’s father. Prithi
Kanakamedala is a historian who organized the “In Pursuit
of Freedom” exhibition at the Brooklyn Historical Society
last year. She teaches at the Bronx Community College,
where 90 percent of the students are either black or Hispanic.
Kanakamedala says her students always perk up when
learning about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
great leverage to Southern states in the apprehension and
return of runaway slaves. The law, Kanakamedala’s students
tell her, “sounds just like stop-and-frisk.”
Burned Alive or Hanged
On a cold afternoon in February, I set out from the
Newsweek offices at the dagger-point of lower Manhattan
and walked north, up the crooked spine of the island that is
Broadway. My goal was to see as much as possible of the
city’s obscured legacy of slavery and abolition. There had
been a slave market on Wall Street, abolitionist newspapers
where Tribeca is, villages for free blacks in Brooklyn. A
patch of Greenwich Village was once known as “The Land
of the Blacks.” What still remained of all this, in a 21st
century metropolis tumescent with glass and steel?
In his recent book Gateway to Freedom, Columbia
University historian and Pulitzer Prize-winner Eric Foner
makes two compelling arguments. First, that even after
slavery was abolished in New York State in 1827, “the
South’s peculiar institution remained central to the city’s
economic prosperity,” with money and goods freely
crossing the Mason-Dixon Line. But despite its pro-South
impulses, the city also became “a crucial way station in the
metropolitan corridor through which fugitive slaves made
their way from the upper South through Philadelphia and on
to upstate New York, New England and Canada.” It was a
place that facilitated bondage while preaching freedom.
Foner’ s book, by turns scholarly and gripping, includes
a map of places in Manhattan and Brooklyn related to the
abolitionist enterprise. The map shows 18 sites in Manhattan
and five in Brooklyn. I chose what I thought were the most
relevant places highlighted by Foner while adding a couple
of my own.
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
A man looks at a display of photographs showing graves at the African
Burial Ground Memorial Site, March 1, 2006 in the Lower Manhattan area
of NeW York. Credit: Stan Honda/ AFP/Getty
My first stop was the African Burial Ground, just north
of City Hall. It is, ironically enough, across the street from
the U.S. Court of International Trade, the name alluding
with sad irony to brigs packed with shackled Africans. The
first slaves — 1 1 men — were brought to the Dutch colony
of Nieuw Amsterdam in 1626; two years later, three female
slaves arrived. They were all owned by the West India
Company, which gave them the right to earn wages, marry
and own some property.
The British assumed control of New York in 1664 and
quickly proved more zealous (and cruel) slave masters, so
that by the end of the 18th century, there were 10,727 blacks
in what is today New York City and Westchester County,
with 77.3 percent of them slaves. “New Yorkers later
prided themselves on the notion that in contrast to southern
slavery, theirs have been a mild and relatively benevolent
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
institution,” Foner writes. “But New York slavery could
be no less brutal than in colonies to the south.” Ninety
years before Nat Turner tore through Southampton County,
Virginia, in a furious fight for freedom, the “Negro Plot” of
1741 supposedly aimed for New York’s fiery destruction. In
the panicked “investigation” that followed, some 30 blacks
were burned alive or hanged. Four white accomplices were
also executed.
Death, for enslaved Africans, only perpetuated the
injustices of life. In 1697, the British masters of New
York forbade the burial of blacks in the cemetery of
Trinity Church. African burials were conducted outside the
settlement’s limits, in what would come to be known as
“Negros Buriel Ground.” After the burial ground was closed
in 1794, it was covered up, and the city grew above it.
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
An 1865 map of New York City by mapmaker G. Woolworth Colton
Credit: .
We rarely think of New York as a slaveholding
city, but it had more slaves than any other city except
Charleston. Foner writes that on “the eve of the War of
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
Independence... some 20,000 slaves lived within 50 miles
of Manhattan island, the largest concentration of unfree
laborers north of the Mason-Dixon Line.” Brooklyn was
even worse than Manhattan: In 1771, one-third of its
population was slave.
By the late 20th century, the site had succumbed the
most mundane of modern uses: a parking lot. In 1990, the
city sold the land to the General Services Administration
(GSA), which set about constructing the Ted Weiss Federal
Building. During excavations the following year, 419 bodies
were found at a depth of 24 feet. As the history of the site
came to light, black activists enjoined the GSA to preserve
the ancient cemetery. Wondered the Brooklyn firebrand
Charles Barron, a former Black Panther, “Do they then own
the remains of your parents because they own the land?”
A man inspects a skeleton at the site of the earliest African American
cemetery found in Lower Manhattan in New York, in October 1991. credit: j a
Giorano/SABA/Corbis
The African Burial Ground is now a national monument
a third of an acre in size; the original cemetery, at 6.6 acres,
was approximately 22 times that size. The remains of the
slaves were re-interred there in 2003; in 2010, a visitors
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
center opened, a jagged ship’s prow of somber black stone
rising from the ground. The Weiss building looms above
the ancient cemetery like an annoyed sibling, much younger
but much bigger. Reviewing the opening, a critic for The
New York Times noted that the memorial “makes the past
seem like an excision, a resurrection of an alien time and
place, a reminder of what lies deep underfoot.” Above all,
the memorial has the feel of a grudging concession. I, for
one, can’t think of another museum that devotes so much
narrative space to the story of its own creation. Then again,
how many institutions can claim to have won a battle against
the relentless force that is New York real estate?
The Eternal Indignities
Those who wish to preserve the physical evidence of
history always fight a losing battle. Against them are aligned
money and time, political avarice and public apathy, not
to mention the eternal indignities of gravity and rust. Just
one of these forces is usually enough to doom a building
for which only the sentimentalist and the historian have any
affection.
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
A commemorative plaque indicating historical ties to the Underground
Railroad hangs outside 36 Lispenard Street in Manhattan's TriBeCa
neighborhood, April 8, 2015. Credit: Jared T. Miller for Newsweek
Still, traces remain, even in this city increasingly
dominated by hedge funders and foreign billionaires who
have so much of the world’s money but so little of its
culture. At 36 Lispenard Street, in the Tribeca neighborhood,
stands the former house of David Ruggles, an African-
American abolitionist described by Foner in Gateway to
Freedom as the “leader of a network with connections
to anti-slavery activists in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New
England and upstate New York.” One of the nation’s first
black journalists (he published a magazine called the Mirror
of Liberty) and founder of the anti-slavery New York
Committee of Vigilance, Ruggles “scoured the wharfs, on
the lookout for fugitive slaves.” Today, there is a plaque
affixed to the side of the building where he lived and,
in 1838, welcomed Frederick Douglass, who was then a
runaway slave.
Ruggles ’s building remains intact. The bottom floor
is a La Colombe Torrefaction coffee shop, its fashionable
patrons buzzing about in the glorious refulgence of a winter
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
afternoon. The excellent urban exploration site Untapped
Cities had a barista confirm that the basement of the building
was “original.” Unsure of what that meant, I asked to see it.
A manager readily complied. She took me through the cafe’s
kitchen, down into the drafty basement. Three stone arches
did seem, quite obviously, to have been part of the original
structure. Behind one these was a small grotto filled with
electrical equipment. Once, maybe slaves had cowered there.
There is no way to know.
The basement of the present-day La Colombe Torref action at 36
Lispenard St. in Manhattan's Tribeca Neighborhood, pictured April 8, 2015.
Credit: Jared T. Miller for Newsweek
Back upstairs, the cool coffee kids were busy with their
iPads and Moleskines. A barista told me she had been
stunned to learn of the building’s history, a revelation she
earnestly deemed “epic.” I fantasized for days thereafter
about being her history teacher.
At 2 White Street was the home of black abolitionist
Theodore S. Wright, bom a free black and educated at the
Princeton Theological Seminary. He warned against those
who condemned slavery but did nothing to improve the lot
of African-Americans. “It is an easy thing to ask about the
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
vileness of slavery at the South,” he said in an 1837 speech,
“but to call the dark man a brother... to treat the man of color
in all circumstances as a man and brother — that is the test.”
A two-story affair of brick and wood just south of Canal
Street’s ceaseless bustle, the house reminds of a half-bucolic
gentility long gone from Manhattan. It turned out that 2
White was an old friend, though one whom it took a moment
to recognize. It had once been home to the Liquor Store, a
bar so unassuming it didn’t even assume a name, keeping
the marquee of the bygone spirit-purveyor. It was, until its
death in 2006, one those dusty, dusky spots that are quickly
disappearing from the scrubbed face of the city, replaced by
“speakeasies” where mixologists work with the solemnity
of biochemists. When my friends and I drank there in the
early aughts, the Liquor Store was an unpretentious place for
people, like myself, who had great pretentions about life in
New York but didn’t have the money to live them out. So we
drank Bud Light and dreamt.
Pedestrians walk by a building at 2 White St. in Manhattan, April 9,
2015. Credit: Jared T. Miller for Newsweek
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
Now, the building that once belonged to Wright and
later belonged to Jim Beam belongs to J. Crew. Though the
interior remains handsome, the feel of invasion hangs in the
air like Justin Bieber cologne. “We’ve taken over the old
Liquor Store,” a J. Crew website proclaims, noting that the
building is an “1825 townhouse” and that the “original wood
bar is still intact.” There is no mention of Wright’s work.
Today, a suit at J. Crew might run you $400; in 1850, that
was the price of a slave.
I left Tribeca and headed for Greenwich Village, where
there was once a settlement called Little Africa, a refuge for
blacks that had strategic value for whites who did not yet
possess the whole island of Manhattan. “The Dutch chose
to settle the families of former slaves on this land in order
to protect the town from incursions by Native Americans,”
notes historian Andrew S. Dolkart. “The Africans would
serve as a buffer and would be the first settlers attacked
during a raid.” But the black settlement survived, becoming
the largest of its kind by the midpoint of the 19th century.
And now it is gone, replaced by bars that cater to
students from NYU and “authentic” Italian restaurants
that cater to tourists from Palookaville. Minetta Street,
whose charming curve is a wormhole of serenity, was once
known as the Negroes’ Causeway. Today, it is a shortcut
to Macdougal Street, which Bob Dylan once roamed. This
is where he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind,” in a coffee shop
called the Commons, which later became The Fat Black
Pussycat and is now a Mexican joint called Panchito’s. This
is what that song says: “How many years can some people
exist / Before they’re allowed to be free?”
Centuries, it turns out.
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
A statue of Horace Greeley sits in Horace Greeley Square in midtown
Manhattan on April 8, 2015. Credit: Jared T. Miller for Newsweek
After a visit to the Hopper-Gibbons House on 29th
Street, I headed for the heart of Midtown. Greeley Square
Park is where Broadway meets Sixth Avenue, near where
Macy’s proclaims itself the world’s largest store and where
a malevolent chaos has always held sway. Horace Greeley
edited the New- York Tribune, which Foner calls “the
nation’s most important antislavery newspaper.” Its offices
had been among the targets of the Draft Riots mob. A
statue of Greeley presides over the din, but he looks less
like the master of the square than a Rip Van Winkle figure
emerging, bewildered, into modernity. He’d have no trouble
recognizing our own conflicts, though. Macy’s, which
dominates the area, recently paid $650,000 to settle a claim
that it discriminated against black shoppers.
Kidnappers and Slave Catchers
James P. Hurley was giving a walking tour of Bedford-
Stuyvesant when someone threw a bottle at his head. Hurley,
who is white, wanted to highlight the rich history and
architectural splendor of the neighborhood. In 1964, there
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
had been rioting there and in Harlem over a white police
officer’s shooting of a black teenager. The neighborhood,
once a bastion of black gentility, was beginning its decades-
long descent into gangs, drugs, no jobs and bad schools.
After the thrown bottle, Hurley stopped giving tours of
Bedford-Stuyvesant and instead began teaching a seminar
about Bedford-Stuyvesant history at the Pratt Institute
Department of Community Development. In 1968, he was
approached by Joseph H. Haynes, who had grown up in Bed-
Stuy and now worked as a subway engineer. Haynes wanted
to show Hurley the lost neighborhood of Weeksville.
The Hunterfly Road houses of Weeksville, Brooklyn, pictured April 7,
2015. Credit: Jared T. Miller for Newsweek
Hurley had been hunting for Weeksville for some
time, after first spotting a reference to this community of
landowning blacks in a 1 9th century history of Brooklyn by
Eugene L. Armbruster. The community had been founded
in 1838 by former slave James Weeks and other African-
Americans who bought the rural parcels of land, then
sold them to brethren. Foner notes that the neighborhood,
far from Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, “offered a
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
modicum of safety from kidnappers and slave catchers.” As
the historian Judith Wellman tells it in Brooklyn’s Promised
Land, the most thorough history of Weeksville to date,
the little village would grow to become the second biggest
community of free blacks in antebellum America (the largest
was in Carthagena, Ohio).
Hurley hadn’t been able to learn much about Weeksville.
The neighborhood seemed lost, just another victim to New
York’s relentless regeneration. The commonly repeated
narrative has Hurley and Haney spotting Weeksville from
an airplane the latter was piloting over the central Brooklyn
area known as Crow Hill. Hurley, who is now 86 years
old and lives near Cooperstown, New York, says that “just
isn’t true,” though he remembers a subsequent flight during
which Haney took photos of Weeksville with one hand
while piloting the airplane with the other. Yet it was an
astounding discovery all the same. In the shadows of the
massive Kingsborough Houses public housing project stood
a dilapidated cluster of houses, on a diagonal strip called
Hunterfly Road that had somehow evaded the grid imposed
on the city in the early 1 9th century and survived more
recent attempts at “urban renewal.”
Here was Weeksville.
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
A photograph taken in the early 1970s shows community
archaeological excavation and education workshops being conducted at the
Hunterfly Road Site, in Weeksville, Brooklyn. Credit: Weeksville Heritage Center
“What we found may not look like much,” Hurley
said in 1969 to The New York Times, which reported that
archaeological digs of Weeksville were being conducted by
“dozens of Boy Scouts, local merchants, parents and school
children.” The motley crew managed to not only save the
four houses from demolition but get them on the National
Register of Historic Places in 1972. The 1980s and ’90s
were as unkind to this strip as they were to the rest of New
York. There were fires, vandals. Local students donated
coins. Somehow the houses survived.
Much like the African Burial Ground, Weeksville
feels out of place, intruding on the endless jigsaw puzzle
of housing projects that dominates the area. Many of the
residents of the adjacent Kingsborough Houses — which
only make the news for drugs, guns and gangs — are only
three or four generations removed from the tea plantations
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
of South Carolina, the pecan groves of Georgia. Whether
these descendants of slaves deserve recompense for the
atrocities inflicted on their ancestors is one of the great
unresolved questions of American society. That question
seems especially pressing here.
In late 2013, the Weeks ville Heritage Center opened. It
is a handsome, modern building, a gleaming new thing in a
neighborhood where most things are old and broken. But it
is not without its troubles: Weeks ville has struggled to raise
money and make itself a draw to visitors. The center’s sunny
new director, Tia Powell Harris, says that while the center
attracts tourists from places like Sweden and China, it has
struggled to get local African-Americans through its doors.
They do not feel, she says, like it is theirs.
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
A tintype portrait, taken circa 1875, of an unidentified female resident
of the historically African American neighborhood ofWeeksville in
Brooklyn, N.Y. Credit: The Granger Collection
This is especially lamentable because Weeks ville
is a lesson in self-empowerment, a deviation from the
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
usual victimhood narrative of slavery. Kanakamedala,
the Bronx Community College professor, says places like
Weeksville remind that the story of African Americans
in the 19th century is about more than just bondage.
Unwilling to subsist on “lofty ideas of freedom” alone,
says Kanakamedala, the blacks of Weeksville sought
home ownership and voting rights as means of personal
advancement that, at the same time, incrementally improved
the social standing of the race. Their struggle may have been
quotidian, but that does not make it inconsequential.
But while Weeksville yearns for the cultural limelight,
at least it isn’t facing oblivion. The same isn’t true on
Abolitionist Place in downtown Brooklyn, where a sad
scattering of 19th century houses may be one of the city’s
most trenchant links to the abolitionist movement. It is right
off the Fulton Mall, the last commercial strip in Brownstone
Brooklyn (i.e., white Brooklyn) that caters to blacks. But
gentrification is coming to this cheerfully scruffy strip. Glass
boxes are rising everywhere, and high-end chains like Shake
Shack are eagerly following in their wake.
Lewis Greenstein points to buildings on Duffield St. in Brooklyn, New
York, which once contained a system of tunnels that hid escaped slaves, on
April 9, 2015. Credit: Jared T. Miller for Newsweek
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
Abolitionist Place is already home to two hotel towers,
with a third in the making. The trio is so hideous, it would
give Houston nightmares. In the shadows of these immodest
abominations are two humble buildings: 233 Duffield Street,
a three-story affair of caramel-colored wood slats, and 227
Duffield Street, whose three stories are a confusion of styles
and colors. A window spans nearly the entire length of 227 ’s
ground floor, and there are faded posters facing out to the
street. This was once a hair salon. Now, it is a museum of
the most rudimentary kind (no admission charge, but also no
actual admission).
The posters tell an incredible story, one that the two
houses’ erstwhile owners fought, without success, to have
the city acknowledge: that the Duffield houses are the
last evidence of a system of tunnels and caverns that hid
runaway slaves and helped whisk them to safety. “The
floor is still earthen,” a reporter for The Brooklyn Rail
wrote during a 2007 visit to 227 Duffield Street. “The
two side walls are lined with cool gray flagstones. The
uniformity of the stones’ pattern is interrupted about three
yards from the front of the building. There... a worn wooden
beam... separates the wall from an arch that is bordered with
stone. Beyond the arch, a new pattern of red brick covers the
rest of the wall.”
Elsewhere, these may just have been architectural curios.
But the house at 227 was occupied by the abolitionists
Thomas and Harriet Lee Truesdell. The owners of the two
buildings believed the tunnels may have served as a secret
passage from Duffield Street to the nearby Bridge Street
African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church. Yes, this is
a fanciful notion. But the past often seems preposterous, and
all history, whether conducted by professionals or amateurs,
is an act of imagination. The fewer the facts, the more the
imagination fills in.
But the New York of Mayor Michael Bloomberg was
not a New York to go weak in the knees for historical
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
fantasies. The city hired an archeological firm, AKRF, to
investigate; it found, according to a New York Times report,
“no conclusive proof’ that the Duffield houses had been part
of the Underground Railroad. So that was that.
The owner of 227 Duffield, Joy Chatel, passed away
in the winter of 2014, and the fate of her building remains
unclear. The other building has been sold, and will soon
come down. “We were surrounded by all these hotels,”
explains former owner Lewis Greenstein. “We had to get
out.”
Officials, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R red
tie), stand behind four coffins containing the remains of free and enslaved
African-Americans, October 3, 2003, after they arrived at Pier 11 on Wall
Street, a colonial-era disembarkation point for slave ships in New York.
Credit: Stan Honda/ AFP/Getty
Foner told me that as he has gone around the country,
lecturing about Gateway to Freedom, audiences are
invariably surprised to learn that “New York was very
closely tied into the South,” that Southerners would vacation
in New York City with their slaves, that before Brooks
Brothers became a symbol of patrician propriety, it provided
clothing for slaves. New Yorkers, too, have been hesitant
to learn of their city’s past. “We are tolerant and we are
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
multicultural,” says Foner, a lifelong New Yorker. “The
Statue of Liberty is our image of ourselves.” He notes,
also, how strange it is that we have a national museum
commemorating the Holocaust, but not one commemorating
slavery.
I left shabby Duffield Street and walked east, into
graceful Brooklyn Heights. There, at 86 Pierrepont Street,
stood a house that once belong to Lewis Tappan, one of
the city’s most ardent abolitionists and a central figure in
the case of La Amistad, a Spanish slave ship on which in
1839 the captive Africans staged a successful mutiny (in the
Steven Spielberg film Amistad, Tappan is played by Stellan
Skarsgard).
I saw no sign of Tappan having lived here; if there is a
plaque, it must be very well hidden. An online listing for
a rental apartment in the building put the rent at $2,375,
lauding the unit’s dishwasher and “excellent light.” You
could live there very happily without knowing anything
of the building’s past. And many surely have. Would their
fleeting months or years at 86 Pierrepont — romances,
breakups, dinner parties, lazy Sundays — have been somehow
enriched by the presence of a plaque?
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
Pedestrians walk by a statue of Horace Greeley in Horace Greeley
Square in midtOWn Manhattan On April 8, 2015. Credit: Jared T. Miller for Newsweek
If remembrance is to be more than just a history-class
platitude, then it requires sacrifice, of space both physical
and mental. The two cataracts on the footprint of the World
Trade Center demand attention by dint of their enormous
size alone: Millions of feet of commercial real estate
were ceded to the National September 1 1 Memorial and
Museum. But that usurpation, by itself, is no moral victory.
The crushing sound of water, the square abyss, the names
etched into granite, these all summon that morning and the
profound associations — personal, political, whatever — that
9/11 continues to have. The city gave up this physical space
so that you, in turn, give up some of your mental space to
think about the 3,000 lives lost on that day. The outrage over
people taking selfies there is rooted in the recognition that
this contract has been flagrantly, mirthfully breached.
And what of the thousands of lives lost by black New
Yorkers throughout the centuries of American slavery? The
city has given up very little space for them, though they, too,
suffered and died at the mercy of forces that move through
FEATURES
2015 . 04.24
flesh and bone like a shock wave, invisible and inexorable.
Like the victims of 9/1 1, the slaves of New York were actors
in the great mercantile drama that daily animates the city.
But they were unwilling actors. And when they died, nobody
plastered posters with their faces in subway stations. Nobody
read their names at memorials, and nobody etched their
names in stone.
They went into oblivion. But they don’t have to stay
there.
Andrey Kuzmin/Reuters
WHAT SANCTIONS? THE
R USSIAN ECONOMY IS
GROWING AGAIN
NOT ONLY IS RUSSIA'S PRESIDENT, VLADIMIR PUTIN,
STILL STANDING, BUT THE RUSSIAN ECONOMY,
AGAINST MOST EXPECTATIONS, IS ACTUALLY
RECOVERING.
Six months ago, the price of oil — the lifeblood of the
Russian economy — began to crater, and U.S.-led sanctions,
implemented in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea
in Ukraine, were biting. Russia’s currency, the ruble,
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
buckled, and capital flight began to accelerate as rich but
nervous Russians moved more and more money out of
the country. It seemed plausible then to wonder: Could
Vladimir Putin be losing his grip? Might economic pressure
be enough to rein him in, or even lead to his downfall?
Today, the answer is becoming clear — and it’s not the
one the West was hoping for. Not only is Putin still standing,
but the Russian economy, against most expectations, is
recovering. Its stock market is one of the best performing
globally this year; the ruble, after losing nearly half its value
against the dollar over the course of a year, is rebounding;
interest rates have come down from their post-sanctions
peak; the government is taking in more revenue than its own
forecast expected; and foreign exchange reserves have risen
nearly $10 billion from their post-crisis low.
The lower price of oil still hurts. Citicorp economists
estimate that every $ 1 0 decline in the price of Brent crude
shaves 2 percent from Russia’s gross domestic product
(GDP). Further declines — not out of the question, given that
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest and lowest-cost producer,
is still pumping record amounts of crude — will crimp growth
even more. But those same Citicorp economists forecast that
GDP, after contracting for the past 18 months, could now
begin to grow at up to 3.5 percent per year, even without a
recovery in crude prices.
What explains this resilience? Consider the city of
Cherepovets, where 300,000 people live in the northwestern
area known as Vologda. It is dreary, gray and industrial
— almost stereotypically so. The major employer in town
is a steelmaker born in the Soviet era. In the wake of the
sanctions and the plunge in the price of oil, Cherepovets
would be one of the more unlikely industrial cities in the
world to be thriving.
But thriving it is. In the last quarter of 2014, the
hometown steelmaker, Severstal, posted its strongest
profit margins in six years, on record output. On April 9,
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
the company signed a contract to supply rolled steel to a
Renault-Nissan auto plant, a facility that plans to increase
exports from Russia to the former Soviet republics, the
Middle East and Africa.
Though better run than many Russian firms, Severstal is
not an outlier. According to data from Bloomberg, some 78
percent of Russian companies on the MICEX index showed
greater revenue growth in the most recent quarter than their
global peers did. And Russian companies on the whole are
now more profitable than their peers on the MSCI Emerging
Markets index.
What’s bailing out Moscow? For the second time in
two decades, Russia is showing that while a sharp drop in
its currency’s value does bring financial pain — it raises
prices for imports and makes any foreign debt Russia or
its companies have taken on that much more expensive
in ruble terms — it also eventually produces textbook
economic benefits. Since a devaluation raises import prices,
it also paves the way for what economists call “import
substitution,” a clunky way to say that consumers switch
to buying less pricey products produced at home instead of
imported goods.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
IB U
Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) meets with students and staff
while visiting the National Mineral Resources University (University of
Mines) in St. Petersburg, January 26, 2015. Credit: Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti/Kremlin/
Reuters
For companies such as Severstal, which exports around
30 percent of its output, the benefits of devaluation are
obvious: All of the costs that go into producing steel in
Russia — iron ore, manganese, nickel, labor, electricity — are
priced in rubles. That means the companies’ costs relative
to their international competitors’ have plummeted. At the
same time, any steel they sell abroad is priced in either U.S.
dollars or euros — both of which have risen in value against
the ruble. When the companies bring those sales dollars
home, they are worth far more in rubles than they were a
year ago.
The same phenomenon applies in a big way to Russia’s
vast energy sector. Moscow exports huge amounts of oil and
gas, and brings in dollars for it. That’s why Rosneft, a huge
oil producer with close ties to Putin’s Kremlin, reported
a revenue increase of 1 8 percent last year, compared with
an increase of less than 1 percent for its international
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
competitors, according to Bloomberg data. This is a big part
of the reason why Russia’s tax revenue has not fallen off
a cliff, mitigating somewhat the pain of last year’s crisis.
Russia’s oil output is still near record highs — one of the
reasons, along with continued full-tilt Saudi output, that
prices remain so weak.
The world shouldn’t have been surprised by what
has happened. More or less the same thing happened in
1998, when the Asian financial crisis spread to Russia
and Moscow both defaulted on its international debt and
devalued the ruble. There was an immediate negative
economic shock, followed by an import substitution-led
recovery that was sharper than most international economists
at the time believed would occur. “This argues for an
economic recovery now similar in nature, if not necessarily
in magnitude, to the one after 1998,” says Ivan Tchakarov,
an economist at Citicorp.
What has changed since then, of course, is the nature of
the Russian government and how it is perceived in the West.
Back then, Russia was a wobbly new democracy trying to
make a transition to capitalism that the developed world was
desperately trying to stabilize. Today, less than two decades
later, Putin sits atop the Kremlin, openly hostile to the
United States with what appears to be a revanchist agenda:
slowly but surely reassembling the old Soviet Union.
When oil prices crumbled last year, there was a fair bit
of hope in Western capitals that the pain would do what
sanctions hadn’t yet: force a Russian climbdown in Ukraine,
and perhaps prompt Putin to turn back inward and tend to his
troubles at home.
Maybe that was wishful thinking. Whatever the case,
it’s now a moot point. The Russian economy is showing
enough resilience that it appears unlikely to check Putin’s
behavior abroad. Public opinion surveys at home provide
little evidence that the people have turned on him. For
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
Washington and its allies, the time for wishful thinking is
over. Vladimir Putin is not going anywhere.
Correction: This article originally incorrectly stated
Severstal’s exports accounted for 20 percent of output.
Exports were 30 percent in 2014. Additionally, an incorrect
statement that Severstal plans to add at least 2,000 new
workers has been removed.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
Yahya Arhab/EPA
THE COMPLEX
POLITICS BEHIND THE
CHAOS IN YEMEN
IT'S TOO EASY TO BLAME IRAN FOR THE CHAOS IN
YEMEN THAT STEMS FROM YEARS OF MISTAKES.
The casual reader of a recent New York Times op-ed
by Yemen’s exiled president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi,
might come away with the impression that all Yemen’s
problems are the fault of Iran and its “puppets,” the Houthi
rebels who in January drove Hadi out of Sanaa.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
That’s a gross oversimplification; Yemen has been
smoldering for decades. Most of the problems are
homegrown, and it’s hard to argue that Iran has had more
influence than other foreign powers.
The poorest country in the Middle East and a corrupt
autocracy for three decades, Yemen started unraveling in
2011, when then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh reluctantly
ceded power, under pressure from Gulf states and Western
powers, during the Arab Spring. He was succeeded by
his vice president, Hadi, who had popular support and a
mandate to oversee a transition to more democratic rule
through a so-called national dialogue that was supposed to
usher in a new era for Yemen. The United Nations sent a
special envoy, Jamal Benomar, and other bureaucrats to help
Hadi’s government stamp out corruption and create a new
constitution.
For years, little has functioned in Yemen, from schools
to hospitals, ministries and the disastrous water system.
Half the population is illiterate, there is a huge problem with
malnutrition, and an archaic patriarchal system rules daily
life for most Yemenis. In 2013, while traveling through the
country with the NGO Oxfam, I met girls as young as 1 1
who were forced into marriages out of economic necessity.
Their mothers, rather than being horrified at signing over
their prepubescent daughters to men three times their age,
were delighted they had one less mouth to feed.
At the same time, the United States maintained an
alliance with Yemen against Al-Qaeda, under which U.S.
forces conducted drone strikes that sometimes missed their
targets, exacerbating anti-government and anti-American
feelings.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
Yemeni security forces stand guard in front of a poster bearing the
portrait of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi during a pro-government
demonstration on August 26, 2014, in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, credit:
Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty
There is also a history of deep regional and tribal
divisions. Until 1990, South Yemen was a separate country,
home to a mostly Sunni population, and a civil war racked
it in the mid-1990s. In the north, Saleh waged six military
campaigns against those who belong to a distinct branch
of the Shiites called the Zaidis. The Zaidis, who make up
20 percent of Yemen’s population, responded to years of
oppression by forming a civil rights movement, known as
the Houthi.
In 2013, Hadi’s national dialogue was losing momentum,
politics were as corrupt as ever, and the Houthis had had
enough. Their militias started pushing south from their
homeland in the north, promising, “We will save you from a
corrupt regime.”
“The Houthis weren’t the only ones who got nothing
from the state, even back in the days of Saleh,” says one
former U.N. official. “But the reason they upped the ante
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
was that there was a tacit agreement between the state and
tribes that everyone somehow scratched everyone else’s
back — with the state being the main banker.”
The Houthis, with the backing of their Shiite brethren in
Iran, arrived in Sanaa by mid-2014. By January 2015, they
had taken over the capital, as well as carved out a sizable
chunk of the country. They brought in a new government
that was broadly technocratic, and forced Hadi to resign and
flee to his hometown, Aden. “From then on, the country
unraveled, and the U.N. — still overseeing the transition
process — lost all credibility,” says one former EU diplomat.
The U.N. special envoy for Yemen, Jamal Benomar,
has been the target of criticism, but Mohammad-Mahmoud
Ould Mohamedou, an academic from Mauritania who is
deputy director of a think tank called the Geneva Centre for
Security Policy, argues that: “The U.N. did not completely
fail in Yemen. Benomar arguably did a good job. ... Faced
with unpredictable and unreliable parties, he managed to get
a decent deal [for Saleh to step down], while other volatile
post- Arab Spring theaters, like Libya, went into chaotic
drift.”
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
Credit:
Now, however, Yemen and Libya are both aflame.
Former President Saleh is actively backing the Houthis.
In March, Saudi Arabia launched airstrikes, citing Iranian
interference in Yemen, and mobilized other Arab countries
to join the cause. The United States, seeing Yemen as a key
in the fight against terrorism, has offered qualified support
for the Saudi-led offensive.
Today on the streets of Sanaa, the Saudi missiles, meant
to take out Houthi military installments, are hitting far too
many civilians. Hospitals are filled with survivors whose
blackened skin and broken bones are brutal evidence of
how hard it is to root out militarily adept rebels in an urban
setting. The U.N. has said more than 600 people have
been killed by violence since March 19. Water is scarce,
electricity is intermittent and food is in short supply in parts
of the country.
Yemen was top of the agenda at the Arab League
Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh at the end of March, but there
was little progress in talks there, and threats of a ground
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
invasion by Egyptian and Saudi forces raised fears of the
crisis escalating. ”Our country is being destroyed now,” says
Najla Mohammed, a 34-year-old teacher in Sanaa. ”And
the mediation to end this crisis or a new constitution won’t
actually stop the Saudi airstrikes, or provide people with
what they need — food, drinking water, oil. What we need
first is to stop airstrikes, then go for dialogue.”
Nearly 60 percent of Yemen’s population is under 25,
and their top concerns are employment, education and a
less corrupt society. The U.N. focus on building a new
constitution after the fall of Saleh seems remote to many,
especially given the latest violence. When asked about
this, Najeeb al-Resafi, a 34-year-old civil engineer, says,
“Constitution? We are being killed. ... Our children and
women are being killed. And you are talking to me about
a new constitution and dialogue? What I want is these
airstrikes to stop shelling us!”
Finding a solution for this crisis will require an honest
assessment of what caused it, so it’s not merely finger-
pointing to ask: Who lost Yemen? Was it the legacy of
Saleh’s greed, Hadi’s inefficiency, Iranian meddling, or the
miscalculations of Western countries that saw Yemen only
as a bulwark against terrorism rather than a failed state that
would soon collapse?
In his New York Times op-ed, Hadi said the Houthis
must withdraw and disarm their militia and return to
dialogue, or face further military action from the Saudi-led
coalition until his government is restored. “If the Houthis are
not stopped, they are destined to become the next Hezbollah,
deployed by Iran to threaten the people in the region and
beyond,” he wrote. “The oil shipments through the Red
Sea that much of the world depends on will be in jeopardy,
and Al-Qaeda and other radical groups will be allowed to
flourish.”
In other words, it’s all about terrorism and oil. If only it
were that simple.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
— With additional reporting by Almigdad Mojalli in
Sanaa.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
California Dept, of Water Resources
CALIFORNIA 'S FARMS
WOULD ONLY NEED
TO CUT WATER BY 6.6
PERCENT TO MA TCH
URBAN RESTRICTIONS
CALIFORNIA MAY NEED TO RATION WATER FOR
FARMERS, TOO
Faced with the worst drought in its history, California
has told towns, businesses and private citizens to replace
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
their lawns with plants that aren’t so thirsty and make other
changes to reduce water usage by 25 percent. That could
save around 500 billion gallons of water a year, which is
impressive. But critics say it’s not enough.
Why, when the state’s stored reservoir water supply is
at risk of drying up within a year, is Governor Jerry Brown
focusing only on ornamental landscaping? Agriculture uses
nearly four times as much water as urban consumers. Towns
and cities in California use around 9.1 million acre-feet of
water per year (nearly 3 trillion gallons), while agriculture
uses 34.6 million acre-feet per year. In the Central Valley,
desperate farmers are pumping greater and greater quantities
of water from dwindling aquifers. The land in some places
is subsiding by 1 foot per year — sinking into the emptying
water table.
While it’s hard to argue that highway medians and golf
courses need all that green grass, it seems odd to ignore
farming entirely when seeking to conserve water.
Towns and cities have been ordered to replace 50 million
square feet of lawns with landscaping that doesn’t require
constant watering, and golf courses, campuses and other
highly irrigated ornamental landscapes will be required
to significantly cut their water use. If the state focused its
mandatory water cuts on agriculture industry, farms would
need to reduce their use by just 6.6 percent to achieve the
same savings.
So why isn’t the state cracking down on farmers?
“Agriculture has already suffered major cutbacks,” Brown
said on April 1 , the day he announced the water policy,
standing on dry grass in the Sierra Nevada, where 5 feet of
snowpack should have been. Already, many farmers had to
leave fields fallow, amounting to 400,000 acres of land taken
out of production last year.
California has by far the largest agricultural industry of
any state in the U.S., producing nearly half of the country’s
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
fruits, nuts and vegetables. In 2013, farmers in the state
generated $46 billion worth of revenue.
University of California, Davis, researchers estimate
that soaring water prices and lost crops have already cost
farmers $2.2 billion in 2014 and resulted in the loss of about
17,100 jobs. Industry groups say allocations of subsidized
water from California’s State Water Project and the federally
managed Central Valley Project, which typically provide
water from reservoirs to farmers in good years, have
already dwindled dramatically. “Farmers in the San Joaquin
Valley have been the only ones to have their water actually
completely cut off,” Dave Puglia, of the Western Growers
Association, told NPR. “I don’t know how you can ask
farmers to conserve more than zero.”
It may be a painful prospect, but if the drought continues,
farmers may face mandatory cuts too.
Michael Dalder/Reuters
THE RACE A GAINST
TIME TO CONVICT
SUR VIVING NAZIS
OPERATION LAST CHANCE: NAZI-HUNTERS ARE ON A
QUEST TO PROSECUTE WAR CRIMINALS BEFORE THEY
DIE.
Martin Uebele has dealt with some horrific cases in his
role as chief prosecutor in the east German city of Gorlitz -
but none as shocking as his current investigation of a local
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
man accused of murdering thousands of innocent civilians
more than 70 years ago.
Uebele soon hopes to put the 90-year-old man on trial
for his role in the shooting of 18,000 Jewish inmates on
3 November 1943 at the Majdanek concentration camp
in Poland. At the time, the man - whose identity cannot
be revealed until he is convicted - was 1 9 years old and
working as an SS guard. He didn’t shoot but he did nothing
to stop the massacre either.
A court-appointed physician is currently evaluating the
man’s health, with a decision expected shortly as to whether
he is fit enough to face a court.
“As a guard, he was part of the killing machine, which
makes him an accessory to murder,” says Uebele tells
Newsweek. “If he is incapable of participating in the court
proceedings I will have to close the case.”
The mass murder at Majdanek, dubbed Operation
Harvest Festival by the Germans, is an undisputed event. Yet
for nearly seven decades German prosecutors were unable
to bring charges against guards who were present at such
killings.
But the case of John Demjanjuk four years ago changed
that, and now the race is on to hunt down alleged Nazis
associated with mass killings.
A court in Munich ruled that although there wasn’t
enough evidence to convict the 91 -year-old Demjanjuk of
murder, he was an accessory to the crime. He was sentenced
to five years in prison but died while appealing the verdict.
The passage of time means there won’t be many more
opportunities to bring Nazi war criminals to court - earlier
this month one of the most wanted remaining Nazis, Soren
Kam, died unpunished in Denmark - but without the
landmark Demjanjuk ruling, most would likely not be
happening at all.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
Prosecutors no longer need proof that each guard
personally participated in murder. Charges can be filed
against them merely for their presence at the time of the
killings.
Dr Efraim Zuroff, a Brooklyn-born Jew who is the
Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s chief Nazi-hunter, is determined
to round up as many suspects as possible in what he calls
Operation Last Chance.
“Life expectancy is working in our favour,” says Zuroff,
who now lives in Israel. “Germany has good healthcare.
These war criminals have the bad fortune of being alive.”
Zuroff knows he won’t find anyone as important as
Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Adolf Hitler’s Pinal
Solution, which allowed for the transportation of Europe’s
Jews to concentration camps. Eichmann was tried in Israel in
1961 and executed the following year.
“The people we’re chasing now were guards, they drove
trains and buses,” he says.
“It’s not possible to prove they’re guilty of murder, but
thanks to Demjanjuk the bar is much lower.”
Zuroff receives many leads, which he passes on to
Germany’s official Nazi-hunting agency, the Zentrale S telle,
which is obliged to act on information from the public.
“What we have to prove is that the person was serving
at the extermination camp while people were being sent to
the gas chambers,” says Kurt Schrimm, the Zentrale Stelle’s
chief prosecutor. “And we have to prove the nature of their
duties. A camp cook was less involved in war crimes than a
camp guard.”
Schrimm took over as head of the Zentrale Stelle 1 5
years ago and has been combing through the agency’s 1.6
million cards containing information about some 100,000
suspected war criminals.
On 21 April, a 93 -year-old former Auschwitz guard
called Oska Groning goes on trial in Liineburg, 45 minutes
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
south-east of Hamburg, accused of assisting in the murders
of 300,000 inmates between
May and July 1944. Groning’s duties allegedly
involved sorting the money inmates had brought with them.
During those two months, at least 137 trains carrying
Hungarian Jews arrived at the camp, and the prosecution
alleges that Groning personally supervised the ransacking of
their belongings on at least one occasion. He also knew that
the inmates would encounter gas, not water in the shower
rooms.
In accordance with German law, Groning isn’t named in
the court documents but he has identified himself, describing
his recurring nightmares of watching another guard hurl a
newly arrived baby against a wall until it died. He argues
that his guilt is different from those who killed. He just
watched.
Later this spring, another 93 -year-old former Auschwitz
guard, accused of assisting in the murders of 170,000
inmates will go on trial for overseeing 92 trains containing
Hungarian Jews arriving at the death camp. The arrivals
were classified as usable and unusable. The unusable ones
were sent to their death in the gas chamber. But some of
them tried to escape, and prosecutors accuse the SS officer
of having participated in “brutally ending their escape”.
And in Neubrandenburg, an eastern German city two
hours north of Berlin, a 94-year-old Auschwitz SS medic is
about to go on trial, accused of assisting in the murders of
3,681 inmates between August and September 1944.
“The failures after the war were simply too big. Many,
many culprits got away,” says Dr Josef Schuster, president
of Germany’s Jewish association. He believes there’s a
public benefit to the trials because they deliver invaluable
material about the Nazi regime to future generations of
historians.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
Before Christmas, Martin Uebele, the chief prosecutor in
Gorlitz, searched the 90-year-old man’s home and read the
accusation to him. Now, the doctor’s report awaits. If it gets
to court, there’ll be some sympathy for the man, given his
age and health - but it won’t be forthcoming from Wilhelm
Wolff, a German Jew who fled with his parents to Britain in
1933 but is now back in Germany serving as a rabbi.
“Every person who’s committed a crime has to defend
himself in front of a court. It doesn’t matter how old you
are,” he says.
Nobody knows how many Nazi war criminals are still at
large. The overshadowing matter is who’s alive. Currently,
some 30 death camp guards are under investigation by
prosecutors in cities including Stuttgart, Munich, Mainz,
Leipzig, Kiel, Nuremberg and Frankfurt. The Zentrale Stelle
has also identified seven suspects living abroad, including
one in Israel.
For the Nazi hunters and prosecutors, it’s a race against
time. They know better than anyone that the race can’t be
won, but nothing will dampen their fervour.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
map®'
1
Z
j i
l*Jf.
n
:s:S
Edgar Su/Reuters
THE HIDDEN COSTS OF
THE WORLD'S GHOST
APARTMENTS
ACROSS THE GLOBE, THE SUPERWEALTHY ARE
SNATCHING UP PALATIAL APARTMENTS AND DRIVING
UP THE COST OF LIVING.
Take an evening stroll on either side of New York’s
Central Park and you will notice how few lights are on in
the newer apartment buildings. That’s because no one lives
there.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
Across the globe, empty luxury apartments darken
many of the most desirable cities — Miami; San Francisco;
Vancouver, British Columbia; Honolulu; Hong Kong;
Shanghai; Singapore; Dubai; Paris; Melbourne, Australia;
and London. The reason: The world’s richest people are
buying these grand residences not to live in but to store their
wealth. In Paris, for instance, one apartment in four sits
empty most of the time.
Some of these wealthy owners are looking for status,
others a good investment. And for rich people in unstable
countries, or those whose incomes depend on dubious
businesses, holding real estate in foreign countries functions
as private insurance.
Either way, the growing demand for luxury housing
illustrates some of the adverse effects of the concentration of
wealth at a time when worldwide wages are mostly stagnant.
Because these palatial apartments and homes are rarely
occupied, they impose a host of hidden costs on locals,
including higher rents, longer commutes and fewer retail
shopping choices. In some cities, notably New York, locals
subsidize absentee owners.
The displacement of locals by the global superrich has
prompted political leaders in San Francisco, Shanghai,
Vancouver and New York, among other cities, to consider
ways to ease the distorting effects of a relatively few wealthy
people on the economies of their cities. In Singapore and
Hong Kong, officials tried to slow the spread of absentee-
owned luxury housing by limiting mortgages.
Welfare for the Wealthy
These days, people who enjoy rivers of cash flowing
into their accounts are having a hard time finding profitable
investments in enterprises that make things or sell services.
Holding money in banks is unattractive because the planet
is awash in so much cash, interest rates are at historic lows.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
Instead of paying interest, some large cash deposits now
incur bank charges.
This economic environment makes luxury apartments
an attractive option to warehouse wealth. So long as other
rich people are buying, owners enjoy the prospect of selling
their units someday for a big profit. Many of these absentee
owners buy their units through companies they control,
transforming what would be personal after-tax operating
costs into tax-deductible expenses. The prospect of higher
prices encourages developers to buy and demolish existing
buildings, often with the aid of government’s power of
eminent domain, which allows them to force existing owners
out, paying them off at a discount.
What’s also propelling this trend is the growing number
of superwealthy people. There are far more billionaires than
the 1,826 on the latest Forbes global list. Forbes primarily
counts liquid wealth, mostly concentrated ownership of
publicly traded companies that must be disclosed. Thus
Forbes misses many more private and diversified fortunes.
And for every billionaire, there are many more millionaires
to whom the cost of a luxury apartment is little more than
pocket change. Billionaires typically own 10 residences
each, according to Knight Frank, a global real estate
consulting firm. That means, statistically, that each of those
residences sits empty 47 weeks per year unless friends or
business associates use the space.
Some of this demand to own — but not live in — fancy
apartments is vanity. But owning, not living in, a luxury
apartment is especially attractive when the locals subsidize
the costs. This welfare for the rich is done through subtle
mechanisms few know about or understand.
In New York state, the average property tax on single-
family homes and townhouses is 2 percent of their assessed
value, and in some counties, rates exceed 4 percent. But New
York City’s property tax on new apartments is a trifle.
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
Yankees slugger Alex Rodriquez owns a $6 million
Upper West Side apartment with a picture- window view of
the Hudson River. The owner of a $6 million house would
pay $120,000 a year, but A-Rod’s property tax is just $1,200
a year, a rate of just two-hundredths of 1 percent annually.
In all, 150,000 New York City apartments qualify for
a property tax break known as the 421 -a program, which
produces these low rates. Fully taxed, those apartments
would pay an additional $1.1 billion annually, the New York
City Independent Budget Office calculated.
To encourage owners to occupy their units or sell,
New York state legislation has been drafted to impose
a progressive tax on vacant luxury apartments worth $5
million or more. The proposed levy would start at one-
half of 1 percent and rise to 4 percent on values above $20
million.
Joggers pass the largely vacant Cape Roy ale condominium in Sentosa
Cove on Singapore's Sentosa island, August 19, 2014. Sentosa Cove is a
man-made island resort where foreigners can buy land. Dozens of houses -
complete with their own private yacht berths and multiple swimming pools
- sit empty while few lights are on in the apartment blocks overlooking the
marina. Credit: Edgar Sii/Reuters
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
A Safety Deposit Box in the Sky
Some buyers use luxury housing to hide criminal
proceeds, often acquiring their real estate through shell
companies set up in jurisdictions from Wyoming to Panama
to the Cayman Islands, which make it easy to conceal
ownership.
Government officials and relatives who have grown rich
from their political power are also active buyers of housing
they seldom if ever use. President Xi Jinping of China has
made cracking down on corruption his primary theme with
the arrests of many party officials, especially from opposing
factions. But when his niece Zhang Yannan was in her
mid-20s, she acquired a $7 million Hong Kong apartment
and a waterfront home in an area of $30 million villas, both
of which appear to be vacant, Bloomberg Business News
revealed three years ago.
While I was on a reporting trip to Singapore, tax
lawyers told me about rich foreign clients who buy luxury
apartments in that city-state to make sure they will retain
some wealth should political change or social unrest force
them to flee their home countries.
One lawyer spoke over lunch about two clients with
similar wealth who owned multiple Singapore apartments.
One was an Indian whose business is in Pakistan, the other
a Pakistani whose business is in India. The businessman
in Pakistan kept 40 percent of his wealth in Singapore,
the businessman in India 20 percent, illustrating their
assessments of the risks they faced.
Two years ago, Sotheby’s International Realty reported
that people living outside Canada — primarily in China,
Iran and the U.S. — had purchased 40 percent of Vancouver
luxury housing.
David Eby, a British Columbia provincial legislator,
said he represents “a very empowered group of wealthy
individuals who feel totally helpless” to stop absentee
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
purchasers in Vancouver’s priciest single-family
neighborhood, where houses routinely sell for several
million dollars. He said they object to teardowns to build
what they consider oversized and tasteless mansions, as
well as the loss of business to keep the area’s village-like
commercial corridor vibrant. Many want a heavy tax levied
on empty residences to discourage absentee owners.
“I am challenged,” Eby said. “How do I even talk about
this issue without instigating racism against a large number
of Mandarin-speaking people who come here?”
This Is Really Hurting Our Business’
Business owners far from the urban core can feel the
effects of the superrich buying apartments they never visit.
When large swaths of dense urban housing are empty,
it means less of the foot traffic that urbanist Jane Jacobs
showed in her 1961 book, The Life and Death of Great
American Cities, is crucial to both economic vitality and
safety.
Jane Kim, a San Francisco supervisor, said that in her
downtown district “a lot of units are sold to international and
out-of-town owners, so it is great in terms of property-tax
revenues and paying into a general fund by people who do
not make much use of municipal services. But it also means
we are not filling the needs of people who want to live in the
city, because they cannot compete” for housing due to high
prices for both owned and rented apartments, “even though
they make good money.”
In New York, in central Brooklyn, Maria Lanauze has
laid off all but family employees of her Wyckoff 99 Cent
and Hardware store. The reason is lack of foot traffic.
The largest residential building nearby was emptied of
residents who were paying $1,200 to $1,500 a month for
their apartments. The building is being renovated for clients
who can pay twice as much, but thanks to the 421 -a property
tax break, the landlord will contribute little to financing
municipal services. “They kicked out all the Hispanic
DOWNLOADS
2015 . 04.24
people and are waiting for people who are forced out of
Manhattan,” Lanauze said, “but so far they haven’t come,
and this is really hurting our business.”
Reduced density causes multiple problems for
neighborhoods, according to Mason Gaffney, a 91 -year-
old, newly retired University of California, Riverside,
economist whose specialty is real estate taxation. “When we
tear down an existing building with many smaller, lower-
cost units to replace it with huge luxury [units], we do
damage to retailing because there are fewer people in the
neighborhood” to buy goods and services, he said.
Gaffney said larger luxury apartments also mean more
workers waste time, energy and money commuting to jobs
they previously could walk to, which in turn makes it more
difficult for businesses to hire from an easily accessible pool
of diverse people with talents.
One way to reduce the problem, Gaffney says, would
be to tax only land values, not buildings, as a means to
encourage the highest and best development of land,
especially in urban cores. But restrictions on mortgages,
higher property taxes on empty apartments and halting
the use of eminent domain to forcibly acquire center-city
land for new luxury housing are unlikely to stop this trend,
because all that cash flowing to the top has to go somewhere.
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
Don Farrall/Getty
A ROBOT THA T CAN
INSERT CATHETERS,
COMING SOON TO A
HOSPITAL NEAR YOU
THE DEVICE HAS THE POTENTIAL TO IMPROVE THE
ACCURACY OF BIOPSIES AND REDUCE ERRORS WHEN
OPERATING ON THE SMALL BLOOD VESSELS OF
CHILDREN.
As sophisticated as modern medicine has become, the
best method available to doctors to insert a catheter is still
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
to use their own two hands, a needle and some wire. Hugo
Guterman, an engineer at Ben-Gurion University in Israel,
wants to remove the first requirement. His lab is currently
developing the Human-Assisted Needle Delivery System,
HANDS, a somewhat ironic backronym for a process that
inserts surgical catheters robotically.
Most people know of catheters from their role in aiding
urination for patients with bladder control problems. But
doctors may also opt to use a catheter during heart surgeries,
either to inject a dye into the heart to have a better look at
what’s awry or to send radio-frequency energy to suspicious
tissue, so they can destroy it and restore a normal heartbeat.
Missing a vein during blood draws is an annoying problem,
but missing these major vessels, either through the groin,
arm or throat, en route to the chambers of a patient’s heart
can be catastrophic.
In many surgeries, ultrasound is used to help locate
artery blockages; HANDS simply wants to solve the second
problem of finding a way to reach them. In its current
form, the device comes in two main parts: a thick joystick
reminiscent of old-school flight simulators and a hidden
needle that plunges into the skin once the user finds the
target on a nearby screen.
HANDS can pinpoint blood vessels from as shallow as
half a centimeter to as deep as 30, Guterman says. “Any
place that we can enter in the body, we think we will be
able to enter much faster and with more accuracy.” HANDS
is patented and currently in clinical trials. It hasn’t yet
received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval,
but already Guterman’ s lab has visions of applying the
technology to improving the accuracy of biopsies, with a
focus on breast cancer. The lab is also currently working
with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in testing to see if
HANDS can help reduce nurse and doctor error when
operating on children, who have smaller vessels that require
more precise catheterization.
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
Ideally, says Guterman, HANDS will follow in the fully
autonomous footsteps of current robotics, such as Intuitive’s
line of da Vinci surgical robots. With only the press of a
start button, the device will be able to locate the ideal site to
enter a vein or collect samples of cancerous tissue and do it
successfully the first time, every time.
But first surgeons must accept it, Guterman says. His
greatest hurdle isn’t developing the technology but getting
it into the operating room, as not all physicians may be keen
on making room for robots. Dr. Ranjan Sudan, vice chair of
education for the Duke University Department of Surgery,
says the acceptance barrier is only a temporary one, apt
to follow the normal curve of innovation. “There are a lot
of [early] adopters of the technology,” he says. “And the
adopters are actually increasing in numbers exponentially.”
As time passes, the new technology will eventually become
the mainstream.
Luke Sharrett/The New York Times/Redux
WHY GO TO THE
DOCTOR WHEN YOUR
PHONE CAN MAKE YOU
BETTER?
APPS ARE ABOUT TO MAKE MOST DOCTOR'S
APPOINTMENTS OBSOLETE.
Going to a doctor’s office and waiting in a fluorescent-
bathed room full of gross, sick people has been a common
form of torture ever since doctors ended house calls. But
technology can fix that, just as it has fixed other age-old
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
practices, like getting a taxi by standing perilously close to
traffic and waving.
As a sign of what’s coming, a handheld medicine startup
called Spruce just got $15 million in funding. Spruce is a
step toward allowing you to “see” a doctor through your
smartphone. Though one of the most interesting things about
Spruce is that it questions why, in many cases, you need
to see a doctor. Instead, why not give the doctor all your
relevant information so she can review it and reply when she
can?
Spruce is starting with dermatology. Once you download
the app, it offers a choice of conditions: acne, eczema, bug
bite and so on. Based on the condition, it asks a series of
diagnostic questions (“How would you describe your skin?
Normal? Oily? Dry?”). Then it tells you what kinds of
pictures to take of your condition. Finally, you can pick a
participating doctor to send everything to, or just choose
“first available.” You’re promised a response within 24
hours, including, if needed, a prescription sent to your
drugstore and instructions on how to care for your condition.
The cost is $40, not much more than the co-pay for many
specialist visits, which means using Spruce can make sense
even if it’s not covered by insurance.
Spruce launched an app in September to treat only acne,
then it released an expanded version for more conditions
in late March. The big surprise, says CEO Ray Bradford,
has been how much both patients and doctors appreciate
the unrushed nature of asynchronous medicine. Patients can
take their time answering questions without feeling as if
the doctor is nervously tapping her foot as she tries to race
though a packed schedule. Doctors, who for now take Spruce
cases mostly as after-hours supplementary work, can make
their diagnoses with their feet up on the couch, sipping a
good Bordeaux. (Hopefully, they’re not reviewing my case
after the second or third glass.)
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
Dermatology is only the beginning, Bradford tells me.
“We’re excited about the set of [medical conditions] we
could apply Spruce to, but we can’t do it all at once,” he
says. “We’re being disciplined, condition by condition.”
Spruce is one startup in a bubbling stew of activity
around handheld medicine. You can’t even call it
“telemedicine” anymore. That term has been around awhile
and usually means real-time, Skype-like video interaction.
The new breed is rethinking medicine based on smartphones,
mobility and cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI).
Handheld medicine companies Doctor on Demand
and HealthTap have referred to themselves as the Uber of
doctors, and they’ve each raised more than $20 million
in funding. Other apps can take blood pressure and
electrocardiogram readings and send them to a cardiologist.
Apps for eye tests are becoming as accurate as those steam-
punkish contraptions ophthalmologists push up to your
face — it probably won’t take Warby Parker long to offer a
prescription eye exam on your phone. Meanwhile, seeing
the potential savings and convenience, state legislatures are
writing bills that would make insurance companies pay for
handheld medicine.
Down the road, AI might be the real difference maker.
IBM’s Watson technology, installed in high-end health
centers such as the Cleveland Clinic, can ask a patient
questions and arrive at an accurate diagnosis. A Watson
computer can be loaded with far more medical information
than any doctor could ever keep in his noggin, so it can
be better than a doctor when it comes to recognizing rare
conditions. Watson may be complex and expensive now, but
like all technology, it will get better and cheaper. Soon, a
Watson-like doctor app will be able to give you a first-pass
diagnosis without ever involving a human doctor. An AI
doc will have some trust issues to get past, but so did ATMs
when they first came out.
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
All kinds of trends are coming together here. Of course,
the technology makes it possible, from the high-res cameras
in phones to the always available cloud. A young generation
that grew up connected will latch on first, but a massive
wave of tech-savvy baby boomers are getting old, needing
more health care and having more difficulty leaving the
house to get it. At the same time, projections say the U.S.
will have a shortage of 52,000 physicians in the next 10
years. Spruce’s Bradford says that one reason he started
with dermatology is that the average wait in the U.S. to see a
dermatologist is 29 days.
While a Spruce “treatment” now costs $40, it’s easy to
see how competition and AI — or for that matter sending
asynchronous patient queries to less-costly doctors in India
or Thailand — could drive prices lower. If a typical doctor’s
office visit for a rash or the flu or a kid’s ear infection ends
up being something you can do on your phone at midnight
for $20, why bother with your insurance for that level of
care? Pay out of pocket, and spend your health insurance
money on more catastrophic coverage.
Who wouldn’t want this? For patients, going to a
doctor’s office when you’re sick is like going to a party
full of strangers when you’re lonely. It might help, but it’s
just as likely to make you feel worse. And good doctors
will be able to waste less time on trivial conditions and
whiny hypochondriacs and focus on patients who really need
hands-on attention.
Then, for most people, the doctor’s office will become a
relic of a time when health care meant that too few doctors
had to see too many patients face to face. Unfortunately,
though, the handheld dentist is nowhere on the horizon.
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
Paige Blankenbuehler for Newsweek
FIREFIGHTING DRONES
COULD SA VE COSTA
RICAN TROPICAL
FORESTS
FIREFIGHTERS THAT PROTECT THE NATIONAL PARK
LANDS OF COSTA RICA HAVE INVESTED IN DRONE
TECHNOLOGY TO HELP SURVIVE THIS YEAR'S FIRE
SEASON.
In Sector Pocosol, an administrative section of Costa
Rica’s Santa Rosa National Park, there’s a wide, open field
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
of browned grass. Its perimeter is guarded by towering trees,
branches barren of their leaves, which cover the ground after
falling in the dry season heat. Shade is a stranger, and by 3
p.m. it’s already 106 degrees. In the field, part of the vast
r
Area Conservacion de Guanacaste (ACG), I stand beside
Arturo Cortes Angulo, a volunteer firefighter. Sweat covers
his forehead as his thumbs hover over the controller of a
drone.
A white machine with red stripes and four propellers
sits in the grass in front of him, while an instructor speaks
in stilted Spanish phrases. Its propellers buzz on and off.
A group from the University of Missouri is training the
firefighters to implement drone technology into their fire
management strategies and better protect the conservation
area. The Santa Rosa Program Protection and Fire Brigade,
led by Julio Dias Orias, isn’t the first firefighting team to
employ drones — in Brookings, South Dakota, for example,
a fire department made a $1,500 investment in March on a
drone and GoPro Camera. But Santa Rosa is at the forefront
of adding drones to land management strategies — and the
first team to do so in Central America.
Fires pose a constant threat to the dry tropical forest, a
rare and delicate ecosystem that once stretched from Panama
to Mexico but, due primarily to clear-cutting for cattle
ranching and banana plantations, is now down to 163,000
hectares of parklands. Forest fires are also a threat. For
decades, firemen here have been fighting and managing fires
without air support, relying on a modest artillery of brooms,
leaf blowers, fire backpack pump systems and a small fleet
of vehicles. The Santa Rosa fire brigade employs just 13
full-time firefighters and relies on another 53 volunteers,
most of whom are Costa Rican but periodically some are
foreign. During the dry season, one man is stationed at the
La Palma lookout point in Sector Pocosol (named for the
palm-thatch rooftop the building used to have; the current
incarnation is topped with wooden planks). The lookout
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
provides strategic views of Liberia to the south, La Cruz to
the north and out toward the Peninsula Santa Elena. Vehicles
move throughout the park surveying for fires and illegal
activity, sending word back to the station when they think
firefighters are needed in the field.
The Costa Rican culture is laid-back — a selling point for
a tourism economy drawing visitors to a simpler life — and
the country has been slow to adopt new technology, Dias
Orias says. But that is beginning to change. On the border of
Sector el Hacha near the Pan-American Highway, a drone
flies over a fire and response team below. “It is a big step;
it’s like opening the horizon,” Dias Orias says.
Training on the drones now, Dias Orias says, will put
the brigade in a better position to fight the influx of fires
expected to come this month. The last precipitation, in
December, produced less than a half inch of rain (normally
you could expect 1 to 2 inches), and trade winds gusting
more than 35 miles per hour have hastened desiccation,
says Maria Marta Chavarria, an ACG biologist. The wet
season was the fourth driest in 30 years of data. “All of
these changes have been impacting the landscape we knew,”
Chavarria says. Generally, dry lands and increased winds
make for more fire, but at the same time, since this “wet
season” didn’t yield typical grass levels, fuel levels are
lower, too. “On one side, that’s good news because then you
don’t expect really ugly fires, because there is not a lot of
fuel. At the same time, they could spread faster,” Chavarria
says.
As drones wobble into the air — some of the firefighters
are attempting their first flights — I’m back at the comedor
(dining room), drinking lukewarm water and loitering
outside of Dias Orias ’s office, when voices come over
his walkie-talkie. A familiar word crackles through the
device. “Incendio!” Fire! At this time of year, late afternoons
almost always bring flames. Fires can quickly spread in the
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
protected area, so every plume of smoke sets off a flurry of
activity in an otherwise tranquil culture.
As I later learn from Raul Acevedo Peralta, the assistant
supervisor for ACG Program Protection and Fire, today’s
fire was set on private land, probably to clear the way for a
citrus plantation. Landowners struggling to make a living
are quick to light fires if it means they can grow more crops,
he says. In fact, almost all Guanacaste fires are caused by
human activity: ranching and agricultural practices, but
also arson against the park or individuals residing near the
boundaries. “These fires are crimes against the environment
and the ACG,” Dias Orias says.
A changing climate and unpredictable rain events have
contributed to an increase in fires, says Chavarria, who has
been compiling data in the park since 1997. Only very rarely
do they start naturally, though. Lightning may have caused
fires in the park previously, but the first confirmed spark
was May 2009 in Sector el Hacha. Since then, only one
other natural fire has been confirmed, Acevedo Peralta says.
Human-caused events far outweigh the natural ones, and in
the dry climate fires smolder and can spark with the littlest
temptation. One fire I could see from the lookout point in
Sector Pocosol had been burning for approximately 20 days
just beyond the protected area. On average, 22 fires per dry
season set the ACG ablaze.
When I visited the Santa Rosa fleet at the end of
March, Dias Orias took me out to Parcela el Principe, a
demonstration plot within the park boundaries, to show me
one way drones could help. At the plot, the fire brigade set
a field of jaragua grasses ablaze. Above the flames hovered
a Phantom 2 Vision+ drone, piloted by Muhammad Al-
Rawi, an electrical engineering student at the University
of Missouri and drone flight instructor. In a real-world
application, flying drones over fire sites will enable Dias
Orias to view his crew in real time from a bird’s-eye
perspective. The drone’s camera transmits the flight-point-
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
of- view to a smartphone attachment, and Dias Orias says
once his team is using the equipment in the field, he’ll be
able to communicate different approaches to controlled
burns and other fires as they’re happening.
The team was able to purchase the four Phantom model
remote-controlled systems designed by Da-Jiang Innovations
thanks to support from the nonprofit Guanacaste Dry Forest
Conservation Fund. Al-Rawi is a teaching assistant for a
drone journalism course at the University of Missouri and
was recruited for the training by Bill Allen, a professor of
science journalism at the university, who provided input on
drone models for the ACG. “I have a lot of fun designing
and building these machines, and I find it just as fun to train
someone and make it easier and safer to do their jobs,” Al-
Rawi says. “I feel like we’re putting this in good hands, to
good use.”
The firefighters are already coming up with innovative
ways to use their new, sophisticated equipment. I sat in on
a brainstorming session in which firefighters, volunteers
and other park employees produced an impressive list of
possible uses: monitoring direction and speeds of advancing
fires, establishing safety points, assisting with geographic
information system mapping, tracking down illegal logging,
illegal cattle grazing and even locations of illegal marijuana
plantations. Dias Orias thinks drones will become a regular
part of operations and will help protect the lands and the tens
of thousands who come to visit the national park every year.
A visiting volunteer firefighter from Palamos, Spain,
Jordi Monge Comas, says the technology could prevent
injuries and save lives. In 2009, five of his Spanish
colleagues were killed in a major fire on the countryside in
Horta de Sant Joan near Tarragona, Spain. The Pau Costa
Foundation, named for one of the fallen firefighters, is
funding his stay in Costa Rica, where his directive is to learn
about fire practices on the ground in Central America.
NEW WORLD
2015 . 04.24
In Spain, helicopters are used for fire response, but in
Costa Rica, all the defense and prevention happens on the
ground. Monge Comas, who has more than 20 years of
experience in forest ecology and fighting fires in Spain,
says he sees an opportunity for using drones to get detailed
perspectives that a helicopter could not. In some cases, a
drone could be used in place of a helicopter, saving money
in the budget and delegating more personnel to safety. “If
fires trap a man, we could see from a drone where a safe
exit route is,” Monge Comas says. “To me, it’s all about two
words: Save lives.”
r
Nearing my last day at the Area Administrativa Pocosol
with the Costa Rica fire brigade, firefighter Raul Acevedo
Peralta stands on the beach of Bahia Potrero Grande with
a drone controller, preparing to land the drone into the
outstretched hands of Francis Joyce, an interpreter for the
University of Missouri trainers. He’s the first on the team
to fly the machine in the field, and the drone lowers slowly,
its red light flashing — 50 feet, 30 feet, 10 feet — into Joyce’s
hands. There’s applause in the foreground by university
trainers, marking the brigade’s entrance into the future of
firefighting. Acevedo Peralta smiles and silently hands the
drone to Dias Orias.
This work was supported by a grant from the Carnegie
Corporation of New York. Follow Paige Blankenbuehler on
Twitter @paigeblank.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
Michael Ip for Newsweek
ELI KLEIN ON RIDING
THE W A VE OF CHINA 'S
CONTEMPORAR Y ART
SCENE
HOW A BLUNT-SMOKING SMART-ASS FROM LOWER
MANHATTAN BECAME A KINGMAKER IN THE CHINESE
CONTEMPORARY ART WORLD.
When prepared properly, the yin-yang fish is gutted so
quickly it survives long enough to roll its eyes at you from
your plate. This Chinese delicacy — also known as “dead-
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
alive fish” — is cooked with a wet towel wrapped around the
head and gills, while the rest of the fish is deep-fried. The
dish is banned in Taiwan, where it was invented, as well as
Australia and Germany. In mainland China, it is considered
a luxury, but when Eli Klein came face-to-face with one, he
understood it was a test. He knew his future was about to be
determined in a Shanghai alley.
Klein and his Chinese partner, Shanna Sun, were
scrambling to establish their Klein Sun Gallery, and this was
a crucial meeting. Klein knew he had to keep face at any
cost if he hoped to convince a prominent Chinese dealer to
hand over the reins and export millions in art to the West, to
Klein. And so he smiled as he ate that ingeniously tortured
fish... and found it was much tastier than the dog and cat he’d
been served as a teenager in Hong Kong.
Klein, who now has a gallery in Manhattan and a
showroom in Beijing, had neither an interest in, nor a hope
of, competing with the old-world art elite, those dealers who
once called Warhol “Andy” and phoned the ambulances
whenever Jean-Michel Basquiat OD’d. Around 10 years ago,
when Chinese art was still mostly dusty filler for antiquities
auctions, Klein sensed that the mainland’s contemporary art
scene could be huge — and dominated by him, because of his
ability to straddle East and West. He was right and is now
rich: The Klein Sun Gallery has had soaring sales for the
past five years, ascending along with the booming Chinese
art market.
I first met Klein and his twin brother, David, 20 years ago
at a Manhattan public school that was nevertheless elite.
Their family had just returned to New York after a year in
Hong Kong, and the twins were so much cooler, tougher and
ambitious than me and my nerdy friends. Roaming lower
Manhattan like made men, brazenly smoking pot and using
Cantonese for their private conversations,
the twins seemed to us godlike, like something out of a
Biggie rap. Eli sported dreadlocks, let his jeans sag and
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
was convincingly tough. “I was a blunt-smoking, street-
smart menace to society,” he recalls. “You couldn’t tell me
nothing.”
Klein’s father had moved the family to Hong Kong
to teach law. He knew that all but a very few school-age
foreigners went to British institutions, but unlike most
coddled offspring of expats, his boys were sent to public
schools. Separately — self-reliance was that semester’s big
lesson. Instantly and constantly bullied for being the only
round-eye in the school cafeteria, Klein says he didn’t win
every fight, but he never backed down from one.
That was another test Klein passed; his prize that time
was a girlfriend with a father climbing up the ladder in a
Triad organization (also called Tongs). The girl’s brother
became Klein’s best friend, and Klein says the time he
spent with that family cleansed him of the odor of Western
condescension that the Chinese always suspect from white
men and always resent. He was thus excluded from the
category of “white devils.”
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
A view of Shen Shaomin's exhibit, " Handle With Care. " By some
calculations, half of the world’s 10 best-selling artists are Chinese. Klein
represents two of them, Li Hongbo and Liu Bolin. Recently, even old-guard
collectors like casino billionaires Stephen Wynn and Stanley Ho have
Started Spending heavily On Asian art. Credit: Michael Ip for Newsweek
“To do business in China, you have to be Chinese,”
Klein explains. “I use translators for formality, so it’s not
language but mindset we’re talking about. What’s cutthroat
in the States is standard on the mainland. Western morals are
a handicap. Squeamishness, your grave. Chinese business
is preyed on by a bureaucracy run by whim and operates
according to an approximate understanding of time that
Westerners cannot comprehend. It requires patience, ruthless
acumen, personal bonds, respect and, most of all, the ability
to discern when to use what. And never lose face.”
It might seem that a sure way to lose face would be
to play a cold-hearted, skirt-chasing version of Klein
on Bravo’s Gallery Girls, a reality show that came and
mercifully went in 2012. Most art dealers at his level
wouldn’t imperil their carefully manicured image by
participating in such fluff, but Klein knew it would amuse
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
the Chinese artists he represents and impress his clients from
Latin America and post-Soviet states.
The critics are divided on this new Chinese art; the
traditionalists insist it is a derivative fad, while progressives
declare it a revolution. Sotheby’s, the esteemed auction
house, is doubling down on the revolt. It knows the nouveau
global clientele prefers Chinese artists to Western ones and
is voting with its rubles and rupees. By some calculations,
half of the world’s 10 best-selling artists are Chinese. Klein
represents two of them, Li Hongbo and Liu Bolin. Recently,
even old-guard collectors like casino billionaires Stephen
Wynn and Stanley Ho have started spending heavily on
Asian art.
The difference between Western art and the Chinese
process is subtle. European culture is still enthralled by the
lone genius; Chinese artists, raised in Buddhist and
Communist societies, find the traditional cult of
personality unnatural, while many of their clients consider
it arrogant. This world favors collaboration over our lone
gunmen. Perhaps that is why 78 people did their best to not
move for three hours last fall in Klein’s gallery. They
stood still to become parts of a Bolin work — the artist
delicately colored the volunteers’ bodies to match
whimsical backgrounds and photographed the result. By
accurately hiding people in images, Bolin melts egos into
their contexts. He’s explained this process as restoring a
proper “balance.”
Western cultural priorities are the opposite: We celebrate
individual glory instead of harmony with nature or even
our society. Nevertheless, prominent figures like Jean
Paul Gaultier, Angela Missoni and Wilbur Ross have been
“camouflaged” by Bolin into currency, brick walls and other
artworks. Bon Jovi commissioned a Bolin album cover.
The Chinese process isn’t typical of the art world. Klein
isn’t an ordinary art dealer (“My blunt-rolling skills were
impeccable”), and his buyers are not the usual suspects.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
Many are new collectors spending new money. Only a third
are American; the rest are from places far from New York
City or Paris or Berlin in both miles and attitude. They’re
unimpressed with Western ideals, and although they have
“I ’ll take that, that and that” money, they buy art with their
heads more than their hearts. Klein puts it more plainly:
They don’t buy, they invest. That’s why he has developed
a novel pitch to steady the hand signing a check for an
oil on canvas big enough to buy an oil field. He argues
that Chinese art is the perfect investment. “Let’s say you
wanted to invest into an entire culture that was headed for
prosperity?” he might say to a wavering client. “Like China.
Over a billion people are Chinese — one out of five human
beings. How would you go about putting your money on
them? With many conventional avenues closed, you invest
in their culture.”
Some more of the " Handle With Care " exhibit. “To do business in
China, you have to be Chinese, ” Klein explains. “I use translators for
formality, so it’s not language but mindset we ’re talking about. ” credit: Michael
Ip for Newsweek
The traditional method is currency speculation, but
China’s central bank makes this impossible; it manipulates
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
the yuan to an artificially low value to make that country’s
manufactured exports the best deal in the world. But China’s
art market is the fastest-growing one on earth — America
remains the largest, but China’s closing fast. Wealth is
no longer concentrated in the pale hands of Europeans;
Klein does get phone calls from Monaco, but most of his
customers are new to both collecting and wealth.
The Chinese boom troubles the art establishment;
Forbes’s Alexandre Errera says a common criticism is
that the art “is repetitive, kitsch, only about Mao and the
Cultural Revolution.” True or not, it matters little to Klein.
Business is business, and good business means following the
money. (As an added bonus, the playful extravagance and
accessibility of Chinese art looks great on an oligarch’s wall,
and it turns out that Brazilian soybean barons are not fond of
abstract expressionism.)
Klein has been preparing for China’s cultural emergence
since that first bloody nose at 14. When Hong Kong now
calls to confirm that millions of dollars in bulky sculpture
have safely reached their destination, Klein knows whom to
thank and how. He may scout in Beijing and have a gallery
there, but he retains his Hong Kong ties. And that middle-
management Triad boss he met 20 years ago, when his
girlfriend brought him home to meet the parents, isn’t mid-
any thing anymore. Like Klein, he has gone legit and today
makes sure things run smoothly for the Klein Sun Gallery.
And if Gaultier calls from Paris to ask if Bolin can paint
him to look as if he’s part of Versailles, Klein can set that
up, too.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection/Getty
MORE REAL THAN
REALITY TV: HOW
ALBERT MAYSLES
TAUGHT AMERICA TO
FEEL
EVEN AFTER HIS DEATH, ALBERT MAYSLES, THE SO-
CALLED DEAN OF DOCUMENTARY, WILL BE MOVING
AUDIENCES.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
Before there was reality television, with its scripted
dramas and unlikeable characters, there was a group of
American filmmakers who looked at the world with fresh
eyes (and lenses) and captured something as close to truth as
we’ll ever see on film.
After five decades of filmmaking, Albert Maysles, the
so-called Dean of Documentary, died March 5 at the age of
88. But he’ll still be moving audiences. Iris, his documentary
about fashion icon and interior designer Iris Apfel, will have
its worldwide release this spring, and In Transit, a portrait of
America through the stories of riders on Amtrak’s Empire
Builder, its busiest long-distance train route, has its debut at
the Tribeca Film Festival in April.
Part of the cinema verite, or direct cinema, movement
that eschewed voice-overs or scripts in favor of carefully
recording reality, Albert and his brother David helped
revolutionize documentary film in the 1960s and 1970s.
They were aided by an early- 1960s innovation: the sync-
sound, handheld camera, which allowed them to roam
unfettered by cables. Freed from the studio, the Maysles
brothers — Albert on camera, David recording sound —
were released into the wilds of the late 1960s, with all of
its political and cultural cataclysms. What they found is
documented in their best-known films, which still seem
radical: Salesman (1968), Gimme Shelter (1970) and
Grey Gardens (1975). The themes and styles explored
there reverberate in popular culture and in the work of
directors such as Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese and Wes
Anderson.
For Salesman, the Maysles followed four men doing
something so alien to our click-and-shop era that we might
not believe it existed if we didn’t have this footage: going
door to door selling expensive Bibles to people who didn’t
need them — and usually couldn’t afford them. Introduced
via intertitles with names like “The Rabbit,” “The Gipper,”
“The Badger” and “The Bull,” each salesman is shown,
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
alternately predatory and desperate, as he charms his way
into people’s living rooms and wallets.
Muffle Meyer, who, with Ellen Hovde and Susan
Froemke, edited Grey Gardens, says great cinema verite
directors like the Maysles didn’t fuss too much about perfect
lighting and angles; they worried most about “sensitivity to
the situation” that allowed them “to be at the right place at
the right time.”
Albert grew up with a learning disability and said it
forced him to focus on listening and paying attention,
for fear he’d miss something. It also helped that he had
professional training in listening — a degree in psychology.
Before he and his brother began making movies together, he
was a psychology professor at Boston University. During a
trip to Russia, he had the idea to investigate Russian mental
institutions, and thus he began his film career, with the 1955
documentary Psychiatry in Russia. His natural empathy,
intense listening ability and training in psychology served
him well in shooting “fly-on-the-wall” cinema.
One beautiful scene from Salesman — The Bull in a
couple’s living room — is both sad and funny. Just as he
closes (improbably!) the sale of yet another expensive Bible,
a woman in curlers writes out a check while her husband in a
ratty white undershirt puts a record on the turntable and turns
the volume up high: It’s an orchestral version of the Beatles’
“Yesterday.”
The music drowns out the salesman’s conversation with
the woman — seemingly a hint from the husband that it’s
time for The Bull to leave. The song, which becomes the
accidental but perfect soundtrack to the scene, fades out as
the door-to-door salesman backs out of their driveway.
In another scene featuring music, The Badger’s failed
sale is punctuated by a young girl randomly hitting the keys
of a piano, her descending minor-key song matching his
deflated expression.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
“The shock of seeing ‘real life’ up close can't be
imagined today,” B. Ruby Rich, a professor at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, and editor of Film Quarterly,
says of Salesman. “It was a time with three networks on
a black-and-white TV, and Ed Sullivan was prime-time
entertainment. The impact of 16-mm documentary back then
was like the Google Glass — but converted into an art form.
They were empathy machines — they taught America how to
feel.” Norman Mailer once said Salesman taught him more
about America than any other film he’d seen.
The Maysles also taught America how to listen — and, of
course, to see. Like the best psychoanalysts, who master the
ability to pay attention, waiting for the moment a patient’s
dull ramblings suddenly reveal a searing emotional truth, the
Maysles cultivated a calm attentiveness, allowing a scene to
unfold in all its ordinariness, until it shimmered and pulsed
with meaning.
Two strangers meet in the observation car in a scene from the
documentary "In Transit. " Credit: Ben Wu/Maysles Documentary Center
Albert was able to show nuances even in stadiums filled
with thousands of concert-goers, as he demonstrated in
Gimme Shelter, which followed the Rolling Stones on the
tail end of their alternately transcendent and calamitous 1969
U.S. tour. Many cultural critics point to Gimme Shelter as
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
the film that shows the end of the ’ 60 s “peace and love”
movement, with its footage of the tour’s climactic and
chaotic Altamont concert. Mick Jagger was punched in
the face on the way to the stage, and a young black man
was fatally stabbed by a Hells Angels biker at the foot of
that stage while the Stones were performing “Under My
Thumb.”
But before it gives us the darkness, Gimme Shelter
gives us the shimmering light. Most live music footage is
deadly dull, unable to re-create the immersive experience
of a concert; but the Maysles captured the rapturous quality
of communion — with a performer, with other audience
members, with music — that many say has yet to be matched.
Gimme Shelter is still considered one of the best rock
documentaries ever made.
Conveying reality sometimes meant deploying cinematic
techniques. The use of music, color and Charlotte Zwerin’s
masterful work in Gimme Shelter — she included scenes of
Jagger watching the Stones’ concert footage, creating a “film
within a film” effect — feel so natural that their artfulness is
often overlooked.
The Maysles were sometimes accused of exploiting
their film subjects. In Gimme Shelter, they were faulted
for including the Altamont stabbing in the film, dubbed
the “Rock ’n’ roll Zapruder” by critic Amy Taubin. And
critics took issue with them filming two women some have
described as mentally ill in Grey Gardens, the documentary
about Jacqueline Kennedy’s eccentric aunt and cousin.
Albert responded by saying they directed nothing. They
filmed only what was there. This is partially true.
“In Grey Gardens,” says Rich, “they broke their own
rules and stepped out from behind the camera, interacting
with their unruly subjects, Big Edie and Little Edie, as they
entered their lives and won their trust.” Grey Gardens was
named the top documentary of all time in a recent PBS
poll and spawned a Broadway musical and an HBO movie
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. “The film is a
Rorschach test for people’s acceptance of the unconventional
and eccentric,” Albert told The Boston Globe.
Making an appearance at a screening of Salesman in
November 2014 at DOC NYC, the annual documentary film
festival in New York City, Albert introduced it not with
cinematic theory but with anecdotes about friendship and
love. He chose salesmen from his hometown in Chicago,
he said, because they were Irish and there had been strife
between Jews and the Irish when he was growing up. He had
hoped he would get to know them better by making the film,
and he remained friends with The Rabbit, James Baker, until
his death.
“As it says in the Bible,” he told the audience, “love thy
neighbor. And I hope you’ll be able to feel that kind of love
from your heart as it was from my heart in making the film.”
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
Sam Wolson for Newsweek
THE LAST (OR AT LEAST
LOONIEST) NEWSPAPER
IN AMERICA
DEEP IN THE TWISTED HEART OF NORTHERN
CALIFORNIA, THE "ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER"
MAKES A THRILLING CASE FOR OLD-FASHIONED PRINT
JOURNALISM.
Dire indeed will be the day when the Anderson Valley
Advertiser of Boonville, California, becomes “America’s
Last Newspaper,” as its masthead proudly but not yet
accurately proclaims. For that would relegate the final
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
vestige of our vaunted free press to nothing more than an
open mic for Mendocino County paranoids, weedheads,
malcontents, crooks, cranks, off-the-gridders, rednecks,
wonks, wankers, pedants, loons, autodidacts, Luddites and
Silicon Valley castaways. When that day comes, sorely will
we miss USA Today infographics on the sexual proclivities
of Minnesotans, and the 37th New York Times article
proclaiming Provo the next Brooklyn.
But the AVA is not America’s last newspaper, at least
not yet. The Palookaville Daily Democrat is said to be
thriving, as are several outlets around the nation with entire
investigative units devoted to Kim Kardashian’s derriere
(yeah, it’s that big). But the AVA may well be one of the
very last genuinely American newspapers, which is why the
most trenchant of the many decorations on its office’s wood-
slat walls, aside from a post-massacre Charlie Hebdo cover,
is a bumper sticker above the door that says, “AVA Nation:
Boonville to Brattleboro.”
Boonville is a good two hours north of San Francisco,
while Brattleboro, Vermont, is two hours north and west
of Boston. There are no AVA subscribers in Brattleboro
today (I know because I asked, just as they told me to in high
school journalism class). Regardless, the bumper sticker
makes a valid point, for the AVA has long attracted an
audience far beyond the verdant hills of Northern California.
“The hometown paper for people without a hometown,”
is how editor Bruce Anderson, 75, explains the weirdly
broad appeal of the newspaper he has owned since the days
when the best way to share an article with your aunt in
Duluth was to clip it from the paper and mail it to her (i.e.,
1984). It is a paper for those who remember America pre-
Wal-Mart, who yearn for a Main Street not yet colonized
by Little Caesars and Dairy Queens. For those who, as
Anderson laments, live in “franchise hellholes.” In other
words, pretty much all of us.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
“People still want to read about the area they live in,”
Anderson says of his newspaper, deemed in 2004 “one of
the country’s most idiosyncratic and contentious weeklies”
by a scrappy little broadsheet called The New York Times.
“The big newspapers don’t do that,” says the bearded
editor, crisply dressed and irrepressibly loquacious, ever
the irascible uncle who slipped you your first Bud Light at
the family barbecue way back when. “And they have the
resources.”
Nor do the big papers, for that matter, publish the likes
of John Kendall of Rancho Navarro, who wondered in a
letter last month to the AVA about a “strange light moving
across the sky.” Elsewhere, this would be disregarded as
paranoia. In Boonville, it’s serious stuff, seriously taken. In
early March, Tim Glidewell of Boonville wrote that “[t]hese
strange lights in the sky keep happening.” He discounted the
possibility of a drone, then tried to rally his fellow citizens to
seek out the truth: “What’s going on here, people?” Perhaps,
then, the AVA will be the last newspaper in America
because it will be the only one sufficiently prepared for the
inevitable extraterrestrial conquest.
“When I’d fled north for Mendocino, the Vietnam War
went on and on, and amphetamine, heroin, the criminals who
sold it, and random homicidal maniacs had taken over the
city streets,” Anderson wrote of leaving San Francisco in
the early 1970s in his memoir, The Mendocino Papers. A
product of Marin County who pitched a 13 -inning shutout
in high school (“the highlight of my life”), Anderson
served in the Marine Corps and later went to the California
Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and San
Francisco State. After college, he joined the Peace Corps,
which sent him to Borneo. There he met Ling Mowe, with
whom he recently celebrated a 50th wedding anniversary.
His explanation for their marital bliss: “She doesn’t
speak English.”
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
Back home, Anderson dabbled in lefty politics, serving
as a founding delegate of the Peace and Freedom Party. In
1969, he and his wife became foster parents to two “mega-
troubled” teenagers. The brood moved to the Anderson
Valley two years later “on the naive assumption that juvenile
delinquents would be less delinquent under the redwoods,”
as he told the AVA in an interview last year. Leasing a
ranch, the Andersons would have as many as 10 children, all
with criminal records, under their care.
Once a logging and ranching town, Boonville had
become primarily famous for Boontling, a jargon developed
in the late 1 9th century. A still-authoritative book on
Boontling by Charles C. Adams was published in 1971,
and a local named Bobby “Chipmunk” Glover, happy to
harb a slip of the Ling for outsiders’ amusement, appeared
on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson. But a quirky
vocabulary can’t quite power a regional economy. It would
be decades before Bay Area tech wealth started wafting over
these ample hills.
Despite the high local incidence of stoners and hippies,
Anderson quickly found himself at odds with “local
adversaries in the school system and the courts." The
country, in other words, was proving no mellower than the
city. But at least its denizens were easier to shout down.
Borrowing $20,000, Anderson bought the AVA from “a
woman desperate to get out of here,” as he recalled last year.
Founded in 1952, the Anderson Valley Advertiser
had not exactly been gunning for the Pulitzer Prize in
its 30 years of existence. It had been started by Eugene
Jamison, a Round Valley American Indian, as an advertising
brochure that began reporting the news the following year.
In fact, the newspaper’s first breaking news item was that
Boonville could print a newspaper, with the first edition
of the first volume bearing the headline: “THIS PAPER IS
PRINTED IN BOONVILLE.” For a single thrilling moment,
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
community journalism and media self-reference united in the
backwoods of Mendocino.
Anderson had bigger ambitions. He sought to make the
AVA “interesting and lively enough to attract readers from
outside the area.” Among those who helped in that regard
was Alexander Cockburn, the prominent lefty journalist and
Christopher Hitchens sparring partner. As would often be
the case in the future, Anderson simply wrote to Cockburn
in New York and asked him to contribute. Cockburn agreed
and, eventually, moved to the Anderson Valley. He passed
away in 2012, but in his posthumous book of writings on life
in America, A Colossal Wreck, he makes clear his fondness
for the AVA, which he wrote “does everything a newspaper
should do.” Cockburn’ s colleagues from the progressive
magazine CounterPunch continue to appear in the AVA.
Robert Mailer Anderson, Bruce’s nephew, became an
unofficial AVA fiction editor in the 1990s. Among the
talents he attracted to the newspaper are Daniel Handler
(better known as Lemony Snicket), who published a short
story there, and the renowned illustrator Sandow Birk,
who has spent about a decade on an American version
of the Koran. Anderson, who has written a well-received
picaresque novel called Boonville, also published well-
regarded Bay Area voices like Floyd Salas and Michelle
Tea, making the AVA more than just a rickety soapbox for
grumpy white geezers.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
An accumulation of kitchen supplies, and back issues organized by
month, of the Anderson Valley Advertiser in the newsroom of the AVA in
Boonville, Calif On the morning Of March 9, 2015. Credit: SamWolson for Newsweek
But in 2004, Anderson sold the AVA for $20,000 to
David Severn, author of the oenocentric “Vine Watch”
column. Anderson told the Times that the Anderson Valley
had “become a wine region, with total strangers dominating
the political life. I began daydreaming about murdering
certain people. I said, You know, this place isn’t really
healthy for me anymore.” The Andersons moved to Eugene,
Oregon, where Bruce started a paper similar to the one he’d
just left. But the AVA Oregon proved a bust, and three years
later, Anderson returned to Mendoland. He bought back the
AVA for $20,000. That same year, Twitter was valued at
$35 million.
Today, the AVA is really a two-man operation with
accoutrements, with sleepy-eyed but sharp-minded Mark
Scaramella, known as The Major, playing the Sancho Panza
role. Ling keeps the books, though she doesn’t read the
paper, her husband says. Much of the rest of the AVA is
put together by contributors who are paid $25 per article.
That’s not enough to retire on a Russian River vineyard, but
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
Anderson reminds his writers that it is what Mark Twain
once earned, per week, for plying the journalistic trade in
San Francisco.
Given the free and odd spirits who pervade the Anderson
Valley, the result is Our Town on bad Mendo meth, a
Norman Rockwell scene painted in the midst of a weed-
wine binge and given a makeover by Hunter S. Thompson.
Behold a typical issue from 2013. Above the fold is
a dispatch from court reporter Bruce McEwen, titled
“Tweakers & The Women Who Love Them.” In the
“Valley People” rundown, a notice laments that the “smugly
oppressive dominance” of the Anderson Valley School
Board by certain “palsy-walsy” potentates has made it “a
kind of self-perpetuating monument to rural nepotism.” This,
mind you, in a news report, not an editorial.
“Things don’t always make sense here in the Valley,”
explains occasional AVA contributor Debra Keipp, who
was working on an article about the crude barroom antics
of a local official when I met her. The article, she said,
was slightly too vituperative for Anderson, which is no
small feat. (“Deb’s hate is pure,” Anderson told me when
I asked him about the article, “but that one was a little too
pure even for me.”) Usually, he craves invective, hyperbole
and outrage. This is not the anodyne community rag for
old ladies who want to clip coupons and read about lost
felines. It is, instead, a weirdly edgy and sophisticated
operation for old ladies with a backyard ganja grow, a degree
in political science from Berkeley and a predilection for
Thomas Pynchon.
And old ladies who might be Thomas Pynchon. In the
1980s, rumor took hold that the famously media-averse
Gravity’s Rainbow author was writing letters to the AVA
as a local Jewish spinster named Wanda Tinasky. The
rumor was inspired in good part by Anderson, who loves
media attention as much as Pynchon detests it. The letters
were verbose and arcane in much the manner of Pynchon’ s
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
fiction. It helped Anderson’s claim that Pynchon was known
to have been living in Mendo while researching his 1990
novel, Vineland, which some believe is set in Boonville.
Anderson’s reading of that novel made him think Pynchon
was Tinasky. “It has been suggested,” he once wrote,
“that Pynchon dashed off the Tinasky letters as a warm-up
exercise for a day’s work on Vineland.”
Some years later, the author Donald Wayne Foster, who
had concluded that political journalist Joe Klein was behind
the Clintonian novel Primary Colors, persuasively surmised
that the Tinasky letters were written by Tom Hawkins, a
Beat poet who killed his wife and then himself in 1988, right
after Tinasky had published her last letter to the AVA. It is
nevertheless telling that the Tinasky legend persisted for so
long. When weirdos publish their weird missives in The Des
Moines Register, nobody suspects Pynchon. But it somehow
made sense that he would contribute to a newspaper that,
like his fiction, treats all authority with paranoia, mocks
yuppie pretensions, questions the motivations of those with
power and never misses the chance to make a puerile joke.
Above all, Anderson values the AVA as a forum for
the everyman (though, of course, no one gets as much time
onstage as the man who owns the presses). “I think some
of the letters we get from prisoners are great,” he says. “I’d
much rather hear from Joe Schmo than I would, say, George
Will.”
But no voice is quite as welcome as Anderson’s own,
along with those that echo his sensibilities. “Freedom of
the press,” the great New Yorker scribe A.J. Liebling once
quipped, “is limited to those who own one.” Anderson
can, accordingly, say whatever he wants about the local
politician, the finance minister of Greece, the wine industry,
the oil industry or the strange old dude at the Buckhorn who
drinks only Shirley Temples. And say it he does, week in
and week out. Every enemy, real or perceived, is obliterated
with a missile strike. His foes’ only recompense is that they
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
are invited to respond in the AVA, sometimes in the very
issue where they’ve been savaged.
Here is columnist Malcolm Macdonald on county official
Dan Hamburg: “I’d sooner vote for a wild hog rooting up
my trees than you again.”
The writer Todd Walton on American exceptionalism:
“a cancerous blood clot in the main artery of what might
otherwise be an effective, functional, egalitarian global
community.”
Anderson on Alice Walker, who supposedly wrote The
Color Purple “in a shack not far from downtown Boonville”:
“Her more recent writings,” he thundered in 2004, were
“the prose equivalent of chipmunk paintings and Hallmark
narratives.”
You get the point. In the eyes of some, the AVA’s
relentless pugilism makes Anderson a bully disguised as an
underdog, a supposed freedom-of-the-press champion who
happens to own the only press in Boonville. “He attacks
a lot of my friends,” says Jimmy Humble, a disc jockey
with KZYX, a favorite Anderson pinata. “It’s not fair. He’s
got this paper.” As we chatted at the Mosswood Market,
Humble complained about the time Anderson called him
“Jimmy Bumble” in print. Humble responded with a letter
the following week informing “Mr. Panderson” that his
name had been misspelled, signing it “Dimmy Bumble.”
Others have been less gracious: In a lengthy essay titled
“Liar Unlimited: The lurid history of Bruce Anderson and
the Anderson Valley Advertiser,” Mike Sweeney makes
Anderson look about as likable as a Der Sturmer scribe. The
wellspring of the bad blood between Sweeney and Anderson
is too complicated to explain, but this being Northern
California, it involves a radical environmentalist and a car
bomb in Oakland. (If you really want to know, plug “Judi
Bari” into Google and enjoy the trip.)
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
The origins of the feud notwithstanding, Sweeney points
out some of the more flagrant transgressions of the man
who blithely calls himself “the beast of Boonville.” In
1988, Anderson went to jail for punching a local school
official who had called him a “third-rate McCarthyite.”
That same year, he published a made-up interview with
local congressman Doug Bosco in which the unsuspecting
baby-kisser supposedly described his constituents as
clueless potheads. This was supposed to be satire, Anderson
maintains. Too bad nobody got the joke.
The newspaper graveyard is ever growing: the Rocky
Mountain News, The Baltimore Examiner, The Honolulu
Advertiser. There is even a website, Newspaper Death
Watch, devoted to print journalism’s protracted demise.
Yet as big-city papers die, small-town papers like the AVA
appear to be thriving: A 2014 study from the Reynolds
Journalism Institute found that, in nonurban areas of the
United States, “67% of the people interviewed read a
community newspaper at least once a week.” A1 Cross of the
Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the
University of Kentucky explained to a Stanford researcher
that the “community newspaper business is healthier than
metro newspapers, because it hasn't been invaded by
Internet competition.” For better or worse, the San Francisco
Chronicle just isn’t going to treat the UFOs-over-Boonville
controversy quite as thoroughly as the Anderson Valley
Advertiser.
But that may not be enough to save the little guys from
the little places. To some, even in beloved old Boonville,
Anderson is an anachronism, as charmingly obsolete as
the faded signs and decrepit buildings that haunt the edges
of what may be only charitably called downtown. At the
Boonville Hotel, a popular destination for Bay Area day-
trippers, copies of The New York Times and The Wall
Street Journal lay in the sun, reposing like fattened felines.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
Issues of the AVA were hidden away in a corner, nursing
grievances in afternoon shadows.
Across the way, at the Boonville General Store, a young
woman relaxed with a novel. She had moved to Boonville
two months ago, yet still hadn’t heard of the AVA, which
is published only a couple dozen feet from where she sat.
All around her, young couples in sunglasses stared into their
screens as warm winter sunlight poured down like liquid
gold.
At the Mosswood Market, Dave Chambers, a
quinquagenarian from San Francisco who sells wine, pecked
away on his laptop. He probably belongs to the odious “Nice
People” demographic Anderson reviles, yet Chambers reads
the AVA once in a while. Sometimes he even takes it home
and leaves it in a coffee shop, knowing some other patron
will get a kick out of Anderson’s ravings. But like many of
those in younger generations, Chambers has no loyalty to
any single outlet, getting his largely news fix from whatever
source the Internet burps up.
Anderson’s deputy, Scaramella, acknowledges that
most subscribers are in their 50s, at least, and that the paper
has few younger readers — or contributors. Neither he nor
Anderson appears to think the paper will last long past
Anderson. And so they are like the last two soldiers at
Masada, besieged but uncowed, fighting doom column inch
by column inch.
Robert Mailer Anderson, who has offered some financial
assistance to the AVA (his wife is an heiress to the Oracle
fortune), says he has no interest in running the paper, no
desire to replace the “American phenomenon” that is his
uncle. “It will exist beyond Bruce,” he says, “but it won’t be
Bruce’s AVA.” He thinks that given the growth in the area’s
Latino population, a Spanish-language section might make
sense. He suggests that his daughter, Frances, might one day
edit the thing. Alas, she is only 10.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
A slightly more credible line of succession has 49-year-
old Zack Anderson, son of Bruce, assuming control of
the AVA. Zack has contributed to his father’s newspaper
and confirms that the “vicious rumor” about his eventual
editorship is true. Anderson is responsible for the 2008 film
Pig Hunt, about “a murderous 3,000-pound black boar”
terrorizing a remote Northern California hamlet. I fear that
nothing could prepare him better to fill the pages of the
AVA.
But whatever may transpire 30 years hence, when Justin
Bieber is the prime minister of Canada and Ryan Seacrest is
our leading public intellectual, Bruce Anderson harbors no
illusions about the Anderson Valley Advertiser. “Outback
newspaper publishing is a fool’s game,” he wrote in his
memoir, “and I’m right where I should be — old and broke in
Boonville.”
DOWNTIME
Tammy Dunakin
RENTING A GOAT FROM
AMAZON
THE ONLINE RETAILER IS NOW RENTING OUT
RUMINANTS.
Due to the shortage of American manpower during
World War I, President Woodrow Wilson relied on sheep
power to cut the White House lawn. In the 1920s the
Philadelphia Phillies became their own farm team when their
groundskeeper, desperate for help to maintain the Baker
Bowl playing field, hired two ewes and a ram to trim the
grass.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
And just yesterday, Amazon began renting out goat
mowers. The online company is offering “goat-grazing”
services as part of the beta trial of its new Home Services
campaign that provides everything from sink installations to
yoga instruction. (At the moment, you can only rent a goat
from the online retailer.) Each rental comes with a money-
back “happiness” guarantee.
It turns out goats are better at clipping than sheep.
According to Modern Farmer, it would take 83 sheep to
mow 50,000 square feet of grass, but only 38 goats. Goats
are also ruminants: Their four-chambered stomachs can
process much more than grass, including many plants and
substances that would be toxic to other critters.
Amazon has been pro-goat since last year, when Amazon
Japan formed its own “weeding corps” of 30 to 40 goats,
each with its own personal Amazon employee ID to work
on the lawn outside the company’s distribution center. Goats
and Amazon are a natural pairing because the company is
based in Seattle, a city known for its state department-funded
goat browsing on public underbrush. Goats can go places
heavy farm machinery can’t, are cheaper than their human
counterparts and leave a smaller carbon footprint. In fact,
their hoofprints are cloven.
The Amazonian goats of Seattle are owned by Tammy
Dunakin of Rent-a-Ruminant on nearby Vashon Island.
Dunakin is prominent in goat-mowing circles, having
appeared in a Colbert Report segment titled “People
Who Are Destroying America: Landscaping Goats.”
Stephen Colbert alleged that her operation was ruining
the livelihoods of human landscapers. “I will not be
satisfied until goats are doing all the landscaping jobs in this
country,” she joked to his correspondent.
Dunakin, 53, has cropped brown hair, pale blue eyes and,
on her pickup, bumper stickers that say, “THE VOICES IN
MY HEAD TELL ME TO BUY MORE GOATS” and “I
SUFFER FROM MULTIPLE GOAT SYNDROME (CUZ
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
ONE GOAT IS NEVER ENOUGH).” While talking goat,
she sways to and fro, perhaps because she’s constantly
being nuzzled. The moment we enter her pasture, I’m
greeted by a horned and bearded buck named Ernie and his
brown- and black-striped buddy, Franz. The rest of the herd
surrounds us, heads rubbing against our coats. “They give
great massage,” Dunakin tells me.
Which may provide a second service to offer on Amazon.
According to Modern Farmer, it would take 83 sheep to mow 50,000
square feet of grass, but only 38 goats. The goats are used to clean up some
roadsides, such as this Seattle job site, seen here before a goat herd does its
"work. " Credit: Tammy Dunakin
Dunakin launched Rent-A-Ruminant in 2004 with 10
goats. “They looked bored, so I put their little butts to work,”
she recalls. She built the business “one goat at a time,” and
today has a herd of 120, all non-milking nannies (therefore,
no chevre) and castrated billies (therefore, no kids). They’re
all rescue goats — unwanted pets and slaughterhouse
refugees. “A lot of them come from bad situations,” Dunakin
says.
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
Her clients range from the state’s Department of
Transportation to nuclear sub bases. Mostly, the beasts are
used to clear out unwanted blackberry bushes. When they’re
not helping the environment, they’re sometimes fighting
crime by munching the mugger-concealing brush and weeds
in high-crime areas. Alas, goats don’t eat drug paraphernalia
or tin cans. “Only paper and vegetation,” Dunakin tell me.
Cardboard political signs are particular favorites.
After the goats finish their buffet, there's hardly any green to be found.
Credit: Tammy Dunakin
She hopes to become the Starbucks of goat rentals, with
outposts all over the world. She already runs an affiliate
license program where goat herders can apply to run a rental
franchise through her outfit. She’s helped affiliate goat
herders as far away as Australia.
The smallest number of her goats rentable on Amazon
is 16; the largest, the entire herd of 120. She’s now weeding
through nearly 100 requests for Amazon rentals. Before
she accepts her first commission, she must drive to the
site, size it up and make sure there’s nothing potentially
DOWNTIME
2015 . 04.24
poisonous. She has turned down requests to bring the herd
to bat mitzvahs and children’s birthday parties. “I’m not a
petting zoo,” she explains.
On this afternoon at the Vashon Island pasture, I watch
Franz and Ernie brush against each other; Huey, Dewey and
Louie butt heads; and Spider-Man, Batman and Superman
duel horns in the grass. I wonder how these troublemakers
actually get work done. “Goats are ADHD. But they’re
problem-solvers,” Dunakin says. “They work on their own
time, goat time.” Even on 24-hour shifts, they “get a lot of
coffee breaks and naps.” Dunakin is assisted by her dogs
(Maddie, an Australian kelpie, and Pearl, a border collie)
who circle and nip at the goats’ heels, keeping them in line.
What would happen if the goats were set loose in
Amazon’s book division?
Goats are book lovers, she says. In fact, they devour
them.
> >
BIG SHOTS
2015 . 04.24
WELCOME TO THE RACE
Brooklyn, New York — To the surprise of very few, Hillary Clinton announced her 2016
presidential campaign on April 12, with a video and social media postings. Wasting
no time, opponents plastered anti-Hillary posters near her campaign headquarters.
Republican presidential candidates Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio also took
jabs at the sole Democrat currently in the race, claiming she was out of touch and would
be the equivalent of a third term for Barack Obama. Republican leadership questioned
her record as secretary of state, especially her handling of the 2012 attack on the U.S.
compound in Benghazi, Libya, and the controversy over her use of private email for
official communications.
*1
V
n
FLJi i I
i 1
i
M
j
V\
i ■
■
•
a
* — 1
“1
1
Jv
• ,1
.1
» •
•1
■ 4 4
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty
BIG SHOTS
2015 . 04.24
HOUTHIS AND BLOWBACK
Sanaa, Yemen — Mourners carry the coffins of victims of a Saudi-led airstrike during a
funeral April 10. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors have been bombing Houthi targets
in Yemen for nearly three weeks, but some of the strikes have missed their target and
killed civilians. The Houthis seized control of the country in January, with the backing
of Iran. Saudi Arabia, with U.S. support, is seeking to restore President Abdu Rabbu
Mansour Hadi to power.
r i '■•1 -i
p - 1 1 1 * -i
l } < W
M I H { \
l( \
Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
BIG SHOTS
2015 . 04.24
HOLA, NEIGHBOR!
Panama City, Panama — After more than 50 years of Cold War enmity, the leaders of
the U.S. and Cuba sat down for an hourlong talk as part of efforts to normalize relations
between the two nations. “It was time for us to try something new,” President Barack
Obama said during his April 1 1 meeting with Cuba’s President Raul Castro. The two
discussed plans to restore diplomatic ties and the first steps toward lifting the Cuban trade
embargo, but they did not touch upon Cuba’s human rights record or plans for the U.S. to
remove Cuba from its list of states that sponsor international terrorism.
r ■
1
Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty
BIG SHOTS
2015 . 04.24
FROM WEDDING TO FUNERAL
North Charleston, South Carolina — Jerome Flood, of James Island, South Carolina, pauses
for a moment at the spot where Walter Scott was shot in the back by a police officer after
a traffic stop, in the latest case of an unarmed African-American being killed by police.
Scott was the best man at Flood’s wedding. The officer, Michael Thomas Slager, was
captured by a bystander’s cellphone camera firing eight shots at Scott as he ran away.
Slager claimed Scott had grabbed his Taser, but after the release of the video, he was fired
and charged with murder.
Chuck Burton/AP
