Photos by Martin Parr

The thing that made the difference in the life of the Ausonia Country Club, where my best friend, Johnny Buschi, and I caddied every summer in high school, was its nearness to the Outerbridge Crossing, only ten minutes by wide-bodied Buick once you touched down on the Jersey side. Because of that, it was the perfect place for the members from Staten Island to get together on the weekends, play golf, and enjoy one another’s company unharassed. I should say at once, as unemphatically as possible, that these men were members of another organization as well. They were mobsters. Literally. They were “made men.” Although this was rarely talked about at the club, it was no secret to the other members, mostly Italian American family-types like my father who owned small, legitimate businesses around Middlesex or Union County.

Though the Staten Island crew counted for little more than a third of the club’s membership, the importance they wielded was much greater in proportion, not only because of what we knew or thought we knew about their weekday activities but also because of the quiet way they carried themselves, the not-easily-ruffled manner that passed, without much trouble, for dignity. Simply, they were there to play golf. While they were at it, they might stick around to have a meal in the 50s-built white-brick clubhouse or, on a Sunday, to watch the NFL games on the TV in the carpeted area of the men’s locker room after they’d showered and shaved. Seated at separate card tables, the two camps looked a lot alike in their snow-white underwear, drinks in hand, giving off a light cloud of talc and aftershave. Sometimes, too, the mob guys would bring their families—who looked a lot like our families. Their wives and kids would swim or sit by the pool while the men golfed, then meet afterward to have a dressy dinner in the dining room—again, at tables separate from ours. In all that they did, they passed among the rest of us like sightless, deep-swimming fish.

But despite the separation, there was one area in which relations between the two groups of men were better than cordial—in which they behaved, even, like friends—and that was on the golf course. Routinely, the foursomes were mixed, probably because getting out at the desired time trumped the whole question of whom you were playing with. But here, too, a strict prohibition was in force: There was never any discussion of business, legitimate or otherwise. The talk was like that of men’s foursomes everywhere. It ran freely—to the delight of us caddies—on the subjects of sports, women, where to go for steak and lobster tails, how the djadrools in Washington had gotten us into another war, and, especially, the deplorable condition of the greens. In other words, there was always enough to brag or complain about without treading on the forbidden turf. The only trespasser, in fact, and only for a short period of time, was my father’s friend Bobby Altieri, the owner of a liquor store in Manhattan and one of the legitimates. It is his breach of the club’s one great rule that I want to tell you about.

Bobby Altieri was a scratch golfer: Four over par was for him a bad day. For that reason my father would rather play golf with Bobby than with anyone, not excepting his best friend, Carmen Desirio. Carmen was genuinely rich, a rarity in the club. Rarer still was the fact that he had grown up with money, as the son of the biggest builder of schools and churches in the state. When my father’s modest electroplating business had begun to grow, Carmen took him under his wing to show him how to live on a slightly larger scale. It was help my father needed: Coming from Newark’s immigrant ghetto, he had the sort of background that often means that pleasures don’t come easily to you. He wanted to be challenged and couldn’t really enjoy playing golf with someone who wasn’t better than he was; and Bobby Altieri, long game and short, was superior to anyone around. My father would watch him with the same concentration he’d used in the Army to teach himself to be an engineer. He would study the way Bobby stood at the tee, hanging loose and long-armed over the ball, with an air peculiar to himself of judicious melancholy, and a cigar fixed tightly in his teeth the whole time, so that he’d have to squint through its wisp of smoke in order to keep the ball in hyper-focus. Then he’d whack it. They called him DiMaggio for a reason.

Everyone admired Bobby’s game, even the Staten Islanders. One day no less a figure than Vincent (never Vinny) Nola, who occupied the highest standing among the mob guys, crossed the locker room in his skivvies to congratulate Bobby on going two under par. The onlookers on both sides grew quiet. When the pair shook hands, Nola noticed the bracelet of woven gold on the other’s wrist, and said he used to have one just like it but he’d given it away, he forgot to whom. Bobby said that, yeah, it had been given to him by a girl who used to work for him, and you should’ve seen what he’d given her. Vincent laughed (actually chuckled, in plain fact) and said he’d look for Bobby for a game next Saturday. What time d’you go out, anyway?

It was an exchange of few words, but it made an epoch. Buschi promptly created a verse about it for the song he was making up, to the tune of “Davy Crockett,” cataloguing Bobby Altieri’s adventures. Bobby had no greater admirer than Buschi. So it was fitting that it was from Buschi I first heard that Bobby Altieri was having trouble with his liquor business. It had started affecting his game. The thoughtful pause he would always take before addressing the ball had disappeared, and the sadness or melancholy, if that is what it had been in the first place, was now replaced by a visible anxiety. As things got worse, he began to drop in a few remarks between strokes, bringing up his problems aloud in a half-kidding way—first to his friends, but then also to the mob guys, with whom he’d been making up foursomes more and more often since Nola’s fabled approach. I don’t know, he’d say, I got this problem, this bad problem that I don’t know what to do about. Or, more particularly: I got this partner, maybe I should talk to you guys about him, maybe you can help me out a little… The only thing more alarming than Bobby crossing the line in this way was the silence with which his words were greeted.

***

Soon the remarks became more and more regular, and he all but abandoned the kidding tone, not only on the golf course but also on the 19th hole, where he’d rarely been seen before. According to club lore, he’d played basketball for Seton Hall when he was young but had been thrown out for drinking in his junior year. Since then he was known for hardly drinking at all, even though “spirits” were his business. As near as I can tell at this remove, he did know a good deal about wine. One day—I suppose because he picked up, somewhere, that I was or wanted to be aware of a world beyond the one we lived in, bounded on one side by the Parkway and on the other by the Turnpike—he told me a story about my father and his friends. He said that once, as a treat, he brought a world-class bottle of wine from his store in New York to their regular Friday-night poker game—just to show the guys what was what, he said, even though he himself would be having no more than a taste. Big mistake. Who sliced the peaches for it? he said. Who poured in the ginger ale? Who did this with the sparkling water? (Here he turned his big hand upside down.) Never again, he concluded. I think this was the only time Bobby Altieri ever spoke to me except to ask for a club on the golf course, and even then he preferred a caddy who really knew something about the game: Julius Hankey, an African American and the only adult among us, who lived in the shack in the summer and taught the rest of us all we knew about carrying a bag. In any event, Bobby wasn’t a drinker by any stretch—but now here he was, starting in again. And the more he drank, the more he said things he shouldn’t have.

At the bar, at least, his friends had a chance to control him, to peel him away and keep him from getting in trouble. Carmen, as the group’s unacknowledged leader, tried giving him a talking-to in the parking lot. So you have problems; who doesn’t have problems? Carmen began. You don’t, said Bobby. The ones I do, said Carmen, I talk to my friends about, not to people I’m not supposed to. Bobby looked around and appealed to my father and the others, who by now were forming a half circle around him. What’s this? he said. All of a sudden we gotta check with Carmen who we talk to? When this didn’t get him any support he took another tack: Besides, who said anything to anybody? I’m just out there playing golf and having a good time. That’s exactly what you should be, said Carmen. Exactly what you should be doing. Right, said Bobby. Right, said Carmen. Who asked you? said Bobby. Which finished up their conversation, which had accomplished absolutely nothing.

There was a story about Carmen Desirio, about the first time his father let him oversee construction on a building, a small storage annex for a factory in Avenel that manufactured aluminum siding. On the day when they were supposed to pour the foundation, which was to be eight and a half feet deep, Carmen was out there running around the site from before the sun came up, telling the men to do this, move that, get the other thing ready—just as he’d seen his father do all his life. Then, just past dawn, he gave the men the signal and the cement was poured, until it filled the hole, which went about fifteen feet by twenty on the surface. By noon the foundation was nearly firm; by five it was as snug and tight as an ice cube in a tray. It was then that Carmen Sr. rolled up in his big Lincoln.

He got out. Little Carmen greeted him with confidence. The old man didn’t say much, asked a few questions. Was this all right, was that all right? Yes, yes. How about the foundation, were you here when they poured? Was I here, I was here two hours before. Did you measure the hole? Carmen Sr. asked. Little Carmen said, It was eight and a half feet; I was standing right there. That’s not what I asked, said Carmen Sr. Did you climb in and measure for yourself?

According to the story, the old man went back to his car and got a folding chair out of the back, the plastic beach kind that costs two dollars, and opened it up and sat in it. He sat there while Little Carmen had the men hoist and remove the concrete foundation, in pieces, using two cranes that had to be brought over from other jobs. They went past midnight. The old man hardly moved. When the pieces had been lifted clear of the ground, he was helped by his son down into the hole, where he took out a retractable tape the size of your palm, the kind that tailors use.

When he measured he found the hole to be eight and a half feet deep. Good, he said. And got back in the car and drove away. I never heard whether the pieces could be put back in or had to be poured fresh. My father pointed out the building to me years later, when he was driving me back to my apartment in New York one night after I had had dinner at the house with him and my mother.

The point is that Carmen knew something about what you could and couldn’t get away with in life, and he knew that when someone drew a line you had to respect it, given who that someone was. Carmen may have known a lot about having a good time, but he also knew where the steel girders were that reinforced the fabric of things, and it was this knowledge that he was trying to impart to Bobby, if Bobby would only hear it. To which the answer was, No. The conversation in the parking lot that was meant to warn him went exactly nowhere. The way Bobby saw him—this was a point my father made to me to which I paid attention, because I knew that my father loved both these men and made sense about them—Carmen was just a guy who’d had a silver spoon up his ass from Day One and had never had the kind of problem that he, Bobby, was having: the problem with his partner, Sandy, in New York, the problem that was crushing Bobby and making him do what he did. I asked my father exactly what the problem was. And, I guess because he decided it was time that I learned what was what, he told me.

I remember the place we were in when we talked about it: a storefront luncheonette, wedged between a cleaner’s and a movie theater, diagonally across from the Newark Library. We were spending the day at the library together, which was an astonishing thing in itself, because as far as I knew it was the only time my father had ever been to the library, had ever been through its great wooden doors. The reason he’d come today had to do with the fact that he had worked out a new technique for plating aluminum. Aluminum could never really be plated; what you did instead was something known as dip brazing, which was tricky and expensive. My father had spent months “fooling around” with it, as he called it, in our garage at night, working on a way to make it less so. When he succeeded, it worked so well that a couple of engineers from the big outfits he worked with, such as Raytheon and Bell Labs, told him that he really had something there and that he should patent it. When he said he knew nothing about patents, they told him to go to the library, where the volumes published by the US Patent Office were kept, and check to see whether anyone had come up with anything similar. He brought me along, maybe because he was somehow aware that I knew my way around the library better than most of the paid staff, or maybe just to have company in what he figured was going to be an alien environment. Either reason would have been okay, as far as I was concerned. Just now we were taking a break, eating sandwiches stuffed with sausages and meatballs at a lunch place across the way, and he was feeling good, reminiscing about growing up in this city and remembering the days when the theater next door had been a music hall where he’d once heard Harry James. I knew he was in the kind of mood wherein I could ask him anything. The facts he told me were the following:

Bobby Altieri had a partner whose name was Sandy Grusskopf. It had been Sandy who, keeping half for himself, let Bobby buy into the liquor store in the first place—at a good price, too, which should have let Bobby know that something was up, then and there. It was a couple of blocks from Herald Square and was doing a good business at the time he bought in, so that Bobby, in his excitement, sold the place he’d had before, up near Columbus Circle, and expanded the new one right off the bat. But that was before he knew what he was dealing with, which was that his partner had a gambling habit and would always be needing cash. More and more, whatever money the store made, it went out the window. His partner was taking down the business. Bobby was going to lose the store, and he was going to lose his house in Iselin, which he put up against it when he did the expanding. Now he had to take his kid out of college; now he had to get rid of one of his cars; now there was even talk he couldn’t make his monthly bill at the club… Bobby’s partner was killing him. He had nowhere to turn.

***

One morning in August Bobby Altieri arrived to open up his store, in New York City, only to find the windows broken, the door knocked from its hinges, and whole racks and cases of wines and liquors smashed on the floor. His partner, Sandy, was there to explain it to him, sitting on the one unbroken piece of furniture, a chair from the back office, and looking not quite as upset about it all as Bobby could have wished. Sandy said it was all just a message sent to him by his bookmaker, and it was really nothing more than a misunderstanding. He had actually had a good run of luck with the trotters up in Saratoga the day before and was confident that this was the turning point, that his losing streak was finally over. In the meantime, though, he had to ask Bobby for a loan. Bobby told him he could drop dead. Sandy said he understood entirely; he said it as if Bobby had just apologized for being unable to help. Sandy had a broad tolerance for catastrophe. He went on to say that repairs to the shop shouldn’t take more than a few days. Then maybe they could reopen with a big “Renovation Sale,” always good for a quick intake of cash—which he could use, he added, to take advantage of the way his luck had suddenly changed for the better. Bobby had by now calmed down, at least on the outside. He said Sandy should get some coffee; he could smell whiskey on his breath. Sandy smiled sheepishly and said it was a good idea.

Bobby went to the bank later that day and talked to the loan officer, a woman he was friendly with since she had been involved in his original purchase of the business. He told her how much money they were going to need to reopen after the random attack of vandalism the night before. She met him with a firm refusal. The bank was unwilling to extend any more credit to a business that seemed unable to right itself. She was sorry to tell him this. She liked Bobby, as most people did, especially most women—and probably she had a hunch, though she didn’t say so, that Bobby himself wasn’t the source of the problem.

The next day was a Saturday. Bobby had signed up for a seven o’clock tee-off time, but he gave it away and worked himself into a 9:30 with Vincent Nola and two others, associates of Nola’s. Bobby played a few holes without saying anything, trying hard to keep enough concentration to play the game, but then, having found what he considered the right moment, said to them something like, You probably know my store got broken up, or, Guess you guys heard about what happened to the store. At first, in the usual way, nobody said anything back. Bobby pressed a little further. I told you before, he said, I got this partner, this son-of-a-bitch Polack; he’s gonna ruin me if I don’t do something about it… This time one of them spoke to him, a red-headed guy named Nick something, his voice quiet but with a hint of admonition in it so that it sounded a little tired: What do you say we just play golf, Nick something said. And that’s exactly what Bobby tried to do again, though he succeeded only for a few minutes. Because at that point his feelings overcame him, and he couldn’t help adding, No, all’s I’m saying is, either he puts me under or I put him under, one way or the other... At which point Nola himself stopped on his way down the fairway with a club in his hand and turned toward Bobby. Nola had the kind of weight to him where he didn’t need to actually use words, and Bobby knew just from the way Nola looked at him that he had been heard. Not Yes, not No, not the slightest bit more, just that Vincent Nola had heard him, and that was all. This we got from Dick LaFave, who had caddied the round. And Bobby had really seemed to get the message, LaFave said, because he played the whole rest of the eighteen holes without bringing anything up. But on Sunday, the next day, Bobby again couldn’t contain himself and actually went out of his way to find red-headed Nick, the one who had tried telling him enough was enough. He took care to speak with him when Nola wasn’t around and said, before Nick could stop him, I know, I get it, but I’m not lyin’. I need a little help. This time Nick said nothing back and, turning from him a little sharply, walked away as if the very sound waves carrying Bobby’s voice had failed to reach him.

***

One morning soon after, Bobby Altieri stepped out the front door of his house in Iselin— a pastel-colored split-level, like most of ours, with a lawn the size of a postage stamp. He had his keys in his hand. He was heading for his car to drive himself to the station in order to catch the commuter train into the city. He preferred to commute by train rather than drive because this way he could read the sports page on the way in and didn’t have to bother with parking and could sleep on the way home. It was still a few minutes before eight, and the day wasn’t hot yet. He didn’t make it all the way to the garage before a car drove up that he thought he recognized. It was a lime-green Buick Riviera, late model and top of the line, bright and shining for the most part but needing a wash just now: The doors and rear skirts were spattered with mud, as if it had just been driven through a field. It eased to a stop in front of the house. Vincent Nola rolled down the window on the passenger side. He was wearing a suit—not something Bobby had seen before, since they’d only been around each other on weekends, and this was a Thursday: two weeks to the day when Bobby’s store had been busted up. Nola gestured to him. Come over here, the gesture said. Bobby came. A look from Nola directed him to look in the backseat.

There was a body there, the body of a dead man, face down in a heap. Bobby no more than saw what it was before the car pulled away, leaving him alone on the sidewalk.

As he stood there he was suddenly sick to his stomach. He felt clammy and insane with fear. He didn’t think one moment could keep following another, in the state he was in; it all had to explode somehow. He’d had a man killed, and he thought that his life was over because of it, that he couldn’t stand or breathe or think anymore, and he kept saying, Oh God, but he wasn’t calling on God, but he heard himself saying it or yelling it and tried to pull the sound back in because he didn’t want anyone to come out and see him there and ask what happened, what was he shouting about. His groin hurt like he wanted to shit or urinate, but he was standing up and outdoors, outside his own house, which still looked like it always did, but he had the feeling that he was in a separate world from it entirely and there would be no way back into it, back into his home, into his life, he’d just shake to pieces and fall apart if he had to face anyone and try to be who he was in spite of what had happened and what he had done. He was too frightened to form a thought about what to do, and the keys in his hand felt heavy, and he saw them sway and rattle in his hand where he was clinging on to them, though it seemed like someone else’s hand holding them, he was that far out of himself and out of his own mind.

Then he heard the sound of the car coming back again. It had gone around the block and pulled up now just as it had done before. Bobby stared as, this time, Vincent Nola got out of the car, which he had not done the first time, and took a couple of steps toward Bobby, since Bobby was weak and shaking too much to come to him.

Relax, Vincent Nola said. Relax, that’s not your partner. Bobby didn’t react, so he said it again.

That’s not your partner. We just wanted you to know what it would feel like.

***

Bobby opened his mouth, but no sound came out, which was okay because he didn’t know what he would have said anyway. He glanced over at the car and could actually see a dark hump or lump where the body still was. There was still a dead body lying in there, but it was not his partner’s. Nola had just told him that.

Nola watched him and could read those thoughts going through his mind. He seemed to know exactly what thoughts they were.

Okay, Nola said, putting an end to a very long pause. Listen to me: It’s okay. Now shut up and play golf. He said it as if that were the whole thing, the whole purpose of what he had done and what he meant by it. Then he got back into his car and drove off.

Bobby said later that he didn’t remember how long he stood there. That’s what he told the two people, and two only, whom he chose to tell what had happened that morning: My father was one, and Carmen was the other. Bobby felt he owed Carmen the whole story because Carmen had been right in what he’d said to him in the parking lot that time.

My own thought, when the story reached me, was that I couldn’t get over the idea that you might just happen to have a body in the car that you were able to use in order to make a point.

John Romano wrote the screenplays for The Lincoln Lawyer and Nights in Rodanthe, and has written for and produced dozens of network TV shows.

The San Martín section of Bolivia's San Pedro prison. Photo by Niels Van Iperen

Being imprisoned for drug smuggling usually means taking a little break from being a criminal. But for Liverpudlian Thomas McFadden—who was apprehended at La Paz airport in 1996 with five kilos of cocaine in his suitcase—the four and a half years he spent at Bolivia’s infamous San Pedro prison consisted of nearly as much nefarious activity as he’d been involved in as a free man, including showing tourists around the cells and selling them homemade cocaine as a parting memento.

Australian writer Rusty Young turned McFadden’s story into a book, Marching Powder, which is now set to be made into a film. In fact, it was announced last week that 12 Years a Slave star Chiwetel Ejiofor would be taking the lead role, meaning development is clearly underway. But I’m impatient, so instead of waiting for the movie to come out, I thought I’d ask McFadden to tell me about his life himself.

Over the phone from his home in Tanzania, where he was born and now owns a chicken farm, he recalled why he abandoned Liverpool, England, for the glitzy world of swallowing balloons full of cocaine for a living. “My guardian parents were giving me a hard time,” he said, “so I left home at 15 and went to India with my Indian friend.” Simple as that.

Of course, being a 15-year-old runaway in a foreign country doesn’t lead to many job prospects, and McFadden quickly ran out of money. Fortunately, he soon met Mathias, a Sri Lankan man who'd lost his legs fighting for the Tamil Tigers and who introduced the teen to a group of wealthy Indians who would turn him on to the drug-trafficking business.

“I was very young at the time—I was just doing it for fun,” McFadden said. “I would go shopping, buy gold… but I wasn’t doing it for the money.”

Thomas McFadden (left) and Rusty Young in Bolivia's San Pedro prison. Photo by Simone Camilleri

Unlike, say, a plumbing apprenticeship, exporting large quantities of illegal substances isn’t really a profession that allows you to ease into it; McFadden started his new career flying shipments of heroin to Morocco, then smuggling them into Europe. But that, apparently, wasn’t something that fazed him too much; for McFadden, the whole thing was basically just a game, albeit one with some very severe consequences.

Depending on the situation, the young smuggler would use a variety of techniques to get his packages through customs. Sometimes he’d swallow bags; other times he’d press and seal the drugs into briefcases with false sides. “Every method has its time,” he said.

I asked him if he thought he was good at smuggling. “Yes, I was good,” he laughed. “Trafficking is not like shopping—it’s not easy. Somebody is waiting for you over there, and in your hand you’re carrying three kilos of drugs. You have to have guts and be smart.”

While guts and intelligence clearly count for something, there were still plenty of unforeseen bumps that almost led to McFadden's getting caught. “One time I was in a queue in India, waiting to board a flight, and a policeman tapped me on my shoulder and told me to follow him,” he recalled. “I didn’t and tried to ignore him. Luckily, the plane was about to take off, and they let me go because they didn’t have enough time to catch me.”

Policemen tapping you on your shoulder as you attempt to board a plane is a pretty good indication that something’s up, so McFadden—aware that he was now being monitored by the Indian authorities—had no option but to relocate his business.

A kitchen in the Palmar section of Bolivia's San Pedro prison. Photo by Niels Van Iperen

Choosing South America as his new stomping ground, he first worked out of Brazil before moving on to Bolivia, transporting cocaine rather than heroin. By this point, his priorities had changed—he was trafficking for a living, “not just for fun,” and it wasn’t long before his new appetite for cash landed him in the situation he’d moved halfway around the world to avoid.

In La Paz, Bolivia, McFadden had been bribing a police colonel in a bid to ward off any hassle from the cops. That worked out for a while, but ultimately the colonel betrayed him, sending a team of police to the airport to intercept him and the five kilos of cocaine he was carrying before he boarded a flight. He was arrested, questioned, and taken into custody, where all of his possessions were stolen by guards, leaving him with nothing but the 70 grams of coke floating around in his stomach.

McFadden was sentenced to six years and eight months in La Paz’s San Pedro prison. The infamous detention center is a microcosm of regular society, where money is king and can get you anything from a television to a night with a prostitute. Inmates run their own restaurants and shops, and many of their families live in the prison with them because they’re too poor to survive alone outside.

An inmate smoking base in San Pedro prison. Photo by Simone Camilleri

Poverty is also rife in San Pedro, with inmates having to pay for the majority of their basic amenities, such as food and rent on their jail cell. Those with no money effectively become homeless on the streets of the prison—a hardship McFadden encountered when he arrived. “On the first day I didn’t have any cash on me,” he said. “So I had to sleep on the floor, which was covered in shit.”

However, with the help of some of the prison’s more generous inmates, a volunteer from the Anglican church, and the charity Prisoners Abroad, McFadden eventually got himself set up for a life in San Pedro. He was loaned the money he needed to rent his own cell and began adjusting to what would be his reality for the next few years.

The prison, as McFadden soon discovered, was also a highly efficient cocaine factory. A vast majority of the inmates were in for drug charges, and if you couple that with the rampant corruption among the guards at the time (the jail has since been cleaned up, thanks in part to the publicity caused by Marching Powder), it’s no huge surprise that the place was producing enough of the stuff to keep an entire Wall Street firm in heart palpitations and coke bloats. Inmates produced the drug within the prison walls, selling it on the outside and using it themselves, while the poorer prisoners smoked base, the residue left over from the manufacturing process.

McFadden with some tourists and a couple of San Pedro inmates

McFadden managed to forge his own career inside by giving guided tours of San Pedro before offering his customers some of the prison’s homemade cocaine. Thanks to word of mouth and some promotion in a Lonely Planet guide—whose writer presumably wasn’t aware of the gift shop at the end of the tour—McFadden was soon dealing with about 70 visitors per day. “People would be planning to go to other places in South America,” he said, “but they would end up spending their whole time in La Paz.”

Every year on San Juan—a Bolivian festival on June 23—the tours would turn into overnight parties attended by a weird mix of international drug smugglers and Western students. “It was a unique time, the day of San Juan,” McFadden laughed, adding that I had missed “something incredible.”

One of McFadden's visitors was Australian Rusty Young, who was backpacking around the country at the time. The two became close friends, and Rusty was so intrigued by the stories he heard that he ended up staying in the prison for three months to begin writing the novel that would become Marching Powder.

Rusty and McFadden today. Photo courtesy of Rusty Young

McFadden was released from San Pedro in 2000 after serving two thirds of his sentence, and he went to Colombia with Rusty to finish off the book before returning to the UK. But arriving back home, he was confronted by a country that he no longer recognized. “Things had changed a lot,” he told me. “Before I went inside there were no internet cafes or coffee shops, and everything was suddenly so expensive.”

After three fruitless years of job hunting, McFadden decided to return to the country where he was born. Today, he tends to 2,800 chickens in Dar es Salaam, following that traditional career progression from international drug trafficker to renowned prison tour guide to livestock farmer. He has two children—a six-year-old son named Rusty, after his friend, and a one-year-old daughter. And after years of cocaine addiction, which wasn't helped by the fact he lived in a drug factory for almost half a decade, he's now clean. “It was difficult, but thank God I had good friends like Rusty to help me," he said.

With the life he’s had, it’s tempting to assume that McFadden could easily up sticks at any moment, trading in Tanzania for a new life in Belize or a job selling yachts along the Dalmatian coast. But listening to him talk from his home in the bush, it’s clear he’s found a place where he belongs.

Follow Jack Gilbert on Twitter.

Writer Brett McCaig and Composer Anthony Bastianon unable to contain their glee as the media rushes to ask them about their musical.
Earlier today, an excessive amount of media personalities descended on the Second City’s Training Centre in Toronto to watch the auditions for Rob Ford: The Musical. In case you’re not already tired out by the Ford fatigue that has consumed the City of Toronto and much of the English speaking world, this fanciful production will reimagine Rob Ford’s rise to notoriety as a comedic song and dance show set to hit the stage this September.

The plotline of Rob Ford: The Musical goes like this: Rob is struck in the face with a TV camera (just like the time he was actually struck in the face by a CBC camera) and is knocked unconscious. From there he enters a dreamy, alternate reality where he's shown the error of his ways, by an ostensibly politically incorrect character named Transgression, who, as the writer and composer of the musical put it themselves, is a “tranny.”

Now, while the jury may be out regarding whether or not the word tranny is offensive (and obviously the producers of this play don’t have a problem with it, in true Rob Ford spirit), this character has already garnered some negative attention. As if to balance the controversial choice of casting Trangression, the play will also include a song called, “It’s Good to be Gay!” which will appear alongside a ditty entitled: “Ford Nation, Fuck You.”

It's too early to tell if Transgression will be a mature, positive depection of transsexuals, but so far all signs point to: no.

Anthony Bastianon, the show’s composer, told the cameras his team is looking forward to “showing different sides of the whole story,” adding that he’s “looking forward to Ford Nation coming to see the show.” He also hopes that RoFo himself will come and give a speech opening night, which would provide the show with another overblown media circus through which they can promote their well-timed musical.

Given that literally anything could happen between now and the time this play hits the stage, Anthony and the musical’s writer, Brett McCaig, have left the final pages of the script blank until the world can see what will happen to Rob Ford. Either that, or they just haven't finished writing it.

Whether or not the script actually exists is irrelevant, because the universe rarely provides an opportunity to interview a bunch of Rob Ford lookalikes. That's why I took some time to get to know a few of the actors hoping to grab their 15 minutes of local musical fame.

The first audition I got to see was put on by Geoff “the Giant” Stone who came all the way from Ottawa to try out for Rob Ford: The Musical. Geoff sang a somewhat catchy song called “Drunken Stupors” which received scattered “Woo’s!” from the media. When asked about the song later, Geoff said: “it practically wrote itself. It flowed out of me like a waterfall.”

He then spent the better part of an hour singing the song on command for the various television stations in attendance. I would have recorded it if I thought you needed to hear it.

After that, I spoke to Matthew Garlic, a construction worker and amateur actor who came to Toronto from Vancouver simply to try out for this musical (but didn’t seem to think he needed to dress up like Rob Ford to sway the judges). According to Matthew, he is often mistaken for Rob Ford, John Candy, and Chris Farley—which is why he asked to pose in front of a photo of the late, great, Trains, Planes, and Automobiles star.

Matthew says he’s a big fan of “footage of Rob Ford falling down drunk in his Argos jersey,” adding that he would definitely vote for Rob if he happened to live in Toronto.

“He balances the budget… he seems to have a following, too. At least we know he’s corrupt, whereas every other politician is, but says they’re not… Other politicians have the same ‘creature of the night’ habits, but it just hasn’t come out yet.”

OK, Mr. Garlic. Good point.

The most notable lookalike of the bunch was this man: Neil Sarel, aka Slurpy. You may remember Slurpy from this National Post story, which quoted an anonymous source who had not only viewed the original crack tape, but alleged that there was a plot to use Slurpy in a fake crack tape, that could be used to presumably extort money from the media.

While Slurpy did not make himself immediately available for comment once that story broke, he did eventually chat with the Post last summer about the unwanted media attention that the fake crack video plot created in his life: “I tried to steer away from this right from the beginning. I don’t even look like the guy… I don’t want to be embroiled in this and that’s it. I said, ‘This is a scam and you’re going to go down for this. You’re going to end up in jail.’”

Despite admitting that he doesn’t really look like Rob Ford, Slurpy showed up to the auditions and we had a nice chat. Slurpy told me in the beginning, when he was dragged into the story, he didn’t want any part of it, and has had the nickname Slurpy since he was seven years old, because of his lisp. The nickname has seemingly stuck into his adult life, because he still has a bit of a lisp, and he's in the candy vending machine business. 

“Long story short, I’ve had a lot of moral support from a lot of good friends, and they all pushed me to come down here to try and catch the leading role. To me, it was a nightmare in the beginning, but now that I see this musical my friends told me: ‘You gotta step forward, you gotta make a move on this.’

“I’ve got a good, positive outlook to try and make this work. So if they want to work with me, I’ll work with them. We’ll see what happens… This is an avenue that could provide a future. Things have been tough for me for the past little while… but my positive outlook has kept me going. I’m going to take a crack at it.”

When I pointed out that "taking a crack at it" was a great pun, he just laughed. Good luck, Slurpy.

After speaking with Slurpy, I met up with Kevin Jollimore, who’s getting ready to play Richard Nixon in a play called Elvis and Dick at the Fringe Festival. Given that he’s familiar with acting like a sketchy political leader, I asked Kevin what the similarities between playing Ford and Nixon are:

“I try to find something loveable (or likeable, at least) in a character. If there’s nothing but hate from the audience, you might lose them. It’s one-dimensional. With Nixon, he’s guilty of a lot of dastardly deeds, but I try and interject that he was doing it for the good of his country…"

“With Rob Ford, I think people feel kinda sorry for the guy. It’s like Chris Farley, I loved that guy but there was a death-watch going on with him, like, ‘When’s he gonna O.D.?’ I think Rob Ford, unfortunately, might be one of those characters..."

“The Rob Ford story isn’t over. It could go many, many ways. He could come out of rehab 180 pounds looking like he walked out of GQ, or he could come out of rehab and something very dark could happen. I don’t think even the most vehement Rob Ford haters wish him deathly harm or ill. Just get him off the political landscape.”

By the third hour of auditions, media attention had hit its peak and the audition began to undergo a tonal shift—thanks to a lack of genuine Rob Ford lookalikes hoping to get a gig, and an emergence of trolls and passersby looking for a bit of attention. That’s about the time when a rapper named Mark Brathwaite came into audition for the part of Rob Ford.

Mark spit a quick freestyle about Rob Ford, then told a story about selling Blue Jays t-shirts on the street, which is where he met Rob Ford for the first time. Apparently, Rob Ford offered him some kind of gig as a rapper who could help him with his initiative to make Toronto a better music city, which was quickly cut short once the whole admitting-to-smoking-crack thing took hold of his career.

The judges did not seem overly impressed with Mark's charming anecdote.

After Mark’s rap, a man named Greg walked in who gave the last audition before the entire media scrum was kicked out of the room. Greg read a very peculiar monologue where he played a man whose lover tells him that she’s fallen for another man—just as they’re about to have to sex. As his ex-lover begins to pack all of her belongings to go and be with another dude, he sneakily takes her “diaphragm jelly” and empties the tube, then fills it back up with the popular heat rub, tiger balm.

This bizarre monologue was met with nervous laughs.

Then Greg went over to the piano and played Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” for a perplexed audience of judges and a few remaining reporters. I’m not going to pretend like the song has any particular relevance to the Rob Ford story, but perhaps you’d like to draw your own meaning from a section of the chorus, which I will leave here to end my article:

The greatest love of all
Is happening to me
I found the greatest love of all
Inside of me
The greatest love of all
Is easy to achieve
Learning to love yourself
It is the greatest love of all

@patrickmcguire

Alexis Neiers, ex-heroin addict and star of cult classic reality show Pretty Wild, has had a pretty crazy life. In this episode of Profiles by VICE, we hear about Alexis Neiers' struggles with addiction, her criminal involvement in the real-life The Bling Ring, and her former Playboy bunny mother, as well as her new role as a sober mother, attempting to help her ex-boyfriend find a way out of his own crippling heroin and crack addiction.

Click here for last week's episode.

Not everyone has the balls or reckless committment to absurdity to suckle milk out of cow udders and put it on TV. For Tom Green, it was one of the most unforgettable moments of his unexpected rise to the top. In fact, few comedians have had a crazier pre-YouTube ascension to fame than the 42-year old Pembroke, Ontario native.

In the early 90s, he cut his teeth in the entertainment world as MC Face of the award-winning Canadian rap group Organized Rhyme. By the mid 90s, he had transitioned into radio and television, bringing his deliriously weird and offbeat brand of comedy to community-access television in Ottawa.

The show was deliberately lo-fi and antagontistc. Some of the more memorable stunts Tom pulled include painting a comically vulgar image on his parents' car and dubbing it the "Slutmobile," attempting to inteview anxious, uneasy pedastarians with slabs of beef stuck to his head and, yes, vigorously humping a dead moose. At the turn of the cenutry, Tom was one of MTV's most original and biggest stars, and his impact has left a noticeable legacy—you can see his comic imprint on avant-garde, genre-busting shows like Jackass to the Eric Andre Show.

We sat down with Tom over beers for a longform discussion of his wild career trajectory, the finer points of suckling milk out of cow udders, and the time Eminem shouted him out in a massive pop song.

Image via Flickr user kk.
Soon, you may get a letter from Chris Saybeck. It will probably be asking for $20, all because you downloaded “Bruno Mars-Just The Way You Are.m4a.”

Saybeck is the CEO of Rightscorp, an American company known for monetization services to artists and holders of copyrighted intellectual property, and he's coming north to tell Canadians that it is not okay to pirate music. And new federal legislation will be a big help.

The proposed bill is S-4, the Digital Privacy Act. It was introduced by the Conservatives in the Senate and, to hear them tell it, it’s a boon for all of our privacy rights.

The bill amends the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) to allow for an organization to “disclose personal information without the knowledge or consent of the individual,” in circumstances of fraud or “for the purposes of investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada or a province that has been, is being or is about to be committed.”

The legislation does offer new protections for users who have their data breached or stolen. But it also legalizes the warrantless sharing of users’ data between corporations, without any sort of oversight or accountability.

Privacy experts see a pretty obvious purpose for the provision: to go after those who download movies, music, and software.

Copyright shakedowns are already popular in America, and involve figuring out who is torrenting, sharing, downloading and seeding copyright material, and then sending them copyright notices. The letters inform the user of how they broke copyright, and offer to settle the case for a set fee—Rightscorp is on the cheaper side, at $20 per infringement. 

Industry Minister James Moore—the man responsible for the bill—rejected that S-4 would create a system of extra-judicial copyright vigilantism.

The notices inform the infringer if they choose to ignore or fight the order, they’ll be heading to court, an option that could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, plus legal fees.

Supporters of companies like Rightscorp call it a necessary recourse for defending intellectual property in a country like Canada, where doing so can be remarkably difficult.​​ It’s essentially like requesting an out-of-court settlement before any court proceedings have even begun. In other words, opponents say Rightscorp is a copyright troll. 

The government has pushed back on that assessment. Outside of a Senate committee studying the bill, Industry Minister James Moore—the man responsible for the bill—rejected that S-4 would create a system of extra-judicial copyright vigilantism.

“We don’t have that concern,” Moore told me. Moore’s office further closed the door that S-4 would mean anything at all for copyright holders.

“Our government’s changes will place tighter rules and stricter limits on information sharing between private organizations,” Moore’s spokesperson said in an email statement.

The Harper government’s logic is that the Digital Privacy Act is intended to crack down on fraud, not copyright infringement.

Moore’s office already contends that British Columbia and Alberta already have legislation mimicking what they’re trying to do in S-4. And if there aren't any copyright trolls out there now, they figure, there won’t be after this bill passes.

The Privacy Commissioner for Alberta has differing opinions. When asked if Alberta’s privacy legislation allows for the sort of data requests to internet service providers like Moore’s office suggested, the answer was succinct.

“No, Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act does not apply in this situation. ISPs are federally regulated; PIPA applies to provincially regulated private sector organizations,” a spokesperson told me.

Asked if the bill will change things for Alberta, the spokesperson noted that “S-4 will impact federally regulated ISPs and how they collect, use and disclose personal information.”

The BC commissioner’s office wouldn’t comment specifically on the copyright trolling issue, but did highlight a submission to a provincial privacy review committee, noting S-4’s warrantless disclosure provisions could have, “unintended consequences in providing authorization for personal information-sharing between organizations under such broad conditions.”

So you might just be hearing from Saybeck sooner rather than later. “We’re in the process of exploring that,” Saybeck told me. “Our business model in Canada is not the same as in the US because the legal model is not the same.”

Nevertheless, he says, Rightscorp is coming. They’ll be starting operations now, while keeping an eye on S-4 to see how it will be interpreted. Saybeck notes that while, at present, they can send the notices to infringers, they don’t have an easy recourse for getting data on just who is downloading the material.

Previous attempts to bring copyright trolling to Canada were, to some degree, thwarted. In 2012, American film company Voltage Pictures (the people behind The Hurt Locker), filed a lawsuit against independent Ontario ISP Teksavvy. They argued before the court that the internet company was required to hand over all the subscriber information for those who were illegally downloading the Iraq War drama.

A Vancouver lawyer said that he’s never heard of a case of copyright trolling here in Canada, but notes he’d welcome the change.

In a controversial decision, the court sided with Voltage, granting them access to the list of infringers. However, the judge slapped restrictions on the company’s ability to go after the infringers. Namely, it made the court an arbiter of these sorts of requests, giving judges the ability to scrutinize whether the demands were legitimate, or whether the company is attempting a throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach.

Yet, another recent court decision might frustrate these efforts. In R. v. Spencer, the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement agencies will need to get warrants if they want ISPs to cough up users’ information. The court did not say anything about how private corporations (to which the Charter doesn’t apply), can share information between each other.

Saybeck’s plan is essentially to side-step the courts. The company counts media giant BMG as a client and thinks it has found the perfect model for if and when that happens. By only requesting $20 per infringement, they can go after downloaders without getting the bad press of bankrupting teenagers and single moms.

“It’s the low settlement amount that makes it a non-story, and makes it reasonable,” Saybeck said. “I don’t think there’s a client we have that doesn’t want to branch out into Canada.”

The costs could go up for big pirates, however. The more you seed or download, the more Rightscorp can ask for. But at $20 per infringement, it’s still substantially lower than the $150,000 per infringement that the courts can impose. Saybeck’s company can also file to have users’ internet service suspended.

Andrei Mincov is a Vancouver lawyer who has experience with the Canadian and American copyright systems. He says that he’s never heard of a case of copyright trolling here in Canada, but notes that he’d welcome the change.

“Currently, the damages are low, and it’s generally hard to get them,” he said.

And that’s the big barrier for companies looking to get their pound of flesh from illegal downloaders. But creating a shortcut, a direct line from rights holders to ISPs to obtain users’ home addresses, will make life much easier for them. For those corporations who provide both television and internet to Canadians, like Bell and Rogers, they will likely be tripping over themselves to feed the copyright holders to the wolves. Now all that’s left is for S-4 to pass.


@justin_ling

A police-training exercise in Kentucky. Photo via Flickr user Maximillian Curry

On June 8, Jerad and Amanda Miller targeted and killed Las Vegas police officers Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck. The Millers apparently harbored a lot of anti-government sentiment and could arguably be called creatures of the far right. The violent right-wing movement that the couple’s attack has been said to represent has made a lot of people nervous, for all kinds of reasons. Those on the left of the spectrum are worried about a rise in patriot militias and don’t look forward to even more white men with guns roaming around the country, while anti-authoritarian outlets like Cop Block and LewRockwell.com made sure to stress that, regardless of how much their readers man hate the Man, mowing down people the way the Millers did is not OK and should not be tolerated.

As usual, before we get caught up in the hype—a bunch of people who get their “news” from Alex Jones are going to go on a cop-killing rampage!—we should look at some cold hard statistics: For one thing, though gun violence and homicide in general has slowed its decline since the 1990s, it was halved between 1993 and 2010. For another, the US is safer than it has been in decades for cops as well as civilians. The number of police officers who die every year is so small that any increase at all can easily be touted as an alarming uptick in violence, but 2009 saw the fewest officer killings in 60 years, and in 2012 there were only 47 cops killed feloniously in the line of duty. (There were 130 officers killed on duty in 1973.) And yet, Jim Pasco, executive head of the Fraternal Order of Police, told the Washington Times that “Over the last 25 years or so there’s been a gradual erosion toward authority figures and of respect for police officers. It’s highly visible.” He went to say that most people just talk big—an important distinction—but that he gets “two to four emails a month” that contain hopes for more dead cops.

It’s hard to quantify a generalized erosion of respect for authority, but there’s no question that the last 25 years have given us a more militarized police force and an explosion in the prison population thanks to the war on drugs. Maybe those bad policies have given some people good reasons to distrust, fear, and hate the institutions behind those trends. Though there is a lot of talk about police misconduct and brutality these days, it was more dangerous to wear a badge 50 years ago—when there was almost unanimous respect for cops—than it is today.

The Miller shooting was a tragic anomaly, but it shouldn’t be allowed to have a chilling effect on criticism of the cops. The lives of police officers matter, but so do those of the people who have suffered at their hands.

Check out the rest of this week’s bad cops:

–To go back to last week’s discussion of terrible taxi laws: A married New York City couple filed a suit earlier this month against the Taxi Limousine Commission, alleging that, in May 2013, TLC investigators pulled the man over on suspicion of driving an illegal cab, mainly because 66-year-old Dan Keys, who is black, had been spotted dropping his caucasian wife, Symone Palermo, off at work. Keys says that even though he and his wife explained to the authorities what had happened, the couple’s car remained impounded for eight days.

–The family of a man who died after being Tasered is suing the cops in Forth Worth, Texas, over officers’ actions during a May 2013 raid. The police busted down Jermaine Darden’s door because cocaine was allegedly being sold out of the house, and when the man (who had synthetic marijuana in his blood) resisted, the cops repeatedly Tasered him. He passed out and died shortly afterward, but officially, his cause of death was “natural” and had nothing to do with the electric shocks the 300-pound asthma sufferer received. The helmet-cam video of the incident, released last week by a local news station, shows Darden being pinned to the ground and zapped during a raid that, if nothing else, should remind everyone of how violent the war on drugs is on a daily basis.

–Remember when New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was a crusading reformer set to right the wrongs of the Bloomberg era? Me neither. According to a report released last week by the Drug Policy Alliance, hizzoner is on track to preside over just as many weed arrests as Michael Bloomberg did in his last two years in office. Unsurprisingly, because this is the NYPD, the majority of those arrested for marijuana offenses are also minorities.

–Campbell, Wisconsin, police chief Tim Kelemen is under investigation for allegedly harassing a local Tea Party activist by signing him up for a bunch of websites. The activist, Greg Luce, had been butting heads with the authorities since he was threatened with a ticket over an anti-Obama demonstration held on a freeway overpass and the frustrated right winger filed a lawsuit against the town over the incident. Keleman admits to escalating the beef by signing Luce up with Match.com, HealthCare.gov, and some porn sites, but he doesn’t think such conduct is illegal—even so, dude, it’s pretty petty behavior for a town’s top cop to be engaging in.

–Jim Ardis, the Peoria, Illinois, mayor who ordered to police to raid a man’s house over a parody Twitter account, is now getting sued by the ACLU. Jon Daniel, the target of the raid, claims that his First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated, and he’s probably right. If an anonymous source is to be believed, the whole thing started because the mayor thought Justin Glawe, who reported on this whole sordid joke for VICE, was behind the silly Twitter feed, which portrayed the mayor as a party-crazed drug fiend. Ardis is not on drugs, but he does seem to hate the free press a lot.

–On Thursday, a Chesterfield County, Virginia, cop carefully carried a bus full of of toddlers—two at a time—from their vehicle to their day-care center so they didn't have to wade through a parking lot flooded with water that went up to the officer’s knees. A passerby recorded Offer Brad Watkins doing his good deed, giving the station an unintentional but deserved PR coup. Watkins’s next act confirmed his Good Cop of the Week status: He caught a loose poodle who had been running on around the flooded roadways, then returned it to its owner after the dog bit his hands repeatedly during the rescue. May child-assisting, mean-dog-saving Officer Watkins keep up his good work.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.

Photos by Megan Koester

You are probably sick of hearing about OJ Simpson by now. If you were around when the trial of a washed up ex-football star became the most important news story in the world, you’re either such a freaky obsessive about the case that you haven’t stopped thinking about it since 1994, or you sincerely believe that it signified the complete collapse of polite society. It was the Hindenberg of news stories; either totally fascinating as sheer spectacle or so horrific and grisly that you can’t look away. 

In the last 20 years, practically every person who was even tangentially involved in the OJ Simpson trial has attempted to cash in on their infamy—even OJ Simpson, who both tried to sell a tell-all book where he "confessed" to the crime and starred in a hidden camera prank show where he told bad jokes about the murders.

The list of pseudo-celebrities is endless: racist cop Mark Fuhrman, the "morally corrupt" Faye Resnick, Paula Barbieri, Robert Shapiro, Kato Kaelin, F. Lee Bailey, and so on. It's still possible to buy OJ trial pogs and Bronco chase-themed wristwatches on Ebay, if carrying around merchandise celebrating a double homicide is the kind of thing you're into.

Of all the people who participated in the metaphorical taxidermy of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, no one made the splash that Larry King did. If Larry could have pulled a Weekend at Bernie's 2 and reanimated their corpses to guest on his talk show, he probably would have. Somehow, that sounds less funny than Weekend at Bernie's 2, if that's even possible.

Larry King photo courtesy of Kevin Parry for The Paley Center for Media

At a panel to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in Beverly Hills (and to promote a new feature-length retrospective documentary titled OJ: Trial of the Century) featuring a wide variety of legal experts, retired talk show host and horny old man Larry King name-dropped Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, Columbo star Peter Falk, and his own sexual prowess.

Reiterating information reported on in a recent Vanity Fair essay on the OJ Simpson trial, King explained that he was dating two women at the same time, one on each side of the case. "The jury consultant for OJ, and the chief assistant to the prosecution—both very pretty girls," King said while grinning widely. The crowd sat in bemused horror as King described his completely unethical behavior. 

"I would eat lunch with the consultant and have dinner with the assistant—I think I took one to Vegas and the other to Phoenix." Whichever one he took to Phoenix probably wasn't nearly as appreciative as the other one. If you're dating a wealthy old man, Phoenix is not high on the list of romantic getaways. It's probably somewhere between Fresno, California, and the Gaza Strip. Watching Larry King play golf in the desert is as glamorous as playing Checkers with Jerry Lewis in Ft. Lauderdale.

In between anecdotes about fucking pretty girls during a murder trial, Larry King spoke of the "enigma of OJ," as though this man was someone who appeared incapable of the crimes for which he was charged. "[OJ] never had a scandal besides the one time with the police on the wife charge." The "wife charge" that he casually referred to was actually pretty serious. OJ pled no contest to domestic violence charge in 1989. According to police records cited in a New York Times article from 1994, the injuries Nicole Brown Simpson suffered in the attack were enough to warrant a hospital stay. Police had been called to the Simpson household on eight separate occasions prior to the night in question.

Maybe this wasn't the OJ Larry King was talking about when he said that, "Friends who knew him said he was the nicest person ever." Maybe they didn't actually know OJ Simpson the way they claimed. Larry also implied that the Juice's erratic, violent behavior was due to drug use. At one point during the hour-long conversation with legal experts and other media figures, he interrupted a discussion of spousal abuse issues to blurt out, "How much were drugs involved?" Obviously, the best way to rationalize kicking the shit out of your wife is to blame controlled substances. If anyone knows that, it's a celebrity.

Maybe this was the OJ Larry King was thinking of. For her 30th birthday, Kris Kardashian, mother of three girls who amusingly all share names that start with the letter "K," starred in a music video parody of Randy Newman's classic 1980s hit song, "I Love LA." Her version—titled "I Love My Friends"—was meant to be an affectionate nod to all the people who contributed to her life in Los Angeles being so deliriously wonderful. Kris is seen driving through Beverly Hills, taking bubble baths, sipping champagne, and opining about her love of Bible study and dinners at a trendy new restaurant on Beverly Drive called "Cheesecake Factory." One of her friends that she loved so much was OJ Simpson.

He pops up at the 3:23 mark in the video, caught by surprise by the camera. His acting skills in his brief cameo are about as good as any other work he'd done in actual Hollywood productions—his one talent was appearing surprised or confused, which ended up serving him quite well in his final career as a defendant. People on trial who fiercely claim their innocence should practice appearing shocked in the mirror of their jail cell. It can only help their cause.

Perhaps after 20 years of contemplation, it's time to stop forcing rationality onto an irrational moment in history. Any attempt to make sense of the collected feverish madness of this case is a fool's errand. Sure, OJ probably did it. His behavior in the years after the trial certainly made him seem like a guilty man. "Probably did it" just isn't enough for prurient interest of the human mind, so we've continued to revive this melodrama every couple years, while simultaneously inflating its cultural importance in the process. We're bombarded with new theories on who the "real killer" was. We try to demystify the phenomenon of the trial. Larry King's futile, bizarre effort to solve the "enigma of OJ" is as outrageous and unnecessary as his choice of wardrobe. 

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

(Click each item for more information)

If you visit Los Angeles this summer, whether you pay a few bucks for one of those notoriously inaccurate "star maps" pamphlets they sell at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, or download some dumb app, they do the same thing: Show you a bunch of big houses where famous people eat eggs in the morning. Who gives a shit? Above, you'll find a comprehensive map that's been carefully researched, and had the boring parts sifted out. What's left is your guide to 100 years of LA's rich history, and it's all yours to explore.

Key:

• Black: Interesting Celebrity Death 
• Red: Miscellaneous Tragedy
• Blue: Interesting Non-Tragedy
• Yellow: Scandal
• Orange: Murder by a Celebrity

Thumbnail image by Flickr user Vicente A.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

Downtown Austin, as seen from the city's impoverished east side. Photo by Gina Pina

More than Savannah, Athens, Atlanta, or New Orleans, Austin has earned a reputation as the only salvaged city in the South. That’s the memo delivered to Northern creative types: Skip the stifling humidity of Houston and the oil-money skyscrapers of Dallas, and only drive to San Antonio if you want to watch basketball games—Austin has the bands, the interior Mexican food, the international music and film festival, and it’s bursting at the seams with starry-eyed newcomers hoping to make their way. I was looking forward to all this when I landed at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport four years ago. I was belatedly off to college, and Austin had always seemed pretty cool from afar. The promises were simple: a growing city with a fertile scene. Austin never lied about those, but it became clear after a while that I wasn't asking the right questions.

One look at the census tracts makes it clear, as does I-35, the grey line splitting the uber-wealthy west side from the impoverished east side. According to the Atlantic, Austin stands as the tenth-most segregated metro area in the entire country. For all of its desire to be removed from the rest of Texas, Austin is in familiar company here. (Some of the other cities in the top ten are San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas.)

I remember exactly when I first noticed it: my first year in town, wandering around the heart of the city, unwittingly crossing through Red River and Sixth Street. It was an immediate shift. Property value sank, and the sidewalks were now populated entirely with black and brown faces. Casting my gaze back west and seeing all that pallid skin bumbling around in merry debauchery, participating in all those Austin promises, made me feel a little guilty. At that moment it was clear that Austin had some unfortunate secrets, because no matter how liberal or progressive your reputation might be, a history of segregation will always rear its ugly head.

“The first city plan that Austin leaders came up with was designed to be segregated, but they couldn’t legally write that into effect,” says Andrew Busch, a visiting assistant professor at Miami University who wrote his dissertation on the history of segregation in Austin. “The city was built to be separate but equal under Jim Crow. Parks were built for African Americans, and parks for whites and Latino schools were placed in very specific parts of the city. In 1930 you’d see African Americans scattered all over the city, but ten years later they were all on the east side. Then, in the early 60s, the city built I-35 right through the divided area.”

The highway still stands. Jutting across the edge of downtown, a manmade dividing line establishes where “Austin” ends and Austin starts. The city didn’t just refuse to integrate; it built a massive concrete barrier to remind minorities where they belong.

“Austin is one of the only cities I know that has a higher population of African Americans in the suburbs than in the city,” continues Busch. “The racial and economic geography is inverted. In most cities, you have a downtown with a lot of money, and then some areas around that that are bad, and surrounding that are the suburbs that are wealthier and whiter. It’s the total opposite in Austin.”

Right now, Austin stands as the only fast-growing city in the country that’s actually losing people of color. The schools remain segregated by the same designer gerrymandering that split Austin apart at its inception. It’s night and day. West Austin and East Austin. “People are interested in conversations about testing, they’re interested in conversations about accountability, but as soon as you bring up the idea of white kids, brown kids, black kids, and kids of different background going to school together, you’re going to hear crickets in the room,” said University of Texas education professor Julian Vasquez Heilig, who completed a study showing that Jim Crow–era segregation persists in Texas.

Every conversation I’ve had about Austin with outsiders has been punctuated with positivity. We are the ideal. Everyone has heard cool things. Everyone is planning a trip to SXSW next year. The culture has done an excellent job of propping up the mirage. Your first trip through “Austin” will take you through about 40 streets. You’ll see exciting people in action and freshly painted concept restaurants on every corner. You’ll see a parade of tattoos and $12 sandwiches. If you’re lucky, you might even get to visit the gentrified parts of the east side, dine in WuWu Sushi, or buy beer from the Quickie Pickie. You’ll see the new condos molded in young concrete and stand in the shadow they cast over El Taquito on Riverside. You may not see a single one of the Latinos that reside within its borders, although they make up 35 percent of the population. Austin will do anything to make you believe in its promise, even if it must feast on its own.

But how can we posture ourselves as an exception when we know what’s happening outside our windows? There seems to be a perception in the Austin community that because we have rock clubs we’re immune from societal ills. In the face of the numbers, Austin falls right back in line: a rich Texas town that holds on to its whiteness for dear life.

Austin incentivizes the rebranding of its slums, pushing people farther out into hill country to make room for incoming tech companies. We all know this; it’s an open secret. But rent is cheap, and the vibes are chill. It’s hard to feel like a bad guy when you’re just looking out for yourself. Gentrification tastes good. It’s certainly not unique to Austin, either—plenty of cities have done their best to keep the races separate, but there’s only one whose cultural motto is a demand to keep the city weird.

“Keep Austin Weird.” That’s the ever-present, often parodied motto. You’ll find some version of those words in every yuppie café within the borders: “Keep Austin Local,” “Keep Austin Wired,” “Don’t Dallas My Austin.” It’s tongue-in-cheek, but it says something about the way we perceive ourselves.

There’s a belief among Austinites that our city needs to resist outside pressure, and that we’re the ideal. Nothing needs fixing beyond the traffic on MoPac.

The pride of that mindset is poisonous. Someday, Austin will need to realize that not everything is OK.

Follow Luke Winkie on Twitter.

In the wake of the war in Kosovo, investigative journalist Michael Montgomery traveled to the Balkans to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Serbs. His scrutiny brought to light evidence that suggested links between a black-market crime syndicate and the upper echelon of the Kosovo Liberation Army—indicating that the end of war doesn't necessarily mean the end of war crimes.

Image via Flickr user chaircrusher.
You’re dragging yourself around downtown, barely awake and with a slashed-up foot. You need to sit, to rest, even to sleep, but the crowds just keep coming and you know from experience that they’ll kick you if you’re in their way. You see a little corner, a quiet nook, and with bitter relief you imagine yourself recuperating there. But it’s impossible. Somebody has installed a device, some kind of metal object, and what appeared to be a calm cranny is in fact a nest of spikes. In Canada, until very recently, only pigeons experienced such things.

That changed last week, when a building on Montreal’s Berri Square installed rows of spiked metal bars at its base. The owners’ intent was doubtlessly to deter homeless people from lying down there, from creating an unsavory or revealing scene at the edge of one of Montreal’s most troubled (and homeless person-intensive) public spaces. But following an article published in Le Devoir last Tuesday, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre took to Twitter to call for the spikes’ removal, stating that “I guarantee that these spikes will be gone today, even if I have to remove them myself!” Later that day, the offending devices were removed.

The Montreal incident follows a similar furor in London, where last Monday Mayor Boris Johnson opined (again via Twitter) that the spikes installed at a South London luxury apartment complex are “ugly, self-defeating & stupid.” Though a petition was circulated against this installation—gathering over 100,000 signatures—private property laws are such that the building owners are under no obligation to comply. When activists noticed that British supermarket chain Tesco had installed a plate of spikes on the sidewalk outside one of its downtown stores, however, they poured wet concrete over them (for more on this story, check out VICE UK). Soon after that, they were removed.

In spite of the recent uproar, these devices are nothing new in London. As it happens, I lived in the British capital back in the early 2000s, and first noticed these things on an office block somewhere between Clerkenwell and the City. I found them striking at the time, because I had never seen anything of the sort in my native Canada. I recall them seeming to signify something about London; they indicated that this was an older and colder place than I came from, that Londoners were prepared to take harsher measures on this and other things than were my countrymen. But maybe Canada wasn’t all that different. Maybe we were just a bit behind.

According to Canada’s Homelessness Partnering Secretariat (a federal government-operated group), there are between 150,000 and 300,000 homeless people in Canada. In 2012, a McGill University study stated that up to 28,000 of them are located in Montreal. Given such numbers, it is impossible to expect that this will be anything but a highly visible social issue in Canada’s largest cities. But this was not always the case. In the 1960s, even reports prepared by advocacy groups did not mention the phenomenon of people sleeping in the streets; instead, they cited “poor-quality accommodations” like rooming houses or charity flops. Until the federal government began to transfer funding from affordable housing initiatives to shelter construction in the mid-’80s, the spectacle of Canadians living and sleeping in public spaces was largely unknown. Every time I visit Montreal or Toronto with my London-born father, he is astonished by how many people are sleeping rough. When he immigrated to Canada in 1974, he noted, “it just wasn’t like that.”

The presence of spiked plates is a rare example of a social debate taking physical form. Though the mayors of Montreal and London might tweet disgustedly about these things, their view is not the only one. On the opposition’s part, Breitbart UK journalist Milo Yiannopoulos has already busted out some heavy imagery, calling out “the fulminating spinsters of the left-wing press” for their “pearl-clutching” and their “squeals”; according to Yiannopoulos, the spikes are simply a healthy incentive, a visible expression of “good city hygiene.”

In spite of the Berri Square incident, this sort of “hygiene” remains foreign to Canada. In London, a great deal of that city’s Victorian West End was developed around small parks enclosed by iron spikes of the “it would-hurt-if-you-fell-on-them” variety. Only residents of the surrounding houses could enter, and trespassing was and is a criminal offence. Though activists may have forced the removal of Tesco’s particular row of obstacles, their counterparts remain scattered throughout the city, impervious to petitions if not poured concrete.

In Canada, so far, the whole thing has prompted more than this sort of grassroots, defensive actions. Following Mayor Coderre’s protest and removal of the Berri Square spikes, Québec Solidaire MNA Manon Massé has asked Government Whip Lucie Charlebois (whose portfolio, as unpromising as it may sound, “includes homelessness”) to amend the Liberal government’s action plan for the homeless.

Charlebois has stated that the new plan would be released as soon as possible, adding that “spikes are not the answer.”

As heartening as that might seem, though, spikes are not really the center of this issue. Though Massé may personally feel (and publicly express) that spikes are barbarous, the spikes are just one property owner’s self-interested response to a vast social concern. It might have been a shitty response, or an insensitive one, but the spikes are arguably less barbarous than the situation of a country whose homeless population has skyrocketed over several decades of continuous growth.

In London, where anti-homeless devices are everywhere, another protest is scheduled for June 21. In Canada, where devices have been removed, we will await a new proposal from the government. Without some sort of unprecedented plan to reverse a decades-long increase in homelessness, we will find ourselves in exactly the same position as we did Tuesday morning, save for the removal of one landlord’s ungracious steel protest. Could it be that in collecting our spikes, we will have still somehow missed the point?

Screenshot via.
Last week, many Ontarians were surprised to see Kathleen Wynne, the Liberal incumbent premier, get re-elected into a majority government after her party had so many costly skeletons in their closet they have yet to answer to. Her majority government owes a lot, I think, to the intense crappiness of Tim Hudak—who managed to turn everyone from teachers, cops, and liquor monopolies against him.

One enemy that Tim Hudak did not have working against his Progressive Conservative campaign machine, however, was the Globe and Mail’s editor-in-chief, David Walmsley.

A day before the provincial election, Jesse Brown’s Canadaland podcast broke a story alleging that David Walmsley overruled the newspaper’s editorial board, who overwhelmingly chose to endorse Kathleen Wynne. At the very last moment, a senior source at the Globe, who Jesse cannot name, and who was not recorded by Canadaland, insists that Walmsley overturned the Liberal endorsement. The post goes as far as saying that Walmsley was following directions from the publisher, who was “carrying out the orders of the Globe-controlling Thomson family.”

Canadaland also has Facebook screenshots showing how the Globe pushed back announcing their endorsement by an hour, which would seem to indicate there was some kind of internal hiccup that led to a delay.

Screenshot via Canadaland.
Just before this allegation broke, David Walmsley appeared on the Globe’s own online news show, Globe Now, to discuss the paper’s endorsement for a Conservative minority. The Globe Now video quotes Professor Paul Booth, who graded all of the editorial endorsements in Ontario, and gave the Globe an ‘F.’ He articulated the silliness of the Globe’s choice very bluntly:

“Recommending that voters return a Conservative minority is nonsensical. How do voters practically implement such a recommendation?”

To this criticism, Walmsley responded: “The thrust of what we’re saying is that there needs to be a period of maturing for the Conservatives, and that Tim Hudak needs to do a better job of explaining some of the math behind his job proposals. But the idea that we’re saying there should be such strategic voting that can ultimately result in a minority is something that’s beyond the individual, but a hope for the province—that is what the Globe and Mail would hope—so that there are reigns applied to Tim Hudak should he win.”

If Canadaland’s story is true, it seems like Walmsley’s confusing defense of their minority endorsement is essentially horseshit. If there was actually an agreement that the paper would go forth with a Kathleen Wynne endorsement and Walmsley changed it at the last minute, it’s hard to believe that there was any genuine “hope” from the Globe that the government Ontario was about to elect would in fact be a Hudak minority.

I sent several emails to David Walmsley and Sylvia Stead, the Globe’s Public Editor, who should probably be dealing with this controversy (since it’s her job) but almost all of my requests for comment were ignored. The only response I got from the Globe was sent yesterday, when I wrote to both Walmsley and Stead asking if they would be providing comment. Stead responded, only by saying: “I won’t.”

When I pressed her on it further, saying that I was planning on writing a story about this and I did not want to proceed, in an ideal world, without comment from the Globe, she wrote: “I'm not in the office today and wasn't for the past two weeks so I am unable to say anything without taking some time to look into this. If you listen to Mr. Walmsley's interview on the Globe show you hear him say that ultimately the decision is his.”

Stead’s what-Walmsley-says-goes defense is acceptable if you run a newsroom strictly under military-style “chain of command” rules, in which case, the editor-in-chief can truly can do whatever they want, and thereby overrule any decision they want. But, speaking personally as a member of the Ontario public and as a journalist, it doesn’t feel kosher for an editor to misrepresent their editorial team’s views by printing a statement that uses the royal we, but really only reflects the beliefs of that one editor. Especially when the statement is used to influence an election (though, as we can plainly see, the power of the Globe’s endorsement is nothing to be impressed with).

Almost zero media attention has been paid to the Globe endorsement scandal, unless you count numerous tweets from media personalities, and a scathing article that Andrew Mitrovica ran on iPolitics yesterday evening. Mitrovica referred to the Walmsley allegation as “in-house censorship” and described Sylvia Stead’s handling of 2012’s Margaret Wente plagiarism scandal as a miserable failure.

It’s hard to disagree there.

Given the Globe’s recent history mishandling an internal scandal, I suppose it’s not surprising to see them plug their ears and close their eyes and pretend no one thinks it’s weird that their editor-in-chief reversed a decision to endorse the Liberal party at the very last minute, but we should expect better from Canada’s “paper of record."

@patrickmcguire