Japan is a country that is dying—literally.  A nation that was once considered the strongest economical powerhouse in the world, rivaling the US, has now slipped to second best. Japan has more people over the age of 65 and the smallest number of people under the age of 15 in the world. It is the fastest growing negative population in the world, and that's because hardly anyone is having babies. In these difficult times, the Japanese are putting marriage and families on the back burner and seeking recreational love and affection as a form of cheap escape with no strings attached. We sent Ryan Duffy to investigate this phenomenon, which led him to Tokyo's cuddle cafes and Yakuza-sponsored prostitution.

More about how we love in 2013:

Tinder and Grindr Users See Some Crazy Shit

You Can't Just Walk Around Masturbating in Public, Swedish People

Just Before Dawn at a Berlin Swinger Club

Veterinarian Dr. Mark Gerard (left) entering the courthouse in Mineola, New York, with his attorney, F. Lee Bailey, September 1978. Dr. Gerard was convicted of fraud for masterminding a horse-racing scandal that involved switching two thoroughbreds. Photo courtesy of the Associated Press

Cheating is deeply woven into the fabric of horse racing. The sport is such a magnet for shady characters and below-the-table dealings that the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act was introduced in Congress this past May, with the intention of curbing rampant dope abuse and “ensuring the integrity and safety” of horse racing. The bill has little chance of becoming law, but it speaks to the potential for corruption in a sport that, to the public, is perceived to be venerable and accessible to all classes.

I first learned about dishonesty at the track in 1966, when I was 16 years old. My father, an avid gambler, would take me to Vernon Downs in central New York to see the standardbreds, harness horses who trotted or paced while pulling a two-wheeled sulky and driver. My father would always look for an “uncle” of mine who magically knew which horses would win and lose; if he wasn’t there, we were out of luck.

As a horse-racing journalist for nearly 40 years, I’ve reported on racetracks all over the country. Along the way I’ve witnessed countless scams ranging from ingenious scores to harebrained disasters, and during my time as a reporter at the New York Post in the 70s, I became an expert in analyzing suspicious races.

Sometimes, if you look closely, it’s obvious that a jockey is pulling on his mount’s reins to slow it down; other times you see a worse-than-usual finishing time and can glean that the riders conspired to let a subpar horse beat the field. But the best indication that a race has been tampered with is when exotic bets on the order of the first few finishers (exactas, trifectas, and superfectas) produce payoffs much lower than normal because everyone in the know has laid down heavy money.

In the 1970s I hung around New York’s three thoroughbred racetracks: Belmont, Aqueduct, and Saratoga. Back then the biggest payoff of the day was the trifecta in the last race—and the races routinely defied all handicapping logic. During the summer of 1974 at Saratoga, it was generally accepted that the jockeys were greedy little men in cahoots to fix the triple on a near-daily basis. Favorites inexplicably finished out of the money, and long-shot trifecta payoffs were far smaller than they should have been.

This all came to a head in 1974, when the popular jockey Michael Hole told trainer John Cotter that he’d been approached to pull one of John’s horses during the Saratoga meet. John reported it to the stewards and was subsequently questioned by the New York State Racing and Wagering Board about the alleged foul play at the state’s thoroughbred tracks. In allegations that first surfaced publicly in a 1978 Sports Illustrated article, John implicated two-time Kentucky derby winner Jacinto Vasquez in the Michael Hole bribery incident and identified jockey Angel Cordero Jr. as one of its ringleaders. The board notified state and federal authorities, who were already investigating the man who was ultimately behind the attempt to bribe Michael, a Boston mobster named “Fat” Tony Ciulla, for race fixing.

Fat Tony, who had been pinched for bribing a jockey in New Jersey on tape and later convicted on charges related to race fixing in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, subsequently agreed to testify against many of the top figures in horse racing about hundreds of fixed races. In his testimony he explained how he paid off jockeys to engineer outcomes, like at the Aqueduct on April 2, 1975. On that day he bribed four separate jockeys to make sure their heavily bet-on steeds finished out of the money at the ninth race. According to Fat Tony, jockey Braulio Baeza stiffed Ham, the favorite, who finished fifth, while Jorge Velasquez ensured that Boston Boy came in sixth. Angel Cordero Jr., on Saratoga Prince, and Mike Venezia, on Sassy Prince, trailed the field. I remember the race well, because I bet on Saratoga Prince and went home broke.

Rags to Riches (left) passes Curlin to win the 2007 Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York. Photo courtesy of EPA/Justin Lane

The sensational testimony of Fat Tony resulted in numerous convictions all over the country. In return, the mobster got to brag about his exploits in public and was given a new identity by the Feds. Michael Hole, on the other hand, was found dead of asphyxiation on April 22, 1976. His body was discovered in the front seat of his parked car, its tailpipe blocked. The death was officially ruled a suicide, but given his involvement in exposing fixed races, it doesn’t take an overactive imagination to believe foul play might have been involved.

But you don’t need to be a jockey to manipulate what happens on a racetrack. Mark Gerard, a top veterinarian whose clients included the great Secretariat and Kelso, masterminded one of the ballsiest attempts to game the system in history. In 1976 Mark bought a pair of horses from Uruguay and shipped them to his Long Island barn. One of them, Lebon, was a cheap horse, a low-level claimer. The other, Cinzano, was a champion. The two horses were almost identical, aside from some subtle markings, and Mark prepared a double scam. First he reported that Cinzano died in an accident the day after arriving in the United States and collected $150,000 in insurance money. In actuality, it was Lebon who suffered the “accident,” leaving Cinzano free to race as Lebon. On September 23, 1976, “Lebon” was entered in a $16,000 claiming race at Belmont Park. His modest past performances were reflected in his 57-to-one odds. But the competition was easy for Cinzano, who won the race under his alias. Mark slipped up by making and cashing a big bet on Lebon/Cinzano himself—he picked up $80,440 in winnings, but was recognized while receiving his ill-gotten gains by racetrack officials, who were naturally suspicious. Mark was eventually caught, and his license suspended. He ended up in Florida, treating polo ponies.

Lest you think these types of schemes are relics of some fast-and-loose golden era of betting on the track, last April, when members of the Zetas cartel were on trial in Austin, Texas, for money laundering, Gerardo Mata Morales, an operative in the Mexican drug gang, testified about his smuggling of cars and cash through Texas and New Mexico. Some of these profits, prosecutors claim, were used to fix a big quarter-horse race—the 2010 All American Futurity at Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico.

Miguel Trevino Morales, Gerardo’s brother and leader of the Zetas at the time, wanted Gerardo’s 22-to-one long shot, Mr. Piloto, to win no matter what. Quarter-horse races take place over very short distances; if a horse gets a bad break from the gate it has almost no chance of winning. With this in mind Miguel bribed the assistant starters, who ensure the horses exit cleanly from the gate, to hold the favorites. Mr. Piloto crossed the finish line first, taking home the winner’s share of the $1 million purse.

While the general public hears about high-profile scandals involving ruthless drug cartels, over my decades of reporting, I’ve found that most racetrack regulars believe there’s a lot more fixing going on than what makes the headlines. Any game that involves gambling will inspire attempts to control the outcome, but unlike cards or dice, horseracing has an extra element of difficulty—a wild, four-legged beast that isn’t in on the scheme and can ruin a fixer’s best-laid plans.

My favorite story about a cheater trying unsuccessfully to influence a race’s outcome happened on February 24, 2007, at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. The meet was in its closing stages, so I was paying close attention to trainers who had yet to win a race—for instance, I knew John Botty was a solid horseman, but he had suffered a run of terrible luck. After 15 starts his horses only had two second-place finishes and five in third place. John entered a horse named Ghostly Magick in the next race, confident about his chances. I was feeling optimistic as well, so I placed a bet on the horse. Then John told me about the peculiar way jockey Donnie Meche was warming him up.

“He took him away from the pony and started warming him up as if he were arthritic or sore,” John said, adding that it was a sign that something fishy was going on. Donnie, who’s received multiple suspensions over the years for suspicious rides, tried to get Ghostly Magick scratched by telling the track vet the horse was lame and he wouldn’t ride it. After the vet found nothing wrong, John had only seconds to find another, more honest rider before the race started. He went into the jockey’s room and found a youngster named Ramsey Zimmerman looking for a mount. Minutes later Ramsey rallied Ghostly Magick down the stretch and caught odds-on favorite Content Cot in the final yards to win the race.

I went to the window and cashed my bet. It felt good to make an honest buck.

Howard Ashman in 1977. Archival photos courtesy of Kyle Rennick.

The first week of November 1989, filmmakers and executives from the Walt Disney Company gathered in a crowded room in Disney World in Orlando, Florida, to promote their latest cartoon to a group of pessimistic reporters. The press had reason to be skeptical: after two decades of critical and commercial flops following the death of its founder, Disney was bordering on bankruptcy, and the company's new CEO, Michael Eisner, had threatened to shut down the animation unit unless The Little Mermaid, its fall 1989 release, turned a profit.

As you probably know, they didn’t need to worry. The film was a huge hit, at least partly on the strength of its soundtrack. The New York Times praised the film’s music, and the movie won Oscars and Golden Globes for Best Song (“Under the Sea”) and Best Score. Two decades after the its release, Disney World remodeled Fantasyland to create an entire section devoted to Mermaid. But back then, in the crowded conference room, nobody knew this. The room was grim, and for good reason—if the filmed flopped, their careers might follow.  

The panel that sat in front of the press that day included Ron Clements and John Musker, the geeky animation-directing team whose last film, The Great Mouse Detective, had performed reasonably well, but not well enough for Eisner’s taste, Jodi Benson, the Broadway veteran who voiced Ariel, and Alan Menken, a composer from Westchester, New York. In this crowd, the last member of the panel—Alan’s collaborator, lyricist Howard Ashman—stood out like a sore, sickly thumb.

Skeletally thin and speaking in a soft but firm voice, Howard looked worn-out and effeminate, more like one of the gay men you’d see drifting around New York’s Lower East Side than someone who made family movies. He spoke with passion about Disney’s rich musical history, but after the panel, it was clear something was wrong. After the press conference, when the attendees adjourned to try out some of the park's attractions, Howard limped up the Dumbo ride’s ramp and had to call for his boyfriend, Bill Klaus, to assist him. Once Howard reached his Disney associates, he rode Dumbo, smiling like he was just another Hollywood native touring Disney World. As usual, he was doing the best he could to ignore that he was dying of AIDS.

“He was completely focused and energy driven,” Jodi recalled to me 23 years later. She didn’t realize the extent of his illness until 1991. “I got the call to fly to New York City from Los Angeles. When I arrived, I was able to visit him in his room as he was listening to auditions for the voice of Aladdin. Then it really hit me: this was very serious.”

After the events at the park, Bill rushed Howard to their hotel. Howard was gasping for breath; he struggled to walk. Inside their room, Bill took out medicine and an IV catheter and stuck the catheter into Howard’s chest. He considered advising Howard to retire or at least work less, but Howard had told Bill he was determined to focus on the film’s premiere, and on his next two movies, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. By then, Howard, like many gay men, had been dealing with AIDS and death for years.

From left: Howard in 1975; Stuart White (left) and Howard on a beach in Rhode Island in the summer of 1976; Stuart in 1975.

Fourteen years before that press conference, in 1975, Howard moved to the West Village to try to make it on Broadway, like so many others. He arrived with Stuart White, who had been his lover since they met at a summer theater program at Tufts University in 1969. Despite the widespread prejudice against gays that existed back then, they didn’t try too hard to conceal their relationship. “As much as two men in 1970 could be together as a couple, they were, without ever saying they’re a couple,” Howard’s younger sister, Sarah, said.

While looking for an entry-level theater position in New York, Howard bumped into Kyle Rennick, an old acquaintance who had also moved to the city, and soon Kyle had become Howard and Stuart’s best friend. “We became New York gay boys, who went to see shows and stayed up to the wee hours,” Kyle told me. “I had a crush on their relationship.”

One night over drinks, Kyle told Howard, “I can’t tell you how much I admire your relationship. I hope I’ll be lucky enough to have that one day.”

“I hope it doesn’t deflate you that there are problems,” Howard replied.

The main problem was that Stuart—who was so charismatic, he was practically irresistible—slept with other men. When he was out and about in the Village without Howard or Kyle, he accepted sexual advances from strangers and took advantage of all the free gay love that post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS-risis New York had to offer.

Howard agreed to group sex and collaborated on plays with Stuart to salvage the relationship, but neither play nor work prevented Stuart from cruising. In 1980, Howard moved out of the apartment they had shared for five years and began dating a man named David Evans.

Howard and David would later part ways, but neither Howard’s sister nor Kyle remembers when or why they broke up. By then, the early 80s, Howard had begun to collaborate with Alan Menken; their second musical, Little Shop of Horrors, an adaptation of a 1960 movie of the same name, beat out Cats for the Drama Desk Award for Best Musical and sold out night after night. After years spent struggling to launch a theater career, Howard had a hit, but he never had the chance to celebrate his success. Shortly into the run, Stuart called Howard and asked him if he had heard about the “gay cancer” that the New York Times had written about. Stuart had it.

Over the next few weeks Howard visited Stuart at St. Vincent’s hospital. He forgave Stuart for his unfaithfulness and watched his first love age before his eyes, losing pound after pound, growing weaker and weaker, until he died in July of 1983.

“He was the first person I knew who died of AIDS,” Kyle said. “Something bad was happening, and there was absolutely no help.” Within 15 years, Kyle would slowly lose all his gay friends, including David, Howard’s second boyfriend. Because David’s old-money parents disowned him due to his illness, it fell to Howard to look after David till he died. Afterwards, he inscribed David’s tombstone with his real, seldom-used first name, Chester, in case his mother decided one day to search for his grave.

After all that tragedy, Howard found love again in the Boy Bar, a gay club in the Village, on Valentine’s Day weekend 1983 when he hit on a young Midwestern architect new to Manhattan.

“He courted me,” Bill Klaus recalled. Over the next few weeks, Howard invited Bill to dinner and to socialize with his collaborators on Little Shop. “He came on strong,” Bill said. “He was ready for someone to settle down with. I was reluctant, but I saw that it was working.”

That summer, Bill spent several nights a week eating and sleeping at Howard’s converted firehouse apartment on Hudson Street, 12 blocks away from Bill’s glorified closet in the East Village.

But the city triggered Howard’s memories of Stuart and David. One night, Howard took Bill to see The Fly, David Cronenberg’s sci-fi film that features Jeff Goldblum’s graphic transformation into a bug. Howard fled the theater in tears. “He has seen so many healthy young men around him deteriorate. It was something he recognized,” Bill said.

Howard needed to leave New York, he needed a new life away from AIDS, and it was just at that moment that Walt Disney Studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg called him up.

Howard coaching Jodi Benson in the studio during a recording session.

After Katzenberg took over Disney’s motion-picture division in 1984 at Michael Eisner’s request, music producer David Geffen advised him to hire “the genius” Howard Ashman and his songwriting partner Alan Menken to compose songs for Disney’s animated movies. Geffen, who was one of the original producers of the Little Shop of Horrors play and was working on a feature-film adaption, predicted Ashman would become a legend.

In 1987, Howard began visiting Los Angeles for two weeks at a time to write the songs for The Little Mermaid with Alan Menken and improve the script. With a new career in front of him, Howard decided to use his new Disney money to build his dream home with Bill. As it happened, Bill’s gay Uncle Sid owned a plot of land next to his home in Cold Springs, New York, in the Hudson Valley. Sid told Bill and Howard, “If you want, we’d be happy to give the other half of the land to Howard, and you could build your house there.”

After years of anxiety, Howard finally had the career and home he always wanted. By the spring of 1987, Bill had hired contractors and had blueprints drawn up.

Then, in March, he woke up with white patches on his mouth.

Howard visited a gay-friendly doctor in Manhattan, who diagnosed the patches as oral thrush, a symptom of AIDS. He then checked Howard’s T cells. They were dramatically low, another sign that Howard had the "gay cancer" that had killed two of his boyfriends.  

Howard stayed away from Manhattan, where his friends would recognize his symptoms for what they were, and decided to postpone telling his friends and Disney associates about the illness till he had entered the final stages of the disease. He did tell Bill the news, which prompted Bill to wonder out loud whether they should make plans for the future. “Do we really want to start building this house?” he asked Howard. “We’re taking on a lot.”

But Howard didn’t want to give in to the disease that had already taken away so much from him—he insisted they build the house and keep his disease a secret. His partner agreed. “How do you take another dream away from somebody who has this condition?” Bill wondered retrospectively when I spoke with him.

But after The Little Mermaid’s release and success, Howard’s health deteriorated, leaving him unable to take care of himself or travel. Before production started on Beauty and the Beast, he called Jeffrey Katzenberg and finally told him he had AIDS. “I don’t know if you know what’s going on, but I’m not well,” he said. “If you want me to work on this project, I have to work in New York.”

Katzenberg hired Howard a private nurse and ensured that he received the most advanced medications available. Every few weeks, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin’s production crew flew to New York to collaborate with Howard. From his deathbed, Howard wrote the lyrics for Beauty and the Beast’s songs—three of them would be nominated for Best Song at the Academy Awards, and the movie’s title song would win the Oscar. The film was the first-ever animated feature to be nominated for Best Picture, but Howard wouldn’t live to see its release.

In Cold Springs, Bill oversaw construction on Howard’s dream home. “We lived with optimism,” he told me, but Sarah, Howard’s sister, recalls it differently. “As a lot of people discover, the construction and building process takes longer than you’d expect. [The disease and the house-building] were going against each other." 

On March 14, 1991, Howard succumbed to his illness. Beauty and the Beast, which he never got a chance to see, is dedicated to his memory. A month later, Bill finished construction on Howard’s house, where he lives alone today.

“If I had to do it over again, I never would have built the house,” Bill said. “We would have bought a house or something in the city. I fell into the house after his death. I did my grieving and mourning here. It’s an odd fit: it’s a house I like very much, but it was custom tailored for a life with Howard.”

Kyle has dealt with a different set of problems, including an intense case of survivor’s guilt. “Everyone I knew died,” he said. “I survived. I couldn’t understand that at all. Because I had done the same kind of behavior, I deserved to die.”

In recent years, preserving Howard’s legacy and managing his complicated estate has become Sarah’s full-time job. When I met her last summer near her home in Tarrytown, New York, she discussed organizing Howard’s papers for the Library of Congress and managing howardashman.com, a website dedicated to reminding fans of Howard’s life outside of Disney.

“I don’t want him to be romanticized as this Disney hero,” Sarah said. “I want people to remember that he was a person.”

@mitchsunderland

Also by Mitchell:

My Family's War with Animal Activists

Trying to Understand the English Gays at Oxford

Life After MySpace for the Scene Queens

NEWS

AUSTERITY'S DRUG OF CHOICE

Sisa Is Destroying the Lives of Athens’s Homeless People

By Alex Miller

A meeting with an anarchist in Exarcheia, a district of Athens. Photos by Henry Langston.

Standing in the Athens police headquarters, interviewing the director of the drug unit, I realized I had a bag of chemically enhanced crystal meth in my pocket. I’d bought it the night before from a Greek homeless man and had forgotten to throw it away. After the interview, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette, which is when some officers noticed the film crew I had brought along, who were recording from a distance. 

Minutes later the cops dragged us into a holding room, the little packet of drugs still stuffed in my pants. They made some calls, glared at us and eventually, reluctantly, released us—without ever searching me, thankfully. On my way out, I threw the baggie into the first garbage can I passed.

Several Greek police stations have been firebombed in recent months, so the cops have reason to be nervous, especially when they notice that they are being filmed. On our first evening in Athens, a different group of officers approached us and, after spotting our film crew down the street, demanded to see our papers. They deleted our footage and detained us for a couple of hours, until we’d managed to get our passports delivered to the station. Greece is a paranoid place at the moment. The police, fascists, anarchists, dealers and drug users are all fighting for local supremacy and no one trusts anyone else. 

The night before our close call at the Athens police headquarters, I was approached by a group of homeless people, one of whom was smoking some horrible-smelling stuff through what appeared to be a meth bowl made from an old lightbulb. Although I don’t speak Greek, I managed to let him know that I wanted to buy some of the drug, colloquially known as sisa. The homeless guy wandered off with my five-euro note, and afterward an old man grabbed my arm and shouted, “No, no take! Very bad.” I wasn’t going to smoke it, but I was very curious about Greece’s infamous new drug. 

In 2012, Charalampos Poulopoulos, director of KETHEA, a government-funded antidrug, rehabilitation organisation, authored a research paper titled “Economic Crisis in Greece: Risks and Challenges for Drug Policy and Strategy” for the journal Drugs and Alcohol Today. In it, he detailed the ways the Greek economic disaster has exacerbated drug use in the country, claiming that “rates of drug and alcohol consumption... as well as the associated mental-health problems are set to rise the longer the recession continues.” At its essence, the report provides data for the obvious: the instability that results from widespread and increasing nationwide poverty leads to hopelessness, health problems, and self-medication by way of street drugs. 

“In the last two years drug users have become more self-destructive,” Charalampos wrote. “Especially in the region of Athens where the effects of economic crisis are more obvious.” According to him, it was around this time that sisa emerged on the market.

The basic ingredient of sisa is methamphetamine. Addicts have reported that it can also contain filler ingredients like battery acid, engine oil, shampoo and cooking salt. “There is no official data on that,” Charalampos told me. “The General Chemical State Laboratory of Greece hasn’t gotten enough samples to reach any conclusions yet.” 

Whatever’s in it, in many ways sisa is the epitome of an austerity drug. The majority of its users are poor, often homeless, city dwellers reeling from the psychological and physical impacts of a country in the grip of total economic collapse. In a country so broke that upper-middle-class families reportedly ate their Christmas dinners in unheated homes so they could afford a turkey, many users’ habits have become unsustainable. Addicts who’ve been priced out of using smack, crack, and meth have turned to sisa, which costs as little as two euros a hit.

As with most cheap highs, sisa comes with some nasty side effects, including “insomnia, delusions, heart attacks and aggressiveness,” according to Charalampos. “It’s often compared with cocaine,” he said, though it acts faster, and the effects last longer than coke. “It’s the drug of the streets, produced in home-based laboratories.” 

Sisa is the latest grim example in a global trend toward mass-produced synthetic drugs, from the skin-eating opiate cocktail krokodil in Siberia to South Africa’s new fascination with getting high from souped-up anti-AIDS meds to the bath-salts craze in America and the UK. These are cheap, DIY highs, so it’s no wonder that in poverty-stricken Greece, sisa has found a natural home. 

Kapodistriou Street, a long road in the center of Athens, where sisa users congregate.

The day we arrived in Athens, we approached a man as we walked through Exarcheia, a district that’s traditionally been home to anarchists and is now known for its high concentration of addicts. The man was glaring at the sky, shouting. I thought he was screaming at God, but it turned out he was just yelling about a broken traffic light. Cars swept past, their drivers giving him no opportunity to beg at their windows. He was inconsolable, flitting between rage and tears, but after I bought him an orange juice, he chilled out, said his name was Konstantinos and told me all about sisa. 

“The cocaine of the poor! It’s the cocaine of the poor!” he shouted. He said that people he knew who smoked too much were losing limbs. “If you smoke it for six months, you’ll be dead,” he said. He claimed that he wasn’t a user, but the next day I bumped into him again and he beckoned for me to follow, squatted behind a car and smoked a pipe full of sisa. It was the middle of the afternoon.

Sisa has become something of an urban legend in Athens; everyone knows it exists, but no one knows exactly what it is. The only people with any real understanding of it are its users, the police who bust them and the dealers who fuel the epidemic. The rest of the country is too busy trying to ignore the country’s 58 percent youth-unemployment rate, the rise of the far right and the extreme left, an increasingly ineffective legal system, a political class reduced to selling the nation’s islands and the European Union’s demands for austerity measures that may or may not be working. As such, reports about sisa in the Greek media have been rare.

“We found out about sisa from a paper by the European Center of Disease Prevention in November,” said Dani Vergou, the health editor of the newspaper Efsyn. Sisa was a mystery to her. She’d heard rumours, but “there’s not much research from the Greek authorities or the Ministry of Health. It just sounds dangerous.” 

In the streets, though, people know all about it. On Kapodistriou Street, one of the most popular junkie hangouts in Athens, I met Kostas, Stathis and Panagiotis – chronically homeless addicts who have been trying to kick sisa, without much success. 

“There’s three ways you can take sisa,” said Stathis, who’s in his 40s. “With a pipe, with a syringe or with a piece of aluminum, and I’ve seen people snorting it as well. But let me say that if you shoot it, you don’t have long to live. It destroys all vital organs from the inside.” I asked him if he knew of anyone who had died from taking it.

“Many,” Stathis said. “I know too many. For some, their innards rotted… It might give you other sorts of sicknesses, it might hit your liver, your heart, kidneys... anywhere.” 

A bag of sisa we bought for $6.50. We suspect we were ripped off.  

The three of them spoke darkly about sisa. “When I had it for the first time, it freaked me out,” Panagiotis said. “I didn’t like it. It tensed me up, I didn’t feel good at all.”

“It melts you,” Kostas said. “It hits others in their nervous system. It creates wounds on the body that don’t heal, they never close. It starts like a pimple and instead of healing, it grows. Even the user’s face is full of holes.” 

“You see 50- to 60-year-old guys addicted to sisa. Men, women, wherever you look, sisa,” Panagiotis bleakly added. “Everywhere in Athens: alleys, squares, smoking all day long and looking for more sisa. You don’t hear about heroin anymore, or weed or pills. This is because sisa is a cheap drug… For me sisa is the drug that will destroy Greece.”

Later the trio took us to the Off Club, a day center for sisa addicts, where the attendants handed us zine-like comic books about the dangers of the drug. The club is located just off Exarcheia Square, which is cluttered with coffee shops, bars, gangs, teens, immigrants and others on society’s margins. Near the square is the enormous building that houses Athens Polytechnic, one of Greece’s most prestigious universities, and where, in 1973, the military sent tanks to break up an antigovernment protest, resulting in 24 deaths. The police don’t patrol around here much; instead they stay in their riot vans on the square’s outskirts, smoking cigarettes, submachine guns hanging from their shoulders. A few anarchists I met harbour a conspiracy theory that the police themselves are behind the influx of sisa into the neighbourhood.

In a nearby bar, we met a notorious young anarchist who we’ll call Alcander. In 2008, during the anarchist riots, he allegedly manufactured gasoline bombs and handed them out en masse. Two years ago, Alcander noticed that homeless drug addicts were acting differently; then he had the shit kicked out of him by a group of people he claimed were users. He said that he directly blames sisa for their wanton aggression, and the way he spoke about the drug made it sound demonic. “How can I tell if someone’s a sisa user? It’s easy – they’re unbalanced, unstable, like a psychopath. They have crazy eyes, are talking to themselves and they are very aggressive. I think sisa is the worst drug in the world.”

I asked him why he thought local police officers were behind the distribution of the potentially fatal narcotic. “Some of [the users] came to us and said that the police told them to go to Exarcheia. They said, ‘We cannot do it anywhere else, they send us away from all the other territories, all the other squares. They said go to Exarcheia.’” 

“So you believe it’s political?” I asked. 

“Yeah, this whole social movement is starting to rise up, and they want to have an excuse to come in as a savior for the residents... They’ve done it before, like two decades ago with heroin.”

Greek anarchists have already begun fighting back against the sisa epidemic by coordinating attacks on dealers and users in an attempt to clean up their neighbourhoods. “We want the children to play in Exarcheia Square and not have to worry about drug dealing,” Alcander said. Their goal doesn’t seem like it will be met any time soon, however. Users are scattered throughout the city and, presumably, other parts of the country. And over the course of our visit, sisa dealers appeared out of nowhere to sell their wares before charging off just as abruptly. 

According to Alcander, some women in the area have been raped by sisa addicts. However, this could be a rumour inspired by the idea that sisa fuels sexual appetites – a description that some addicts agree with. Konstantinos said that after he smokes sisa, he usually ends up having wild, violent sex. And he wasn’t bragging; he looked upset about it.

A sisa user smoking his pipe on Kapodistriou Street.

As recently as 2009, it was a rarity to see homeless people in Athens. But since then, homelessness in Greece has gone up 25 percent, according to Greek activists, and today, a drive through the city feels like touring a never-ending Skid Row. The police have even started throwing the homeless in the back of vans and driving them out of Athens to Amigdaleza, an immigrant detention center, in an effort they’ve dubbed Operation Thetis, after Achilles’s mother. The word thetiko, taken from her name, means “positive”, but in the minds of the homeless people it targets and those who work with them, it’s nothing short of fascistic. 

“This is crazy policing,” said Charalambos. “It pushes people with the problems to the margins, and toward criminal behaviour.” While we were in Greece, the homeless people we spoke to claimed that at least twice a day, the police were conducting sweeps through the center of Athens to round up the homeless and drug addicts.

“We don’t know where they’re taking them or what they’re doing it for,” said one social worker, as I accompanied her on her nightly tours of addict hot spots. “It’s a mystery.” She was being coy; it was obvious what she thought the police were doing: cleansing the streets of undesirables. 

A couple days later, we visited Kannigos Square, where prostitutes, addicts and drug dealers (who, we’d been warned, were often armed) congregated. The atmosphere was tense: earlier that day, about 20 uniformed policemen had rounded up the homeless situated throughout the square and loaded them into three large buses. When we arrived, plainclothes cops were still milling around a crowd of tweaked-out sisa and heroin users. 

The sergeant who had detained us and deleted our footage when we arrived in Athens was also there, so we hid our cameras and approached his colleagues. They told to us inquire at the local headquarters, which is how I ended up accidentally bringing sisa into a Greek police station, where I met George Kastanis, the director of the Athens narcotics division. He said that he thinks sisa originated in Africa and Asia, and although he told me he was increasingly worried about its popularity, he didn’t believe the drug was turning users into violent maniacs and rapists, which matched up with my own impressions – very few of the addicts I met had showed any signs of aggression. When I asked George about Operation Thetis, he told me that it had been enacted only once. 

“But I saw something this morning that looked a lot like a sweep of the streets. Was that Thetis?” I asked. 

“No. It’s something completely different,” George answered, adding that these detainees are taken to police stations where the cops check for outstanding warrants against them, and that most of the time, they’re set free after an hour and a half. When I asked him whether he believed schemes like Operation Thetis were useful, he looked as though the question made him uncomfortable and said, “I’m a policeman – I follow orders.”

The follwing day, before returning home, we bumped into Konstantinos again and took him to a bakery to get him some lunch. We stood in the sun, eating small, honey-covered balls of dough, while Konstantinos tried to explain something in broken English. He kept running his finger across his neck to clarify his point, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was a nice guy, the son of a prostitute who said he’d always been surrounded by drugs, whose quality of life had become immeasurably worse since Greece’s financial collapse. We gave him prints of some photos he’d asked for earlier, and he left smiling, saying he loved us. 

“You know what he was trying to tell you before?” my translator asked me later. “That he loved you, but if you’d approached him in English that day underneath the traffic light, he would have got his sisa dealers to kill you for your cameras.” 

Watch our new documentary, Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor, now on VICE.com

Read more about drugs on VICE:

Internet Psychonauts Try All the Drugs You Don't Want To

New Frontiers of Sobriety

We Can't Get High Like We Used To

Chicago is a misunderstood city. More renowned for its crooked politics, oppressive violent crime, and shitty weather than whatever the local tourist board tells you, the true essence of the place is barely known or appreciated by outsiders. For over a century, Chicago has been home to a diverse collection of hustlers, radicals, and eccentrics, all of whom have helped to give the "Paris of the Midwest" its unique cultural vernacular.

Between 2010 and 2013 I documented candid moments and attempted to build a picture of the city. These images are the result of that project. 

For more of Sam's work, check out his website.

Does your town or city qualify for paradise status? Send your pitches to ukphotoblog@vice.com. Don't be shy.

Previous Paradises:

Detroit / Lahti / Budapest / Leeds / Dublin / Birmingham / Miami / Phoenix / Tbilisi / Los Angeles / Berlin / Rotterdam / Bristol

The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) is supposed to prevent passengers from slipping anything that could be used as a weapon past its multiple layers of security personnel, scanning devices, and explosive-detecting swabs. Trouble is, there are a slew of items that you can purchase just past the security checkpoint that can be turned into a makeshift arsenal. Evan Booth, a computer programmer and self-styled security researcher has crafted a wide range of explosive, incendiary, and projectile-launching devices made from seemingly innocuous items. VICE’s Tim Pool traveled to North Carolina to meet with Evan and get a demonstration of how the massive and costly infrastructure of the TSA may be little more than a security blanket.

It's hard to predict the habits that end up defining our personalities. Most of us strive to remain close to the norm, recognizing our few deviant tendencies and working to correct them, or perhaps bury them further into private routine where no one can gawk at them. But life intervenes and unforeseen events or dispositions that were once unfamiliar to us can draw us into patterns of behavior that we wouldn't have otherwise predicted.

I’m officially a homebody, and pretty much everyone around me knows it. Every day when I return home from work and enter my room, I put down my bag, take off my coat, close my eyes and feel the deepest euphoria. I am now in my space and have nothing on the docket for the rest of the night. I can strip down to boxers and a T-shirt and lie in bed, watch movies, work on beats, and smoke away the stresses of the day by huffing clouds of smoke. Occasionally, this meditation is thrown off schedule by my obligations, things that most people would consider part of a normal social life: parties, concerts, dinners, meeting for drinks. I try to minimize these as much as possible. They become especially hard to avoid on weekends.

Like most people, I have a group of friends that understand me, whom I don’t have to make an effort to hang out with. With these cats, I generally smoke hard and shoot the shit a couple times a week. Outside of this crew, I care very little to make new friends. My whole life I’ve been enthusiastic and friendly when I meet people, and for a long time I meant it, but over the past few years I’ve noted people seeing through my pleasantries and catching a glimpse of my impatience and unease at having to have conversations. As they’ve caught on, I’ve made less of an effort to hide it. That probably makes me come off like kind of a dick, but frankly if that’s what it takes for me to be left alone, I’m all about it.

Before I start sounding like a stereotypical pothead, let me fill you in on why I find myself most comfortable at home. Yes, weed probably has something to do with it, but it’s another substance entirely that has led me to this place. The central point of socialization in New York, as it is in most places of the world, is alcohol. Sporting, coupling, celebration, sympathy, relaxation, and just about every other social institution, save for AA, is accompanied by drinking. In college I was as limitless in my capacity for alcohol as any 21-year-old, but this invincibility disintegrated for me suddenly, in a single act inflicted upon me by a 14-year-old kid. Just after I graduated from college, I was out drinking, positively shitfaced, with a friend in Baltimore when we were jumped by a gang of boys trying to steal our cell phones. One of them stabbed me in the throat with a broken glass bottle.

The edge missed my Carotid artery by an eighth of an inch and instead severed the nerve that controls the area between my right shoulder and elbow, immediately leaving the area paralyzed. Though there are plenty more fascinating details of that ordeal, in the context of this story it serves to establish the next year of my life trying to recover. I lived with constant, excruciating nerve pain for many months, and no drugs, not even the ones designed specifically for nerve pain, did the trick. My doctor, knowing how fucked I was, pretty much gave me an open prescription to anything I wanted—if not to address to pain, to distract me from it. He first prescribed me Oxycontin, and I had the wits to ask for something weaker and less addictive. Instead, I was given hordes of generic Percocet. Alongside these awful little things, I self-medicated with weed, nearly doubling the amount I was smoking in college. For those months, I scarcely left the house, and like a geriatric or a prisoner, every excursion out became an adventure, as exciting and horrifying as retrieving buried treasure from a mystical ancient ruin. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine a trip to the barber gave me so much adrenalin. I was scared of everything: packs of kids, people on bikes, anyone walking behind me. The only solace I had was that I would eventually return home to my room, where I could be alone and in silence.

Alcohol never, ever felt the same to me again. Though in subsequent years I had several nights of drunken debauchery, I’d always have to force myself to ignore the horrible nausea, dehydration, headaches, and restless sleep that consistently result from alcohol. I still will never say that I don’t drink or that I have quit drinking, because it’s too dire of a statement to make and I still occasionally hold and daintily sip a token beer, but I will say plainly that I hate alcohol. I can understand why people like it, but to me it’s a corrosive poison that will forever be associated with disorientation, vulnerability, and imminent death.

After about a year, my shoulder made a surprising and unprecedented recovery, giving me nearly the full range of motion I had before the injury. I got a job and eventually moved out of my mom’s house. My prescriptions ran out, and I didn’t ask for refills. Kept smoking the same amount though, perhaps even a bit more in the absence of the pills. I resumed my social life but began to see every engagement as a chore. The comfort that I had felt as an agoraphobe never left my temperament, and I would watch the clock any time I was out, waiting for the right moment to make an exit. Another deterrent for me was that as my drinking diminished to nothing, my friends grew into real Philadelphia men, for whom drinking was a consistent habit. Overworked, embittered, and slowly being crushed by the responsibilities of the real world, their beer bellies grew, and to this day those paunches remain monuments to their owners’ desperation for escape. 

My own habits hardened alongside theirs, and when the day came for me to move to New York, I plunged into the change knowing that it would be good for my working life, and recognizing that a lot of it would bother the shit out of me. Here, it’s hard to be a young person who’s a homebody. People think it’s weird when someone in their late 20s doesn’t go out. According to every movie, TV show, and commercial, going out and getting fucked up is what I should naturally strive to do. Instead, I get invited to go to things, and I always make up an excuse involving work or some prior engagement. To this day, I haven’t told a single person the honest truth: “That sounds nice, but I was really looking forward to getting the hell away from you and all other people in the world tonight so I can sit on my ass and get stoned out of my mind alone, so I’m going to do that. I’ll be in my room smoking tons and tons of trees, reading comic books, and eating candy.”

When I first moved here, there was a slight, natural guilt I sometimes felt for ignoring all the shit that most people consider to be fun and staying home instead. When I’m holed up in my room on weekend nights, I can hear the wasted knuckleheads through our paper-thin walls, bounding around the hallways and screaming, guys and girls without the wherewithal to walk a straight line or speak using inside voices. It’s hard for me to imagine wanting that now, and as I get more set in my ways it seems less and less likely that I’ll ever enjoy that lifestyle again.  

@ImYourKid

Previously:

Weediquette - Acid Reflections

Weediquette - Prohibition Smoke Down

Weediquette - The Serene Stonedness of Dabbing Errl

Image via Flickr user another.point.in.time.

This week, I lost a childhood friend to drugs and alcohol. He was only 24 years old. My friend was a brilliant musician and talented artist, but he was also dependant on benzodiazepines to function. Although we’re still waiting on a coroner’s report, I believe his drug addiction may have contributed to his death.

My friend never spoke about why he used or if he suffered from childhood trauma. All I know is that he liked to use the way that I did. I remember one time he invited me to Disneyland when I was sixteen. He had a hotel room there, and by the time I showed up at 2PM, he had already started partying. At the time the amount of drinks he drank, pot he smoked, and Xanax he snorted didn’t seem like a big deal. Looking back, I wonder why he needed all those substances just to ride Splash Mountain.

Sadly, he’s not my first friend to die of a drug addiction—he’s isn’t even the first friend I've lost this year. But his death still blows my mind, because going to friends’ funerals never gets easier. To see the parents’ despair is gut wrenching, and as the mother of a newborn baby, I can’t imagine my child leaving this world before me. Young peoples' deaths leave their friends and family with many unanswered questions—the biggest one being “What could I have done differently to prevent my child’s overdose?” But I understand how these deaths can happen. Having been addicted to prescription medication myself, I know first hand how dangerous these drugs can be.

At a very young age, psychiatrists prescribed me large doses of medication, but never taught me about the drugs’ addictive nature and side effects, which can be fatal. When my doctor first gave me Xanax, he never mentioned the drug can cause seizures, heart attack, stroke, and hallucinations if I abruptly stopped using them. Instead, after years of use, I began to depend on the drug. It led me to having even bigger anxiety attacks than I was having in the first place, because the thought of not having enough sent me into a state of paranoia. If I didn’t have the benzos to numb the pain and trauma, I believed I wouldn’t be able to function—I went into a spiraling hole of fear and wasn’t able to leave my house.

What has happened to my friends and me aren’t isolated events. Currently, 70 percent of Americans are on some sort of prescription medication. The US Center for Disease Control report says, “The estimated number of [Emergency Room] visits involving nonmedical use of benzodiazepines increased 89 percent during 2004-2008 (from 143,500 to 271,700 visits) and another 24 percent during 2007-2008."  

People weren’t always this way. Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, measured both historical Social Security Administration payments for the mentally ill and rates of mental illness hospitalizations. In the US one in 300 were considered mentally ill in 1955. Today, one in 50 people are diagnosed as mentally ill.  And according to the National Institute of Mental Health, Anxiety Disorders affect about 40 million American adults age 18 years and older. 

Clearly, people are using these drugs because we're afraid. But what are we afraid of? I personally was afraid of the pain. The pain associated with living a life without a bumper or a safety net, which were my drugs. It seems as if we must be afraid of life, itself, afraid of the human experience.  The English philosopher and mystic, Alan Watts, called it the “quaking mess.”  This is what we are. To be human involves a certain amount of shakiness, anxiety, and a sense of separation.  But what makes the problem unbearable is our attempt to try to get away from this. 

I know my friend must have tried to get help in the past, but I don't know how. At one point or another, every person who abuses drugs questions their use and tries to find a way out. It was absolutely vital for me to get off all medication when I chose the path of sobriety—I knew that I needed to rip the Band-Aid off and face my life head on in order to recover.

Unfortunately, many of us do not know the way out.  We are lost and turn to doctors and licensed professionals for help who then give us quick fixes for our unbearable problems that has lead to the deaths of many of my friends and many more to come. There is hope; slowly but surely we can all make the decision to wake up and face this human experience together as a community. But if we don’t change, in fifty years, we could all be a bunch of fucking zombies. All walking around (or probably driving) and going shopping; not really home, but not dead either. Zombies because someone thought it would be a good idea for thousands of people to heal their pain with drugs. If we don’t experience the pain and the challenges, then we also can’t experience the joy and elation of being alive.

@ItsAlexisNeiers

Previously - How Do We Solve North America's Heroin Epidemic 

 

Shorty Rock on the streets of Central, the neighborhood that is the epicenter of Cleveland’s scrap trade. All photos by Peter Larson.

One sweltering afternoon in July, I found myself breaking and entering into a derelict warehouse on the east side of Cleveland. I was in the middle of a crash course in metal theft from a man named Jay Jackson. Dressed like a plumber with a crumpled blue baseball cap on his head, Jay’s muscular physique belied the fact that he was once a crackhead. These days his life still revolves around illegally acquired goods, but not ones smoked, snorted, or injected: Jay makes his living stripping copper and steel from abandoned buildings like the one we were sneaking into, selling his yield by the pound to scrapyards for quick cash.

“Scrapping is just like being an entrepreneur,” he said, leading me toward a gaping hole in one of the warehouse’s walls, which we then scurried through. “It’s just a job, and you can make as much money as you put into it.”

Earlier that day, I’d used Google Street View to map out our jaunt through the epicenter of the city’s thriving scrap trade, the neighborhood known as Central (counterintuitively located on the east side of town). But the building Jay and I broke into looked completely different from what I had seen on my computer screen. The photos on Google, taken in 2009, showed a tidy vacant office building with nearly all of its windows intact and sturdy wooden boards blocking off its many entrances. But now it looked like the aftermath of a drone bombing in Afghanistan: every window was blown out, every orifice torn open. The stinking carcass of a rodent was splayed on the floor. The drop ceiling had been ripped down, revealing empty tracks where ventilation, piping, and wires once snaked through the building. I couldn’t believe that we were only a ten-minute drive from the stadiums, skyscrapers, and fine dining of downtown Cleveland.

The place may have looked like a dump to me, but to Jay it was a treasure trove of unknown proportions. “I could bring my torches in here and cut that steel box right over there,” he said, tiptoeing as he critiqued the work of the scrappers who’d already hit the spot, rattling off a litany of different ways to dissemble the building “properly.”

Jay and his cohorts, he explained, didn’t do hit-and-runs; they worked in teams, living in an abandoned building like this for weeks while meticulously taking apart every square foot for all it was worth. A scrapper like Jay can earn a couple thousand bucks on a big haul. Metal thieves with his approach are so good at tearing things apart, in fact, that sometimes the City of Cleveland has had to replace support beams and girders of buildings after they’ve been gutted so the huge structures don’t just collapse. Jay, by his own reckoning, told me he was in the “deconstruction business”—and in Cleveland, business is booming.

Like many tangential commodities in this tumultuous economy, the good fortune of Cleveland’s scrappers is a direct result of the misfortune of the city’s home and business owners. Between 2000 and 2008, Cuyahoga County, which encompasses Cleveland, racked up the most foreclosures per capita in the country—a whopping 80,000 houses were repossessed by banks, or about one out of every eight homes. Entire blocks were abandoned or sold to financial institutions, which have in turn left these homes sitting empty.

The east side of the city, the heart of the scrapping industry and the hardest hit by the recession, in many places brings to mind the rotten mouth of a meth addict, with decaying structures in every direction and great, gap-toothed spaces where homes and businesses sheltered and provided livelihoods for thousands of Ohioans. Today there are more than 16,000 of these empty properties, each stocked with lucrative goodies that can be scrapped, such as aluminum siding, metal-laden appliances, copper wire, and plumbing, all just waiting to be ripped out of the walls.


Jay Jackson walks down a secret path to Wilkoff and Sons, one of Cleveland’s largest scrapyards. They buy most of their metal from smaller operations, shred it up, and ship it across the US and overseas. Jay said he frequently steals metal from this yard and sells it to other yards.

Due to the combination of the 2007 mortgage crisis and a roughly simultaneous rise in metal prices worldwide, scrapping has exploded in cities across America. And nowhere more so than in Cleveland, which has the highest number of reported metal thefts per capita in the country. As a result, Cleveland has become the sort of city where ten to 20 manhole covers go missing in one night and a toddler falls into one of the pits left behind; where people joke about getting electrocuted just walking down the street because the ground wire has been plucked from all the telephone poles; where copper statues downtown honoring important figures in American history have been replaced by composite ones painted to look like copper to deter thieves. The scrappers, in other words, are everywhere, boldly tearing away at the city’s infrastructure in broad daylight like vultures hovering over a pack of lemmings that followed one another over the edge of a cliff.

So it wasn’t surprising when Jay and I, after snooping around the warehouse for a bit, bumped into another scrapper on the ground level. Filthy and sweaty, he said his name was Sean. We caught him sizing up some heavy beams that Jay believed could fetch about $300 per ton at the yard. Naturally, Sean refused to be photographed and didn’t seem too happy to see us—he wanted this spot all to himself. Trying to spook us, he told what sounded like a tall tale about how he was working for the building’s owner, who was trying to salvage the place before turning it into a fish farm. “He’ll probably be here in about an hour,” Sean said. Jay didn’t think he was very convincing.

It was obvious that Sean didn’t want to talk to me, but when I asked him how much he could score in an average haul, he couldn’t pass up the chance to brag: “I’m living in a nice-ass house. You could look at where I live and you’d never think I scrap. To be a scrapper, you’ve gotta be a hustler by blood. I make money—about $200 a day. I know how to get it.”

Jay and I left Sean to his work. As we stepped out of the decrepit warehouse and into the sunlight, I turned to Jay and asked why he scrapped instead of finding a job that people might find more respectable. He looked at me like I was an idiot and flashed me a receipt for $511.

“This right here,” he said, “some folks don’t even make this in a week. If I’m working a minimum-wage job, I’m not getting this. I’m going to get maybe $300. What’s $300 gonna do you? How can you provide for your family or put a roof over your head with $300?”

I didn’t have an answer.


Towering piles of scrap at Wilkoff and Sons. The ladder on the right is used by scrappers to sneak in and steal metal.

Although I was born and raised in Cleveland, the rabbit hole I crawled down with Jay was nothing I’d seen in the 20 years I spent growing up there. The Cleveland I’m from is the one you read about in fluff pieces in regional magazines that describe at length how the city is being revived thanks to gentrification and urban renovation. There is a renewed vitality on the west side of Cleveland, and I see it when I hang out with my old friends who didn’t jump ship and move to other cities after college, like I did. They live in spacious lofts west of the Cuyahoga River, where old warehouses are being converted into alternative-living spaces for artists, and it’s not hard to catch a farmer’s market or drink a locally brewed IPA—a little dollop of Brooklyn’s gentrified renaissance sandwiched between the city and the suburbs.

Back on the east side, it’s a totally different story. There, old and abandoned warehouses and factories aren’t going to be renovated anytime soon—they’ll just continue to rot in plain view for years, maybe even decades. It’s here that the stories of metal scrapping, a clear symptom of the city’s dismal economic prospects, have become a gray-market industry.

While I was in town, I was invited to a big dinner with my girlfriend’s family, who have also lived in Cleveland for decades. Everyone at the table had a horror story about metal theft. They piled on anecdotes, from local churches and beauty salons that were hit for their air-conditioning units to homes raided for their siding and wiring.

“It’s so bad, people go around painting NO COPPER on their houses now,” my girlfriend’s dad said. “But that’s almost an invitation, if you ask me.”

After spending time with Jay and learning how scrappers strip homes and what they look for, I was curious about the other side of the equation: how they fence their goods so easily.

One morning, wandering around the east side not far from where I spent time with Jay, I met a guy who goes by “Shorty Rock.” He was pushing a shopping cart of random scrap down East 55th Street in Central and agreed to let me follow him around as he scavenged and, more important, as he sold his stolen goods to a yard. We wouldn’t have to walk far; there were countless abandoned buildings and scrapyards lining every block. If Jay is a “professional” scrapper, a master of big-money jobs, Shorty is more representative of your average hustler who just sells what he can find on the street to survive.

Shorty was short, of course, and talked fast and with a Southern drawl. As he pushed his rickety shopping cart, he explained that his game was simply haphazardly ripping whatever he could grab off a house, stuffing it into his cart, and running off with it. On his very best day fencing metal odds and ends, he said he had made $111—a rare score.


A dumping area in one of Cleveland’s many scrapyards, where scrappers can bang up household appliances and consumer items and extract their metals onsite.

On the day I met Shorty, he had been pilfering the skeletons of buildings since 5:30 AM and was on his way to cash in at the New Western Reserve Recycling Center, just down the street. As we walked, Shorty told me his story, one typical of most scrappers: he was 51, had spent eight years in the penitentiary, and hadn’t been able to land a steady job since he got out in 2002. “I’ve been out longer than I was in there,” he said. “And I can’t even get hired at Walmart.”

As a young man, Shorty said, he had never imagined he’d be covered in dirt and sour sweat in 90-degree heat, lugging stolen metal down the streets of Cleveland for a few bucks. He told me he was originally from Arkansas and claimed to have a couple years of college down in Georgia, but had been kicked out for committing aggravated robbery—the cause of his first stint up the river.

As Shorty told me about his time in the pen, I thought about Jay. Even though Jay made bigger hauls than Shorty, their backstories were similar. Jay had been to the penitentiary six times in his life—mostly for drugs—and agreed to help me out at the behest of local law enforcement to avoid going back in again for a violent altercation he’d had with another scrapper over who would haul in a load. And, like a lot of the scrappers I met, Jay had a history of drug abuse; scrapping had initially helped him support his habit. However, now that he was relatively clean, one of Jay’s biggest hustles was buying stolen scrap from addicts for bargain-basement rates at all hours of the night and then selling that scrap to legitimate yards in the morning at a profit.

Shorty was a talkative guy. As he pushed his cart along the street, he spun several yarns about the scrapping life. The most interesting—and one that I had no way of verifying—was about an undercover millionaire who earned his fortune stockpiling scrap from properties owned by Case Western Reserve and University Hospital—large institutions in Cleveland that sprawl across a tremendous amount of land and equipment in the city.
“This dude opened his house up,” Shorty told me, “and nothing fell out but metal. He could make $2,000 in an hour by selling that stuff.” The story was the scrappers’ version of a Horatio Alger tale—if you hit hard enough, anybody could get rich doing this.

While it’s very hard to believe that individual scrappers are making millions off stolen metal, with Cleveland’s average income at just $27,470, and one in three people living below the poverty line, metal theft beats many of the other job opportunities—both legal and illegal—in the city. Considering that the supply is endless, the risks of getting caught are low, and the ability to distribute is as easy as walking down East 55th, it almost seems like a sensible career path for many.

“I wish I knew about this scrapping shit when I was 20,” Shorty said as we arrived at New Western Reserve Recycling, a dreary little yard tucked around the corner. “By now, I would probably have my own legit company and be sitting back, married with 25 kids.”

Shorty then performed a ritual I would witness dozens of times during my trip, as he fenced items at the yard with no questions asked: An attendant took Shorty’s load and placed it on a wide cement floor scale, where he weighed it and took a photo. Then a clerk at one window printed out a ticket, which he could redeem for cash at another window. When Shorty claimed the money, they linked the load to a digital profile the yard keeps on file that includes his photo. This new feature is mandated by recent legislation designed to enable law enforcement to trace stolen scrap back to its seller—but according to Cleveland police officials from the Central neighborhood, like Vice Sergeant Heather Misch of the Third District, it’s not helping.

Part of the problem is that it’s nearly impossible to differentiate between scrap metal that isn’t stolen—when a property owner lawfully dumps off some old sinks or wiring, for example—and scrap metal that was ripped out of a vacant or occupied building. There’s also the fact that metal thefts often aren’t reported, at least in the case of abandoned homes, because there’s frequently no owner around to realize they’ve been robbed for quite some time. Criminal scrappers will also travel across city and state lines to unload hauls, or mask their metal by melting it down, banging it up, or bundling it with other scrap so that it’s harder to trace.
But Shorty didn’t have to do any of that at the local yard. He was able to get rid of his haul of siding and other metal bits, lifted less than a mile away, without hassle. When he received his cash, he flashed me the receipt clutched in his grubby palms and grinned. The result of five hours spent scrounging the streets? $5.54.


Councilman Anthony Brancatelli, of Cleveland’s 12th Ward, outside an abandoned house in Slavic Village; its aluminum siding had already been completely scrapped, save for that on its stoop.

In the past decade or so, scrapping has become a major phenomenon across the US. As with most clandestine and illegal activities, precise numbers are hard to quantify, but Gary Bush, a metal-theft expert at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) in Washington, DC, believes the increase in scrapping in recent years has been significant. ISRI created a Scrap Alert system in 2008, which has made it easier for police departments and metal yards to alert each other of criminal scrapping activity. Some police departments’ vice squads, usually tasked with investigating drug- and sex-related crimes, have also begun investigating metal thievery, and according to ISRI, metal-theft claims rose more than 500 percent between 2009 and 2012.

Meanwhile, the image of the dirty metal hustler has penetrated the cultural consciousness. AMC’s new Detroit-based crime drama Low Winter Sun features several stories that take place at the nexus of scrapping and drug dealing, and Detroit rapper Danny Brown famously flipped Young Jeezy’s drug-dealer anthem “Trap or Die” to explore the ins and outs of the metal-theft game with his track “Scrap or Die,” reimagining scrapping as a form of class warfare against property owners: “This metal crowbar’s gonna get us through the door,” he spits. “We come to take everything, nigga, fuck the landlord.”

It makes perfect sense that Detroit—America’s most vivid and stereotypical symbol of postindustrial collapse—would serve as the setting for so much scrapper mythology. The scrapper is the perfect antihero of this landscape, creeping through the shadows and sifting through the wreckage of the American economy, trying to turn a profit from it any way he can. Many scrappers got into the game to replace some other form of lost work, and now, with 14 million vacant homes across America, they are yet another reminder of the largely unresolved financial crisis and its lingering effects on American cities. What better figure to embody the resulting contradictions of this recession than these postindustrial termites. They are at once some of the most pernicious creations of the recession, literally scrapping the future of their cities, and also enterprising Americans—in the most classic of ways, as an attempt to pick up the pieces of a broken economy out of necessity and with true grit.

Although the setting for these types of “American hardship” stories in newspapers and magazines is often Detroit, Cleveland has a far more serious scrap problem than the Motor City. It’s true that Detroit is second to Cleveland in overall metal-theft claims nationwide, but it doesn’t even rank in the top ten when you break down these claims per capita. Cleveland has 73 claims per 100,000 residents, according to a study by the University of Indianapolis. The next closest city, Flint, Michigan, has 66 claims per capita; Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio, also top the list. Cleveland remains number one, and scrapping here has even caught the attention of the FBI, who have recently been investigating and busting organized rings for transporting stolen metal across state lines and stealing from federally regulated electrical substations.

On a national level, most experts partially view the recent rise in scrapping, beginning around 2008, as a byproduct of skyrocketing prices for steel and copper, which was itself the result of increased demand for those metals worldwide. According to Joe Pickard, chief economist at the ISRI, scrap prices began to climb then and reached their peak in 2011, when copper was fetching as much as $4 per pound. Most scrapyard owners, law-enforcement officials, and informed scrappers believe this rise in demand was the result of a building boom in China; however, Joe told me he believes it also has to do with US mining production falling behind projected outputs. Either way, about 30 percent of the scrap that is illegally lifted out of the homes and warehouses of the United States is likely to make its way overseas; some of it is then sold right back to US buyers in the form of cheap industrial and consumer goods. And although mining production in the US has ramped up in the past two years, and the Chinese building boom has cooled significantly, the criminals who learned how to scrap between 2008 and 2011 show no signs of being thwarted—instead they’ve adapted their skills to strip abandoned homes left over by the foreclosure crisis.

This is what has made Cleveland such ripe soil for the growth of scrappers. According to Councilman Anthony Brancatelli, who is leading an effort to fight scrapping in the city, the seemingly unlimited supply of scrap made available by the city’s uniquely beleaguered housing market is another key factor responsible for the boom. And Anthony would know: his ward contains Slavic Village, a Polish, black, and Hispanic neighborhood that was hit harder by foreclosures than any other zip code in the US and is still being ravaged by metal theft.

One morning, I met Anthony at a quaint Polish diner in the heart of Slavic Village. It took 15 minutes before he could get from the entrance of the diner to the booth where I was sitting because he had to shake hands and greet every person in the place with a dad joke that was just witty enough to impress, but not too funny to offend. He looked like a consummate statesman, and even on that scorching summer day he sported the politico wardrobe of an ill-fitting blazer and lapel pin.

Over some wheat toast and scrambled eggs, Anthony explained to me how you can trace the city’s housing troubles back to the late 90s, when people were “flipping” homes en masse: buying up properties, moderately investing in them, and then selling at inflated prices. Back then, rehabs of crummy houses were going for as much as $100,000, overvalued properties that were the first wave of foreclosures to hit the city. Then, in the 2000s, the housing market became very competitive thanks to exotic financing mechanisms. Mortgages were handed out like candy and people were buying way above their price point with no ability to pay their debts.
It was at this time, around 2008, that scrapping prices started hitting record highs. The lure of these high prices have led to what amounts to organized criminal scrapping. Guys like Jay started working in teams and renting industrial construction equipment to make bigger hauls. Then scrappers were stripping neighborhoods that weren’t completely abandoned yet, and soon after that manhole covers started disappearing and even electrical substations became prime targets.


Throughout Central, manhole covers have gone missing. In most cases, they’ve been swiped by thieves and scrapped for their copper.

“It was so bad,” Anthony said, “that contractors were driving their vehicles into the scrapyard because they were getting more for their beat-up pickup truck than they than they would if they were working.”

As the rest of the country pulls itself out of the housing crisis, Cleveland’s rate of mortgage delinquency and foreclosures remains at 9.5 percent. Anthony is adamant that the creative destruction of abandoned properties is the only solution to city’s housing issues. He serves on the board of directors of the Cuyahoga County Land Bank, which buys up blighted properties and either tears them down, or, in rare cases, rehabs and sells them to new owners. Anthony told me they’ve taken 500 properties offline in the past five years.

After breakfast, Anthony took me to my first “bando,” a blighted and vacant home in his ward, a few minutes from East 55th. The place looked like it had been ransacked by Huns. The front door was wide open, aluminum siding completely torn off, and every other imaginable piece of metal, even the hand railing on the stoop, had been stripped. Inside were jagged holes in the drywall where piping and electrical wire had been yanked out. Anthony has been providing simple solutions like working with the city to cut off the utilities on homes like this. Often, when scrappers remove the pipes, the structure is flooded with water that runs for days, and when they tear up the electrical wiring haphazardly, it can lead to fires.

“I can’t push demolition enough,” Anthony said to me as we stepped out of the foul atmosphere of the derelict house, back into the summer sun. “The more abandoned properties you have, the more abandoned properties you’re going to get. Which is why we’ve got to take them off the market.”

Anthony’s thinking is that empty lots are better than blighted buildings, because the damage caused by scrappers dismantling them from the inside out makes them just that more unsellable—the wreckage someone like Shorty Rock does for $100 in scrap can cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair.

After we left the bando and drove around Slavic Village, I saw community gardens on every block and two or three house-size gaps between homes on any given street. On one block, there was a huge velodrome for bicycle races, which was built on property acquired through foreclosures. Based on the 20 years I spent growing up in Cleveland, I had a hard time believing anyone older than 13 in Slavic Village owned a bicycle, let alone knew what the hell a velodrome was, but it’s clear that residents and legislatures of Slavic Village are getting so much land through this acquisition process, they don’t quite know what to do with it.

If Anthony and locals favor demolition, though, to people like Shorty and Jay—unemployed and without many legal job prospects—demolition represents a wasted economic opportunity. As I left Slavic Village, I thought of something Shorty had told me. “You’ve got thousands of condemned homes in Cleveland,” he’d said. “What do they do with all the stuff in those buildings? They send it to a landfill. Why wouldn’t you let someone who is unemployed go into a building and get what they can get? It’s going to be demolished anyway.”

Maybe that is the paradox of scrapping: the same economic forces that created the housing crises also helped create the scrappers who survive on its wreckage. And so, while city leaders like Anthony might see scrappers as their enemies—leeches on the city’s meager resources—both parties are part of the same destroyed economy and neither will likely stop harassing the other until the city finds some larger economic salve for its wounds. They’re all on this sinking ship together.

Demolition does have one upside—the opportunity to build something new and exciting in the place of what’s been torn down. The Slavic Village neighborhood is, unfortunately, an anomaly on the east side of Cleveland, with its velodrome and community gardens. Unlike the west side of town, with its hip, unconventional workspaces for artists in old factories, the east side is looking more and more like one of those ghost towns you see in old westerns. It’s not hard to imagine tumbleweeds blowing down the middle of some streets in Central—before falling into an uncovered manhole.


Henrietta “Cookie” Kolger, the owner of Tyroler Scrap, paying out money to a scrapper for assorted metals.

While the scrappers of the city make a decent living stealing metal, the best gig in the game is to run a yard: they’re the pawnbrokers who never have to get their hands too dirty, and rarely face related charges. Curious about the ethics (or lack thereof) when it comes to receiving stolen goods, I asked scrappers and others the best place to sell hauls, and one owner’s name in particular was on the lips of everyone: Henrietta Kolger, also known as Cookie.

Jay and Anthony both alleged, on record, that Henrietta and her yard, Tyroler Scrap, is a place that would buy any piece of metal, no matter how bent, ripped, or pried off it appeared to be. Vice Sergeant Misch had it on her short list of sketchy yards to watch. And even a victim of scrapping I interviewed had actually recovered his stolen property at Tyroler.

I had been trying to lock down an interview with Cookie for weeks, but whenever I called, her staff gave me the runaround: “You’ve got to call before 3 PM, she’s never here in the late afternoon.” “Whoa, she doesn’t get in until like 2:30 PM. You’re gonna have to call back tomorrow.” “Damn, you just missed her. She went to the bank to make a deposit…”

Cookie and her associates were right to be wary. Heat was starting to come down on Cleveland scrapyards. Local journalists and the cops had been poking around lately, and the last thing she wanted was to get caught up in some mess. Eventually, after visiting Tyroler in person two days in a row and explaining to her that I only wanted to offer her side of the story, since everyone was talking about her anyway, she did concede to a sit-down to speak her piece.

Cookie’s yard is not like most of the other ones on East 55th, many of which have sprung up in recent years alongside the rise in scrap prices. Tyroler is a small mom-and-pop operation that has been independently owned since 1935. Cookie’s late husband, Robert Becker, took ownership of the yard in March of 1988. A master welder who lived to work with metal, Robert spent every nickel he had to buy it.

Two months after Robert purchased his dream business, he had a massive heart attack at 45 years old. Before his death, Cookie had worked as the manager of a hotel, but in honor of Robert, she decided to pick up the pieces and keep Tyroler up and running. The business now employs her oldest daughter, her youngest son, and her second husband.

Tyroler is set up like most small yards, with a truck scale outside for the big loads and an oversize light-blue garage that contains a payout booth and a smaller scale for the kind of stuff brought in by cart-toting small-timers. The pay booth is where Cookie spends most of her days, cracking open the cash register and sliding greenbacks through a shelf to scrappers.

After so much hype, it was a bit disarming to meet the “top mama” of Cleveland scrap metals. I imagined she was going to be a hard-edged, fast-talking, stone-cold hustler. But when I stepped into the wood-paneled pay booth, which buzzed with the sound of air-conditioning and smelled of Mexican takeout, I met someone else. Cookie is a frail, withered woman with a quivering voice and varicose veins you could see through her cool, translucent skin. She wore comfortable shoes, and had a lumbering step that would make it tough for her to just walk across the yard. And she sported the puffed-up short haircut Midwestern white women get once they start receiving copies of AARP the Magazine in the mail.

Right away it was clear Cookie had an idea of her true value within the community—that she believed herself to be a good person. “I treat these people really nice,” she told me when I asked about her reputation among her clients. “I’m not prejudiced. I never look at somebody and think they’re beneath me… I’ve been here so long, most of my customers call me ‘Mom.’ When they pull into the yard, they yell, ‘Hey Mom! How are you doing? How are you feeling?’”

She lamented the days when the poor blacks kids of the neighborhood, barefoot and dirty, used to be able to collect aluminum cans for money to buy ice cream in the summertime. The increased regulation of the industry in the past few years means that these days you have to be 18 or older to sell scrap at a yard, even empty soda cans.

When I began telling her what I had learned about Cleveland’s scrap trade, Cookie’s face turned up at the thought of scavengers ripping siding off of people’s homes, and yards selling that metal to countries like China. She told me about how she had pushed local politicians at City Hall to institute scrapping permits—but her voice was drowned out.

Like all yards in Cleveland, Tyroler matches all sales with state IDs, a practice that hasn’t curbed theft. When I asked Cookie why some of those same customers had fingered her yard as the place where they sell all of their stolen wares, she looked hurt.

“When people get caught, they’ll just say stuff to try to keep themselves out of a lot of trouble,” she said. “But you know, Richard will tell you, he runs my outside yard. Richard, do I take manhole covers?”

Richard, her second husband, chimed in behind me, his mouth half full with some funky slop: “The only way we take them is if a contractor has given an authorized letter.”

I told Cookie that one of my sources had accused her of buying stolen manhole covers.

“I’ve heard when the scrapyards are closed there are people who will buy that scrap,” she said. “They pay a lesser price for it. Chris and I are the only two who do the scale in this place.”

Then she encouraged her daughter to chime in, too, shouting, “Chris, if I brought you a truck that had manhole covers, what would you tell me?”

Chris popped her head into the booth where were sitting, and spoke methodically. “We wouldn’t buy it,” she said. “Nobody here would take them. We’re not allowed to buy that.”

I’d come to Tyroler with the name of a manhole scrapper, who was turned in only a few months prior. When I asked Cookie to check her ledger, her hands started to shake and her voice fluttered. Unlike the newer yards—which use a computer program to match images, scrap hauls, and ID profiles—Tyroler still used a paper binder for its records.

“Tell me how you spell his last name, and I’ll look it up,” Cookie said.

“J-E-F-F-E-R-Y S-H-U-G-A-R-T,” I replied.

She flipped through until she finally got to S, and we scanned down rows of what looked like mug shots. Shugart was nowhere to be found. It all seemed about right. Neither of us had much of anything else to say other than goodbye.

Leaving the yard, I ran into a scrapper who was stripping reams of copper wire with a blade. I asked if I could speak with him or let my photographer take his picture, but he balked back.

“I ain’t saying nothing,” he said.

All Photos by Peter Larson.

Special thanks to Jim Henry.

Due to the criminal nature of metal theft, some names in this piece have been changed to protect their identities.

Follow Wilbert on Twitter: @WilbertLCooper

Read more articles by Wilbert on VICE: 

The Will to Kill

It's Probably Not Going to Be OK

My Dad Told Me a Black Man Would Never Be President

The Romance Behind the Designs of Robert Geller

Hello Comical Comrades,

It's almost 2014 so I have succumbed to peer pressure and put together a best-of-the-year list. Trying to rank creative works in order of goodness is sort of vulgar and stupid. People like lists more than they like comics though, so here is a list of ten good things that came out this year. I would tell you to buy these books for people for Christmas, but Christmas is over so I guess you'll just have to buy them as gifts to yourself, assuming no one loved you enough to get them for you.

#10
School Spirits
Anya Davison
PictureBox

Anya came out of left field with her first widely available graphic novel and it's great. She makes work that is psychedelic, pretty, and unlike anything else happening right now. It's a shame that this is one of PictureBox's final releases, but at least this great publisher went out at the top of its game.

#9
Epoxy 4
John Pham

John Pham's been doing a lot of good work for a long while but it's clear that he set out to astound everyone when he made this comic. The cover is beautiful and the whole thing was printed on a risograph. It’s full of ambitious drawings, as well as a whole other comic that is stapled into the main comic. The attention to detail in the new Epoxy makes it one of the best independent comics I have ever seen and one of the best objects I have ever owned.

#8
Life Zone
Simon Hanselmann
Space Face Books

Remember Simon? Sure you do. He's still doing great stuff.

#7
The Manara Library Volume 5: The Further Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman
Milo Manara
Dark Horse

Dark Horse has done such a nice job on the Manara series. This book features Milo Manara, who is a comics super-genius who's at his weirdest with the second Giuseppe Bergman comic.

#6
Lose 5
Michael DeForge
Koyama

Michael DeForge is the closest thing we have to a new Dan Clowes in terms of his ability to make each issue of his series special and perfect. In 20 years each installment of Lose will be a coveted art object that'll easily fetch for $60 to $90.

#5
Prison Pit 5
Johnny Ryan
Fantagraphics

If you don't buy every Johnny Ryan book right now then fuck you. Johnny Ryan consistently delivers the goods. No need to explain further.

#4
My Dirty Dumb Eyes
Lisa Hanawalt
Drawn and Quarterly

I'm guessing that this book is going to be on more of other people's "top ten comics of 2013" lists than any other. Lisa Hanawalt is great. My Dirty Dumb Eyes collects some of her best previously uncollected stories, articles, and comics into one nice little thing.

#3
Blobby Boys
Alex Schubert
Koyama

Blobby Boys is a comic about a gang of punks made out of green slime who go around doing bad shit. Everything about it feels very carefully designed and considered, on top of being hilarious. Also, I wrote the introduction for this book, so if you're enjoying this list you have that to look forward to.

#2
"'Tain't The Meat… It's the Humanity" and Other Stories
Jack Davis
Fantagrapics

Jack Davis is one of the most beloved EC artists, so making a book of just his EC horror work seemed like a no-brainer. Somehow it took 50 years, but it's finally here.

#1
The Adventures of Jodelle
Guy Peellaert and Pierre Bartier
Fantagraphics

Everyone should have this book regardless of their level interest in comics. Even if you don't give a shit about drawings that tell stories, you'll learn to love the comics medium through this book. This is a perfect and beautiful poster-art style French comic from the 60s about sex and gender issues and pop culture and stuff by some sophisticated Frenchos. You really can't do better than this book in terms of content or presentation. This is the best comic of 2013.

So that's my top ten list. Feel free to get really mad at what is and isn't on it. I stand by my list. I would like to give an honorable mention to Heather Benjamin who just generally ruled 2013 and made a book that is hard to get in America.

@NicholasGazin

NEWS

The Wizard of the Saddle Rides Again

Is a Park in Memphis, Tennessee, the Epitome of Racism in Modern America? The KKK Say It’s Just History, Many Others Disagree  

By Rocco Castoro

A cross-lighting ceremony that took place near Tupelo, Mississippi, in late March following a Ku Klux Klan rally in Memphis, Tennessee, that was organized to protest the renaming of three parks in the city built in honor of the Confederacy. It is a “cross lighting,” not “cross burning,” because these Klansmen “do not burn, but light the cross to signify that Christ is the light of the world.” Photo by Robert King.

I

n the middle of an unkempt park in Memphis, Tennessee, stands an oversize bronze statue of a Confederate lieutenant general astride his mount. Its subject, Nathan Bedford Forrest, is considered by some to be one of the most infamous and powerful racists in American history. The first official leader of the Ku Klux Klan, some historians allege that Lieutenant General Forrest’s most heinous act was ordering his troops to slaughter hundreds of surrendered soldiers at 1864’s Battle of Fort Pillow, more than half of whom were African American. Others celebrate him as the physical manifestation of the South’s ethos during the Civil War and beyond: a rebel hero who relentlessly campaigned for his cause until it became untenable; he never gave up, even after his death.

Unveiled in 1905, the Memphis News-Scimitar reported that the masterfully sculpted monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest (or NBF) would “stand for ages as the emblem of a standard of virtue.” And today it seems the newspaper’s prophecy was correct, except for perhaps the “virtue” part. As of 2013, “that devil Forrest,” as he was infamously nicknamed by Union General William T. Sherman, is still sprinting across a Tennessee ridge on his stallion, kicking up dust in a city with historically tense racial relations. 

Pink granite tiles and modest bronze headstones that look like plaques skirt the sculpture. General Forrest and his wife, Mary Ann Montgomery, are buried underneath. NBF’s more celebrated moniker, at least in some circles, is the “Wizard of the Saddle,” a nickname he earned for his wondrous equestrian talents in battle, and one that calls to mind the highest modern-day rank of the KKK—the Imperial Wizard. 

The latest controversy surrounding the park and statue came to a head in early February, when the Memphis City Council unanimously voted to change the name of Forrest Park to Health Sciences Park (at least temporarily; a special commission is still in the process of deciding its final name as of press time), in line with the downtown medical-student facilities of the University of Tennessee that surround it. Two other Memphis parks—Confederate Park and Jefferson Davis Park, named after the president of the Confederacy—were also renamed by the City Council, with the reasoning that they were publicly funded reminders of an era that could be considered offensive and unwelcoming to the majority of the city’s residents, 63 percent of whom are African American according to the 2010 census. 

Shortly after the City Council’s decision, a man identifying himself as Exalted Cyclops Edward announced that his chapter of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was planning a massive rally to protest the renaming of the three parks. “It’s not going to be 20 or 30,” he told local NBC affiliate WMC-TV. “It’s going to be thousands of Klansmen from the whole United States coming to Memphis, Tennessee.” Later  in the month the city granted the Loyal White Knights a permit for a public rally to be held March 30 on the steps of the county courthouse in downtown Memphis, one day before Easter and five days before the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel.  

It was an eerily familiar scenario for Memphians. On January 17, 1998, around 50 members of the KKK held a rally at the very same courthouse in what they claimed was an attempt to protect their “heritage” in the lead-up to MLK Day and that year’s 30th anniversary of his assassination. Outnumbered by counterprotesters, the Klan’s vitriolic screeds incited a small riot that resulted in looting and the ill-prepared police force teargassing the entire crowd. 

One Memphian and self-proclaimed member of the Grape Street Crips seemed to take the Klan’s threats to return to his city very seriously. Following the announcement of the planned rally, 20-year-old DaJuan Horton posted a video on YouTube in which he states that he’s organizing a consortium of local gangs—some rivals—to unify and show their discontent on the day of the rally. Local and national media suddenly became very interested in the impending event, whipping a diverse cross-section of the city into a frenzy.

“They gonna come to Memphis, Tennessee… where Martin Luther King got gunned down,” DaJuan says in the video. “You’re going to come here and rally deep—really, really deep, in my language, just to talk? No, it’s not gonna happen like that. When you come to Memphis, Tennessee, we’re gonna rally right across from you, and it’s gonna be Young Mob, Crips, Bloods, GDs, Vice Lords, Goon Squad… I’m getting on the phone with them daily. I’m talking to the big guys, the big kahunas. I’m talking to the Bill Gates of the gang wars. You come to Memphis, we’re going to be waiting on you. It’s versatile down here. We got every gang you can think of; we’ve got the fucking Mob down here. Bring your ass on.” 

Had the City Council’s decision to rename the park sparked a potential showdown with what many law enforcement agencies consider America’s oldest terrorist organization and a mega-alliance of the country’s most violent gangs? Or was the Klan struggling to retain relevancy in an era when race relations have progressed so much that the US has elected a black president twice over? I traveled to Memphis about a week before the rally to meet everyone involved and find out. 

Continue reading on page two.

A rider is a contractual proviso that outlines a series of stipulations or requests between at least two parties. While they can be attached to leases and other legal documents, they’re most famously used by musicians or bands to outline how they need their equipment to be set up and arranged, how they like their dressing room organized, and what types of food and beverages they require. Anyone who’s seen Spinal Tap knows these requests can be extremely outrageous and unreasonable. (And, in the case of Iggy Pop's, unexpectedly hilarious.)

I was inspired to create this series after reviewing a few riders from some of the biggest acts in the world, all of which were ridiculous. But what I found most interesting about them is that they offered a glimpse into their larger-than-life personalities. 

I initially thought I would try and shoot all of the items listed on the catering riders but quickly realized that this would become an exercise in wasting money. So I decided to focus on the quirkiest requests and shoot them in a Flemish Baroque still-life style because I felt that there was a direct connection between the themes in these types of paintings and the riders: the idea of time passing and the ultimate mortality of a musician’s career as the limelight inevitably fades—they only have a short time in which they are able to make these demands and have them fulfilled.

Photography and Direction: Henry Hargreaves

Prop Styling: Caitlin Levin

Previously: Henry Hargreaves Photographs Death Row's Final Meals

Black Bike Week is an annual bike rally that happens every year in South Carolina over Memorial Day weekend. Up to half a million predominantly African American bikers and revellers descend on the usually sleepy seaside town of Myrtle Beach for several days of riding and partying. Each year the traffic comes to a standstill as the streets fill with brightly customised sports bikes, their riders taking advantage of the state’s "no helmet" law to perform burnouts and stunts up and down the main strip along the seafront.

Hordes of women – known as "huggers" – also flock to Myrtle Beach for the event, hoping to be picked up for a ride, and maybe something more. A girl will often perform the "pillion clapping" move as a passenger – essentially twerking on the back of the bike. Unfortunately, the combination of partying and biking without a helmet isn’t an especially safe one, and every year there are people who don’t make it home. The event also attracts a ton of prostitutes, but more and more women are starting to ride their own bikes and each year an increasing number of female biker gangs show up for the party.

Medical marijuana is legal in 20 states and the District of Columbia, but there are still use cases that are very controversial, like medical marijuana for children. Some claim it's a wonder drug for epilepsy, severe autism, and even to quell the harsh side effects of chemotherapy, while others decry pumping marijuana into still-growing bodies. We went to the small town of Pendleton, Oregon, where medical marijuana is legal, to visit Mykayla Comstock, an eight-year-old leukemia patient who takes massive amounts of weed to treat her illness. Her family, and many people we met along the way, believe not only in the palliative aspects of the drug, but also in marijuana's curative effect—that pot can literally shrink tumors.

Watch more:

Colombia's Hidden Killers - Part 1

BC Bud

Butane Hash Oil

When AMC's Breaking Bad premiered in 2008, one of Alabama's most successful meth cook was already knee deep in building one of the biggest meth empires the state would ever see. His name? Walter White. In this documentary, Walter tell us the secret behind his product, how he stacked up thousands of dollars per day, and why his partner is now serving two life sentences.

Elan Nelson, a cannabis industry consultant, looks over Medicine Man's cannabis inventory in anticipation of a high-volume sales day.

Weed has already been legal in Colorado and Washington state for more than a year, only there's exactly nowhere to legally buy it, unless you're an approved medical marijuana patient. Tomorrow, however, that's going to change, dramatically, when America's first retail marijuana stores open their doors to anyone 21-and-over, no matter where you live, and without a note from your doctor.

This slow rollout of legal pot began back in November 2012, when voters heartily approved two separate ballot initiatives that immediately ended criminal penalties for adult marijuana possession, while mandating the creation of statewide regulations governing commercial cultivation and distribution. Now, after a long and often contentious political process, Colorado has at last fully licensed 136 marijuana retailers, 178 cultivation facilities, 31 infused-product manufacturers (who make everything from cannabis chocolates to BHO), and three laboratories charged with testing all of these intoxicants for potency and potential contamination.

The first of these stores will open in less than 24 hours, and naturally I'll be there, cash in hand, and most likely a tear in my eye. Even if it means standing in line for hours in the freezing cold. Because after more than a decade spent reporting on cannabis from the front lines, I desperately want to witness the beginning of the end of America's longest, stupidest war. Though I also know I'll look back some day and find myself filled with nostalgia for the outlaw days of yore. Before big business and corporate cannabis ever muscled in on our turf.

The author, inside Medicine Man's “green mile”grow room.

Countdown to Burn Down

Marijuana is not anti-establishment because it’s illegal. It’s illegal because it’s anti-establishment. Or so I've believed ever since taking my first illicit toke as a teenager. But what if a certain willingness to question authority, long associated with smoking herb, comes to us not from any of the plant's inherent properties, but from its prohibition?

I know I first started seriously questioning authority based on the vast discrepancy between my own adolescent high times and the anti-pot propaganda ads on television. Looking back now, in fact, I have my own competing gateway theory. I believe that, for myself and many others, marijuana serves as the gateway social justice issue of our time. A form of arbitrary oppression so egregious and ubiquitous that even a white, suburban teenager can experience the violence inherent in the system firsthand.
           
In Larry “Ratso” Sloman's book Reefer Madness (1998), for example, beat poet laureate Allen Ginsberg related his own personal gateway experience, a life-altering epiphany that took place the very first time he got baked.
            
When I smoked grass I suddenly realized how amazing it was that on the evidence of my own senses, which I did not doubt, here was a very mild stimulator of perception that led me into all sorts of awes and cosmic vibrations and appreciations of Cezanne and Renaissance paintings and color and tastes. And here was this great big government plot to suppress it and make it seem as if it were something diabolic, satanic, full of hatred and fiendishness and madness… It was the very first time I ever had solid evidence in my own body that there was a difference between reality as I saw it myself and reality as it was described officially by the state, the government, the police and the media. From then on I realized that marijuana was going to be an enormous political catalyst, because anybody who got high would immediately see through the official hallucination that had been laid down and would begin questioning, “What is this War? What is the military budget?”

Ginsberg went on to form the first pro-marijuana lobbying and activism organization in America, an effort duly noted in his Federal Bureau of Narcotics file.

On December 27, 1964, GINSBERG and _____ marched in front of the Department of Welfare Building… with signs reading “Smoke Pot, It’s Cheaper and Healthier Than Liquor,” and “Pot Is a Reality Kick.” These individuals are members of an organization called LEMAR (Legalize Marijuana) and their names appear in the files of Interpol.

Nearly 50 years later, those first green shoots of organized resistance have finally cracked through the pavement, for all the world to see. To celebrate, I spent a day in Denver touring the (sigh) Mile High City's retail cannabis stores and cultivation facilities as they prepare to make history.

Back when I first started working this beat, pot reporters wore blindfolds on the way to a “stash house” or a “grow operation,” or better yet we rode in the trunk of the car, so as not to compromise the safety our sources, but nowadays, I'm far more likely to meet the head of a marijuana private equity firm for drinks at an upscale hotel bar. I'll let you guess which scenario makes for a more enjoyable afternoon.

Julie Berliner, proprietress of Sweet Grass Kitchen, prepares a batch of pot-infused brownies.

Wake and Bakery

First stop on the pot tour: Sweet Grass Kitchen, a Denver-based edibles bakery, where owner and operator Julie Berliner greets me with a plate of pot-less pot cookies, so I can sample her merchandise for breakfast without missing my next three appointments.

Julie started up the company way back in the “wild west” days of 2008, when supplying medical marijuana patients with cannabis-infused food required little more than a home kitchen and the nerve to do it. Now she operates a licensed commercial kitchen that employs two full-time bakers, with plans to expand into cultivation as well, so she can produce enough cannabis in-house to supply her growing business.

Sweet Grass won't be selling their THC-laden cookies, brownies, and pies in any of the retail pot stores when they open tomorrow, however. Mostly because Colorado's exploding dab scene makes sourcing enough marijuana trim to make enough cannabutter to supply 75 medical marijuana centers an ongoing challenge, never mind expanding into the recreational market. Hence the 40-light grow room currently under construction. All part of the $300,000 investment she's made in the business since serious regulations kicked in three years ago.

So does Julie miss the carefree days before pot fell fully under the government's thumb?

“In ways, yes,” She admits. “But back then I was always incredibly anxious. We could have lost everything in a crackdown. And meanwhile, I would wake up some mornings to discover I was breaking a new law that just passed.”

Medicine Man's budtenders prepare to start selling their wares over the counter.

Growing Pains

Twenty construction workers hammer and saw around the clock at one of just a dozen or so retail marijuana stores fully licensed to open tomorrow in Denver. It's like some dumb reality show where they remodel a restaurant in 24 hours, only we're talking converting a medical marijuana center into a “dual-use facility” that also sells recreational pot. So perhaps we should call it an altered-reality show.

Elan Nelson, a leading cannabis industry consultant, takes me on a tour of Medicine Man's 20,000 square-foot facility, including a fully stocked sales counter and a massive grow operation in the back. Elan describes herself as a “once-a-year” herb smoker, who entered the pot industry seeking an exciting career path with serious upside potential.

Then she learned it's a lot more.

“At one of my first jobs, a customer came in to buy medical marijuana legally and told me he'd just gotten out of jail after serving several years on a pot charge. That made me realize just how much people have suffered for this, something I never experienced directly.”

Meanwhile, ever since they were among the first to announce a January 1 opening for recreational sales, Medicine Man has been inundated with reporters. So as we stop to chat with the dozens of diligent employees that make this place hum along like a hash-oiled machine, Elan takes care to inform them that I actually know a thing or two about getting high—as apparently the vast majority of my colleagues in the media haven't got a clue.

At our last tour stop, one of Medicine Man's top budtenders sets off my jaydar as a guy who got into this thing of ours sometime before selling lots and lots of marijuana was quite so legal. So I ask if he ever fondly recalls the black market?

“Working here is way more uplifting and way less stressful,” my source asserts while setting out huge jars of top-shelf herb for me to sniff. “I don't have to worry about who's following me home. Or doing business with the kind of people I'd really rather not know.”

Toni Fox, of 3D Cannabis Center, gazes into the bright future of legal marijuana.

High Demand

“What's 'an eighth?'”

Toni Fox suppresses a wry smile before explaining to a German reporter that one eighth of an ounce serves as a standard unit of measure in the underground ganja world. And so, in order to undercut that very same black market, her 3D Cannabis Center will offer a wide variety of high-quality eighths at prices ranging from $35 to $50 pre-taxes. Sixty different strains in all are grown on-site. Customers can even check out 3D's 14,000 square-foot cultivation operation in the back through a specially designed viewing window.

Toni then informs me that she doesn't harbor any nostalgia whatsoever for the outlaw days of marijuana. Nor does her brother, who spent ten years in prison over probably less pot than her store will sell tomorrow.

Between now and then, the shop's closed for final preparations. Including making arrangements to deal with the hundreds of eager cannabis enthusiasts from around the world expected to start lining up outside hours before the big grand opening.

Including me.

After all, wild rumors have been flying around town about immediate supply shortages, and I'd surely hate to miss out. Toni assures me she's got enough product on hand to make it to the end of the week at the very least, and hopefully well into February, without having to dramatically raise prices or take other drastic measures.

But why take the risk of showing up late to the greatest pot party of all time?

Can't make it to Colorado? Check VICE.com tomorrow for further adventures in search of legal weed.