Survive the Jive Alive

Joe Adams Talks About Joe Adams

2011-10-02T11:08:00.003-05:00

An interview with St. Louis private detective and former mercenary Joe Adams in the late 1990s.

One Spooky Dude: Joe Adams Debriefed Part 2
Adams interview, side two

They all think they're going to be overnight millionaires, right? Well guess who jumps on the bandwagon with these guys? Barnard Spector. Who I don't even know. All of a sudden he shows up in St. Louis.

Anyway, they missed Bernard Spector's kilos, how many ever that he brought up. And that's why we had to go to trial. Everybody else plea bargained.

Valenti's reference by the defense attorney, Ryder Trucks? Why would he even bring that up?

I have no idea. Valenti's was one of the hot spots in St. Louis(?) It was kind of funny, years later (corrects himself Valenti's is in Miami). They killed, the famous informant for the FBI was killed there in the parking lot. Hell, I hang out a mob spot and didn't even know it.

Dresnick is the attorney, he mentions that you met with a DEA agent, Tom Robinson, at the Edge Restaurant. Isn't the Edge Restaurant a Mafia hangout?

Yes.

Why would you guys be meeting in a Mafia hangout?

I was dating one of the waitresses. There you go again. Sorry. I wish I could do better.

I was doing a lot of business with a lot of guys from the Edge [the Edge was a Mafia hangout in St. Louis]. Collections. Skip tracing. I was an investigator for a couple of years and didn't even realize what I was doing. I started out in 78. I've been playing this game for 20 years now.

There's no connection between the Webb situation and what he's writing about and St. Louis. There's no connection whatsoever.

pilots. Some of them came from this area or at least the Midwest.Texas.

What about Terry Reed, Oklahoma, right?

I know him, yeah. I remember him. He had some luggage problems down there. They lost a bunch of his shit and I had to go down and retrieve it. It's amazing how the Contras tended to lose Americans luggage somehow. Nice guy.

What about John Hull, I already mentioned him and James Denby? Is he still alive?

I heard he got killed. What did they tell me? I don't comment on things I'm not sure about. Whether it was a plane crash, I'm not sure. I wouldn't have flown with him. I had to go down there for something and he talked about me flying with him and I just made every excuse in the world, I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but no thanks, you know.

Hull's ranch used as a transshipment point?

I heard that constantly, especially from Terrell. Where Terrell was getting his information, I don't know, but he always claimed that it was a big drop off pick up, you know, depot spot for drugs. I don't know, when I was down there it was the business of war not drugs.

Drugs financed the war, a partnership of convenience?

It doesn't take somebody from South America with Colombian pilots to figure out gee whiz we're going back empty to New Orleans and nobody's going to inspect use, I'll just put a couple of kilos on board and make some money. Those things probably happened because we did have open doors, I mean nobody checked anything. We could have done anything. It was sort of spooky too that our borders could be that open. If you were going hire a bush pilot to fly in and out of, some of these areas where we dropped cargo and landed, you're talking about grass air strips. The places we landed in the Rus Rus there in the Miskita for the Indians and stuff, I mean you'd be flying through some of the most dense mountains and jungles in the world. Then all of a sudfden there's this airstrip and you've got to hit it right the first time. Now who do you want flying that plane? Do you want people who are used to doing that as a profession? Or do you want some rookie.? I'll take the professional.

Do you think this stuff is still going on? It's got to be coming in somehow. ...

I've been so far removed from the drug world, I've been removed from the drug world since Jeez, 84, I really haven't worked a big drug operation since then.

I was the only agent inside working Burma for the DEA in 88 and 89.
Tracking drug routes from Khun Sa, the opium lord. What I did I went in under the authorization of the DEA and CIA to Burma and provided military training to the Kerin sp? rebels at Kotoola (sp?) training base across the border from Thailand. In exchange what I was doing was gathing American intelligence on drug trafficking for our agency in Bangkok.

Do you know Bo Gritz?

No. We have a lot of mutual friends, I guess.

Khun Sa? Is he still operating?

Sure he does. He's got a 30 to 40,000 man standing army. He's anti-Burmese government. And AnSuKee (sp?) who got the Nobel Peace Prize what happened because of Iran-Contra all the blow up in Washington during Iran Contra, I had taken off for a short period of time and was working in South Africa working. Doing the same thing again. Working as a body guard, training body guard personnel to some upper class people in Johannesburg. Came back. Iran-Contra is warming up. People are calling me. Getting my name from different sources. I appeared befor the Senate Foreign Relations Commitee and testify. And then all of the sudden I got Jack Singlaub calling me. Anyway, because of all the Burmese resistance in W.ashington was trying to recruit military trainers to go back in Burma and train their young people. So I had a couple of Burmese people through other avenues that contacted me. I went to Washington and they knew quite a bit about me and so I ended up going to Thailand and the Phillipines for some meetings and arranged for some logistics to be transported from the Phillipines to Thailand to Burma. They needed some maps. Associates of mine within the American military gave me those maps to smuggle to the Burmese guerrillas. That was my first contact. We didn't have any aerial photography of the areas.

So I befriended the Burmese guerrillas. And then they made me an offer to put together trainers to come in and train our team because we predict that the government was going to close the universities. And, of course, they did and all the students fled into the jungles and got pissed off and joined the rebels for fours years anyway.

So I was very lucky. I organized the DAB, which is the Democratic Alliance Burma Army, which was the first all-student revolutionary group against the government. And in that group of course we had people who had formerly been associated with Khun Sa, some students. If you've got a 40,000 member standing army, you've got families. Just like the Red Chinese, I mean they moved 100,000 troops at a time. You got family, you got kids. Well, you're kids are going to go to the University of Rangoon, eventually right? ... I was their trainers. I organized and trained these small teams to go back and sabotage the Burmese government.

In exchange, I wanted to make sure there were no snags so what we did was we met with the CIA and other officials in Bangkok and told them about the proposals and they said fine, but here's what we want out of you: We want you to run frug intelligence for us.m And I said not a problem. See what actually I was doing was I was covering my own ass because I was already being threatened with jail in the U.S. because of violation of nuetrality (against Nigaragua).

Now I've got official sanction, again. Of course, I had official sanction the first time. But that was my cover for going back in. If I was ever questioned about violation of nuetrality again, well, why I was there was for gaining intelligence for the U.S. government. 88-89.

I retired from being a mercenary in 89 because of malaria. I almost died because of malaria in Burma. Then I came out of retirement in 91, of course, and went to Croatia. Yeah, I'm a colonel in the Croatian army.

Indonesia now?

Yeah, we got a team ready to go to Indonesia to evacuate personnel from a private company that's back in the jungle ... We've been on standby since February. In fact, the FBI came and hit me recently and said that you can't do this. And I said, Oh, yes I can. So I had to straighten them out. Why we're doing it and who we're working for. How it's going to be done. They looked at this as a military invasion and it's not. It's like if they had a big earthquake in Mexico a private corporation could hire a team to get the people out. That's all we're doing.

Who are you representing?

I was contacted and paid by Beloit Industries. I'm just a member of the team. They have wood processing plants. The problem is that they are so remote that the American. They've been warned if you want out get out now. Because we're not sure we can get to you. ... younger FBI agents no longer know him

You know something, you hit that right on the head. When Doug Abrams before he died, the FBI agent, he got killed shot in the head here in St. Louis, they named the FBI building here after him, him and I were like thick as thieves, man. He was up here every fucking day. And we did more neat stuff off the record then I've done since. You're right. There's a new generation of agents who are picking up pieces of files on me and they don't know the whole story. ...

I've probably worked with 500 agents over the years and he no doubt was the best, as human being, as a father and as an agent. He got the job done and he did it right. . ...

You know I was involved in that Lieberman thing, right? I was working for her attorney when Barbari decided to set them up and double cross them, I backed off. One thing about it, you'll never find me double crossing anybody. It's like Scar Face said, I never fucked over anybody that didn't have it coming. They double cross me, I'm going to get them. But until somebody double crosses me, I can't do that. I wasn't raised that way. No matter who it is or what they've done. I don't operate that way.

I'll give you a little tid bit though. Remember when Harold was goingt to go to Cuba? I was there waiting on him. I was there waiting, pal. He was coming home. See, they won't extradite me back to Cuba for kidnapping. But they would extradite me back to Santiago for kidnapping. So that was my end, When I got wind that Harold was coming to Cuba, I was there waiting on him. ... I worked for Phyliss (Harold Lieberman's wife).When Barbari doublecrossed Phyliss and set them up, I couldn't be a part of that. Because there was no reason to. Phyliss never did me wrong. Barbari was in trouble on a drug charge and so he did that to get out of the gun charge problems.

She got busted for coke, right?

That was a gift. That wasn't supposed to happen. That had nothing to do with what was going on. ...

Notes from the Underworld: Federal Snitch Joe Adams

2011-10-02T10:40:00.006-05:00

To: Safir
From: C.D.’s dustbin

ADAMS, JOSEPH S., FEDERAL INFORMANT, ST. LOUIS, MO. AND MIAMI, FL.

Notes based on Adams’ testimony in the 1984 trial of Bayard Spector. Spector was set up by Adams.

Adams acted as a federal informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1984. As a part of being a snitch, he testified against Bayard Spector, then a 31-year-old Miami record chain owner. The U.S. attorney’s office in St. Louis cut a deal with Adams, which essentially let him off the hook for his own cocaine trafficking. In exchange, Adams was never even arrested. Spector’s defense attorney, Ronald Dresnick, questioned the legality of the agreement between the government and Adams.

Spector’s trial took place in September 1984. By December, Adams was again in Miami. This time he was associating with Jack Terrell and Tom Posey, two mercenaries who headed Civilian Military Assistance, an Alabama based paramilitary operation engaged in the support of the Contras in Nicaragua.

A federal jury found Spector guilty and he was sentenced to 11 years i n prison.

Irl B. Baris, a criminal defense attorney from St. Louis, was also a part of Spector’s defense team.

Spector’s Miami attorney, Dresnick , was listed as having an address of 4770 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, Fl., 3313 4. His phone number in 1984 was (305) 573-4400.

When Spector filed for a new trial in 1989, Clayton attorney, Arthur S. Margulis, represented him

Spector’s co-defendants in the case were: George Kelly, Vinson Rood, Phillip Rima and Bruce Cohen,
aka, Bruce Copelan.

The court set Spector’s bail at $5 million.

The trial was set for July 2, 1984, but was delayed.
U.S. Assistant Attorney Debra Herzog prosecuted the case
After exhausting his defense attempts, the court ordered Spector to report to Leavenworth on Feb. 2, 1987

On Jan. 9, 1989, Spector asked for a new trial based upon new evidence that had previously been sealed. A civil case, asking that the conviction be overturned was filed in Spector’s behalf in 1991. At that time, Spector was represented by Thomas M. Dawson of Leavenworth, Kan. Dawson’s address is 2300 S. 4th St., Leavenworth, Kan., 66048. His phone number is (913) 6821-5331. The request was turned down by the original trial judge, Edward L. Fillippine of the 8th District of Eastern Missouri.

Spector was also represented by another Miami attorney Samuel J. Smargon.

Spector’s efforts for a new trial were denied by U.S. Magistrate Catherine D. Perry on July 2, 1993.

Spector’s plea at that time includes an affidavit from one of the co-conspirators in the trial, Bruce Copeland. Copeland states that Spector was not involved in the cocaine deal and had no knowledge of the crime.

At the original trial, Joseph S. Adams testified that he was a “collector” and bodyguard for drug dealers. Adams testified that his role involved :”planting the seed” that people in St. Louis needed drugs.

George Kelly told Adams that he and Phillip Rima could provide 25 kilos to Adams. Bayard Spector’s name didn’t come up during these conversations in April 1984, Adams testified.

Copelan wanted $200,000 up front to go through with the sale, according to Adam’s testimony.

Bob Craig, an employee at Monsanto Co. in St. Louis, testified that he had a business appointment with Spector on May 2, 1984. Telephone records show that the appointment with Craig was made before any contact between Kelly and Spector.

The defense asked George Kelly about Spector’s involvement. Here is the exact question and response:

Q: It’s not your testimony is it that Bayard Spector ever saw, touched felt or had anything to do with that cocaine?

A: I never said he did.

Spector’s case is number (89) S1-84-94-CR (2)
The district court’s decision was upheld on appeal on Nov. 3, 1989
The defense claimed that Spector had been entrapped by Adams, who was working as a confidential informant for numerous federal agencies, including the DEA.

The defense cited two cases to support its case. One was the Dailey decision of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts the other was the Wat erman decision in the 11th Circuit.

Spector’s attorney, Dresnick, took exception to the terms of the government’s agreement with Adams, which in part read:
“The government will carefully and in good faith consider and evaluated Mr. Adams’ cooperation and the information he provides in making its determination whether or not to reduce or forgo some or all of the aforementioned maximum charges and imprisonment exposure.”

The government must have decided that Adams did a good job, because he never served one day.

Another of Spector’s attorneys, Paul Rashkind of Miami, stated:
“It’s clear that this is an agreement that provides Joe Adams with two things, a guarantee and a contingency. He has a guarantee if he’s cooperative and truthful that a number of charges will not be brought and his exposure is limited and contingent that if he’s successful in solving crimes and the government is successful in prosecuting, he may suffer even less penalty and there may be none at all.”

According to U.S. Assistant Attorney Debra Herzog, Adams had worked as an informant in five federal cases by the fall of 1984. “He’s only peripherally involved with this particular defendant in this case,” Herzog said.

“The problem,” continued Herzog, “is Mr. Adams is still active ly working with the government in cases that are pending and other cases that he has participated in are cases are still open.”

This statement indicates that Adams may have very well been working with the government as an informant in the Contra resupply operation or related guns or drug smuggling.

Herzog defended the government’s agreement with Adams by saying that his freedom was tied to his ability to provide valuable information: “The more important we deem tha t information and cooperation, the
more likely the reduction of charges and his sentencing risk,” Herzog said.

Rushkind questioned the governments agreement with Adams by saying that it set a dangerous precedent. “It has never been keyed to the government’s success, that’s the part that violates due process,” said Rushkind.

DEA agent Luss is mentioned by Rushkind on page 31 of the pre-trial motions?

The Jenck’s Act is mentioned repeatedly.

At least one audio tape exists that has to do with Adams and his role as informant in the Spector case. That tape includes a phone conversation that took place between Adams and George Kelly. Adams called Kelly from the Atlanta airport. The tape also includes Adams talking to himself.

The court transcript also includes the testimony of Norman Hausfater, a St. Louis wholesale record distributor who knew Spector. Court testimony shows that the Spector family owned 18 record stores in Florida.

Adam operated a security consulting business in Miami called G-2 Enterprises. The slogan that appeared on Adams’ business card was: “Survival Needs No Apologies.”

Adams said his other business interests included the renting of athletic equipment in St. Louis.

Attorney Ronald Dresnick asked, “Would it be fair to say that most of your clients are drug dealers?”

Adams replied: “Oh, yes.”

The two DEA agents in charge of handling Adams were Archie Luss and Tom Robinson.

Dresnick asked Adams: “Did this investigation of yours have anything to do with stolen airplanes or stolen airplane parts?

Adams said, “no.”

“Do you know anything about stolen airplanes?” asked Dresnick.

“That was a case I put together,” said Adams.

At one point, Adams stated: “I don’t trust the government, I trust Tom Dittmeir.” Dittmeirr was U.S. attorney in St. Louis at the time and gave Adams his get-out-jail-free card on Dec. 27, 1983. The letter is actually signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Fagan.

As a part of the Spector drug sting, Adams wore a Kel-set device, a wireless transmitter that the DEA agents then recorded from a nearby van.

Adams arranged for the bust at the Marriott Hotel in downtown St. Louis. He rented the presidential suite for the occasion.

As a part of the operation, DEA agent Dean Dempsey and electronic technician George Jenkins listened in from the van. Spector himself stayed at another St. Louis hotel, the Bel Air Hilton in room 507

The agent who arrested Spector found a hotel key and matchbook from the Bel Air in his possession. Meanwhile, a blue Samsonite suitcase was seized from room 1414 of yet another St. Louis hotel, the Rodeway at Jefferson and Market.

A local television station was brought in to videotape the bust and had some advance knowledge of the arrest. This was brought up as a reason to dismiss the charges against Spector, but Judge Fillippine denied the motion.

Still another of Spector’s attorney has a last name of (Richard) Sindell.
DEA agent Thomas Robinson denied intimidating Spector in his pre-trial testimony, which took place on June 26, 1984.

When asked under oath, Adams denied working for the CIA, although he admitted working for other federal agencies including, DEA, FBI, Customs, ATF, and IRS.

Adams testified on Sept. 20, 1984. He became involved with Terrell a few short months later.

Dresnick asked for a mistrial based on thfact that Assistant U.S. Attorney Debra Herzog questioned Adams about the morning’s cross examination during lunch break.

It was brought out during the trial that DEA agent Robinson told Adams to lay off the Red Metrik ATF entrapment until after Spector was busted. The last name of the ATF agent involved in that case was “Lewis.”

“I ha d to do what (DEA agent) Tom Robinson said,” testified Adams. “The other agencies told me in the office, only if it’s Ok with Tom Robinson.”

Marcy was the name of a Canadian courier associated with Adams.

Ada ms named Bruce Cohen as the person who provi ded cocaine to the “jet set.”

Adams indicated that Valenti’s restaurant was a known hangout for drug pushers. Other hangouts included the Rainbow Lounge and the Eclipse Lounge in Miami.

Dresnick asked whether Adams had ever seen him at Valenti’s. He ask ed whether Adams’ was saying everybody who ate at Valenti’s was a drug dealer. Adams said they weren’t all drug dealers. During this series of questions and answers Dresnick asked -- “Do you remember seeing Jim Ryder, the chairman of the board of Ryder Trucks or the ex-chairman of the board at Ryder Trucks?”

“Where is he from?” asked Adams

“Eating at Valenti’s. From Miami,” said Dresnick.
The questioning then moves to events that transpired in St. Louis.

“Do you remember seeing (DEA agent) Tom Robinson on the night of the 24th of April?” asked Dresnick.

“Oh, yes, sir, at the Edge Restaurant,” answered Adams.
The Edge is a known mafia hangout in St. Louis.

Hank Pyla is mentioned as being anothe r of the DEA agents involved in the Spector case

Adams met with U.S. Attorney Thomas Dittmier in December 1983.

Louis Berry is one of the St. Louis police detectives assigned to the DEA task force that worked on the case. His partner was Terrence Sloan.

Bud Weasel 1998

2011-03-31T15:29:00.000-05:00

Obama Backs Loans to Build Nukes in U.S. by Toshiba

2011-03-14T10:51:00.002-05:00

U.S. Backs Construction Of Reactors
New York Times, The (NY) - Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Author: MATTHEW L. WALD

Abstract: United States officials, as well as American public, are embracing Pres Obama 's announcement of construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia; reactors would be first reactors built in United States since 1970s; as officials and average Americans applaud efforts for clean energy, environmental groups have long opposed return to reliance on nuclear power; Pres Obama hopes acceptance of proposal will lead to more substantial clean energy program for nation (M)
President Obama , speaking to an enthusiastic audience of union officials in Lanham, Md., on Tuesday, underscored his embrace of nuclear power as a clean energy source, announcing that the Energy Department had approved financial help for the construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia.

If the project goes forward, the reactors would be the first begun in the United States since the 1970s.

The announcement of the loan guarantee -- $8.3 billion to help the Southern Company and two partners build twin reactors in Burke County -- comes as the administration is courting Republican support for its climate and energy policies. With climate legislation stalled in the Senate and its prospects for success dim, Democrats are seeking new incentives to spur clean energy development and create jobs.

At the same time, the president's embrace of nuclear energy has drawn the ire of environmental groups that have long opposed any return to a reliance on nuclear power.

In his speech, Mr. Obama portrayed the decision as part of a broad strategy to increase employment and the generation of clean power. But he also made clear that the move was a bid to gain Republican support for a broader energy bill.

"Those who have long advocated for nuclear power -- including many Republicans -- have to recognize that we will not achieve a big boost in nuclear capacity unless we also create a system of incentives to make clean energy profitable," Mr. Obama said.

Some Republicans, however, said that the announcement would have little effect on their votes.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, said that Mr. McConnell had repeatedly praised Mr. Obama for favoring additional loan guarantees for nuclear power plants. But, he said, this would not translate into support for a cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

"It won't cause Republicans to support the national energy tax," Mr. Stewart said.

He added that Republican and Democratic ideas on energy policy overlapped in some areas, but that much of Mr. Obama 's energy program did not fall into those areas.

Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said that she thought nuclear power was "a core component of a comprehensive energy plan," but that she would vote on an energy bill as a whole.

"One or two provisions aren't going to offset bad provisions," he said.

The announcement of the loan guarantees, which had been signaled in advance, drew immediate praise from the nuclear industry and criticism from some environmental groups.

David M. Ratcliffe, the chairman and chief executive of the Southern Company, said that a nuclear renaissance was in the wings and that "we will get on with that at a more rapid pace now that we've made this first step."

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, however, said that nuclear power was not the fastest or cheapest way to reduce the greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

"The loan guarantees announced today may ease the politics around comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation, but we do not believe that they are the best policy," he said.

Despite the financing, the reactors are far from a done deal: their design has not yet been fully approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose staff has raised questions about whether changes made to harden the plant against aircraft attack had made it more vulnerable to earthquakes.

The builders hope to have a license to build and run the plant by the end of next year, under a revised process that is supposed to eliminate problems that caused huge cost overruns in the 1970s and 1980s, when regulatory changes during construction added billions to costs. About 100 reactors were abandoned during construction in that era.

The Southern Company applied two years ago to the commission for permission to build and operate the reactors, adjacent to its Vogtle 1 and 2 reactors.

The loan guarantees were authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. If the reactors are built and operate profitably, the borrowers will repay the banks and pay a fee to the federal government in exchange for the guarantee; if the borrowers default, the federal government will repay the banks. Critics have argued that the chance of default is high, and the loans have been delayed by protracted negotiations over what the fee should be.

The money for the reactors is the first award from $18.5 billion in loan guarantees provided for under the 2005 act. But Mr. Obama proposed this month to triple that amount. The guarantees can cover up to 80 percent of the estimated project cost, although some builders may ask for less. Southern asked for 70 percent, but the project may also be eligible for loan guarantees from the Japanese government; the reactors were designed by Westinghouse, a unit of Toshiba .

The Energy Department is negotiating with potential borrowers for three other projects, two of which could win guarantees soon. The Scana Corporation and Santee Cooper want to build a nuclear plant near Jenkinsville, S.C., and UniStar is planning a reactor in southern Maryland, adjacent to the Calvert Cliffs reactors. A third project, in Texas, is in some doubt because of rising cost estimates and a lawsuit filed by the municipal utility serving San Antonio against its partner in the project, NRG of Princeton, N.J.

The United States has 104 operating power reactors, but all the reactors ordered after 1973 were canceled.

A Bit of The Troubles Told from an Anglo Angle

2011-02-04T16:47:00.000-06:00

Godfather of terror - Focus
Sunday Times, The (London, England) - Sunday, May 17, 1998
Author: Barrie Penrose and Liam Clarke
Farmer and IRA chief Thomas Murphy has never been convicted of terror offences and has always escaped the law. But the key IRA strategist could not plot the defeat of truth in a Dublin libel court. Barrie Penrose and Liam Clarke report.

One day at the end of August 1985, Thomas Murphy stood on a beach in Co Wicklow savouring a problem that other IRA commanders had only dreamt about: he had a surfeit of weapons. Arrayed about him were 300 boxes containing AK-47 assault rifles, Taurus automatic pistols and an awesome assortment of ammunition and grenades.

Even more valuable were three heavy machineguns capable of attacking armoured cars or British Army helicopters. Rubber dinghies had ferried the wooden boxes, marked Libyan Armed Forces, from the waiting ship Cassamara, later renamed the Kula, to the Clogga Strand near Arklow.

With such military largesse from Colonel Gadaffi, the IRA would be a force to be reckoned with for the next 30 years.

Murphy had driven by tractor down to the beach, where a gang of trusted volunteers began manoeuvring the cargo gingerly on to the trailer. As they were short-handed, Murphy rolled up his sleeves enthusiastically and waded into the water alongside Kevin McKenna, the IRA 's then chief of staff.

It was a telling moment of co-operation between the two dour godfathers of terror. They were always bickering on the beach, says Adrian Hopkins, who captained the Kula and other IRA ships which also landed weapons at Clogga. But Murphy was the boss on this operation.

Hopkins, a failed travel operator desperate enough for money to turn his hand to gunrunning for the IRA , was indifferent to the use his deadly cargo would be put to. Four successful arms shipments from Libya in the mid-1980s had netted him more than Pounds 500,000. Murphy was Hopkins's paymaster, handing over thick wads of used notes in plastic bags.

"For the Kula mission I received a total of Pounds 100,000 in Pounds 20 and Pounds 50 notes," Hopkins said. "This money was handed to me by Tom when I met him in Dundalk. I then deposited it in the Bank of Ireland with instructions to transfer it to my account in Jersey."

Hopkins remembers meeting Murphy and McKenna, along with a Libyan intelligence official called Nasser Al-Ashour, at a safe house in Northern Ireland organised by the IRA activist Malachy McCann, who later sailed on the ill-fated Eksund voyage in October 1987.

Murphy's genius of spiriting 400 tons of arms into Ireland, unnoticed by the Irish authorities and western intelligence agencies, marked him out as a future IRA chief of staff.

His terrorist exploits had al ready made him a legendary figure within the terrorist group. From the 1970s his operations included masterminding the murder of Lord Mountbatten and countless British soldiers.

IN 1963, at the age of 14, Thomas Murphy left school to work on the family farm in the townland of Ballybinaby near the village of Hackballscross, not far from Dundalk.

On 30 acres of poor grazing land straddling the border, his father Joseph Murphy, his wife Elizabeth, and their five children eked out a meagre existence.

In 1968 Joseph Murphy died. Elizabeth took over the family homestead, relying heavily on her sons. With the return of the Troubles a year later, her middle boy, Thomas, was attracted to the emerging Provisional IRA , already active in the republican heartland of South Armagh where some of the farm was located. Crossmaglen, a stone's throw away, became known in the popular press as "bandit country".

The whole area was steeped in traditional Irish culture. It was a clannish place and outsiders often regarded the area with suspicion - and fear.

Murphy quickly spotted the commercial potential of the Irish border being drawn right through the middle of his farm.

The IRA , and the power to enforce loyalty, soon gave him the edge over rival racketeers. He could play the patriot game and win. His South Armagh active service unit was by far the most ruthless and efficient IRA formation in the country. Between 1976 and 1982 more than 100 British soldiers and civilians were murdered by Murphy's men.

He never married; his wife was the movement and it brought a rich dowry.

Murphy was a gifted IRA talent-spotter who put potential recruits to work at his mother's homestead. In the late 1970s he recruited Gerard McGeough, a teenager destined to become one of the IRA 's top operators.

In 1977, McGeough was working on a bulldozer at the Murphy farm with two other IRA volunteers when it was raided by the RUC and British Army. As the helicopters lifted off with their captives, Murphy's mother expressed outrage in the local press. McGeough was released after the Irish government protested to London, claiming the three had been lifted in the part of the farmyard which lay in the republic.

Murphy also took the raid personally and determined to secure weaponry to shoot down British Army helicopters. While his IRA colleagues had largely stopped British soldiers and RUC officers from moving freely along the roads and lanes around Crossmaglen, the privacy of his home remained vulnerable from the air.

After McGeough was wounded in a shoot-out on the border, Murphy, by now a very wealthy man, sent him to America with $50,000 to purchase surface-to-air missiles which would home in on the heat from the helicopters and bring them down. Before Libya stepped in with SAM-7 missiles, America was the obvious market place for military hardware.

McGeough was double-crossed. In an FBI sting captured on video tape, he and his companion told undercover Federal agents he was from the IRA and wanted to buy missiles to take back to Ireland. Lou Stephens, an FBI squad chief, decided against an immediate arrest, hoping the terrorists would lead them to bigger fish. Instead, McGeough gave them the slip and fled to Europe, where he masterminded a series of terrorist atrocities in England, Germany and Belgium.

Murphy lost one of his top operators when McGeough was arrested in a car on the German-Belgium border in 1988 carrying Kalashnikovs and three revolvers. One of the guns had been used in the shooting of a British Army sergeant at Ostend shortly before. McGeough was sent to America, where he pleaded guilty to arms smuggling.

Murphy soon graduated from local warlord to the IRA 's top table. His natural ally was Kevin McKenna, a rough-hewn rabbit poacher from nearby north Monaghan, who had become chief of staff after a shake-up in the Provisional leadership in Belfast. To move around the country and evade surveillance, Mc Kenna pretended he was making his living snaring rabbits at night with a lamp.

His nocturnal journeys provided the perfect cover for moving around to meet other IRA activists, including Murphy. Gardai also noted McKenna and Murphy meeting Pat Doherty, a Sinn Fein leader but, according to evidence given in last week's libel action, also an IRA boss.

McKenna had the idea of creating a liberated zone that would stretch from Murphy's border farm to the Clogher Valley in Tyrone. Within this area and with the security forces excluded, the IRA could design new weapons and strike out across the province.

One plan was to attack the Maze prison and free the inmates, but first the IRA would need a secure supply of weaponry and military grade explosives with which to fire mortars and prime big bombs.

The FBI had closed down the IRA 's traditional market in America, so Murphy and McKenna began to look to Libya, where Gadaffi's regime had shown itself willing to help in the past.

From the early 1980s Sean O'Callaghan, the garda's most highly placed informant, started noticing Murphy at meetings, though he often showed distrust and disdain of other IRA leaders.

If Murphy could find a reason not to come to a meeting where he thought he would have to discuss things with other people, then he would not be there, said O'Callaghan. The South Armagh attitude was that while everyone was sitting around thinking and talking, they were getting up and doing it.

One meeting Murphy did attend was in 1984 at Heath House , a Georgian mansion a few miles from Portlaoise, which was owned by the veteran republican, Uinseann McEoin, who is also a noted architect and conservationist. McEoin, who says he does not remember the meeting, admits that he frequently made his property available to republicans.

The Heath House meeting was of the IRA 's GHQ staff, the men who prosecute the IRA 's war on a day-to-day basis. It was also attended by Sinn Fein peace negotiators Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams and Doherty.

It was a typical meeting. The men were effectively locked up together for 24 hours. Security and mutual mistrust meant that the terrorists arrived one evening, worked into the night, camped down for the night together and worked again the next day before dispersing late on the second day.

Murphy said little. O'Callaghan recalls a rare example of what passed for humour at these meetings. Doherty asked Murphy how the British could be persuaded to negotiate with the IRA .

"Bomb them to the conference table and then booby-trap the table," came Murphy's gruff reply. "What about the Sinn Fein delegation?" asked Doherty. "We never tell anybody about booby traps in South Armagh," Murphy quipped.

It was through GHQ meetings that Murphy met the veteran IRA leader Joe Cahill, who had been sentenced to death in 1942 and now controlled the IRA 's purse strings. Cahill had just been released from jail after being caught by the Irish navy smuggling arms from Libya. Cahill was a man the Libyans trusted. He would introduce Murphy to their charmed circle.

Murphy needed a false passport if he was to travel to the Middle East. The IRA could provide. One hundred blank but numbered passports had been stolen from the Irish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1984. One was filled in for Murphy in the name of Jim Faughey. It contained a photograph of Thomas together with his height, weight and eye colour.

With the Faughey passport, Murphy made repeated trips to Athens en route to clandestine meetings on Greek islands with the senior Libyan intelligence officer Colonel Nasser Al-Ashour.

Gadaffi had sent Nasser to London following the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, gunned down outside the Libyan Peoples' Bureau by a diplomat in 1984. Gadaffi publicly sought to calm diplomatic relations with Britain, then at fever pitch, carefully hiding his secret intention to rearm the IRA .

Al-Ashour was no run-of-the-mill official. His job was to liaise with Murphy and a handful of leading IRA hard-liners. Hopkins was impressed by him. "He spoke English with a very distinguished accent," said Hopkins, in a statement to French intelligence officers obtained by The Sunday Times. "He never looked you in the face, likes to parade, has small feet, wears Italian shoes, drinks whisky but does not smoke."

Al-Ashour had visited Northern Ireland and was impressed by Murphy and the IRA 's set-up. He recognised they needed sophisticated weaponry and large supplies of Semtex. On Gadaffi's behalf, he promised to supply it and more than Pounds 1m to buy ships and other help to get the arms to Ireland. To prove his sincerity the Libyan invited IRA representatives, including James Boyle, to stay at his country home near Tripoli.

On April 28, 1986, two weeks after America bombed Tripoli, Murphy flew into Athens with his false passport to meet fellow IRA men. Their favourite haunt was the fashionable Gran Britannia hotel in Athens's main square.

Murphy left Greece the same day to meet Al-Ashour and other Libyan officials at sea. It was to be the first of at least seven trips to liaise with the Libyans that year. In the days after the American raids, in which the bombers used British airfields, Gadaffi was determined to strike back at Britain by covertly backing the IRA in a well-funded military campaign.

Murphy met other Libyan officials. One contact was known as Ahmed. He worked in Malta for Libyan Airlines. But it was Al-Ashour who forged the arms deal, and Murphy was eager to keep him sweet. After four successful shipments of arms and explosives, the South Armagh farmer arranged an appreciative gift for Nasser.

Hopkins said: "Tom insisted that I should buy a german shepherd dog and offer it to Al-Ashour from Joe Cahill." The largest shipment followed on the Eksund, which Hopkins brought from Sweden to Malta in August 1987.

In this period Murphy, now using a genuine passport, made three trips to Athens, which he again used as a base from which to meet Libyans. He also authorised shipment of Al-Ashour's double bed, a large clock and two cans of olive oil, which were picked up at a factory near Valetta, the Maltese capital, and transported on the Eksund as it went to collect the arms from a Libyan vessel moored close to Tripoli.

The fifth shipment, 150 tons of arms and ammunition, including 20 Soviet surface-to-air missiles, was collected in Libyan waters in October before heading for the Irish coast. Murphy, now back in Ballybinaby, was the first to hear the good news.

Hopkins told the French police: "I transmitted a message to Tom (Murphy) via a shipping company in London. I used a codeword which indicated the unloading date, October 29, 1987." Murphy had been given the codename Prendergast.

But Hopkins sailed too close to the French coast and attracted the attention of a French patrol boat off Brest. The skipper sent another coded message to Murphy. It was to warn him of his intention to send the cargo to the bottom of the sea.

But before he could carry out his plan, the Eksund was escorted into French waters. Three IRA terrorists were discovered on board, along with Hopkins and his friend, Henry Cairns, a bookseller and republican sympathiser who had introduced Hopkins to the IRA .

Two of the men carried false passports from the same stolen batch used by Murphy for his Faughey passport. Such documents were the hallmark of a top-flight IRA operator. Others from the 1984 theft were found on other former IRA activists, including Gerry Kelly and Brendan "Bic" McFarlane. Passports from the same series were found on the seaside bombers convicted of planning attacks throughout Britain in 1985.

While the IRA men faced heavy prison sentences, Murphy remained free to plan the next operation and the next business deal. He also fitted in an arms-buying trip to Yugoslavia as his false passport clearly demonstrated. The ubiquitous Colonel Nasser was his companion, this time in Belgrade.

By now he was dividing his time between a Dallas-style bungalow and the family homestead, which he had transformed into a fortress. As the British Army built watchtowers overlooking his land to spy on his IRA activities, Murphy responded by raising the height of huge metal barricades to cut off the army's line of sight.

The garda special branch, which knew of Murphy's seniority through O'Callaghan, interrogated Hopkins and learnt of his hands-on role in importing weapons and explosives. They raided countless farms, barns and specially constructed bunkers dotted around Ireland to hide earlier arms shipments. One was later found on Murphy's own land.

When questioned, Murphy said nothing.

In 1989 uniformed gardai swooped early one July morning. Murphy ran through the house, abandoning his aged and infirm mother, and crossed into Northern Ireland by jumping through a kitchen window. After he disappeared, detectives found the false passport, with its telltale Athens stamps, hidden in the house.

Two days later Murphy gave himself up at Dundalk garda station. He followed IRA orders and remained silent. Forty-eight hours later he was released. For several years he had had such short-lived brushes with the law and had seen off the police. On February 30, 1984, he was arrested and held overnight with convicted IRA leader Kieran Conway at Tallanstown near Ardee.

Conway was a senior Provisional whose main claim to fame was ensuring Martin McGuinness and other IRA terrorists escaped from a house in Derry surrounded by the security forces. Conway remained behind in possession of a large quantity of explosives.

In Ardee Conway gave a false name and Murphy lied to the police, claiming his passenger was a hitch-hiker he had never met. It was a familiar story. He had been arrested on June 28, 1985, in Monaghan with Michael McKevitt, now a leading figure behind the 32 County Sovereignty Committee, a breakaway from Sinn Fein.

On another occasion he was picked up by a detective carrying a forged driving license in the name Joseph Murphy. Again he was released, just as he was after being caught with the false Faughey passport. His Pimpernel-like luck has baffled observers and enraged sec urity agencies on both sides of the Irish border.

Money and the grip of fear he holds in South Armagh have helped him escape justice. A fleet of cars, including two four-wheel-drive Isuzu Troopers, a BMW and a Volvo, help put any would-be pursuers off the scent, although every number plate entering the yard is recorded and logged by the British Army from an observation tower built for that purpose.

Murphy has houses on both sides of the border, but pays income tax in neither jurisdiction. He has told civil servants he is not resident in Ireland but living overseas and therefore not liable for tax. Recently he formally listed his occupation as: "farmer (no land)".

In 1990 he admitted, in the first libel trial he brought against The Sunday Times, that he owned seven acres. Today his land holdings run to hundreds of acres.

Through building up a business empire, including a deer farm worth Pounds 100,000, exten sive land holdings, a considerable cattle herd and a large number of pigs, he is seen by some as a benevolent employer providing much-needed work in the area. Others see it as a technique to make people dependent on him, like a feudal baron controlling his fiefdom.

Some of those who opposed him have ended their lives in unmarked graves. Alleged IRA informers have been killed on his authority. He is also suspected of involvement in the kidnapping of businessman Don Tidey and the bizarre abduction of the racehorse Shergar.

He is also believed to be behind the gunning down of RUC Superintendent Harry Breen and Chief Superintendent Bob Buchanan, who were ambushed in February 1989 as they returned to Northern Ireland from an intelligence exchange at Dundalk garda station.

Even though Murphy had successfully avoided being charged with any terrorist or criminal offence, he chose to go to court voluntarily, mounting a costly libel action against The Sunday Times in 1989, which he lost. His appeal added a further expensive trial. Murphy believed he would win enormous damages after the Daily Mail and a London publisher paid him substantial sums in out-of-court settlements.

Venturing into the halls of justice against The Sunday Times proved a huge mistake that has cost him and the IRA dear. Although he denounced violence from the witness box, an Irish jury twice found he had organised it and the case resulted in the naming of several prominent IRA men in open court.

Murphy's greed and folly, breaking the IRA rule of silence and exposing himself to cross-examination and hostile witnesses, has stripped the organisation of much of its mystique. It has also painted a sordid portrait of an IRA henchman willing to exploit the idealism and fanaticism of others to line his own pockets.

He was a poor witness, a man who tried to pitch his limited wit against lawyers and lost. He was far removed from the Armani-suited, eloquent young turks of Sinn Fein and the IRA .

Despite his total defeat and humiliation in a Dublin courtroom, his fearsome reputation as a man who must not be crossed remains intact.

Late last week a number of people who have helped The Sunday Times uncover the truth about Murphy telephoned our Dublin offices to seek assurances that their identities and roles would be protected.

One man said: "He would have you killed as soon as he would look at you."

The Sunday Times agreed to such requests, although it meant withholding evidence against Murphy. Some witnesses received threatening phone calls but bravely proceeded.

One said: "It is a question of whether you side with the state, the courts and institutions that make us a free people or whether you buckle down to some tin-pot local dictator."

* A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SLAB MURPHY CASE

June 30 1985: The Sunday Times reports that eh senior IRA member, responsible for the planned seaside bombing campaign earlier that year, is a farmer known as Slab Murphy.

June 1987: Murphy claimed that the article libelled him and begins legal action.

March 1990: Jury in Dublin dismisses Murphy's libel case, branding him a prominant IRA officer who planned murder and bombing.

May 1996: Murphy's appeal: The Irish Supreme Court orders retrial on the basis that the original judge had not distinguished justification evidence from evidence concerning reputation.

May 15 1998: After a three-week trial, the culmination of a 13-year saga, the jury takes less than an hour to reject Murphy's case.

WTC made in St. Louis

2011-01-11T10:45:00.003-06:00

Area Man's Joist Design Stood Up AREA MAN'S JOIST DESIGN STOOD UP
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 5, 1993
by Charlene Prost

Carl Weber takes special interest in how well the twin 110-story World Trade Center towers survived an explosion in the basement last week.

The reason: Weber's design for composite-type steel joists, considered revolutionary when the towers were built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is embedded deeply in all the above-ground concrete floors. As far as anyone knows, the towers were the first, and probably the only, skyscrapers built that way.

As vice president in charge of engineering at Laclede Steel Co., Weber devised what he considered a stronger joist system for buildings. As a result, he said, Laclede Steel won a contract to supply more than 24,000 tons of steel trusses and internal supports for the world's two tallest buildings at the time. Sears Tower in Chicago has since topped them.

Two other St. Louis-area companies also got contracts. Cupples Products, today a division of Robertson Ceco Corp., supplied windows and aluminum covering the exterior. A division of Granite City Steel Co. made forms for the concrete floors.

Weber, 83, said his new joist design was part of Laclede's bid for the job, which got stiff competition from Bethlehem Steel Co. of Bethlehem, Pa.

Back then, steel joists in most buildings were not tied into the floors.

Weber's design, by contrast, imbedded joists into concrete floors, making them, he said, "an integral part of the structure of the building."

Weber also devised a way to weld joists on the ground into modules that could be hoisted into place - more efficient than the usual hoisting of individual pieces before welding them.

With Laclede and Bethlehem in close competition, Weber and his associates went to New York to plead their case to the Port Authority, the developer. At that point, he had used the new joist design only twice before - in houses he built for his family in University City and in Creve Coeur.

"He'd had a terrible time selling his design in St. Louis because people were skeptical of it," recalled Edna Weber, his wife. "But I remember that when he came back from New York, he said people there understood it immediately . . . and wanted to use it."

Eugene Fasullo, chief engineer for the Port Authority, remembers Weber's design as "unique" but said he thought "any floor system would have survived" the blast.

Larry Stallings worked with Weber at Laclede Steel and did some of the detailed design for the new system.

Between 1967 and 1969, he said, Laclede's plant in Madison, Ill., made more than 7,000 joists for the trade center towers. They were shipped by rail to Newark, N.J., and assembled into panels - each 60 feet long, 20 feet wide and 32 inches deep.

Stallings knows of only a few other buildings where Weber's design was used. They include older buildings at Northwest Plaza shopping center and the Sheraton Westport Hotel.

"Is She Breathing?" "WE don't know."

2010-12-26T17:18:00.004-06:00

A transcript of the 911 call released by the Frontenac Police Department in suburban St. Louis County, Mo. was obtained today by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The emergency call relates to the death of 27-year-old Adrienne Nicole Martin at the home of former Anheuser Busch CEO August Busch IV on Dec. 19. The police failed to release the police report on the death until Dec. 23, after the newspaper made an inquiry. The newspaper identified the caller as "household employee" Michael Jung. When asked by the operator whether the "girl," as he referred to her, was breathing , Jung told the operator: "We don't know." The transcript as printed in the newspaper reports that Jung gave the address as 2032 S. Lindbergh. Listening to the audio recording of the 911 call confirms the transcript's accuracy. Busch's residence is listed as 2832 S. Lindbergh.

OPERATOR: Emergency, 911.

CALLER: Yeah, we need an ambulance at 2032 South Lindbergh.

OPERATOR: Okay, is that a residence or business?

CALLER: Residence.

OPERATOR: Okay, what's the problem?

CALLER: Ahh, uhhh, she, this girl is just not waking up. We can't get her to ...

OPERATOR: (Interrupting) Is she, is she breathing?

CALLER: Yeah, we don't know. It's dark back there. I'm going to get a light and try and see.

OPERATOR: Okay, all right, I'll get them going right away.

CALLER: Okay, thanks.

OPERATOR:All right, thanks. Bye bye.

"Is She Breathing?"

2010-12-26T17:18:00.000-06:00

2010-12-21T21:55:00.001-06:00

Callaway Petition

Dutch Labour Party Leader Warns Americans to Stay Home

2010-10-02T16:31:00.009-05:00

"American tourists in the streets of Amsterdam represent a clear and present danger."

In a speech before members of the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions in Leiden on Saturday, Marius Job Cohen, the parliamentary leader of the Dutch Labour Party, called for support of the U.S. State Department's proposed travel advisory that warns Americans to stay away from public places while traveling in Europe.

"This may have a temporary adverse effect on our economy, but it is necessary," Cohen said. Cohen's speech, however, was not limited to concerns over conventional terrorism, though he recognized that the current terrorism threat is elevated. The problem includes serious concerns for public safety beyond the possibility of Al Qaeda attacks in Europe, Cohen told the audience.

"American tourists in the streets of Amsterdam represent a clear and present danger to themselves and the public at large," Cohen said. "They get high at coffeehouses and then invariably wander aimlessly into bicycle lanes without looking. We've had three fatalities already this year and hundreds of injuries."

The Dutch politician said that the legalisation of so-called "medical marijuana" in the U.S. has not decreased the incidents in the Netherelands. He added that passing a nationwide, mandatory helmet law in the Netherlands was not the solution to this problem.

"Until American tourists understand that the city of Amsterdam is not a Disney theme park put on earth for their pleasure, this situation is bound to continue. Therefore, I am supporting U.S. President Barack Obama's efforts to curtail the presence of American tourists in public places throughout Europe."

Cohen asked that the European Union look into the issue and consider passing legislation that would mandate that Americans be sequestered at their hotels or at designated "control areas," where they can be fed and properly supervised by the authorities.

"Most of the Americans I see walking about the city seem dazed and confused," said Cohen. He added that the typical American tourist refuses to even attempt to speak a word of Dutch, and he personally found American-style baseball caps to be inappropriate attire.

"It's is truly terrifying," said Cohen, after his speech. "I once had an American tourist accost me once," he recalled, shuttering. "He was smoking a spliff and rudely demanding directions to the sex zone. He was already in the sex zone." Cohen laughed off his presence in the red light district by saying he was on "official business."

Under Cohen's proposed legislation, Americans will be provided McDonald's hamburgers or KFC fried chicken at least once a day. In the Netherlands, he proposed that they also be allowed to have licensed prostitutes visit their hotel rooms, and purchase recreational drugs at the hotel bar.

"It's about time we dealt with this issue directly," he said.

Triple Cross: Fitzgerald Threatened to Sue Book Publisher

2010-08-18T11:04:00.002-05:00

TERRORISM: Liberals' darling strikes out

Miami Herald, Tuesday, June 16, 2009
by Glenn Garvin

When U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was investigating the leak of a CIA officer's name a couple of years ago, he bullied witnesses, threw innocent people in jail and generally acted like J. Edgar Hoover on the trail of a commie spy -- and his noisiest cheerleaders were American liberals, thrilled by the discovery that prosecutorial abuse can be fun when you're directing it at the Bush administration. I wonder if they'll like it as much now that Fitzgerald is slapping around the First Amendment.

Fitzgerald and his Justice Department pals, outraged by this week's publication of a critical book they've tried to kill for two years, are threatening to sue not only the author and publisher, but even bloggers.

The book, Triple Cross by former ABC reporter Peter Lance, tells the story of al Qaeda master spy Ali Mohamed, who infiltrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI while laying the groundwork for Osama bin Laden's campaign of terror that culminated in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mohamed passed his Green Beret training along to a terrorist cell in New York, which killed Rabbi Meier Kahane, bombed the World Trade Center in 1994 and planned to blow up bridges into the city in what became known as the "Day of Terror" attacks.

That Day of Terror never dawned; cell members were successfully prosecuted by Fitzgerald, then an assistant U.S. attorney in New York, in the case that earned him the reputation as the nation's law-enforcement ace on terrorism. Triple Cross , however, argues that Fitzgerald and the Justice Department muffed chance after chance to roll up al Qaeda's U.S. network (including some 9/11 hijackers) and deliberately discredited intelligence on al Qaeda from a jailhouse snitch that might have exposed FBI screw-ups.

That's not the kind of fawning press Fitzgerald is accustomed to, particularly since his term as special prosecutor on the Valerie Plame leak case. By any objective standard, the case was a legal flop and an insane waste of resources: Assigned a relatively simple task -- finding who leaked Plame's CIA identity to the press -- Fitzgerald spent three years and almost $3 million and in the end couldn't even prove the leak broke the law; the leaker, State Department official Richard Armitage, was never charged with anything. And though Armitage confessed the leak to Fitzgerald almost immediately, the prosecutor kept it secret and continued his investigation for years, inflicting huge legal bills on Bush staffers who would never be charged and even jailing New York Times reporter Judith Miller for three months although she'd never written a word about the case.

When a special prosecutor strikes out that way against anybody else -- say, Bill Clinton -- he's vilified as a vindictive judicial inquisitor. Fitzgerald, however, was the American left's dream warrior, criminalizing policy debate over the Iraq war and exacting a revenge that voters refused to deliver in the 2004 election. He became a media folk hero -- even made People magazine's Sexiest Men Alive list.

Given the mountain of good press Fitzgerald got for the molehill of results on the Plame case, it's not surprising that smoke started belching from his ears when Triple Cross was published in 2007. But he didn't just call a press conference to defend himself, he wrote a scorching letter to the publisher to "demand" -- his word -- the book be yanked off shelves. When HarperCollins didn't get with the program, Fitzgerald wrote a second letter -- and just to be sure the company knew who it was messing with, he faxed it from the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago.

Fitzgerald didn't succeed in killing Triple Cross , but he managed to keep the paperback version off the market for more than a year while HarperCollins and its lawyers went over the text line by line. Meanwhile, increasingly bellicose letters from Fitzgerald have continued at regular intervals. "I write to demand immediate compliance with my demands of October 2007," said one. When a lawyer uses the word "demand" twice in six words, you know his subpoena-finger is twitching. And when HarperCollins announced that the paperback, essentially unchanged, would be published, Fitzgerald's target list expanded.

A blogger who wrote about the book two weeks ago was immediately warned by one of Fitzerald's former Justice Department buddies that he might be breaking the law and had better get an attorney.

Just as he sought to criminalize disagreements over the Iraq war, Fitzgerald is now trying to force criticism of his performance as a public official into a courtroom. Libel law was never intended to protect the government from its own constituents. "Fitzgerald is just going to have to have a thicker skin," says Jan Schlichtmann, the attorney whose tangle with the chemical industry was dramatized in the film A Civil Action. "If he wants to defend himself against criticism in the book, do it in the marketplace of ideas. He shouldn't use his public office to be a gatekeeper. Patrick Fitzgerald is not supposed to be the one who decides what we read and what we discuss."

Sadly, that's going to be news to Fitzgerald.

Twisted Fate?: Fitzgerald Eulogized O'Neill

2010-08-18T10:36:00.004-05:00

NYC tower official is mourned - Security boss had been in FBI here

Chicago Tribune - Wednesday, October 10, 2001
by Aamer Madhani, Tribune staff reporter.

Friends, family and colleagues who knew FBI Special Agent John P. O'Neill long before he headed the bureau's anti-terrorism task force, chasing Osama bin Laden and others, celebrated his life Tuesday with a memorial mass in Old St. Patrick's Catholic Church on the Near West Side.

O'Neill left the FBI to become head of security at the World Trade Center days before the Sept. 11 attacks. He was among about 5,000 people who died when the skyscrapers collapsed.

O'Neill had escaped from the North Tower after it was struck by a hijacked airliner and called the FBI and longtime companion Valerie James shortly after the second tower was hit to say he was OK and was returning to the burning North Tower to try to help others.

"John, you never took the easy road. You made waves, and you made a difference," eulogized Bob Walsh, a retired FBI agent who worked with O'Neill in the Chicago office.

About 200 people--including Chicago police officers, firefighters and local FBI agents--filled most of the pews in the small church. Bagpipers from the Police Department's Emerald Society played at the beginning of the service and again afterward as mourners filed out of the church. Patrick Fitzgerald , acting U.S. attorney for the Northern Illinois District, gave one of the readings.

A 31-year FBI veteran, O'Neill was assistant agent-in-charge of the Chicago office from 1991 to 1995. As the head of the anti-terrorism unit in the FBI 's New York office from 1997 until this August, O'Neill led the inquiry into the suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole last year in Yemen.

He also played pivotal roles in the investigations of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing and the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa.

O'Neill retired from the FBI after becoming the subject of a bureau investigation because he misplaced a briefcase--later recovered--containing highly classified information. Authorities said last month that the briefcase included a report outlining virtually every national security operation in New York.

At the memorial in Chicago, his family recognized the irony that bin Laden, who O'Neill tracked for years, allegedly masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks.

"He probably knew bin Laden better than bin Laden knew himself," said Valerie James' daughter, Stacey, who wore a pendant on a necklace that O'Neill received from the FBI for 30 years of service. "He had posters of him in the house. Even my 5-year-old son knows, unfortunately, who Osama bin Laden is and that he killed his `Bapa.'"

John McKillop, James' brother and a paramedic with the Chicago Fire Department, was one of a number of area firefighters who drove to New York the day after the attack to assist in the rescue effort.

McKillop said that when he started the trip, he went with the intention of helping to rescue O'Neill, but that when he arrived at Ground Zero in the early morning hours of Sept. 13, he realized there was no hope.

"All I could think is, `What am I going to tell my sister?'" McKillop said.

Tuesday's Chicago memorial did not have the star power of O'Neill's funeral last month in Atlantic City. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh and Tom Pickard, the FBI 's deputy director, were among the mourners at the funeral.

But there was no doubt of O'Neill's importance to those who attended the Chicago memorial.

His colleagues from the FBI 's Chicago office recalled him as a hard-nosed investigator and demanding boss. But they also said O'Neill had a less serious side--he was a good guy to get a beer with after work and wouldn't let a lack of grace get in the way of having fun on the dance floor.

" John O'Neill never did anything half way," said Joe Doorley, supervisor of the FBI's fugitive task force in Chicago.

The Case Against Patrick Fitzgerald

2010-08-17T22:03:00.002-05:00

In the days preceding Sept. 11, 2001, Peter Fitzgerald, the one-term Republican senator from Illinois, named Patrick Fitzgerald to the post of U.S. attorney in Chicago. His choice was curious for more reasons than the fact that the two share the same last name.

Peter Fitzgerald and Patrick Fitzgerald aren't related, but both are staunch Republicans. And it would be unusual for a senator to nominate a U.S. attorney that wasn't a member of his respective political party. That didn't happen, of course.

But something odder did. Sen. Fitzgerald nominated Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of New York City to be the U.S. attorney in Chicago.

That never happens.

It's unprecedented. Senators name politically-connected lawyers from their home state to be U.S. attorneys.

Odder still is the fact that Patrick Fitzgerald, a rising star in New York City, would accept the job and choose to move to Chicago, a smaller judicial stage on which to perform. After all, as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Big Apple, Patrick Fitzgerald had handled some of the highest profile cases of the 1990s, including the prosecution of the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing.

Years later, after moving his show to Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald would be named by then-U.S. Attorney John Ashcroft to another unusual role: special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame leak case. Plame was the CIA agent outed by the Bush administration because of her husband exposed the false reasons given by Bush for invading Iraq.

Special prosecutor Fitzgerald would investigate and prosecute that case for a couple of years. In the end, only Dick Cheney's chief of staff would be convicted of obstructing justice. His boss and everybody else, including Bush, walked.

Fitzgerald's capacity to handle complex cases almost seems super human. While he investigated and tried the Plame case in Washington, he continued as the U.S. attorney in Chicago. During this same time period, his office in Chicago would prosecute a major Mafia case and also investigate the influence peddling of Chicago wheeler-dealer Tony Rezko, who was eventually convicted and sentenced to prison.

But it didn't stop there.

The Rezko case would eventually morph into charges being brought against Gov. Rod Blagojevich. And we know what happened since those charges were announced in December.

Doesn't it seem just a teeny-weenie bit weird that one attorney would not only be the lead prosecutor in all these cases -- but handle them all simultaneously?

I can't think of a single prosecutor in U.S. history that has a comparable record. None.

The other thing that is striking about U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is his unblemished reputation. If his reputation was any more pristine, somebody would be bound to start a new religion and begin worshiping him.

All of which gives me pause. Nobody is that perfect. Barack Obama isn't even considered that perfect. After all, he lived next door to Tony Rezko and got a sweetheart deal from Rezko on his residential property and also received hefty campaign contributions from the now-convicted Chicago developer.

This leads me back to former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, Patrick Fitgerald's original patron, the man who brought him to the Windy City. Where is he?

Well, he runs a little bank in Falls Church, Va. nowadays. Peter Fitzgerald didn't make the family fortune, but he was the beneficary of it. His father Gerald Fitzpatrick, also a banker, made the money. He sold his stake in a group of Illinois banks to French-Canadian investors for more than $200 million in the 1980s.

Daddy Fitzgerald is today chairman and president of Cornerstone Bancorp in suburban Chicago. He is also a director of AAR Corp. of Wood Dale, Ill. AAR is a major defense contractor and has received hundreds of millions of dollars in Pentagon pork since the endless war on terrorism was announced after the 9/11 attacks.

In September 2008, for example, AAR received a contract for almost $138million from the Air Force for pallet repair work at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia. In December 2007 AAR received a smaller contract worth more than $7 million for supplying parts for Blackhawk helicopters. A search of one minute or less at the Defense Department contract website yielded those results.

As a reward for his patriotism during wartime, Gerald Fitzpatrick received more than $126,000 in total compensation for sitting on AAR's board of directors in 2008, according to Forbes magazine.

Nice work if you can get it. It's good to see somebody profited from 9/11, and it just happened to coincidentally be the father of the Republican that installed Patrick Fitzgerald to his permanent position as the grand inquisitor of Chicago.

You gotta love this country and the great state of Illinois. God bless em.

The French Connection

2010-08-14T10:04:00.004-05:00

St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay isn't the only local Dem to accept the generous donations of right-wing ideologue Rex Sinquefield. So-called "Progressive" Ald. Antonio French of the 21st Ward has also fattened his campaign coffers with Sinquefield's money, according to Missouri Ethics Commission records. Sinquefield, who opposes the city earnings tax and favors charter schools, gave French's campaign committee $5,000 on April 16, 2009.

More Large Donors to Slay

2010-08-11T09:32:00.003-05:00

This list includes a number of usual suspects, but also Greg Wendt, a San Francisco venture capitalist who buys political influence from coast to coast, contributing to both major political parties.

Merry Xmas Mayor Slay From Rex Sinquefield

2010-08-10T13:36:00.006-05:00

Right-wing economist and stock-market millionaire Rex Sinquefield gave Democratic St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay an early Christmas present last year, when he contributed $50,000 to the mayor's campaign fund on December 23.

Mayor Slay, Donald Flynn and Waste Management

2010-08-10T12:40:00.007-05:00

Waste Management, the trashy conglomerate with a long history of ties to organized crime, contributed $5,000 to St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay's campaign coffers on November 29, 2009. As explained in the following story from the current issue of the St. Louis Journalism Review, former WM exec Donald Flynn and his son, Kevin Flynn, were denied an Illinois license to operate the proposed Emerald Casino in Rosemont, Ill. because of ties to the Chicago mafia.

All the News that’s Fit to Omit
An investor in the Chicago Sun-Times also holds a stake in a Soviet-era military aircraft owned by Illinois powerbroker Gary Fears.

A bankruptcy case filed in St. Louis last fall on behalf of Air Support Systems LLC shows that former Illinois casino operator Kevin Flynn holds a $1.3 million stake in the corporation’s only asset – a gargantuan Soviet-era military aircraft worth millions of dollars.

Since securing an interest in the refueling tanker – which has been stranded for a year at a former Air Force base in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan – Flynn has made another investment.

He is now part owner of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Flynn, 42, was among ten co-investors who bought the financially troubled tabloid in October, according to the Chicago Tribune. Other investors include William and Robert Parrillo, whose father was an attorney for Al Capone.
Flynn is alleged to have more recent ties to Chicago organized crime. In 2001, the Illinois Gaming Board yanked his long-dormant state license because two of his investors had ties to the Chicago mob.

At the time of the revocation, Flynn and his father, Donald Flynn, a former executive of Waste Management Inc., were seeking to transfer their gaming license from the shuttered Silver Eagle casino in East Dubuque, so they could operate the proposed Emerald Casino in Rosemont, a Chicago suburb. Investors in the casino deal included an aide to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Donald Flynn, 70, is CEO of LKQ Corp., a Chicago-based national auto salvage company. Kevin Flynn heads Renovo Services LLC, a multi-state vehicle repossession operation.
Gary Fears, the 64-year-old owner of Air Support Services, met the Flynns in the 1990s, when they operated the Blue Chip Casino in Michigan City, Ind. Kevin Flynn and Fears were later involved in a failed Indian casino development in California.

Fears, who is the subject of an investigative series in the online journal FOCUS/Midwest, resides in Boca Raton, Fla. But his career is rooted in Madison County, Ill. politics, where he made his bones decades ago as an operative for then-Gov. Dan Walker. Since leaving public life, he has traded on his insider status to parlay a series of controversial deals into a financial empire.

That empire began in the early 1980s, when he received millions from the state to build a hotel in Collinsville but eventually defaulted on the loan, leaving Illinois taxpayers in the lurch. A decade later, he circumvented regulators and made a fortune selling his family’s hidden interest in Illinois’ first riverboat casino. Both deals involved Illinois powerbroker William Cellini of Springfield, who is now under federal indictment on unrelated charges tied to the corruption trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Besides Cellini and the Flynns, Fears’ Illinois connections include Springfield lobbyist Robert Kjellander. In 2007, Fears’ lobbying firm, Avatar Enterprises Inc., hired Kjellander, a former GOP national treasurer, to represent the Moroccan government and a Gibraltar-based, online gambling operation, according to federal records. Morocco funneled payments to Avatar through a front company in the Turk & Caicos Islands.

During the Bush administration, Kjellander had access to the White House through his friend Karl Rove, then-deputy chief of staff. While Kjellander lobbied on behalf of Avatar, Fears pursued other ventures, including acquisition of the Ilyushin IL-78 aircraft.

The plane, formerly owned by the Ukrainian Air Force, departed Kiev on May 23, 2006, according to flight records, and landed the next day at the North Texas Regional Airport in Sherman, Texas. Once there it sat idle for the next three years due to financing problems and squabbles among Fears’ partners.

Finally, on July 17, 2009, a nine-member Ukrainian crew boarded the IL-78 with the intent of flying it to Pakistan. Alerted to the plane’s departure, Victor Miller, the owner of Air 1 Flight Services, filed a restraining order, and the plane was diverted to Sawyer International Airport, in Gwinn, Mich., where it has been stranded ever since due to litigation.

The St. Louis bankruptcy case is related to a civil suit filed by Miller for unpaid maintenance expenses of more than $70,000. On October 23, a judge in Marquette County, Mich. ruled in Miller’s favor. Fears countered by filing for Chapter 11 protection for Air Support Systems on October 28 in federal bankruptcy court in St. Louis.

“That stayed all of the action,” says Cheryl Hill, the Marquette County prosecutor who is the legal custodian of the aircraft. On Dec. 17, Fears reversed his strategy and had his St. Louis bankruptcy attorney dismiss the case. In March, the Michigan court’s ruling was upheld.

But Fears is still fighting to keep the plane. “Air Support Systems owns the plane,” told FOCUS/Midwest late last year. “The whole thing was a huge misunderstanding and blown out of proportion by the press.”

The abortive bankruptcy filing, however, shows that Fears’ acquisition of the plane was not carried out alone. Besides Flynn, Air Support Systems’ backers include Trident Response Group, a private mercenary group based in Dallas with holdings of $2.5 million; and Headlands Ltd., a shadowy company in Gibraltar, which holds a $1.1 million stake. – C.D. Stelzer

The investigative series on Gary Fears is available at http://focusmidwest.com.

Mayor Slay's Whales

2010-08-10T11:12:00.007-05:00

Campaign finance reports filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission show large contributions to Mayor Francis Slay late last year. The generous donors included Waste Management of Houston, Texas, which donated $5,000,and American Milling of Granite City, which contributed $5,000.

Crime Scene Photos

2010-08-10T07:16:00.012-05:00

After speaking to the head of the St. Louis Forestry Division, it still remains unclear what exactly prompted the city agency to extract the towering, 70-year-old oak tree in the 6300 block of Sutherland Avenue in St. Louis Hills last week.

Calls for the "servicing of trees" are made to a separate city agency, according to forestry chief Greg Hayes, and those complaints are often made anonymously. The Forestry Division, which receives 26,000 service orders annually, has no knowledge of who places any of the calls, he says

Hayes started off the conversation by saying he would not apologize for the unwarranted tree removal. He then went on the defend the decision by two of his subordinates to fell the tree. Despite the fact that trunk of the tree was healthy, Hayes says his workers decided to remove the tree without his knowledge rather than trim it. The reason they gave him for cutting down the tree was because a significant portion of its canopy was dead.

Judging by the amount of sunlight that is now hitting my building that explanation seems disingenuous.

Hayes then said that he had conducted a drive-by survey of the block and determined without getting out of his car that other trees on block were in the same condition as the tree that was cut down and that they too needed "servicing." Of course, Hayes freely admitted that he didn't inspect the felled tree himself. I took his "servicing" remark as an implicit threat that he was inclined to clear cut the entire block simply because I questioned his authority and expertise.

Hayes offered three criteria for cutting down a city tree: diseased or rotting branches; roots that cause plumbing problems; or roots that damage sidewalks, making them unsafe.

The reason given for cutting down this particular tree allegedly met the first guideline. The upper limbs were deemed to be diseased or dead. But the evidence left in the wake of the tree removal indicates another possible reason. The sidewalk is buckling where the tree once stood. In addition, there is a hole near the base of the tree that has a traffic cone in it. The hole and the traffic cone were there before the Forestry Division cut down the tree.

The alternative to cutting down the tree would have been to trim its upper branches, fill the hole and replace the sidewalk. But that would have required coordination with the city Street Department, which apparently is impossible to do. Instead, the residents of the block are left with an ugly tree stump, a hole in the ground and a buckling sidewalk, all of which are indicative of the deteriorating conditions in the neighborhood, which are being inexplicably exacerbated the Forestry Division.

The art-deco apartment buildings in the 6300 block of Sutherland are architectural gems, but lately the city has been remiss in enforcing code violations. The problems include erosion, deteriorating steps and buckling sidewalks. None of these issues are being addressed. On the other hand, the city Forestry Division seems very efficient in removing the neighborhood oak trees that date back the time that St. Louis Hills was established in the 1940s. The removal of the trees adds significantly to the overall decline of the neighborhood and should be avoided, if at all possible.

Frankly, I don't think Hayes has control over his work crews. They appear to do whatever the hell they want without any oversight or supervision.

The owner of the building at 6329-31 Sutherland next to where the tree once stood is millionaire John E. Simon III of Warson Woods. The business school at Maryville University in Chesterfield is named for John E. Simon. It is unclear whether the two are related.

Warson Woods Stays Green while St. Louis Hills is Cut Down

2010-08-09T12:57:00.007-05:00

Sutherland Avenue landlord John E. Simon III has plenty of shade around his home on Rolfe Drive in Warson Woods, but he doesn't care about the landscape of his city property enough to preserve a 70-year-old oak tree. Instead, he had the St. Louis "Forestry" Department cut it down even though the tree was perfectly healthy.

St. Louis Deforestation Program

2010-08-09T11:49:00.006-05:00

The St. Louis Forestry Department, which falls under the aegis of the mayor's office, should be renamed the Deforestation Department judging by its recent slash and burn policies in the St. Louis Hills neighborhood. In a one-block area, three stately oak trees have been sawed down by the city's urban lumberjacks in a year's time.

The latest to fall came just last week at 6329-31 Sutherland Avenue. The other two were deeply rooted at 6400 Sutherland and 6405 Devonshire.

St. Louis Hills is defined by its tree-lined streets so much so that its neighborhood association has adopted a leafy tree as its logo, but at this rate there will soon be few if any trees left in the neighborhood.

Mayor Francis Slay's office recommended calling the Forestry Department to find out why the trees were cut down. The Forestry Department did not return a call placed to it this morning.

Ald. Donna Baringer (D-16th Ward) says that the Forestry Department is only allowed to cut down trees that are deemed to be diseased or whose roots have damaged sewer systems.

It is apparent from the stump of the latest tree to fall that it wasn't diseased. The the towering 70-year-old, which was as old as the neighborhood, is now gone forever. No trees have been replanted in place of the ones that were cut down.

The Vision Thing

2010-07-26T11:02:00.007-05:00

What flies from Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas.

Earlier this month, the Cold War reemerged for a few days, when a United States-Russian spy swap garnered headlines.

The 10 accused Russian agents were flown to Vienna on July 9 and exchanged for four spies being held by Moscow.

Despite all the hoopla, Vision Airlines, the charter airline hired by the United States government, received little attention. The New York Times mentioned the name of the airline in the next to last paragraph of its story on the spy swap.

Vision was founded in 1994 to provide service to the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas, but it quickly expanded. The airline now owns a fleet of Boeing 767s and 737s, according to its website. The burgeoning charter company offers flights from not only Las Vegas but also Louisville, Miami, Atlanta and Washington DC.

As a part of its expansion, Vision announced that it would buy Paradise Island Airlines of Fort Lauderdale, Fl. in 2000, according to the Owensboro (Ky.) Messenger-Inquirer.

Brook Agnew, the CEO of Vision, told the Messenger-Inquirer about the buyout a decade ago when the airline was considering using the Owensboro, Ky. airport as one of its hubs.

Paradise Island Airlines was a subsidiary of Resorts International and provided flights from Florida to Paradise Island in the Bahamas, the location of Resorts International's notoriously mobbed-up casino. Resorts International's ties to mob financier Meyer Lansky date back to the late 1960s.

In the early 1970s, Resorts International formed a private intelligence-gathering operation called Intertel, which was staffed by former CIA agents and various other spooks. The manager of the casino was Eddie Cellini, the brother of a longtime associate of Lansky's. The agency was rumored to have laundered dirty money through the casino.

Resorts International was formerly the Mary Carter Paint Co. Paradise Island Airlines was formerly Chalk's International Airlines, which was founded in 1919.

Top Secret in Arnold, MO

2010-07-19T22:56:00.005-05:00

Snapshots of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in Arnold, Missouri, which is mentioned in the Washington Post series Top Secret America.

Her Majesty's Secret Service -- in Arnold, Missouri

2010-07-19T22:22:00.005-05:00

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in Arnold, Missouri is one of the unnamed, classified government sites that the Washington Post mentioned today in the first of its three-part series Top Secret America.

GIA provides satellite images for the Defense Department and various branches of the military. It's no top secret that it's located across the street from the Target and Home Depot stores on Vogel Road in Arnold.

But there is a lesser known fact about the facility. Google Map shows the same location as the local office of privately-operated Griffin Services, a subsidiary of the VT Group, a British company. Griffin provides a variety support services to U.S. military and intelligence organizations, according to its vaguely worded website.

Griffin's parent company -- VT Group -- is the former Vosper Thornycroft, a noted British shipbuilder. VT Group was bought out earlier this month by Babcock International, another privately-held, spooky British company. Babcock was formerly called Babcock & Wilcox. Like Vosper Thornycroft, Babcock & Wilcox was involved in serving Her Majesty's Royal Navy. Babcock originally built ship boilers.

The Secret Life of Gunther Russbacher

2010-07-17T12:45:00.010-05:00

The convicted felon claims he was a Navy captain, CIA operative and George Bush's Pilot in the infamous October Surprise Scandal

BY C.D. STELZER

published in the Riverfront Times, 1992.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- North, south, east and west. The lines in Gunther
Karl Russbacher's brow run in all directions. There appears to be a crease for every one of his 50 years. Deep undulating furrows that register emotional changes across a craggy facial landscape.

"I'm trying to catch my breath, I'm not quite with it yet," says Russbacher,
after entering the Control Unit of the Missouri Correctional Facility here.
He is carrying a foot-thick binder of court briefs, depositions, memos, diary entries, bills of lading, letters of credit and loading manifests. And while not gasping for air, the heavy paper load makes it easy to believe this man is under stress.

To reach inmate 184306, a vistor must be escorted through three check points and five clanging sets of iron bars. Gunther Karl Russbacher is a prisoner-- and not just any ordinary prisoner. But beyond that, no one is sure who he really is.

So far, those interested in finding out have included Texas billionaire Ross Perot, the United States Congress and Geraldo Rivera.

In the past, Russbacher has admittedly used aliases such as Emory Joseph Peden, Robert Andrew Walker and Robert Behler. He has also allegedly been known as "The Raven." The last pseudonym could be classified a nom de guerre, because Russbacher claims to be a Navy captain -- and not just any ordinary Navy captain.

Federal authorities arrested him in July 1990 for impersonating a military officer at Castle Air Force Base in Atwater, Calif. The charge led to Russbacher's probation revocation in St. Charles Co., where he had a 1989 conviction for stealing through deceit. Russbacher pled guilty in that case to defrauding clients of the St. Louis-based National Brokerage Companies, which he headed. He received a 21 year sentence. In both of these instances, Russbacher now claims he was carrying out covert duties for the United States government.

By his own account, he is a CIA operative with knowledge of the agency's involvement in financial fraud, drug trafficking, and illicit arms trading. Russbacher established National Brokerage and other proprietary companies, including failed savings and loan in Pennsylvania, at the behest of the CIA, he alleges. He further charges that his military and criminal records -- ostensibly altered to infiltrate terrorists and narcotic rings -- are now being used against him.

In addition, Russbacher claims his 1990 arrest followed a secret flight to inform Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the pending war with Iraq. This would be fantastic enough, but it's not all.

As an aviator attached to the Office of Naval Intelligence, Russbacher says he piloted a BAC-111 aircraft -- with George Bush on board -- to Paris in 1980. Perhaps more importantly, Russbacher claims to have shuttled Bush back to the United States a few hours later in an SR-71 spy plane -- and he professes to have proof.

His knowledge of these events is the real reason he is in prison, Russbacher says. Bush's French rendezvous purportedly finalized earlier negotiations between the Reagan-Bush campaign and Islamic revolutionaries. Those talks supposedly centered on delaying the release of 52 American hostages then being held by Iran until after the November presidential elections. In exchange for prolonging their captivity, the Iranians were allegedly promised arms and spare parts to supply their burgeoning war with Iraq. According to Russbacher, the Reaganites also forked over $40 million up
front to seal the deal.

The move was meant to assure a Republican victory over then-President Jimmy
Carter and pre-empt any "October surprise," or last-minute administration plan to gain the hostages release.

Russbacher is not the first nor most credible person to make these allegations. Reagan administration member Barbara Honegger published the initial October Surprise book in 1989.

In 1990, Gary Sick, a National Security Council member in the Carter administration, renewed interest in the subject through a New York Times op-ed article. Sick followed it up last year with a volume of his own.

Although there seems to be substance to these claims, there is uncertainty
as to Bush's presence at the Paris meetings. Citing Secret Service logs and interviews, the House October Surprise Task Force, a congressional inquiry now under way, dismissed the possibility of president's participation in an interim report issued June 30. In February, a lengthy analysis by writer Frank Snepp of the Village Voice similarly refuted the premise.

Another writer delving into related scandals didn't get a chance to jump to any conclusions. Journalist Danny Casolaro was found dead in a Martinsburg, W. Va. motel room last August. The local cornoner ruled it a suicide. But Casolaro's investigation into the BCCI banking debacle and Inslaw computer software case has left doubt as to the actual cause of his death.

Within this context, and given his alleged association with such shadowy figures as
arms merchant Richard Brenneke and self-proclaimed CIA contract agent Michael Riconosciuto, Russbacher's incredible story teeters on the verge of plausibility.

Inside the Control Unit of the Missouri Correctional Facility at Jefferson City, the air conditioning isn't working in one of the two visiting rooms. The four by four closet-sized space is furnished with two metal folding chairs and divided in the middle by a narrow counter top. Windows and a concave mirror allow prison guards to keep watch. The cubbyhole isthick with humidity as Russbacher, dressed in a sky blue sweat suit, begins to divulge the trump that he believes will set him free, and, ultimately, lead to either President Bush's impeachment or resignation.

"It's actually quite a simple thing," says Russbacher. "Every (SR) 71 flight -- be it a training session or actual mission -- is documented through a voice cockpit and video cockpit recorder," he explains. According to Russbacher, the plane's recording devices "document each and every facial expression, every movement of your hands and every turn of the instruments."

After the video is is transmitted in six-second bytes to one of three satellites positioned at "keyhole 11, 12 or 13" a signature is superimposed at the bottom of the screen, which includes: the exact time, aircraft of origin and its location. "It's beamed back down to the NSA (National Security Agency) station at Fort Meade, Md. There is no way to tamper with it. If you try to make a secondary copy from the
original, bar codes jump up," says Russbacher.

"This tape is in our possession," he adds. Once the tape is turned over to congressional investigators and authenticated, he has been promised a release from prison and immunity from prosecution, Russbacher claims. His supporters, those who purloined the recording, form a cadre of disgruntled covert operatives, according to Russbacher. The way he explains it, there is a war going on within the intelligence community that involves three groups. "Faction one is the pro-Bush or the loyal faction within the agency," says Russbacher. "Faction two (is) comprised mainly
out of ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) handlers." These are the good guys, according to Russbacher. "Faction two is loyal, basically, to the Constitution and to the concept of military law and order." Russbacher indicates the third bunch is in league with the second.

"They're called rouge elephants. They're stationed overseas, they're
stringers, they're cutouts, they're low-level agents."

Be it an act or the bonafide portrayal, Russbacher's stance hasn't gone unreviewed. Back in February -- days after announcing an interest in the presidency -- Ross Perot sent his top lawyer, David Bryant, and two pilots to interview the Missouri inmate. Perot also contacted Rep. Richard A. Gephardt in regard to Russbacher's treatment at the Fulton Correctional Facility. Gephardt's office in turn requested Missouri House
Speaker Bob Griffin inquire about Russbacher's condition. Griffin then spoke to George Lombardi, a state prison official. This flurry of concern came after Perot's delegation was refused the right to interview Russbacher. At the time, Russbacher, who claims a heart condition, was being cloistered at the University Hospital in Columbia, Mo. News accounts have implied Russbacher feigned illness to dodge the investigators.
Russbacher denies this, but says he still can't state what transpired out
of fear for himself and his family.

When The RFT asked why he had been admitted, a hospital spokeswoman said the information was confidential. Since being moved to Jefferson City, Russbacher has been placed in protective custody. Because of the delay, Bryant and both pilots departed before speaking to Russbacher. To determine his familiarity with the SR-71, the remaining investigator, Bob Peck, asked a specific question about TEB, a jet fuel additive, according to Russbacher.

The question came despite agreeing in advance not to discuss the aircraft, he says. With a prison official monitoring the interview, the self professed spy plane pilot either couldn't anwser the question or was unwilling to do so under the circumstances. Russbacher's reticence became one more reason for the press to label him a charlatan. Russbacher has no compunction about discussing the SR-71 now, however.

"You know what TEB stands for?" he asks. "That's for tetra ethyl-borane, which is like the stuff you squirt into a car on a cold morning."

Such details and jargon add credibility to Russbacher's story. There is also the stubble of beard that contrasts with his bald pate, and a subtle comportment that projects a military air. The combination seems almost enough to transform "Capt." Russbacher's prison garb into a flight suit. More startling is his missing fingernails, the result, Russbacher claims, of having been tortured by the enemy after he crashed over Laos during the Vietnam War. Eyeglasses offer the finishing touch to his persona.

If this were a movie, Robert Duvall would be cast in the role. Indeed, Russbacher's alleged exploits have already piqued an interest within the entertainment industry. He is quick to cite Gorby Leon, of Coumbia Picture's story department, as one of his contacts. He also granted Geraldo Rivera's "Now it Can be Told" a five-and-a-half hour interview recently.

The segment never ran, and since then the TV show has been cancelled. True to character, Russbacher attributes its demise to forces more nefarious than low ratings. Likewise, members of the House October Surprise Task Force aren't tuning in the "Gunther Russbacher Show," or so they would have it seem. Richard Lewis, a spokesman for the task force in Washington, D.C., cannot comment on specifics, but says all
individuals who claim participation or knowledge of events surrounding the October surprise are being interviewed.

However, as mentioned earlier, the task force has already refuted Russbacher's allegation that Bush attended the 1980 Paris meetings. To explain this premature judgment, Lewis notes that task force chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), "is intent upon not having this seen as a partisan investigation." Russbacher sees just that. "Hamilton entertained thoughts that he would become Mr. Clinton's running mate. You will find that Mr. Hamilton will be more at ease now with the situation, ... and I
think you will see a retraction quite soon," he says. "Lee Hamilton doesn't play little games like that," responds Lewis. The spokesman concedes Hamilton was "very wary" of accusations against Bush from the beginning.

The committee chairman wanted to "show good faith" and give the perception of professionalism by refuting the allegations as soon as possible, Lewis says.

Presidents always seem to garner "good faith" from the pols and the press.
Russbacher hasn't been nearly as fortunate. Mainstream media, when it refer to him at all, often doesn't mention his name. The best reporting on the subject has been by small independent newspapers like the Jefferson City News Tribune and the Napa (Calif.) Sentinel. The St. Louis Post Dispatch, by contrast, calls Russbacher "the great pretender," but seems more fawning to Bush administration officials. In reporting a visit by U.S. ambassador Donald Gregg on June 8, the newspaper failed to mention that the former CIA official has been implicated in the October surprise. And only in the photo caption is there word that Gregg conferred with Missouri Gov. John Ashcroft before speaking to the World Affairs Council. Interestingly, this was the first time Ashcroft attended such a seminar, according to a council spokeswoman.

In St. Charles, assistant prosecutor Phillip W. Groenweghe appears no
more eager to talk about the Russbacher case. Repeated calls to his office went unreturned last week. Robert Fleming, a court-appointed public defender, provided the following background on his client. Russbacher acquired a record for passing bad checks in the Army as a teenager. Then in the 70s, he was placed on probation after being convicted on federal charges in Louisiana of carrying bearer bonds, while
dressed in a Army major's uniform. Before now, Russbacher "doesn't seem to have served any time in any penitentiary," says Fleming. This dovetails with his contention that he has been "sheepdipped," Fleming says. The espionage term describes a spy whose identity has been changed. Fleming is challenging Russbacher's conviction on grounds that the statute of limitations had expired and that his client previously received
inadequate legal counsel.

National Brokerage Companies, the alleged CIA proprietary, was registered
with the state in January 1986. The names connected to the company are Emory Joseph Peden, Russbacher's alias, and Peggy Russbacher, his former wife. A Florissant firm now using the title appears to be unrelated, Fleming says. Russbacher and his wife also incorporated other companies, according to Fleming, but investigators have been unable to find records of any National Brokerage spin-offs, which Russbacher asserts were part of the CIA operation. Russbacher says he ran the CIA proprietary at 7711 Bonhomme in Clayton and shared an office with the Connecticut
Mutual Insurance Company.

There may even be a more secretive organization behind Russbacher's activities. As the interview concludes, he shows off a the wide gold band he wears on one finger. There are enigmatic symbols inscribed on the ring. "The pyramid is also the symbol for delta," Russbacher cyptically explains. Other symbols, shaped like asterisks, represent the eight points of the earth, he says. "I'm just telling you very few people wear this ring. "My wife has one, I have one. All other married couples wear them. They're handmade. It signifies the ability to strike as a unit for the sake of humanity," says Russbacher.

"It's a very long story."

Lost in Space, Found in Belgrade, Mo.

2010-07-16T09:56:00.006-05:00

first published in the Riverfront Times (St. Louis), Aug. 1, 1990

By C.D. Stelzer

On page one of the Belgrade telephone directory-- a book about the size of a healthy RFT -- the name Akers appears 14 times. By Lawrence Akers' count, most all those folks are kin.

To the east of the town of 200, Aker Hill rises 1,198 feet. The farm village 85 miles southwest of St. Louis owes its agricultural wealth to its position within Belleview valley, a fertile swath hemmed by the most rugged hills in the state. Akers Road appears on a county road map. Akers lives in the last of three ranch-style homes along that road, the first two occupied by his daughters and their families. He was born a few miles from here, his wife Dolores a few miles the other direction.

Akers, 64, raises fescue and clover, fodder for his star boarders, 200 head of mixed-breed beef cattle. making hay while the sun shines is no cliche in Akers' lexicon. Neither are the hours -- dawn till dusk. For 37 summers, Akers has cut grass in these rolling pastures that now number 554 acres.

He has been here a long time -- and by his recollection, so have the inexplicable nocturnal lights in the sky. But in all those years working the land, Akers says he never before saw what he came across on June 12. On that date, while astride his Ford 500 diesel tractor, he noticed a circular pattern of radiating lines in the middle of the hillside he had nearly finished mowing. "We have all kinds of lightning strikes here. ... Never seen nothing like this ... and I've been over every inch of this ground every year, " Akers says.

Akers is responding to the latest in a litany of rational explanations for the wheel-impression that scars his pasture. The most recent theory arrived in his morning mail from Barbara Becker, a member of the UFO Research Network in St. Louis.

Other explanations include wind currents, fungus and an overdose of fertilizers. The farmer regards all the hypotheses as having no more value than the dried dung he says he kicked from the hub of the controversy at the time he discovered the markings.

"See this dirt here?" says Akers, pointing to the center of the 12 radiating lines. "I kicked it over. That was a dried cow pile, ... If that had been lightning it would have blowed that thing all to pieces. Akers further altered the site by cutting over it to make the pattern easier to observe.

"This grass was this tall," says Akers, indicating with his hand a knee-high position on his more-than-six-foot heavyweight frame. "All of that was just pushed down, where it depressed it. Lightning wouldn't press that stuff down," he says, of the area, 24-feet in diameter, which the impressions encompass.

Under his bib overalls, a short-sleeved shirt reveals strong, weathered forearms. His face is shielded from the noonday sun by a cap displaying the name of the University of Missouri Agricultural Extension, for which he has been an agent for the last 14 years. Akers advises local family farmers about the problems with livestock or field
conditions. It is a role he is far more familiar with than grappling with unknowns under the skeptical eye of the press.

After his discovery, Akers contacted the University of Missouri for expert opinion. The university gave him several names, but before he pursued academic advice, he contacted KTVI-TV (channel 2) in St. Louis. Ensuing publicity caught the interest of local UFO investigators, a Post Dispatch reporter and a man from Hillsboro who
checked the site with a Geiger counter. Add to the commotion nightly expeditions to the site by family, friends and neighbors at the busiest time on the farm calendar, and a more scientific approach became lost in the shuffle.

Akers' initial conjecture that the markings were caused by a UFO made the incident officially off-limits to federal investigation. Since the 1969 closing of Project Blue Book -- an Air Force UFO study -- the government considers the subject verboten. Besides Becker, the site has been visited by J.L. Palermo, a field investigator for the Mutual Unidentified Flying Object Network (MUFON), a nationwide group that began around the time the Air Force ended its investigation. Palermo took soil samples, shot video footage and supported Akers' opinions, says the farmer.

But Palermo's business card raises questions about his credibility. It identifies him as a video producer, MUFON lecturer and investigator and under his name reads: "a.k.a. The Spirit of Elvis."

Now, during a midday dinner break, Akers is answering more questions, this time from a person with no business card and the flimsiest of credentials, a freelance writer.

"Well, I could go along with lightning," he says, "if it wasn't for the indentations. Akers roped off the area, using iron fence posts and strands of twine. Inside the ring, he plods like a weary fighter who knows the match is fixed, but determined to go the distance, parries no query and never wavers his stance. The indentations he speaks
of are circular impressions, ranging from faint to clear, arranged in identical triangular design at the end of each of the dried grass spokes that form the wheel.

The physical evidence is impossible to see without squatting and pushing the already-clipped grass aside. The pattern was his grandchildren's discovery, he says.

"I didn't even know they were there until the kids saw little places in the grass." Behind Akers, two mountains, Pruitt and Johnson rise beyond the Big River Valley. Just out of sight is the hamlet of Sunlight. Wilma Wiley lives there.

While driving, Wiley, 68, saw four and then two "brilliant bright lights," hovering at treetop level near Highway C last October, she says. Her third and final sighting that Sunday night was of a "round red glowing light," which appeared to be sectioned off in windows, she says. "There's been numerous amount of people seen them," says Akers,
mentioning another Sunlight resident Winfred Gilman, his own brother-in law, and an unidentified county official.

Although Akers has seen UFOs three times, he says he saw nothing recently. The only house visible from the pasture is his, faintly discernible through trees a mile away. The spot is accessible to vehicles only by Akers' farm road. With a county average of 25 people per square mile, Akers surmises whatever occurred could have happened days before he found the after-effects.

If what fascinates terrestrials is the possibility of UFOs, any intelligent aerial observer would have more down-to-earth interests. On the surface, Akers' farm appears in the middle of nowhere. But the area's topographical map shows the Fifth Principal Meridian -- a major survey line -- about two miles west of Akers' farm. Tracing the meridian 50 miles south shows that the line runs west of Piedmont a town where UFO sightings drew national attention in 1973.

The flap prompted a seven-year study by Harley Rutledge, head of the physics department at Southeast Missouri State University. Rutledge and others logged 178 UFO encounters. On the bumpy return jaunt through Akers' pastures, the farmer points to a spot where he unearthed an Indian tomahawk five or six years ago.

As a child, he says, he found dozens of the artifacts. At the opposite end of the county, atop the Big River bluffs, ancient Indian petroglyphs are carved in rocks at Washington State Park. Archaeologists attribute the carvings to the Mississippian culture that built Cahokia Mounds.

One carving -- a squiggly line with attached arrow - resembles a serpentine river. Another depicts a human stick figure joined to one of many radiating lines forming a circle -- a design similar to the impression Akers discovered. Back at this house, Akers goes inside to fill his water jug. "We don't know what it is, or where it comes
from," he says, seated at the kitchen table with his wife.

"I'm not saying it's from outer space." Based on his experience with IFOs (identified flying objects), Akers says he first suspected government origins. Military aircraft often fly at treetop level near his house, he says. Indeed, according to a front-page Post-Dispatch story from July 5, 1985,F-4 Phantom low-altitude flights were observed over an area west of Akers' farm near Viburnum. the jets were from the Missouri National Guard in St. Louis, according to the account.

After years studying UFOs over southeast Missouri, physicist Rutledge, concluded: "A relationship, cognizance, between us and the UFO intelligence evolved. A game was played. ... This facet of the UFO experience perturbed me as much as the advanced technology we observed. It is a facet I cannot really fathom -- and I have thought about it every day for more than seven years.

While Akers sips iced tea at his kitchen table, he recalls the one interactive experience he had with a UFO more than 20 years ago. His family witnessed a brilliant white light hovering at treetop level by their old farmhouse in the valley. Akers challenged the object to draw closer. The UFO crossed his line twice before departing, he says.

Rain will soon wash traces from Akers' pasture, but it won't erode his one certainty. "Just as sure as I'm, sittin' here ... something landed or something set down from the air there, and went back up," says the Show-me farmer.

"What it is, I don't know."

Blast from the Past

2010-07-13T11:13:00.006-05:00

Fallout shelters are showing their Atomic Age

first published in the Riverfront Times (St. Louis), March 11, 1992

BY C.D. STELZER

This is a public service announcement, this is not a warning: Swine have eaten civil defense provisions in Jefferson County, and the Midwest's most secure fallout shelter in Glendale is stocked with 5,000 pairs of foreign shoes. If you are concerned about personal safety and the nation's welfare in the event of a nuclear attack please read the following report.

The underground office of Laurie's Shoe Center at 9916 Manchester Road doesn't have much of a view, but the workspace does offer a sense of security.

The shoe store basement is considered the safest nuclear fallout shelter in the Midwest, according to Joan Waldman, the matriarch of the family-owned business. When Waldman's late husband Wally built the store in 1951, at the height of the Cold War, he consulted civil defense authorities and constructed the basement to their rigid specifications. The basement floor is made of four sheets of lead, each sandwiched between a foot or two of concrete. The ceiling is lead plated as well and the few small windows are equipped with lead shutters.

The construction cost $70,000, according to Waldman. An emergency management official for St. Louis County told her it would take $250,000 to build an equivalent structure now, she says. Authorities have also told her in the past that the shelter could survive a direct hit.

The basement was originally equipped with oil heat and a separate air conditioning unit. An internal filtering system cleansed the air and an auxiliary generator provided backup electricity. Initially, the Waldmans stockpiled enough provisions to feed 250 people for three weeks. The family held mock drills and students from the Kirkwood and Webster Groves toured the facility.
B
ut gradually, the threat of nuclear holocaust yielded to shoe leather and the basement became devoted to storage space. As recently as 1982, however, during Reagan's holy war against the "Evil Empire," county officials considered restocking the shelter, according to Waldman.

When asked why she and her husband built the bunker, Waldman replies: "We were civic minded." In the unlikely event that the big one is dropped on St. Louis in the future there is only one prerequisite for gaining safe haven at Laurie's Shoe Center. Waldman says: "We'll let anybody in that'll buy a pair of shoes."

Since the advent of the atomic age, giant defense contractors have cornered the market on nuclear hysteria, but that doesn't mean small businessmen haven't tried. A few miles east of Laurie's Shoe Center in Maplewood, John Garlich exhibited the All-American entrepreneurial spirit back in 1961. Garlich, a used car salesman for Ted's Motors at 7490 Manchester, was also the president of Nuclear Fallout Shelters, Inc.

Garlich told a St. Louis Globe-Democrat reporter that "It will become normal for the average family to have a shelter just like an automobile, appliances and so forth. Without a doubt, in two or three years, 60 to 70 percent of the homes in this area will have shelters," the used car salesman predicted.

While private fallout shelters never did become trendy, public and corporate civil defense accommodations -- thanks to federal funding -- mushroomed in the early 1960s.
A subterranean bunker built in the late 1950s, at 14847 Olive Street Rd. in Chesterfield, once served as the city and county's joint civil defense command post. The property near the Missouri River, then belonged to the City of St. Louis and was part of Howard Bend Station, one of its waterworks. The facility is still the headquarters for the St. Louis County Office of Emergency Management, and is equipped with auxiliary power, telephone hotlines and its own 10,000 gallon water tank, according to Mike Smilely, county emergency management specialist.

At the paranoia's zenith, McDonnell Aircraft stocked provisions for 29,000 people for two weeks and the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown St. Louis hoarded enough supplies to sustain 1,200 people for a month.

Human safety was not the only thing officials were worried about. The St. Louis Union Trust Co., for example, stashed a duplicate set of it financial records in a 1,024-square-foot-underground vault in the Clark National Forest 200 miles south of St. Louis. Entry to the underground storage facility was gained through a tunnel adjoining the Winona Savings Bank in the tiny Ozark burg of Winona, Mo.

By 1965, the St. Louis Office of Civil Defense estimated that the city's 530 shelters had a capacity to hold 332,037 citizens. Within five years, however, the civil defense budget was cut, and stockpiled supplies were pilfered or deteriorated. What happened to all the food, water and medicine at hundreds of public fallouts shelters is impossible to determine.

There is, however, at least one instance in which the neglected civil defense provisions went to a worthy cause. Oddly enough, it could be described as a case of United States national-security objectives being turned into bacon.

Dave, an expatriated city dweller, joined the back-to-the-land movement in the early 1970s. The hipster rented acreage on the outskirts of DeSoto and became a subsistence farmer. So-subsistent that he found it necessary to purloin his pig feed. Through an acquaintance, who worked as a night watchman at the sand mines near Crystal City, Dave learned about a languishing stockpile of civil defense supplies stored in the depths of an abandoned labyrinth.

To reach the stash, the pig farmer and the night watchman drove inside the Jefferson County hills, through miles of tunnels, down shifting the brakeless-glass-company jeep, engine ping echoing off cavernous ceiling 150 feet high.

When they reached their destination, they loaded the vehicle with boxes of phenobarbital and five-gallon tins of "survival crackers," which tasted like saltines without salt.

According to Dave, the swine ate the crackers only as a last resort. The tranquilizers were reserved for human consumption. After all, living with the threat of nuclear war can be nerve-racking.

Pacheco's Folly

2010-07-13T10:59:00.004-05:00

When Manuel Pacheco accepted his new job as president of the University of Missouri, he also joined the board of directors of one of the worst polluters in the state

published in the Riverfront Times (St. Louis), Aug. 13, 1997

BY C.D. STELZER

In April, a Sierra Club member traveled to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) regional offices in Poplar Bluff with a copy machine. She spent the next two weeks diligently duplicating the compliance files of the state's lead mining companies. The files revealed little compliance and many violations. Violations of state and federal environmental laws. Violations of court-ordered consent decrees. Violations on top of violations.

In the case of Asarco Inc., the New York-based multinational corporation, the Xeroxed documents amounted to about 750 pages. By June, the Sierra Club had completed a 30-page summary of the DNR records that concisely exposes a decade of environmental negligence by Missouri's lead industry; a legacy of pollution that has fouled the land, air and waters of the state.

Last week, Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club sent a copy of the report to Manuel Pacheco, the new president of University of Missouri. Midkiff has publicly asked the academic leader to give up the seat he recently acquired on Asarco's board of directors. Pacheco, who previously headed the University of Arizona, has refused to sever his ties with the mining company, which is rated by regulators as the number two polluter in Missouri. A spokesman for Asarco in New York refrained from commenting on the controvery.

"We think it is inappropriate for the president of major university system to align himself with one of the worst company's in the state," says Midkiff. "Every law that they are responsible for observing, they have violated." The list includes solid and hazardous waste laws and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, according to the environmentalist. "They've even polluted the drinking water of their own employees with fecal coliform and lead," says Midkiff. Recent signs of improvements in Asarco's environmental performance has not mollified him. "They're record is atrocious. We found Asarco has been in continuing non compliance for air violations since they opened their operations (in Missouri) in 1968."

The pollution problems associated at Asarco extend well beyond the state's borders, however. Since organizing as the American Smelting and Refining Co. in 1899, the corporation has mined minerals in the Western U.S., Mexico and more recently Peru. It remains a profitable enterprise. Last month, the company reported that earning rose 39 percent to $46.5 million, or 90 cents a share. Although Asarco's investors may now be taking stock of their dividends, no one is keeping as accurate a tab on the overall costs that mining operations have on the environment.

For his part, Pacheco claims his membership on Asarco's board will benefit public interests. "There are some very serious efforts that are being made at making sure that (Asarco) comes into compliance," says the university president. "I have an opportunity to influence from within better than I would from outside. You have to take that into context," says Pacheco, who will be paid $2,100 a month for his membership on the board. His university salary is $195,000.

As for Asarco's poor environmental record in Missouri, Pacheco says he was unaware of any problems prior to accepting his seat on the board of directors. "When I was approached, there wasn't even a thought about it. I had no reason to know about Missouri. Asarco has operations all over the world," says Pacheco. "I hadn't looked into that before I agreed to join the board."

This small oversight, on the part of the university president, needs to be placed in context, too:

*In 1996, Asarco agreed to pay $1.7 million in fines for dumping excessive amounts of lead into a tributary of the West Fork of the Black River in the Missouri Ozarks. The penalty was the largest in state history. *As a part of the settlement, the state also required the company to build a $500,000 waste-water treatment plant to prevent further contamination of the watershed.

*In 1995, the Environmental Protection Agency cited Asarco for its failure to meet air emission standards at its lead smelter in Glover, Mo.

* A study released in 1995 by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry showed that residents who lived near the Glover lead smelter were more likely to have elevated levels of lead in their blood, respiratory problems and diminished lung capacity.

*Earlier this year, the Missouri Conservation Department dropped its plan to grant prospecting rights on state land to Asarco and its competitor, the Doe Run Co.

* Last month, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon asked the U.S. Forest Service to prohibit Asarco and Doe Run Co. from doing exploratory drilling on federal property in the state.

"It's incredulous to me. I don't know how the man could not know," says Tom Kruzen, an Ozark environmentalist. "How the hell did he get where he is, anyway? Who in the university system, what curator, what mining interest suggested him? This is not a coincidence, I'm sorry. Feed me free Bubble-Up and rainbow stew, it is not a coincidence!"

A coincidence or no coincidence? That is the question. Pacheco says he can't remember exactly when Asarco first approached him about joining it's board. Last week, the Columbia (Mo.) Tribune reported that the university president had said he received the offer in February or March, which would have been around the time he accepted the post at the University of Missouri. "I just simply can't remember the exact timing on these things except that we had been discussing board membership before I came to Missouri," he says.

Pacheco does remember vaugely that he has worked with Asarco on a number of issues in the past. "In terms of my knowledge and work with Asarco and other mining communities, especially in Arizona, it goes back a long time," he says. "I've known people from Asarco from Boy Scout activities and things like this for a long time."

But Asarco is noted in the sunbelt state for more than its charity. The company's copper smelter in Hayden, Ariz. has released more arsenic into the air than any facility in the country, according to the Sierra Club. And news reports in Tucson, the site of Pacheco's last academic posting, have long chronicled Asarco's controversial bid to acquire mining rights in the nearby Santa Rita Mountains of the Coronado National Forest.

Asarco's Western exploits are by no means confined to the Santa Rita range, however. In Montana, for instance, environmentalists have confronted the mining company over pollution entering into the Clark Fork River. To the east, in Omaha, Nebraska, an Asarco lead refinery has been penalized millions of dollars for contaminating the soil and polluting the waters of the Missouri River, according to the Omaha World -Tribune.

Asarco's environmental record is no better in the Southern Hemisphere, but it does appear to receive more financial support from the federal government south of the border. Asarco owns a majority interest in the Southern Peru Copper Corp. (SPCC). In 1995, according to an Asarco press release, SPCC received a $35 million loan from the Export-Import Bank, a U.S. agency that specializes in direct credit to borrowers outside of the country.

By coincidence, that same year, a group of Peruvian citizens filed a civil suit in Texas against SPCC, according to The New York Times. The plaintiffs alleged that air emission from SPCC's copper smelter in Ilo, Peru had caused respiratory diseases and other health problems. The Times story cited unnamed environmentalists who claimed that Asarco's Peruvian copper smelter emitted 2,000 tons of sulphur dioxide every day, which is 10 to 15 times the limit for similar plants operating in the U.S.

As recently as 1993, an Internal Revenue Service returns showed that the Rockefeller Family Fund has invested a heft amount in Asarco, according to Washington Babylon, a book by muckrakers Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein. Serving as a guardian to even a small portion of the Rockefeller fortune must indeed be heady stuff for Pacheco. But he remains modest and self-deprecating about his role, when comparing himself to other high-ranking university administrators.

"If you look at university presidents around the country," says Pacheco, "I would say that the majority serve on many corporate boards. I only serve on this one. So it's common practice. The reason for it is that it is beneficial to the corporations and it's beneficial to the universities."

Although Pacheco may now only sit on one corporate board, he admits he is also a member of the National Security Education Program (NSEP). Formed in 1991, NSEP was the brainchild of former U.S. Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.). The program is administered by the Department of Defense (DOD), which allocates NSEP funding to hundreds of college campuses across the country. As its name indicates, NSEP is essentially an intelligence operation. Its purpose is to financially support certain university programs and offer scholarship and grant money to undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students who are studying foreign languages and cultures that are deemed important to U.S. national security interests. The DOD money is funneled through two organizations: the Academy for Educational Development and the Institute of International Education.

After completing their education, participating students are obligated to serve either in academia or work directly for the defense intelligence establishment. Officially sanctioned NSEP career choices include: the National Security Council, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Rand Corp., a think tank.

The trend toward bolstering overt ties between the CIA and the academia began during the Reagan-Bush administration, when the agency started openly recruiting university researchers. In 1988, for example, the Columbia (Mo.) Tribune reported that former University of Missouri chancellor Haskell Monroe met with a St. Louis-based CIA employee who informed the administrator of agency liaisons with university professors. The passage of the National Security Education Act in 1991 allowed for an even more cordial relationship to develop. By 1994 -- the year Pacheco assumed his position on the NSEP board -- the DOD program provided more than $231,000 for Islamic studies at Washington University here, according to the NSEP's web site on the Internet. The program's home page also boasts of other similar educational projects at private and public colleges and universities across the country in recent years.

Infiltration of the nation's campuses by the defense-intelligence establishment, along with the increasing presence of multinational corporations such as Asarco withinnow seems to be a standard practice within the once hallowed halls of academia. As a result, questions dealing with academic freedom, and the undue influence of governmental and corporate interests have been for the most part ignored. When asked, Pacheco, adamantly objected to the suggestion that his dual alliance with private industry and the intelligence community is even remotely related. "There is absolutely no relationship, whatsoever," he says. "There is absolutely no connection."

The University of Missouri Board of Curators don't appear see any connection either. So far there there has been signs of concern by the curators about the potential conflict of interest that Pacheco's off campus activities may cause.

Mary Gillespie, one of the nine curators who approved Pacheco's appointment, wasn't aware of the new university president's NSEP affiliation until she was informed by The RFT. According to Gillespie, the board of curators relied on the expertise of Korn/Ferry International, a professional executive search firm, in its efforts to find a replacement for the presidential vacancy at the university. Korn/Ferry does business in 40 countries worldwide, and is especially active in Latin America. Given current U.S. trade policies and foreign policy interests, Pacheco's hispanic background obviously represents a strong point on his resume.

As for Pacheco's membership on the board of directors of Asarco, Gillespie sees it as an asset as well. "In order for them (Asarco) to recognize their obligation to be a responsible corporate citizen I think you have to have people on that board who can assist them on focusing on issues," says Gillespie, who is an accountant and a lawyer. "I don't know a whole lot about Asarco, but I will give them credit for the fact that they recognized diversity. They have had a woman on their board for a number of years and now they are adding a man of hispanic dissent."

Gillespie says she is encouraged by legal precedents that are shifting more liability into corporate boardrooms. She adds that Security and Exchange Commission rules also require that publicly held corporations disclose environmental losses. "As a board member, he (Pacheco) is going to be required to review those financial statements, when they are issued to the public," says Gillespie. "I would hope that if at some point he feels that they are not accomplishing what needs to be done, he will look at his board membership very carefully and decide whether to stay or resign."

Gillespie points out that the University of Missouri at Rolla, which has an entire curriculum devoted to mining, is currently conducting studies in childhood lead poisoning, which is funded through a grant from the National Institutes for Health.

However, Midkiff of the Sierra Club asserts that past research has been compromised because it was largely funded by the lead industry.

"So far they have been apologists for the mining industry and have found ways to whitewash what they are doing rather than to help find ways for them to clean up their act," says Midkiff, referring to the researchers at Rolla. "There are a couple of professors down there who have just done a major job of trying to show that lead released into the environment does not cause health or environmental problems -- which is bogus. All other scientists just sort of laugh at those studies."

The Flower and the Glory

2010-07-13T10:42:00.002-05:00

A botanist presents evidence at the Missouri Botantical Garden for the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin

BY C.D. STELZER

first published by the Riverfront Times (St. Louis), June 11, 1997

Questions regarding the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin date back to 1389 A.D., when a French bishop denounced the relic as a fake. Since then, the controversy has continued as to whether the 14-foot-long fabric -- which bears the faint image of a crucified person -- is actually the funeral cloth of Jesus Christ.

Last Friday evening, an Israeli botanist, presented details of his own research on the shroud to a St. Louis audience. In a lecture at the Missouri Botanical Garden, Avinoam Danin, of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, asserted that the relic is indeed genuine.

"I cannot say that this is Jesus. I cannot. Nobody can," Danin told The Riverfront Times in an interview preceding his public appearance. "(But) I believe it is authentic. I believe that it came from Jerusalem. I believe that there was some physical-chemical process that made the images of the things on it. ..." The barrel-chested botanist spoke rapidly with flourishing hand gestures, sometimes pausing to translate his thoughts from Hebrew.

Danin's findings concur with those of Alan and Mary Whanger of Duke University, who have been studying existing photographs of the shroud since 1977. By using a special photographic process, along with negatives and ultraviolet light scanning, they have been able to make visible images on the shroud that have previously been indiscernible to the naked eye.

After consulting the seminal botanical guide to Palestine, the Christian couple determined the images they had found were identical to 28 types of flowering plants native to the Jerusalem area. All but one of those plants bloom in March and April, during the time of Passover when Christ is thought to have been crucified. The North Carolina researchers speculate that the flowers placed around the head of the corpse were part of a funeral ritual.

Ten years after making their discovery, the Whangers asked Danin, who is a renown Israeli plant expert, for assistance in confirming the identity of the flora. After examining the photographic evidence, the botanist says he verified not only the Whanger's research, but found evidence of other plants native to Jerusalem as well.

The endorsement of the shroud's authenticity is an unprecedented position for a Jewish scholar to take. But Danin, who wore a pair of New Balance running shoes to the interview, appeared unconcerned about the consequences of his action. He indicated he was encouraged to take his rather radical stand by the demeanor of his American colleagues.

"The Whangers were so honest, dealing with facts and not with beliefs," says Danin."I thought that this was an opportunity to promote this project and this is why I'm here." Danin had landed on a TWA flight only about an hour before the interview commenced, and came prepared with a rucksack filled with scientific literature on the shroud.

The botanist announced his findings to students during a lecture at Hebrew University on April 8. Word of his stance soon leaked to the press, and within a days CBS Evening News aired an interview with him. The morning after the television broadcast, Danin heard a radio report that a major fire had erupted in San Giovanni cathedral in Turin, where the shroud has been held since 1578. Firefighters rescued the linen by smashing through bullet-proof glass and carrying the silver reliquary containing the relic to safety.

This isn't the first time the shroud has been endangered by fire. After falling into the hands of the royal House of Savoy, the cloth narrowly escaped destruction in 1532, when its repository in Chambery, France burned. The 16th-Century blaze charred the edges of the shroud and left it water stained.

Danin points to the fire damage as a reason to doubt the results of modern radiocarbon dating analysis, which, according to some scientists, proves the shroud a fraud. In the 1988 tests, three international laboratories concluded the shroud was created no earlier than 1260 A.D. Danin, suggests the test sample taken from a corner of the linen may not have been representative of the whole cloth. According to Danin and others, one part of the relic might not be the same age as the main cloth, because repairs were known to have been done to the charred portions of the shroud following the fire in 1532.

The botanical evidence put forth by the Whangers and Danin supports the theory that the shroud originated in the Holy Land rather than medieval Europe, where the relic made its first historic appearance at Lirey, France about 1350. Legend has it that Geoffrey de Charny, a knight, returned to France with the shroud following a Crusade.

In recent times, the shroud has been placed on public display in 1898, 1931 and 1978, when more than 3 million pilgrims visited Turin. After the last exhibition, a group of international scientists ran a series of exhaustive tests. Most of those participating in the Shroud of Turin Research Project agreed that the relic was not a painting. Evidence gathered at that time also supported the idea that the dark stains on the shroud may be blood. Other images that have been discerned on the shroud include: a Roman spear, a crown of thorns, and a sponge on reed.

In 1973, another group of experts were allowed to examine the shroud. At that time, Swiss criminologist Max Frei detected dozens of different pollens on the surface of the cloth. Twenty-five of those of pollens are produced by plants native to Jerusalem, which the Whangers claim to have discovered on the shroud.

Danin cited other reputed evidence of the shroud's ancient origins. These include the similarities of the blood stains on the shroud to those found on another funeral cloth -- the Sudarium of Oviedo -- which surfaced in Spain in the 7th Century. In addition, the facial images of many Third to 10th Century icons resemble the gaunt, bearded visage on the shroud. Of particular significance, says Danin, is the likeness of Christ that appears on a Byzantine coin from the reign of Justinian II, circa 695 A.D., which is nearly identical to the image on the shroud. The Whangers, using a series of polarized filters, have superimposed these images on top of each other, and found multiple points of congruence, says Danin.

Confirming articles of religious faith through scientific method seems to be an oxymoron, but it hasn't stopped a cavalcade of inquiring minds from investigating this age old enigma. As for Danin, he hopes to see the shroud itself next year, if he is accepted as a participate in the third international conference dedicated to the mystery.

St. Louis: Gateway to the Waste

2010-07-12T08:43:00.006-05:00

In 1996, a proposal for trains and trucks loaded with high-level nuclear waste to roll through St. Louis was averted. But like a slow-moving freight, the debate over Yucca Mountain continues.

Riverfront Times (St. Louis), June 12, 1996

BY C.D. STELZER

Worst-case scenario:

An Amtrak passenger train departs Kirkwood Station traveling east toward St. Louis -- but never arrives.

Instead, it collides with a slow-moving west-bound freight. The impact causes the two trains to derail and topple over the old Marshall Avenue trestle in Webster Groves. One locomotive slams into a flatcar carrying a 125-ton lead-and-stainless-steel cask filled with high-level radioactive waste. The cask erupts, as an intense fire breaks out, sustained by diesel fuel. While emergency workers argue whether to evacuate the immediate neighborhood, radioactive particles rise with the smoke, spreading deadly nuclear poisons.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulator Commission (NRC) is confident that such an accident is nearly impossible. So are the federal Departments of Transportion (DOT) and Energy (DOE).

If the the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1996 (NWPA) becomes law, the regulatory agencies' assumptions will be tested on an unprecedented level. The legislation now pending in Congress would send large volumes of high-level radioactive waste from more than 100 nuclear power plants to a proposed "interim" storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

No matter how slim the odds of an accident, the potential consequences of such a move are cataclysmic. Under the plan, tons of radioactive materials would likely pass through the St. Louis area by either truck or rail a few times a week for the next 30 years. The most likely route for the nuke shipments would be Interstates 270 and 70 for trucks and the Union Pacific Railroad for trains. Each cask would contain the radiological equivalent of 200 Hiroshima bombs. All tolled, the nuclear dunnage would be enough to kill everybody on earth.

Lauren Bohannan and her family live in Webster Groves near the old Tuxedo Park station. Like her neighbors on Clark Avenue she hears the passing freight trains at night and can see the tracks from her front porch in the morning. At this distance, the proposed law -- SB1271 in the Senate and HR1020 in the House -- are clearly a threat. "Common sense tells you that this is not quite right," says Bohannan. "Why ship it out there?"

The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB) asked the same question. In March, the panel of scientific experts advised against moving spent fuel rods from reactors sites at this time. The independent executive branch agency reported: "There is no compelling technical or safety reason to move spent fuel to a centralized storage facility for the next few years."

The DOE is convinced the current "interim" storage proposal could derail plans for a permanent underground nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Moreover, the Clinton administration feels the law now on the books prohibits the federal government from accepting waste until after a permanent disposal site is found suitable.
Local environmentalists are not enamored of either interim storage or permanent disposal at Yucca Mountain. Instead, they argue spent fuel should be kept at the reactor sites for the foreseeable future. They are certain shipping waste through St. Louis is not the answer.

Key Drey of University City, a longtime opponent of nuclear power, warns that communities along waste shipment routes face unprecedented dangers. "One of these casks exploding in a backyard in Kirkwood -- forget it. There's no way to protect the people who live near there," says Drey. "It would be an experiment," adds Don Fitz, leader of the Gateway Green Alliance. "They say ... it's impossible for this stuff to rupture. (But) nobody really knows do they?"

One thing is for sure. The legislation is backed by U.S. Rep. Jim Talent, whose district includes the projected radioactive rail route, and U.S. Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond. The two elected officials are among the many sponsors pushing the interests of the nuclear energy industry at the expense of public safety. Calls to both congressional offices were not returned last week.

Not surprisingly, the Missouri Republicans' endorsement of the "Mobile Chernobyl" bills runs counter to local sentiments. Both the St. Louis Board of Aldermen and the St. Louis County Council have passed resolutions opposing the plan. Other cities, including Webster Groves and the smaller municipality of Oakland, have also voiced disapproval.

"We don't want this stuff coming through our communities over and over and over," says Mayor Terri Williams of Webster Groves, who is lobbying the National League of Cities to oppose the proposed law. "To me, this has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats or Libertarians," says Williams. "This is about protecting my community."
If the proposal were to become a reality, conservative estimates by the state of Nevada indicate more than 15,000 shipments of nuclear waste would move across the country, at least 70,000 metric tons over the course of the next few decades.

Conceivably, thousands of more radioactive cargoes could traverse the U.S., depending on the cask size and transportation means selected.

A large percentage of that waste would flow through the St. Louis area because most reactors are east of the Mississippi. Estimates by the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects show waste from 31 reactors in nine states passing through the St. Louis area. More than 2,300 truck casks and 3,800 rail canisters could travel through Missouri. Under the proposed legislation, shipments might begin before the turn-of-the-century. New multi-purpose canisters now under consideration could reduce the number of shipments, but plans for the new casks have been placed on hold because of congressional budget cuts.

Utilities across the country, including Union Electric (now Ameren UE), argue they are running out of space to store highly-radioactive spent fuel rods at their reactor sites. They claim the federal government is bound to take responsibility for all this commercial waste by 1998, under the terms of an earlier NWPA passed by Congress in 1987.

A group of utility companies, along with 20 states, not including Missouri, have filed suit against the DOE to force it to accept the waste. That case is now awaiting a decision from the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. At the same time, talks on locating another temporary parking lot for the waste on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico have come to a standstill.

Meanwhile, the electric meter keeps running.

Consumers who use nuclear power pay one mil (a-tenth-of-a-cent) per kilowatt hour into the Nuclear Waste Fund, a federal kitty created to cover the cost of disposing of the resulting radioactive mess. The fund has so far collected more than $11 billion. Of that amount, more than $4 billion has already been spent to study transporting the waste and permanently housing it at Yucca Mountain. The total cost of the project is estimated at $34.4 billion in 1994 dollars, according to a spokeswoman at the DOE's Yucca Mountain office. Ninety percent of that cost is supposed to be paid for through the waste fund. The other ten percent will be reimbursed through general revenue because it covers the cost of defense related waste.

At this rate, the fund will likely become insolvent before the job is anywhere near complete. That's because, as more nuclear power plants reach the end of their life cycles over the next few decades, less money will be available to sustain the fund. The amount of nuclear waste, however, will have increased dramatically over the same time. Utilities claim their customers are being shortchanged by the government's slow response. Conversely, environmentalists and consumer advocates consider the proposed legislation a bale out -- another government subsidy for a private, profit-making industry that has already received more than its share of entitltements.

In the opinion of the nuclear power industry, there is no doubt about what course to take. "We have to put it some place. The waste has to go somewhere, someday," says Scott Peters, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) in Washington, D.C. "In order to get it to a place where it can be stored safely for a long, long time -- it has to be shipped." The NEI, which represents the interests of the nation's 109 operating nuclear power plants, estimates that 26 reactors in the U.S. will soon run out of space to store spent fuel rods.
At Union Electric's Callaway nuclear plant near Fulton, Mo., the storage dilemma is less dire. "We have until the 2004, and we could stretch that perhaps to 2007," says UE spokeswoman Susan Gallagher.

Callaway's circumstances may be more the rule than the exception within the nuclear power industry given the opinion of the federal nuclear waste review board, which found no reason to hurry moving the waste from reactor sites for at least a few years.
So the political wrangling -- in Washington at least -- is not if nuclear waste needs to be shipped, but when. The other cogent issue is how the waste will be stored once it arrives at its Nevada destination. Arguments, both pro and con, are wrapped in technocratic jargon, but boil down to whether radioactive garbage should be permanently buried or temporarily parked on the surface once it arrives at the desert dump.

Within the lexicon of the debate, terms like "deep geologic disposal" and "permanent repository" are synonymous with burying the waste. "Interim storage," on the other hand, means temporary. Just how "temporary" an interim site would be is unclear, but the term is often associated with a period spanning the next few decades, an easier-to grasp chunk of time compared to the 250,000 years or more that plutonium from the reactors will remain hot.

Policy makers are not accustomed to dealing with issues that will remain critical for millennia. Nevertheless, current Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines require any underground facility at Yucca Mountain remain undisturbed for 10,000 years. Those standards, however, are subject to change. As part of the 1992 Energy Policy Act, however, Congress asked a panel from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to reevaluate the EPA's rules. The NAS concluded there is no scientific way to predict human behavior in the distant future, and suggested relaxing EPA radiation exposure standards in a way that would permit the Yucca Mountain project to be licensed more readily. The EPA will decide whether to adopt the recommendations later this year.

But for the congressional supporters of the nuclear power industry, the lessening of safety precautions is not fast enough. Earlier this year, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee went against both Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary's recommendations and those of the nuclear waste review board, voting two-to-one to allow interim storage at Yucca Mountain.

Prospects for a permanent repository dimmed late last year, when Congress slashed the Yucca Mountain budget to $400 million, earmarking $85 million of that total for future interim storage. The reduced funding and reallocation lightened the project's coffers by 40 percent from 1995. That shortfall is now expected to delay the opening of the of the permanent repository until 2015. Postponement, of course, increases the chances for interim storage at Yucca Mountain. As a result, the temporarily stored waste may be shuffled to yet another location, if the DOE finds Yucca Mountain unsuitable for permanent disposal.

Indeed, transporting the waste again is a distinct possibility. Although the DOE has already spent more than $4 billion dollars to study entombing the waste permanently at Yucca Mountain, it has not concluded whether the site is safe. A good share of the largesse sunk into a hole in the Nevada desert has ended up in the deep pockets of corporations such as Bechtel, a giant engineering firm. Years of further study are anticipated even though many inherent dangers have been verified at the Nevada site, including nearby earthquake faults (see sidebar).

"The only solution we have to date is to keep moving (nuclear waste) around; move it from one place to another place," says Drey. Stripped of its bureaucratic veneer, federal nuclear waste policy takes on all the sinister trappings of a deadly expensive shell game.

If the 1996 NWPA becomes law, the dangers of a nuclear mishap occurring in the St. Louis area will extend from freight yards of East St. Louis to the back yards of Kirkwood.

The utilities are sure that an accident will never happen, and point to their own exemplary past performance. "Nuclear industries have a 30 year record of transporting waste," says Gallagher of UE. "There have been over 2,400 shipments over U.S. highways and railways since 1964. During that time, no fatalities, injuries or environmental damage have been caused."

Gallagher also cites NRC tests of currently approved shipment casks, which she says are sufficient proof of transport safety. "They subjected the casks that carry these materials to incredible tests, (including) a 30 foot drop ... onto a flat unyielding surface, and a 40-inch drop into a vertical steel spike 6-inches in diameter. They subjected them to a 1475 (F) degree fire, engulfing the cask for 30 minutes. In all those cases, the casks ... have never been impregnated," says the UE spokeswoman.
But environmentalists are wary. In their view, the safety record is misleading. Reasonable concerns exist, say the critics, because the proposed waste shipments would be much more frequent and cover considerably longer distances than any in the past. They point out that anyone within several feet of a cask will receive the equivalent of a chest X-ray.

"I'm really exasperated at the ... bland assurances that accidents will not occur," says Judith H. Johnsrud, a member of the Sierra Club's National Nuclear Waste Task Force. "Moreover, if one looks at the testing requirements for the casks that have been in use, it is abundantly clear that they do not test for worst-scenario highway or rail accidents."

More than a decade ago, a DOE contractor filed a report that estimated the damage of a nuclear disaster in an urban area. The findings are not encouraging. The contents of one shipment cask could contaminate a 42-square-mile area. Cleaning up would cost billions of dollars. Even after a cleanup, radiation would remain in the soil, causing cancer and genetic defects well into the future.

Drey, the local anti-nuke activist, warns: "We learned during the TMI (Three-Mile Island) waste shipment campaign that the corridor communities lacked adequately equipped and trained emergency responders."

At least two close calls took place between 1988 and 1990, when 26 shipments of nuclear waste from the Three Mile Island disaster passed through St. Louis on the way to an Idaho dump site. One train hit a car at Macklind and Manchester in St. Louis in March 1987. In another case, a rail car labeled calcium chloride, a highly inflammable chemical, was coupled to one carrying a cask of highly-radioactive nuclear waste. On other occasions, trains hauling the waste traveled at excessive speed or were overloaded. Often local emergency services were not informed of the shipments in a timely manner.

Then as now, citizens' concerns went begging. On a recent morning, Bohannan, the Clark Avenue resident, sat at her dining room table thumbing through a file of form letters she has amassed by writing elected officials. "I love Talent's letters, says Bohannan, speaking of Rep. Jim Talent. "They always give me a good laugh. ... I asked for a copy of the EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) and he didn't even mention it."

Bohannan is disturbed that the congressional bills would allow the federal government to skirt its own environmental laws, including the Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. The legislation would also preempt all applicable state and local statutes.

In 25 years of dealing with the controversy, Judith H. Johnsrud, a member of the Sierra Club's National Nuclear Waste Task Force, says she has never encountered a more ominous threat to the rights and safety of Americans ."This is fascism in action," says Johnsrud of the proposed nuclear waste law. "(But) it's almost a logical conclusion to the Atomic Age that democratic processes must be set aside. "I'm horrified by it to tell you the truth."

Although no commercial reactor has been licensed since 1973, the waste, from those still in operation, continues to pile up.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the use of commercial reactors gained widespread acceptance through an industry-and-government-sponsored public relations campaign, which portrayed nuclear power as a peaceful means of harnessing the power of the atom. The psychological implications are rather obvious in hindsight: Terror unleashed by the detonation of the atomic bombs that ended World War II ameliorated through finding a more benign use for a nuclear chain reaction.

But the scientists who advocated the "peaceful" use of nuclear technology never did quite figure out what to do with the radioactive leftovers that are the inevitable result of nuclear fission.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) initially recommended burying the hot stuff back in 1957, the same year the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) licensed the first commercial reactor. There have been other solutions bantered about, too, including shooting radioactive garbage into outer space or dumping it in the ocean. One of the most highly regarded plans involved reprocessing spent fuel rods, but that didn't work out nearly as well as scientists had hoped outside of the laboratory.

Consequently, millions hot fuel rods continue to accumulate in water-filled cooling pools at commercial reactors throughout the country. By comparison, the nuclear waste created as a byproduct of weapons production equals only about ten percent of the total in the U.S.

The enormity of the problem has often evoked a collective denial among responsible parties. In the past, scientists, for example, intuitively understood that dwelling on the negatives of nuclear power would not further careers . For their part, the politicians traditionally have difficulty with issues that require planning beyond their next election, and are additionally influenced by parochial interests. The outcome of all of this are laws cobbled together with little or no insight into long-term ramifications.

A review of how the original 1982 NWPA came to pass is illustrative. In December 1982, Congress rushed the law through in the final hour-and-a-half before the lame-duck session recessed for Christmas vacation, limiting debate on 17 unprinted amendments to just 15 minutes in the Senate. In the House, a third of the representatives failed to vote on the legislation, and those who did had no understanding of the details of the 30,000 word bill.

It could happen again.

BZ, Agent Orange, Robert Vesco and Times Beach

2010-07-11T22:54:00.009-05:00

Toxic chemicals make for strange tripping partners among the military-industrial complex.

BY C.D. STELZER

Whenever PCBs or dioxin are mentioned, secrecy seems to descends: doors close, sources become unavailable, Freedom of Information requests go wanting, and lies are
told.

Former U.S. Sen. Thomas Eagleton (D-Mo.) recognized early the consequences of such a flawed policy. "If we were discussing national security such as the A-bomb or nuclear warheads, I could see where there would have to be a cloak of secrecy," Eagleton told the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1982. ... "But we are discussing a situation that is affecting people's lives. ... The worst thing is for there to be secret leaks that may be misleading to the people in those affected areas," Eagleton said.

That the senator referred to national security is telling. From the beginning, the military-industrial complex has inhabited the edges of the dioxin controversy.

Hoffman-Taff and Monsanto, of course, both originally manufactured a chemical component of Agent Orange for use by the Army in Vietnam. But Monsanto's military connections predates that era by decades. As far back as World War II, the chemical company did work for the government. In 1944, for example, the St. Louis Star Times reported that Monsanto had gained approval from the Army to produce a catapulting rocket" fashioned after the German "robot bomb," an allusion probably to the early V 2 missiles used by the Nazis.

Another intriguing detail is that Syntex -- Hoffman-Taff's parent and the company ultimately held liable for the Times Beach cleanup -- is incorporated in Panama, a center for clandestine banking and international espionage.

The Roche Group, a Swiss-based pharmaceutical conglomerate bought Syntex in 1994. During World War I, the allies suspected Hoffman-LaRoche of aiding Germany. More recently, the company's American subsidiary provided a hallucinogenic drug, quinuclidinyl benzilate, known as BZ, to the U.S. Army. The Army Chemical Corps is
reported to have conducted human experiments using BZ at the Edgewood Arsenal between 1959 and 1974.

There are also indications of a close working association between public health officials and the military. Health officials were steered to at least one Missouri dioxin site in Verona, Mo. by the Defense Contract Administrations Services, a part of the Pentagon.

In addition, one of the early investigators of the Missouri dioxin case had a background tied to the armed forces. In a 1975 deposition relating to the Piatt case, Coleman Carter, a physician for the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), testified he had joined the health agency less than two years before, while still a commissioned officer on active reserve duty. Carter worked under the auspices of the Epidemiological Intelligence Services (EIS). EIS had been specifically set up to respond to the threat of biological warfare, according to Alexander D. Langmuir,
the chief epidemiologist for the PHS from 1949 to 1970.

Moreover, the Bliss Waste Oil Co. picked up used motor oil from Ft. Leonard Wood near Rolla. One former Bliss driver alleged that the company also collected waste from Scott Air Force Base near Belleville. IPC, the St. Louis company that sub-contracted Bliss to haul the dioxin-contaminated waste from Verona, was a subsidiary of Charter Oil. During the 1970s, Charter Oil engaged fugitive financier Robert Vesco, and Billy Carter, the brother of Pres. Jimmy Carter, to negotiate trade deals with Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi .

Perhaps the most bizarre footnote to this toxic odyssey are the tete-a-tetes Bliss reportedly shared with the late U.S. Rep. Richard Ichord (D-Mo.) In a 1980 prison interview, an alleged Bliss Waste Oil Co. employee, recalled witnessing meetings between his former employer and the ultra-conservative congressman. A transcript of the interview is on file at the IEPA offices in Collinsville. According to the transcript, DNR and EPA officials and an assistant Missouri attorney general interviewed inmate Scott Rollins at the Missouri Penitentiary in Jefferson City. Rollins is quoted as saying Bliss met Ichord, on more than one occasion, at an
unspecified restaurant and the two would sometimes leave together.

Ichord is probably most remembered for being the last chairman of the House Internal Security Committee (previously the Un-American Activities Committee), and a zealous anti-communist. After leaving office, he became a lobbyist for the extreme-right wing American Freedom Coalition, which received funding from the Unification Church, founded in Korea by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

During his tenure in Congress, the congressman also strongly supported chemical weapons. In 1980, Ichord pushed a more than $3 million appropriation through Congress for a binary nerve gas facility at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. In the prison interview, Rollins mentions that Bliss also did business in that state, but didn't say where.

Whether the congressman and the waste oil hauler ever met is, for now at least, still remains a matter of conjecture. But it is clear that they both, in their own ways, contributed to massive pollution problems. The Army has been faced with destroying tons of chemical weapons in recent decades.

In a 1970 speech before the St. Louis County Chamber of Commerce, Ichord, warned that the environmental movement could someday be subverted by the radical left. Speaking at Slay's restaurant in Affton, Mo., the congressman said, "Solving the problems of pollution will require sound and pragmatic actions from state and city governments, plus massive volunteer activities as well as the support you have the right to expect from the federal government."

A Familiar Tune on a Foreign Street

2010-07-10T00:06:00.003-05:00

Walking along the Dam on cold night in April 2003, I heard a flutist playing a familiar melody. The Dam is one of Amsterdam's main boulevards. Centuries old, the street harkens back to the halcyon days when the Dutch ruled the world of commerce. On this particular night, chill winds had chased the tourists indoors, leaving the street nearly deserted by early evening. I found myself alone in a foreign city, listening to this street musician's song as it echoed off the walls of the commercial district. The musician occupied the alcove of a shuttered department store entrance. The instrument he played wasn't a modern flute with valves and levers, but a wooden one of some ancient design. His improvised version of the Star Spangled Banner lacked the bravado and jingoism that I've come to associate with the American national anthem. Instead, this version of the song sounded mournful and filled with lament.

Keeper of the Farm

2010-07-09T09:41:00.002-05:00

Singer-songwriter Wil Maring finds her place in rural Illinois

Illinois Times, Wednesday, August 8,2007

By C. D. Stelzer

It’s a languid August evening in Cobden, a former flag stop on the old Illinois Central line about 10 miles south of Carbondale. At one time, the surrounding orchard country supplied cities to the north, including Springfield, with fresh produce by way of the railroad. Freight trains, belonging to Canadian National, still chug through the middle of town on their way to Chicago and New Orleans.

Over the weekend, Cobden celebrated its sesquicentennial in conjunction with its annual Peach Festival. A cold snap this spring killed much of the crop, but the town imported some fruit and crowned this year’s peach queen nonetheless.

There is less fanfare on the dusky eve of the celebration, as Wil Maring and Robert Bowlin schlep their equipment across Front Street to the Yellowmoon Café. After uncrating their instruments and setting up the sound system and microphones, they perform a sound check. By the time the show commences, about a dozen people have congregated.

Over the next couple hours, the duet performs a hybrid of bluegrass, country, and folk music. Maring accompanies herself on guitar and bass fiddle; Bowlin backs her up on lead guitar and violin. Maring takes one request after another for her original songs. Most of the folks seem as familiar with her compositions as they are with nearby Route 51, the road to Carbondale.

They know the titles, melodies, and lyrics. Midway through the set, Bowlin plays a few solo instrumentals, including a medley of Stephen Foster songs and a jazz number by the late Django Reinhardt, the famed Gypsy guitarist. Guest performers join them in a finale. Each song receives resounding applause from the small audience. At the end of the night, Maring and her sideman both receive $24 in tips, or, as she calculates, two sacks of groceries each.

It could easily be said that these musicians are paying their dues, except for the fact that they are already journeymen in their craft, exceptional artists with decades of professional experience. Maring has performed on the Grand Ole Opry, played in Europe and Japan, and won accolades for her songwriting skills. She has produced three solo recordings of original material in the past decade. Bowlin has been a studio musician in Nashville, won national guitar-playing awards and worked as a fiddler in the late Bill Monroe’s bluegrass band. He has appeared onstage with everybody from B.B. King to Ricky Skaggs.

So it would be reasonable to ask why these superlative musicians prefer to hang out in Cobden, at the Yellowmoon. The answer has something to do with the place Maring calls home. “I’m from here,” she says. “I love the area. I know every inch of it.”

Maring lives on the edge of town in a 19th-century farmhouse with an old ash tree in the front yard. Emma, her black-and-white border collie, barks at visitors. Buddy, her roan quarter horse, limps in the corral out back. He cut a hoof recently and is mending slowly. The 1992 Oldsmobile with the Tennessee plates belongs to Bowlin, a recent exile from Music City, who barely made it from Paducah late this afternoon.

Inside the house, the parlor is filled with musical instruments: A bass fiddle leans against one wall. A gourd-back mandolin sits on a shelf. There is a piano, covered by a quilt. On top of the quilt rest a vintage Martin flattop guitar, a fiddle, and a well-used five-string banjo.

Maring sits at the kitchen table, explaining her career decisions. She wears a sleeveless print blouse, green khaki shorts, and sandals. A wisp of her long brown hair is beginning to turn gray. “I have gone to Nashville many times over the last two or three years, thinking that it might be good to meet people there, meet people in the industry, other writers,” Maring says. “They say that you’ll never make it if you don’t live there and co-write with famous people and work your way up the ladder, but I went there enough times to know that it’s not a place where I would want to live.”
Driving around the country-music capital, she realized that nothing she encountered evoked any recollection of the past.

Nashville holds no memories for her, and memories are a key inspiration for her songwriting. Every little piece of Murphysboro, Carbondale, Makanda, and Cobden harbors meaning. “My history is here,” she says. “I drive down a country road and I see a spot that holds a memory, [a] creek I used to swim when I was in eighth grade.”
Eighth grade is also when a close friend started calling her Wil. The nickname stuck.
Nowadays, few people other than her parents refer to her as Lillian.

After she started playing guitar, as a youngster, she realized that it was easier to create her own songs then it was to learn other music. She honed her skills in the summertime, while tending the family’s vegetable stand along Route 51. “There were six kids, and we were all one year apart,” Maring says. Each sibling worked a shift. When her turn came, Maring would take her father’s cheap guitar out to the stand with her to occupy time. In her spare time she listened to John Denver and James Taylor albums and tried to figure out the chord progressions. But Maring’s musical career might have wilted at the roadside if it hadn’t been for the influence of friends and family.

Both of her parents, Ester and Joel Maring, were anthropologists at Southern Illinois University. Her father befriended another faculty member, Dale Whiteside. The two academics shared a special interest in ethnomusicology. Whiteside taught a class in American folk music. The Marings would often visit the Whitesides’ rustic homestead near Jonesboro, which was called Rivendell after the mythical place created by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. “It was always fun to go there as a kid,” Maring says, “because it was like camping.”

In 1971 the Whitesides began hosting a biannual private music festival at Rivendell, inviting university students to the farm. The gathering ended up attracting folk musicians from far and wide, with attendees camping in the nearby Shawnee National Forest. Maring was inspired as she watched and listened to other children playing their instruments, including her friend Ann, one of the Whiteside kids, who managed to pluck the bass fiddle by standing on a box. “That’s where I think I got the bug to try and play,” Maring says. “I thought, ‘Man, if she can do it, I can do it.’”

Later, during her college years, Maring developed her rhythm-guitar playing by backing up her then-boyfriend at fiddle contests, which culminated each year in Springfield with a competition at the Illinois State Fair. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she followed her parents into anthropology, earning a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from SIU.

From 1984 to 1986, she lived in Japan, collecting folksongs for her thesis. While there, she taught English and played in two bluegrass bands. During a 1988 European vacation Maring met Mark Stoffel, a German-born mandolinist. They returned together to Carbondale. Stoffel enrolled at SIU, and the couple formed Shady Mix, a bluegrass band, in 1989. In 1992 they married and moved back to Germany, re-forming the group with Munich musicians. For the next decade Shady Mix toured Germany, Italy, France, and the Czech Republic. Most of the touring involved traveling with a Wild West show in Germany called the Red Grizzly Saloon. The mock Western town was set up inside convention centers as part of trade fairs and home-and-garden shows. Maring describes the entertainment as a combination of Buffalo Bill and vaudeville.

“There were stuntmen. There were bank robberies four times a day,” she says. “We worked together in close conjunction with the actors. It’s so weird, now that I’m in a different phase of my life. I think, ‘Did I really do that?’ ”

Maring and Stoffel returned to southern Illinois in 2001 and bought a farmhouse outside Murphysboro. That place was the inspiration for one of her songs, “Keeper of the Farm,” which was a finalist this year in the prestigious songwriting contest associated with the annual Kerrville (Texas) Folk Festival.

Red and golden on a farmhouse wall, The sun shone in and showed a place that I’ve known all along. A place that needed me, A place that I’d call home,
A place I knew where I belonged.

“I’ve always had an affinity for old houses and old farms,” Maring says. “When I was the tiniest kid, I would get excited if I saw an old farm. I don’t know why.” But this particular farmhouse charmed her more than usual. “When I walked in, it was like one of those eerie déjà vu things. I felt like I had already been there to the point where I knew where all the rooms were.”

They came a hundred years ago to rest beneath this tree. They built a home just like the home they left across the sea. Three generations and now it’s come to me. I am the keeper of the farm.

Memory, a sense of place, and history are evident in all of Maring’s lyrics, as well as a strong visual element. If she appears to have the eye of a painter, it is because she is one. She studied art as an undergraduate and worked at the University Museum at SIU. Her watercolors and other graphic designs are displayed on the covers of her albums, as well as on others’. “Landscapes are things that I build into the songs,” she says.

Weathered wood against a bright blue sky, The whites just aren’t as white now as they were in Grandpa’s time. But I have the power and I hope I still have the time. I am the keeper of the farm.

Her songs are personal and introspective, but they also draw from the lives of others, merging their stories and hers with pictures of the land. The result is an authenticity that would be impossible for the music industry in Nashville to replicate. The music itself crisscrosses the boundaries of bluegrass, country, and folk to form a montage of American roots music.

The Calling, Maring’s latest CD, coincides with Maring’s recent divorce, and many of the songs on the album reflect the changes in the musician’s life and career. While living in Europe Maring wrote songs, but cultural and language differences there made it difficult for her to measure their quality. That changed in 1998, when she won a songwriting contest in North Carolina for her song “Bottomlands,” which she performed on the Grand Ole Opry in 2004.

In the intervening years, Maring says, she has received plenty of positive feedback from Nashville professionals, but her music has gained more recognition and exposure lately on the Internet. Maring’s MySpace page (myspace.com/wilmaring) has received more than 39,000 hits in less than a year. Four songs posted at the site have been listened to more than 42,000 times. More than 19,000 “friends” have linked to her site. Last Wednesday, 68 people had listened to her music by 8 a.m. — either the listeners rose awfully early, or Maring now has an international following. The page averages between 300 and 400 hits per day.

These numbers astound Maring. She attributes much of her online popularity to a 21-year-old fan, Jared Ingersol, of St. Charles, Mo., who has volunteered his time to manage the Web site. The online popularity seems to indicate that her homegrown music has the capacity for mass appeal. The buzz generated by MySpace hasn’t translated into any significant increase in CD sales, but the site has helped her find some new gigs, and her energetic webmaster is hoping that Maring’s presence on My Space and YouTube will help promote a California tour in November. Although her home in southern Illinois is her muse, home life is not always conducive to songwriting.

“I actually look forward to going on the road,” Maring says. “You don’t have the house to take care of and all the other things that distract you. You’re in a hotel room with your guitar.”

Maring performed regularly in the Springfield area in recent years, in the now-defunct Cabin Concerts series. Her longtime friend Ann Bova, formerly Whiteside, started the series, along with then-partner Joe Bohlen, in 2004 to promote acoustic music in central Illinois. The concerts were held at Bohlen’s spacious log cabin north of Pleasant Plains, and Maring became a favorite of the concertgoers. To Bova, the secret to Maring’s innate talent is the way she conveys real life in a sincere way: “The sweetness of her voice has a magical way of delivering a message straight to your heartstrings.”

Through the concert series Maring met U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, who, she says, has become one of her biggest fans. A few months ago Maring attended a dinner party in Springfield at which she had a tête-à-tête with the senator about the influence of cyberspace on their careers. “We sat around in the kitchen for a long time, talking about Internet promotion,” Maring says. “He was brainstorming, trying figure out a way that I could get my music out there, because he feels like it needs to be heard. He had just started a MySpace for his own political stuff, and I was telling him about [its] potential if you know how to manage it.”

When asked about her goals, Maring laughs. “My goal is to be able to pay my bills and fix up this house,” she says. Then she considers the question more seriously. She talks about setting her sights higher and winning a Grammy. But in the end she reiterates her first priority: “This house is one of the oldest houses around. This part is a log cabin. It would be a shame to bulldoze it just because somebody didn’t want to spend money to keep it. . . . So that’s my goal. “I’m the keeper of the farm.”

On the Trail of MLK's Assassins

2010-07-09T09:18:00.009-05:00

BY C.D. STELZER

(first published in the Riverfront Times April 8, 1992)

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)concluded there was a St. Louis-based conspiracy to murder the Rev. Martin Luther King. Evidence gathered by the HSCA has been sealed until 2027. James Earl Ray, the convicted murderer of King, claims the congressional investigation itself was a cover-up.

Ray pleaded guilty to the crime in 1969, but immediately recanted. There has never been a trial. He is now a prisoner at River Bend Penitentiary in Nashville, Tenn.

In the preface to Ray's book, "Who Killed Martin Luther King," published in 1992, the Rev. Jesse Jackson demands a special prosecutor be named and the case reopened. The following story centers on the HSCA's St. Louis-based conspiracy theory and is comprised of information gleaned from Ray's book, congressional testimony and newspaper accounts.

At 7:55 a.m. Nov. 8, 1979, produce man John Paul Spica said goodbye to his girlfriend Dina Bachelier for the last time. He walked out of the two family flat at 1115 Claytonia Terrace in Richmond Heights and stepped into his 1977 black Cadillac. When Spica touched the break pedal, he detonated five to eight sticks of dynamite. The explosion blew both of Spica's legs off. The driver's door of the vehicle landed 30 yards away. Moments later, Wellston police officer Nick Sturghill, saw a
bearded white male in a yellow pickup truck speeding away.

Spica, who had a speech impediment, mumbled a few unintelligible words to Sturghill before he died. Spica's violent death a year after his closed-door testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) may be a coincidence. But at
the least, a review of the congressional investigation's inquiry into the murder of Martin Luther King reveals an intriguing cast of bizzare
characters and byzantine machinations.

Despite James Earl Ray's guilty plea, the HSCA findings suggest the convicted assassin did not act alone, but its conclusion raises more questions than answers. The doubts begin with the HSCA's chief witness and Spica's brother-in law, Russell G. Byers, the suspected mastermind of a 1978 St. Louis Art Museum burglary. Byers was arrested but
never charged with the crime.

The FBI in St. Louis provided HSCA investigators with Byers' name after a misfiled 1974 report surfaced, which stated Byers boasted of receiving an offer to kill King. In 1978, Byers told the HSCA that the offer came from two prominent deceased St.
Louisans: former stockbroker John R. Kauffmann and patent lawyer John H. Sutherland, who founded "whites rights" groups locally.

Spica was a convicted murder contractor himself. He served 10 years of a life sentence for negotiating the 1962 killing of John T. Myszak, a North St. Louis County realtor. Upon parole, Spica opened The Corner Produce, a vegetable stand at Shaw and Vandevanter, which may have been a front because Spica was known to have ties with organized crime, including the late Anthony Giordano, leader of the St. Louis mafia. Police believe Spica's slaying, and subsequent car bombings during the early 80s,
began as a power struggle within then-mob-dominated Laborers' Union Local 42.

In a 1987 federal trial here, Raymond H. Flynn, the local's business manager, was implicated in Spica's bombing and found guilty of multiple racketeering and conspiracy charges. But Spica had other interesting associations besides his brother-in law and the mafia: While in a Missouri prison, Spica shared the same cell block with James Earl Ray.

In 1978, after being subpoenaed and granted immunity by the HSCA, Byers publicly testified that in late 1966 or early 1967 he was approached by Kauffmann, a retired stockbroker and former aircraft company owner active in St. Louis County Democratic politics. Byers had been a friend of the elder Kauffmann's late brother Gil, an assistant St. Louis County coroner. According to Byers' account, Kauffmann introduced him to a neighbor, John H. Sutherland, an avowed racist who made the $50,000 contract offer to kill King. At this time, Kauffmann lived in Jefferson County and operated
the Bluff Acres Motel on Highway 67 in Barnhart.

Byers claimed the motel was actually a front for illegal activities and told the committee he used the premises for his stolen car operations. When asked by the committee whether he had informed Spica of the contract offer to kill King, Byers
said he had not, but said that his brother-in-law, who was in state prison at the time, may have learned of the offer through other sources.

Also in the same prison at the same time, was James Earl Ray, who was serving a sentence for the robbery of a Kroger's supermarket on Ohio Avenue in South St. Louis. Both he and Spica, for a brief period, worked in the prison hospital together. Newspaper accounts cite rumors that Spica and Ray were dealing drugs inside. Interestingly, the prison doctor, with the keys to the medicine chest, was Hugh W. Maxey -- an old friend of Kauffmann's.

One shady business Kauffmann operated out of his motel was Fixaco, Inc., a pharmaceutical company. Seven people connected with Fixaco, including Kauffmann, were arrested on April 4, 1967 for conspiracy to illegally sell 725,000 amphetamines
pills. Among those charged were two New Yorkers: Bernard Chubet, a former stockbroker and Anthony K. Chang, a Chinese Nationalist (Taiwanese) exchange student. Also arrested was Sgt. Henry Geerdes, a Jefferson County deputy.

Former Jefferson County Sheriff Walter "Buck" Buerger claimed his deputy was acting as an undercover agent when arrested by the U.S. Bureau of Drug Abuse Control. However, the HSCA testimony of one of Byers' former lawyers, the late Murry Randall, indicates the Jefferson County sheriff -- not a deputy -- purchased drugs from Kauffmann. Within weeks of Kauffmann's speed bust, Ray, with another inmate's help, smuggled himself out of prison in a bread box.

Inexplicably, charges against one of his earlier failed escape efforts were dropped not long before the breakout, allowing Ray back into the main prison population. Fred Wilkinson, the Missouri director of corrections at the time, was a former federal prison official with ties to the CIA. In 1962, Wilkinson helped exchange a Russian spy for Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union. Ray wasn't the only one taking leave of the prison in those days. Maxey, the prison physician, released at least one inmate to work at Kauffmann's motel as part of a "rehabilitation
program." And in a 1978 interview, Kauffmann's wife said that in 1966, Spica visited the motel with Byers, while Spica was serving his life sentence. According to prison records, Spica received his first official prison furlough in 1972.

The other St. Louis businessman implicated by Byers, in the alleged assassination plot, was the late John H. Sutherland, a neighbor of Kauffmann's and a patent attorney who had offices in the Shell Building on Locust Street where The Riverfront Times is now located. The firm of Sutherland, Polster and Taylor represented clients such as Monsanto Co.. When he died in 1970, Sutherland left a portfolio of mainly oil and chemical stocks worth more than $300,000, including investments in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

In 1978, another St. Louisan was linked to a local firm -- Hydro-Air Engineering, Inc. -- which was being investigated for illegal trade with the same white-supremacist nation. The allegations came soon after William Webster was confirmed as FBI chief. While the African business may be unrelated, Webster had a closer tie to the case, which is harder to dismiss.

Richard O'Hara, an art restorer, was the FBI informant who purportedly reported Byers'
assassination claims in 1974 to the FBI. O'Hara had been arrested in 1972 for his knowledge of a Maryland Plaza jewel robbery. Two suspects in that case were murdered, another was acquitted here in a federal trial racked with improprieties. Judge
Webster presided over the questionable judicial proceedings. Webster and Sutherland also both belonged to the then-all-white Veiled Prophet society.

Sutherland's membership in the organization was posthumously investigated the HSCA the same year Webster's VP connection was questioned during his Senate confirmation hearings. The reason the HSCA showed interest in the VP was because of Byers'
testimony that Sutherland represented a "secret Southern society," with a lot of money.

The wealthy social group was founded in the post Civil War era by Southern sympathizers. However, the HSCA gave more credence to the theory that one
of three overtly racist political groups may have been involved in the conspiracy. The HSCA theorized word may have been passed to Ray through his family. In 1968, Ray's brother, John, operated the Grapevine tavern at 1982 Arsenal Street adjacent to
Benton Park. The saloon was the gathering place for American Party workers who had a campaign office nearby.

The third-party movement was created to support the George Wallace's presidential bid. Sutherland was a Wallace supporter. Another possibility mentioned by the HSCA was the St. Louis Metropolitan Area Citizens Council, a "whites' rights" group. Sutherland had been the group's first president. But the outfit the HSCA took most seriously was the Nashville-based Southern States Industrial Council to which Sutherland belonged.

A position paper published by the council quotes FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover's belief that the "Negro movement" was being subverted by communists.

IT's Back!

2010-07-08T08:58:00.006-05:00

Thrice Burned?

In the mid-1990s, Steve Taylor, the former organizer for the Times Beach Action Group, continually referred to the EPA-approved incineration of the dioxin-contaminated dirt in Eastern Missouri as "destroying the evidence." The question of where the dioxin originated remains unresolved to this day.

Flash forward 15 years: The company that Taylor and other environmental activists continually challenged has now merged with Shaw Group Inc., a global engineering firm that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is currently employing to clean up radioactive waste on Latty Avenue in Hazelwood. Shaw took over IT Group in 2002. The company's remediation work on Latty Avenue is the last leg in the St. Louis area's Formerly Utilized Sites Remediation Action Program (FUSRAP), which is the Corps' jargon-laden title for its clean up of radioactive waste dating back to the Manhattan Project and the Cold War.

Shaw and the Corps refused to answer any questions about the Latty Avenue clean up yesterday at the Latty Avenue clean up site, referring all inquiries to public affairs officers at the district level.

Workers were busy yesterday using heavy equipment to load dirt into railcars at the radioactive waste site. Company and government officials seemed surprised when a camera crew arrived at the scene. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has not reported anything about Shaw's involvement in the clean up operation in Hazelwood.

The following story, which was first published in 1996, offers a glimpse at IT's questionable practices in the 1990s and the lax regulatory oversight by the EPA and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources regarding the Times Beach Superfund cleanup.

first published in the Riverfront Times, Aug. 26, 1996

by C.D. Stelzer

When IT Analytical Services merged with another company and became Quanterra Environmental Services in 1994, the nascent laboratory didn't even bother to change the phone number. The newly formed company also remained at the same location, 13715 Rider Trail North, in a strip of innocuous one-story offices known as the Business Center in Earth City. The doors to the lab were locked last Saturday, and mirror windows made it impossible to see the interior.

Corporation records at the Missouri secretary of state's office in Jefferson City show that Quanterra was officially dissolved as a business in the state in late 1994. Nevertheless, the lab took part in important tests of stack emissions conducted in November 1995 at the Times Beach dioxin incinerator, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund cleanup near Eureka.

The test results assured the EPA, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the public that the incinerator would operate safely. Based on these test results and other criteria, the DNR issued a requisite permit for the incinerator to operate earlier this year.

Despite the mirror windows at the lab and the smoke now flowing from the incinerator stacks, this much is clear: IT Analytical was owned by International Technology Corp. (IT), and Quanterra, its successor, is still partially controlled by IT -- the builder and operator of the Times Beach dioxin incinerator.

IT, in turn, has a contract with Syntex, the corporation held liable for disposing of dioxin-contaminated soil at Times Beach and more than two dozen other sites in Eastern Missouri. In short, the lab involved in testing incinerator emissions is partly owned by the company that operates the incinerator.

Steve Taylor, an organizer for the Times Beach Action Group (TBAG), objected to the Quanterra-IT relationship in a meeting with high-level EPA officials last Wednesday night at the Hilton Hotel in Frontenac. Robert Martin, the ombudsman from the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters, chaired the meeting, which was attended by 15 citizens, an aide to U.S. Rep. Jim Talent (R-2nd) and two other EPA officals.

"We have always had problems with how the trial burn was conducted. Now we have found that IT -- the owner of the incinerator -- was solely responsible for the physical custody of the stack samples," Taylor says. "There has always been a serious problem with credibility with (EPA) Region VII and the information that we've received pertaining to this incinerator. To date, this is probably the most blatant example of allowing those who have a financial interest in this cleanup to proceed without any oversight."

That a laboratory with ties to the incinerator operator would be allowed to handle test samples from a Superfund site is enough to raise concerns, but there is another nettlesome detail that casts doubt on the credibility of the lab work. In 1990, IT purchased the assets of metaTRACE, a laboratory located at the same address in Earth City and having the same phone number as the two previously cited labs.

In the year preceding the acquisition, metaTRACE came under scrutiny for conducting fraudulent tests for the EPA, including faulty soil analysis at Times Beach and other dioxin sites in Eastern Missouri. Ultimately, the EPA canceled metaTRACE's contracts and two company officials pleaded guilty to fraud charges. The rescinded contracts had a value of more than $8.7 million. Most of that money was earmarked for EPA Region VII, which includes the St. Louis area.

After purchasing metaTRACE, IT moved its own analytical operation into the defunct lab's Earth City office. MetaTRACE didn't dissolve until 1992, according to Martha Steincamp, head counsel for Region VII. So it appears IT Analytical in some manner shared the facility. IT even hired some of metaTRACE's employees, Steincamp concedes.

When the sign on the front door changed to Quanterra in 1994, IT Engineering conveniently moved in next door. Again, if this is not disturbing enough, state records show that Quanterra was dissolved in December 1994 for failure to file an annual report. Quanterra,in other words, doesn't even exist as a corporate fiction in the state.

IT created Quanterra in May 1994, when it merged IT Analytical with Enseco, an environmental test lab owned by Corning Inc. Originally, each company held a 50 percent stake in the joint subsidiary. IT's share of the lab has since decreased to 19 percent, following a $20 million buyout by Corning in January. The change in the percentage of ownership, however, did not take place until after critical stack-emissions tests were conducted in November. The results of those tests were published in January. Quanterra's name appears on the title page of that report.

Despite the lab's obvious role in the stack tests and its connections to IT, Bob Feild -- the EPA project manager at Times Beach -- denied knowledge of Quanterra's participation at last week's meeting in Frontenac. Under questioning by Mick Harrison, an attorney for the Citizens Against Dioxin Incineration (CADI), Feild stated: "I'm not aware of any involvement that they (Quanterra) had in the chain of custody."

Feild's denial contradicts documents provided to the RFT by the Region VII office last Friday. The documents show a representative of Quanterra signed over stack-emissions samples to an employee of Triangle Laboratories of Durham, N.C. Triangle was charged with analyzing the samples.Nevertheless, a lapse of seven to eight days existed between the time the samples were collected and the point when Quanterra handed them over to the other lab. Environmentalists familiar with the case say the time lapse could invalidate the tests results, if the samples were not stored and handled properly.

In a phone interview on Monday, Feild dismissed all of these issues as inconsequential. Feild argued that it is standard procedure for the incinerator operator to collect test samples. He claimed all aspects of the tests were overseen properly by the EPA and that safeguards prohibited any kind of manipulation of the findings. "We haven't done any research as to the current status of a company called Quanterra," Feild says. "It doesn't really matter if IT themselves did the work or if they paid a partially owned subsidiary to do the work. The contractual relationship between the operator and Syntex is really not pertinent here. It's not our concern, and we certainly don't have that information. We don't know who Quanterra is under direct contract with."

The RFT filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the EPA on this matter last Friday. In a letter to EPA regional administrator Dennis Grams last week, Rep. Talent, whose district includes Times Beach, requested "all chain of custody documents for all stack samples collected during the dioxin stack test, which took place in November of 1995." A spokesperson for Talent could not be reached for comment. Spokespersons for IT, Quanterra and Corning did not return calls placed to them.

An official at the EPA's Criminal Investigations Division in Kansas City would not confirm or deny whether an inquiry had been initiated into the matter.

This latest controversy follows an announcement in July that the completion date for the incineration has been pushed back to early next year because an estimated 70 tons of additional contaminated dirt will need to be burned.

Since initiating operations in March, the incinerator has been plagued by a series of emergency releases that have spewed unknown quantities of untreated dioxin-contaminated particulate matter into the atmosphere.

The EPA's own dioxin draft reassessment concludes that dioxin is a likely human carcinogen and is responsible for reproductive and immunological problems. EPA research further indicates that everyone is already overexposed to the toxin, and incineration is one of the sources of the pollution.

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Dead End on Latty Avenue

2010-07-06T10:47:00.006-05:00

The Legacy of Hiroshima Extends Directly to St. Louis

C.D. Stelzer

first published in the Riverfront Times (St. Louis), Aug. 2, 1995

Down at the end of the industrial court, where the concrete turns into a circle, a beige-colored, double-wide mobile home is parked between the Stone Container Corp. and Futura Coatings Co. The address, at 9200 Latty Avenue in Hazelwood, is landscaped sparsely with yews that have been manicured beyond salvation. On Saturday night, the trailer's air conditioner hums even though nobody is there. Unpainted wooden steps lead to the door, as does a ramp for the disabled. A small gravel parking lot also includes handicapped-designated spaces.

For the most part, the site seems like any suburban-industrial park except for the small nuclear warning signs on the nearby cyclone fence. Behind the barrier is an imposing mound that juts over the surrounding one-story warehouses. The manmade hill is covered by grayish-black rocks and topped with a green net or tarp.

Although it is not identified as such, this radioactive waste site, which is now watched over by the Department of Energy (DOE), is a monument to the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima. Other contaminated locations that indirectly commemorate the origins of the atomic age are scattered across the St. Louis area, from the Mississippi River to Lambert Field and out to Weldon Spring in St. Charles County. They are dangerous reminders -- twentieth-century vestiges of nuclear war.

Much of the radioactive waste that remains here is an unwanted by product of uranium purification conducted at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works on North Broadway. In 1942, the St. Louis chemical manufacturer began refining uranium for the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime program to develop the atom bomb. The uranium used in the first atomic test explosion and two subsequent military strikes against Japan was processed in St. Louis.

The first atom bomb used in actual warfare exploded over Hiroshima at 8:15 in the morning on Aug. 6, 1945. More than 100,000 people died, either instantly or of radiation sickness. The 2-kiloton bomb was nicknamed "Little Boy." The atomic annihilation would be repeated three days later on Nagasaki. Japan quickly surrendered.

Whether the atom bomb attacks saved more lives bybringing a rapid end to the war is still a matter of great debate. President Harry S Truman, a Missourian, claimed that using the bomb prevented what would have been bloody land invasion that could have cost the U.S. a million more casualties. This much is known, Japanese civilians who survived the attack on Hiroshima say they didn't hear any noise at the moment the bomb detonated. Instead, they describe a blinding light, disintegration, darkness, and fire.

In short, hell on earth.

Photographs of the aftermath show miles of charred rubble. Many survivors bore terrible burns. The estimated heat generated by the bomb blast was four times as hot as the interior of the sun. The Hiroshima explosion could be seen from a distance of 250 miles.

The Manhattan Project cost the U.S. taxpayer about $2 billion. The subsequent nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union skyrocketed the into the trillions. In the rush to produce nuclear armaments, expedient means took precedence over safe disposal of radioactive waste. Generations of future Americans will be strapped with the expensive task of mopping up.

The Department of Energy (DOE) now estimates the tab at more than $100 billion. By the end of the Cold War, there were 14 active nuclear weapons facilities in the U.S., occupying more than 3,350 square miles. The DOE has counted 8,700 radioactive and chemical dump sites nationwide that need remediation.

As a part of the Manhattan Project, Mallinckrodt developed a method of uranium purification using ether as a coolant. African pitchblende, which contained high concentrations of uranium, made up much of the crude ore the company then processed. The combination of extremely radioactive materials, wartime haste and lack of experience led to over-exposures among uranium workers here. Due to wartime secrecy, the workers weren't given a clear indication of the dangers.

After the war, production at Mallinckrodt continued. Safety measures increased, but so did the waste. The legacy in St. Louis now amounts to 2.3 million cubic yards of radioactive material. Much of that unwanted stockpile is still untreated.

At the Mallinckrodt plant on North Broadway, for instance, the radioactive levels in some buildings still exceed what is now considered safe by the DOE. Earlier efforts to clean up the site only served to spread the waste. In the decade following the war, the federal government secretly moved hundreds of tons of radioactive waste and debris from the chemical factory to a 21.7-acre site north of Lambert Field.

In the process, truck routes, ground water and surface water all became contaminated. Later, efforts to reuse some of the radioactive material resulted in the dump site on Latty Avenue. From there, some waste was illegally hauled to the West Lake landfill in Bridgeton. In addition, at least 5,000 truckloads of radioactive waste were transported to a quarry near Weldon Spring.

By 1957, the AEC had opened a new uranium processing plant there. Mallinckrodt operated the facility for the next ten years. It, too, became radioactively contaminated. Unlike the sites in St. Louis County, however, a DOE cleanup of the quarry and nearby plant is now underway.

A 1981 study of more than 2,000 Mallinckrodt uranium division workers showed an increase in three different cancers, including a 24 percent above-normal rise in the rate of leukemia . In addition, a controversial a series of cancer cases has plagued one block of Nyflot Avenue, a residential street in North County, a dump route where radioactive waste was spilled. In 1993, the Missouri Department of Health (MDOH) ruled the cancers on Nyflot were probably not related to radioactive exposure. But some environmentalists doubt MDOH's conclusion.

The consequences of living with the emotional fallout from the bomb raises other concerns. Denial, rationalization and other psychological defense mechanisms have been a means by which responsible politicians, military leaders and the public at large have been able to cope with the sheer magnitude of the carnage that ended World War II, as well as the ensuing threat that it could happen here.

"As a cultural historian, ... it seems to me that the prospect of a nuclear war, -- evidence of the destruction of two cities -- had a profound effect psychologically, often in ways that (we) didn't recognize," says historian Paul Boyer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Boyer, the author of Bomb's Early Light, a cultural history of the nascent atomic age, believes the bomb undermined an essential sense of continuity in American society. "Much of American culture ... since the period from 1945 really has to be understood in terms of this underlying anxiety and sense of uncertainty," says Boyer.

Secrecy and deception added to the unease. After the war, the federal government embarked on a campaign to misrepresent the potential hazards of radioactive fallout, Boyer says. "The Eisenhower cabinet ... said we'll just confuse the public, ... (and) say there's no danger -- people don't understand these scientific complexities, anyway. ... They didn't know what they were doing. There were terrible poisons being pumped into the air," says Boyer.

Today, there is ample evidence that public distrust of the government was warranted. In the post-war years, approximately, 250,000 combat troops were placed in close proximity to above-ground nuclear test blasts in Nevada and Utah to simulate possible wartime conditions. As a result, soldiers were exposed to as much as 12 billion curies of radiation, or 148 times more than was released from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the former Soviet Union. Untold numbers of civilians, who lived downwind from atmospheric testing, were also exposed. Recently, Congress belatedly passed legislation granting $50,000 to civilians who can prove they got cancer after being subjected to radioactive fallout from the atmospheric nuclear test that occurred between 1951 to 1963. The Committee of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimates fallout from weapons testing has caused 430,000 additional cancer deaths in the last 50 years.

Even as it denied the seriousness of nuclear fallout, the government was conducting secret experiments on radiation exposure. A 1986 congressional investigation headed by U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts found that, as a part of the Manhattan Project, American scientists injected unsuspecting patients with plutonium. Afterward, the surviving subjects weren't informed of the experiment for more than 20 years, because the word "plutonium" was classified information during World War II. The list of these kinds of incidents is long.

By early 1945, Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-American physicist, had begun circulating a petition among colleagues that implored the government not to use the atom bomb on Japan and keep it a secret. Well over 100 scientist signed the pact. By the time the appeal reached the White House, however, Truman had departed for the Pottsdam Conference in Europe, but not before Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project director, had convincingly argued in favor of using the bomb.

The scientists who foresaw the dangers of atomic weapons were far from alone. The military leaders who raised questions or opposed dropping the bomb on Hiroshima included Gen. George C. Marshall, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, and Adm. William H. Leahy. Yet the majority of the scientific and military community involved in the Manhattan Project remained true believers.

Physicist Arthur Holly Compton, the post-war chancellor of Washington University, became one of the most staunch defenders of Cold War diplomacy. In an open letter to U.S. Sen. Stuart Symington of Missouri, Compton wrote: "There are those ... who believe that by arming our nation with the most effective weapons we are exciting the world toward war. My own appraisal of history is the reverse." Although acknowledging the dangers of nuclear fallout, Compton stood fast in his support of nuclear weapons testing. "In my judgement," wrote Compton, "the hazard has in certain quarters been grossly exaggerated."

Compton had won the 1927 Nobel Prize for his work on X-Rays, which he did while the head of the physics department at Washington University. Later, at the University of Chicago, he became involved in overseeing work being done there on the Manhattan Project. As a part of that role, Compton came to St. Louis in April 1942 and asked chemical tycoon Edward J. Mallinckrodt, to help purify large quantities of uranium needed for the project. Three months later, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works was cranking out a ton of purified uranium daily. By December 1942, a team of scientists at the University of Chicago, led by Enrico Fermi, had generated and controlled the first nuclear chain reaction.

During his post-war tenure as chancellor at Washington University, Compton attracted nuclear scientists such as Arthur C. Wahl and Joseph W. Kennedy, two of the discoverers of plutonium. Kennedy died at age 40 of cancer, only two years after he and his partners had sold the rights to the plutonium separation process to the AEC for $400,000.

After witnessing the first atomic test explosion at Los Alamos, N.M. on July 16, 1945, another leading physicist -- J. Robert Oppenheimer -- recited an ancient Sanskrit verse from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Hindu holy book. "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds," said Oppenheimer. Less reverently, his test director Kenneth Bainbridge responded to the atomic explosion by saying, "We are all sons of bitches now."

Following the detonation over Hiroshima less than a month later, Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the bomb, gazed at the inferno below and exclaimed: "My, God, look at that son of a bitch go!" , Later, Lewis revised his reaction in his journal by writing, "My God, what have we done?"

That question obviously entered the mind of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Two days after the Hiroshima bombing, Stimson had a heart attack. He resigned soon after the Japanese surrender. In a February 1947 Harper's magazine article, Stimson defended the decision to drop the bomb, but nonetheless warned of its grave consequences.

"The face of war is the face of death," wrote Stimson. "War in the twentieth century has grown steadily more barbarous, more destructive, more debased in all its aspects. Now, with the release of atomic energy, man's ability to destroy himself is very nearly complete. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended a war. They also made it wholly clear that we must never have another war."

Bombs Bursting in Air ...

2010-07-05T22:32:00.002-05:00

Fug It

2010-07-05T16:08:00.004-05:00

John Kerry, John Lennon, David Peel and Tuli, Man!

The FBI investigated both John Kerry and John Lennon for their anti-war activities in the early 1970s. In the case of Lennon, at least, much of the information was false because the feebies got Lennon -- an ex-Beatle -- confused with David Peel.

Hard to believe but true.

Peel was a minor New York City rock `n' roller, who fronted a band called the the Lower East Side. That's where he lived, too, in a warehouse loft -- way before lofts were trendy.

His was a rathole.

The FBI got the two mixed up because Peel resembled Lennon, and that wasn't an accident, either. Peel had his hair cut or uncut similar to the ex-Beatle and he wore round wire-rimmed glasses like Lennon. Peel was, in some ways, a Lennon imitator.

When I met Peel, at his East Side loft in early 1973, he was so downed out on ludes that he could barely speak. I visited him with a couple of my college roommates, one of them a native New Yorker. My friends were trying to convince Peel to come down to a branch of Antioch College in Baltimore to do a show.

Their request wasn't altruistic. They were theater majors and were attempting to earn credit through a whacky curriculum they had created for themselves. These two made the same pitch to Manhattan Transfer backstage at the Mercer Arts Center on the same trip. They were rejected both times.

My roommates did manage to talk Tuli Kupferberg, a former member of the Fugs, into doing a poetry reading, however. Tuli, was by then a New York City street poet. He wrote the now-forgotten tract of verse entitled 1,001 Ways to Beat the Draft. He also crashed on the couch at our basement apartment at 33rd and Guilford in Baltimore. Back then Tuli was nothing but a sack of bones and had the appearance of a needle freak.

Four or five years earlier, he and and fellow Fug Ed Sanders along with Abbey Hoffmann and thousands of other people surrounded the Pentagon for the purpose of levitating it off the ground. That might have been been Tuli's idea, actually.

Peel, on the other hand, lacked the same poetic genius. How the FBI mistook him for Lennon I can't "Imagine."

The FBI records show photographs of Peel's album The Pope Smokes Dope and identify him as the Lennon. The Pope Smokes Dope wasn't exactly on the same caliber as Abbey Road, but maybe the FBI agents didn't listen to much rock music back then.

The only thing I can remember Peel saying during our one-time meeting was: "We're going to rip-off Apple Records, man."

If the FBI can get Lennon mixed up with Peel maybe they got Kerry mixed up with somebody else, too.

Who might that be? I can't Imagine.

State Senator Jelly Roll Hogan

2010-07-05T11:05:00.010-05:00

Gov. Forrest Smith of Missouri (right), who served from 1949 to 1953, was under the thumb of organized crime figures, including Missouri state Sen. Jelly Roll Hogan.

by C.D. Stelzer

The origins of modern political power in St. Louis date back to the 1920s and Edward J. "Jelly Roll" Hogan's gang. The gang leader's influence over city and state politics lasted for decades and can still be felt today. As a state senator Hogan was named a delegate to Missouri Constitutional Convention in 1943-44. In 1962, one year before his death, steamfitter boss John "Doc" Lawler asked 77-year-old Hogan to come out of retirement and run for a seat in the state senate again, but he declined.

Back in the Roaring 20s, Lawler's brother-in-law, John F. Dougherty, was a member of Egan's Rat's, a rival Northside Irish gang. Dougherty was present when gang leader William T. Egan, a city constable, was gunned down at 1400 Franklin Avenue (now Martin Luther King Drive) on the night of Oct. 31, 1921.

Dougherty later served as St. Louis sheriff from 1945 to 1948. During that period, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Dougherty was associated with the Eastside gang headed by Frank "Buster" Wortman, who also held a steamfitter's union card. In addition, the Post-Dispatch also reported that the sheriff had an interest in the Hyde Park Casino in East St. Louis and was involved in a gangland war to take over the gambling rackets in the Chicago suburb of Cicero.

Hogan's criminal career began during Prohibition when he battled competing gangs for control of the bootlegging trade in St. Louis. During the span of a few years, 23 murders were attributed to the gangland warfare in St. Louis.

Egan, Hogan's nemesis, was the Democratic Committeeman of the 5th Ward. His lieutenant was armed robber William P. "Dinty" Colbeck, who was gunned down after being released from prison on Feb. 17, 1943. Egan's murder was never solved, but Hogan's brother Jimmy was suspected of the hit job.

Some of the slayings were gangland executions that took place in remote areas of St. Louis County. Others were carried out through a series of drive-by shootings in the streets of St. Louis. For example, Jacob H. Mackler, the Hogan gang's attorney, was riddled with bullets in his car the night of Feb. 21, 1923 1730 North 12th Street.

Mackler's murder was followed by that of Egan soldier George Ruloff. Not long after Mackler's death, the bodies rival bootleggers and hoodlums Joseph Cammarata, Joseph "Green Onions" Cipolla and Everett E. Summers were found in ditches and fields in then-rural areas of St. Louis County.

Hogan himself came under attack more than once. In March 1923, he exchanged shots with Isadore "Izzy" Londe and Elmer Runge at Grand and St. Louis Avenue. A 13-year-old boy was killed during the shoot out.

The Hogan gang hung out at the Maxwellton Inn and race track on St. Charles Rock Road, where they planned the $260,000 robbery of an armored mail truck in downtown St. Louis on April 2, 1923. Several weeks later they pulled off a mail robbery in Staunton, Ill. that netted $54,000.

Ray Renard, one of Hogan's men, eventually snitched on his criminal partners, which resulted in lengthy prison sentences for those involved in the mail truck robberies. Renard moved to California and became a consultant for Hollywood gangster movies.

After the gang war ended, Hogan became the business agent for soft drink workers union in St. Louis and continued to serve as a state senator.

When. Forrest Smith of Missouri announce his candidacy in 1948, Hogan joined forces with his former enemies to help elect Smith governor. Both sides supported Smith because they realized that his election would be an opportunity to re-establish illegal gambling rackets. Among those with whom Hogan formed an alliance were former Egan members Frank "Buster" Wortman and Dougherty, who by then was serving as sheriff.

Hogan was also a close political ally of Kansas City boss Charles Binaggio, who took over control of that city's machine following the ouster of Thomas J. Pendergast.

source: Herbert A. Trask, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 16, 1963

Lowney's Legacy

2010-07-05T08:44:00.004-05:00

More than a love of writing drove the strange colony in Marshall, Ill.

first published in Illinois Times, Feb. 20, 2008

By C. D. Stelzer

The contents of 77 boxes shelved in the special-collections department of the Brookens Library at the University of Illinois at Springfield tell a love story, a love story that gave rise to one of the most curious chapters in modern American literature.

The documents, including diaries, journals, manuscripts, and approximately 2,000 letters, chronicle the life and work of Lowney Handy, who founded a writers’ colony in the eastern-Illinois town of Marshall. Between 1950 and 1964, she tutored more than 100 writers, including her premier pupil, James Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity, arguably the most famous novel to come out of World War II.

“Whether they were great writers is almost not even the point,” says Chicago filmmaker Dawn Sinclair Shapiro, who labored for three years making a documentary on the subject. Inside the Handy Writers’ Colony is slotted to air nationally on the PBS television network later this year. Shapiro used materials from the UIS collection to help reveal the complicated relationship between Jones and his mentor and explain how that collaboration grew into a Midwestern literary school.

Altogether, the colony spurred the publication of a dozen novels. Four of the books were adapted into Hollywood movies. The Handy Writers’ Colony didn’t follow in the tradition of other touted retreats on the East Coast that catered to established authors and poets. Instead, Lowney was interested in training less experienced and often disadvantaged writers. She bragged that she could mold anyone into a great writer if he or she would follow her advice. Her prospects included disgruntled veterans, dropouts, and ex-cons.

“She believed in them,” Shapiro says. “She believed in their work. There is something to be said about that, when someone believes in you.”

The first writer Lowney believed in was Jones, who had joined the Army in 1939 after graduating from high school in Lowney’s hometown of Robinson, Ill. Jones was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He later saw combat in the South Pacific, at Guadalcanal, before injuring his ankle and being shipped stateside. After his return, Jones convalesced at the Kennedy General Hospital in Memphis with other recovering soldiers.

Over the next few months his ankle mended, but his battle-scarred psyche did not. Both of his parents had died while he was away. His combat experience had alienated him, and Jones increasingly exhibited symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress. On leave from the hospital, he facilitated his drinking and philandering by booking a room at the Peabody Hotel for six weeks. His bouts at the hotel bar often ended in brawls.

When the Army ordered him back to active duty in August 1943, Jones went on another binge and was briefly absent without leave, but he returned to Fort Campbell, Ky., where his newly assigned unit was being readied for the forthcoming D-Day invasion of Europe. In November he went AWOL a second time, taking refuge at the home of his uncle Charles Jones, a conservative attorney in Robinson. At a birthday celebration held on his behalf at the Elks Club, Jones drunkenly insulted some of the town’s leading citizens, embarrassing his uncle. Concerned over his drinking and anti-social behavior, Charles Jones’ wife introduced James Jones to Lowney Handy, a neighbor who worked with troubled youth.

The meeting would forever change both their lives.

Years later, Lowney gave her first impression of Jones in a story that appeared in Life magazine: “He swaggered; he wore dark glasses; he even asked me to read his poetry out loud. He had obviously come over for a drink. Then he saw my books. . . . He flipped through them and plopped them back as if he were gulping down what they had in them. So I asked him if he’d like to see my writing room.”

Lowney, a fledgling writer herself, became Jones’ mentor. She also became his lover, though that aspect of their relationship was not mentioned in the Life article. She was 17 years older than Jones. During the course of their 15-year affair she remained married to Harry Handy, a superintendent at the Ohio Oil Co. refinery in Robinson. When Jones went AWOL the final time, in May 1944, Lowney coaxed him into returning to his Army base to face disciplinary action. She then began lobbying the military bureaucracy for leniency on his behalf. On the basis of a series of psychiatric evaluations the Army finally determined that Jones was “psychoneurotic” and granted him an honorable discharge in July 1944.

Jones went back to Robinson to live with the Handys at 202 W. Mulberry St. While she provided emotional support and literary guidance, her husband paid the bills. The Handys added a room to their house for Jones to use as his study. They also bought him a house trailer and a jeep to use for road trips out West and to Florida. For the next several years Jones worked on his first novel, They Shall Inherit the Laughter, and later wrote much of From Here to Eternity while living with the couple.

“My own view is that From Here to Eternity would certainly not have been written if Jones had not had Lowney and her husband,” says George Hendrick, a James Jones scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “He was a great writer, but he needed help.”

Lowney received no accolades in her hometown for her efforts, however. “There were a lot of people in town who thought she was the town whore,” says 81-year-old Helen Howe of Robinson, a longtime friend, “but she didn’t worry about other people’s attitudes toward her, so long as she was satisfied. At that time, you couldn’t find that many women who could afford to be that independent.

“Harry didn’t care,” Howe adds. “The relationship between Lowney and her husband couldn’t have been better. He had been having affairs for years. Harry had a girlfriend for as long as I knew him, and it was the same girlfriend. At the time, it was not that unusual in Robinson.”

An open marriage flourishing in a small Midwestern town contradicts the stereotype often associated with 1950s America, but the Handys’ less-than-perfect union had been forged much earlier. Before their 1926 nuptials, Harry allegedly paid for Lowney to have an abortion and then married her out of guilt. He later contracted gonorrhea and passed it to his wife. As a result she had to undergo a hysterectomy, and the couple remained childless.

Lowney founded the writers’ colony in 1950 in Marshall on five acres of land owned by Harry Handy’s mother. Initially her literary recruits bivouacked in tents. Barracks and other improvements, including the construction of a swimming pond, came later. In the early years Jones lived on the premises in his shiny aluminum Spartan Airstream house trailer. Lowney spent the summers in a nearby cottage.

The colony operated from spring through fall. In the winters Lowney and Jones would live together in Florida or Arizona, where she often invited her most promising acolytes to join them. At first, most of her students were young men who lived nearby, but after the publication of the Life article in May 1951 they began flocking to the colony from all over the country. They ranged in age from their late teens to their early thirties. Lowney’s published novelists included Tom T. Chamales, Jerry Tschappat, Edwin Daly, Charles Wright, William Duhart, Jere Peacock, and Jon Shirota.

An applicant’s desire to write was deemed the most important criterion for acceptance, followed by a willingness to adhere to Lowney’s strict regimen. In return, she asked that novelists pay her 10 percent of their future royalties from books written at the colony. She believed that a writer’s creativity could not be tapped unless the writer had first been stripped of his ego. One way of achieving this goal, according to Lowney’s method, was through isolation. Once a writer entered the colony, much of his contact with the outside world was cut off. Newspapers, radios, and television were prohibited.

Inside the gates, members led essentially a monastic existence. They rose at 5:30 a.m. and had a breakfast of toast and coffee in silence at the ramada, the name for the building that housed the screened-in kitchen and dining area. Afterward they returned to one of the two barracks, which were divided into 12 small rooms. Each room contained a cot, chair, table, typewriter, and lamp. In these austere quarters, writers would work on their assignments until noon. Before graduating to writing their own novels, members of the colony were required to copy the works of noted authors.

The objective was to subconsciously instill in the student the style of the writer whose work was being copied. Lowney selected the copying exercises on the basis of the perceived weaknesses of the student’s own writing. Writers of long, florid prose were forced to copy the terse style of Ernest Hemingway. Conversely, those who found themselves short of words were required to copy William Faulkner. The works of Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot were forbidden because she considered them too intellectual and “sissy-like.”

Once freed to pursue their own writing, Lowney’s charges were encouraged to write short “skits,” or scenes, which later would be stitched together to form novels. She also prohibited writers from talking about their novels with anyone except her. After a bland lunch, which often included cottage cheese or shots of liquid Jell-O, everyone was expected to labor for a few hours on various projects to improve and maintain the grounds. Writers spent the remainder of the afternoon reading or participating in recreational activities. After dinner, her wards were allowed to socialize until 9 o’clock, when they retired for the evening.

With few exceptions, women were excluded from joining the colony and banned from visiting. Their mere presence, according to Lowney, might distract her male writers. In general, she took a harsh view of her own sex. “A woman is the most cold-blooded creature on earth when it comes to selecting a man,” Lowney allegedly told one of her star pupils. “You poor sons-of-bitches. You think women are delicate and need protection, but that’s a myth created by a matriarchal society. Women have you by the balls, all of you, and you never have figured it out. . . . A man who gets married and becomes a householder will never be an artist.”

Jones, the established artist of the bunch, drew attention to his nonconformity by roaring through Marshall on a Harley-Davidson in a black leather jacket. On another occasion he reportedly sallied downtown shirtless, wearing shorts, sandals, and a leather-fringed vest, with silver-and-turquoise bracelets dangling from his wrists. Nobody questioned his flamboyant attire, perhaps because of the pearl-handled pistols holstered on his hips. But rumors proliferated. Locals suspected the colony of being a demonic cult or a collective of homosexuals. In the summer heat, the writers frequently wore swimming trunks and little more, leading to further speculation.

“It was viewed by some as a nudist colony and a colony full of nut cases,” says 71-year-old Kenny Snedeker, a Marshall native who joined the colony in 1954 after graduating from high school. “None of that is true, of course.”

Once a week, Lowney allowed her scribes to go into Marshall for dinner and a movie but not by themselves. The only break from this cloistered existence came approximately once a month, when the group was permitted to travel to Terre Haute, 20 miles away. Beyond the confines of the colony and Lowney’s vigilant eyes, her disciples, including Jones, acted like Army recruits on a weekend pass. They would start a typical spree at Bohannon’s bar and then stagger to other watering holes before seeking female companionship.

Snedeker says he was too young to participate in the carousing, but he remembers Terre Haute’s risqué reputation. “Back then, Terre Haute was known as Sin City,” he says. “There was lots of gambling, and Cherry Street had several blocks of whorehouses.”
After sating their hedonistic desires, the writers returned to the ascetic atmosphere of the colony, where their indoctrination continued.

Writing may have been the major subject at the colony, but Lowney’s personal philosophy was also part of the courseload. She peppered her literary advice with biblical quotations and wrote about karmic consequences in her letters. She meditated, practiced yoga, studied Eastern mysticism, believed in reincarnation, and recommended that her students give themselves enemas to cleanse their systems of impurities.

Her eccentricities and avant-garde beliefs preceded the New Age movement by decades. She went braless and wore sweatshirts, barking commands and extolling praise. Colonists opposed her edicts under threat of banishment. Many left of their own volition, unable to adhere to the strict rules. In a later era, the colony might have been considered a hippie commune but for the fact that Lowney loathed long locks. She also frowned on facial hair, with the exception of Jones’ military mustache.

“She was a self-made person,” Snedeker says, “self-educated and very well read. She ran it [the colony] like any Army base. You knew what the limits were. She could be very sweet or she could curse you out like a sailor, if you crossed her, but it was a pleasant place. I never had any problems, whatsoever.”

Others remembered their stays less fondly. In his 1971 memoir, The Colony, John Bowers described the conditioning as similar to experiments endured by Pavlov’s fabled dog. “We never knew when our masters’ anger would be turned against us,” wrote Bowers. “Like dogs we might run to them, wanting to be petted — and find ourselves being beaten because they were in a bad mood. Things had a way of happening between them, things we knew nothing about, that would cause them to lash out for no reason we could understand.”

During his term at the colony, Lowney wrote Snedeker a rambling missive. The typewritten letter is filled with sentence fragments, advice, and aphorisms, the kind of disjointed encouragement she offered many aspiring writers. But in retrospect, Lowney’s opening paragraph now seems to reveal as much about her personal struggle as it does about how to write well: “Conflict is the key to writing. People with problems. DUALITY. Internal inconsistency, which is the note of evil, the destruction of the Garden of Eden. . . . ”

Snedeker, who was 17 years old at the time, says that he was unaware of Lowney and Jones’ affair — “but I would notice real late at night, like maybe around 11 o’clock, that I’d see Lowney slip over to his house.” He didn’t learn the reason for the nocturnal visits until years later. More discerning colony members felt caught in the middle. Bowers wrote that a fellow writer explained the situation to him this way:
“There are games being played here I don’t understand, and I’d just as soon be left out. I have the distinct feeling that this whole thing — the Colony, everything — is just something between Jim and Lowney and that we’re only here as stagehands.”

After the success of From Here to Eternity, Jones sold the movie rights and contributed an estimated $60,000 to $100,000 of his newfound wealth to the colony. In early 1952, he accepted the National Book Award in New York, where he hobnobbed with novelist Norman Mailer and other leading literati. As Jones’ career ascended, his younger sister’s life slid closer to the abyss.

Mary Ann Jones had been in freefall since adolescence, when she discovered the body of their alcoholic father, a dentist, on the floor of his office in Robinson. Ramon Jones had died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head. Mary Ann was 17 years old. Their mother had died a year earlier. As Mary Ann grew into adulthood, her behavior became increasingly erratic. She drank heavily and abused drugs. After an unsuccessful stab at being an actress in Hollywood, Mary Ann began writing. Making an exception to her exclusionary rule, Lowney admitted Mary Ann to the colony. Her autobiographical novel The Third Time You Killed Me was nearing completion when she was found dead on the floor of her trailer on June 5, 1952. Charles Jones, who disapproved of his niece and nephew’s lifestyle, suspected foul play and requested that the U.S. marshal in Danville, Ill., oversee a coroner’s inquest. The inquest, however, found that Mary Ann had died of natural causes as a result of a seizure caused by a brain tumor.

Within days of Mary Ann’s funeral, life at the colony seemingly returned to normal. Later that summer, Mailer visited. He arrived driving a sporty Studebaker with wire wheels, his future wife, the raven-haired beauty Adele Morales by his side. Actor Montgomery Clift also dropped by. Clift had met Jones after being cast in a leading role in the movie adaptation of From Here to Eternity.

Despite the broadening of his social network, Jones showed no signs of wanting to leave Marshall or Lowney. In late 1953 he moved into a custom-built $85,000 bachelor pad located next to the colony’s grounds. His new digs included a cathedral ceiling, lavish Philippine mahogany, and a bidet. But he kept the same arduous schedule six days a week, working each morning on his next novel, Some Came Running, a 1,200-page opus devoted to the hypocrisies of life in a small Midwestern town.

In December 1956, Jones went to New York to meet with his publisher. While there, writer Budd Schulberg introduced him to Gloria Mosolino, a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe in the feature film The Seven-Year Itch. After a whirlwind romance, Jones and Mosolino were married in Haiti on Feb. 27, 1957. Lowney, in Florida for the winter, had already sent a congratulatory telegram, but she could not contain her jealousy. In a letter to Harry, she referred to the bride as “Gloria Vanderbilt Mussolini.”

A few months later the newlyweds arrived in Marshall, intent on setting up housekeeping. Jones still hadn’t told his wife the truth about his relationship to Lowney, but she had her suspicions, and tensions rose. Finally Lowney’s anger erupted over the Fourth of July holiday.

Gloria’s nieces, 10 and 12 years old, were visiting at the time. In the new documentary, they publicly recount the incident for the first time.
“She had the knife like this,” says Kate Sotiridy, holding her clenched fist over her head. “She just cut the screen and . . . and barged in and came after Gloria with the knife.”

According to James Jones’ biographer Frank MacShane, Lowney shouted: “The only reason Jim married you is that you’re the best cocksucker in New York!” The two women fell to the floor, punching and scratching each other until Jones separated them. Jones and his wife left the next day, and Jones never returned.

In 1958 the couple moved to Paris, where they lived for the next 15 years in self-imposed exile. They had two children. Jones would go on to write other novels, including The Thin Red Line, based on his combat experiences at Guadalcanal. He and Gloria would entertain a cast of celebrities and visiting authors at their Paris apartment. But he never wrote another book as successful as From Here to Eternity.

For her part, Lowney continued to work with aspiring writers, but the colony slowly declined. In later years she provided guidance mainly through correspondence, but she was still instrumental in getting her students’ novels published. After her husband’s death, in 1963, her health declined rapidly, and she died on June 27, 1964. She was 60 years old. The Handys are buried side by side in the Marshall Cemetery.

None of Lowney’s cherished writers attended her funeral.

At the end of the forthcoming documentary, the narrator reads from a letter by Jones dated Jan. 27, 1949. He is writing to Lowney from Robinson, where he is spending the winter with Harry at the Handy residence on West Mulberry Street. Lowney is in Tampa, struggling to write her own novel, which she ultimately burns on the beach. The letter expresses Jones’ angst at their separation. He credits Lowney with helping him write From Here to Eternity. Jones attempts to explain their ménage à trois in psychological terms, slipping back and forth from a hypothetical situation to their own. In his analysis he describes a power struggle, a war of sorts, in which each combatant vies for domination. Jones says that he longs to transcend that battle — but he also muses about using their relationship as material for a future book.

"I’ll be able to write a great love novel someday, don’t you think? It will end as a tragedy, of course. But yours and mine must not end that way. It has been too great a thing for both of us. It has made both of us, though it nearly destroyed us both a thousand times."

Jones will always be remembered for his realistic portrayal of military life and the impact of war on men’s souls. Though elements of Lowney’s personality found their way into his female characters, he never wrote that great love novel.

Instead, his letters to Lowney are his tribute to tragic love.

"There is no joy in life without love, everything is drab, meaningless. I’d just as soon not be alive, as not have your love.
Forevermore, Jim"

Uncle Bucky and MK-ULTRA

2010-07-04T21:54:00.003-05:00

George W. Bush's uncle -- William H.T. "Bucky" Bush -- lives here in St. Louis. He used to be the president of Boatmen's Bank. When Reagan was shot in March 1981, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat had reporter Rick Stoff do a story on "Bucky's" reaction to the assassination attempt. It remains one of my all-time favorite weird clips.

First, there's the headline: "Bush is devoted to Reagan; `it's got to be terrible for him,' brother says."

Then there's the cutline under Bucky's mugshot: "William H.T. "Bucky" Bush, president of Boatmen's Bank of St. Louis, said he was trying not to think about the possibility that his brother, George, could become president."

But the best part was tucked at the end of the story itself:

"... As an example of the unstable personalities responsible for assassination attempts, Bush offered a flier forwarded to him Monday after copies were left on cars during Saturday night's performance at the St. Louis Repertory (formerly Loretto-Hilton) Theatre in Webster Groves. Bush is a member of the theater's board of directors.

"The printed sheets, labeled `WARNING,' contained a man's rambling account of how he was a target of a `subliminal learning/mind control operation conducted by the U.S. government with the cooperation of `local law enforcement agencies, corporations, universities, colleges and certain private citizens.'

"The sheet said the man had been a target of the operation since 1977 in attempts to turn him into a homosexual.

"He listed government officials and public institutions that have allegedly participated in attempts to control his mind, and concluded that a possible motive was the `assassination of the president,' from which St. Louis might profit because the next president would be George Bush, `whose brother heads a bank in St. Louis.'

"Bucky Bush said he had never heard of the man, who listed his name and address on the sheet, and referred to him as 'some three-dollar bill.'

"When a reporter asked for a copy of the sheet, Bush suggested he take the original. 'I don't want the damn thing.'"

Where is Living with War Vol. 2?

2010-07-04T21:32:00.005-05:00

Living with War – Neil Young

Aficionados of Heart of Gold and other introspective, acoustic ballads should be forewarned: Neil Young is on the warpath, or more accurately, the anti-war path. Accompanied by Crazy Horse, his longtime backup band, Young’s latest release, Living with War, attacks the US government and President George W. Bush, specifically, not with weapons of mass destruction but thrashing power chords at decibel levels unequaled since his 1990 recording Ragged Glory, a work that forged a new legion of grunge rock fans who weren’t even born when Young cast his lot with Crosby, Stills, Nash in 1969.

In 1970, CSN&Y recorded Young’s song Ohio, an ode to the four students gunned down by US National Guard troops at Kent State University that spring during a protest against the Vietnam War. Subsequent radio play of the dirge galvanized opposition to US military aggression in Southeast Asia, essentially broadening the anti-war movement from its relatively narrow political base into a cultural phenomenon.

Now at age 62, Young is poised for a repeat performance. The drum beat of Living with War signals a shift in American public opinion. Though millions of Americans have opposed the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq with the same vigor as Europeans, the majority viewed opposition to the war as unpatriotic or even treasonous. But the tide has turned. George W. Bush’s approval rating are currently the lowest of any sitting US president in the last 50 years.

Grabbing that wave of discontent with the seasoned skills of a California surfer, Young hastily cobbled together this ten-song collection, including an anthem, Let’s Impeach the President, the theme of which is obviously summed up in the title. In a calculated move also aimed at seizing the moment, he pre-released the entire compilation on his Internet web site (www.neilyoung.com) to maximize exposure, if not profits.

The other compositions in the batch are no less fervent in their conviction, while still managing to intimate a more personal note. For instance, on the opening cut, After the Garden, Young’s lament is both enigmatic and subject to interpretation. He rails against the need for a ‘shadow government,’ but leaves the listener to ponder the refrain:

‘… What will the people do, after the garden is gone? … Where will people go, what will people know, after the garden?’ The questions could connote the ravages of living in an apocalyptic, post-9/11 world or Young could be musing over his own mortality.

Taken as a whole, the underlying subtext of Living with War seems predicated on an urgency that would not necessarily be as apparent in the efforts of a younger artist. Last year, Young was diagnosed as having a potentially lethal brain aneurism, but he, nonetheless, continued to write and record during treatment.

In another song, Restless Consumer, Young touches on his ill health, comparing the selling of the war, which he blames on a quest for oil, to commercials for the latest anodyne marketed by the pharmaceutical industry:

‘Don’t need no Madison Avenue war. … Don’t need no more lies. … Don’t need no TV ads telling me how sick I am. Don’t need no dizziness. Don’t need no nausea. Don’t need no side effects like diarrhea or sexual death. Don’t need no more lies. …’

Young, of course, is not the first or the most articulate singer-songwriter to voice dissent over recent US foreign policy issues. American Folksinger David Rovics has been touring Ireland and other European nations for years, hurling vocal petards at the Bush administration. Even more impressively, country rocker Steve Earle’s 2003 release Jerusalem questioned the morality of the so-called ‘war on terror.’ Earle followed up that effort the next year with The Revolution Starts Now. But these artists have effectively been singing to the choir. Their leftist perspectives, however astute, only reach a limited audience.

Young, on the other hand, is a rock ‘n’ roll icon, a legend who sold millions of vinyl recordings decades before either Rovics or Earle entered the scene. For better or worse, he is not an ideologue, either. Similar to his music, his politics have wandered from one end of the spectrum to the other. In the 1980s, for inscrutable reasons, he supported the right-wing presidencies of the late Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the current US leader’s father. Despite Young’s wavering allegiances, he possesses the ability to instinctively hit the vein of the American body politic that abhors tyranny – at exactly the right moment.

In Looking for a Leader, another anti-war anthem featured on Living with War, Young pleads for someone to restore integrity to the White House:

‘…Looking for somebody tough enough to take it on, clean up the corruption and make the country strong. Walking among our people there’s someone straight and strong to lead us from desolation in a broken world gone wrong. Someone walks among us and I hope he hears the call. Maybe it’s a woman or a black man, after all. …’

Or maybe it’s Neil Young. He’d get my vote.
-- C.D. Stelzer

Seems Like a Long, Long Time

2010-07-04T19:53:00.005-05:00

Feb. 15, 2003

Local anti-war activists join millions around the world in opposing the Bush Administration’s foreign policy objectives

BY C.D. Stelzer

ST. LOUIS -- A man of Middle Eastern descent cradled a child in his arms at the foot of the altar at the Pilgrim Congregational Church on Union Boulevard last Saturday afternoon.

At the pulpit, a young woman asked those gathered to close their eyes and ask themselves what they could do to stop the imminent U.S. attack against Iraq.

The moment of silence came at the end of an anti-war rally attended by more than 2,000 people. Opponents of the Bush administration’s foreign policy filled every pew, including those in the balcony, where a dim winter’s light filtered through a stain-glassed window that depicted the image of Jesus Christ.

Those who came to this house of worship represented a diverse cross section of the American public; people of all faiths, races and creeds. They crowded the aisles, sat on floor, jammed the vestibule, and stood out in the cold on the sidewalk. All or them
shared one thing in common: a determination to stop the Bush administration’s unilateral and unprecedented decision to wage a preemptive, unprovoked war.

Instead of War, a local anti-war organization (www.Insteadofwar.org), sponsored the event, which coincided with peace rallies, marches and demonstrations by millions of people across the globe. Despite the moment of silence, the mood of the those gathered in St. Louis seemed more defiant than solemn. The determination and solidarity harkened back to the militant civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s.

After the rally, a radical splinter group of approximately 500 demonstrators took to the streets of St. Louis in a spontaneous and unauthorized march. Police did nothing to stop the demonstrators and no arrests were made. But the burgeoning anti-war movement here is already organizing training sessions in civil disobedience should
war break out.

Inside the church, the crowd listened to passionate speeches given by the Rev. C. Skully Stikes, a United Methodist minister from St. Louis and Henry Nicholas of Philadelphia, president of the National Union of Health Care Employees, an AFL©CIO affiliated union.

Nicholas, a U.S. Navy veteran and labor organizer since 1959, did not mince words, when he addressed the audience. "The framers of the Declaration of Independence said to us, and I quote: ‘When this government no longer represents the wishes of the people it is the duty of the people to change their government.’"

The audience responded to the recitation with thunderous applause and a standing ovation.

“For the first time in history, we meet worldwide, joined with one vision, with one understanding and with one commitment and that commitment is there should not be this unjust war. We want peace in our time," Nicholas said. “It is our duty to rescue our people from a government that would take us in the wrong direction.

“We must not be manipulated into a vision that tries to make the American people feel that their only way out is to support this unjust war. I believe from the bottom of
my heart that this war is about oil.”

The union leader then broadened his criticism to include the Bush administration’s negligent domestic policies. He accused the administration of misappropriating tax dollars to benefit the rich at the expense of poor and working-class Americans.

"People right here in this city go to bed homeless and hungry, Nicholas said. The war will not change those conditions. He pointed out that under the Bush administration there has been a loss of 1.7 million jobs in the United States in less than two years. Moreover, pension funds, on which the elderly depend, have been gutted because of the decline in the capitalist stock market; and despite the vast wealth of this nation, many Americans receive inadequate health care, while billions of dollars are being wasted on war preparations."

“Human values must out weigh military claims,” said Stikes, the United Methodist minister. "The militarization of society in the world must be challenged and stopped. We must insist on complete disarmament of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons under strict and effective international control.

" There are some who would argue that some military actions are just, ... no proof has been provided that Iraq has nuclear weapons aimed at the United States or troops massed at its borders (or that it) has the deliberate capability of the weapons of mass destruction. No case can be made that a war against Iraq is justified for the defense of the United States. Further, Iraq’s neighbors are not calling for assistance from the United States," he added.

"This matter can and should be handled by the United Nations. No member nation has a right to take unilateral military action without the approval of the U.N. Security Council. Without Security Council approval, the United States would stand in violation of international law. The administration’s proposed attack is essentially a unilateral effort that uses as its rationale Iraq’s non-compliance with U.N. weapons inspectors. Arab and European governments strongly oppose the invasion of Iraq. Their views cannot and should not be disregarded.

"A preemptive war presents a major and dangerous change in U.S. foreign policy It also sets a terrible precedent for other nations.

The plight of Iraqis and the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis over the past 12 years of sanctions weighs heavy on our hearts. We need to help all people of the world in loving actions not in destructive actions. I am for peace. We are for peace. We must not let blind and deceitful tongues lead us into war."

Some of Duffy's Blues

2010-07-04T18:57:00.005-05:00

I remember standing on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C. on the day of President Richard M. Nixon's second inauguration. I had decided to take the train down from Baltimore that morning to experience the historic event. Baltimore is only about 30 miles away from D.C. At the time, I was attending a satellite campus of Antioch College.

As I wandered through the streets of the nation's capital that day, I found myself cast into a surreal scene comparable to a Fellini movie. The city and the country were divided by the Vietnam war. And I walked between the two camps. On the inaugural route, midgets juggled on street corners and hawkers sold bangles and baubles to the throng. At one point, I glimpsed the re-elected president through the grandstands, standing up through the sunroof of his black limousine, smiling and waving at the crowd. I remember it was January and Nixon had a deep tan, evidence of a recent holiday visit to his pal Bebe Rebozo's mansion in Key Biscayne, Fl.

On the other side of the barricades, along the pedestrian mall, hundreds of thousands of protestors had gathered for the last anti-war march on Washington. The atmosphere was somber. They carried plackards, sang hymns and chanted slogans; people of all ages and walks of life united. I stood on the sidelines, more an observer than a participant.

Between the two processions were school buses full of U.S. Army troops. I had long hair then, which was a sign that I was a member of the enemy camp. The buses were lined up for blocks. Thousands of troops were on standby in case violence broke out. None did. But standing next to one of the buses, I watched and listened as the soldiers screamed invectives at me. I have never since experienced so much mass hatred directed towards me.

When I came back to St. Louis, I took up playing the guitar and met a Duffy, an ex-Marine. Duffy, who was of Scandinavian descent, looked like a viking, blue-eyed and blond. He was the son of a chauffeur. When he was young, he lived above a garage in Ladue. Duffy used to play lead guitar for a band that featured a 400-pound drummer named Earthquake. The singer and harp player in the band was the son of Jimmie Reed, the legendary Chicago bluesman. Jimmie Jr. played all of his father's standards, including Big Boss Man. Duffy showed me how to play bar chords and rudimentary three-chord progressions.

Duffy knew more about the blues than just how to play them, however. He had his leg blown off in Vietnam. When he came back, he couldn't find a job. Eventually, he got on with the post office. Now he's retired.

I remember closing up the Waterhouse, a saloon on Manchester Avenue across from Scullin Steel, one night. Duffy decided he wanted to visit a friend of his in Southern Illinois, another amputee who had served time at the Philadelphia naval hospital with him. I agreed to drive. We threw our guitars in the back of my VW bus and took off, with a six-pack for the road, of course. I got lost driving on the backroads somewhere between here and Carbondale. Duffy passed out. Around dawn, I decided to head back and return the war veteran to his wife.

Duffy taught me the blues.

The Lady in Red

2010-07-04T09:37:00.008-05:00

Jean Hill, the closest witness to the JFK assassination still swears the shots came from the grassy knoll

first published in the Riverfront Times, June 1991

Between questions, Jean Hill removed one of her large gold costume earrings and placed it on top of the photo image of Dealey Plaza, which lays on the conference room table at the RFT offices. She gazes out the 9th floor window at the imposing gargoyles of the Christ Church Cathedral and her red fingernails instinctively massage a sore earlobe.

By her account, the first time Hill heard some of these same queries was on a November day almost 29 years ago as she looked out on another urban panorama.

The windows in the third-floor room of the Dallas County Criminal Courts Building provided a perfect proscenium arch for the tragedy, which had just transpired in the plaza below. From that theater-like vantage point, Hill would first recall to anonymous
federal interrogators what she had witnessed.

Earlier on this warm sunny Friday afternoon in the Indian summer of 1963, Hill, then a 32-year-old substitute school teacher, rode to the western edge of downtown in a friend's Thunderbird to watch a presidential parade pass by on Elm Street. The two convinced a police officer to allow them beyond the barricades so they could snap Polaroid photographs. In so doing, Hill and her companion, Mary Moorman, became two of the closest eye witnesses to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

"I replay this assassination tape in my brain all the time," says Hill. Her presence in Dallas that day, of course, predates videotape, but Hill was captured on Abraham Zapruder's now-famous eight-millimeter home movie. From that cameo appearance, she became known as the "lady in red."

True to her legendary image, Hill wore a red blouse with black brocade Saturday morning. The 61-year-old blonde also flaunts a button that says: "JFK, release the files."

Using the photocopies of Dealey Plaza as a reference, she recites in a Southern drawl her movements that fateful day to Kevin Belford, the RFT's free-lance illustrator.

Hill came to St. Louis to promote her new book, JFK,
The Last Dissenting Witness, which she co-authored with former Dallas Times Herald reporter Bill Sloan. Later, she replays the same sequence of occurrences to Kenn Thomas and Phil Gounis of KDHX radio, who will air the interview on July 1 at 7 p.m.

Although Hill's recollections do not completely correspond with a statement she gave the Dallas County Sheriff's Department at the time of the assassination, the essentials have remained constant.

"I did see a muzzle flash and a puff of smoke at the moment that Kennedy's head exploded," says Hill. But the eye witness's attention was not drawn to the sixth-floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where the Warren Commission concluded Lee Harvey
Oswald fired alone.

Instead, Hill and others ran to the fence at the top of the grassy knoll across the street. More than one source has claimed that Hill herself invented the phrase, which
now defines one of the most intriguing locations in American history.

What is not an invention, according to Hill, is her steadfast recollection of events. From the very beginning, Hill has maintained there were four to six shots fired, not the three reported in the Warren Commission report. Once she reached the parking area behind the fence, Hill says she saw a policeman, who appeared to be holding either a rifle or a shotgun. But perhaps what is most interesting about Hill's story involves the man in a brown coat she says she saw running from the area of the School Book Depository toward the knoll. According to Hill, within 48 hours, she saw someone on TV who looked exactly like that fleeting figure. "The man that I chased, the man running back toward the shooter, I saw again as I walked toward my TV on Sunday morning," says Hill. "I was going to turn it off and leave the house. And I started yelling to my daughter: `Come quick. This is the man that I was chasing down on the knoll.'

Of course, it turned out later that the man's name was Jack Ruby." Hill soon learned that Ruby, the nightclub owner who shot Oswald to death on national television, knew both his victim and J.D. Tippit, the Dallas police officer purportedly murdered by Oswald on the same day as the assassination. A clue to the source of Hill's inside information is the gold necklace she is wearing at the interview Saturday. It is a replica of a turtle charm given to her by a Dallas motorcycle cop with whom she was intimately involved in 1963.

The officer, also an assassination witness, is identified in the book as J.B. Marshall, a pseudonym for the late B.J. Martin. Much of the book revolves around the recreated dialogue between Hill and the police officer. Sloan, the writer who accompanied Hill on her St. Louis tour, expresses no qualms about employing
such a novelistic approach to his non-fiction work.

"Dialogue has always been one of my strong suits, whether it was a feature story for a newspaper or ... a magazine article. The collaborators were aided by the fact that Hill still lives in the same house she occupied then. "I'm sure that we're not totally accurate. But I think that, as far as a representation of what happened, what was said between the two of them, I feel comfortable. ..."

Sloan has also written a novel about the Kennedy slaying called The Other Assassin. The writer, who once was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, has also contributed articles to super market tabloids such as The National Enquirer, Globe and Star. The sensational reputations of those publications and Sloan's literary license may be enough to cast doubt on the biographical account of the assassination witness.

But the accuracy of Hill's recollections themselves have long been questioned by critics. A deposition taken the day of the assassination and bearing Hill's signature does not mention being collared by plainclothesmen and taken to an office on the third-floor of the Dallas County Criminal Courts Building.

Instead, it states she was escorted by a reporter to the press room of the sheriff's department. And in a TV interview immediately following the assassination, Hill
mistakenly identified a bouquet in Jackie Kennedy's lap as a dog. David Belin, a former Warren Commission counsel, has attempted to use the error to discredit the rest of Hill's account for years. According to Hill, federal authorities began trying to twist her story from the moment they first interrogated her following the
assassination.

Two men, one of whom identified himself as a Secret Service agent, apprehended Hill after she slipped behind the fence at the top of the knoll, she says. Hill says they then confiscated the Polaroid photos she had in her pocket and took her to the Dallas County Criminal Courts Building. "I was probably in there and out of there (within) 15 or 20 minutes of the assassination," says Hill, recalling her questioning. Hill suspects her early release was brought about because she refused to tell the officials what they wanted to hear.

She doggedly maintained she heard from four to six reports. They kept telling me I was hearing echoes and firecrackers," says Hills. "Finally, they got angry and said: `We've got three bullets, so three shots are all we're going to say right now.' They hadn't even had time to get up to the sixth floor and find the sniper's nest," adds Hill. After the assassination, Hill was kept under FBI surveillance for 15 months.

She received numerous death threats in the mail and over the phone. She also believes her house was burglarized and that her automobile was sabotaged. Hill's identification of the man she saw running from the Book Depository has since been corroborated by
Julia Ann Mercer, who places Ruby in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza an hour before the arrival of the motorcade. Also, there is now speculation that the police officer Hill saw behind the fence was the late Roscoe White, a former Marine with an intelligence background.

White has been implicated in the assassination plot by his son Ricky. Hill now says the unidentified police officer she saw could have been White, but she can't be certain of it. Like many of those somehow connected to the assassination, White met an untimely death. In another case, Sloan remembers a fellow Dallas Times Herald reporter Jim Koethe, who was killed by a karate chop within 10 months of searching Jack Ruby's apartment.

As a member of the media, Sloane holds himself partially responsible. "Even when Koethe was killed, there was no connection made in the press," he says. "We were all totally brainwashed by the FBI and the federal authorities. We thought they were good guys." He sees no excuse for that degree of naivete now, however. "I have a hard time understanding why the national media is so adamant, so bitter, so unwilling to accept that there might be another scenario here that we ought to be thinking about. ... Any thinking person has got to start giving some credence to these other ideas," says Sloane.

Since the publication of the book in April, Hill says she has received two new death threats. In the long run, however, the reactionaries may have more to fear from her role as a teacher. Hill still instructs inner-city third-graders at the H.S. Thomson Learning Center in Dallas. Each year, she holds a mock press conference at the school, and the students ask questions based on their studies of the assassination. "It gives them a sense that history is a living, ongoing thing, and that they are definitely a part of it, and they can actually change history," says Hill.

"We tell them they are our hope for tomorrow."

I am a Cocoyea Devil

2010-07-03T17:16:00.006-05:00

By C.D. Stelzer

I am a Cocoyea Devil, at least until the sun rises over Port of Spain. Smeared dark with cocoa oil, I am among hundreds of kindred spirits milling outside the Trinidad Arts Center on Jamaica Boulevard at 3:00 a.m. on a February morning, foam-rubber horns protruding from our heads. We don capes, sashes and headdresses fashioned from remnants of cloth, as organizers pass out cocoyea brooms, simple talismans made from the stems of a few coconut leaves.

In the street, a ragged crowd forms behind a truck, where volunteers dispense rum and beer, as the St. James Tripolian Steel Band strikes up a tune on a flatbed trailer decorated like a streetcar. A tractor hitched to the float slowly lurches forward. Revelers fall in line, shouting, shuffling, waving their brooms high in the humid night air. Within a few blocks, the steel band is replaced by a giant sound truck that pumps out soca music, an infectious blend of soul and calypso. Cocoa-covered dancers cavort with one another, jumping and gyrating to the beat.

Across the city other bands of merrymakers, slathered in mud or painted yellow and blue, engage in similar cathartic capers. As dawn draws near, the groups converge in a cacophonous crescendo.

J’ Ouvert, however, is only the beginning, the opening movement of Trinidad’s raucous two-day Carnival. The Caribbean island’s pre-Lenten celebration rivals or perhaps surpasses the frenzied fetes in Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans. That’s because Trinis, as they call themselves, are avid participants in the many masquerades or “mases” of the Carnival season and they actively encourage tourists to join in the endless parades.

CWBut Carnival in Trinidad really never stops. It is an integral part of the national identity and planning for the annual extravaganza goes on year around. The parties themselves begin in early January, when calypso singers showcase their latest songs and steel drum bands start rehearsing in outdoor panyards.

The musical competition culminates in successive evening performances on stage in front of the grandstands in the Queen’s Park Savannah. On Monday, tens of thousands of jubilant parade participants stride through the streets of Port of Spain and across the stage before an overflow audience and a panel of judges.

Each dance group or band loosely embraces a universal theme such as love, peace or freedom. Women dancers generally out number men by as many as seven to one. Their costumes are starkly different than those of the rag-tag J’Ouvert revelers, who traditionally usher in Carnival in the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning. Participants in the daytime parades or “pretty mases ”, can spend as much as $200 to $300 on outfits that more often than not consist of little more than a few glittery spangles stitched together.

Tourists interested in joining a band are advised by the Trinidadian tourism board to arrive early and check out various mas camps before registering. Large groups should consider an advance visit for the same purpose. Larger bands, including favorites such as Poison and Legends, routinely register thousands of participants.

The official language of Trinidad and its sister island of Tobago may be English, but Carnival has a parlance all its own. Dancers who strut in rhythm to the music are said to “chip.” Those who “jump up” sway their hips in ecstasy “Wining,” on the other hand, is a more sexually pronounced rotation of the hips and waist carried out solo or with a partner.

Carnival customs are as rich in diversity as Trini culture, which is a mixture of African, East Indian and other ethnic groups. Long a British colony, Trinidad and Tobago gained their independence in 1962. After slavery was abolished in the mid-19th-Century, East Indians were brought to the island as indentured servants. The combined influences of African and East Indian cultures make Trinidad unique among the islands of the Caribbean. Located only several miles from the coast of South America, the two-island nation is also the wealthiest in West Indies due mainly to its abundant supply of oil and natural gas.

Christian dogma and ancient European and African mythology have all played roles in the development of the modern-day Carnival. The origins of the Trinidadian version, however, are deeply rooted in its colonial past, when masqueraders flouted authorities and clashed among themselves. Over time, disguises and mimicry became an annual ritual that temporarily relieved the tensions created by the rigid class structure.

Characters that have evolved in this rich anthropologic stew include: Moko Jumpie, a stilt-walking giant of African origin; the Midnight Robber, a native highwayman; Jab Jabs, whip-snapping jesters ; and assorted blue and black devils. More recently, some Carnival costumes have been created to mimic American military presence in Trinidad since World War II. The most common of these is the ubiquitous sailor uniform.

The steel drum or pan, which is the national instrument of Trinidad, also has an indirect tie to the United States. Using abandoned 55-gallon oil drums, cut to various depths, Trini musical innovators hammered and forged concave tops capable of being tuned to a full chromatic scale. Winston “Spree” Smith is given credit for the invention, but many Trinidadians helped give rise to the instrument. Now respected around the world, steel band players were considered rebellious street hoods until 1950. The names of prominent steel bands, including the Desperadoes and Renegades, still attest to their once-notorious reputations.

Calypso, too, is Trinidad’s gift to the world. With its topical subjects and clever parodies of societal ills, the music may well be considered the precursor of modern protest songs. Harry Bellafonte may have popularized calypso music during the 1950s in the United States, but the Mighty Sparrow’s statue stands in Port of Spain. Other colorful calypso legends include Growling Tiger, Lord Invader and Black Stalin.

Carnival’s annual calypso competition mirrors the concerns of Trinidadian society. At last year’s final, Skatie, a young calypso artist who dressed in a red-sequined suit and cap, sang a song imbued with the spirit of Carnival: “Rich or poor the same color runs through our veins. Here there is only one race, the human race.”

Standing at the foot of the stage, the performer’s manager, a big man who wore Skatie’s name across the chest of his XXL T-shirt, beamed with pride. “I wrote that song,” he said.

Whose Side Are You On?

2010-07-01T21:43:00.003-05:00

Labor's achievements - and promise - cited at tribute to legendary organizer

first published in Illinois Times, Nov. 1, 2006

By C. D. Stelzer

Bert Vancauwelaert knows the song well. At the end of the verse, he softly sings the refrain. The lyrics ask a question he answered for himself a long time ago, but it’s one that still bears repeating: “Whose side are you on? Whose side are you on?”

The 80-year-old retired coal miner was among the small gathering of organized-labor supporters who made a pilgrimage to the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive on Sunday to pay tribute to Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones, the legendary labor organizer who is buried there.

A local labor leader who spoke before the singing started said that Vancauwelaert represented the sorts of rank-and-file union members who have been the true champions of organized labor. Because of the infirmities of age, though, the old miner didn’t rise from his folding chair to acknowledge the accolade.

More than one of those who did stand and address the audience Sunday wondered how to best attract younger workers to labor’s side in an era of dwindling membership.

The memorial ceremony culminated a weekend of labor-oriented events. On Saturday, United Mine Workers President Cecil E. Roberts Jr. spoke at the 21st annual Mother Jones Dinner, held at the Knights of Columbus hall on South Meadowbrook Road in Springfield. Earlier that day, the town of Virden dedicated a monument commemorating the “Battle of Virden,” which took place on Oct. 12, 1898.

Violence erupted on that date after mine operators refused to honor a contract with the union, choosing instead to hire African-American replacement workers from Alabama who were unaware of the labor strife. When the union miners tried to stop a train carrying the replacement workers and a crew of armed guards, a gunfight broke out. Several miners, as well as company thugs, died as a result.

Disapproval of the mayhem prompted religiously affiliated local cemeteries to refuse to accept the bodies of some of the slain miners, so in 1899 the UMW bought land in Mount Olive, establishing the only union-owned burial place in the United States.

Unlike the clergy, Mother Jones attached no stigma to the miners who died in Virden. They were martyrs of the labor movement to her and members of her adopted family. After losing her husband and children to a malaria epidemic in Memphis in 1867, the Irish immigrant spent much of her life acting as a matriarch and agitator for coal miners and other union workers in their struggles to improve working conditions and wages. Before her death in 1930, at 100 years of age, she asked that her remains be buried with “her boys” in Mount Olive.

Eleanor Miller, a 77-year-old Mount Olive native, remembers the dedication of the granite monument erected in 1936 at the cemetery to honor both Mother Jones and the miners who died at Virden. “We lived on the east end of town, across the railroad tracks,” she says. “They brought train after trainload of people in. There must have been 50,000 people here.”

For years thereafter, Miller recalls, she marched in the Miners Day parade each Oct. 12. She learned more about local labor history at Mount Olive High School, where students were tested on the subject. But her personal knowledge of labor struggles came from the men in her family, including her father, who were members of the Progressive Miners of America, a radicalized faction that split from the UMW during the Depression.

Bob Sipe, a University of Illinois at Springfield professor and board member of the Mother Jones Foundation, which organizes the annual tribute, says that recognizing the efforts of Mother Jones is only part of the group’s mission. “The United States has had one of the most militant labor histories of any industrialized nation in the world,” says Sipe. “Today, we’ve lost sight that the unions came out of struggle. People got killed. They got beat up. They lost everything they had. The idea of workers’ banding together collectively to improve lives is something we can’t forget.”

After decades of improved working conditions, mine safety is again a prominent issue. Forty-two coal miners have died as a result of work-related accidents so far this year, nearly double the number killed in 2005. Last week, while Congress was in recess, President George W. Bush appointed Richard Stickler, a mining executive, to head the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration. The Senate previously blocked Stickler’s nomination twice because of complaints regarding his lax attitude toward safety issues in the past.

For coal miners and their families, the occupational hazards can never be overlooked. In this regard, Vancauwelaert, the octogenarian, shares something in common with 24-year-old Michael T. Bendorf: Both of their fathers died in coal-mining accidents. Vancauwelaert’s father was one of 119 miners who died in an explosion at the Orient No. 1 mine in West Frankfort, Ill., in 1951. Bendorf’s father died in a coal-mining accident in 1994 at the Monterey No. 2 in Albers, Ill., which is owned by ExxonMobil.

The benefits derived from his late father’s union membership have allowed Bendorf to pursue a college education. It’s an opportunity he doesn’t take for granted.

“Within my own family we certainly respect and recognize the need for unions,” he says. “It seems to me, though, the majority of other people I’ve met in college from white-collar families just expect everything to be handed down.”

Banished

2010-07-01T20:59:00.006-05:00

Al Delugach and Denny Walsh won the Pultizer in 1969 and were rewarded with a one-way ticket out of St. Louis

By C.D. Stelzer

It’s been a while since the last St. Louis newspapermen garnered a Pulitzer Prize for reporting – 41 years to be exact. St. Louis Globe-Democrat reporters Denny Walsh and Albert L. Delugach received the honor on May 5, 1969.

Their award now hangs on the wall behind the reference desk at the Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri St. Louis. Surrounded by unrelated bric-a-brac, journalism’s highest honor and its recipients are easily overlooked.

Their former boss, the late G. Duncan Bauman, however, was among the first to receive the laurel three years ago. On its lower level, the Mercantile displays a permanent exhibit of his memorabilia, including his desk. As publisher of the Globe, Bauman was most likely seated at that desk when he decided to kill Denny Walsh’s story that linked then-St. Louis Mayor A.J. Cervantes Jr. to the St. Louis underworld.

In 1995, Bauman told St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Jerry Berger that he halted publication of that story to save the integrity of the newspaper. “I found he went to great lengths to link Mayor Cervantes to organized crime,” said Bauman. “I then made some personal phone calls to the sources that Walsh said he was using and found out Walsh was not reflecting the views of those sources accurately. So, I told Walsh we would not print that installment of the [series]. … Walsh became angry and quit.”

“He lied to Berger,” counters Walsh, who at 72 years of age is still a working reporter for the Sacramento Bee. “He couldn’t have talked to any of my sources. They weren’t in St. Louis and they wouldn’t have talked to him. The sources were all federal. I believe he let his unsavory connections in the community guide his stewardship of the Globe,” Walsh adds. “I know that he told Cervantes that he had taken care of that series.”

After leaving the Globe, Walsh joined the staff of Life magazine, taking his spiked story and notes with him. His eight-page investigative report, St. Louis, the Mayor, the Mob and the Lawyer, appeared in the magazine’s May 29, 1970 issue. The account named names, dates and places, and included information from FBI reports and wiretap transcripts.

The story that Bauman had prevented from running locally had gained national exposure.
Walsh alleged the mayor had mobbed-up business ties and maintained a “steady liaison” with organized crime figures through Anthony Sansone, his campaign manager. Sansone, a successful real estate broker, was the son-in-law of Jimmy Michaels, leader of the Syrian faction of St. Louis’ underworld. Michaels, in turn, was a criminal associate of Anthony “Tony G” Giordano, don of the St. Louis Mafia.

Walsh reported Sansone arranged a 1964 campaign-strategy session between Michaels and the mayor. After Cervantes won the mayoral primary, according to Walsh, Sansone attended another strategy meeting with Michaels and Giordano.

The lawyer mentioned in Life’s headline was St. Louis criminal defense attorney Morris Shenker, part owner of the Dunes casino in Las Vegas and counsel to numerous mobsters and corrupt labor bosses, including Teamster President James R. Hoffa and Lawrence Callanan, the head of Steamfitters Local 562 in St. Louis. Despite these questionable associations, Cervantes had brazenly appointed Shenker, a political crony and Democratic power broker, to head the city’s Commission on Crime and Law Enforcement.

The mayor and his backers reacted to the Life story as if Walsh had set off a bomb inside the rotunda at City Hall. Cervantes complained that he was not only defamed, but that the reputation of the entire city and all its inhabitants were under attack. Shenker and Sansone denied wrongdoing, labeling the accusations as false. The mayor subsequently sued Walsh and the magazine for libel but failed to recover damages. In the court of public opinion, however, local broadcast and print media overwhelmingly sided with the Cervantes.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for instance, editorialized that “… visible evidence of everyday affairs in St. Louis does not support the correlative accusation of Life that organized crime flourishes here. On the contrary the city appears to be unusually free from the usual symptoms of such crime. …”

The idea that St. Louis had been spared the deleterious influence of organized crime must have come as news to Delugach, Walsh’s former partner. They shared the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for doggedly investigating Local 562. The byline of Delugach and Walsh appeared at the top of more than 300 stories from 1965 to 1968. Their collaborative effort revealed a pattern of labor racketeering that resulted in multiple federal indictments having to do with a kickback scheme related to the sale of insurance to the union’s pension fund.

By the time Walsh’s Life article appeared, Delugach had also left the Globe, joining the staff of the Post-Dispatch. His tenure was brief, however, lasting only a year-and-a-half. Shortly after the Post absolved the mayor and declared the city free from organized crime, Delugach quit in protest.

“If I had thought that this was just the opinion of the editorial page of the Post, I might have borne up under it,” he told the St. Louis Journalism Review, which covered his resignation in its first issue. Instead, Delugach found the same attitude permeated the newsroom. “I didn’t want to work for a newspaper that had this view of organized crime and that had this way of dismissing the most serious accusations against its top (city) official.” Delugach found the premise that organized crime was non-existent in St. Louis untenable. “I think it has been voluminously proved that it is a major factor in all kinds of crime – in all cities,” he said.

When he made this statement, Delugach was 44 years old and had been a staff reporter at three daily newspapers in Kansas City and St. Louis for nearly two decades. After leaving the Post, he moved to the West Coast, where he continued as an investigative reporter for another 20 years, retiring from the Los Angeles Times in 1989. Reached by phone at his home in Los Angeles, the 82-year-old retiree still expressed outrage over the affair.

“It was really an insult for them to come out with that attitude in print,” says Delugach. “I took it very personally. I figured there was no future here for me. The Globe-Democrat had people that had an interest in not stirring things up, but the Post-Dispatch, they were just so aloof. Even after what we did – getting the Pulitzer Prize – they didn’t act like it had any validity at all. They didn’t demonstrate at all that they considered it important after they hired me. I don’t know why they bothered.”

Delugach recalls the Post sent him to Alaska to cover the oil boom for two months. It was a plum assignment, but far from the beat that had nabbed the Pulitzer. In retrospect, it almost seems like the Post used its deep pockets to send him into exile.

By contrast, Delugach and Walsh had the full support of Richard Amberg, the previous publisher of the Globe who originally teamed them up. But after Amberg died and Bauman took over in 1967, Walsh noticed a change in course.

“Al and I were having a lot of difficulty with Bauman,” says Walsh. “He began to squeeze us on what we were doing in respect to the steamfitters.”
The impasse reached a critical stage after Walsh learned through his sources in Washington that top Justice Department officials had quashed the federal criminal prosecution of those involved in the $1 million-dollar steamfitters’ kickback conspiracy case.

“We wrote that story and handed it in,” says Walsh. “He (Bauman) killed it.” Walsh says he then leaked the piece to Wall Street Journal reporter Nicholas Gage. After the Journal ran the story, Delugach and Walsh were free to report on it in the Globe. More importantly, the news coverage forced the Justice Department to reverse its decision and go forward with the prosecution.

“We wouldn’t have won the Pulitzer Prize had the indictment not been returned,” Walsh says.

The defendants included the president of the First United Life Insurance Co. of Gary, Ind. and two officials of Local 562. Court documents named Shenker and Callanan as beneficiaries of the scheme, but they weren’t charged. John “Doc” Lawler, another top steamfitter official, also allegedly benefited from the kickbacks.

John O’Connell Hough, Lawler’s personal attorney and un-indicted co-conspirator, agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors, but never got the chance to testify. The Clayton-based lawyer disappeared in the Miami area on August 12, 1967. Fishermen discovered his body two months later in a secluded pine grove near the Inter-Coastal Waterway several miles north of the Bal Harbour, Fla. Hough had been beaten and shot to death with .38-caliber handgun.

After Hough’s murder, two prosecution witnesses refused to testify and the defendants were acquitted.

In the intervening decades, the Post-Dispatch’s editorial position has been accepted as unequivocal. Nowadays it is taken for granted that organized crime no longer exists in St. Louis.

Walsh refuses to speculate on whether the mob is dead or alive here.
“I’ve been gone for 40 years. I don’t know what’s going on there. I don’t know what the Post is doing or not doing.”

The veteran reporter is sure of this much: “I would not want to be a member of any organization, or any group or any entity that counts Duncan Bauman as a member. I think he’s a stain on St. Louis journalism.”

Fish Story

2010-06-29T22:51:00.005-05:00

Up the River Without a Salmon:
New Brunswick's Hearst Lodge Ain’t What it Used to Be

By C.D. Stelzer

In the shadows of a late summer’s afternoon, the rocky trail struggles to follow the stream past a series of rapids and pools, cutting a narrow swath through the deepening woods. Wintergreen, laurel and cranberry hem the path. Dappled sunlight punches holes in the forest canopy, highlighting assorted ferns and lichens. Black spruce cling to the cliffs above the rushing waters of the Big Salmon River.

The beauty of this New Brunswick setting overwhelms the senses. But nature is treacherous, too. Tangled roots of the ubiquitous spruce can snare a hiker’s boot with one false step. Ken Bennett had to help evacuate a woman who fell and broke her leg on the trail last year.

Rescue work is part of his job. Like his father before him, the stoic north woodsman, is the caretaker at Hearst Lodge, which is now a part of the Fundy Trail Parkway.

Before the nine-mile scenic drive opened several years ago, the Pejebscot Paper Co. owned much of the remote coastal land along the Bay of Fundy near the hamlet of St. Martins. After World War II, the Hearst newspaper chain acquired the company and its vast property holdings to help supply its unceasing demand for newsprint. The parkway ends near the mouth of the Big Salmon River, where logs once were sluiced to a sawmill.

As its name denotes, the river once teemed with wild Atlantic salmon. In 1968, local laborers built a rustic fishing lodge for Hearst corporate executives a couple miles upstream from the site of the now-defunct sawmill. For the next 20 years, Bennett’s late father acted as a fishing guide for visitors to the lodge, including celebrities such as actor Donald Sutherland, a New Brunswick native. Later, employees of J.D. Irving Ltd., another paper and pulp manufacturer, leased the cabin.

In those halcyon days, anglers could practically walk across pools of fish, recalls the younger Bennett. Even a novice almost always caught his limit. Those times are gone. This year, Bennett says less than a dozen salmon swam upstream from the ocean to spawn. Unfortunately, the Big Salmon River is not unique in this respect. The tragic, spiraling decline in salmon populations continues to be repeated each year in the streams of New Brunswick and Maine, where the fish is listed as an endangered species.

For more than three decades, the governments of Canada and the United States have spent millions of dollars to reverse the trend, but efforts to stem the tide have thus far failed. Reasons for the Atlantic salmon’s plunge toward extinction remain uncertain. There are, however, many suspected causes – all of them related to human activities.

Environmentalists and government officials not long ago hailed the latest threat as a solution. To curb overfishing in the ocean by commercial fishermen, guardians of the dwindling species supported the growth of salmon farms.

But now cage-raised fish are spawning more grief for their wild cousins. The crowded fish pens favored by the aquaculture industry can breed viral diseases and parasites, including sea lice, which potentially can spread to free-swimming salmons. Moreover, when the European strains used in fish farming escape their confines, they interbreed with their feral counterparts, creating a hybrid less adapted to survival. Arguments over whether the salmon in Maine’s waters are a genetically distinct species on the brink of extinction have led to vicious squabbles, with the corporate fish farms and the state of Maine opposing sanctions leveled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The debate is a class-book example of how politics, business and science, working at a glacial pace, serve to confound rather than clarify an issue. While interested parties on all sides of the debate cast aspersions on one another, the numbers of wild Atlantic salmon are dropping to next to nothing on both sides of Passmaquoddy Bay. It doesn’t matter whether the Canadian and American fish are genetically distinct. What matters most is an entire species is on the verge of extinction.

Meanwhile, other longstanding problems effecting wild salmon along the North American coast persist. Sea temperatures continue to rise. Dams continue to thwart the ability of salmon to migrate upstream to reproduce. Industrial pollution continues to wreak havoc on their immune systems. Clearcutting timber in upland forests continues to destroy habitat by choking spawning grounds with deadly sediments.

The spoiling of the Big Salmon River is sadly ironic. By the time the workers hauled the stones out of the river to build Hearst Lodge, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst had been dead for well over a decade. The successors to his newspaper empire commissioned the building of a modest, pine cabin. The backwoods retreat was the polar opposite of San Simeon, the California mansion of the founder of the newspaper chain. Instead, the rich and famous came here simply to fish for the once plentiful salmon. Nature itself was spectacle enough. But felling the forests around the fishing stream for tomorrow’s newspaper contributed to the eventual decline of the salmon.

Bennett carries on his father’s work. Nowadays, though, he tends to act more as a museum curator and less a fishing guide. In the dining room of the pine-paneled lodge, Bennett keeps a loose-leaf binder with a history of the place in a bureau drawer; a history which tells the stories of the people who lived and worked and visited here, when the salmon swam free. Bennett, a man of view words, never heard of Orson Welles’ movie Citizen Kane, inspired by William Randolph Hearst’s life. Still he wonders how the worldly ambitions of men inevitably work against them to the detriment of all.

Minnows in the Sun

2010-06-29T22:25:00.004-05:00

photo by Chris Baker

excerpted from an the unpublished novel Rendezvous with Rousseau
copyright 2004 by C.D. Stelzer and Robert Allen

This section is based on a canoe trip that Irish novelist Robert Allen and I took in on the Current River in the summer of 2001. The protagonist is a young St. Louisan who has spent most of his adolescence at a boarding school in Switzerland. The Balkan wars are raging in the background of this scene, which is set in the Ozarks.

As the Big Man clamored up the rocky bank and headed towards town, Eoghan busied himself unloading the canoe and sorting its contents. Even with the unusually mild weather, it was not a pleasant job. An inch of icy water had gathered in the middle of the vessel, soaking everything not protected inside the plastic containers. It took him a good 15 minutes to coil the knotted ropes and sort the sopping-wet tangle of towels and sweatshirts.

No one in their right minds would ply the entire length of the Current River this early in the season and Eoghan took satisfaction in doing so. Standing alone on the gravel bar at Doniphan, he looked upstream at the glimmering waters. The rains that preceded their float had pushed the Current to within less than a foot of flood stage. Within a month, the spot where he now stood would be submerged by a torrent more than six feet deep. At this moment, however, the inherent dangers of nature escaped his attention. The lower end of the river seemed placid.

Hoisting the emptied canoe above his right shoulder, he turned it over in one motion, letting the water drain out, bowing gently as he set the canoe upside down. He stood ankle deep in the river, listening to the ripples that swirled around an uprooted tree. They reminded him of the fragile sounds of the wind chimes on the front porch at home. A stiff breeze out of the southwest caused his eyes to tear up. Wiping the corners of his eyes with both hands, he gazed down. A school of Ozark shiners, tiny, silvery minnows, had gathered in the eddy around his feet. The sun glinted off their backs like coins in a fountain. For an instant, he felt faint. His legs faltered and, as he stumbled to regain his balance. The minnows darted away.

Every river is different, Eoghan thought, and they change each day like the weather. The only thing binding them is perpetual motion itself, and the urge to flow to the sea.

A West Cork State of Mind

2010-06-29T12:09:00.002-05:00

By C.D. Stelzer

The Skellig Islands off the southwest coast of Ireland, once home to a noted 6th-Century monastery, is the furthest spit of Irish soil from Dublin. On the mainland, however, that distinction may very well be the tip of the Beara peninsula not far from Garinish, the townland where I stayed for part of my five-week journey.

In Garinish, as in other areas of West Cork, there are more sheep than people, and both the livestock and their keepers seem quite content with the ratio. Part of the local economy, of course, is dependent on the blow-ins, tourists, who come from Cork City or Dub or the four corners of the world, and therein lies the rub. They are inevitably changing the charcater of the place. Moreover, the natives often don't take too kindly to the absentee landlords who have been building "holiday homes" here of late, not to put roofs over their heads but as a tax shelters.

On the other hand, many of those who live in West Cork come from elsewhere, captivated by the stark, unbridled beauty of a landscape that quickly finds a way into their marrow. This is land's end: a place to which saints and travellers, artists and rebels have gravitated longer than anyone can remember; before the Sheahy, Caha and Slieve Mikish Mountains had names or their peaks -- Sugarloaf, Hungry Hill and Knockgour, Knockoura -- straddled a liguistic divide. Here the weather changes and time stands still, if only for a moment, as life laps against age-old mysteries like the tides meet the shore.

So be it destiny or coincidence, the gent on the cover of the decade-old Irish travel guide I lugged from America just happens to be posing in front of O'Neill's pub in Allihies. When my host in nearby Garinish spied the book on his dining room table, he laughed. The man on the cover, he said, is not an Irishman at all, but a mad English artist who has lived on the peninsula for the last 15 or 20 years. No more than a few hundred people live in Allihies, nonetheless, the Irish musicians who played at that same pub are friends of St. Louis musicians whom I also know. John Prine, the American singer and songwriter, drank here, as well, and not too far from Allihies, film director Neil Jordan keeps a holiday home.

No chamber of commerce is promoting the tourism trade. There are no golf courses, no grand hotels, no theme parks, no beaches worth mentioning. The roads are dangerously narrow, often hemmed by stone walls, and they wind like corkscrews through the mountains. In winter, there are few tourists and rain can fall for days on end. The natives and would-be natives like it this way. They don't want to make the Beara peninsula more accessible. The eccentric poet, who lives down the road a piece, may still traipse into O'Neill's with his retinue of bedazzled blow-ins, but it's more the exception than the rule. During this time of year, the owner of the Lighthouse pub, which is next to O'Neill's, still stokes his fireplace with blocks of turf. Ollie, the village idiot savant, still rolls his meager cigarettes as he babbles to anyone who will listen, his words mostly unintelligible even for those who speak the native dialect. Through a translator, however, Ollie's gibberish can be strikingly insightful. After railing against the government, he summed up his rant by declaring: "The only freedom is found inside a man."

There's nothing really worth seeing on the Beara peninsula unless you're ready to see it. And there are those who will tell you that it's a waste of time to venture any further south than, say, Killarney. A film director I met in Allihies, himself a blow-in from Dublin, likes to say that this is the "arse end of the island." Then again, the first words of advice that my Irish friend Robert Allen told me upon arrival was, "Don't believe anything an Irishman tells you."

Poisoning the Workers' Beer at Anheuser-Busch

2010-06-29T08:00:00.010-05:00

Blue-collar radiation exposure lacks cachet for Fourth Estate

by C.D. Stelzer

Yesterday's bust of the alleged Russian spy ring, reminded me of the the media stir in England caused by the poisoning death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Litvinenko was reported to have been poisoned by a deadly dose of Polonium-210, a radioactive isotope. The chief suspect in the case was former Russian President Vladimir Putin, the current prime minister, who Litvinenko accused of orchestrating his assassination shortly before he died.

Litvinenko's mysterious death has all the ingredients of a bestselling thriller worthy of Ian Fleming or Tom Clancy. The quantity of Polonium-210 used to kill the ex-spy was the size of a grain of sand. The poisoning made headlines worldwide. But the potential radioactive contamination of large volumes of beer at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis in 1988 received far less scrutiny.

Polonium-210 was also the subject of concern in that case.

Government inspectors determined that static air eliminators used on production lines at the brewery were found to be leaking the nuclear material for an unspecified length of time. But when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported the problem it downplayed the health risks to workers and consumers and misrepresented where the contamination took place.

Radioactive leaks also occurred at other St. Louis area companies, including McDonnell Douglas Corp., which sent some of its workers home after the leaks were discovered. 3M Corp. of Minneapolis produced the faulty devices that caused the hazard.

The Post-Dispatch first broached the subject on Saturday Feb. 6, 1988. In its initial story by staffers Peter Hernon and Theresa Tighe, the newspaper reported leaks in laboratories at McDonnell-Douglas. Three days later, a page one story by Christine Bertelson reported on the radioactive contamination at Anheuser-Busch and elsewhere. The second paragraph of that story said: "Officials at Anheuser-Busch insisted that 'absolutely no health hazard existed.'" The story goes on to quote a brewery spokesman denying any risk: "There was no effect whatsoever on product quality. ... No plants were shut down."

Indeed, work continued uninterrupted at the brewery and unlike McDonnell-Douglas no workers at Anheuser-Busch were sent home or tested.

Bertelson's story said that "areas contaminated with low-level emissions were cleaned last week." But the story gave no indication of where the leaks occurred. After the front-page coverage on Feb. 9, 1988, the story all but died in St. Louis. Three days later, on Feb. 12, 1988, then-Post reporter Joan Bray filed a story buried on page 4-C with the obituaries that reported further recalls of faulty 3M static air eliminators. Bray inaccurately reported that "laboratories where the devices were used at Anheuser-Busch ... have been decontaminated."

The faulty static air eliminators weren't used in laboratories, however. Instead, the devices were used in the production process to dust the inside of bottle caps before they were placed on the full bottles of beer coming out of the fillers.

Obviously, radioactive isotopes leaking at a point in the assembly lines where the filled beer bottles were capped posed a greater risk to consumers and workers then if the devices had merely leaked in laboratories. Whether the ceramic coating surrounding the radioactive pellets would lessen the risk of exposure wasn't cited.

I worked as a beer bottler at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis in 1988. When I learned that the leaks occurred on the bottling units and not in laboratories as reported by the Post-Dispatch, I called reporter Christine Bertelson and informed her.

She didn't follow up on my tip.

More than two years later, Bertelson did, however, report that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was seeking to fine 3M $160,000 over the defective devices. Her story wrongly identified the radioactive isotope that had leaked out of the devices as "polonium-20."

In March 1988, the NRC denied my Freedom of Information request on the radioactive leaks at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, but the Food and Drug Administration released a partially redacted report of its limited inspection.

The inspection was categorized by FDA as "limited" because it did not independently test all of the suspected devices but relied largely on information provided by the NRC and Anheuser-Busch. Moreover, by blacking out the unit numbers in its report the FDA made it difficult, if not impossible, to determine which batches of beer may have been contaminated. Nonetheless, it is clear from the report that more than one bottle unit had operated with faulty static air eliminators that spewed Polonium-210. The copy of the report indicates that the FDA uncovered another bottle unit had been contaminated, which was overlooked by the NRC and Anheuser-Busch.

The FDA report says that Knut Heise, then-associate general counsel for Anheuser-Busch, "admitted that a mistake was made," by the company when it failed to initially identify the other faulty device that leaked Polonium-210. Led by Anheuser-Busch quality assurance employees, the FDA reported that it took samples of the various brands of Anheuser-Busch products for testing. The results of those tests are not contained in the report.

St. Louis-based FDA investigators Robert E. Davis and Robert Nesselhauf signed the report dated Feb. 12, 1988. The random samples taken only represented a small fraction of the beer that could have potentially been contaminated.

Cleaning crews washed the contaminated surfaces down with water and the walls and columns were repainted. Work went on as usual and beer continued to be bottled, packaged and shipped 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Since then, of course, many Anheuser-Busch employees have died of cancer, and ingesting or breathing Polonium-210 can cause cancer. But no epidemiological studies have ever been conducted to determine whether a correlation exists that would link the leaks to cancer clusters in the work place.

Looking back on it, it's almost like the radioactive incident at the St. Louis brewery in 1988 never happened.

Almost.

Every Picture Tells a Story

2010-06-28T21:09:00.005-05:00

Every Picture Tells a Story: Steven Spielberg, Norman Rockwell, and the MLK Assassination

by C.D. Stelzer

More than 30 years after its theft, a Norman Rockwell painting stolen from a St. Louis art gallery was discovered in 2007 in the possession of Hollywood director Steven Spielberg. On its surface, it's an intriguing story. The details make it even more so. But nobody at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, made the effort to even look up the background information that's available through the newspaper's own archives.

If anyone on the Post's staff had done so, they would have discovered that the missing Rockwell painting shared an interesting link to a couple of long unsolved local mysteries.

Instead, the newspaper chose to publish a wire service story on the recovered artwork, which was buried at the bottom of page 21A of its Saturday, March 3, 2007 edition.

That story reported Spielberg notified the FBI in California, after he recently became aware that the painting, "Russian Schoolroom," had been stolen before he purchased it. The filmmaker said he acquired the painting from a legitimate dealer in 1989. The Rockwell piece had been taken more than a decade earlier in a late-night burglary of a suburban St. Louis art gallery in late June 1973.

At the time, the painting was valued at between $20,000 to $25,000. Today, it is estimated to be worth $700,000. According to a FBI web site, the painting surfaced at an auction in New Orleans in October 1989. At that time, the FBI says that the painting was associated with Circle Galleries of Chicago and the Danenburg Gallery of New York. At the time of its theft in 1973, the painting had been purchased by St. Louisan Bert C. Elam.

The wire service story that ran in today's Post included some of this information. But old newspaper clips dating back to the 1970s, from the archives of the now-defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat, as well as the Post-Dispatch, provide a fuller picture.

The painting was snatched late on a Sunday night or in the early morning hours of Monday June 24-25, 1973 from Arts International Ltd., 8113 Maryland Ave., Clayton, Mo. The out-of-town owner of the gallery, identified in today's wire service story as the aforementioned Circle Fine Art of Chicago, had arranged for the Rockwell painting to be exhibited here as part of a showing of other works by the same artist. The burglar or burglars smashed plate glass doors at the entrance to the gallery, grabbing only the one painting and leaving other Rockwell works of lesser value.

The Globe-Democrat quoted the late Marjorie Pond, the gallery's director, as saying: "That painting is known all over the country. There is no possible way they can unload that painting."

Despite its high-profile, however, the gallery director's prediction didn't prove true.

In 1978, Pond would be cited by the press again in another story having to do with stolen art from the same gallery. On Feb. 28 of that year, police raided the home of Russell Byers in the 9300 block of Frederic Court in Rock Hill, Mo., another St. Louis suburb. Law enforcement authorities seized suspected stolen artwork from Byers' residence -- including nine paintings by Norman Rockwell, according to a Globe-Democrat account. Months later, the Post-Dispatch reported that eight lithographs had been confiscated during the same raid. Those eight lithographs were also reported to have been stolen in 1976 from the same Clayton art gallery, Arts International Ltd.

The police had raided Byers' home because they suspected him of being the mastermind of one of two St. Louis Art Museum burglaries that occurred in early 1978. Investigators believed Byers had ordered the first burglary on Jan. 29 in which a valuable bronze by Frederick Remington and three other statuettes had been taken.

Two of the suspected burglars soon thereafter died violent deaths. A third burglary suspect refused to testify against Byers. Over the course of the next few months, the St. Louis police would recover all of the stolen art museum pieces. One suspect pleaded guilty in the case, but Byers managed to evade prosecution.

Byers, however, had also been charged with possessing the other stolen art from the 1976 Clayton art gallery heist. But those charges were dropped, too, on May 25, 1978, after Pond, the art gallery director, failed to appear in court to testify. Other witnesses who failed to appear on the same date included policemen who had searched Byers' home and found the stolen artwork.

Then Post-Dispatch reporter Sally Bixby Defty paraphrased Pond as saying that "that she did not appear because because she had been told that the case would be thrown out of court."

Just who told the art gallery director that the case would be thrown out of court is not made clear in Defty's story. This much is clear: Byers, a convicted felon and career criminal, walked. Prosecutors in St. Louis and St. Louis County gave him a free get of jail card.

Not long after all charges were dropped against Byers, he became a the star witness in the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings into the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. That summer, Byers would testify that he received a $50,000 offer to kill King from two St. Louis businessmen, alleged racists, in late 1966 or early 1967. By the time of Byers' testimony, however, the two men, John R. Kauffmann and John H. Sutherland, were already dead.

Based on Byers' testimony, the HSCA concluded that James Earl Ray, King's alleged assassin, killed the civil rights leader as part of a St. Louis-based conspiracy. The conspiracy theory had been put together by congressional investigator Conrad "Pete" Baetz, a deputy on leave from the Madison County, Ill. sheriff's department.

Byers alleged knowledge of the assassination plot came to the attention of the FBI only after he became a suspect in the art museum burglary case in the winter of 1978. By no small coincidence, on March 19, 1978, less than three weeks after local police raided Byers' house, the FBI in St. Louis claimed that they found a misfiled report. The report -- dated March 1974 -- was based on information provided to the bureau field office by informant Richard O'Hara, a criminal associate of Byers. In the report, O'Hara claimed Byers had bragged about receiving the offer to kill King.

In 1992, as a reporter for the Riverfront Times, St. Louis' alternative weekly, I asked Baetz about Byers' involvement in the St. Louis Art Museum burglaries of 1978. Baetz said he never knew that Byers had been a suspect in the case.

The former congressional investigator's expressed ignorance, can lead to only three conclusions: Baetz's memory is bad or his investigative skills are worse or he lied.

Perhaps the now-Democratically-controlled Congress should consider investigating its own 1978 inquiry into the assassination of King.

But I wouldn't bet on it.

The Ashcroft Files

2010-06-28T18:00:00.007-05:00

Ashcroft Bag Man, Ex-Cop Pete Vasel Both Worked for Mobbed Up Molaksy Clan

The origins of John Ashcroft’s rise to power have never been clearly told. Like most politicians of his generation, he shares the distinct advantage of entering the political scene in the last century. Past events and relationships, many of which were never thoroughly reported at the time, are further shrouded by the gap between the days of hard copy and the advent of the electronic information age. Ashcroft’s long political career spans the gulf between these eras. The details that have fallen into the breach provide the former attorney general with a means to avoid the scrutiny that should be directed at those who hold the highest of public offices.

Some aspects of the news trade haven’t changed that much over the years. Ashcroft’s resume still reads the same as it did in the early 1970s, when he first entered state politics. Even in the old days, newspaper accounts, written by chain-smoking reporters on Royal typewriters and transferred by printers' devils to hot type, focused on a one-dimensional image of the man. Deadline pressure and a reliance on press releases are partly to blame, as is the misconception that reporters are objective in ways in which they present the news. Much of Ashcroft’s image was first sculpted by the now-defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat, a Republican newspaper that employed Pat Buchanan as an editorial writer.

Based on the Globe’s creative writing style, a myth developed over the years, and Ashcroft has been stereotyped ever since as the hymn-singing, preacher’s son from Southwest Missouri; an evangelical Christian beyond reproach. In this respect, he plays the poor cousin of retired Republican U.S. Senator John Danforth, an ordained Episcopal priest. In a sense, these two GOP pols represent the prototypes for Republican virtue. They are righteous guardians of "good government," steadfast in their belief in God and country. In comparison, Democrats have been cast as amoral dealmakers, who -- by their very nature -- are subject to corruption.

The idea that any politician is above the influence of special interests because of his or her religious faith is a convenient and effective canard, of course. After he lost his senate re-election to the widow of Gov. Mel Carnahan, Ashcroft was reborn, again. The conventional reason given for his nomination to the post of U.S. attorney general in the Bush administration has been that he is a strong opponent of abortion. Again, social conservative issues have been trotted out to dismiss complex political decisions. Still widely ignored are Ashcroft’s Machiavellian skills, which were honed decades ago.

Though the paper trail has grown cold, a vestige of Ashcroft’s less-than-divine origins can be traced to his mucky gubernatorial candidacy of 1984, when Frederick Steinbach acted as his campaign finance director.

It remains uncertain where Ashcroft and Steinbach first crossed paths, but following the money is less difficult. In 1984, when then-Missouri Attorney General Ashcroft ran for governor, Steinbach raised nearly $3 million for his gubernatorial bid, with more than half the total coming in the last weeks of a hard-fought race against Democratic Lt. Gov. Kenneth J. Rothman. In those critical days before the election, Ashcroft unleashed a series of TV attack ads against Rothman that led to his defeat. In the end, the Ashcroft campaign had out spent its rival by $1 million.

The victory catapulted Ashcroft to a new stage in his political career. He won re-election to the governorship in 1988 and in 1992 moved on to the U.S. Senate, following the same path as his mentor, Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond.

Steinbach’s political fortunes started out on a high note, too, but ultimately he did not fair so well. When the sprawling, 26-square-mile community of Chesterfield incorporated in 1988, the St. Louis County Council named him interim mayor. The appointment received the bles sings of then-County Executive Gene McNary.

Later that year, Steinbach ran for a full mayoral term in the newly created suburban municipality, and Ashcroft endorsed his candidacy, lauding him with accolades. But within months of winning election, in June 1989, a St. Louis County grand jury, led by then-Prosecuting Attorney George "Buzz Westfall, indicted Steinbach for sexually abusing his secretary. Steinbach pleaded no contest to the charge, which was reduced to a misdemeanor by the court. Under attack from critics, including St. Louis Sun columnist Karen Koman, he resigned in January 1990.

Throughout his work for Ashcroft and his subsequent tenure as Chesterfield mayor, Steinbach’s business career never received much attention. A 1984 St. Louis Business Journal story referred to Steinbach as the president of Display Information Systems Co., a St. Louis firm that monitors the sales of magazines in retail outlets. In 1988, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch identified him as the president of Steinbach Enterprises. Steinbach’s own campaign material featured a litany of his philanthropic endeavors and mentioned that he received a MBA from Mizzou. In addition, Steinbach was listed as a member of many public boards, including the Missouri State Bank, the financial institution that handles fiscal transactions for the state government. But the same flyer gave no details about his professional career, referring to the candidate only as a "successful businessman."

Steinbach, the successful businessman and Mizzou alum, held his first fundraiser for Ashcroft in November 1982, when he sold 100 tickets to a University of Missouri basketball game for $100 each. The money continued to roll in during the course of the campaign. Between Sept, 6, 1984 and the election in November, Steinbach raised $1.6 million for Ashcroft. At the time, the amount spent by Ashcroft represented the most expensive political campaign in Missouri history. By any measure, the St. Louis fund raiser had contributed greatly to Ashcroft’s success. Without the largesse collected by Steinbach, Ashcroft might very well have slunk back to Springfield and returned to teaching law at Southwest Missouri State College.

But after Steinbach’s indiscretions made headlines in 1989, his efforts on behalf of the then-governor were forgotten. There was no compelling reason to delve any further into the Ashcroft’s former campaign finance director’s background. Steinbach had fallen from grace. The sex charge had effectively cut the ties between the two. Ashcroft, the righteous singer of hymns, could not be blamed for distancing himself from the tragic sins of one of his chief supporters.

But cleansing himself of Steinbach’s stain had another unseen advantage for the governor. The separation ended the possibility of Ashcroft being tied to his finance director’s past. Missouri Secretary of State reports show that Steinbach previously worked for corporations controlled by Mark Molasky. In the 1970s, Molasky and his father, Allan H. Molasky, controlled a St. Louis-based magazine distribution empire with a long record of questionable business activities.

Nowadays, the late Mark Molasky is remembered, if at all, for being at the center of an other sex scandal. In June 1981, Molasky was arrested on charges of sexually molesting a three-year-old boy. The high-profile case stemmed from his part in videotaping his third wife having oral sex with an infant. Molasky received a 32-year sentence. He was later acquitted of plotting the assassination of Westfall, who had prosecuted him before being elected St. Louis County Executive. Molasky allegedly committed suicide in 1990 by overdosing on a prescription painkiller, while serving time at the Missouri Penitentiary in Jefferson City.

Less known about are the machinations surrounding the Molaskys’ far-flung business enterprises, which included multi-state and international distribution of paperback books and periodicals, including adult magazines. Steinbach, Ashcroft’s 1984 campaign finance director, was a vice president of two Molasky distribution corporations, according to 1979 Missouri incorporation records. His name appears on the 1979 registration reports for both SLF News Distributors and River City Inc. Steinbach is also identified as being one of the shareholders in another Molasky company, Gulf News Inc., according to a civil disposition given by Mark Molasky in November 1976. Besides Steinbach, Molasky named Pete Vasel, a former St. Louis County Police detective, as being connected to Gulf News. Other names appearing on corporate records are S. Leslie Flegel, Mark Molasky’s uncle (on his mother’s side), and F. Terrell Eckert Jr.

After Mark Molasky’s arrest in 1981, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporters Roy Malone, Claudia MacLachian and Dennis Hannon set about unraveling the confusing web of the Molasky-controlled companies. But Steinbach isn’t mentioned in the accounts. He does, however, show up as a fundrasier for Ashcroft the following year -- 1982. Two years later, in 1984, the St. Louis Business Journal, reported that Steinbach was president of Display Information Systems Co., a company with close ties to Flegel, Molaksy’s uncle.

Around the time that Steinbach worked for the Molasky syndicate, the United States and Canadian governments took a special interest in the St. Louis family’s business activities. In 1975, the U.S. District court in New Orleans fined Molasky Enterprises, Ltd., Mark Molasky and Allan H. Molasky a total of $150,000 for attempting to monopolize magazine and paperback book distribution along the Gulf Coast, from Brownsville, Texas to Florida. The indictment charged the Molaskys with using coercive tactic to buy out competitors from January 1971 to September 1972. The federal judge suspended a one-year prison sentence on Mark Molasky, but not before he spent more than three weeks in jail at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida. The Molaskys used similar coersion between 1969 and 1972 in the Canadian province of Ontario, which resulted in the enactment of the so-called "Molasky Law," restricting future foreign ownership of wholesale distributorships.

At its zenith, Molasky’s distribution empire covered more than a dozen states. After the empire began to fall into disarray, Mark Molasky continued to lead a playboy lifestyle, which included a lavish mansion in Creve Coeur, luxury cars and fast women. By the time of his arrest in 1981, his assets were so well-protected from creditors that he couldn’t raise bail. Those offering to help spring him included his father’s cousin, Irwin Molasky, a Las Vegas developer, who anted up a $110,000 unsecured loan.

In 1951, Irwin Molasky moved to Las Vegas from Ohio, where his father had be en a newspaper distributor. A few years later, he teamed up with Merv Adelson to form Paradise Development Co. In 1956, Irwin Molasky and Adelson joined forces with Allard Roen and Moe Dalitz of the Desert Inn casino to build the Sunrise Hospital in Vegas, with a $1 million loan from the Teamsters, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The partnership continued, with the union’s Central States, Southeast and Southwest Pension Fund providing $100 million to finance future developments, including a string of Vegas casinos and the Rancho La Costa resort outside San Diego. Two of the foursome had criminal records: Roen pleaded guilty to stock fraud in 1962 and Dalitz, the most notorious partner, had a rap sheet that stretched back to the Prohibition Era, when he was a major bootlegger in Cleveland. In 1975, when Penthouse magazine published an expose alleging that La Costa was established and frequented by mobsters, Irwin Molasky and Adelson sued the magazine for libel. A jury cleared Penthouse of libel in 1982, but the case wasn’t over yet. According to former Houston Post reporter Pete Brewton, the judge who set aside the verdict had connections to some of the witnesses. Eventually, the case was settled out of court. Penthouse didn’t pay a dime in damages, but retracted the inference that Adelson and Irwin Molasky had ever been members of organized crime.

In 1992, the Las Vegas Organized Crime Strike Force named Irwin Molasky as a member of a sports betting ring. Given immunity, he testified that in 1982 -- the year after he generously loaned Mark Molasky $110,000 for bail -- he lost $350,000 betting on football.

Gambling appears to be a Molasky family trait. As the story goes, Willie Molasky, Mark’s grandfather, won the exclusive rights to distribute the Racing Form in St. Louis and New Orleans from racing news czar Moe Annenberg in a poker game. Along with his partners Clarence "Gully" Owen and Paul "Bev" Brown, Willie Molasky operated the Pioneer News Service in downtown St. Louis from 1931 until 1946. Pioneer purchased the racing odds and track results nationwide from an Annenberg company in Chicago and then resold them to bookies throughout the St. Louis area. During its heyday, Pioneer had two state senators on the payroll and paid off judges and the police. Its influence extended all the way to the governor’s mansion in Jefferson City. Moreover, Willie Molasky was one of the largest shareholders in Western Union, the wire service that transferred the racing results. In 1940, the IRS convicted Willie Molasky of income tax evasion. He served a year in prison. President Harry Truman later pardoned him. After Owen and Brown died in the late 1940s, Willie Molasky continued to operate Pioneer, which by then had been taken over by the Capone Outfit of Chicago. Local mob boss Frank "Buster" Wortman represented the Outfit’s interests in St. Louis. But when Willie Molasky testified before the Senate Crime Committee in 1950, accompanied by attorney Morris Shenker, he denied any affiliation with organized
crime.

In May 1958, St. Louis police raided the Pierce News Co. at 2206 Locust St. and seized 21 publications alleged to be obscene material. The next month Willie Molasky and his two sons, Jerome and Allan, were arrested and charged with the possession and circulation of obscene materials. Willie and Jerome Molasky died within six months of each other in 1965, leaving Allan Molasky reluctantly in charge of the family business. By 1969, Mark Molasky had joined Pierce News as financial vice president and started making the business decisions.

Hundreds of miles away, in Springfield, Ashcroft was poised to begin his career, too. The next year he would be appointed state auditor.

The future was wide open.