The One-Man Political Machine
On a brutally cold morning in mid-December, Rahm Emanuel, hatless and wearing a glove on only his left hand, stood for an hour in front of the turnstiles at the Paulina el station, which sits in his old Congressional district on Chicago’s North Side. As the trains slammed and screeched overhead, he offered his hand to the mostly young and professional commuters heading downtown. Emanuel’s manner seemed more studied than spontaneous. He employed standard lines — “nice hat,” “good book” — and relied on the logos on riders’ head wear and jackets for conversation starters. He addressed both sexes as “man,” and when a woman asked about his plans for the Chicago Transit Authority, he was characteristically a trifle abrupt — “Here’s the deal,” he said to start — and egocentric.
Tabloid Takedown
The John Edwards tale began, like so many National Enquirer investigations, with a phone call. When the tip line rang in the paper’s Santa Monica office, reporters often raced to answer it. Rick Egusquiza grabbed it late one afternoon in fall 2007, knowing full well that nine out of 10 calls were worthless, just wackos promising the story of the decade. Egusquiza, 44, had been a Venice Beach bartender, his only writing experience reviewing porn movies for Adult Video News. But he quickly learned the Enquirer culture; his first scoop was that Angelina Jolie had gotten a Billy Bob tattoo on her arm.
Meet the Heroes of Early Scientology Reporting
Then came the six-part expose published June 24th through 29th, 1990, in the Los Angeles Times, a story that conclusively divided the wheat from the chaff where Scientology rumors were concerned. Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos spent five years on the story and it was, and still is, a corker. The other day Sappell told me that the Times’ Scientology investigation began when he learned that a former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant had become a private investigator for the Scientology organization, after having been fired by the department in 1981 for allegedly running a house of prostitution and alerting a drug dealer to a planned raid. (He was acquitted of all criminal charges in a later trial.) Soon enough it became clear that this former officer was using his LAPD contacts on behalf of his new bosses at Scientology. Sappell’s editor scented a bigger story, and the game was afoot.
Is Ecstasy a Viable Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
Untold thousands of practitioners have risked their licenses to use MDMA in underground clinical settings since 1985, when the drug was added to Schedule I (the Drug Enforcement Administration’s category for substances with no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse). To these therapists, MDMA offers the opposite of party-hard escapism—instead, they see the drug as a catalyst for digging deep into the human psyche.
Making Chicago’s Top Chef
With three Michelin stars to Grant Achatz’s name and many critics convinced that Alinea is now the best restaurant in the United States, Achatz and Kokonas are in an enviable position: They can do what they want. … Take, for instance, Next’s reservation system. There are no reservations. If you want to eat there, you will have to buy tickets through Next’s website. So far, 15,000 have signed up to be notified when tickets go on sale.
How Egypt’s Leaders Found the ‘Off’ Switch for the Internet
Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.
The Hard Luck and Beautiful Life of Liam Neeson
Then Liam Neeson asked me what I remembered about the interview. I echoed him: “You told me about your accident. You told me about your wife’s accident. That was hard for you. You were upset. You got very quiet. So I traded stories. I told you something bad that happened to me. I have the picture of your house right here. I remember that your hand was shaking.”
Bohemian Cove: Inside Malibu’s Hottest Trailer Park
In the 1990s, some of the trailers at Paradise Cove went for as little as $25,000, while trailers with an ocean view sold for up to $400,000. But in the housing boom of 2006, prices went up tenfold, much more than in the rest of Malibu, even though buying a trailer is a pretty sketchy real-estate deal. The owner of the park still controls the land, and you’re just buying the improvements—in other words, all you own is the trailer itself. But prices still rise with each resale: a 75-year-old woman who seldom changed out of her bathrobe sold her trailer for $750,000 to the ex-wife of a former Eagles guitarist in 2003, but she never moved in—she decided she wanted to live on a boat. She sold it for $975,000 to another flipper, who sold it to Mac Humphries, a retired Countrywide executive, and his wife, Jill, for $1.2 million. The Humphrieses put another $1 million into renovations.
The Sabotaging of Iran
Majid Shahriyari became an Iranian martyr while he was driving to work on an autumn day in Tehran. As he made his way along Artesh Boulevard, an explosive device ripped through his car. The 45-year-old was a devout man: Iranians would describe him as a Hizbollahi, a person fiercely loyal to the country’s Islamic system and easily identified by his unshaven face and simple clothes. But Shahriyari also stood out for another reason. He was one of Iran’s leading atomic scientists, an expert on nuclear chain reactions.
The Life and Death of Blago Aide Christopher Kelly
(City Magazine (CRMA) Award nominee.) “He was part of [Blagojevich’s] inner, inner circle, about as close to the sun as you can get.” Those days were gone. Now Kelly was holing up on and off in this trailer near 173rd and Cicero. His marriage was on the rocks—he was shacking up in a downtown condo with his girlfriend, Clarissa Flores-Buhelos, a married woman two decades his junior. The feds had indicted him three times in two years; he had pleaded guilty twice, and he was slated to go on trial with his old pal Blagojevich on the third set of charges. A decade or more of prison loomed. In fact, Kelly was expected to turn himself in within a few days. “My life is over,” he had admitted to reporters four days earlier, in a rare unguarded moment before the press.
You must be logged in to post a comment.