The Sinaloa Cartel’s 90-Year-Old Drug Mule

How did Leo Sharp—a day-lily farmer, World War II veteran, and great-grandfather—become a drug mule for Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel?

Sharp’s lawyer, Darryl A. Goldberg, said that it was unclear precisely when Sharp began working with the cartel, but he believed it started at the day-lily farm. “He has Mexican fellas working on the farms,” Goldberg said. “They happen to know people who introduced him to other people who asked him if he wanted to get involved in something.” His first assignments were to ferry cash, he said. “And then it morphed into something bigger.”

Law-enforcement authorities said the cartel deliberately recruited couriers who played against type. Walter Ogden, a 57-year-old man from Oklahoma, was another trusted driver. Ogden has been on disability since 2010 and has had four heart attacks, according to his lawyer. He was a former heavy-equipment operator for an excavation company in Oklahoma City and, like Sharp, had no criminal record.

Published: Jun 11, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,135 words)

I Know You Got Soul

In its heyday, Billboard’s R&B chart credibly reflected the tastes of the genre’s core fans, paving the way for artists like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Lionel Richie, Prince, and Whitney Houston. But now, a new digital methodology has rendered the tally a shell of its former self, replete with dubious racial and cultural consequences.

Over on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, however, those millions in digital sales had no impact. Billboard still wasn’t factoring iTunes and its ilk into its black music chart in the late 00s; only physical singles sales still counted. To say the least, this was a rather surreal chart policy for the time. If the new millennium had been tough on brick-and-mortar music chains—shuttering the nation’s Tower Records, Coconuts, and Strawberries franchises—it was downright brutal on the smaller shops that reported to Billboard’s R&B charts, which were disappearing just as quickly. And anyway, so few physical singles were being released in the 00s that whatever black-owned-and-oriented music stores remained didn’t have much to report to the chart.

Source: Pitchfork
Published: Apr 14, 2014
Length: 33 minutes (8,436 words)

Greet the Enemy

The writer on his experience with night terrors, which he associates with his love of horror films and the work of Tom Savini, a special-effects artist known for working with director George Romero on zombie films:

Savini joined the Army rather than wait to get drafted because enlisted men got to pick their jobs. He served as a combat photographer in Vietnam. After the war, he moved to North Carolina and started acting in a repertory theater. He was still playing around with makeups, still using them to scare the holy shit out of people. (In Vietnam, he had been all, “Mama-san, take . . . a . . . look . . . at . . . THIS!”) In fact, that’s what earned him his early notoriety, the verisimilitude of his wounds. “There’s something about seeing the real thing that sets me apart from, let’s say, some other makeup artists who have never experienced that,” he said in a post-Vietnam interview. “When I’m creating an effect, if it doesn’t look good to me—real—doesn’t give me that feeling I used to get when I’d see the real stuff, then it’s just not real enough for me.”

Source: Tin House
Published: Jun 1, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,453 words)

Life, After

TV reporter Miles O’Brien’s first-person account of what it’s like to lose your arm:

I’d always heard amputees talk about the stares and the acute awareness of being viewed as different. During my first shoot for the NewsHour with one arm, I was wearing a blazer when I met a researcher I was to interview. She left the lab, and I took my jacket off. When she returned, it was a good thing she wasn’t sipping her coffee, because she would have offered up an amazing spit take. As we both looked at my stump, I shrugged and said, “It happens.” She smiled and nodded and then we pressed on. It didn’t really bother me for some reason—perhaps because of the honesty of her reaction. What makes me more uncomfortable is when I notice people consciously looking away. Is that pity? Revulsion? On the sidewalks, I look straight at people looking at me, and lots of times, they smile. Maybe I am still attractive. Or maybe I’m a freak.

Published: Jun 12, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,680 words)

The Fight to Find John Wilkes Booth’s Diary in a Forgotten Subway Tunnel

The story of an urban explorer in New York city and his decades-long fight to excavate a four-story wall of rocky debris that he believes contains the lost pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary:

Diamond is a plump, 54-year-old New Yorker with kind, sunken eyes and frazzled hair—what’s left of it. Known in the local papers as “the Tunnel King,” he is an indisputably odd and paradoxical fellow. His acquaintances describe him as “brilliant”—he is an obsessive researcher and prodigious Googler whose living room is filled with piles of books, engineering diagrams and newspaper clippings about the tunnel. But they also say he can be “paranoid” and “hyperbolic” regarding his belief that the city has conspired to keep him out of the tunnel; and that if he gets back inside, he might find the missing pages of Booth’s diary that will prove a cabal of high-ranking, pro-Confederate New York officials plotted to kill Lincoln. When asked about this latter, seemingly preposterous claim, Diamond simply replies, “They used to say the tunnel didn’t exist.”

Author: Joe Kloc
Source: Newsweek
Published: Jun 10, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,131 words)

The Prisoner’s Daughter

What if your dad had been doing time for murder for as long as you’d known him?

She was a leader like her father, Amanda’s relatives told her. She’d inherited his forceful personality and his stubborn streak. She took gymnastics classes and sang in the school chorus — a natural performer, just like her father.

She took pride in the comments, but they wore on her, comparisons to a man she had never really met. As her 13th birthday approached, she resolved to see her father again. She told her mother, making it clear she didn’t believe the stories about him serving overseas.

Conceded Minerva: “Your father is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”

“Why is he there if he didn’t do it?”

Source: Village Voice
Published: Jun 10, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,856 words)

The Last Night in the Shelter – Our College Pick

“Reporting out stories that go nowhere is a frustrating, tedious business – unless, of course, they turn into something good.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 11, 2014

Inside Europe’s Last Dictatorship

The crisis in neighbouring Ukraine has rattled Alexander Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime. But with the opposition in retreat and the media silenced, can Belarus escape his grip?

In the pantheon of great dictators, Lukashenko is a curiosity. The man known as ‘Batka’ (father of the nation) leads the country’s absurd TV news night after night, whether he is inspecting a tractor, ticking off the cabinet, arriving in Kazakhstan, or all three.

Before last month’s world championships of his beloved ice hockey – the biggest sporting event Belarus has ever held – the president was taking no chances. Concerned about possible shows of dissent, dozens of activists were rounded up and sent to jail.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jun 9, 2014
Length: 8 minutes (2,219 words)

Scammed

Some of America’s poorest people are being targeted by cyber-scammers. Can an errant hacker find the culprits?

Mike’s encounter with these scammers began one rainy day in January of last year, he says when I call. His voice is flat and matter-of-fact; he could be an accountant discussing a company’s tax return. He tells me it started with a text message: “Do you need up to $1,600 today? It’s secure and takes only a minute at http://www.quickhelpfunds.com”. Mike, who is 34, was on a job for a major software manufacturer and was bored, so he signed up for a loan using a fake name, just to see what would happen.

Source: Matter
Published: Apr 23, 2014
Length: 23 minutes (5,778 words)

The Magical Stranger: A Son’s Journey Into His Father’s Life

The first chapter from The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick’s memoir about his father, squadron commander and Navy pilot Peter Rodrick. Our thanks to Rodrick for sharing it with the Longreads community.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 10, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,779 words)