A Boom Behind Bars: Private Jail Operators Profit from Illegal Immigrant Crackdown
In CCA facilities for immigrant detention, inmates have become lost—sometimes fatally—in the ICE churn. CCA’s Eloy Detention Facility in Arizona had more deaths than any other immigration jail listed in a congressional report last year. In one case, a 62-year-old Ghanaian barber named Emmanuel Owusu spent two years in a CCA facility contesting his deportation from the U.S., and died there of diabetes-related heart problems. He had lived in the U.S. for 33 years. In internal documents, ICE employees wondered why he ever ended up in an ICE facility to begin with.
Amazon Crusader. Chevron Pest. Fraud?
Attorney Steven Donziger won an $18 billion pollution verdict against Chevron. But is he clean enough to collect? “Court papers seek to transform Donziger from a humanitarian firebrand into the mastermind of a conspiracy ‘to extort, defraud, and otherwise tortiously injure’ a corporation with a market capitalization of $208 billion, more than three times the size of Ecuador’s annual economic output.”
USA Inc.: Red, White and Very Blue
What you’ll see on the following pages is hard to misinterpret: We have big issues, but the U.S. is in sounder shape than Apple was in 1997, when it lost a billion dollars. That’s the year Steve Jobs returned as CEO and took extreme measures, including agreeing to make Internet Explorer the Mac’s default browser. Jobs also got Microsoft to buy $150 million in nonvoting Apple shares—a lifeline for a company that, according to Jobs himself, was 90 days from bankruptcy court. Apple is now the second most valuable company in the world.
Turks and Caicos: Caribbean Hangover
The blue water is so clear you can count every reef, so still you can see the odd cloud reflected in it. Lucy and Jeff have agreed to offer a view from the sky of what wary developers wrought on the ground: shuttered private-island resorts and abandoned luxury hotels marring the landscape, suspended in time by financing woes, criminal investigations, or both. This British territory, largely undeveloped in the 20th century, became a playground for celebrities and the ultrarich as its reputation grew along with the easy money and loose credit of the boom years.
Cheating, Incorporated
Profile of Noel Biderman, founder of cheaters website Ashley Madison. “When I asked Biderman’s wife, Amanda, what it’s like being joined in holy matrimony with an anti-marriage entrepreneur, she let out a long sigh. ‘Really, the business itself doesn’t match who he is as a person—it’s not our lifestyle or value system or any of that,’ she said. ‘I mean, yeah, I’d love it if he were working on a cure for cancer. But it’s a business, and that’s how we look at it.'”
Byron Reese & Demand Media’s Planet of the Algorithms
Every week, Reese would come up with an idea for something new to peddle. They would draft a business plan, launch a website, and measure consumers’ subsequent interest in a product. Efforts to sell coins and watches failed. At one point, Reese tried manufacturing family portraiture using inexpensive subcontractor artists in places such as Russia. The concept wasn’t easy to expand. “A lot of people have ideas,” says Handsman. “Byron has the discipline to actually measure them. He was willing to come up with a ridiculous number of ideas, but he was also willing to abandon them if they were proven not to work.”
Larry Page’s Google 3.0
In the 1.0 era, which ran from 1996 to 2001, Page and Brin incubated the company at Stanford University and in a Menlo Park (Calif.) garage. In 2001 they ushered in the triumphant 2.0 era by hiring Schmidt, a tech industry grown-up who’d been CEO of Novell. Now comes the third phase, led by Page and dedicated to rooting out bureaucracy and rediscovering the nimble moves of youth.
Forever 21’s Fast (and Loose) Fashion Empire
How did the Changs, Korean immigrants who opened their first store in a gritty section of Los Angeles in 1984, become such important players in fast fashion? The family credits its accomplishments to hard work, faith, and frugality, though Forever 21 has not prospered without controversy. The company has been accused many times of not just following the trends but selling copies of clothes created by trendy designers. Some of its suppliers, many of whom are part of a tight-knit Korean-American community of manufacturers and vendors that dominate the garment industry in Los Angeles, have been accused of underpaying their workers. Now Forever 21’s expansion raises a question, both strategic and existential: When is more too much?
Glock: America’s Gun
For all the anguish and outcry in the days after a community college dropout named Jared Loughner allegedly sprayed a Tucson crowd with 33 bullets from a semiautomatic pistol, one response was notably absent: any sense that America’s latest shooting spree, which killed six people and wounded 14, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, would bring new restrictions on the right to own or carry large-capacity, rapid-fire weapons.
Afghanistan: Land of War and Opportunity
In Herat, Kabul, and cities large and small, Paul Brinkley serves as tour guide, ambassador, fixer, motivational speaker, and leader of the unofficial Afghanistan chamber of commerce. With all of his titles and duties, he prefers to think of himself primarily as a matchmaker, negotiating high-stakes unions between multinational companies like IBM and JPMorgan Chase and Afghan officials and entrepreneurs. Building a culture of business is the only way Brinkley and General David Petraeus, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, believe they can counteract the legendary forces of destruction here—from decades of war and deprivation to the brutal rule of the Taliban and a reliance on opium as a chief export.