Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (2,357 words)
Halfway through Dirty John, the Bravo series based on the life of sociopathic con artist John Meehan, the titular character’s first wife, having discovered her husband of several years has been cheating and shooting up, meets one of his friends in a diner. Sitting stone-faced across from her husband’s grinning college buddy, she learns how “Dirty John” got his nickname through an ever-expanding laundry list of scams his classmates witnessed: being a “dog” with women, conning old people, credit card fraud, insurance fraud. She says nothing, but it’s clear from her face that she is getting progressively more enraged at this man for having repeatedly stood by and watched as the father of her children mistreated a succession of people. At one point, it seems to kind of dawn on the guy that the fruits of his failure to act might in fact be sitting right in front of him, so he issues a half-assed mea culpa: “I lived with him that year and we had good times, or whatever, but he never talked about things and I never asked.” Read more…
Former Abu Ghraib interrogator turned playwright Joshua Casteel, left, interviews an unidentified prisoner, played by David Blum, during a dress rehearsal of his production, "Returns," in 2007. (AP Photo/The Daily Iowan, Ben Roberts)
Joshua Casteel had to decide between attending seminary and deploying to Iraq as an army interrogator. He chose Iraq, where he hoped to bring morality and humanity to interrogations. But army interrogators already had their own version of “moral order”:
For the first week Casteel sat in on interrogations. There were six booths on each side of a long hallway; down the center was a two-way mirror that didn’t always work well, and when it didn’t, the prisoners watched you watch them. The rooms held little beyond plastic chairs, cheap tables, maybe zip ties on the chair legs. Sometimes a steel hook was attached to the floor. Every now and then prisoners were led to a more comfortable room, to confuse them, make them relax. The goal was to make them slip up. Sometimes Casteel saw men kept naked. Sometimes they were handcuffed to chairs.
During lessons, Casteel’s supervisors explained how to use fabricated stories and charges of homosexuality to shame the prisoners and manipulate them. The commanders were clear about who they were dealing with, Casteel remembered.
“These men,” they said, “are the agents of Satan, gentlemen.”
Casteel kept his own moral compass in the interrogation room, where it turned out that treating people like people was more effective than treating people like animals to be broken.
It turned out he couldn’t help but feel bad for the prisoners. It didn’t matter if the prisoner was a wrongly accused farmer or a jihadist bent on Casteel’s destruction. His orders commanded that he approach prisoners as assets to manipulate, but when Casteel walked into the interrogation room and saw the prisoner, he thought, This is a man in need of redemption. “From my very first interrogation,” he wrote later, “I have simply lacked the ability to look at the person I interrogate in a way that does not demand I also think about what is best for him.” Soon Casteel was attending confession with an Army chaplain after each interrogation, because “of an overwhelming burden to atone for what I considered the sin of reducing individuals to strategic ‘objects of exploitation.’” Once, he told a prisoner “You are not a criminal, you are not a terrorist,” and the prisoner wept, because no American had ever called him anything but evil.
At the same time, Casteel was extracting more information from the prisoners than other interrogators. During interrogations, Casteel smiled a lot and tapped his foot or smoked a cigarette to give the prisoner time to think, or sometimes because he didn’t quite know what to do next. He tried to show respect. He listened more than he spoke. He paid attention to a prisoner’s words, tone of voice, body language. “Some good news came in today,” he wrote to his parents after a month in Iraq. “I was just notified that the results of my past three interrogations received special recognition from ‘higher up.’ I guess my cigarettes and smiles with the ruthless man I spoke briefly of earlier did something profitable for the commanders in the field. That was a big boost of confidence, being as the best thing I did was simply respect him.”
Casteel eventually left the military as a conscientious objector after one particularly transformative encounter with a detainee. On his return to the U.S., he struggled both with the aftermath of his experience and with his health — his time monitoring burning waste pits in Iraq left him with Iraq/Afghanistan War-Lung Injury, and the ensuing cancer killed him. For Smithsonian and Epic magazines, Jennifer Percy tells the story of his life, work, and death.
Paul Le Roux is unequivocally a criminal mastermind, and if you’ve never heard his name, that only proves the point. After all, a criminal mastermind isn’t just defined by the audacity of his crimes, but the extent to which he gets away with them, and by that measure Le Roux is nothing short of brilliant.
Journalist Evan Ratliff has spent years piecing together who Le Roux is and the unbelievable nature of his crimes. In his recently released book, The Mastermind, Ratliff paints a picture of a man considered by one source to be the “most versatile criminal in history.” Throughout the mid-aughts, Le Roux, a South African computer programmer, ran an illegal online pharmaceutical scam that sold addictive painkillers to Americans at astonishing rates. Real doctors signed off on the scam. Real pharmacists sold the drugs. But it was Le Roux, usually operating from a computer in Manila, who was pulling all the strings. The painkiller scheme grossed him hundreds of millions of dollars.
That money would go on to fund a global criminal enterprise that included literal boatloads of cocaine, shipments of methamphetamine from North Korea, weapons deals with Iran, and a team of ex-military mercenaries who were ordered to kill anyone who threatened Le Roux’s bottom line.
The Mastermind is an incredible feat of reporting that takes the reader step by step into the journeys of Le Roux’s employees, accomplices and hired killers, as well as the law enforcement teams trying to take him down. Most of these parties were largely unaware of the scope of Le Roux’s enterprise. The shocking details and twists that Ratliff reveals are unrelenting; they tell a story that would be impossible to believe if Ratliff didn’t bring the reader along on the reporting upon which it all rests. Read more…
On Lampedusa, a fisherman once asked me: “You know what fish has come back? Sea bass.”
Then he’d lit a cigarette and smoked the whole thing down to the butt in silence.
“And you know why sea bass have come back to this stretch of sea? You know what they eat? That’s right.”
And he’d stubbed out his cigarette and turned to go.
There was nothing more, truly, to be said.
What had stuck with me about Lampedusa were the calluses on the hands of the fishermen; the stories they told of constantly finding dead bodies when they hauled in their nets (“What do you mean, ‘constantly’?” and they’d say, “Do you know what ‘constantly’ means? Constantly”); scattered refugee boats rusting in the sunlight, perhaps nowadays the only honest form of testimony left to us — corrosion, grime, rust — of what’s happening in this period of history; the islanders’ doubts about the meaning of it all; the word “landing,” misused for years, because by now these were all genuine rescues, with the refugee boats escorted into port and the poor devils led off to the Temporary Settlement Center; and the Lampedusans who dressed them with their own clothing in a merciful response that sought neither spotlights nor publicity, but just because it was cold out and those were bodies in need of warmth. Read more…
Jacob Silverman | Longreads | February 2019 | 22 minutes (6,069 words)
Mark Doten is a deranged seer, a mad scribe mapping the end of the world. In The Infernal, his wonderfully strange first novel, he tackled a host of twenty-first century horrors: Osama Bin Laden and his followers, the moral disaster of the War on Terror, the gravitational pull of the networked world on our minds, and a seemingly inevitable post-human future in which one of the few survivors is Mark Zuckerberg. Now, in Trump Sky Alpha, Doten’s produced a fierce, unexpectedly moving, and surprisingly quickly conceived book about the Trump presidency. The new novel begins with a nuclear conflagration that wipes out 90 percent of the global population. The protagonist, Rachel, a journalist steeped in the folkways of the internet, is one of the few survivors. In an effort to reboot American journalism, the New York Times Magazine, risen from the ashes, assigns her to write an article about internet humor at the end of the world. What were people tweeting as the bombs fell?
It may sound like a deliberately obscure assignment, but it soon takes Rachel into some of the darkest corners of the post-apocalyptic American landscape. Mourning her dead wife and child, Rachel is also searching for their final resting place; along the way she finds a new lover, encounters an American security state that seems just as malevolent as its pre-apocalyptic forebears, tangles with a frightful hacktivist-turned-cyber-villain, and meets a novelist dying of radiation exposure who may be the key to it all. Trump Sky Alpha begins as an elaborate farce and ends as something much more grim and compelling, covering issues of politics, resistance, identity, and what, after all these years of mindless info-consumption, the internet actually means to our society. Read more…
I don’t think my father ever took off his Star of David necklace from the day he put it on in the infancy of the Carter administration. It was always there, resting in a copse of chest hair, a silver target in the V of his open shirt collar. I never asked, when he was alive, what it meant to him, but I imagined he had started to wear it simply because he could, having just escaped more than four decades of oppression in the U.S.S.R., where he couldn’t. Or, perhaps, wouldn’t.
The necklace had first belonged to me; my parents bought it for me when I was 14, when we were in Rome awaiting our entry visas to the United States. I had only recently learned of such a thing and its significance when my mother’s cousin Zhenya came to visit us in Odessa from Moscow just before we emigrated in August 1976. I had never before met this cousin, and when I first saw her what jumped out at me was her weird hair, a brown helmet of large immobile waves with a dullness I’d associated with dolls. Thankfully I had by then acquired some tact and didn’t blurt out my first impression. Zhenya wore a necklace, a darkly patinated metal circle, smaller and thinner than a penny, about the size of the old Soviet kopek. Into it was etched a shiny six-pointed star. When I asked my dad what it was, he said, “A Magen David,” the shield of King David, a symbol of the Jewish people. Although his matter-of-factness surprised me, I didn’t press him, thinking I must be missing something.
By the time we were readying to leave, I had spent almost half my lifetime with the awareness of being a Jew, though with no clue as to its larger meaning. At 7, I took a ballroom dance class at the Palace of the Pioneers because my mother thought it might instill some grace into my otherwise clumsy build. At the end of the first lesson, our teacher lined us up against a bleached wall, boys in white shirts and brown pants sagging from their scrawny frames like laundry on a line, girls with pigtails tied in exuberant white bows the size of parachutes, all performing a silent ritual of respectful attention. She instructed us to bring to the next class information about our nationalities. When I asked my parents about it that evening over dinner, my dad, staring into his bowl of soup, said, “We are Jews.” Read more…
Elisa Albert | Longreads | February 2019 | 17 minutes (4,343 words)
They never empty the dedicated shitcan in the dog park. It’s always full to the brim, overflowing with poop bags, swarming with flies and wasps. Which is odd, because all the other trash cans get emptied on the regular, and the fields are mown like clockwork, every other week. Dilapidated Department of General Services carts are often seen cruising around, taking care of park business. So what’s up with the perpetually overflowing dog park shitcan? It’s the enduring mystery of summer. You can smell it from forty paces in the infernal heat.
I call the DGS every couple days to complain about the overflowing shitcan, and always speak to the same lady. We are buds.
Hey, so the poop-bag thing still hasn’t been dealt with, I say.
Yeah, she says. Okay, gotcha. I’ll let them know.
I imagine writing a short story about our relationship, me and the DGS lady. About how we eventually come to share some singular kinship based on our limited exchanges. About how our different lives are ultimately defined by a common emotional struggles. Very Raymond Carver. Maybe we eventually have a fight, or a misunderstanding. Maybe we carry private knowledge of one another like a sacred oath, far into the future. Maybe we pass on the street and don’t register a thing.
Barely seven minutes into her black-history elective on the morning of April 16th, Juanita Douglas was asking her students a question she’d never asked in a classroom before, not in 24 years of teaching in Chicago’s public schools. She’d been preparing to ask the question for over a year, and she knew that for many of her students the conversation that followed would be painful. Disorienting. She didn’t like the idea of causing them pain. She didn’t want to make them feel overwhelmed or lost. But she thought, or at least hoped, that in the end the difficulty would be worth the trouble.
It was only second period. Several of Douglas’s students — a mix of juniors and seniors — were visibly tired. A few slumped forward, heads on their desks. I was sitting in the back row, so I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought one or two might be fully asleep. Some were stealthily texting or scrolling through Snapchat. Others were openly texting or scrolling through Snapchat.
After a few seconds, Douglas repeated the question: “Do you know Jon Burge?”
A ragged chorus of noes and nopes and nahs.
“Tell me again what year you were born in,” said Douglas, who is 54 and likes to playfully remind her students that they don’t know everything about the world.
2000. 2001. 1999.
“Okay,” she said. “Well… Welcome to Chicago.”
Like so many new curriculum units in so many high schools across America, this one began with the teacher switching off the lights and playing a video. Who was Jon Burge? The video supplied the answer. Burge was a former Chicago Police Department detective and area commander. Between 1972 and 1991 he either directly participated in or implicitly approved the torture of at least — and this is an extremely conservative estimate — 118 Chicagoans. Burge and his subordinates — known variously as the Midnight Crew, Burge’s Ass Kickers, and the A-Team — beat their suspects, suffocated them, subjected them to mock executions at gunpoint, raped them with sex toys, and hooked electroshock machines up to their genitals, their gums, their fingers, their earlobes, overwhelming their bodies with live voltage until they agreed: yes, they’d done it, whatever they’d been accused of, they’d sign the confession. The members of the Midnight Crew were predominately white men. Almost all of their victims were black men from Chicago’s South and West Sides. Some had committed the crimes to which they were forced to confess; many had not. The cops in question called the electroshock machines “nigger boxes.”
The video cut to Darrell Cannon, one of the Midnight Crew’s victims. He spoke about getting hauled by cops into a basement:
I wasn’t a human being to them. I was just simply another subject of theirs. They had did this to many others. But to them it was fun and games. You know, I was just, quote, a nigger to them, that’s it. They kept using that word like that was my name… They had no respect for me being a human being. I never expected, quote, police officers to do anything that barbaric, you know… You don’t continue to call me “nigger” throughout the day unless you are a racist. And the way that they said it, they said it so downright nasty. So there’s no doubt in my mind that, in my case, racism played a huge role in what happened to me. Because they enjoyed this. This wasn’t something that was sickening to them. None of them had looks on their faces like, ugh, you know, maybe we shouldn’t do this much. Nuh-huh. They enjoyed it, they laughed, they smiled. And that is why my anger has been so high. Because I continuously see how they smile.
Text on the screen explained that Burge was fired in 1993, following a lawsuit that forced the Chicago Police Department to produce a report on his involvement in “systematic torture,” written by its own Office of Professional Standards. After his firing Burge moved to Apollo Beach, Florida, where he ran a fishing business. In 2006 another internally commissioned report concluded that he’d been a torture ringleader, but still no charges were brought; the Illinois five-year statute of limitations for police brutality charges had by then expired. In 2008 FBI agents arrested Burge at his home, and creative federal prosecutors charged him — not with torture, but with perjury. In a 2003 civil case, Burge had submitted a sworn statement in which he denied ever taking part in torture. In 2010 a jury found him guilty. After the trial, jurors pointed out that the name of Burge’s boat — Vigilante — hadn’t helped his case.
As soon as the video ended and Douglas flipped the lights back on, her students — most of whom were, like her, black — started talking. Their confusion ricocheted around the room.
“How long did he get?”
“Four-and-a-half years.”
“He only got four-and-a-half years?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“I really feel some type of way about this.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I’ve got it on my phone.”
“He didn’t torture them alone. Why didn’t anyone else get charged?”
Between April of 1926 and September of 1927 Mikhail Sholokhov performed a literary miracle. Never before — and never again — would a similar feat be accomplished. During those incredible months he managed to generate hundreds of typed pages of some of the most engaging prose ever to appear in Russia, a country blessed with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and numerous other gifted writers. On an epic scale he narrated events that occurred in far-flung trenches of World War I, distant centers of power, and revolutionary meetings. He described multiple historical figures he had never met, and he painted vivid verbal pictures of battles that took place when he was still a boy. Brief periods of mad, feverish writing were sandwiched between moves, multiple trips to Moscow to meet with editors, and the birth of his first child.
His literary output during those months exponentially exceeded the accomplishments of his whole career up to that point and most decades of his career afterward. The improvement in quality was incredible. None of his colleagues wept with rapture when they read his early, formulaic, communist short stories. Early editors sometimes had to apply a heavy, corrective hand just to get some of them into print. Suddenly seasoned editors were in awe of his prose. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that this rapid, unexpected literary metamorphosis occurred at the age of twenty-two.
How did he manage to pull off such an improbable literary feat? Some locals insisted that he acquired manuscripts that were left behind when the Cossack side was routed by the Red Army during the civil war. At a minimum the archive he acquired appears to have included an unfinished novel that ended around 1919 and a trove of scrapbooks consisting of stories, sketches, newspaper clippings, and articles spanning over a decade of Cossack history. Read more…
I like to lean. Too much of the time I have to hold myself up, so if an opportunity to swoon presents itself, I take it. When I’m getting a haircut and the lady asks me to lean back into the basin for a shampoo, I let myself melt. My muscles go slack, my eyes fall shut, and there is nothing holding me except gravity and the chair and the water and her hands on my head. I feel my tears of bliss slide into the suds.
In photos I am often leaning. When I’m not resting my head on someone’s shoulder, I am hugging a column in a haunted castle in Great Barrington or bracing myself against a big block of basalt on a pedestal in a Barcelona park. At home alone, I improvise with bookshelves and doorjambs, but sometimes I need to lean on something alive. Seeking support on a stormy night, I run out into the rain and lean against the dogwood tree in front of my house until the wet bark soaks through my coat. The world is my trellis.
Ten years ago, I bought a Gordon Parks print of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward leaning against each other by lamplight on a big brass bed. They are sitting side by side, eyes closed, serene. He is leaning more heavily, his body slanted into hers, his head on her shoulder. She is resting more gently, her cheek against the top of his head. Her face is half-illuminated, half-eclipsed. They seem solemn and private and young. He is quiet in her shadow.
I hung the photograph over my bed. Next to it I tacked another 1950s Paul and Joanne picture I tore out of a book. They are leaning on a bed again, and he is still slumped against her shoulder, but this time the lean seems more in league with an audience. They are both meeting the photographer’s gaze and smiling small smiles. Her eyebrows are slightly raised; she might be sly or smug. She is holding a cup of tea in one hand, and his head, proprietarily, with the other. He is supine and sated and holding a glass of wine.
Paul and Joanne liked to lean for the camera. For their 1968 LIFE cover promoting Rachel, Rachel (she starred, he directed), they are layered on wall-to-wall carpet; she is reclining in the foreground, and he is her blue-eyed backrest. In yet another famous photo from an earlier era (Joanne is still in gingham, not yet in Pucci), they are leaning back to back with their shoulders against each other, their mutual pressure holding each other up, with an isosceles triangle of space between them, and a sturdy baseline of brick patio beneath them.
I like to fall asleep under images of leaning every night and wake up beneath them every day.
I like to believe that leaning is love. Read more…
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