Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills

On August 20 the New York Times reported on the freeing of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., commonly known as the West Memphis Three. Imprisoned seventeen years ago for allegedly murdering three young boys in a satanic ritual, their freedom was won through DNA evidence as is so often the case nowadays. The article mentions a 1996 documentary about their case that led to a national campaign to win their release:

An award-winning documentary, “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,” was released after their convictions, bringing them national attention.

Benefit concerts were held, books were written, a follow-up documentary was made and a movement to free the “West Memphis Three” grew in size and intensity, drawing those intrigued by the case and those who saw a kinship with the men at the heart of it.

“I was kind of going through the same clothing style: long hair, dark clothes,” said Mecinda Smith, 30, one of the hundreds of supporters who had come to the courthouse, holding posters and wearing “Free the WM3” T-shirts.

“We were just trying to stand out and be different,” said Ms. Smith, who was 12 when the murders took place.

Last night I watched it on HBO and like all their documentaries, it can be also bee seen on-demand from Time-Warner or on your computer using HBO Go. Additionally, you can rent it from Netflix, as well as a follow-up documentary made in 1999 titled Paradise Lost 2: Revelations. Meanwhile, “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” which was shown at this year’s New York Film Festival and scheduled for HBO next year, brings the case up to date.

These films were co-directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who also worked on “Brother’s Keeper” together, another film about marginal members of society being accused of a capital crime. In that film, a mentally impaired brother is accused of a mercy killing of his own brother on a dilapidated farm that he shared with another brother. Despite the fact that the three elderly men were reclusive and shabby-looking, this did not prevent their neighbors from pitching in to help them find a lawyer and build solidarity for the accused brother. It is a singularly inspiring film and also available from Netflix, including a streaming version.

Berlinger is also the director of “Crude”, the courageous and radical story of Chevron’s attempt to force the people of Ecuador to accept the toxic waste legacy of Texaco, a company absorbed by Chevron, that has left land and water despoiled and thousands ill. He has been in a running battle with Chevron over the oil company’s demand to see his outtakes as part of a bid to prove that they have no responsibility for the damage.

There is an obvious affinity between the characters in “Brother’s Keeper” and the West Memphis Three. The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Jessie Misskelley Jr., who had an IQ of 72 and who was grilled by the cops for 12 hours after being arrested. He was pressured to testify against his two friends Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, who—like him–came from poor and dysfunctional families. Echols in particular was the easiest to demonize since he listened to heavy metal music, dressed in Goth style and described himself as a Wiccan. In a rural Arkansan town in the early 1990s, this was not the way to endear you to the community, least of all the cops. Like many towns in the Bible Belt, it was also a breeding ground of Baptist churches that took the idea of Satan very literally.

When the local cops could not find the actual killers of the three boys, they victimized Echols and his two friends who they calculated a jury would find guilty just on the basis of their appearance. While Misskelley and Baldwin did not share Echols’s Goth lifestyle, guilt by association could be relied on by local prosecutors. As Echols states in the film, West Memphis was a modern version of Salem, Massachusetts.

With a complete lack of physical evidence, the prosecutor is forced to rely heavily on questions to Echols on the witness stand about his reading habits, particularly the Satanist Aleister Crowley who the youth has actually never read, only heard of. On his Wiccan beliefs, Echols states that he was drawn to them because they stressed the eternal female principle. One can only wonder how he survived growing up to the age of 17 in West Memphis, an ordeal by fire equal in some ways to the next 17 years he would spend in prison.

The Salem-like hysteria that pervaded this trial overlapped with the “repressed memory” sexual abuse cases of the period that were documented in another powerful HBO documentary titled “Capturing the Friedmans”, about a gay computer programming trainer who supposedly sexually abused dozens of his students in his basement classroom on Long Island without them ever telling their parents. Although Satanism was not a factor in the trial, it relied completely on the “repressed memories” of his students who described wild orgies in the basement prompted by the suggestions of the investigators.

The two themes of ritual satanic abuse and repressed memories, however, did come together in the infamous McMartin preschool case of 1983. Young children were pressured into “remembering” that the satanic teachers and care-givers at the school lured them into orgies as wild as that took place in the Friedman basement. The wiki on the McMartin case states:

Some of the accusations were described as “bizarre”,^[6] overlapping with accusations that mirrored the just-starting satanic ritual abuse panic.^[4] It was alleged that, in addition to having been sexually abused, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken through underground tunnels.^[4] When shown a series of photographs by Danny Davis, the McMartins’ lawyer, one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers.^[2]

Some of the abuse was alleged to have occurred in secret tunnels beneath the school. Several investigations turned up evidence of old buildings on the site and other debris from before the school was built, but no evidence of any secret chambers was found.^[4] There were claims of orgies at car washes and airports, and of children being flushed down toilets to secret rooms where they would be abused, then cleaned up and presented back to their unsuspecting parents. Some children said they were made to play a game called “Naked Movie Star” in which they were photographed nude.^[4][1][21] During the trial, testimony from the children stated that the naked movie star game was actually a rhyming taunt used to tease other children—”What you say is what you are, you’re a naked movie star,”—and had nothing to do with having naked pictures taken.^[4]

Although I have been harshly critical of Alexander Cockburn in recent years, this Wall Street Journal piece on the McMartin miscarriage of justice reminds me of how his writings back then inspired me to take up the cause of the left after 11 brutal years in a Trotskyist sect:

Wall Street Journal

February 8, 1990

The McMartin Case: Indict the Children, Jail the Parents

Ray Buckey is a man whose life has already been effectively destroyed. The first charge of child abuse against this teacher at the McMartin day-care school in Manhattan Beach, Calif., was laid against him in the summer of 1983. The allegations against him had been extorted from her two-year-old by a mother — now dead — with a history of mental illness who also claimed that an AWOL Marine had sodomized her dog.

It was not long before Ray Buckey had direct experience of the operations of the justice system. The Manhattan Beach Police Department sent a letter to 200 families whose children attended McMartin that read in part, “Any information from your child regarding ever having observed Ray Buckey to leave a classroom alone with a child during a nap period, or if they have ever observed Ray Buckey tie up a child, is important.”

By spring 1984, Mr. Buckey, his mother, grandmother, sister and three fellow teachers had been arrested, and the police now claimed no less than 1,200 alleged victims of abuse. Briefly released, Mr. Buckey was rearrested and jailed for five years. On Jan. 18 of this year, after a trial that lasted more than two years and cost $15 million (making it the most expensive criminal trial in U.S. history), a jury acquitted Mr. Buckey and his mother on 52 counts of molestation. On 13 remaining counts of molestation and conspiracy against Mr. Buckey the jury was deadlocked (though it seems a majority was convinced of his innocence) and a mistrial on these counts declared.

Any sane society would have granted the Buckeys peace to recover as best they could from this horrible ordeal. But on Jan. 31, Los Angeles County District Attorney Ira Reiner announced that Ray Buckey would be retried on at least some of the 13 counts. The decision came after a period of grotesque agitation by the parents of the supposedly abused McMartin children. They appeared on talk shows, and terrorized the Los Angeles Board of County Supervisors into voting 4 to 1 to urge the district attorney to a new trial. (If he did not, they wanted the board to call upon the state attorney general to take the decision out of Mr. Reiner’s hands.)

Mr. Reiner, who is running for the office of state attorney general this year, has in the recent past lost well-publicized cases. The McMartin verdict was another blow, and he obviously felt he had to put Mr. Buckey back in court or face taunts for being soft on child abusers. Mr. Reiner was also presumably under great pressure from Attorney General John Van de Kamp to retry Mr. Buckey, since Mr. Van de Kamp is running for governor and public sentiment is strongly against the jury’s verdict of Jan. 18. So here are two men with tremendous incentives to put Mr. Buckey back in the dock — in an atmosphere so polluted with hysteria it must be doubtful whether any jury could be assembled to assure Mr. Buckey a fair trial.

The psychological squalor is even more disturbing. The McMartin case was but one in nearly 40 episodes across the country between 1983 and 1987 in which prosecutions against teachers or supervisors in day-care centers were prompted by children’s accusations.

Many of these accusations, taken seriously by parents, social workers and the justice system, were of the most fantastic nature. McMartin children said they had been marched to cemeteries to dig up bodies. One child said he had seen his teacher fly. In 1985 children in Pennsylvania said teachers had forced them to have oral sex with a goat. In 1986 children in a preschool in Sequim, Wash., said they had been made to watch animal sacrifice in a graveyard. In Chicago, the kids said they had watched a baby being boiled.

Terrible injustices were done in this extraordinary replay of the 17th-century Salem witch trials. People were tossed into prison for years, on the say-so of infants. In all 50 states children as young as two or three can testify to abuse, without corroboration from adults and without physical evidence. In many states they can make charges without having to endure cross-examination, being bounced up and down on a judge’s knee in private chambers. In some states the charges can merely be repeated as hearsay by adults.

What was the reason for this wave of self-evidently preposterous stories about a satanic network terrorizing infant schools, and other tales of ritual abuse?

Society seems to have a periodic need for witch trials. At the onset of the Reagan era there weren’t really any Communists around to persecute, so the hunt went back to the traditional exorcism of Satan, whose horns and cloven feet assumed the form of the local day-care teacher.

The 1980s also brought the great onslaught against Freud, arguing against Oedipal fantasy and in favor of the reality of physical abuse. These days many people like to claim they were “abused” as a child. It’s a way of absolving yourself for screwing up by shifting the blame to your infancy, when you can’t be blamed for anything. From these gymnastics, by which “therapists” make their money, the adult emerges guilt-free.

Also, the charges were quintessentially Reaganite, in that they took child abuse out of the family, which is where 99% of it occurs, and put it into day-care centers, which in the Schlaflyite scheme of things are abodes of Satan. Again, some parents probably feel a fair amount of guilt for dumping their children in day-care centers anyway, and are obviously ready by way of compensation to support passionately whatever their children may claim. Of course, any considerate parent, social worker or sane therapist (as opposed to the hysterical self-promoters who mostly feature in these cases) would realize that months and years of interrogation and court procedures are the very last things a child needs after a genuine case of abuse. The public investigation and litigation merely magnify the hurt.

The trouble is that these parents now have a huge emotional investment in “the case,” whether it be McMartin or similar episodes. Indeed, in some of these court trials the parents also have a strong material interest, in the form of very substantial awards by insurance companies that cover day-care centers.

So now the McMartin parents can triumphantly torture poor Ray Buckey again, abetted by the cowards and opportunists in the justice system. But if people can be prosecuted on the words of children, then children should take full responsibility for what they are saying. If a child says he saw Ray Buckey kill a horse with a baseball bat (which one did claim) and if this charge is disproved (which it was), then the child should be indicted for perjury, with present prohibition against such infant indictment removed.

If a parent abetted the child in this false accusation, then this parent should be indicted for perjury, too. If the court then establishes that parent and child were lying, at least the parent should suffer the consequences. A few well-publicized sentences of imprisonment of parents (along with “therapists” and social workers, it goes without saying) and we would see a speedy end to these disgusting miscarriages of justice.

Carancho

Over the years, automobile crashes have become apt symbols in a group of movies attempting to make big statements about society. Perhaps the most profound was Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” that featured a long tracking shot of a traffic jam on a French country road that culminated in a shocking car wreck with mangled bodies strewn across the road. That pivotal scene was an introduction to the remainder of the film that depicted a France descending into barbarism.

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, there’s Paul Haggis’s “Crash”, a movie that preaches “understanding” as a way for the races to reconcile. Orchestrated over a series of fender benders, the film exhibits Hollywood liberalism at its most meretricious. Apparently, Haggis just resigned from Scientology after 35 years in protest over the cult’s opposition to gay marriage. Now that would be a plot for a movie I’d much prefer to see.

The most recent entrant into the field is Carancho, an Argentine film directed by Pablo Trapero that opens at the Angelica Film Center in NY tomorrow. I have seen Trapero’s Crane World, a powerful neorealist study of a crane operator, as well as El Bonaerense, a documentary-like feature about police corruption in Buenos Aires. Crane World is available from Netflix and I recommend it highly.

Carancho is the Spanish word for vulture and refers to the main character, an ambulance-chasing lawyer who preys on the families of the dead and those injured in car crashes. While Trapero is aspiring for social commentary in the same way as Godard and Haggis, he is also insistent on the more mundane aspects of a problem which is decimating Argentina. The film opens with words to this effect on the screen (these were taken from the press notes):

In Argentina, more than eight thousand people die every year in road accidents at a daily average of twenty-two. More than a hundred and twenty thousand are injured. Only the last decade has seen one hundred thousand deaths. The millions of pesos that every victim represents in medical and legal expenses produces an enormous market, supported by the compensations of insurance companies and the weakness of the law. Behind every tragedy, there is an industry.

We first meet the lawyer Sosa at a funeral where he is being punched and kicked by a couple of burly surviving relatives for representing himself as a friend of the deceased and a fan of the same soccer team the dead man followed religiously. Suspecting rightly that he was a shyster, the relatives ask him to name the team. After Sosa answers incorrectly, they pummel him. Lying on the ground, he keeps naming other teams—incorrectly—and receives fresh blows for his efforts.

His shady business brings him into contact eventually with a young female doctor named Luján who works the night shift in an ambulance. Without wasting any time, the two end up as passionate lovers even though she understands that he is a carancho. Her own social isolation working at nights might have something to do with this, but Sosa has a real charisma despite his tawdry background. On their first date, he bets her that if two cars go through a red light at the nearby intersection, she will have to let him kiss her. She ups the ante to four. After 6 cars ignore the red light, they kiss. In the very next scene, they are undressing each other in Luján’s bedroom.

Sosa is played by Ricardo Darín, one of Argentina’s most respected actors. He plays Sosa as a kind of tarnished Bogart-like figure. Darín was Marcos, the senior partner of younger con man in “Nine Queens”, a similar role. Middle-aged and a bit overweight, Sosa has an insouciant charm that Luján finds irresistible. She is played by Martina Gusman who has starred in other Trapero movies, including El Bonaerense, and co-founded a film production company with him in 2002. She is excellent.

In the press notes, interviewer Michael Guillén asks Trapero for his thoughts on a comment by Eduardo Galeano:

Galeano argues that there is nothing accidental about car wrecks; that, in fact, from the moment cars were manufactured and set loose on the roadways car wrecks were inevitable. He said a better word to describe a car wreck would be “a consequence”, rather than “an accident”.

If Trapero is intent on describing the consequences of the automobile on Argentine society, he seeks to it not as a documentary film-maker would. Instead, his approach is that of the film noir director for whom the crashes—always occurring at night—serve as a kind of deux ex machina that drives the plot forward, with ever-increasingly ghastly results. When Trapero decides to break with the gangsters who employ him, they threaten both his life and Luján’s. In the stunning climax, the conflict between man and man, and man and machine is resolved in chilling fashion.

Sins of South Beach

I return to NYC tomorrow after a wonderful time in South Beach, especially the time spent with Alex Daoud, the author of the must-read “Sins of South Beach”. I plan to write a longer and more analytical review but this amazon.com review I wrote should be sufficient to persuade you to get your own copy.

http://www.amazon.com/South-Corruption-Violence-Murder-Making/dp/1424310784/

If “Sins of South Beach” accomplished one and only one thing, namely to show how corruption works in politics, then author Alex Douad would have performed an enormous service to our country. There is hardly a week that passes by without someone like Tom DeLay being sentenced for money laundering. Americans really need to know how and why such a thing happens.

As someone who spent 18 months in a federal prison for bribes taken while mayor of Miami Beach, Douad is uniquely positioned to describe his own sins and those who he came in contact with, including some of the area’s most powerful politicians, real estate developers and bankers. Given the power of some of these individuals, it is something of a miracle that the book was ever published. It is also all the more remarkable given that it is likely the very first book ever written by a politician who has fallen from grace. In light of the state of American governance, this honest, insightful, courageous and beautifully written memoir is worth all the self-serving memoirs of public officials put together, including that of George W. Bush.

But “Sins of South Beach” is more than this. It is also a spell-binding tale that is written with a experienced novelist’s touch, one in which the reader can’t wait to get to the next chapter to find out what happens to the tarnished hero Alex Daoud. Indeed, this is the kind of book that would have made me miss a subway stop in my hometown New York City. But here in South Beach, where I am vacationing, the same thing happened. I took the book down to the beach with me with the intention of spending two hours under the sun while getting the low-down on what was happening here in the roaring 80s. But I became so riveted by the action that I lost track of the time and got myself a good sunburn! Oh well, that’s a small price to pay for getting immersed in such a gripping tale.

As someone with a background in politics and law, Alex Daoud is a remarkably gifted writer. “Sins of South Beach” has a cinematic quality, evoking “The Godfather” in some ways as well as classic tales of an honest man seduced into doing wrong, like “Double Indemnity” or “Body Heat”. In Alex Daoud’s case, the seducer was not a beautiful woman but a wealthy establishment in Miami Beach that bought and sold politicians like they were condominiums. Although the author is unsparing with himself, one cannot but note that the bribes he took harmed nobody except the rich men who were buying favors, and for whom such monies were almost pocket change. By comparison, Jack Abramoff hurt Indian tribes and non-unionized sweatshop workers in his quest to achieve wealth and power.

It should be understood, however, that Alex Daoud does not try to whitewash his career here. Despite being mayor at a time when Miami Beach was making great strides forward as an art deco cultural center and a fabulous place to spend a vacation, the book is focused almost totally on his sins. They say that Catholics are great both at sinning and at confessing. When a Catholic (a Lebanese Catholic in Daoud’s case) has a talent with the pen, such as St. Augustine’s Confessions, the result can be a classic of literature. While it would be a bit much to compare Alex Daoud to St. Augustine, I can say with conviction that this is the finest memoir by a public official that I have ever read and a book that I will recommend to friends and associates for the rest of my life.

Client 9: the rise and fall of Elliot Spitzer; Casino Jack

Alex Gibney is a virtual one-man industry turning out one documentary after another on the abuses of American capitalism, from its imperialist wars abroad (Taxi to the Dark Side) to corruption and white-collar crime at home (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). Two of his most recent movies that fall into the second category are must viewing for anybody trying to get a handle on the terminally ill political/corporate system. Released earlier this year, Casino Jack and the United States of Money is now available from Netflix while Client 9: the Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer opens at the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza theaters in New York on November 5^th. They make for interesting companion pieces since they are both about powerful Jewish-Americans whose political careers serve as paradigms for a system in crisis.

I was introduced into the complexities of Elliot Spitzer in Charles Ferguson’s The Inside Job, in which Spitzer served as one of the talking heads making the case against Goldman-Sachs and the rest of the “banksters”. At one point, in the course of dealing with the cozy relationship between high-priced whorehouses and their investment banking clientele, Spitzer tells Ferguson with a sheepish grin that this was emblematic of the corruption of the times even though he is probably the last person in the world in a position to cast judgment.

Essentially, Client 9 is a full-length treatment of the rise and fall of Elliot Spitzer who started out as an attorney general dedicated to cleaning up Wall Street but who ended up in ignominy after being exposed as buying the services of $2000 per hour call girls. But as Gibney makes clear, his exposure was almost certainly the result of a vendetta by powerful Wall Street interests who resented his challenge to their criminal behavior.

Elliot Spitzer, unlike Barack Obama, came from a socially prominent and wealthy family. His father Bernard was a real estate tycoon worth $500 million in 2008. We learn that the family would sit around dinner table at night discussing current events, often heatedly. From early in life, Elliot Spitzer—to the manor born—aspired to the kind of reform politics that have virtually disappeared from the Democratic Party. As economist Doug Henwood astutely noted during the 2008 primaries, figures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama from more modest backgrounds tend to be deferential to the ruling class while those who emerge from it, like FDR, are more willing to take it on. This has to be understood of course in terms of defending the system against those whose shortsighted behavior goes against its long-term interests. Such is the crisis of bourgeois politics today that no politician is willing to stick his or her neck out in defense of the very system that it rests on.

As Attorney General, Spitzer went after Wall Street abuses with great relish. As a typical former high school athlete and alpha male lawyer, he saw this combat as one conducted to the death—figuratively speaking. In one of his most high-profile cases, he tried to prevent Richard Grasso, the CEO of the NY Stock Exchange, from retiring with a package worth $140 million. Grasso had made lots of friends over the years with men just as powerful as himself, who joined the battle against Spitzer. Twi of them are interviewed throughout the movie and come across as total sleazebags, just as you would expect.

One was Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the former CEO of AIG who had his own beef with Spitzer, after he had conducted an investigation of fraudulent business activities at AIG that led eventually to Greenberg’s resignation. Greenberg, now 85, comes across as a lizard-like gnome who is incapable of telling the truth, stating at one point that if he had remained head of AIG it never would have been bailed out.

Another of Spitzer’s nemeses is Kenneth Langone, co-founder of Home Depot and a former director of the NY Stock Exchange. He was responsible for putting together Grasso’s retirement package. He is even more repulsive than Greenberg, if that is imaginable.

After getting elected governor of NY, largely on the basis of his anti-corruption record, Spitzer was determined to clean up Albany. With his sharp elbows, he came into conflict immediately with Joseph Bruno, the Majority Leader of the NY State Senate who was an amateur boxer and widely viewed as corrupt. Interviewed as well throughout the film, Bruno comes across as the sort of character you would meet on “The Sopranos”. Just as Spitzer butted heads with Grasso and his supporters on Wall Street, he went after Bruno not long after taking office. In one phone conversation with Bruno, Spitzer described himself as a “fucking steamroller”. When Bruno was charged with using helicopters for private use, Spitzer was accused of Richard Nixon dirty tricks for supposedly using state troopers to follow Bruno around—hence the term Troopergate.

Eventually, Roger Stone enters the picture as someone determined to bring Spitzer down. Hired by Bruno, Stone, an amateur body-builder, is arguably one of the most grotesque figures ever to operate from the rightwing fringes of the Republican Party. Referring to himself as a “hitman”, Stone resigned from Robert Dole’s campaign staff in 1996 after it was found out that he and his wife advertised in “adult” magazines looking for other couples to “swing” with. Obviously, he was in a good position to sniff out Spitzer’s secret life. Stone had to stop working for Bruno after leaving a profanity-laced message on Bernard Spitzer’s phone about how he was going to bring his son down.

We also meet the proprietor of the Emperor’s Club that procured call girls for him, including Angelina whose trysts with Spitzer at the Mayflower Hotel became fodder for the tabloids, as well as the NY Times. In total disgrace, Spitzer resigned and went into seclusion until very recently. He has reemerged as a host of a CNN show that I have ignored up till now, but will probably tune in out of curiosity. I have seen Spitzer doing commentary on MSNBC making the same kinds of anti-Wall Street points as other hosts, but he has the distinction of making them during the time that Wall Street was booming.

I should add that nothing I wrote above should be interpreted as an after-the-fact endorsement of Spitzer. Ever since “peace candidate” LBJ escalated the war in Vietnam, I have never voted for a Democrat. In 2006, Marty Goodman, an old friend from my Trotskyist days who is involved with Transit Workers Union reform and adheres to “old school” Trotskyism, asked me to send an article he wrote taking exception to his union’s endorsement of Spitzer. Here is his introduction:

As a TWU Local 100 Executive Board member I cannot contain my rage and will not remain silent about my union’s humiliating endorsement of Democratic Party candidates in this November’s election, particularly the candidacy of Eliot Spitzer for governor. The endorsements were made in time for the Democratic Party primary this Tuesday. [Unlike others, my vote was not sought in an undemocratic Executive Board phone vote on endorsements.]

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Like Roger Stone, Jack Abramoff was into pumping iron. Unlike him, however, he lived the puritanical life of an orthodox Jew, a faith he adopted as a high school after seeing “Fiddler on the Roof” and as a kind of rebellion against his secular parents.

Once he started college, Abramoff became an avid Republican this time as an act of rebellion against the left. In no time at all, he became head of the Young Republicans national organization and a major player in rightwing causes. One of his early partners in the Young Republicans was Grover Nordquist who would become a powerful opponent of an equitable tax system. He also got close to Ralph Reed, another emerging rightwing shit-bag.

These characters adopted the surface style of the New Left but for rightwing causes. They loved to burn leftist enemies of the U.S. effigy and stage publicity stunts of the sort that Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin pioneered. Not long after graduating college, Abramoff organized a kind of counter-revolutionary convention in Angola that had Jihadists from Afghanistan, Nicaraguan contras and Savimbi’s UNITA in attendance.

Growing up in Beverly Hills, Abramoff became a film buff. This would lead him to produce a movie called “Red Scorpion” in 1989 that was close in spirit to the sort of Reaganite junk being turned out by Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris. It stars Dolph Lundgren as a KGB operative who becomes converted to the anti-Communist guerrilla movement led by a Savimbi type figure. The NY Times’s Stephen Holden summed up the movie this way:

As directed by Joseph Zito, ”Red Scorpion” has the logic and pace of an adventure comic. The moment the going gets slow, a helicopter or a tank appears to blow everything in sight to smithereens, often to the musical accompaniment of Little Richard hits. The movie’s reflective moments belong to Mr. Lundgren’s sweaty chest.

Using connections made in the Young Republicans, Abramoff launched a career as a super-lobbyist with particularly close ties to the awful Tom DeLay. Work with two of his clients is examined in grizzly detail in Gibney’s first-rate film.

Abramoff was the “go to” man in Washington for the mostly Chinese sweatshop owners in Saipan, an island in the Northern Marianas, an American Commonwealth. East Asian workers were recruited for jobs that paid below the minimum wage while the commonwealth status allowed the label to say “Made in the USA”. Workers were charged exorbitant sums to get the jobs and often had to work for months without pay in order to meet their debts, a status close to slavery. Women who sought to get off the treadmill often took jobs as prostitutes just so they could get the money to return home. Abramoff took delegations of mostly Republican politicians to Saipan to give their stamp of approval while they stayed at a 5 star hotel and played golf.

In another filthy operation that would eventually land him in prison and lose Tom DeLay his cushy job in Washington, Abramoff became a lobbyist for Indian tribes with gambling casinos, hence the name of the movie. They got some favors from the politicians, but of negligible value to the Indians at the grass roots levels. All of their millions went to line the coffers of politicians like DeLay, to support the life-style of Abramoff and his partners in crime, and to various rightwing causes inimical to Indian interests. All the while Abramoff was writing email to his cohorts describing his clients as “morons” and “monkeys”.

Abramoff served 3 ½ years of a six-year sentence and is now living in a halfway house in Baltimore where he has a job paying $7.50 per hour at a kosher pizzeria. He is one of the most evil people that has been churned up in the 25 year period of reaction we are enduring and Alex Gibney’s documentary reveals every wart on the toad.

Two gangster movies

Just by coincidence, two very flawed but interesting gangster movies came my way recently, taking entirely different approaches to their anti-heroes. Both open soon in New York and are worth the price of admission, especially if you can get a senior discount like me.

Jean-Francois Richet’s Mesrine: Killer Instinct is the first part of a biopic about Jacques Mesrine who was public enemy number one for many years in France until he was ambushed and killed by 80 cops in August, 1979. It is deliberately and forcefully anti-romantic. Played skillfully by Vincent Cassel, this is a Mesrine lacking entirely in the bogus chivalry of the Corleone family in Francis Coppola’s classic. You sit through 113 minutes of sheer brutality, mesmerized by Cassel’s ability to convey malevolence and little else.

Quite the opposite, Johnnie To’s Vengeance is a highly romanticized fantasy about Chinese triad gangsters being willing to sacrifice their own lives in a quest to take vengeance on another group of gangsters who left a French restaurateur’s daughter mortally wounded, while killing her Chinese husband and children in a raid. Johnny Halliday, a French rock-and-roll musician from the 1960s–not a very good actor, I’m afraid–plays Francis Costello, the restaurateur who has hired the three hit men he ran into at his hotel just after they finished a contract killing. Yes, friends, Hong Kong movies dote on coincidence. The main appeal of the movie is its stylized camera-work and noirish touches that To has mastered to the point of perfection.

Abdel Raouf Dafri, the son of Algerian immigrants who wrote the screenplay for Mesrine, told the Independent: “The honourable bandit is a meaningless notion.” One can understand why he might be more repelled by Mesrine than the average screenwriter since Mesrine was a veteran of the French army in Algeria, who is seen torturing FLN captives in the beginning of the film. After he returns to France at the end of the war, he joins a gang led by Guido (played brilliantly by Gerard Depardieu who has achieved late Brando proportions) who is an operative in the fascist OAS.

After a crime spree in France has made Mesrine a marked man, wanted both by cops and rival gangsters, he flees to Quebec where he takes a job as a structural ironworker high on top of buildings under construction. One day he strikes up a conversation with a fellow worker up on a girder who turns out to be an operative in the Front de libération du Québec, an urban guerrilla group. Before long they start robbing banks together.

Now all of this might suggest that there might be some interesting political dimensions to the film, given these connections to the ultraright and ultraleft. However, despite the words of the director in the press notes that Mesrine was “a true rebel” who didn’t like the laws, because “they are made for the rich”, none of this can be found in the movie. Perhaps that is because the screenwriter did not see him this way at all. The Independent quotes him:

And Mesrine as a political activist? What a joke! His revolt against the high security prisons? An imposture. [When in prison] he had the screws lighting up his cigars for him…. Let’s get real. Mesrine was a clown.”

Mostly the movie is content to unfold as a series of vignettes, none lasting more than a couple of minutes, that show Mesrine carrying out bold robberies and beating up or killing people who get in his way. Some of this is done with panache, but mostly it is repellent. One scene in particular struck me as the Algerian screenwriter’s manifest desire to portray Mesrine as a disgusting animal. After an Arab pimp has slashed the face of a prostitute that Mesrine had a relationship with, he and Guido take him for the proverbial ride. Sitting between them, the Arab listens to them tell one racist joke after another until they tie him up and shoot him. This bid for realism is commendable, but the net effect is rather like listening to Rush Limbaugh especially in light of everything we know about how Arabs have been treated in “the war on terror”.

Vengeance, the fourth film I have seen by Johnnie To, displays the usual themes and preoccupations of the veteran director. They all involve male bonding, primarily between cops and/or gangsters, and a fatalistic journey toward martyrdom as the main characters give up their lives for some code of honor. A typical To movie includes at least 3 or 4 gun battles that are as choreographed as a Balanchine ballet.

His primary influence would appear to be the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, which also featured stylized gunplay and male bonding. In order to take a Johnnie To movie seriously on its own terms, it is necessary to buy into the idea that a triad gangster would be capable of selfless behavior. In Vengeance the plot revolves around something of a gimmick. The French restaurateur, who was a cop long ago, has a bullet lodged in his head that threatens to erase his memory in Alzheimer fashion. At some point there is a question of whether he remembers that his daughter’s family has been killed, thus allowing his hired assassins to take their money and go on their way. They decide to carry on the struggle nevertheless. I had a hard time believing that a gangster would act in this fashion, but would probably prefer to see this kind of fable most days of the week than sit through another movie featuring the disgusting pig Jacques Mesrine.

The most memorable scene in Vengeance takes place in a park near the seaside late at night, when Costello and his three henchmen corner the hit men who killed his son-in-law and grandchildren. Just when they are ready to take out their guns and open fire, the killers’ wives and kids join them at the picnic table where they are sitting. Costello’s gang sits on top of a hill, waiting to be alone with their rivals. An enormous full moon can be seen in the sky above as the children throw brightly colored Frisbee-like toys in the air that hover like flying saucers as the tension mounts.

There’s nothing like this in Mesrine, a movie that does not flinch from depicting the sheer ugliness and brutality of gangster life. One imagines that it will be harder and harder to romanticize gangsters in movies, given the revulsion felt toward criminal behavior in a period dominated by what some liberal pundits call banksters.

While this is commendable, I am not sure whether this can facilitate fully realized drama based on characters that the audience can identify with. When looking through the press notes for Mesrine, I noticed that Abdel Raouf Dafri was also the screenwriter for A Prophet, a highly touted (97 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes) movie about prison life and gangsters that I received countless press invitations but never got around to seeing. An early “rotten” review had convinced me that I probably would have ended up experiencing it with the same sense of dismay as Mesrine:

If you want your melodrama red in tooth and claw, Jacques Audiard’s prison movie A Prophet has been wowing critics and winning awards around the world. I’m only sorry I can’t join in the chorus of wholehearted approval.

It’s the story of Malik (Tahar Rahim), a 19-year-old French thug with Arab origins, coming of age within a brutalising prison system. It’s partly a story of self-education, partly a tale of a man descending into a kind of amoral hell. Most reviews emphasise the first aspect.

Very few point out that the behaviour of the protagonist – which includes several gruesome murders – makes him extremely hard to identify with.

Just around the time that A Prophet was garnering rave reviews, I made the mistake of sitting through another movie about a man descending into a kind of amoral hell. Like Mesrine, this was a biopic about a psychopathic criminal and jailbird.

I am referring to Bronson, a movie about the British criminal Michael Gordon Peterson who named himself after the American movie star famous for his hard-boiled characters, especially in the Death Wish series about an urban vigilante.

The movie consists of one scene after another showing Bronson beating up prison guards or being beaten by them. Like Mesrine, Bronson was a master at manipulating the press in a fashion best known by leftists through the example of Abby Hoffman.

There are a number of set scenes in the movie that pit Bronson against a gang of prison guards determined to beat him into submission. In one confrontation, Bronson strips naked and covers himself with grease, the better to fend up his captor’s fists and clubs.

As is the case with Mesrine, who like Michael Gordon Peterson came from a respectable middle-class family, you don’t have a clue to what drives him to such anti-social behavior. The movies are far less interested in psychology than they are in spectacle. All in all, you are dealing with a carnival freak show reformatted as art movie.

This is what I wrote about Bronson last November:

A major disappointment. Directed by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, who brought us the incomparable Pusher trilogy about the dregs of Copenhagen society, this is a character study of a British psychopath named Michael Peterson who spent 34 years in prison (he is still there), 30 of them in solitary confinement. He calls himself Charlie Bronson in homage to the American b-movie actor who practically defined what it means to be a tough buy. An attempt is made to make him interesting in a kind of Jean Genet fashion, but mostly you are left wondering why you spent $10 or so watching a violent prisoner who lives for the day when he can get naked and fight prison guards six at a time. I wasted nearly two hours trying to figure out why I was wasting my time at no expense other than my customary irritation at crappy movies.

Living in a period of diminished cultural as well as economic expectations, one would hope for but remain pessimistic about the rise of a new generation of film makers who first of all understood that if you are going to make a movie about gangsters, you have to make them three-dimensional characters. With the virtual retirement of Francis Ford Coppola and the decline of Martin Scorsese who turned out a pale imitation of “Infernal Affairs”, a Hong Kong masterpiece about triad gangsters, you really have to wonder who is up to the task. There are of course lots of biopics that would be a lot more interesting than Mesrine, even if they fail to include any gunplay. With characters like Bernie Madoff sitting on the throne once occupied by Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel, you’d think that a budding screenwriter would leap at the opportunity to dramatize a real public enemy.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct (part one) opens August 13th at the Angelika Theater.

Vengeance will be available as an IFC download from Time-Warner cable on August 4th.

Everyone’s watching us

Jimmy Conway, crime boss

A scene from “Goodfellas” between gang leader Jimmy Conway, played by Robert DeNiro, and Johnny Roastbeef, one of his henchmen who took part with him in a big robbery at JFK airport:

Jimmy Conway: Who’s this?

Johnny Roastbeef: This is my wife. Come here. I want to show you something, Jimmy. Isn’t she gorgeous? I bought it for my wife. It’s a coupe. I love that car.

Conway: What did I tell you? I talked to you, didn’t I? Didn’t I say not to go buy anything for a while? The fucking car.

Roastbeef: It’s a wedding gift from my mother. It’s under her name. I just got married. I love that car.

Conway: Are you nuts?

Roastbeef: Why are you getting excited?

Conway: Are you stupid? We got a million bulls out there. Everyone’s watching us.

Roastbeef: It’s under my mother’s name. It’s a wedding gift.

Conway: I don’t give a fuck. Didn’t you hear what I said? Don’t buy anything. Don’t get anything. What’s the matter with you?

****

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman-Sachs boss

New York Post, August 4, 2009
Goldman Princes Told: Spend Like Paupers
By Mark Decambre

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has warned his employess to avoid making big-ticket, high-profile purchases as the gold-plated Wall Street firm hunkers down amid a firestorm of public and political anger over outsize bonus payments.

According to sources at the bank, Blankfein has Goldman in particular, should be toned down in light of the billions in bailout money that banks, including Goldman, have gotten from Uncle Sam.

A source within the bank said Blankfein first began calling for an end to the conspicuous consumption late last year, but has stepped up his campaign in recent weeks as the White House has sought to rein in compensation and as the firm has gotten dinged by a pair of high-profile magazine articles.

“This is a sensitive time for us, and [Blankfein] wants to make sure that we’re not being seen living high on the hog,” said one Goldman exec.

Indeed, the exec said that senior managers were ordered to tell their staffs that just because Goldman made a record second-quarter profit of $2.3 billion, they shouldn’t bank on getting a fat bonus just yet. Blankfein was quoted as reminding staff that bonuses are based on full-year results, and that the year is far from over.

Blankfein’s admonishing of workers about profligate spending comes as the firm has been hit with a barrage of negative press lately over its uncanny ability to make money not only in the best of times — but also the worst.

A Rolling Stone article referred to the firm as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” while a recent New York magazine piece floated the idea that Goldman benefited from the rescue of troubled insurance giant American International Group.

A spokeswoman declined to comment.

Goldman’s speedy recovery in the wake of the global recession and the demise of many of its rivals has drawn more outrage than awe.

Observers question everything from the bank’s massive pay to its uncanny ability to serve as a incubator for Washington policymakers. Goldman alumni include former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin, and Jon Corzine, the current New Jersey governor and former US senator.

Goldman accepted $10 billion in rescue funds from Uncle Sam to help it stay afloat last year amid a crisis of confidence on Wall Street but quickly repaid the money thanks to record revenues.

The Goldman exec said that while Blankfein was cajoling workers to cut back on their spending to avoid negative publicity, he was also playing cheerleader.

In a company-wide voice mail left last week, the CEO assured employees that management is “focused on addressing the negative news and that [Goldman] remains committed to integrity and excellence.”

“I know you’re all working hard,” he added.

mark.decambre@nypost.com

Bernie Madoff performs public service

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/boldface-names-from-the-madoff-customer-list/

February 5, 2009, 10:03 am Boldface Names from the Madoff Customer List

For weeks, the list of prominent people known to be caught up in Bernard L. Madoff’s investing scandal has been growing. And the roster got a flurry of new additions late Wednesday, when the names of thousands of customers of Mr. Madoff’s now-infamous firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, were made public in bankruptcy-court filings.

The 163-page list included notable figures from the worlds of sports, politics and business; DealBook highlighted a few below.

Some caveats: The list includes anyone who responded to advertisements placed by the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of the firm, and not every name on the list is necessarily a victim of Mr. Madoff’s reputed $50 billion Ponzi scheme. There was no indication how much money, if any, each customer invested.

From baseball: Sandy Koufax, the Hall of Fame pitcher and Dodgers legend (also an old friend of Fred Wilpon, the Mets owner who was also burned by the Madoff scheme) and Tim Teufel, a former Mets second baseman.

From entertainment and the media: John Malkovich, the actor; the estate of John Denver, the late singer; and Larry King, the talk-show host.

From politics: Frank Lautenberg, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, and Mark Green, the former public advocate of New York City.

From the business world: Larry Silverstein, the New York real estate developer.

As the media combed through the list for names, one in particular seemed to catch nearly everyone’s attention: Ira Lee Sorkin, Mr. Madoff’s own lawyer.

—

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/1967317.stm

Saturday, 4 May, 2002, 08:21 GMT 09:21 UK

MP stunned at actor’s outburst A Scottish Labour MP is taking legal advice after the Hollywood star John Malkovich allegedly said he would like to shoot the politician.

Malkovich is reported to have said that the Glasgow Kelvin MP, George Galloway, was one of two people he would most like to kill.

The source of Malkovich’s anger appears to be Mr Galloway’s condemnation of Israel’s action against Palestinians and his criticism of the west’s policies on Iraq.

The actor was addressing students at the Cambridge union debating society when he was asked who he would most like to “fight to the death”.

Malkovich, star of movies including Dangerous Liaisons and the Killing Fields, replied: “I’d rather just shoot them.”

He named Mr Galloway and The Independent newspaper’s Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk.

Union spokesman Julian Blake said: “He had been speaking to the union president before the event and he mentioned then that he read the British press and had been following George Galloway’s comments.

“People were fairly surprised when he brought him up though.”

‘Terrorism climate’

The actor did not explain exactly why he disliked Mr Galloway. He said only that Mr Galloway did not tell the truth.

Mr Galloway said he was astonished that the actor should have such animosity against him.

The MP said he assumed that his outspoken criticism of American policy in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Iraq was behind the outburst.

“In the current climate of terrorism and violence and so on, if it was a joke it is not very funny and if it wasn’t a joke, he will be hearing from my lawyers,” he added.

“We can have a high noon at the Old Bailey if he likes.

‘Very strange man’

“His comments are especially dangerous because in a couple of days’ time, I will be in the Palestinian Authority visiting President Arafat and there are a lot of bullets flying around there.”

Malkovich is in the UK filming Johnny English with Rowan Atkinson and Natalie Imbruglia.

Mr Galloway asked: “Who can get inside the head of John Malkovich, a very strange man offering a dangerous liaison – indeed, offering a killing field?”

Last month, Mr Galloway renewed his call for people in Scotland to boycott goods from Israel in response to violence in the Middle East.

Chase Manhattan Late Fee

One of the things I inherited from my father is fiscal responsibility. I pride myself, just as he did, on paying my bills on time and not going into debt unless it is absolutely necessary. The biggest debt I ever accrued in my life was for college tuition and it was paid off promptly.

Back in 7^th grade, we were taught how to balance a checking account and the lessons have stuck with me. Every time either I or my wife uses our ATM cards, we put the charge slip into a little basket on my desk and when I get a chance I enter a batch of them into MS Money. And when I get my Chase banking statement each month, I reconcile the Chase transactions against what I entered in MS Money in the same way that I learned in the 7^th grade.

I also use Chase Online to pay my bills. Since more and more credit cards impose stiff penalties if you are even a day late, I make sure to check the time it takes for a payment to register. Some accounts take a day or two, but most are flagged as “same day”. So when I last paid my Chase Visa bill on September 2^nd, the same day it was due, I assumed that there would not be a penalty.

So given my anal retentiveness around these questions and my hatred for banking institutions, you can imagine my consternation when I discovered that I incurred a $29 late fee. I called Chase and discovered that according to their records, my payment was received on September 3^rd, not the 2^nd. After insisting emphatically that their records were wrong, I finally discovered how I was snookered into a late charge following the logic of Kafka novel.

The Chase help desk operator directed me to the reverse side of the statement which has “Information About Your Account”. In the second paragraph (“Crediting of Payments”), it states that “Payments made electronically through our automated telephone service, Customer Service advisors, or our website will be subjected to any processing times disclosed for those payments.” He then added that the processing time for payments made through Chase Online usually take 2 to 3 business days even though the system tells you that it is same day. I asked where the information about 2 to 3 business days can be found since it was certainly not within “Information About Your Account”. He replied that it was on the Agreement I received after signing up for a Visa Card. I laughed bitterly when I heard this, since my Visa Card is at least 20 years old and asked him who the hell would hold on to a 20 year old Agreement form? He assured me that he would be happy to mail me one.

Does this sound like Chase is trying to rip people off? Perish the thought but it appears that big banks are relying more and more on this line of business in the face of declining profits.

The Harper’s Magazine Index for October 2008 reports:

Percentage of Citigroup profits in 2006 that came from credit cards: 18

Percentage last year: 79

That’s a huge increase. Although Harper’s does not analyze the statistics, it seems pretty obvious that traditional profit sources have dried up, most especially home mortgages one must assume.

The Naderite Public Research Interest Group reported:

SKYROCKETING LATE FEES: The survey found average late fees of $27.61. Credit card companies are reaping more profit than ever before from late fee income, for three reasons: (1) the average late fee has more than doubled in ten years, (2) companies have decreased the amount of time between when they mail a bill and when payment is due; and (3) nearly two-thirds of companies have eliminated leniency periods, and have begun to impose late fees immediately.

“Credit card marketing has become reckless and deceptive, and sometimes violates consumer protection laws,” said Mierzwinski. “These deceptive tactics are used by some of the country’s largest card issuers and affect millions of consumers each year.”

Some of the largest credit card companies have recently paid major settlements and penalties in lawsuits by consumers and civil actions by the government, for amounts ranging from $7-105 million. Alleged practices include purposely posting monthly payments late in order to increase cardholders’ APRs and to gain more late fee income. For example, Providian was found by the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the San Francisco District Attorney to have violated the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits unfair and deceptive practices, when it said a card had no annual fees, even though mandatory monthly fees on the card totaled $156/year. The bank agreed to settle the charges and had to pay consumer restitution of $300 million.

I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything that much different from a bank founded by John D. Rockefeller Jr., the architect of the Ludlow Massacre. On April 20, 1914, when he sat on the board of the Colorado Fuel and Iron company (his father owned a majority of the shares), the Colorado National Guard opened fire on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners. 20 people, 11 of them children, died during the attack.

Killing strikers or extorting late fees from poor schmucks like me boils down in the final analysis to the imperatives of profit-making. When you put the almighty dollar on the altar, all sorts of devilish behavior ensues. Maybe the mammoth disgust with financial institutions boiling up over the 700 billion dollar bailout will finally put these bloodsuckers on the defensive. There must be millions of other people who feel like their bank has “mugged” them, as I put it to the poor soul making a living at the Chase help desk who had to suffer the wrath of Louis Proyect.

UPDATE

Posted to PEN-L and Marxism mailing list by economist Michael Perelman:

In The Confiscation of Economic Prosperity, I have a short section on fees (and other costs borne almost exclusively by the poor), because such costs do not count when the government measures real income. I think it is an important subject. A former student who works for the BLS tried to interest people there in the question, but without success.

In addition, the reported income of the poorer segments of society does not account for the many extra expenses that poor people pay. For example, the data ignores the late fees that banks and other corporations charge. In 2004, banks, thrifts, and credit unions collected a record $37.8 billion in service charges on accounts, more than double what they received in 1994, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the National Credit Union Administration. Banks continue to raise fees for late payments, low balances, and over-the-limit charges to as much as $39 per violation. Some banks even charge for speaking with a service representative. Naturally, these fees predominately fall on the poor (Chu 2005; Foust 2005).

Insurance companies charge more for people in poor neighborhoods. The poor also find themselves at the mercy of predatory lenders. To make matters even worse, their food costs more because they lack convenient access to grocery stores. Even though the government disregards these factors in assembling its statistics about wealth and income, they can be significant (Brookings Institution 2006).

Human Connections

It is easy to become inured to the steady diet of sensationalist crime stories in the New York news media, but the torture and rape of a Columbia University journalism student over a 19 hour period in April 2007 spoke to me in a way that others didn’t. I felt more connected since she was a Columbia student (I have been employed by the university since 1990) and because the incident took place in her Hamilton Heights apartment, a Harlem neighborhood that is rapidly being gentrified just like the rest of Harlem.

Hamilton Heights begins just 4 blocks from my office in the Manhattanville neighborhood that Columbia will be expanding into over the objections of some community groups. It is clear that the intention of the university and its allies in the real estate industry is to “improve” the neighborhood. Such a desire led to the famous campus rebellion of 1968 when students resisted the war in Vietnam and Columbia’s plans to build a new gymnasium in Morningside Park over the objections of the Black community.

The Columbia student, whose name was not released to the press as is customary in rape cases, was victimized by Robert A. Williams, a homeless man who had followed her into her building. He was found guilty of attempted murder, rape and arson last Tuesday. The arson charge stemmed from a fire he lit beneath the futon he had tied her to and from which she managed to escape.

A June 10^th NY Times article recounted her desperate efforts to make some kind of emotional connection with Williams, who had already raped her and made clear his intention to kill her.

When the rapist asked her to turn on her iPod, she said, a Bob Dylan song popped up. She asked if he liked Bob Dylan. “I don’t know who that is,” he responded.

The prosecutor, Ann P. Prunty, asked the woman why she struck up that conversation.

“I wanted to have some kind of human connection so he wouldn’t kill me,” the woman said.

No matter how much Williams was determined to dehumanize his victim by raping and torturing her (he slit her eyelids and sealed her mouth with glue at one point), she kept struggling to break through the enormous abyss that separated them.

After the conversation about Bob Dylan and after Mr. Williams had her make him a microwave meal and some tea, he asked her a series of questions. He picked up a book she had, “A Savage War of Peace,” about the fight for independence in Algeria, and asked her, “Do you like black people from Africa?”

She told him yes.

Later, after looking at her Connecticut driver’s license, he asked her if she was on the run from the law and other questions about her encounters with the police. She said she believed that he wanted to find out if she had anything to lose by going to the police. So she told him, “I can’t go to the cops.”

She said she wanted to let him “infer whatever that meant, that I was somehow in trouble with the law.”

At a lull, she told him: “Well, I guess you know my name. What’s your name?” She said he told her to shut up. The woman told Ms. Prunty that she was “trying to bring some element of humanity into it.”

The state of reporting being what it is at the newspaper of record, I am not surprised that the reporter did not bother to draw out the powerful associations between Horne’s book and the human tragedy taking place in the student’s apartment. Horne’s book is one of the most respected accounts of the war in Algeria, but very much written from the point of view of “what went wrong”, like the rafter of books written by former Bush administration officials attacking his ineptitude. One can only assume that if the occupation of Iraq had met no resistance that not a single one of these books would have been written.

Indeed, Bush once told an interviewer that he was reading Horne’s book himself. One supposes that he was looking for helpful hints to put down the Iraqi resistance. When Horne learned that Bush found his book “most useful,” he told Salon.com that he was “stunned.” Originally a supporter of the war, Horne–like most of sentient humanity–began to retreat from that position. He was especially averse to the use of torture, since one of the lessons of the Algerian war is that it is counter-productive. This, indeed, is the universal criterion adopted by both liberal and conservative critics of the war in Iraq. If it is not working, then there must be a change. Implicitly, if the war were going well–as it had in the invasion of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s–there would be no objection.

I relied heavily on Horne’s book for my review of “Battle in Algiers”. It thoroughly documented the torture meted out to FLN captives in order to wrest information about the underground. In an epoch where torture has become the modus operandi of imperialist powers in their overseas adventures, it should not come as any surprise that psychopaths would mete out the same kind of treatment to their hapless victims. If Mr. Williams had watched the evening news over the past few years, he would have noted Alberto Gonzalez’s strenuous efforts to legitimize water-boarding and all the rest. If the President of the United States can get away with torture, why should a homeless man with a grudge against white America be held to account?

It is also worth noting that Horne’s book focused on the Casbah, the “native quarters” of Algiers that was feared and despised by the French colonists. Harlem, of course, is our Casbah. Like its Algiers counterpart, it is also a place with a certain kind of allure for the outsider. The trailer for the 1938 movie Algiers included the tag line “Come with me to the Casbah”, just as white Manhattanites frequented Harlem jazz clubs in the 20s and 30s. With the arrival of 1960s militancy and the subsequent crime waves driven by drugs and poverty, Harlem became a no man’s land. However, the real estate squeeze has made it attractive once again, both for bargain hunters and for a major university looking to expand.

The intense racial and economic pressures that led to the journalism student’s ordeal have been part of the fabric of New York life for quite a long time. Like many third world cities that mix super-rich and super-poor populations cheek by jowl, there are outbursts of violent crime that shock the news commentators. It is only surprising that there are so few of them given the extreme class differences and the indifference of those at the top.

Finally, I should reveal that I felt a connection with the Columbia student’s ordeal because I went through one myself, and, like her, found a way to connect with the humanity of my victimizers.

In late 1977, just after entering the alcove of my apartment building on West 69^th Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West around 6pm, I was accosted by two youths–one African-American and the other Latino–who demanded my money. Since there was only about 5 dollars in my wallet, they decided to force me into my apartment where they thought more money or goods could be found.

Although they did not show me a weapon, I acceded to their demands since I didn’t want to risk being stabbed or shot over items that could be easily replaced–as opposed to my life.

Once inside the apartment, they noticed prints of chimpanzees and gorillas on the wall that the Black mugger interpreted as proof of my racism. He threw me down on my bed and the two of them begin to punch me in the face, cursing me out all the while. The prints of course had nothing to do with race. A year or so earlier, when I had been living in Houston, I found myself growing more and more disaffected from the Socialist Workers Party, the sect-cult that I had belonged to for about a decade. When I saw the movie “Morgan”, I felt a powerful identification with the insane eponymous artist who was obsessed with Leon Trotsky and primates. That and nothing else led to my adorning my walls with their pictures (the apes, not Trotsky).

After about five minutes of being beaten, the Black attacker decided that “this motherfucker had to die” and placed a pillow over my head with the clear intention of suffocating me. After a minute or so, I decided to try to make a human connection and pushed the pillow off my face (which led to a new flurry of blows) and plea for my life. I told them:

“Look, you got the wrong guy. I am not a racist. Those pictures are just pictures. I have been fighting racism all my life. I work with the Militant, a socialist newspaper that Malcolm X supported. I just came to New York from Houston, Texas where my party’s headquarters were bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.”

I kept at it while I was being punched. Finally, my words must have made some kind of connection since the Black mugger announced to his accomplice that “he didn’t need a homicide rap”. They then tied me up with my neckties, blindfolded and gagged me. They picked me up like a trussed animal and carried me from room to room until they finally decided on the bathroom where they dumped me in my bathtub. For an agonizing moment or two, I cringed at the idea of a knife being plunged into my chest. When I heard them leave through the front door and walking down the stairs, I knew that I would live. I ended up with a broken nose and a stolen stereo, but that was about it.

A week or two later, I read in the N.Y. Times that a man had been found bound and gagged in an apartment about 3 blocks from my own. He was not so lucky. He died of stab wounds.

As American society and New York City in particular becomes more and more class divided, the underclass will continue to lash out at those who it deems to be responsible. Since the Donald Trumps and Michael Bloombergs of the world are protected by multiple layers of security, they will never become victims like me or the journalism student. Facing an unfolding crisis of monumental dimensions, their answer will be to defend the existing class system since it alone is capable of generating the “trickle down” wealth that is necessary to keep everybody happy. This lie will be challenged more and more by a population that sees its living standards diminished while the fat cats go to the opera and $100 per plate restaurants in their chauffeured limousines.

If a massive revolt of the American people eventually abolishes the privileges that the Trumps and the Bloombergs defend to the hilt, one of the side benefits might be a lowering of the class tensions that victimized me and the journalism student.

When I was involved with Nicaragua in the late 1980s, I was always struck by the account of street life in Managua given by solidarity activists. They said it was possible to walk all around the city late at night without fearing for your life or your property. Once the Sandinistas were overthrown, that came to an end as a desperate and atomized urban underclass resorted once again to mugging and burglary.

Happiness and security are realizable as long as one understands that the main obstacle to achieving them has to be removed, namely the private property system that pits one human being against another in a ruthless struggle for survival. When they describe this as the law of the jungle, they are slandering the animals who live there. Those animals only kill when they are hungry, while the big capitalists kill millions in order to enjoy the kind of privileges that the Kings and Queens of Europe enjoyed until they were toppled from their thrones.