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A Fall From Grace
A former Broadway actress turned war photographer--and a life unhinged
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 5/9/04

On a frigid December morning last year, two New York City police officers came upon a 52-year-old woman sitting on the stoop of a brownstone in Manhattan's tony West Village. She was wearing a leather coat over a blue sweater, gray sweat pants, and two ski hats. She had a cup of coffee in her hand, a sweet Hav-a-Tampa cigarillo in her mouth, and $1.91 in her pocket, all in change. She was surrounded by a bunch of plastic bags containing the vestiges of her life: a few changes of clothes, some cardboard for shelter, and a scrap of donated pizza.

Most important to the woman, however, was the stack of documents she kept in a manila envelope, wrapped in plastic to stave off moisture and stuffed in the front of her pants to protect them from theft. They were her identity, proof that she still mattered. Once she had no such doubts. In an earlier time, Jana Schneider was an award-winning Broadway actress who, in an extraordinary career change, became a daring war photographer. But then she disappeared. When she turned up again late last year, she looked like just another bag lady. Her name, once in lights, meant nothing to the two officers. Whether they feared she might freeze to death or because, as her doctors wrote later, she exhibited "paranoid ideations," Schneider was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center in lower Manhattan for psychiatric evaluation.

Bellevue is a few miles and a lifetime away from Broadway, where Schneider first experienced the heady taste of fame. The New York Times, describing her 1985 Broadway performance in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, had this to say: "She snarls like a tigress, baring her teeth and raking the air with blood-red talons; she slithers like a snake, lasciviously darting her tongue in and out with reptilian speed." Playing the half-Ceylonese Helena Landless, Schneider went on to earn a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination.

At Bellevue, Schneider was locked up in a psychiatric ward. A sign on the door cautions visitors against taking in sharp metal objects or allowing residents to "elope," a euphemism for escape. A woman who hated to be hemmed in, who had gone where she wanted when she wanted, Schneider was medicated and placed under constant observation, her nights filled with the screams and rants of other patients.

The tigress of the 1980s seems to have utterly vanished. Now middle-aged, Schneider wears schoolmarm glasses. Frail and soft-spoken, she seems lost in an oversize cotton sweater, her brown hair cut short and straight. Wherever she goes, Schneider carries her personal papers, the jigsaw pieces of her puzzling life. Beauty queen, actress, war photographer, Jana Schneider's story is simple, in some ways, a sobering arc of hope, ambition, and tragedy. During the course of her journey, she toted her cameras to some of the world's darkest places, documenting pain, suffering, and death. But now she is in a cruel dark place of her own, the personal hell of mental illness.

A STAR IS BORN

She was born Janet Ann Schneider on Oct. 24, 1951, the second of two children, in McFarland, Wis. Only 260 people lived in the little farm town at the time. Main Street was a gravel road divided by a massive oak. Jana's parents, Lloyd and Daphne, moved to McFarland not long after World War II. Lloyd set up his first law office in the back of a grocery, but he had big plans. He started McFarland's American Legion post, was a charter member of the Lions Club, and helped the town acquire the land for its only high school. The town, Jana Schneider recalls now, was "typical red, white, and blue Eisenhower." As a young girl, she adored her father, and the feeling was mutual. "My sister was an actress from age 2," says James, her brother, "and her most rave reviewer was her father." In high school, she blossomed on the stage, a rare talent who could both act and sing, according to Eugene Olson, her English teacher. Schneider had another thing going for her. She looked like a beauty queen and once placed first runner-up in the Miss Teen Wisconsin pageant.

A complex young woman, she showed compassion for the less fortunate but was also obsessive at times. Some people found her difficult to understand, recalls Steven Gibbs, her high school sweetheart. "It was terrible to get a letter from her because she'd fill it up, writing across the bottom and the sides and across the top." But what defined her? He thought for a minute, then says, "She had no fear." She certainly didn't worry about what people thought. During a final exam at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Schneider brought her pet ferret along, leaving it in her book bag to scratch about just outside the class. "A lot of students are reserved," says Robert Skloot, her drama professor. "But she was a kind of an independent free spirit, a forceful presence to contend with." Madison gave Schneider a taste of the world. The campus was a hotbed of activism against the Vietnam War. Schneider began shedding the mental constraints of her rural upbringing. In 1971, she visited Belfast, Northern Ireland, and saw violent demonstrations. No one, she recalls, was wandering around with a peace candle, as she had back in Madison.

HELLO, BROADWAY

As much as she was drawn to human conflict, Schneider craved the applause and footlights of the stage. In 1973, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin and lost no time packing her pickup and heading for New York. "She had no money," Gibbs recalls, "just a driver's license, and that was it."

Schneider never liked her first name, so in New York Janet became Jana. She found a ratty third-floor walk-up near the Theater District and enrolled in Circle in the Square, one of the city's premier acting schools. There were a few jobs, a play here, a voice-over there, a commercial, but nothing steady.

Slowly, the good parts started coming. In 1977, she was cast in Broadway's the Robber Bridegroom and went on tour as a featured player in Shenandoah. In 1982, she was brought in as a replacement in Othello. Her big break came three years later, when she was picked during an open audition for the Mystery of Edwin Drood. Based on an unfinished murder mystery by Charles Dickens, Drood won five Tonys. Part of its allure was that the audience was able to vote for its choice of killer and ending.

Competition was fierce. Whoever received the most audience votes as the killer got to perform a final solo. Some who worked on Drood recall that Schneider, who played the conniving Helena Landless, was often the audience's favorite. "She just vied for those votes," remembers Debbie Corwin, an associate producer. "I always remember thinking, 'I wonder what Jana will do tonight.' She just ate it up."

During her Broadway years, Schneider met Tom Wilson, a model and musician, while photographing an Irish relief rally in New York City. "He saw her across the room and thought she was beautiful," says his mother, Peg Shumacher."He was, I guess, smitten with her, as most boys get with someone who is glamorous and outgoing and sure of herself as Jana was." The couple married in 1986. The bridesmaids wore burgundy velvet dresses. The bride dressed simply in a style from the 1920s. "Jana was on her way up at the time," recalls Fran Bradfield, a close friend. The moneymen of Broadway were knocking on her door, and she was reading for some big names in Hollywood. But nothing jelled. When Schneider left Drood, in 1988, her marriage was fall-ing apart, and her moment in the bright lights seemed to have passed. "She had contracts signed for another production," Bradfield remembers, "then all of a sudden they decided they wanted to redo the cast and take it younger." Schneider was in her mid-30s. "That," Bradfield said, "hit her extremely hard."

She continued to work but became increasingly depressed, complaining about the politics of the theater. She needed to make a difference, Schneider told friends. Finally, she turned her back on the theater. She was going to reinvent herself, this time behind the lens of a camera.

IN THE WAR ZONES

Schneider had done some travel photography in Asia and had met several photojournalists whose work intrigued her. She had also talked with the heads of photo agencies about how to break into the business and learned that the quickest path to success was to go where others feared to tread. In October 1988, Schneider made her way to Sri Lanka. Her timing was great. Big stories--Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia--were coming, rapid-fire. Editors were desperate for good photographers unafraid of danger.

Guts, Schneider had. She traveled endlessly--Pakistan, India, Cuba, Angola, Baghdad, Sarajevo, Kabul, and cities across the former Soviet Union. "She was aggressive, very determined," Jim Colton, then U.S. bureau chief for the French photo agency SIPA, says, "and she wouldn't take no for an answer."Schneider was among a handful of photographers to document the retreat of Russian forces from Afghanistan and one of the few photographers to remain in Baghdad during the first Gulf War. Her photographs began appearing in newsmagazines around the world, including U.S. News . Recalls Richard Beeston, the diplomatic editor for the Times of London: "She was one of those larger-than-life characters."

At Bellevue, Schneider remembers her photos from this period as a patchwork of dark memories, clicking off the moments as if sifting through an old file:

Sri Lanka--"Four bodies, tortured to death, flies, their eyes open, rotting, stinking, hung, with threatening messages posted on them."

Afghanistan--"Young Soviet relaxing on his tank, with his helmet on and chewed down fingernails smoking a cigarette, and reading a book."

Iraq--"Moving searchlights and bright red tracers . . . time exposure of the nighttime sky."

Bosnia--"Terrible huge road, incinerating bombs, starting over the hill when one took off the side of the house, so we could see inside, like a dollhouse."

Many of her fellow journalists respected Schneider's aggressiveness and were amazed by her strength--she often carried upwards of 70 pounds of photo equipment and wanted to be among the band of brothers making their mark and their living by shooting images of the dangerous and the remote. But others criticized her ambition and worried about her disregard for personal safety. "This was her Everest, her noble calling, and she was absolutely prepared to do anything to succeed," says Edward Gorman, a writer for the Times of London with whom she traveled for nearly a year. "She was always trying to find this unbelievable image. This was probably behind her reckless approach because she felt that if she went that little bit further, people would notice." Asked what he meant, Gorman recounted the last time he saw Schneider, at a riot in Northern Ireland, in late 1989. While other journalists were hiding behind cars, he says, "in her typical way, she was wandering around in no-man's land with bricks flying."

Schneider was drawn to the excitement of "being out with all the other photographers," she says, emphasizing that she was "just covering stories" like them. "As a photographer, you have the news of the day, the news of the week, the news of the year, the news of the decade," she said during one of several interviews at Bellevue. "Each picture will reward you."

Schneider's aggressiveness was legendary. In May 1992, she turned up in Sarajevo. Retired Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, the Canadian commander of the United Nations forces in the former Yugoslav city, remembers Schneider vividly. "She was like a breath of fresh air, vivacious in the midst of all those stinky male journalists. I was impressed by her dedication. I told her she would end up either famous or dead." Many journalists had been wounded or killed, so they began working in a "pool," where one team went out and shared its photos with others. Not Schneider, though. "She was after getting the story," MacKenzie says, "not helping her colleagues."

Schneider's aggressiveness finally caught up with her. On June 17, 1992, she and a Slovenian journalist named Ivo Standeker crossed into a section of Sarajevo called Dobrinja. It was one of the most dangerous parts of the city, a war zone unto itself. Dobrinja was cut off from Sarajevo by Serbian gunmen, who made sport out of picking off Bosnian civilians in their apartments. Schneider and Standeker made it past the Serbian gunmen into Dobrinja, then stopped for a few seconds, so she could snap a photo. The view was of some white curtains blowing peacefully in an apartment window against the backdrop of a menacing Serbian tank looming on a hill. "Then I felt one of the worst blasts of sound and air that I had ever heard, and it threw me back through the air," she recalls, gripped by the bloody memory. The tank shot twice again. Two men rushed the journalists into an ambulance. Schneider tried to talk to Standeker, but he was vomiting. Then he fell unconscious. "It is such a serious part of my life, I don't want to misremember it," Schneider says now. "I haven't talked about it in a long time." Standeker died; Schneider was flown back to the United States to recover from shrapnel wounds to her legs and head.

The tragedy thrust Schneider back into the public eye. Newspapers across the United States reported on her injuries. People magazine and Street Stories, Ed Bradley's now defunct CBS television program, produced lengthy profiles. Each is a bit of an embarrassment for Schneider now. Bradley's program drew attention to her good works--particularly how she took care of Bosnian refugee Fikret Alic for months after his escape from a Serbian concentration camp. But Schneider also came off in the interview as a bit of a self-promoter. She risked going into war zones, she told Bradley, because she relished staring into "the corridor of death," adding that "there was no story if I didn't." Asked by Bradley how many times she had been raped while covering war, Schneider replied coolly: "More than once."

Schneider seemed to be back on her game. She started a fund for victims of the Bosnian conflict and traveled around Wisconsin talking about the ravages of war. Volvo asked her to star in a commercial. Schneider, naturally, obliged. The 90-second spot was shot in South Africa in 1994. A fast and sturdy car is critical to the photojournalist's career, the spot says, as Schneider intones, "I can't get a photograph if I'm not in position. This car gets me in that position. Equipment is everything: eyes, camera, car."

THE FALL

But this was all illusion. Inside, Schneider was troubled. She returned to Wisconsin from Bosnia deeply depressed, according to her family and friends. Behind the bravado, she was haunted by her part in Standeker's death and her own close call. She began to focus more on the victims of war. Among them was her friend Darja Lebar, a Slovenian journalist in Sarajevo who had been shot in the face a few months after Standeker died. Schneider helped Lebar raise money for her operations and find doctors to reconstruct her face, and gave her a place to stay at her parents' home in Wisconsin. "I couldn't open my mouth, and it took me eight months to learn how to speak again," Lebar says. "One operation was about $109,000, so Jana helped me out a lot."

Schneider also started working on a screenplay about her life and began seeing a psychologist to talk about trauma. After Lebar returned to Sarajevo, Schneider vowed to get back into journalism. "But she wasn't really up to it," Lebar says. Schneider became increasingly distressed, seemingly lost and erratic in her interests. Her brother, James, recalls that she began a prolonged legal fight over a rent-stabilized apartment she kept in New York and refused to settle. Work on her script stalled. She also began running up huge bills on credit cards, he says, and even bought an expensive horse, an Oldenburg jumper named Arctic Kachina Queen.

Schneider's mother-in-law, Peg Shumacher, had lost contact with her after Tom Wilson filed for divorce in the early 1990s. Then, in 1996, Schneider showed up at Wilson's funeral. She had changed drastically, Shumacher says. Schneider appeared haggard, was living out of her car, and seemed antagonistic, insulting two neighbors who offered condolences. "She was--before--very outgoing, and full of vim and vinegar," Shumacher recalls. "But the day of the funeral she was not good at all. She looked like a street person. I felt very bad for her."

Schneider's mother and other family members couldn't keep up with her wanderings. She called from time to time, usually requesting money from some place on the other side of the Earth, then often vanished before the money arrived. When her father died in January 1998, says Suzanne Severson, her cousin, "she just dropped out of the picture completely." Schneider didn't even make it to the funeral, a slight that Lloyd Schneider's American Legion post buddies still talk about today.

Schneider continued to wander. In 1999, she showed up in Slovenia at the home of Ivo Standeker's mother. Schneider called Darja Lebar and asked to meet her there. They hadn't talked in five years. When Lebar arrived, she says, Schneider looked unwell and complained repeatedly of conspiracies. "She was saying someone had made a plan to destroy her," Lebar remembers. "I was translating for her, and it was very difficult. I didn't want to upset Ivo's mother." Asked what she thought was going on, Lebar says: "A lot of people actually snapped after the war because they didn't deal with their issues. When I saw her, it was kind of like, I was always afraid that you go crazy after all of that. You go to sleep a normal person, then wake up crazy."

Eventually, Schneider turned up back in McFarland. It was at 3 in the morning on a freezing winter day. She was, says her brother James, "absolutely depleted." Schneider was traveling with several cats, and her brother says she continued to talk of conspiracies and secret communications. Family members were worried. They hid all the guns in the house and tried to persuade Schneider to enter a hospital. She refused. Instead, James says, she became combative and accused him of "stealing her estate." James was in charge of their father's property and all of the trusts he had set up before his death, a fact that still rankles Schneider. She left her mother's house two months later and set up residence in her father's empty office on Main Street, keeping resolutely to herself, even refusing to open the door to friends or family.

She spent some time in New Hampshire, but in early 2000 she took off on a trip around the United States in her Volvo wagon. Her companions: several parakeets and two Persian kittens named God and Bob. She drove to Washington, D.C., and watched the House of Representatives conduct business for a day, then headed down to Fort Myers, Fla., looking for a job. "I wanted anything from receptionist, to secretary, to maid," she says. No one would hire her, so she headed to Texas, intent on becoming a crime-scene photographer, then crossed into Mexico, hoping to get work at a U.S. government agency. Once again, no luck. Customs officers took her birds into custody when she crossed back over the border. By then, Schneider says, she was living off antique currency inherited from her father. Initially, she tried to sell the currency, mostly bills, but people "really weren't offering that much," Schneider says, because "they saw that I was in trouble." She ended up trading the money for little more than gas and food and landed, eventually, in Moose Pass, Alaska. Years before, she had filed a compensation claim against Iraq with a United Nations fund meant to help those who had lost property during Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Schneider's claim was for a little over $18,000, for confiscated camera equipment. Hearing that the money was about to be released, she waited in Moose Pass, whiling away the time in another search for work. "I didn't get any of the jobs, so I stayed in a hostel in Anchorage, and I also lived with a man, a great big blond-haired grizzly in Alaska," she says. "Then the money arrived."

Schneider wanted to start over again as a photojournalist and bought a plane ticket to Europe in early 2001. Beginning in Prague, she says, she hoped to do a story on fascism. Then she moved to Slovakia and on into Austria, where, she says, she bought more parakeets. "They made me happy," she explains. But there was to be no new journalism career. Instead, she continued traveling, first to Germany, then crossing into France, and, finally, Spain. She had a feeling she was being watched and wrote a long note, faxing it to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, expressing her concerns about "surveillance [and] harmful technology."

Life became even more dire. Her car died, and someone stole her keys, her jewelry, and the money she had left over from the United Nations. She hitchhiked to Italy. In late 2003, several American tourists found her wandering outside Rome, homeless and broke. A short time later, Udo Schreiber, who had been her Vienna-based photo agent during the war in the former Yugoslavia, received a call from the Austrian police. Schneider had illegally crossed into Austria from Italy. "She was on the street," he says, "very disturbed, not clear in her mind." Not long after, Schneider received help from Caritas Internationalis, a humanitarian agency in Vienna. "The man of Caritas said she spoke really quite strange things, that everybody of her family died," Schreiber says. "She was so strong a person, to be lost without anything on the streets, without a camera. This was unbelievable to me." Caritas bought Schneider a plane ticket to New York in late summer of 2003. In some of the paperwork she filled out for her return home, Schneider listed several contacts, including a retired Army colonel named Millard Peck, whom she had met in Bosnia. Tracked down in Virginia, where he lives now, Peck says he corresponded with Schneider over several years during the 1990s. "She was a very prolific writer, a wonderful writer, very artistic," he says. "She overwhelmed me." Told of her condition now, he added: "I attribute that to a girl with scars, to getting beaten up in Bosnia."

In New York, Schneider sailed through customs and immigration. Bedraggled, looking very much like a homeless woman, she carried no baggage and had no money. "There was no police, no questioning," she says. She hitched a ride to Manhattan. Then she started looking for shelters.

Life became a series of moves. Some shelters offered only food, some just a bed for a day or two at a time. Occasionally, she stayed with men, she says, who took pity on her. She was cited for vagrancy, she recalls, but the charges were dismissed. Then, on December 10, the police picked her up again. "They got a call about someone named Jana being boisterous and loud, but Jana was just sitting there quietly smoking a cigarette," she said recently. "However, I knew my days were up. It was getting too cold to survive outside anyway." The police took her to Bellevue, where her talk of extraordinary accomplishments seemed little more than the ravings of a deranged woman. A state court ordered her involuntarily committed.

At Bellevue, Schneider spent her days reconnecting with friends through the pay phone in the hall and talking with her court-appointed lawyer about her chances of getting out of the psychiatric ward. She was put on medication to help with her depression and to control what her doctors believed were psychotic episodes brought on possibly by schizophrenia. The medication seemed to be taking hold, and Schneider began trying to persuade family members to help her get back to Wisconsin. She wanted money from a trust to rent an apartment there and to see the psychiatrist who had helped her after her injury in Bosnia. Former mentors and friends were eager to help her reconnect with the community. And Schneider was already pondering what she'd like to do once she was well--maybe teach children back in Wisconsin or participate in community theater there.

But those hopes have vanished, at least for now. Bellevue, a mental health way station, doesn't provide long-term care. When she couldn't get family help, the hospital sought to transfer Jana to the Rockland Psychiatric Center, a soaring complex 18 miles north of New York City. Jana fought to be released. But in March, faced with sending Jana back into a city shelter or placing her in Rockland, a state court judge chose the latter. "The greatest fear I have is that she will become a part of this system," says Michael Genkin, her lawyer. Even patients who are very "accomplished,"Genkin explains, can easily be lost in the bureaucracy.

That is also Schneider's greatest fear. Before her recent move, she noted that on pleasant days patients were allowed on the roof of Bellevue. It is fenced and contains playground equipment, including a sandbox, jungle gym, and three yellow slides. But Schneider went up there for the view--to look out over the city's expanse of crooked rooftops, and the promise of a world just beyond her reach.

This story appears in the May 17, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

U.S. News & World Report

August 13, 2007 Monday

A Typeface for All Time

BYLINE: Kit R. Roane

SECTION: COVER STORY; Nineteen Fifty-Seven; Pg. 71

LENGTH: 787 words

HIGHLIGHT: Hardworking Helvetica gets the message across


It may look like the name of a hard rock band, but the beauty of Helvetica is that metaphorically speaking, it hardly makes a sound. Helvetica is a typeface, or more appropriately, the typeface of the 20th century. And, surely, it is the only typeface ever to have its 50th birthday observed with a major museum exhibit and an award-winning independent film.

"Helvetica is really a standout," says Christian Larsen, curator of the exhibition on the history of Helvetica at New York's Museum of Modern Art. "It helped define the typographic look of the 20th century, and I think it is here to stay."

It is certainly ubiquitous, if sometimes in a Big Brother sort of way. Hundreds of firms set brand names in its strong, straight lines, from icons of stability like 3M, Microsoft, and Sears to upstart retailers like American Apparel and Comme des Garçons. New York's signage, including that of its subway system, is set in Helvetica, as is virtually every lighted exit sign in every building in the country. The U.S. government is so sure of Helvetica's ability to lead that the typeface has become the default font for tax forms.

Helvetica wasn't always a leader. In fact, when the Swiss-run Haas Type Foundry first tried to compete with the popular Akzidenz Grotesktypeface in 1957, its attempt landed with a bit of a thud. The somewhat austere typeface, originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, was only modestly successful at gaining converts until four years later when the company rebranded itself with the strong, simple name that means Switzerland in Latin.

Modernist. Whether because of the branding or the growing movement of modernist design, Helvetica soon took off as the typeface of choice for a new generation-first as a favorite in advertising, then in 1985 becoming the choice of the masses. That was the year Apple introduced a Macintosh computer with Helvetica as one of its five fonts. Helvetica suddenly seemed the natural choice for a new century as well.

"Helvetica was introduced at a moment where postwar optimism was at its highest, at a time when-pre-Vietnam, pre-Watergate-people had real confidence in modernism and modern institutions to solve the world's problems," says Michael Bierut, a partner in Pentagram, a New York design firm. It was "a beautifully machined, rationally resolved, entirely modern typeface that seemed absolutely suited to its times."

Not everyone is so generous, of course. In Lars Müller's book Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface, Wolfgang Weingart, a leader in experimental typography known as the father of "Swiss Punk," sniffed that anyone who uses Helvetica must know nothing about typefaces. He calls it "the epitome of ugliness."

And even those who do see its beautiful neutrality are sometimes given pause by its use. Tom Geismar, a well-known New York designer, noted that Helvetica is "like a good screwdriver; a reliable, efficient, easy-to-use tool. But put it in the wrong hands, and it's potentially lethal."

That, of course, can be said about most typefaces, or-with typefaces now popping up like mushrooms on a log-of many typefaces. But when it is used correctly, the beauty of any typeface, including Helvetica, is its ability to facilitate message delivery, its role as a mass communicator, an unseen persuader that helps readers understand both the message and the messenger. Like most typefaces, Helvetica "works its magic on an entirely subconscious level," says Bierut. "Its ubiquity and inherent authority are inescapable," he adds, noting that "if it's important to people's daily lives, it's largely without their knowledge or consent."

Whether Helvetica will remain the typeface of choice is up for debate. Arial, which Minnesota designer Mark Simonson derides as "a knockoff riding on Helvetica's coattails," may already enjoy the greatest mass appeal, even if designers, marketers, and American companies still hold tightly to its competitor. And Helvetica's omnipresence could be its undoing.

While it was designed to be "neutral" and "unbiased," Gary Hustwit, creator of the film Helvetica, noted in an E-mail-typed in Helvetica-that over 50 years, Helvetica has "picked up baggage." Because it's used by big business and government, "when we look at a word set in Helvetica, we pick up the subtle feelings of authority, efficiency, [and] permanence." In some ways, its overuse may have left it powerless to steer people correctly, making not just the typeface but also the message invisible to some eyes.

Warning messages on cigarette packs are set in Helvetica, notes Hustwit, but "although it clearly says, 'Smoking kills,' apparently people aren't understanding the message. Maybe if it was set in a scary, ugly typeface, people would get the point."

When the Poor Go to Court
Across the nation, many indigents wind up being sentenced to jail time without ever seeing a lawyer
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 1/15/06

Last July, a homeless man named Hubert Lindsey was stopped by police officers in Gulfport, Miss., for riding his bicycle without a light. The police soon discovered that Lindsey was a wanted man. Gulfport records showed he owed $4,780 in old fines. So, off to jail he went.

Legal activists now suing the city in federal court say it was pretty obvious that Lindsey couldn't pay the fines. According to their complaint, he lived in a tent, was unemployed, and appeared permanently disabled by an unseeing eye and a mangled arm. But without a lawyer to plead his case, the question of whether Lindsey was a scofflaw or just plain poor never came up. Nor did the question of whether the fines were really owed, or if it was constitutional to jail him for debts he couldn't pay. Nobody, the activists say, even bothered to mention alternatives like community service. The judge ordered Lindsey to "sit out" the fine in jail. That took nearly two months.

Lindsey isn't the only poor American to face a judge on dubious charges without adequate legal representation. Far from it. More than 40 years after the Supreme Court ruled that competent counsel was a fundamental right of all Americans accused of crimes, the American Bar Association says thousands of indigent defendants still navigate the court system each year without a lawyer, or with one who doesn't have the time, resources, or interest to provide effective representation. Whether they face serious felony charges or misdemeanors, the poor often find themselves alone in a sometimes-Kafkaesque system where they have little, if any, voice.

Without advocates, some poor defendants serve jail time longer than the law requires or plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit just to get out of jail. A few, as has been documented, receive the death penalty or life in prison because their court-appointed lawyers were incompetent, lazy, or both. Most shocking, says Norman Lefstein, who chaired the American Bar Association's Indigent Defense Advisory Group, "is the lack of overall real success, the lack of progress" given the overwhelming evidence that inadequate counsel often leads to wrongful conviction. The many cases we know about "likely are only the tip of the iceberg," he says. "This is an enormous problem."

Kicking and screaming. It's also quite a complicated one. The federal government has been slow to the game, both in providing funds or setting rules. That means that each state, and often each county, is left to its own devices on deciding how to fund and institute indigent-defense programs. Funding is a perpetual problem. In New York alone, there are more than 95 different systems. Sometimes, representation is determined by whichever lawyer bills taxpayers the least, no matter that the lawyer could have a full load of other pending cases.

It's not hard to see why the bottom line has such pull. Most states have a hard time coming up with the necessary dollars for indigent-defense programs, and only 27 attempt to provide full funding. That leaves already-strapped cities and counties on the hook for most of the costs--costs that must be weighed against local needs, from new roads to sewer upgrades and firehouses.

Shortfalls in some places are acute. In Alabama, pay cuts have caused lawyers representing indigent death penalty clients to flee the system. In New Mexico, a lack of funds to hire lawyers for indigent defendants caused the court of appeals there to place an ad for lawyers willing to work free.

While several states have enacted some reforms in recent years, most have been dragged kicking and screaming to the table, often on the heels of civil rights lawsuits, court orders, or striking examples of injustice made public. And while such reforms are welcome, critics say the jury is still out on how well they are implemented. In Georgia, for instance, new public defenders are required to contact their clients within 72 hours of their arrest, but there is no requirement that they do much else until a defendant has his day in court. In one case, a public defender representing a severely mentally ill woman facing a parole violation had contacted his client only once after her arrest and was not scheduled to see her again until a bond hearing set for nearly two months later. John Cole Vodicka, director of the Prison and Jail Project, a watchdog group active in southern Georgia, says the public defender didn't even meet with the woman personally on the first occasion; he sent her a form letter. Cole Vodicka left several messages for the lawyer, saying that he knew the woman from his church and that he could help get in touch with character witnesses with knowledge of her troubles and her mental illness. The lawyer failed to call him back, Cole Vodicka says. The woman's case is pending. Asked about the case, Samuel Merritt, the head of the public defender's office in that circuit, said his office should have fought more aggressively to schedule the woman's bond hearing for an earlier date, but he says the new system is generally working very well.

At least Georgia is trying. In many cities and states, advocates say, it appears officials have just ignored the law. The New York Civil Liberties Union has threatened to file suit against New York State. While New York City, which has a well-funded legal-aid office, is in many ways a model for other locales, the rural counties upstate are another story. In Schuyler County, lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's legal defense fund say an investigation they conducted revealed a system where indigent defendants routinely sat in jail for weeks or months without seeing a lawyer. Often they went through the entire court process, from arrest, to arraignment, on through bail hearings and even through plea bargains, without ever consulting an attorney. One public defender, they say, deliberately kept his phone off the hook.

Then there's Gulfport, the second largest city in Mississippi, which, up until Hurricane Katrina hit, was beating the pavement looking for those who owed fines for things like public profanity--at $222 a pop. The result of Gulfport's fine-reclamation project was that while it collected modest sums of money, it also packed the county jail with hundreds of people who couldn't pay. The Southern Center for Human Rights filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Gulfport last July. Attorney Sarah Geraghty says that before bringing the case against the city, she witnessed hundreds of court adjudications involving Gulfport's poor in which no defense attorney was present or even offered. Many defendants, Geraghty said, were obviously indigent, mentally ill, or physically disabled, like Hubert Lindsey; some had been jailed for fines they had already paid. One mentally ill woman attempted suicide by jumping from an elevated cell in the county jail after she was picked up for having failed to pay several city fines; the lawsuit alleges that police then grabbed her again on the same charge a few months later, causing her to miss the surgery scheduled to fix the broken bones in her feet.

The city says it is still reviewing the lawsuit, but there is talk of a settlement. And Geraghty, who recently sat in on the court's proceedings again, says judges are now advising indigent defendants of their rights. But it never should have taken a lawsuit, adds Geraghty, noting that the problem with the city's actions was clear: "It's illegal. Period."

This story appears in the January 23, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

A Mayor, A Murder, A Martyr
New charges rekindle a decades-old killing
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 5/27/01
YORK, PA.--On a steamy night in July 1969, Lillie Belle Allen was looking for a grocery store with her family when they took a wrong turn at Newberry Street and Gay Avenue. It was an innocent mistake with a tragic consequence. A city already roiled by riots erupted in violence again. A man stepped from an angry white mob and pulled the trigger of a shotgun as Allen stepped from the family sedan and screamed: "Don't shoot!" Dozens of others then opened fire on the car as her family cowered inside. Lillie Belle Allen, 27, became another martyr to racial intolerance.
Hundreds of people saw the crime, but for 32 years no one was charged. Now an indictment accuses the current mayor of York, Charles Robertson, as an accomplice. Robertson, 67, was a police officer at the time. The day before Allen was shot, he had chanted "white power" at a rally. Like many before him, Robertson now says he, and York, have changed.
Today, the intersection of Newberry and Gay is a lonely cluster of sagging row houses, broken stoops, and "no trespassing" signs. Fittingly, it has the look of a place with a haunted past. Now the new indictments threaten to awaken its old ghosts. Allen's sister, Gladys Oden, hopes "justice will finally be served." But others urge a quiet retreat. "They should just sweep this thing under the rug," says Ronnie Young, 39, a Confederate battle flag pin on his hat. "Let the past be past."
But in York, that's proving to be impossible, and late last week Mayor Robertson admitted as much in dropping his bid to be re-elected to a third term this November. The pressure had been mounting all week. The local congressman, Rep. Todd Platts, and the local chapter of the NAACP had urged him to resign; the FBI opened a preliminary civil rights investigation. Robertson said dropping out of the race was the "right decision" for York but "the most painful decision I have ever made."
Allen's murder is a stark reminder of how insidiously the nation had been ripped apart along racial fault lines three decades ago. This manufacturing city, 50 miles north of Baltimore, is perhaps best known for its Peppermint Pattie confections. It was poor and segregated, and its predominately white police force was ill equipped. Neighborhood gangs and vigilantism ruled. On July 17, 1969, two sparks ignited the city. A black youth, who burned himself with lighter fluid, blamed a white gang; then an unknown gunman shot a black teenager being questioned by police. The next day a white police officer, Henry C. Schaad, was fatally gunned down.
"Commando raids." It was in this boiling farrago that Allen and her family found themselves when they stopped in York to visit family on their way from South Carolina to New York City. The Newberry Street crowd saw the family's 1961 Cadillac. Someone yelled: "It's niggers, and they have guns!" The Caddy stalled on the railroad tracks. Allen, unarmed, was killed as she got out, waving her arms to calm the crowd.
Robertson was in an armored car about a block away and was one of the first officers on the scene. The indictment charges that in addition to his "white power" remarks, Robertson gave ammunition to Newberry Street residents. He also allegedly told them that "if I weren't a cop, I would be leading commando raids against niggers."
The York County district attorney's office reopened investigations into both the Allen and Schaad murders when a newspaper story two years ago revealed new leads. While prosecutors won't comment on the case, Robertson vigorously denies the charges. He says he did nothing wrong except yell the slogan. "Yes, it was a racist statement, but these were common," he explains. "Do I agree with that talk now? No. And I haven't for some time."
Blacks and whites have almost always had an uneasy separation in York. Jim Kalish, author of The Story of Civil Rights in York, Pennsylvania, says that blacks first arrived as slaves and were the only nonwhite part of York's population until Hispanics began moving there in recent decades. Blacks were never treated as equals. They lived in substandard and essentially segregated housing, and police repressed them. As a 1968 Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission study warned, riots were almost a certainty if the "status quo as York knew it didn't change."
The question for York now is not just how much the mayor may have changed but how much the city has matured. "York has grown, but there is still racism," says George Ruffin, a black bail bondsman who provided bail for one of the whites charged in the Allen attack. "Change comes very slow."
This story appears in the June 4, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

A Risky Trip Through `White Man's Pass'
In New Jersey, a losing war on racial profiling
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 4/8/01

More than a decade ago, the New Jersey Turnpike came to be known as "White Man's Pass" to black and Hispanic drivers. Many suspected they were being pulled over and searched by state police far more often than whites. They were right. But it wasn't until white officers shot three minority travelers on the turnpike in 1998 that the perils of DWB--Driving While Black--forced the Garden State to try to clean up its act. New Jersey's Highway Patrol hired its first black superintendent, and the U.S. Justice Department ordered a series of reforms to stop racial profiling.

But nothing, it seems, has worked. Last week, as six days of tempestuous hearings on the issue concluded before the state Senate Judiciary Committee in Trenton, it became clear that DWB traffic stops on the Jersey Turnpike have slowed only modestly. "It is puzzling, frankly . . . that we're still seeing the numbers that we're seeing," state Attorney General John Farmer told the committee, noting that trooper resistance to reform was a possible reason minorities still make up about two thirds of all stops. Whatever the cause, he added, "it is clear we have not solved the problem."

New Jersey isn't alone. Over the past two years, 10 states passed laws to discourage racial profiling. Another 13 are considering similar legislation. And one state, Oklahoma, allows cops to be charged criminally for the practice. Impelled by Justice Department scrutiny and the fear of a loss of public trust, scores of police departments today are keeping tabs on traffic stops of minority drivers. The Bush administration intends to keep the pressure on. Acting on a directive from the president, Attorney General John Ashcroft has called for an eradication of racial profiling nationwide.

There's a problem, though. Many in law enforcement believe it is unwise not to include race in criminal profiling. Johnny Hughes, spokesman for the National Troopers Coalition, said during testimony before the U.S. Senate last year that including race as one of the factors in identifying criminals was about "reason, not race." Hughes claimed that blacks were more likely than whites to be carrying drugs along the interstate in New Jersey. Bernard Parks, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, said pretty much the same thing: "We're not just using race," said Parks, who is black. "It's got to be race plus other indicators."

Whites' contraband. But indicators can mislead. A study released in March of data compiled by the Texas Highway Patrol found that while Hispanics were stopped and searched more than twice as often as non-Hispanic whites, officers discovered illegal contraband on whites at nearly twice the rate of minorities. Statistics released last week by Farmer show that 25 percent of all searches of white drivers in New Jersey last year found contraband; police found contraband in vehicles of only 13 percent of black drivers.

Stories like Elmo Randolph's help put a human face on the problem. The 44-year-old from New Jersey's Bergen County is among dozens of minorities suing the New Jersey State Police for allegedly stopping him illegally while he was driving. Randolph says police officers pulled him over more than 100 times in seven years, even though he wasn't speeding or carrying drugs; he was never arrested. The mild-mannered dentist says he was stopped because he is black, adding that driving to work every day gave him "the worst feeling of anxiety." Every day, he thought, " `Are they going to stop me today? Are they going to search my car today? Will I be late for work again?' Growing up in New Jersey," Randolph says, "it was a known fact [that blacks need] to be careful on the turnpike."

The question now for New Jersey is what to do. The state settled a lawsuit filed after the 1998 turnpike shooting for $12.9 million, and criminal charges are pending against the two officers involved. But last week's testimony shows that the efforts made after the shooting weren't successful. The Justice Department mandated reforms in the state police, including new training; data collection on the race of all those stopped, searched, and arrested; and the placement of video cameras in every patrol car. None of the changes worked. The New Jersey Turnpike, as a result, is still the "White Man's Pass." Farmer said minorities still make up 73 percent of those stopped and searched by the state police. "The process has been slow and painful," he said, "and will continue to be."

This story appears in the April 16, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

Policing the Police Is a Dicey Business
But the feds have a plan to root out racial bias
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 4/22/01

The fires are out, the looters are gone. Timothy Thomas, whose fatal shooting by Cincinnati police lit the spark for days of rioting, has been buried. Now community activists like Jackie Shropshire are leaving no doubts about who will be blamed if Cincinnati erupts again. Attorney General John "Ashcroft can make or break it," says Shropshire, 56, as he tools around the Queen City in his canary-yellow Ford Fairlane. "And he can make or break himself depending on how he handles it."

Ashcroft isn't the only one in the hot seat. But there's little question that the aftermath of the violence in Cincinnati has presented President Bush's attorney general with a peculiar challenge. Last week, Mayor Charlie Luken asked Ashcroft to review the "practices, procedures, and training" of his police department. The shooting of Thomas, 19, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer ignited the city's worst racial unrest since the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Thomas was the 15th young black man killed by police in Cincinnati in the past six years.

Ashcroft dispatched Justice Department lawyers to assess the situation. The department was already probing more than a dozen other state and local law enforcement agencies to determine if they engaged in a "pattern and practice" of racial discrimination or brutality. But many current and former Justice officials were surprised by Ashcroft's move. The reason: During his campaign, George W. Bush insisted that he didn't want Justice to "instruct" local police departments or to become another "internal affairs division." Ashcroft echoed those sentiments last month, so many Justice officials were certain that pattern-and-practice inquiries would be quietly shelved.

The law authorizing such investigations was passed in 1994 after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. It has gotten serious results--and generated plenty of controversy. The feds sued Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Steubenville, Ohio, and others to compel cop shops to initiate safeguards against excessive force and racial bias--for instance, computer systems to track complaints and disciplinary actions. Some cops sued in return. Earlier this year, the National Fraternal Order of Police filed its own lawsuit, charging that the Justice Department's use of the law was unconstitutional. The department's special litigation section, which includes the 30-member pattern-and-practice unit, "has been operating like a bully in a high school playground," says FOP Executive Director Jim Pasco, who now hopes for greater "fairness." This, says Pasco, was a key reason the FOP endorsed Bush. After he won, Bush named Pasco and another FOP official to the Justice Department's transition team. They supported Ashcroft's nomination as attorney general.

New rules. There has already been a noticeable shift in the way the special litigation section operates, say current and former prosecutors in the civil rights division. Requests by attorneys within the unit to open two pattern-and-practice investigations, including one in Cincinnati in late January, were originally blocked because of "political concerns," says a prosecutor who recently left the unit. The prosecutor says managers later refused a request to investigate police in Oakland, Calif. A current Justice official says he is worried the Bush administration might move toward nonbinding agreements with troubled departments instead of suing to clean them up. In perhaps a harbinger of what is to come, a former Justice Department official says lawyers in the special litigation section can't make routine document requests or phone calls to litigants without clearance from higher-ups like Alexander Acosta, a noted judicial conservative. "In many ways," the former official says, "you have to prove your case before you can even do an investigation. . . . The concern is that they will just sit on these cases to shut them down."

No way, says Mindy Tucker, a Justice Department spokesperson. Ashcroft won't "micromanage local law enforcement from Washington," she says, but he also won't "ignore violations of the law." The difference is, "he wants to deal with the problem, not just assign blame to someone."

Looking for patterns of abuse

The Justice Department has confirmed it is investigating a dozen local police departments.

Buffalo, N.Y.

Charleston, W.Va.

Cleveland

Detroit

Eastpointe, Mich.

New Orleans

New York City

Orange County, Fla.

Prince George's County, Md.

Riverside, Calif.

Tulsa, Okla.

Washington, D.C.

This story appears in the April 30, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

The Philadelphia Mob Goes Down
Mobsters sing in the City of Brotherly Love
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 6/4/00
PHILADELPHIA--The demise of the mob here--the end of the good life for Ralph, "Skinny Joey," and "The Crumb"--can be traced to March 21, 1980, the day "Docile Don" Angelo Bruno was killed in a hail of bullets. The Sicilian code of silence--omerta--died with him. Since then, internecine rivalries have left dozens of capos and soldiers dead or jailed and those still on the street so jittery that they're doing the once unheard-of: cooperating with the feds.
In recent years, similar turns have helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation break La Cosa Nostra's stranglehold in dozens of cities. But nowhere has the mob fallen so far as in the City of Brotherly Love, where former boss Ralph Natale has been chirping to the government for nearly a year. Natale is believed to be the highest-level mobster ever to cooperate with the government, and his revelations may put the final nail in the local Mafia's coffin. That's the good news. The bad news: What comes next may be worse.
Even so, that does not diminish the import of the Feds' crackdown on the mob here, nor the singular accomplishment of reeling in Natale, who is seeking leniency for a host of alleged crimes, including seven murders. U.S. Attorney Michael Stiles is ecstatic about his good fortune; last month, he indicted reputed acting mob boss Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino and 10 alleged associates on a raft of racketeering charges. And Stiles's luck just keeps getting better. In May, another reputed mob leader, Peter "The Crumb" Caprio, 70, decided to live up to his nickname and agreed to testify against Merlino.
A more decorous don. Bruno, the former "Docile Don," is probably rolling over in his grave. The proprietor of a chain of grocery stores, Bruno kept a lock on violence and shied away from dabbling in drugs or kidnapping in favor of loan-sharking, running numbers, and other gambling exploits. Under his leadership, the Philly mob gained new prominence, forging ties with New York's Gambino crime family and stretching its reach into the gaming center of Atlantic City. "He gave people a code to live by, taught them respect and honor," says his 58-year-old daughter, Jeanne, standing by her South Philly rowhouse.
But times changed, as tough new racketeering laws put the squeeze on mob families and numbers rackets were hurt by legal gambling. Bruno was pressured by New York's Gambino and Genovese crime families for a bigger cut, and by members of his own crew to move into drugs. Bruno was killed shortly after the feds began asking him over for talks.
Then all hell broke loose. Lee Seglem of the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation says that between Bruno's death and Merlino's indictment at least 29 reputed mob figures in New Jersey and Philadelphia were murdered. They include one of Bruno's alleged killers, Antonio "Tony Bananas" Caponigro, who was found shot to death in a New Jersey field with money stuffed in his mouth, and Bruno's replacement, Phil "Chicken Man" Testa, who was blown up by a nail bomb. Snitches and prosecutors wore down the successive bosses. Natale, a ranking member of Atlantic City's Bartenders Union, took over the Philly mob after getting out of prison in 1994--but four years later he was back in, thanks to a parole violation.
Then came Merlino, "a young, flashy guy wearing strobe lights, saying 'I'm a mobster and proud of it,' " says Seglem. Merlino, 37, reflected the new mob, "sloppy guys who just wanted the veneer of being a gangster," says Celeste Morello, a mob historian who lives in South Philly. Merlino has maintained his innocence.
As the mob's power has receded, other crime organizations have jumped into the breach, like Eastern European, Asian, and Latin American groups, as well as organized street gangs like the Bloods and motorcycle gangs like the Pagans. Experts say that Asian gangs involved in gambling, prostitution, and smuggling have established a base in Atlantic City and that Dominicans control much of the East Coast drug trade.
And so things are getting complicated. For one thing, the FBI doesn't have nearly the intelligence database on these groups that it has on the traditional mob. For another, the mob is now partnering with these groups. La Cosa Nostra families have been discovered working with Latin American organized-crime groups in drug schemes and with Russians on complicated tax swindles. What's different these days is that "there's no monopoly," says Temple University Prof. Nikos Passas, an organized-crime expert. "And that's going to keep law enforcement busy."
This story appears in the June 12, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

Boston's Big-Bucks Highway to Hell
Is there light at the end of its expensive tunnel?
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 2/20/00

BOSTON--Over the past nine years, Bostonians have looked at it with a mix of pride and consternation, a massive public-works project that has been compared in size and ingenuity to the Pyramids and the Panama Canal. They call it the Big Dig. Or they did, anyway, when it was still an ambitious $2.6 billion effort to turn one of the nation's most congested stretches of highway into a high-tech tunnel of speed. But at about $12 billion and growing, the "Big Dig" is increasingly being called the "Big Pig."

The multibillion-dollar question in Boston and Congress, which is footing about 70 percent of the tab: What's 7.5 miles of highway worth? Earlier this month, project directors admitted that what was billed until recently as a $10.8 billion cap for the Big Dig was off by $1.4 billion. The announcement came only hours after the Federal Highway Administration selected the project for new financing.

Last week, a House panel began probing what is officially called the Central Artery/Tunnel Project. Federal auditors, charging an "alarming lapse of oversight," will begin picking through the project's books, possibly delaying both it and federal highway funding for the state. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority misled investors in a Big Dig bond offering. And the civil division of the U.S. Attorney's Office is reportedly nosing around in the project's insurance fund, referred to by one U.S. official as "a possible slush fund."

As the feds crack down, Gov. Paul Cellucci is scrambling to come up with the extra dough. In addition to hiking toll fees, he plans to borrow nearly $1 billion. That sits poorly with many state residents, who are already furious that the Big Dig has devoured funding for their own road repairs. The state gets only about $500 million a year in federal highway funds; the Big Dig gobbles about $5 million every day.

Costly choice. There's little chance Washington will come to the rescue, because even the state's congressional members are distancing themselves from the boondoggle. "If Congress had known the project would cost even a fourth of what it has cost, [it] would have dismissed the idea in the beginning," says Rep. Joseph Moakley, a South Boston Democrat. An aide to another Massachusetts lawmaker is even more blunt: "There is no way in hell we could get that thing any more money. We'd be laughed out of Congress."

The current price tag: around $1.6 billion a mile. U.S. Rep. Barney Frank has said it would have been cheaper to raise the city than sink the tunnel. But when the plan was hatched in the early 1980s, Massachusetts officials didn't think they had much choice. The old elevated highway that cut through the city like a scar was too small and in disrepair, and citizens were in no mood to raze more homes to fix it. The city planned to replace the six-lane highway that snaked through downtown Boston to its waterfront with a multiproject "Big Dig": an eight-to-10-lane underground tunnel that could carry more than 245,000 cars a day, two new bridges over the Charles River to the northeast, and a second tunnel to the southwest under Boston Harbor to Logan International Airport. Fred Salvucci, whose grandmother's home was destroyed to make way for the Massachusetts Turnpike in 1959, fought aggressively for the tunnel program while state transportation secretary. And Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and the late Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, who was then speaker of the House of Representatives, helped override a 1987 veto by President Reagan of a funding package for it.
Even those most disrupted came to believe that the upgrade was necessary and could beautify a long, desolate stretch of the city by replacing the old section with parks and other green space. "There are so many holes it looks like Boston's been bombed," says Nancy Caruso, who lives near Paul Revere's home."But it's going to be a bonanza for the city."

The trick has been to do it all without shutting down Boston. No easy task when more than 4,000 workers are excavating enough dirt to fill 13 football stadiums and replace it with enough concrete to build a sidewalk from Boston to San Francisco and back three times. "It's the biggest thing ever attempted in the world, and when we're done, the world will be scratching its head wondering how we ever did it," says sandhog Richie Logan, standing atop one tunnel segment.
Project officials agree, saying they never misled anyone about costs. And don't expect work to stop. Project directors say it would cost more to shut down the Big Dig than to complete it, since most of the bill is locked up in contracts. Besides, they say, Boston needs it. "We're going to finish it," says John Birtwell, the governor's spokesman. "There is light at the end of the tunnel."

Are Police Going Too Far?
A New York shooting trial weighs aggressive policing and civil rights
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 1/30/00
NEW YORK CITY--As the crow flies, it's 138 miles from here to Albany, but culturally the gulf is virtually incalculable. So the scrutiny will be intense this week when a jury in that decidedly upstate venue is chosen to preside over a distinctly urban case. The incendiary question it will be asked to answer: Were four white New York City cops justified in fatally shooting an unarmed African immigrant, who died in a hail of 41 police bullets?
The shooting of street vendor Amadou Diallo in the Bronx last February sparked widespread protests and state and federal investigations into the NYPD's conduct in minority communities. It also rekindled the debate over where the line is drawn between aggressive law enforcement and civil rights. This "would not have happened on Park Avenue to a white person," says Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University Law School.
Diallo, 22, had just reached his apartment door when the cops decided to question him for reasons that remain unclear. The officers--Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss, and Richard Murphy--were part of the elite roaming Street Crime Unit credited with confiscating a large number of illegal guns. The officers claim Diallo--who spoke with a stutter--ignored their orders to freeze and motioned toward a pocket. The officers then began to fire.
A regrettable mistake. Lawyers for the four have contended that the incident was a regrettable but understandable mistake in the big city, where every suspect must be approached with caution and every furtive gesture may signal a hidden weapon. Prosecutors have called the shooting a murder, saying the officers showed a reckless disregard for human life.
The trial was moved to Albany out of fear that pretrial publicity made a fair verdict impossible in New York City. Diallo's death has clearly struck a troubling chord there. Everyone wants laws enforced, Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson has argued, but "we should not have to sacrifice the freedoms they are designed to protect."
Still, more and more law enforcement agencies have followed New York City's example of aggressive policing. The reason: It seems to work. Murders in Gotham fell from a recent high of 2,245 in 1990 to 667 last year, a drop of 70 percent. Cities from New Orleans to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Newark, N.J., have mined New York's police force for new leaders. And a recent Supreme Court decision tends to embrace tough policing by allowing cops to stop and frisk people for running from them in certain circumstances. But as officers have been pushed to make more stops, the claims of police abuse, the lawsuits, and the investigations into whether cops unfairly target minorities have mounted.
The tension was starkly illustrated in the aftermath of the Diallo shooting. New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir quickly retooled the Street Crime Unit, replacing many white officers with minorities and forcing them to work in uniform instead of plainclothes. But he scrapped the uniform policy five months later after the unit's gun seizures and arrests plunged.
Similar issues are playing out nationwide. The Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart division has garnered neighborhood support for reducing crime but is now reeling from a corruption scandal. More than a dozen officers are under investigation. Twenty-two cases have been dismissed--and hundreds more called into question--amid allegations that some officers planted evidence and perjured themselves. In December, the New Jersey State Police agreed to cease using racial profiles in stopping motorists. Similar practices are alleged in California and Illinois.
Civilian complaint review boards are the watchdogs on police abuses in many cities. But they are often seen as paper tigers, record keepers powerless to carry out recommendations or punishment. And the Diallo shooting, say experts, shows how closely officers come every day to teetering over the edge. Says Columbia University Law School Prof. H. Richard Uviller: "The challenge to develop an aggressive patrol that is not murderous or excessive is a constant puzzle."
This story appears in the February 7, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

FBI's Glitches With Snitches in Boston
Was the bureau too nice to the wrong guys?
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 1/23/00
BOSTON--Cops don't ordinarily solve crimes by schmoozing with clergy or choirboys. But even by accepted snitch standards, cozying up this close to James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "the Rifleman" Flemmi seemed a tad risky. Cops say the duo virtually ran South Boston's Irish Mob. They were leg breakers and loan sharks, who scared drug dealers into paying "rent" and threatened to kill anyone who got in their way.
But did these government informants make good on some of those death threats at the same time they were dining with FBI agents? Earlier this month, three bodies were unearthed near some railroad tracks. And the cops say Bulger and Flemmi--now under indictment on lesser charges--may have put them there.
South Boston is a heavily Irish enclave where familial ties and neighborhood bonds are paramount, where cops and robbers grow up on the same block, where silence is golden. It's also become a place where the age-old use of informants has been called into question--an inquiry that reaches all the way to Washington, where a Justice Department task force is re-examining the feds' policy toward snitches.
Before that's done, though, the FBI has explaining to do in Beantown. John J. Connolly, the former Boston bureau agent who worked with Bulger and Flemmi, is now awaiting trial on racketeering charges. Another Boston-based FBI agent is under pressure to resign after allegedly lying under oath to protect Connolly. And the family of John McIntyre, whose body is thought to be among those exhumed, intends to sue the bureau. The McIntyre family alleges that Connolly--already charged with tipping off his top-shelf informers in other probes--told Bulger and Flemmi that McIntyre had dropped a dime on them to local cops as part of a separate investigation. Federal Judge Mark L. Wolf said the family's concerns were reasonable; the family contends that Connolly cost McIntyre his life. Connolly denies revealing informants and claims all of his dealings with Bulger and Flemmi were encouraged by superiors. "What's happening now," he says, is "Operation Scapegoat."
No "clipping." Agent Connolly's Faustian bargain looked better before the ink dried. Back in the 1970s, a Cosa Nostra was enemy No. 1 in Boston, and Connolly, a Southie native, was doing his part to wipe it out. Enter his old neighborhood pal, Bulger, and his sidekick, Flemmi. Connolly has said the deal was this: Bulger's Winter Hill gang got to keep loan-sharking, and Connolly got the skinny needed to bring down Bulger's rivals in the Italian mob. Connolly's boss, John Morris--who received immunity for testifying before Judge Wolf--reportedly assured Flemmi and Bulger they'd be spared legal woes as long as they didn't "clip" anyone. The deal seemed to work for more than 20 years. "We put a stake in the heart of the Mafia," claims Connolly.
But at what price? Bulger and his buddies took more territory. And with Connolly or Morris allegedly running interference, other law enforcers trying to bust Bulger or Flemmi always came up empty. When a federal grand jury began asking questions, prosecutors believe Bulger was somehow tipped off and disappeared, reportedly with a platinum-blond woman from the old neighborhood by his side. They've been spotted in West Palm Beach, Fla., and Chicago.
In yet another bizarre twist, it turns out the key to their capture may well be two pooches, poodles, to be precise, which Bulger's girlfriend left behind with her sister in Boston. When America's Most Wanted runs a segment on Bulger later this month, the host is expected to reveal that the sister put those pups to "sleep." The hope is the sad news just might bring Bulger and his grieving companion back to town. Flemmi--now in jail--has claimed that FBI promises of protection should spare him from prosecution. His lawyer has declined comment on the recently unearthed bodies.
Meanwhile, a Justice Department task force has been working for months to tighten rules on handling informants. Among the proposals: that agents consult with prosecutors before cutting any deals with informants, and that prosecutors be notified if snitches commit unauthorized crimes. New ground rules might help--in the future. But "as far as what happened in Boston," says one law enforcement official, "we already have laws against that."
This story appears in the January 31, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

The New York Times

November 12, 1998, Thursday, Late Edition - Final

In Private Homes, Itinerant Abortion Protesters Find Support

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk

LENGTH: 1841 words

DATELINE: ROCHESTER, Nov. 8



By outward appearances, Dorothy Hayes's life seems ordinary. She and her family live in a rambling old home on the shore of Lake Ontario, and every morning, she gives her husband, John, a peck on the cheek before he goes to work. She runs errands, like other suburban moms, and spends much of her day taking care of her children.

But one thing sets Mrs. Hayes apart from her neighbors. As a devoted opponent of abortion, the 43-year-old mother of nine regularly plays host to a series of traveling speakers, priests and protesters -- many of whom have come to Rochester intent upon spreading the word against abortion and shutting down clinics that provide it.


She is one of thousands of people across the country loosely associated with anti-abortion groups like the Lambs of Christ who have opened their homes to the Lambs' founder, the Rev. Norman U. Weslin, and other itinerant demonstrators. While many -- including Mrs. Hayes -- disavow violent tactics, some supporters of abortion rights say that people like her bear some responsibility when the protesters they help blockade clinics or threaten doctors.

"These people who provide Father Weslin with food and shelter when he comes into town to close the clinics are not innocent," said Ann Glazier, the director of clinic defense for the Planned Parenthood Federation. "It's just not credible to say they aren't part of the extremist activity that is taking place at these clinics. They are still guilty of interfering with women's access."

But Mary E. Quinn, a local organizer for the Lambs of Christ who also offers her home to protesters, sees matters in a differing light.

"Taking people in like this is an act of Christian charity," Mrs. Quinn said. 'People who travel around the country doing this work are taken in by those of us who don't want to lose their stupid houses. We take in these people because they are willing to make the sacrifice."

Members of the Lambs of Christ have been persistent figures in protests at the Buffalo women's clinic where Dr. Barnett A. Slepian worked before he was shot to death last month. Although no suspect has been identified in the shooting or in several similar attacks in New York and Canada over the past several years, officials are looking to question a Vermont man whose car was seen near Dr. Slepian's home.

That man, James Charles Kopp, has participated in abortion protests for more than a decade, and often was a house guest of other members of the Lambs of Christ.

While Mrs. Hayes says she would never so much as obstruct a clinic's door, some of those to whom she has given refuge have no qualms about doing so. Father Weslin, the leader of the Lambs of Christ, is one of those who has benefited from Mrs. Hayes' hospitality, a modern version of the generosity that Christ and the Apostles knew well. He prides himself on being arrested more than 60 times during protests in front of medical clinics. And throughout the 1980's and early 90's, he was active in clinic "rescues," in which protesters tried physically to restrain patients trying to enter clinics.

Father Weslin stayed at Mrs. Hayes's home only once, beginning in May 1996 when he first came to speak at local churches about the anti-abortion movement. But during a stay that lasted several months, he was arrested on Federal charges of blocking access to a Rochester health clinic where abortions were performed. He was later convicted and served two and a half months in prison. During the protest outside the clinic, he and several other protesters locked themselves in a homemade contraption called "the oven," made of cement and iron. It took police officers several hours to lug the device to a horse trailer that carted it off. At the same protest, one man glued his head to a lock on a gate surrounding the clinic, a move some protesters later said was an accident.

Abortion opponents like Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Quinn speak of attending peaceful observances at abortion clinics and offering prayers for the unborn. They talk about counseling women about alternatives to abortion at Roman Catholic "pregnancy centers," and their support of anti-abortion candidates. But they also say they saw nothing wrong with Father Weslin trying to block access to clinics. They describe the activity as peaceful resistance meant to stop what they see as murders.

Father Weslin and the other house guests of Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Quinn come recommended from friends and members of local Catholic churches, they said, adding that most are speakers at local churches or anti-abortion events. And although they say they would never take into their homes a stranger wanted by the F.B.I., like Mr. Kopp, they concede that they sometimes know little about their guests.

But Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Quinn say they know a lot about Father Weslin. An Army veteran, he has been a leader of the anti-abortion movement for more than 25 years, they say, and founded a home for unwed mothers. Mrs. Hayes said that when she met him, it was obvious he was a man of peace who "had a tremendous devotion to the Blessed Mother and basically recognized that we are helpless lambs."

Barbara Fredericks, another local abortion opponent who developed ties to the Lambs after Father Weslin came to town, added that the priest epitomized a man of God. "I just knew when I looked at his holy shoes and his simple coat that had been mended 50 times," she said. "He was humble, a man who was doing this for a higher purpose, trying to save people through sacrifice and prayer."

Mr. Kopp also has robust defenders among the people who housed him as he rode about the country from protest to protest. E. Kenny, 20, said that his parents housed Mr. Kopp in their St. Albans, Vt., home for two years after he spoke at their local church in 1988. During Mr. Kopp's stay, he was a pleasure, Mr. Kenny said, always helping around the house. "He was a nice guy, kind of like an uncle to us," Mr. Kenny said. "He'd sit around and play video games with us and make us model planes out of wood."

Like Father Weslin, Mr. Kopp was consumed by a need to fight abortion and often talked about its evils, Mr. Kenny said, adding that Mr. Kopp was a gentle man who wanted to become a Catholic priest.

"He was always in a good mood," Mr. Kenny said. "He never did anything violent at all."

Both Mr. Kopp and Father Weslin have been arrested repeatedly during abortion protests. The men have moved in the same circles and at times found themselves arrested at the same events. Mrs. Quinn said that Father Weslin told her in a recent telephone conversation that he knew Mr. Kopp. Father Weslin could not be reached for comment, but it is clear that the two men have encountered each other.

Both faced misdemeanor charges after blocking a Burlington, Vt., health clinic in 1990 that Mr. Kopp called "the mill." And they spent time in the same jail in Atlanta in 1988 after a clinic protest.

Dr. Slepian's death has abortion opponents like Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Quinn worried, both about how the killing is being portrayed in the media and what it will do to membership in groups like the Lambs of Christ. "For a long time, you felt like the voice in the desert that wasn't being heard," Mrs. Hayes said. "And then there was this horrible tragedy of this doctor's death becoming the face of the movement.

"We're about saving lives," she said.

The F.B.I. has not talked to Mrs. Hayes, but Mr. Kenny said that agents have spoken to him. The Justice Department says that a Federal task force set up this week to investigate the killing of Dr. Slepian is looking for evidence connecting anti-abortion violence at various clinics. "It's fair to say that when investigating these events, we will look at any connection between individuals engaged in criminal conduct," Myron Marlin, a spokesman for the department, said.

Many local Catholics associated with the Lambs of Christ have tried to distance themselves from the killing of Dr. Slepian. They are mailing literature saying that the killer does not represent their movement.

In addition, some people associated with the Lambs are offering other possible explanations for the killing. Some say they believe that the killer might have been someone overcome by grief after a personal experience with abortion. Others wondered whether the shooter had tried to wound the doctor to scare him or prevent him from performing more abortions. The Lambs also wonder whether abortionist opponents are being blamed for a shooting committed by a disgruntled patient.

One idea gaining currency among the Lambs, and prominently displayed on their Web site, suggests that the killing was the result of a plot by abortion supporters to discredit abortion opponents just before last week's elections.

Mrs. Hayes says she doesn't know the truth. "There are wackos who travel around and they may be in front of the clinic because we are drawn to the same place," she said. "But you don't know everyone who shows up and you don't turn to the person next to you and tell them they don't belong there."

Mrs. Fredericks said that anyone who would shoot a doctor who provides abortions was someone "who had snapped, perhaps because of the importance of the situation."

Members of the Lambs of Christ and other opponents of abortion in Rochester wonder whether the killing of Dr. Slepian will hinder their efforts. When Father Weslin first arrived two years ago, he brought new focus to a group that often had done little more than counsel pregnant women and set up booths on college campuses, they said.

"In many cities, they have a priest for life coordinating and leading rosary marches" against abortion, Mrs. Quinn said. "But with Father Weslin coming here, we could finally come together and feel like we were doing something sacrificial as a group."

Mrs. Hayes said that she felt the first pull of the movement in the early 1980's, when she heard women speak about "choice" in regard to abortion. Then she saw "Silent Scream," a well-known anti-abortion film that purports to show the footage of an abortion.

"What I saw was the end of life," she said.

She began to volunteer at a Catholic pregnancy center where she encouraged women "not to kill their child." She also began to house unwed mothers and went to stand vigil outside local clinics where abortions were performed.

Mrs. Hayes looked at her 3-month-old daughter, Bernadette, then pointed to the prenatal image of the infant, a sonogram taken at 13 weeks that she keeps on her refrigerator door. She described what could have been her baby's fate, had she been someone else's child.

"Two pounds and two inches ago, she could have been a partial-birth abortion," Mrs. Hayes said, referring to a controversial late-term abortion procedure. "They have the hardest time getting the shoulders out, so they can get to the head and puncture it.

"It's brutal, but what do you expect when the purpose is a dead baby? There's no question that these doctors are trying to murder a child."

The New York Times

September 16, 1996, Monday, Late Edition - Final

Santa Monica Tries to Curb Charity to Homeless

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section A; Page 13; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 902 words

DATELINE: SANTA MONICA, Calif., Sept. 15

For years, this beach city meant good living to the homeless, a place where the poorest of the poor could beg among the liberal rich, sleep under stars, and be fed from city coffers.
And they came in droves, filling up Santa Monica's pristine parks, wandering its beaches, and bathing in its fountains.
But tough love is changing all that.
Faced with what has at times seemed an incurable homeless problem, the once liberal-minded city of 85,000 has changed its tune, increasingly heeding the call of residents who say they are tired of stepping over the dispossessed and being badgered for change while shopping.
The city government has responded in measured steps, enforcing old laws and passing new, narrowly focused measures meant to reverse its image as a destination for the shiftless. The latest, passed last month, turned loafing on the curb, in the walkways or other nonsanctioned sitting areas on the Third Street Promenade -- a prime shopping and entertainment spot -- into a crime, with penalties of up to six months in jail and a $500 fine.
Local merchants like the ring of it.
"I've been waiting for some relief from this for 20 years," said Tony Ayoub, whose jewelry store sits near a sculpture favored by a group of homeless teen-agers.
"We've got these guys spread-eagle in the street, bathing in the fountains and playing with pet rodents outside my store," he said. "They frighten away customers and smell so bad you can't even use the benches when they're around."
Other new laws prohibit people from sleeping on the beach or bathing in fountains. And some existing measures have been more strictly enforced, with fines levied for such activities as grinding cigarette butts out on the street and having unleashed pets -- which in the case of the homeless have included a rat and a snake.
Also, while more money is poured into social services than ever before in Santa Monica, it is now disbursed mainly to those who would help themselves. And most of these programs now require that entrants demonstrate both a willingness and ability to get off the street. In one newly opened city shelter, the homeless are allowed to stay for up to six months, but only if they agree to job training and counseling.
The city spends about $2 million a year on the homeless, with about half of the money coming from the Federal Government, Mayor Paul Rosenstein said.
Porpoise sculptures with change slots now compete with panhandlers at busy intersections, allowing shoppers to put their money in a homeless program instead of a homeless person's hand.
"This city has been at war over the last couple of years," the Mayor said as he went over Santa Monica's battle plan. "Laissez-faire just wasn't working and we saw the need for a surgical strike. Things were just getting out of hand."
But to many, the city once nicknamed the "Home of the Homeless" and "People's Republic of Santa Monica" has killed some of its soul in the course of the fight.
Robert M. Meyers, a former city attorney who was dismissed four years ago for refusing to curtail a homeless feeding program on the City Hall lawn, calls the new attitude an example of how the city government has capitulated to a conservative wave.
"This is part of an ongoing evolution away from embracing progressive solutions," he said in a telephone interview from his law office. "We now have a mediocre City Council that wants to move toward a law and order approach to social problems. And the end result will just make things harder for the poor."
The homeless, as expected, are also a bit chagrined. Santa Monica, after all, once prided itself as a beacon of liberal philosophy and egalitarian action, opening its parks and beaches to their encampments, its social services to a multitude of ills.
"We've been coming to Santa Monica since the beginning of time," said one homeless woman who wished to be known only as Her Here and said she had no plans of becoming Her Gone.
"Of course we sit and laze around," she said. "What else are we going to do? But it used to be that they didn't mind. Now they're trying to drive us out. Can't even panhandle for a coffee and doughnut without getting hassled."
That is not likely to change anytime soon.
The quiet town of old-timers and left-leaning baby boomers that Santa Monica sprung from has grown up, turning into an older and more prosperous environment.
Rent-control laws, which once protected the low-income residents, are slowly being phased out under to state law.
The Third Street Promenade, once a wasteland, has been developed into a popular night destination. And the nearby Santa Monica Pier has recently undergone a $12 million renovation, its circus atmosphere and amusement rides attracting hordes of tourists.
Planning is also in the works for a third luxury beach hotel and an up-to-date 390,000-square-foot film production center to complement the already burgeoning entertainment industry.
And for those in the city government, such projects have helped to move the discourse away from talk of free food, shelter and a helping hand to that of "emerging markets," "nodes of development" and "coming on-line."
"We aren't making a conscious decision to gentrify," said Jeff Mathieu, director of resource management for the city. "But we are striving for balance and renewal. And when you do that changes are inevitable. People just have to accept it."

The New York Times

July 27, 1995, Thursday, Late Edition - Final

Cost of 'Quiet on Set' Is Escalating

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 1036 words

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, July 26

In his seven years as a location manager in the film industry, Patrick McIntire has rented noisy chain saws just so he could turn them off and paid lawn crews to stop clacking their shears and revving their leaf-blowers. Loud radios, barking dogs and immovable people have cost him a bundle.
Mr. McIntire is not alone. In Los Angeles and other California areas popular for filming, residents are sometimes making thousands of dollars from movie crews by promising to vacate outdoor sets, tone down noise or otherwise stop harassing them. The problem has become so acute that the State Legislature has stepped in, drafting laws to make harassing film crews for profit a criminal offense.
"It's gotten to the point where at almost every shoot, somebody has their hand out," said State Senator Herschel Rosenthal, Democrat of Van Nuys, the sponsor of one such bill. "People blow horns, walk through shots, make their dogs bark or crank their stereos. And they all demand money to stop."
A survey of 113 people in film production conducted by the California Film Commission in January found that half had been harassed by opportunists jockeying for money. One production manager said he had paid a man in Culver City to stop pelting his crew with pebbles and debris.
"The individual was compensated for the disruption," the manager wrote, adding that "after filming was in process, he decided the compensation was not enough and decided to throw empty cans."
Sometimes, hecklers wind up in jail when film production people decide to take the time to press charges under public nuisance laws. But enlisting law enforcement does not always stop the harassment. One production manager said he had called the police after a store owner in Venice Beach turned on a "boom box" during filming. After the police ordered the offender to tone down the music, the respondent wrote, "the owner still would not comply, instead calling his lawyer, who arrived with threats." The company, he said, finally gave up and moved.
Patti S. Archuletta, director of the film commission, which promotes shooting movies in California, said: "Warner Brothers called me saying they were held up for $500 by a guy wielding a ladle and a bucket, and a whole neighborhood tried to charge another group $500 just to let a film truck drive down the street. This has really gotten out of hand."
Though no one believes such penny-ante ploys will bankrupt the state's film industry -- a $17 billion-a-year business that employs more than 350,000 people -- some companies now routinely look for film locations outside of California to avoid harassment, Ms. Archuletta said. Others have moved their entire operations out of the state to get away from it, she said.
"This kind of institutional extortion is very bad for California," she said, "particularly Southern California. We have come to a point where people think it's business as usual to stand in front of a production and make life difficult. It's bad for the economy. It has to stop."
Film companies in New York City have not gone unscathed. City officials say that a man who claimed to be running a film school for disadvantaged youth tried to extort money from so many productions, including those of Woody Allen and Spike Lee, that the city was seeking a permanent court order to keep him off movie locations.
In California, two separate bills in the Legislature are aimed at halting the practice. One would make the offense a civil infraction, the other a criminal infraction, but both would carry fines. The bills, with separate sponsors, are now in committee. One is sponsored by Senator Rosenthal and the other by Assemblyman Jim Brulte, Republican of Rancho Cucamonga.
The bills would allow off-duty officers and licensed security guards to ticket offenders after one warning. Both bills would impose fines of up to $100 for the first offense and up to $500 for each later infraction.
Though the bills have strong bipartisan support, residents of popular filming locations and some union representatives have expressed concern that such a law could be used by film companies to muzzle the outspoken.
"I have seen horn honking, and I have seen residents shine lights at the set," said Robert G. Picard, chairman of the Department of Communications at California State University at Fullerton, and a resident of a popular filming area. "But a lot of this is not extortion; it's anger.
"You see some production crews who are very arrogant, and they just say: 'Get out of our way. We're bulldozing through, blockading your street and trampling your bushes.' And that's just not right. If this law is written over-broadly, it could make reasonable requests for compensation a criminal offense."
Ms. Archuletta said that the proposed language for both bills would protect the rights of unions to picket film companies and would allow residents to voice complaints about unruly productions to the commission.
"If you don't seek money, you can't be cited," she said. "This is not going to stop disgruntled people from being noisy. It's going to stop people from holding hostage an industry they perceive to be a cash cow."
She added that the law, which would allow officers to ticket extortionists immediately, could save productions thousands of dollars by reducing unnecessary delays. "Time is money in this business," she said. "As it stands, companies face hours of delay waiting for police to arrive and drag someone off to jail."
Mr. McIntire recalled the man in downtown Los Angeles with the sputtering chain saw, which he offered to the film crew for $5,000. The man, who was more than a block away, enlisted the help of lookouts on the street, Mr. McIntire said, and would open the throttle full bore every time the director yelled, "Action." The saw would miraculously go quiet at every shout of "Cut!"
When the chain-saw operator was given a package containing several hundred dollars, Mr. McIntire said, the saw fell silent.
"I don't mind forking over some cash if we are creating an inconvenience for people," Mr. McIntire said. "But a lot of this is just blackmail and bribery, and right now movie companies can't do anything but open their wallets."

The New York Times

February 8, 1995, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final

In Los Angeles Gallery, Tears for Grumpy Guru

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE, Special to The New York Times

SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 837 words

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, Feb. 7

It was the sort of wake Curley Morrow would have loved. His friends were there, Hank Williams was wailing, and there was plenty of beer and cigarettes to go around.
Mr. Morrow, who died of bone cancer last month at the age of 70, was by all accounts an ill-tempered janitor who did little work in the Zero One Gallery, one of the most prominent showcases in Los Angeles for new artists. But for the vast majority of the 50 or so mourners who turned out to see him off, Mr. Morrow was much more, counted as a friend, confidant and critic by a whole beleaguered generation of hipsters and hopeful artists in a city not known for brotherly love.
"He was a de facto guru, a reprobate sage from the lower phylum of society," explained Robert Williams, a prominent neo-Surrealist. "He didn't charm people like a Svengali, but he brought out a warm spot in them. He was more Forrest Gump than even Forrest Gump, and because of that mere fact he became a mainstay in the underground art world."
His fans, a parade of artists, fashion designers and benefactors, gathered early Saturday night at the trendy Melrose Avenue gallery to file past a cardboard box on a white column and pay their last respects to the man who had touched so many but had said so little. It did not matter that Mr. Morrow, who had watched some of art's most notorious cutting-edge talents -- Karen Finley, Christof Kohlhofer, Mike Kelley, Ray Pettibon and others -- ply their trade, had never picked up a paintbrush himself.
"He was kind of like an icon," said Mike Rosenfeld, a psychedelic artist who participated in a Curley retrospective several months before Mr. Morrow's death. "He was just so incongruous to what you would expect at an art gallery. But you could show him a painting and trust his judgment. He wasn't blinded by all that rhetoric that goes along with art. He could see the work."
Some recalled the time Mr. Morrow turned down an offer by David Lee Roth, the rock star, to buy him dentures, or how the artist Aileen Getty used to bring him hand cream. Others talked of his love of the Old West and his dogeared collection of Western novels -- titles like "Pistol Pete" and "Hanging Judge" peeking out of neat rows in his tiny room at the back of the gallery.
"He created his heaven from Louis L'Amour books and Hank Williams tapes," said Tommy T., who once worked in the gallery and who wrote a short eulogy in honor of Mr. Morrow: "He lived his life simple, honest and brave. Lord, we give you Curley; try not to irritate him."
A few people, like Pat Garvin, a onetime bar owner who had known Mr. Morrow for more than two decades, lamented that all of him could now fit in a box about the size and weight of a large flashlight battery.
"He was a grump and meaner than hell, but he loved all these weirdos," she said, showing pictures of Mr. Morrow. Noticing a few of his acquaintances picking him up off the pedestal, she added: "Maybe we should put him away for a while. He needs to rest. We can bring him back out later."
People also recounted Mr. Morrow's better tales, culled from a lifetime of drifting and odd jobs that finally ended in his 10-year stint as watchman and janitor at the Zero One Gallery, a job that paid $10 to $30 and several beers a day.
Born Arba Junior Morrow in Lancaster, Ohio, he left school at age 5 to become a paperboy, then went on to move furniture, fight in World War II and operate a pool hall and a newsstand, among other things, friends said. In their accounts, he proposed marriage unsuccessfully to three women, once killed a ferocious grizzly bear in the mountains, sold Howard Hughes his newspaper every morning and had a brief stint as a model for postcards.
They also spoke of Mr. Morrow's being interviewed on the tabloid television program "A Current Affair" after he claimed to have seen the ghost of Rita Hayworth during an exhibition at the gallery that included some of her clothing.
Many of the works first presented in the Curley retrospective were displayed again during Mr. Morrow's wake. There were "Curley Series No. 1" trading cards. There were renditions of Curley sleeping and, most often, of Curley smoking and drinking. By the door to his room was perhaps the finest tribute, a jar of "Curley Preserves" prepared by lowbrow artist Anthony Ausgang, filled with stale beer, old cigarettes and a set of dentures held together with tape.
Nearby, a crowd gathered around a television showing a videotape of interviews with the tight-lipped icon. Other mourners passed out commemorative cards with his likeness on one side and biographical basics on the other. More beer kept arriving, some donated by the liquor store on the corner where Mr. Morrow had run a large tab, one always paid by his friends.
"He would have just loved this," said Ms. Garvin, brushing tears from her eyes. "I mean, he would have been grouchy about it, but I think he would have been really touched. The thing that bothers me so much was that we hadn't finished with him yet."

The New York Times

March 19, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Novel Cafe: A Deadbeat Poets Society

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 1; Page 22; Column 4; National Desk

LENGTH: 911 words

DATELINE: SANTA MONICA, Calif.

In the four-and-a-half years that Diana Birchall and her kin have warmed seats at The Novel Cafe, she has produced five novels, none published. Her son, Paul, has written one play, to no avail. And her husband, Peter, has scribbled several volumes of poetry, without any intention of showing them to anyone.
Upstairs, David Carver is on his 23d year writing a memoir about being a homeless Vietnam veteran. And across from the fiction section, a place where books find their own uneasy order, Doug -- nicknamed "Dogfood" Doug because of an earlier failed script, not the cafe's food -- worries over his latest attempt at screenwriting, "Banana Rose." The title recently appeared in hardcover, written by someone else.
"You could skip a rock off the heads of at least 20 screenwriters any time of day in this place," said Bill F. Kelman, the author of several B-movie scripts, paraphrasing a line from "Barton Fink." "This place is kind of a microcosm of Los Angeles; anybody who buys a ream of paper calls himself a writer."
These are the heirs to Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and Anais Nin, a set of scribblers and laptop-toting typists who dream of big breaks rising from small ruminations and have so far failed. Some are unemployed, many are in debt, and a few live in their cars. There is not a Hollywood Player among them.
"We thought about plastering the first page of everybody's work on the front wall when it was published," said Richard Karno, the cafe's owner. "But there was the obvious problem -- it might be a pretty blank wall."
From 7 A.M. to 1 A.M., this cafe just off Santa Monica's Main Street is a hostel to Los Angeles's disenfranchised intelligentsia, a mix of aging Hollywood hopefuls, Generation X beatniks and local students, all crowded into an eclectic selection of odd seats on a worn parquet floor.
Outside, smokers line the sidewalk, puffing on hand-rolled cigarettes or stroking their Vandykes, or both. Others rush upstairs to the balcony overlooking the espresso machine where tattooed youths dispense bitter coffee and wry wit to the wails of Patsy Cline.
The Novel crowd still prefers caffeine to decaf, and in a town not known for its literature, likes to read -- a distraction well-provided for at The Novel, where books on everything from canoeing to crystal healing line hundreds of wooden shelves.
All are for sale, as are the works of interminably undiscovered artists. The paintings, stillborn like many of the manuscripts written below them, hang in every open space, collecting little more than dust and cobwebs.
"There are a lot of dysfunctional characters engaged in a lot of fantasy here," said Jerry Prager, a friend of many, as he nursed a cup of coffee at his window seat near the front of the cafe. "This is Santa Monica hip, bohemian cool," added Mr. Prager, an actor and telemarketer. "It's a lot of people in their 40's who like to hit on young women and have been working on the same script for years."
Diana and Paul Birchall may have achieved the closest thing to fame among the cafe regulars; they not only have agents, but real jobs. Both are employed as script readers in the entertainment industry, an occupation with only one hazard -- they are frequently harassed by fellow Novel customers.
"We get approached at least once a week by some screenwriter asking us to look at his stuff," Mrs. Birchall confided from her usual perch in an overstuffed armchair at the center of the cafe. "As a rule they are the weirder ones, about space aliens or lonely writers who hang out in coffee shops.
"And," she whispered, grabbing a chunk of brownie, then washing it down with a 16-ounce iced cappuccino, "they are all awful."
Mr. Karno opened The Novel in the summer of 1990. The characters began to show up shortly thereafter, and few have ever strayed to trendier establishments like Starbucks Coffee a mere six blocks away, where, they complain, the stools are uncomfortable, the cappuccino expensive.
At The Novel the first refill is free, and regulars like Mr. Carver are allowed behind the counter to fetch as much as they want. On Sunday, when the meter maids stay home, the few writers who live in their cars sometimes pull up and use The Novel's restroom to bathe.
Few customers have been banished from the cafe, and some have nowhere else to go anyway. When they are tossed out, it is usually because they have been caught stuffing costly volumes into their backpacks without paying for them, or because they have skipped out on weighty tabs that Mr. Karno was kind enough to let them run up during lean times.
Sometimes Mr. Karno longs for the well-heeled clients that frequent Il Fornaio, a cafe just a block away, where -- like the few stars who visit The Novel -- people buy coffee, tip well, then leave. But Mr. Karno's lot appears to have been decided soon after his cafe opened, when the first customer discovered his lax loitering policy and the abundance of electrical outlets scattered throughout the building. Since then, laptops have sprouted like mushrooms on his many tables, and customers have rooted like trees.
"I got more Powerbooks in here than in a school cafeteria," he complained while calculating their drain on his electric bill. "But the last thing I want to do is run around collecting a buck-fifty for electricity every hour from a bunch of starving writers. Besides, they would just switch to pens and pads and still sit there all day anyway."

The New York Times

June 18, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Kingman Journal;
In Arizona Desert Town, Suspicion Walks Streets

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 1; Page 16; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 884 words

DATELINE: KINGMAN, Ariz.

James Maxwell Oliphant has waited more than a decade for United Nations occupational forces to come knocking at his door here in the desert scrub of Mohave County. During that time, the 70-year-old Mr. Oliphant, a self-described patriot who proudly displays a Ku Klux Klan business card, has blown off one of his arms practicing with explosives, taken in skinheads who later turned against him and served a spell in prison for conspiring to rob armored cars.
Now his expectations are finally being realized: the first wave of enemies, Mr. Oliphant says, has arrived.
And finding agreement among other residents of Kingman is easy.
Since April, so many Federal investigators have scoured Kingman for clues to the Oklahoma City bombing that at times the town has seemed a place for only two kinds of people: suspects and suspected agents.
Timothy J. McVeigh, already charged with the bombing, spent much of the last two years in and around Kingman, and agents have pushed hard to uncover his connections here, staking out his friends' homes and questioning all those who met him.
To be sure, far from everyone in this community of almost 13,000 people is wary of things Federal. But the number who are is sufficient that rumors of impending assault by mystery helicopters and jackbooted foreign troops under one-world command have circulated for years.
Against that backdrop, the influx of the agents, wearing dark glasses and driving shiny rental cars, has lent this ancestral home of the cowboy comic Andy Devine an air of intrigue, as if it were a Wild West version of East Berlin.
"This is just the first sound of the alarm," said a man peering out from under a floppy leather hat, one of many residents who now either decline to identify themselves altogether or, alternatively, make up names on the spot. "People are going to rise up. There's going to be a war. You can hear about it on AM radio."
Kingman, a mining town 180 miles northwest of Phoenix, was founded in 1880 and has long attracted malcontents, drifters and those dodging the law. Most recently, since the 1970's, it has become a haven for disillusioned Americans hoping to distance themselves from big government.
Now the arrival of the agents has brought the realization that Kingman is not entirely insulated, and a few here have come unhinged. Jim Rosencrans became so irritated with the investigators' presence that he bought a new assault-style rifle and then, when the agents came to search a nearby house trailer, brandished several other guns. He was promptly hauled off to jail.
And David Baker, an auto mechanic who says he once sold Mr. McVeigh a beat-up sedan, rarely leaves his house anymore for fear that agents may be lying in wait to question him.
At the Golden Valley Swap Meet, a weekend flea market where men sell guns alongside broken toasters and counterfeit watches, the presence of Federal agents conspicuously rummaging around has left some vendors so fearful that they ignore actual customers whom they do not know.
But a security guard at the flea market said he was now more worried about some of the vendors than about shoplifters. "Like that guy," motioned the guard, who said his name was Glenn. "He tells everybody he wants to be called Adolf -- Adolf Hitler. I tell you, I wouldn't trust any of them."
The agents' presence in Kingman has also led to occasional confusion, not limited to the local citizenry. More than once, agents themselves have rushed off after reporters driving away from one location or another, in the mistaken belief that a possible suspect was fleeing. And during a midnight raid on a house trailer, one agent briefly mistook a reporter for another agent and, before realizing his error, began sharing confidential information.
Adding to the confusion are the residents who happily provide information to reporters and agents alike but juice up their accounts with each succeeding interview.
Jack Gohn, 66, who was once a neighbor of Mr. McVeigh, seems to remember more about him every day. Most recently, after relating his troubles with Alzheimer's disease and his wish to receive a $2 million reward, Mr. Gohn told a reporter that he had seen Mr. McVeigh in the presence of a man who resembled Terry L. Nichols, the other imprisoned bombing suspect. He also provided a name for a man he described as a dead ringer for John Doe No. 2, since identified as a soldier at Fort Riley, Kan., who apparently had no connection to the bombing whatever.
On the other hand, the manager of a local video store where Mr. McVeigh had rented the movie "Blown Away," about a mad bomber, did not tell investigators of the rental for some time, because, he said, they had never asked. And George Boerst, the manager of a photocopy shop where Mr. McVeigh had browsed through paramilitary magazines, did not come forward with that information, instead waiting until a customer's recollection caused inquisitive agents to visit the shop.
One vendor at the Golden Valley Swap Meet said proudly that he lied to the agents just for sport. "I sold McVeigh a .44 Magnum once," said the vendor, adding that his name was John Smith and pausing to see whether the reporter appeared to believe him. "But I didn't tell them that. It's none of their business."

The New York Times

July 10, 1995, Monday, Late Edition - Final

Oklahoma Witness Sees a 'Witch Hunt'

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section B; Page 10; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 974 words

DATELINE: KINGMAN, Ariz., July 8

James Rosencrans says he has always been suspicious of Federal agents. Now, he says, he is downright fearful of them.
The latest witness to appear before the grand jury in the Oklahoma bombing investigation, Mr. Rosencrans has returned to his home here with nothing but complaints about the experience. He says the agents he went to Oklahoma to help are on "a witch hunt" and are bent on crucifying him.
While Mr. Rosencrans's suspicions may seem extreme, they may also prove to be the norm among the people who populated the world of the two main bombing suspects, Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols.
Mr. Rosencrans, 29, became embroiled in the bombing investigation after agents discovered that he had recently sold a relatively rare Winchester Model-43 .22-caliber Hornet rifle that investigators believe was taken in a robbery in November in Arkansas.
Mr. Nichols had already been linked to that robbery because agents searching his home after the bombing found a safe-deposit key that had been among the items stolen in Arkansas.
Mr. Rosencrans, who has acknowledged knowing the suspects, said he told the grand jury in Oklahoma City that he had been given the rifle by his neighbor, Michael Fortier. Mr. Fortier, who is known to have sold weapons at area gun shows, is an Army buddy of both Mr. McVeigh and Mr. Nichols.
But Mr. Rosencrans complained that when he went before the grand jury, prosecutors interrupted his answers twice, only allowed five retorts and cut all of them short.
"All they wanted was 'yes' or 'no,' " he said on the porch of his trailer house, a Robinson Crusoe-like structure with steps made out of old boxes that once held 90 mm shells and a padlock on the outside of the only usable door.
"They grilled me for four hours and then gave me four minutes on the stand," he said. "I went down there to help these guys. They treated me like a criminal, and then they ignored me when I got there."
This is not the first time Mr. Rosencrans has felt abused by law-enforcement officers. He has been arrested on more than one occasion here in his hometown, once for disturbing the peace when he brandished several rifles and a pistol during a midnight raid by Federal agents at Mr. Fortier's house.
Mr. Rosencrans now says the arrest was a warning -- an attempt to make him sweat before Federal agents started interrogating him.
Mr. Rosencrans said that Federal agents and prosecutors questioned him several times before sending him before the grand jury and that they had been following him for months beforehand.
"I used to see them in the grocery store before any of this happened," he said. "They would follow us as we pushed our cart around." Peering down his street, devoid of agents, he insisted, "They're up to something."
Federal agents said that they believe the rifle Mr. Rosencrans sold to the A& P pawn shop in Kingman is one of more than an estimated $60,000 worth of guns, precious metals and gems stolen in November from Roger E. Moore, a Royal, Ark., gun dealer. Other guns like those taken during the robbery have already turned up at Mr. Nichols's home in Kansas.
Mr. Rosencrans said he originally believed that Federal agents wanted to link his rifle to the two known suspects in the case, as well as to Mr. Fortier, who is believed to be currently negotiating a plea agreement with the authorities in Oklahoma City. But he said that he quickly became circumspect about their motives after he noticed the way they phrased their questions.
After seeing a list of the guns stolen in the Arkansas robbery, Mr. Rosencrans said he became more certain that Federal agents wanted nothing more than to frame him and other Kingman residents. One of the three guns he bought from Mr. Fortier -- and later taken by the F.B.I. -- was not even on the list of stolen items, adding that the two others were dissimilar. And though he told Federal investigators that six of his friends had bought guns from Mr. Fortier's collection, none of those guns matched the stolen items either, he said.
"Mike had a lot of guns," Mr. Rosencrans said. "He liked to collect them, like me. But they aren't the ones on this list."
Claiming that Federal agents had pushed him to "rat" on the other gun buyers, he said he would continue to refuse because "they could be innocents, just like me."
"The Feds seem to think that there are 30 or 40 people involved in this thing, but they could just be somebody who happened to know somebody," he said. "It's a sad day in America when everything's guilt by association."
F.B.I. officials said they would not comment on grand jury investigations.
When agents first disclosed the connection between the Winchester rifle and the Arkansas robbery, Mr. Rosencrans accused Mr. Fortier of setting him up, not only by selling him a stolen gun, but also, according to Mr. Rosencrans, because Mr. Fortier had passed along a cryptic request by Mr. McVeigh: Mr. Rosencrans was to drive him to an undisclosed location and then leave the car at the nearest airport. Mr. Rosencrans said that he declined the offer both because Mr. McVeigh wanted to trade a gun for the ride instead of paying cash and because Mr. McVeigh refused to tell him the reason for the trip.
But since appearing before the grand jury Mr. Rosencrans has re-evaluated his opinion of Mr. Fortier and Mr. McVeigh.
"I'm sorry for the families of the victims," he said of the 167 people who died in the bombing and the 442 who were injured. "But there is a witch hunt going on here, and they are taking our Constitutional rights away in the process." He said the investigation had caused him to lose his construction job.
"If Mike and Tim did this thing, then they should charge them," Mr. Rosencrans said. "But what's going on right now -- this dragging everybody down -- just ain't right."

The New York Times

July 16, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Witness Tells Of Bag Sought In Bomb Case

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 1; Page 22; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 865 words

DATELINE: KINGMAN, Ariz., July 15

A large duffel bag being sought by Federal agents in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing may contain a cache of explosives and gun parts, a witness in the case says.
That witness, James Rosencrans, said in an interview this week that his next-door neighbor, Michael Fortier, asked him to help bury a large camouflage bag in the scrub behind their trailer homes in this western Arizona town three days before the April 19 explosion.
Mr. Rosencrans said he believed that this bag could be the one sought by the Federal agents, apparently in their hunt for guns taken in a robbery last November that may have financed the bombing.
The bag he handled weighed perhaps 80 pounds, Mr. Rosencrans said, and Mr. Fortier told him it contained grenades and other explosives. Mr. Rosencrans said that what sounded like the clinking of metal inside had led him to suspect that it also held small gun parts.
"After Mike told me that there were grenades in there, he said I didn't want to know what else was there," Mr. Rosencrans said. "And he was right: I didn't want to know."
Ultimately, he added, Mr. Fortier decided not to bury the bag and took it home instead.
Mr. Fortier -- a onetime Army buddy of Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols, the two imprisoned bombing suspects -- has declined to speak to reporters in recent weeks and has not been at his home here for days. His mother, Irene, when asked today about Mr. Rosencrans's account, replied: "We have nothing to say. We don't bother with stuff like that anymore."
The 29-year-old Mr. Rosencrans was drawn into the Government's investigation of the bombing when agents discovered that he had recently sold a Winchester Model-43 .22-caliber Hornet rifle, which they believe was taken in last November's robbery. Mr. Rosencrans, who has testified before the Federal grand jury investigating the bombing, says he told the jurors that Mr. Fortier gave him the rifle.
The robbery victim, a gun and munitions dealer in Arkansas, has told Federal investigators that he knew Mr. McVeigh. And a search of the Kansas home of the other bombing suspect, Mr. Nichols, has yielded a safe-deposit key taken in the $60,000 robbery, as well as some of the guns taken.
Law-enforcement officials say Mr. Fortier has told them that he drove with Mr. McVeigh from Kingman to Oklahoma City about a week before the bombing and inspected the doomed nine-story Federal Building there. Months earlier, the officials say, Mr. McVeigh had confided to Mr. Fortier his plans for blowing up the building.
For many weeks now, Federal investigators have scoured the desert around Kingman in search of clues and have repeatedly questioned Mr. Rosencrans about a bag that may have been left in the desert. In the inteview, Mr. Rosencrans said that once, while riding in an agent's car, he saw a map on which several areas of desert behind Mr. Fortier's home, as well as others near reservation lands north and northeast of Kingman, had been circled in ink.
Agents have also been seeking people in Kingman who bought guns from Mr. Fortier, but the task has been made difficult by residents' fears that the Government will confiscate any weapons they turn in.
Although Mr. Rosencrans agreed to testify to the grand jury, he says he has refused to disclose the names of people who, he says, purchased rifles from Mr. Fortier. They could "be innocents like me," he said.
Some of these, Mr. Rosencrans said, are people who could get guns nowhere else because they had committed felonies. Others are fearful that they will lose their weapons or be charged with a crime.
One man who lives near Mr. Fortier's trailer home and bought an M-1 rifle from him has refused to come forward. And Mr. Rosencrans predicts that Federal agents will have a tough time turning up many more weapons linked to the robbery, because "they got no right coming here and taking people's guns like this."
Another man, a 25-year-old steam cleaner who bought a Ruger 10/22 from Mr. Fortier this spring, completely disassembled that weapon and stashed it in his backyard before finally turning it over to Leaf Beale, a deputy in the Mohave County Sheriff's Office, whom he had met while bowling.
"I saw the news that they were looking for these guns and got a little jumpy at first, so I put it in a safety bag and buried it," explained the man, who would speak only on condition of anonymity. He said he had also turned over a rifle, obtained in a trade with Mr. Rosencrans, that the authorities thought might be one sold by Mr. Fortier.
"The F.B.I. said they were looking for all the guns stolen and that they wanted to get them all together so that they could ask Mike about it," he said.
This man said Mr. Fortier had approached him while he was helping Mr. Rosencrans work on a car and told him he had several guns for sale. Mr. Fortier, he said, explained that he had obtained the guns from a brother who lived in Tucson and traveled to gun shows.
The man said Mr. Fortier had shown him only two Ruger 10/22's. "The way he talked about it, he had more guns. He told us to tell anyone who wanted a gun that he had more. But he wouldn't say where they were."

GRAPHIC: Photos: James Rosencrans (Kit R. Roane)

San Juan Capistrano Journal;
Could This Be the Year Swallows Don't Return?

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE, Special to The New York Times

SECTION: Section A; Page 14; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 780 words

DATELINE: SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, Calif., March 2

For more than two centuries, Mission San Juan Capistrano has been immortalized as the summer home of the cliff swallows, whose return each March has become the source of weeklong festivities in the surrounding town.
But two weeks from now, on Swallows Day, when thousands of craned necks and binoculars again congregate at the mission, there is worry that one thing will be missing -- swallows.
Like many other buildings in Southern California, the mission has been earthquake-proofed, which over the past six years has caused hundreds of the swallows' mud nests to be knocked down, with some now replaced by a towering Erector set of steel beams and concrete. So the swallows have moved to more hospitable eaves and crevices in places like nearby Mission Viejo with only about half a dozen nests remaining at the mission in Capistrano.
"We want those birds back," said Gerald Miller, the mission's administrator, who lately has been trying to woo the swallows back with mud pits called "swallow wallows" and plans to install prefabricated mud nests under the roof tiles. "But when they see that darned scaffolding they just veer off and fly away."
As the birds go, so goes the town's identity. Tourism is Capistrano's No. 1 industry, with the biggest single event being Swallows Day, March 19, when up to 10,000 visitors converge on the mission. Roughly a third of the nearby businesses use the word "swallow" in their name, decorate their signs with swallow tails or make money selling trinkets.
The swallows' return has even been immortalized in song: "When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano," written by Leon Rene in 1939.
This is not the first time mission employees have worried about being forsaken by the swallows, which 30 years ago could be counted in the thousands. Increased building in the area has pushed the birds farther from the mission, and more than a decade ago severe droughts kept them away in droves. But when the rains returned, so did the swallows, at least until the State of California forced the mission to clutter its crevices with girders and beams. The question now is will they come back at all.
According to legend, the birds were first welcomed to the mission by Father Junipero Serra more than 200 years ago after the townsfolk began hitting them with brooms and ripping down their nests. Since then, the annual calling of the swallows has pulled thousands of visitors to the mission and brought about a drink-fest that can continue unabated for days even if the swallows never land.
In the 1940's, radio announcers broadcast the first sightings live from the patio. And to this day, employees baby-sit a bank of phones to give coordinates on the birds' progress as they get closer to the mission.
"Last year the Interior Minister of Argentina called just to see if they had arrived," said Msgr. Paul Martin, a priest at the mission.
But bird lovers say the mission is now known more for a large battalion of pigeons that fly overhead and are fed from seed-spilling bubble-gum machines in the courtyard. "This has become a very pleasant place for pigeons," said Ken Fortune, president of the South Coast Audubon Society, as a nearby child pointed to a sky chock full of them, only to yell, "Swallow!"
"I would probably discontinue the seed," Mr. Fortune added. "We don't need welfare for pigeons."
If the swallows do not return, most birders will flock to nearby freeway overpasses or to Mission Viejo Mall, where a large contingent of the swallows set up shop last year and hundreds of their little mud crocks, like relics from a small lost civilization, stand ready for service.
Besides the steps being taken at the mission to woo the birds back to Capistrano, the South Coast Audubon Society has begun ripping up a thicket of non-native bamboo that clogs nearby creeks.
"It will be a regular swallows welcome wagon when they get here," said Linda M. Evans, executive director of the Pacific Wildlife Project.
But not all citizens in Capistrano like being the swallow capital of the world.
"I don't miss them because they are messy little birds," Edna Olibares said as her friends at the Walnut Grove Restaurant tried to quiet her. A lifelong resident of Capistrano, Ms. Olibares recalled being let out of school as a child, just to watch the skies go black with swallows. But she does not care for them anymore, nor for that matter, does she now enjoy Swallows Day.
"We used to have movie stars and celebrities leading the parade," she said. "We had kings and queens. One year we even had Claude Akins, you know, Lobo.
"Now it's just horses and no-names, and there's more people than swallows. It stinks."

The New York Times

May 30, 1994, Monday, Late Edition - Final

Muslim Figure Is Wounded in California

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE, Special to The New York Times

SECTION: Section 1; Page 6; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 710 words

DATELINE: RIVERSIDE, Calif., May 29

Khallid Abdul Muhammad, the former Nation of Islam spokesman who has stirred controversy with his verbal attacks on Jews and other whites, was shot and wounded today by a black gunman after a speech at a college here.
Mr. Muhammad appeared to have been shot in the left leg or foot. Two bodyguards were also wounded when the gunman fired at short range with a pistol, and at least two bystanders were hurt when members of the crowd began to riot.
The gunman, who appeared to be in his 30's and was wearing a dark suit and bow tie, was attacked by the crowd and was then seized and driven away by the police. His identity was not immediately released.
Mr. Muhammad was taken to Riverside Community Hospital, where a nursing supervisor said he was in stable condition.
Mr. Muhammad, a longtime aide to the Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, had just completed a speech to a mostly black audience at the University of California at Riverside, 55 miles east of Los Angeles. The speaker and many members of the audience then moved outside.

'Turncoat, Turncoat!'
Mr. Muhammad was answering a question about what he could do for the common man when the gunman raised his pistol, appeared to aim for Mr. Muhammad's head but instead hit a bodyguard in the upper body.
"He's got a gun! He's got a gun!" people in the crowd shouted.
The gunman continued to fire, hitting the bodyguard once or twice more and wounding a second bodyguard in the shoulder. The shooting stopped only when bystanders shoved the gunman to the ground and began to beat him. Others shouted: "Turncoat! Turncoat!"
Police officers rushed in and pulled the gunman free, dragging him away.
The crowd became angry and began attacking reporters and photographers and throwing rocks and bottles at the police. Seven university security officers and two Riverside police officers had been monitoring the speech, said Sergeant Valmont Graham of the Riverside police.
The police officers called for assistance and donned riot gear, then went to retrieve the felled security guards and other injured people.

Trail of Bloody Footprints
Mr. Muhammad was rushed by supporters back through the recreation hall where he had spoken, leaving a trail of bloody footprints.
Jack Chappell, spokesman for the university, said the supporters drove Mr. Muhammad to the hospital. Mr. Chappell said the other shooting victims were Caliph Sadig, 33, and Varnado Parkett, 34, from Pomona. Mr. Parkett was in surgery late tonight.
Afterward, the scene was littered with ripped, bloody Nation of Islam newsletters and sweet-potato pies that had been on sale inside the hall.
A bystander who identified himself only as Black Man called the gunman "no more than a devil."
Mr. Muhammad, 48, born Harold Moore Vann, has been a member of the Nation of Islam for more than 20 years and had served as its "minister of defense."
He was largely unknown outside the Nation of Islam until his speech at Kean College in Union, N.J., last Nov. 29 provoked a widespread backlash against him, Mr. Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
In that speech he attacked whites, homosexuals and Roman Catholics -- he referred to the Pope as a "cracker" in a dress -- but he saved particular venom for Jews, who he said controlled the Federal Government and news organizations, and whom he accused of "sucking our blood in the black community."
The Rev. Jesse Jackson and other black leaders repudiated his remarks and called on Mr. Farrakhan to do the same. After the speech, mainstream Muslim groups, already at odds with the Nation of Islam over doctrine and politics, also distanced themselves.
On Feb. 3, at a rare news conference, Mr. Farrakhan said he had relieved Mr. Muhammad of some of his official duties and considered his aide's speech "vile in manner, repugnant, malicious, mean-spirited and spoken in mockery of individuals and people, which is against the spirit of Islam." But, in a phrase that was open to endless interpretation, he added, "I stand by the truths that he spoke," without explaining.
Despite the apparent demotion, Mr. Muhammad continued to lecture.
Today, he said, to shouts and cheers, "This is the time of the white world's demise and of the black nation's rise."

The New York Times

May 22, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Two White Sport Coats, Two Pink Carnations: One Couple for a Prom

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE, Special to The New York Times

SECTION: Section 1; Page 20; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 673 words

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, May 21

On Friday night, Paul Rivera, a slim 16-year-old from Diamond Bar High School in Walnut Valley, Calif., put on his tuxedo, clipped on his bow tie and went to the junior-senior prom, a rite of passage for millions of high school students around the nation.
But Mr. Rivera did not attend the prom in his hometown. Nor did he drive to other proms nearby. To do so would have risked more of the slurs, threats and violence he says he endures every day at his school.
Instead, he and his date, Christopher Barlow, also 16, from nearby Littlerock, traveled 40 miles west to Los Angeles and joined 100 other couples at a citywide prom for gay and lesbian students called Live to Tell. Although similar dances have been held in cities like Boston and Detroit, this was the first prom sponsored by a school district, national gay rights groups said.
"I was told I would get my butt kicked or bashed if I took my date to my school prom," said Mr. Rivera, whose foster father drove them and Mr. Rivera's 15-year-old brother, Steven, to the event. "I am used to being harassed. But I didn't want to subject my date to it."
He did not have to.
After passing a small group of protesters outside the Hilton Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the three youths found themselves in a well-furnished ballroom with a parquet dance floor, several dozen banquet tables and hundreds of pink-and-white balloons. A disk jockey spun hip-hop tunes and house music, a younger generation's rock-and-roll.
And no one batted an eye when Mr. Rivera dragged Fernando Rod riguez, a friend from Los Angeles, onto the dance floor. "This is so exciting," Mr. Rivera said. "It's like I'd always dreamed it would be."
An old high school friend spotted Mr. Barlow and was surprised to find out he is gay. "I always thought Chris was interesting," said William Walker, 18, who said he had left home more than a year ago because of abuse and now lives in Los Angeles. "But I wasn't 'out' then."
School administrators agreed to sponsor the prom after students promised to pay for it through private donations. Off-duty police officers were hired for security, and 25 adults volunteered to be chaperones.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the nation, after New York City, offers an alternative school for gay and lesbian teen-agers called the Eagle Center. It is patterned after the only other one like it, the Harvey Milk School in Greenwich Village, but it has space for only 42 students, while the prom reached many more.
"This is my prom," said Matthew Noural, who spent months making a black lycra-and-lace dress for the occasion. "And it feels absolutely wonderful. There is no hate here."
Even the protesters refrained from slurs. Instead, they distributed pamphlets and tried to convert the youths as they passed.
"We're not here to gay-bash or be homophobes," said the Rev. William Ervin. "But this prom is promoting negative feelings that are sinful."
There are roughly two million gay and lesbian adolescents in the United States, a recent Harris Poll found. Beginning in the late 1980's, studies by the United States Department of Health and Human Services and others have found that these teen-agers have high suicide rates, and that alcohol and drug abuse are common.
"This prom is aptly titled Live to Tell," said Jerry Batter, the director of the Eagle Center. "These kids need to be recognized and appreciated for who they are -- not just in Los Angeles, but across the nation. And if we make the effort, there will be fewer kids slitting their wrists and jumping off overpasses."
As the event wound down, some participants took part in another prom ritual: Off in a corner, a few couples were obviously quarreling.
By 11 P.M., Mr. Rivera's date was nowhere to be found.
"We kind of broke up," he said sheepishly. "But I'm really happy, kind of nauseous from all the dancing, but really happy." Fingering his class ring, he added: "I decided that I am going to my own prom next year. They can't stop me now."

GRAPHIC: Photo: Fernando Rodriguez, left, dancing on Friday night in Los Angeles with his friend Paul Rivera at the citywide prom for homosexuals. (Jan Sonnenmair for The New York Times)